, 2012).
Merz, John Theodore. A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1907).
Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, reprinted vols. 7–8 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. Robson. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91 [1843]).
Reill, Peter. “Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany.” History and Theory 33 (3), 1994.
Richards, Robert. “Biology,” in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Stanley, John. “Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.” Science and Society 61 (4), 1997.
Sulloway, Frank. Freud: Biologist of the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Szöllösi-Janze, Margit. “Science and Social Space.” Minerva 43, 2005.
Windelband, Wilhelm. “History and Natural Science,” trans. of the Strasbourg Rectorial Address “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaften” by Guy Oakes. History and Theory 19 (2), 1980 [1894]. Abbreviated GN.
* * *
1 See Greg Frost-Arnold, “The Large-Scale Structure of Logical Empiricism” (Philosophy of Science 72 (5), 2005), 826–38.
2 John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1907).
3 See, for example, Margit Szöllösi-Janze, “Science and Social Space” (Minerva 43, 2005), 339–60.
4 Robert Richards, “Biology,” in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 17–18.
5 See, among others, Sven Dierig, Wissenschaft in der Maschinenstadt (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), and Frank Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
6 Peter Reill, “Science and the Construction of the Cultural Sciences in Late Enlightenment Germany” (History and Theory 33 (3), 1994), p. 345 and passim.
7 See Klaus Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36ff.
8 Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin 1900f.), Ak. 4: 470.
9 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, in The Works of John Locke, vol. 1. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854 [1690]), 132.
10 Johann Herbart “Possibility and Necessity of Applying Mathematics in Psychology,” trans. H. Haanel (Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11, 1877), 255.
11 See, for example, Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), ch. 5.
12 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, reprinted vols. 7–8 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–91 [1843]).
13 For more background on Dilthey, see among others Rudolf Makkreel, “Wilhelm Dilthey,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta, available at
14 Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2012), 298. Further references to this text will be abbreviated GHT, followed by page number. Here see also William Kluback, Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1956), ch. 1. Further references to this text will be abbreviated WDPH, followed by page number.
15 See, for example, the essays in Uljana Feest ed., Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009).
16 Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol. 1, tr. Ramon Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988 [1883]), 72. Further references to this text will be abbreviated IHS, followed by page number.
17 This argument is not intended to be formally valid, of course. It is summarized from Dilthey’s account in IHS, ch. 3. See also WDPH, p. 59.
18 Moritz Lazarus, Über die Ideen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1865), 41n.
19 See Michael N. Forster, “Hermeneutics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, ed. Michael Rosen and Brian Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and “Herder’s Philosophy of Language, Interpretation, and Translation” (Review of Metaphysics 56 (2), 2002), 323–56 for the background, motivations, and arguments of hermeneutic theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
20 Kristin Gjesdal, “Aesthetic and Political Humanism” (History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (3), 2007), 281.
21 For Dilthey’s objections to their views, see Kluback, pp. 35–6.
22 Wilhelm Windelband, “Strasbourg Rectorial Address,” trans. of “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaften” by Guy Oakes (History and Theory 19 (2), 1980 [1894]), 173. Further references to this text will be abbreviated GN, followed by page number.
23 See, for example, John Stanley, “Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature” (Science and Society 61 (4), 1997), 449–73.
24 Carl Hempel, “Aspects of Scientific Explanation,” in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965).
25 Henk de Regt, Sabina Leonelli, and Kai Eigner, Scientific Understanding: Philosophical Perspectives (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
26 Several in-depth and wide-ranging discussions with Michael Forster have been invaluable to the conception and development of this project. Dick Burian, Dan Linford, and Robert Richards contributed thought-provoking discussion, and suggested case studies and resources. Errors remain mine.
CHAPTER 31
MATERIALISM
KURT BAYERTZ
31.1 INTRODUCTION
IN early modernity, Germany can hardly be counted among the strongholds of materialist thought. Compared with materialist theorizing in Great Britain leading from Francis Bacon via Thomas Hobbes to John Locke, or with French materialist thought from Pierre Gassendi to Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, and Paul Thiry d’Holbach, materialist thought was not only scarce, but it also remained parochial with respect to its theoretical ingenuity and its national as well as international reception. This only changed in the nineteenth century.
(a)Whereas materialist writings previously had to be published clandestinely and, if discovered, were censored, in some cases even publicly burned by the executioner, it became increasingly possible to avow one’s materialism and publish corresponding writings, despite the fact that it remained impossible throughout the nineteenth century to hold a professorship at a university as a materialist.
(b)Materialist thought gained a growing audience and, at the latest, in the second half of the century gave rise to controversial public debates. Even though it never became a mainstream position, it could now significantly influence philosophical debate as well as public awareness.
