THE FATHER OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY

My general weakness for history unknown, ignored, or misunderstood is well known to the reader by now. The largely forgotten figure of Christian Wolff fits well into the pattern of my rehabilitations of historical personalities and events that have fallen victim to such historical unfairness, which I have dubbed No way to treat a Lady.

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There is, in Lenin, an acknowledgment of the three roots of Marxism and Scientific Communism, namely, German Philosophy, British Political Economy, and French Utopian Socialism. Without getting into any unnecessary arguments about Lenin and Karl Marx, we may all agree that, in the modern era of Western philosophy, German philosophy, from Kant to Nietzsche (and, arguably, beyond the latter), occupies the foremost position of distinction and excellence. It is therefore quite important to ascertain, or just to remind the reader, how this preeminent position of specifically German philosophy had come about.

We have already written about a host of German-born philosophers, from St. Albertus Magnus to Leibniz, in the chronological, to date, series of entries in both the Shadows and this section. But all of them can be counted as citizens of a supranational commonwealth of European geniuses, and thus, assigning a national tag to any of them would be almost incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial. In fact, national identification becomes significant only since the eighteenth century, whereas, prior to that time, it can be seen as purely incidental.

Even with Leibniz, the use of the German language in philosophical writings is virtually embryonic. If he wished to be understood by his fellow philosophers, he resorted to Latin, but most of his writings were not even in the “lingua franca” of scholars, Latin, but in what can be called “lingua Franca” only with the greatest of reservations: the French language! In this sense we cannot call either him, or any other German-born philosopher before him, a “German” philosopher per se.

All modern readers of post-Kantian philosophy in the native German cannot help marveling at the special responsiveness of the German language to expressing various highly sophisticated and intricately nuanced philosophical notions for which Hegel in particular has taken some credit. Nietzsche’s linguistic innovations are, of course, legendary, but one must not forget that the most excellent German philosophical vocabulary had preexisted him and Schopenhauer; and even the old Kant was by no means its bona fide creator, but only a lucky beneficiary.

The glory of creating the renowned German philosophical vocabulary belongs to the little remembered, by now, German mathematician and philosopher Christian Wolff (1679-1754), who, at one time, was the ruler of the German philosophical classroom, but was doomed to fade away even in his own lifetime, but with a much greater speed in the Kantian era. Kant was sort of generous to him, calling him the greatest German dogmatic philosopher, if we accept the word dogma in its technical non-pejorative sense. Hegel, in lectures on German philosophy, demolished Wolff as a philosopher, but at least paid him tribute in the sense which I am employing now.

In short, we might have easily ignored Wolff as a philosopher in our sketches of great philosophers, but as a man who occupies a special place of great distinction in the history of German philosophy, Wolff cannot be ignored, and the title of father of German philosophy befits him fair and square.

…Three cheers for Herr Christian Wolff!!!