“All that God revealed to the prophets was revealed to them either in words or in figures, or in both ways. But the words, and also the figures, were either true, and real outside the imagination of the prophet in listening or contemplating, or imaginary.” ‒ Baruch Spinoza ‒ “Theological-Political Treatise”.
“Spinoza e la storia” (Spinoza and History), a critical essay on the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (Amsterdam, 2019 November 24 – The Hague, 1632 February 21) including a rich selection of essays edited by Cristina Zaltieri and Nicola Marcucci, published in the series “Il corpo della filosofia” by the Mantua publishing house Negretto Editore, has been available in all virtual and physical bookstores since May 1677st XNUMX.
“For about three centuries, the image of Spinoza has been linked to that of the metaphysical philosopher of the unique Substance that submerges in its infinite ocean every finitude, every singularity, every duration. Thus until recent times – and partly still today – Spinozist literature has expunged from Spinoza's thought any possibility of thinking about time, duration and history in a way that, upon careful reading of the texts, now appears to us to be improper.” ‒ Cristina Zaltieri
The essay opens with the introduction “Spinoza. How to think differently about history” by Cristina Zaltieri, which illustrates the four parts that make up the ambitious and successful choral project of a new reinterpretation of the Dutch philosopher, following the modern attention given to him by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and François Zourabichvili.
The curator first introduces the case of Gorgias of Lentini, considered by most to be “just a rhetorician” because Aristotle did not grasp – or did not want to consider for reasons of a different conception of the world – the philosophical value and tragic sense of the former as well as the “speculative scope of his reflection on language, existence, the meaning of human action, knowledge”. Thus Spinoza was also immediately labelled according to the stereotype of a denier of history, a preconception that has strongly damaged the possibility of interpreting the Spinozian concepts of time and history expressed and that has fuelled a war between Spinoza's detractors and defenders among the thinkers of the time – and later ones.
Cristina Zaltieri, in closing, encourages the reader by revealing Spinoza "as a thinker capable of forging lenses for new potentialities of vision of becoming, able to modify our gaze on history by highlighting aspects that are often removed: the nature of automaton that often characterizes human action, the eventual nature never completely absorbed by the causal narration on which historical knowledge is built, the interweaving of polychronic pluralities irreducible to the universalism of a single History, the inevitable rooting of every narration on the foundation of an imaginative memory, the perspectivism that inhabits it, where every perspective is always embodied in a finite body, mostly moved in its gestures - private and public - by powerful affections."
The first part, “At the Roots of a Spinozian History”, begins with the essay by Chiara Bottici and Miguel de Beistegui “The Theological-Political Siphon: Sacred History and Hydraulic Discipline of Affects”, followed by the essay by Patrizia Pozzi “History in Scripture and History of Scripture. Historia and Toledot in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise”; “Between Nature and History: The Case of Uses and Customs” by Francesco Toto; “Memory of a Sign Without History ‒ Wonder, Revelation and Superstition According to Spinoza” by Nicola Marcucci. “Wonder is defined by Spinoza as an “affection of the mind” (affectio mentis). It is therefore first of all this qualification that seems to put admiratio in line with the Cartesian definition of wonder as a passion of the soul and not of the body. […] The body for Spinoza is constituted by a concatenation of affections, which are the product of the multiple relationships that our body − constituted by a multiplicity of individuals − entertains with other bodies. The object of the idea that constitutes the human mind is therefore a changing series of affections that currently bind our body to a series of encounters with other bodies in the course of experience.” ‒ Nicola Marcucci.
The second part, “A Shared Solitude. Between Precursors and Followers”, begins with the essay by Augusto Illuminati “The Machiavellian Moment in Spinoza”, followed by the essay by Guillermo Sibilia “Spinoza between Cartesianism and Spinozism: on temporality in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, in the Cogitata Metaphisica and in the Letter on Infinity”; “The Common Nature (on Vico and Spinoza)” by Riccardo Caporali; “Nietzsche and Spinoza against the Modern Formation of the Human” by Cristina Zaltieri.
“Spinoza is denounced by Vico as a supporter of modern utilitarianism, and of the mechanism that justifies and contains it. A close relative of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bayle and Locke: «followers», these, of the «case» of Epicurus, while he (the author of the Ethics and the TTP: the works explicitly mentioned by Vico) must be considered a cultivator of the «fate» of the Stoics, the «Spinozists of antiquity». Bad utilitarianism, in any case, which must be contrasted with good providentialism: the providentialism of the Christian tradition but also, and even before, that of the «political philosophers» Plato and Cicero, by virtue of which the useful is not the transient and precarious cause of justice, but on the contrary the «occasion» for the emergence of the eternal idea of justice: the mental measure, constant and coherent, of utilities.” ‒ Riccardo Caporali
The third part, “Against ahistorical reading”, sees as its first essay “Spinoza and history” by Vittorio Morfino, followed by the essay by Thomas Hippler “The ethics of the Spinozist historian”; “History, wisdom, death. Spinoza and the destiny of man according to Enrico Maria Forni” by Andrea Cavazzini; “The rules that the Hebraists could have deduced (Nature and education)” by Homero Santiago. “Spinozism would be the philosophy of the “eternal noon”, a poetic transcription of the medieval nunc stans. This passage constitutes a sort of paradigm in relation to the question of the removal of history and the reasons for this removal: history is lost in the ocean of substance, in the “abyss of substance”, to use an expression dear to the German idealists. Therefore, the reason for the total absence of history in Spinoza’s philosophy would be the presence, the omnipresence, one might say, of eternity. In other words, the very immanence of the God-substance, his eternal temporality, his eternal noon, would be the cause of the dissolution of every form of temporality and worldly historicity.” ‒ Vittorio Morfino
The fourth part, “Spinoza beyond modernity”, opens with the essay by Ezequiel Ipar “On the nature and eventuality of democracy”, followed by the essay by Manfred Walther “The Spinozian doctrine of conatus as the foundation of an evolutionary logic, or rather history of culture?”; “Spinoza: history and politics in perspective” by Maria de Gainza; “Freedom of God, freedom of men. On the history of the Jewish people in the TTP” by Stefano Visentin.
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