What can be more calamitous than that men should be regarded as enemies and put to death, not for any crime or misdeed, but for being of independent … - Benedictus de Spinoza

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.

aquele que quer responder às injúrias com o ódio vive na tristeza ou na mágoa, aquele que quer vencer o ódio com o amor combate alegremente e sem temor. Triunfa tanto sobre um grande número de inimigos quanto sobre um único, prescindindo de todo socorro da fortuna. Aqueles a quem ele consegue vencer ficam alegres por terem sido derrotados; e, derrotados, eles não são menos fortes; ao contrário, são mais fortes.

This sets us off on a path which was opened for us almost without our knowledge, I think, for we have not really considered it, by two philosophers in history: Spinoza and Marx. Against what should really be called the latent dogmatic empiricism of Cartesian idealism, Spinoza warned us that the object of knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely distinct and different from the real object, for, to repeat his famous aphorism, the two objects must not be confused: the idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge must not be confused with the circle, which is the real object. In the third chapter of the 1857 Introduction, Marx took up this principle as forcefully as possible. Marx rejected the Hegelian confusion which identifies the real object with the object of knowledge, the real process with the knowledge process: ‘Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real (das Reale) as the result of thought recapitulating itself within itself deepening itself within itself and moving itself from within itself whereas the method that allows one to rise from the abstract to the concrete is merely the mode (die Art) of thought which appropriates the concrete and reproduces (reproduzieren) it as a spiritual concrete (geistig Konkretes)’ (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Berlin 1953, p. 22). This confusion, which in Hegel takes the form of an absolute idealism of history, is in principle simply a variant of the confusion which characterizes the problematic of empiricism.