The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant
Daniel Whistler
At the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason stands the chapter, ‘The Discipline of Pure
Reason’. Here, Kant portrays philosophy as an instrument for the suppression of
reason’s desires. Desire must be fought in the interest of truth. This essay describes a
parallel disciplining out of which the discipline of philosophy of religion emerged. I
argue that Kant’s well-known critique of the dangers of fanaticism and enthusiasm are
part of a larger ‘discipline of pious reason’ occurring in Germany during the late
eighteenth century. Pieties were to be restrained in the name of philosophy. Yet, far
from leading to a critical philosophy of religion aware of its own pieties, this religious
disciplining resulted in a renewed dogmatism.
[A] The Invisibility of Piety
Piety should be a central concept in philosophy of religion. It designates the process
by which we select what matters most and maintain a relationship to it. Such valueselection
is a crucial condition for all thinking. Piety is not the only condition of
thought of course, but, as the arbiter of that to which thought is ultimately directed, it
is both a necessary and universal condition. Pieties and impieties colour all thought. A
philosophy of piety therefore would describe and analyse the appropriate and
inappropriate practices by which one attends to what is valuable. 1

Nevertheless, the silence of contemporary philosophy of religion on piety is quite
deafening. Piety seems to elude the critical gaze. It is for such reasons that I will
speak at the end of the essay of the anti-transcendental nature of contemporary
philosophy of religion; it has suppressed the conditions which made it possible. The
obvious question is therefore: What reasons can be given for philosophy of religion’s
suppression of the conditions of its own possibility? This question structures the
present essay. I ask how and why piety ‘became invisible’ and I do so by describing
three ‘scenes’ from the history of ideas which take place at the intersection between
philosophy of religion and moral philosophy: two early poems by Goethe (Ganymed
and Prometheus) a short essay by Herder (Liebe und Selbstheit) and the closing
sections of Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten. All three dramatise the effacement of piety
from philosophy of religion.
In these ‘scenes’, Goethe, Herder and Kant confront the dominant pieties of their day
and stutteringly articulate alternative, often improper models for relating to what
matters most (i.e. ‘God’). All three are uneasy over how piety is usually conceived, so
try to conceive it differently. The piety being challenged was essentially neoplatonic
and itself had only recently come to dominance as a by-product of the Platorenaissance
in post-1750 Germany. This neoplatonic piety was tethered to the figure
of the One and postulated a future fusion with the divine. The impiety of Goethe,
Herder and Kant focused, on the contrary, on the multiplicity of existence. This
concern for multiplicity was often mediated (oddly enough) through Spinozist ethics.
Neo-Spinozistic impiety designated the manner in which the individual relates to God
as individual, released from the bonds of fusion, mysticism and apotheosis. Impieties
of the multiple were pitted against pieties of the One.

More concretely, Goethe, Herder and Kant set limits to and posited restraints against
the dangers posed by a neoplatonic thinking which exhibited too great a familiarity
with the divine. The latter was too interested, and with such interest came the danger
of being overwhelmed and ultimately engulfed by the deity. Impiety therefore took
the form of an inhibition of reason, locking down its capabilities in favour of what
Kant termed a pudor pietatis. Out of this restraint, philosophy of religion (or, at least,
one form of it) was born. In late eighteenth century Germany, philosophy of religion
was engendered as a disinterested enterprise: to philosophise one must keep one’s
distance from the divine. While the philosopher is to be forever tempted by the divine,
she must vigilantly thwart and frustrate such a desire. As such, she must struggle
towards an improper indifference to the divine.
[A] Goethe: Pious Desires and Impious Revolts
I begin, then, with two of Goethe’s poems—Ganymed and Prometheus. Both written
in the early 1770s, they are testament to an emergent dialectic between an attitude of
succumbing to the divine and one of resisting it. 2 The final stanza of Ganymed runs as
follows,
Hinauf! Hinauf strebt’s.
Es schweben die Wolken
Abwärts, die Wolken
Neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe.
Mir! Mir!

In euerm Schoose
Aufwärts!
Umfangend umfangen
Aufwarts an deinen Busen,
Allliebender Vater! (1919, I/2:79-80)
Upwards, drawn upwards,
The clouds float down,
The clouds descend
To my love and my longing,
To me! To me!
Upwards, carried in their womb,
Embraced and embracing!
Borne aloft to your heart,
Oh father, lover of all! (2005, p. 9)
Ganymed treats romantic love, love of nature and love of god. It is this last,
theological level which is my present concern. Ganymede climaxes in divine love; the
consummation of his existence (both its terminus and perfection) is to be absorbed
back into the womb of the divine. Human desire is fulfilled in theosis. The telos of
individual life occurs at the moment when the god descends, humanity ascends and
the two are fused together, so that all finite individuality is dissolved. Although
Goethe adds romantic and pantheistic overtones, his model is therefore a traditional
Christian one: blessedness is achieved by means of a dialectic of descent and ascent.
God descends to Ganymede to embrace him (emptying Himself in the process), and in

that embrace human and God ascend back in glorification. There is no moment of
equality.
The underlying model of Ganymed can be further determined as neoplatonic; indeed,
the poem bears the imprint of the neoplatonic renaissance which was spreading
through Germany at this period. 3
For both the Goethe of Ganymed and the
neoplatonists of his day, proper human desire is desire for a return to unity with the
One. It is no accident that later in his life ‘Goethe discovered in the thought of
Plotinus something very congenial to his own’ (Beierwaltes, 1972, p. 93). 4
The
Goethe of Ganymed could have agreed as early as 1774 with Plotinus’ comments
concerning ‘the love innate in our souls’:
Every soul is an Aphrodite… As long as the soul stays true to itself, it loves the
divinity and desires to be at one with it, as a daughter loves with a noble love a
noble father… Only in the world beyond does the real object of our love exist, the
only one with which we can unite ourselves. (1964, VI.9.9)
It is important to note that Goethe conceives the One not as transcendent to the world
of sense, but (in part, at least) identical with it; yet, despite this shift in emphasis, the
desire to be borne ‘upwards… embraced and embracing’ remains the same. The claim
that ‘love unites beings’ (Herder, 1994, 4:407; 1993, p. 111) is, as we shall see, the
premise of all neoplatonic piety of the late eighteenth century.
The naturalness of this desire to return to the One is a central component of the
imitatio Dei and the imago Dei, both of which Goethe here flirts with. Desire for

union is the natural inclination of humanity: humanity lives to ultimately become like
God. This natural inclination is also the effect of the divinity implanted in humanity
from the beginning. 5 In line with this implant, the individual strives to revert back to
her source and, in so doing, rise above the finite realm. For all these doctrines, fusion
is the appropriate goal of human striving. The proper—or pious—relation to God is
one that puts an end to all relations by merging God and humanity together into the
One. In consequence, it also puts an end to all piety and to finitude altogether. This is
a self-destructive form of piety. 6
Contemporaneous with Ganymed, Goethe wrote the poem Prometheus. Its second
stanza reads,
Ich kenne nichts Ärmeres
Unter der Sonn’, als euch, Götter!
Ihr nähret kümmerlich
Von Opfersteuern
Und Gebetshauch
Eure Majestät
Und darbtet, wären
Nicht Kinder und Bettler
Hoffnungsvolle Toren.
I know of no poorer thing
Under the sun, than you gods!
Wretchedly you feed

Your own majesty
On sacrificial offerings
And the breath of prayers,
And you would starve
If children and beggars
Were not fools full of hope.
The narrator (Prometheus) goes on to narrate his own childish and ‘deluded’ faith in
divine mercy, before continuing later in the poem,
Ich dich ehren? Wofür?
Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert
Je des Beladenen?
Hast du die Thränen gestillet
Je des Geängsteten?
… Hier sitz’ ich, forme Menschen
Nach meinem Bilde,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,
Zu leiden, zu weinen,
Zu genießen und zu freuen sich,
Und dein nicht zu achten,
Wie ich! (1919, I/2:76-8)
I should respect you? For what?

