Early Modern Naturalism in Modern German Thought

In this dissertation, I explore how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century shapes of naturalism impact the thought of several key figures on the cusp of or within the nineteenth-century German tradition. By “naturalism” I mean here the view according to which there is nothing but nature. In clarifying the legacy of early modern versions of this view in the modern German context, I contribute to recent scholarship in at least two main ways. First, in each case I supplement the literature on particular figures who are discussed in detail throughout the dissertation—for instance, in the dissertation’s fourth chapter, Friedrich Nietzsche and Benedict Spinoza. Nietzsche once considered Spinoza his only “predecessor” (Vorgänger), and indeed a number of links between the two remain to be explained. But here I primarily show, and for the first time: (a) that there’s a consistent tendency to etiology in Spinoza resulting from his naturalist perspective; (b) that Nietzsche was attracted to this dimension of his thought; and also (c) that clarifying as much can help us understand what’s at stake in Nietzsche’s related engagement with genealogy. Second, I contribute to scholarship on modern German thought more generally by helping to distinguish what I claim to be a major dimension of the tradition. Alongside the dissertation’s chapter on Nietzsche and Spinoza, for instance, further chapters on especially the Jewish Enlightenment (Moses Mendelssohn and Salomon Maimon), Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe demonstrate that the strict naturalism of early modern thinkers like Spinoza proved a prominent challenge to later figures, and to a degree that has not adequately been appreciated. Of course, any given intellectual context can be understood from any number of perspectives. But I argue across the dissertation that central German thinkers grasped the allure of strict early modern formulations of naturalism—their consistency, their explanatory power, and more—and were decisively also then forced to confront the difficulties such thinking presented for prevailing notions of God, humanity, and human knowledge in particular. In short, I propose in this dissertation that the naturalist perspective establishing robust continuity in nature posed a substantial challenge to an entire era, as is evident from a close look at several prominent representatives—and although my aims in this dissertation are primarily intellectual-historical, I also ultimately suggest that the difficulties resulting from a consistent commitment to naturalism continue to loom large