Spinoza: A Genealogy of Radicalism Presentation Script

Spinoza: A Genealogy of Radicalism Presentation Script I’d like to begin this presentation by offering some context. In some senses, to continue writing about the 18th century as a Marxist is like beating a dead horse. We’ve all heard the debates about the bourgeois revolution in France, the industrial revolution in England, the war of independence in America, and more. Those more interested in intellectual history may feel no less exhausted by discussions of the Enlightenment, that period of unprecedented scientific and philosophical advancement commencing in the 1670s and terminating in the 1780s. But there is another sense in which this century remains subject to too little consideration, and this is in terms of what it can add to our understanding of the intellectual history of materialism, culminating in Marx’s philosophy. It is to this that I hope to contribute here. This paper is based on a research project which I am commencing now at the University of Oxford; accordingly, parts of my argument may seem underdeveloped or preliminary. This is assuredly because they are, but I am convinced that even the more conjectural parts can be readily substantiated with both bibliographical and philosophical evidence. My thesis here, stated in the broadest terms, is this. Interest in Spinoza’s philosophy has steadily grown in the world of critical theory since the 1960s. Attempts to relate Marx to Spinoza have suffered by ignoring archival evidence contradicting claims about Spinoza’s influence on Marx. For this reason, among others, these attempts have consistently resulted in bad interpretations of both Marx and Spinoza. Yet there is a way of relating Marx to Spinoza which is not so easy to repudiate, and this is by means of the radical materialists of the French Enlightenment. First, then: what evidence do we have of the influence of Spinoza on Marx? Bernardo Bianchi’s article ‘Marx’s Reading of Spinoza: On the Alleged Influence of Spinoza on Marx’ is, in my opinion, the definitive work on this connection. Bianchi (2018). There was a period of Marx’s life during which he was undoubtably under the influence of Spinoza: the preparatory notebooks for Marx’s dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus contain substantial excerpts from Spinoza’s writings. He devoted one of his eight preparatory notebooks to Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, and two to Spinoza’s Letters. Notably, there is no evidence that Marx had ever read Spinoza’s main work, the Ethics. In fact, as Olivier Bloch has argued, the structure of Marx’s later comments on the Ethics suggests that he mostly relied on Charles Renouvier’s Manual of Modern Philosophy for his discussions of Spinoza’s metaphysics, and not on Spinoza himself. Bloch (1977). In this sense, Franck Fischbach is certainly correct that Spinoza’s influence on Marx is the greatest in his youthful writings, rather than in his writings after the so-called epistemic break of 1844. Fischbach (2023), 14-5. Although there is sparse evidence of Spinoza’s prolonged influence on Marx’s work, the story of the influence of French Enlightenment materialism on Marx is quite different. This may be surprising to some: in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, Hegel is placed above his materialist predecessors and successors because he, unlike the materialists, had managed to keep all the elements of his system in motion. As Marx wrote there, “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” Marx and Engels (1976), 3. Marx does not mention any of the Enlightenment materialists here, and one is naturally left to wonder whether, in speaking of ‘all hitherto existing materialism’, he had intended to include that of certain Enlighteners. There is much wrong with this as a depiction of Enlightenment materialism. But there are also reasons to think that Marx may have withheld from applying such a disparaging judgement to it. Certainly, in The German Ideology Marx spares no opprobrium when it comes to Helvétius and the Baron d’Holbach. But there, he is predominantly concerned with their limited conception of human relations. Ibid, 409. Perhaps even without a sufficiently rich conception of human relations we could still exempt them from the condemnation whose principal target is Feuerbach. It may be the case that they limited their understanding of human relations against their own better judgement. In his earlier The Holy Family, Marx’s opinion of French materialism appears somewhat different. In that text he wrote, “There are two trends in French materialism, of which one traces its origin to Descartes, and the other to Locke. The latter is mainly a French development and leads directly to socialism.” Marx and Engels (1975), 125. Later in the same chapter, and still discussing French materialism, he adds, “There is no need for any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, […] etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism.” Ibid, 130. Concluding this chapter, Marx proffers a barrage of quotations