Idealism and Asexualism j 439439 439
Schelling’s formulation of Naturphilosophie owed much to the writings of the Dutch
philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was born into a Jewish émigré community in
Amsterdam populated by families who had fled Portugal to escape forced conversion and
the Inquisition. Although an excellent student, he abandoned his rabbinical studies at the
age of seventeen to work in his family’s export business. By the time he was twenty- three,
his reputation as a heretical thinker was so widespread that he incurred the wrath not
only of the Talmud Torah congregation, but also of the local Calvinist clergy. According
to Stephen Nadler, Spinoza was probably expressing those ideas he would later incorpo-
rate into his philosophical writings, which negated beliefs fundamental to Jewish identity,
such as the existence of a providential God, the claim that Jews received their Laws directly
from God (and are therefore bound by them), and the immortality of the soul.^32 He was
soon expelled from the congregation and forced to leave Amsterdam, after which he spent
the remainder of his years as a private scholar in nearby towns, earning his living as a lens
grinder and instrument maker.
The aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy that most appealed to Schelling and the other
Romantics was his contention that God and nature are one. No longer does God stand
apart from nature, immune from nature’s laws. The unity, God/ Nature, obeys physical
laws and proceeds in a temporal chain of cause and effect. And since humans are part of
God/ Nature, human consciousness is an aspect of God/ Nature as well. Thus, in one stroke,
Spinoza eliminated the dualism between the spiritual and the material, between mind
and body.
This was the holistic argument that Schelling was seeking in order to extricate
Naturphilosophie from the logical absurdities of Fichte’s subjective idealism. On the
other hand, Schelling rejected Spinoza’s belief in mechanistic determinism. Like Holbach,
Spinoza had argued that free will was an illusion and that humans could no more choose
to do what they do than a newborn “chooses” to suck its mother’s breast. Such a view ran
counter to the Romantics’ insistence on the existence of free will. While conceding that
most human activities may be instinctual, Schelling asserted that it was nevertheless pos-
sible to experience free will through the study and practice of Naturphilosophie, which
enabled the mind to free itself from the bondage of determinism. Taking his cue from Kant,
however, Schelling argued that great artists had no need of free will because of their ability
to perceive pre- existing, universal ideals of beauty and translate them into material form.^33Goethe’s Early Career
Goethe was born in 1749, in Frankfurt am Maim, a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman
Empire, to a relatively affluent family that owed its prosperity to inherited wealth.^34 His
father was trained as a lawyer and had purchased the honorific title of Imperial Councillor,
which carried prestige but involved few official duties. His mother came from a distin-
guished line of lawyers and city officials. Goethe attributed his imagination and creative
gifts to his mother. From his father, who had made the grand tour of Europe in his youth, he
absorbed a deep desire to study classical art and to experience the exotic landscapes of Italy.
As a boy, Goethe aspired to become a dramatist, but his father insisted that he follow a
more practical path. After completing his training as a lawyer, Goethe had the good for-
tune to meet the young Duke Karl August of Weimar, who was sufficiently impressed by