Baruch Spinoza

"I would not claim that Spinoza is the only philosopher who can help maintain equilibrium, but whenever I have been in a difficult situation, professional or personal, it has been Spinoza's emphasis on our ability to reason in everyday life that has come to my rescue. We must understand the possibility, even the necessity of negative aspects of our lives, such as depression, lack of energy or unhappiness. Reason can show us the difference between what is temporary, and what is permanent."

"The great Voltaire once accused Spinoza of ‘abusing metaphysics’. Is not the uncompromising nature of metaphysics more important today than ever? Has not liberated thinking become the most valued freedom at a time when political systems, social constraints, moral codes and political correctness often control our thinking?"

"Spinoza helps me to see myself objectively. This makes life bearable even in experiencing suffering; and with the teachings from the Ethics the world is perceived as manageable."

"Spinoza would not tolerate restrictions, imposed by any political or religious system or by any moral attitude. He struggled for the ideal of free thought. Hardly any other philosopher made so many enemies. He was labelled ‘a troublemaking Jew’, banned from the synagogue and from the academic establishment. Even his pupils would acknowledge him in private. And when Karl Ludwig asked the impoverished lonely philosopher to lecture at the University of Heidelberg, he turned him down. Spinoza could not guarantee that his thinking would not threaten ‘widely accepted religious concepts’. The philosopher in him preferred the quiet retiring life to a bourgeois career."

"Spinoza had no particular interest in music. Nonetheless, his logic was influenced by his approach to music. My father, who studied philosophy, was the first to introduce me to Spinoza. He advised me to look at scores philosophically and rationally. Spinoza's principle that reason and emotion cannot be separated, became for me a primary approach to music. I believe that one can approach a concept and a piece of music only if the logical structure can be established simultaneously with the emotional content."

"I think back to the last discussion I had with the great conductor Otto Klemperer. We talked about Spinoza and he said “Spinoza's Ethics is the most important book ever written”. Klemperer was, as we know, Jewish. At the age of 22 he converted to Christianity because he believed that only as a Christian could he conduct Bach's St Matthew Passion. Many years later, after the War, when Klemperer had already reached old age, he converted back to Judaism. And the reason he gave was Spinoza's Ethics. Perhaps the most important Jewish philosophy. Questions about Jewish ethics and morals and “What is being Jewish?” were long identified as being a minority. The traditional thinking and perceived identity of the Jewish people in its 2,000 year history was as a minority. Historically the Jews were integrated into social and cultural life but tragically persecuted under the Spanish Inquisition and the tyranny of Adolf Hitler. What is special about Spinoza's philosophy is that, despite persecution, abuse and alienation, his thinking was never based on the premise of Jews being a minority. That is precisely why his philosophy is so contemporary, now that the Jewish people have their own state, i.e. are no longer a minority. Spinoza's Ethics remains a potent formula for creating intellectual and moral unity among the Jews."

"Spinoza suffered two experiences which are strongly evident today. Although a Jew, he was excluded from the Jewish community; he also became a victim of anti-Semitism. A recent survey in Germany exposed the reality that a majority of Germans believe that the Jews were the greatest risk to world peace. [...] It is significant that Spinoza's ideas had an influence on what is regarded as typical German thinking today – on Feuerbach, Wagner and Nietzsche. How could Richard Wagner become an anti-semite while influenced by Spinoza? Anti-semitism definitely formed part of the profile of a German nationalist in the nineteenth century. Why did Wagner pursue this idea with such fervour? He could not draw these ideas from his spiritual father, the heir to Spinoza, Feuerbach."

"...So when you play five notes, if each note had a big ego it would want to be louder than the note before. And therefore I learned from this very simple fact, that no matter how great an individual you are, music teaches you that the creativity only work in groups, and the expression of the group is very often larger than the sum of the parts. And you can draw whatever conclusions you want from this, but I think that this is a not unimportant factor. And maybe in a strange way I've found some answers to all this, not in music but in philosophy, especially from reading regularly and for many years the Ethics of Spinoza. Spinoza was a religious scholar, a political architect, a philosopher, who aspired to geometric demonstration of the universe and the human being in it, and he was a biological thinker who advanced the science of emotion. And there lies of course one of the great difficulties of making music, the science of emotion."

