|
|
|
|
Critical Review
Liberalism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany
by James Schmidt
*
Abstract
The eighteenth-century controversy among Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, and Immanuel Kant undermines the tendency to equate liberalism with the Enlightenment. While the defender of the Enlightenment, Mendelssohn, championed defended such traditional liberal values as religious toleration, his arguments were often illiberal. In contrast, many of the views of his anti-Establishment opponent, Jacobi, are remarkably liberal. Kant’s essays from the mid-1780s advanced a liberal conception of politics but a view of Enlightenment that was quite distant from those of both Mendelssohn and Jacobi.
Liberalism is frequently viewed as a child of the Enlightenment. 1 Some of the more important figures in the liberal tradition, such as Locke and Kant, have played significant roles in the Enlightenment, while others, such as John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, have built their theories on the basis of principles first elaborated during the Enlightenment. And typically, both liberalism and the Enlightenment have been seen as emphasizing the protection of individual rights over the more ambitious aim of achieving the human good. Indeed, both tend to be uneasy with talk of “the good,” advising tolerance of diverging conceptions of the ultimate purpose of life. Both traditions also tend to focus on the individual rather than the collectivity, both normatively and empirically. Thus, there are good reasons for supposing that those who regard the development of liberalism and the spread of Enlightenment as “aspects of one and the same current of thought and practice” (Gray 1986, 16) are not entirely misguided.
The identification of liberalism and the Enlightenment is not, however, quite as straightforward as it first appears. While it may be the case that leading figures of the English Enlightenment (assuming, for the purposes of argument, that we can speak of such a thing as an English Enlightenment) 2 also played a major role in the history of liberalism, it is not at all clear that this relationship holds everywhere else. Eighteenth-century Prussia offers one counterexample worth examining. In Berlin during the last quarter of that century, a wide-ranging debate on the nature and limits of enlightenment raged in the pages of scholarly and popular journals (see Schmidt 1996). One particularly fierce sideline of this more general controversy was the dispute between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn over Jacobi’s claim that Mendelssohn’s friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had, shortly before his death, revealed to Jacobi that he was a “Spinozist.” In the debate that followed—which came to be known, somewhat misleadingly, as the “Pantheism Dispute”—Mendelssohn defended the Enlightenment against Jacobi’s criticisms. 3 Yet Mendelssohn, even when he was advocating such traditional liberal values as religious toleration, argued in ways that are difficult to square with our understanding of liberalism, while Jacobi, the critic of the Enlightenment, took many conventionally liberal positions.
In what follows I will first discuss Mendelssohn’s defense of the idea of enlightenment and his arguments in favor of religious toleration. I will then examine Jacobi’s critique of the Enlightenment in both its philosophical and its political dimensions. I will conclude with a suggestion about the tension between rationalist and critical strains within the Enlightenment and its significance for the relationship between liberalism and the Enlightenment.
Mendelssohn’s Defense of Enlightenment and Religious Liberty
In December 1783 the Berlinische Monatsschrift published an article by the theologian and educational reformer Johann Friedrich Zöllner that, in a footnote, posed the question “What is enlightenment?” (Hinske and Albrecht 1990, 115). Zöllner’s question launched a debate that, over the next decade, would fill the pages of German literary journals and moral weeklies. While Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question in the December 1784 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift is by far the most famous, it was not the first response to the question published by that journal. Three months earlier the journal had published an article on Zöllner’s question by the great German-Jewish man of letters Moses Mendelssohn.
The question that appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift had been under discussion for several months in the Berlin Wednesday Society, a secret society of “Friends of Enlightenment” closely linked to the journal. Its members included Zöllner and Mendelssohn. 4 While Kant’s response was written without knowledge of the extensive discussions of the question within the Wednesday Society, Mendelssohn’s essay represented, in part, an effort to summarize the debate about the nature, the advisability, and the possible limits of enlightenment that occupied the distinguished group of civil servants, clergy, and men of letters who made up the club. 5
It is difficult to classify the members of the Wednesday Society as liberals. 6 Some, such as the jurists Karl Gottlieb Svarez and Ernst Ferdinand Klein, were members of the Prussian bureaucracy who, committed to the reforms initiated by Frederick the Great, accepted the idea that it was the duty of the state to undertake measures that would further the common well-being of its citizens, and viewed as legitimate the police powers that the state exercised over the material and spiritual lives of its citizens in pursuit of this goal (see Raeff 1975). Meanwhile, the clerical members of the Wednesday Society, all of whom embraced enlightened views on the relationship between reason and religion, expressed no qualms about the integration of their churches into the bureaucracy. Johann Joachim Spalding, Johann Samuel Diterich, William Abraham Teller were members of the Upper Consistory [Oberkonsistorium], the chief governing body of the Lutheran Church. Established as a part of the Prussian bureaucracy in 1750, the Upper Consistory was responsible for the appointment and supervision of clergy, the instruction of theological students, and the approval of candidates for teaching positions at the Lutheran seminaries. 7 Karl Franz von Irwing and Friedrich Gedike, also members of the Wednesday Society, were lay members of the Upper Consistory.
There were members of the Wednesday Society who had no ties to the Prussian bureaucracy, including the writer and publisher Friedrich Nicolai, the philosopher and dramatist Johann Jacob Engel, and Mendelssohn. But even those who were not directly connected with the bureaucracy appear to have had few, if any, reservations about the program of reform absolutism. Indeed, the Wednesday Society itself testified to the shared assumptions that brought together: reformist elements within the state bureaucracy engaged in the process of modernizing and rationalizing the legal code; enlightened clergy whose interpretation of Christian doctrine emphasized civic and social responsibilities; and philosophers who, in company with publicists, sought to transmit useful knowledge to a new reading public. For the members of the Wednesday Society, the state and the churches administered by it were potential instruments for social improvement, not barriers to reform—a situation far different from that faced by the French philosophes. 8 The Berliners’ attempts to enlighten the citizenry presupposed a state with the authority to intervene in people’s lives to a degree that would be anathema to liberal theorists.
