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I now want, much more briefly, to take another path across my essays in order to look at another group of theses developed there on the question of "knowledge". I cannot hide the fact that in this matter I depended heavily on Spinoza. I said a moment ago that Marx was close to Hegel in his critique of the idea of a theory of knowledge. But this Hegelian critique is already present in Spinoza. What does Spinoza in fact mean when he writes, in a famous phrase, "Habemus enim ideam veram..."? That we have a true idea? No: the weight of the phrase lies on the "enim". It is in fact because and only because we have a true idea that we can produce others, according to its norm. And it is in fact because and only because we have a true idea that we can know that it is true, because it is "index sui". Where does this true idea come from? That is quite a different question. But it is a fact that we do have it , and whatever it may be that produces this result, it governs everything that can be said about it and derived from it. Thus Spinoza in advance makes every theory of knowledge, which reasons about the justification of knowledge, dependent on the fact of the knowledge which we already possess. And so every question of the Origin, Subject and Justification of knowledge, which lie at the root of all theories of knowledge, is rejected. But that does not prevent Spinoza from talking about knowledge: not in order to understand its Origin, Subject and Justification, but in order to determine the process and its moments, the famous "three levels", which moreover appear very strange when you look at them close up, because the first is properly the lived world, and the last is specially suited to grasping the "singular essence" -- or what Hegel would in his language call the "universal concrete" -- of the Jewish people, which is heretically treated in the Theologico-Political Treatise. I am sorry if some people consider, apparently out of theoretical opportunism, that I thus fall into a heresy, but I would say that Marx -- not only the Marx of the 1857 Introduction, which in fact opposes Hegel through Spinoza, but the Marx of Capital, together with Lenin -- is in fact on close terms with Spinoza's positions. (en) |
