The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

neoplatonic forms of piety and the establishment of a new, modern alternative based
on autonomy, separation and ultimately indifference towards the divine.
To comprehend this ‘ideological’ employment of Spinoza, we must turn to the context
of Liebe und Selbstheit—a burgeoning ‘ethical neo-Spinozism’ in 1770s and early
1780s Germany. There were a number of German thinkers at this period (including
Herder and Lessing) who took part in a recovery of Spinoza’s thought, but did so by
‘reading the Ethics back-to-front’. Instead of concentrating on Parts I and II of the
Ethics with their stress on metaphysics and the ultimate unity of all reality, this
‘ethical neo-Spinozism’ sought to reinvent Spinozism by appropriating insights from
the latter parts of the work on human desires and emotions. Avoiding Spinoza’s
pantheism, these thinkers were far more interested in his accounts of conatus and
joyful passions.
Therefore, prior to the pantheism controversy in 1785—when Jacobi published his
Briefe and so when Spinoza-reception went mainstream—there was a period in which
Spinoza was used as a resource for moral philosophy. 15 During the 1770s and early
1780s, Herder frequently makes clear his adherence to the later portions of the Ethics.
For example, he writes,
Without doubt Spinoza was no Christian and no enthusiast. But take the purely
ethical part of his Ethics, quite separately from his metaphysics, and see… in the
simplest and most powerful way [Christian ethics] confirmed by facts, and
grounded in its whole design. (Quoted in Bell, 1984, p. 55)