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Eclecticism and the History of Ideas

Donald R. Kelley

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 62, Number 4, October 2001,

pp. 577-592 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2001.0035

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577

Copyright 2001 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

Eclecticism andthe History of Ideas

Donald R. Kelley

“What we call the history of ideas,” Joseph Mazzeo wrote in in 1972, “itself

has a history.”

1

In this country the history of ideas in the past century has beenassociated with the American philosopher and founder of this journal, Arthur O.Lovejoy, and his epigones and critics. However, this field has an earlier historysub literam, going back almost two centuries, and a still deeper prehistory be-fore the coinage of the phrase, traceable at least indirectly back to antiquity. Thepurpose of this essay is to trace some aspects of one intellectual tradition out of which the history of ideas has, knowingly or not, emerged.

In 1829 Victor Cousin gave a diagnosis of and his prescription for philoso-phy in the wake of one revolution and on the threshold of another. He saw justthree possibilities: either it could renounce its independence and submit again toauthority, it could keep on retracing the circle of obsolescent systems, or—and

this was his solution—it could “disengage what is true in each of these systems,and thus construct a philosophy superior to all systems [and] shall be neither thisor that philosophy in its essence and in its unity.” This procedure, “to select in allwhat appears to be true and good, and consequently everlasting,—this, in asingle word, is ECLECTICISM.” Moreover, Cousin added, “[i]f this philoso-phy is to be Eclectic, it must also be sustained by the history of philosophy.”

How had Cousin come upon this program? In December 1815, in the firstyear of both the Restoration Monarchy and his teaching at the École NormaleSupérieure, he was lecturing on the history of philosophy. In post-revolutionaryFrance this was a field in great disarray, and Cousin looked back to the greatschools of the earlier generation, noting three in particular—the French, the

1 “Some Interpretations of the History of Ideas,” JHI , 33 (1972), 379; repr. The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations, ed. D. R. Kelley (Rochester, 1990). This essay is a byproduct of my forthcoming book, The Descent of Ideas: The History of Intellectual History. Thanks for critical comments to Constance Blackwell, Knud Haakonssen, Maryanne Horowitz, JosephLevine, Steven Nadler, J. B. Schneewind, Ulrich Schneider, Jerrold Seigel, and Perez Zagorin.



578 Donald R. Kelley

Scottish, and the German traditions, represented respectively by Condillac, Reid,and Kant. “It would be an interesting and instructive study,” he told his enthusi-astic young students, “to examine the weaknesses of these schools by engagingone with another and by selecting their various merits in the context of a great

eclecticism which would contain and surpass all three.”2

Over the next three decades this doctrine was publicized and extended byCousin’s many scholarly publications, by the still more famous lectures he gaveafter returning to his chair of philosophy in 1828, by his many internationalcontacts and disciples, and by his later public career as minister of education.3

For half a century before his death in 1867 Cousin had an unparalleled intellec-tual influence as virtually the “official philosopher” in France, with Eclecticismbeing widely regarded as a “state philosophy,”4 and translations of his worksextending his renown into other parts of Europe and this country. In defendinghis achievements and hegemonic position Cousin claimed an absolute originalityand a unique truth-value for his ideas. Eclecticism had not been drawn from

German sources, he protested in 1855. “It was born spontaneously in our ownspirit [notre esprit ] from the spectacle of the resounding conflicts and the hiddenharmonies of the three great philosophical schools of the eighteenth century,” hedeclared. “Thus,” he concluded, “eclecticism is a French doctrine and peculiar to us.”5

Historically speaking, however, nothing could be further from the truth—or indeed further from the premises of the earlier eclectic tradition on which Cousinknowingly drew. The defining characteristic of his philosophy was its depen-dence not only on the three schools he recognized in his early years of teachingbut on the whole history of philosophy from its Greek and especially Platonicbeginnings, to which Cousin himself devoted much of his historical and philo-

2 Premiers essais de philosophie (Paris, 18624), 280. See especially the recent compre-hensive work by Patrice Vermeren, Victor Cousin (Paris, 1994), and Ulrich Johannes Schneider,

Philosophie und Universität: Historisierung der Vernunft im 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 1999),180-212. Important earlier studies are by followers, especially Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire,

M. Victor Cousin, sa vie et sa correspondance (3 vols.; Paris, 1895), the major life-and-times,with many letters; Jules Simon, Victor Cousin (Paris, 1897), and Paul Janet, Victor Cousin et son oeuvre (Paris, 1865). See Vermeren (ed.), Victor Cousin, suivi de la correspondanceSchelling-Cousin, Corpus, 18-19 (1991), and Catalogue des manuscrits des bibliothèques

publiques de Paris. University of Paris (Paris, 1918), and the Supplement. Bibliothèque de laSorbonne (Paris, 1989).

3 Course of the History of Modern Philosophy (New York, 1960), I, 272. Paul Janet, La Philosophie française (Paris, 1879), 8, calls Cousin’s school “la philosophie nouvelle.” See

also Sainte-Beuve’s articles, collected in Les grands écrivains français XIXe siècle, Philosopheset essayistes, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris, 1930); Augustin Thierry, Dix ans d’études historiques(Paris, 1835), 203; Hippolyte Taine, Les Philosophes classiques du XIX siècle en France (Paris,1888), 79ff; J. E. Alaux, La Philosophie de M. Cousin (Paris, 1864); and Saphary, L’Ecoleéclectique et l’école française (Paris, 1844); also Copleston, A History of Philosophy, IX (Lon-don, 1975), 37-50.