(c)At the same time it got rid of its parochialism and achieved a European level. The corresponding writings were received internationally. A literary document of this development is to be found in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862), the main protagonist of which advises against reading Pushkin and instead recommends reading Ludwig Büchner’s materialist bestseller1 Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter).
31.2 ANTHROPOLOGICAL MATERIALISM
The decisive author for this ‘break-through’ was Ludwig Feuerbach, who in the 1830s had freed himself of Hegel’s influence and published his epoch-making book Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) in 1841. The book was written in the context of the critique of religion by the Young Hegelians and the Biblical criticism by the protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauß and led this movement to a theoretical climax. Feuerbach was not only concerned with the Christian dogma and the political as well as social function of Christianity in his age, but more generally with the philosophical interpretation of religion itself. The main idea in the book is that the human being is the centre of all religion. More precisely: that all predicates app
lied to God such as love, justice, omnipotence, or omniscience are idealized human properties and that, in consequence, theology is merely idealized anthropology. Even though, in articulating this idea, Feuerbach performed an inversion typical of materialist thought, that is, he attempted to disclose the earthly ‘material’ core of heavenly or spiritual phenomena, Das Wesen des Christentums did not contain an explicit commitment to materialism. This was only made explicit in a number of texts published shortly afterwards which were written in the form of theses and sketched a programme for a new type of philosophy.
These texts are carried by a sense of an epochal change. Feuerbach sees himself as a witness to the end of a long historical phase and as at the brink of a dawning new one: ‘Disbelief has taken the place of belief, reason the place of the Bible, the place of religion and the Church has been taken by politics, the place of Heaven has been taken by the Earth, that of prayer by work, that of Hell by material need, the place of the Christian has been taken by man.’ (Notwendigkeit einer Veränderung 1842/43: 224). For one thing, Feuerbach here asserts the decline of belief, religion, and the church. This is crucial, for in his view the historical epochs are distinguished by religious changes. For him, religion is not just any part of human consciousness, but has previously been its centre, it is, to put it with a characteristic formulation of his, the ‘heart of man’. With the decline of religion, the role of philosophy changes. This is the second aspect of the change. In the past, philosophy was always closely linked with religion, so closely that Hegel spoke of an identity of philosophy and religion. Now philosophy would have to emancipate itself from religion and take its place. But since it was not prepared for this, a completely new kind of philosophy had to be created. Thirdly and finally, the dawning of a new age is also expressed in the increasing appreciation of politics. In turning away from the heavens, towards the earth, man takes his earthly desires more seriously and actively tries to improve his earthly fate. His fear is no longer directed towards Hell, but towards material need.
Let us take a closer look at the second of these three points. In his Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future) written in 1843, Feuerbach characterizes the essence of the dawning new epoch and derives from it the demands for a new philosophy. ‘The deification of what is real, of what exists materially—of materialism, empiricism, realism, humanism—the negation of theology is the essence of the new age.’ (§15). So the new philosophy has to be materialist, but can also be characterized as ‘empiricism’, ‘realism’, or ‘humanism’. What Feuerbach was concerned with was dealing with what is real, with what ‘exists materially’, but not the name under which this is done. But what was the ‘real’ with which philosophy should deal? In answering this question, Feuerbach marks a significant change in the tradition of materialist thought. In this tradition reaching back to Antiquity the ‘real’ had always been identified with matter; and matter, in turn, with nature. Materialism had primarily been natural philosophy. Feuerbach did not part with this tradition, but made a shift of emphasis: ‘The new philosophy makes man, including nature, as the basis of man, the sole, universal and highest object of philosophy, that is, anthropology including physiology becomes the universal science.’ (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft: §54). Feuerbach’s materialism was not a natural philosophy (‘physiology’) that included an anthropology, but an anthropology that viewed man as a part of nature. So the relative weight of ‘man’ and ‘nature’, of ‘anthropology’ and ‘natural philosophy’ were switched. This is confirmed by the notion of ‘Sinnlichkeit’ (sensuousness) central to Feuerbach’s philosophy: ‘What is real in its reality is the real as the object of the senses. Truth, reality and sensuousness are identical. Only a sensuous creature is a true, a real creature. Only through the senses is an object given in the true sense—not by thinking alone.’ (Grundsätze: §32). Accordingly, he was not concerned with the real, with matter itself, but with the real, with matter insofar as they are the objects of human senses. This had already been negatively sketched in his analysis of religion. For if man is the essence of religion and if theology is merely idealized anthropology, then that suggests a case for revising this inversion and for demanding that man become the focus of theorizing. For this reason, a philosophy that wants to do justice to the ‘spirit of a new age’ has to see the ‘real’ in man and devote its entire attention to it. As such, Feuerbach’s materialism has been characterized as an anthropological materialism.
