Goethe and Spinoza: A Reconsideration

Abstract

Goethe and Spinoza: A Reconsideration Horst Lange I No investigation into the origins of German Idealism can ignore the importance of Spinoza. To get an understanding of this, we only have to remember that, as convincing as many contemporaries found Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason to be, there were certain problems associated with them that begged for a solution. There was, for example, the problem of the Ding an sich, which seemed to be, as Jacobi observed, an essential precondition of Kant’s system, but the assumption of which seemed to introduce fatal contradictions into precisely this system. There was the problem of the status of Kant’s own philosophy: since Kant strictly limited the possibility of synthetic propositions a priori, it could be argued that his own statements, presumably themselves synthetic a priori, were excluded by his own criteria. There was the problem of how the transcendental principles established in the first critique (space, time, and the twelve categories, and in particular the three analogies of experience) could be used to deduct a priori principles of physics. (Kant tried to give such an account in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, but he himself appears to have grown suspicious of his answer.) And there was the problem that although there were clear connections between the two critiques, they appeared to be haphazard, and as a consequence Kant’s system had to be viewed as unfinished insofar as there was no satisfying explanation of the unity of reason in its theoretical and practical modes. (Kant attempted to tackle this issue in his Critique of Judgment, but few people found the answer satisfying.) Difficulties like these drove the development of ever-new systems of transcendental philosophy that we now group together under the label of German Idealism. And curiously, quite often the name of Spinoza came up whenever people thought they were moving a step forward. Interestingly, Kant himself toyed with the idea that Spinoza was someone he should be thinking about. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, he was still rather dismissive of Spinoza and talked of the “Ungereimtheit seiner Grundidee” (see A 182–83). But after having realized that his transcendental foundation of physics might be wanting, he tried to think through the matter anew in the manuscript collection of notes and reflections we now [End Page 11] call the opus postumum. And in one of his attempts to properly define his philosophical system he says the following: Der transzendentale Idealismus ist der Spinosism in dem Inbegriff seiner eigenen Vorstellungen das Object zu setzen. [S]pinozens Idee alle Gegenstände in Gott anschauen heißt so viel als alle Begriffe welche das Formale der Erkenntnis in einem System d.i. die Elementarbegriffe ausmachen unter Einem Princip fassen.1 In addition, he starts to refer approvingly to Schelling, whose early publications he apparently read, and in doing so, he is clearly aware of the connection of Schelling’s philosophy to that of Spinoza: Spinozens Gott, in welchem wir Gott in der reinen Anschauung vorstellen. NB. der Raum ist auch Object der reinen Anschauung, aber keine Idee. System des transc. Idealisms durch Schelling, Spinoza, Lichtenberg etc. gleichsam 3 Dimensionen: Die Gegenwart, Vergangenheit u. Zukunft.2 It is not the point here to try to understand what Kant could have meant by these cryptic statements,3 but it is instructive to realize that here already Kant, thinking through the foundations of his philosophy, had begun to see Spinoza in a more positive light. The opposite intellectual impulse can be seen in Fichte. In the introduction to what is commonly known as the Wissenschaftslehre von 1794, i.e., his first full-fledged attempt at presenting what he considered to be his major philosophical insight, he tries to defend what he considered to be the highest principle of philosophy (“Ich bin”) by discussing Spinoza. “Ueber unseren Satz, in dem angezeigten Sinne, hinausgegangen ist Spinoza,” he says,4 and he basically argues that whereas Spinoza must conceive of consciousness as being produced by Nature, his system conceives of nature as being produced by consciousness. In effect, Spinozism emerges as the only other philosophical system that could be...