Mendelssohn’s article represented an attempt to pull together the various strains of the discussion of enlightenment that predated the appearance of Zöllner’s article. 9 To this end, Mendelssohn focused on the relationship of the term “enlightenment” to two other related concepts: “culture” (Kultur) and “education” (Bildung). All three terms, he argued, denoted “modifications of social life, the consequences of the industry and the efforts of men to better their social conditions” (Mendelssohn 1996, 53). The most fundamental of the three terms, Bildung, defies easy translation: it can be rendered as “culture,” “education,” “formation,” or “development.” Mendelssohn distinguished two aspects of Bildung. Aufklärung refers to the “theoretical” side of the process of Bildung, involving a “rational reflection on the things of human life.” Kultur, in contrast, is concerned with “practical” matters, with “goodness, refinement, and beauty in handmade arts and social mores” (ibid.). Summarizing the distinction for a friend shortly after the publication of his essay, Mendelssohn (1977, 237) wrote that “Enlightenment is concerned with the theoretical, with knowledge, with the elimination of prejudices; Culture is concerned with morality, sociality, art, with doing and not doing.” 10
Mendelssohn’s distinction between Aufklärung, Kultur, and Bildung echoed a distinction he had made a year earlier in Jerusalem, his treatise on religious toleration. Where his response to Zöllner subdivided Bildung into Kultur and Aufklärung, Jerusalem subdivided Bildung into “government” (Regierung) and “education” (Erziehung). Government concerns itself with the actions of members of society and seeks to direct them towards the common good by providing them with “reasons that motivate the will” (Bewegungsgründe). Education seeks to instill in people the convictions that motivate actions that serve the common good by offering “reasons that persuade by their truth” (Wahrheitsgründe) (Mendelssohn 1983, 40). Despite the difference in terminology between Mendelssohn’s article in the Berlinische Monatsschrift and his discussion in Jerusalem, the parallels are not difficult to see. “Enlightenment” and “education” attempt to shape convictions by examining the truth or falsehood of the underlying beliefs. “Culture” and “government” seek to influence actions by providing incentives and disincentives that motivate the will.
At first glance, both Mendelssohn’s understanding of enlightenment and his account of the relationship between church and state would appear to adhere to well-worn conventions in liberal thought. Like Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, a work he knew and admired, Mendelssohn distinguishes “external” actions from “internal” convictions, and he is concerned to confine the use of the coercive powers of the state to controlling the former. While legislation, with its system of rewards and punishments, can serve as an appropriate means for the motivation of the will, Mendelssohn, like Locke, thought it folly to assume that convictions could be coerced through laws establishing oaths of religious conformity. Locke and Mendelssohn part company, though, over Locke’s attempt to distinguish “the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.” Locke defined civil government as “a Society of Men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing of their own Civil Interests,” and he listed as “civil interests” “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.” He explicitly denied that the state was concerned with the “the Salvation of Souls,” which was the proper concern of the church—“a voluntary society of men, joining together of their own accord, in order to the public worshipping of God, in such manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the Salvation of their Souls” (Locke 1983, 28).
Mendelssohn’s dissent from Locke moved on two levels. First, where Locke granted churches the right to expel members who dissented from their religious principles (with the proviso that excommunication could carry no civil penalties), Mendelssohn resisted the idea of granting even this much coercive power to religion:
Civil society, viewed as a moral person, can have the right of coercion, and, in fact, has actually obtained this right through the social contract. Religious society lays no claim to the right of coercion, and cannot obtain it by any possible contract. The state possesses perfect, the church only imperfect rights. (Mendelssohn 1983, 45)
While the state had the power to order and to coerce, religion has only power of “love and beneficence.” “The only rights possessed by the church,” Mendelssohn (1983 59–60) insisted, “are to admonish, to instruct, to fortify, and to comfort; and the duties of the citizens toward the church are an attentive ear and a willing heart.”
Second, Mendelssohn questioned the exclusively secular focus of Locke’s understanding of “civil things.” For Mendelssohn (1983, 42), the best form of government was one that “achieves its purposes by morals and convictions... by education [Erziehung].” Hence, “one of the state’s principal efforts must be to govern men through morals and convictions.” Since laws cannot create convictions, and rewards and punishments cannot produce principles or refine morals, the only means the state has for influencing the morals and the convictions of its citizens is “persuasion” (Ueberzeugung).
It is here that religion should come to the aid of the state, and the church should become a pillar of civil felicity. It is the business of the church to convince people, in the most emphatic manner, of the truth of noble principles and convictions; to show them that duties toward men are also duties toward God, the violation of which is in itself the greatest misery... ; that serving the state is true service of God, law [Recht] and justice [Gerechtigkeit] are commandments of God, and charity is his most sacred will; and that true knowledge of the Creator cannot leave behind in the soul any hatred for men. (Mendelssohn 43; omission in translation corrected.)
Circumstances such as the growth of population or the emergence of cultural differences may force the state to rely increasingly on externally binding coercive laws, but Mendelssohn holds that these must be seen as secondary remedies, used by the state when it cannot achieve its ends in tandem with religion by shaping the convictions and morality of the population.
Mendelssohn explicitly rejected Locke’s restriction of “civil interests” to the “temporal welfare” of the individual. It is, Mendelssohn (1983, 39) argued,
neither in keeping with the truth nor advantageous to man’s welfare to sever the temporal so neatly from the eternal. At bottom, man will never partake of eternity; his eternity is merely an incessant temporality. His temporality never ends; it is, therefore, an essential part of his permanency and inseparable from it. One confuses ideas if one opposes his temporal welfare to his eternal felicity.
Thus, the state cannot be completely indifferent to the matters that transcend the immediate concerns of “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body” and “the possession of outward things.” The distinction between state and religion, Mendelssohn maintains, cannot be made at the level of the interests each seeks to advance. The state differs from religion in that it alone has the authority to shape actions through coercive laws. But it can enter into a partnership with religion in advancing, through education and persuasion, both the temporal and the eternal interests of individuals.
