Eclecticism or Skepticism? A Problem of the Early Enlightenment

Bibliographic Data

ID4455596
AuthorsMartin Mulsow (corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume58
Issue3
Pages465
Publication date1997-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the History of Ideas (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-5037 • E-ISSN: 1086-3222
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1353/jhi.1997.0028
OpenAlexW2086048120
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited3

Eclecticism or Skepticism? A Problem of the Early Enlightenment Martin Mulsow Eclecticism has its own logic.1 According to this logic, eclecticism is an attitude which seeks to free itself from sectarian doctrines and to achieve a more objective position above all such groups. However, many revolutions end by catching their own tails, and this attitude quickly deteriorates into the definition of just another sect, taking the original argument for eclecticism with it. Germany’s self-styled “eclectic” philosophy found itself in just such a self-destructive phase at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the very point at which the concept was beginning to be used much more widely, as a recent comprehensive study by Michael Albrecht has demonstrated.2 Taking Albrecht’s observations as my basis, I wish to draw upon the example provided by two thinkers and some previously neglected material to consider in greater depth a problem which characterizes a part of the eclectic movement of the early German Enlightenment: the tense relationship between eclecticism and radical skepticism.3 [End Page 465] Jakob Friedrich Reimmann, Skeptic As a young man, Jakob Friedrich Reimmann, the great scholar and historian of philosophy and scholarship, was one of the most resolutely skeptical philosophers of the early Enlightenment.4 In an anonymous contribution to the eighth volume of the Observationes selectae, which appeared in 1704, Reimmann raises the question: was Solomon a skeptic?5 The anonymity which protected this article, as it did all others which appeared in Halle’s periodical,6 made it possible for Reimmann to experiment with unorthodox ideas, including some which had to do with the then-fashionable eclecticism. He could thus include such criticism of eclecticism as: [I]t is not so, as you say, that a distinction must be made between sectarians and eclectics. For it is possible to prove from induction that eclectics also disagree among themselves about knowledge of fundamentals, and that they do not agree among themselves any better than the clocks of a large town. What could be found wiser, what more pious, what better than the hypotheses of the Pyrrhonists?7 Contemporary eclecticism, he asserted, was nothing other than a reproduction of the various individual sects because its own arguments mirrored their fundamental differences. Reimmann’s risky suggestion was that this eclecticism should be replaced by a pyrrhonism which would be better able to fulfil the original intentions of the “eclectic” philosophers. [End Page 466] Reimmann’s article has a somewhat cryptic relationship to Joachim Lange’s Medicina Mentis of 1704.8 Reimmann replies to this work without referring to it explicitly. Lange had written a history of philosophy as a history of corruption (a historia philomoriae, of the love of madness), according to which philosophy could only become blinder when, after the fall of Adam and the loss of Old Testament wisdom, it moved away from its origin. This argument was combined with an eclectic psychological logic in the style of Buddeus and Poiret. Reimmann is revenging himself for the “collubus,” that is, for Lange’s twisting of the ideas which Reimmann had discussed with him in confidence to portray them falsely as godless. The tensions between Thomasius and Lange, which increased after 1702, may also have played a role in the background. It is possible here to see the close contact and discussions which preceded the publication of books in Halle. From the safety of his anonymity Reimmann responds that it is ridiculous to try to sell the patriarchs as philosophers, but that, if one must do so, then Solomon can only be seen as a skeptic, if not a pyrrhonist. French libertines had already shocked the church with this assertion at the beginning of the seventeenth century,9 and it is significant that this tendency [End Page 467] reappears in the midst of the eclecticism of the early Enlightenment. Reimmann cites La Mothe le Vayer extensively. It seems logical, then, that Reimmann should have taken a critical position against Thomasian eclecticism as early as 1697 in his Schediasma philosophicum de Logices Aristotelicae, Rameae, Cartesianae & Electivae insufficientia.10 With Johann Jakob von Ryssel, a student of Thomasius, Reimmann develops the concept of “eclectic doubt”; his growing experience

Argument (complex analysis) · Eclecticism · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Skepticism · Theology · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Historical Philosophy and Science · Kantian Philosophy and Modern Interpretations · Medicine · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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