Baruch Spinoza on Science

"It is a pity that such a thinker as Spinoza had to leave our stage so soon. He could not live to see the enormous progress of science which would also have improved his system."

"...The teaching of Spinoza, the product of the Jewish genius and modern science , does not stand in contradiction with the Jewish teaching of unity - at most it may contradict its rationalistic and super-naturalistic approach."

"It is generally agreed that Spinoza fell into nominalism. But he did in any case take measures to protect himself from idealism, both in developing his theory of a substance with infinite attributes, and in arguing for the parallelism of the two attributes extension and thought."

"That our modern natural sciences have become so thoroughly entangled in this Spinozistic dogma 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."

"...Leibniz's Theodicy is an intelligent abstract of Christian doctrine, exhibiting what it would be if it were essentially scientific, whereas it is essentially moralistic, so that its inspiration is missed, while its dogmas are harmonized as much as possible. Spinoza does much the same thing for the natural universe. He misplaces nothing, but draws it all in purely intellectual concepts. He is a great master."

"Lenin's mind was hewn from the rock of Spinozism, and, because his mind imposed itself firmly upon Russia, Christianity in Russia actually was replaced with Spinozism. In all the thirty-four volumes of the collected works of Lenin, published by the Lenin Institute in Moscow, Spinoza's name occurs only once. The manner in which he refers to Spinoza makes it almost certain that if he knew him at all he knew him secondhand. Lenin, however, was not the only ruthless politician who embraced Spinozism de facto. Bismarck, the iron chancellor, who forged the Wilhelminic German Empire, was also a disciple of Spinoza. Hence, it is not blind chance that men like Lenin and Bismarck were Spinozists, either in fact or in theory."

"While it is patently not the case that key figures such as d'Holbach and Condorcet delved deeply into Spinoza's thought, or cited him often or in some cases ever, at the same time, one must acknowledge that the key elements constituting High Enlightenment French ‘Spinozisme’ in the sense intended here were not discovered or concocted by these post-1740 writers and thinkers but were transmitted to them by those sections of the pre-1730 radical philosophical underground literature, especially clandestine manuscripts and suppressed printed books, that were more directly immersed in Spinoza's own texts and thought. Those who performed this bridging role transmitting the basic elements of ‘Spinozism’ to the generation of Diderot and d'Holbach consisted of two distinct coteries. On the one hand there were those English ‘deists’, Toland, Tindal and Collins especially, who rejected Locke's dualism and principle of ‘supra rationem’ and adopted instead seemingly directly from, or else in emulation of, Spinoza, the latter’s one-substance doctrine based on the idea that motion is inherent in matter, his necessitarianism, anti-Scripturalism and attack on ‘priestcraft’ along with his plea for full freedom of conscience and expression, or ‘freedom to philosophize’. Secondly, there were a group of subversive Huguenot and other French thinkers in the years around 1700, and down to the 1730s, whether or not they themselves can accurately be called ‘Spinozists’, who were deeply preoccupied with Spinoza's texts and bequeathed a powerful philosophical impetus to the generation of Diderot and d'Holbach. Especially important for the transmission of Spinozist ideas in France, and the literary depicting of an underground sect of ‘Spinozists’ pervading the whole of European culture, were Bayle, Boulainvilliers, and d'Argens but there were many others in this group, Tyssot de Patot among them."

"Not only Goethe's poetry but his science is Spinozistically motivated. Convinced of the oneness of nature, he approached it with a certainty to discover in it oneness, and his discovery of the os intermaxtllare in man, which influenced the development of comparative anatomy, is one of the by-products of his Spinozistic sentiments. In his theory of the metamorphosis of the plants, which he expounded scientifically and poetically, he also expressed a good deal of Spinozism. Spinoza enabled him to read the various pages of nature as one book. Goethe respected Kant and may be described as a Kant scholar, but he was a Spinoza adherent. His world-picture is Spinozistic and not Kantian."

"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 of its ‘premises’ – it is only the Imaginary in action ."

"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."

"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."