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ARCHIVIO
DI FILOSOFIA
A RC H I V E S O F P H I LO S O P H Y
a journal founded in 1931 by enrico castelli
formerly edited by marco m. olivetti
lxxxvii · 2019 · n. 1
Q U E S T I O N I D I M E TA F I S I C A
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SOMMARIO
Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Introduzione 9
Alice Ragni, Gli esiti della Schulmetaphysik a Giessen: Johann Christian Lange e il
dibattito sull’ontologia (1708) 15
Clemens Schwaiger, Christian Wolffs Deutsche Metaphysik und die Thomasianer
Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling und Johann Franz Budde 27
Paola Rumore, Between Spinozism and Materialism: Johann Franz Budde and the
Early German Enlightenment 39
Alexei N. Krouglov, Das Problem der Unsterblichkeit der Seele bei D. S. Aničkov
und A. N. Radiščev: Zwischen deutscher Metaphysik und russischer Orthodoxie 57
Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, From the Folds of the Rhino to the ‘Hand of Nature’:
Maupertuis’s Essay on Cosmology and its Reception in the 1750s 75 Paolo Treves, Baumgarten e l’ens rationis ratiocinantis: un concetto al confine tra
ontologia e psicologia empirica 91
Igor Agostini, Wolff e Baumgarten attorno alla definizione di sostanza: fra la
Scola-stica e Descartes 105
Paolo Pecere, Kant e la sostanza materiale. Fisica, metafisica, esperienza 125
Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Kant et le schématisme ‘pragmatique’. L’«idée
maté-rielle» entre Platon et Aristote 137
Arnaud Pelletier, Kant and the Demarcation Challenge: the Background Debate on
Improper Science 149
Sophie Grapotte, Kant: projet et mise en œuvre de la réforme de la métaphysique 163
Antoine Grandjean, Métaphysique des mœurs et anthropologie morale chez Kant 177
Gualtiero Lorini, The Unity of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Capital
Puni-shment as a Case Study 189
Antonino Falduto, The Metaphysical Foundation of the Self and the Right to
Revo-lution 205
BETWEEN SPINOZISM AND MATERIALISM
:
JOHANN FRANZ BUDDE
AND THE EARLY GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT
Paola Rumore
Abstract · The paper focuses on the role played by the Lutheran theologian Johann Franz Budde (1667-1729) in the struggle engaged in the early German Enlightenment against atheism, superstition and any form of threat for natural and revealed religion. Special attention is paid to the question of materialism, which turns out to be a central issue both in his contribution to the early German debate on Spinozism, and in his controversy with Wolff. Budde’s polemical writings reveal the presence of philosophical and methodological claims derived from Locke’s
Essay, on which Budde grounds his conservative understanding of the relation between reason
and religion.
Keywords: German Enlightenment, Spinozism, Materialism, Christian Wolff, John Locke, Scepticism.
1. An apology for religion
«
W
e agree that without freedom of thinking no one can bear a true opinion onwhatever topic, [but] only in so far we refer to a legitimate freedom, which
is circumscribed within its own limits».1 By means of this claim expressed in a
success-ful Commentatio theologica de libertate cogitandi (1715), Johann Franz Budde (1667-1729), at the time one of the most relevant representative of the German theological scene, pronounced its verdict in the debate originated by the anonymous recent publication of Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Free-Thinking. The provocative booklet from 1713, rightly
considered one of the most prominent programmatic writings of the Enlightenment,2
concerned in fact a much debated topic in the first decades of the 18th century. Col-lins’s vindication of an irrenounceable freedom of thought and expression in the pub-lic sphere as a fundamental ingredient of any healthy and safe political and religious society recalled undeniably, beside the obvious presence of Locke’s idea of toleration, the arguments Spinoza had developed in the last few chapters of his highly debated and contested Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Indeed, the dispute about freedom of thought went perfectly across the boundaries of the theological and the philosophical
discussion of the time – boundaries that in early 18th-century Germany were for some
different reasons at least as permeable as in the Britain of that time, if not even more. The discussion on the authority of the Holy Scripture, on the reliability of the issues of revelation (such as the nature of miracles, the role of prophets, the authority of ap-ostolic teaching), and the general attempt of the ‘religious Enlightenment’ to promote
paola.rumore@unito.it, Università di Torino.
1 Johann Franz Budde, Commentatio theologica de libertate cogitandi, Jena 1715, p. 14.
2 Günter Gawlick, Die ersten deutschen Reaktionen auf Collins’ «Discourse of Free-Thinking» von 1713,
«Aufklärung», i, 1986, pp. 9-25: p. 9.
https://doi.org/10.19272/201908501004 · «archivio di filosofia», lxxxvii 1, 2019
Paola Rumore, Between Spinozism and Materialism: Johann Franz Budde and the Early German Enlightenment
an alternative exegetic path beside the one offered by dogmatic theology share with the philosophical debate an univocal methodological approach. Scholarship in the past few
decades has offered a detailed investigation of the historical phenomenon of 18th
-centu-ry Eclecticism, which represents the outcome of the early modern cultural struggle both in theology and in philosophy against what at the time was identified as the ‘prejudice of the sect’, or ‘prejudice of the system’. Oversimplifying, that meant on the one side the opposition to the monodic approach of dogmatic theology, and on the other the refusal to accept apriori any implication of a philosophical system on the mere basis of its alleged internal consistency. Eclecticism was in this original sense the healthy and
reasonable practice of a ‘selective thinking’ against any form of sectarianism: the new
philosophia eclectica opposed the philosophia sectaria, against which it raised the claim of
reason as the unique legitimate authority in knowledge and practice.1 It is easy to see
how it will be later understood as the original core of the programmatic idea of
Selbst-denken, of the ‘thinking for oneself’, the motto of the mature Enlightenment.2
The interconnection between theological and philosophical issues, which goes through the different stages of the German Enlightenment in an uninterrupted even if often disputable way, is one of the main features of Budde’s cultural engagement. Even
if he has been recently presented as «one of the most relevant Lutheran theologians
of the early German Enlightenment»,3 Budde is still nowadays a quite minor presence
in the philosophical Aufklärungsforschung, which usually positions him – without too many distinctions – in the general frame of Wolff’s pietistic opponents between Halle
and Jena.4 Some biographical notes, and a focus on his presence in Halle and Jena, the
two philosophical and theological poles of the Früh- and of the Hochaufklärung, help to understand which way led him to become one of the most influential theologians
in the first half of the 18th century. Born in Anklam in the Swedish Pomerania from a
French Huguenot family, Budde received his early education in history and theology at the University of Wittenberg, where in 1686 he obtained his degree under the advisory of Johann Georg Neumann, interestingly enough a representative of the anti-pietistic front of German theology. Short thereafter in 1693 he moved to the newly founded University of Halle, where he spent a little more than a decade as professor of moral philosophy, before moving in 1705 to the University of Jena. There he was initially ap-pointed professor of theology, and then rector of the school of theology, contributing with his teaching to the enlargement of the local University that would become in the
1 On the idea of Eclecticism cf. the standard work by Michael Albrecht, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte
mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, frommann-holzboog, 1994; Donald R. Kelley, Eclecticism and the History of Ideas, «Journal of the History of Ideas», lxii, 2001, pp. 577-592; Aaron Garrett, The Eclecticism of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, in The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy, ed. by Aaron Garrett, London-New York, Routledge, 2014, pp. 1-27. On the central role of this idea in the Enlightenment, cf. Eklektik, Selbstdenken, Mündigkeit, ed. by Norbert Hinske, «Aufklärung», i, 1986. On the development of Eclecticism in Germany see in particular Horst Dreitzel, Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart der Eklektischen Philosophie, «Zeitschrift für historische Forschung», xviii, 1991, pp. 281-343. 2 Cf. Eklektik, Selbstdenken, Mündigkeit, cit.
