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Baruch Spinoza
507 quotes
“Today I have been reading Linné again and am quite unnerved by this extraordinary man. I have learned an infinite amount from him, not just in botany. Outside of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know of no one who has had such a wrenching effect on me. [Original in German: Dieser Tage habe ich wieder Linné gelesen und bin über diesen außerordentlichen Mann erschrocken. Ich habe unendlich viel von ihm gelernt, nur nicht Botanik. Außer Shakespeare und Spinoza wüßte ich nicht, daß irgend ein Abgeschiedener eine solche Wirkung auf mich getan.]”
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in a letter to his friend Carl Friedrich Zelter on November 7, 1816
“...This contrariety between Reason and Necessity, which Spinoza threw out in so strong a light, I, strangely enough, applied to my own being; and what has been said is, properly speaking, only for the purpose of rendering intelligible what follows. [Original in German: Diesen Gegensatz, welchen Spinoza so kräftig heraushebt, wendete ich aber auf mein eignes Wesen sehr wunderlich an, und das Vorhergesagte soll eigentlich nur dazu dienen, um das, was folgt, begreiflich zu machen.]”
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Recorded in: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life (1848). Translated from the German by John Oxenford (London: George Bell and Sons, 1897)
“As early as the 1670s, and continually, right through the eighteenth century, one finds numerous references in the contemporary controversial literature, theological, philosophical and historical, in all the Western European countries, to ‘Spinoza’ as supposedly the foremost and most dangerous of the ‘atheists’ threatening Christianity, society and the moral order generally, and the ‘sect of Spinozists’ specifically as the veritable hard-core of the libertine underground challenging all the structures of authority then in place.”
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Recorded in: Jonathan Israel, 'Spinoza and Spinozism in the Western Enlightenment: the Latest Turns in the Controversy,' (Araucaria: Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, nº 40, 201…
“An important part of Deleuze's oeuvre is devoted to the reading of philosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc. But a rather singular position in this list would be assigned to Spinoza, owing to the philosophical interest that corresponds to him [...]”
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Recorded in: Pierre Macherey, in his article 'Deleuze in Spinoza'. In: Warren Montag (ed.), In A Materialist Way: Selected Essays by Pierre Macherey (New York: Verso, 1998)
“Spinozism dominated the eighteenth century both in its later French variety, which made matter into substance, and in deism, which conferred on matter a more spiritual name.... Spinoza's French school and the supporters of deism were but two sects disputing over the true meaning of his system....”
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Recorded in: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (1844) [original in German]
“In Hegel there are three elements, Spinoza's Substance, Fichte's Self-Consciousness and Hegel's necessarily antagonistic unity of the two, the Absolute Spirit. The first element is metaphysically disguised nature separated from man; the second is metaphysically disguised spirit separated from nature; the third is the metaphysically disguised unity of both, real man and the real human species.”
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (1844) [original in German]
“Hegel's History of Philosophy presents French materialism as the realization of Spinozistic Substance, which in any case is more comprehensible than the "French school of Spinoza.”
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Herr Bauer picked out French materialism as a school of Spinoza from Hegel's History of Philosophy. But when he found in another of Hegel's works that deism and materialism are two parties with one and the same fundamental principle, he concluded that Spinoza had two schools which disputed over the meaning of his system.”
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“Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.”
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Recorded in: Karl Marx, in his letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, 31 May 1858 [original in German]
“The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of “Das Kapital,” it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre ‘Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a “dead dog.” I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him.”
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Recorded in: Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I (1873) [original in German]
“Descartes... fell back on his original confusion of matter with space—space being, according to him, the only form of substance, and all existing things but affections of space. This error... forms one of the ultimate foundations of the system of Spinoza.”
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Recorded in: James Clerk Maxwell, Matter and Motion (1876)
“Spinoza's teachings were already known outside of Holland during the final years of his life [approximately in his late 30s to early 40s]. So fast did his fame spread that at a time when no Jew could occupy an academic position in Central and Western Europe he was invited to fill the chair of philosophy in the University of Heidelberg [1673], one of the most important seats of learning of the time in Germany.”
