My general objective in this paper is to provide (1) the outlines of the reception of Baruch Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn in the Russian Enlightenment of the late 18th century as well as (2) in the Russian-Jewish Haskalah. In part (1) of the paper I consider Gavrila (Gavriil) Derzhavin’s mention of Mendelssohn in his “Opinion,” the translation of Mendelssohn’s Phaedon in Nikolay Novikov’s Masonic-inspired journal Utrennyi Svet, and the readings of Spinoza’s view on God and then-shared interpretation of his views as an “atheism” in Feofan Propovich, Vasily Trediakovskiy, and Alexander Sumarokov. In the part on the late Russian-Jewish Haskalah of 1860s I examine two intellectual biographies appeared in the period—Saveliy (Saul) Kovner on Spinoza and Yakov Gurliand on Mendelssohn, which aim to interpret positions of Spinoza and Mendelssohn as exemplary strategies of the Jewish emancipation within the framework of claims and prospects of the modern European culture. I also rediscover and reinterpret Spinoza’s approach to religion as the late Russian Haskalah’s authors strongly object to label Spinoza’s philosophy of religion as “atheistic” and consider it as close to the “pure, or true Judaism.”
In this paper, I seek to clarify, criticize, and expand upon the ambiguous-yet-influential concept of divine violence introduced by Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”. I proceed in three parts: in the first, I outline Benjamin’s argument about the cycle of mythical violence and divine violence’s special role as an interruption of that cycle. Next, I explicate Spinoza’s key concepts of potentia and potestas, which can be used to more clearly define what ought to instead be translated as “divine force”. In the third part, through Benjamin’s brief discussion of Sorel’s theory of the anarchist general strike, I equate potentia as a determinate power of aggregative individuals to divine force, both as a collective action and as an idea itself. I use this renewed and more sophisticated concept of divine force to oppose several interpretations of Benjamin’s concept, including Benjamin’s own quietist stance toward divine force.
Przedmiotem rozważań jest analiza dobra własnego istot żywych, które analogicznie do banalnego zła, w rozumieniu Hannah Arendt, jest bezwiedne, gdyż pozaludzkie organizmy żywe nie posiadają świadomych motywów swojego działania. „Motywem” samorealizacji dobra własnego jest informacja genetyczna. Dobro własne istot żywych, czyli zdolność do życia na miarę własnego gatunku jest podyktowane dążeniem do samozachowania i jest wartością fundamentalną, gdyż jest podstawą posiadania wszelkich innych dóbr. Jego realizacja wymaga podmiotów życia, podobnie jak realizacja dobra moralnego wymaga podmiotów moralnych. Tezą artykułu jest twierdzenie, że podmioty moralne i dobra moralne są pochodną podmiotów życia.
EN
This paper is about the good of living beings. The concept is analogous to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil in that it is unconscious (unknowing) since the nonhuman living beings are not driven in their actions by conscious motivation. The “motivation” of realization of the good of its own is genetic information. The good of their own of living beings i.e., the ability to live within the measure of one’s own species is related to the drive of self–preservation and is a fundamental value since it is the basis of all the other goods. Its realization requires the subjects of life, just like the realization of moral good requires moral subjects. The thesis of this paper is that moral subjects and moral goods derive from the subjects of life.
This article turns to early modern and Enlightenment advocates of tolerance (Locke, Spinoza, John Stuart Mill) in order to discover and lay bare the line of argument that informed their commitment to free speech. This line of argument will subsequently be used to assess the shift from free speech to the contemporary ideal of free self-expression. In order to take this assessment one step further, this article will finally turn to Immanuel Kant’s famous defense of the public use of reason. In the wake of Katerina Deligiorgi’s readings of Kant, it will show that the idea of free speech requires a specific disposition on behalf of speakers and writers that is in danger of being neglected in the contemporary prevailing conception of free speech as freedom of self-expression.
In his book Althusser and His Contemporaries. Philosophyʼs Perpetual War (2013) Warren Montag proposed an interpretation of Louis Althusserʼs work through engagements with Althusserʼs own contemporaries but above all through his engagement with Baruch Spinoza. This review essay is an attempt to both reconstruct and evaluate this attempt by showing heretical nature of Althusserʼs and Spinozaʼs materialism.
PL
Warren Montag w swojej książce Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophyʼs Perpetual War (2013) zaproponował spojrzenie na dzieło Louisa Althussera przez pryzmat jego relacji z jemu współczesnymi, ale przede wszystkim jego lektury Benedykta Spinozy. W niniejszym artykule recenzyjnym autor podejmuje się zarówno rekonstrukcji, jak i oceny tej próby, skupiając się na wydobyciu heretyckiego wymiaru materializmu uprawianego tak przez niderlandzkiego filozofa, jak i francuskiego marksistę.