Spinoza and German Idealism ed. by Eckart Förster, Yitzhak Y. Melamed (review)

It turns out that you can teach an old dog—even a “dead dog,” as Lessing would describe Spinoza—new tricks. In Spinoza and German Idealism, we learn not only how Spinoza influenced the German Idealists, but also how they transformed and gave new life to the key concepts of his system. In this collection of fourteen essays, we see how Kant, Schleiermacher, Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Trendelenburg understood (and misunderstood) Spinoza’s conception of God, intellectual intuition, human freedom, and the relation between the infinite and the finite—to name but a few of the topics treated in these pages—and also how they defined their own philosophical projects in response to Spinoza on those points. The breadth of ideas covered in this volume alone make it worthy of attention, and given that they have been so seldom studied in connection with German Idealism, this is an important reference text for scholars in the field.

Much could be said about each of the essays here, but for the purpose of this review I will keep to some highlights. In pieces that serve to bookend the collection, Michael Della Rocca and Don Garrett take up Spinoza’s philosophical position as it pertains to idealism. Della Rocca argues that an application of the principle of sufficient reason not only commits us to reading Spinoza as a kind of idealist, but further pushes us beyond the limits of Spinoza’s own monism to the claim that no thing really exists. In “A reply on Spinoza’s behalf,” Garrett rebuts Della Rocca’s interpretation, but he also takes to task the Idealist conceptions of Spinoza that are prominent in this volume. While Garrett’s discussion is compressed, it invites further dialogue about the issues—which is precisely what the editors of this volume hope it will initiate (1).

In the richly contextual essay “Herder and Spinoza,” Michael Forster defends the theses that “Spinoza’s Tractatus had a major positive impact on Herder’s thought before Spinoza’s Ethics did” (62), that Herder fell under Spinoza’s influence in 1768, several years before it is commonly believed, and that this dating correctly situates Herder’s influence on Goethe’s own interest in Spinoza. Eckart Förster’s “Goethe’s Spinozism” nicely complements Forster’s piece, and in this essay we find a sophisticated and philosophically compelling apology of the Spinozistic notion of intellectual intuition as it was developed by Goethe.

Both essays on Fichte are impressive. In “Fichte on the consciousness of Spinoza’s God,” Johannes Haag explains Fichte’s critique of Spinoza’s account of consciousness against the dual background of Fichte’s account “of the Thathandlung, i.e., the original positing of the self as itself” and his concept of intellectual intuition (100). Against this background, Fichte can argue—correctly, Haag wagers—that “neither empirical subjects nor God can fulfill the conditions Fichte places on an explanation of consciousness” (100). Spinoza’s determinism comes under fire in Allen Wood’s “Fichte on freedom: the Spinozistic background.” Here, Wood explicates Fichte’s contention that determinism runs afoul of the conditions of rational deliberation, which require that judgments made for reasons are “always contingent, not merely epistemically, but really contingent” (130).

Two final words of praise go out to Dalia Nassar and Frederick Beiser, for their respective essays on Schelling and Trendelenburg. Nassar marshals compelling textual evidence to show that the early Schelling was considerably more influenced by Spinoza than Fichte. And Beiser makes a convincing case that Trendelenburg’s ever-developing views on Spinoza need to be appreciated if one is to have a full appreciation of Spinoza’s impact on German Idealism.

There are, however, things about this collection with which some readers may take issue. To begin with a quibble: the essays are typographically inconsistent, with varying conventions governing the translation and italicizing of non-English texts. On more substantive matters, of the fourteen essays...