By that which is <i>self-caused</i>, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent. - Benedictus de Spinoza

...He [Lessing] even felt that the highest compliment he could confer on his friend Moses Mendelssohn, whom he greatly admired, was to call him a "second Spinoza." Mendelssohn, one of the fathers of the modern German enlightenment, was an adherent of Leibnitz. As such he could not be a follower of Spinoza, although he, too, admired his personality. Furthermore, he failed to understand Spinoza, for he could never free himself from Bayle's presentation of Spinoza's doctrine. Nevertheless, this very Mendelssohn, by his controversy with Jacobi about Lessing's relationship to Spinoza, was instrumental in making the latter a potent force in German letters. It is interesting to observe that even those thinkers who dedicated their lives to the cause of anti-Spinozism paid the highest tribute to his personality.

We literally understand, then, a thorough study and assimilation of all the scientific works of primary importance on which the knowledge of Marxist theory rests. We might use a striking formula of Spinoza's to represent this objective: Spinoza said that a science solely of conclusions is not a science, that a true science is a science of premisses (principles) and conclusions in the integral movement of the demonstration of their necessity.

Spinoza redefines the problem of Modern philosophy, which is the conquest of the world and the liberation of humanity, and destroys both its multiple antinomies and the continually resurgent separation (dualistic, transcendental, etc.) in the theory of knowledge and history, in the same way that criticism has always destroyed Zenonian sophism: moving forward, putting reality in motion. Spinoza's philosophy is born from the radicalization of the ontological paradox of being: in the recognition that the hypostasis, the only possible hypostasis, is that of the world and of the development of its necessity from physics to practice. It is a conception of the world that immediately produces, as if from its own basis, a completely modern conception of science and worldly knowledge, both technical and liberatory. It is a radically materialistic conception of being and of the world.