4 See Stéphanie Donailler et al., La Philosophie saisie par l’état (Paris, 1988), 149ff.5 Premiers essais, loc. cit.



Eclecticism and the History of Ideas 579

logical scholarship. That Eclecticism was a sort of higher plagiarism was admit-ted by Cousin himself: “What I recommend,” Cousin said in 1817, “is an en-lightened eclecticism which, judging with equity, and even with benevolence, allschools, borrows from them what they possess of the true and neglects what in

them is false.”6

This was purportedly a philosophy, and Cousin indeed sought truth (as wellas goodness and beauty) in his courses at the Sorbonne. Yet in his search Cousinwas in fact deflected into scholarship and what (on eighteenth-century prece-dent) he called “the history of ideas” (l’histoire des idées). Terminologically,then, Cousinian eclecticism may be regarded as an early planting ground for thisfield of study. However, both Eclecticism and history of ideas had longer careersante litteram, and Cousin’s work opens up a deeper perspective on this prehis-tory.

Sixteen centuries before Victor Cousin’s derivative innovations a new move-ment appeared among the contending philosophical schools of the age in which

Christianity and paganism overlapped. The locus classicus of eclecticism wasprovided by the second-century (AD) doxographer, Diogenes Laertius, whoseunreflective and gossip-ridden Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophersdefined an intellectual canon which came to be known as the history of philoso-phy (historia philosophica) and of which Cousin was one beneficiary. “Notlong ago,” Diogenes Laertius reported, “an Eclectic school was introduced byPotamo of Alexandria, who made a selection from the tenets of all the existingsects”—including Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Epicureans, and Cynics.7

Potamon broke with the conventions of discipleship imposed by the ancient schoolsof philosophy (and carried over into religious doctrines) and encouraged hispupils instead to learn from a variety of masters. His approach, inadvertentlycomparative and necessarily historical, was a prototype of the more self-con-scious ideas of “eclecticism,” German and then French, which emerged in mod-ern times, defining both the primary point of intersection between history andphilosophy and the point of departure for the history of ideas.8

Eclecticism became especially entangled in religious thought, and even be-fore Diogenes Laertius remarked, “When I speak of philosophy, I do not meanStoic, Platonic, Epicurean or Aristotelian. I apply the term philosophy to all thatis rightly said in each of these schools, all that teaches righteousness combined

6 Lectures on the True, the Good and the Beautiful, tr. O. W. Wight (New York, 1872), 9.On the distinction between “true eclecticism” and “false” eclecticism (i.e., syncretism) see

Jacques Matter, Essai historique sur l’école d’Alexandrie (Paris, 1820), II, 253; cf. I, 297.7 Lives of Eminent Philosophers, tr. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), I, 19. See

Richard Hope, The Book of Diogenes Laertius (New York, 1930); Allen Brent, “DiogenesLaertius and the Apostolic Succession,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 367-89;and the work by Cousin’s disciple, Jules Simon, Histoire de l’école d’Alexandrie (Paris, 1845).

8 Michael Albrecht, Eklektik: Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie-und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1994), with full bibliography, but also the review byUlrich Johannes Schneider in the JHI , 59 (1998), 173-82.




with a scientific knowledge of religion, the complete eclectic unity.” Eclecticismalso attracted mystics like Proclus, whose works Cousin edited. As Cousin’sdisciple Jules Simon wrote, “All the Alexandrines are eclectics, but Proclus isthe most eclectic of all”—the “maddest Eclectic of all,” in the words of Diderot.9

Eclecticism also included women philosophers, especially (whatever her reli-gion) the beautiful, intellectually peerless, and the ill-fated Hypatia, whose death,according to Diderot, marked also the end of ancient Eclecticism.10

Eclecticism was hardly a school, still less a tradition; but like Laertiandoxography, it was given new life in early modern times. In its modern formEclecticism appeared at the confluence of several intellectual movements: therevival of ancient and patristic learning; evangelical religious reform; the “lib-erty of philosophizing,” a secular version of the Protestant rejection of dogmaticauthority; and the adoption of critical history as the basis for understanding. Thestrength of Eclecticism was that it tried to accommodate this entire agenda; itsweakness was its less-than-critical faith that these goals were in keeping with

reason, the new science, and Christian religion.In this modern context the mysterious Potamon reappeared. Early modern

scholars repeated and embroidered on the passage in Diogenes Laertius anddebated the erroneous view in Suidas that Potamon had been born in the time of Augustus.11 He figured in most surveys of the history of philosophy from theseventeenth century onwards and was often credited with being not merely thefounder of a sect but the creator of an original method (methodus , modus, ratio,or genus philosophandi). For some historians, such as Boureau-Deslandes,Potamon became a sort of proto-Enlightenment hero. Others of a more rational-ist bent, like Diderot in his article on “Eclecticism” in the Encyclopédie, refusedhim admission into this canon.12 More severe critics regarded Potamon as justanother sectarian, and his putative school as no less authoritarian than the oth-ers. Refusing to follow a master was a nice idea, wrote Guillaume Maleville:“But this neat plan was wholly speculative and disappeared almost as soon as itwas formed. The pupils of the Eclectic school followed the preferences of their professors just as did those in the Stoic, Epicurean, Peripatetic, and other schools.”13

9 Procli philosophici platonici opera, Lat. tr. Victor Cousin (Paris, 1820); Diderot, Oeuvrescomplètes, VII, Encyclopédie, VII. ed. J. Lough and J. Proust (Paris, 1976), 36; and see Simon,

Histoire de l’École d’Alexandrie, II, 397.10 J. J. Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae (Leipzig, 1742), II, 351; and see Maria

Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria, tr. F. Lyra (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

11 See H. G. Gloecknerus, De Potamonis Alexandrini Philosophica Eclectica (Leipzig,[1745]).

12 Boureau-Deslandes, Histoire critique de la philosophie (Amsterdam, 1737), III, 83, andDiderot, “Eclectisme,” in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Varloot (Paris, 1975), VII, 36-111 (alsothe art. on “Thomasius, Philosophie de”); Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris,1982), ch. 7; also Nelly Schargo, History in the Encyclopédie (New York, 1947).

13 [Maleville], Histoire critique de l’éclectisme, ou des nouveaux platoniciens ([Paris],1766), I, 4.