To see more particularly what Mendelssohn might have had in mind, we need only look at the article in the Berlinische Monatsschrift that served as a spur for Zöllner’s question in the first place. The article to which Zöllner responded had been written by a fellow member of the Wednesday Society: Johann Erich Biester, librarian of the Royal Library in Berlin and co-editor (with the educational reformer and Gymnasium director Friedrich Gedike) of the Berlinische Monatsschrift. 11 His article maintained that the presence of the clergy at marriage ceremonies led the “unenlightened citizen” to feel that the marriage contract was unique in that it was made with God himself, while other contracts “are only made with men, and are therefore less meaningful.” Because of this tendency to underestimate the importance of contracts unsanctified by clerical participation, Biester concluded that purely civil weddings are appropriate not only for the “enlightened citizen,” who “can do without all of the ceremonies,” but also for the unenlightened citizen, who would learn that all laws and contracts deserve respect (in Hinske and Albrecht 1990, 95).
Biester’s intent, then, was not to remove religion from public life, but rather to teach citizens that all civil responsibilities, not just marriage, had a religious dimension. “How excellent,” he wrote, “if faith and civil duty were more integrated, if all laws had the sacredness of religious prescription” (in Hinske and Albrecht 1990, 99).
O when comes the time, that the concern for the religion of a state is no longer the private monopoly of a few who often lead the state into disorder, but rather becomes itself again the business of the state.... Then we will have once again state, citizen, patriots; undefiled would be the debased names.... Let politics and religion, law and catechism be one! (Ibid., 101–102)
Formulations such as these are far removed from Jefferson’s “thick wall” between church and state.
One final feature of Mendelssohn’s essay calls for comment. Mendelssohn (1996, 54) writes: “I posit, at all times, the destiny of man [Bestimmung des Menschens] as the measure and goal of all our striving and efforts, as a point on which we must set our eyes if we do not wish to lose our way.” The more a people is brought, through art and industry, into harmony with this destiny, the more Bildung we ascribe to it. The goal is that culture and enlightenment advance together; otherwise, both will fall into corruption. 12
Mendelssohn took this notion from Johann Joachim Spalding’s Destiny of Man. First published in 1748, Spalding’s book was one of the most successful products of enlightenment theology. 13 Through a series meditations on the questions “Why do I exist?” and “What should I do?”, Spalding sought to discover a fundamental rule that could serve to guide one’s life. The first possibility he considered was devoting oneself to the satisfaction of physical drives, a possibility he quickly dismissed as offering no permanent satisfaction. Spalding next weighed the possibility of pursuing a more refined sort of desire, that associated with aesthetic experience. Such a life, however, takes no consideration of one’s relationship to others, and it too was rejected. Spalding then turned to the pursuit of virtue, which proved to be the first serious possibility as the human destiny. 14 Spalding, who had translated the works of Shaftesbury and Butler, agreed with them that there is a natural human disposition to work for the common good. For Spalding (1908, 25), my “natural” ability to judge matters of right and wrong is, in fact, the “voice of God, the voice of eternal truth, which speaks in me.” This voice impels me to act to bring about a state of happiness that, because of the contingencies of human existence, can never be achieved on earth. However, the failure to achieve the greatest good in this world holds out the promise of a future life wherein “my constrained and beclouded soul will be given so much more light and freedom that I will be assured of a complete enlightenment of all the obscure parts of the plan by which the world is ruled” (ibid., 28). This, then, is our ultimate end: immortality in the kingdom of God.
Spalding’s account of human destiny provided Mendelssohn with what, in more recent literature, might be characterized as a “thick” theory of the human good. In the remainder of his essay in response to Zöllner’s question, Mendelssohn (1784, 116; Schmidt 1996, 54) discussed how the human telos is subdivided, setting the stage for potential conflicts that might arise between the universal “destiny of man as man” and the particular “destiny of man as citizen [Bürger].” This conflict does not arise in the practical dimension of Bildung. The practical goal of Bildung is to improve a social order that is separated into different estates and bound together by a network of rights and duties. The task is to make sure that agreement between the various parts of the society is achieved. The practical aim of Bildung can thus be nothing other than the cultivation of a Bürger, a member of political society who has certain rights and duties and the skills and abilities needed to perform a specific set of tasks. In practice, then, man’s cultural destiny is simply membership in civil society.
On the theoretical side of the process of Bildung, however, there can be a conflict between the “destiny of man as man” and the “destiny of man as citizen.” Enlightenment has two differing aspects: the “enlightenment of the citizen” (Bürgeraufklärung), which must adjust itself according to the ranks of society it addresses; and the “enlightenment of man” (Menschenaufklärung), which is “universal” and pays heed neither to social distinctions nor to the maintenance of social order. “Certain truths,” Mendelssohn (1996, 55) noted, “that are useful to men, as men, can at times be harmful to them as citizens.” So long as this “collision” between the enlightenment of man and the enlightenment of citizen is confined to matters that do not directly address what Mendelssohn termed the “essential” destiny of man as man or man as citizen, and thus do not put into question either those aspects of men that distinguish them from animals or those civic duties that are necessary for the preservation of public order, Mendelssohn (1996, 55) saw little cause for concern, for (he argued) rules can easily be drawn up to resolve potential conflicts. It is an entirely different matter when a conflict arises between the “essential” destiny of man as citizen and either one’s “essential” or “extra-essential” (außerwesentlichen) destiny as man.
The “essential destiny of man,” Mendelssohn explained in a letter to Hennings, “is a matter of existence” (Daseyn), while the extra-essential destiny “is a matter of improvement” (Besserseyn). The first generates “perfection,” the other “beauty.” If it is not possible to achieve both, the latter must give way (Mendelssohn 1977, 236). 15 “In the absence of the essential destiny of man,” Mendelssohn (1996, 55) explained in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, “man sinks to the level of the beast; without the extra-essential destiny, he is no longer a good and splendid creature.”