Have you ever soothed
The pain that burdened me?
Have you ever dried
My terrified tears?
… Here I sit, making men
In my own image,
A race that shall be like me,
A race that shall suffer and weep
And know joy and delight too,
And heed you no more
Than I do! (2005, pp. 11-13)
While it might be slightly hyperbolic to claim with Boyle that ‘neither Nietzsche or
Feuerbach will add anything of emotional or intellectual significance to this outburst
of an Antichrist’ (1991, p. 164), it is certainly correct to assert that the metaphysics,
theology and ethics underlying Ganymed are here rejected in their entirety.
Prometheus forms a race of men in his own image—the image of revolt and
autonomy. Humans are hardwired to impiety. Desire for God is transformed into
desire against or despite the gods. This is what is natural to humanity: to remain selfsufficient,
liberated from divine aid and divine demands. The human individual is
born free of the gods—and this is something to be celebrated, since the gods are
despicable creatures, feeding on sacrifice, prayer and hope only to give slavery in
return. We are far away from the pious desires of Ganymed. The allure of the
theological has been neutralised. If ‘philosophy of religion has no higher task than to

question dominant pieties’ (Goodchild, 2002, p. 3), then Prometheus is a crucial text
in the genesis of philosophy of religion.
If Ganymed is the offspring of the neoplatonic renaissance, whence comes
Prometheus? Although it might sound initially odd to modern ears, to some of its first
readers Goethe’s Prometheus was a manifesto of Spinozism. Indeed, Prometheus
became one of the most famous documents of late eighteenth-century neo-Spinozism,
owing to the part it played in F.H. Jacobi’s 1785 Über die Lehre des Spinoza in
Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn 7 . Jacobi’s Briefe, containing a reported
confession of Spinozism by G.E. Lessing, sparked the Spinozismusstreit, the
repercussions of which were felt for three decades in German philosophy. Moreover,
it was, Jacobi claimed, a copy of Goethe’s Prometheus which gave rise to Lessing’s
admission. After Lessing praises the poem, the conversation continues (as reported by
Jacobi):
Lessing: I mean [Prometheus] is good in a different way… The point of view from
which the poem is treated is my own point of view… The orthodox concepts of
the Divinity are no longer for me, I cannot stomach them. Hen kai pan! I know of
nothing else. That is also the direction of the poem, and I must confess I like it
very much.
I: Then you must be pretty well in agreement with Spinoza.
Lessing: If I have to name myself after anyone, I know of nobody else. (Jacobi,
1994, p. 187)

Beginning from Goethe’s Prometheus, Lessing proceeds directly to a confession of
his own allegiance to Spinozism. Just like Goethe, he claims, ‘I too am a disciple of
Spinoza.’
What is strange is why Lessing should think Prometheus is obviously Spinozist or
promotes in any way a Spinozist worldview. 8 Lessing’s own explanation that the hen
kai pan of Spinoza’s monism is somehow implicitly present in the poem seems, on the
face of it, patently false. The poem speaks of gods and is imbibed with the
polytheistic worldview of the Greeks. It in no way questions the existence of these
multiple divinities. 9 What Prometheus interrogates is not so much the metaphysical
assumptions of theist or even polytheist worldviews, but their ethics. The gods
obstruct humanity’s joyous pursuit of its earthly existence with their ressentiment;
Prometheus’ stealing of the heavenly fire is a symbolic liberation from dependence on
the gods—freeing humanity to increase its joy through its own activity. Prometheus
allows the individual to desire as individual, free from the gods.
Some of this may just about sound Spinozist; however, to those involved in the early
stages of the Spinoza renaissance in 1770s and 1780s Germany (like Lessing) it was
the very essence of Spinozism. It is, however, crucial to stress that the Spinozist
reading is one Lessing imposes on Goethe’s text; there is no evidence that Goethe at
this period subscribed to Lessing’s ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’ or intended Prometheus to
be Spinozist in any way, shape or form. 10 Indeed, in 1785 he firmly reprimanded
Jacobi for implicating his poetry in this controversy (1919, IV/7:212-4). What
complicates the picture somewhat, however, is that in the early 1780s (around seven
years after writing Prometheus) Goethe did become an important figure in the German

Spinoza revival; this is one of the reasons why, in fact, Jacobi employed Goethe’s
poetry in his critique of contemporary Spinozism. However, it is important to note
that, despite the fame Prometheus was to have as a manifesto of Spinozism, it was
most likely not intended as such.
This of course merely adds to questions why Lessing did call Goethe’s Prometheus
Spinozist and hopefully this will become clearer as the essay progresses. In the
meantime, we can preliminarily conclude from the initial juxtaposition of Ganymed
and Prometheus that Goethe’s early poetry exhibits two distinct lines of thought: one,
in line with the neoplatonic revival of his day, conceives the appropriate relation to
God to reside in fusion. The other line of thought, however, contests this: Prometheus
asserts the need to rebel against such a pious ethos, to keep one’s distance and remain
free as human. Prometheus rebels against the all-embracing oneness of Ganymed in
the name of the multiple.
[A] The Herder/Hemsterhuis Debate
The next ‘scene’ I explore furthers this tension between neoplatonic piety and neo-
Spinozist impiety. In 1781, J.G. Herder wrote a short appendix to a 1770 work by
François Hemsterhuis: Liebe und Selbstheit (Ein Nachtrag zum Briefe des Herr
Hemsterhuis über das Verlangen) 11 . At issue was the monopoly neoplatonism held on
the God/human relation. Herder takes Hemsterhuis (as representative of this
neoplatonism) to task for advocating a self-destructive conception of piety, and in its
place Herder begins to articulate an alternative, neo-Spinozist model of friendship.

[B] Hemsterhuis’ Lettre sur les désirs
To begin, therefore, it is worth summarising the argument of Hemsterhuis’ Lettre sur
les désirs. 12 Like all Hemsterhuis’ work, this piece consists in (what one critic has
called) ‘a mixture of empiricism and Platonism’ (di Giovanni, 1994, p. 47).
Hemsterhuis is very influenced by the mechanistic sensualism of his French
contemporaries and his vocabulary is theirs, but beneath this empiricist terminology
there resides a neoplatonic metaphysics. While, it must be admitted, Hemsterhuis’
neoplatonism is crude, his work was still perfectly recognisable to his contemporaries
as providing an eighteenth-century reworking of neoplatonic thought. Indeed,
Herder’s Liebe und Selbstheit is exclusively concerned with Hemsterhuis’
neoplatonism.
At the beginning of the work, Hemsterhuis states, ‘The absolute goal of the soul,
when it desires, is the most intimate and most perfect union of its own essence with
that of the desired object.’ (Hemsterhuis, 1846, p. 54) Again, the comparison with
Plotinus is revealing: as for Plotinus so for Hemsterhuis, to desire something is to
desire to become one with it. Moreover, and also in line with Plotinus, such desire is a
force of attraction inherent in all matter. A tendency towards oneness forms the
essence of all beings—animate and inanimate. Whenever there is more than one
discrete object dispersed in the world, the natural inclination will be to rid the world
of the multiple until only the One remains. The ultimate goal of this tendency is ‘that
two substances will become united to such an extent that any notion of duality will be
destroyed.’ (ibid, 53) As Herder summarises, ‘Hemsterhuis demonstrated that love
unites beings and that all longing, all desire, strives only for this union, as the only
possible pleasure of separated beings.’ (1994, 4:408; 1993, p. 112)

