“A GREAT NOBLE MAN YET A DENIER OF GOD ACCORDING TO STRICT CONCEPTS”

SPINOZA ENTANGLED BETWEEN FICHTE AND HÖLDERLIN

Abstract

The reception of Spinoza in German Idealism is anything but unequivocal. The great noble man of the last century, in Hölderlin’s words, despite being cursed for a long time in the German 18th century, began to attract the interest as his philosophy was compared with that of Leibniz, an association that placed him alongside an important figure for the Aufklärung. The 1780s would place Spinoza definitively in the German philosophical debate, starting with the quarrel over pantheism (Pantheismusstreit) initiated by Jacobi. Despite the latter’s intention to accuse the former of atheism, Spinoza fell in into Goethe’s grace as well as, in Tübingen, into the young friends still in their philosophical beginnings: Hölderlin, Hegel and Schelling. When Fichte made his debut in Jena, Spinozism had already established itself as the inevitable and irrefutable rational system. The aim of this essay is to show how intricately Spinoza and Spinozism appear in a debate that has long remained secondary in the research of German idealism, namely in Hölderlin’s Fichte-Kritik in Jena (1794-1795), and in the suspicion that Fichte’s system was at the watershed between being considered dogmatic or not. To approach this debate, it will be necessary to consider some Fichtean formulations of his Wissenschaftslehre of 1794, as well as some aspects of Hölderlin’s philosophical conception at the time. As result, we can see that Hölderlin incorporate Spinoza in way not foreseeable in Jacobi’s and in Fichte’s Spinoza-polemic. Although there is no concrete textual mobilization of Spinoza by Fichte or Hölderlin, I assume that Spinozism is as present in its spirit (Geist) as Kantianism is by the time, even if the letter (Buchstabe) of the former is not present.