Nietzsche was quite keen on Spinoza. But he doesn't spend a lot of time on any modern (non-ancient) philosopher. FWIT the epigraphs to my PhD thesis (on materialism) were quotes from Spinoza and Nietzsche, and I am pretty sure N pointed me to the quote from S.
S was of course excommunicated from the Jewish community in the Netherlands for atheism because he rejected a transcendental God -- Deus sive Natura, God or Nature -- is his way of referring to the deity. But it is incorrect to treat him as an atheist as opposed to an antisupernaturalist. For S, the mind and body are different aspects of the same thing, so the word, regarded as mind, is God. Hegel of course was absolutely high on this formulation.
S was not an atheist in the way as d'Holbach, de Mettrie, and Hume (despite his protestations, necessary in the circumstances) or his contemporary Hobbes (also despite necessary protestation to the contrary) -- open atheism would have been worth Hobbes' life, quite literally, and Hume's reputation. The French guys could get away with it because they lived in a cynically Catholic country. Frederick the great once asked the mathematician LaPlace, who put Newtonian mechanics on a firm mathematical footing that we still pretty much use, where there was room for God in his universe. "Your Highness," said the scholar, "I have no use for that hypothesis." But Frederick was probably a a closet atheist too. (Newton, by contrast, was complete religious fanatic.)
Anyway, Hobbes, Hume, and the French guys they were just atheists in the Proverbial sense ("The fool saith in his heart, 'There is no God.'"). S had an eccentric notion of the divine -- one that Einstein later subscribed to. There is no reason to think that he was really a secret atheist likes Hobbes or Hume.
Neither was Nietzsche an atheist like Hobbes or Hume (probably) or de Mettrie or De D'Holbach. Nietzsche takes to metaphysical positions. He could not care less about whether certain a supernatural being existed or not, although he doubtless did not believe that it did.
N's proposition "God is dead," is a piece of sociological genealogy, an observation that _belief_ in the existence of a supernatural deity is (he thinks) no longer sustainable and not something that can play the social role it once did. It is like Marx's comment on religion as the opiate of the masses, which bypasses the truth value of religious claims and addresses their social role. So if Spinoza was an atheist, which he was not, he was not on the same page as Nietzsche. And N was definitely not on the same page as Hobbes, Hume or hibachi, but very much on the same page as Marx.
--- wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>
> > On an unrelated point, when I was reading Spinoza,
> I went looking
> > through indexes of some of Nietzsche looking for
> references to
> > Spinoza, but didn't find any by very passing
> mentions. After going
> > over some Spinoza, I thought, if Nietzsche thought
> God was dead in the
> > 1880s, he should have checked out Spinoza, who for
> all intent and
> > purposes abolished the old dude back in the 1660s.
> >
> > So where I am going with this is that the
> postmodernist interest in
> > Nietzsche reflects a kind of historical
> parallelism between two
> > empires. Postmodernism seemed to devote most of
> its efforts to
> > critiques of what it selected as representative of
> the establishment
> > intellectual milieu---completely excluding any
> interest in the
> > material conditions of the masses, much like
> Nietzsche.
>
> Actually Nietzsche recognizes Spinoza as an
> ancecedent (although some of
> his readings of Spinoza are a bit problematic.) As
> for the question of
> postmodernism, I am not sure what you mean, but one
> can certainly find
> concern for mass conditions amongst writers such as
> Foucault, Montag,
> Haraway, etc. I am beginning to feel that these
> postmodernists are a bit
> of a phantom (one of considerably less substance
> than the specter of
> communism)
>
> > In my own limited readings in the pomo school, I
> was constantly
> > reminded of Nietzsche even if he wasn't mentioned,
> partly because most
> > of these readings gave me the same feeling of
> nausea.
> >
> > I think my reaction to both was just that I was
> sick and tired of
> > endless attacks, critiques, haggling over small
> points, and never
> > asserting a single positive point of view. Maybe
> it was just that I
> > don't like the hermeneutic method. This is why I
> keep returning to
> > Cassirer. He almost never bothers to criticize
> others in order to make
> > his ideas clear. Instead he picks ideas that help
> illustrate what he
> > is writing about.
>
> I'd recommned Wendy Brown's Wounded Identities for a
> reading of Nietzsche
> towards a radical politic.
>
> > On the other hand, your right, the pomo crowd are
> a pretty elite
> > bunch. I don't see many of them in wheelchair
> repair or over at the
> > auto shop getting down with la gente. While they
> are quite adept at
> > using intellectual relativism in the culture wars,
> I am not all that
> > sure their relativism translates into concrete
> political equality. But
> > who knows, maybe getting run out of the academy
> will help clear their
> > heads.
> >
> I don't know. I just remember that when the
> secretarial staff went on
> strike at the University of Minnesota, the
> comparative literature grad
> students and faculty made a lot of effort to help
> out. This is true of a
> lot of grad students around the country. I feel
> like this assertion might
> be a bit unfair.
>
> robert wood
>
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