which he claims will aid with the study of the connection between eighteenth century materialism and communism. Ibid, 132-4. The authors quoted are Helvétius, d’Holbach, and Bentham. It is possible that, having noted that such a study had not yet been written, he attempted to undertake it himself. This would explain the change in his opinion on d’Holbach, who a year later is construed no longer as a predecessor of communism, but a committed ideologist of incipient capitalism. Despite Marx’s changing appreciation of d’Holbach and Helvétius, his appreciation of other Enlighteners is less mercurial. Diderot, says Lenin, “came very close to the standpoint of contemporary materialism”, by which he means dialectical materialism. Lenin (1977), 35. This conclusion is repeated by Jonathan Kemp, editor and co-translator of the anthology Diderot, Interpreter of Nature. Kemp states that “Diderot marks one of the great stages of development in philosophy in general and in the philosophy of natural science. The study of his work is essential for the proper understanding of modern dialectical materialism.” Kemp (1963), 3. More to the point, recall again Marx’s criticism of ‘all hitherto existing materialism’ in the Theses: namely, that they had failed to grasp reality as both the object of contemplation, and as sensuous human activity. It might be unwise to say this much of Diderot. Plekhanov, in the Essays on the History of Materialism quotes d’Holbach, who affirmed that Diderot conceived of matter, not as inert, but as active and sensuous. Plekhanov (1976), 10. Perhaps Feuerbach, in his critique of German idealism, had simply inverted all its aspects. Where for one everything is ideal but active, for the other everything is material but passive. But this is not so among the French Enlighteners, and recognition of this fact clearly has its place in the intellectual history of Marxism. It should be uncontroversial to observe the relation between Marx and Diderot. The extent of this relation may be a subject of debate, and it seems to have received only minimal attention, although Marx had clearly read him. A complete study of Marx’s references to Diderot does not yet exist, but based on a review of the MECW it is possible to conclude that Marx had at least read Le Neveu de Rameau, and some of Diderot’s correspondence. What does this all have to do with Spinoza? I will now try to show that there is a direct lineage running from Spinoza, to Diderot, to Marx. Before that, a moment of hesitancy. The venerable work of the Princeton historian Jonathan I. Israel is an unavoidable reference for any discussion of Spinoza in the French Enlightenment today. So exhaustive is his research that, whatever its detriments, it is perhaps the most valuable resource for investigating this subject since Paul Vernière’s Spinoza et la pensée française avant la révolution. But his work suffers, as Alan Charles Kors among others has observed, from the assumption that any naturalistic, atheist, or materialist philosophies of this period were also in some sense Spinozist. Kors (2003), 459. This is an incredible assumption to make, especially since it asserts that even books which attempt to refute Spinoza nonetheless have some Spinozist provenance. Israel is right that Spinoza’s philosophy constitutes a part of the intellectual horizon of the Enlightenment, but it is not obviously the dominant part of that horizon. An important piece of evidence for relating Spinoza to Diderot is offered in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. The entry on Spinozist, written by Diderot, reads: “A distinction should be made between ancient and modern Spinozists. The essential principle of the latter is that matter is sensible. They demonstrate this through the development of the egg, an inert body, which by the sole influence of progressively increased heat passes to the state of a living, feeling being […]. From this they conclude that matter is all there is and is enough to explain the whole process. Modern Spinozists, moreover, follow ancient Spinozism in all its consequences.” [Diderot] (2007). This is an interesting passage for several reasons. The image of the egg deployed by Diderot here can be found repeated as recently as the 20th century in the works of Gilles Deleuze. A passage in A Thousand Plateaus describes the concept of the body without organs using this image, before adding, “After all, is not Spinoza’s Ethics the great book of the BwO?” Deleuze and Guattari (2005), 153. More immediately pertinent to my argument is the question of whether Diderot considered himself one of these modern Spinozists. Many have said that Diderot’s familiarity with Spinoza was severely limited. Moreau concludes that the use of Spinoza in the Encyclopédie “ne suppose sans doute pas une lecture directe de l'œuvre.” Moreau (2009), 113. Strugnell shares this conclusion, stating that “It is likely that the influence of Spinoza is indirect, Diderot having assimilated the rudiments of his thought through reading Meslier's Testament.” Strugnell (1973), 5. It is certainly true that