Just as Feuerbach’s materialism is anthropological, so his anthropology is materialist. He sets his position on man off from all religious and idealist philosophical positions according to which man is first and foremost a spiritual, mental, and thinking creature. For the ‘philosophy of the future’, by contrast, man is primarily a natural, embodied and sensuous creature with corresponding natural, embodied, and sensuous desires. The notion of ‘sensuousness’ (Sinnlichkeit) thus not only marks a specific conception of reality in general, but also a specific conception of man. (a) Sensuousness first characterizes the ‘essence of man’: man is an embodied and therefore also a needy creature. (b) Furthermore, man’s relation to nature is thus also denoted. Man lives in nature and he needs it to sustain his life in and by this nature. (c) But as a sensuous creature man is not only situated amid an external material nature, but always also among other sensuous human creatures: ‘individual man has the essence of man in him neither as a moral nor as a thinking creature. The essence of man is only contained in community, in the unity of man with man—a unity that is solely based on the reality of the difference between me and you.’ (Grundsätze: §60). Here Feuerbach is primarily thinking of natural relations between individuals, not least of erotic relations and reproduction. In this sense his anthropology is non-individualist: for him, man is essentially a ‘Gattungswesen’ (species-being), that is, a creature necessarily standing in natural relations to other human beings.
Against this background Feuerbach developed his conception of politics. Having turned away from the heavenly beyond and towards the earthly here and now, it has to be in the interest of human beings to shape this earthly world optimally. As an embodied, material creature, man has to tend to his embodied, material interests: first and foremost he has to ensure a sufficient supply of food. In this sense, not only philosophy takes the place of religion, but politics, too.
31.3 SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM
Feuerbach was not the only proponent of a materialist way of thinking in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany.2 But, nationally as well as internationally, he was the most influential. His theory was the starting point for the two main lines into which materialist thought subsequently developed. One of these further developed Feuerbach’s anthropological turn into a theory of society. While man was also a natural creature for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, he was first and foremost a social creature and the relations between humans were not purely natural, but predominantly social and economic in nature. At the same time, man was an active creature that rearranged nature by means of labour and thereby constantly changed society and itself. As such, their materialism was ‘historical’ rather than ‘anthropological’. Here we will not go into this kind of materialism in any greater depth.
A second approach, however, picked up on the central role that Feuerbach had accorded the sciences. While traditional idealist philosophy had allied itself with theology, the ‘philosophy of the future’ was to lean on science. For Feuerbach the sciences were the paradigm of the materialist, empiricist, or realist way of thinking, which should also gain ground in philosophy. A group of scientifically trained authors sought to spell out what had only been generally postulated in Feuerbach’s programme. This group was mainly represented by Carl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, became the epitome of materialism in Germany and beyond. Some of them had already gained prominence by publications towards the end of the 1840s; but it was only in 1854
that they received significant public attention when the Christian physiologist Rudolph Wagner directly attacked materialism and made it out to be a danger to Christianity and also to the ‘moral foundation of social order.’ (Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz 1854: 80). This speech was received widely and provoked a polemical response by Carl Vogt, followed by a whole flood of publications pro and (mostly) contra materialism. The dispute was fuelled further in the 1860s when Darwin’s theory became known in Germany. The materialists welcomed this theory as a solid confirmation of their claims, whereas the antimaterialists rejected it for that very reason. In the 1870s direct as well as indirect criticism of materialism grew stronger, not least on the part of academic philosophy. In the fin-de-siècle finally, neo-idealist, partly also irrationalist philosophical tendencies had a hegemonic status.
The materialists never put forward a theoretical system. Moreover, they hardly made substantial theoretical progress compared with their precursors in the eighteenth century or Feuerbach. This diagnosis, already raised as a criticism by their contemporaries, fit their self-understanding, as they did not place great value on theoretical ‘originality’: ‘We do not boast of having produced anything new. Similar ideas have been promulgated at all times, partly by old Greek and Indian philosophers; but the necessary empirical basis furnished by modern science was then wanting. Hence the present views are, in respect to their clearness, a conquest of modern empirical science.’ (Büchner, Force and Matter 1855: XVII). The ‘views’ of the new materialist thus do not differ from those of the old materialist as regards their content, but in virtue of the solid foundation that content had found in contemporary science. The new element here is the result not of philosophical but of scientific innovation. This point is crucial. Since the sciences had become independent of philosophy, materialism had seen itself confirmed by their results. The German materialists of the nineteenth century took a decisive further step: their aim was no alliance of philosophy and the sciences, but an overcoming of the former and its replacement by the latter. An ‘autonomous’ philosophy distinct from the sciences as regards its object, its methods, and its claims was rigorously rejected. Materialism thus construed is different from its precursors not primarily in virtue of its contents, but its ‘form’. It sees itself not as a philosophically but as a scientifically founded materialism. Although they never coined the phrase themselves, ‘scientific materialism’3 aptly reflects these authors’ underlying intentions.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 112