The similarity to Ganymed is immediately obvious: ethics is ruled by the One. Lettre
sur les désirs can be read as a theoretical elaboration of many of the philosophical and
theological presuppositions behind Goethe’s poem; in fact, Hemsterhuis’ work is
representative of the neoplatonic renaissance as a whole which was then sweeping
Germany. 13 All ethics, even our relation to God, remains bound to the model of union.
Just as in Ganymed, piety is the natural desire for all-embracing oneness.
Every mental and physical event can be explained by striving for union. Much of
Hemsterhuis’ account here is explicitly dependent on Aristophanes and Socrates’
myths of desire in the Symposium. All the physical behaviour of animate organisms is
directed towards sexual union, or, as Hemsterhuis puts it, ‘all the physical means the
soul has at its disposal are used in its tendency towards a union of essences’ (1846, p.
58). 14 Moreover, again, following traditional Platonic thought, Hemsterhuis goes on to
distinguish such sexual union from intellectual union and assigns the telos of reality to
the latter. The fusion of mind and world (or, even better, mind and mind) provides the
ultimate standard for all activity. It explains (among other things) art, friendship, love
and religion. In fact, Hemsterhuis ranks these different phenomena on the basis of
their capacity for unification:
One will love a beautiful statue less than one’s friend, one’s friend less than one’s
mistress and one’s mistress less than the Supreme Being. It is for this reason that
religion gives rise to more intense enthusiasts than love, love more than friendship
and friendship more than desire for purely material things. (ibid, p. 54)

The reasoning behind this hierarchy is to be found in the maxim, ‘The degree of
attractive force is always measured by the degree of homogeneity to the desired
object, and this degree of homogeneity consists in the degree to which perfect union is
possible.’ (ibid, p. 54) The extent to which I desire an object is determined by the
likely union I can achieve with it. Hence, friendship is inferior to love because the
complete fusion of two beings into one is more the preserve of love than of friendship.
Friendship is, on this account, merely an imperfect form of love; a less intense desire
for complete union.
The above also provides Hemsterhuis with the beginnings of an account of the
relation between humanity and God (and so of piety). God is the being into which one
can be most easily absorbed without remainder. Through religion desire can be most
easily consummated; it is thus the most proper channel for human desire. Here,
‘homogeneity appears perfect’ (ibid, p. 55). In consequence, religion is the very
paradigm and the most natural form of human behaviour. There is nothing more
proper to humanity than fusing with God.
However, Hemsterhuis ends his Lettre having hit a snag. If all tends towards
‘coagulation’ (and the human/God relation is the paradigm example of this), why then
do there still remain discrete, individual entities? The question, as Hemsterhuis notes,
is even more problematic with respect to creation: if love is a tendency towards union
and God loves his creatures infinitely, why then did He disperse them into isolated
individuals when creating them? Hemsterhuis has no answer to such questions;
instead, he concludes as follows,

I conclude from this that everything visible and sensible is in fact in an artificial
state, since, tending eternally to union but remaining always composed of isolated
individuals, the nature of everything continues to be eternally in a state of
contradiction… Since everything tends naturally towards unity, then there must be
a foreign force who has decomposed the total unity into individuals and this force
is God. It would require the most extravagant madness to want to penetrate to the
essence of this impenetrable being. (ibid, p. 68)
In the end, individuation remains an insoluble, divine mystery for Hemsterhuis. The
force of inertia which impedes the desire to unite is a surd he is unable to theorise. It
belongs to the suprarational realm of the divine which human thought cannot access.
[B] Herder’s Postscript
Herder’s Liebe und Selbstheit picks up the thread of Hemsterhuis’ argument precisely
at this point. Herder takes it upon himself to provide an answer to this mystery, a
theoretical basis to the question of why there are individuals. In so doing, he ends up
contesting the very neoplatonic model of piety Hemsterhuis was attempting to justify.
Herder’s essay is explicitly intended as a mere ‘postscript’, filling in the gaps of
Hemsterhuis’ description of reality. Yet, as we know from other postscripts (such as
Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript), such a genre of writing not only
adds to the original but tends to end up supplanting it. This is, in fact, the case here: in
providing a theory of the pleasure of individual existence, Herder ultimately
invalidates Hemsterhuis’ neoplatonism. Herder, that is, depicts a competing view of
reality—in place of Hemsterhuis’ metaphysics of the One, he describes an alternative
ethics of friendship.

The crux of Herder’s disagreement is contained in the following claim,
The more spiritual the pleasure, the more it endures and the more its object also
endures outside of us… [the more] an object exists and continues to exist outside
of us and can only really become one with us metaphorically, that is, hardly or not
at all. (1994, 4:409; 1993, p. 113)
Hemsterhuis asserted that desire for union (and so the possibility of union) increased
the more spiritual the desire became; Herder here—under the pretext of summarising
Hemsterhuis’ thought—gives a diametrically opposed analysis. The more spiritual a
desire, the less explaining it by means of fusion makes sense, for such fusion is, in
fact, less possible here. Moreover, in a complete disregard for Hemsterhuis’ actual
position, Herder suggests this is a good thing: pious desire for union is not something
to be positively valued, but is rather merely the model for ‘crude’ desires. Desire for
union is a ‘brief, deceptive illusion’ (ibid, 4:416; p. 116). Spiritual desires are to be
valued more highly precisely because they obey a very different model and are not
determined by the figure of the One.
The reason for this is the self-destructiveness of neoplatonic piety. As Aristophanes
already noted in the Symposium, when one unites with the object, all pleasure is at an
end, for the subject/object relation is annulled. The same problem holds for
Hemsterhuis who follows the Symposium closely: desire for the One destroys desire.
‘It is impossible for man to flow together with everything like mud’—and stay man,
Herder writes (ibid, 4:422; p. 119). Hence, Herder argues that spiritual pleasures are

an improvement upon carnal ones precisely because there is no union and so the
desired object goes on persisting. It is for this reason desires, pleasures and even ways
of relating to God that do not tend towards unity are to be preferred—and at this point
Herder leaves Hemsterhuis far behind him.
In opposition to Hemsterhuis, Herder introduces his alternative: friendship, which will
go on to become the key motif in what follows.
Friendship! What a… holy bond it is! It links hearts and hands together into one
common purpose… It [unlike love] is ongoing and arduous… Love destroys
either itself or its object with penetrating, consuming flames, and both lover and
beloved then lie there like a pile of ashes. But the fire of friendship is pure,
refreshing, human warmth. (ibid, 4:410-1; pp. 113-4)
In a reworking of Classical and humanist discourses on the eros/philia distinction,
Herder maintains that, while love designates those desires that tend towards union,
friendship is the name of another, preferable ethical relation—which does not destroy
its object, but allows it to persist. In friendship, desire does not obliterate itself. The
crucial word is ‘ongoing’: friendship is the pleasure between individuals as
individuals; unlike love, such pleasure is not premised on the ultimate dissolution of
the desiring subject and desired object—but on their perpetuation. Unlike love which
is caught up in the self-destructive paradox that desire is for an end of desire (that, in
other words, the individual desires her own dissolution), friendship maintains the
integrity and distinctness of the subject and object even in the achievement of

