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Baruch Spinoza

507 quotes

• “The first person ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true. This explains to us why Marx could not possibly have become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science, and why in the last analysis this foundation was consummated in the dissipation of the religious myth of reading.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968), Part One: From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy

• “This sets us off on a path which was opened for us almost without our knowledge, I think, for we have not really considered it, by two philosophers in history: Spinoza and Marx. Against what should really be called the latent dogmatic empiricism of Cartesian idealism, Spinoza warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely distinct and different from the real object, for, to repeat his famous aphorism, the two objects must not be confused: the idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge must not be confused with the circle, which is the real object. In the third chapter of the 1857 Introduction, Marx took up this principle as forcefully as possible. Marx rejected the Hegelian confusion which identifies the real object with the object of knowledge, the real process with the knowledge process: ‘Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real (das Reale) as the result of thought recapitulating itself within itself deepening itself within itself and moving itself from within itself whereas the method that allows one to rise from the abstract to the concrete is merely the mode (die Art) of thought which appropriates the concrete and reproduces (reproduzieren) it as a spiritual concrete (geistig Konkretes)’ (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Berlin 1953, p. 22). This confusion, which in Hegel takes the form of an absolute idealism of history, is in principle simply a variant of the confusion which characterizes the problematic of empiricism.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968), Part One: From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy

• “If all that divides Marx from the Classical Economists amounts to the historical character of economic categories, Marx need only historicize these categories, refusing to take them as fixed, absolute or eternal, but, on the contrary, regarding them as relative, provisional and transitory, i.e., as categories subject in the last instance to the moment of their historical existence. In this case, Marx's relation to Smith and Ricardo can be represented as identical with Hegel's relation to classical philosophy. Marx would then be Ricardo set in motion, just as it is possible to describe Hegel as Spinoza set in motion; set in motion, i.e., historicized.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968), Part Four: The Object of Capital, Chap. 4 : The Errors of Classical Economics: Outline of a Concept of Historical Time

• “Spinoza's philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical revolution in the history of philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical revolution of all time, insofar as we can regard Spinoza as Marx's only direct ancestor, from the philosophical standpoint. However, this radical revolution was the object of a massive historical repression, and Spinozist philosophy suffered much the same fate as Marxist philosophy used to and still does suffer in some countries: it served as damning evidence for a charge of ‘atheism’. The insistence of the seventeenth and eighteenth century establishment's hounding of Spinoza's memory, and the distance every writer had ineluctably to take with respect to Spinoza in order to obtain the right to speak (cf. Montesquieu) are evidence both of the repulsion and the extraordinary attraction of his thought. The history of philosophy's repressed Spinozism thus unfolded as a subterranean history acting at other sites (autres lieux), in political and religious ideology (deism) and in the sciences, but not on the illuminated stage of visible philosophy. And when Spinoza re-appeared on this stage in German idealism's ‘Atheismusstreit’, and then in academic interpretations, it was more or less under the aegis of a misunderstanding.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968), Part Four: The Object of Capital, Chap. 4 : The Errors of Classical Economics: Outline of a Concept of Historical Time

• “By posing the question of the ‘givenness’ of the object, Marx poses the question of the object itself, of its nature and limits, and therefore of the domain of its existence, since the modality according to which a theory thinks its object affects not only the nature of that object but also the situation and extent of its domain of existence. As an indication, let us adopt a famous thesis of Spinoza's: as a first approximation, we can suggest that Political Economy's existence is no more possible than the existence of any science of ‘conclusions’ as such: a science of ‘conclusions’ is not a science, since it would be the actual ignorance (‘ignorance en acte’) of its ‘premises’ – it is only the Imaginary in action (the ‘first kind’).”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (1968), Part Four: The Object of Capital, Chap. 7 : The Object of Political Economy

• “If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed to be, even though we were not, why there came about this strange misunderstanding on the basis of which books were written. We were guilty of an equally powerful and compromising passion: we were Spinozists. In our own way, of course, which was not Brunschvicg's! And by attributing to the author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Ethics a number of theses which he would surely never have acknowledged, though they did not actually contradict him. But to be a heretical Spinozist is almost orthodox Spinozism, if Spinozism can be said to be one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world has seen! In any case, with very few exceptions our blessed critics, imbued with conviction and swayed by fashion, never suspected any of this. They took the easy road: it was so simple to join the crowd and shout "structuralism"! Structuralism was all the rage, and you did not have to read about it in books to be able to talk about it. But you have to read Spinoza and know that he exists: that he still exists today. To recognize him, you must at least have heard of him. Let us clarify this business in a few words. After all, to lump structuralism and theoreticism together is hardly satisfactory or illuminating, because something in this combination is always "hidden": formalism, which happens to be essential to structuralism! On the other hand, to bring structuralism and Spinozism together may clarify certain points, and certain limits, as far as the theoreticist deviation is concerned. But then comes the important objection: why did we make reference to Spinoza, when all that was required was for us simply to be Marxists? Why this detour? Was it necessary, and what price did we have to pay for it? The fact is: we did make the detour, and we paid dearly. But that is not the question. The question is: what is the meaning of the question? What can it mean to say that we should simply be Marxists (in philosophy)?”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Elements of Self-Criticism