The most severe conflict occurs in those “unhappy” times when the essential destinies of man as man and man as citizen collide. In such cases the enlightenment that “is indispensable for man cannot be disseminated through all classes of the realm without the constitution being in danger of perishing.”
Here philosophy lays its hand on its mouth! Here necessity may prescribe laws, or rather forge fetters, that are applied to mankind, to force them down, and hold them under the yoke! (Ibid., 55)
When one’s “essential” destiny as citizen collides with his “extra-essential” destiny as man, the consequences are less grim. In this case it is not a question of the state avoiding our reduction to the level of a beast; it is merely that “certain useful and—for mankind—adorning truths may not be disseminated without destroying prevailing religious and moral tenets” (Mendelssohn 1996, 55).
Here Mendelssohn echoed the views of a number of his colleagues in the Wednesday Society, who saw a need to set limits to enlightenment. He argued that in such cases, the “virtue-loving bearer of enlightenment will proceed with prudence and discretion and endure prejudice rather than drive away the truth that is so closely intertwined with it” (Mendelssohn 1996, 55). 16
Mendelssohn’s conception of enlightenment thus results in an approach to politics that is difficult to square with our typical understanding of liberalism. He allowed for a considerable blurring of the boundaries between church and state, and for rather significant limitations on freedom of expression. With Spalding’s notion of the destiny of man providing him with a thick account of the human good, Mendelssohn allowed for political institutions that aim at bringing about this good, even at the cost of limiting what some might see as the rights of individuals.
Certainly there are formulations, particularly in Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, that prefigure certain aspects of ideas that would eventually be found in thinkers such as John Stuart Mill (or, within the German tradition, one of Mill’s own sources of inspiration: Wilhelm von Humboldt). But what prevents us from treating Mendelssohn as “anticipating” certain liberal formulations is the fact that he defended enlightenment against a contemporary who had already presented a recognizably liberal account of the state: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi—one of the Enlightenment’s most vocal critics.
Jacobi’s Liberal Critique of Enlightenment
Jacobi’s critique of the Enlightenment reached its climax in his dispute with Mendelssohn over the question of whether Lessing, shortly before his death, had embraced Spinozism—a designation that, despite Mendelssohn’s attempted rehabilitation of Spinoza in his Philosophical Dialogues of 1755, remained tantamount to an accusation of atheism. 17 According to a letter Jacobi wrote to Mendelssohn, during a conversation in the summer of 1780 Lessing had expressed admiration for Goethe’s unpublished (and, to many contemporaries, sacrilegious) poem “Prometheus,” and he had rejected “all orthodox conceptions of the divinity” in favor of the ancient Greek concept of the “One and All” (hen kai pan). When a shocked Jacobi asked whether this did not amount to an allegiance to Spinoza, Lessing allegedly responded, “If I were to name myself after someone, I know of no other.” 18
Behind Jacobi’s letter stood a deeply held antagonism toward the political and philosophical positions of Mendelssohn and the Berlin Enlightenment. 19 Prior to his dispute with Mendelssohn, Jacobi was known primarily as the author of Woldemar and The Letters of Edward Allwill, two philosophical novels that shared some of the hostility of the Sturm und Drang toward the Enlightenment’s purportedly one-sided emphasis on reason at the expense of sentiment and feeling. 20 Jacobi’s initial literary efforts had been encouraged by Lessing, and after Lessing’s death in 1781 Jacobi sent copies of his novels to Mendelssohn, seeking support in the face of less-than-favorable reviews. Mendelssohn, repelled by what he saw as the novels’ excessive sentimentality, responded by suggesting that Jacobi aim for a greater “simplicity of style”—which was hardly what Jacobi wanted to hear. 21 This rebuff convinced Jacobi that Mendelssohn had been corrupted by the “magisterial, self-satisfied demeanor” that he saw as the hallmark of the “morgue berlinoise” (Mauthner 1912, 17; Altmann 1973, 604).
Jacobi’s attack on the Berlin Enlightenment had begun several years earlier with a critique of its politics. Between 1759 and 1761, Jacobi studied in Geneva, a city that was the emblem of republican virtue for many during the eighteenth century. He returned from his studies with a hatred of absolutism and a contempt for “the stupidity of people who in our century regard superstition as more dangerous than the growing power of unrestrained autocracy.” 22 In 1782 he published a short work entitled Something Lessing Said, which began by recalling a conversation in which Lessing had claimed that the arguments of princes against the rights of the papacy were all “either groundless or applied with double and triple force to the princes themselves” (Jacobi 1996, 191). 23
The immediate point of departure for Jacobi’s essay on Lessing was the publication of Johannes von Müller’s Journeys of the Popes, a critique of the autocratic character of the rule of Austria’s Joseph II. Müller’s work, in turn, had been occasioned by the visit of Pope Pius VI to Vienna in response to Joseph’s radical educational and ecclesiastical reforms. In the opening pages of Something Lessing Said, Jacobi suggested parallels between Müller’s critique of Joseph and Justus Möser’s critique of Frederick the Great’s actions in the legal controversy involving the case of a miller named Arnold, who had sued the lord of a neighboring manor because the lord’s newly constructed carp pond had drawn water away from his mill, making him unable to meet rent payments to the lord of his own manor. Frederick was convinced that Arnold had received unfair treatment from the noble judges who had dismissed his suit. When an appeals court did not find for Arnold, Frederick reversed its decision, and imprisoned not only the judges who had initially decided against Arnold, but also those who had refused to grant his appeal. While Frederick’s reversal of what he regarded as yet another instance of aristocrats exploiting commoners enjoyed considerable support, Möser was troubled by what he saw as Frederick’s capriciousness. In the essay Jacobi cited at the start of Something Lessing Said, Möser (1986, 99–100) criticized Frederick’s flouting of the rule of law, and argued that a monarch “who bids compliance to a real truth just as he does a formal one overthrows the first and fundamental law, holy to every state.” Similarly, for Jacobi, both Joseph’s reforms and Frederick’s intervention on Arnold’s behalf highlighted the central failing of the advocates of enlightenment: their complicity with autocratic forms of rule, as long as the results of the policies of these rulers were seen as “enlightened.”
