‘The Philosophy of Spinoza’ by Paul Salter (Howard Selsam) from New Masses. Vol. 8 No. 5. December, 1932.

On November 24th, the tercentenary of Spinoza was celebrated throughout the world. The spiritual descendants of those whom he most bitterly attacked now praise his name. Catholic priests and bishops, Protestant theologians, and Jewish Rabbis all glorify his character, signal out his “religious” fervor, and gloss over and excuse his heresies. Others make an organized cult of this inspired atheist, and become prayerful at the mention of his name.

The independent spirit of Spinoza is praised by men like the infamous President of City College, Dr. Robinson, who imposes on his students restrictions of speech and opinion, which Spinoza had thoroughly denounced.

The noisiest “followers” of Spinoza today are these cultists who make up the Spinoza Center, and they are the farthest removed from his thought and spirit. A thinker who took men as products of nature, and constructed his theory of the state on his analysis of men, is now honored by an appeal for “unselfishness.” Men are corrupt, they say, not because of the society in which they live but because they are selfish and uninterested in improving themselves ethically. They celebrate Spinoza’s tercentenary by calling for a new revolution: “Not one with a lot of revolt and noise, nor with boisterous acclaim and mass movements, but a White Revolution.” What we need, they say, is not new systems of society but new men. They make the mistake of reading the Fifth Part of the Ethics before the Fourth, of considering “Human Freedom” without “Human Bondage.” They have forgotten that Spinoza never speaks of selfishness or unselfishness. He simply points out that men seek their own interests and therefore the affairs of society must be so ordered that the individual in working for his own interest is at the same time serving the interests of the group. Throughout his Political Treatise he insists that if we are to have a well governed state we must impose such regulations on the leaders that they can serve themselves only by serving the common good.

Spinoza was a radical in action and thought. He was a friend and supporter of Jan de Witt, the liberal Grand Pensionary of Holland who was brutally murdered by the reactionary Orange party. We know that on hearing of the murder Spinoza wrote a placard denouncing its perpetrators and was only prevented from posting it near the scene of the crime by his landlord who locked him in the house. Another friend, his early teacher Van den Enden, was beheaded in front of the Bastille after conspiring to raise a rebellion in Normandy. In 1665 Spinoza turned aside from his more speculative Ethics to support, as a “good republican,” the fight for the separation of church and state. His Theological-Political Treatise was the result. The clergy and supporters of William of Orange denounced this as a wicked instrument “forged in hell by a renegade Jew and the devil.” After the death of the de Witts, William strictly prohibited the treatise and measures were contemplated against the known author of the anonymous work. We know further how Spinoza distrusted Leibniz. When Leibniz was in Paris a friend of Spinoza asked his permission to show Leibniz a manuscript copy of the Ethics. Spinoza refused, asking what Leibniz was doing in Paris. He had reason to suspect that Leibniz was on a mission for the reunion of Protestants and Catholics which he knew would lead to a joint effort to repress all liberal tendencies and freedom of thought and speech. These are a few of Spinoza’s practical interests and aims.

Today it is popular to talk of Spinoza’s god. The church appeals to the less orthodox by ignoring his heresies and emphasizing the religious aspect of his thought. It is wise in doing this, but we have more respect for the churchmen of his day who knew he was their deadly enemy and gave him no quarter. “Is it not the most pernicious atheism that ever was seen in the world?” they asked. We are told, “his works were scarce published but God raised to his Glory, and for the defence of the Christian Religion, several Champions who confuted them with all the Success they could hope for.” Spinoza’s use of the term God has occasioned considerable difficulty. He himself declared that “while we are speaking philosophically we must not use modes of expression of Theology.” Undoubtedly his use of God represented an attempt to retain the emotional values of religion in the new world of science to which he was devoted. But in terms of the thought of his day there was no more effective way of destroying the traditional religious idea of God that by attributing to nature attributes that formerly had been ascribed to the deity alone.

Why, some ask, has his attack on religion succeeded so little in demolishing it? For the same reason that the eighteenth century atheists of France failed of their purpose. It attacked only the product, not the roots; it demolished theology, but left the source untouched. Not until the nineteenth century, with its new social and historical concepts, was it possible to understand that religion was an historical social product which would exist so long as the conditions existed which produced and required it. Then only was an instrument forged which threatens all religion because it seeks the destruction of that form of society on which religion rests. That it has been successful is evidenced by a recent appeal of churchmen for the united struggle of all the religious forces of the world against their common enemy–the philosophy of Marx and Lenin. It was sufficient for Spinoza, in his time, to criticise the religious conception of God, to attack the authority of the scriptures, and to castigate religion’s priests and prophets.

His “Theological-Political Treatise,” is the first critical examination of the inconsistencies of the Old Testament, and the true ancestor of the modern scientific analysis of sacred books, it is also a powerful defense of the liberty of speech and opinion against the restrictions of private and religious authority. He was one of the first to see that religion derives its power authority from the state and not from God, and that its rites and ceremonies are products of a particular social, political and economic form and cannot have any validity under new conditions.

He saw in religion remnants of ancient slavery and pointed out the self-interest of an established church to maintain its power and its revenues. In his Theological-Political Treatise he quotes with approval the words of a classic historian, Quintus Curtius, that there is no more effective means of governing the masses than superstition. Hence he derived the power of the religion from the state, rather than from God: “The great secret of the monarchical regime and its major interest is to deceive men and to color with the name of religion the fear which is to dominate them, in order that they should fight for their (masters) as if it were a matter of their own salvation, and believe it not shameful, but even honorable to the highest degree to shed their blood and their lives for the vanity of a single man.”

It was Spinoza’s great achievement to see nature as a unified whole. From that it follows that man is in nature and is determined by natural laws. His emotions arise out of particular conditions in accordance with determinate rules and principles. To understand them, therefore, is to understand the processes through which they have come to be, in terms of general principles. The possession of this kind of knowledge permits prediction and control. Although Spinoza applies this technique only to the emotions, it can with equal right be extended to political and economic forms. In Marxism there is precisely this kind of knowledge. And whereas Spinoza had a Utopian conception of the ideal society as that which gives the most freedom, Marx provided the scientific means for its attainment.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

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