19th Century History
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History
The Nineteenth Century
If the first flowering of affirmed atheism belonged to the French eighteenth century, Germany would be the seat of the most important developments in the nineteenth. As the French Enlightenment produced more than one form of atheism, nineteenth century Germany would also produce different types, from the confident atheism of young Hegelians such as Marx, to the pessimistic and despairing atheism of Schopenhauer, and the voluntaristic atheism of Nietzsche.
Although Germany produced the first (isolated) avowed atheist, Matthias Knutzen, and also had its radically irreligious (if not quite atheist) voices in the eighteenth century,[1] the figure of central importance for understanding the development of nineteenth century German atheism is Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804).
According to the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the God of faith which disappeared in the eighteenth century and was replaced by the deistic God of reason by the French philosophes was given its death blow by Kant.[2] Kant himself was not an atheist, but denied that God could be proven by pure reason alone, in the opinion of some at least leaving space only for 'unreasonable' (i.e., fideistic) belief. According to Kant, we cannot know that there is a God, but must act as though there is for the sake of morality.
References
Der Atheismus und Seine Geschichte Im Abendlande. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1922-24.
Histoire de L'atheisme. La Fleche: Fayard, 1998.
Footnotes
[1]↑ For an exhaustive treatment of these (now mostly unknown) authors, see
Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus und Seine Geschichte Im Abendlande
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1922-24).
[2]↑ Georges Minois, Histoire de L'atheisme (La Fleche: Fayard, 1998), 434.