Bayle, Spinoza, and Evil

FERNANDO BAHR

Buenos Aires

Encuentro; Encuentro Internacional Leer a Spinoza. Problemas en torno a la creación, la interpretación, la actualidad y la influencia del spinozismo; 2018

Universidad de Buenos Aires

The Manichean objections are for Bayle, as we know, the crucial test to which every philosophical system must submit to be considered successful. The Spinoza system passes that test. Should it be considered, therefore, that, despite all his statements against, Bayle was a hidden Spinozist? Was Pierre Poiret right in considering Bayle?s attacks as part of a ?simulated combat?? We do not think so. It is true that around the article ?Spinoza? there has been some mystification, but it is also true that Bayle?s purpose there was to show the, in his opinion, ?appalling inconveniences that destroy? the hypothesis of the author of the Ethics. Among these drawbacks, in the first place, was the dogma of the unity of substance, a dogma that Bayle considered with no doubt rationally unsustainable. We can suppose, however, an alternative atheist system, that is, a system that, unlike monism, established a plurality of eternal principles acting on nature. Such a system, while retaining the advantages of Spinozism (particularly, the denial of finalism and creation), would also be able to respond successfully to Manichean objections. In the Continuation des pensées diverses, Bayle will elaborate precisely this new hypothesis, which he will call ?stratonism?. Was this his last philosophical word? Some qualified interpreters have supported it. In any case, it is clear that the defeat of Spinozism did not suppose for Bayle the triumph of Christian theology or of any philosophical system compatible with orthodoxy. Only the naked faith remained, literally, the faith with no rational aids.