Book
Willi Goetschel. Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine. Studies in German Jewish Cultural History and Literature Series. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
Reviewer
Jonathan R. Seiling, University of Toronto
On the front cover of Spinoza’s Modernity isa famous, rather stoical portrait of Spinoza presented in four different panels, ranging from a classic portrayal to various degrees of modern distortion using graphic touch-up software. Yet in each portrait the same Spinoza emerges in its own way, contrasting to the others. Willi Goetschel’s study of Spinoza’s thought and reception depicts the profundity of Spinozism at its inception and then at three crucial moments in the German Enlightenment. Far more than a specialized examination of Spinoza’s relation to the Enlightenment, this book deals with the meaning and possibility of “modernity” itself.
Although it does not precisely spell out what distinguishes Spinoza’s modernity from other forms of modernity for a reader unfamiliar with Goetschel’s historical and philosophical concerns, this volume does provide a detailed, convincing analysis of Spinoza’s legacy as found in Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Heinrich Heine.
To consider the emergence of Enlightenment thought through this prism puts an entirely different perspective on the project and meaning of modernity. Similar to groundbreaking studies like Jonathan Israel’s mammoth Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (2001) and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (2006), this account of Spinoza’s originality and later reception highlights his thought particularly in regard to what Goetschel calls his “Jewishness.”
The “scandal” of this aspect of Spinoza’s thought is what connects his trajectory with two key modern Jewish thinkers, Mendelssohn and Heine, and one non-Jewish thinker, Lessing, who devoted much attention to the role and meaning of Jews in modern European society. Goetschel’s analysis attempts to wrest the “critical” Spinoza from traditional depictions or distortions at the hands of late Enlightenment ideologues like Friedrich Jacobi that have largely determined Spinoza’s reception until very recently.
Although the scandal of Spinoza’s Jewishness is a central and original feature of Goetschel’s book, this is not a theological study or an examination of Spinoza’s religious thought in a narrow sense. Rather, the angle of Jewishness aims to account for both what is particular about Spinoza’s thought as a western thinker and what distinguishes the way he was received into some of the debates – though not the canon – of western philosophical traditions. This book’s main argument, which resonates with Jonathan Israel’s concurrent historical studies, is that Spinoza’s legacy includes an element of “critical” modernity that is sharply distinguished from mainstream versions of the modern project.
Beginning with Spinoza and then receiving indirect expression in Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine, Goetschel finds in this critical Enlightenment tradition strong coherence with the recent “critical theory” movement in philosophy. Although some of these connections are largely inferred and not always stated explicitly, Goetschel’s portrayal of Spinoza is especially fruitful for those sharing an affinity with aspects of contemporary philosophy, especially critical theory. Therefore, aside from using this as an alternative hermeneutic for reading Spinoza, one highlighting a largely unsung legacy in modernity, Goetschel finds the critical impulse in Spinoza’s thought holds great potential for contemporary thought as well.
The study provides a detailed contextual analysis of a wide range of primary texts, many unavailable in English, while using insights from recent literature. The first part offers a fresh re-reading of core aspects of Spinoza’s thought that are crucial for understanding Goetschel’s subsequent portrayal of late-Enlightenment Spinozism. Here his in-depth treatment of Spinoza’s “critical” underlying philosophy allows readers to connect Spinoza’s thought to concerns in contemporary philosophy and ethics, and prepares them for how these issues are taken up by Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine later in the study.
Arguing against interpretations that see Spinoza’s Ethics as the ultimate form of a philosophical system, Goetschel stresses the anti-totalizing character of Spinoza’s thought, which is constructivist and anti-hierarchical, as a special form of rationalism. The truth Spinoza sought was not one that was static and simply waiting to be grasped but one that unfolded in the act of cognition. The mos geometrico of Spinoza’s Ethics thusconstitutes a set of rules for engaging subject matter whose conclusions are not determined at the outset.
This open, searching rationalism also characterizes Spinoza’s approach to psychology, hermeneutics, society, and politics as found in his most mature works. The “critical” form of rationalism challenges Cartesian dualist rationalism, and this element becomes the key to those who later share Spinoza’s vision and project, however implicitly. While largely avoiding sociology-of-knowledge discussions, Goetschel relates the nature of Spinoza’s critical philosophy to his status as an excommunicated Jew, doubly marginalized in the context in which he lived.
It would have been helpful for Goetschel’s historical approach to include some analysis of the groups forming the immediate intellectual and social circles in which Spinoza lived for the rest of his life. To draw connections between his philosophical project and the concerns of the Collegiant, Socinian, and Mennonite intellectual communities in which he lived would further clarify the concrete historical environment in which his thought developed and was passed on. Here, in the marginalized Christian communities of the period, one may also find socio-political analogues of what Goetschel describes as traits of Jewishness. Indeed, the radical religious communities in which Spinoza eventually found a home provided an important social context for understanding the new intellectual movement of which he was a key leader.