And, contrary to what historians of philosophy may say, Spinoza's successors have not yet been able to break free from the power of the ideas he proclaimed. Neither the "criticism" of Kant, nor the "dynamism" of Hegel, nor the scientism of Fichte, nor the attempts of Leibniz and Schelling, nor even the latest philosophical criticism have been able to step over the line of the circle outlined by Spinoza. Much has been said about Spinoza's rationalism, and much has been made to oppose his "reason" to our "experience," but all this has led to nothing and could not lead to anything. For no one dared to touch Spinoza's fundamental thesis. Everyone after him is convinced that when we need the truth, we must go for it to the same "unrighteous" judge from whom we learned that the sum of angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles. Everyone believes that there is no other "righteous" judge and there cannot be, and also that Spinoza himself went to the unjust judge for all his truths and obediently, even joyfully, submitted to his sentences. Obedience on earth has always been considered the highest virtue, for only if all people agree to submit to one principle can that "harmony" be realized, which is also considered the highest ideal of achievement. No philosopher would have dared to say what the frivolous Susanna said to Figaro, who was in love with her, that her caprice, the caprice of a living being, stands above inanimate norms and laws. After all, Susanna had conquered Figaro before, and then argued with him. Philosophers, on the other hand, have to appeal to listeners who are completely indifferent to them, and who will never submit unless they are forced to obey by force, whether by physical force or by the force of dialectics.

And so, we are witnessing an amazing phenomenon. Philosophers, i.e., men to whom truth is most dear, and who ought to be truthful par excellence, are found to be less truthful than ignorant women. The Thracian woman laughed, looking at Thales floundering in the well, Susanna frankly said that for her caprice was the only source of truth. Have you ever heard anything like this from the lips of representatives of wisdom? Even the sophists, who seem to be brave men, who have so compromised themselves by their boldness before the judgment of history, have never allowed themselves to be so truthful. They "argued" with Socrates: they wanted Socrates and all other people to recognize their truth, i.e., to agree that their assertions were not the expression of their "accidental" desires and aspirations, but something that they had received from the same thing, which stood above men and gods, but had nothing human in it, not even one of the signs of an animate principle. For on this, and only on this, Socrates caught them in his dialectical nets, if only what Plato tells us about Socrates' disputes with the Sophists corresponds to historical reality. For if the sophists, like the merry Thracian woman or the careless Susanna, had answered all the objections presented to them with laughter, or had refused to argue because they were useless or out of contempt for universally binding truths, Socrates, invincible in disputes, would have been completely disarmed. But, apparently, the sophists also believed in the sovereign right of reason to decree universally binding truths, or, if they did not believe, then. Fate did not want to preserve in history traces of such an unusual daring for mortals. This is quite acceptable; We know very well that the gods are envious and jealously guard the deepest secrets from the eyes of men.

In any case, the history of philosophy testifies to us that for man the search for truth has always been the pursuit of universally binding judgments. It was not enough for a person to possess the truth. He wanted something different, as it seemed to him, "better": so that his truth would be the truth "for everyone." In order to have the right to do so, he has created the fiction that he does not create his own truth, but takes it ready-made, and not from a being like himself, i.e., from a living being, that is, first of all, a living being, that is, first of all, inconstant, changeable, capricious, but from the hands of something that does not know change and does not want change, because it does not want anything at all and does not care about itself. to no one else: from the hands of that which teaches us that the sum of angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles. Accordingly, since truth has its source in such a special and necessarily inanimate being, human virtue is reduced entirely to self-denial, to self-denial. Impersonal and impartial truth on the one hand, and readiness to sacrifice everything to such truth on the other, this was the primum movens of ancient philosophy. In the Middle Ages, even earlier, almost from the beginning of our era, philosophers and theologians, inspired by the Bible, made attempts to combat the "wisdom" bequeathed by the Hellenes. But, in general, they were unsuccessful and doomed to failure in advance. Several decades before the Bible was revealed to the peoples of Europe, Philo of Judaea had already begun to work for the "reconciliation" of Eastern revelation with Western science. But what he called reconciliation was a betrayal. Some Church Fathers, like Tertullian, for example, were aware of this. But not everyone, like Tertullian, was able to see what the essence of the Hellenic spirit was and the danger of its influence. He alone understood that Athens, as he expressed it, would never come to terms with Jerusalem. He is the only one, and also only once, in the famous saying, which I have already quoted more than once, and which, in my opinion, as I have already pointed out, each of us should repeat every day when going to bed and rising from sleep, has ventured to recognize the incantatory formula which alone can give us freedom from age-old delusion. Non pudet quia pudendum est, prorsus credibile est quia ineptum, certum quia impossibile. Such was the novum organum with which Tertullian tried to approach the Eternal Book. Only once, once in the two thousand years that have passed since the Western peoples began to read the Bible, it occurred to one man that the pudet, ineptum, impossibile, glorified by reason, were robbing us of what was most necessary and most precious. No one heard Tertullian, he did not even hear himself. His words are either completely forgotten, or if they are sometimes quoted by secular or ecclesiastical writers, it is only as an example of extreme nonsense and tactlessness. Everyone considers it their duty not only to reconcile Athens with Jerusalem, but to demand that Jerusalem go to Athens for justification and blessing. Philo's thought even penetrated into the Holy Scriptures. The Scriptures colored the fourth Gospel. In the beginning there was a word that meant: first there was Athens, and then Jerusalem. And, therefore, everything that came from Jerusalem must be weighed on the Athenian scales. The God of the Bible, since he did not conform to the Hellenic concept of an all-perfect being, had to agree to change his "nature." First of all, he had to renounce "image and likeness," for, as the Greeks knew for sure, the most perfect being was not supposed to have any image and no likeness: least of all the image and likeness of man...