pleasure. Friendship circumvents the One in favour of the multiple. Friendship is
‘endless’—an infinite, ‘arduous’ task which never reaches completion.
Herder elucidates friendship through opposing ‘common purpose’ to union. What is
sought is not for two individuals to become the same, to meld into one another, but
rather collaboration—the mutual and reciprocal interchange of ideas that helps form
each individual in divergent ways. Herder writes, ‘The two flames on one altar play
into one another, they jubilantly lift and carry one another… In general a life in
common is the mark of true friendship: the disclosing and sharing of hearts’ (ibid,
4:412; p. 114). Perhaps we could gloss Herder’s comments anachronistically by
quoting Michèle Le Doeuff’s allusion to the collaborative relationship of John Stuart
Mill and Harriet Taylor. She writes in The Sex of Knowing,
However far we go back in the history of their relationship, Harriet Taylor never
was a disciple of John Stuart Mill. Still less was she his creation… Each stood up
to the other, neither was completely under the “influence” of, or “incorporated”
by, the other, but each had to defend her/himself against the other, each had a
slight tendency to want too much from the other. (Le Doeuff, 2003, p. 217)
Just as for Herder, so too for Le Doeuff it is not the ‘incorporation’ of one individual
into another which provides the ethical telos of life, but rather collaboration between
two distinct and competing individual thinkers—not discipleship but friendship. It is
the pleasure the individual as individual takes in another.

Thus, having begun with the intention of providing a mere ‘postscript’ to
Hemsterhuis’ Lettre sur désirs, Herder can conclude after only two pages, ‘Even love
serves friendship… Friendship appears to me to be the climax of every desire.’ (1994,
4:413; 1993, pp. 114-5) In direct opposition to Hemsterhuis, instead of seeing
friendship as an imperfect form of love, Herder conceives love as an imperfect form
of friendship! And this is precisely because friendship is directed to other things than
to union: friendship is grounded in the mutual interchange of individuals (‘this pulse
of passive and active’ (ibid, 4:420; p. 118)), rather than in an illusory and unhealthy
ideal of becoming-one. As Herder’s concludes,
Where the destruction of the other ends there first begins a freer, more beautiful
pleasure, a cheerful coexistence of many creatures who mutually seek and love
one another… Consonant, not unisonant, tones must be the ones that create the
melody of life and pleasure. (ibid, 4:420-1; pp. 118-9)
In a matter of pages, the self-destructive piety of Hemsterhuis is thoroughly
transformed into the impiety of the burgeoning philosophy of religion. Desire for
fusion must be tempered by a respect for multiplicity. Discipline is privileged over
consummation: what is truly ethical is that which battles against desires for union in
the name of the individual will.
In Liebe und Selbstheit, however, Herder is not only directing his attack outwards
against Hemsterhuis, he is also interrogating his own tendencies to neoplatonic piety.
Just like with Goethe, there is an internal conversation being pursued between piety
and impiety. The ideal of friendship is pitched in combat against Herder’s own

attraction to a neoplatonic ethics of universal attraction. Not only are there examples
from elsewhere in Herder’s work of him enthusiastically embracing this doctrine,
even in Liebe und Selbstheit itself there are neoplatonic flourishes. Herder
apostrophises, for example,
To whom can I ascend… except to you, great universal Mother, tender supreme
Father!… Who ought not but to love you, for every creature draws toward you,
points to you? And yet who can love you as one should, since one drowns in the
sea of your thoughts and your presentient feelings and sinks into the deepest
depths only beyond oneself… This eternal pull of your heart to mine is for me an
innate guarantee of my eternal affection for you. (ibid, 4:417-8; p. 117)
Liebe und Selbstheit is therefore not only a polemic against Hemsterhuis, but also a
self-examination. Enacted within the very text of the essay is the struggle between
friendship and love, impiety and piety.
Hence, immediately after the above rhapsody, Herder insists, ‘Even in the current of
divine love, the heart remains a mere human heart.’ (ibid, 4:419; p. 117) This claim is
at the centre of Herder’s interpretation of piety and, more specifically, of his attempt
to apply his ethics of friendship to the human/God relation. Religion should not be
directed towards a unio mystica or ascent to the divine, in which the human self is
annihilated and absorbed into the Godhead. Rather, religion should insist that the
individual relates to God as individual—on a purely human level, without need for
apotheosis or transfiguration. ‘We always remain creatures,’ Herder insists (ibid,

4:423; p. 120). Humanity’s finitude can and should never be overcome. In relating to
God, the individual must insist on remaining separate and retaining her integrity:
We are individual beings, and we must be so if we do not want to give up the
ground of every pleasure—our own consciousness of pleasure—and if we do not
want to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again in another being that we
never are and never can be. Even if I were to lose myself in God, as mysticism
strives to do, and were to lose myself in God without any further feeling or
consciousness of myself, then I would no longer be experiencing pleasure. The
deity would have devoured me; and instead of me, the deity would have
experienced the pleasure. (ibid, 4:419; p. 118)
To affirm the neoplatonist notion of piety is to affirm a ‘devouring God’ who puts an
end to all individual existence. It is to affirm self-destruction. Hence, instead of
desiring union with God, we should desire to co-exist with God and ‘peacefully and
mutually seek to take pleasure in one another’ (ibid, 4:420; p. 118). We should exist
autonomously and separately. The ideal is for friendship with God, rather than love of
God. It is the ideal for ‘the way we are in this world’ (ibid, 4:422; p. 119)—a refusal
of the utopia of apotheosis in favour of continuing ethical work in the finite.
Even with regard to God, therefore, humanity must achieve a ‘modulation and
balance.’ (ibid, 4:420; p. 118) We will see Kant make very similar claims below.
Friendship with God (as well as other finite individuals) is ‘not possible except
between creatures who are mutually free and consonant, but not unisonant, let alone
identical’ (ibid, 4:423; p. 120). Only by restraining our desires and holding up

alternative ideals than union can ‘the most dangerous dream’ of infinite oneness be
avoided. Neoplatonic piety and the increasing engulfment of God on which it is
premised should be thwarted, in favour of keeping God at a distance. Humanity
should strive for an artificial and improper relation to the deity which does not
succumb to natural attraction. Moreover, by means of his ethics of friendship, Herder
claims to have explained the mystery of individuation Hemsterhuis was unable to
solve: individual existence is necessary for the experience of a different, more
valuable relation than that which unification brings. Individuation is necessary for
friendship, and so Herder concludes, ‘The supreme good that God could grant all
creatures was and is individual existence.’ (ibid, 4:423-4; p. 120)
[B] ‘Ethical Neo-Spinozism’
The dispute between the superiority of friendship and love is, as I have mentioned, of
classical origin and was preserved in the humanist tradition. However, surprisingly, it
is not on this tradition that Herder draws (at least explicitly); instead, Liebe und
Selbstheit is littered with allusions to Spinoza’s Ethics. For example, Herder writes,
By giving and acting, rather than receiving and being passive, our existence
necessarily will become ever freer and more effective from stage to stage, our
pleasure will become less damaging and destructive, and we will learn to taste
ever more joy. (ibid, 4:423; p. 120)
This juxtaposition of joy, activity, pleasure and freedom is extremely Spinozist. For
example, Spinoza writes, ‘By joy, therefore, I shall understand… that passion by
which the mind passes to a greater perfection’ (1994, IIIP11D), and by ‘greater

