Christian Thomasius and the Desacralization of Philosophy

Introduction

Despite his significance in early modern Germany, where he was well-known as a political and moral philosopher, jurist, lay-theologian, social and educational reformer, Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) is little known in the world of Anglophone scholarship. ¹ Unlike those of his mentor, Samuel Pufendorf, none of Thomasius's works was translated into English, when, at the end of the seventeenth century, English thinkers were searching for a final settlement to the religious question. None has been translated since. Moreover, while Thomasius has been subject to increasing scholarly attention in Germany since the 1970s, where he has been treated largely as a representative of the "early Enlightenment," there is very little secondary literature on him in English. ² Things are however beginning to change in this regard, with recent research already giving rise to important new Anglophone books and essays. ³ Knud Haakonssen's article on Thomasius for the new Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy might well be a straw in the wind. ⁴

Nonetheless, if we compare Thomasius to the "great line" of German metaphysicians--Leibniz, Wolff, Kant, Hegel--we are struck by the depth of the obscurity into which he has been cast by today's alignment of the philosophical planets. There are several deep-seated reasons for this state of affairs. Among these the most important is the continuing dominance of post-Kantian philosophical historiography, which is constitutionally inimical to the type of "civil" philosophy represented by Thomasius and his mentor Pufendorf. The post-Kantian history of moral philosophy treats early modern practical philosophy as a series of attempts to reconcile two opposed yet inescapable principles: the moral norms issued by a powerless reason and the coercive commands issued by a powerful will. This antinomy is supposed to find its resolution in Kant's conception of self-commanding rational being. ⁵ In the histories written from this standpoint, Thomasius appears as one of the many philosophers who fall short of the necessary reconciliation. The most common claim made against Thomasius in this regard is that his conception of law--as sovereign commands issued for the end of social peace--cannot be given a suitably rational-moral grounding.

In the larger work on which the present paper draws, I offer detailed arguments regarding why this historiographical standpoint is unsuited to an historical understanding of Thomasius's central doctrines and objectives. For present purposes we can propose that Thomasius did not fail to achieve the Kantian reconciliation of unmoving reason and irrational command because he did not attempt it. Such a reconciliation, we may suggest, is pertinent only within the discipline of metaphysics. Here it appears as a variant of the traditional metaphysical problem of how immaterial rational being can have effects in a world governed by the material ends and inclinations of embodied beings. ⁶ Far from failing to rise to this level of philosophical concern, Thomasius looked askance at it from another standpoint altogether, viewing the metaphysical pursuit of rational self-governance as both morally self-deluding and a threat to the civil polity.

Thomasius's position may be characterized in terms of his elaboration of a detranscendentalized and desacralized philosophy. In this regard he belongs to a loose coalition of early modern "civil philosophers," that includes Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Pufendorf, and Barbeyrac. All of these writers sought to deprive metaphysical philosophy of the quasi-sacral authority it claimed through insight into the divine "intelligibles" underpinning the material world. Sacral insight into the intelligibles--the substantial forms, perfections, pure ideas--was the central tenet of scholastic metaphysics, allowing it to build the great systems in which the (Greek) philosophical conception of the divine mind's intellection of the essences could be reconciled with the (Christian) theological doctrine of the world's ex-nihilo creation by God. ⁷ Despite all talk of a "rational" Enlightenment, this central doctrine passed directly into enlightenment metaphysics. ⁸ Here it was manifest in Leibniz...