The Savage Anomaly
THE POWER OF SPINOZA'S METAPHYSICS AND POLITICS
Antonio Negri
Translation by Michael Hardt
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis Oxford*
For Anna and Francesco
Je ne connais que Spinoza qui ait bien raissoné; mais personne ne peut le lire.
Voltaire to D'Alembert
Antonio Negri, a native of Italy, is currently professor of political science at the University of Paris (VIII) at Saint-Denis. During the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, after leaving the Socialist Party, Negri served on the editorial boards of several political reviews: Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, Contropiano, Critica del Diritto, and Magazzino, among others. In 1977 he spent some time in France during an investigation of his editorial activities. In 1979 he was accused of being the intellectual force behind terrorism in Italy. Negri spent four and a half years in prison and then fled to France after his release. Shortly after, the Italian authorities sentenced him in absentia to thirty years' imprisonment. Negri is the author of Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (1984); Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis, and New Social Subjects 1967-1983 (1988); and The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (1989).
Michael Hardt is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Washington and also a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Paris (VIII) at Saint-Denis.
We have adopted the following abbreviations for referring to these Spinoza texts:
Therefore, for example, "P37S2" would refer to the second scholium of Proposition 37.
For the Ethics and the early works we have quoted from the Edwin Curley translation, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1 (Princeton, 1985). Unfortunately, there are no adequate English translations of the political treatises and the later letters. For this reason, we have done our own translations of the necessary passages of these texts, consulting the original Latin and the English, Italian, and French translations.
The investigation of the nature of Power has emerged as one of the central projects of contemporary theory, especially among French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. These theorists focus on analyzing the myriad forms, mechanisms, and deployments through which Power invests and permeates the entire social, personal, and political horizon. Throughout their works we also find suggestions of new and creative social forces and of affirmative alternative practices. Antonio Negri's interpretation of Spinoza is an important contribution to this project. His analysis attempts to demonstrate that Spinoza provides us with an effective "other" to Power: a radically distinct, sustainable, and irrecuperable alternative for the organization of society. In fact, Negri maintains that recognizing the distinction and antagonism between these two forms of power is an important key to appreciating the contemporary relevance of Spinoza's thought.1
This proposition, however, immediately poses a difficult translation problem. Whereas the Latin terms used by Spinoza, potestas and potentia, have distinct correlates in most European languages (potere and potenza in Italian, pouvoir and puissance in French, Macht and Vermögen in German), English provides only a single term, power. To address this difficulty, we have considered several words that might serve for one of the terms, such as potency, authority, might, strength, and force, but each of these introduces asignificant distortion that only masks the real problem. Therefore, we have chosen to leave the translation issue unresolved in this work: We make the distinction nominally through capitalization, rendering potestas as "Power" and potentia as "power" and including the Latin terms in brackets where there might be confusion.
This is one of those fortunate instances, though, when an intractable question of translation opens up to a complex and fascinating conceptual issue. The thrust of Negri's argument transports the terminological distinction to a political terrain. On this horizon, he contends that Spinoza provides us not only with a critique of Power but also with a theoretical construction of power. Spinoza's conception of power is much more than a constellation of resistances or a plane of individual forces or potentialities — it is a real dynamic of organization grounded on a solid metaphysical foundation. Spinoza's power is always acting in a collective dimension, tending toward the constitution of a democratic social authority. In this regard Negri's work on Spinoza is perhaps best situated as a constructive complement to the works of the contemporary French thinkers: although Foucault and others have made great strides in criticizing and analyzing the nature and functioning of Power, Negri's Spinoza provides us with the foundation of an anatomy of power, the constitutive force to create society freely.
In Spinoza studies this problem is often posed as a purely philological issue that involves investigating the consistency of Spinoza's usage of potestas and potentia to verify the necessity of making a distinction between the two in his texts; this question has received considerable critical attention, but it remains largely unresolved.2 Negri, however, does not enter directly into this discussion. He takes the philological distinction for granted and considers the problem instead as a philosophical and political issue, inviting us to address a different set of questions. First of all, how does recognizing a distinction between potestas and potentia afford us a new perspective on Spinoza's work and enable us better to understand his comprehensive philosophical and political project? Further, can we discern a real difference between Power and power in the world, and if so, how would a Spinozian perspective afford us a richer understanding of the nature (or natures) of power and thereby provide new possibilities for contemporary theory and practice? This line of inquiry does not by any means exhaust Negri's entire project in this book, but it does constitute a central vein of his thought, both in this and his other works. Therefore, by reconstructing the broad outlines of Negri's interpretation of Power and power in Spinoza, we can provide a preliminary framework for understanding and evaluating this distinction, and, at the same time, we can help clarify the position of Negri's work both within Spinoza studies and within the field of contemporary theory as a whole.
Throughout Negri's writings we find a clear division between Power and power, both in theoretical and practical terms. In general, Power denotes the centralized, mediating, transcendental force of command, whereas power is the local, immediate, actual force of constitution. It is essential to recognize clearly from the outset that this distinction does not merely refer to the different capabilities of subjects with disparate resources and potentialities; rather, it marks two fundamentally different forms of authority and organization that stand opposed in both conceptual and material terms, in metaphysics as in politics — in the organization of being as in the organization of society. For Negri the distinction marks the form of a response to the Marxist mandate for theoretical inquiry: Recognize a real antagonism. In the context of the Marxist tradition the antagonism between Power and power can be applied in relatively unproblematic terms, and we often find the central axis of Negri's work oriented to the opposition between the Power of capitalist relations of production and the power of proletarian productive forces. In fact, we could adequately characterize the major part of Negri's intellectual and political work as an effort to clarify the terms of this antagonism in various fields: in the history of metaphysics, in political thought, and in contemporary social relations. Given this theoretical orientation and intellectual history, it should come as no surprise to us that when Negri turns to study Spinoza he finds an opposition between Power and power at the core of Spinozian thought. In addition, however, we should keep in mind the circumstances of the writing of this book. As Negri notes in the Preface, he wrote the book in prison, where he was being held to face a succession of irregular charges of subversion against the Italian State. Even if Negri could take a certain refuge in the clarity and tranquility of an erudite study of Spinoza, even if he could imagine at times that his prison cell harked back to Spinoza's austere optical laboratory, it is unimaginable that he would not be conditioned by the intense pressures of reality. A real and concrete antagonism animated Negri's world, and, among other things, this pressure placed him in an excellent position to recognize the antagonism in Spinoza's world. In a Spinozian context, though, we are wise to be wary of any dualistic opposition. Proposing an antagonism between Power and power brings to mind Spinoza's warning "non apposita sed diversa," "not opposed but different." Is Negri's interpretation merely an attempt to force Spinoza to fit into a traditional Marxist framework of opposition? This is clearly not the case. When Negri approaches Spinoza, his Marxist conception of power relations is greatly enriched. Through the development of his reading of Spinoza, we find that Power and power are never related in simple static opposition; rather, the relation between the two concepts moves progressively through several complex transformations toward a destruction of the opposition between them. Negri's historical interpretation of Spinoza's texts linksthese phases to form a tendency or a logic of development, giving a rich and original meaning to the two terms.
In the first phase of Spinoza's thought Negri finds that the distinction between Power and power reveals an opposition between metaphysics and history. The metaphysical foundation of the discussion appears at the end of part I of the Ethics, and, paradoxically, the function of this passage is to negate any distinction between the two terms. God's essence is identical with God's power (P34): This is the positive basis. Spinoza then proposes that all we can conceive is within God's Power, but he immediately adds that from every cause some effect must follow (P35-P36). These three propositions show a typically Spinozian form of argument: With the essential nature of power as a foundation (P34), Spinoza engages a conventional notion that God's Power is a virtual capacity of production (P35) only in order to attack that same notion with the final proposition (P36). God's Power is not the possibility of producing all that is conceivable but the actuality of producing all that exists; in other words, nothing is made possible by God's essence except what actually exists in the world. There is no room in Spinoza's metaphysics for virtuality or possibility.3 Therefore, God's Power cannot be other than God's power. This reduction provides the abstract foundation for the discussion. In the metaphysical domain the distinction between Power and power cannot exist; it merely serves a polemical function, affirming Spinoza's conception of power and negating the conventional notion of Power. Therefore, from the point of view of eternity, in the triumphant idealism of the Ethics, there can be no distinction because there is only power: In metaphysics, Power is an illusion.
From a historical and political perspective, however, Power has a very real, material existence in Spinoza's world. Negri's historical reading shows us how deeply the seventeenth century is imbued with the real and material griddings of Power, in the form of both monarchical governments and religious hierarchies. In fact, the massive tide of seventeenth-century Europe is engaged in the conceptual and actual construction of Power, with Descartes at its metaphysical core and Hobbes at its political center. Spinoza swims against this current: From ample evidence in the correspondence and political writings Negri shows us a democratic and republican Spinoza advocating freedom of thought, struggling against theological and political authority, and attacking the construction of Power. At this point there seems to be a complete rupture, an absolute opposition in Spinoza between metaphysics and history: From the idealistic perspective of the Ethics Power is recognized as an illusion and subordinated to power; but from the historical perspective, in Spinoza's world, power is continually subordinated to Power as political and religious authorities suppress the free expression of the multitude. Here we have the outlines of the opposition in Spinoza, albeit in schematic,abstract form. But we find that this obstacle, this opposition between power and Power, between metaphysics and history, does not block Spinoza's inquiry. In fact, as Negri follows the development of Spinoza's project to its mature phase, he discovers two strategies for destroying this opposition. Together, they form a sort of chiasmus: One strategy progresses from power to Power, from metaphysics toward politics and history; the other moves in the opposite direction, from Power to power, from politics and history toward metaphysics.
The recognition of the ontological density and the political centrality of Spinoza's metaphysical conception of power is perhaps Negri's most important contribution. The theoretical construction of power, a long process of the accumulation of conceptual relations, extends throughout Spinoza's work. It begins with the human essence, conatus, or "striving," and proceeds through desire and imagination to arrive at an image of the power to think and act as a complex productive force. Yet we cannot be satisfied with any idea of power that remains merely an individual force or impulse, because power is always organizing itself in a collective dimension. The Theologico-Political Treatise and parts III and IV of the Ethics are central texts in this regard, because they develop an analysis of the real, immediate, and associative movements of human power, driven by imagination, love, and desire. It is through this organizational project of power that the metaphysical discussion of human nature enters the domain of ethics and politics. Negri highlights two Spinozian concepts to bring out this organizational aspect of power: the multitude and constitution. Multitude is the term Spinoza uses to describe the collective social subject that is unified inasmuch as it manifests common desires through common social behavior. Through the passion and intelligence of the multitude, power is constantly engaged in inventing new social relations. The multitude, the protagonist of Spinoza's democratic vision, creates a social authority through the process of constitution, a process whereby social norms and right are constructed from the base of society through a logic of immediate, collective, and associative relations. In the process of constitution the metaphysics of power becomes an ethics, an ethics of collective passions, of the imagination and desire of the multitude. This analysis of power brings us from metaphysics to politics and thereby prepares the ground for addressing the historical dimension, the problem of the real existence and eminence of Power.