"...We know at least since Spinoza that joy and its variant lead to a greater functional perfection, and that sorrow and related effects are unhealthy and should therefore be avoided. But music allows us to feel pain and pleasure simultaneously, both as players, and as listeners. [...] Music to me is sound with thought, and as Spinoza believed that rationality was the saving grace of the human being, then we must learn to look at music like this too."

"I read Spinoza's Ethics for the first time when I was thirteen years old. Of course at school we studied the Bible – which for me is the ultimate philosophical work. However, reading Spinoza opened up a new dimension for me, which is the reason for my continuing dedication to his works. Spinoza's simple principle 'man thinks' has become an existential mindset for me; my copy of his Ethics has become dog-eared and torn. For years I took it with me on my travels and in hotel rooms or intervals in concerts became absorbed by many of its principles. Spinoza's Ethics is the best training ground for the intellect, above all because Spinoza teaches the radical freedom of thought more completely than any other philosopher. This Spinozan brand of freedom is not a release from discipline into arbitrariness of thought, but an active process. The more one is able to determine one's own thoughts – in fact, causing one's own thoughts, thereby creating one's own experience of reality – the more it is possible to become self-determined, to be truly free."

"...This awareness has become a kind of pre-Freudian self-analysis for me; Spinoza helps me to see myself and my surroundings objectively. This can make life bearable even throughout the experience of suffering; the teachings presented in the Ethics allow one to preceive the world as a manageable place. Freud himself once wrote in a letter to [Lothar] Bickel, 'I admit my dependence on Spinoza's teachings.' Conversely, Spinoza admits, foreshadowing Freudian analysis, that we cannot be in complete control over our emotions. [...] The ability to create emotional balance, though, is dependent upon the intellectual awareness of the problem. In this way Spinoza demands the integration of all human aspects in order to attain true freedom."

"One of Spinoza's most important conclusions is that of the human being's necessity to overcome the contradiction between the finite and the infinite. Spinoza was able to express the very nature of the Judaeo-Christian way of thought and, at the same time, to remain outside it and even negate it. Both in the Jewish and the Christian traditions, God creates the world but is outside it. Spinoza, on the other hand, would not say that God creates the world, but that He produces it – in philosophical terms, He causes it. God, for Spinoza, is not outside the world and this view was the object of very harsh criticism by his contemporaries. The Jewish community in Holland even saw fit to excommunicate him. The God of Judeao-Christian thought, according to Spinoza, is an invention of man, who imagines that God thinks and acts as human beings do."

"There is no substitute for knowledge, self-knowledge, or a metaphysical understanding of the score and one's relationship to it; and no amount of talent or even training can compensate for the lack of all these elements. 'Man thinks,' says Spinoza, and this thinking is the result of a dialogue between the intellect, the emotions and the intuition. This is not only true of the thinking of each individual, but of groups of people and even of nations."

"The rise of Spinozism in the late eighteenth century is a phenomenon of no less significance than the emergence of Kantianism itself. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spinoza's philosophy had become the main competitor to Kant's, and only Spinoza had as many admirers or adherents as Kant."

"Until the publication of Jacobi's Briefe über die Lehre von Spinoza in 1785, Spinoza was a notorious figure in Germany. For more than a century the academic and ecclesiastical establishment had treated him “like a dead dog” as Lessing later put it. The Ethica was published in Germany in 1677, and the Tractatus Theologico-politicus in 1670 (though it appeared anonymously, Spinoza was known to be the author). Until the middle of the eighteenth century it was de rigueur for every professor and cleric to prove his orthodoxy before taking office; and proving one's orthodoxy demanded denouncing Spinoza as a heretic. Since attacks on Spinoza became a virtual ritual, there was an abundance of defamatory and polemical tracts against him. Indeed, by 1710 so many professors and clerics had attacked Spinoza that there was a Catalogus scriptorum Anti-spinozanorum in Leipzig. And in 1759 Trinius counted, probably too modestly, 129 enemies of Spinoza in his Freydenkerlexicon. Such was Spinoza's reputation that he was often identified with Satan himself. Spinoza was seen as not only one form of atheism, but as the worst form. Thus Spinoza was dubbed the "Euclides atheisticus', the 'princips atheorum."