The great mass of our thinkers... want to see the essentially true and the essentially good spread by power, and want to see every error suppressed by power. They would like to help promote an enlightenment—elsewhere than in the understanding, because that takes too long. They put out the lights, filled with childish impatience for it to be day. Oh hope-filled darkness, in which we hurriedly totter our way toward the goal of our wishes, toward the greatest good on earth; forward, on the path of violence and subjugation! (Jacobi 1996, 192)
Seeking to achieve substantive ends that were presumed to serve the public interest, the enlightened supporters of absolutism paid little heed, Jacobi argued, to the damage that was being done to the rule of law, the rights of individuals, and the civic life of the nation.
Jacobi insisted that civil society was, and could only be, “a mechanism of coercion” whose function should be simply “to secure for every member his inviolable property in his person, the free use of all his powers, and the full enjoyment of the fruits of their employment”(Jacobi 1996, 195). Attempts by apologists for enlightened absolutism to justify more extensive state intervention—whether justified by appeals to the “interests of state” or to the “welfare of the whole”—led only to “the advancement of self-interest, money-grubbing, indolence; of a stupid admiration of wealth, of rank, and of power; a blind unsavory submissiveness; and an anxiety and fear which allows no zeal, and tends towards the most servile obedience” (Jacobi 1996, 200). Drawing on Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, Jacobi argued that “enlightened” governments are in fact despotisms that corrupt civic virtue and individual morality by eradicating the freedom necessary if either is to flourish. 24
Mendelssohn responded to Jacobi’s argument in his contribution to a multi-authored critical essay that was published anonymously in the Deutsches Museum of January 1783. (The essay had been assembled, at Jacobi’s request, out of several critical letters Jacobi had received. His purpose in having these criticisms printed was to give him the pretext for writing a response that would amplify and clarify his original argument [see Altmann 1973, 599–600]). Mendelssohn maintained that “perfectly virtuous characters can be more easily formed under a despot” than in a republic and argued that the real questions, unanswered by Jacobi, were how one might go about transforming monarchies into popular regimes and whether such a step would be advisable. Urging restraint in criticizing the political establishment, Mendelssohn asked,
What is the point of all declamations which can lead to nothing, which should lead to nothing[?] We tell a sick person, with all the embellishments of rhetoric, that he is dangerously ill; but we do not tell him what he has to do to make himself healthy, or at least to lessen his suffering. It would be better for him to think he is healthy, than to hear a truth, which cannot be useful to him. (In Jacobi 1815, 399–400) 25
In his rejoinder, Jacobi (ibid., 409) argued that such reticence could easily be overdone. “I fully agree with the view: that one must not extinguish candles until it is day,” he wrote in his response, “but it does no harm at least to undo the shutters” and thus avoid the fate of those “who out of fear of awakening too early have slept until a second sunset.”
Jacobi’s attack on the Berlin Enlightenment did not stop with the critique of its political views; he also questioned its understanding of the relationship between religion and reason. It was this issue that lay at the heart of the Pantheism Controversy. Jacobi’s reading of David Hume and Thomas Reid had convinced him that reason cannot attain certainty about the existence of external objects, and that our experience of such objects takes the form of a revelation that is beyond argument and rests on “faith” alone. 26 Carrying this dichotomy between the spheres of faith and knowledge into theology, he argued that reason alone can never lead to certainty of God’s existence. This, he claimed, was the lesson he took from Spinoza. 27
I love Spinoza because he, more than any other philosopher, has led me to the full realization that certain things cannot be unraveled: one must not turn one’s eyes from them; rather they must be taken as they are found.... I must assume a principle of thought and action that remains totally inexplicable to me. (Jacobi 1994, 193)
For Jacobi, the goal of philosophy was not to explain the reasons for what existed. Its aim was rather simply “to disclose, to reveal existence.”
Explanation is the means, the path to a goal, the next task—never the last task. This last task is what can never be explained: the irresolvable, the immediate, the simple. (Jacobi 1994, 194)
Spinoza’s importance for Jacobi lay in his relentless attempt to provide a complete explanation for the world. His failure, in Jacobi’s eyes, to account for human freedom demonstrated what resisted reason and had to be taken on faith alone.
Jacobi had already provided a sketch of this discussion of the limits of reason in a passage near the beginning of Something Lessing Said, where he argued that apologists for enlightened absolutism had fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between reason and the passions:
What distinguishes man from animals and shapes his particular species is the capacity to see a relationship among ends and to guide his conduct by this insight.Out of this source of humanity flows, in all its tributaries, the same reason [Vernunft], only overflowing beds and between banks of immense diversity and size and hiding its efflux from all eyes. These beds, these banks are the passions. Many have wanted to see it differently, and—against all appearances and arguments—have taken reason for the banks, and the passions for the stream. (Jacobi 1996, 193)
Jacobi was not disparaging reason. Indeed, he argued that only when “man is determined in and by himself” can he be said to be “fully human.” “Where there is no freedom, no self-determination, there is no humanity” (ibid., 193). He was, however, insisting (like Hume before him) on the relative weakness of reason in the face of the passions. Hence the difficulty facing political theory: civil society must be “an institution of reason and not of the passions, a means of freedom and not of slavery, constituted for beings who by nature stand in the middle between the two.” Because reason can “never command a passion as such,” civil society must find a way of turning the passions against each other, in order “to inhibit or stop one passion by means of another (ibid., 194). A creation of human reason, civil society is nonetheless a mechanism for checking the passions by means of countervailing passions. Its ultimate concern is not with making men good, but rather with protecting them from the actions of their fellow citizens.