• “Spinoza's "theory" rejected every illusion about ideology, and especially about the number one ideology of that time, religion, by identifying it as imaginary. But at the same time it refused to treat ideology as a simple error, or as naked ignorance, because it based the system of this imaginary phenomenon on the relation of men to the world "expressed" by the state of their bodies. This materialism of the imaginary opened the way to a surprising conception of the First Level of Knowledge: not at all, in fact, as a "piece of knowledge", but as the material world of men as they live it, that of their concrete and historical existence. Is this a false interpretation? In certain respects, perhaps, but it is possible to read Spinoza in such a way. In fact his categories do function, daringly, in this way in the history of the Jewish people, of its prophets, of its religion, and of its politics, where the primacy of politics over religion stands out clearly, in the first work which, after Machiavelli, offered a theory of history. But this theory of the imaginary went still further. By its radical criticism of the central category of imaginary illusion, the Subject, it reached into the very heart of bourgeois philosophy, which since the fourteenth century had been built on the foundation of the legal ideology of the Subject. Spinoza's resolute anti-Cartesianism consciously directs itself to this point, and the famous "critical" tradition made no mistake here. On this point too Spinoza anticipated Hegel, but he went further. For Hegel, who criticized all theses of subjectivity, nevertheless found a place for the Subject, not only in the form of the "becoming-Subject of Substance" (by which he "reproaches" Spinoza for "wrongly" taking things no further than Substance), but in the interiority of the Telos of the process without a subject, which by virtue of the negation of the negation, realizes the designs and destiny of the Idea. Thus Spinoza showed us the secret alliance between Subject and Goal which "mystifies" the Hegelian dialectic.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Elements of Self-Criticism

• “In affirming that "what is true is the sign of itself and of what is false", Spinoza avoided any problematic which depended on a "criterion of truth ". If you claim to judge the truth of something by some "criterion", you face the problem of the criterion of this criterion -- since it also must be true -- and so on to infinity. Whether the criterion is external (relation of adequacy between mind and thing, in the Aristotelian tradition) or internal (Cartesian self-evidence), in either case the criterion can be rejected: for it only represents a form of Jurisdiction, a Judge to authenticate and guarantee the validity of what is True. And at the same time Spinoza avoids the temptation of talking about the Truth: as a good nominalist (nominalism, as Marx recognized, could then be the antechamber of materialism) Spinoza only talks about what is "true". In fact the idea of Truth and the idea of the Jurisdiction of a Criterion always go together, because the function of the criterion is to identify the Truth of what is true. Once he has set aside the (idealist) temptations of a theory of knowledge, Spinoza then says that "what is true" "identifies itself", not as a Presence but as a Product, in the double sense of the term "product" (result of the work of a process which "discovers" it), as it emerges in its own production. Now this position is not unrelated to the "criterion of practice", a major thesis of Marxist philosophy: for this Marxist "criterion" is not exterior but interior to practice, and since this practice is a process (Lenin insisted on this: practice is not an absolute "criterion" -- only the process is conclusive) the criterion is no form of Jurisdiction; items of knowledge [connaissances ] emerge in the process of their production. There again, by the contrast between them, Spinoza allows us to perceive Hegel's mistake.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Elements of Self-Criticism

• “Hegel certainly did rule out any criterion of truth, by considering what is true as interior to its process, but he restored the credentials of the Truth as Telos within the process itself, since each moment is only ever the "truth of" the moment which precedes it. When, in a provocative formula which took up Lenin's words ("Marx's doctrine is all-powerful because it is true") directed against the dominant pragmatism and every (idealist) idea of Jurisdiction, I "defined" knowledge as "production" and affirmed the interiority of the forms of scientificity to "theoretical practice", I based myself on Spinoza: not in order to provide The answer, but to counter the dominant idealism and, via Spinoza, to open a road where materialism might, if it runs the risk, find something other than words. It is understandable that, behind these reasonings, we found other theses in Spinoza which supported them, and that we put these to use too, even at the cost of overdoing things. Spinoza helped us to see that the concepts Subject/Goal constitute the "mystifying side" of the Hegelian dialectic: but is it enough to get rid of them in order to introduce the materialist dialectic of Marxism, by a simple process of subtraction and inversion? That is not at all sure, because, freed of these fetters, the new dialectic can revolve endlessly in the void of idealism, unless it is rooted in new forms, unknown to Hegel, and which can confer on it the status of materialism.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Elements of Self-Criticism

• “To sum it up in a word: Marx was close to Hegel in his insistence on rejecting every philosophy of the Origin and of the Subject, whether rationalist, empiricist or transcendental; in his critique of the cogito, of the sensualist-empiricist subject and of the transcendental subject, thus in his critique of the idea of a theory of knowledge. Marx was close to Hegel in his critique of the legal subject and of the social contract, in his critique of the moral subject, in short of every philosophical ideology of the Subject, which whatever the variation involved gave classical bourgeois philosophy the means of guaranteeing its ideas, practices and goals by not simply reproducing but philosophically elaborating the notions of the dominant legal ideology. And if you consider the grouping of these critical themes, you have to admit that Marx was close to Hegel just in respect to those features which Hegel had openly borrowed from Spinoza, because all this can be found in the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. These deep-rooted affinities are normally passed over in pious silence; they nevertheless constitute, from Epicurus to Spinoza and Hegel, the premises of Marx's materialism. They are hardly ever mentioned, for the simple reason that Marx himself did not mention them, and so the whole of the Marx-Hegel relationship is made to hang on the dialectic, because this Marx did talk about!”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?

