Imagining Aristotle in Early Modern Germany

The history of early modern European philosophy has been dominated by narratives of rupture. According to these accounts, the new and important ideas in science, politics, or religion that are with us today largely developed in self-conscious opposition to the modes of thought prevailing in universities. Scholasticism appears in such stories as a regressive bastion of Aristotelian authority, which contributed little to the genesis of European modernity. While the rise of modern philosophy has been complicated in recent histories of ideas—scholars have highlighted, for instance, connections between the new metaphysics and natural philosophy on the one hand, and material and pedagogical practices in the technical arts, spiritual disciplines, and mercantile communities on the other—important gaps remain in our understanding. In particular, the resilience and creativity of the scholastic tradition remains understudied. Universities were especially significant in the German territories in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War and, as I intend to show, played a key role in the intellectual reconciliations that made possible the German Enlightenment.

Building on my dissertation research, I plan to undertake a monograph-length project on Aristotelianism in early modern Germany. This project will focus on broadly Aristotelian interpretations of the new, mechanical conception of nature: the idea shared by figures like Descartes and Galileo that the physical world should be conceived as an inert, material system governed by mathematical laws. My point of departure is a concern shared by several German professors, including Johann Clauberg, Erhard Weigel, Johann Christoph Sturm, Christian Wolff, and even Immanuel Kant to reconcile the new science with an older, Aristotelian understanding of nature as essentially purposive and goal-directed. By no means offering mere lip-service to tradition, many of these authors in fact sought to retain some of the central features of Aristotelianism alongside the claims of the new natural philosophy. They remained committed, for example, to understanding reality in its manifold aspects—spiritual, mental, physical—as a unity, and to locating value within the natural world. The new scholastics were not unreflective adherents of medieval orthodoxy, but rather offered inventive proposals to accommodate the mechanical philosophers’ limitations on appeal to purposes in science, or their separation of facts from values. Indeed, the subsequent rise of Idealism in the late-eighteenth century, I will argue, can be seen as testament to the success of the Aristotelian resistance to some of the radical tendencies of early modern Europe, such as those of materialism and skepticism.

This project promises to fill a gap in the historiography of early modern ideas with a shift in perspective: instead of viewing its intellectual developments from within royal academies, wealthy courts, and private salons, it focuses on how these developments were assimilated and taught in gymnasia and universities. It aims to achieve this in part by borrowing methods already fruitfully deployed by historians of science and religion to widen the interpretive context for philosophical texts. A shift away from the canonical figures and circumstances of early modern ideas has revealed, for instance, the technical contributions of Jesuit scholars in the scientific debates of the time. It has also problematized the dialectic between science and religion, relations between which were as often harmonious as fraught. In a similar manner, I believe attending to the institutional and cultural context of the German Enlightenment will, besides recovering a neglected episode in the history of philosophy, provide fresh resources for interpreting canonical authors such as Leibniz and Kant.

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I plan to organize my research for this project under three main headings: 1) the institutional and confessional setting of early modern German universities in which the New Science was received; 2) the translation of mechanical science, and specifically of its causal categories, into the framework of Aristotelian natural philosophy; and 3) the modern career of the classical doctrine that the notions of being, good, true, and one are convertible, which expresses the commitment of many scholastics to conceive created reality as a unified, perfectible whole.

In what follows, I shall briefly outline some of the key subtopics in my research.

One strand of my project concerns the reception of the mechanical philosophy, in particular that of Descartes, in seventeenth century German universities. This requires examining the institutional setting of philosophy in the context of the Thirty Years’ War. Framing the reception of Cartesianism was, in the first place, a bitter conflict over the value of philosophy, and reason in general, for constructing Reformed and Lutheran theologies. As in other parts of Europe, German lands also witnessed calls for educational reform, often closely linked to the contested space between faith and reason. Moreover, the politically and economically weakened state of German territories following the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) meant, in part, that nothing comparable to the Royal Society of London or the French Academy of Sciences would be established there until 1700. This complex set of factors—the absence of central political authority, communities sharply divided along confessional lines, educational reform movements, and an evolving negotiation of religious and secular learning—occasioned the creation of several new universities to serve Lutheran or Reformed communities, as the case may have been, in towns such as Altdorf, Duisburg, and Halle. These emerged as sites of both innovation and tradition, and remained important loci of philosophical activity in Germany until the mid-eighteenth century.

The figure most responsible for assimilating the new, Cartesian metaphysics to existing modes of teaching and exposition was the Duisburg professor Johann Clauberg (1622-1665), whose commentaries and paraphrases first introduced Weigel, Leibniz, and Wolff to Descartes. In a paper in progress (“Domesticating Descartes, Renovating Scholasticism: Johann Clauberg and the German Reception of Cartesianism”), I highlight two features of Clauberg’s treatment of Descartes: a pedagogical interest to find a simpler method for natural philosophy, and a systematic interest to disentangle metaphysics from theological disputes. Clauberg’s unique synthesis, motivated by the practical constraints of his vocation and concerns to reconcile faith and reason, defies labels such as ‘Cartesian’ or ‘Aristotelian’. Clauberg, as well as contemporaries like Weigel and Sturm, I argue, are better interpreted as crafting novel responses to local pressures.

A second topic is the transformation of Aristotelian causal concepts. German metaphysicians systematically treated the four Aristotelian causes (efficient, final, formal, and material) in their textbooks. But, in contrast to the radical challenges to natural teleology one finds in Bacon, Descartes, or Galileo, these writers preserved the traditional framework, even as they reconceived the roles of ends and forms in explanation. The category of end or final cause, for instance, progressively became identified as a psychological mode of causation, rather than as a physical one. Unlike the mechanical philosophers, who sought to conceive all natural change as due to the pushes and pulls of material parts, the neo-Aristotelians continued to entertain a wider range of possibilities in causal reasoning.

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A third thread of the project examines the modern career of a classical doctrine. Discussions of the ‘convertibility thesis’—that the notions of being, goodness, unity, and truth are convertible, or that every being manifests goodness or truth in some measure—appear explicitly in metaphysical texts through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (including in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason), and implicitly in the arguments of thinkers both inside and outside the universities. Many early moderns retained a commitment to the thesis, and ultimately to a conception of reality as a unified, perfectible whole, while adjusting the thesis to reflect their changing conceptual priorities. If the thesis added little by way of content to scholastic metaphysics, as Kant observed, its retention nevertheless kept philosophy oriented toward the vocation of depicting reality as a unity of facts and values.