In the Political Treatise Spinoza develops a logic for evaluating political forms, and Negri shows us how this logic sets in motion a tendency that moves from Power to power on the basis of the constitutive power of the multitude. Spinoza starts from his present point in history by considering what would be the best constitution of a monarchical government. With his developed conception of power and right as a foundation, Spinoza arguesthat from the point of view of peace and freedom the best monarchy is one in which the supreme Power, the monarch, is moderated by the constitutive power of the multitude. In other words, monarchy is a limited form to the extent that the supreme Power is not freely constituted by the multitude. Spinoza turns to aristocratic government as the next step in the progression from Power to power. According to Spinoza's logic, aristocracy is a less limited form of government to the extent that the supreme Power, in the form of a council, is more fully constituted by the multitude. Democratic government is the final point of this process, but unfortunately Spinoza died before completing this section. The logic, however, is clear. Democracy is to be the absolute, unlimited form of government, because in it the supreme Power is fully constituted by the power of the multitude: Spinoza's democracy is to be animated by a constituent Power, a dynamic form of popular authority.4 With this progression from monarchy through aristocracy to democracy, Spinoza moves from history to metaphysics, from Power to power. In effect, democracy is a return to the plane of the Ethics: Power (potentia) does not exist in Spinoza's democracy except to the extent that it is a constituent Power, completely and freely constituted by the power of the multitude. In a certain sense, then, the trajectory we have sketched here of the relationship between Power and power has come full circle to its point of departure, but in the process it has gained both a metaphysical density and the corporeality of concrete political determinations. If the Ethics reduces the distinction and subordinates Power to power in the idealistic terms of its Utopian vision, the Political Treatise poses the real tendency toward a future reduction of the distinction, when a democratic Power would be completely constituted by the power of the multitude. In this image of democracy Spinoza's vision is at least as alive today as it was in his own time. Here we can see the tendency he describes as our own future.
Spinoza is the anomaly. The fact that Spinoza, atheist and damned, does not end up behind bars or burned at the stake, like other revolutionary innovators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, can only mean that his metaphysics effectively represents the pole of an antagonistic relationship of force that is already solidly established: The development of productive forces and relations of production in seventeenth-century Holland already comprehends the tendency toward an antagonistic future. Within this frame, then, Spinoza's materialist metaphysics is the potent anomaly of the century: not a vanquished or marginal anomaly but, rather, an anomaly of victorious materialism, of the ontology of a being that always moves forward and that by constituting itself poses the ideal possibility for revolutionizing the world.
There are three reasons why it is useful to study Spinoza's thought, each of them not only positive but also problematic. In other words, Spinoza not only poses and resolves several problems of and in his own time; the very form of the Spinozian solution comprehends a progressive problematic that reaches our time and inserts itself into our philosophical horizon. The three problematic reasons that make studying Spinoza's thought important are the following.
First: Spinoza founds Modern materialism in its highest form, determining the horizons of both Modern and contemporary philosophical speculation within an immanent and given philosophy of being and an atheism defined as the negation of every presupposed ordering of either theconstitution of being or human behavior. However, even in its productive and living form, Spinozian metaphysics does not succeed in superseding the limits of a purely "spatial" (or Galilean-physical) conception of the world. It certainly pushes on this conception and tries to destroy its limits, but it does not reach a solution. Rather, it leaves unresolved the problem of the relationship between the spatial dimensions and the temporal, creative, and dynamic dimensions of being. The imagination, that spiritual faculty running throughout the Spinozian system, constitutes being in an order that is only allusively temporal. As such, the problem remains intact, in terms that are unresolved but pure and forceful: Being (before the invention of the dialectic) evades the tangle of dialectical materialism. In fact, the readings of Spinoza by socialist and Soviet authors have not enriched dialectical materialism but have, rather, only diminished the potentialities that Spinozian metaphysics offers for superseding the purely spatial and objectivistic dimension of materialism.
Second: Spinoza, when confronting political themes (and politics is one of the fundamental axes of his thought), founds a nonmystified form of democracy. In other words, he poses the problem of democracy on the terrain of materialism and therefore as a critique of every juridical mystification of the State. The materialist foundation of democratic constitutionalism in Spinoza is posed within the problematic of production. Spinozian thought squeezes the constitution-production relationship into a unitary nexus; it is not possible to have a correct conception of politics without weaving together these two terms from the very beginning. It is impracticable and despicable to speak of politics outside of this nexus: We know this well. However, Spinoza has too often been thrown into that mixed-up "democratic" soup of normative Hobbesian transcendentalism, Rousseauian general will, and Hegelian Aufhebung — functioning, in effect, to fortify the separation between production and constitution, between society and the State. But this is far from the case: In Spinozian immanentism, in the Spinozian specificity of politics, democracy is the politics of the "multitude" organized in production, and religion is the religion of the "ignorants" organized in democracy. This Spinozian construction of politics constitutes a fundamental moment in Modern thought. Even if this formulation does not successfully bring the antagonistic function of class struggle as the foundation of reality to its maturity, it does succeed in grasping all the presuppositions of such a conception, presenting the activity of the masses as the foundation of both social and political transformation. This Spinozian conception is one that "closes" in the face of and definitively rejects a series of mystified problems that in subsequent centuries would be presented to the bourgeoisie by liberal-democratic thought, mostly in its Jacobinist version (on the theoretical line Rousseau-Hegel). Let us pose the problem in itspure form: the conception that the multitude makes up the State and the ignorants make up religion (a conception that unhinges us from an entire tradition, eliminating the possibility of all the idealistic and juridical solutions that in subsequent centuries were repeatedly, monstrously proposed) alludes forcefully to the problems that the communist class struggle still poses today. Constitution and production, like threads of a fabric in which the experiences of the masses and the future are interwoven in the form of the radical equality that atheism demands.
Third: Spinoza shows that the history of metaphysics comprehends radical alternatives. Metaphysics, as the highest form of the organization of Modern thought, is not a unitary whole. It comprehends the alternatives that the history of class struggle produces. There exists an "other" history of metaphysics, the blessed history against the damned. And we should not forget that it is still only in the complexity of metaphysics that the Modern age can be read. Consequently, neither skepticism nor cynicism is the positive form of negative thought (of thought that traverses metaphysics to negate it and opens toward the positivity of being). Rather, the positive form of negative thought exists only in the constitutive tension of thought and its capacity to act as a material mediation of the historical activity of the multitude. Constitutive thought possesses the radical character of negation but transforms it and puts it to use by grounding it in real being. In this context the constitutive power of transgression is the Spinozian definition of freedom. Here the Spinozian anomaly, the contradictory relationship between his metaphysics and the new order of capitalist production, becomes a "savage" anomaly: It is the radical expression of a historic transgression of every ordering that is not freely constituted by the masses; it is the proposition of a horizon of freedom that is definable only as a horizon of liberation. It is thought that is more negative as it is more progressive and constitutive. All of the antagonistic force of innovative thought in the Modern age, the popular and proletarian origins of its revolutions and the entire arc of republican positions from Machiavelli to the young Marx, is concentrated in this exemplary Spinozian experience. Who can deny that, also in this sense, Spinoza remains in the middle of contemporary philosophical debates, almost like a young Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem?
These are the primary reasons that make interrogating Spinoza useful. But maybe it is worthwhile to reconsider for a moment. Why do we make this descent to the origins of an alternative system of thought (that of the revolution, as opposed to the origins of the capitalist ordering), to the contradiction, in fact, situated right in the middle of the development of Modern thought? This recognition, though, most importantly of Spinoza's thought but also of a terrain and a proposition that permit us to construct beyond" the tradition of bourgeois thought, all this constitutes an operation that is really oriented toward another goal: that of constructing a "beyond" for the equally weary and arthritic tradition of revolutionary thought itself. We find ourselves faced with a revolutionary tradition that has pulled the flags of the bourgeoisie out of the mud. We must ask ourselves, though, confronting the historic enemy of this age: What besides the mud are we left with?
In this sense reading Spinoza has been an incredibly refreshing revolutionary experience for me. However, I have not been the only one to have seen the possibility of proceeding down this path. There has been a great renewal of Spinozian studies in the last twenty years. On the interpretive plane, philological in the strict sense, this is well demonstrated by Martial Gueroult's extraordinary, but unfortunately incomplete, reading of the Ethics. But we should perhaps also look elsewhere for more impassioned works: I am referring to the recent attempts to reread Spinoza within the critical problematic of contemporary (and Marxist) philosophy. For example, in the Althusserian school, Macherey reexamines Hegel's reading of Spinoza and is not satisfied merely to denounce its profound falsifications. Instead, he casts his glance much further and identifies in Spinoza's thought a system that critically anticipates the Hegelian dialectic and that founds the materialistic method. On another tack and with different systematic preoccupations, but perhaps with even more innovative force, Deleuze shows us a full and sunlit horizon of philosophy in Spinoza: He gives us the reconquering of materialism as the space of modal plurality and the concrete liberation of desire as a constructive power. In the field of religious and political philosophy, there is Hacker's historical-structural redefinition and, more felicitous still, that of Matheron: Democracy is presented as the material essence, the product of the imagination of the masses, the constitutive technique, and the project of being that sweeps away the dialectical imbroglio. From this point of view Spinoza's critique anticipates the future; he is therefore a contemporary philosopher, because his philosophy is a philosophy of our future.
Given all that I have said regarding the profound newness of the various interpretations that have enriched Spinoza studies since the late 1960s, it would seem a good idea to clarify my own objectives in this study. However, it may be better to explain these later. One issue, though, should be clarified at the outset. It is incontestable that an important stimulus to studying the origins of Modern thought and the Modern history of the State lies in the recognition that the analysis of the genetic crisis can be useful for clarifying the terms of the dissolution of the capitalist and bourgeois State. However, even though this project did form the core of some of my earlier studies (on Descartes, for example), today it holds less interest for me. What interests me, in fact, is not so much the origins of the bourgeois State and its crisis but, rather, the theoretical alternatives and the suggestive possibilities offered by the revolution in process. To explain more clearly: The problem that Spinoza poses is that of the subjective rupture within the unidimensionality of capitalist development (in both its bourgeois and superstructural guise and in its real capitalist and structural form); in other words, Spinoza shows us that the living alternative to this tradition is a material power that resides within the metaphysical block of Modern philosophy — within the philosophical trajectory, to be precise, that stretches from Marsilio Ficino and Nicola Cusano all the way through to the nineteenth-century death of philosophy (or, in Keynesian terms, to the felicitous euthanasia of rentier knowledge). It has always seemed paradoxical to me that philosophical historiography has oriented the alternatives toward the past: Gilson reconstructs them for Modern culture toward medieval Christian philosophy, and Wolfson does so for Spinoza toward the medieval Hebraic culture, to give only a couple of examples. Who knows why this procedure is considered scientific? Who could know? To me this seems exactly the opposite of a scientific discourse, because it is a study in cultural genealogies, not a material genealogy of conditions and functions of thought: It is not a discovery of the future, as science always is. Neither is the liberation of a cumbersome past worth anything if it is not carried through to the benefit of the present and to the production of the future. This is why I want to invert this paradox and introduce the future into this discussion, on the basis of the force of Spinoza's discourse. And if, for prudence or laziness, I do not succeed with the future, I want at least to attempt a reading of the past with this inverted method. Bringing Spinoza before us, I, one poor scholar among many, will interrogate a true master with a method of reading the past that allows me to grasp the elements that today coalesce in a definition of a phenomenology of revolutionary praxis constitutive of the future. Moreover, this method of reading the past allows me (and truly obliges us) to come to terms with all the confusion and mystification — from Bobbio to Della Volpe and his latest followers — we have been taught: the holy doctrine that democracy lies in the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), that the general interest "sublimates" particular interests in the form of law, that the constitutional functions of the State are responsible before the generality, that the party State (Stato dei partiti) is a formidable political mediation of unity and multiplicity, and so many other similar absurdities. Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, does not put up with this drivel. Freedom, the true one, the whole one, which we love and which we live and die for, constitutes the world directly, immediately. Multiplicity is mediated not by law but by the constitutive process. And the constitution of freedom is always revolutionary.
