“For Spinoza, philosophy originates in the very personal… feeling of emptiness”

— Baruch Spinoza

Context: For Spinoza, philosophy originates in the very personal... feeling of emptiness that in the philosophical tradition has earned the distinguished name of contemptu mundi, the contempt for worldly things, or, better, vanitas.... Spinoza says that... success in life is just a postponement of failure;... pleasure is just a fleeting respite from pain; and... the objects of our striving are vain illusions....
The feeling of vanitas Spinoza describes is... a dire encounter with the prospect of descent into absolute nothingness, a life without significance coming to a meaningless end.... The experience Spinoza records... establishes... the moment of extreme doubt, fear, and uncertainty that precedes the dawn of revelation.... the journey... is one trodden by poets, philosophers, and theologians too numerous to mention, who for millennia have recorded this feeling that life is a useless passion, a wheel of ceaseless striving, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and so on.<!--pp. 55-56

Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (2006)

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Baruch Spinoza210

Dutch philosopher 1632–1677

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“"Spinoza did not seek to found a sect, and he founded none"; yet all philosophy after him is permeated with his thought.”

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“Spinoza is the clear and luminous side of Modern philosophy. He is the negation of bourgeois mediation and of all the logical, metaphysical, and juridical fictions that organize its expansion. He is the attempt to determine the continuity of the revolutionary project of humanism. With Spinoza, philosophy succeeds for the first time in negating itself as a science of mediation. In Spinoza there is the sense of a great anticipation of the future centuries; there is the intuition of such a radical truth of future philosophy that it not only keeps him from being flattened onto seventeenth-century thought but also, it often seems, denies any confrontation, any comparison. Really, none of his contemporaries understands him or refutes him.”

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“All feelings are false and deceptive. […] Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the pure sensation of divine being. And that pretty well sums up the whole spiritual process. But the spiritual process is so little understood that people don't realise their feelings are personal and false and have been misleading them all their life.”

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Context: All feelings are false and deceptive. [... ] Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the pure sensation of divine being. And that pretty well sums up the whole spiritual process. But the spiritual process is so little understood that people don't realise their feelings are personal and false and have been misleading them all their life. If that's not true, why is humanity still unenlightened and basically unhappy after all this time - when enlightenment is the completely natural, sensational state of being every moment?