• “I now want, much more briefly, to take another path across my essays in order to look at another group of theses developed there on the question of "knowledge". I cannot hide the fact that in this matter I depended heavily on Spinoza. I said a moment ago that Marx was close to Hegel in his critique of the idea of a theory of knowledge. But this Hegelian critique is already present in Spinoza. What does Spinoza in fact mean when he writes, in a famous phrase, "Habemus enim ideam veram..."? That we have a true idea? No: the weight of the phrase lies on the "enim". It is in fact because and only because we have a true idea that we can produce others, according to its norm. And it is in fact because and only because we have a true idea that we can know that it is true, because it is "index sui". Where does this true idea come from? That is quite a different question. But it is a fact that we do have it (habemus), and whatever it may be that produces this result, it governs everything that can be said about it and derived from it. Thus Spinoza in advance makes every theory of knowledge, which reasons about the justification of knowledge, dependent on the fact of the knowledge which we already possess. And so every question of the Origin, Subject and Justification of knowledge, which lie at the root of all theories of knowledge, is rejected. But that does not prevent Spinoza from talking about knowledge: not in order to understand its Origin, Subject and Justification, but in order to determine the process and its moments, the famous "three levels", which moreover appear very strange when you look at them close up, because the first is properly the lived world, and the last is specially suited to grasping the "singular essence" -- or what Hegel would in his language call the "universal concrete" -- of the Jewish people, which is heretically treated in the Theologico-Political Treatise. I am sorry if some people consider, apparently out of theoretical opportunism, that I thus fall into a heresy, but I would say that Marx -- not only the Marx of the 1857 Introduction, which in fact opposes Hegel through Spinoza, but the Marx of Capital, together with Lenin -- is in fact on close terms with Spinoza's positions.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?

• “What also fascinated me about Spinoza was his philosophical strategy. Jacques Derrida has spoken a lot about strategy in philosophy, and he is perfectly right, since every philosophy is a dispositif of theoretical combat that disposes of theses as so many strongholds or prominent places so as to be able, in its aim and strategic attacks, to take over the theoretical places fortified and occupied by the adversary. Yet Spinoza began with God! [...] A supreme strategy: he began by taking over the chief stronghold of his adversary, or rather he established himself there as if he were his own adversary, therefore not suspected of being the sworn adversary, and redisposed the theoretical fortress in such a way as to turn it completely around, as one turns around cannons against the fortress's own occupant.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Louis Althusser, in Montag, Warren; Stolze, Ted (eds.): The New Spinoza. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

• “Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality). Spinoza explained this completely two centuries before Marx, who practiced it but without explaining it in detail.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Spinoza would not tolerate restrictions, imposed by any political or religious system or by any moral attitude. He struggled for the ideal of free thought. Hardly any other philosopher made so many enemies. He was labelled ‘a troublemaking Jew’, banned from the synagogue and from the academic establishment. Even his pupils would acknowledge him in private. And when Karl Ludwig asked the impoverished lonely philosopher to lecture at the University of Heidelberg, he turned him down. Spinoza could not guarantee that his thinking would not threaten ‘widely accepted religious concepts’. The philosopher in him preferred the quiet retiring life to a bourgeois career.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Barenboim, "The Purpose of the State is Freedom" (DanielBarenboim.com, December 2003)

• “I think back to the last discussion I had with the great conductor Otto Klemperer. We talked about Spinoza and he said “Spinoza's Ethics is the most important book ever written”. Klemperer was, as we know, Jewish. At the age of 22 he converted to Christianity because he believed that only as a Christian could he conduct Bach's St Matthew Passion. Many years later, after the War, when Klemperer had already reached old age, he converted back to Judaism. And the reason he gave was Spinoza's Ethics. Perhaps the most important Jewish philosophy. Questions about Jewish ethics and morals and “What is being Jewish?” were long identified as being a minority. The traditional thinking and perceived identity of the Jewish people in its 2,000 year history was as a minority. Historically the Jews were integrated into social and cultural life but tragically persecuted under the Spanish Inquisition and the tyranny of Adolf Hitler. What is special about Spinoza's philosophy is that, despite persecution, abuse and alienation, his thinking was never based on the premise of Jews being a minority. That is precisely why his philosophy is so contemporary, now that the Jewish people have their own state, i.e. are no longer a minority. Spinoza's Ethics remains a potent formula for creating intellectual and moral unity among the Jews.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Barenboim, "The Purpose of the State is Freedom" (DanielBarenboim.com, December 2003)

• “Spinoza suffered two experiences which are strongly evident today. Although a Jew, he was excluded from the Jewish community; he also became a victim of anti-Semitism. A recent survey in Germany exposed the reality that a majority of Germans believe that the Jews were the greatest risk to world peace. [...] It is significant that Spinoza's ideas had an influence on what is regarded as typical German thinking today – on Feuerbach, Wagner and Nietzsche. How could Richard Wagner become an anti-semite while influenced by Spinoza? Anti-semitism definitely formed part of the profile of a German nationalist in the nineteenth century. Why did Wagner pursue this idea with such fervour? He could not draw these ideas from his spiritual father, the heir to Spinoza, Feuerbach.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Barenboim, "The Purpose of the State is Freedom" (DanielBarenboim.com, December 2003)

• “...So when you play five notes, if each note had a big ego it would want to be louder than the note before. And therefore I learned from this very simple fact, that no matter how great an individual you are, music teaches you that the creativity only work in groups, and the expression of the group is very often larger than the sum of the parts. And you can draw whatever conclusions you want from this, but I think that this is a not unimportant factor. And maybe in a strange way I've found some answers to all this, not in music but in philosophy, especially from reading regularly and for many years the Ethics of Spinoza. Spinoza was a religious scholar, a political architect, a philosopher, who aspired to geometric demonstration of the universe and the human being in it, and he was a biological thinker who advanced the science of emotion. And there lies of course one of the great difficulties of making music, the science of emotion.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Barenboim, "Reith Lectures 2006: In the Beginning was Sound: Lecture 1: In the Beginning was Sound" [Recorded at Cadogan Hall, London]

