Descartes stayed on the abstract level whereas the philosophes of the 1700s or the
Utilitarians of the 1800s limited their issues to topical lay concerns, cannot be
explained by this aspect of their material bases, since all of them were non-aca-
demics. The thinkers of the 1600s were inwardly oriented toward their own
network, especially the part of it which was carrying out the autonomous re-
searches of physical and mathematical science, whereas later non-academic phi-
losophers were much more lay-oriented because of their bases in popular literary
media and political movements.
- “Religion on the strength of its sanctity, and law, on the strength of its majesty,
try to withdraw themselves from [criticism]; but by so doing they arouse just
suspicions, and cannot claim that sincere respect which reason pays to those only
who have been able to stand its free and open examination” (Kant, [1781] 1966:
A.xi).
- “For if God actually spoke to man, man could still never know that it was God
speaking. It is quite impossible for a man to apprehend the infinite by his senses,
distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such” (Kant, [1798] 1991:
115).
- A quasi-experimental validation of this point is the fate of the Karlsschule, founded
by the duke of Württemberg at Stuttgart in the early 1770s, and upgraded from
a Gymnasium to a university in 1781 (DSB, 1981: 7:366–368; Schnabel, 1959:
424). Here the culture was heavily secular, focusing on the Enlightenment program
of practical sciences (especially medicine and public administration) plus vernacular
languages. Its notable early graduates (all with medical training) included Schiller
(posted as an army surgeon) and the biological scientists Cuvier and Kielmeyer.
The Karlsschule was suppressed in 1794, at the height of educational failures
during the crisis of the revolutionary wars. The structural weakness which it
illustrated was that reform in too secular a direction eliminated the main career
attraction of the traditional university: its credentialing claim on careers in the
church and in law, the two occupations on which the bureaucratizing state was
building. The Enlightenment culture left education dangling too much on its
popular appeal to withstand shocks in material support.
- Kant was the son of a harness maker, who happened to grow up in a university
town; Fichte, son of a poor ribbon peddler, was educated by the charity of a
neighboring landowner; Herder, son of a schoolmaster, was so poor that Kant
remitted his lecture fees; Schelling’s and Hölderlin’s fathers were pastors. Hegel’s
father was in the upper civil service of one of the small states, but Hegel too had
to find support as a tutor and secondary school teacher. The literary intellectuals,
by contrast, were typically from wealthy families; they were much less dependent
on low-paying academic or clerical careers, and had greater access to aristocratic
connections for becoming higher officials. Goethe, Jacobi, and Friedrich Schlegel
were university-educated in law, the faculty favored by aristocrats. Schopenhauer,
the only one of the major Idealists who was independently wealthy, could afford
to be a maverick; by the same token he was uninterested in educational or religious
reform.
- The very availability of tutoring jobs was due to the widespread unfashionableness
Notes to Pages 647–649^ •^1007
