Finally, it is out: Wolfgang Bartuschat’s new German translation of Spinoza’s Letters—and with this, the last piece of Spinoza’s work that was still lacking a modern and philosophically adequate German translation since Bartuschat took up the gigantic task of retranslating all of Spinoza’s work into German in 1993. Like his previous translations, Bartuschat’s new translation of Spinoza’s letters is a success. It provides a philosophically accurate, yet well-readable German translation of Spinoza’s correspondence, originally written in Latin and Dutch. What is more, Bartuschat’s new translation masterfully preserves the variation of Spinoza’s original tone: his enthusiasm when he is confronted with serious inquiries that express the correspondent’s desire for truth and understanding, his recalcitrance when it comes to explaining things that he takes to have already sufficiently explained elsewhere, and even the rare flashes of his dry humor. Due to this, Bartuschat’s translation is not only helpful for the Spinoza scholar, but also for those merely interested in the intellectual atmosphere of the seventeenth-century Netherlands where critical libertines, defenders of the science nouvelle, and missionizing Catholics struggled with how to conceive of the world and our place within it.

Above all, however, the new German edition of Spinoza’s letters bears the hallmarks of its philosophical translator. Wolfgang Bartuschat is one of the most distinguished Spinoza scholars in Germany, and his translation profits a lot from his outstanding expertise. The same holds for his introduction and his detailed comments: in altogether 154 comments on thirty-eight pages, Bartuschat reminds us of important background information of Spinoza’s philosophy and fills in the details of many of Spinoza’s rather sketchy remarks. In doing so, Bartuschat goes well beyond usual editorial commentaries. His comments are full of valuable historical information about persons, books, and institutions mentioned in the letters, but in addition to this they are philosophically revealing. Drawing from his expertise, Bartuschat provides a lot of background to Spinoza’s explanations which otherwise had to be compiled from a range of scattered remarks in Spinoza’s oeuvre. This is enormously helpful, especially for those who have not read through Spinoza’s works (yet). At the same time, the reader should bear in mind that Bartuschat’s comments are all but exegetically neutral. They often reflect his distinctive exegetical views, some of which are hotly debated in the secondary literature on Spinoza. Let me illustrate this by mentioning just two examples:

In his comment number 10, for instance, Bartuschat points out the unclear nature of Spinozist axioms and notes that the only commonality between them consists in the fact that they are “unprovable sentences” (293). This view has not only been contested (cf. Jonathan Bennett, A Study on Spinoza’s Ethics [1984], 18f.), but also faces a textual problem. It seems to run against Spinoza’s own explication of axiom 5a2 of his Ethics, where Spinoza says that this axiom is evident from 3p7.

In comment number 124, Bartuschat takes up the intricate question as to how the finite modes follow from God’s infinite attributes. Not at least due to Hegel’s famous objection that in Spinoza the assumption of finite modes “is not deduced, it is found,” this question is widely discussed. Without mentioning this discussion, Bartuschat simply holds that there is no causal connection between the derivative infinite mode (“the face of the universe”) and the finite modes that it comprises. Though I am very sympathetic with Bartuschat’s view, it is surely not that exegetically innocent that it can be accepted without further comments or qualifications.

As helpful then as Bartuschat’s comments are, they should be taken with their due grain of salt: they are rich, thoughtful and philosophically illuminating, but they are also opinionated. Occasional room for disagreement, however, only bespeaks their philosophical substance. And given Bartuschat’s superb modern translation of Spinoza’s Briefwechsel, the German audience has now—in conjunction with Bartuschat’s formidable translation of the rest of Spinoza’s work—all means to critically assess them.