3 Cf. Vladimir Abashnik, «Johann Franz Budde», in The Dictionary of eighteenth-century German
philos-ophers, ed. by Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn, London, Continuum International Publishing, 2010.
4 Cf. Kurt Aland, «Buddeus, Johann Franz», in Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), Berlin, Duncker &
Humblot, 1955; Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz, «Johann Franz Buddeus», Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirch-enlexikon (BBKL), Hamm, 1975 (19902); Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,
Tübingen, Mohr, 1945 (reprod. Hildesheim, Olms, 1992), pp. 63-75; Michael Albrecht, Eklektik, cit., pp. 434-450.
johann franz budde between spinozism and materialism 41 forthcoming years (surely from at least 1711 to 1720) the most attractive and the biggest University in Germany.
The decade Budde spent in Halle – from 1693 to 1705 – was determinant for his philo-sophical and theological orientation. Without trying to give an univocal answer to the
difficult question whether Budde was himself a Pietist or not,1 it is certain that in that
period he became a close collaborator of the founder of the biggest pietistic pedagog-ical institution in Germany, August Hermann Francke, with whom he shared beside a general hostility towards any strict dogmatism, the conviction of a necessary restraint
of the claims of reason in religious issues.2 Even if he didn’t belong to the radical
pro-gressive group of German theologians, Budde was from the side of his conservatism one of the main actors of the theological Hallenser Aufklärung. On the ground of his op-position against different forms of sectarianism, and supported by an unusually broad theological and philosophical erudition, he was well inclined to mediate between rea-son and faith on the basis of the deep conviction that revelation and rearea-son cannot ultimately be in contrast.
The eclectic orientation in theology that led him to a rediscovery of the “historical
theology” in opposition to the mere dogmatic approach3 reflects in general Budde’s
intellectual inclination. The reassessment of the history of philosophy, that he consid-ered a set of possible solutions to still urgent problems, as well as the practical orienta-tion of knowledge, and the aversion towards any form of intellectualism are the main features of Budde’s understanding of philosophy, that he forged under the direct influ-ence of Christian Thomasius, his colleague at the University of Halle. On the basis of the ideal of an eclectic orientation in philosophy, which claims its independence from any kind of authority, and of the distinction between the concrete, practical and prag-matic direction of the Weltgelehrtheit and the abstract, useless and vain speculations of the Schulgelehrtheit, Budde is still nowadays considered one of the leading figures of the Thomasian tradition. In fact those claims were at the very center of his philosophical investigation. In his philosophical masterwork – the Institutiones philosophiae eclecticae (1703) – Budde dates the origin of modern philosophy to the emergence of the eclectic
approach that leads to a kind of Weltweisheit,4 which, far from being a mere syncretistic
practice,5 «can draw accurately the truth from every sect», «in order to free it from
1 Cf. Albrecht Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus in der lutherischen Kirche des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts,
Bonn, Marcus, 1884, vol. ii, pp. 389-392; but cf. also Walter Sparn, Auf dem Wege zur theologischen Aufklärung in Halle: Von Johann Franz Budde zu Siegmund Jakob Baumgarten, in Zentren der Aufklärung I. Halle. Aufklärung und Pietismus, ed. by Norbert Hinske, Heidelberg, Schneider, 1989, pp. 71-89.
2 Cf. Kelly J. Whitmer, Eclecticism and the Technologies of Discernment in Pietist Pedagogy, «Journal of the
History of Ideas», lxx, 2009, pp. 545-567, and Ead., The Halle Orphanage as Scientific Community: Observation, Eclecticism, and Pietism in the Early Enlightenment, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2015.
3 Walter Sparn, Auf dem Wege zur theologischen Aufklärung in Halle, cit., in particular pp. 72-77.
4 It is quite interesting to consider that Budde qualifies this new kind of philosophy as dogmatic, in the
sense that «it rests on solid grounds» and is therefore safe from any skeptical drift. On the topic cf. Martin Mulsow, Eklecticism or Skepticism? A Problem of the Early Enlightenment, «Journal of the History of Ideas», lviii, 1997, pp. 465-477. On the original positive meaning of «dogmatic philosophy» before Kant’s criticism cf. Jean-Paul Paccioni, Qu’est-ce qui est dogmatique? La pensée wolffienne et l’articulation du critique du dog-matique selon la Critique de la raison pure, in Kant et Wolff. Héritages et ruptures, ed. by Sophie Grapotte and Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, Paris, Vrin, 2011, pp. 101-118.
5 Already a few years before, in the Historiae philosophicae succinta delineatio premitted to the second
edi-tion of the Elementa philosophiae instrumentalis seu instituedi-tionum philosophiae eclecticae (Halle, 1703, 17062, now
in Id., Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Walter Sparn, Hildesheim, Olms, 1999-, vol. ii, 2004) Budde distinguishes between true eclectic philosophers (veri eclectici) and pseudo-eclectic philosophers (pseudo-eclectici).
Pseu-every human authority, taking as its guide the reason itself, rather than the ancient
philosophical opinions».1 In this sense Budde affirms that «it is worthy to give the name
and the title of eclectic only to the one who carefully forms his own principles by con-templating things directly, i.e. to the one who assumes as his only rule to accept what is
convenient with them and to reject what cannot be reconciled».2
Thomasius was also the main promoter of the new idea of a philosophia aulica, which represents one of the most significant stages of the long-lasting German debate on the opposition between Schul- and Weltgelehrtheit – an opposition that will go through the whole century, involving among others even Kant’s opposition between a Schul- and a
Weltbegriff der Philosophie (KrV A838/9-B 866/7), and the later post Hegelian polemical
debate on the real goal of philosophy in opposition to its mere academic practice.3 This
idea is at the core of Budde’s successful Philosophisches Discurs von dem Unterschied der
Welt- und Schul-Gelahrtheit (1709), which is still nowadays considered one of the most
relevant manifestos of the progressive tendency that Thomasius introduced in the early German Enlightenment. In the Discourse Budde presents the ‘world-erudition’ as the amount of knowledge that can lead us to our earthly and heavenly happiness
(Glückse-ligkeit), whereas the ‘school-erudition’ is nothing but a sort of ‘professionalization’ of
knowledge, which concerns the different methods and procedures of the philosophical
investigation adopted by any sectarian school.4
Nevertheless, the necessity to synthesize the new eclectic philosophy in compendia and writings suitable for teaching, as well as the claim to avoid the difficulties arisen among the students by the employment of the new German technical language, led Budde to what Max Wundt has called the first systematic – almost encyclopaedic –
or-ganization of philosophy before Christian Wolff’s enterprise; a sort of ‘scholasticisation’
of the originally anti-scholastic attempt of the philosophia aulica.5 The enormous amount
of his successful handbooks, which had a huge dissemination in German universities and were repeatedly reprinted, enlarged and revisited by Buddle himself, dominates the German academic scene until the diffusion of Wolff’s philosophy in the early 1720s.