"After 1785 public opinion of Spinoza changed from almost universal contempt to almost universal admiration, largely as a result of the publication of Jacobi's Briefe, in which he revealed Lessing's Spinozism. Lessing was the most admired figure of the Aufklarung, and his credo automatically gave a stamp of legitimacy to every secret Spinozist. One after another the Spinozists could now come out of their closets and form a file behind Lessing. If Lessing was an honorable man and a Spinozist, then they could be too. Ironically, Jacobi's Briefe did not destroy Lessing's reputation, as Mendelssohn feared. It did the very opposite, making him a hero in the eyes of the nonconformists. Lessing made it a fashion to be unorthodox; and to be fashionably unorthodox was to be a Spinozist. Of course, Lessing's credo explains only how Spinozism became respectable. It accounts for why a Spinozist might go public, but not for why he became a Spinozist in the first place. To understand why Spinozism became the credo of so many other thinkers, we have to consider the new situation of the sciences at the close of the eighteenth century. The rise in the fortunes of Spinozism resulted in part from the consequence of the decline of theism and deism."

"Hegel turned fully to Spinoza only in his early Jena years during his collaboration with Schelling, who had been especially inspired by Spinoza, and who, even during his Fichtean phase, declared himself to be a Spinozist. But Hegel's turning toward Spinozism was not simply the result of Schelling's influence. It fitted hand-in-glove with his own intention to find some rational foundation for his organic vision. After all, there were some deep affinities between Spinoza's doctrines and Hegel's mystical pantheism; Hegel could only have admired Spinoza's monism, his immanent religion, and his intellectual love of God. It was indeed Spinoza who had first attempted to find a rational foundation and technical vocabulary for such doctrines. It is no accident, then, that we find Hegel's first metaphysical writings in the Jena years replete with Spinozist vocabulary and full of sympathetic references to Spinoza."

"The prototype for Hegel's reading of the principle of subject–object identity came not from the Kantian–Fichtean tradition but its very antithesis: Spinozism. For Schelling and Hegel around 1801, the principle of subject–object identity essentially functioned as a declaration of their monism. It served as a statement of protest against all forms of dualism, whether Kantian, Fichtean or Cartesian. Schelling and Hegel greatly admired Spinoza for his monism, for showing how to overcome dualism when Kant, Fichte and Jacobi had only reinstated it. True to Spinoza, their principle of subject–object identity essentially means that the subjective and the objective, the intellectual and the empirical, the ideal and the real – however one formulates the opposition – are not distinct substances but simply different aspects, properties or attributes of one and the same substance. The principle follows immediately from the Spinozist proposition that there is only one substance, of which everything else is either a mode or an attribute. If this is the case, then the subjective and objective cannot be two things but must be only modes or attributes of one and the same thing. Though he never used the term, Spinoza himself had developed something like a principle of subject–object identity."

"No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither was any philosopher more maligned and hated. To grasp the reason for this it is not enough to recall the great theoretical thesis of Spi­nozism: a single substance having an infinity of attributes, Deus sive Natura, all "creatures" being only modes of these attributes or modifications of this substance. It is not enough to show how pantheism and atheism are combined in this thesis, which denies the existence of a moral, transcendent, creator God. We must start rather from the practical theses that made Spinozism an object of scandal. These theses imply a triple denunciation: of "consciousness," of "values," and of "sad passions." These are the three major resemblances with Nietzsche. And already in Spinoza's lifetime, they are the reasons for his being accused of materialism, immoralism, and atheism."