Diderot’s written references to Spinoza are limited. But it is important not to evaluate this fact without an appreciation for the political circumstances of his time. Even before the publication of the Encyclopédie, Diderot had already suffered imprisonment as a consequence of speaking his philosophical and political beliefs too freely. Looking for the methods and deceits of clandestine literature in Diderot’s writings is in no way invalid, as it is highly likely that some degree of dissembling was at play. Noting that any positive association with Spinoza or Spinozism was liable to end in one being accused of atheism, it would be unsurprising also for Diderot to have downplayed the significance of Spinoza for his work. Beyond this, citation practices in the 18th century differed from what they are today, and it was not as frowned upon to lift passages and ideas from other writers without attributing these to them. Knowing this brings us a small distance towards appreciating the connection between Spinoza and Diderot. Even more to the point is the fact that, in the article Spinozist, Diderot pointedly states that ‘they’, the modern Spinozists, demonstrate that matter is sensible using the egg as an example. In the first part of Diderot’s 1769 D’Alembert’s Dream, he uses this example as well. Diderot (1963), 57-9. The ‘they’ of the Spinozist article should therefore be understood as including its author, Diderot. Furthermore, in 2019, a new critical edition of Diderot’s magnum opus, the Éléments de physiologie, was released, edited by Motoichi Terada. In this edition, Terada notes several times what are likely to be intentional allusions on Diderot’s part to Spinoza. Diderot (2019), passim. These annotations may have originally been authored by Jean Mayer, from his edition in the DPV. These allusions suggest a closer familiarity with Spinoza’s own writings than Moreau or Strugnell allow. Let us grant, then, that Diderot had read Spinoza, and considered himself one of these ‘modern Spinozists.’ The distinction Diderot draws between ancient and modern Spinozism is particularly interesting from the perspective of contemporary research into the radical implications of Spinoza’s philosophy. As luminescent as Spinoza’s system is, contemporary commentators point out that his way of formulating it leads to many unsavoury conclusions. Ellen Meiksins Wood includes an extended discussion of Spinoza’s political philosophy in her Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment. It is hard to say that she has understood Spinoza correctly. Despite this, many of her criticisms of him remain apt. Reading his attempts to subvert authority in the Dutch republic as anticapitalist manoeuvres implies that capitalism already existed in Holland in the 17th century, but it is not clear that it did. Wood (2022), 377-8. And his commitment to democracy is arguably not to the type of radical democracy of which some Marxists like Antonio Negri are advocates, but to a mercantile democracy in which the voices of various tradespeople are represented, to the detriment of workers. Ibid, 374. For this reason, Wood concludes her analysis of Spinoza as follows: “the debates at Putney – to say nothing of even more radically democratic ideas that emerged out of the English Revolution – reveal a universe of democratic thinking that goes well beyond Spinoza’s ideas on the ‘multitude.’” Ibid, 385. And this is to say nothing of his view that “women have not by nature equal right with men: but that they necessarily give way to men, and that thus it cannot happen, that both sexes should rule alike, much less that men should be ruled by women.” Spinoza (2002), 753. A notable limitation of Wood’s presentation of Spinoza rests on the fact that she considers only his explicitly political writings, and not his masterpiece the Ethics. It is after all in this text, so Negri argues, that Spinoza breaks with his liberalism and utopianism. Negri (1991), 61-2. That would not get us much further. Yitzhak Melamed has argued that the same discriminatory impulse of Spinoza’s political texts is present in the Ethics. In Melamed’s words, “were I a young child, an autistic person, or even someone who refuses the friendship of B.d.S., I would think twice before becoming his neighbour.” Melamed (2010), 164. This is only a sample of the worries which scholars have voiced about Spinoza’s philosophy. There are many others which are available, for instance in the tradition following Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In closing I want to indicate another reading of Spinoza which predominated in the 18th century, and which deserves consideration among radicals even today. Balibar argues that Spinoza’s correspondence with Tschirnhaus “shows the possibility of understanding the relationship of substance, attributes and modes according to two antithetical patterns, each of which represents the beginning of quite a different ontology.” Balibar (2022), 16. The first of these, which Balibar terms ‘Path A’, is a form of the abstract metaphysics which Marx sees 18th century French