History in Spinoza through the confrontation of six readings

To deal with the theme of History in Spinoza, we compared six readings, defining conveniences, differences and oppositions between them, in order to explain the relevance, scope and difficulties of this theme. We observe that the relation between metaphysics and history is the common basis of the considered readings, with their reciprocal differences to be measured from the different conceptions of this relation. By this criterion, we divided the authors into two groups: Cassirer, Strauss and Gueroult separated metaphysics and history in Spinoza; Matheron, Althusser and Negri link them. We spent more time reading Negri, because, among these readers, the Italian philosopher took further the proposition according to which History – in his terms, as the production of the real and as the ontology of the social – is at the heart of this philosophy and, therefore, constitutes it. Our basic argument, however, involves highlighting that none of these interpretations satisfactorily discerned the accordance, in Spinoza’s philosophy, between the geometric and historical methods, or even between metaphysics and the interpretation of experience.