In any case, at the basis of Budde’s theological and philosophical commitment was the very clear attempt to provide, even by means of reason itself, a solid apology for
do-eclecticism is nothing but a deteriorate form of systematic philosophy, i.e. syncretism, which compares the issues promoted by different sectarian philosophies without coming to a coherent and organic philo-sophical system (those expressions are in the table of contents, p. 73, and are then developed in cap. vi, §§ xliii-xliv. Cf. also Id., Compendium historiae philosophicae, Halle, 1731, pp. 537-541).
1 Johann Franz Budde, Philosophisches Discurs von dem Unterschied der Welt- und Schul-Gelahrtheit,
Vorre-de zu Martin Musig, Licht Vorre-der Weisheit, in Vorre-denen nöthigsten Stücken Vorre-der wahren Gelehrsamkeit, zur Erkänntniß menschlicher und göttlicher Dinge, nach Anleitung der philosophischen und theologischen Grund-Sätze, Leipzig, 1709, § xv.
2 Johann Franz Budde, Historiae philosophicae succinta delineatio, cit., cap. vi, § xliii, p. 96.
3 On the relation between philosophia aulica and Philosophy for everybody (Philosophie für alle Stände und
Geschlächte) cf. Werner Schneiders, Nicht plump, nicht säuisch, nicht sauertöpfisch. Zu Thomasius’ Idee einer Philosophie für alle, in Die Philosophie und die Belles-Lettres, ed. by Martin Fontius and Werner Schneiders, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1997, pp. 11-20.
4 Johann Franz Budde, Philosophisches Discurs von dem Unterschied der Welt- und Schul-Gelahrtheit, cit.,
§§ iii-iv. Cf. Werner Schneiders, Zwischen Welt und Weisheit. Zur Verweltlichung der Philosophie in der frühen Moderne, «Studia Leibnitiana», xxv, 1983, pp. 2-18.
5 Cf. Max Wundt, Die deutsche Schulphilosophie im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, cit., pp. 65-66; Gustav Zart,
Einfluss der englischen Philosophie seit Bacon auf die deutsche Philosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, Dümmler, 1881, pp. 40 and 66.
johann franz budde between spinozism and materialism 43 Christian faith and a defence of religion from any form of heretics, atheism, and free
thinking.1 Even the comment on Collins’s defence of free-thinking that has been
re-called at the beginning of this paper, was much less progressive than it seems to be at a first sight. Budde’s defence of freedom of thought is explicitly meant to prove that Rev-elation and reason cannot be in contrast, in so far reason and its claim for knowledge are subordinated to the teaching of the Holy Scripture. The right of free-thinking (libere
cogitare) is subordinated to the duty of right-thinking (recte cogitare), i.e. to the duty of
thinking in accordance with the truths taught by Revelation and with the principles of
Christianity: «we know that the Holy Scripture has been given to us as a criterion and
a rule, according to which we have to conduct not only our life and our actions, but
also our speech and thought».2 According to Budde the origin of the degeneration of
philosophy had to be seen in analogy with the original fall in the Biblical narration in
the departure from the «clear light of the Gospel» towards the darkness and the
shad-ows of a world now far from God. Revelation thus represented in the eyes of Budde the nucleus, the precious gem (Kleinod) of authentic wisdom, so that the path to happiness
could only coincide with the pacification within the Christian faith.3 In this sense,
phi-losophy was reconciled, from its subordinate position, with the truths of theology: its
purpose was to preserve the latter from the attacks of the infidels, heretics and atheists. The idea of freedom of thought, which was deeply rooted in the Enlightenment dis-cussion and in the birth of an eclectic philosophy, led to a solution which was now far from the one suggested by Collins.
Devoting a large part of his philosophical reflection in the struggle against the manifold detractors of religion, Budde gained very early a central place among the German opponents of the so-called ‘radical thinking’. Very properly Jonathan Israel
recognises that Budde himself, «the great Jena Scholar», was the one who compiled
«the fullest German account of the advent of radical thought».4 It is not an audacity
to conceive his whole academic career as a reiterated attempt to provide a systematic and historically grounded opposition against any sort of threat that a bad form of
philosophy could pose for religion. In fact, during the first 30 years of the 18th century
Budde engaged two important controversies in defence of Christian religion and of morality, that he conceived as basically resting on a religious ground. The first one situates at the very beginning of the new century and concerns the debate on
Spi-nozism and its atheistic consequences; the second one, that occurs in the mid 1720s,
has its peak in the final stage of the pietistic attack against Wolff’s philosophy and its fatalistic implications.
1 On Budde role in the controversy against heresy, atheism and free-thinking cf. Martin Pott, Aufklärung
und Aberglaube: die deutsche Frühaufklärung im Spiegel ihrer Aberglaubenskritik, Tubingen, Niemeyer, 1992, pp. 171-182.
2 Johann Franz Budde, Commentatio theologica de libertate cogitandi, cit., p. 10 and p. 26. On Budde’s
crit-icism of Collins and on his conservative and orthodox idea of free-thinking, cf. Kay Zenker, Denkfreiheit. Libertas philosophandi in der deutschen Aufklärung, Hamburg, Meiner, 2012, pp. 268-278; Günter Gawlick, Die ersten deutschen Reaktionen auf Collins’ «Discourse of Free-Thinking» von 1713, cit., pp. 18-19.
3 Johann Franz Budde, Philosophisches Discurs von dem Unterschied der Welt- und Schul-Gelahrtheit, cit.,
§ xi.
4 Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Oxford,
Ox-ford University Press, 2001, p. 634. On the conservative inclination of Budde’s understanding of the En-lightenment cf. also Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund. Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland (1680-1720), Hamburg, Meiner, 2002, in particular pp. 309-353 («Gundling und Budde: Skeptische versus kon-servative Aufklärung»).
2. Budde and the struggle against Spinozism
In 1701, at the age of 34, Budde defended in Halle a Dissertatio de Spinozismo ante
Spino-zam, which will be then published only in 1706.1 This dissertation plays a central role in
Budde’s philosophical commitment; he himself considered his analysis of Spinozism
one of his most successful philosophical performances, so to include it in the series
ex-ercitationum of his Analecta historiae philosophicae (Halle 1706, 17242), and to recall some
main claims of it even in the very fortunate Theses theologicae de atheismo et
supersti-tione, written in Jena in 1717, immediately translated into German, and about twenty
years later even into French.2 In the Dissertatio Budde takes a stand on the broad debate
on Spinozism that had broken out in Germany at first with Jacob Thomasius’
Adver-sus anonymum de libertate philosophandi (1670), which was a severe denunciation of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that – in accordance with a huge part of its readers – he
considered a threat for religion and civil society. The struggle on Spinozism moves on with great intensity through the German philosophical debate of the time, engaging its prominent representatives (for instance Leibniz and Wolff ), as well as less known authors, and provoking the publication of a huge amount of polemical and apologetic
writings, which circulated often in a clandestine milieu.3 Even if the Dissertation reacts
explicitly against the idea of Spinozism Wachter had illustrated in his Der Spinozismus
im Jüdenthumb (1699), Budde looks at Bayle and at his broadly debated article «Spinoza»
as his privileged polemical target.4 By means of a huge amount of explicit references
to Bayle’s Dictionnaire Budde comes to a precise definition of Spinozism, that he now assumes as a mere theoretical concept, and not as a historical fact. In his ‘a-historical’ definition Budde follows the development of Spinozistic thought – in the variety of forms it assumed from time to time – through the entire history of western philoso-phy, from ancient pagan Greek culture to Christianity. Budde’s cultural operation was extremely clear, since such an understanding of Spinozism, that saw in it a general philosophical attitude instead of the outcome of the system of a single philosopher,