"In the reproach that Hegel will make to Spinoza, that he ignored the negative and its power, lies the glory and innocence of Spinoza, his own discovery. In a world consumed by the negative, he has enough confidence in life, in the power of life, to challenge death, the murderous appetite of men, the rules of good and evil, of the just and the unjust. Excommunication, war, tyranny, reaction, men who fight for their enslavement as if it were their freedom — this forms the world in which Spinoza lives. The assassination of the De Witt brothers is exemplary for him. Ultimi barbarorum. In his view, all the ways of humiliating and breaking life , all the forms of the negative have two sources, one turned outward and the other inward, resentment and bad conscience, hatred and guilt. "The two archenemies of the human race, Hatred and Re­morse." He denounces these sources again and again as being linked to man's consciousness, as being inexhaustible until there is a new consciousness, a new vision, a new appetite for living. Spinoza feels, experiences, that he is eternal."

"Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers – painters too, even chance reader – may find that they are Spinozists; indeed, such a thing is more likely for them than for professional philosophers. It is a matter of one's practical conception of the “plan”. It is not that one may be a Spinozist without knowing it. Rather, there is a strange privilege that Spinoza enjoys something that seems to have been accomplished by him and no one else. He is a philosopher who commands an extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed, systematic, and scholarly; and yet he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a “flash”. Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist; one arrives in the middle of Spinoza, one is sucked up, drawn into the system or the composition. (…) What is unique about Spinoza is that he, the most philosophic of philosophers (…) teaches the philosopher how to become a non-philosopher."

"Spinoza's ethics has nothing to do with a morality; he conceives it as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on this plane of immanence. That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination."

"What interested me most in Spinoza wasn't his Substance, but the composition of finite modes. I consider this one of the most original aspects of my book. That is: the hope of making substance tum on finite modes, or at least of seeing in substance a plane of immanence in which finite modes operate, already appears in this book. What I needed was both (1) the expressive character of particular individuals, and (2) an immanence of being. Leibniz, in a way, goes still further than Spinoza on the first point. But on the second, Spinoza stands alone. One finds it only in him. This is why I consider myself a Spinozist, rather than a Leibnizian, although I owe a lot to Leibniz. In the book I'm writing at the moment, What is Philosophy?, I try to return to this problem of absolute immanence, and to say why Spinoza is for me the 'prince' of philosophers."

"Spinoza: the absolute philosopher, whose Ethics is the foremost book on concepts."

"Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery."

"...Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. In the last book of the Ethics he produced the movement of the infinite and gave infinite speeds to thought in the third kind of knowledge. There he attains incredible speeds, with such lightning compressions that one can only speak of music, of tornadoes, of wind and strings. He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. [...] Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape. Will we ever be mature enough for a Spinozist inspiration?"

"The Ethics is a book of concepts (the second kind of knowledge), but also of affects (the first kind) and percepts (the third kind) too. Thus the paradox in Spinoza is that he's the most philosophical of philosophers, the purest in some sense, but also the one who more than any other addresses non-philosophers and calls forth the most intense non-philosophical understanding. That is why absolutely anyone can read Spinoza, and be very moved, or see things quite differently afterward, even if they can hardly understand Spinoza's concepts. Conversely, a historian of philosophy who understands only Spinoza's concepts doesn't fully understand him."

"It was on Spinoza that I worked the most seriously according to the norms of the history of philosophy — but he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch's broom which he makes you mount. We have not yet begun to understand Spinoza, and I myself no more than others."

"He put forth his pantheism in a series of propositions and proofs—and what he hoped to prove was that mind and matter were merely two different manifestations of a single sacred Substance. It took a special kind of mind to deduce Nature’s divinity, step by step, from a simple set of axioms. Never has pantheism been proclaimed in such a punctilious fashion. Never before, and never since, has the world seen such a meticulous mystic."

"But in his search for the divine, Spinoza delved down far below the roots of the Jewish religion. Deep in the depths of his own soul, he discovered the wellspring of the world, the secret source that sustained all things. Spinoza basked in the waters of this sacred spring until they saturated his whole being."

