...His [Lessing's] pantheism is so outspoken and defended with so much courage and his admiration for Spinoza is so deep that he was more of a Spinoz… - Benedictus de Spinoza
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...His [Lessing's] pantheism is so outspoken and defended with so much courage and his admiration for Spinoza is so deep that he was more of a Spinozist than many of those of his contemporaries who took pride in calling themselves Spinozists. [...] Lessing and Goethe can be said to be the two most potent forces of Spinozism in the fatherland. Through Lessing's mediation Spinoza became a force of general cultural progress in Germany while through Goethe he became the great literary inspiration.
Benedictus de Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a social and metaphysical philosopher known for the elaborate development of his monist philosophy, which has become known as Spinozism. Controversy regarding his ideas led to his excommunication from the Jewish community of his native Amsterdam. He was named Baruch ("blessed" in Hebrew) Spinoza by his synagogue elders and known as Bento de Spinoza or Bento d'Espiñoza, but afterwards used the name Benedictus ("blessed" in Latin) de Spinoza.
Native Name:
בָּרוּךְ שְׂפִּינוֹזָה
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Benedito de Espinosa
Alternative Names:
Benedict de Spinoza
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Baruch de Espinosa
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Barukh Shpinozah
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Benoît de Spinoza
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Sbīnūzā
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Ispīnūzā
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Barukh Spinoza
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Bento de Espinosa
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Baruch d' Espinoza
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Shpinozah
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Baruch de Spinoza
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Spinoza
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Benoit de Spinoza
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Benedictus De Spinoza
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Benedictus Spinoza
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Baruch Spinoza
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Baruch Benedictus de Spinoza
I ought to love the Jews, as they seem to be my only friends intellectually, beginning with Edman—not to go back to Spinoza.
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.
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In Hegel there are three elements, Spinoza's Substance, Fichte's Self-Consciousness and Hegel's necessarily antagonistic unity of the two, the Absolute Spirit. The first element is metaphysically disguised nature separated from man; the second is metaphysically disguised spirit separated from nature; the third is the metaphysically disguised unity of both, real man and the real human species.
