Philosophy and Religion, Part 2b
Renaissance and Enlightenment
The longer part of today’s attached
and linked text, on Alberti and Spinoza, written by Anthony Blunt, describes
the Italian Renaissance (= “rebirth”)
through the life and work of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). The
Renaissance is significant as an intermediate high point of humanism between
the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and the modern, Marxist world. The
Renaissance followed the European “Dark Ages” and “Middle Ages”. The
Renaissance thinkers drew upon Arab, Indian and Chinese culture as well as on
that of the Ancients who had slept for a thousand years beneath their Italian
feet. This piece of writing can also help to show how the unity of historical
thought that Hegel later theorised had in practice been realised.
The Italian Renaissance,
based on reason and the understanding that humans can and do by themselves
develop human culture; and that human culture is not limited by the extent of
the knowledge of the ancients, or by any other interior limitation. The Italian
Renaissance at its peak represents a pure form of humanism – the best-developed
in history up to that time.
The Italian Renaissance was
later overcome by its own internal reactionary forces (e.g. see the last
paragraph of Blunt’s account), but humanism did not then sleep for as long as
it had slept after the fall of the Roman Empire. It quickly rose again in
Northern Europe, led in particular by the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1637) among others,
in a movement known as The Enlightenment, which we may regard
as continuing up to the time of Hegel, and therefore up to the dawn of Marxism.
A short piece of Spinoza’s writing is given at the end of the Anthony Blunt
document.
The following quotation is
from a Spinoza page on MIA. It shows how Spinoza’s
thought prepares the way for Engels’ thought:
“That thing
is said to be FREE (libera) which exists by the mere necessity of its own
nature and is determined to act by itself alone. That thing is said to be
NECESSARY (necessaria), or rather COMPELLED (coacta), which is determined by
something else to exist and act in a certain fixed and determinate way.”
These writings show the
development of understanding of the dialectic of Freedom and Necessity, and the
closely-related, parallel dialectic of Subject and Object. They can help one to
understand the philosophical ground upon which Marx and Engels stood. For
further reading on Spinoza, see the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov’s essay on Spinoza on MIA,
where Ilyenkov remarks, and then quotes Hegel, as follows:
“…he was
probably the only one of the great thinkers of the pre-Marxian era who knew how
to unite brilliant models of acutely dialectical thought with a consistently
held materialist principle (rigorously applied throughout his system) of
understanding thought and its relations to the external world lying in the
space outside the human head.
“The
influence of Spinoza’s ideas on the subsequent development of dialectical
thought can hardly be exaggerated. ‘It is therefore worthy of note that thought
must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower
of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy.’ [Lectures
on the History of Philosophy, Hegel]
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Alberti and Spinoza
compilation, Blunt, Spinoza.
