Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Betraying Spinoza means trying to tie him down to a particular time, place, personality, circumstance, and that's just what Rebecca Goldstein accomplishes in this book. She brings her sensitivities both as a philosopher and as a novelist to bear on Spinoza in such a way that vivifies him and his thought by placing him in the matrix of the times and the community that he inhabited. She also makes it clear that Spinoza would object strenuously to such particularizing as trivial. The circumstances of his life were irrelevant to the real task of understanding reality.

The central experience of his life was his excommunication by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. I was disturbed by the decree the first time that I read it years ago in Will Durant's history of philosophy, and wondered at its severity. Goldstein makes it clear that the preoccupations of this community, just a generation removed from the persecution and expulsion first by the Spanish ("the other 1492") and then by  the Portugese, not only triggered Spinoza's excommunication but also drove his thinking to finding a way out of the problems of suffering and identity that dominated La Naçao, the former Marranos living in Holland. "It was the community itself that had made the problem of personal identity of such crushing exigency for Spinoza that a way simply had to be found out of it, even though the way would set him at irreconcilable odds with that community."

Forced to live as Christians under Spanish and Portugese rule, most Marranos had to practice Judaism as secretly as possible, risking torture and death if found out. Goldstein suggests that Theresa of Avila (coming from a family of Conversos, or Jewish converts to Christianity) also came out of this environment where spirituality was strictly a matter of private observance. Having lost the knowledge of many or most of Judaism's essential practices and beliefs over the years, a fierce debate broke out over what constituted Jewish identify. Can the Marranos still in Portugal, for example, still be considered Jewish even though they were forced to practice Christianity? Much of the debate was fueled by a strong steak of kabbalism among the Sephardic Jews and the problems of suffering and identity become questions of cosmic redemption.

But Spinoza, in a classic case of reframing, saw his excommunication as an opportunity to pursue the problems of meaning and intelligibility without fear of offending the community. "The first and foremost rule is to remember that we have no control over anything other than the progress of our own understanding. And the second rule is to care only about that over which we have control." He couldn't offend them because he was now completely and totally cut off from the community. Amsterdam Jews were even forbidden to speak his name, much less acknowledge his presence. That didn't keep him from offending the rest of Europe, however, as the "atheist jew" pursued the meaning of life, the universe, and everything without any reference to an external creator God.

The first thing to understand about Spinoza's thought is that the "world is…intelligible, through and through." Goldstein calls this the presumption of reason: "All facts have explanations. For every fact, there is a reason why it is true." "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." That's not to say that we know it all, for we're trying to understand an infinite universe with a finite mind. But logic can reveal the fabric of reality because "logic alone is the fabric of reality." Interestingly enough, Goldstein, who comes out of the empiricist school  that would find such ideas nonsensical, seems to accept this premise as she considers the alternatives, citing David Hume that the rejection of the presumption of reason leads to the mind being just a series of mental events with no necessary connection to reality.

Spinoza begins with a few basic premises and proceeds to discover reality by using deductive logic. "By that which is self caused (causa-sui), I mean that of which the essence involves existence." (Is this the formula that Sartre stood on end when he said that existentialism means that existence precedes essence?) Only Substance is self caused, and so Substance = Nature [as in Laws of Nature] = God. All that is. What is, is, and that's all there is. There is nothing external or outside this. There is no God different from nature. There is no spirit different from matter. There is no soul different from body. Every separate thing in the universe, then, is a "logical entailment" or mode of the Substance. But as Goldstein makes clear, this is more than just an exercise in metaphysics. Bento's message is one of salvation using reason and logical proofs. "Salvation is achieved by bringing the vision of the causa-sui -- the vast and infinite system of logical entailments of which each of us is but one entailment--into one's very own conception of oneself." "Spinoza turns the Cartesian methodology…to illuminate the mysteries of the kabbalists:…the beginning of all things, the Ein Sof's [That Without End] relationship to creation and to our knowledge, the mysteries of evil and suffering."

Here Goldstein leads into a discussion of "conatus" which is any thing's identity with itself. It's that which makes me me, or you you. The logical and automatic consequence of the "conatus" is that everything seeks, as far as possible, to further it's own well being. "Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we think it through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interests to attain." This leads to "dispassionate knowledge of oneself…the most self-expansive of all experiences, the most liberating, the boundaries of one's self stretching to incorporate the infinite system of explanations that constitute the very world." Goldstein calls this ecstatic rationalism, but Spinoza calls it "amor dei intellectis," the intellectual love of God. (This was certainly not a God that would love us back, but Spinoza's love of God does not depend on God loving us.) Taking this point of view then takes us outside the contingent situations of time and place and personality and circumstances. "To the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity." To be caught up in the contingent, then, weakens us, leading to suffering, pain and evil.  (Isn't this essentially what Gautama said in the fifth century BC, that avidya [ignorance] leaks to dukkha [suffering]?) But is it possible to live and thrive with such an objective, dispassionate point of view?

