Johann Clauberg

Johann Clauberg (born Feb. 24, 1622, Solingen, duchy of Berg [Germany]—died Jan. 31, 1665, Duisburg, Brandenburg) was a philosopher and theologian who became the foremost German proponent of the thought of the French philosopher René Descartes.

After study at Bremen and in the Netherlands at Groningen and after travel in France and England, Clauberg encountered Cartesian philosophy in lectures by the Dutch thinker Johan de Raey at Leiden, Neth. From 1649 to 1651 Clauberg served as professor of philosophy and theology at the academy of Herborn, Nassau (an academy that was conducted according to the Reformation theology of John Calvin), and he soon distinguished himself as the leading Cartesian in Germany and the Netherlands. Opposition to his views from colleagues, particularly from a professor of rhetoric, C. Lentz, influenced Clauberg to accept an appointment as head of the Gymnasium, or secondary school, at Duisburg in 1651. Two years later he was commissioned to teach philosophy and theology there and was named rector in 1655, when the school became a university.

Against Lentz and Jacobus Revius, a Dutch Calvinist poet, Clauberg upheld the Cartesian method of pursuing knowledge in his Defensio Cartesiana (1652). He sought again to refute Revius in his Initiatio Philosophi (1655). In Exercitationes Centum de Cognitione Dei et Nostri (1656; “One Hundred Exercises on the Knowledge of God and Ourselves”), he proceeded from his proof for the existence of God based on a concept of the infinite to an account of knowledge and being in general. The similarity of this work to the thought of Plato is evident also in Corporis et Animae in Homine Conjunctio (1663; “On the Joining of the Body and the Soul in Man”), in which he addressed the Cartesian topic of the relation between body and soul. The soul, he maintained, is incapable of movement and cannot create movement in the bodily world, because the quantity of movement remains constant. Yet the soul can guide bodily movements through its will. Consequently, the soul has moral rather than physical force. In Clauberg’s view, known as occasionalism, bodies do not cause or create the soul but provide the “occasion” for it to function creatively. The harmonious interaction of body and soul depends on the providence of God, who is considered by Clauberg in Cartesian fashion to be the ultimate cause of all motion.

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A collected edition of Clauberg’s philosophical writings, by J.T. Schalbruch, appeared in 1691. In addition to a work on German philology, Ars Etymologica Teutonum e Philosophiae (1663; “The Art of Teutonic Etymology”), Clauberg wrote lucid expositions of Descartes’s Meditations and Principia Philosophiae. In his Ontologia sive Metaphysica de Ente (1660; “Ontology or Metaphysics of Being”), Clauberg sought to reconcile Cartesian doctrines with the metaphysical positions of his pre-Cartesian Ontosophia (1647; “The Wisdom of Being”).