Our Inevitable Third Spinoza Controversy: Ontologies of Necessity and Environmental Nihilism

First providing a new and thought-provoking interpretation of the Spinoza Controversy of around 1800, and the Controversy’s reprise in the 1920s, this work then makes a compelling case for the Controversy’s ongoing vital relevance. If the Spinoza Controversy has historically been one of the few times our mainstream discourse has adequately identified and opposed the fatal early German romantic flaw which still lies at the heart of Western scientific naturalism - the unfounded belief that necessity relations are really, and not ideally, ontological - then the Controversy’s lens is invaluable now, in an era characterized by our still deeply underestimated and mischaracterized environmental nihilism, a multifaceted condition in line with which we cognitively and philosophically nullify the actual external world while also increasingly physically rendering it nothing by removing, dismantling, and consuming it. In linking this nihilism with a romantic understanding of necessity over two centuries old, Snow shows how not only our environmental nihilism, but also our increasing belief in worlds even less real than Spinozistic naturalism’s - such as the worlds ostensibly brought into being only through economic or, now, sheerly informatic, types of necessity - calls out for opening up, for a third and final time, the questions the Controversy affords us unique ways of asking regarding the purpose, the limits, and perhaps even the future, of Western theoretical rationality itself.

Katherine C. Snow is an environmental philosopher and research associate at Princeton University. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2021.