• “I read Spinoza's Ethics for the first time when I was thirteen years old. Of course at school we studied the Bible – which for me is the ultimate philosophical work. However, reading Spinoza opened up a new dimension for me, which is the reason for my continuing dedication to his works. Spinoza's simple principle 'man thinks' has become an existential mindset for me; my copy of his Ethics has become dog-eared and torn. For years I took it with me on my travels and in hotel rooms or intervals in concerts became absorbed by many of its principles. Spinoza's Ethics is the best training ground for the intellect, above all because Spinoza teaches the radical freedom of thought more completely than any other philosopher. This Spinozan brand of freedom is not a release from discipline into arbitrariness of thought, but an active process. The more one is able to determine one's own thoughts – in fact, causing one's own thoughts, thereby creating one's own experience of reality – the more it is possible to become self-determined, to be truly free.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music, edited by Elena Cheah. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008)

• “...This awareness has become a kind of pre-Freudian self-analysis for me; Spinoza helps me to see myself and my surroundings objectively. This can make life bearable even throughout the experience of suffering; the teachings presented in the Ethics allow one to preceive the world as a manageable place. Freud himself once wrote in a letter to [Lothar] Bickel, 'I admit my dependence on Spinoza's teachings.' Conversely, Spinoza admits, foreshadowing Freudian analysis, that we cannot be in complete control over our emotions. [...] The ability to create emotional balance, though, is dependent upon the intellectual awareness of the problem. In this way Spinoza demands the integration of all human aspects in order to attain true freedom.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music, edited by Elena Cheah. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008)

• “One of Spinoza's most important conclusions is that of the human being's necessity to overcome the contradiction between the finite and the infinite. Spinoza was able to express the very nature of the Judaeo-Christian way of thought and, at the same time, to remain outside it and even negate it. Both in the Jewish and the Christian traditions, God creates the world but is outside it. Spinoza, on the other hand, would not say that God creates the world, but that He produces it – in philosophical terms, He causes it. God, for Spinoza, is not outside the world and this view was the object of very harsh criticism by his contemporaries. The Jewish community in Holland even saw fit to excommunicate him. The God of Judeao-Christian thought, according to Spinoza, is an invention of man, who imagines that God thinks and acts as human beings do.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Daniel Barenboim, Everything is Connected: The Power of Music, edited by Elena Cheah. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008)

• “Until the publication of Jacobi's Briefe über die Lehre von Spinoza in 1785, Spinoza was a notorious figure in Germany. For more than a century the academic and ecclesiastical establishment had treated him “like a dead dog” as Lessing later put it. The Ethica was published in Germany in 1677, and the Tractatus Theologico-politicus in 1670 (though it appeared anonymously, Spinoza was known to be the author). Until the middle of the eighteenth century it was de rigueur for every professor and cleric to prove his orthodoxy before taking office; and proving one's orthodoxy demanded denouncing Spinoza as a heretic. Since attacks on Spinoza became a virtual ritual, there was an abundance of defamatory and polemical tracts against him. Indeed, by 1710 so many professors and clerics had attacked Spinoza that there was a Catalogus scriptorum Anti-spinozanorum in Leipzig. And in 1759 Trinius counted, probably too modestly, 129 enemies of Spinoza in his Freydenkerlexicon. Such was Spinoza's reputation that he was often identified with Satan himself. Spinoza was seen as not only one form of atheism, but as the worst form. Thus Spinoza was dubbed the "Euclides atheisticus', the 'princips atheorum.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), Chap. 2 : Jacobi and the Pantheism Controversy

• “After 1785 public opinion of Spinoza changed from almost universal contempt to almost universal admiration, largely as a result of the publication of Jacobi's Briefe, in which he revealed Lessing's Spinozism. Lessing was the most admired figure of the Aufklarung, and his credo automatically gave a stamp of legitimacy to every secret Spinozist. One after another the Spinozists could now come out of their closets and form a file behind Lessing. If Lessing was an honorable man and a Spinozist, then they could be too. Ironically, Jacobi's Briefe did not destroy Lessing's reputation, as Mendelssohn feared. It did the very opposite, making him a hero in the eyes of the nonconformists. Lessing made it a fashion to be unorthodox; and to be fashionably unorthodox was to be a Spinozist. Of course, Lessing's credo explains only how Spinozism became respectable. It accounts for why a Spinozist might go public, but not for why he became a Spinozist in the first place. To understand why Spinozism became the credo of so many other thinkers, we have to consider the new situation of the sciences at the close of the eighteenth century. The rise in the fortunes of Spinozism resulted in part from the consequence of the decline of theism and deism.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), Chap. 2 : Jacobi and the Pantheism Controversy

• “Hegel turned fully to Spinoza only in his early Jena years during his collaboration with Schelling, who had been especially inspired by Spinoza, and who, even during his Fichtean phase, declared himself to be a Spinozist. But Hegel's turning toward Spinozism was not simply the result of Schelling's influence. It fitted hand-in-glove with his own intention to find some rational foundation for his organic vision. After all, there were some deep affinities between Spinoza's doctrines and Hegel's mystical pantheism; Hegel could only have admired Spinoza's monism, his immanent religion, and his intellectual love of God. It was indeed Spinoza who had first attempted to find a rational foundation and technical vocabulary for such doctrines. It is no accident, then, that we find Hegel's first metaphysical writings in the Jena years replete with Spinozist vocabulary and full of sympathetic references to Spinoza.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Frederick C. Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005)

• “The prototype for Hegel's reading of the principle of subject–object identity came not from the Kantian–Fichtean tradition but its very antithesis: Spinozism. For Schelling and Hegel around 1801, the principle of subject–object identity essentially functioned as a declaration of their monism. It served as a statement of protest against all forms of dualism, whether Kantian, Fichtean or Cartesian. Schelling and Hegel greatly admired Spinoza for his monism, for showing how to overcome dualism when Kant, Fichte and Jacobi had only reinstated it. True to Spinoza, their principle of subject–object identity essentially means that the subjective and the objective, the intellectual and the empirical, the ideal and the real – however one formulates the opposition – are not distinct substances but simply different aspects, properties or attributes of one and the same substance. The principle follows immediately from the Spinozist proposition that there is only one substance, of which everything else is either a mode or an attribute. If this is the case, then the subjective and objective cannot be two things but must be only modes or attributes of one and the same thing. Though he never used the term, Spinoza himself had developed something like a principle of subject–object identity.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Frederick C. Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005)

