Georgi Plekhanov on Baruch Spinoza

“...Elsewhere I have shown that La Mettrie and Diderot – each after his own fashion – arrived at a world-outlook that was a ‘brand of Spinozism’, that is, a Spinozism without the theological appendage that distorted its true content. It would also be easy to show that, inasmuch as we are speaking of the unity of subject and object, Hobbes too stood very close to Spinoza. That, however, would be taking us too far afield, and, besides, there is no immediate need to do that. Probably of greater interest to the reader is the fact that today any naturalist who has delved even a little into the problem of the relation of thinking to being arrives at that doctrine of their unity which we have met in Feuerbach.”

“While Herr Bernstein returns to Kant “to a certain point” Herr Stern speaks to us of the old Spinoza, and asks us to return to the philosophy of that great and noble Jewish thinker. That is something else, and far more reasonable than Herr Bernstein's call. Indeed, it is important and interesting to study the question of whether there is something in common between the philosophical ideas of Marx and Engels on the one hand, and Spinoza's on the other. [...] Meanwhile, I assert with full conviction that, in the materialist period of their development, Marx and Engels never abandoned Spinoza's point of view. That conviction, incidentally, is based on Engels's personal testimony. [...] After visiting the Paris World Exhibition in 1889, I went to London to make Engels's acquaintance. For almost a whole week, I had the pleasure of having long talks with him on a variety of practical and theoretical subjects. When, on one occasion, we were discussing philosophy, Engels sharply condemned what Stern had most inaccurately called “naturphilosophische materialism”. “So do you think,” I asked, “old Spinoza was right when he said that thought and extent are nothing but two attributes of one and the same substance?” “Of course,” Engels replied, “old Spinoza was quite right.””

“...Note that in saying this, Feuerbach stands close to Spinoza, whose philosophy he was already setting forth with great sympathy at the time his own breakaway from idealism was taking shape, that is, when he was writing his history of modern philosophy. In 1843 he made the subtle observation, in his Grundsätze, that pantheism is a theological materialism, a negation of theology but as yet on a theological standpoint. This confusion of materialism and theology constituted Spinoza's inconsistency, which, however, did not prevent him from providing a ‘correct – at least for his time – philosophical expression for the materialist trend of modern times’. That was why Feuerbach called Spinoza ‘the Moses of the modern free-thinkers and materialists’. In 1847 Feuerbach asked: ‘What then, under careful examination, is that which Spinoza calls Substance, in terms of logics or metaphysics, and God in terms of theology?’ To this question he replied categorically: ‘Nothing else but Nature.’ He saw Spinozism’s main shortcoming in the fact that ‘in it the sensible, anti-theological essence of Nature assumes the aspect of an abstract, metaphysical being’. Spinoza eliminated the dualism of God and Nature, since he declared that the acts of Nature were those of God. However, it was just because he regarded the acts of Nature to be those of God, that the latter remained, with Spinoza, a being distinct from Nature, but forming its foundation. He regarded God as the subject and Nature as the predicate. A philosophy that has completely liberated itself from theological traditions must remove this important shortcoming in Spinoza's philosophy, which in its essence is sound. ‘Away with this contradiction!’, Feuerbach exclaimed. ‘Not Deus sive Natura but aut Deus aut Natura is the watchword of Truth.’ Thus, Feuerbach's ‘humanism’ proved to be nothing else but Spinozism disencumbered of its theological pendant. And it was the standpoint of this kind of Spinozism, which Feuerbach had freed of its theological pendant, that Marx and Engels adopted when they broke with idealism. However, disencumbering Spinozism of its theological appendage meant revealing its true and materialist content. Consequently, the Spinozism of Marx and Engels was indeed materialism brought up to date.”