If the locus classicus of eclecticism was Diogenes Laertius, the locusmodernus was the Manductio ad stoicam philosophiamof Justus Lipsius (1604).In this highly influential work Lipsius rhetorically addressed the eclecticism of Potamon in these terms: “You finally appeared, O excellent philosophy, and

started on the road leading to truth. You arrived and became known too late; youshould have come first.”14 What Lipsius meant was that the method of criticalchoosing or election should have guided philosophers all along and helped themto avoid dogmatic errors and sectarian disputes. It remained for historians of philosophy, according to the “elective” or “eclectic” argument, to review andreap the harvest of philosophical tradition from this critical standpoint.

Following Lipsius, Johann Alsted included eclecticism in his view of thehistory of philosophy and went on to declare that the followers of Pico andRamus enrolled in that school (sectam electivam eligerunt ).15 In this way theopposition between ancient and modern sects could be either joined in an an-cient-modern synthesis ( philosophia novantiqua) or else historicized according

to the lights of Renaissance scholarship. From the second quarter of the seven-teenth century the term and concept of eclectic philosophy gained currency, asdid the associated idea of the “liberty of philosophizing” (libertas philo-sophandi)—that is, the “freedom to choose between philosophical schools.”16

By the end of the century eclecticism, despite disagreements about its nature,had become an essential justification for the history of philosophy and for itsclaims to be a distinctive “science.”

“The liberty of philosophizing,” a founding principle of Eclecticism, wasassociated with the anti-authoritarian attitudes of Renaissance humanists likeLorenzo Valla and Erasmus, who rejected the notion of “Magister dixit” in favor of the old Horatian motto, “I am not bound over to swear as any masterdictates”(non jurare in verba magistri)17 For Erasmus the Pythagorean “Ipse dixit,”which migrated from Pythagorean and oracular discourse into common speech,was too close to the Biblical “Thus saith the Lord.”18 In his anti-Aristoteliancampaign Peter Ramus also pursued this quest for “philosophical liberty,” claim-ing membership in the secta veritatis —“the sect not of Aristotle, of Plato, or of

14 Manductionis ad Stoicam philosophiam libri tres (Paris, 1604), fol. 13v; and seeBlackwell, 124ff.

15 Thesaurus Chronologiae (Herborn, 1650 [1624]), 477; see Albrecht, Eklektik , 160, andHoward Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588-1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000).

16 E. g., Johannes Reinboth (1628), Johann Conrad Dannhauer (1634), Johannes Phocylides(1651), and others discussed in Albrecht, Eklektik .

17 Ep. 1.1.14, “non jurare in verba magistri.” See Capasso, Historiae philosophiae synop-sis (Naples, 1728), 165; also Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Theodizee und Tatsachen: Das

philosophisches Profil der deutschen Aufklärung (Frankfurt, 1988), 203; Paul Dibon, Le Philosophie néerlandaise au siècle d’or (Paris, 1954); Robert B. Sutton, “The Phrase LibertasPhilosophandi,” JHI , 14 (1953), 310-16; and Albrecht, Eklektik , 112ff.

18 Adages, tr. R. A. B. Mynors, II, v, 82, in Collected Works, XXXIII (Toronto, 1991), 279.




any man, but only of truth.”19 In this sense Eclecticism was not a mere accumu-lation of knowledge or even a reconciliation of doctrines but rather, according toits own lights, a method of separating truth from opinion and falsehood, sciencefrom superstition, and so a process of intellectual enlightenment and human

progress. Intellectual tradition was thus seen as a sort of Dantean Comedy of Ideas, founded on the premise of free will, with Criticism leading Erudition fromthe depths of Error through many levels of Opinion and Prejudice to the highestreaches of Wisdom, that is, the final “critical” Philosophy.20 Along the way thestudent, or reader, would be introduced to the major figures of pagan and Chris-tian thought, who are judged and assigned to appropriate places in the account,with the most blessed and celebrated philosophers appearing before the culmi-nating vision—although this vision, unlike the final scene of Dante’s Commedia,was set not in Heaven but in the future and given rational rather than mysticalform.

In the seventeenth century “eclecticism” became a word to conjure with.21 In

1631 G. J. Vossius told how, as a young student, he served successive philo-sophical apprenticeships under Aristotelians, Platonists, Stoics, and Epicure-ans; and he concluded, “Clearly, I have become an eclectic.”22 Late in life Vossiuscontinued to defend eclecticism (secta electiva ... sive electrix ) as a permanentcondition of philosophizing and argued that it pointed the way to wisdom: “Howwould it be in the future if we should be not Ionic philosophers, or Italians,Eleatics, Platonists, or Peripatetics, not Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, or anyother such sects, but all of these?”23 Twenty years later Thomas Gale, whoseproject was “to make an universal Inquisition into all Opinions,” associated thenew “reformed philosophy” with the ancient “Eclectic sect,” including “thosemost distinguished men Potamon, Plutarch, Ammonius Saccus, and Plotinus,and others of this golden succession” ( Aurea successionis) which joined paganwisdom and Christian truth.24

19 Animadversiones Aristotelicae (Paris, 1543), 30r .20 Werner Schneiders, Aufklärung und Vorurteilskritik: Studien zur Geschichte der

Vorurteilstheorie (Stuttgart, 1983).21 See Albrecht, Eklektik ; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis: Eine

Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg, 1983); Helmut Holzhey,“Philosophie als Eklektik,” Studia Leibnitiana, 15 (1983), 19-29; Werner Schneiders,“Vernünftiger Zweifel und wahre Eklektik: Zur Entstehung des modernen Kritikbegriffes,”Studia Leibnitiana, 17 (1985), 142-61; Horst Dreitzel, “Zur Entwicklung und Eigenart‘Eklektischen Philosophie,’ ” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 18 (1991), 281-343; and

T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2000).22 “Nempe eclecticus factus sum,” cited by C. S. M. Rademaker, Life and Works of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649) (Assen, 1981), 30.

23 De Philosophia et philosophorum secta (The Hague, 1658), 117; and see Rademaker,op. cit.

24 Philosophia generalis, in duas partes determinata. Una de Ortu et progressu philosophiaeejusque Traductione e Sacris Fontibus (London, 1676), 9.




