tion of church and state. The 1769 incident made an attention center out of
the cleavage between rationalist Deists and sentimentalists. Soon afterwards
Goethe gave impetus to the latter by launching Sturm und Drang.^4
The literary network, far more than the philosophical one centered on the
universities, was the cosmopolitan path for making rapid contacts, spreading
enthusiasm, and acquiring fame. The takeoff of Kantian philosophy came when
it was adopted by the core literary network; and the first big waves of philo-
sophical attention went not to Kant but to Jacobi, who used the literary
network to publicize Spinoza.The Spinozastreit, or Pantheism Controversy of 1785
The second flashpoint is around Jacobi. He belongs to the same network: an
acquaintance of Lavater, a friend of Goethe on the basis of previous family
connections since both were young poets in the 1770s, Jacobi made his entrée
into the intellectual world on Goethe’s coattails. Jacobi pursued a career not
too different from Goethe’s bread and butter as a lawyer-official at Düsseldorf
on the lower Rhine. He was no literary success, but he kept aggressively
cultivating the network, on the Deist side as well as that of its opponents.
Jacobi got himself into the confidence of Lessing, famous from the 1760s
for his aesthetic criticism and his dramas extolling the rational basis of all
religions, underlying Judaism and Christianity alike. After Lessing’s death in
1781, Jacobi created a furor by publishing Lessing’s letters to Moses Men-
delssohn and declaring that he had been a Spinozaist. The year was 1785, four
years after Kant’s Critique but before Kant became famous. The ensuing
quarrel in letters, pamphlets, and the major literary journals drew in not only
Mendelssohn and the Berlin Deists but also Goethe, Herder, and Hamann, a
gathering of the contemporary famous.
Jacobi did not openly endorse Spinoza, but declared the latter’s monistic
determinism the only rationally consistent philosophical position, while reject-
ing it as incompatible with Christian faith. Jacobi thereby shared in the
publicity of the intellectual focus of attention without attaching to himself the
onus of unconventionality. Earlier, in the 1770s, Jacobi had used his knowledge
of Spinoza to impress the newly famous Goethe, who looked on Jacobi as a
guide in his quest for a sympathetic philosophy of nature and spirit. As late
as 1784, just before Jacobi’s attack on Spinoza, he was conferring with Goethe
and Herder at Weimar on Spinoza’s significance. And as Jacobi became the
storm center of attack on the new philosophy and maneuvered to draw the
non-polemical Kant into combat, he kept up an unctuous correspondence with
the very pro-Spinozaist Goethe; eventually, by cultivating Hamann, Jacobi
engineered a friendly contact with Kant himself (Zammito, 1992: 230–237).
628 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths