I'm grateful for all the feedback and engagement. It has cemented me in my approach. I stand with Spinoza and those who follow in his wake. Here is a summary the outlook that I expect to become general:
The nineteenth-century Jewish Enlightenment was like a beam of light refracted through a prism into a spectral band of brilliant intellectual colors spread across Western Europe. The prism through which Jewish thought was refracted was a Jew born in Amsterdam in 1632, a Jew so modern in his thinking that the second half of the twentieth century has not yet caught up with him. Excommunicated by the Jews in the seventeenth century, abhorred by the Christians in the eighteenth century, acknowledged great in the nineteenth century, Baruch Spinoza will perhaps not be fully understood even in the twenty-first century. But perhaps by then Spinoza's philosophy will have become the basis of a world religion for neomodern man.--Max I. Dimont /
Jews, God and History, p. 343
Once Marx is understood as a son of Spinoza, the project of mapping humanity's generic essence is complete.
Dimont’s passage is a beautiful bit of prose, but it isn’t doing what you’re trying to make it do. He’s not “proving” a historical destiny, he’s writing, in the 1960s, a speculative perhaps about Spinoza’s future influence. The sentence you’re leaning on literally hangs on “perhaps” twice. That’s not a completed map of human nature, it’s a historian musing about how important Spinoza might become.
And “once Marx is understood as a son of Spinoza, the project of mapping humanity’s generic essence is complete” just ignores two awkward facts.
First, Marx explicitly rejects the idea of a fixed, transhistorical human essence that can be “mapped” once and for all. His whole point in the Theses on Feuerbach is that “human essence” is the ensemble of social relations and therefore changes with history. If essence is historical and relational by definition, then any claim that the mapping is now “complete” is anti-Marxist on its face.
Second, Spinoza → Marx is one contested genealogy among many. Marx is at least as much “son of” Hegel, Feuerbach, German idealism, British political economy, and French socialism as he is of Spinoza. Even people who do trace a Spinoza–Marx line (Althusser, Negri, etc.) treat it as a fruitful way of reading them, not as the moment where philosophy finishes its work and humanity’s “generic essence” is settled forever.
So at best, what you’ve got is, “Here’s a 20th-century Jewish popular historian being enthusiastic about Spinoza, and here’s my personal thesis that Marx + Spinoza are the final word on human nature.” That’s allowed as a belief. But nothing in that quote, or in Marx, or in Spinoza turns your belief into an inevitability of “serious study,” and nothing stops the rest of philosophy, history, anthropology, psychology, etc. from continuing to revise, reject, or bypass your preferred storyline.
NHC