That coercion without which the society cannot exist does not have as its object that which makes man good, but rather that which makes him evil; it has a negative rather than a positive purpose. This purpose can be preserved and secured through external form; and everything positive, virtue and happiness, then arise of themselves from their own source. (Jacobi 1996, 204)
If we were looking for a brief summary of what liberalism meant in the eighteenth century, it would be difficult to improve on this passage.
Liberalism and the Limits of Reason
This brief sketch of the political views of Mendelssohn and Jacobi has led us to what may strike some as an unexpected result: Jacobi, the relentless critic of the Enlightenment, articulated a vision of civil society that was recognizably liberal, while Mendelssohn, the Enlightenment’s faithful defender, elaborated a political philosophy that is, in many respects, difficult to square with liberal principles. Jacobi saw the function of legislation as fundamentally negative; its purpose was not to achieve the good, but rather to protect individual rights. Mendelssohn, in contrast, saw politics as performing an important role in the process of reaching our destiny. When the destinies of man and citizen come into conflict, the public good trumps individual rights.
Perhaps this result should not be all that surprising. “Liberalism” and “the Enlightenment” are blanket generalizations, and blanket generalizations rarely provide much insight into the messy relationships that make up the history of political thought. There are too many different tendencies within the various efforts at enlightenment in late eighteenth-century Europe to inspire much confidence in generalizations about them. Indeed, sometimes it appears that the only commentators who pronounce about what “the Enlightenment” stood for are those who are in the process of dismissing it (see Schmidt 1998). Similar things could be said of liberalism. Asking about the relationship between “the Enlightenment” and “liberalism” is asking for trouble.
Yet there may still be utility in such an exercise insofar as it reminds us of how multifaceted the various intellectual currents that we call the Enlightenment were, and of the role that attitudes toward reason played within both “the Enlightenment” and “liberalism.” The story that has been sketched here suggests that it may well have been Mendelssohn’s confidence in what reason could achieve that led him to adopt certain positions that prevent us from classifying him as a liberal. Likewise, Jacobi’s doubts about the power of reason fueled both his critique of the Berlin Enlightenment and his advocacy of political positions that were more recognizably liberal than those adopted by Mendelssohn. Support for the suspicion that liberalism may best be fostered by an awareness of the limits of reason may be found in the series of essays that Kant published between 1784 and 1786 in the Berlinische Monatsschrift. Splitting the difference between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, Kant sketches an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between enlightenment and liberalism.
In his 1784 response to Zöllner’s question, Kant articulated a conception of enlightenment that departed in significant ways from Mendelssohn’s formulation (see Schmidt 1992). Defining it not in terms of what it achieves, but rather by reference to what it escapes, Kant famously characterized enlightenment as mankind’s departure from a state of “self-incurred immaturity.” He thereby tied his definition of enlightenment to an uncompromising defense of the free public use of reason (see Laursen 1996 and O’Neill 1989, 28–50). Two years later, in “What is Orientation in Thinking?”—his contribution to the Pantheism Dispute—Kant insisted, against Jacobi, that in seeking “orientation” in speculative thinking, there is no need to appeal to “some alleged truth-sense, nor a transcendent intuition dubbed faith”; here, as elsewhere, “reason alone” suffices (Kant 1949, 134). At the same time he argued that Mendelssohn had greatly overestimated what reason could demonstrate, and thus failed to see that his defense of traditional proofs the existence of God represented a “dogmatizing with pure reason” that, paradoxically, culminated in “philosophical fanaticism” (Kant 1949, 297). Kant’s article closed with yet another emphatic defense of the freedom of the press.
As Onora O’Neill has suggested in a number of important essays, 28 Kant’s defense of free and open public discussion is central to his understanding of the nature of reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant rejected the axiomatic procedures of the geometrician as a way of establishing the authority of reason and instead developed his argument through images drawn from law and politics. Critical philosophy, Kant suggested, serves as “the true tribunal for all disputes of pure reason.”
In the absence of this critique reason is, as it were, in the state of nature, and can establish and secure its assertions and claims only through war. Critique, on the other hand,... secures us the peace of a legal order, in which our disputes have to be conducted solely by the recognized method of legal action.... The endless disputes of a merely dogmatic reason thus finally constrain us to seek relief in some critique of reason itself, and in a legislation based upon such criticism. (A751–2/B779–80)
When imported into philosophy, geometrical methods can produce only the “so many houses of cards” resting on foundations that must be accepted dogmatically (A727/B755). Reason, Kant argues, cannot derive its authority from such presuppositions. It “depends on freedom for its very existence” and “its verdict is always simply the agreement of free citizens, each of whom must be permitted to express... his objections or even his veto” (A738–9/B766–7).
In his 1785 essay in the Berlinische Monatsschrift on the relationship between theory and practice, Kant sketched a conception of the nature of civil society that was as emphatic as Jacobi’s in rejecting paternalistic conceptions of political rule. Kant insisted that a “paternal government,” established on the principle of “benevolence” towards its people, represented “the greatest conceivable despotism.” He called instead for a “patriotic government” in which each citizen is pledged to defend every individual’s right to liberty (Kant 1991, 74). Here, at last, we seem to have returned to familiar ground: a defense of enlightenment that goes hand in hand with support for liberal principles of political rule. Kant limited what enlightened reason could promise while at the same time setting restrictions on what the state could attempt to achieve. In working out the historical relationship between liberalism and the Enlightenment, Kant lends support to what the example of Mendelssohn and Jacobi has suggested: only an enlightenment that has learned to criticize itself can provide a secure foundation for liberal politics.
References
Adler, Hans. 1994. “Die Bestimmung des Menschen: Spaldings Schrift als Ausgangpunkt einer offenen Anthropologie.” Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert 18:125–37.
Altmann, Alexander. 1973. Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study. University: University of Alabama Press.