perfection’ Spinoza means the becoming more active of the mind (ibid, IIIP11) as
well as its becoming freer (ibid, VP36). Linked here is Spinoza’s understanding of
conatus. When Herder exclaims, ‘You are indeed a limited, individual creature… Pull
yourself together and strive on!’ (1994, 4:420; 1993, p. 118), he alludes to Spinoza’s
claim that ‘the striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing
but the actual essence of the thing.’ (1994, IIIP6) Just like Herder, Spinoza conceives
of individuals in terms of an endless striving; moreover, such desire is not for
something that would annihilate the individual—such as fusion with or apotheosis
into the divine—rather the desire is essentially finite. It is a desire to be as active and
joyful as possible within the limits of finitude.
However, (as with Goethe’s Prometheus) to call Herder’s model ‘Spinozist’ seems
strange—for is not Spinoza the ultimate philosopher of the One, the most rigorous and
extreme monist known to Western philosophy? How then can Herder’s defence of the
multiple against the One be characterised as Spinozist? Herder, I seem to be arguing,
is using Spinoza to argue against monism. Moreover, it is clear that Herder is
unconcerned with historical and philosophical accuracy here. For example, the
implicit contrast he establishes between Spinozism and neoplatonism, while plausible
in some respects, cannot be maintained as sharply as he intends. Second, to align
Spinoza with an ethics of friendship in opposition to an ethics of love is once more
puzzling: since love (especially ‘the intellectual love of God’) plays a crucial role in
the latter parts of the Ethics, while the concept of friendship does not (1994, IIIP59S,
IVP37S1). Herder’s Spinoza is therefore inaccurate; indeed, ‘Spinoza’ is little more
than the name of a ‘heretic’ whose attack on Orthodoxy Herder is here repeating (on a
smaller scale). Spinoza is an ideological ally in the destruction of traditional

neoplatonic forms of piety and the establishment of a new, modern alternative based
on autonomy, separation and ultimately indifference towards the divine.
To comprehend this ‘ideological’ employment of Spinoza, we must turn to the context
of Liebe und Selbstheit—a burgeoning ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’ in 1770s and early
1780s Germany. There were a number of German thinkers at this period (including
Herder and Lessing) who took part in a recovery of Spinoza’s thought, but did so by
‘reading the Ethics back-to-front’. Instead of concentrating on Parts I and II of the
Ethics with their stress on metaphysics and the ultimate unity of all reality, this
‘ethical neo-Spinozism’ sought to reinvent Spinozism by appropriating insights from
the latter parts of the work on human desires and emotions. Avoiding Spinoza’s
pantheism, these thinkers were far more interested in his accounts of conatus and
joyful passions.
Therefore, prior to the pantheism controversy in 1785—when Jacobi published his
Briefe and so when Spinoza-reception went mainstream—there was a period in which
Spinoza was used as a resource for moral philosophy. 15 During the 1770s and early
1780s, Herder frequently makes clear his adherence to the later portions of the Ethics.
For example, he writes,
Without doubt Spinoza was no Christian and no enthusiast. But take the purely
ethical part of his Ethics, quite separately from his metaphysics, and see… in the
simplest and most powerful way [Christian ethics] confirmed by facts, and
grounded in its whole design. (Quoted in Bell, 1984, p. 55)

Or again, J.G. Müller reports the following conversation that took place between him
and Herder in 1781:
We talked of Spinoza… The first, theoretical part was, [Herder] said, the heretical
one, but the second, ethical part contained the purest, most sublime ethic. (Quoted
in Bell, 1984, p. 67)
Prior to 1785 therefore the German Spinoza-reception is dominated by ethics—
concentrating on Spinoza’s doctrines of conatus, joyful passion and freedom, at the
expense of his monism. During this initial phase, the Ethics are read back-to-front. It
is only in 1785 that Spinoza’s metaphysics and pantheism becomes a major issue in
German thought. Indeed, Jacobi’s Briefe, which single-handedly made Spinozist
metaphysics so contentious, is (amongst other things) an attack on Herder’s ‘ethical
neo-Spinozism’.
[B] The Neoplatonic Renaissance
The argument of this essay necessitates a further claim: ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’ was
generated in reaction to another more prominent renaissance of the time—a revival of
neoplatonic philosophy. That is, while a renewed interest in Spinoza was, it is true,
characteristic of German thought in the 1770s and 1780s, even more noticeable is the
significance neoplatonism took on during that period. Indeed, Herder himself was
profoundly influenced by both movements and, as such, his work of this period bears
the scars of the struggle between these two competing renaissances.

Let me flesh this out by returning to François Hemsterhuis and his context.
Hemsterhuis was the leading thinker of the ‘Münster circle’—a group of mystics and
theologically-inclined thinkers residing in Münster on the patronage of the Princess
Gallitzen. ‘A neoplatonist in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists and
Shaftesbury’ (Gusdorf, 1976, p. 280), Hemsterhuis’ blend of empiricism and
neoplatonism became representative of this group’s work. The circle was particularly
influential during the late eighteenth century: Hamann moved to Münster in the last
year of his life to participate in the group, Jacobi was also closely involved and
Goethe and Herder were regular visitors. 16 As late as the 1790s, Novalis claimed
Hemsterhuis as his favourite philosopher and devoted a ‘study’ to his work (1988,
2:360-78). Indeed, Gusdorf has concluded, ‘Through the intermediary of Jacobi
[among others], Hemsterhuis’ influence spread to Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller
and the young Romantics.’ (1976, p. 281)
Hemsterhuis’ legacy was so great, I contend, precisely because his neoplatonism
chimed in so well with the intellectual currents of the time. As Arthur Lovejoy has
claimed, ‘a revival of the direct influence of neoplatonism was one of the conspicuous
phenomena of German thought in the 1790s’ (1936, pp. 297-8) 17 ; however, this
revival should be antedated by at least thirty years. Beiser, for example, has shown
how the German reception of Plato began in the 1750s:
It was in 1757 that Winckelmann read Plato who became one of the central
influences on his aesthetics. By the 1760s interest in Plato had grown enormously.
The writings of Rousseau and Shaftesbury, which were filled with Platonic
themes, began to have their impact. It was also in the 1760s that Hamann, Herder,

Winckelmann, Wieland and Mendelssohn all wrote about Plato or Platonic
themes. By the 1770s Plato had become a popular author. New editions and
translations of his writings frequently appeared. (2002, p. 365)
Bearing this context in mind, Herder’s Liebe und Selbstheit provides a fascinating
microcosm of the times. In it, burgeoning ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’ is pitched in battle
against the far more established neoplatonic renaissance. In this text, what is more, it
becomes clear precisely why Herder rejects the prevalent neoplatonism interpretation
of piety. It is because it could not account for the desire the individual experiences as
an individual. Instead, the neoplatonism of the time merely saw individual existence
as a transitory epiphenomenon of the One. Neoplatonic piety was self-destructive.
Herder uses Spinoza to ground an ethics of the multiple so as to resolutely counter
such neoplatonism. He uses Spinoza to sketch the ethical figure of ‘the not-One’ in
which the mutual interchange of discrete individuals is the telos of life. He moves
therefore towards a very different mode of piety. Herder’s Liebe und Selbstheit stages
the ethical conflict of the period between love and friendship, between Plato and
Spinoza. 18
[A] Kantian Pudor Pietatis
Kant’s late philosophy—despite the notoriety of the pantheist controversy—takes
place in a very different context. As he admitted when the controversy broke out, he
had never really read Spinoza’s Ethics. It would be futile then to wish to discover
Spinozist elements in his thought. However, despite this lack of direct influence, there
are very interesting parallels between what Kant says about friendship and the

