Soviet Spinoza
Faith searching for
understanding
1. Baruch the Baptist
2. Fatalism or hymn to freedom?
3. Animal sociale: the clash of affects
4. Whom are you with, Spinoza?
Andrey Maidansky,
Aleksanteri Institute Visiting Fellow, 2012
Spinoza’s substance is
“the metaphysically disguised
nature as separated from man”
(Die helige Familie, 1845).
Karl Marx
Georgy Plekhanov
— So in your opinion old Spinoza was right in saying
that thought and extension were nothing but two
attributes of one and the same substance?
— “Of course”, answered Engels, “old Spinoza was
quite right.”
“The modern materialism is nothing other
than more or less self-aware Spinozism.”
“The materialism of Marx and Engels was a kind of Spinozism.”
“Mechanists” vs. “Dialecticians” (the 1920s)
Lubov’ Akselrod: Spinoza transferred his religious feeling onto the
world order. “What an absurdity it is to assert that, in Spinoza,
Substance is matter”.
“Spinoza’s teaching, in its basic principles, appears to be a
motionless and irreparable parallelism”.
If Plekhanov offered to revise
Spinoza in the materialistic spirit,
then
Abram Deborin tried to prove
that Spinoza actually was a materialist,
disguised himself in the “theological clothes”.
Marxism is “a Neo-Spinozism of the XX century”
(Ivan Luppol).
Vasily Sokolov vs. Evald Ilyenkov
(since the 1950s)
Spinoza was “unable to advance the
consistently materialistical point of
view on Nature”.
Spinoza is “a convinced materialist with
a most strong aspiration for dialectics”.
“Thought is only a property,
a predicate, an attribute of body.”
“Pantheistic form of Spinoza’s materialism”
is an effect of “insufficient maturity
of the bourgeois ideology”.
Res cogitans (thinking thing) = “thinking body”.
FATALISM
Spinoza’s concept of freedom
is fictitious, nothing more than
verbal disguise of fatalism
(Russian Neo-Kantians:
Alexandr Vvedensky, Lev Lopatin et al.)
“Mechanists”: Spinoza’s fatalism resulted
from his religious feeling, not from his
determinism.
FREEDOM
Valentin Asmus: “Spinoza himself
decidedly rejected all fatalistic
interpretations of his doctrine”.
“This teaching is imbued not with
metaphysical abstractness, but with the
leaving breath of practice and activity”.
To be free means to act reasonably (ex ratione agere), i.e.
“to do those things which follow from the necessity of our
nature, considered in itself alone.”
(Ethica IV, propositio 59, demonstratio)
Spinozism is the philosophy of Action, from head to toe.
“The more active is man, the more external
counteracting things are involved in his
activity, subjecting him to reciprocal
effects of them, – the higher is degree
of his freedom. ” (Evald Ilyenkov).
Freedom is acting in accordance
with the universal laws of Nature.
Valentin Asmus: “The dialectics of necessity
and freedom is the most important key for
understanding Spinozism.”
In Spinoza, freedom is “the highest activity of
man, absolutely independent of any external
forces and stimuli.”
Cultural Historical School in psychology
Using the human, cultural means to regulate
its own behaviour, man makes it free. The
degree of our freedom is characterised by the
power and extent of the internal, immanent
determination of human activity.
Lev Vygotsky: “We cannot help but note that
we have come to the same understanding of
freedom and dominance over self as Spinoza
developed in his Ethics.”
“To revive Spinozism in Marxist psychology” (L.S. Vygotsky).
Political life
is a clash of active affects and passions,
confrontation of forces of solidarity and hostility.
Tractatus politicus: “Insofar as they are assailed by anger,
envy, or any affects of hatred, people are, by nature, enemies.”
Ethica: “All should so agree in all things that
the Minds and Bodies of all would compose,
as it were, one Mind and one Body.”
Empedokles: Cosmos is moved by Love and Strife
Spinoza as “Marx without a beard”
Lubov’ Akselrod:
“Spinoza builds all his state legislation proceeding
from the material interests... If to translate it into the
Marxist language, it means that legal awareness of the
individual is determined by economic being .”
Isaak Razumovsky:
“Let us translate the ideas of Spinoza into the language of historical materialism.
And we get the elements of the teaching about adaptation of the social man to
external environment and to work tools; the elements of theory about thingish
and commodity fetishism; finally, the elements of the realistic teaching of Marx
about the tasks which emerge and is posed only when the material conditions of
their implementation become mature ”.
Spinoza vs. Marx
 Spinoza looks at society mainly through the eyes of a
psychologist, and Marx through the eyes of an economist.
 Social life, for Spinoza, is a struggle of affects,
while for Marx, it is a struggle between classes,
or material interests.
 Spinoza completely abstracts from class distinctions.
He analyses two oppositions: rulers vs. people, and
crowd vs. philosophers.
 In Spinoza there is no cornerstone of the materialist
understanding of history, the concept of labour.
And the very concept of history is not fully crystallised.
Achilles heel of Spinozism is an “abstract man,
considered outside the historical process” (Valentin Asmus).
Qui bono?
“Mechanists” & “Dialecticians”:
Spinoza expressed the class interests
of the bourgeoisie.
Anatoly Lunacharsky: Materialism and rationalism are
two “main principles of the bourgeois world”, having
founded the brilliant embodiment in Spinoza’s system.
But the bourgeoisie dared not drive these principles to
their logical conclusion. Spinoza remained in solitude – he
“appeared to be practically an outcast of his class”.
Proletariat was, thus, destined to master and develop the
revolutionary ideas of Spinoza.
Spinoza as a weapon of the proletariat
Vasily Sokolov: Denying the
Calvinist “morality of accumulation”,
Spinoza evolves the “passively
moralising critique of contemporary
bourgeois society”.
Evald Ilyenkov: “Ethics” is a code
of moral axiomatics of working class,
and in no way of the class of dealers,
hucksters and bankers. Hence its
sincere democratic character.”
The modernity of Spinoza
“As a philosopher, Spinoza is our contemporary. And not
because we have lagged behind by 300 years, but because
he was 300 years ahead of his time” (Evald Ilyenkov).