Thus, the ontological proof of the existence of God, which still seduces many today (although Kant rejected it, while Hegel convinced us that we must return to it) means nothing more than a readiness to surrender Jerusalem to the judgment of Athens. The idea of an all-perfect being was created in Athens, and the God of the Bible, in order to acquire the predicate of being, had to follow him with a prostration to Athens, where all the predicates were forged and distributed, which cannot exist without general recognition. No "reasonable" person will agree to admit that God can obtain for himself the predicates he needs according to Tertullian's novum organum — non pudet quia pudendum est and certum quia impossibile. And this applies not only to our contemporaries or to the ancients: it must not be forgotten that the "religiously" minded in Aristotle the præcursor Christi in naturalibus, and thought to themselves that Philosophus was also the forerunner of Christ in supernaturalibus. [5]

This ancient idea, which did not die even in the "dark era" of the Middle Ages, received its full expression in modern times in the philosophy of Spinoza. Now it has so taken hold of the minds of people that no one living today even suspects that the truthful Spinoza was not at all as truthful as it is commonly believed. He spoke, and often said, not at all what he thought. It is not true that he did not consider his philosophy to be the best, but only the true one. It is also not true that when he created it, he did not cry, laugh, or curse, but only listened to what reason told him, that is, that indifferent to everything, because he is not alive, judge, who proclaimed that the sum of the angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles. If you do not believe me, read the "Tractatus de emendatione intellectus" or at least the introductory words to this treatise. Then you will know that Spinoza, like Thales, fell into the abyss, and that from the depths of the abyss he cried out to the Lord. It is also not true that he treated of God, of the mind, of human passions, as one treats of lines and planes, and that he, like the judge whom he imposed on men, was indifferent to good and evil, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, and only sought "understanding." The mathematical robes in which he clothed his thought were "rented" by him in order to give more heaviness to his exposition, for people are so willing to identify heaviness with significance. But try to "tear apart" them, and you will see how little the real Spinoza resembles the one that history has preserved for us. He did not consider his philosophy, I repeat, to be the truest, but the best, contrary to what he so categorically stated to his correspondent. He himself admitted it at the end of the ethics: "omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt," he said. He was not looking for verum, but for optimum, and he, the truthful Spinoza, told people the lie that he who decides that the sum of angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles is given the right to solve all the questions that arise in the rebellious and yearning human soul. How it happened that the truthful Spinoza proclaimed such an ugly lie all his life, I speak of this elsewhere. Here I will only say once again that this lie was accepted by the people of modern times as the only possible higher truth. Spinoza seemed not only a sage, but also a saint. For us, he was the only sober among the drunk, as Anaxagoras once was for Aristotle. And he was also canonized as a saint – remember at least the enthusiastic words of Schleiermacher: "opfert mit mir ehrerbietig den Manen des heiligen verstossenen Spinoza",[7] and so on.

