Thread by @jholbo1

The Kant thing is boring because the guy hasn't read Kant and is, therefore, making stuff up. But it's interesting that a grown man, who doesn't have a college paper due, would straight up pretend to have read any Kant. Like, any. 1/

The interesting thing, for those who care about Kant, is the way in which Kant's own career started with a similar, spun-up 'I haven't read it but I'm talking about it' episode. (I have been harping on this, intellectually & graphically in recent months, but it's interesting!) 2/

The Pantheism controversy, in German ideas & letters, starts when the philosopher Jacobi tells the philosopher Mendelssohn the playwright Lessing confessed to him to having been a closet Spinozist. 3/

Anxious exchanges follow. Mendelssohn had been planning to write a bio of Lessing. Mendelssohn dies from a cold he reportedly catches running to his publisher's office, without a coat, due to Jacobi publishing first. Ugh. 4/

The freakout is due to Jacobi playing up Lessing's alleged Spinozism to mean even moderate Enlightenment influence (Lessing seems the very model of a modern major Aufklärer) must lead to 'nihilism'! (Jacobi coins 'nihilism' and so we have it today.) 5/

Since everyone is freaking out it's a great time to sell books so Rheinhold writes a popularizing book, expounding the philosophy of this prominent professor Kant, who has written these big, thick, forbidding books. Rheinhold: Kant saves us from the nihilism dilemma! 6/

That's why Kant's famous to this day! & in a weird way the subsequent course of German idealism is set, because Jacobi & Fichte go at it, hammer and tongs, and the three biggies, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are all not just following Kant but trying to balance Spinoza & Kant. 7/

But it isn't really Spinoza. Just 'Spinoza', for a Pantheismusstreit value of that. (What card was going to be #7? I never got around to making a Hamann card. Kant's frenemy Hamann told him about what Jacobi was up to.) 8/

Anyway, what's the significance? Big picture: everyone is artificially freaking out about a Jew, Spinoza, dead a century, whom few have read - few even of those who end up wrapped up in this whole brouhaha. (Ain't it the way. 'Find me a dead, dangerous Jew.') 9/

Jacobi is a conservative who disapproves of Enlightenment, cosmopolitan liberalism and rationalism - as emblematized by Lessing and expounded by Mendelssohn (another Jew! Makes you think!) 10/

So, obviously, cultural anxieties are working themselves out. Conservatives want Enlightenment revealed as an alien infection! A thing that is sure to end in disaster. So the threat from Spinoza is a weird sort of scapegoat wish fulfillment fantasy. 11/

Then, in a weird way, there's backlash. Jacobi only makes Spinoza popular - puts him up on a pedestal for the 'other side'. If Jacobi is sure Spinoza is all bad, he must be a bit of alright! (That doesn't explain pro-Spinozist German idealism, but there's a bit of that.) 12/

If you want to understand, not why Kant is important, but where the 'energy' comes from at this time, the 'Pantheismusstreit' is key. I haven't talked about pantheism! It's kind of a MacGuffin, really. "I'll show YOU the life of the mind!" as a man said. 13/

So many different figures end up getting dragged in. It's huge! And figures and events - 'Sturm und Drang' - get retroactively revalued. (I was going to make more cards but I got tired. But Coleridge is the guy who spreads it to Britain.)

Getting back to today, the Pantheismussreit really is the template for modern culture war fights ... like the fight over CRT. You see unrest & conflict. BLM! What is behind this terrifying threat from within? It must be Adorno and the Frankfurt School. A threat from without! 14/

The sheer implausibility of that causal influence claim (why are we talking about CRT? how many people read this stuff?) is mirrored in earlier freak-outs about Spinoza. Jacobi is a lot like contemporary culture warriors on the right, then. Same Twitter energy. 15/

And one irony is that somehow Jacobi's portrait has gotten mistaken for Kant's, so you get t-shirts like this which show Jacobi's face, and are oddly ... appropriate. Because Jacobi tried to stop philosophy. But Kant stopped him, sort of? 16/ dailynous.com/2019/12/20/tha…

And one more thing. Jacobi has to engage in a two-step - against 'reason', also for it - that, in the end, has him dancing on heads of pins, making wild moves (leaps of faith) when he wants to be the guy with his feet solidly on the ground. Not crazy, like these nihilists. 17/

The analogy today would be with the way that everything comes up CRT. Criticism of reason is CRT. Irrationalism! But, also, rationalism (which fails to appreciate the humane truth of conservatism) is CRT. All these Utopian blueprints for making everyone equal! Pure reason! 18/

If being either FOR and AGAINST reason makes you CRT, things are getting pretty darn CRT up in here. The South seceded to defend CRT. Legally, that's true in a lot of states now. (But then why aren't Confederate flags symbols of CRT? Riddle me that.) 19/

Philosophically - stepping back from the CRT scene - the thing to see, which people don't always, is how 'the Spinozist imaginary' feeds into the legacy of Kant (who never read Spinoza.) It makes German philosophy oddly relatable to see how it's like CRT Kulturkampf of today. 20/

Final thought: but Kant never pretended to have read Spinoza! He was reasonably good about being fairly calm about all that. But he got dragged in. Both Jacobi and Mendelssohn wanted him as an ally. Kant is a guy who gets dragged into stuff that isn't his fault a lot of the time.

[Sorry, having made my little trading cards, for pedagogy purposes, I have to keep playing 'em and playing 'em, for fun.]

I should recommend readings. Read everyone's SEP page, of course. Start with Jacobi. Read Beiser's books. This Berkeley his book is good, although the angle seems quirky. It contains good, clear, basic intro and I personally appreciate the Coleridge angle. books.google.com.sg/books/about/Co…

This thread doin' numbers. If anyone wants graphical swag, I've got a shop. (I really need to make all the Pantheism cards available to be stickers and fridge magnets, because that's so darn funny. And I need to make a Jacobi t-shirt. Maybe today.) redbubble.com/people/jholbo/…