ᚺÈÅᛏᚺËN

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), a Dutch Jew, is considered one of the primary figures in the rationalist movement in modern philosophy. Spinoza argued that God is the whole – the entire universe of being, and therefore that nothing exists outside God. Traditional theology, by contrast, had maintained that God is absolutely distinct from nature. Spinoza completely rejects this, arguing that nature (“extension”) and thought are the two primary modes of God’s being. For many, this was a sublime conception. But proponents of orthodoxy saw it as extraordinarily dangerous. For them, Spinoza had erased the distinction between God and nature, which was the same thing as erasing God. Spinozism was therefore equated with atheism. More sympathetic critics equated it with “pantheism.” Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin all came of age during the notorious Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy) of the late seventeenth century. This was sparked by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s 1785 work On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mr. Moses Mendelssohn, in which Jacobi reported a private remark made by Gotthold Lessing: “The orthodox concepts of the deity are no longer for me. Hen kai pan, I know no other.” This resulted in a revival of interest in Spinoza and pantheism, which sharply divided both intellectuals and the literate public. Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin were all strongly sympathetic to Spinozism and pantheism, and jointly adopted hen kai pan (“one and all,” i.e., “all is one”) as their motto while at the Tübingen seminary.