This article is part of The Return of Metaphysics series, and was produced in partnership with the Essentia Foundation.
Spinoza is having a moment. Previously dismissed as a speculative metaphysician, his metaphysical monism has been rehabilitated even in analytic-dominated Anglophone philosophy. But it’s his challenge to humanism and its commitment to human exceptionalism that’s most relevant today, and the hardest to accept, argues Yitzhak Y. Melamed.
A few years ago, I took part in a conference at Bochum University, and partly out of respect for the university which hosts the illustrious Hegel-Archiev, I decided to present a paper in which I argued that, not unlike Hegel’s Encyclopedie, one can profitably read Spinoza’s Ethics as a circular text which ends just where it begins. The Q&A session after my talk was lively and joyous, but one specific question still resonates with me. “This was an interesting talk. Still, if I may. What is the point of engaging again with Spinoza’s metaphysics? Has not Kant already proved that dogmatic metaphysic is obsolete?” asked one of the participants, a senior Kant scholar and philologist. Since the question was genuinely well-meant and fair, I asked the scholar whether he would mind repeating Kant’s proof, so that we could consider it jointly. At which point I was rewarded with a warm, generous, smile followed by a hand gesture which I interpreted as indicating certain desperateness or recognition that some “dogmatic” philosophers are just incorrigible.
SUGGESTED READING
The Return of Metaphysics: Hegel vs Kant
By Robert Pippin
While few contemporary philosophers would be as blunt as this colleague and friend, one must admit that the underlying view that Kant killed off metaphysics dominated modern philosophy until very recently. This perception of Kant as the “all-crushing [Alleszermalmer]” destroyer of metaphysics, is not groundless.
Join the conversation