"[Alberto Knox] Spinoza belonged to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, but he was excommunicated for heresy. Few philosophers in more recent times have been so blasphemed and so persecuted for their ideas as this man. It happened because he criticized the established religion. He believed that Christianity and Judaism were only kept alive by rigid dogma and outer ritual. He was the first to apply what we call a historico-critical interpretation of the Bible."

"[Alberto Knox] He denied that the Bible was inspired by God down to the last letter. When we read the Bible, he said, we must continually bear in mind the period it was written in. A ‘critical’ reading, such as the one he proposed, revealed a number of inconsistencies in the texts. But beneath the surface of the Scriptures in the New Testament is Jesus, who could well be called God's mouthpiece. The teachings of Jesus therefore represented a liberation from the orthodoxy of Judaism. Jesus preached a ‘religion of reason’ which valued love higher than all else. Spinoza interpreted this as meaning both love of God and love of humanity. Nevertheless, Christianity had also become set in its own rigid dogmas and outer rituals."

"[Alberto Knox] When things got really tough, Spinoza was even deserted by his own family. They tried to disinherit him on the grounds of his heresy. Paradoxically enough, few have spoken out more powerfully in the cause of free speech and religious tolerance than Spinoza. The opposition he was met with on all sides led him to pursue a quiet and secluded life devoted entirely to philosophy. He earned a meager living by polishing lenses, some of which have come into my possession. [...] There is almost something symbolic in the fact that he lived by polishing lenses. A philosopher must help people to see life in a new perspective. One of the pillars of Spinoza's philosophy was indeed to see things from the perspective of eternity."

"...The Festschrift [1932] dedicated to Spinoza may be said to be a praiseworthy international achievement. Its initiators were Germans and it appeared as a Sonderausgabe of a German newspaper. Spinoza had nothing in common with the German nation. The Germans, however, were the first to manifest serious interest in him. Their first great philosopher Leibniz went to seek his advice and his counsel; they were the only ones to invite him to lecture at their university. Even though Leibniz concealed him from the world, the Germans revealed him to the world. The generation of their greatest philosophers and poets from the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries grew up under his influence. Goethe read him together with Charlotte von Stein, and even read him together with her in Latin. To Hegel, Spinoza was "der Mittelpunkt der modernen Philosophie"."

"Between 1854 and 1856, while Bain and Spencer were publishing their first major studies of psychology, George Eliot was immersed in the task of translating Spinoza's Ethics (1677). Before the middle of the nineteenth century, relatively little attention had been given to Spinoza by British philosophers, in part because his geometrical style of metaphysics was antithetical to the spirit of eighteenth-century empiricism, and also because of his unpalatable reputation as an atheist. As Lewes remarked, "the accusation of Spinozism was another name for atheism, and deliberate yielding of the soul to Satan". Although Coleridge had absorbed Spinoza's writing as part of his immersion in Continential metaphysics, and Shelley too had been drawn to his religious radicalism, no one before Eliot's generation championed the philosopher in the way that Goethe had done in Germany. By 1878, however, the philosopher Frederick Pollock was commenting in the journal Mind that "in the Ethics of Spinoza we have one of the most remarkable achievements of constructive philosophic genius ever given to the world." Such keen praise was commonly accepted by this time as being neither eccentric nor misguided. Lewes, who was among the first in Britain to give Spinoza serious critical consideration, believed the Ethics opened "a new era in History." Carlyle's literary executor, J. A. Froude, who grudgingly acknowledged in 1855 that "Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or set aside," eventually became another important channel for the dissemination of his ideas. [...] There was, then, an increasingly wide spread recognition in the second half of the nineteenth century that Spinoza was a central figure in modern thought, an opinion few in Britain endorsed before the 1850s."