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Recorded in: S. M. Melamed, Spinoza and Buddha: Visions of a Dead God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933)
“The rediscovery of Spinoza by the Germans contributed to the shaping of the cultural destinies of the German people for almost two hundred years. Just as at the time of the Reformation no other spiritual force was as potent in German life as the Bible, so during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no other intellectual force so dominated German life as Spinozism. Spinoza became the magnet to German steel. Except for Immanuel Kant and Herbart, Spinoza attracted every great intellectual figure in Germany during the last two centuries, from the greatest, Goethe, to the purest, Lessing.”
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: S. M. Melamed, Spinoza and Buddha: Visions of a Dead God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933)
“Philopon: The misfortune of this man has always touched me in an extraordinary way. He lived in moderation, alone and irreproachable; he renounced all human idols and devoted his entire life to reflection, and look what happened! In the labyrinth of his meditations, he goes astray and, out of error, maintains much that agrees very little with his innocent way of life and that the most depraved scoundrel might wish for in order to be able to indulge his evil desires with impunity. How unjust is the irreconcilable hatred of scholars towards someone so unfortunate!”
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Moses Mendelssohn, in his Philosophical Writings (1755–77) [original in German]
“[In the 18th century] Whether one reads the underground texts or those of the great Enlightenment authors, one has the impression that Spinozism was everywhere; but at the same time, it can be said, strictly speaking, there were no Spinozists (except as convenient phantoms for apologists); there were only thinkers who make use of Spinoza. Naturally, they could do so with more or less creativity, style, and depth.”
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Recorded in: Pierre-François Moreau, “Spinoza’s Reception and Influence,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, Don Garrett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 413
“Nature as conceived by many ecologists, and expressed philosophically by James Lovelock and others, is not the passive, dead, value-neutral nature of mechanistic science but is akin to the active, "naturing" nature of Spinoza. It is all-inclusive, creative (as natura naturans), infinitely diverse, and alive in the broad sense of Spinozistic so-called panpsychism.”
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“No great philosopher has so much to offer in the way of clarification and articulation of basic ecological attitudes as Baruch Spinoza.”
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“It is doubtful whether the translation “moral” is adequate anywhere in the Ethics where Spinoza rigorously exhibits his system. The opinion that he is one of the greatest opponents of moralism that ever lived seems not altogether unreasonable.”
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Recorded in: Arne Næss, “Environmental Ethics and Spinoza's Ethics: Comments on Genevieve Lloyd's Article,” (Inquiry 23[3]:313–25, 1980)
“Spinozism is a last-ditch salvationist movement, aimed at redeeming the status of isms. It stands for ‘ismhood’, a necessarily total secular faith fusing conceptual satisfaction and moral-political guidance. The aim is redemption, guaranteeing the future of the intelligentsia in this postmodern, and post-everything sense. Entrancing the globe by multitude-speak, the role of intellectuals is to fuse the coat of many colours into a consummate internationalism. And what can the warp and woof of this fabric be, but politically correct love?”
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Recorded in: Tom Nairn, London Review of Books, Vol. 27 No. 9 (5 May 2005)
“This work [The Savage Anomaly] was written in prison. And it was also conceived, for the most part, in prison. Certainly, I have always known Spinoza well. Since I was in school, I have loved the Ethics (and here I would like to fondly remember my teacher of those years). I continued to work on it, never losing touch, but a full study required too much time. Once in prison I started from the beginning: reading and making notes, tormenting my colleagues to send me books. I thank them all with all my heart.”
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Recorded in: Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Translated from the Italian by Michael Hardt. Originally published as L'anomalia sel…
“How many philosophers and historians of philosophy have gone along with the academies, burning with the desire to be able to sit there! The Dutch thought and art of the siècle d'or reside not only outside of the academies but also, to a large extent, outside of the universities. Spinoza's example serves for all the others. When declining the proposal of the excellent and honorable Sir J. L. Fabritius, who in the name of the Palatine Elector offers him a chair at Heidelberg, Spinoza reminds him that the freedom to philosophize cannot be limited in any way.”
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Recorded in: Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Translated from the Italian by Michael Hardt. Originally published as L'anomalia sel…
“Twenty-some years ago, when at the age of forty I returned to the study of the Ethics, which had been 'my book' during adolescence, the theoretical climate in which I found myself immersed had changed to such an extent that it was difficult to tell if the Spinoza standing before me then was the same one who had accompanied me in my earliest studies.”
