The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time

3. Nature

There is in biology a formula called “the equation of burning.” It is one of the fundamental pair of equations by which all organic life subsists. The other one, “the equation of photosynthesis,” describes the way that plants make foods out of sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water. The equation of burning describes how plants (and animals) unlock the stored sunlight and turn it into the heat energy that fuels their motion, their feeling, their thought . . . All that is living burns. This is the fundamental fact of nature. And Moses saw it with his two eyes, directly. That glimpse of the real world—of the world as it is known to God—is not a world of isolate things, but of processes in concert. —William Bryant Logan1 I The Pantheism Controversy had created a sensation, and in its heat other philosophers emerged either to take sides or to dismiss both participants. The young Pietist, fideist, and friend of Jacobi, Thomas Wizenman, for example, defended Jacobi (through arguments independent of Jacobi) in his Die Resultate der Jacobi’schen und Mendelssohn’schen Philosophie, kritisch untersucht von einem Freiwilligen, The Results of the Jacobian and Mendelssohnian Philosophy, Critically Undertaken by a Volunteer (1786). Kant, on the other hand, dismissed the extremity of both sides of the debate while forging a third way between the Scylla of nomadic irrationality (and pseudorationality) and the Charybdis 65 3 Nature of dogmatic optimism in his small essay of the same year, “Was heist: sich im Denken orientieren?” or “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” Kant defended a humbled form of reason and its capacity for a certain kind of rational faith. On the other hand, the Pantheism Controversy had made Spinoza himself a hot topic. Spinoza, even while despised by the orthodox, had always had a small following among the heterodox and iconoclastic.2 Even before the Spinoza reception among certain freethinking and politically progressive Pietists, pantheism had been associated with political radicalism. During the Counter-Reformation, for example, Valentin Weigel and Sebastian Franck deployed a pantheistic critique of the neo-orthodox that helped pave the way for the Pietist interest in Spinoza’s philosophy almost two hundred years later.3 This time around, when it seemed that Spinoza’s ignominy would be further assured, some thinkers, most notably Goethe and Herder and eventually Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and others, emerged to take his side. For Novalis, Spinoza was a Gottbetrunkener man, a man drunk with God. “Spinozism is a supersaturation with the divine. Unbelief a lack of the divine sense and of the divine. . . . The more reflective and truly poetic a person is, the more formed and historical his religion will be.”4 While disliking some of its nomenclature, Goethe again studied the Ethics in 1785 and again found Spinoza’s holistic outlook to be a corroboration of Goethe’s own pantheistic convictions about nature. “Being is God,” Goethe scolded Jacobi in 1785. It was, after all, Lessing’s comments on Goethe’s then unpublished poem “Prometheus” that had first kindled the fires of the Controversy.5 For Heine, “Goethe was the Spinoza of poetry.”6 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the precritical Kant’s star student in Königsberg from 1762 to 1764, for his part, published his dialogue Gott, einige Gespräche über Spinozas System (1787). Kant had been fond enough of the young Herder to waive his lecture fees. The precocious Herder also developed an abiding friendship and correspondence with Hamann. Although the latter did not always agree with his young friend’s positions (Hamann was the subtler and less prolix writer), his influence on Herder is readily apparent. Both insist on the fundamental importance of the role of language and the historical imbeddedness of cultural practices, including philosophy and religion . For both, reason is bound by history (the heterogeneity of times) and location (the heterogeneity of space). It is their delimitation of the sovereign pretences of reason that sometimes earned both of them, along with Jacobi, the moniker of Glaubensphilosophen, philosophers of faith. Regardless of how one values a term like faith or belief (Glaube), it is at least clear that the term is not automatically reducible to Jacobi’s naïveté. In Herder’s dialogue, Philolaus is led by Theophron from the cave of an ignorant hatred of Spinoza (in the tradition of the militant opposition inaugurated by Bayle), through the blinding confusions of the Pantheism Contro66 THE CONSPIRACY OF LIFE [3.147.73.35] Project MUSE...