Altmann, Alexander. 1994. “Mendelssohn im deutschen Idealismus.” In Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit, ed. Michael Albrecht, Eva J. Engel, and Norbert Hinske. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Beck, Lewis White. 1969. Early German Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Beiser, Frederick C. 1992. Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought 1790–1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Beiser, Frederick. 1987. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Birtsch, Günther. 1990. “The Christian as Subject: The Worldy Mind of Prussian Protestant Theologians in the Late Enlightenment Period.” In The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Birtsch, Günther. 1996. “The Berlin Wednesday Society.” In Schmidt 1996.
Garrard, Graeme. 1997. “The Counter-Enlightenment Liberalism of Isaiah Berlin.” Journal of Political Ideologies 2:281–96.
Gray, John. 1986. Liberalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Haakonssen, Knud. 1996. Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hammacher, Klaus. 1971. “Jacobi und das Problem der Dialektik.” In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Philosoph und Literat der Goethezeit, ed. Klaus Hammacher. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
Hampson, Norman. 1981. “The Enlightenment in France.” In The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hellmuth, Eckhart. 1982. “Aufklärung und Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft während der Jahre 1783 und 1784.” Zeitschrift für historisches Forschung 9:315–45.
Heraeus, Otto. 1928. Fritz Jacobi und der Sturm und Drang. Heidelberg: Winter.
Hinske, Norbert, and Michael Albrecht, eds. 1990. Was ist Aufklärung? Beiträge aus der Berlinische Monatsschrift, 4th ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Hinske, Norbert. 1981. “Mendelssohns Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? oder Über die Aktualität Mendelssohns.” In idem, ed., Ich handle mit Vernunft... : Moses Mendelssohn und die europäische Aufklärung. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Homann, Karl. 1973. F. H. Jacobis Philosophie der Freiheit. Freiburg: Alber.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1815. Werk, vol. 2. Leipzig: Jüng.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1987. Briefwechsel 1782–1784. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1994. The Main Philosophial Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1996. “Something Lessing Said: A Commentary on Journeys of the Popes.” In Schmidt 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. 1949. “What is Orientation in Thinking?” In idem, Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, trans. Lewis White Beck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1991. Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” In Schmidt 1996.
La Vopa, Anthony J. 1990. “The politics of Enlightenment: Friedrich Gedike and German professional ideology.” Journal of Modern History 6:34–56.
Laursen, John Christian. 1996. “The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity.’” In Schmidt 1996.
Locke, John. 1983. Letter Concerning Toleration. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Mauthner, Fritz. ed. 1912. Jacobis Spinoza Büchlein. Munich: Müller.
Mendelssohn, Moses. 1976. Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 12, no. 1: Briefwechsel II.1. Stuttgart Bad-Cannstatt: Frommann.
Mendelssohn, Moses. 1977. Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 13: Briefwechsel III. Stuttgart Bad-Cannstatt: Frommann.
Mendelssohn, Moses. 1981. Gesammelte Schriften Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 6, no. 1. Stuttgart Bad-Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
Mendelssohn, Moses. 1983. Jerusalem. Or, On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Alan Arkush. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England.
Mendelssohn, Moses. 1996. “On the Question: What is Enlightenment?” In Schmidt 1996.
Merlan, Philip. 1967. “Kant, Hamann-Jacobi, and Schelling on Hume.” Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 22:481–94.
Möhsen, Johann Karl. 1996. “What Is to be Done toward the Enlightenment of the Citizenry.” In Schmidt 1996.
Möser, Justus. 1986. “Von dem wichtigen Unterscheide des würklichen und förmlichen Rechts.” In Justus Mösers Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7. Osnabrück: Wenner.
Nicolai, Heinz. 1971. “Jacobis Romane.” In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Philosoph und Literat der Goethezeit, ed. Klaus Hammacher. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
O’Neill, Onora. 1989. Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Neill, Onora. 1990. “Enlightenment as Autonomy: Kant’s Vindication of Reason.” In The Enlightenment and its Shadows, ed. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova. New York: Routledge.
Oz-Salzberger, Fania. 1995. Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pascal, Roy. 1953. The German Sturm und Drang. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Porter, Roy. 1981. “The Enlightenment in England.” In Porter and Teich 1987.
Porter, Roy, and Mikulás Teich, eds. 1981. The Enlightenment in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raeff, Marc. 1975. “The Well-Ordered Police State and the Development of Modernity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe: An Attempt at a Comparative Perspective.” American Historical Review 80:1221–43.
Saine, Thomas. 1997. The Problem of Being Modern, or The German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Schmidt, James. 1989. “Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Question of Enlightenment.” Journal of the History of Ideas 50:269–92.
Schmidt, James. 1992. “What Enlightenment Was: How Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant Answered the Berlinische Monatsschrift.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30:77–101.
Schmidt, James, ed. 1996. What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schmidt, James. 1998. “Civility, Enlightenment, and Society: Conceptual Confusions and Kantian Remedies.” American Political Science Review 92:419–27.
Schollmeier, Joseph. 1967. Johann Joachim Spalding: Ein Beitrag zur Theologie der Aufklärung. Gütersloher: Gerd Mohn.
Scholz, Heinrich, ed. 1916. Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen Jacobi und Mendelssohn. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard.
Snow, Dale E. 1996. “Jacobi’s Critique of the Enlightenment.” In Schmidt 1996.
Spalding, Johann Joachim. 1908. Bestimmung des Menschen (1748) und Wert der Andacht [Studien zur Geschichte des neueren Protestantismus; 1 Quellenheft], ed. Horst Stephan. Giessen: Töpelamann.
Venturi, Franco. 1971. Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whaley, Joachim. 1981. “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany.” In Porter and Teich 1981.
Zoeppritz, Rudolf, ed. 1869. Aus F.H. Jacobi’s Nachlass. Leipzig: Engelmann.