If modern Eclecticism took its point of departure from the liberation of schol-ars from dependency on one sectarian view, it also bound them in a sense totradition, since one of its premises was the belief that truth was the product notof individual but of collective effort. According to Francis Bacon (who was

indeed admitted posthumously into the Eclectic canon), “The perfection of thesciences is to be looked for not from the swiftness and ability of one inquirer; butfrom a succession.”25 As Francisco Sánches had asked, “But, after all thosegreat men, what fresh contribution can you possible make? Was Truth waitingfor you to come upon the scene?”26 This intellectual humility also entailed exam-ining philosophical error, so that wisdom could be distinguished from falsity— sapientia from stultitia; Weisheit from Narrheit —as historians of theology havelong done and as historians of philosophy would continue to do.27 For all thesereasons history was given a privileged position in philosophy, so that there couldbe no valid philosophy without the history thereof. Thus the aim of Eclecticismwas to join the old, unreflective doxographical tradition with the scientific search

for truth in order to give philosophical legitimacy to the history of philosophy— and conversely, historical legitimacy to the practice of philosophy.

These attitudes produced what some saw as a new school, which took thename of “Eclectic.” Among adherents of this school, or at least conspicuousemployers of the term, were J. C. Sturm, J. F. Buddeus, D. G. Morhof, C. A.Heumann, Nicolas Gundling, J. G. Heineccius, Ephraim Gerhard, ArnoldWesenfeld, Giambattista Capasso, J. J. Brucker, and their students in many dis-sertations written in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.28 Just asthere were Eclectics ante litteram, so there were Eclectics sine titulo, such asJean-Baptiste Du Hamel, professor at the Collège Royal and author of DeConsensu veteris et novae philosophiae (1663); Abraham de Grau, Dutch teacher of philosophy and author of a Historia philosophica (1674); and Adrian

25 De Sapientia veterum, “Prometheus, in Works, II, 654. In general see Steven Shapin, TheSocial History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994).

26 That Nothing is Known, ed. and tr. E. Limbrick and D. Thomson (Cambridge, 1988),169.

27 See Martial Gueroult, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1984), I, 87, and Zwischen Narretei und Weisheit , ed. Gerald Hartung and Wolf Peter Klein (Hildesheim, 1997),from Plotinus to William Hamilton.

28 On all these see the comprehensive work of Giorgio Santinello (ed.), Dalle originirinascimentale alla “historia philosophica,” I (Brescia, 1981), translated as Models of the

History of Philosophy, ed. Santinello and C. T. Blackwell (Dordrecht, 1993), with updatedbibliography; and more recently, Ulrich Johannes Schneider, “Eclecticism and the History of Philosophy,” in History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Mod-ern Europe, ed. D. R. Kelley (Rochester, 1997), 83-102, Martin Mulsow, “Gundling and Buddeus:Competing Models of the History of Philosophy,” in ibid ., 103-26, and Martin Gierl in Map-

ping the World of Learning: The Polyhistor of Daniel Georg Morhof , ed. Françoise Waquet(Wiesbaden, 2000), 280.




Heereboord, who defended the “liberty of philosophizing” in his Meletemata Philosophica (1664).29

The first major work to display the eclectic label was J. C. Sturm’s De Philosophia sectaria et electiva (1679), which applied the eclectic method praised

by Vossius to physical science.30 It was most likely through Sturm that ChristianThomasius turned to this new eclectic method and, because of his more promi-nent position, gained a reputation as a founding figure of modern Eclecticism— “der erste Eclectische Philosophus in Deutschland,” he was called by J. G.Walch.31 According to Diderot (following Brucker), Thomasius deserved a place“among the reformers of philosophy and the founders of a revived eclecticism.”32

Drawing not only on the teachings of his father, Jakob Thomasius, and col-league Leibniz but also on the methods of natural law and on Lutheran faith,Thomasius, according to Brucker, “introduced Eclectic freedom into the Ger-man schools.” Thomasius was, at least by reputation, head of the Eclectic school(eclectica philosophia; Wahl-Philosophie).33

For Thomasius, as for Vossius, philosophy was a collective enterprise notreducible to the teaching of one author or separable from learned tradition andsuccession of teachers. “I call eclectic philosophy,” he wrote in his Introductioad philosophiam aulicam ( Einleitung zur Hof-Philosophie) in 1688, “not whatdepends on the teaching of an individual or on the acceptance of the words of amaster, but whatever can be known from the teaching and writing of any personon the basis not of authority but of convincing arguments.”34 For Thomasius thekey to understanding was the alliance between history and philosophy. “Historyand philosophy are the two eyes of wisdom,” he argued. “If one is missing, thenone has only half vision” (einäugy).35

29 Du Hamel, Philosophia vetus et nova ad usum scholae (Paris, 1684), 48; Grau, Speci-men philosophiae veteris (Franeker, 1673), “praefatio”; Heereboord, Selectarum ex pphilosophiadisputationum (Leiden, 1650), 750; cf. Meletemata philosophica (Nijmegen, 1664); and seeSantinello, I, 259, 211; II, 22.

30 J. C. Sturm, Physica electiva sive hypothetica (Nürnberg, 1697).31 Philophisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1740), 163; and on the vocabulary of Eclectic philoso-

phy, German as well as Latin, see Dagmar von Wille (ed.), Lessico filosof ico del la Frühaufklärung: Christian Thomasius, Christian Wolff, Johann Georg Walch (Rome, 1991).

32 Oeuvres complètes, XIV (Paris, 1972), 892.33 Martin Pott, “Christian Thomasius und Gottfried Arnold”; and see Klaus Deppermann,

Der hallesche Pietismus und der preussische Staat unter Friedrich III (Göttingen, 1961), CarlHinrichs, Preussentum und Pietismus (Göttingen, 1971); Wilhelm Schrader, Geschichte der

Friedrichs-Universität zu Halle (Berlin, 1894); Notker Hammerstein, Jus und Historie: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens in deutschen Universitäten im späten 17. und in 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1972); F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism during the Eigh-teenth Century (Leiden, 1973), and August Hermann Francke: Das humanistische Erbe desgrossen Erziehers (Halle, 1965).