• “No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither was any philosopher more maligned and hated. To grasp the reason for this it is not enough to recall the great theoretical thesis of Spi­nozism: a single substance having an infinity of attributes, Deus sive Natura, all "creatures" being only modes of these attributes or modifications of this substance. It is not enough to show how pantheism and atheism are combined in this thesis, which denies the existence of a moral, transcendent, creator God. We must start rather from the practical theses that made Spinozism an object of scandal. These theses imply a triple denunciation: of "consciousness," of "values," and of "sad passions." These are the three major resemblances with Nietzsche. And already in Spinoza's lifetime, they are the reasons for his being accused of materialism, immoralism, and atheism.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2001)

• “In the reproach that Hegel will make to Spinoza, that he ignored the negative and its power, lies the glory and innocence of Spinoza, his own discovery. In a world consumed by the negative, he has enough confidence in life, in the power of life, to challenge death, the murderous appetite of men, the rules of good and evil, of the just and the unjust. Excommunication, war, tyranny, reaction, men who fight for their enslavement as if it were their freedom — this forms the world in which Spinoza lives. The assassination of the De Witt brothers is exemplary for him. Ultimi barbarorum. In his view, all the ways of humiliating and breaking life , all the forms of the negative have two sources, one turned outward and the other inward, resentment and bad conscience, hatred and guilt. "The two archenemies of the human race, Hatred and Re­morse." He denounces these sources again and again as being linked to man's consciousness, as being inexhaustible until there is a new consciousness, a new vision, a new appetite for living. Spinoza feels, experiences, that he is eternal.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2001)

• “Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers – painters too, even chance reader – may find that they are Spinozists; indeed, such a thing is more likely for them than for professional philosophers. It is a matter of one's practical conception of the “plan”. It is not that one may be a Spinozist without knowing it. Rather, there is a strange privilege that Spinoza enjoys something that seems to have been accomplished by him and no one else. He is a philosopher who commands an extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed, systematic, and scholarly; and yet he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a “flash”. Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist; one arrives in the middle of Spinoza, one is sucked up, drawn into the system or the composition. (…) What is unique about Spinoza is that he, the most philosophic of philosophers (…) teaches the philosopher how to become a non-philosopher.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What interested me most in Spinoza wasn't his Substance, but the composition of finite modes. I consider this one of the most original aspects of my book. That is: the hope of making substance tum on finite modes, or at least of seeing in substance a plane of immanence in which finite modes operate, already appears in this book. What I needed was both (1) the expressive character of particular individuals, and (2) an immanence of being. Leibniz, in a way, goes still further than Spinoza on the first point. But on the second, Spinoza stands alone. One finds it only in him. This is why I consider myself a Spinozist, rather than a Leibnizian, although I owe a lot to Leibniz. In the book I'm writing at the moment, What is Philosophy?, I try to return to this problem of absolute immanence, and to say why Spinoza is for me the 'prince' of philosophers.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy. Translated from the French by Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992)

• “...Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. In the last book of the Ethics he produced the movement of the infinite and gave infinite speeds to thought in the third kind of knowledge. There he attains incredible speeds, with such lightning compressions that one can only speak of music, of tornadoes, of wind and strings. He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. [...] Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape. Will we ever be mature enough for a Spinozist inspiration?”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The Ethics is a book of concepts (the second kind of knowledge), but also of affects (the first kind) and percepts (the third kind) too. Thus the paradox in Spinoza is that he's the most philosophical of philosophers, the purest in some sense, but also the one who more than any other addresses non-philosophers and calls forth the most intense non-philosophical understanding. That is why absolutely anyone can read Spinoza, and be very moved, or see things quite differently afterward, even if they can hardly understand Spinoza's concepts. Conversely, a historian of philosophy who understands only Spinoza's concepts doesn't fully understand him.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Gilles Deleuze, in his letter to Réda Bensmaïa, 1995 [original in French]

• “[Alberto Knox] He denied that the Bible was inspired by God down to the last letter. When we read the Bible, he said, we must continually bear in mind the period it was written in. A ‘critical’ reading, such as the one he proposed, revealed a number of inconsistencies in the texts. But beneath the surface of the Scriptures in the New Testament is Jesus, who could well be called God's mouthpiece. The teachings of Jesus therefore represented a liberation from the orthodoxy of Judaism. Jesus preached a ‘religion of reason’ which valued love higher than all else. Spinoza interpreted this as meaning both love of God and love of humanity. Nevertheless, Christianity had also become set in its own rigid dogmas and outer rituals.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Translated from the Norwegian by Paulette Møller. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994)

• “[Alberto Knox] When things got really tough, Spinoza was even deserted by his own family. They tried to disinherit him on the grounds of his heresy. Paradoxically enough, few have spoken out more powerfully in the cause of free speech and religious tolerance than Spinoza. The opposition he was met with on all sides led him to pursue a quiet and secluded life devoted entirely to philosophy. He earned a meager living by polishing lenses, some of which have come into my possession. [...] There is almost something symbolic in the fact that he lived by polishing lenses. A philosopher must help people to see life in a new perspective. One of the pillars of Spinoza's philosophy was indeed to see things from the perspective of eternity.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. Translated from the Norwegian by Paulette Møller. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994)

