Repository | Book | Chapter

"Goethe was never a Spinozist,"¹ claimed Wilhelm Dilthey in "Aus der Zeit der Spinozastudien Goethes' ("From the Time of Goethe's Spinoza Studies"), one of the essays assembled in his Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation (Worldview and Analysis of Humanity since the Renaissance and Reformation). Situated amid a wide range of reflections on the rise of the "modern worldview" that Dilthey assembled between 1891 and 1904, the claim comes as a bit of a surprise, as Goethe had conventionally been seen as a pivotal figure in Spinoza reception. In the wake of the so-called Pantheism Controversy of the late eighteenth century, in which contemporaries debated the deleterious moral implications of Baruch Spinoza's thought, Goethe boldly discovered and celebrated Spinoza's famous equation of God with nature,² helping to pave the way for the establishment of Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher of Portuguese descent, as a "German classic."³ Since Dilthey was quite clearly aware of the influence conventionally attributed to Goethe's Spinozism—his own citations betray him on that front—it may warrant asking about the argument he was initiating with his claim and about the context in which it would have resonated.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137011749_5

Full citation: