Germanic Forum: Jason Yonover (Johns Hopkins University) on “Freedom, the One-and-All: Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling, Günderrode, and Spinozism“

Date: 

Thursday, December 17, 2020, 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Location: 

Virtual

Germanic Forum Yonover

In cases as various as Goethe, Hegel, Nietzsche, and beyond, recent scholarship on modern German thought has shown that there is a great deal to learn in understanding how a wide range of figures position themselves with respect to Spinoza—a great deal to learn about such canonical thinkers, about Spinoza, and about the many exciting issues under debate, from the metaphysical and epistemological to the ethical and political. One problem with the literature on modern German thought and Spinoza, however, is that it has paid little to no attention to the women thinkers that engaged with Spinoza’s thought and its legacy. In this paper, I make some initial progress on that lacuna. In particular, I explore liberatory Spinozistic tendencies in the writings of Caroline Michaelis-Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling and Karoline von Günderrode, who develop divergent accounts of freedom that can productively be understood in relation both to one another and to Spinoza.