إن سعادة الفرد ونعيمه الحقيقي لا يكونان إلا في تَمتُّعه بالخير، لا في فخره بأنه وحدَه الذي يتمتَّع به مع استبعاد الآخرين - Benedictus de Spinoza

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.

The German and English Romantics (Shelley aside) got Spinoza wrong. Reading his superbly cryptic masterwork, the "Ethics," I find myself agreeing with Strauss that Spinoza pragmatically was an Epicurean materialist. As in Epicurus and Lucretius, Spinoza's God is scarcely distinguishable from Nature, and is altogether indifferent to us, even to our intellectual love for him as urged upon us by Spinoza.

Spinoza's philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical revolution in the history of philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical revolution of all time, insofar as we can regard Spinoza as Marx's only direct ancestor, from the philosophical standpoint. However, this radical revolution was the object of a massive historical repression, and Spinozist philosophy suffered much the same fate as Marxist philosophy used to and still does suffer in some countries: it served as damning evidence for a charge of ‘atheism’. The insistence of the seventeenth and eighteenth century establishment's hounding of Spinoza's memory, and the distance every writer had ineluctably to take with respect to Spinoza in order to obtain the right to speak (cf. Montesquieu) are evidence both of the repulsion and the extraordinary attraction of his thought. The history of philosophy's repressed Spinozism thus unfolded as a subterranean history acting at other sites (autres lieux), in political and religious ideology (deism) and in the sciences, but not on the illuminated stage of visible philosophy. And when Spinoza re-appeared on this stage in German idealism's ‘Atheismusstreit’, and then in academic interpretations, it was more or less under the aegis of a misunderstanding.