IV

The truthful Spinoza, with hitherto unheard-of power and inspiration, announced lies to people. The truth is, as I have already pointed out, that this lie was not invented by him. It has been living in the world since human thought began to strive for the domination of "knowledge" over life. If you believe the textbooks of philosophy, this happened in Europe six centuries before our era and the father of this lie was Thales. According to the Bible, this happened much earlier, when there were only two people on earth, and the father of this lie was not a man, but the devil who took the form of a serpent. We don't believe the Bible; Spinoza revealed to us that in the Bible you can find high morality that is still good for us, but you need to go to other places for the truth. But one way or another, whether it comes from Thales or from the devil, the fact remains unchanged: people are deeply convinced, people consider it a self-evident truth, that they are in the power of some eternally existing, incorporeal and indifferent force, which is given to decide and what the sum of the angles in the triangle is equal to, and what fate awaits man, nations and even the universe. Or, as the same Spinoza put it, with his characteristic mysterious and sinister calmness: the mind and will of God has as much in common with the mind and will of man as the constellation of the Dog with the dog barking as an animal. Any attempt to break free from the power of a conviction that has been created over the centuries is shattered by a whole series of pre-prepared, also "self-evident" and insurmountable in their self-evidence pudet, ineptum, impossibile.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable examples of the coherence of modern philosophical thought is the famous Humeau-Kantian dispute. As you know. Kant repeatedly stated that Hume woke him up from his sleep. And indeed, reading Hume and those passages in Kant in which references to Hume are found, it seems that it could not be otherwise, that what Hume saw and what Kant could already see after Hume, could not only awaken the sleeping, but also the dead. Hume wrote: "Is there a principle in nature more mysterious than the connection of soul and body, a principle by which the supposed spiritual substance acquires such power over material that the most refined thought can act on the grossest matter? If we were to possess power by a secret desire to move mountains, or to direct the planets in their orbits, this vast power would not be more extraordinary or more beyond our comprehension than that aforesaid." Thus wrote Hume. Kant, repeating Hume's words, spoke in almost the same words: "dass mein Wille meinen Arm bewegt, ist mir nicht verständlicher, als wenn jemand sagte, dass derselbe auch den Mond zurückhalten könne." [8] It seemed, what else? It would seem that for people who have seen this, further sleep, further faith in understanding, in intelligere, will become impossible and unnecessary. That they, like Tertullian, would break free from the power of the devil's delusion and, awakening to the final reality, would smash to pieces all the pudet, ineptum, impossibile that bound them...

But it wasn't like that. Both Hume and Kant woke up in a dream. Their awakening was illusory. Even the fact that they had discovered in themselves the miraculous power to move mountains and guide the planets in their orbits did not teach them that they had a different purpose than perpendiculars and triangles. Hume began to talk about "habit" and forgot about the miracles he had seen. Kant, in order not to look at miracles, transferred them to the realm of Ding an sich, and left to people synthetic judgments a priori, transcendental philosophy, and three miserable "postulates." That is, he fulfilled Spinoza's program in its entirety: he defended piety and morality, and betrayed God, putting in its place a concept that he created in the image and likeness of the highest criteria of mathematical truths. And such a philosophy seemed to everyone "sublime" par excellence. Morality, like its parent, reason, or what was called reason, became autonomous, self-legitimate. And the "purer", the more self-legitimate, the more independent morality was, the more it was worshipped. Fichte followed Kant and again recreated Spinoza in his "ethical idealism". Man must first of all obey, and obey a principle as far removed from it as the perpendiculars and triangles sung by Spinoza, and they are, in their humble obedience to the supreme principle, eternal and unattainable models for restless and irrationally restless mortals. Hegel went in the same direction: no matter how much he struggled with Spinoza, no matter how stubbornly he strove in his dynamism to overcome the statics of his teacher, he still more strengthened people's faith in the "autonomy" of reason. For him, philosophy was the "self-development" of the spirit, i.e., the automatic unfolding of the Absolute, which, in its "ideality" of nature and its inanimateness, surpasses even mathematical concepts. I am not even talking about modern philosophers. Their fear of "reason" is so great, the belief in the inviolability of synthetic judgments a priori is so irresistibly strong, that it does not occur to anyone that a struggle is still possible here. The "miracles" that were revealed for a moment to Hume and Kant are forgotten. Those who are not with science will face the fate of Thales. Sooner or later, he will be "swept off the face of the earth" or, like Thales, will fall into a well, to the merry laughter of young beauties.

I said that the truthful Spinoza had told people a deliberate lie. It may be asked: why did people believe him? How did he manage to bewitch them - to take away their sight and hearing? An attentive reader may have already guessed how to answer these questions. It is not for nothing that I have had to think of Thales so many times in these pages. After all, he definitely fell into a well - this is not a lie or an invention. And with anyone who does not look at his feet, sooner or later trouble will happen. In other words: common sense and science cannot be neglected with impunity. That is why Hume and Kant were in such a hurry to forget the miracles they had seen, and clung so tightly, the one to habit, the other to synthetic judgments a priori. Their students and admirers felt this, and this ensured the success of their philosophies. Whoever is afraid of failure must believe in the "truthfulness" of Spinoza, listen to Hume and Kant, and hide himself with whatever God sends from everything extraordinary and "miraculous"...

