Abstract
Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677) is a figure who has been the object of much philosophical investigation and interpretation, influencing the philosophical systems of many thinkers. This is especially true in the land of poets and thinkers. Spinoza, from the late 17th to the late 19th century, was an important figure in German philosophy who shaped the thinking of such diverse philosophical movements as those of German Idealism and Jena Romanticism. This influence, however, as I shall argue throughout this dissertation, is not a mere historical curiosity but represents a turning point in the direction of German thinking and, moreover, is something that unites the beginning of the so-called klassische deutsche Philosophie2 with its end in post-Romanticism. Now, the importance of the figure of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) among the great sea of German thinkers is that he is the transitional figure, both temporally and intellectually, in this history, in this journey of Spinoza through these lands. It is through him and his criticisms and interpretations of Spinoza that we can observe the essential aspects of the previous interpretations of the Dutch heretic and how they made a lasting impact on German philosophy. Moreover, as a great transitional figure, he not only provides a view of the past but also of the future; and so it is with him that we can glimpse at the future and culmination of klassische deutsche Philosophie in the figure of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900).