Introduction

Abstract

It is perhaps hard to imagine two more disparate figures in the entire history of philosophy than that of the ‘blessed’ Benedict de Spinoza, who sees divinity in everything as an almost serene arch-rationalist, and the ‘Anti-Christ’ Friedrich Nietzsche, who revels in the ‘death of God’ while mocking any attempt to spin the world into something ‘rational’. The manner in which they construct their work also seems completely incompatible, with Spinoza’s methodical and mathematical construction on the one hand and Nietzsche’s highly stylised aphoristic prose on the other. Spinoza’s major work, the Ethics, appears as a great monolith of a philosophical system with geometric stages and interweaving propositions, while a great deal of Nietzsche’s effort is directed at breaking down such structures and exposing the futility of all system building. Spinoza is also the great advocate of democracy as a political form of organisation, whereas Nietzsche’s elliptical aphorisms seem to favour the aristocratic ‘pathos of distance’. They were furthermore separated by two centuries and came from very different backgrounds: seventeenth century Spinoza, a lens-grinder and the descendent of a Sephardic Jewish family expelled from Portugal, was himself famously excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam at the tender age of twenty-three, while Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor with a protestant upbringing in nineteenth century Prussia, was made chair of classical philology at the University of Basel when he was only twenty-four. They thus came from very different times and shared neither a common language nor social background.