Heidegger, reader of Spinoza

Abstract

The present investigation intends to address what could be termed as a “tangential reading” of Spinoza. The axis that we have chosen to study this peripheral episode in the history of Spinozism is a seminar dictated by Martin Heidegger and entitled History of philosophy from St. Thomas Aquinas to Kant. This course of late 1926 represents a point of complex texture within the history of Germany: the lectures that Heidegger dedicates to the careful and detailed analysis of the Ethics coincide with his editing and correction works for the first publication of Being and Time, with the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the death of Spinoza (February 1927) in the Republic of Weimar and with the dissemination of the cultural project of the Societas Spinoziana founded by Gebhardt. In this sense, the aim of our work will be to reconstruct some central elements in the heideggerian interpretation of Spinoza, putting them in relation with his reflections on the concept of “facticity”. For Heidegger, the idea of amor Dei intellectualis expressed in the Ethics is one of the ways in which the metaphysical tradition has clogged the richness of man’s relationship with the world, with himself and with others