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Recorded in: Antonio Negri, in Subversive Spinoza: (Un)Contemporary Variations. Translated from the Italian by Timothy S. Murphy et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Originally published as Spinoza sovversivo (Rom…
“It is clear that the origins of the discourse on multitude are to be found in the subversive interpretation of the thinking of Spinoza. I can never tire of stressing the importance of the Spinozan premise in the treatment of this thematic. And one highly Spinozist theme is that of the body, and particularly that of the potent body.”
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Recorded in: Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Reflections on Empire (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008)
“My ancestors Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. [Original in German: meine Vorfahren Heraclit Empedocles Spinoza Goethe.]”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, from his collected writings; fragment in 1884; quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950)
“When I speak of Plato, Pascal, Spinoza and Goethe, I know that their blood flows in mine—I am proud, when I tell the truth about them—the family is good enough not to have to poeticize or to conceal; and thus I stand to everything that has been, I am proud of the humanity, and especially proud of unconditional truthfulness.”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950)
“[The journey to Hades] I, too, have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and shall be there often yet, and not only rams have I sacrificed to be able to speak with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs it was that did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered alone; they may call me right and wrong; to them will I listen when in the process they call each other right and wrong.”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (1879), 408.
“Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit—amor intellectualis dei—after the fashion of Spinoza.”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilights of Idols (1888), "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", 23.
“Goethe—not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, [...] He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, [...]”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilights of Idols (1888), "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", 49.
“...For millennia, wrongdoers overtaken by punishment have felt no different than Spinoza with regard to their 'offence': 'something has gone unexpectedly wrong here', not 'I ought not to have done that'–, they submitted to punishment as you submit to illness or misfortune or death, with that brave, unrebellious fatalism that still gives the Russians...”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Second Essay, 15.
“...I hold up before myself the images of Dante and Spinoza, who were better at accepting the lot of solitude. Of course, their way of thinking, compared to mine, was one which made solitude bearable...”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, in his letter to Franz Overbeck, 2 July 1885 [original in German]
“In the antiquity, every senior man had the desire for the fame – this came from the fact that everyone believed to be at the beginning of the humanity and knew which broadness and duration to give oneself, to be transposed in the posterity as tragedy playing on the eternal scene. My pride is that ‘I have origins’ – therefore I do not need any fame. Whilst what moved Zarathustra, Moses, Mahomet, Jesus, Plato, Brutus, Spinoza, Mirabeau, I was already living and it came to me in many things mature in the daylight what a couple of thousands of years needed.”
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“These old philosophers were heartless; philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism. Looking at these figures, even Spinoza, don't you have a sense of something profoundly enigmatic and uncanny? [...] I mean categories, formulas, words (for, forgive me, what was left of Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei, is mere clatter and no more than that: What is amor, what is deus, if there is not a drop of blood in them?)”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
“The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation. It should be considered symptomatic when some philosophers–for example, Spinoza who was consumptive–considered the instinct of self-preservation decisive and had to see it that way; for they were individuals in conditions of distress.”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
“That our modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this Spinozistic dogma (most recently and worst of all, Darwinism with its incomprehensibly onesided doctrine of the “struggle for existence”) is probably due to the origins of most natural scientists: In this respect they belong to the “common people”; their ancestors were poor and undistinguished people who knew the difficulties of survival only too well at firsthand.”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
“What knowing means. - Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as is his wont. Yet in the final analysis, what is this intelligere other than the way we become sensible of the other three? A result of the different and conflicting impulses to laugh, lament, and curse? Before knowledge is possible, each of these impulses must first have presented its one-sided view of the thing or event; then comes the fight between these one-sided views,...”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
“Lovingly facing the “one is everything” amor dei, happy from comprehension— Take off your shoes! That three times holy land— —Yet secretly beneath this love, devouring, A fire of revenge was shimmering, The Jewish God devoured by Jewish hatred . . . Hermit! Have I recognized you?”
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Recorded in: Friedrich Nietzsche, in his poem To Spinoza. Translated from the German by Yirmiyahu Yovel, in his book Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vol. 2: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), …
“[Spinoza] — A God-intoxicated man. [Original in German: Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch.]”
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Recorded in: Novalis, as quoted in Novalis (1829) by Thomas Carlyle: "Spinoza is a God-intoxicated man (Gott-trunkenet Mensch).
