As ilusões do eu—Spinoza e Nietzsche ed. by André Martins, Homero Santiago, and Luís César Oliva, and: Spinoza e Nietzsche—filósofos contra a tradição ed. by Ana Claudia Gama Barreto, Danilo Bilate, and Tiago Mota da Silva Barros (review)

As ilusões do eu—Spinoza e Nietzsche [The Illusions of the I—Spinoza and Nietzsche] and Spinoza e Nietzsche—filósofos contra a tradição [Spinoza and Nietzsche—Philosophers Against the Tradition] are products of the second Spinoza & Nietzsche International Congress held at the University of São Paolo during the second semester of 2009. This congress is one of the results of the collaboration between Brazilian and French universities under the heading of the Capes-Cofecub program: “Crises and Anathemas of Philosophic Modernity: Spinoza and Nietzsche as Schisms in the Metaphysics of Subjectivity.”

These collections of essays are timely as they contribute to a growing research interest in the comparative study of Spinoza and Nietzsche. The fact that these volumes are collections of essays has the advantage that the reader can find within them interesting articles on a number of important topics in Spinoza and Nietzsche scholarship. However, it also means that there is no single guiding thread running through the books and that not all articles are immediately relevant to the themes announced by the titles of the books. Only a small number of contributions address the question of the relation between Spinoza and Nietzsche directly. This is noted by the editors of The Illusions of the I in the preface (15): “The diversity of the texts is intentional and desirable: we do not seek to offer the reader a single interpretation, but, to the contrary, a picture of the effervescence of current academic research.”

The Illusions of the I contains twenty-five articles, grouped into three sections. The first section is dedicated to the task of investigating Nietzsche’s debt to Romanticism and, more specifically, to elucidating how Nietzsche read Spinoza through the Romantics. In the first article of the volume, Eduardo Nasser places Nietzsche’s philosophy in the context of his reaction to Romanticism. The crucial question that Nasser asks is who Nietzsche counts under the heading of Romantics. The answer includes not only the German but also the French Romantics, together with all of German philosophy and even Epicurus and Christ (25). The author emphasizes that the criteria that determine what counts as Romantic are not purely historical, but psychological and physiological. Nasser argues that Nietzsche is indebted to Goethe’s distinction and contrast between classical and Romantic art, which he reformulates as the dichotomy between expressions of vital abundance and impoverished life. The complex arguments of this essay set the background for the rest of the essays in this section. Most important for the overarching theme of this book, it provides the context for André Martins’s investigation of Spinoza’s influence on Nietzsche through the medium of German Romanticism. Martins places particular emphasis on the use made of Spinoza’s philosophy by the Romantics in their attempt to go beyond the limits of knowledge set by Kant. The Romantics interpreted Spinoza’s famous notion of the third kind of knowledge as a privileged way of access to the divine essence of nature. Martins takes Nietzsche’s valuation of art over reason, science, or logic to be the result of Nietzsche’s debt to Romanticism (126), but he does not sufficiently explore (1) the question of whether this emphasis on art over science and reason is constant through all of Nietzsche’s work or (2) whether this justifies his claim that Spinoza’s philosophy is at the origin of Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche had access...