34 Introductio ad philosophicam aulicam (Leipzig, 1688), translated as Einleitung zur Hoff-Philosophie (Berlin, 1712), following the lead of Armand de Gerard, La Philosophie desgens de court (Paris, 1680). See Wundt, Aufklärung, 19; Hammerstein, Jus und Historie, 53,and Paola Zambelli, La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1972), 386.

35 Cautelae circa Praecognita jurisprudentiae in usum auditorii Thomasiani (Halle, 1710),84, cited by Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica Universalis, 283.




Thomasius was joined by others in pursuing this eclectic argument, amongthem Arnold Wesenfeld in his essays on “sectarian and eclectic philosophy”(1694)36; Thomasius’s colleague at Halle, J. F. Buddeus, whose Elements of Instrumental Philosophy (1717) surveyed philosophical history from poetical

origins down to the “new body of philosophy”37; and J. G. Heineccius, who gavefurther methodological shape to Eclecticism, concluding that “one should notseek truth by oneself, nor accept or reject everything written by ancients andmoderns, and so no other method of philosophizing is more reasonable than theEclectic Method.”38

According to Sturm and Wesenfeld, eclecticism, which drew both on theobservation of nature and the writings of others (natura et scripta eruditorum),had created a “society of scholars” (societas litterarum) in Europe. Thus, Eclec-ticism projected philosophy across the Republic of Letters both backward andforward in time, joining Ancients, Moderns, and Posterity in a continuous andworldwide intellectual pilgrimage toward enlightenment. It was another strength

of Eclecticism that it served utility as well as truth by accommodating ideas tothe spirit of particular times and places (ad genus seculi et locorum). As ananonymous author put it in a work on The Lives of the Ancient Philosophers(1702), “This method, as I take it, is preferrable to that of culling one GeneralSysteme of philosophy out of all their writings, and to quoting them by scrapsscattered here and there.”39

A clear sign of the popularity of Eclecticism and autonomy of the history of philosophy was the founding of the Acta Philosophorum by C. A. Heumann, thefirst serial publication devoted to the new discipline of the history of philoso-phy.40 This journal, published in Halle from 1715 to 1721 and modeled on the Acta Eruditorum —if not the Acta Apostolorum —featured not only monographsbut also reviews of recent “literature” in the field, beginning with the works of Thomasius and Buddeus.41 In his introduction Heumann, invoking Lipsius’s praiseof ancient eclecticism, declared of its modern counterpart that it was “the best

36 Arnold Wesenfeld, Dissertat iones philosophicae quatuor materiae selectioris de philosophia sectaria et electiva (Frankfurt, 1694); and see Albrecht, Eklektik , 387ff, and UlrichJohannes Schneider, “Über den philosophischen Eklektizismus,” Nach der Postmoderne, ed.Andreas Steffens (n.p., 1992).

37 J. F. Buddeus, Elementa philosophiae instrumentalis [1697] (Halle, 1714), Compen-dium historiae philosophicae (Halle, 1731), and Historia juris civilis; and see Serenella Masi,“Eclettismo e storia della filosofia nel Johann Franz Budde,” Filosofia e storia della filosofia

(1977), 163-212, and Santinello, II, 373.38 Elementa philosophiae rationalis et moralis (Berlin, 17568), 272: “Folglich kein anderer Methodos philosophandi raisonable sey, als: METHODOS ECLECTICA.”

39 The Lives of the Ancient Philosophers (1702), preface.40 See Günter Mühlpfordt, “Ein kryptoradikaler Thomasianer: C. A. Heumann, Der

Thomasius von Göttingen,” Christian Thomasius, 1655-1728, ed. Werner Schneiders (Ham-burg, 1989), 305-34; and Santinello, II, 437.

41 Acta Philosophorum, Gründl. Nachrichten aus der Historia Philosophica, ed. C. A.Heumann (Halle, 1715-21).




method of philosophy and, furthermore, that no one deserved the name ‘philoso-pher’ who was not an Eclectic.” In successive fascicles of the Acta Heumannoffered a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of the history of philosophy from itsorigin (Ursprung) through all stages of succession and growth (Wachsthum),

which was a common metaphor for intellectual progress.42 In the course of thissurvey Heumann published an extensive dissertation on the scholarly theme andancient topos, the trustworthiness of history, which he compared to Thomasius’sanalogous discussion of legal credibility ( fides juridica).43

What was novel about Heumann’s method was his willingness to consider extra-philosophical factors. “Know thyself,” to be sure; but philosophical self-understanding required not merely inward speculation but also inquiry into theouter conditions of philosophizing, since, as Heumann aphorized, “Philosophersare made, not born” ( Philosophi fiunt, non nascuntur ). This reversal of thecondition of the poet (nascitur non fit ) suggests another major theme of the Acta, which is the philosopher’s character or “genius,” defined in terms of pow-

ers of judgment and criticism, freedom from prejudice, and temperamental bal-ance.44 Beyond psychological factors, Heumann inquired into the influence of environment, climate, the stars, and historical periods: was there agenius locorumor a genius seculi? For historians needed to take factors of climate, race, andnationality into account.

