The chapter explores the concept of the individual as a democratic citizen who voluntarily exercises rights and authority, and can both legitimize and delegitimize the government. It suggests that Western secular cosmological dualism, which separates the world from man, has led to the development of the modern individual, capable of introspection, autonomy, and agency. This dualism creates a divide between the physical human body and the autonomous human mind and spirit. It has facilitated the simultaneous growth of natural sciences and humanities. The chapter examines how this secular imaginary, based on the separation of Nature and man since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is reflected in the philosophical discourses of influential thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. They explored the potential of this separation to evolve human agency in politics and to derive universal rights from Nature to safeguard individual freedom in society and politics. This dual cosmology also led to the development of social sciences and varying views on voluntarism and natural determinism, as seen in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Finally, it shows how Nature has become a cultural resource through art.

In this chapter, Ezrahi analyzes the influence of philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Vico, and Rousseau, as well as the Federalists, on the shift from a medieval monistic cosmology based on God to a modern dualistic cosmology, emphasizing dynamic Nature and human agency. These thinkers played a pivotal role in shaping a political order and obedience independent of divine authority, turning to Nature as the source of laws and a check on human actions. This transformation led to the emergence of new concepts, such as the state, freedom, and equality, despite their being imaginative. Hobbes pioneered the use of metaphors and empirical sciences in civic affairs. Spinoza adopted a detached scientific perspective, viewing human emotions and drives as natural phenomena. Locke presented empiricism and probability to inform political decisions through an understanding of human judgment. Vico proclaimed that political systems are based on collective political imagination, facilitating the construction of institutions and political processes rooted in commonsense. Rousseau further developed the dichotomy of Nature/Culture, highlighting its impact on politics, education, and ethics. The American Revolution marked the merging of objective Nature and human agency, giving rise to the idea of employing science to manipulate Nature.

Proposition 67 of Spinoza’s hyper-rationalistic Ethics proudly proclaims that: “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death.” Well, in this book I have thought a great deal about existential death, and a good bit about the “noth-ing of the nothing” that such death discloses. Still, I have probably thought of noth-ing less than of death, so Spinoza might have to count me “free” on a technicality. There are, at any rate, worse things than being freed on a technicality. One can be convicted on a technicality, for example, or even convicted by technicality. Indeed, the later Heidegger suggests that we have all been convicted by technicality, technicity, or technologicity, that is, by “the essence of technology.” According to his view of our late modern age of technological enframing, we have all been thrown by Western history into the prison city-state (or polis) of nihilistic technologicity.

Chapter 21 examines Goethe’s relationship to German Idealism. Although the speculative nature of the Idealist method appears alien to Goethe’s own thought, and he himself expressed reservations about it, his poetic and scientific works display a significant degree of sympathy with the concerns that motivated his contemporaries. The chapter highlights the importance of Spinoza in the alignment between Goethe and Idealist thought, before considering in detail the significance of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and above all Schelling, whose philosophy of nature and art is particularly resonant with Goethe’s own.

Chapter 7 examines Goethe’s unconventional attitudes to religion and religious authority, and their influence on his creative work. It emphasises that, despite his opposition to institutionalised Christianity, Goethe remained interested in Christian beliefs and convinced of the value of scriptural reading. The chapter details his engagement with Spinozist Pantheism (the view of God as embodied in the world), with Judaism and the Hebrew Bible, and with Islam. It argues that we should see in Goethe’s approach not the rejection of religious narratives, but their reframing and rewriting.

Chapter 19 examines Goethe’s relationship to philosophy, which throughout his life was one of both interest and guarded distance. It considers the transformations which philosophy as a discipline underwent during his lifetime, details Goethe’s attitudes to intellectual developments in his own time, above all the work of Kant, and devotes particular attention to Spinoza, without whose inspiration Goethe’s work is unthinkable, even if it cannot be reduced to a Spinozist position. The chapter also emphasises the singularity of Goethe’s own thought, which was forever transforming any influences that it received, becoming a source of inspiration and critical reflection for contemporary and succeeding generations of philosophers.