human/God relation in the Metaphysik der Sitten and ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’. Kant
too attacks the prevalent self-destructive piety preserved in neoplatonic thought in
favour of an alternative based on friendship. What is more, Kant stresses that the
disinterested quality of this alternative; he insists that his new form of piety keeps its
distance from God.
Indeed, the parallels between Herder and Kant’s alternative become even more
noteworthy if one bears in mind, what Blumenberg has dubbed, the ‘late anti-
Platonism’ of Kant’s thought (1987, p. 56). Kant’s 1796 essay, On a Recently
Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy, is evidence of this. It responds to the
ever more prominent neoplatonic renaissance of late eighteenth century Germany, and
berates ‘the new Platonists’ and their ‘latest mystico-Platonic idiom’ (2002, 8:399). 19
Directly, Kant is reacting to J.G. Schlosser and F.L. Stolberg, yet, more generally, this
work is a ‘polemic against a contemporary neoplatonism’ (Blumenberg, 1987, p. 53),
a reaction against the neoplatonic renaissance in general. Like Herder and Goethe
before him, Kant is uneasy with his era’s increasing use of neoplatonic philosophy
and turns on it.
While the concerns of On a Recently Prominent Tone are for the most part
epistemological, this turn away from Plato is also prevalent (if implicit) in the
Metaphysik der Sitten and other late ethical writings. It results in an obsessive
concern for limits—especially limits on love and piety. Moreover, it also results in an
alternative model for ethics based on friendship.
[B] The Trouble with Love

In the lectures Kant gave on the Metaphysik der Sitten, he introduces the concept of
pudor pietatis (modesty of piety), and this idea of limiting one’s piety or love is a
central refrain throughout the lecture course. For example, the final section devoted to
‘Duties to God’ is shot through with the rhetoric of discipline. Its focus is the
appropriate methods for the veneration of God: on the one hand, Kant insists, ‘Love
towards God is the foundation of all inner religion’ (1997, 27:720); yet, he is equally
insistent that such love must be understood in an extremely attenuated fashion:
Love of God can be known only through our reason… There can be no sensuous
feeling of love without a concurrent pathological effect; to love practically means
merely to perform one’s actions from duty… Love God tells us no more than to
base our observance of laws, not merely on obedience, which produces the
coercion and necessitation of the law, but on an inclination in conformity with
what the law prescribes. (ibid, 27:721)
While not the main focus of Kant’s attack (the Pietists of his youth probably hold that
honour), contemporary neoplatonists like Hemsterhuis are implicitly condemned here.
Kantian love of God should not be confused with a desire—either sensible or
intellectual—for increasing unity with the deity; rather, ‘love’ is diluted so as to
‘mean merely’ a willing performance of duty. Kant goes on to distance his own
interpretation of love from ‘enthusiastic’ conceptions of ‘fanatical love’ or ‘the claim
to an immediate, intercourse, fellowship and social connection with God.’ (ibid,
27:726) Love must be freed from its dependence on desire, especially carnal or
natural desire. Only desireless love—love which thwarts our pious temptation to
approach God—is moral. A new piety is here in the process of emerging, a piety

concerned with disciplining desire and becoming disinterested about God.
Indifference replaces interest as the motivating theoretical force.
Moreover, such restrictions on love of the divine lead also to limitations on piety
itself, for Kant, like Herder and Goethe before him, identifies piety with a constant
desire for union with God and a consequent withdrawal from the finite. Kant therefore
makes clear, in opposition to all ‘religious fanatics’: ‘In practising religious we do
not… find ourselves in a state of devotion, i.e. in a mood directed to the immediate
contemplation of God, and withdrawn from all sensible objects.’ (ibid, 27:731)
Fanaticism involves a withdrawal from the world, an attempt to live on a divine plane
instead of a human one. Such fanaticism, Kant continues, runs the risk of bigotry and
hypocrisy, for there is no means of distinguishing genuine and fake mystic
experience. In all these problematic forms of religious display, there is ‘an ostentatio
pietatis’, a shameless display of religious feeling. On the other hand, Kant
recommends a ‘pudor pietatis which consists in a bashfulness about avoiding in one’s
actions any suspicion of bigotry.’ (ibid, 27:732) Religion consists not in the
cultivation of piety, but instead in restraint of piety, the limitation of desire for God
and of any ‘delusion’ concerning humanity’s ability to fuse with Him. 20
Kant makes a similar point in the Religion. He berates the individual who believes
that ‘to become a better human being… [he must] busy himself with piety (which is a
passive respect of the divine law) rather than with virtue (which is the deployment of
one’s forces in the observance of the duty which he respects).’ Instead, Kant advises,
‘It is this virtue, combined with piety, which alone can constitute the idea we
understand by the word divine blessedness (true religious disposition).’ (1998, 6:201)

Kant here almost falls into contradiction: the correct religious disposition and so the
way to achieve divine blessedness is not through piety! Piety is not the appropriate
manner in which to relate to God; instead, it should take a role subordinate to the
cultivation of virtue and only then is the ‘true religious disposition’ attained.
Blessedness is not reached by means of piety alone.
Kant’s central objection is the passivity of piety. Just like Ganymede, the pious
individual waits expectantly to be embraced by the divine, whereas the virtuous
individual is like Prometheus actively pursuing the ends dictated by human reason—
not in the hope of some future apotheosis, but with the goal of living ethically in this
world. The enthusiast, who expects a future fusion into the divine and escape from
this world, renounces virtue. Eschatology here trumps ethics. 21
[B] Friendship beyond Love
In the published Metaphysik der Sitten itself, Kant goes even further—albeit
implicitly. Friendship is here crowned as the ethical ideal in a manner extremely
reminiscent of Herder’s reaction to Hemsterhuis’ neoplatonism. 22 The Metaphysik der
Sitten concludes with the highest form of relation that can exist between two subjects,
and, Kant makes clear, this is not love but friendship. Friendship is the ideal for
intersubjective relations. Just like Herder, Kant reverses the traditional neoplatonic
hierarchy to assert friendship as a higher form of ethical relation than love.
Friendship, Kant insists time and again, checks and frustrates love. That is, Kant—
following the neoplatonists—explicitly conceives love as a desire for union, but
insists that ‘respect’ is a necessary supplement in order to limit such unity. The
neoplatonic ideal of two subjects fusing together in love is explicitly rejected by Kant

in favour of a more temperate balance between unity and separation which he labels
‘friendship’.
There are three fundamental reasons Kant prefers friendship to love. First, friendship,
unlike love, is necessarily reciprocal: ‘There can be amor unilateralis; but strictly such
well-wishing changes into friendship (amicitia) through a reciprocal love, or amor
bilateralis.’ (1997, 27:676) Second, friendship, unlike love, requires equality between
the parties: ‘inter superiors et inferiors no friendship occurs’ (ibid, 27:676), for
friendship demands ‘reciprocal esteem… among equals’ (ibid, 27:680). Finally, and
here Kant is most insistent, friendship, unlike love, keeps the other at a distance. He
writes in the Lectures, we ‘cannot permit the other to come too close… In this lies the
mutual restriction of reciprocal love among friends.’ (ibid, 27:682) In consequence,
one of Kant’s ‘rules of prudence’ reads, ‘To keep sufficiently at a distance from our
friend’ so as to prevents ‘rash communication and… unrestrained love’, for ‘Too deep
an intimacy detracts from worth’ (ibid, 27:684-5). Kant returns to this topic in the
published version of the Metaphysik der Sitten. There he writes,
Love can be regarded as attraction and respect as repulsion, and if the principle of
love bids friends draw closer, the principle of respect requires them to stay at a
proper distance from each other. This limitation on intimacy, which is expressed
in the rule that even the best of friends should not make themselves too familiar
with each other, contains a maxim that holds [in all cases]. (1996, 6:470)