"George Eliot herself had recognised Spinoza's importance some year before Arnold paid the philosopher this elaborate double-edged compliment. In a letter to Charles Bray in 1849 she wrote, diagnostically: "What is wanted in English is not a translation of Spinoza's works, but a true estimate of his life and system. After one has rendered his Latin faithfully into English, one feels that there is another yet more difficult process of translation for the reader to effect, and that the only mode of making Spinoza accessible to a larger number is to study his books, then shut them out and give an analysis." Since she began writing fiction only months after finishing work on the Ethics, it is plausible to consider Eliot's novels as attempting this larger project of Spinozan translation [...] But the detached voice speaking in this letter widens its import beyond the personal, for what animates Eliot here is an issue with a much broader horizon than private ambition: she is hinting at a more general correlation between Spinoza and contemporary British thought. Spinoza has become a crucial figure, she is insisting, one who speaks relevantly to the intellectual predicaments and debates of the mid-nineteenth century."

"Can the seventeenth-century rationalist, who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the history of Western philosophy, be considered, by any stretch of interpretation, a Jewish thinker? Can he even be considered a Jew? Benedictus Spinoza is the greatest philosopher that the Jews ever produced, which adds a certain irony to his questionable Jewishness."

"He supported himself by grinding lenses, which was no lowly menial occupation, as it is often presented to have been in romanticizing versions of the philosopher's life, but was rather a craft that drew extensively from Spinoza's serious interest in the science of optics. The quality of his wares was highly valued by other scientists of his day. The important Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Saturn's rings as well as one of its four moons, preferred Spinoza's lenses to all others. "The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish," Huygens wrote to his brother in 1667. The one part of the romantic lens-grinding legend that is sadly true is that the dust from the optical polishing was unhealthy for Spinoza, whose mother and brother had both died young from tuberculosis. He himself succumbed to the disease at the age of forty-four."

"Some important intellectual figures of the day made their way to the modest rooms he rented in the Hague in his last years, including the up-and-coming young go-getter Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who would emerge as one of the most dazzling figures in the seventeenth century's impressive lineup of genius. Leibniz spent a few days with Spinoza, conversing on metaphysics. The only written record of their extensive conversations was a slip of paper on which Leibniz had written down, for Spinoza's approval, a proof for God's existence. Leibniz was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's ideas but sought always to conceal his philosophical debt, and is on record as denouncing the philosopher. When a professor of rhetoric at the University of Utrecht, one Johan Georg Graevius, wrote to Leibniz, castigating the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as a "most pestilential book," whose author "is said to be a Jew named Spinoza, but who was cast out of the synagogue because of his monstrous opinions," Leibniz prudently chimed in with his own diplomatic calumny: "I have read the book by Spinoza. I am saddened by the fact that such a learned man has, as it seems, sunk so low.""

"Spinoza remained throughout his life, and well into the eighteenth century, a thinker whom one could admire only in secret, hiding one's sympathy just as his Marrano antecedents had concealed their wayward Jewishness. Open admiration could destroy even the most established of reputations, well into the eighteenth century's so-called Age of Reason. In the 1780s, for example, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi launched a generalized attack on Enlightenment thought by claiming that the late poet Lessing had been a closet Spinozist, a charge sufficient to compromise the entire movement for which Lessing had been a leading spokesman. Jacobi even went after Immanuel Kant and his successors, arguing that "consistent philosophy is Spinozist, hence pantheist, fatalist, and atheist.""

"The Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document first drafted by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza's contemporary — both were born in 1632 — is a more obvious influence on Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself been influenced by Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy. In fact, Locke spent five formative years in Amsterdam, in exile because of the political troubles of his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury. Though Spinoza was already dead, Locke met in Amsterdam men who almost certainly spoke of Spinoza. Locke's library not only included all of Spinoza's important works, but also works in which Spinoza had been discussed and condemned. It's worth noting that Locke emerged from his years in Amsterdam a far more egalitarian thinker, having decisively moved in the direction of Spinoza. He now accepted, as he had not before, the fundamental egalitarian claim that the legitimacy of the state's power derives from the consent of the governed, a phrase that would prominently find its way into the Declaration. Locke's claims on behalf of reason did not go as far as Spinoza's. He was firm in defending Christianity's revelation as the one true religion against Spinoza's universalism. In some of the fundamental ways in which Spinoza and Locke differed, Jefferson's view was more allied with Spinoza. (Spinoza's collected works were also in Jefferson's library, so Spinoza's impact may not just have been by way of Locke.)"

