Clarke, Kelsen, Tschirnhaus, Zwingli and a letter on Roosevelt's desk: 11 October
Samuel Clarke, Newton's advocate against Leibniz, was born on 11 October 1675; Hans Kelsen, author of the Pure Theory of Law, on 11 October 1881. Tschirnhaus died on the date in 1708, Zwingli in battle in 1531, and in 1939 Alexander Sachs carried Einstein's letter into the Oval Office. The thread is where reason's reach ends and responsibility begins.
Christoph Bernhard Francke, portrait of Leibniz, c. 1695 · Wikimedia Commons
Two births, two deaths and a delivery share 11 October, and between them they mark out a single question from five sides. Samuel Clarke, born in Norwich on 11 October 1675, believed that unaided reason could demonstrate the existence of God and the obligations of morality, and defended absolute space against Leibniz on God's behalf. Hans Kelsen, born in Prague on 11 October 1881, believed that a science of law was possible only if reason first stripped law of every moral and political claim. Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, who died in Dresden on 11 October 1708, thought the mind could be cured of its errors by method, and in his spare time invented European porcelain. Huldrych Zwingli, killed at Kappel on 11 October 1531, staked the Reformation in Zurich on a reading of a single verb. And on 11 October 1939 the economist Alexander Sachs sat down with Franklin Roosevelt and summarised a letter signed by Albert Einstein, with consequences that none of the four philosophers would have known how to weigh.
The question all five press is where the reach of reason ends and the burden of responsibility begins. Clarke, Kelsen, Tschirnhaus and Zwingli each assume that thinking clearly settles something. The letter on Roosevelt's desk is the reminder that thinking clearly also produces consequences nobody has thought about.
Clarke took his Cambridge BA in 1695 and was a Newtonian before he was anything else. His association with Newton became official, as the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, when he translated the Opticks into Latin in 1706, and he was by then already the most able public defender of the new natural philosophy. He gave the Boyle Lectures in 1704 and 1705, published as A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God and A Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion, and in them argued two things that would govern British philosophy for a generation: that the existence of a necessary being can be proved by reason from the fact that anything exists at all, and that morality rests on 'fitnesses' among things that are as objective as the truths of mathematics and are known in the same way. Right is not what God commands; God commands it because it is right. The theory made him the target of Hume's and Hutcheson's attacks on moral rationalism, which is the most reliable sign of having mattered.
He was a royal chaplain from 1706 and rector of St James's, Westminster, from about 1709, and would have risen higher had he not published The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity in 1712, against his friends' advice, and been called an Arian for it. He was never censured. He was also never a bishop.
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was born in Berlin on 10 October 1873. He made the history of ideas a discipline, traced one idea from Plato to the Romantics in The Great Chain of Being, and helped write the rules of academic freedom he later qualified. The same date, in four Catholic countries, did not exist in 1582.
Jacques Derrida died in Paris on 9 October 2004; Nicolai Hartmann died in Göttingen on 9 October 1950. One spent a career showing that presence never quite arrives, the other rebuilt an ontology of levels in which being does not depend on anyone's knowing it. The date puts the two reflexes of twentieth-century philosophy side by side.
His place in every history of philosophy rests on a sequence of five letters exchanged with Leibniz in 1715 and 1716, passed through Caroline, Princess of Wales, who had been Leibniz's pupil in Hanover and was now a Newtonian's parishioner in London. Leibniz opened by complaining that Newton's God was like a watchmaker who must wind and mend his watch. Clarke replied that the analogy failed, since a God who sustains the world continuously is more present in it, not less. From there the argument widened to everything that divided the two systems: whether space and time are absolute containers, as Newton required, or orders of relations among things, as Leibniz insisted; whether the principle of sufficient reason forbids God to choose between indiscernible alternatives, or whether, as Clarke held, a free will is exactly the capacity to choose without a determining reason; whether there are atoms and a vacuum; whether the universe could have been created elsewhere or earlier than it was. Leibniz died in November 1716 before answering Clarke's fifth letter, and Clarke published the exchange the following year. It remains the founding document of the philosophy of physics, and the quarrel over relational against absolute space, which relativity was widely held to have settled for Leibniz, has reopened in the quantum theory of gravity. Clarke died in 1729 after a short illness.
Kelsen was born in Prague and raised in Vienna, and Austria still lives under the constitution he drafted in 1920. Its most original feature, a court with the power to annul statutes for unconstitutionality, was his design, and he sat on that court, appointed for life, until political pressure over a line of divorce rulings removed him in 1930. He took a chair at Cologne, lost it when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, taught international law in Geneva, and sailed from Lisbon on 1 June 1940 for the United States, where Harvard Law School, on Lon Fuller's objection, declined to keep him and Berkeley's political science department did. He died in Berkeley on 19 April 1973.