• “...The Festschrift [1932] dedicated to Spinoza may be said to be a praiseworthy international achievement. Its initiators were Germans and it appeared as a Sonderausgabe of a German newspaper. Spinoza had nothing in common with the German nation. The Germans, however, were the first to manifest serious interest in him. Their first great philosopher Leibniz went to seek his advice and his counsel; they were the only ones to invite him to lecture at their university. Even though Leibniz concealed him from the world, the Germans revealed him to the world. The generation of their greatest philosophers and poets from the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries grew up under his influence. Goethe read him together with Charlotte von Stein, and even read him together with her in Latin. To Hegel, Spinoza was "der Mittelpunkt der modernen Philosophie".”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Marián Gálik, Two Modern Chinese Philosophers on Spinoza (Some Remarks on Sino-German Spinoza's “Festschrift”), in Oriens Extremus 22(1), 1975

• “Between 1854 and 1856, while Bain and Spencer were publishing their first major studies of psychology, George Eliot was immersed in the task of translating Spinoza's Ethics (1677). Before the middle of the nineteenth century, relatively little attention had been given to Spinoza by British philosophers, in part because his geometrical style of metaphysics was antithetical to the spirit of eighteenth-century empiricism, and also because of his unpalatable reputation as an atheist. As Lewes remarked, "the accusation of Spinozism was another name for atheism, and deliberate yielding of the soul to Satan". Although Coleridge had absorbed Spinoza's writing as part of his immersion in Continential metaphysics, and Shelley too had been drawn to his religious radicalism, no one before Eliot's generation championed the philosopher in the way that Goethe had done in Germany. By 1878, however, the philosopher Frederick Pollock was commenting in the journal Mind that "in the Ethics of Spinoza we have one of the most remarkable achievements of constructive philosophic genius ever given to the world." Such keen praise was commonly accepted by this time as being neither eccentric nor misguided. Lewes, who was among the first in Britain to give Spinoza serious critical consideration, believed the Ethics opened "a new era in History." Carlyle's literary executor, J. A. Froude, who grudgingly acknowledged in 1855 that "Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or set aside," eventually became another important channel for the dissemination of his ideas. [...] There was, then, an increasingly wide spread recognition in the second half of the nineteenth century that Spinoza was a central figure in modern thought, an opinion few in Britain endorsed before the 1850s.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot. (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010)

• “George Eliot herself had recognised Spinoza's importance some year before Arnold paid the philosopher this elaborate double-edged compliment. In a letter to Charles Bray in 1849 she wrote, diagnostically: "What is wanted in English is not a translation of Spinoza's works, but a true estimate of his life and system. After one has rendered his Latin faithfully into English, one feels that there is another yet more difficult process of translation for the reader to effect, and that the only mode of making Spinoza accessible to a larger number is to study his books, then shut them out and give an analysis." Since she began writing fiction only months after finishing work on the Ethics, it is plausible to consider Eliot's novels as attempting this larger project of Spinozan translation [...] But the detached voice speaking in this letter widens its import beyond the personal, for what animates Eliot here is an issue with a much broader horizon than private ambition: she is hinting at a more general correlation between Spinoza and contemporary British thought. Spinoza has become a crucial figure, she is insisting, one who speaks relevantly to the intellectual predicaments and debates of the mid-nineteenth century.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot. (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010)

• “He supported himself by grinding lenses, which was no lowly menial occupation, as it is often presented to have been in romanticizing versions of the philosopher's life, but was rather a craft that drew extensively from Spinoza's serious interest in the science of optics. The quality of his wares was highly valued by other scientists of his day. The important Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Saturn's rings as well as one of its four moons, preferred Spinoza's lenses to all others. "The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish," Huygens wrote to his brother in 1667. The one part of the romantic lens-grinding legend that is sadly true is that the dust from the optical polishing was unhealthy for Spinoza, whose mother and brother had both died young from tuberculosis. He himself succumbed to the disease at the age of forty-four.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken, 2006)

• “Some important intellectual figures of the day made their way to the modest rooms he rented in the Hague in his last years, including the up-and-coming young go-getter Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who would emerge as one of the most dazzling figures in the seventeenth century's impressive lineup of genius. Leibniz spent a few days with Spinoza, conversing on metaphysics. The only written record of their extensive conversations was a slip of paper on which Leibniz had written down, for Spinoza's approval, a proof for God's existence. Leibniz was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's ideas but sought always to conceal his philosophical debt, and is on record as denouncing the philosopher. When a professor of rhetoric at the University of Utrecht, one Johan Georg Graevius, wrote to Leibniz, castigating the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as a "most pestilential book," whose author "is said to be a Jew named Spinoza, but who was cast out of the synagogue because of his monstrous opinions," Leibniz prudently chimed in with his own diplomatic calumny: "I have read the book by Spinoza. I am saddened by the fact that such a learned man has, as it seems, sunk so low.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken, 2006)

• “Spinoza remained throughout his life, and well into the eighteenth century, a thinker whom one could admire only in secret, hiding one's sympathy just as his Marrano antecedents had concealed their wayward Jewishness. Open admiration could destroy even the most established of reputations, well into the eighteenth century's so-called Age of Reason. In the 1780s, for example, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi launched a generalized attack on Enlightenment thought by claiming that the late poet Lessing had been a closet Spinozist, a charge sufficient to compromise the entire movement for which Lessing had been a leading spokesman. Jacobi even went after Immanuel Kant and his successors, arguing that "consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist, and atheist.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken, 2006)

