Was Plato a spinozist?

Some thoughts on the reception of Plato in Germany at the end of the 18th century

Abstract

This article proposes to address the reception of Plato in the context of the famous Pantheism debate (Pantheismusstreit) by applying the conceptual and methodological tools obtained from a collective exploration begun some years ago and still ongoing, which we call caminos cruzados (crossed paths). In the course of this polemic, triggered in the early 1780s by F. H. Jacobi when he revealed that the great man of the German Enlightenment, G. E. Lessing, had confessed to him shortly before his death his secret Spinozism, a thesis already defended at the end of the previous century by P. Bayle and G. Wachter reappears, according to which Spinoza and Plato were nourished by the same tradition and subscribe, at their core, to the same doctrine. Using the perspective of crossed paths, I pose the question (impossible from the usual historiographical perspectives) about Plato's Spinozism in order to reconstruct the link that Jacobi sees between them and thus reveal aspects that, in the study of reception, often remain hidden, such as the fact that the same thesis can have a completely different meaning in different authors and the fundamental role that the construction of an enemy plays in shaping and justifying one's own position.