The three reasons that I have cited for justifying a rereading of Spinoza today all coalesce on the field of study that is usually called "the definition of a new rationality." Spinoza defines, in a radical form, an "other" rationality different from that of bourgeois metaphysics. Materialist thought, that of production and constitution, becomes today the necessary and elemental basis of every neorationalist proposition. Spinoza accomplishes all this by means of a very strong tension that contributes to the determination of a dynamic of transformation, of projection into the future, of ontology. A constitutive ontology founded on the spontaneity of needs and organized by the collective imagination: This is the Spinozian rationality. This is the basis. But this is not enough. In Spinoza there is not only the definition of a foundation, there is also a drive to develop it, and the limits of that development (the networks it projects) are gathered together and submitted to critique. This is where the dialectic comes into play, not as a conclusive form of thought but as an articulation of the ontological foundation, as a determination of existence and power: Spinoza's thought supersedes any possibility of transforming the dialectic into a generic key and regards it instead as a direct organization of the conflict, as an elemental structure of knowledge. And so in this study I have sought to see (1) with respect to materialist thought: the Spinozian effort to define a horizon of the absolute multiplicity of needs and desires; (2) with respect to productive thought: the Spinozian attempt to bring together in a theory of the imagination the pattern formed by the relationship between needs and wealth, the mass solution to the Platonic parable of love, socialized by the Modern dimensions of the approach, by the religious presumptions of the struggle, by the capitalist conditions of development; and (3) with respect to constitutive thought: Spinoza's formulation of the first Modern definition of a revolutionary project (in phenomenology, in science, in politics), of a rational refoundation of the world based on liberation, rather than exploitation. Not as formula and form but, rather, as action and content. Not as positivism but as positivity. Not as legislation but as truth. Not as a definition or exercise of Power (potestas), but as the expression and management of power (potentia).1 These aspects of Spinoza must be studied in much greater depth. Spinoza is really a scandal (from the point of view of the "rational" knowledge of the world we live in) : He is a philosopher of being who immediately effects the inversion of the totality of the transcendent imputation of causality by posing the productive, immanent, transparent, and direct constitution of the world; he is a radical democrat and revolutionary who immediately eliminates even the abstract possibility of the rule of law and Jacobinism; he is a scholar of the passions who defines them not as suffering but as behavior — historical and materialist, and therefore constitutive, behavior. From this perspective my present work is only a first sounding of the depths. This project urgently awaits completion with respect to the analysis of the passions in Spinoza, that is, the analysis of the concrete modes in which the Spinozian project of refoundation unfolds. This will be the object of a second study, concentrating on parts III and IV of the Ethics. It is a task waiting to be begun and developed, certainly not just by the research of one scholar, toward and in the dimension of a phenomenology of collective and constitutive praxis that would provide the framework for a contemporary, positive, and revolutionary definition of rationality.
This work was written in prison. And it was also conceived, for the most part, in prison. Certainly, I have always known Spinoza well. Since I was in school, I have loved the Ethics (and here I would like to fondly remember my teacher of those years). I continued to work on it, never losing touch, but a full study required too much time. Once in prison I started from the beginning: reading and making notes, tormenting my colleagues to send me books. I thank them all with all my heart. I was convinced that in prison there would be time. But that was an illusion, simply an illusion. Prison, with its daily rhythm, with the transfers and the defense, does not leave any time; prison dissolves time: This is the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society. So this, like all my other works, was drafted by the light of midnight oil, in stolen moments stripped away from the daily routine. The routine in prison is awful and certainly less pleasant than that in the university; I hope that this lack of comfort is manifest in this study only in a demonstrative and expository concreteness. As for the rest, I ask forgiveness for not having presented a complete bibliography (even though I believe I have seen all that one need see), for not having sufficiently explored the historical fabric of Spinozian culture (even though I believe the appeal to Frances and Kolakowski, above all, allows me to feel in good company), for perhaps having too easily given in to the lures of Huizinga and Kossmann in the interpretation of the "golden age" (but what could be substituted for their reading?), and finally for having at times enjoyed the pleasures of the thesis — inevitable when one works outside of the scientific community. But, this said, I do not believe that prison has given a different quality, either better or worse, to the product. I do not plead for mercy from the critics. I would like, rather, to be able to think that the solitude of this damned cell has proved as prolific as the Spinozian solitude of the optical laboratory.
A.N.
From the prisons of Rovigo, Rebibbia, Fossombrone, Palmi, and Trani: April 7, 1979, to April 7, 1980.
Studying Spinoza means posing the problem of disproportion in history, the disproportion between a philosophy and the historical dimensions and social relationships that define its origins. Even a simple glance from an empirical point of view makes this discrepancy clear. The chronicles attest, whether approvingly or hostilely, that Spinoza's thought is monstrous. To some it is "chaos impenetrable," "un monstre de confusion et de ténèbres"; with great mastery Paul Vérnière has shown us the history of this tradition in French thought before the Revolution.1 But others speak "d'un homme illustre et sçavant, qui à ce que l'on m'asseure, a un grand nombre de Sectateurs, qui sont entièrement attachez à ses sentimens,"2 and Spinoza's correspondence abounds with demonstrations of this assertion. In any case these chronicles present us with a personage and a body of thought, an image and an evaluation, that evoke a superhuman character. And a double character. At times he seems satanic: the portrait of Spinoza is accompanied by a plate reading "Benedictus de Spinoza, Amstelodamensis, Gente et Professione Judaeus, postea coetui Christianorum se adjungens, primi systematis inter Atheos subtiliores Architectus."3 And at other times he appears as just the opposite: "il lui attribue assez de vertus pour faire naître au Lecteur envie de s'écrier: Sancte Spinoza, ora pro nobis."4 Continuing along these same lines, we could reveal clearly nontheoretical aspects of the Spinoza cult still existent in the Pantheismusstreit, in Herder and Goethe, not to mentionthe idea of Spinoza as a "virtuous atheist and a saint of laical reason," put back in circulation in the Europe of the Belle Èpoque.5
This double image comes out of the chronicles and enters the history of philosophy in a similarly varied fashion. The history of the interpretations of Spinoza's thought is already so long and contrasting that through these texts one could read a veritable history of Modern philosophy.6 Again, the central element is not simply the doubling of the philosophical figure, which is easily definable wherever the pantheistic enigma comes to the surface. It is this doubling, but dislocated in monstrosity, in the absoluteness of the opposition that is revealed in the doubling. This situation is perhaps best interpreted by Ludwig Feuerbach, grasping, on the one hand, Spinoza's thought as absolute materialism (the inversion of Hegelianism)7 and considering, in contrast, the form taken by this inversion, Spinozian naturalism, as an operation of sublimation that accomplishes the passage "from the negation to the affirmation of God."8 What strikes us in the double reality of Spinoza's thought is precisely this absoluteness and this extremism.
At this point we can hazard a hypothesis: there are, in effect, two Spinozas. If only we were able to succeed in suppressing and subduing the suggestions or the apologies that erudite history produces, if we were able to situate ourselves on the solid terrain of the critical and historiographie consciousness of our own times, these two Spinozas would come to life in full play. And they would no longer belong to the demonized or sanctified history of the dark centuries that preceded the Revolution. They are two Spinozas who both participate in contemporary culture. The first expresses the highest consciousness that the scientific revolution and the civilization of the Renaissance have produced; the second produces a philosophy of the future. The first is the product of the highest and most extensive development of the cultural history of its time; the second accomplishes a dislocation and projection of the ideas of crisis and revolution. The first is the author of the capitalist order, the second is perhaps the author of a future constitution. The first is the highest development of idealism; the second participates in the foundation of revolutionary materialism and in its beauty. But these two Spinozas are only one philosophy and, yet, two real tendencies. Real? Constitutive of Spinoza's thought? Implicated in Spinoza's relationship with his times? We will have to work to deepen this hypothesis. The true duality of Spinoza's thought will not be made clear by either the empirical horizon of erudite historiography or the continuistic and categorical horizon of philosophical historiography. Ideology does not have history. Philosophy does not have history. Ideology and its philosophical form can only be history, the history of who has produced them and who has traversed with his or her thought the depth of a determinate praxis. We can draw insights from the complexity of that praxis, of that situation, but between yesterday and today there is only the continuity of a new determinate praxis. It is we who take up an author and pose questions. What is it that permits this use of Spinoza? Some connection between his philosophical praxis and ours? These are the conditions that the historical situation of Spinoza presents. The doubling of Spinoza's thought, that internal leap that dislocates its significance onto diverse horizons, is an anomaly so strong and so specific to Spinozian thought that it makes it both close to us, possible for us to grasp, and at the same time irreducible to any of historical ideology's mechanisms of filiation or systemization. What we are presented with is an absolute exception.
This anomaly is founded in the world where Spinoza lives and develops his thought. Spinozian anomaly, Dutch anomaly. "Can you point to another nation," Huizinga asks, "that reached its cultural peak so soon after its creation? Our astonishment would be somewhat tempered were we to find that, in the seventeenth century, Dutch culture was merely the most perfect and clearest expression of European culture in general. But such was not the case. On the contrary, lying though it did between France, Germany and England, our country differed so greatly from them and in so many respects, that it proved the exception and not the rule."9 What does this mean?
