ABSTRACT
When Heydenreich opens the first dialogue between Xenophanes and Parmenides in Natur und Gott nach Spinoza, he presents the two protagonists in a dialectic not of words, but of settings. Xenophanes, the philosopher and Spinoza sympathizer, is leaving his urban study at the end of a long day of reflection to gain some respite in the nearby countryside: "He left his room in order to refresh his spirit by looking at the beauties of nature, and also to see whether the rarefied ideas he had strung together would hold up against the feeling of reality and the living perception of the world." 1 As he is strolling, he sees his friend Parmenides sitting under an oak at the top of a hill. Parmenides, who shares his friends interest in speculative philosophy but whose main passion is for the fine arts, has just completed a sketch of the landscape before him, along with a poem, when Xenophanes arrives. The landscape scene is embellished with a group of shepherds and several monuments (Grabmiiler•); the poem is a "hymn to nature." 2 The status of these "free" acts of artistic production, the drawing of the sketch and the composition of the poem, will serve as the entry point for the two friends' discussion of agency and mechanism in Spinoza's philosophy.
