1 - Marxism and Spinozism

Summary

It is necessary to arrive at a certain form of unity, a space, between two diverse philosophers: the entire question is to know if this is possible without falling into the confusion that purely and simply identifies two philosophers with the fiction of a common truth.

Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza

Most know the role that Spinoza played in German philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth century in the famous ‘pantheism controversy’ (which continued into the debate over atheism). Most also know the importance that Hegel attributed to Spinoza's thought (‘Spinoza or no philosophy at all’ stated the philosopher of Berlin). The presence of Spinoza throughout the philosophy of Schelling, from beginning to end, is also relatively well known. However, it seems that far fewer know about the role played by the reference to Spinoza at the end of the remarkable sequence of German Idealism, and notably in the period following the death of Hegel in 1831. There was a significant return of Spinoza, which was at the same time a return to Spinoza, in the period opened up by Hegel's achievement of speculative idealism, and more precisely in the period of the decomposition of the Hegelian system, which began in earnest from 1838 with the divide between the ‘old’ and ‘young’ Hegelians, accentuated by the publication of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity in 1841 and by Marx's own works between 1843 and 1846. This is the moment when Spinoza becomes not only an explicit point of reference, but also an explicitly positive reference, most notably in the work of Heine and Moses Hess. After the publication in 1833 of Feuerbach's History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza, Hess published in 1937 his first book, the Holy History of Mankind, with no indication of the author's identity other than as ‘a disciple of Spinoza’. As a thinker of the unity of all life, and of ‘the one’ as life, Spinoza is for Hess the thinker of the unity of natural life and spiritual life: his doctrine contained, in larval form, the reconciliation of Schelling's philosophy of Nature and Hegel's philosophy of Spirit prior to their development. It thus prepared the way for the philosophy of the future, which would reunite in action the activity of the self and the absolute and its activity outside the self.