Spinoza says that pursuit of anything else will not lead to that which all men seek: continuous, supreme, unending happiness. It is only through reality itself that we will reach the highest possible state of emotional well-being. "When we are able to grasp its infinite sweep, to sense the infinite context embracing each finite modification, then there is supreme, continuous, and unending happiness." Is this what we want? Goldstein questions this outlook: "I would argue that the highest level of imagination also amounts to a sort of love. I would further argue that the imaginative acts by which we try to grasp the substance of others, that specific singularity of them that resists universalizing into the collective, rational impersonal are a necessary component of the moral life." And so she brings us around to a view of Spinoza that is both personal and particular, and while it may not lead us to supreme happiness, it certainly deepened my understanding of the man and his thought and has led me to grapple with the issues of being human from yet another perspective. Can there be anything more moral in a book?

Author: Goldstein, Rebecca

Date Published: 2006

Length: 304 pp

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The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

So, it comes down to this: Spinoza believed that there was only one substance--make that Substance--to everything there is--all things, events, thought, everything--and everything is a mode of this substance. It can be called Substance, or it can be called Nature, or it can be called God. Therefore, mind is not separate from body, therefore there is no immortal soul--mind is really only an abstraction that the body has of itself.

"The most important feature of Spinoza's Nature--and, in a sense, the very point of his philosophy--is that it is in principle intelligible or comprehensible…there is nothing that cannot be known--even if we do not necessarily know everything."

"Spinoza claims to demonstrate once and for all that there can in fact be only one Substance in the world…everything in the world is merely a "mode" of an attribute of the Substance, or God"

(and how does he prove this? What does Spinoza take for his starting point? This crucial step is not in my highlights for the book. I wonder if I missed it or if Stewart put this in? If this is missing, then Substance becomes just another article of faith…and I don't think that Spinoza would have gone down that path. Does it follow from the determination that everything can be known? That seems to be Leibniz's jumping on point, where he found Spinoza so attractive, and so dangerous. "With a chain of definitions, axioms, and proofs…" is about the closest I can come to this. Isn't Kant's point that we cannot know how things really are?)

Leibniz sees the possible consequence to social order of this seemingly metaphysical proposition, and Stewart claims that Leibniz's mature philosophy is built on a rejection of Spinoza--namely that the universe consists of an infinite number of immortal "monads" and that the world was created and set into eternal harmony by God, who chose this universe out of an infinity of other universes as being the best that there is. Hence, Voltaire's Pangloss: this is the best of all possible worlds.

From this basic conflict, which Stewart calls "the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza…and there is no more compelling expression of this reaction to Spinoza…than …Leibniz." We live largely in a world of thought traced back directly through Spinoza: liberal, secular democracy, a naturalistic explanation of the growth and order of the world we see around us, and a concept of human life that is naturalistic and materialistic (vide Antonio Damasio's books: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain) Leibniz, in Stewart's explanation, stands for those forces who look to authority, especially to divine authority, to give order and meaning to life and to the universe.

The central act of the book is three days of conversation between Leibniz and Spinoza calls the defining moment of Leibniz's life and thought: the rejection of Spinoza's naturalistic explanation of everything--which Leibniz really saw as depending on Spinoza's concept of Substance.  Substance = Nature (as in natural law) = God. Unfortunately, there is no there there. There is only the sketchiest of records of the conversations themselves--some marked over notes that Leibniz made--and so what we're really left with is an act of imagination on Stewart's part of what must have taken place. Leibniz himself downplayed the importance of the conversations in trying to distance himself from Spinoza's thought, but as Stewart makes clear, Leibniz is hardly to be trusted in matters of honesty.

The books has given me the best description of Spinoza's thought and of Spinoza's importance in the history of thought. A lot of Jonathan Israel's ideas about the "radical enlightenment" now make more sense to me. The chapter of "A Secret Philosophy of the Whole of Things" is alone worth the price of the book. I still can't grasp the proposition of Spinoza's thought, but at least I can see how it came about. About Leibniz's thought, which is given equal treatment in "The Antidote to Spinozism," however, I'm not so sure. I guess that I get, in some measure, the idea of monads, but I'm not quite sure why Leibniz felt so compelled to go there. I understand the reaction to Spinoza, but I don't find his logic for the monads very compelling. But then, neither did Bertrand Russell, who called Leibniz's metaphysics "a fascinating fairy tale, coherent, perhaps, but wholly arbitrary," so I guess I'm in good company.

I suspect that Stewart gives Leibniz fairly short shrift in his descriptions of his character and motivations. Leibniz comes off as fairly shady and self deluded, so it's hard to say how much of Leibniz is a straw man who is chosen for the purpose to represent an idea--a conservative, religion idea. (the T. S. Eliot of his day--"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics.") How much of his character is caricature?

Author: Stewart, Matthew

Date Published: 2006

Length: 312 pp

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A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy

This is certainly a much different look at many figures of the Enlightenment than I've come across before. Israel maintains a major split amongst Enlightenment writers: the Moderate Enlightenment, as represented by Newton, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau among others, and the Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza, Bayle, Diderot, d'Holbach, Helvetius, Paine, et. al. 

"Radical Enlightenment is a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state. It sees the purpose of the state as being the wholly secular one of promoting the worldly interests of the majority and preventing vested minority interests from capturing control of the legislative process." (Preface)

Israel traces this split back to Spinoza's positing of one substance--pure materialism--as the metaphysics of the universe, without the corresponding split between mind and matter "Spinoza…forged the basic metaphysical groundplan, exclusively secular moral values, and culture of individual liberty, democratic politics, and freedom of thought and the press that embody today the defining core values of modern secular egalitarianism" (location 1955) In other words, Spinoza really underlies most modern thought.

The moderate enlightenment figures, especially Voltaire and Rousseau, really come off fairly badly in Israel's eyes. Whereas I've kind of thought of Voltaire as an Enlightenment hero, to be revered alongside Erasmus and Montaigne, Israel sees him as a major conservative figure, who attacked the church, it is true, but only to destroy the abuses of its power and to consolidate power with the aristocratic classes. Of course, Israel may be talking more about the later Voltaire, but he maintains that Voltaire "consistently opposed radical thought and its egalitarian aims" throughout his career. Voltaire almost comes off as a pitiable figure at the end of his career as he stops attacking the church and begins attacking la philosophie moderne and its deplorable tendencies toward evolution, among other ideas. He recognized that his own influence over the ideas of the day were waning.

That's because a flood of literature in the 1760s-1780s bought about the predominance of the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution. Israel vents against the historicism of the revolution for failing to emphasize this role and concentrating almost exclusively on social and political forces at work. "One cannot begin to grasp the revolutionary position in 1789 rightly without acknowledging that philosophisme was seen to have engineered a vast "revolution of the mind." And this phenomenon is in turn inexplicable without looking at the long, and in part self-conscious, build-up to its climax in the 1770' and 178os of a radical tradition reaching all the way back to the 166os. (location 1861) And it was the thinking of Rousseau that directly influenced Robespierre and the Jacobins in the excesses of the Terror, not the supposed "coldly clinical, unfeeling machine of rational ideas" that many critics of the Enlightenment have pointed to.

The moderate enlightenment thought lost influence because, in the end, it could not effectively criticize the abuses and social grievances of the day. The radical enlightenment became the "mouthpiece" for social resentment, calling for radical equality, the redistribution of wealth and happiness, and the universal education of mankind. It seems to me that that is still the world that we strive for today.

Author: Israel, Jonathan

Date Published: 2009

Length: 296 pp & 7 hr 28 min

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Narrator: Adams, James

The Philosophy of the Enlightenment

This is supposed to be a classic, but like all classics, I eventually ran out of steam. I did OK until the last chapter on aesthetic problems and then the reading seemed to take forever. Cassirer is at pains to show that the enlightenment of 18th century thought is quite a bit different, although heir to, seventeenth century thought, which culminated, really, with Newton. Newton was the culmination of thought begun with Bacon, Kepler, Galileo and Spinoza. Newton formulates the observations of others into mathematical laws wholly devoid of authority and revelation.

But in discovering the natural world, the new empiricism really discovers the mind, and in so doing, begins to criticize itself. If there is no guarantee of the uniformity of nature and experience, then how do we know what we know? It leads thence to Hume and to Kant. "What we call objectivity or truth or necessity has no absolute but merely a relative meaning." (p. 115)

In essence, the Enlightenment was about attitude, or as the essay once said, freeing man from the horse latitudes of faith. And yet it runs into it's own issues of epistemology even while seeing "from the advancement of knowledge a new moral order and a new orientation of the political and social history of man." (p. 214) Quite a tall order, but the foundation of all of our thinking. Diderot was characteristic in rejecting all conceptual schemes and seeking a dynamic view of the world in which present knowledge is but a transitory view or a "resting point" to be overturned as new knowledge becomes available.

Author: Cassier, Ernst

Date Published: 1932

Length: 360 pp

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