Review of Klassische deutsche Philosophie (8): Georg Forster, militants and atheists

Adolf Freiherr von Knigge (1752-1796)

Part 8 of a review of Wolfgang Förster, Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008)

Förster more briefly discusses radical-democratic philosophers like Adolf Freiherr von Knigge (1752-1796) who wrote about the French Revolution and criticized the negative effects of extreme maldistribution of wealth. Johann Benjamin Erhard (1766-1827) was a radical democrat of Jacobin leanings who favored redistributing wealth through land reform and having a democratic state hold the social accumulations of capital.

Förster highlights several atheist/materialist thinkers. Georg Chistoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) was a physicist who promoted English empiricism in Germany, though he later took an Idealist/Kantian approach to the relation of Subject and Object while nevertheless taking an atheist position. He wrote, “Gott schuf den menschen nach seinem Bilde, das heißt vermutlich der Mensch schuf Gott nach dem seinigen. (God created man after His own image – that probably means that man created God after his own image.)”

Other atheist thinkers covered by Förster include Johann Heinrich Schultz (1739-1823), Karl von Knoblauch (1756-1794), August von Einsiedel (1754-1837), Karl Ludwig von Knebel (1754-1844), Andreas Riem (1749-1807), the “left Kantian” Karl Heinrich Heyden reich (1764-1801), Ernst Platner (1744-1818), Christian Gottfried Selle (1748-1800), Friedrich Carl Forberg (1770-1848) and the anonymous author of Philosophische Geschichte des Abergalubens, herausgegeben von dem Verfasser des Hierokles.

Generally the German atheist philosophers’ work focused on several points:

• They were influenced by French materialists though Förster says little about those links. Those ideas were certainly “in the air” during the lifetimes of these thinkers.

• They tended to be attracted to the ideas of freedom associated with the protagonists of the French Revolution.

• They saw religion as a key and even indispensable tool and ally of the outgoing feudal social and political order.

• They were oriented toward a materialist outlook on nature.

• They played an important role in developing freedom of speech and religion by insisting on the right to advocate atheism.

• They emphasized defensively that atheism was perfectly compatible with morality and good moral conduct.

• They pointed to wars like the Crusades and the 30 Years War of 1618-1648 as examples of the great harm religion can do.

Andreas Riem asked rhetorically:

War es die Aufklärung oder die Täuschung, die wenigstens achtzig Millionen Menschen durch die Schärfe des Schwerts, die Pestilenz des Krieges und die lodernden Flammen des Scheiterhaufens vertilgte?

[Was it the Enlightenment or the Deception [i.e., religion] that exterminated at least 80 million people by the edge of the sword, the pestilence of war and the blazing flames of the stake?]

Karl Ludwig von Knebel argued that the soul and body cannot be considered as separate substances. The spirit is dependent on the physical brain. Humanity, he declared, “in seiner ersten Grundanlage nichts Anderes als ein Their, und keine sener gestigsten Vollkommenheiten könnten Staat finden ohne diese Grundlage (in its fundamental basis nothing but an animal, and none of its highest manifestations could take place without this basis).” Human intellectual qualities are the result of development, he argued, not a divine spark planted by supernatural intervention.

Förster summarizes August von Einsiedel’s materialistic theory of perception: “Alle Objekte der Erscheinungswelt erzeugen nach Einsiedel bestimmte Nervenfibern im Gehirn. (All objects of the world of appearances, according to Einsiedel, produce particular nerve fibers in the brain)”.

Johann Georg Adam Forster (1754-1794)

Förster devotes a chapter to Georg Forster and the German Jacobins, among whom he includes Joseph Görres (1776-1848), Johann Andreas Georg Friedrich Rebmann (1768-1824), Heinrich Christoph Albrecht (1763-2920), Heinrich Würzer (1751-1835) and Georg Conrad Meyere (1774-1816), Wilhelm Koenemann (1751-1794), Andreas Riedel (1748-1837) and Franz Hebenstreit (1747-1795). He calls Georg Forster’s basic Jacobin principle the idea that government belongs by right to the people as a whole, which was most definitely a revolutionary idea in America and Europe in the late 1700s and for a long time thereafter.

Georg Forster became famous for his book that he did with Captain James Cook, the 2-volume A Voyage Round the World (1777), which is considered a classic of travel literature. A careful and realistic observer, Forster’s added notably to the European understanding of „primitive“ cultures. Forster objected to the romanticizing of the Noble Savage by Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers. A professor of natural history, beginning in 1778, Forster was also a careful observer of the French Revolution and believed that similar social conflicts and tensions would produce a European-wide revolution against the old feudal order. Forster, our author Wolfgang Förster notes, was the first to publicize Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), his impassioned response to Edmund Burke’s attacks on the French Revolution, in which Paine defended both the French and American Revolutions and the democratic principles they represented.

When the city of Mainz was seized by the French in 1792, Forster became a representative of the city’s new republican government to the central government in France. German forces re-occupied Mainz while Forster was gone, and he spent his final months in revolutionary Paris, where he died in 1794. He wrote a detailed account of the events in Mainz, called Darstellung der Revolution in Mainz (1793), which he was unable to complete before his death. Förster describe Forster has having conceived a humanistic concept of the French Revolution.

I find it intriguing that Forster contributed in his scientific work in important ways to the debate over slavery, which Forster opposed. Although full-blown pseudo-scientific racism would develop in the early decades of the 19th century and be enthusiastically embraced by the slaveholders of the American South, in the late 18th century the scientific attempts to study the difference between races was new. Forster argued for the essential equality of all peoples. He contended that arguments for racial superiority, such as that advanced by the anthropologist and philosopher Christoph Meiners, “dienen nur der Legitimierung kolonalistischer Ausbeutung und Sklaverei (served only the legitimating of colonial exploitation and slavery)", in Wolfgang Försters summary.

I was curious enough about Georg Forster to read a couple of his essays. One was “Noch etwas über die Menschenraßen“ (Something more on the races of humanity) published in Der teutsche Merkur in October and November 1786. Forster was responding to two article published by Immanuel Kant in the Berlinische Monatsscrift in 1785 and 1786. The basic dispute between the two had to do with whether humans had evolved originally from a common source, which was Kant’s argument, or whether it was more likely that humanity evolved separately in multiple locations (Forster). This dispute is by no means settled even today.

One of Forster’s arguments was clearly mistaken. He contended that skin pigmentation depended on climate and that contemporary Africans who come to cooler climates will acquire a lighter skin pigmentation. No doubt that the phenomenon of Africans becoming lighter over time was true in the slaveholding regions of the American South. But it wasn’t because of the climate.

And Forster’s essay is not free of particular prejudice against the physical appearance of black people. But he was arguing in 1786 that there was essential biological equality among the various races of humanity, a more egalitarian position than even the great apostle of democracy and anti-slavery advocate Thomas Jefferson ever accepted. And this essay drips with the scorn Forster held for the hypocritical, self-interested claims of the slaveowners.

His "Leitfaden zu einer künftigen Geschichte der Menschheit" (1789) reflects Forster’s focus on understanding the development of human history in a materialistic sense intimately connected to the physical development of humanity.

Among other “German Jacobins” that Förster describes, Georg Friedrich Rebmann is notable for his emphasis on the social component of freedom, in contrast to the classical liberal emphasis on formal/legal equality with a minimum government role in restricting the freedom of capitalist business enterprises. In Vienna, Andreas Riedel and Franz Hebenstreit represented similar radical-democratic, social-levelling outlooks.

Tags: atheism, georg forster