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

gave rise to Ganymed, the Spinozism of the poem was very likely to have been
understood (not entirely unjustly) through the lens of the neoplatonic tradition (see
further Bell, 1984, pp. 149-51). It is for this reason (as I go on to argue) Prometheus
too was unlikely to have been intended as a Spinozist poem by Goethe at the time.
7 In English: On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn. I will refer
to this work as the Briefe.
8 This even seemed strange to Lessing’s contemporaries. An anonymous reviewer
wrote in 1786, ‘To say that the Gods are wretched beings, that man saves himself, that
the Gods do nothing but sleep and we need not revere them—none of this yet amounts
to agreeing with Spinoza… That Lessing had found Spinozism [in Goethe’s
Prometheus is a] mystery.’ (Quoted in di Giovanni, 1994, p. 68).
9 ‘Zeus… is for Goethe-Prometheus an enemy, not a nonentity.’ (Boyle, 1991, p. 168)
10 See note 6 above.
11 In English: Love and Selfhood, A Postscript to Hemsterhuis’ Letter on Desire.
12 I provide more detail about Hemsterhuis and his context in a later section.
13 Although Hemsterhuis wrote in French, he was based in Germany—specifically in
Münster, as we shall soon discover.
14 Such speculation leads Hemsterhuis into some murky waters. He finds it difficult
on this basis, for example, to discriminate against ‘pederasty and other monstrous
couplings of men and animals’, for ‘it is evident that these abuses are born naturally
from this universal attractive force’ (ibid, p. 59).
15 I am here closely following Bell, 1984, p. 171.
16 For Goethe’s account of his relation with the Münster circle, see 1919, I/33:230-45;
1987, 2:709-35.
17 See also Abrams (1971, p. 146) for a similar claim.