1 Johann Franz Budde, Dissertatio philosophica de Spinozismo ante Spinozam, Halle, 1706.
2 Id., Theses Theologicae de atheismo et superstitione variis observationibus illustratae et in usum recitationum
academicarum editae, Jena, 1717 (reprod. in Id., Gesammelte Schriften, cit., vol. ix, 2010). The German transla-tion (by Theognostum Eusebium) came out in the same year with the title Jo. Franc. Buddei Lehr-Sätze von der Atheisterey und dem Aberglauben mit gelehrten Anmerckungen erläutert, Jena, 1717 (reprod. in Id., Gesammelte Schriften, cit., vol. x, 2010). The French translation is published much later: Traité de l’athéisme et de la super-stition, Amsterdam, 1740.
3 The bibliography on the reception of Spinoza in Germany is boundless, for the present paper I have
considered Leo Bäck, Spinozas erste Einwirkungen auf Deutschland, Berlin, Mayer & Müller, 1895, Max Grun-wald, Spinoza in Deutschland, Berlin, Calvary, 1897, Winfried Schröder, Spinoza in der Frühaufklärung, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 1987; Rüdiger Otto, Studien zur Spinozarezeption in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt, Lang, 1994; Vittorio Morfino, Genealogia di un pregiudizio. L’immagine di Spino-za in Germania da Leibniz a Marx, Hildesheim, Olms, 2016, which offers a very rich bibliography. Winfried Schröder has often put into question the legitimacy of the historical claim of an early German Spinozism: cf., beside the work mentioned just above, Winfried Schröder, Ursprünge des Atheismus. Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik- und Religionskritik der 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, frommann-holzboog, 1998; Id., «Die ungereimste Meynung, die jemals von Menschen ersonnen worden» – Spinozismus in der deutschen Frühaufklärung? in Spinoza im Deutschland des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. by Eva Schürmann, Norbert Waszek and Frank Weinreich, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, frommann-holzboog, 2002, pp. 121-138.
4 On the occasion of Budde’s dissertation, cf. Haim Mahlev, Der Spinozismus vor Spinoza. Johann Franz
Buddes Erwiderung auf Johann Georg Wachters Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, «Scientia Poetica», xv, 2011, pp. 67-91.
johann franz budde between spinozism and materialism 45 allowed him to increase the degree of dangerousness of such an opinion, which he shows to be widespread in the history of philosophy. Recalling a distinction already introduced by Bayle, Budde distinguishes between an ancient and a new Spinozism, and the philosophical traditions he takes into account are in general the same ones we find in the Dictionnaire. Nevertheless, and differently from Bayle, Budde doesn’t think that the only innovation Spinoza brought to atheism can be reduced to his ‘systematic
spirit’ or, as Bayle claimed, to have brought «Atheism into a new method» while «the
ground of his doctrine was the same with that of several ancient and modern
philoso-phers».1 On the contrary, Budde wants to dissolve the until then obvious identification
of Spinozism and atheism, with the clear conviction that if Spinozism always leads to a more or less clear form of atheism, not any form of ancient atheism grounds on a
Spinozistic principle. In one sentence: not every form of atheism can be accused of
Spi-nozism, but every form of Spinozism implies atheism. Therefore, atheism in general cannot properly be labeled as Spinozism as such.
In fact, the «main grounds of Spinozistic atheism (fundamenta atheismi spinoziani)»2
are to be seen in three very specific claims. The first one is the idea of a metaphysical monism, that Spinoza infers from his definition of substance as something which is
caused by itself (causa sui), and whose existence is implied by its essence (Ethica i, p 7).3
The second one is pantheism: since there is one only substance, unum esse omnia; that
is the identification of God and nature (Deus sive natura), and the negation of creation
and of any ontological gap between God and finite being: «whatsoever is, is in God,
and without God nothing can be, or be conceived» (Ehica, I, p 15), and again «God is the
very nature of things, and except from this nature there is nothing that may or must
be called God».4 Finally, the third claim Budde mentions is Spinoza’s erroneous idea of
freedom, which is in fact a denial of freedom itself, and of any providential plan. On these fundamenta Spinoza’s philosophy promotes a fictitious idea of God (fictitius Deus)
and reveals its atheistic implications: God is deprived of any ontological primacy on the
created world, so that he is not the Ens summum; he is deprived of any personal feature,
so that he is not the wisest being. He enjoys only a miserable kind of freedom (libertas
a coatione): «God acts solely by the laws of his own nature, and is not constrained by
anyone» (Ethica, i, p 17). Therefore, he is himself involved in the general inflexible
de-terminism that rules nature, so that he is not even the (moral) best being.
That being so, Budde undertakes a revision of ancient philosophy in order to amend the current trend to stigmatize as Spinozist any atheism of the past. Rectifying Bayle’s opinion in many cases – for example about Strato of Lampsacus or Democritus – Bud-de allows the qualification of Spinozist only for those philosophers who agree with the mentioned cornerstones that Spinoza has later affirmed in his Ethics. On this basis Budde leaves Spinozism its own precise place in the quadripartite typology of atheism he sketches in the Dissertation, where it is placed beside Aristotle’s atheism – based on
1 Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, Rotterdam, 1697 (17022; 17203; Paris, 17405), iv 253; the
first German translation (by Gottsched) came out in Leipzig between 1741 and 1744 with the title Histo-risches und critisches Wörterbuch: Nach der neuesten Auflage von 1740 ins Deutsche übersetzt, auch mit einer Vorre-de und verschieVorre-denen Anmerkungen versehen von Johann Christoph Gottsched (reprod. ed. by Erich Beyreuther, Hildesheim, Olms, 1997).
