In Amsterdam, Baruch Spinoza developed the most significant radical thought in European philosophy. Jonathan Israel calls it the philosophical basis for the radical Enlightenment – a democratic challenge to religious and political authoritarianism committed to universal equality. For Israel: “(T)here is no scope for ignoring the universal conviction during the revolutionary age, beginning in the early 1790s, that it was philosophy that has demolished the ancient régime, and in particular the ideas, beliefs, and loyalties on which it rested, and that it had accomplished this feat long before the first shots were fired at the Bastille.”
Spinoza influenced Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot and, via the people he came to influence, the French Revolution. Later on, he was Karl Marx’s favourite philosopher. Fanon had a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics on his shelf when he died in Tunis in 1961.
Spinoza’s ancestors had fled the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536. His father, Miguel, was a merchant. There is some evidence that Miguel’s business included trading in sugar from the Spanish plantations in the Canary Islands. Some of Spinoza’s contemporaries were linked to the sugar plantations in Brazil. In a letter written in July 1664, Spinoza described a waking hallucination: “One morning, as the sky was already growing light, I woke from a very deep dream to find that the images which had come to me in my dream remained before my eyes as vividly as if the things had been true – especially the image of a certain black, scabby Brazilian whom I had never seen before. For the most part this image disappeared when, to divert myself with something else, I fixed my eyes on a book or some other object. But as soon as I turned my eyes back away from such an object without fixing my eyes attentively on anything, the same image of the same Black man appeared to me with the same vividness, alternately, until it gradually disappeared from my visual field.”
However we interpret Spinoza’s philosophy, and his own political intentions, there is no doubt that, again and again, the dominant currents of radical politics developed in Europe during the Enlightenment did not take a genuinely universal form. On the contrary Europe was falsely conflated with the universal with the result that most people were expelled from the count of the human and, when revolution came to America and France, the rights of man.
Spinoza’s hallucination allowed the African enslaved in Brazil, a category of person that does emerge explicitly in the philosopher’s books, to (momentarily) emerge from the unconscious. This episode evokes Dussel’s idea of the ‘underside of modernity’ – but without Dussel’s explicit conclusion that “truth and justice” require the retrieval of “the non-hegemonic, dominated, silenced, and forgotten counter-discourse, namely, that of the constitutive alterity or underside of modernity itself.”
