Baruch Spinoza on Philosophy

"Spinoza did not seek to found a sect, and he founded none"; yet all philosophy after him is permeated with his thought."

"...The doctrine of Spinoza was of great importance, if for nothing more than having brought about the first crisis in modern Philosophy."

"A Theologico-Political Treatise - English translation by . H. M. Elwes"

"No great philosopher has so much to offer in the way of clarification and articulation of basic ecological attitudes as Baruch Spinoza."

"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."

"Spinoza is the originator of speculative philosophy, Schelling its restorer, Hegel its perfecter."

"The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant, Ch. IV, Spinoza"

"Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Spinoza"

"Every philosophy of philosophy that excludes Spinoza must be spurious."

"Although during these years Rolland's chief interest was directed towards philosophy, although he was a diligent student of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, of the Cartesians, and of Spinoza,..."

"My dear Tyndall—I find that in the midst of my work in Edinburgh I omitted to write to De Vrij, so I have just sent him a letter expressing my pleasure in my being able to co-operate in any plan for doing honour to old Benedict, for whom I have a most special respect."

"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."

"The only successful attempt to free human reason from the authority of religion was that of Spinoza . In his Theologico-Political Treatise he denied the claims for divine authority based on the text of Scripture and religious tradition. Spinoza was the first secular Jew, and as such, the first secular man. Indeed, he served as the role model for all secular Jews, instituting the precise features that characterized future Jewish secularists."

"...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."

"The book recognized as containing the most complete attempt at explaining and defending pantheism from a philosophical perspective is Spinoza's Ethics, finished in 1675 two years before his death. In 1720 John Toland wrote the Pantheisticon: or The Form of Celebrating the Socratic-Society in Latin. He coined the term “pantheist” and used it as a synonym for “Spinozist."

"Can the seventeenth-century rationalist, who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the history of Western philosophy, be considered, by any stretch of interpretation, a Jewish thinker? Can he even be considered a Jew? Benedictus Spinoza is the greatest philosopher that the Jews ever produced, which adds a certain irony to his questionable Jewishness."

"He denied personal immortality, and worshiped reason alone. He appears to have had no sexual life, existed austerely, and sensibly allowed his most important writings, including the "Ethics," only a posthumous publication. As a teacher of reality, he practiced his own wisdom, and was surely one of the most exemplary human beings ever to have lived. He troubles me most by his extraordinary autonomy, all but unique in that Jewish history of which he did not desire to be a participant, in any way whatsoever."

"...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?"

"It was on Spinoza that I worked the most seriously according to the norms of the history of philosophy — but he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch's broom which he makes you mount. We have not yet begun to understand Spinoza, and I myself no more than others."

"...As to feeling a difference in Jews, I feel it I think, only if they do; and then it doesn't signify a preference or the opposite, but only a diversity. My best pupils were Jews, as was my only modern “master” in philosophy, Spinoza. But many are not happy, and that is a pity."

"The rise of Spinozism in the late eighteenth century is a phenomenon of no less significance than the emergence of Kantianism itself. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spinoza's philosophy had become the main competitor to Kant's, and only Spinoza had as many admirers or adherents as Kant."

"Monist is, in fact, every philosophy that is not an eclectic patchwork. Therefore, I gladly admit to you that I myself consider my positions even more monist than yours, because I try to give my monism a broader extension, following as far as possible the example of the greatest of all monists: Spinoza."

"And then, a little Jew, with a long nose and a pale complexion, Poor but satisfied, pensive and reserved, A subtle but hollow spirit, less read than celebrated, Hidden under the mantle of Descartes, his mentor, Walking with measured steps, comes close to the great being: Excuse me, he says, addressing him in a whisper, But I think, just between us, that you do not exist at all."

"In 1676 Leibniz found a pretext to visit Spinoza in The Hague, having learned that Spinoza was at work on a philosophical treatise of great importance. Spinoza showed Leibniz the manuscript of the 'Ethics', and the two men discussed philosophy together over several days. Although there is no written record of their conversation, it seems likely that these discussions were among the most rewarding in the whole history of philosophy."

"Spinoza shows that the history of metaphysics comprehends radical alternatives. Metaphysics, as the highest form of the organization of Modern thought, is not a unitary whole. It comprehends the alternatives that the history of class struggle produces. There exists an "other" history of metaphysics, the blessed history against the damned. And we should not forget that it is still only in the complexity of metaphysics that the Modern age can be read."

"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 the views of the decried Spinoza. We shall find also many more minor inconsistencies than in the earlier part of 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."

"I believe there is another reason also why Spinoza seems to me so pre-eminent: that in spite of being traditional, or because he was not distracted by side issues, he was an entire and majestic mind, a singularly consecrated soul. All these trite dogmas and problems lived in him and were the natural channels for his intuitions and emotions. That is what I feel to make a real philosopher and not, what we are condemned to be, professors of the philosophy of other people, or of our own opinions."

"...This divergence and perversion of the essential question is most striking in what goes today by the name of philosophy. There would seem to be only one question for philosophy to resolve: What must I do? Despite being combined with an enormous amount of unnecessary confusion, answers to the question have at any rate been given within the philosophical tradition on the Christian nations. For example, in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, or in Spinoza, Schopenhauer and specially Rousseau."

"To the very end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century Spinozism remained an important factor in Western philosophy. Herbert Spencer in England, Wundt and Lotze in Germany, Bergson and Renouvier in France, found many elements in Spinoza's philosophy to which they felt themselves attracted and by which they were greatly influenced. Spinozism as a rigid system dissolved itself into many component parts, and each part became an element in the systems of the modern philosophers."

"During the last quarter or so of the eighteenth century and then well into the nineteenth century a wave of neo-Spinozism swept through German philosophy and literature: in addition to Lessing and Herder, further neo-Spinozists included Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel. This wave was largely a result of Herder's embrace of neo-Spinozism in God: Some Conversations . Accordingly, it for the most part took over Herder's modifications of Spinoza's position."