Let us begin by evaluating this affirmation in relation to cultural behavior, to the most subtle aspects of the civilization of the seventeenth century, the siècle d'or. The erudite apologia shows us a reserved and shy Spinoza, and this is true; the letters and various testimonies all substantiate it. But it is not a legend, and it cannot serve as an apologia, because what we are observing is primarily the character of Dutch society. The philosopher is hidden to the degree that he is socialized and inserted in a vast and adequate cultural society. Kolakowski, as we will see, has clearly depicted the religious life and the forms of community constructed by the cultured strata of the Dutch bourgeoisie.10 Spinoza lives in this world, with a vast network of simple and sociable friendships and correspondences. But for certain determinate strata of the bourgeoisie the sweetness of the cultured and sedate life is accompanied, without any contradiction, by an association with a capitalist Power (potestas), expressed in very mature terms. This is the condition of a Dutch bourgeois man. We could say the same thing for the other genius of that age, Rembrandt van Rijn. On his canvases the power of light is concentrated with intensity on the figures of a bourgeois world in terrific expansion. It is a prosaic but very powerful society, which makes poetry without knowing it because it has the force to do so. Huizinga rightly maintains that the Dutch seventeenth century has nothing to do with the Baroque; that is, it has nothing to do with the interiorization of the crisis. And this is true. Even if, during the first part of the seventeenth century, Holland is the land « choice for all the libertines in Europe and for Descartes himself searchingfor freedom,11 they would find nothing here of the French cultural climate and the crisis, poorly hidden behind the splendor, that the new philosophy only tries to exorcise. One can perhaps say that the seventeenth century never reached Holland. Here there is still the freshness of humanism, intact, the freshness of the great humanism and the great Renaissance. There is still the sense of freedom and the love for freedom, in the fullest meaning of the term, precisely in the humanistic sense: constructing and reforming. There still remain, immediately visible and functional, those revolutionary virtues that in other countries have been gradually sapped of their strength and that monarchist absolutism in general has tried to eradicate from its political system.
Just one example: Absolutism, at this time, attempts to close off and reshape the movement for renewal in the academies in an effort to control and solidify the literary and scientific unity of the State. How many philosophers and historians of philosophy have gone along with the academies, burning with the desire to be able to sit there! The Dutch thought and art of the siècle d'or reside not only outside of the academies but also, to a large extent, outside of the universities.12 Spinoza's example serves for all the others. When declining the proposal of the excellent and honorable Sir J. L. Fabritius, who in the name of the Palatine Elector offers him a chair at Heidelberg, Spinoza reminds him that the freedom to philosophize cannot be limited in any way (letters 47 and 48). Another man of the Court, irritated by Spinoza's response, cannot help but grumble: "II se trouvait bien mieux en Hollande où ... il avoit une liberté entière d'entretenir de ses opinions et de ses maximes, les curieux que le visitoient, et de faire de tous ses Disciples, ou des Déistes, ou des Athées."13 That is exactly what Spinoza thinks: "Academies, which are founded at the public expense, are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free republic arts and sciences will be best cultivated to the full if everyone who asks leave is allowed to teach publicly, and that at his own cost and risk" (Political Treatise, VII:49).
But actually the Dutch anomaly is not merely Holland's tranquillity and sociability. We are dealing with a great commercial and industrial power here. Leiden, Zaandam, and Amsterdam are among the largest industrial centers of Europe. And the commerce and pirating stretch from the Vistula River to the West Indies, from Canada to the Spice Islands.14 Here the capitalist order of profit and the savage adventure of accumulation on the seas, the constructive fantasy that commercial dealings produce and the amazement that leads to philosophy — all this is woven together. The vast and savage dimensions bring with them a qualitative leap that provides an extraordinary matrix, an extraordinary field for metaphysical production. In contrast to what Cantimori proposes about following Huizinga's example, Ihave the impression that we can learn more about this age from Grotius the internationalist than we can from Grotius the author of pious treatises, because it is in this dimension that the anomaly becomes savage, externally and internally.15 Thalheimer, in the introduction to his study of Spinoza, emphasizes the intensity of the social revolution taking place. It is a bourgeois revolution but in an anomalous form, not protected by an absolute Power but developing absolutely in the vastness of a project of rule and savage reproduction. For an extended period the class struggle is resolved in dynamic and expansive terms: in the political form of the oligarchy or in that of the monarchy (of the "Bonapartist" type, Thalheimer adds!) installed by the Oranges in 1672 — in any case, at a very high level of capitalist socialization. (Holland and Venice: how intently their politicians and moralists, in the centuries of the "crisis of the European consciousness," pursued the dream of a development within the "immediate form" of the socialization of capital! We will return to this soon.)16 I have no intention of discussing the relative appropriateness of Thalheimer's definition; the problem here is quite different. Our problem is that the substance of this Dutch life, of this cultural sociality, is overdetermined by the dimensions of the revolution in progress.
If the philosopher is not in the academy but in his workshop and if this workshop closely resembles the humanistic workshop (even accepting Huizinga's suggestion not to confuse the humanism of the North, Erasmian humanism, with the Italian and German humanism), the workshop of the humanist is still no longer that of an artisan. As we will see, those great cultural and philosophical tendencies over which Spinoza's thought spreads, the Judaic and the Renaissance tendencies, the Counter-Reformational and the Cartesian tendencies, they are all transformed before they are presented to this synthesis. They are offered to it as philosophies that seek to be adequate to the revolution in progress. In Spinoza the transformation is given. The workshop of the humanist no longer has an artisanal character. Certainly, a constructive spirit animates it, that of the Renaissance. But already we find such a difference, here, now, in the manner of situating oneself before knowledge, of fixing the constructive horizon of thought; how far we are already from the great artisanal craftsmanship of Giordano Bruno or of Shakespeare's final plays, only to cite the clearest and finest examples of the final stage of the Renaissance, which Frances Yates has described with such bravura!17 Here instead, in Holland, in Spinoza, the revolution has assumed the dimensions of accumulation on a world scale, and this is what constitutes the Dutch anomaly: this disproportion between the constructive and appropriative dimensions.
One fundamental concept is perhaps useful to bring up in this regard, and we will return to it for an extended discussion below: the concept of the"multitudo." It appears principally in the Political Treatise, Spinoza's most mature work, but it is a concept that lives throughout the maturation of his philosophy. This is a concept in which the intensity of the Renaissance legacy (the sense of the new dignity of the subject) is united in extension. This new quality of the subject, that is, opens up to the sense of the multiplicity of subjects and to the constructive power that emanates from their dignity, understood as totality. It arrives, in fact, at the point of situating the theoretical and ethical problem on the threshold of the comprehension of the radical immeasurability of the development in progress.
It is on the basis of this material force that Spinoza's philosophy is comprehensible, as power and as an anomaly with respect to all modern rationalism, which is irremediably conditioned and restricted by the limitations of mercantilist development.18 Certainly, as we will see, even this Dutch seventeenth century that is not the seventeenth century, even this first great experience of the capitalist essor and of the bourgeois spirit — even it is permeated with the moment of the crisis and the revelation of the critical essence of the market.19 But the anomaly survives on the margin of the crisis of development. In fact, it has been catapulted forward; the apex of the revolution has thrown off the terms of the cyclical progression, jumping over the low economic conjuncture of 1660 to 1680, ambiguously crossing the crisis of the preabsolutist political forms in 1672 and allowing Spinoza to make the crisis something other than the original sin of rationalist philosophy (as it is in Descartes and in the contemporary French culture). Instead, through the consciousness of the crisis, the revolution determines the grafting of a higher, absolute vision of reality. This is the historical period, and Huizinga emphasizes its paradox several times and from several perspectives. He writes, for example, that "the Republic may thus be said to have passed-by mercantilism" (p. 24) and immediately, moving out of originary accumulation, entered the phase of the monetary market. And yet, from another perspective, we see the Holland that firmly planted the stakes for burning the witches at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This historical period undergoes a critique, and its constitutive anomaly allows the Spinozian anomaly to jump over the very limits of bourgeois culture and philosophy and to nourish and transfigure the savage, open, and expansive dimension of its basis toward a philosophy of the future.
Are there, then, two Spinozas? It is quite possible that there are. In rhythm with the Dutch anomaly a theoretical potential is determined that, while sending down its roots into the complexity of the initial capitalist development and into the fullness of its cultural environment, proceeds toward a future dimension, toward a dimension that supersedes the limits of that historical period. The crisis of the utopia of the bourgeois origins, the crisis of the founding myth of the market — this essential point in the history ofModern philosophy — does not mark a regression in Spinoza but a leap forward, an advance, a projection into the future. The basis is decomposed and liberates the meaning of human productivity and the materiality of its hope. The crisis destroys the utopia in its bourgeois historical determinateness, dissolves its contingent superficiality, and opens it instead to the determination of human and collective productivity; critical philosophy prepares the ground for this destiny. Naturally, the two Spinozas will be two moments internal to his thought.
The instruments and the components of Spinoza's thought are brought together at the apex of the Dutch revolution. As we have seen, there is a historical basis of Spinoza's thought; from this basis and through its terms the genetic process presents us with an initial, structural figure. Spinoza's thought runs throughout the networks of this historical substrate and critically recognizes its form. His philosophical analysis and production anticipate a material totality and allow his thought to extricate itself enough from the historical substrate to be capable of synthesis and, eventually, of dislocation. What makes the Spinozian synthesis so powerful is its adequateness to the specific potentiality of its age, to the power and the tonality of its times. This is what we will now focus our attention on.
A Golden Age, a siècle d'or? "And indeed," says Huizinga, "the name of 'Golden Age' smacks of the aurea aetas, the classical Fools' Paradise, which annoyed us in Ovid even while we were still at school. If our great age must perforce be given a name, let it be that of wood and steel, pitch and tar, colour and ink, pluck and pity, fire and imagination. The term 'golden' applies far better to the eighteenth century, when our coffers were stuffed with gold-pieces." Cantimori emphasizes the intelligence of Huizinga's approach.20 It is from this "aura," so dense and determinate, that Spinoza and his correspondents leap forth to center stage. This Dutch society and these bourgeois strata lack the rigid division of labor characteristic of the contemporary intelligentsia in Europe, and particularly in France, which is reinforced by the crisis and by the absolutist restructuring. At least, it does not exist to the same degree. Experimental science is not yet in any way pure specialization, or even academic activity, and it is often not even professorial activity. The study of the laws of reflection is carried out by the opticians and the lens makers, Jelles and Spinoza; Schuller, Meyer, Bouwmeester, and Ostens are doctors, intent on that emendatio of the body that must also invest the mind; De Vries is from a family of merchants and operates a trade on the highest commercial levels, Bresser is a beer maker, and Blijenbergh is a grain broker; Hudde is a mathematician who studies the taxes of interest on revenue, and through his friendship with De Witt he reaches the position of burgomaster of Amsterdam. And thus we enter into the highest stratum of Spinoza's circle, one in which the members of the oligarchy participate in philosophical developments, from De Witt to Burgh to van Velthuysen and, finally, to the Huygens and Oldenburg, who have already been drawn into the orbit of cosmopolitan culture.21 Science, technology, the market, politics: We should not understand their nexus and their articulation as an unstable mixture that the science of Power (potestas) is in the process of splitting apart (as would come to pass in the other European countries). Rather, they should be understood as direct agents of different facets of a conception of life, of its force, of its power (potentia) that is not yet corrupt. They should be understood as productive activity, as labor.
