Retrospect and More General View

Because of the Kantian criticism of speculative theology, the German philosophers threw themselves back on Spinoza.

The post-Kantian philosophy are simply Spinozism dressed up.

How is my philosophy related to Spinozism in particular?

It stands, then, to Spinozism as the New Testament stands to the Old. What the Old Testament has in common with the New is the same God-Creator.

Analogous to this, the world exists, with me as with Spinoza, by its inner power and through itself.

But with Spinoza his substantia æterna, the inner nature of the world, which he himself calls God, is also, as regards its moral character and worth, Jehovah, the God-Creator, who applauds His own creation, and finds that all is very good, ¿±Ωƒ± ∫±ª± ªπ±Ω. Spinoza has deprived Him of nothing but personality.

Thus, according to him also, the world and all in it is wholly excellent and as it ought to be: therefore man has nothing more to do than vivere, agere, suum Esse conservare ex fundamento proprium utile quærendi (Eth., iv. pr. 67); he is even to rejoice in his life as long as it lasts; entirely in accordance with Ecclesiastes ix. 7-10.

In short, it is optimism: therefore its ethical side is weak, as in the Old Testament; nay, it is even false, and in part revolting.54 With me, on the other hand, the will, or the inner 54 Unusquisque tantum juris habet, quantum potentiâ valet (Tract. pol., c. 2 § 8). Fides alicui data tamdiu rata manet, quamdiu ejus, qui fidem dedit, non mutatur voluntas (Ibid., § 12).

Uniuscujusque jus potentiâ ejus definetur (Eth. iv., pr. 37, schol. 1.)

Especially chap. 16 of the Tractatus theologico-politicus nature of the world, is by no means Jehovah, it is rather, as it were, the crucified Saviour, or the crucified thief, according as it resolves. Therefore my ethical teaching agrees with that of Christianity, completely and in its highest tendencies, and not less with that of Brahmanism and Buddhism.

Spinoza could not get rid of the Jews.

His contempt for the brutes, which, as mere things for our use, he also declares to be without rights, is thoroughly Jewish, and, in union with Pantheism, is at the same time absurd and detestable (Eth., iv., appendix, c. 27).

With all this Spinoza remains a very great man. But in order to estimate his work correctly we must keep in view his relation to Descartes.

The latter had sharply divided nature into mind and matter, i.e., thinking and extended substance, and had also placed God and the world in complete opposition to each other; Spinoza also, so long as he was a Cartesian, taught all that in his “Cogitatis Metaphysicis,” c. 12, i. I., 1665.

Only in his later years did he see the fundamental falseness of that double dualism; and accordingly his own philosophy principally consists of the indirect abolition of these two antitheses. Yet partly to avoid injuring his teacher, partly in order to be less offensive, he gave it a positive appearance [475] by means of a strictly dogmatic form, although its content is chiefly negative.

His identification of the world with God has also this negative significance alone. For to call the world God is not to explain it: it remains a riddle under the one name as under the other. But these two negative truths had value for their age, as for every age in which there still are conscious or unconscious Cartesians.

He makes the mistake, common to all philosophers before Locke, of starting from conceptions, without having previously investigated their origin, such, for example, as substance, cause, &c., and in such a method of procedure these conceptions then receive a much too extensive validity.

Those who in the most recent times refused to acknowledge the is the true compendium of the immorality of Spinoza’s philosophy.

Neo-Spinozism which had appeared, for example, Jacobi, were principally deterred from doing so by the bugbear of fatalism.

By this is to be understood every doctrine which refers the existence of the world, together with the critical position of mankind in it, to any absolute necessity, i.e., to a necessity that cannot be further explained.

Those who feared fatalism, again, believed that all that was of importance was to deduce the world from the free act of will of a being existing outside it; as if it were antecedently certain which of the two was more correct, or even better merely in relation to us.

What is, however, especially assumed here is the non datur tertium, and accordingly hitherto every philosophy has represented one or the other. I am the first to depart from this; for I have actually established the Tertium: the act of will from which the world arises is our own.

It is free; for the principle of sufficient reason, from which alone all necessity derives its significance, is merely the form of its phenomenon.

Just on this account this phenomenon, if it once exists, is absolutely necessary in its course; in consequence of this alone we can recognise in it the nature of the act of will, and accordingly eventualiter will otherwise.