The Germans

A scientific academy arose at Berlin in 1707, seventeen years before one arose at St. Petersburg, thirty years before one arose at Stockholm and thirty-eight years before Copenhagen. To Protestant Germany had also come a belief in Deism, but to only a few. The so-called Enlightenment and reading were for the few. At the beginning of the 1700s, most people in Germany remained illiterate and their rulers, from Prussia and Berlin to the surrounding German states that were a part of the Holy Roman Empire or independent principalities, were not interested in having them educated.

Among those who could read, the dominant trend was Pietism, a movement that sought truths from a literal interpretation of the Bible. Pietism was against the authority of clergy between God and the faithful and believed in the unostentatious living of earliest Christianity.

Wilhelm Leibniz

Enlightenment had reached the town of Leipzig, in Saxony, where Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the son of a university professor, invented infinitesimal calculus independent of Newton. He learned of Newton's new physics, and like Newton he tried to put the new physics within traditional Christianity.

Regarding John Locke's ideas, Leibniz objected to morality being reason applied to sense experience rather than from God. God, he believed, had made this the best of all possible worlds -- a view that Voltaire was to satirize in his little novel, Candide, with Leibniz as Dr. Pangloss.

Leibniz's philosophy adhered to the scholastic tradition. Like Descartes he was a rationalist and believed in deductive reasoning -- in keeping with mathematics.

Bertrand Russell described Leibniz as leaving his best writing "unpublished in his desk." What he published," wrote Russell, "was designed to win the approbation of princes and princesses." Unpublished works being "slowly unearthed from his manuscripts" Russell described as "profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic, and amazingly logical."

Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Following Leibniz, another philosopher arose to notoriety among the Protestant Germans: Immanuel Kant of Königsberg (in East Prussia), a grandson of a Scottish immigrant. He had been influenced by Lutheranism, Pietism, the Enlightenment and Christian von Wolff. He wrote of the courage to use one's own intelligence rather than blindly accept tradition, and he saw the Enlightenment as liberating humanity from what he called immaturity.

Like the British empiricists, Kant dwelled on personal experience as the source of knowledge, but he believed that David Hume had gone too far in his skepticism. He believed that there were limits to what people could know but that by weighing thoughts in a disciplined manner, people could establish certitudes.

Kant argued against the empiricist position, as with Locke, that the mind was a blank slate upon which sense experience is written. And he argued against the rationalists attitude that there was knowledge -- or even concepts I would add -- that were completely separate from the world of sense experience. In other words, Kant argued that one could not start from a premise and build logically to real knowledge -- as Aristotle and others after him had done. The mind had to work with what it had acquired through the senses, to arrange the sense experience, and make generalizations regarding it. (Our sense of motion and space derives from experience. So does the sense of a supernatural being, anthropomorphical or not.)

Moving philosophy beyond naive empiricism and its opposite, and also naive, rationalism, Kant put humans at the center of philosophical inquiry. With Kant there was no philosophizing about things independent of the person doing the perceiving and thinking.

Kant believed that he was uniting philosophy with science. He urged people to use scientific thinking to understand their own nature and nature outside of themselves. With such thinking, he claimed, religion could transcend tradition and dogmatism. He criticized church ritual, superstition and hierarchical church order. Knowledge, he believed, allowed people to know what they should do. And, without seeing tradition involved in his own thinking, Kant saw knowledge as the source of proper religion and morality.

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