• “The Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document first drafted by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza's contemporary — both were born in 1632 — is a more obvious influence on Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself been influenced by Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy. In fact, Locke spent five formative years in Amsterdam, in exile because of the political troubles of his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury. Though Spinoza was already dead, Locke met in Amsterdam men who almost certainly spoke of Spinoza. Locke's library not only included all of Spinoza's important works, but also works in which Spinoza had been discussed and condemned. It's worth noting that Locke emerged from his years in Amsterdam a far more egalitarian thinker, having decisively moved in the direction of Spinoza. He now accepted, as he had not before, the fundamental egalitarian claim that the legitimacy of the state's power derives from the consent of the governed, a phrase that would prominently find its way into the Declaration. Locke's claims on behalf of reason did not go as far as Spinoza's. He was firm in defending Christianity's revelation as the one true religion against Spinoza's universalism. In some of the fundamental ways in which Spinoza and Locke differed, Jefferson's view was more allied with Spinoza. (Spinoza's collected works were also in Jefferson's library, so Spinoza's impact may not just have been by way of Locke.)”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Rebecca Goldstein, in her article 'Reasonable Doubt' (The New York Times, 29 July 2006)

• “The significant writers to whom Spinoza has significantly mattered range across genres and sensibilities, and their reasons for considering him artistically relevant vary as widely as their methods of making him so. Some writers declared themselves devotees of his thought and were strengthened in their art by their interpretations of his views. Others were deeply bothered by some aspect of his system—his determinism, for example, or his insistence on the supremacy of reason over the passions—and made art out of their resistance. George Eliot (1819–1890), arguably the most philosophically inspired of the great nineteenth-century British novelists, falls into the first category. She decided to write fiction seven months after completing her translation of the Ethics, the first in English, and her view of her writing as a “set of experiments” is imprinted with certain Spinozist positions. The robust determinism to which she subjects her characters, as well as the conception of freedom and virtue that moves her plots along to their ethically resounding dénouements, bears the impressions of her close relationship with Spinoza's works.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Rebecca Goldstein, in her article 'Literary Spinoza,'. In: The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, edited by Michael Della Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

• “My intention is to give a sense of the grand sweep of literary artists—that is, novelists, poets, and playwrights—reacting through their art to Spinoza's ideas. Given the irreconcilability of the approaches and attitudes, it is all but impossible to make a sustained argument concerning Spinoza's literary appeal. If there is an overarching explanation for why this particular philosopher has been so artistically generative, perhaps it lies in what one might call Spinoza's rationalist purity. Nobody has ever made greater claims for the life of pure reason. For some temperaments this is inspiring, for others off-putting. Other philosophers—one thinks particularly of Plato—have influenced important literary artists, but Spinoza seems unique among philosophers in the amount of literary fascination with the man himself.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Rebecca Goldstein, in her article 'Literary Spinoza,'. In: The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, edited by Michael Della Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

• “Now, if instituting comparisons in both directions, we place the lowest and most ape-like men (the Austral Negroes, Bushmen, and Andamans, etc.), on the one hand, together with the most highly developed animals, for instance, with apes, dogs, and elephants, and on the other hand, with the most highly developed men—Aristotle, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Lamarck, or Goethe—we can then no longer consider the assertion, that the mental life of the higher mammals has gradually developed up to that of man, as in any way exaggerated. If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation: Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes [2 vols.]. Translated from the German by E. Ray Lankester. (New York: D. Appleton, 1876)

• “It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that pantheism was exhibited in its purest form by the great Baruch Spinoza; he gave for the totality of things a definition of substance in which God and the world are inseparably united. The clearness, confidence, and consistency of Spinoza's monistic system are the more remarkable when we remember that this gifted thinker of two hundred and fifty years ago was without the support of all those sound empirical bases which have been obtained in the second half of the nineteenth century. We have already spoken, in the first chapter, of Spinoza's relation to the materialism of the eighteenth and the monism of the nineteenth century. The propagation of his views, especially in Germany, is due, above all, to the immortal works of our greatest poet and thinker, Wolfgang Goethe. [Original in German: Erst in der zweiten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts wurde durch den großen Baruch Spinoza das System des Pantheismus in reinster Form ausgebildet; er stellte für die Gesamtheit der Dinge den reinen Substanzbegriff auf, in welchem »Gott und Welt« untrennbar vereinigt sind. Wir müssen die Klarheit, Sicherheit und Folgerichtigkeit des monistischen Systems von Spinoza heute um so mehr bewundern, als diesem gewaltigen Denker vor 250 Jahren noch alle die sicheren empirischen Fundamente fehlten, die wir erst in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts gewonnen haben. Das Verhältnis von Spinoza zum späteren Materialismus im 18. und zu unserem heutigen Monismus im 19. Jahrhundert haben wir bereits im ersten Kapitel besprochen. Zur weiteren Verbreitung desselben, besonders im deutschen Geistesleben, haben vor allem die unsterblichen Werke unseres größten Dichters und Denkers beigetragen, Wolfgang Goethe.]”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Translated from the German by Joseph McCabe. (London: Harper & Brothers, 1900). Originally published as Die Welträthsel: Gemeinverständli…

• “The first thinker to introduce the purely monistic conception of substance into science and appreciate its profound importance was the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza; his chief work appeared shortly before his death in 1677, just one hundred years before Lavoisier gave empirical proof of the constancy of matter by means of the chemist's principle instrument, the balance. In his stately pantheistic system the notion of the world (the universe, or the cosmos) is identical with the all-pervading notion of God; it is at one and the same time the purest and most rational monism and the clearest and most abstract monotheism. This universal substance, this “divine nature of the world,” shows us two different aspects of its being, or two fundamental attributes — matter (indefinitely extended substance) and spirit (the all-embracing energy of thought). All the changes which have since come over the idea of substance are reduced, on a logical analysis, to this supreme thought of Spinoza's; with Goethe I take it to be the loftiest, profoundest, and truest thought of all ages. [Original in German: Der erste Denker, der den reinen monistischen »Substanzbegriff« in die Wissenschaft einführte und seine fundamentale Bedeutung erkannte, war der große Philosoph Baruch Spinoza; sein Hauptwerk erschien kurz nach seinem frühzeitigen Tode, 1677,...]”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. Translated from the German by Joseph McCabe. (London: Harper & Brothers, 1900). Originally published as Die Welträthsel: Gemeinverständli…