The book that made him is the Reine Rechtslehre, the Pure Theory of Law, first published in 1934 and expanded in 1960. Its ambition was to describe law as a scientist describes an object, purified of the sociology, the politics and above all the morality that jurists had always mixed into it. Law, for Kelsen, is a hierarchy of norms. A by-law is valid because a statute authorises it; the statute is valid because the constitution authorises it; the constitution is valid because an earlier constitution, or a revolution that succeeded, authorised it. The regress must stop somewhere, and Kelsen stopped it with the Grundnorm, the basic norm, which is not a law at all but a presupposition: the hypothesis, which anyone who treats a legal order as binding has already made, that the historically first constitution ought to be obeyed. Whether the order is just is a separate question, and a legal scientist, as such, has no competence to answer it.
This is legal positivism in its most rigorous form, attacked ever since from both sides: by natural lawyers who say that a wicked statute is not law, and by realists who say that the Grundnorm is a fiction dressed as a hypothesis. The quarrel's descendants include Robert Alexy's argument that law has a dual nature, part fact and part claim to correctness, and the attempts of theorists such as Scott Shapiro to say what a legal system is in a world where more and more of its operations are executed by software. Kelsen's own fiercest exchange was with Carl Schmitt in 1931, over who should guard the constitution. Schmitt said the President; Kelsen said the court. Within two years Germany had its answer, and Kelsen had lost his job.
Tschirnhaus links the day's two centuries. Born in Lusatia in 1651, he studied at Leiden, befriended Spinoza in the 1670s and was one of the few allowed to read the Ethics in manuscript. His letters to Spinoza press the hardest objection anyone put to the system in its author's lifetime: how, from the concept of extension alone, the variety and motion of bodies could follow. In Paris he met Leibniz; in 1682 he became the first German member of the Académie des sciences. His Medicina mentis (1687), a 'medicine of the mind', proposed a general method of discovery combining Descartes's rules with Spinoza's geometrical manner, and the algebraic 'Tschirnhaus transformation' still carries his name. In his last years, in Saxony, he directed the experiments with Johann Friedrich Böttger that produced the first hard-paste porcelain in Europe; the manufactory at Meissen opened in 1710, two years after his death, and the credit went to Böttger. Philosopher, mathematician and engineer in one person, he is the early Enlightenment at its most characteristic, and almost nobody now reads him.
Zwingli, who had begun the Reformation in Zurich independently of Luther, died on the battlefield at Kappel on 11 October 1531, where he had gone as chaplain to the Zurich army in its war with the Catholic cantons; he was forty-seven. He is in a philosophy calendar because he was a humanist first, an admirer of Erasmus who had learnt Greek and Hebrew, and because the dispute that split Protestantism in two was, at bottom, a dispute in the philosophy of language. At the Marburg Colloquy in October 1529 he and Luther agreed on fourteen articles and broke on the fifteenth. When Christ said 'This is my body', Luther held that is meant is. Zwingli held that it meant signifies, and that a sentence can be literally true in a figurative sense. Between a sign and the thing it stands for, Zwingli opened the gap that later hermeneutics would spend four centuries exploring. His treatise on providence of 1530 moved so far towards a Stoic and Platonic conception of God, and allowed so freely for the salvation of virtuous pagans, that Luther thought him scarcely a Christian.
Einstein's letter to Roosevelt is dated 2 August 1939. Leo Szilard, who feared that German physicists would reach a chain reaction first, wrote it; Einstein signed it. Alexander Sachs, an economist with access to the White House, waited until he could be sure of Roosevelt's attention, and on 11 October 1939, five weeks into the European war, sat with him and summarised what it said. 'What you are after', Roosevelt said, 'is to see the Nazis don't blow us up', and called in his aide to say that the thing required action. An advisory committee on uranium was set up within days, and the road from that room led to Los Alamos. Einstein later said that had he known the Germans would not succeed, he would have done nothing for the bomb.
Philosophers teach the letter as a founding case in the ethics of knowledge. Who answers for what a discovery makes possible, the discoverer or the user? Does 'before they do' license what would otherwise be forbidden? How far does a scientist's responsibility run along the chain of consequences he can foresee? The same questions have returned, almost word for word, in the debate over artificial intelligence, as we noted on the responsibility gap in AI geopolitics. On 11 October 1962 John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council in Rome, which ended the monopoly of Thomist philosophy in the Church; Charles Taylor'sA Secular Age traces what followed for the modern self. Jean Cocteau died on the same day in 1963 at Milly-la-Forêt. Reason, in Clarke's hands, reaches to God; in Kelsen's it reaches only to the Grundnorm and stops; in Tschirnhaus's it cures; in Zwingli's it reads. The letter is what happens when it builds. Yesterday's entry, on Lovejoy and the great chain of being, asked how an idea travels; this one asks who answers for where it arrives. The month's gatherings are in the October conference diary.
Gabriel Marcel died in Paris on 8 October 1973, aged eighty-three. Philosopher, playwright and music critic, he opened the French road to existentialism and then refused the name. His distinction between a problem, which can be solved and forgotten, and a mystery, which involves the one who asks, is the day's inheritance.
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