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While it is patently not the case that key figures such as d'Holbach and Condorcet delved deeply into Spinoza's thought, or cited him often or in some cases ever, at the same time, one must acknowledge that the key elements constituting High Enlightenment French ‘Spinozisme’ in the sense intended here were not discovered or concocted by these post-1740 writers and thinkers but were transmitted to them by those sections of the pre-1730 radical philosophical underground literature, especially clandestine manuscripts and suppressed printed books, that were more directly immersed in Spinoza's own texts and thought. Those who performed this bridging role transmitting the basic elements of ‘Spinozism’ to the generation of Diderot and d'Holbach consisted of two distinct coteries. On the one hand there were those English ‘deists’, Toland, Tindal and Collins especially, who rejected Locke's dualism and principle of ‘supra rationem’ and adopted instead seemingly directly from, or else in emulation of, Spinoza, the latter’s one-substance doctrine based on the idea that motion is inherent in matter, his necessitarianism, anti-Scripturalism and attack on ‘priestcraft’ along with his plea for full freedom of conscience and expression, or ‘freedom to philosophize’. Secondly, there were a group of subversive Huguenot and other French thinkers in the years around 1700, and down to the 1730s, whether or not they themselves can accurately be called ‘Spinozists’, who were deeply preoccupied with Spinoza's texts and bequeathed a powerful philosophical impetus to the generation of Diderot and d'Holbach. Especially important for the transmission of Spinozist ideas in France, and the literary depicting of an underground sect of ‘Spinozists’ pervading the whole of European culture, were Bayle, Boulainvilliers, and d'Argens but there were many others in this group, Tyssot de Patot among them. (en) |