Spinoza's library corresponds to this situation in two ways.22 It is not a specialized library in the seventeenth-century academic sense.23 It is, rather, the library of a cultured merchant, where we find the Latin classics mixed with the Italian politicians (Machiavelli is enthroned there) and the Spanish poets with the humanistic and contemporary philosophers — a Renaissance-style library for consultation and stimulation. On the other hand, it is not a library of the crisis of the Renaissance, it is not a Baroque library. The desk of an intellectual from the early part of the century was completely different; here there are no magicians, no mnemonic devices.24 All in all it is a humanistic library, in continuity with the humanistic project and free from the crisis that humanism has suffered elsewhere. It reflects a culture that is still moving forward.
If at this point we attempt a definition of the cultural components in Spinoza's arsenal, we can grasp at least four: the Judaic, the Renaissance-humanistic in the real sense, the Scholastic (belonging to traditional philosophy and theology and renewed by the Counter-Reformation), and the Cartesian.
Spinoza is strongly tied to Judaic culture. He is part of that rich community in Amsterdam that directly participates in Power (potestas),25and his family is of a high station.26 Spinoza himself is educated in the Jewish schools and almost certainly participates in the open religious polemics there.27 The Judaic sources of Spinoza's thought are at the center of an already secular polemic; from Joel to Wolfson the analysis is very extensive in every respect, and all of it has brought important results.28 Still more important is the study of the open discussions within Dutch Judaic culture and, in particular, within the Amsterdam community. The figures of Uriel da Costa and Juan de Prado seem to be decisive in constructing that cluster of problems around which the Modernity of the debate is defined.29 Nonetheless, we have still not arrived at the heart of the problem as Spinoza specifically conceives it. It is different from the problem posed in the Judaic tradition: it is undoubtedly a problem of seventeenth-century culture, of the encounter and conflict between the traditional, finalistic philosophy of being and the humanistic revolution, with its conceptual nominalism and its realism of being. Judaism, like the entire culture, has been invested by humanism, even more so to the degree that the Judaic community is more open to the world. The philosophy of the market and the first glimmers of the spirit of capitalism cannot but determine these fertile connections, too. It is here that we can establish a solid point, perhaps relevant for understanding Spinoza's expulsion from the community. In Spinoza, from the beginning, the conception of being is divorced from the two forms in which Judaic metaphysics traditionally conceived it: from the theological finalism expressed in the form of immanence and from that expressed in the form of Neoplatonism. Because he is free of these traditional forms, Spinoza is able to arrive, instead, at a realistic and productive conception of being. His is a productive realism, the sense of which cannot be understood except by traversing the entire path that leads from the first humanism to the scientific revolution and that, in this process, separates itself definitively from any teleological support. The conception of the immanence of the divinity to being is present in the Judaic metaphysical tradition and is found primarily in Maimonides, its supreme philosopher.30 On the other side, the cabalistic tradition, which emerges strongly in Crescas's thought, brings with it, in full humanistic style, the ideas of creation and degradation inspired by the Platonic tradition.31 Spinoza comprehends both of these metaphysical variants of the Judaic tradition, but only in order to liberate himself from them.
The meeting of humanism and Hebraic philosophy is symbolized by Leo Hebraeus (Levi ben Gershon). Spinoza has a copy of his Dialogues,32 which is probably the source of that productive definition of being that characterizes all of Spinoza's early philosophy. The meeting is certainly decisive with regard to the philosophy of knowledge in which the synthesis of intuitio, imaginatio and ratio determines a constant in Spinozian thought.33Thereby, the tradition of the Platonic Symposium is established in Modern philosophy. But, one could object, it has already arrived with Bruno! And it seems, indeed, that Spinoza drew a lot from Bruno.34 Yet here there is more than one could possibly draw from Bruno's thought. The productivity of being that Bruno defines is never free from the analogy with artisanal production or aesthetic creation, and consequently it lapses onto the terrain of universal animism.35 The conception of being in Spinoza is, instead, an overdetermined conception, outside of every possible analogy or metaphor. It is the conception of a powerful being, which knows no hierarchies, which knows only its own constitutive force.36 And it is clear that, with the advent of this conception, there is an end to the naturalistic tendency running throughout humanistic and Renaissance philosophy, which finds its highest expressionin Bernardino Telesio and Tommaso Campanella, in many respects important influences on Spinoza's work.37
Now we can reconsider the problem of two Spinozas, putting the first and the second in relation to each other. Paradoxically, the relation will, in every way, pose "productive being" against "productive being." This means that from the beginning Spinoza adopts a conception that is radically ontological, nonfinalized, and productive. When his thought passes later to a higher level, the resulting conception will be such that while the corporeality of being is maintained, every residue of transcendence is eliminated. Already in the earliest Spinoza there is no room for any gnoseological transcendence (except, perhaps, for the conception of the attribute). Neither is there a place for any possible moment of ethical transcendence. The passage to the mature phase of Spinoza's philosophy will consist of scraping away any even minimal residue of ontological difference, eliminating the very concept of ontological productivity when it is posed as categorically articulated. The productive being of the second Spinoza will be only the ontological constitution of praxis. From his contemporary culture Spinoza recovers, purifies, and fixes an initial, fundamental, and foundational ontological polarity, and from the Judaic tradition he adopts a substantialist conception of being that he develops in humanistic terms, in the sense of productivity. He pushes the limits of naturalism to the point at which he passes beyond it. But the second phase signals a qualitative leap: in effect, the problem, at a certain level of the critical refinement of the concept of being, becomes the problem of developed materialism.
This first cultural polarization of Spinozian philosophy, in its origins, is both confirmed and put in crisis by the influences determined by a second large group of doctrines, the Scholasticism of the Counter-Reformation and Cartesianism. In this case, too, the two doctrines merge, especially in the Dutch cultural atmosphere, and form a dense chiaroscuro in the background of Spinoza's thought.38 The fundamental point is that both of these doctrines rupture the unity of being, one by means of a reelaboration of the theory of ontological transcendence and the foundation of a metaphysics of the possible, the other by means of the theory of epistemological transcendence. It is likely that Spinoza encounters Counter-Reformational thought as a youth. In 1652 he is at the school of Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit who probably retained the elegance of the Latin and Dutch reminiscences of the philosophy of the "Societas Jesus."39 In any case Spinoza would inhale the scent of this thought in the atmosphere around him, in the philosophical, theological, and academic culture of his times.40 And here we must pay close attention: paradoxically, this current of thought rests on elements that will be fundamental in the origins of the second foundation of the Ethics,41 when the absolute unity of pantheistic being will seek an opening to the problem of the constitution of reality and will, therefore, confront the thematic of the possible and tend toward a philosophy of the future. It will be essential, then, to note the influence of Counter-Reformational theories on Spinoza's mature political thought. But for now, in the early Spinoza, the opposite is most urgent: he needs to free himself from this thought, from this Counter-Reformational and reactionary Scholasticism, from the ordered unreality of being that it describes, from the hierarchies and the ontological levels, and from the orders of the imagination.
The theoretical framework also frees itself from Descartes's reasonable ideology:
In Descartes, God is without doubt the object of the most clear and distinct of ideas, but this idea is made known to us as incomprehensible. We touch the infinite, we do not understand it. This incomprehensibility explodes in the all-powerful, which, raised above our reason, gives it a precarious quality in principle and leaves it with no other value than that invested in it by an arbitrary discretion. From God the mystery spreads through all things. Because it is made so as to understand the finite, our understanding, incapable of deciding whether things are finite or infinite, is reduced to the prudent affirmation of the indefinite. Finally, in the base of our being, our psychophysical nature brings to light the incomprehensibility of a substantial union between two incompatible substances. The incomprehensible all-powerful of God is manifest here in a singular effect, and reason is constrained to limit itself in order to recognize in this sphere the primacy of sentiment. Thus, above, below, and also in the center our reason always remains confronted by the mystery.42
The revolution at its apex does not allow these concessions. Descartes's God is purely and simply an "asylum ignorantiae" (Ethics, I, appendix) like the God of the superstitious and the ignorant.43 Translated in prose: The relationship, from the bourgeois point of view, wants harmony, wants to resolve itself immediately. If we compare this Spinoza with his contemporary Europeans, we find ourselves faced with an absoluteness and an immediacy in the conception of being that destroy every tactical illusion. For example, one such tactical illusion presents a being that is not resolved; this is Descartes.44 This is the dreadful dream that dominates the robins who are faced with the crisis of the market, faced with the first appraisal of the effects of class struggle, and, consequently, faced with accepting an absolutist mediation. To complete this line of thought: in the Low Countries at the peak of the revolutionary process, conceptions come to be accepted that, in one way or another, view being as revealed in an unfillable vacuum of existence, along the mystical lines, both Judaic and Christian, that continue throughout thecentury. If a utopia arises here, it is still a positive utopia. If being is presented, it is a full being. This wholeness of being will nonetheless be attacked in methodological terms, but the method itself is ontological fullness. There is no artifice in any way; the ontological sense of Galilean physics expels Descartes's formal methodologism.45 Nothing of Descartes, then, not even in this regard. No method considered as hypothesis. No provisional morality. No premise by which the indefinite is presented as the end-all of existence, neither on the ontological terrain nor — even less — on the ethical terrain. The French and Continental world has set foot on the terrain of the necessary compromise. Here in Holland that makes no sense. In truth, classicism disfigures the order of reason and takes away that productive originality that is revolutionary intelligence. The thought and experience of the crisis are still far from this Spinoza.
Let us return to the dynamic center of Spinoza's thought in its origins. It is Renaissance thought, in which the naturalistic immanentism is pushed to the limit of a conception that is both absolutely ontological and absolutely rationalistic. It is a powerful union that constitutes this synthesis, formed on the terrain of the capitalist revolution, within the mature conditions attained through the process of primitive accumulation in Holland.
