Michael Hißmann (1752–1784): Ein materialistischer Philosoph der deutschen Aufklärung editor by Heiner F. Klemme, Gideon Stiening, and Falk Wunderlich (review)

Even amidst the current surge of interest in the figures and debates in the period of German philosophy between Leibniz and Kant, the Göttingen philosopher Michael Hißmann (1752–84) might seem an unusual choice for a second look. While he was impressively productive despite his early death at the age of thirty-one from tuberculosis, his work had little impact on his most significant contemporaries (he merits only a single explicit reference by Kant, at AA 8:217n), and some of his best known pieces were translations into German from French, including two important essays on apperception by Johann Bernhard Merian. However, this volume, along with its companion Ausgewählte Schriften edited by Gideon Stiening and Udo Roth (Berlin: Akademie, 2012), makes a good case that Hißmann’s originality and breadth as a thinker makes him deserving of wider scholarly attention.

Hißmann’s originality is evident in his principal texts on theoretical philosophy, where he adopts a materialist perspective and an account of the operations of the mind that is clearly influenced by David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and Charles Bonnet, but which departs from these thinkers in interesting ways. So, in the Psychologische Versuche of 1777, Hißmann defends materialism with respect to the soul as the most scientifically fruitful and probable hypothesis, yet he nonetheless admits that little can be settled empirically regarding the soul’s nature and, accordingly, downplays the importance of accepting the soul’s materiality for understanding, for instance, its personality. Moreover, Hißmann attempts to defuse worries about materialism, particularly regarding its ability to account for the experienced unity of the subject as he identifies the nerve-complex of the brain itself as the sensorium commune, but also regarding its consistency with morality and religion, as he endorses (whether sincerely or not) the immortality of the soul on materialist grounds. Hißmann’s materialism unsurprisingly influences his psychology, as in the Geschichte der Lehre von der Association der Ideen of 1776 where he posits a physical ground of the association of ideas, that is, an association on the basis of the proximity of bundles of nerves in the brain, in addition to the more familiar grounds of similarity and contiguity. Indeed, this is quite in conformity with the strictly empirical and anti-metaphysical character of Hißmann’s psychology in general with its rejection of the Wolffian method of demonstration and renewed emphasis on observation and experiment.

In addition to these notable contributions to metaphysics and psychology, Hißmann commanded an impressive breadth of philosophical interests as this volume considers in some detail his numerous self-standing essays on topics ranging from practical philosophy to the philosophy of history and language (in addition to other, more esoteric contributions). In his Untersuchungen über den Stand der Natur of 1780, Hißmann adopts a broadly Rousseauian, anthropologized account of the state of nature and claims that human beings are originally indifferent to socialization, being driven to it only in pursuit of their own happiness, in opposition to for instance H. S. Reimarus’s recent defense of a Geselligkeitsliebe natural to the human being. In this text Hißmann also offers his own thoughts on the climatic causes of the differences between the human races, a discussion recently re-invigorated by his fellow Göttingen philosopher J. F. Blumenbach. Hißmann would also engage with J. G. Herder’s philosophy of history and language; so, in his Anleitung zur Kenntniß der auserlesenen Literatur in allen Theilen der Philosophie, Hißmann like Herder defends the importance of historical cognition for all areas of philosophical inquiry, though Hißmann takes the former more generally, namely in the Wolffian sense as cognition of facts. In his Über den Ursprung der Sprache of 1776, which belatedly addresses the question posed by the Berlin Academy in 1769, Hißmann offers an alternative naturalistic...