Immanuel Kant, Universal Understanding, and the Meaning of Averroism in the German Enlightenment
Johann Joachim Lange, in his Caussa Dei et religionis naturalis adversus atheismum (1723), characterised the allegedly overbearing influence that scholastic Aristotelianism exercised upon Italian culture during the Renaissance as an atheistic infection (l
- PDF / 183,736 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 16 Downloads / 166 Views
Immanuel Kant, Universal Understanding, and the Meaning of Averroism in the German Enlightenment Marco Sgarbi
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbras, Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.1
The Presence of Averroistic Motifs in the German Enlightenment Did early modern German thinkers stop paying attention to Averroes? Were there hidden undercurrents of Averroism during the eighteenth century in Germany? How did German authors in this period contextualise Averroes and Arabic philosophy within their own cultural heritage? How different was their perception of Averroes from the actual Ibn Rushd, the theologian, jurist and philosopher of the Islamic tradition? In this chapter, I will try to answer these questions by focusing on Kant and the philosophy of the German Enlightenment. It may seem odd to devote a chapter to ascertaining the nature of Kant’s ‘Averroism’, for it is highly likely that he had only a smattering of knowledge concerning Averroes’s philosophy. However, it may thus come as a surprise that one of the most important philosophers
1
Virgil, Aeneid, 6, 268–269: ‘They walked through the dark, in the desolate night populated by shades, along the lifeless regions where Pluto reigns.’ Quoted by Kant in his Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900-), II, p. 329. M. Sgarbi (*) Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University, Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Via di Vincigliata 26, 50135 Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Akasoy and G. Giglioni (eds.), Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 211, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_13, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
255
256
M. Sgarbi
of the Enlightenment and, indeed, a former pupil of Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), characterised Kant’s critical philosophy as a form of Averroism.2 In the past two decades, three scholars have investigated possible relationships between Kant and the Averroistic tradition. The first, in an essay entitled ‘El “averroismo” en la filosofia moral de Kant’, published in 1992, is Fernando Montero Moliner. In 1996, Alparslan Açikgenç wrote on ‘Ibn Rushd, Kant and Trascendent Rationality.’ Finally, the most recent article on the topic is ‘Wandering in the Path of the Averroean System: Is Kant’s Doctrine on the Bewusstsein Überhaupt Averroistic?’ by Philipp W. Rosemann and published in 1999.3 By characterising Kant’s philosophy as Averroistic, Moliner intends to refer to the distinctively Kantian emphasis on universal values in ethical philosophy and the ensuing effacement of the role of the individual in human action. For Kant, universality is the necessary condition of morality, while individual motivations, including happiness, are as a result incompatible with a true ethical behaviour. It seems therefore that there is no room in this view for the value of i
Data Loading...
