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  • Cultivation Wars: Philosophical Ascetics in Eary Modern German Thought
  • Paul Saurette (bio)
Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Despite incisive critiques by a wide variety of dissenting philosophers, it is fair to say that there remains a powerful strain of post-Kantian philosophy which seeks to understand its own history in the sweeping strokes of grand ideas, emerging unities, smooth transitions and synthetic resolutions. Without resorting to caricature, histories of philosophy in this style tend to demonstrate two key characteristics. The first is the tendency to understand the progression of philosophy as the realm and interaction of pure ideas. Not in the sense that ideas aren’t impacted by — or don’t impact — events. But rather in the sense that the orienting concern of philosophers is to discover concepts and ideas that help us gain knowledge of our common world rather than create concepts that act on our common world. The second characteristic in this tradition is to portray the development of philosophical ideas as inevitably synthetic — the history of philosophy is the history of ideas considered, incorporated, improved upon and superseded. This type of philosophy may admit to standing on the shoulders and ideas of previous thinkers. But in doing so, it condemns past philosophies to the status of precursors to the present — as vanquished contenders, incomplete premonitions or revered ancestors.

According to Ian Hunter, this approach is nowhere more prevalent — and nowhere more misguided — than in our understanding of early modern German thought. Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany is the attempt to challenge this tradition not through grand theoretical pronouncements, but instead through a detailed historical reconstruction of the deep fissures and unresolved contestations that made up early modern German thought. And the work pays off. If you’re like me, by the end of the book you’ll never again be able to look your students in the eye and utter the word ‘the enlightenment’ in the singular. You will likely think long and hard about leaving Pufendorf, and perhaps even Thomasius, off any political philosophy reading list that includes Rousseau and Kant. You will leave convinced that political and moral concerns played central roles in shaping early modern philosophy. And you will especially question the predilection to treat philosophical reflections on the ethico-political as afterthoughts or conclusions derived from the conditions of theoretical knowledge. For Hunter not only shows that early modern philosophy was characterized by rival intellectual cultures. He argues that they are intensely rival models of cultivation.

Culture Wars and Cultivation Wars

Hunter opens up the book clearly stating his partisan position. His immediate goal is to reinstate a marginalized intellectual culture to its proper place. In particular, he wants to “retrieve” the civil philosophy of Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius from the “all-assimilating, all-unifying mill of dialectical philosophy” (ix). According to Hunter, post-Kantian thought has been particularly guilty of smoothing over and erasing the fundamental divergences in early modern German thought by presenting all earlier perspectives as inevitable steps in the emergence of a single philosophical and rationalist Kantian Aufklarung.

With the hope of disrupting and rectifying this post-Kantian consensus, Hunter argues both (a) that in the wake of the religious wars in Germany, there emerged at least two distinct ‘enlightenment’ answers to the question ‘how should civil and religious authority be related to one another’ and (b) that ignoring this fact badly skews our understanding of both Kant and earlier German philosophy. The bulk of Hunter’s book, therefore, is given to a detailed reconstruction of the deep intellectual moral and political divisions in early modern German thought and an analysis of how these issues fundamentally influenced the shape of that philosophy.

The book is organized around four key figures who define the contending traditions. On one side there is the tradition of ‘metaphysical philosophy’ — spearheaded by Leibniz and eventually leading to Kant. According to Hunter, this tradition built on scholastic rationalism and forwarded a specific anthropology and moral method designed to bring civil politics back under the sway of philosophy/theology. On the other side there is a frequently forgotten...

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