And yet Spinoza and all those who came from Spinoza and were spiritually nourished by him, told people lies. Needless to say, common sense and science cannot be neglected with impunity – this is what people discover in their "everyday experience". But there is another experience — it reveals something else. It reveals that it is also impossible to trust common sense and science "with impunity". That those who have been entrusted as well as those who have neglected will be equally punished. The Thracian woman who mocked Thales — has she passed the abyss? Where is she? Where is her merry laughter? History is silent about this! History, a mysterious science that tells about the affairs of bygone days, never remembers what awaited the "winners", what abysses were prepared for them. You can memorize many volumes of history books and not know such a "simple" truth. The more you read historical writings, the more thoroughly you forget the old truth that man is mortal. It is as if history sets itself the task of recreating life as if people had never died. Yes, it is. History has its own philosophy, and this philosophy requires of it precisely such a reconstruction of the human past. Otherwise, how could people have the ridiculous myth that the willingness to follow science and common sense ensures impunity? However, one must think that historians would not have coped with such a task by their own means. Behind the historians there is and they are moved by some other and incomprehensible force – or rather, although I will not be forgiven for it, the will. It is this enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel (194) and the apparently supernatural delusion of which Pascal speaks, and of which neither Kant nor the epistemologists who followed Kant's path ever suspected. Neither mathematics nor the sciences that are equal to mathematics can disenchant human consciousness and free it from supernatural spells. And does science strive for "free" research? Is it looking for a way to reality? I have already cited the patterns of thinking of such courageous men as Kant and Hume. As soon as something out of the ordinary stood in their way, they immediately hid in their shell, decided that this was something that should not be seen, even something that did not exist, that it was a "miracle". For greater clarity, I will cite another example from the book of a modern, very famous and influential historian of philosophy. In order to explain to his reader the meaning and significance of the "philosophy of identity" inherited by Hegel from Schelling, who in turn received his "epiphany" from Spinoza's books, the learned historian writes: "Solange man die Erkenntnis sich nach dem Gegenstand "richten lässt" in dem Sinne, dass dieser ein Ziel bezeichnet, dass für sich bei aller noch so grossen Annäherung doch immer ein äusserliches ist und bleibt; — solange bleibt die Zusammenstimmug des «Subjektiven» und des «Objektiven» ein unbegreifliches Wunder. Dieses Wunder schwindet nur erst…" etc.[10]

I could collect as many examples of such judgments as I like. From them it is clear what is the basic "faith" of science and philosophy, which constantly looks back on science in the conviction that if it does not get along with science, it will inevitably be "swept off the face of the earth" (the words in quotation marks also do not belong to me, but to a very famous contemporary philosopher). A miracle is "incomprehensible" because it cannot be caught in the net of "universal and necessary judgments." Ergo: If it were before our eyes, our science would teach us not to see it. She cannot rest until all the "miraculous" is out of her sight (das Wunder schwindet). And with such a voluntary self-limitation, the equal of which human thought has apparently not known in any historical epoch, science, in all sincerity, identifies itself with free investigation. What is this, I ask again, if not the "supernatural delusion" with which Pascal was so painfully tormented? With the methods of searching for truth developed by science, we are fatally doomed to make the most important, the most significant for us seem non-existent par excellence. When it appears before us, we are seized with insane terror, the soul fears that the great Nothing will swallow it up forever, and runs back without looking back, to where the cheerful and careless Thracian women triumph.

What is the way out of here? How to overcome a nightmarish delusion when it is sent by a supernatural force? And "how can a man quarrel with God"? The supernatural delusion is dispelled only by the supernatural force. Spinoza's judge, who was not satisfied with power over triangles and perpendiculars and subjugated living people, will never, of course, bless the arbitrariness hidden in the supernatural, and will continue to frighten us with the perunas of his "necessity." But neither his blessing nor his threats, now that the glamour has disappeared, have the same effect. All the pudendum, ineptum, impossibile, plucked by our forefather from the tree of Eden, are forgotten. Forgotten are both the "universally binding judgments" and the self-imposed piety that so seduced us. And then, only then, free research will begin. Perhaps the reader who will not be repelled by the long soul-to-heart wanderings that have provided the material for this book will be convinced that in the Holy Scriptures. Scripture is the Truth, and that Spinoza, in fulfillment of the will of the one who sent him, was doomed to take this truth away from our contemporaries.

L. Sh.