The culmination and fruition of the first phase of modern Eclecticism (andthe modern field called historia philosophica) was Brucker’s Critical Historyof Philosophy, published in four volumes from 1741 to 1743. In this monumen-tal work, building on the labor of Heumann and other earlier scholars, Brucker defended philosophical history and the associated eclectic method. He offered acompendious survey of philosophy from “barbaric” origins down to his ownenlightened day, in effect fixing the canon of academic philosophy down to thederivative handbooks of Tennemann, Cousin, Windelband, and Ueberweg.Brucker summed up the eclectic view of the history of philosophy in this way:

42 Acta Philosophorum, I, 1-63; II; 1-381; II, 567-682, “Einleitung zur Historia Philosophica.”43 Acta Philosophorum, I, 381-462, “De fide historica, oder von der Glaubwürdigkeit in

dieser Historie,” citing also Johann Eisenhart, De Fide historica (Helmstadt, n.d.). See F. G.Bierling, Commentatio de pyrrhonismo historico (Leipzig, 1724); Arno Seifert, Cognitio

Historica: die Geschichte als Namengeberin der Frühneuzeitlichen Empirie (Berlin, 1976),152; and Markus Völkel, “Pyrrhonismus historicus” und “fides historica”: Die Entwicklungder deutschen Methodologie unter dem Gesichtspunkt der historischen Skepsis (Frankfurt, 1987),128ff. See also Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Historian,” Journal of the Warburg

and Courtauld Institutes, 13 (1950), 297-98, and D. R. Kelley, “ Fides Historia: Charles Dumoulinand the Gallican View of History,” Traditio, 22 (1966), 349 n. 7.

44 Acta Philosophorum, I, 567-656, “Von dem Ingenio Philosophico.” Cf. William Ringler,“ Posta nascitur non fit : On the History of an aphorism,” JHI , 2 (1941), 497-504. The formulasCriticus non fit, sed nascitur , attributed to David Ruhnken, and interpres not fit, sed nascitur ,are reported by Phillip August Boeck, “Theory of Hermeneutics,” in The Hermeneutics Reader ,ed. Kurt Mueller Vollmer (London, 1986), 139.




“A history of philosophy, is a history of doctrines, and of men. As a history of doctrines, it lays open the origin of opinions, the changes which they have under-gone, the distinct character of different systems, and the leading points in whichthey agree or disagree: it is therefore, in fact, a history of the human understand-

ing” (historia intellectus humani).45

Further:

We have carefully remarked those personal circumstances respectingany author, which might serve to throw light on his opinions; such, for example, as his country, his family, his education, his natural temper,his habits of life, his patrons, friends, or enemies.... We have been par-ticularly careful, not to ascribe modern ideas and opinions to the an-cients, nor to torture their expressions into a meaning which probablynever entered into their thoughts, in order to accommodate them to a

modern hypotheis or system.46

Finally, citing once again the Horatian formula of liberation: “From these laud-able attempts a species of philosophy has arisen, more pure and excellent thanthose of any former period, which we shall distinguish by the name of the Mod-ern Eclectic Philosophy.”47

Brucker was a crucial figure in the history of ideas, too, in the sense that itwas from his History of the Doctrine of Ideas (1723) that, via Vico, the phrase“history of ideas” gained currency. Vico found Brucker mistaken in tracing ideasand their origins only from the Platonic source and failing to realize that thedoctrine was not just philosophical but belonged to a more general kind of con-ceptualizing. Finding “this history of human ideas ... strikingly confirmed by thehistory of philosophy itself,”48 Vico told a different story, which was that theol-ogy “took its start not when the philosophers began to reflect on human ideas”(as, he adds, in the “erudite and scholarly little book” recently published byBrucker) “but rather when the first men began to think humanly.” So unlike

45 Brucker, I, 19 (trans. in William Enfield, The History of Philosophy from the Earliest Periods [London, 1840], I, 26); in general see Santinello, II, 527ff, and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Theo Stamm (ed.), Johann Jacob Brucker (1696-1770): Philosoph und

Historiker der europäischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 1998), especially the articles by UlrichSchneider, Gregorio Piaia, and the editors.

46 Brucker, I, 15 and 28 (Eng. tr., Enfield, I, 19): “... nec ad nostrorum temporum habitumet sapientiae inter nos cultae ideam philosophia vetus exigenda est.”

47 Brucker, IV (2), 3-4 (Enfield, II, 468-69).48 Scienza nuova, par. 499. See Constance Blackwell, “Epicurus and Boyle, Leclerc and

Locke: ‘Ideas’ and their Redefinition in Jacob Brucker’s Historia Philosophica Doctrinae de Ideis,” in Il vocabulario della Republique des lettres, terminologia filosofica e storia della filosofia, ed. Marta Fattori (Florence, 1997).




Brucker and Diogenes Laertius, Vico projected philosophy back into the periodof “barbarism,” thus expanding the history of ideas as well.

The history of philosophy continued under the shadow of Brucker duringthe eighteenth century, with at least a hundred separate publications in the genre.49

Many of these books were popular textbooks, and few had much to add to theaccumulation of scholarship brought together in Brucker’s “critical” history.The main purpose of this genre was initially to promote the imperial status of philosophy; yet there were also subversive influences at work, which, divergingfrom the history of concepts and systems of thought, led to the study of a larger expression of human culture and history. As a disciple of Brucker wrote in thelast years of the century, the history of philosophy offered “not only an exposi-tion of philosophical meanings ... but a representation of the development of thehuman spirit.”50

This should suggest some of the long tradition on which Cousin drew whenhe began teaching in the philosophical vacuum of Bonapartist France. Dissatis-

fied with the poverty of the French philosophical tradition, he turned to Britishand German systems of thought. In 1817 he made his first pilgrimage to Ger-many and established contacts with Hegel, Schelling, Jacobi, and Goethe.51 In-tellectually Germany was “on fire,” and from these foreign flames Cousin lit hisown “spiritualist” torch. By 1820 he was studying Kant, and in that same year he introduced French readers the virtually unknownScienza nuova of Vico. Heencouraged Jules Michelet to undertake the translation of this work,52 as he later encouraged Michelet’s friend Edgar Quinet to translate Herder’s “idea of thephilosophy of history.”53 During the 1820s, too, he prepared editions of Proclus,Abelard, and Descartes and translations of Plato and Tennemann’s history of philosophy.54 By then he was well aware of the great work of Brucker, whom hehonored as “the father of the history of philosophy.”55 In his lectures in 1829 healso added touches of Indian philosophy, newly recovered in the “oriental re-naissance” of the previous generation and reinforcing the “spiritualism” of Eclec-ticism.56

49 See Santinello, passim.50 Fülleborn, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie, I (Jena, 17962), 41.51 Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (eds.), Lettres d’Allemagne: Victor Cousin et les

hégéliens (Tusson, Charente, 1990).52 Histoire abrégée des sciences metaphysiques, morales et politiques depuis la renais-

sance des lettres, tr. J. A. Buchon (Paris, 1820), ded. to Cousin; see Michelet,Oeuvres complètes,I (Paris, 1971), for his trans. of Vico’s La Science nouvelle (1827).