2 Johann Franz Budde, Dissertatio philosophica de Spinozismo ante Spinozam, cit., § 3. 3 «Ad naturam substantiae pertinet existere»; cf. ibid.
the denial of creation and on the idea of the eternity of the world – Epicurus’s – who denies any form of providence and freedom – and the Stoics’s – whose atheism is im-plied by their idea of a deterministic fatalism. Among the ancients, only Platonists
were immune to the virus of atheism, and even more of Spinozism: «the Platonic sect
does not support neither atheism, nor Spinozism; the Epicurean one does not support
Spinozism, but atheism; the Stoic sect is the nearest to Spinozism; the Aristotelian
one, supporting atheism without controversy, is the one which – right after the
Sto-ics – comes closer to Spinozism».1
But what is the very peculiar feature that distinguishes Spinozistic atheism from any
other variety of ‘general’ atheism? According to Budde, it is its very tight connection
to what in a while, and still today, would be called ‘materialism’ – a term that was not
yet available in the philosophical vocabulary at that time.2 Spinoza’s claim Deus sive
nat-ura leads to «justify every element of the world by means of the blind and fortuitous
movement of matter»,3 that is by means of mechanical laws. According to Budde, it
is precisely on this mixture of monistic metaphysics and mechanical explanation that Spinoza’s materialism can grow irretrievably. The connection between a mechanical explanation of nature and a materialistic metaphysics far from being first introduced
by Spinoza, was already present in ancient times; according to the David of Dinant,4
for instance, Alexander Epicuraeus «wrote a book on matter, in which he
attempt-ed to prove that everything is one and the same thing in matter».5 Budde finds the
1 Ivi, § 19.
2 The German terms «Materialismus/Materialisten», understood in their still common meaning as
qual-ification of the philosophical sects that admit the soley existence of matter and deny any spirit or immate-rial substance, appears for the first time in Heinrich Köhler’s translation of the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke (Merckwürdige Schriften welche [...] zwischen dem Herrn Baron von Leibniz und dem Herrn D. Clarke über besondere Materien der naturlichen Religion in Französischer und Englischer Sprache gewechselt und in Teutscher Sprache herausgegeben worden von Heinrich Köhler, Frankfurt-Leipzig, 1720). The translation was prefaced by Christian Wolff (Herrn Christian Wolffens [...] Vorrede der erstern Ausgabe der Leibnitzischen und Clarkischen Streit-sc hriften vorgefügt, then published in Des Freyherrn von Leibnitz kleinere philosophische Schrif-ten, now in Christian Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Jean École et al., Hildesheim, Olms, 1960-, vol. iii/114, 2010, pp. 18*-19*), who will introduce this new terminology in the Preface to the second edition of his German Metaphysics to indicate one of the two main philosophical sects, i.e. the monists and the dualists: «There are two sort of monists, the idealists (Idealisten) and the materialists (Materialisten)» (Vernünfftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt. Vorrede zu der anderen Auflage, 1721 (1719), p. 18*). This seems not to be a mere question of philosophical terminology. The emer-gence of the term «Materialism» and its progressive emancipation from the concept of «Mechanicism», implies the birth of a new philosophical concept and of a new strong ontological commitment. On this topic cf. Paola Rumore, Mechanism and Materialism in Early Modern German Philosophy, «British Journal for the History of Philosophy», xxiv, 2016, pp. 917-939.
3 Johann Franz Budde, Dissertatio philosophica de Spinozismo ante Spinozam, cit., § 9.
4 On David of Dinant, cf. Gabriel Théry, Autour du decret de 1210: 1. David de Dinant: Etude sur son
pan-theisme materialiste, Kain, Revue des Sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 1925. The critical edition of his works, together with a very rich introduction, is published by Elena Casadei, I testi di David Di Dinant: filosofia della natura e metafisica a confronto col pensiero antico, Spoleto, Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 2008.
5 Johann Franz Budde, Dissertatio philosophica de Spinozismo ante Spinozam, cit., § 10. It is not clear
whom Albertus Magnus and Thomas of Aquin are referring to; it may be an Arabian philosopher called with a Greek name. On Spinoza’s materialism cf. at least Pierre-Francois Moreau, Matérialisme et spino-zisme, in Materia actuosa. Antiquité, Âge classique, Lumières: mélanges en honneur d’Olivier Bloch, ed. by Miguel Benítez, Antony McKenna, Gianni Paganini, Jean Salem, Paris, Champion / Geneva, Slatkine, 2000, pp. 253-259; Meriam Korichi, Defining Spinoza’s Possible Materialism, «Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal», xxii, 2000, pp. 53-69.
johann franz budde between spinozism and materialism 47
same reference in Albertus Magnus and in Thomas of Aquin, who state that «it was
Alexander Epicuraeus the philosopher who claimed that God is matter».1 Conceiving
that God, intellect and matter are one and the same substance, Alexander provided a
form of Spinozism ante litteram: he denied any ontological difference between God
and nature, any teleological explanation of phenomena, and any intervention of the divine providence in the world. The identification with the material world deprives
God of his ontological and moral perfection. «God’s freedom is so much less free as
he is more closely connected and deeply plunged in matter», concludes Budde quoting
Jacob Thomasius.2 By the way, it is precisely the connection Budde detects between
Spinozism and materialism that helps us to understand the reason of his rehabilitation of Platonism and Neo-Platonism, which on the basis of their firm statement of the sep-aration between mundus intelligibilis and sensibilis, God and matter, can be legitimately
exonerated from the charge of Spinozism.3
In accordance with a relatively large part of the early reception of Spinoza,4
Bud-de has actually promoted a clear unilateral interpretation of Spinoza’s pantheism, in which not only God but even the realm of spirits collapsed into the mechanical de-terminism of the material world. In his eyes materialism becomes therefore – so to say – the ‘royal road’ to that very peculiar kind of atheism.
Some years after the defense of the Dissertation on Spinozism, this same idea be-comes one of the main issues of the fortunate Theses de atheismo et superstitione (1717). Thanks to this successful work Budde would be seen for a very long time as the gen-uine champion of the struggle of early German Enlightenment against any form of threat to religion and morality. The Theses give voice to the denounce of the misera-ble intellectual situation dominating in Europe, and especially in Germany, after the disintegration of the hegemonic role of Scholasticism, and the consequent discredit of theology. In particular, the attempt to reconcile religion and natural science under the authority of the latter was the occasion of the remarkable increase of dangerous opinions, among which materialism, fatalism, and atheism were only the most evident episodes. Atheism and superstition play in this context a very central role, and the at-tempt to investigate both their theoretical premises and their historical manifestations in order to show the mistake they rest on was the great ambition of Budde’s work.
In the list of what he calls the dogmas of atheism Budde includes the following thesis,
that all derive from Spinoza’s atheistic system. First, «the denial of Providence» which
is promoted by any variety of old and new Epicureanism by stating that «the world
has been formed by a mere and fortuitous combination of atoms», «without being
1 Johann Franz Budde, Dissertatio philosophica de Spinozismo ante Spinozam, cit., § 10. 2 Cf. ivi, § 13.
3 Cf. the conclusion in ibid., where he rests again on Thomasius’ view: «Cum Aristoteles contra, ita pergit
vir ille doctissimus, et Stoici, illum sive congressum, sive nexuum necessarium, ipsique Deo inevitabilem statuerunt. Ergo et Aristoteles et stoici propius ad Spinozismum accedunt quam Plato». Focusing on the definition of Spinozism, for example, Budde makes clear his understanding of ancient Platonism and Vetero-Testa-mentarian doctrines, respectively assumed as forerunner by enthusiastic spiritualists and occultists, or by materialists denying the immaterial nature of the soul. On this question, deeply intertwined with a peculiar understanding of the history of philosophy, cf. Martin Mulsow, Prekäres Wissen. Eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 2012, pp. 288-316. On Budde’s idea of the history of philosophy cf. also Serenella Masi, Eclettismo e storia della filosofia in Johann Franz Budde, «Memorie della Accademia delle Scienze di Torino», ii. Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, v/1, 1977, pp. 163-184.
