It is true that God is necessity, or, as we may also put it, that he is the absolute Thing: he is however no less the absolute Person. That he is the absolute Person however is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached: and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of religious consciousness in Christianity. Spinoza was by descent a Jew; and it is upon the whole the Oriental way of seeing things, according to which the nature of the finite world seems frail and transient, that has found its intellectual expression in his system. This Oriental view of the unity of substance certainly gives the basis for all real further development. Still it is not the final idea. It is marked by the absence of the principle of the Western world, the principle of individuality, which first appeared under a philosophic shape, contemporaneously with Spinoza, in the Monadology of Leibnitz.
Baruch SpinozaRelated topics
absence absolute basis christianity consciousness content descent development expression final found frail gives idea individuality intellectual jew less monadology nature necessity notion oriental person philosophy point principle real religious seeing shape short side substance system thing transient under unity view way western world things leibnitz fallsRelated quotes
For a philosophy based on faith is no longer philosophy. Perhaps it was this unresolved conflict which has prevented Western thought from ever coming to rest. Perhaps it is this conflict which is at the bottom of a kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy. It is in trying to understand modern philosophy that we come across Machiavelli. Machiavelli is the only political thinker whose name has come into common use for designating a kind of politics, which exists and will continue to exist independently of his influence, a politics guided exclusively by considerations of 'expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, iron or poison, for achieving its ends-its end being the ag grandizement of one's country or fatherland-but also using the father land in the service of the self-aggrandizement of the politician or statesman or one's party.
Leo Strauss
Novalis was cried down as an enthusiastic mystic by the prosaic, and Spinoza as godless by the literalists. It was incumbent upon me to protest against this view of Spinoza, seeing I would review the whole sphere of piety. Something essential would have been wanting in the ex position of my views if I had not in some way said that the mind and heart of this great man seemed deeply influenced by piety, even though it were not Christian piety. The result might have been different, had not the Christianity of that time been so distorted and obscured by dry formulas and vain subtilties that the divine form could not be expected to win the regard of a stranger. This I said in the first edition, somewhat youthfully indeed, yet so that I have found nothing now needing to be altered, for there was no reason to believe that I ascribed the Holy Spirit to Spinoza in the special Christian sense of the word.
Baruch Spinoza
Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy. The extent of his achievement, and the unpretentious simplicity with which he, Feuerbach, gives it to the world, stand in striking contrast to the opposite attitude (of the others). Feuerbach's great achievement is: (1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of "man to man” the basic principle of the theory; (3) His opposing of the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.
Karl Marx
Take a moment to remember the times on your own spiritual quest when you felt most enthusiastic. We want to pinpoint the times in which we felt more God conscious and devotional than ever before. Conversely, look at the times when you felt unenthused and do a similar analysis. These questions might help stimulate your thought process: Are you enthusiastic about your existence as a servant of the Lord? Are you enthusiastic to follow the basic principles that will help elevate your consciousness? Are you enthusiastic in the association of saintly people? Are you enthusiastic about what you can experience in your purest state? We must examine our spiritual life on a daily, weekly, and even yearly basis. This examination will help us recognize how various activities and thoughts affect us. We should note how the quality of our experiences varies according to our absorption in the process of bhakti.
Bhakti Tirtha Swami
Bukharin, like Lenin, regarded the system of basing economic life on mass terror not as a transient necessity but as a permanent principle of socialist organization. He did not shrink from justifying all means of coercion and held, like Trotsky at the same period, that the new system called essentially for the militarization of labour – i.e. the use of police and military force to compel the whole population to work in such places and conditions as the state might arbitrarily decree. Indeed, once the market is abolished there is no longer any free sale of labour or competition between workers, and police coercion is therefore the only means of allocating "human resources”. If hired labour is eliminated, only compulsory labour remains. In other words, socialism – as conceived by both Trotsky and Bukharin at this time – is a permanent, nation-wide labour camp. (pg. 28-9)
Leszek Kołakowski