Endnotes
*: James Schmidt is Professor of Political Science and Sociology, University Professors Program, Boston University, 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, telephone (617) 353-4020. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Lisbeth Haakonssen, gifted scholar, dedicated teacher, and friend of the Enlightenment. Back.
Note 1: For an overview of some of the received wisdom on this point, see Garrard 1997, 281–82. For an account of Enlightenment natural-law theory that is attentive to the ways in which these generalizations do not hold up, see Haakonssen 1996. Back.
Note 2: For an argument that there was one, see Porter 1981. Back.
Note 3: For general treatments of the Pantheism Dispute, see Beiser 1987, 44–126; Beck 1969, 352–74; and Scholz 1916, lix–lxxvii. Back.
Note 4: On the Wednesday Society and its membership, see Birtsch 1996. Back.
Note 5: I have analyzed the relationship between the published responses and the secret discussions in Schmidt 1989. Back.
Note 6: For a general exploration of the relationship between the liberalism and enlightenment in Germany, see Beiser 1992, 15–26 and 309–17. Back.
Note 7: For a discussion of the Oberkonsistorium and its responsibilities, see Birtsch 1990. Back.
Note 8: The contrast between the situation faced by French philosophes and the German Aufklärer is detailed in Hampson 1981, 45 and Whaley 1981, 117. Also, see La Vopa 1990, 35–37. Back.
Note 9: The origins of the debate within the Wednesday Society may be traced to a lecture of December 17, 1783 by Johann Karl Möhsen (translated as Möhsen 1996). Back.
Note 10: Letter to August Hennings of November 27, 1784, in Mendelssohn, 1977, 237. Note also his letter to Hennings of June 29, 1779, where Mendelssohn describes his planned translations and commentaries on the Scriptures as “the first step towards culture from which my people is, alas, kept at such a distance” (Mendelssohn 1976, 149). Back.
Note 11: The article was signed with the initials “E. v. K.,” a pseudonym that Beister had used on other occasions. See the editorial note in Hinske and Albrecht 1990, 484. Back.
Note 12: On the centrality of the notion of the “destiny of man” for Mendelssohn’s work, see Hinske 1981, 94–99. Back.
Note 13: For discussions of Spalding’s book and its impact, see Schollmeier 1967, 56–65 and Adler 1994, 125–37. Back.
Note 14: For the argument thus far, see Spalding 1908, 16–24. Back.
Note 15: My rendering of Mendelssohn’s außerwesentlichen as “unessential” in my translation of Mendelssohn’s essay (Mendelssohn 1996) now strikes me as potentially misleading. In the passages that follow, I have translated the term as “extra-essential.” Back.
Note 16: See Hallmuth 1982, 315–45, on the debate within the Wednesday Society on this question. Back.
Note 17: Conversely, Spinoza was revered by radical exponents of toleration, freedom of speech, and political reform. On this underground reputation of Spinoza in Germany see Beiser 1987, 48–52. Back.
Note 18: For the letter, see Mendelssohn 1977, 135–53; for the statement on Spinoza see ibid., 137–38. For discussions, see Altmann 1973, 613–21; and Beiser 1987, 65–69. Saine 1997, 214, notes the importance of the hypothetical form of Lessing’s response, which does not mean “that he had to identify himself with any group or master.” Back.
Note 19: Altmann 1994, 6–8 treats Jacobi’s general strategy in the Pantheism Dispute. Back.
Note 20: On the novels, see George di Giovanni’s introduction to Jacobi 1994, 117–51. For discussions of Jacobi’s relationship with the Sturm und Drang see Nicolai 1971, 347–60; Heraeus 1928, 94–95; and Pascal 1953, 3, 151–52. Back.
Note 21: Mendelssohn’s opinion was communicated to Jacobi by Christian Wilhelm Dohm in his letter of December 18, 1781 (in Zoeppritz 1869, I:50). The letter begins with an allusion by Dohm to a warning in an earlier letter from Jacobi on the need to avoid contamination by “the Berlin spirit.” Back.
Note 22: Letter to J.W.L. Gleim of May 31, 1782, in Jacobi 1987, 35–6. For Jacobi’s early political views, see Homann 1973, 38–96. On the significance of the image of Geneva during the Enlightenment, see Venturi 1971, 84. Back.
Note 23: For discussions of this essay, see Snow 1996 and Beiser 1992, 145–47. Back.
Note 24: Long quotations from “the noble Ferguson” may be found in Jacobi 1996, 198–200. Jacobi also drew on two other defenders of republican virtue: Montesquieu (Jacobi 1996, 210n15) and Machiavelli (Jacobi 1996, 204–6). On Jacobi’s use of Ferguson, see Oz-Salzberger 1995, 257–79. Back.
Note 25: As support for the argument that virtuous characters can be formed more easily under despotisms than republics, Mendelssohn appealed to Lessing’s decision to set his Nathan in Turkey, and to Socrates, who “was raised in Athens at a time when the form of government was inclined towards tyranny” (Jacobi 1815, 399). The latter example is hardly compelling; with the exception of an oligarchy imposed by Sparta briefly at the close of the Peloponnesian war, Socrates’ Athens was a democracy. Back.
Note 26: For the importance of Hume and Reid, see Hammacher 1971, 120–21; Jacobi’s most extended discussion of Hume is found in his David Hume über die Glaube, oder Idealismus und Realismus in Jacobi 1815, 127–288, esp. 152–53 and 156–63. This rather strange reading of Hume is aided by Jacobi’s translation of Hume’s “belief” by the German Glaube (which carries religious connotations not found, for example, in Meinung); see Merlan 1967 483–84 and di Giovanni’s discussion in Jacobi 1994, 90. Back.
Note 27: For a discussion of Jacobi’s use of Spinoza, see Beiser 1992, 54–55 and 79–91, and di Giovanni’s discussion in Jacobi 1994, 73–90. Back.
Note 28: See, in particular, O’Neill 1989, 3–27, especially 14–15 and 17–20; and O’Neill 1990, 184–99, especially 190–94. Back.