4 Cf. Paola Rumore, La réception matérialiste de Spinoza et la littérature clandestine à l’âge de la
produced by an infinitely wise being».1 Second, «the soul is mortal, and it dies with
the body».2 According to Budde, the rejection of the immortality of the soul implies
the rejection of the existence of God, since the main reason for us to serve God is to be seen in the hope of future rewards and in the fear of eternal punishments. Budde’s
polemic goals are here the ancient atomists, Democritus and once again Epicurus: they
admit no other principle but matter and void, denying on this basis the simplicity of the soul and its immortality. Among modern philosophers the name that is mentioned
is once again the one of Spinoza, who claims that the soul is material: «he recognizes
one only substance in the whole universe, which [scil.: the substance] is material; and
believes therefore that the soul itself must be material and mortal».3 Third, «the denial
of the existence of spirits, or of good and wicked angels».4 In Budde’s words, «it is
certain that most of the atheists do not admit any substance but bodies, rejecting, as a
consequence, any spirit». The polemical target is still Spinoza: «the soul he ascribes to
man is itself material, and even material are the finite spirits, i.e. they are bodies and
not really spirits»; «The basis on which rests the opinion of the deniers of the existence
[...] of spirits are the following: there is no other substance than matter; there is no
contradiction in conceiving thinking matter».5
The origin of this mistake can be seen in the following fallacious deduction: since
in the world everything can be explained by means of mechanical laws (which are the laws of matter), materialists erroneously conclude that in the world there is nothing but matter and bodies, and that any change and modification in it depends on the dis-position of this unique substance. The materialistic basis of Spinozism, that the
Disser-tatio considered the main feature of its drift into atheism, becomes here a real dogma of
that very peculiar kind of atheism.
The dangerous implications of the claim Deus sive natura concern also the realm of morals. The lack of freedom that affected God in the Dissertatio is here extended to the human condition. In this context Budde’s criticism focuses on the nexus rerum fatalis that derives from both Spinoza’s ordo et connexio rerum, and Leibniz’s pre-established harmony – a connection that would become an urgent philosophical issue in the very next years, that is in the struggle of German pietistic theology about Christian Wolff’s philosophy.
3. Budde’s role in the controversy on Wolff’s fatalism
At the time of his involvement in the notorious controversy engaged by the Pietistic front in Halle against Christian Wolff, Budde had already moved to Jena, where he had been appointed professor of theology since 1705. It was 1724 and Wolff had just re-plied to Joachim Lange’s accusations with the publication of the Luculenta
commenta-tio and with a related Monitum, which – at least according to Wolff – should have put
an end to the long series of misunderstandings of his philosophy.6 However, right at
that precise moment «a certain Mr. Budde from Jena entered the controversy, calling
1 Johann Franz Budde, Theses Theologicae de atheismo et superstitione, cit., § 1.
2 Ivi, § 2. 3 Ibid.
4 Ivi, § 3. 5 Ibid.
6 On the controversy with Lange: Bruno Bianco, Fede e sapere. La parabola dell’«Aufklärung» tra pietismo
e idealismo, Napoli, Morano, 1992, and more recently, with a special focus on the topic of mechanism and materialism, Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, La chaîne des causes naturelles. Matérialisme et fatalisme chez Leibniz, Wolff et leurs adversaires, «Dix-huitième siècle», xlvi, 2014, pp. 381-398.
johann franz budde between spinozism and materialism 49
himself the judge or advocate of the opponents in Halle», «repeating their hard
accu-sations with a rush to judge, with great insistence [...], as if I [Wolff] purposely tried to mislead my readers with those mistakes that would put in danger any religion,
morality, discipline and justice».1 Wolff’s idea that Budde was just repeating Lange’s
accusations was not completely wrong, since in the Bedencken über die Wolffianische
Philosophie – with which Budde reopened the controversy2 – the list of Wolff’s
dan-gerous opinions is almost the same one presented by Lange in his polemical writings. Budde summarizes them in 14 items, which cover a wide range of topics in Wolff’s philosophy, going from the proofs of the existence of God, to the divine origin of nat-ural law, to the question of theodicy. The common thread among Budde’s criticisms is still the nexus rerum fatalis, the fatum physico-mechanicum, which leads – as Lange had already claimed – to the denial of any form of freedom, both for God and humans, and finally to atheism.
Nevertheless, beside the old question of fatalism Budde insists on a topic which, it’s true, goes originally back to Lange, but which becomes now the very central point of the debate, i.e. the item of materialism. Indeed, in his first polemical writing against Wolff’s philosophy, the Caussa Dei from 1723, Lange had already claimed that Wolff was putting together in his system the two most absurd and dangerous philosophical opin-ions ever, that is idealism and materialism. According to Lange, this was the genuine metaphysical outcome of the pre-established harmony. The full independence of phys-ical and psychphys-ical realm implied the possibility to explain the functioning of the soul as
if there was no material world, and vice versa the series of movements in the physical
world as if there were no spirits. In Lange’s view, Wolff offers therefore an «idealistic
definition of the soul»: being the soul a ‘mirror’ in which the universe is represented,
it is nothing but a «spiritual automaton», whose internal development does not require
any interaction neither with ‘its’ body, nor with the physical world.3 Beside that, Wolff
has a «materialistic definition of the body», insofar he conceives it as a mere machine,
a «mechanical automaton», which can move and act by means of the mere mechanical
laws of nature, with no involvement of the soul.4
This was at least the way Lange understood the debated claim in the ‘rational psy-chology’ of the German Metaphysics, where Wolff affirms that our mouth could
pro-nounce rational speeches by itself, without any contribution of the soul.5 According to
Lange, Wolff’s claim about the complete independence of physical and psychical realm provides good arguments for both idealism and materialism, that Wolff himself had defined as ‘monistic degenerations of dogmatic philosophy’ in the second edition of
his German Metaphysics (1721).6
Materialism in particular seems to be Budde’s idée fixe, even after the long years of his polemical confrontation with Spinoza and with the varieties of atheism. The same kind
1 Christian Wolff, Ausführliche Nachricht von seinen eigenen Schrifften die er in deutscher Sprache von den
verschiedenen Theilen der Welt-Weißheit herausgegeben, auf Verlangen ans Licht gestellet (1726), reprod. of the edition of 1733 ed. by Hans-Werner Arndt in Id., Gesammelte Werke, cit., vol. i/9, 1973, § 120.
2 Johann Franz Budde, Bedencken über die Wolffianische Philosophie, Jena, 1724. On the precise order of
the many writings published by Wolff and Budde during their short but intense controversy cf. Jean École’s preface to Christian Wolff, Schutzschriften gegen Johann Franz Budde, in Id., Gesammelte Werke, cit., vol. i/18, 1980.
