Pantheism dispute

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The pantheism or Spinoza dispute is one of the most important and influential philosophical disputes at the beginning of the younger modern age. The dispute was triggered by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's book On the Teaching of Spinoza in letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn , the first edition of which was published in 1785 and the second in 1789, with a number of additional supplements. In addition to the direct protagonists Jacobi and Mendelssohn , many other prominent representatives of philosophy were involved in the discussion, including Goethe , Herder , Hamann and Claudius , the representatives of the Berlin Enlightenment, and Kant . The effects of the dispute then ran through the entire philosophy and literature of the epoch and are tangible in Fichte , Schelling and Hegel through to Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Feuerbach , among others .

The reason for the dispute was Jacobi's request to Mendelssohn whether he knew that his friend Lessing, who had recently died, was a "Spinozist". Already in the correspondence that developed between Jacobi and Mendelssohn from 1783 based on Jacobi's reproduction of his conversation with Lessing in Wolfenbüttel in 1780, the focus shifted relatively quickly from the initial question about Lessing's Spinozism to the much more fundamental question of what the "doctrine of Spinoza" exists and what the constitution of reason is all about. The focus of the Spinoza dispute thus moved Jacobi's thesis, according to which Spinoza's philosophy realized the epitome of a strictly rational philosophy and therefore did not lead to atheism and fatalism by chance, but as a strict consequence . The conventional accusations against Spinoza that his philosophy is atheistic and fatalistic were put on a completely new basis with this systematic reconstruction of a perfectly rational correspondence of content and form in the form of a complete and universal justification in the principle of "a nihilo nihil fit", which Jacobi defended critically and at the same time full of admiration for Spinoza.

With the publication of the Spinoza Letters , although Jacobi initially only published his own contributions and paraphrases of the exchanged letters, but Mendelssohn's “Memories” only in the second edition of 1789, the further course of the Spinoza dispute coincided with the so-called “Spinoza Renaissance”. Thanks to Jacobi's portrayal, Spinoza moved into the center of attention, while the dispute mainly revolved around the question of whether and to what extent Spinoza could be refuted and converted into a version of pantheism that overcomes the offensive atheistic and fatalistic connotations, and on the other the importance of enlightenment and reason.

The position of "purified pantheism" advocated by Mendelssohn in the morning hours (1785) and in the pamphlet An die Freunde Lessing (1786) was held by Jacobi in Wider Mendelssohn's accusations concerning the letters on the teachings of Spinoza (1786) with the dual philosophy of his " Spinoza und Antispinoza ”counteracts the irrefutability of Spinoza:“ The immortal librarian Gotthold Ephraim Leßing knew well that a pantheism can no more be purified from Spinozism than cloudy from clear water, and that the matter is exactly the other way around. ”It was similar Jacobi then in supplements IV and V of the second edition of the Spinoza letters against Herder's neospinozist work Gott (1787), while in supplement I with the “excerpt” from Giordano Bruno he pursued the purpose “by combining Bruno with Spinoza, as it were to present the sum total of the philosophy of Hen kai Pan in my book ”.

Already in a conversation with Lessing Jacobi countered the self-contained and therefore irrefutable rationalism of Spinoza with the contradiction of the “Salto mortale”, which, as an act of freedom, “emerges from fatalism directly against fatalism and against everything connected with it, closes [t] “. In the course of his “Antispinoza” Jacobi referred to an “immediate certainty” of practical self-understanding that preceded discursive, searching reason, which he initially referred to as “belief”, and since Appendix VII of the Spinozabriefe also as the instrumental rationality against the actual reason of the spirit. With the talk of faith, whose meaning of intuitive knowledge remained misunderstood in the misjudgment of alleged irrationalism, Jacobi provoked violent reactions on the part of the Berlin Enlightenment, which assumed he had crypto-Catholic ambitions. Kant, too, feared the “overthrow” of reason “in the Jacobian and Mendelssohn controversy” and, in his contribution to the Spinoza dispute, developed What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking? (1786) the concept of a “pure belief in reason”. In his correspondence with Jacobi after the publication of the second edition of the Spinozabriefe , however , Kant dropped the charge of enthusiasm for Jacobi.