materialism as breaking with decisively. Marx and Engels (1975), 130. The second, ‘Path B,’ restores to the immediate things of this world their full reality, instead of deriving them from infinite modes, which in turn derive from the attributes of substance. In saying, as Diderot did, that modern Spinozism follows ancient Spinozism in all its consequences, one wonders whether he had perceived this difference between the form of initial presentation of Spinoza’s system, and its ultimate implications. Daniel Garber observes that there is some hesitancy in Balibar’s essay over whether this ‘Path B’ can be rightly attributed to Spinoza. Garber (1986), 78. If one were to follow Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza in The Savage Anomaly, one would naturally say that it can be. There are certainly grounds on which to argue that all the components of Spinoza’s ontology possess one and the same kind of reality: modes are real in just the same way that substance is. But to read Spinoza as providing a metaphysics in which the immediate things of this world are not subordinated infinitely to substance would be a mistake. One cannot read his philosophy as one in which, as Deleuze put it, “substance turn[s] around the modes” unless one interprets it in a partisan way, seeing it through the lens of another system. Deleuze (1994), 304. This form of intentional misreading may accurately describe the way in which Spinoza’s philosophy was appropriated by Diderot who, following his preferred method of eclecticism, took what he wanted and left the rest behind. Diderot (2007). Drawing on Spinoza in an almost poetical fashion, he reads Spinoza against himself as a materialist for whom thinking is something that bodies do, rather than something totally distinct from bodies except at the deepest level of his metaphysics, at which the difference arguably disappears. The question remains of why one today ought to return to this 18th century interpretation of Spinoza. I argued earlier that Diderot had in fact read Spinoza directly. On these grounds, one need not say that Diderot had simply misunderstood Spinoza. If one worried that, in engaging with this reading, one was actually learning nothing about Spinoza, but everything about Diderot, such a worry could be assuaged. Just how much fidelity Diderot’s reading of Spinoza has to the original texts is something on which I cannot yet speak, although I suspect that his interpretation of Spinoza is at least workable. If I am correct, then the precedent which, according to Marx, was set for the birth of communist thought by French materialism, could be traced directly to the reception of Spinoza in 18th century France. Then, to grasp the historical circumstances in which modern socialism was first thought would require a consideration of Spinoza. References Balibar, E. (2022) Spinoza, The Transindividual, trans. Kelly, M. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bianchi, B. (2018) Marx’s Reading of Spinoza: On the Alleged Influence of Spinoza on Marx, Historical Materialism (26:4), 35-58. Bloch, O (1977) Marx, Renouvier, et l’histoire du matérialisme, La Pensée (191), 3-42. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Patton, P. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2005) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, B. (London: University of Minnesota Press). Diderot, D. (2019) Éléments de physiologie, ed. Terada, M. (Paris: Éditions Matériologiques). [Attributed] (2007), “Spinozist”, in The Encyclopaedia of Diderot & D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Eden, M. Forthcoming URL = <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.761>. Last accessed 23/10/2023. (2007) “Eclecticism”, in The Encyclopaedia of Diderot & D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Eden, M. Forthcoming URL = <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.843>. Last accessed 23/10/2023. (1963) Diderot, Interpreter of Nature, ed. Stewart, J. and Kemp, J. trans. Kemp, J. New York: International Publishers. Fischbach, F. (2023) Marx with Spinoza: Production, Alienation, History, trans Read, J. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Garber, D. (1986) Spinoza’s Worlds: Reflections on Balibar on Spinoza, in Spinoza: Issues and Directions, ed. Curley, E. and Moreau, P-F. (Leiden: E.J. Brill), 77-81. Kemp, J. (1963) Introduction, in Diderot (1963), 1-34. Kors, A.C. 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(Oxford: University of Minnesota Press). Plekhanov, G. (1976) Essays on the History of Materialism, in Selected Philosophical Works, trans. Katzer, J. (Moscow: Progress Publishers). 31-182. Spinoza, B. (2002) Complete Works, ed. Morgan, M. trans. Shirley, S. (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company). Strugnell, A. (1973) Diderot’s Politics: A Study of the Evolution of Diderot’s Political Thought after the Encyclopédie. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff). Wood, E.M. (2022) A Social History of Western Political Thought. (London: Verso). 20th Historical Materialism Conference