What a fascinating question! Putting these two together on the same page is something that I have not seen done. These are both very complicated, but also very brilliant philosophers. Of course, they are opposed in much of their respective ontologies, but Sartre does take away a lot from Spinoza by way of contrast. In Being and Nothingness Sartre ridicules Spinoza's notion of the infinite regress of causes of consciousness (an idea is caused ad infinitum to previous ideas). Spinoza is of course considered the great enemy to the ontology of freedom from his basic premise that everything has a cause. He says that contingency is merely just our ignorance and in truth there is nothing outside of necessity. However, what Spinoza misses is the notion of negation or what Sartre calls negatit茅. This is the notion that without negation, without definition (this is this and not that) there is nothing but being (being is, being is what it is, being is in itself). Spinoza, like many others, sees negation as merely a mistaken judgment (I thought I had five dollars when in fact I only had three) that does not in fact exist (in the above example there is only positive terms, I posit this but when compared to positive phenomenon I realize that this positive phenomenon is the truth). Sartre however provides a more primordial negation that is the nec. conditions for the possibility of that kind of negation. When we ask a question, for instance, we have an expectation of a particular type of answer. (What is wrong with my car? It could be the radiator or the thermostat.) By positing this expectation we actually see the two types of negation.
1. Recognizing a thing as a thing (a car is not a dog)
2. Recognizing a possible answer (there is something there that I do NOT know).
By positing a question we open the possibility to the answer being nothing, nobody, NO. What wrong with my car? Nothing.
Sartre's brilliant example of destruction will do well here. Without negation it is not even possible to have destruction. In full positivity some sort of geological placation comes through to (say) a house. The house is not destroyed, but merely its matter is redistributed. Furthermore, it would be wrong to even describe it as redistribution, for that would require a negation-synthesis (It was here but is no longer here, the pile of wood is no longer a house but it was a house). Without negation you only have the Moment, the now, or the disconnected series of nows.
For Sartre, this introduction of negation, which is consciousness, is what is our freedom. Man is what he is not and is not what he his. Man is the negation of being, and the being of negation. Without a notion of negation (proper) Spinoza lacks the language to describe freedom at all, but instead describes positivity (all things have a cause and are substantial (God)). However, his ideas require negation (distinguishing between this and this). His system is missing the portico of negation, so he stays on the outside looking in at a bleak misrepresentation of lived experience.
I hope I am not being too harsh on poor Baruch. I don't think that the image of the philosopher was ever better portrayed than through the three S's, Socrates, Spinoza, Sartre. They are all three philosophers which I come back to again and again. With the exception of Socrates, these philosophers are not taken as seriously as they should be by the academic (grad schools) community.
Cheers!
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