In post-Kantian philosophy, after Kant's and Jacobi's critique of reason, Mendelssohn's rationalism was no longer a benchmark. The philosophical task now consisted rather in conveying the rational consequence of Spinozism with motifs from Jacobi's “Antispinoza” in order to design a new speculative philosophy of freedom in the transformation of substance into subject. This constellation led from Fichte's doctrine of science to Schelling's philosophy of self and identity to Hegel's science of logic , in which the transition from essential to conceptual logic is about the “true refutation” of Spinoza. But Schelling's later philosophy also remained committed to this constellation: "A system of freedom - but in just as broad lines, in the same simplicity, as a perfect counterpart to Spinozian - that would actually be the highest."

Ludwig Feuerbach drew the following quintessence from this: “ Spinoza is the originator of speculative philosophy. Schelling their restorer, Hegel their finisher. The Pantheismus is the necessary consequence of theology (or Theismus) - the consistent theology; the atheism the necessary consequence of the 'pantheism', the consequent 'pantheism'. ”But it immediately improved in a footnote: The theological designations he used here only in the sense of trivial nicknames . In themselves they are wrong. As little as Spinoza's and Hegel's philosophy was pantheism - the latter was rather an orientalism - so little was modern philosophy atheism. About the necessary transition from half theology to the whole , ie to pantheism, Paragraph 112 of his history of philosophy from Baco to Spinoza should be compared.

swell

  1. ^ Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Writings on the Spinozastreit , in: Werke, Gesamtausgabe , ed. v. Klaus Hammacher and Walter Jaeschke, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998ff., JWA 1,1.8.
  2. ^ Heinrich Scholz, Introduction , in: The main writings on the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn , Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1916, XIXff.
  3. ↑ JWA 1,1.274.
  4. ↑ JWA 1,1.290.
  5. ↑ JWA 1,1.152. Cf. Stephan Otto, Spinoza ante Spinozam? Jacobi's reading of Giordano Bruno in the context of a justification of metaphysics , in: Walter Jaeschke and Birgit Sandkaulen, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. A turning point in the intellectual education of the time , Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2004, 107–125.
  6. ↑ JWA 1,1.20.
  7. ↑ JWA 1,1.259f.
  8. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Academy Edition, Volume VIII, 141-143.
  9. ↑ See Kant's letter to Jacobi v. August 30, 1789, in: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Briefwechsel , Volume 8, ed. v. Manuela Köppe, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2015, 271–274.
  10. ↑ Dieter Henrich, Hegel in context, Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp, ​​1967, 62.
  11. ↑ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic , in: Gesammelte Werke, GW 12, 14ff. Cf. Birgit Sandkaulen, The Ontology of Substance, the Concept of Subjectivity and the Facticity of the Individual. Hegel's reflection-based “refutation” of Spinozan's metaphysics , in: International Yearbook of German Idealism / International Yearbook of German Idealism 5 (2007), Berlin, New York 2008, 235–275.
  12. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Munich Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy (1833/34) , in: Sämmliche Werke, SW X, 36.
  13. ↑ Ludwig Feuerbach: Preliminary theses on the reformation of philosophy. , in: Drafts for a New Philosophy. (Ed. Walter Jaeschke, Werner Schuffenhauer): Felix Meiner: Hamburg 1996. ISBN 3-7873-1077-0 . 3.

literature

  • Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, writings on the Spinoza dispute , in: Werke, Gesamtausgabe , ed. v. Klaus Hammacher and Walter Jaeschke, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1998ff., Volumes 1,1 and 2.
  • Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, On the doctrine of Spinoza in letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn , study edition ed. v. Marion Lauschke, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000, ISBN 978-3-7873-1434-8 .
  • The main writings on the pantheism controversy between Jacobi and Mendelssohn . Edited and provided with a historical-critical introduction by Heinrich Scholz . Verlag von Reuther & Reichard: Berlin 1916 ( digitized ; new edition: Spenner, 2004. ISBN 3-89991-019-2 .)