Benedictus de Spinoza Quotes

...Aside from a little Spinoza and Plutarch, I have read nothing since my return, as I am quite occupied by my present work. ...I have read lately some amazing theological things, which I have intermingled with a little of Plutarch and Spinoza. ...Just now, I am reading in the evening, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Barni, and I am freshening up my Spinoza. [Original in French: Présentement je lis, le soir, le Critique de la raison pure, de Kant, traduit par Barni et je repasse mon Spinoza.] ...If only I do not make a failure also of Saint-Antoine. I am going to start working on it again in a week, when I have finished with Kant and Hegel. These two great men are helping to stupefy me, and when I leave them I fall with eagerness upon my old and thrice great Spinoza. What genius, how fine a work the Ethics is! [Original in French: Pourvu que je ne rate pas aussi saint Antoine! Je vais m'y remettre dans une huitaine quand j'en aurai fini avec Kant et avec Hegel! Ces deux grands hommes continuent à m'abrutir et, quand je sors de leur compagnie, je tombe avec voracité sur mon vieux et trois fois grand Spinoza! Quel génie! quelle œuvre que l'Éthique!] ...I knew Spinoza's Ethics, but not the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. The book astounds me; I am dazzled, and transported with admiration. My God, what a man! what an intellect! what learning and what a mind! [Original in French: Je connaissais l'Éthique de Spinoza, mais pas du tout le Tractatus théologico-politicus, lequel m'épate, m'éblouit, me transporte d'admiration. Nom de Dieu, quel homme! quel cerveau! quelle science et quel esprit!]

He flew through the nets of Judaism, Calvinism, Aristotelianism and the Cartesian dualism, but nevertheless Descartes was his starting point. Could he have become Spinoza without Descartes? Did he beget himself, as Socrates did, or even as Hobbes largely was self-generated? Spinoza's "Nature or God" is not one of the Cartesian formulations, but Spinoza relies upon a number of Cartesian concepts.

Meum institutum non est verborum significationem sed rerum naturam explicare

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.

If he [Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling] had consulted me as an old friend in this matter, I would have answered: haven't you learned that much from our old master Benedict Spinoza that we and people like us can only thrive in private life? Even if the Elector of the Palatine had guaranteed this intelligent Jew total freedom to teach his convictions, the author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus would have answered: Honorable majesty, you cannot do that because freedom to teach, directed against the established powers, can only lead to the following: either I would overthrow the sanctioned order of things or I would be driven out in shame and disgrace. [Original in German: Hätte er mich, als alter Freund, in diesem Falle gefragt, ich würde geantwortet haben: hast du von unserm alten Herrn und Meister Benedict Spinoza nicht soviel gelernt, daß wir unseres Gleichen blos in Stillen gedeihen? Hätte der Kurfürst von der Platz diesem klugen Juden auch völlige Lehrfreiheit in Heidelberg zugesagt, so hätte der Verfasser des Tractatus theologico-politicus geantwortet: Ew. Durchlaucht, das können Sie nicht, denn Lehrfreiheit gegen das Bestehende kann nur dazu führen, daß ich entweder ihren sanctionirten Zustand umwerfe, oder daß ich daraus mit Schimpf und Schande vertrieben werde.]

In so far as we understand, we can desire nothing but that which must be, nor, in an absolute sense, can we find contentment in anything but truth.

Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind.

...The Festschrift 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".

Indeed, just as light makes manifest both itself and darkness, so truth is the standard both of itself and falsity.

Novalis was cried down as an enthusiastic mystic by the prosaic, and Spinoza as godless by the literalists. It was incumbent upon me to protest against this view of Spinoza, seeing I would review the whole sphere of piety. Something essential would have been wanting in the ex position of my views if I had not in some way said that the mind and heart of this great man seemed deeply influenced by piety, even though it were not Christian piety. The result might have been different, had not the Christianity of that time been so distorted and obscured by dry formulas and vain subtilties that the divine form could not be expected to win the regard of a stranger. This I said in the first edition, somewhat youthfully indeed, yet so that I have found nothing now needing to be altered, for there was no reason to believe that I ascribed the Holy Spirit to Spinoza in the special Christian sense of the word.

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.

Spinoza is the anomaly. The fact that Spinoza, atheist and damned, does not end up behind bars or burned at the stake, like other revolutionary innovators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, can only mean that his metaphysics effectively represents the pole of an antagonistic relationship of force that is already solidly established: The development of productive forces and relations of production in seventeenth-century Holland already comprehends the tendency toward an antagonistic future. Within this frame, then, Spinoza's materialist metaphysics is the potent anomaly of the century: not a vanquished or marginal anomaly but, rather, an anomaly of victorious materialism, of the ontology of a being that always moves forward and that by constituting itself poses the ideal possibility for revolutionizing the world.

That by the decrees and volitions, and consequently the providence of God, Scripture (as I will prove by Scriptural examples) means nothing but Nature's order following necessarily from her eternal laws.

Such was Benedict Spinoza — thus he lived and thought. A brave and simple man, earnestly meditating on the deepest subjects that can occupy the human race, he produced a system which will ever remain as one of the most astounding efforts of abstract speculation — a system that has been decried, for nearly two centuries, as the most iniquitous and blasphemous of human invention ; and which has now, within the last sixty years, become the acknowledged parent of a whole nation's philosophy, ranking among its admirers some of the most pious and illustrious intellects of the age. The ribald Atheist turns out, on nearer acquaintance, to be a "God-intoxicated man." The blasphemous Jew becomes a pious, virtuous, and creative thinker. The dissolute heretic becomes a child-like, simple, self-denying and heroic man. We look into his works with calm earnestness, and read there another curious page of human history : the majestic struggle with the mysteries of existence has failed, as it always must fail ; but the struggle demands our warmest admiration, and the man our ardent sympathy. Spinoza stands out from the dim past like a tall beacon, whose shadow is thrown athwart the sea, and whose light will serve to warn the wanderers from the shoals and rocks on which hundreds of their brethren have perished.

In February of 1927, the historian Joseph Klausner stood before an audience at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and delivered a lecture on the “Jewish character” of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy. As he neared the end of his talk, Klausner dropped the usual academic idiom and, with great passion, announced his intention to bring Spinoza, excommunicated in 1656 by the Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam, back into the Jewish fold. “To Spinoza the Jew,” he declared: “The ban is nullified! The sin of Judaism against you is removed and your offense against her atoned for. You are our brother! You are our brother! You are our brother!” Klausner's theatrical performance was the first of several efforts in the 20th century to revoke Spinoza's excommunication. No less an eminence than David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, publicly argued for “amending the injustice” done to the philosopher, insisting that the 17th-century rabbis had no authority “to exclude the immortal Spinoza from the community of Israel for all time.” All these efforts were unsuccessful (not to mention unauthorized). Unlike most of the bans issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese in that period, the ban on Spinoza was never rescinded. In fact, in 1957, Rabbi Solomon Rodrigues Pereira of Amsterdam even reaffirmed the excommunication. Like Galileo, disciplined by the Roman Catholic Church just two decades before him, Spinoza has gone down as one of history's great thinkers punished by intolerant ecclesiastic authorities for his intellectual boldness.