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

[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)