• “Jefferson instead recognizes that the multitude will act at times on the basis of ignorance, and yet he still affirms not only their right to rebel but also the benefits of their rebellion. His thinking in this regard runs parallel to that of Spinoza, and, in fact, Spinoza's thought can help carry this line of democratic thinking further. The two thinkers share a pair of basic assumptions: one on the virtue of disobedience, since freedom can never result from obedience to authority; and another on the capacities of the multitude, even though it is born ignorant, to become intelligent and rule itself autonomously. The process leading the multitude from ignorance to wisdom is indeed the steep path that runs throughout Spinoza's work.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Michael Hardt, Jefferson and Democracy (American Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 1, March 2007)

• “These distinctions make sense only when AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is assumed (hence Spinoza's failure, who assumed mere A). Just as AR is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created — this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. Thus ARCW, or absolute-relative panentheism, is the one doctrine that really states the whole of what all theists, if not all atheists as/well, are implicitly talking about.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Charles Hartshorne, in Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1964) p. 348

  Also quoted by: Charles Hartshorne

• “...For natural science he [Otto von Bismarck] shewed little interest, and indeed at that time it scarcely could be reckoned among the ordinary subjects of education; philosophy he pursued rather as a man than as a student, and we are not surprised to find that it was Spinoza rather than Kant or Fichte or Hegel to whom he devoted most attention, for he cared more for principles of belief and the conduct of life than the analysis of the intellect. ...He [Otto von Bismarck] astonished his friends by the amount and variety of his reading; it was at this time that he studied Spinoza. It is said that he had among his friends the reputation of being a liberal; it is probable enough that he said and did many things which they did not understand; and anything they did not understand would be attributed to liberalism by the country gentlemen of Pomerania; partly no doubt it was due to the fact that in 1843 he came back from Paris wearing a beard.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: James Wycliffe Headlam, Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1899)

• “...We must mention the providential man who, at the same time as Locke and Leibnitz, had educated himself in the school of Descartes, had for a long time been viewed only with scorn and hatred, and who nevertheless today is rising to exclusive supremacy in the world of intellect. I am speaking about Benedict Spinoza. One great genius shapes himself by means of another, less through assimilation than through friction. One diamond polishes the other. Thus Descartes' philosophy did not originate, but merely furthered, Spinoza's. Hence we find in the pupil, first of all, the method of the master; this is a great gain. We also find in Spinoza, as in Descartes, a method of demonstration borrowed from mathematics. This is a great defect. The mathematical form gives Spinoza's work a harsh exterior. But this is like the hard shell of the almond; the kernel is all the more delightful. On reading Spinoza we are seized by an emotion similar to that which we feel at the sight of great Nature in her most animated composure. A forest of heaven‑aspiring thoughts whose blossoming treetops are tossing like waves, while the immovable trunks are rooted in the eternal earth. There is a certain mysterious aura about Spinoza's writings. The air of the future seems to flow over us. Perhaps the spirit of the Hebrew prophets still hovered over their late‑born descendant. There is, withal, a seriousness in him, a confident pride, a solemn dignity of thought, which also seem to be a part of his inheritance; for Spinoza belonged to one of those martyr families exiled from Spain by the most Catholic of kings. Added to this is the patience of the Hollander, which was always revealed in the life of the man as well as in his writings. It is a fact that Spinoza's life was beyond reproach and pure and spotless as the life of his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like Him, he too suffered for his teachings; like Him he wore the crown of thorns. Wherever a great mind expresses its thought, there is Golgotha.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Heinrich Heine, in his Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1833–1836), translated by Helen Mustard, in: The Romantic School and Other Essays, edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New Yor…

• “Benedict Spinoza teaches: there is only one substance, and that is God. This one substance is infinite; it is absolute. All finite substances originate from it, are contained in it, arise out of it, are immersed in it; they have only a relative, transient, accidental existence. The absolute substance is revealed to us both in the form of infinite thought and in the form of infinite dimension. These two, infinite thought and infinite dimension, are the two attributes of the absolute substance. We recognize only these two attributes, but it is possible that God, the absolute substance, has other attributes that we do not know. "Non dico, me deum omnino cognoscere, sed me quaedam ejus attributa, non autem omnia, neque maximam intelligere partem." Only stupidity and malice could attach to this doctrine the epithet "atheistic." No one has ever spoken more sublimely of the Deity than Spinoza. Instead of saying that he denied God, one might say that he denied man. All finite things are to him only modi of the infinite substance. All finite things are contained in God; the human mind is but a light‑ray of infinite thought; the human body is but a particle of the infinite dimension. God is the infinite cause of both, of spirits and of bodies, natura naturans.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Heinrich Heine, in his Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1833–1836), translated by Helen Mustard, in: The Romantic School and Other Essays, edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New Yor…

• “Nothing is more absurd than ownership claimed for ideas. Hegel did, to be sure, use many of Schelling's ideas for his philosophy, but Mr. Schelling would never have known what to do with these ideas anyway. He always just philosophized, but was never able to produce a philosophy. And besides, one could certainly maintain that Mr. Schelling borrowed more from Spinoza than Hegel borrowed from Schelling. If Spinoza is some day liberated from his rigid, antiquated Cartesian, mathematical form and made accessible to a large public, we shall perhaps see that he, more than any other, might complain about the theft of ideas. All our present‑day philosophers, possibly without knowing it, look through glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.”

  Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) said by 1677 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Heinrich Heine, in his Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1833–1836), translated by Helen Mustard, in: The Romantic School and Other Essays, edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New Yor…

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