Spinoza’s philosophy places a radical importance on the present, the now, for any form of politics. Politics incurs violence, change or decaying sustainability in the present–not the past, nor the future. And yet, many political philosophical discourses get lost, mired in the past or planning for a future on which it has no jurisdiction.
In Political Treatise, Spinoza privileges the now of existence in opposition to two other philosophical modalities, perhaps: pessimism and optimism. Nostalgia hides or indulges on latent sense of defeat, whereas the messianic future hinges on an irrational sense of optimism that can never justify itself. According to Spinoza, the optimists are those who strive to eliminate the passions and thus establish action on the opposite of the affects. He considers that ilk of philosophy to be less ethics than satire. The pessimists, on the other hand, declare that when it comes to human affairs the vices of private persons interacting in public will never be effectively suppressed. Spinoza denounces the moralistic entrenchment of the pessimists’ position.
Rejecting the pessimists’s emphasis of the past or the optimists’ blind bet on the future, Spinoza focuses on the present and declares that in the space of the now ethics comes into being.
Just recently, Dmitris Vardoulakis published a collection of essays on the 16th century philosopher, Spinoza Now, co-edited by Christopher Norris (University of Minnesota Press). A must read for those who want a concise and persuasive historical narrative of the current body of knowledge on Spinoza and his philosophy.
Realism 