Spinozist Monism, or the Ethics of Natural Necessity in Nineteenth-Century Germany

In the late nineteenth century, Spinozist monism often served as a means for intellectuals to try to undercut many of the binaries that defined the century's “culture wars”: science vs. religion, ethics vs. determinism, materialism vs. conscious agency. Left-leaning intellectuals in Germany in particular turned to the seventeenth-century philosopher's thought as a means to discuss ethics in terms of immanence, and in keeping with laws of natural necessity. My paper will examine the work of three individuals at the end of the nineteenth century who found in Spinoza's thought a means to articulate an ethics within – rather than in opposition to – natural science. These include the Marxist Jakob Stern's interpretation of Spinoza within orthodox historical materialism as a science; Ferdinand Tönnies's sociological effort to understand a Spinozist ethics as akin to “chemistry and engineering,” and the psychiatrist Julius Friedlaender's works on Spinozism within the natural sciences. The organic connection between all three efforts to popularize a Spinozist ethics was their articulation within the context of the German Society for Ethical Culture, an organization that was itself devoted to the critical interrogation of ethics as a modern and secular category. Conceptually the more important connection between the three, however, was their joint participation in what I call an “alternative” Enlightenment legacy, a legacy of the Enlightenment that relied neither on transcendent universalism, nor on disenchanted mechanistic materialism. Rather, for these secularly oriented and left-leaning thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century, Spinoza's monism – his equation of God with nature, his understanding of thought and matter as two attributes of one singular substance, even his logical focus on an individuated ethics as a means to overcome atomized individuation – provided a means to think about an ethics of immanence and the subjective meaning in the causal necessity of the material world.