And yet all of this would lose its essential implications if we were to forget another component of the synthesis, a formal and yet fundamental component: the religious component. Here, the philosophical and biographical developments intersect in a new and determinantal way. When Spinoza is expelled from the Judaic community of Amsterdam on July 26, 1656, and, in all likelihood, also from the Judaic commercial milieu — finding himself thus in economic straits — he begins, with a group of colleagues, to explore the initial paths of his research. Around 1660, after he retires to Rijnsburg, that small community consolidates and becomes philosophically important. Another group unites in Amsterdam, a religious community. Are they Collegiants, Arminians? The very definition of these terms is problematical.46 In reality, we are dealing with a solid and new experience. It is solid because it replicates the characteristics of a "sectarian" religiousness, already acquired from the Dutch socialization. It is new because it translates this experience in terms of the terrific experiment of rationalistic rigor applied to religious behavior. But saying "religious" does not in any way mean that this is a confessional community;47 and saying that this community is not confessional does not, on the other hand, assert that it is composed of esprits libres, like the French libertines, who were certainly neither Collegiants nor religious reformists.48 Kolakowski,49 taking up the conclusions of Meinsma,50 provides us with a history of this community. Among the Mennonites, he writes, it makes no sense to pose the problem of the distinction betweencommunity and internal reform. Nor (in this climate), even at the limit, does it make sense to distinguish between religious reformists and free-thinking Deists. The fact is that the nonconfessional aspect is fundamental, and it is on this ground that the various figures of the synthesis between rationalism and religiousness are articulated. If, however, the members of Spinoza's circle do not remain Christians, nothing can lead us to the conclusion that they are libertines or lacking in religious preoccupation.51 Here, then, we are within the formal aspect of the Spinozian synthesis. The absolute rationalism and ontologism take the form of religiousness, but this form has already run throughout this type of thought, from Plato's Eros to Diotima's Demon newly retold by Leo Hebraeus.
Here, however, the connection is at the same time satisfied and more tense than ever. It is satisfied in the conception of the fullness of being, in the consciousness of the maturity of the revolution. But the tension is increased in a new way, because the same solid presentation of the revolutionary project demands a step beyond, a complete dislocation. It is strange how no one, faced with analyzing this Spinoza, has sought to grasp the savage elements already present in this early and finely accomplished synthesis. To rationalism, they were spurious elements, but they were still present, and so important! Spinoza's circle is traversed by points of chiliastic religiousness and by an internal tension that we cannot help but read also in the mature Spinoza.52 But perhaps we should take several other elements into account here, not the last of which is the fact that Rijnsburg is only a short distance from Leiden, a town that at this time has recently become a very important textile and manufacturing center and was already the land of the Baptists par excellence. And the land speaks its history.53
We will have to return to all of this at great length. For now, though, what needs to be clearly recognized is that the religious form of Spinoza's thought pertains to the form of the Dutch culture at the apex of its revolutionary process. This religiousness overdetermines the material specificity of the revolutionary process as Spinoza reads it. It is several things at once: a refined theological rationalism, a widely held popular belief, and an open debate. As Huizinga tells us, Calvinism is reappropriated here and transformed by the tradition of popular humanism. In effect, the Dutch anomaly consists of this extraordinary continuity of the presence of the humanistic myth. The early Spinoza is its apologist.
The political form of the Low Countries has certainly not reached the same level of maturity as the social and economic revolution. All the historiansemphasize this fact.54 But what is its political form? In the period that interests us here, stretching from the death of William II (1650) and the "Great Assembly" of 1651 through the entire period of the hegemony of Johan De Witt (1653-72) and finally to the victory of William III and the house of Orange, the political form of the Dutch Republic never really succeeds in clearly defining itself. It remains merely a collection of figures and structures, federated or hierarchical, held together according to designs that evade all functional characteristics and result simply from the accumulation of traditional experiences, in particular, of those institutional experiences typical of communal development, which are themselves derived from the remnants of late medieval forms. At various points, then, the equilibrium of Powers or the centrality of one Power comes to be fixed in the balance of the relationships of force.55 With respect to this indecipherable constitutional mélange, therefore, even the most frequently used appellations, like "oligarchic republic" or "Bonapartist monarchy" (in Thalheimer's sense), seem to me to be eccentric and inadequate. Actually, the Dutch constitution lacks a formal unity of rules, and it perseveres principally through the survival of the (already quite inert) institutional dynamic proper to the revolutionary process. Spinoza sees it this way: "The Dutch thought that to maintain their freedom it was enough to depose their Count and cut the head off the body of their State, but they never thought of reforming the rest. They left its limbs just as they had been constituted before, so that Holland has remained without a Count, like a headless body, and the same State has survived, deprived only of the name. It is no wonder, then, that most of the subjects do not know in whose hands lies the supreme Power of the State" (Political Treatise, IX: 14). But from this same situation is also born the potential offered by the crisis of the constitution; Spinoza also emphasizes this, and De Witt continually insists on this point after the failure of the Great Assembly.56 It is still necessary that the negative essence of the matter, emphasized up to now, also reveals its positive aspect, which in fact must be linked to it, given the undeniable, powerful effectiveness of the existence and development of the republic. I believe that I am using sound categories when I insist on the following hypothesis: the political constitution of the Dutch Republic is, in this period, completely implicated in its economic constitution. The political forms are relatively neutral, "conjunctural" phenomena, to borrow a term that Keynes and Hamilton use in studying the relationship that defines the origins of capitalism in relation to the State-form.57 De Witt or William III: they are themselves conjunctural phenomena, in which the formal constitution (the small part of it that is recognizable) is completely subordinated to the constitutional materiality of the economic relationships. I do not pretend that this constitutes a law: it is, rather, a sign (but such animportant one!) of the exceptional character of Holland, of the Dutch anomaly. However, the form of the ideology, compared with the extraordinary anticipatory force of the relations of production, remains archaic. We do not approach the real political relationships of force either with the democratism of the Althusian school (but we will have to return to certain aspects of this tradition that are fundamental from another point of view)58 or with the new attempts to theorize absolutism by the De la Court brothers and by von Insola.59 It is not off the mark to insist on the fact that the West Indies Company demonstrates formal characteristics that are more adequate than any other constitutional figure, even, in the strict sense, more adequate than any really political ideology, for showing us the reality of the Dutch constitution.
If we want to delve deeper into this problem, still from this same perspective, the point of departure is humanism and the Renaissance. It is the idea of the market as the spontaneity of productive forces, as their vigorous and immediate socialization, and as a determination of value by means of this process. The philosophy of appropriation unfolds naturally from that of the market. The market is the virtuous coincidence of individual appropriation and the socialization of productive force.60 It is of little importance that Respublica is really a union of res publicae. What is fundamental is the solution that must be imposed on this relationship, the dynamic, unified creation of value — valorizing for all its members — that this relationship must, in some way, determine. The effectiveness of this representation is important from the point of view of analysis. One can, in effect, read in it the working mechanism that the high phases of development and a stable institutional dimension of commerce (the companies, for example, or the Stock Exchange of Amsterdam) produce in order to better define reality.
What is the cultural, philosophical, and ideological scheme that rules this representation?61 Confronted by these representations of reality, we are accustomed to reasoning in dialectical terms: the market is the dialectic. This is not so in the seventeenth century. The philosophical scheme that is more adequate to this type of real appearance is, in this situation, a Neoplatonic one. It is renewed Neoplatonism, conceived as a pattern of the universal correspondence of causes and effects and seen as a continuous nexus between subjective existence and objective existence, between individuality and collectivity. Philosophical historians from Dilthey to Cassirer to Paolo Rossi have traced the importance of the Neoplatonic representation of the world that triumphantly traverses the Renaissance and is rearticulated in the philosophies derived from it. It seems to me that, in addition, we must emphasize another fundamental element here: in the period that we are considering, these functions of universal connection, interpreted by Neoplatonism,lose more and more the weight of their ontological connotation. In the original Plotinian tradition this ontological dimension situated the universal connection in the framework of the metaphysical process of the creation and degradation of being, and thus subordinated the "horizontal" relation to the order of the "vertical" creation and hierarchization. As Deleuze has clearly demonstrated,62 Neoplatonism shows a tendency toward being transformed into a philosophy of expression, a philosophy of surfaces, in order to eliminate any aspect of transcendence, of hierarchy, of emanation or degradation. It seems to me that the early ideology of the market (this ideology that produces extraordinary effects that are constitutionally effective) is linked to this ideological plane. Studying the early Spinoza, we will have the means to grasp and evaluate this perspective.
Still, we are dealing with an ideology, with a bourgeois utopia, the ideology of a class that wants to functionally destroy the real contradictions and antagonisms on which it is based. Around 1660 in Holland, as in the other European countries, a declining economic cycle begins; it will last until about 1680. Certainly, in a country such as the Holland that has such strong capitalistic structures, this declining cycle does not bring with it a dramatic economic recession or any analogous, pathological phenomenon. But together with other open contradictions on the international level (note, in particular, the second Anglo-Dutch war over the problems of maritime competition, 1665-67, and the bitter Franco-Dutch conflict, which, in diverse forms and with changing fortunes, lasts from 1670 to 1676) the crisis shows itself to be particularly effective at striking down and destroying the specificity of the experience of the Dutch political ideology.63 In other words, what essentially undergoes a crisis here is the dream of a linear socialization of the effects of capitalist development; what undergoes a crisis is that model of expansion in which class conflict would be contained and maintained in equilibrium. The capitalistic revolution shows its boundary, even in Holland. The rupture arrives in Holland almost three decades after it has affected most of Europe, but even so it is no less effective.64 It is clear that the defeat of De Witt and the Orangist solution to the constitutional crisis in 1672 do not represent the decisive moments of the crisis. Previously, in the middle of the 1660s, De Witt's politics had to yield in the face of the new difficulties of capitalist development. Neither, on the other hand, does the Orangist solution represent a way out of the institutional marasmus; it is not an institutional reform but a restoration. In effect, both of them, De Witt and William III, are moments of a conjuncture, but of a critical conjuncture, destined to become always more heavily critical. Is this the end of the Dutch anomaly? However things stand, it is certain that the Dutch situation, within this passage, even with all the specificities that remain, beginsto approach the European situation. Little by little, political theory yields to accept those ideas that, with the crisis, best interpret the inevitably critical nature of the development of the bourgeois class. Hobbes truly becomes, at this point and from this perspective, the Marx of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois pressure of appropriation demands a relationship of subjugation in order to develop itself and even to preserve and stabilize itself. All this is given in the ideology: the simulation of the political relationship that historically is experienced as the crisis of the previous revolutionary development. The revolutionary development itself and the glory of the humanistic and Renaissance appropriative offensive are considered to be a state of war, a society of natural violence from which we must liberate ourselves. The crisis of the development is interpreted as a fault in its original foundations in order to define the process as insufficient, to define the limits of the project: This is the unhappy consciousness that follows the unveiling of a mystification — which, however, was only an illusion.65
On the boundary of the revolutionary process, on the limit of the crisis, Spinoza rejects the Hobbesian conclusion, the bourgeois solution. Does he reject the bourgeoisie? One thing, at least, is certain: His thought goes beyond the determinate limits of the reflection of the crisis. It is not the case, though, that the crisis is not appraised. It is not that the powerful mechanical atomism of the Hobbesian presuppositions is not accepted or that, therefore, the crisis, both as the possibility and the actuality of its concept, is not treated in the philosophy. But in Spinoza the boundary of the revolution cannot be reduced to the crisis, it cannot simply be enclosed within the dimensions of the crisis. The definition of the historical subject, in Spinoza, cannot be contained within the concept of crisis. When the bourgeoisie, in the moment of the seventeenth-century rupture, assumes the crisis as the constitutive element of its own definition, Spinoza accomplishes a dislocation of the global force that the previous project wielded, by the fullness of development. A philosophy of the future is grafted onto the preconstituted base, the revolutionary pressure continues to be exerted, and the crisis is an obstacle, not an essence. Essence is constructive; the crisis is accepted only in order to pass beyond it. And the discontinuity provides an opportunity to take a leap forward.
