Madame de Staël

I have thoroughly enjoyed spending the day reading the sections on philosophy from Madame de Staël's lively and engaging three-volume work on Germany. It was a crucial text for encouraging the importation of German philosophical ideas into France at the beginning of the nineteenth century and key for understanding how these ideas were originally understood by French thinkers. Perhaps most importantly, it makes clear that metaphysics and morals were at this time inextricably linked. She writes in a nice passage, which shows at once the text's lively prose and the fact that she was clearly in the company of the finest German minds, that:

'I put a question one day to Fichte, who possesses one of the strongest and most thinking heads in Germany, whether he could not more easily tell me his moral system than his metaphysical? “The one depends upon the other”, he replied; and the remark was very profound: it comprehends all the motives of that interest which we can take in philosophy.'

As I work on the reception of Leibniz's philosophy, I was pleased that she rates him so highly:

'Leibniz is their [the Germans] Bacon and their Descartes. We find in this excellent genius all the qualities which the German philosophers in general glory to aim at: immense erudition, good faith, enthusiasm hidden under strict form and method. He had profoundly studied theology, jurisprudence, history, languages, mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry; for he was convinced that an universality of knowledge was necessary to constitute a superior being in any department: in short, every thing in Leibniz displayed those virtues which are allied to sublimity of thought, and which deserve at once our admiration and our respect.'

Her opinion of Kant though appears mixed. She certainly doesn't try to convince her French readership of the necessity of engaging with him. In fact, she claims: 'No one in France would give himself the trouble of studying works so thickly set with difficulties as those of Kant.' Perhaps it was partly due to such a verdict that it wouldn't be until the 1850s when French philosophers would start to seriously engage with the sage of Königsberg.