On Spinoza’s Historiography

Spinoza (1632-1677), a famous Dutch philosopher, was the mainrepresentative of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Ethica ordine geometrico, KorteVerhandeling van God, de Mensch, en deszelfs Welstand, Tractatus de intellectusemendatione, Renati des Cartes Principia Philosophiae, accesserunt eiusdemCogitata Metaphysica, Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae and so on.Spinoza was the first to criticize Bible as historical records. In Collingwood’s workThe Idea of History, he regarded that it was Spinoza’s brilliant writings that made hima founder of textual criticism of Bible. Distinguished popularity was won by Spinozaas a historian at that time. After his death, Spinoza’s success in philosophy graduallyovershadowed his historical achievements. But it can not be ignored that he was richin the ideas on history.This paper will study Spinoza as a whole from the view of historiography--takehistorical, philosophical, political and other kinds of works into consideration. It willfocus on exploring Spinoza’s ideas on history, to determine his historicalachievements and significance.Spinoza’s ideas on history was a comprehensive result of politics, economy andculture background in that age. Spinoza mainly lived in the Netherlands in the17thcentury. The Netherlands in the golden age, whose development of modern economywas quite earlier and relatively fast, was cherished by Marx as “a standard capitalistcountry in the17thcentury.” During this period, the politics was democratic, theeconomy was prosperous, and the atmosphere of academic culture was free. AndSpinoza’s thoughts came from the development of natural science. It started to subvertthe traditional concept,classical arts, rationalism and skepticism,etc. Worked on thesefactors, Spinoza set up his own system of historiography.Spinoza’s historical contributions lied in two aspects:historical ideology and itspractice. From the aspect of historical ideology, Spinoza advocated a combination ofsuspicious attitude and truth-seeking spirit towards history cognition; in the study ofthe motivation and its purpose to narrate history, Spinoza advocated that themotivation of history is to explain--that is, to explain the views of religion,philosophy, politics and so on. On the purpose, he thought that history has moralfunction of education; in social history, he represented and explained social contracttheory and atheistic society hypothesis, which were based on the analysis of human nature. From the aspect of historical practice, Spinoza regarded Bible as a historicalcritique, using version bibliography, textual criticism,linguistics, history etymology,forgeries and other methods. In historical research methods, Spinoza would likehistory deductive method and applied the concept of rationalism doctrine intohistoriography.It’s the unity of inheritance and creation. Spinoza was the first to criticize Bible ashistorical records. Bell, Leibniz and some others inherited the ideology; atheistichypothesis later influenced greatly on the society. Feuerbach, Black Siegel, Marx andsome others carried on these ideas; Spinoza adopted historical hermeneutics, whichlaid the foundation for its later development. Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer andsome others inherited and developed it.In short, to get to understand Spinoza’s historical ideology is not only to give aposition of his ideology, but also to clear the development of modern westernhistorians’thoughts.