3 Joachim Lange, Caussa Dei et religionis naturalis adversus atheismum, Halle, 1723 (reprod. in Christian
Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, cit., vol. 3/17, 1984), p. 5. 4 Ivi, pp. 5-6.
of attitude turns out again in one of his later works, namely in the Bedencken he writes against Wolff in 1724, where he introduces the accusation of materialism as a direct con-sequence of Wolff’s fatalism, or rather as its genuine meaning. In this context Budde presents determinism as a successful philosophical way to eliminate the soul by reducing it to the physical realm. Determinism reveals the real metaphysical consequences of the pre-established harmony, whose apparent ‘dualism’ was in fact hiding an actual ‘monism’. This is what Budde claims in three criticisms he addresses to Wolff. The first one says that being the soul independent from the body, what happens to the body
can-not be ascribed to the soul. But since «the big part of our sins concerns the body»,
the soul would seem not to be responsible for them. Therefore morality would be no
longer possible.1 The second accusation focuses on what Budde presents as an internal
contradiction in Wolff’s system. In fact, on the one hand Wolff affirms the complete independence between soul and body, but on the other hand he claims that the soul is a
vis repraesentativa universi pro situ corporis sui. According to this claim, the soul seems in
fact to be strictly dependent on the body, since it ‘reflects’ the modifications that occur in the body. But if the soul ‘reflects’ the modifications of the body, its representations
are nothing but sensations, i.e. expressions of mere passivity.2 Thus, the soul is a mere
passive being. This claim introduces Budde’s third criticism, according to which there is a very short and straight path that goes from the idea of the soul as a ‘mirror’ of the mechanical connections of the physical world to the idea of the soul as an Uhrwerk, whose modifications are nothing but movements. This is precisely the path Budde de-cides to walk by describing the series of modifications that occur in the Wolffian soul
nexu mere mechanico.3
Wolff immediately understood that by means of this precise criticism Budde
intend-ed to charge him with the accusation of being a ‘psychological materialist’.4 In the
An-merkungen to Budde’s Bedenken Wolff writes somehow explicitly that Mr Budde wanted
him to say that the soul is material, an accusation he replies to by repeating once again his
usual arguments for the simple, immaterial and active nature of the vis repraesentativa.5
But there is at least one aspect which deserves to be pointed out in this context. In fact, in the dispute with Budde Wolff changes radically the argumentative strategy he had adopted against Lange. Instead of showing the fallacy in the deductions of his opponent, or even denouncing the profound misunderstanding of his own claims, Wolff takes into
1 I quote Budde’s Bedencken from the reproduction of the text in Christian Wolff, Herrn D. Joh.
Fran-cisci Buddei [...] Bedencken über die Wolffianische Philosophie mit Anmerkungen erläutert von Christian Wolffen, Frankfurt, 1724, now in Id., Kleine Kontroversschriften mit Joachim Lange und Johann Franz Budde, in Gesammelte Werke, cit., vol. I/17, 1980, § 10, p. 77. 2 Ivi, § 11, p. 84.
3 Ivi, § 12, p. 102.
4 The definition goes back to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Metaphysica, Halle, 17574 (1739;
re-print ed. 17797, Hildesheim, Olms, 1982; historical-critical edition by G. Gawlick and L. Kreimendahl,
Stutt-gart-Bad Cannstatt, frommann-holzboog, 2011), § 757. It is then specified by Georg Friedrich Meier, Metaphysik. Zweyter Theil. Die Cosmologie, Halle 1757 (reprod. Hildesheim, Olms, 2007), § 361: «Materialism can be divided into theological, psychological, and cosmological materialism. The first states that God or the infinite substance is a composed thing […]. The other one admits that finite spirits, especially human souls and those of other animals, are composed things […]. According to the third […], a cosmological materialist is he who affirms that there is no simple substance in the world, and that every substance is in truth a composite thing».
5 Christian Wolff, Herrn D. Joh. Francisci Buddei [...] Bedencken über die Wolffianische Philosophie mit
Anmerkungen erläutert von Christian Wolffen, cit., pp. 86-101. On Wolff’s arguments for the immortality of the soul, cf. Paola Rumore, Wolff on the immortality of the soul, «Aufklärung», xxix, 2018, pp. 29-44.
johann franz budde between spinozism and materialism 51 account Budde’s theological and philosophical works in order to discredit him on the basis of two (interconnected) reasons. First, Budde does not develop his arguments in a proper philosophical way (i.e. by means of the clarification of concepts, and of their
con-nection), and falls very often in contradiction with himself; secondly (as a confirmation
of his philosophical weakness), he promotes dangerous opinions (or opinions with dan-gerous implications) without even being aware of that. Among the dandan-gerous opinions
Budde was endorsing malgré lui, Wolff points out the same «patrocinium materialismi»
(the advocacy of materialism) Budde has charged him of. In an important polemical work directed against Budde (the so called Nöthige Zugabe) two chapters out of four are
used to return to sender the charge of materialism, and of its dangerous implications.1
The controversy on this topic turns out to be extraordinary interesting – not only for what concerns the history of materialism in Germany, but mostly because it allows us to focus on a much broader question. Indeed Wolff considers materialism the outcome of a very peculiar philosophical approach, that is of the skeptical attitude, that sort of ‘metaphysical modesty’ perfectly embodied by Budde and, most importantly, by one
of his very influential philosophical sources: John Locke. Indeed Locke seems to
rep-resent an influential source for the Thomasian school in which Budde moved his first
philosophical steps; but in general, one could assume that the theory of free will Locke
developed in the second edition of his Essay concerning human understanding might have been very warmly welcomed by the Pietistic front as a valid alternative to Wolff’s fatal-ism. But these are, so far, only hypothetical connections.
What is not hypothetical is the presence of Locke in Budde’s philosophical writings.
Both the Elementa philosophiae practicae (1697, 17032) and the Institutiones philosophiae
ec-lecticae (1703, 1724) show clear Lockean suggestions: the division of ideas in simple and complex, the difference between inner and outer senses, the distinction of three arts of complex ideas (i.e. modus, substance, and relation), and most of all a certain awareness of the question of the boundaries of understanding. In the polemical writings that go back to the controversy with Wolff, one can find at least three items that show a Lockean echo in the accusations Wolff charges Budde of, and that are at the basis of the charge of providing a patrocinium materialismi.
The first one concerns the possibility of the materia cogitans. This is the claim accord-ing to which it implies no contradiction to affirm that a corporeal beaccord-ing can be capable by itself of thought and will. Materialism is therefore a ‘not absurd opinion’, in the
sense that it doesn’t conflict with the principle of contradiction.2 In Lockean terms:
Materialism is not against reason. That’s what one can read in the Elementa philosophiae
theoreticae (6.1.§ 8): «the essence of spirits and bodies is unknown to us; about them we know nothing but mere properties and effects. It’s also meaningless to affirm that it is contradictory that matter could think, since we cannot state anything concerning a soul which is unknown to us, or if something can be in accordance with its nature or not. Even less one could conclude that since spirits can think, they are therefore
imma-terial, or are not made of matter».3
1 Christian Wolff, Nöthige Zugabe zu den Anmerkungen über Herrn D. Buddens Bedencken von der
Wolf-fischen Philosophie auf Veranlassung der Buddeischen Antwort herausgegeben, Marburg, 1724, reprod. in Id., Schutzschriften gegen Johann Franz Budde, cit., Vorrede, p. 3*. 2 Ivi, § 13.
