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

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,