1 - University metaphysics

Summary

INTRODUCTION

We have suggested that, rather than representing the path taken by human reason's recovery of its own transcendental conditions, German university metaphysics was itself polemically enmeshed in the religious and political conflicts of the early modern period. This chapter provides an overview of this approach to the history of German university metaphysics. We argue that in its anthropology and cosmology Schulmetaphysik gave shape not to a universal rational being, but to a particular kind of moral personage. Through his self-purifying recovery of the pure concepts of things, this personage was groomed for the exercise of a quasisacral power in the civil domain. This spiritual grooming, carried out in the teaching of metaphysics itself, created the prestige and authority required to judge civil affairs in accordance with transcendent concepts - in particular, the concepts of man's rational being and the natural laws required for its realisation.

One of our central concerns will be to sketch a genealogy for the prestige of enlightenment metaphysics by showing its indebtedness to seventeenth-century Protestant Schulmetaphysik. The ‘enlightenment’ defence of the intelligible conditions of empirical experience, we argue, may be regarded as an historical improvisation on the neoscholastic defence of the divine intellection of the supersensible forms and substances.