53 Herder, Idées sur la philosophie de l’histoire, tr. Quinet (Paris, 1827).54 Tennemann, Manuel de l’histoire de philosophie, tr. V. Cousin (Paris, 18392).55 Tennemann, Manuel, 2. In a report on “the progress of learning” since 1789 prepared for

Napoleon in 1808 and published in 1810 Dacier (Tableau historique de l’erudition française[Paris, 1862], 344), referred to “the eclectic philosophers of Germany” remarking also thatFrance had no history of philosophy at that time.

56 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680-1880, tr. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York, 1984), 95.




As Cousin’s academic power grew under the July Monarchy, his philosophicalreputation declined, and Saint-Beuve listed him among the “prophets of the past.”57

Yet what might be a defect for a philosopher could be a virtue for a historian of ideas, which was indeed his major calling. His celebrated course of 1828-29 was

devoted to the “idea of philosophy” (inaugural lecture), the “fundamental ideasof history” (fifth lecture), and to particular ideas (especially “the True, the Beau-tiful, and the Good”) in the Platonic mold.58 In his translation of Tennemann’smanual Cousin listed “the history of ideas, principles, and other particular doc-trines” treated by scholars, including that of the true God (Christoph Meiners),atheism (Jacob Thomasius), fate (Grotius), the soul (Joseph Priestley), adiaphora(C. C. Schmid), the association of ideas (Michael Hissmann), and others whosework Cousin indiscriminately plundered and whose authority he vicariously en- joyed—or whose place in the history of ideas he fixed. For Cousin “ideas” rep-resented a currency of exchange acceptable in many different contexts through-out the Republic of Letters and across many centuries, and their history consti-

tuted a high priority for scholarly inquiry.If by the beginning of the twentieth century Eclecticism was dead and unla-

mented, the history of ideas was a thriving, though hardly organized enterprise.There were histories of ideas and histories of particular ideas in the wake of Cousin’s work, which employed the terminology and conceptualizations of thefield—for example, A. A. Cournot’s Considérations sur la marche des idéesdans les temps modernes (1872) and Eugène Lerminier’s De l’Influence de la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle sur la législation et la sociabilité du XIX e (1833),invoking “the power of ideas.” By the end of the century, in any case, the “his-tory of ideas” entered the semantic field of scholars throughout Europe. As LordActon wrote, “What chiefly distinguishes the modern historical art from that of the ancients is that the history of ideas is now understood in its bearings on thehistory of events....” And further: “To exhibit the course of ideas in their parallelprogress and their action on each other, is a principal function of the modernhistorian.”59

The history of ideas was cultivated especially in association with the “newhistories” appearing in Germany, France, and the United States. In the first issueof his Revue de Synthèse Henri Berr used the phrasehistoire des idées, and later he drew one of his younger colleagues, Lucien Febvre, into the field. “But howdifficult it is!” he wrote to Berr in 1926: “intellectual history, the history of ideasand beliefs, and as impassioned as it is difficult to write.”60 In 1903 François

57 Les grands écrivains, 188.58 Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1847).59 Herbert Butterfield, “Acton: His Training and Intellectual System,” Studies in Diplo-

matic History and Historical Geography in Honour of G. P. Gooch (London, 1961), 189.60 De la Revue de Synthèse aux Annales: Lettres à Henri Berr 1911-1954, ed. Gilles

Candar and Jacqueline Pluet-Despatin (Paris, 1997), 125 (Aug. 1926).




Simiand, from the standpoint of Durkheimian social science, criticized the ideal-ism of the “history of ideas.”61 In Germany in the later nineteenth century the“history of ideas” took its place next to “cultural history”; and indeed EberhardGothein, a champion of the “new cultural history” associated with Karl

Lamprecht, wrote that “in its pure form cultural history is the history of ideas.”62

The phrase was also applied to a series of volumes published by the philosophydepartment of Columbia University between 1918 and 1935, which were de-voted to “a field ... in which it appears that ideas have a history and that their history is influenced by contact with lines of experience not commonly calledphilosophical.”63

In keeping with its eclectic and interdisciplinary background the history of ideas was pursued in several distinct intellectual traditions—the history of sci-ence, social science, literature, and of course philosophy. In a volume in Berr’s Evolution de l’Humanité series, Abel Rey celebrated Paul Tannery as one whohas “renewed the history of sciences by treating their true history, linking it, as

Comte had done, to the history of ideas and human thought.”64 For Mannheim’sdisciple Werner Stark the aim of the sociology of knowledge was “a deeper understanding of the history of ideas.”65 This was also a purpose of JürgenHabermas, whose Knowledge and Human Interests is not only a “critique of ideology” but also, says one expert, “a history of ideas with systematic intent.”66

Literary history was also an area in which the history of ideas was cultivated:Basil Willey, for example, surveyed the “background” of English literature fromBacon to the Victorians and studied the “history of ideas” in the wake of the“pioneering” efforts of Mark Pattison.67 More generally, in the words of Hans

61 Méthode historique et sciences sociales, ed. Marina Cedrono (Paris, 1987), 171 (“A

propos de l’histoire des idées” [1903]).62 Die Aufgaben der Kulturgeschichte (Leipzig, 1889), 50: “Kulturgeschichte in ihrer reinen

Form ist Ideengeschichte.”63 Studies in the History of Ideas, edited by the Department of Philosophy of Columbia

University (3 vols., New York, 1918, 1925, 1935), prefatory note, including contributions byJohn Dewey, Frederick Woodbridge, John Hermann Randall, Richard McKeon, Sidney Hook,Herbert Schneider, and Ernest Nagel.