The other must always be kept at their proper distance; pious fusion in love is to be
avoided in favour of a relation of friendship in which the subject works at maintaining
a barrier between her and her friends.
Kant therefore stresses the artificial nature of friendship. While love ‘already lies in
human nature’, friendship ‘is not a natural inclination’ but a task (1997, 27:682). Love
and piety might be natural to humanity, but pudor pietatis and the restraint of love
require work—they involve an unnatural, forced operation on ourselves. This, indeed,
adds to their ethical value for Kant. 23 The artificiality of impiety is necessary to avoid
the natural lure of the neoplatonic One. And of course the religious implications of
such a move must always be kept in mind: our desire for God and for apotheosis must
be suppressed. Only friendship with God safeguards the requisite pudor pietatis.
This aspect of Kant’s ethics obeys a model parallel to that which guides Kantian
philosophy as a whole: we must thwart and frustrate our natural desires in order to do
good philosophy. Reason may desire to illegitimately transcend the realm of possible
experience, but it is the task of the philosopher to restrain such natural desires. Just as
neoplatonic piety disregards the integrity of the individual, metaphysical reason
‘tear[s] down all those boundary-fences and… seize[s] possession of an entirely new
domain which recognises no limits of demarcation.’ (1929, A296/B352) Such
unrelenting transcendence is ‘the natural predisposition of our reason’ (2001, 4:353)
which the philosopher must labour tirelessly at frustrating through conceptual work.
Reason must be kept dissatisfied. 24
The God/human ethical relation is one more
example of this same model—a pudor pietatis. Both theoretically and ethically, the
human individual requires ‘discipline’— ‘a system of precautions and self-

examination… by which the constant tendency to disobey certain rules is restrained
and finally extirpated.’ (1929, A709-11/B737-9) In fact, in On a Recently Prominent
Tone, Kant goes so far as to speak of ‘the police in the kingdom of the sciences’ who
regulate ‘the philosopher of vision’ (2002, 8:403-4).
Reason’s ethical demand is to thwart the desire so natural to humanity to fuse with the
deity and so put an end to individual life. God must be held ethically at the same
distance that the noumenal is theoretically. Only through restraint and ‘bashfulness’
can good philosophy and correct living occur. Such is Kant’s anti-Platonic ethics.
[A] A Genealogy of Piety
In this essay, I have brought together three ‘scenes’ from the interface of moral
philosophy and philosophy of religion which all originate from late eighteenthcentury
Germany and are all concerned with developing alternatives to dominant
neoplatonic conceptions of self-destructive piety. They are not identical by any
means 25 , yet all three do illustrate a similar transition. In this final, concluding section,
I now want to place this description within a larger theoretical framework. It is here
that I finally answer the question I posed in my Introduction: why has contemporary
philosophy of religion forgotten piety?
There is no doubting the current hostility to Kant among analytic philosophers of
religion. 26 As a result, bold metaphysical truths are articulated without due attention to
the philosophical conditions underlying them. Contemporary philosophy of religion
names God, the afterlife and theological dogmas, but neglects that which makes such

naming possible. 27 This is not a new trend, however. Indeed, what I have implicitly
argued in this essay is that such hostility to criticism (in the Kantian sense) within
philosophy of religion has a long historical tradition reaching back to the late
eighteenth century. It is a tradition that features Kant himself! Kant’s philosophy of
piety (along with Herder and Goethe’s) is anti-transcendental—a philosophy of piety
that reverts to dogmatism in order to combat its opponents. The dogmatism of the
analytic theology movement is merely the culmination of this tradition.
Goethe, Herder and Kant all attack neoplatonic piety on the grounds that it gives into
its desire for God. On the contrary, they argue, this desire must be thwarted.
Philosophy of religion needs to be a disinterested enterprise, exhibiting indifference to
the divine. God must keep his distance. Yet, the problem with such a move is that it
forecloses self-examination. Disinterest in God is disinterest in piety itself. The
condition on which philosophy of religion emerges as a disinterested discipline is
suppressed in the very act of self-constitution. Therefore, Goethe, Herder and Kant
inaugurate a form of philosophy of religion that neglects its own conditions. They
formulate a new piety of thought which prohibits any talk of piety. Philosophy of
religion here takes on dogmatic form.
I want to explore this twist further in terms drawn from Philip Goodchild’s genealogy
of piety. 28 Among the many lines of thought running through Goodchild’s Capitalism
and Religion, one charts piety’s disappearance from philosophical scrutiny. 29 Why has
modern reason effaced its own pieties? The answer concerns the nature of these
pieties. There are two: to the question, ‘what is the appropriate way to relate to God?’,
one type of piety responds: ‘God is to be approached and fused with’; while the other

esponds: ‘God must be held at a distance’. Thought must either possess God or exalt
Him from afar. These two poles exist in a dialectic which circles between yielding to
the desire to fuse with God and cultivating a will which thwarts such desire. Desire
must be both satisfied and unsatisfied. What is crucial is that both moments (despite
their antithetical relation) have an identical result—the suppression of piety. Both
pieties put paid to any further critical discussion of piety as a concept. It is here we
have the reason for philosophy of religion’s silence on this issue and in consequence
the reason for its incessant dogmatism.
This ‘dialectic’ is of course just an abstract summary of the transitions involved in the
three ‘scenes’ I have described in this essay. On the one hand, piety is a desire for
God. Such is the fundamental principle of the neoplatonic piety against which Goethe,
Herder and Kant were reacting. Moreover, they attacked it because it is selfdestructive:
piety is itself destroyed as soon as God is obtained. It obeys the logic of
desire elucidated by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium—the fulfilment of desire is
the end of desire. Goodchild writes similarly,
The offence of piety that claims to identify its divinity, whether through ascending
to heaven, or by the divinity ascending to earth, is that it abolishes the temporal
existence of piety, and, with it, piety itself. (2002, p. 7)
In the beatific vision, piety becomes redundant to itself. On this view, the goal of
philosophy is the elimination of all talk about piety, for once the desire on which
philosophy is founded (fusion with God) is achieved, a critical philosophy of piety is

unnecessary. Dogmatic philosophy of religion is the end to which such philosophy
strives.
On the basis of this failure, piety is transformed, and such a transformation is
precisely what I have been describing in detail in this essay. Goethe, Herder and Kant
react against self-destructive piety and establish another, alternative (im)piety in its
place. This is the second moment of the dialectic. Now, desire becomes something to
be thwarted and infinitely deferred. Philosophies form ‘defences and shields against
the absolute’ (Goodchild, 2002, p. 13)—sites of discipline and restraint. Crucially,
however, here too piety disappears. By thwarting desire for God, piety neutralises its
own efficacy—becoming indifferent to itself. This conception of piety is therefore
self-neutralising: piety is conceived in a manner which invalidates all talk of piety.
Again, therefore, philosophy is told to ignore the conditions which made it possible.
This anti-transcendentalism marks Goethe, Herder and Kant’s philosophies of
religion. The pieties underlying philosophy are not worthy of the philosopher’s
disinterested gaze. Philosophy is disciplined to be dogmatic.
This transition from self-destructive to disinterested piety is intimately bound up,
moreover, with the genesis of philosophy of religion. Philosophy established itself as
a discipline (in both senses of the word) through remaining disinterested in its own
piety. Goethe, Herder and Kant enact this anti-transcendental turn in modern
philosophy of religion. While neoplatonic philosophy postulated the suppression of
the conditions of its existence as a future ideal, Goethe, Herder and Kant’s
philosophies of piety posited such suppression as an urgent necessity. Piety—as one

