Abstract
Spinoza’s pantheism was treated with cynical mockery by Georg Büchner. If God is present in all things of Nature, he scoffed in his tragedy Danton’s Death (1836), then he is bound to suffer our toothaches and even our venereal diseases too — a most edifying thought indeed! Except that Spinoza’s God is not totally contained within everything but rather extends himself, as it were, in varying degrees of divine perfection into all things. This is not our topic, however. Without going into the details of his philosophical system, I just wish to point out that this great 17th century thinker was still in the focus of discussion in the 1830s when Büchner wrote his play.
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Notes
Cf. my articles: “The Sea in Faust and Goethe’s Verdict on His Hero”. In: A. T. Tymieniecka (ed.): Analecta Husserliana XIX, 433–45; “Irrestorable Destruction and Tragic Reconciliation in Goethe’s Faust” .In: Goethe Proceedings. Essays Commemorating the Goethe Sesquicentennial, ed. Clifford Bernd, et al. (Columbia SC: Camden House 1984), 93–106.
Cf. “‘Daß er als Kleinod gehütet werde’. Stifter’s Nachsommer. Eine Revision”. In: Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft 16 (1975), 73–132. Translated by Christoph Steppich
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Wittkowski, W. (1990). Beware of the Beasts! Spinoza and the Elemental Passions in German Literature. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passions of the Soul Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: Part 3. Analecta Husserliana, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2335-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2335-5_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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