64 La Science dans l’antiquité: la jeunesse de la science grecque (Paris, 1933), dedication.65 The sub-title of his book, The Sociology of Knowledge (New Brunswick, 1991); and see

Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (eds.), Knowledge and Politics: The Sociology of Knowledge Dis- pute (London, 1990).

66 Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass., 1978),110. According to Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, tr. Michael Robertson (Cambridge,Mass., 1994), 111, before the breakup of the Institute in 1933 “a study group on Social History

and the History of Ideas” was formed by Mannheim, Löwe, Bergstraesser, and Noack. See alsoMartin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Boston, 1973).

67 The Seventeenth Century Background (London, 1934); The Eighteenth Century Back-ground: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (London, 1940); NineteenthCentury Studies: Coleridge to Arnold (London, 1949); and More Nineteenth Century Studies(London, 1956), 137.




68 Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. T. Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982), 6; and see R. S.Crane, “The History of Ideas and Literary Theory,” The Practice of Modern Scholarship(Glenview, Ill., 1954), 27-38.

69 Modern Language Notes, 34 (1919), 305, cited by Gladys Gordon-Bournique, Arthur O. Lovejoy et l’histoire des idées (Ph. D. diss., Paris, 1974).

70 These included, besides Lovejoy himself, George Boas, Harold Cherniss, LudwigEdelstein, Leo Spitzer, Gilbert Chinard, Philip Wiener, Dorothy Stimson, Erich Auerbach, CarlBecker, Charles Beard, Niels Bohr, John von Neumann, Hans Baron, Owen Lattimore, Lionel

Venturi, Samuel E. Morison, Americo Castro, Charles Singleton, Hajo Holborn, Don CameronAllen, Basil Willey, Alexandre Koyré, and Eric Voegelin.

71 Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948), 8.72 Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, tr. John W. Stanley (Albany, 1994), 154; and see Daniel

Wilson, Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), 230.73 “On the Existence of Ideas,” The Johns Hopkins University Circular , 33 (1914), 178-

235.

Robert Jauss, “The history of ideas [Geistesgeschichte] strove secretly for arenewal of the history of philosophy in the mirror of literature.”68

In the United States Lovejoy was employing the phrase “history of ideas” asearly as 1919.69 From 1923 the “History of Ideas Club,” under Lovejoy’s lead-

ership, met at the Johns Hopkins University, with a series of papers being givenby many distinguished scholars.70 From the beginning (as formerly with Eclec-ticism) the study of the history of ideas has been pursued in the shadow of thehistory of philosophy; for in this field, according to Lovejoy, “is to be found thecommon seed-plot, the locus of initial manifestation in writing, of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas, and especially of the rul-ing preconceptions, which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectualhistory.”71 Lovejoy aspired to make the history of ideas an interdisciplinary en-terprise, but he never himself broke entirely with the preconceptions of the disci-pline in which he fashioned his career, thought, and writing.

More specifically, the point of departure for what he came to regard as the

new discipline of the history of ideas (as distinguished from James HarveyRobinson’s brand of “intellectual history”) came, as he once admitted, from hisreading of Windelband’s History of Philosophy, a book which (as Hans-GeorgGadamer remarked) “was based upon the assumption of a constancy of prob-lems from which, depending upon the changing historical situation, varying an-swers followed.”72 Lovejoy’s line of thought was also shaped by the questionsprovoked by William James about the existence of consciousness and, in thatconnection, the “existence of ideas.”73 Lovejoy always defended the existence of consciousness, arguing that, though not observable, it was “not a groundlessand functionless philosophical superstition, but a natural product of human re-flection upon certain common human experiences”; and so were the ideas whichinhabit this consciousness. This was the thesis that he pursued more elaboratelyin The Revolt against Dualism in 1929, and it was also the grounds for the




notion of “unit-ideas” that underlay his agenda of 1933 laid out in the Lowelllectures published as The Great Chain of Being in 1936.

Although Lovejoy’s “unit-ideas” were often criticized as being limited toformal and intellectualized concepts, in practice he also wanted to accommodate

less conscious and intellectual “mental units.” These included “implicit or in-completely explicit assumptions or more or less unconscious mental habits,operating in the thought of an individual or a generation.” Like the earlier Eclec-tics, if not like Cousin, Lovejoy was quite aware of external “influences” andabove all of the role of language in thought. He was himself no mediocre philolo-gist; and in some ways he anticipated the “linguistic turn” of the later years of this century, pointing out in particular “the role of semantic shifts, ambiguities,and confusions, in the history of thought and taste,” and remarking that “nearlyall of the great catchwords have been equivocal—or rather, multivocal.”74 If ideas can be given stable definitions, they are nonetheless often, in the context of language, in conflict, even in the mind of a single thinker—consider the many

meanings of “nature,” “romanticism,” and “progress,” as well as the inflamma-tory terms of ideological debate—for such, in his view, was the “anomaly of knowledge”75

While Lovejoy, unlike Cousin and earlier eclectics, surrendered the hope of achieving metahistorical truth through the critical study of the thought of earlier ages, he did not give up the notion that some measure of contemporary wisdommight be gained, and as usual in the classic form of self-knowledge. For him thehistory of ideas was the major repository of such knowledge and was still di-rected at questions about the human condition, including what (writing in 1940in the first issue of the JHI ) he regarded as “the gravest and most fundamental of our problems” (not “what’s the matter with philosophy”? but)—“the question,‘What’s the matter with man?’ ”76 Lovejoy never found an answer to this ques-tion, but his intellectual quest continues, while the “history of ideas” itself hasgone through a number of transformations since the establishment of his agenda,which itself is a beneficiary of the massive, interdisciplinary, and “eclectic” heri-tage suggested here.

Rutgers University.

74 Essays, xii, xiii.75 Thirteen Pragmatisms, 236.76 “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” JHI , 1 (1940), 9; repr. The History of Ideas:

Canon and Variations.

kelley eclecticismi & history of ideas 2013

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