"One of the ideas that I play around with in the book [Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity] is tracing a possible path from Spinoza's influence in Amsterdam to the founding fathers of America, by way of John Locke, who spent time in Amsterdam a few years after Spinoza's death and fraternized with people of the same liberal persuasion as those in whom Spinoza had confided his ideas. No matter whether Madison and Jefferson really did read Spinoza (Spinoza was in Jefferson's library) they often sound just like him in their letters."

"The attention that literary artists have lavished on Spinoza is remarkable. Writers have not only shaped their aesthetics by reflection on Spinoza, have not only inserted his views into the inner lives and dialogues of their characters, but have molded the man himself into a protagonist in their novels, poems, and plays. This last aspect of the literary fascination with Spinoza is particularly noteworthy. The person of Benedictus Spinoza has drawn, over the centuries, unusual attention, and not only from literary writers."

"The significant writers to whom Spinoza has significantly mattered range across genres and sensibilities, and their reasons for considering him artistically relevant vary as widely as their methods of making him so. Some writers declared themselves devotees of his thought and were strengthened in their art by their interpretations of his views. Others were deeply bothered by some aspect of his system—his determinism, for example, or his insistence on the supremacy of reason over the passions—and made art out of their resistance. George Eliot (1819–1890), arguably the most philosophically inspired of the great nineteenth-century British novelists, falls into the first category. She decided to write fiction seven months after completing her translation of the Ethics, the first in English, and her view of her writing as a “set of experiments” is imprinted with certain Spinozist positions. The robust determinism to which she subjects her characters, as well as the conception of freedom and virtue that moves her plots along to their ethically resounding dénouements, bears the impressions of her close relationship with Spinoza's works."

"My intention is to give a sense of the grand sweep of literary artists—that is, novelists, poets, and playwrights—reacting through their art to Spinoza's ideas. Given the irreconcilability of the approaches and attitudes, it is all but impossible to make a sustained argument concerning Spinoza's literary appeal. If there is an overarching explanation for why this particular philosopher has been so artistically generative, perhaps it lies in what one might call Spinoza's rationalist purity. Nobody has ever made greater claims for the life of pure reason. For some temperaments this is inspiring, for others off-putting. Other philosophers—one thinks particularly of Plato—have influenced important literary artists, but Spinoza seems unique among philosophers in the amount of literary fascination with the man himself."

"...But when it comes to the subject of the arts, Spinoza is oddly reticent. His failure to consider the aesthetic response—surely a profound facet of human experience—is all the stranger when one compares him, again, to Plato who directs as much conflicted pondering to the arts, particularly to poetry, as to erotic love."

"Before I became a Marxist in 1924, I was in favor of pantheism, Zhuangzi, the Indian Buddhist thought of the Upanisads, and the Western philosopher Spinoza. I felt close to Johann W. Goethe also because of this inclination."

"I love our old Chuang-tzu because I love his pantheism, because he got a living by making straw shoes. I love the Dutchman Spinoza because I love his pantheism, because he got a living by grinding lenses. I love the Indian Kabir because I love his pantheism, because he got a living by knotting fishing-nets."

"Previously, the world in my eyes is just a graphic drawing of death. Now it comes to life and becomes a subject as exquisite as rock quartz. I always like reading Zhuangzi, but I only appreciate his diction and ignore his meaning. I can't understand his meaning. At this moment, I understand him thoroughly. I know what “Tao” and “Hua” mean. From then on, I am led to Laozi, Confucius philosophy and especially Spinoza, so I found an all-directional solemn world."

"Since I always like Zhuangzi and I am close to Tagore, I am greatly affected by the thought of pantheism. Hence, my works are close to works of the great philosopher of Europe Spinoza and poetry of German poet Goethe."