Johann Augustus Eberhard

Johann August Eberhard: The Man Kant Bothered to Answer

Immanuel Kant made a policy of ignoring his critics, and he had a great many. In 1790 he broke it. He published a book whose title is one of the most withering in the history of philosophy: *On a Discovery According to Which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One*. The discovery in question was Johann August Eberhard's claim that everything of value in the *Critique of Pure Reason* was already in Leibniz. It is the rare distinction of Eberhard's life that the most formidable philosopher in Europe decided he could not be left alone.

Halberstadt, and a Career Made of Small Posts

He was born in Halberstadt on 31 August 1739 and read theology at the University of Halle. The years that followed were unglamorous: tutor, co-rector of St Martin's school, hospital preacher, and from 1768 chaplain to a Berlin workhouse and a fishing village. In 1774 he was given the parish at Charlottenburg. He was a good linguist — fluent in French, competent in English, Italian and Dutch — and it was Berlin that made him, because Berlin in the 1760s and 1770s was where the German Enlightenment kept its headquarters. He fell in with its central figures, Moses Mendelssohn and Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, and absorbed the habits of the *Popularphilosophen*: distrust of abstract speculation, preference for empirical method, and open hostility to enthusiasm, sentimentalism and occultism.

The New Apology for Socrates

The book that made his name was a defence of a man dead for two thousand years. The *Neue Apologie des Socrates*, issued in parts through the 1770s, took up the theological attacks on Socrates and answered them — and in answering them advanced claims about Christianity that were considerably more explosive than anything about Athens.

Eberhard denied that salvation depended on revelation. He asserted that there is no original sin. He held that pagans could be saved, and that eternal punishment was incoherent, since a punishment without end cannot serve moral improvement, which is the only purpose punishment can have. Socrates was the test case: either the best man of the ancient world was in hell for the accident of his birth date, or the doctrine was wrong. Eberhard concluded that the doctrine was wrong. For a Prussian clergyman this was a substantial risk, and it worked — the book made him a figure.

Frederick's Professor

In 1778 Frederick II of Prussia appointed him to a chair at Halle, the university where he had been a student. It is a mark of the Prussian Enlightenment that the reward for publishing against original sin and eternal damnation was a royal professorship.

He remained there for the rest of his working life, and his lecture room mattered more than the reputation of his own books would suggest. Friedrich Schleiermacher — who would become the pivotal Protestant theologian of the nineteenth century — sat in it. So did Dositej Obradović, the man who carried Enlightenment thought into Serbian letters. He was elected to the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1786 and made a privy councillor in 1805.

Locke Joined to Leibniz

Eberhard's *Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens* — a general theory of thinking and feeling — won the Berlin Academy's prize in 1776, and it defines his philosophical position. He was trained in Wolffian rationalism, the dominant German system descended from Leibniz, but he took sensation to be passive in the Lockean manner and built from there a thoroughgoing phenomenalism.

This is the key to the Kant affair. Eberhard was not a reactionary defending scholasticism. He was attempting the same synthesis Kant was attempting — reconciling the rationalist inheritance with empiricist accounts of sensation — and he believed the Leibnizian tradition had already done it. When the *Critique of Pure Reason* appeared, he read it not as a revolution but as a rediscovery, executed in worse prose.

The Assault on the Critique

He built the machinery for the attack himself, editing the *Philosophisches Magazin* from 1788 to 1792 and the *Philosophisches Archiv* from 1792 to 1795, and filling both with articles arguing that Kant was derivative and dogmatic — that the critical philosophy was Leibniz repackaged, with the genuinely new parts being the mistaken ones.

Kant answered in 1790. The response is one of his few direct refutations of a critic, and its title alone conveys the contempt. Henry Allison later translated the exchange as *The Kant–Eberhard Controversy*, which is the name under which it survives; that Eberhard's name appears in it at all is his most durable claim on posterity. He lost. The nineteenth century went entirely Kant's way, and the *Philosophisches Magazin* is now read, when read, as evidence of what intelligent people failed to see in 1790.

Beauty, Play, and Words

His other work has aged better. In aesthetics he argued for a subjective finalism: beauty is not a property of the object but the relation between the object and the representative power of the observer — its adequacy to the mind perceiving it. He connected aesthetic activity to the play of children, an association Schiller would shortly make famous. He set the theory out in *Theorie der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften* (1783) and the *Handbuch der Ästhetik* (1803–1805), and also produced a *Sittenlehre der Vernunft* (1781) and an *Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie* (1788).

Then there is the work that outlived all the philosophy. Between 1795 and 1802 he compiled the *Versuch einer allgemeinen deutschen Synonymik*, a six-volume dictionary of German synonyms — a systematic attempt to fix the precise difference between words that mean nearly the same thing.

Why Johann Is Called a Genius

The defensible core of the claim is a talent for discrimination — the ability to see and articulate fine distinctions, whether between two German words, between a beautiful object and the mind that finds it so, or between what Kant had genuinely added to Leibniz and what he had merely renamed. A six-volume synonym dictionary is that faculty in its pure form. So is the *Neue Apologie*, which took a tangle of inherited theology and separated the load-bearing claims from the assumptions nobody had examined, then discarded original sin and eternal punishment on grounds of internal incoherence. Frederick the Great rewarded him with a chair; the Berlin Academy gave him its prize and then its membership; Schleiermacher learned philosophy from him.

The counter-case is that his one attempt at a large judgement was wrong, publicly, and at length. Eberhard staked two journals and seven years on the proposition that the *Critique of Pure Reason* contained nothing new, and philosophy has agreed ever since that this was a serious misreading by a man who could not see past his own training. Nor was he original: his position was Wolff crossed with Locke, his aesthetics anticipated Schiller without producing Schiller, and his history of philosophy is a survey. He was a first-rate expositor, systematiser and lexicographer with excellent instincts about theology and a fatal blind spot about the most important book of his lifetime. "Genius" is too strong. "Formidable, and unlucky in his enemy" is nearer.

Legacy

He died in Berlin on 6 January 1809. The verdict on him has always been shaped by the fight he lost, which is a distorting way to be remembered — a philosopher who denied original sin at real professional risk, taught Schleiermacher, and mapped the German language word by word is reduced to a footnote in the Kant literature. The footnote is nevertheless permanent. Kant's sarcasm preserved him.

Achievements

• Held posts at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg