Citizens are not born, but made. - Benedictus de Spinoza

Spinoza in particular belongs to the immortal authors. He is great because of the sublime simplicity of his thoughts and his way of writing, great because of his distance from all scholasticism, and, on the other hand, from all false embellishment or ostentation of language.

Although proclaiming Spinoza the chief and most prominent ‘representative’ of the underground atheistic tradition supposedly striving to undermine the main structures of authority underpinning Christendom has an astoundingly long history, from 1673 when we first encounter this notion that Spinozism was a forbidden philosophy being promoted, first in Holland, by an underground sect of disciples, called ‘spinozistes’, continuing down to the 1820s, roughly lasting a century and a half, modern historians took very little interest in this striking phenomenon until the question became tied to the (since 2001) highly divisive issue of ‘Radical Enlightenment’. The remarkable historiographical and philosophical controversy over the role of Spinoza and Spinozism in the Western Enlightenment generally sparked by the debate over ‘Radical Enlightenment’ since 2001, instead of receding after some years, as one might expect from the normal course of historiographical controversies, has been escalating for more than a decade now especially since 2009, in a dramatic fashion.

As regards the philosophy of Spinoza, it is very simple, and on the whole easy to comprehend; the difficulty which it presents is due partly to the limitations of the method in which Spinoza presents his thoughts, and partly to his narrow range of ideas, which causes him in an unsatisfactory way to pass over important points of view and cardinal questions. Spinoza's system is that of Descartes made objective in the form of absolute truth. The simple thought of Spinoza's idealism is this: The true is simply and solely the one substance, whose attributes are thought and extension or nature: and only this absolute unity is reality, it alone is God. It is, as with Descartes, the unity of thought and Being, or that which contains the Notion of its existence in itself. The Cartesian substance, as Idea, has certainly Being included in its Notion; but it is only Being as abstract, not as real Being or as extension (supra, p. 241). With Descartes corporeality and the thinking 'I' are altogether independent Beings; this independence of the two extremes is done away with in Spinozism by their becoming moments of the one absolute Being. This expression signifies that Being must be grasped as the unity of opposites; the chief consideration is not to let slip the opposition and set it aside, but to reconcile and resolve it. Since then it is thought and Being, and no longer the abstractions of the finite and infinite, or of limit and the unlimited, that form the opposition (supra, p. 161), Being is here more definitely regarded as extension; for in its abstraction it would be really only that return into itself, that simple equality with itself, which constitutes thought (supra, p. 229). The pure thought of Spinoza is therefore not the simple universal of Plato, for it has likewise come to know the absolute opposition of Notion and Being.