Pantheism controversy
The pantheism is a fundamental for the German philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment debate about the view expressed by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi theory: Spinozism was the consistent expression of pantheism; that is more consistent rationalism and thus atheism.
Jacobi sought to prove this thesis against Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Goethe, Herder and others, who held the pantheism of a reasonable religious view and Spinozism, properly understood and, where appropriate, in a modified form, thus quite compatible. Jacobi case represented a philosophical position of Romanticism, which emphasized the irrationality against the rationalism and theology personalism. Jacobi unintended historical merit lies in the fact that he has just given by its strong fighting Spinoza's philosophy of a sharp profile and so brought his contemporaries consciousness.
The dispute was opened by Jacobi in his 1785 anonymously published book about the teaching of Spinoza in Letters to the Lord Moses Mendelssohn, in which he initially used only their own letters. All the world knew immediately who was the author. By Matthias Claudius, the book received the nickname " Spinoza Booklet ". In the second, strongly enlarged edition of 1789, Mendelssohn's letters were then printed. In the continuation of the center of gravity of the dispute of Lessing's real or suspected Spinozism shifted toward the justifiability of rationalism at all. It was mainly about the following questions:
The dispute was at the time a lot of attention. Immanuel Kant defended here the position of rationalism, by distinguishing between demonstrable reason insights and reason faith and stressed the limits of knowledge and faith. While Kant himself protested against equating his criticism with Spinozism, took place in the immediate aftermath of the armed echoed in the philosophers of German idealism by Schelling, namely by recourse to Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Spinoza's philosophical motives were revived. Ludwig Feuerbach drew the following quintessence:
" Spinoza is the author of speculative philosophy Schelling her restorer, Hegel her finisher Pantheism is the necessary consequence of theology (or theism ) - the consistent theology. . Atheism the necessary consequence of ' pantheism ', the consequent ' pantheism '. "
But he improved immediately in a footnote: he gebrauche The theological names here only in the sense trivial nickname. As such, they are wrong. So little of Spinoza and Hegel's philosophy is pantheism - the latter is rather a Orientalism - so little was modern philosophy atheism. About the necessary transition to half the theology to the whole, ie, to pantheism, § 112 was to compare his history of the philosophy of Bacon to Spinoza.