Let us limit ourselves now to the properly philosophical level. We have seen how the ideology of the market is given originally in Neoplatonic form. Spinoza, in his turn, adopts this horizon but in a way that, precisely in correspondence with the power of the Dutch anomaly, stresses the very structure of Neoplatonism, pushing it to the limit, toward a philosophy of sur-races. When the experience and theory of the crisis intervene, this surface is broken by a destructive force that denies any idea of linearity in the constitutive process and any idea of spontaneity. There are, at this point, two possible solutions: either restore the linearity and the essentiality of the constitutive process by means of the mediation and the overdetermination offered by a function of command — and this is the master line of the bourgeois utopia of the market66 — or, rather — and this is the Spinozian line — identify in the passage from a philosophy of surfaces to a theory of the constitution of praxis the route that passes beyond the crisis, the route of the continuity of the revolutionary process. In Hobbes the crisis implies the ontological horizon and subsumes it; in Spinoza the crisis is subsumed in the ontological horizon. Perhaps this is the true birthplace of modern and contemporary revolutionary materialism. In any case here the models of appropriative society are differentiated in ontological terms: in Hobbes freedom yields to Power (potestas) ; in Spinoza Power yields to freedom.
It is strange: once again Spinoza's thought is revealed to us as an enormous anomaly. In effect, this definition of his thought that we are proposing comes close to denying that he belongs to history. His thought, absolutely hegemonic in the moment when it interprets the triumph of revolutionary ideology, becomes minoritarian, finds itself excluded from the historical developments of bourgeois ideology, and at the very point that it grasps the concept of the crisis (but unfolds it and twists it in an emancipatory direction), it attaches itself permanently to the revolutionary contents of the humanistic proposal. But we know how empty the history of ideology is! We know, in contrast, how strong the hope of truth and emancipation is! The paradox of Spinoza's thought can be seen in this aspect: his philosophy is presented to us as a postbourgeois philosophy. Macherey calls it a post-dialectical philosophy.67 And so it is, because the dialectic is the form in which bourgeois ideology is always presented to us in all of its variants — even in those of the purely negative dialectic of crisis and war. The materialistic transfiguration that Spinoza accomplishes on the revolutionary contents of humanism pushes his philosophy beyond any dialectical form, beyond any overdetermined mediation — that is to say, beyond the concept of the bourgeoisie as it has come to be formed in a hegemonic way in recent centuries.
We can now define one last series of concepts that we will have to go into more deeply. Spinoza's philosophy, to the extent that it is a humanistic and revolutionary philosophy, is above all, like Hobbes's philosophy, a philosophy of appropriation. The difference, as we have seen, lies in the divergence of their ontological conceptions of appropriation: In Hobbes it is presented as crisis and is therefore, once again, legitimated by Power (potestas), by subjugation. The horizon of the creation of value is command exercised over the market. In Spinoza, in contrast, the crisis negates the meaning of the Neoplatonic origins of the system; he destroys and transfigures every preconstituted metaphysical correspondence, and he no longer poses the problemof the Power for freedom but, instead, the problem of the constitution of freedom. This divergence still presupposes a series of new concepts. In other words, the Hobbesian scheme is insuperable when we approach it from the perspective of individuality. Therefore, with this phenomenology of constitutive praxis, the Spinozian dislocation must also found a new ontological horizon on which this phenomenology can hold. This horizon is collective. It is the horizon of collective freedom, of a nonproblematized collectivity. But is this merely a simple translation of the spontaneous, vague dream of the revolutionary utopia of humanism? No. The idea of the crisis, subsumed in the ontological process, is at play here. It puts in motion all the necessary mechanisms of the constitution of collectivity. The idea of the multitudo transforms what was a Renaissance, Utopian, and ambiguous potentiality into a project and a genealogy of collectivity, as a conscious articulation and constitution of the whole, of the totality. The revolution and its boundary are therefore, in Spinoza, the terrain on which an extraordinary operation is founded, the prefiguration of the fundamental problem of the philosophy of the subsequent centuries: the constitution of collectivity as praxis. From this perspective Spinoza's philosophy is truly a timeless philosophy: Its time is the future!
Korte Verhandeling van God de Mensch en deszelfs Welstand, 1660: The problem that the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Weil-Being poses for philological criticism may be entirely insoluble.1 Nonetheless, I want to take this text into account, certainly not as a first draft of the Ethics (even though here we find many elements of continuity with its opening propositions) and yet neither as an "irreparably damaged text"2 but, rather, as an important document of an ideological situation shared by Spinoza and those, from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg, who are part of his circle and who probably intervene in the production of the text, with confused dedication, only to disfigure it. What we are dealing with is an ideological situation characterized by a theoretical commitment that was deliberately pantheistic or rather (in this frame) almost mystical.
The first part of the Short Treatise is exemplary from this point of view: It is the construction, in successive stages, of the substantial identity of the object.3 These stages are (1) a conception of the Divinity as causa sui, as an absolute immanence in the Dialogues; (2) a polemic against every anthropomorphic conception of the Divinity, where anthropomorphic is understood as that which adopts a definition of being that is in any way metaphorical or analogical (and this is in Chapter VII,4 which perhaps constitutes another fundamental level of the text);5 and (3) three successive passages: the absolute, a priori identity of the essence and the existence of God (chapters I-II), the convergence of the idea of God and the idea of the positive infinity (chapters III-VI), and, finally, the identity of the essence of God and the essence of Nature, reached through the identity of the attributes that constitute them both (chapters VIII-X). But these stages are successive only in the chronological order of their composition. Logically there are no stages, only the circulation and fluidity of one and the same substance, evaluated from different angles of approach but indefatigably repeated in its centrality, in its positive infinity. Philosophy's perspective is to be found within the substance, within its immediate perception and construction. What is described here is an initial contact with ontology, a relationship that just touches on the intensity of the mystical identity. "Whatever we clearly and distinctly understand to belong to the nature of a thing, we can truly affirm of that thing: But we can understand clearly and distinctly that existence belongs to God's nature. Therefore ..." (I.1). "The essences of things are from all eternity and will remain immutable to all eternity. Therefore ..." (I.2).
The interpreters have all been struck by the exceptional power of this early Spinoza: Perhaps it is precisely this perception that assures us that we can use the Short Treatise as a Spinozian text. Cassirer emphasizes that here "the general method of philosophical reflection, which had been the common ground of all doctrines, regardless of their conflicts, gives way to a completely different mode of thought. The continuity of the means of posing problems seems to be suddenly interrupted, ... that which was always considered as a result is taken here as a point of departure," and thus the mystical tension is extremely strong.6 Gueroult takes this observation to a deeper lever, without focusing on the mystical connection, when he discerns in the Spinozian affirmation of an absolute objectivism of being an inflection that is absolutely original in the framework of Modern philosophy.7 I, too, believe that, in effect, the utopia of Spinoza's circle is shown here in its maximum tension, in the complexity of the revolutionary determinations that originally formed it. Let us go back to the elements of Spinoza's workshop: everything is here, and the influence of Renaissance naturalism, primarily Bruno's version of it, is made particularly clear in the heroic conception of pantheism:8
That man has an Idea of God is clear, because he understands his attributes," which he could not produce because he is imperfect. But that he understands these attributes is clear from his knowing hat the infinite cannot be composed of a number of finite parts, that there cannot be two infinities, but Only One, that it is perfect and immutable. This last he knows because he knows that no thing through itself seeks its own destruction, and that it cannot change into something better, since it is perfect, which it would not be if itchanged — and also that such a being cannot be acted on by something coming from outside, since it is omnipotent. (I.9)
What is most striking, then, is the general tonality of the Short Treatise, this innocent and radical choice that Deleuze recognizes as characteristic of absolute rationalism: the choice of a positive infinity that leads immediately to a qualitative definition of being (which is non-Cartesian, nonarithmetic and not reducible to any numeric distinction).9 From here it is a short step to grasp the religious spirit that animates this first assumption of the concept of being in Spinoza's circle. It is incontrovertible that here reason and faith (Christianity) are immediately identified with each other. Certainly, this identity, which is the distinctive trait of the development of the second phase of the Dutch Reform (and of the Protestant Reform in general), is charged with suspense, because this identity implies an extreme alternative, either reason without Christianity or Christianity without reason.10 But at this point why not accept the felicity of this identity, the brief but strong existence of this utopia, the sincerity of the "Christian" definition applied to pantheism and to its foundational enthusiasm?
This said, we have still not yet worked out even the rough outlines of our problem. Really, it is posed in the Short Treatise as soon as the initial enthusiasm over the perception of being dies down. Let us look, for example, at the note (certainly added to a later draft of the text) that Spinoza includes to explain the text treated above: "His 'attributes': it is better [to say] 'because he understands what is proper to God,' because those things are not God's attributes. God is, indeed, not God without them, but he is not God through them, because they indicate nothing substantive, but are only like Adjectives, which require Substantives in order to be explained" (I.9). Here we are then, in the indeterminacy. The tendential identification of the attribute of essence given in the text corresponds to an adjectival definition of the attribute in the note. From here emerges an alternative, the same that we saw on, the terrain of the religious experience: either a completely mystical conception of being that grasps the Divinity through the mechanism of the negative definition or, rather, the flattening of being and the Divinity, of the attribute and the mode, onto a single substantial level. Either Christianity without reason or reason without Christianity. These tendencies are both present, yet Spinoza does not explore them. Instead, in chapter VII, inverting the terms of the problem, he asserts: "So definitions must be of two kinds: 1. Of attributes, which are of a self-existing being; these require no genus, or anything else through which they are better understood or explained, for since they, as attributes of a being existing through itself, exist through themselves, they are also known through themselves. 2. Of those thingswhich do not exist through themselves but only through the attributes of which they are modes and through which, as their genus, they must be understood" (VII.10).11God, attribute, mode: A confused process of emanation is put in motion, and it is marked by a partial, timid, and unresolved response to the fundamental question posed by the emergence of the infinite, positive being! With respect to the position of the problem, there is still a nominal conception of the attributes, an idea of "saying God" that is in no way an explanation of the fundamental way in which being is taken into account.12 Chapters VIII and IX, Natura naturans and Natura naturata, repeat the enigma of mysticism's indivisible union (theological productivity and ontological emanation), of the complexity of the sources and the components of the Spinozian machine.13
These are the facts: a positive utopia is proposed with exceptional power but tenuously balanced between mystical annihilation and logical and ontological objectivism, in terms that allow for no escape from the indistinct and the indeterminate. And yet the innovative tension, which follows from the first perception of being, persists. In the second part of the Short Treatise this is shown from another prospective, in other dimensions. Within the fullness of being, human essence is constituted. This exacerbates the problem more than it clarifies it: on the one hand, the metaphysical apparatus maintains its ambiguity and unfolds by means of the emanationist deduction of the "downward path"; on the other hand, the refinement of the degrees of knowledge and their passage out from the shadow of opinio and the confusion of experientia toward the progressive distinction between fides and clear knowledge (chapter IV) tend to fix the absoluteness of rational knowledge and the determinateness of ethical value on a terrain of pure affirmation.14 We are now confronted with the second element of the utopia of the Spinozian circle: the conception of knowledge as synthesis and, even more, as a symbiotic relationship among intellect, will, and freedom. The religious aspect of the approach is manifest here in the urgency to correlate the theoretical and the practical, in the necessity to live the life of the saints and the prophets, naturally, laically. Is this still the Dutch religious utopia? Or is it the teachings of a Hebrew ascetic, the classical influence of Renaissance Stoicism, or, purely and simply, that attitude so characteristic of the late Renaissance that one can find in the Rosicrucians and in the Reformist mysticism of the early seventeenth century?15 There are all of these, undoubtedly, in the intensity of sentiment in Spinoza's circle. But this intensity does not interest us nearly so much as does the tension that it gives rise to. And it is the progressive tension of the method in the theory of knowledge that is constitutive on the ethical plane and, consequently, profoundly innovative on the ontological plane.
