A Philosophy of the History of Humanity: From Spinoza to Lessing

In the final section of chapter 3, we focused on the different uses of the terms concatenatio and connexio in the Ethics. The latter refers to the complex weave of singular modes, and therefore to the weave of durations, whose measuring point is immanent to the process. The former indicates the linear series of the ideas of the affections of the body (to the idea of the succession of geometric points, the metaphor of the chain adds the idea of a necessary link between the elements), and therefore the arrangement of events along a straight line or circle that represents the flux of the absolute temporality of the imagination. Its unit of measure is constituted by the massive, regular movements of nature. In light of this distinction, we must now analyse the passages of the TTP which have been interpreted as the sketches of a philosophy of the history of humanity by Lessing as well as Herder (a type of philosophy whose posterity was immense if we bring to mind Hegelianism, Marxism and that Jünger Spinoza himself, Moses Hess). In other words, we can ask whether Spinoza participated in the philosophical dream of modernity – or, to use Fulvio Papi's adept expression, the philosophical dream of history.

The first passage that seems to legitimate an interpretation of the TTP in the sense of a philosophy of history (understood as an attempt to give a meaning, direction or end goal to the set of historical facts) appears at the beginning of chapter three. Concerning the election of the Hebrew people, Spinoza distinguishes true happiness or blessedness as enjoying a good from the enjoyment of a good at the exclusion of all others. Election, as declared in Scripture, is the evidence of the Hebrews’ incapacity to apprehend and know true blessedness, an incapacity that in this context is the consequence of a childish mentality: