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...Whereas taking side at once with Spinoza were the really great and free spirits, our Goethe at their head, who calls him the Saint and christianissimum et theissimum, and calls himself a fervent disciple; he feels himself "very close", "although Spinoza's spirit is much deeper and purer than his own." We will analyze at another occasion how far the thinker and how far the poet Goethe was stirred by his enthusiasm for Spinoza; it was also this poet who, since, has been called the Spinoza of poetry. In fact, without the spirit of Spinozist thinking no poet nor artist is really conceivable, and, how important could Spinoza become to each of them! "Indeed, I do not understand how one could be a poet," writes Friedrich Schlegel in his speech on mythology, "without admiring and loving Spinoza and becoming his follower. In the invention of particular subjects your imagination is rich enough; to stimulate, to excite it to activity and to provide it with nourishment nothing is more appropriate than the poetries of other artists. In Spinoza however you find the beginning and the end of all imagination, the general ground and basis on which your own thinking reposes and that very separation of the primordial, of the eternal awareness, from all individual and particular subjects, should be very welcome to you. Seize the occasion and take a look! You are granted a penetrating glance into the innermost workshop of poetry. And as with his imagination, so is it also with Spinoza's affectivity. No sensitiveness for this or that, no passion which rises and falls; but a limpid fragrance hovers invisible-visible over the whole: everywhere the eternal longing finds a reminiscence soaring from the depth of the simple opus, which in its quiet grandeur breathes the eternal spirit of primordial love." I say that all free and active spirits paid homage to Spinoza as to their sovereign—for he was not one of those pedantic philosophers, but the true king and savior of the Espritals, of all those who find their inner life in Philosophy, in Art and in Love. And this familiarity with Spinoza's ideas coincided with the most important period of modern German history, with the rising and liberation of all beautiful and noble trends in the German being; the important part played by these ideas in the said events will be ignored or undervalued only by those who do not know the power of ideas and how at that period the rediscovery of Spinoza precipitated everything in utter tension and passion and was the fact and reason why all dynamic spirits joined Spinoza. Their discovery of Spinoza became the discovery of themselves and areas which until then were nameless, as the hidden depth which directs their life and generates ideas in their heart, suddenly acquired a verbal expression. (en) |