Exhuming the positive meaning of the tendency of this line of thought from the Short Treatise is certainly not an easy task. Let us take, for example, knowledge and its tendency toward method. At the outset it seems that there is very little to add to what has already been emphasized on the terrain of the theologizing utopia: the perpetual confusion of "fides" and "absolutely clear knowledge" (in the first chapters of part II) brings with it an adherence to being that, in its apprehension, leads to a passional, rational, and mystical fullness. And yet, little by little, the reasoning proceeds, and the pressure exerted by clear knowledge is always more determined. The causal mechanism that the affirmation of the Divine substance has put in motion and the absolute determinism that the Short Treatise shows us as already defined (chapter VI)16 must be elaborated on the cognitive plane. The deduction becomes geometrical because knowledge both has to and is able to adjust to the deterministic rhythm of being. Gueroult notes that in the geometrical appendix to the Short Treatise "causa sui is recognized as the property of each substance."17 In effect, the play of axioms, propositions, demonstrations, and corollaries shows that, within a coherent fabric, all substances are ontologically integrated. We must be quite clear: the integration of method and ontology here does not attain the constitutive force offered by the Ethics, and, in general, the indeterminateness of the procedure does not allow us to see clearly the rupture from the pantheistic deduction, from the dark passages of the "downward path." The aesthetic of pantheism has not yet vanished, the constructive power of the method is only hinted at, and the immediate and original apprehension of the substantial being creates a kind of soft atmosphere in which the deductions glide along instead of developing systematically. And yet it is still true that this "grounding oneself in the absolute," which is at the basis of every subsequent articulation, has the force to move toward a completely immanent theory of surfaces, flattening the entire cognitive universe onto a solid and constitutive horizon. The theory of depth is deepened in the same moment that, paradoxically, it is inverted in the theory of extension and developed on a flat and constructive terrain. Immanence is radicalized to the point of being presented as the negation of the three real categories, of the three ontological articulations of "equivocality, eminence, and analogy."18 The element that we are recognizing here is certainly still at the stage of being a pressure, and only a pressure, but it is absolutely coherent with the specificity of the genetic moment of Spinoza's thought.
Also on the specifically ethical terrain we find a pressure toward developing the initial ontological tension, from at least two points of view. The first consists in taking up the traditional thematic of the passions (chapters V-XIV). What is striking here, however, is the clearly constructive direction, the phenomenological determination, and the special quality of the genealogical thought at work in the definitional process. A fabric that is full of being, whole, sees the formation of the passions and their articulations not as the results of a deduction from the absolute but, rather, as the motors of a constitution of the absolute. It is only a beginning, certainly, and far from the extensive arguments of the Ethics! But once again the tension of the utopia manifests its power. More important, though, is a second perspective that is set in motion by the very construction of the idea of beatitude. The supreme beatitude, the project to resolve the problem of the articulation between knowledge and freedom, consists of the union of the mind with the Divinity but also of the recognition of a constitutive process, of a communion between knowledge and freedom, of an absolute sociability:
All the effects which we produce outside ourselves are the more perfect the more they are capable of being united with us to make one and the same nature, for in this way they are nearest to internal effects. For example, if I teach my fellow men to love sensual pleasure, esteem, and greed, then whether I also love these things or not, I am hacked or beaten. This is clear. But [this will] not [be the result] if the only end I strive to attain is to be able to taste union with God, produce true ideas in myself, and make all these things known to my fellow men also. For we can all share equally in this salvation, as happens when this produces in them the same desire that is in me, bringing it about thereby that their will and mine are one and the same, and producing one and the same nature, agreeing always in all things. (XXVI.8)19
The indistinct tension of Spinoza's circle is exceeded by the metaphysical intensity of the philosophical and religious connotations it gives rise to: The utopia is also a utopia of the members themselves, of the sweetness of the community that they experience together. This immediate humanity of the collective participation in the utopia is a defining factor in the theoretical projection itself.20 Here, already, the perspective of ontology is identical to the perspective of salvation, of community, of the restless desire to construct. And it is clear, with all this before us, that any reference to the absoluteness of negativity, be it called evil or the devil, would be superfluous!21 On the terrain of this sweetness, of this fullness of being in which all participate, the very concept of absoluteness, not only of the negative but also of the positive, seems, in effect, to vanish. The path of the synthesis between knowledge and freedom gives way to the ontological establishment of the causa sui, and if in the theory of knowledge this folding back leads to the method, here this same movement pushes toward a theory of potentia, of the expansion of the practical being. The design, then, of which we begin to get a glimpse here is that of the process of the dissolution of absolutenessthrough constructive power, both in methodical knowledge and in the philosophy of praxis. A long path lies ahead, but the given premises insist that it is the only route.
We can thus see that the Short Treatise is a pantheistic text. This is its fundamental tonality. We can also see this tendency in Spinoza's correspondence during this period. The fundamental themes come up again, always in pantheistic terms, and are proposed with even more intensity than in the Short Treatise, if that be possible.22 But in evaluating the overall significance of Spinoza's premise at this stage, we should not in any way forget that if seventeenth-century pantheism unfolds as a philosophy that has lost the Utopian meaning that the Renaissance gave to it (Bruno was burnt at the stake, the utopia is dead), nonetheless, in the Dutch context and in the spirit of Spinoza's circle, this premise still constitutes a basis for resisting the defeat. An insufficient basis, certainly, but valuable for providing the possibility of moving ahead. Pantheism must be traversed. That is the only way to get beyond it. Already in the Short Treatise we begin to read some of the premises of this new strategy. We have already seen where it resides, and we have also begun to see where it leads. Causa sui toward potentia, toward methodus. Pantheism can go beyond itself only by opening itself up again. But this is a theory of the fullness of being: Its reopening can only mean the construction of being. It is a project that philosophy must carry out with a method, a praxis that philosophy must construct — without mediations but, instead, by means of the labor of constructing new, single, determinate fields of truth. Spinoza, while recognizing a revolutionary past and a living utopia, puts himself in position to go beyond the defeat.
Some interpreters have considered the passage to the problematic of the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatone (1661)23 "a complete transformation of perspective," a transformation that can be recognized even in the final ' corrections and additions to the Short Treatise.24 We will see later that this claim bears little truth, in general. Already, though, we have seen that it is not true for the additions to the Short Treatise when we considered the geometrical appendix, probably the final addition to that text. My hypothesis is that the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (TdIE) represents not a dislocation of the metaphysical perspective but an initial attempt to go beyond the original pantheistic horizon, an attempt that is extremely important, with some truly innovative aspects, but that substantially remains inconclusive and contradictory. How does it attempt to go beyond pantheism? By grasping and developing, on the terrain of the theory of knowledge, all those aspects specific to the first Utopian approach that could determine an operative opening within the fullness of being. From here, then, the fundamental problem, the real target of the TdIE, is not that of reaching a new configuration of the metaphysics in relation to a new conception of truth25 but, on the contrary, that of excavating the ontological terrain so as to produce a new horizon of truth, that of rising back up from the power of being to the power of truth.26 But to what degree is such an excavation possible? What results can we obtain from this methodological strategy while the ontological apparatus remains unchanged? Will this not, consequently, in the present state of the investigation, lead to an impasse? Will it not produce a certain slippage between the results of the investigation and the global aims of the theory, so that the force of the attempt will be lost? And once the failure of the project of the TdIE (to construct a new concept of truth within the pantheistic fullness of being) becomes clear, and only at this point,27 will this not suggest the necessity of a radical modification in the very conception of being? These questions push us too far ahead; our reconstruction has only begun. Here, then, we will attempt only to grasp the specific ways in which the TdIE deepens the utopia of Spinoza's circle.
And yet we still need another premise. Because if it is true that the ontological perspective remains fundamental, it is equally true that here Spinoza "takes a clear position in the debate about the method of knowledge, so characteristic of seventeenth-century thought."28 Consider a passage that Spinoza writes to Oldenburg:
You ask next what errors I find in the Philosophy of Descartes and of Bacon. Though it is not my custom to uncover the errors of others, I do also want to comply with your wishes. The first and greatest error is that they have wandered so far from knowledge of the first cause and origin of all things. Second, they did not know the true nature of the human Mind. Third, they never grasped the true cause of error. Only those lacking any education or desire for knowledge will fail to see how necessary the true knowledge of these three things is. (letter 2)
The outline of Spinoza's response, therefore, is simple: It is, first of all, a reference to the ontological foundation of the theory of knowledge, to the fact that logic depends on the first cause. With regard to Descartes it must be added that in his philosophy the mind is illegitimately divided into various functions and is thus removed from the determinism of the cause; with regard to Bacon, we must see that in his thought the mind tries to extricate itself from ontological determinism, in just the same way as when things are forged "ex analogia suae naturae" rather than "ex analogia universi." In each case, Spinoza's critique is equally strong. But if we look closely, although the anti-Cartesian polemic is maintained insistently in the letters ofthis period and has decidedly radical results,29 the discussion of Bacon's theory of knowledge is much more open, and it also shows a responsiveness to the other influences of empirical rationalism, Hobbesian influences in particular, which have a real effect and appear consistently in Spinoza's work. But we can see that this is not a paradox, particularly when we keep in mind the humanistic and constructive characteristics of the utopia of Spinoza's circle, the atmosphere that leads him to the felicitous meeting with Oldenburg and to his encounter with the first scientific project of the Royal Society.30 It is, in fact, far from being a paradox; on the contrary, it fully corresponds to the constructive and logical schema of the ontological project, which has already been drafted in the Short Treatise. As Cassirer and Koyré, among others, have demonstrated at length,31 here there is a significant convergence of views on the conception of logic and the inductive rhythm of thought