Abstract
The argument of this paper is threefold: (a) Charles Bonnet’s naturalization of the principle of perfectibility (in the wake of Rousseau) is one example of a more general philosophical operation to be found in his writings: to naturalize the metaphysical while insisting upon its minimal difference from the material and so to generate an immaterialism that looks like a materialism; (b) this operation structures Bonnet’s entire palingenetic project which can be defined as an ‘anomalous naturalism’; (c) variants of this anomalous naturalism were available to German philosophers during the last decades of the eighteenth century – philosophers such as G. E. Lessing, F. H. Jacobi and J. G. Herder – and, to this extent, their writings also display traits of this ‘anomalous naturalism’.
You will see with pleasure how your ideas spread throughout Germany and bear fruit there. (Jean Trembley to Charles Bonnet, 14 July 1777, quoted in Marx [1976, 420].
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Despite their obvious differences, Lovejoy’s thesis converges in key respects with Leroux’s: both see Bonnet’s developmental approach to the integrated natural and human worlds as an intellectual landmark that determines nineteenth-century thinking.
- 3.
Bonnet’s epiphanic and supposedly transformational reading of Leibniz in 1747 is also often presented as a moment of rupture in his philosophical trajectory. Bonnet himself comments that it was ‘something I have always regarded as one of the principal moments of my thinking life… that marvellously increased my field of vision’ (1948, 100; see Anderson 1982, 7–12). It is also important to underline the significance of the reference to Leibniz for this whole tradition of anomalous naturalism being described in the present essay—not just in Bonnet, but in Lessing and in Herder too (for example).
- 4.
Gaukroger puzzles over precisely this feature: Bonnet is a naturalist who manages nevertheless not to commit himself to reductive materialism. Quoting Bonnet, Gaukroger characterises him as “transferring to the body those things that are commonly attributed to the soul [without] diminishing the soul” (2022, xvi). Despite Bonnet’s “physiology of the mind”, his project “has no necessary connection with materialism and… materialism is not the direction in which he wants to go.” (2022, xxx).
- 5.
On this treatment of Hemsterhuis as a thinker in the German tradition, see further Whistler (2022).
- 6.
For a further attempt to sketch the contours of a post-Bonnetian tradition in Germany, see Whistler (2023).
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Whistler, D. (2023). Post-Bonnetian Naturalism. In: Corti, L., Schülein, JG. (eds) Life, Organisms, and Human Nature. Studies in German Idealism, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_16
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