The Spinoza Problem

In the aftermath of the Second World War, in a salt mine outside of Frankfurt, Allied soldiers discovered a box. On it was a memo from an officer in the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, an organization founded by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg to steal cultural treasures from around Europe. The box was full of books?Baruch Spinoza's personal library. The memo said, this box contains ?valuable early works of great importance for the exploration of the Spinoza problem.In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin D. Yalom attempts to discern?through brilliant recreation of both Spinoza's and Rosenberg's intellectual lives?what exactly that problem could have been? Rosenberg was a racist journalist obsessed with German cultural greatness. Was the influence of Spinoza, a Dutch Jew, on such German luminaries as Goethe responsible for Rosenberg's obsession? Goethe, claimed by the Nazis as an emblem of German superiority, felt a great debt to Spinoza, calling him the greatest philosopher. Resolving this tension would have been a primary concern for Rosenberg, who would have wanted to know how the hero he misappropriated could have himself felt enthralled to someone Rosenberg and his comrades would have killed. We will never know for certain what the Spinoza problem was, but in Yalom's hands, it becomes a powerful tool for investigating the great tensions, and the major dangers, incumbent on anyone brave enough, or foolish enough, to attempt an intellectual life.

Hardcover. English. Basic Books. 2012. ISBN: 9780465029631. 336 pp. Good with dw. Book No: 55188