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
electronic print
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