Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (1694–1768)

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REIMARUS, HERMANN SAMUEL
(1694–1768)

Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the German philosopher and theologian, was born in Hamburg and studied theology at Jena. After serving as a lecturer in Wittenberg and as director of a high school in Wismar, he became a teacher of oriental languages at the Johannes-gymnasium in Hamburg. He began writing very late in life, when he was about sixty. One of his most important works, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Apology for or Defense of the Rational Worshiper of God), was first published by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing—posthumously and only in part—as fragments of an allegedly anonymous manuscript found in the Wolfenbüttel Library, where Lessing was librarian ("Wolfenbüttler Fragmente eines Ungenannten," in Beiträge zur Geschichte und Literatur, 1774–1777).

Reimarus was originally a Wolffian, and Wolffianism was a lasting foundation for his thought; but he developed individual doctrines in both philosophy and theology as one of the "popular philosophers." He stressed the moral aim of philosophy, that is, the happiness and moral perfectibility of man. He dissented from Christian Wolff chiefly in his views of philosophical methodology. He wrote in a "popular," or nonscholastic, style; he asserted that philosophy can be neither as certain as mathematics nor mathematically demonstrated; he stressed the function of common sense in knowledge; and he tried to simplify logic. In metaphysics, his main points of divergence from Wolff were his admission of a real interaction of soul and body and his view that life cannot be mechanically explained, but that it is an effect of the soul.

Reimarus's most important work was in the field of animal psychology and in his classification of the instincts of animals. Humans, unlike animals, have only a very few instincts. This lack may be a disadvantage for material life, but it is the basis for morality.

Reimarus appeared in his lifetime to be a moderate advocate of natural religion who did not openly oppose Christian revelation. But in the posthumous Apologie he submitted Christian revelation to a radical criticism in the spirit of English deism. In this work, for the first time in Germany the traditional view of Christianity was attacked neither on a speculative plan nor through superficial historical arguments, but on the basis of sound historical scholarship. Reimarus pointed out discordances between the Old and the New Testaments and between the different sections of each. He refused to accept the Gospels as the word of God, but described them as being an exposition of theological views elaborated by Jesus' successors in the leadership of Christianity. He considered the accounts of miracles, and in particular the account of the resurrection of Jesus, to relate events that never happened and to be forgeries of the Apostles. This purely rationalistic criticism made a tremendous impression on late eighteenth-century Germany, and deeply influenced the subsequent evolution of German theology.

Bibliography

additional works by reimarus

Abhandlungen von den vornehmsten Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion. Hamburg, 1754.

Vernunftlehre. Hamburg arid Kiel, 1756.

Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Tiere. Hamburg, 1760.

Uebrigen noch ungedruckte Werke des Wolfenbüttelschen Fragmentisten, edited by C. A. E. Schmidt. Berlin, 1786. Contains further portions of the Apologie.