Chapter Two examines the various discourses of nature in early Romantic-period scientific, philosophical, religious, and poetic texts, showing how these have contributed to the emergence of the biological sciences and of ecological consciousness. Highlighting interchanges between Germany and Britain, it first looks at definitions of nature in both languages, arguing that the term underwent a semantic explosion between 1750 and 1850. Informed by recent ecocritical theory, it then bases itself on an anonymously published 1783 essay co-authored by G.C. Tobler and Goethe to revise the commonplace idea of Romantic nature as something wild, pure and distinct from culture. Drawing on the ideas of Spinoza and Leibniz via Herder and Schelling, the text imagines nature as an active, self-organising process of becoming in which humans participate. This Naturphilosophie informed an ethos of contemplation often cast in opposition to industrial capitalism. The chapter then discusses Romantic language theories and their relation with the non-human world. It closes with an overview of nature’s spiritual dimension in the theology of Schleiermacher and poetry of William Wordsworth, John Clare, and, again, Blake.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the composition, publishing, and reception histories of Peter Bell and The Waggoner, poems dating from the late 1790s and early 1800s but not published until 1819. In a reading of Peter Bell, the chapter reflects on the representation of violence and on the poem’s attempts to negotiate the terms of a peaceable relationship between the human and the non-human. In the discussion of The Waggoner, the focus turns to the poem’s meditation on creative failure, artistic isolation, and the potential for cooperative living in the aftermath of war. Picking up on the conative entanglement of human and non-human entities addressed in Peter Bell, the chapter concludes with a consideration of how Benjamin’s waggon works like a peaceable commonwealth to realise the potential of its component parts in ways that advance the well-being of the whole.

In this chapter, we consider a group of philosophers who formed their views in opposition to voluntarist natural law. Although there are important differences between Spinoza, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Leibniz, all four were united by their opposition to voluntarism. For voluntarists, even natural law is a kind of positive law since it is created by God’s discretionary imposition. Against this, Cudworth complained that voluntarism makes morality “positive, arbitrary and factitious only” and unable to explain morality’s “eternal and immutable” character. Leibniz was also a critic of positivist law, and he subversively reinterprets law in terms of love. Justice, he says, is the “charity of the wise.” For his part, Spinoza opposes not just positivist law but law itself. Indeed, although his great metaphysical work is titled Ethics, it constitutes nothing less than a metaphysical reduction of ethical or normative categories. At the same time, he develops a deeply attractive account of human freedom that inspired thinkers to come (including Nietzsche). Shaftesbury draws mostly from Cudworth, but in a way that gives rise to the moral sense tradition of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.

The most disastrous blunder of the age was its refusal to acknowledge what most subalternised cultures and people took for granted: nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. The reckless destruction of nature ended up threatening the survival of the human species, in the form of recurrent pandemics, extreme weather events, massive numbers of environment refugees, the disappearance of small island states, and environment-related chronic diseases. I argue in this chapter that all the main mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination at work in modern societies – whether class, race or gender – are traceable to the root dualisms between humanity and nature, and between mind/soul and body. The ways in which modern society deals with inferiority are modelled on the ways it deals with nature. If abyssal exclusion means domination by appropriation/violence, nature – including land, rivers and forests as well as people and ways of being and living whose humanity was negated precisely for being part of nature – has been the favoured target of this domination in Western modernity since the sixteenth century. I start by examining old and new contestations of Cartesian dualism, then I illustrate how this contestation has entered the field of law, what it entails and the prospects for the future. The rights of nature are a promising real legal utopia.

There is today so much inequality, discrimination, and uncertainty concerning the future that the lives of most people in the world are dominated by fear rather than by hope. However, people cannot afford to be so pessimistic, given that their struggle for survival, an urgent and inescapable everyday task, is at stake. Their struggle will be all the more successful, and their revolt all the more likely to attract followers, if more and more people come to the realization that the hopeless fear of powerless majorities stems from the fearless hope of powerful minorities. This epochal condition endows our time with an atmosphere of monstrosity, i.e. the unpredictable and uninsurable risk to avert vulnerability, the almost incommensurable power differences between oppressors and oppressed, and systemic impunity. Monsters present themselves as specifically disturbing threats, while at the same time constituting realms within which there is room for manoeuvre and resistance. This chapter identifies seven such threats.

This chapter considers how Jacobi’s philosophy of mind distinguishes itself by ascribing a resolutely realist intuition to sensibility, the intellect, and reason. The key to this difference is Jacobi’s personalism, or self-feeling – an awareness of the finite nature of one’s existence – which reveals itself as an unmediated, pre-discursive, non-sensuous actuality.

Jacobi played a determinative role in shaping the landscape from which German Romanticism would emerge. His critique of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte, and his advocacy of transcendent realism, would deeply influence Early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin and would go on to shape the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This chapter outlines the relationship between Johann Georg Hamann and Jacobi, demonstrating its significance for their respective reception within the history of ideas. Despite Jacobi and Hamann’s affinity in friendship, there were significant differences in the very foundation of their post-enlightenment thought.

This chapter addresses Jacobi’s literary contributions, Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters and Woldemar, in the context of his critique of both Enlightenment reason and feeling. Both, Jacobi argues, undermined human individuality and freedom.

This analysis of Jacobi’s pivotal Spinoza Letters illustrates that the driving force behind his innovative altercation with Spinoza lies not in religious motives, but rather in motives derived from the philosophy of action. By putting into effect the contradiction between system and freedom in the practical sphere, Jacobi opened up new perspectives in modernity’s own self-understanding.