3 Cf. Johann Georg Walch, Bescheidener Beweis, daß das Buddeische Bedencken noch fest stehe: wieder Hrn.
Christian Wolffens nöthige Zugabe aufgesetzet, Jena, 1724, reprod. in Kontroversstücke gegen die Wolffsche Meta-physik, in Christian Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, cit., vol. iii/29, 1990, pp. 26-27.
The second claim concerns the idea that reason cannot proof in a demonstrative way that the soul is immaterial, and that we have a soul which is something different from
our body. Reason, in other terms, cannot refute materialism.1 As one can read in the
Institutiones, thinking and will «can be even found in a material being, and it cannot be
proven in this way that spirits are free from matter».2 Materialism is beyond the
bound-aries of reason.
The third claim affirms that according to his omnipotence, God could have provided thought and will to corporeal bodies, even though this might seem impossible to our
limited understanding. Again in the Institutiones: «it involves no contradiction to
con-ceive that God has created a thinking matter».3 Materialism is in accordance with reason.
According to Wolff, Budde’s advocacy of materialism consists in providing it with a logical legitimacy – which is exactly what Budde, and Locke before him, were doing. In fact Wolff doesn’t include in the sect of materialists only those who deny any im-material substance, claiming for a sort of physical monism where the soul itself has to
be conceived as a material being (as by the ancient atomists, or by Hobbes); in Wolff’s
eyes materialists are also those who embrace a more – as he calls it – «sceptical» version
of materialism, affirming that an almighty being – that is God – could have bestowed matter with the faculty of thinking. And this is precisely what Locke had done in the 4th book of his Essay.4
This is at least the way Wolff explains this peculiar position in the later Theologia
naturalis:
In England, Hobbes declared to support materialism, which still has many followers today, and Locke introduced the sceptical materialism (zweifelnde Materialisierey) in the Essay on
hu-man understanding by denying that we can be sure of the immateriality of the soul, because
we do not know whether God has bestowed even matter with the power of thinking. So, in his opinion, there is no contradiction in the fact that a certain matter has in itself thoughts or feelings similar to the ones we have in our soul, and consequently it is not contradictory to think that God himself is material. This sceptical materialism has been propagated by Le Clerc, and in Germany it was disseminated by Budde, who was driven to do so by the prestige of Locke and Clerckens.5
The hypothesis Locke promoted in his Essay disclosed even in German philosophy (and precisely through Budde, so about 15 years before the German translation of Voltaire’s
Letter on Locke6) its own dangerous potentiality. Budde’s claims (the possibility of the
1 Christian Wolff, Nöthige Zugabe, cit., § 13.
2 Johann Franz Budde, Elementa philosophiae theoreticae seu institutiones philosophiae eclecticae, cit., p.
328: «istae autem facultates, cum non porsus repugnet, quo minus in substantia materiali sint, ratio quidem non demonstrare potest, cum spiritum materiae esse expertem».
3 Ivi, p. 116: «pro demostratione hoc argumentum haberi nequit, cum nulla tandem involvat
contradic-tionem, quo minus Deus substantiam corpoream cogitantem producere possit».
4 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), ed. by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1979, iv.x. On the very debated question about Locke’s alleged materialism cf. the recent work by Nicholas Jolley, Locke’s Touchy Subjects. Materialism and Immortality, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, and the pioneering studies by John W. Yolton, Thinking Matter. Materialism in Eigh-teenth-Century Britain, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984; Id., Locke and French Materialism, Oxford, Clarendon, 1991.
5 Christian Wolff, Theologia naturalis methodo scientifica pertractata. Pars posterior, Frankfurt-Leipzig,
1737, reprod. ed. 1741 in Id., Gesammelte Werke, cit., vol. ii/7.2, 1980, § 616.
6 On this topic, and on the variety of German reactions against materialism, cf. Paola Rumore, Materia
johann franz budde between spinozism and materialism 53
materia cogitans, the helplessness of reason in refuting materialism, and such a use of
God’s omnipotence) are all based on the same assumption Locke had put at the basis of his philosophical investigation, and which concerns the impossibility for reason to grasp the ultimate nature of things, i.e. their real essence. According to Locke, Budde conceives the difference between a nominal and a real essence as the difference
be-tween the set of properties that frame the complex idea and their source or foundation.1
The real essence is a very metaphysical issue that cannot be gathered by means of the senses, and remains therefore beyond the boundaries of understanding. On this basis, one cannot theoretically deny that properties can coexist in a single essence even if a limited understanding conceives them as conflicting. This statement can only rest on a prejudice. Consequently, Budde affirms that the almighty God cannot be limited by the arrogance of human understanding, and God could have ascribed matter the faculty of thinking, even it we are not able to understand how matter could think and cannot therefore avoid our anti-materialistic prejudice.
This position, and its Lockean origin, is clearly described by Wolff in the second edition of the Anmerkungen zur deutschen Metaphysik, where he significantly adds a few lines to the paragraph (nr. 19) on the impossibility of ascribing things properties which
do not belong to their essence. There he writes:
The famous theologian Budde cannot accept my theory of the necessity of essence because he follows the authority of Locke (who opened the way to such an unusual claim) with such a huge conviction that he does not need either a demonstration or a proof to believe it and to teach it as an evident philosophical truth.
And in order to stress the threat implied by such philosophical opinion, Wolff
conclu-des: «Even more: in accordance with Locke, Budde states therefore that it is absolutely
impossible to prove in a rational way either the immateriality or the immortality of
our souls».2
For having adopted the view of «those who think that materialism is at least possible
and that it cannot be rejected by reason»,3 what Budde actually does is «winking at
materialists»,4 «providing them with theoretical weapons», «promoting» and even of
«patronizing» the idea of «the materiality and the mortality of the human soul».5
But reason – at least in Wolff’s opinion – can not be declared helpless up against such fundamental questions. This seems to be an important point, which reveals once again
Wolff’s optimistic attitude towards the potentiality of reason: what should we have
reason for, if not to solve questions that concern primarily our moral task, that is our
condition of happiness (Glückseligkeit)? That’s the reason why Wolff decides to use the
controversy engaged with Budde in order to stress the advantages of its own dogmatic
approach against any sort of philosophical skepticism.6
1 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, cit., iii.vi.3.
2 Christian Wolff, Der vernünfftigen Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen
Dingen überhaupt, Anderer Theil, bestehend in ausführlichen Anmerckungen, und zu besserem Verstande und be-quemerem Gebrauche derselben Herausgegeben («Anmerkungen zur Deutschen Metaphysik»), Marburg, 1724, reprod. of the 1740 edition in Id., Gesammelte Werke, cit., vol. I/3, 1983, ad § 43 (§ 19). On this specific topic cf. Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, L’origine delle essenze. Wolff, Spinoza e i teologi, in Essentia actuosa. Riletture dell’Ethica di Spinoza, ed. by Francesco Toto and Andrea Sangiacomo, Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2016, pp. 93-116.
3 Christian Wolff, Ausführliche Nachricht von seinen eigenen Schrifften, cit., § 208, p. 588.
4 Christian Wolff, Nöthige Zugabe, cit., §§ 13-15. 5 Ivi, § 15. 6 Cf. ivi, § 15 (p. 43); Id., Ausführliche Nachricht von seinen eigenen Schrifften, cit., § 208 (p. 590).