“Modern philosophy begins with a conscious return to the rational style of the Greeks, with a religious critique of all irrational interpretations of the Bible and a political critique of all forms of despotism. These are the three main elements of Spinoza's thought.”
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“Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his very vulgarity, and by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man, from his granite pedestal, will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he found; and ages hence, the cultivated traveler, passing by this spot, will say in his heart, "The truest vision ever had of God came, perhaps, here.”
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Recorded in: Ernest Renan, at the dedication of a statue to Spinoza in 1882, as quoted in The Story of Philosophy (1962) by Will Durant
“I will never forget that, in the hurricane of my adolescence, I found refuge in the deep nest of the Ethics. [Original in French: Je n'oublierai jamais que, dans le cyclone de mon adolescence, j'ai trouvé refuge au nid profond de l'Éthique.]”
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“[We] will discuss Soul and Body, the doctrine of God, and Ethics. ...We shall find that Leibniz no longer shows great originality, but tends, with slight alterations of phraseology, to adopt (without acknowledgment) the views of the decried Spinoza. We shall find also many more minor inconsistencies than in the earlier part of [Leibniz's] system, these being due chiefly to the desire to avoid the impieties of the Jewish Atheist, and the still greater impieties to which Leibniz's own logic should have led him.”
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Recorded in: Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900) Ch. 1, Leibniz's Premisses, p, 5.
“Spinoza (1634-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.”
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Recorded in: Bertrand Russell, in The History of Western Philosophy (1945) Ch. X.
“Speaking of Spinoza he [Nietzsche] says: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!" Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military.”
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Recorded in: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part II, Chapter XXV, "Nietzsche," p. 767
“Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza.”
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Recorded in: Steven Nadler, in article Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (First published Jun 29, 2001; substantive revision Jul 4, 2016)
“Spinoza's naturalist and rationalist project demands that we provide these notions with a proper intellectualist interpretation. Thus, the love of God is simply an awareness of the ultimate natural cause of the joy that accompanies the improvement in one's condition that the highest knowledge brings; to love God is nothing but to understand nature. And the eternity in which one participates is represented solely by the knowledge of eternal truths that makes up a part of the rational person's mind.”
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Recorded in: Steven Nadler, Spinoza the atheist (New Humanist, 31 May 2007)
“There is no place in Spinoza's system for a sense of mystery in the face of nature. Such an attitude is to be dispelled by the intelligibility of things. Religious wonder is bred by ignorance, he believes. Spinoza contrasts the person who "is eager, like an educated man, to understand natural things" with the person who "wonders at them, like a fool". For Spinoza, anyone who would approach nature with the kind of worshipful awe usually demanded by the religious attitude represents the latter. By definition, and in substance, pantheism is not atheism. And Spinoza is an atheist.”
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Recorded in: Steven Nadler, Spinoza the atheist (New Humanist, 31 May 2007)
“Without a doubt, the Theologico-Politicus Theological-Political Treatise is one of the most important and influential books in the history of philosophy, in religious and political thought, and even in Bible studies. More than any other work, it laid the foundation for modern critical and historical approaches to the Bible. And while often overlooked in books on the history of political thought, the Treatise also has a proud and well-deserved place in the rise of democratic theory, civil liberties, and politcal liberalism.”
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Recorded in: Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)
“What can be said is that Spinoza is, without question, one of history's most eloquent proponents of a secular, democratic society and the strongest advocate for freedom and toleration in the early modern period.”
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Recorded in: Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)
“...To the extent that we are committed to the ideal of a secular society free of ecclesiastic influence and governed by toleration, liberty, and a conception of civic virtue; and insofar as we think of true religious piety as consisting in treating other human beings with dignity and respect, and regard the Bible simply as a profound work of human literature with a universal moral message, we are the heirs of Spinoza's scandalous treatise [Tractatus Theologico-Politicus].”
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Recorded in: Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011)
“For Spinoza, by contrast, there is to be no criminalization of ideas in the well-ordered state. Libertas philosophandi, the freedom of philosophizing, must be upheld for the sake of a healthy, secure and peaceful commonwealth and material and intellectual progress.”
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Recorded in: Steven Nadler, in his article Spinoza's Vision of Freedom, and Ours (The New York Times, 5 February 2012)