of the transcendental conditions of thinking—became (even more) invisible; it
disappeared from the critical gaze.
Insofar therefore as both neoplatonic and neo-Spinozist pieties fail to grasp their own
transcendental conditions, neither the modern nor the premodern succeeds. Piety is
caught in a vicious circle between self-destruction and self-neutralisation. Both pieties
annul themselves; both moments remain complicit in philosophy’s silence about
piety. It is thanks to both these traditions that philosophy of religion is still dogmatic
and awaits its Copernican Revolution.
What is needed therefore is a genuinely critical philosophy of religion. If, as Johnson
(2010, pp. 377-8) has recently argued, the philosopher of religion should attend to ‘the
conditions of naming’ what matters most (rather than to the act of naming itself,
which is the preserve of the theologian), then the necessary precondition (and so
preliminary work needed) so as to make possible such attention to these conditions is
the making visible once more of the pieties which condition philosophy. Philosophy
of religion must first overcome its own dogmatism. In other words, Kant’s ‘discipline
of pious reason’ failed: it did not give rise to criticism, only a renewed dogmatism.
And so new experiments in such disciplining are ultimately needed so as to reveal
(not conceal) pieties. What is required therefore is, as Goodchild sums up helpfully, ‘a
creative rereading of the philosophical tradition, drawing out the dominant pieties,
reasons and processes that determine our present age, and reorienting them in a new
direction.’ (2002, p. 9). This essay is a small contribution to that end.

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1 As will become clear as the essay progresses, these formulations owe much to
Goodchild (2002). Indeed, this essay takes the form of a philosophical reconstruction
of the first few paragraphs of Goodchild’s book.
2 Goethe considered these two poems as a complementary pair: when he finally
published Prometheus in 1789, it was only on the condition that Ganymed was printed
alongside it.
3 I describe this renaissance in more detail in a later section.
4 Translations of sections from Plotinus’ Enneads appeared in Goethe’s later writings:
most famously, the beginning of the Farbenlehre (1919, II/1:xxxi) and Wilhelm
Meisters Wanderjahre (ibid, I/48:196). Goethe also writes in a draft of his
autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, ‘All at once [in 1782]—and as if by
inspiration—Neoplatonic philosophers and especially Plotinus emotionally appealed
to me in a quite extraordinary way… [and] for a long time [afterwards] Plotinus still
clung to me.’ (ibid, I/27:382)
5 For more on the imitatio Dei in late eighteenth-century German thought, see
Whistler (2010).
6 It is often claimed that Ganymed is Spinozist in inspiration; however, it is crucial to
my argument that this is not the case. Goethe’s acquaintance with the neoplatonic
tradition before 1775 was long and deep. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, he recalls a
philosophical system he dreamt up in 1768. Of this ‘systema emanativa’, he writes,
‘Neoplatonism was its basis.’ (1919, I/27:204; 1987, 1:261) During the 1760s, Goethe
was also fascinated by the work of the minor Roman Platonist, Marcus Manilius (see
Keller, 2002, p. 445). On the other hand, Goethe only encountered Spinoza’s Ethics in
a cursory manner in May 1773 (see 1919, IV/2:75). Even if this encounter somehow

gave rise to Ganymed, the Spinozism of the poem was very likely to have been
understood (not entirely unjustly) through the lens of the neoplatonic tradition (see
further Bell, 1984, pp. 149-51). It is for this reason (as I go on to argue) Prometheus
too was unlikely to have been intended as a Spinozist poem by Goethe at the time.
7 In English: On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn. I will refer
to this work as the Briefe.
8 This even seemed strange to Lessing’s contemporaries. An anonymous reviewer
wrote in 1786, ‘To say that the Gods are wretched beings, that man saves himself, that
the Gods do nothing but sleep and we need not revere them—none of this yet amounts
to agreeing with Spinoza… That Lessing had found Spinozism [in Goethe’s
Prometheus is a] mystery.’ (Quoted in di Giovanni, 1994, p. 68).
9 ‘Zeus… is for Goethe-Prometheus an enemy, not a nonentity.’ (Boyle, 1991, p. 168)
10 See note 6 above.
11 In English: Love and Selfhood, A Postscript to Hemsterhuis’ Letter on Desire.
12 I provide more detail about Hemsterhuis and his context in a later section.
13 Although Hemsterhuis wrote in French, he was based in Germany—specifically in
Münster, as we shall soon discover.
14 Such speculation leads Hemsterhuis into some murky waters. He finds it difficult
on this basis, for example, to discriminate against ‘pederasty and other monstrous
couplings of men and animals’, for ‘it is evident that these abuses are born naturally
from this universal attractive force’ (ibid, p. 59).
15 I am here closely following Bell, 1984, p. 171.
16 For Goethe’s account of his relation with the Münster circle, see 1919, I/33:230-45;
1987, 2:709-35.
17 See also Abrams (1971, p. 146) for a similar claim.

18 Of course, I am not claiming that Spinoza and Plato, love and friendship, were
universally considered incompatible. One need only look to the Jena Romantics and
Idealists (or even Goethe’s later writings) to dispute this. Here, as so often, the
younger generation of the 1790s attempt to synthesise what previous generations had
believed to be incompatible.
19 All volume and page citations are to the Akademie edition, except in the case of the
Critique of Pure Reason where references are to the A and B-editions.
20 For more on the language of fanaticism and its role in Kant’s philosophy (as well as
in philosophy more generally), see Toscano (2010).
21 It should be pointed out that, while Herder attacks neoplatonic piety because of its
lack of relationality between humanity and God, Kant attacks it for the opposite
reason: ‘Pathological love would betray an equality or felt unity of the lover with
God… collaborating in the production of the highest end.’ (1997, 27:725) Such
‘collaboration’ is precisely what Herder advocates.
22 To repeat, there is no evidence of Herder’s direct influence on this section and it is
clear that Kant’s conception of friendship (as well as the rest of his moral philosophy)
bears no direct trace of ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’.
23 Compare Kant’s remarks on marriage (ibid, 27:683). See also On a Recently
Prominent Tone (2002, 8:390) where Kant insists on the ‘labour’ necessary to
overcome neoplatonic thought.
24 See Kant 2001, 4:351.
25 The naturalness of Goethean impiety contrasts with the artificial work needed to
achieve Herderian and Kantian friendship; Herder’s call for collaboration with God
jars with Kant’s attempt to safeguard God’s absolute transcendence.

26 Examples can be found throughout the oeuvres of Swinburne and Wolterstorff (to
take the two most obvious examples). See further Wood (2009, pp. 952-4) on the
‘intense anti-Kantian rhetoric’ of recent analytic philosophy of religion.
27 This characterisation owes much to Brian Clack’s essay in the present volume.
28 Goodchild is the exception to the rule given at the beginning of the essay that
contemporary philosophy of religion does not speak of piety.
29 ‘Modern reason eliminates access to piety’ (Goodchild, 2002, p. 6). ‘Piety became
invisible’ (ibid, p. 247), because modernity ‘arises from a disavowal of the
determinate practices of directing attention.’ (ibid, p. 250)