Our Inevitable Third Spinoza Controversy Ontologies of Necessity and Environmental Nihilism

The Spinoza Controversy – a debate over the correct use and inherent limits of human reason which swept through the German world of letters around 1800 – is usually treated as an interesting historical episode which came and went like any other intellectual debate during that tumultuous time in European intellectual life. This work presents a different view of the Controversy, arguing that it was never satisfactorily resolved, and must continually return to confront the West, particularly at times when our ability to make sense of the world by declaring it to be merely a zone in which only necessity-relations are real gets put under particular pressure. The Controversy arguably returned once to the discourse after the First World War; Snow argues that it is now time to recognize that its third iteration has begun. The West’s ongoing annihilation and literal vanishing of the natural world of our direct experience, and the rapid proliferation of novel types of pseudo-worlds and even entire private rationalities, both imply the need to radically rethink the proper construction and use of the ontology of necessity, including why it should not in fact be used as – and cannot in fact coherently continue to serve us as – our primary way of understanding nature and existence. The radical critique of the ontology of necessity first offered two hundred years ago by the “losing” side of the Controversy forms a vital starting point for re-navigating the Controversy today. The stakes of the Controversy this time around are nothing less than the individual’s freedom and even survival as a full subject, and the possible unraveling of Western reason itself, which if it is allowed to happen – if the Controversy is not arbitrated differently this third time around – will have been predicted, in essence, two hundred years ago during the first appearance of this intriguing, crucial, and yet at its heart compellingly simple debate.

1. Introduction.- 2. The Spinoza Controversy: Jacobi’s claims about the irredeemable price of romanticism and their neglected significance for environmental questions.- 3. The Spinoza Controversy Redux: Inter-war Germany’s self-consciously “religious” thinking about nature and the dispute over its boundaries.- 4. Interlude, I: The rise of modern physics and cosmology out of the same inter-war culture.- 5. Interlude, II: The post-War global destruction of the living world by humans and the use of the sciences to try to convey the resulting crisis and need for change.- 6. A Spinoza Controversy for our Time: Ecological nihilism, the limits of science, and the contemporary void of experience without meaning.- 7. Conclusion.

Katherine C. Snow is an environmental philosopher and research associate at Princeton University. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2021.