Diderot and Lessing as Exemplars of a Post-spinozist Mentality

Renowned as the chief challenger of traditional views of morality, mans freedom, and religion from 1650-1750, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) spread alarm and confusion throughout Europe through his writings. Theologians and rulers desperately sought to ban the spread of Spinozist ideas, and, in the post-Spinozist climate, eighteenth-century thinkers, often exasperated and perplexed, attempted to cope with the fallout from this intellectual explosion. The philosophical radicalism of Denis Diderot (1713-84), a French philosopher, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), a German philosopher, well exemplifies the post-Spinozist mentality that permeated eighteenth-century thinking. As they grapple with the loss of intellectual, moral, and theological certainties, Diderot and Lessing re-work post-Spinozist ideas and in many instances elucidate even more radical ideas than Spinoza himself had envisaged.