Betraying Spinoza (7 page)

So the rigorous consequences of accepting the Presumption of Reason and the rigorous consequences of rejecting the Presumption of Reason both lead us to counterintuitive points of view. Perhaps rigor is just not in our cards. But that’s a pretty unpalatable conclusion, too.

One could perhaps be inclined to counter Spinoza’s Presumption of Reason by enumerating all the ways in which our contemporary knowledge seems to belie it. Our most powerful scientific theories—evolution in the biological sciences, quantum mechanics in the physical sciences— enshrine chance and contingency at their most fundamental explanatory levels. And when it comes to our accounts of human behavior—history, psychology, economics—then there is even less appearance of deterministic necessity. A Spinozist response would be to say that these explanations— whether in physics, biology, or the human sciences—appear fundamental only from the human point of view, which by its nature must be limited. From the point of view of God, of logic itself, there is neither chance nor contingency.

As mentioned in the last chapter, there are contemporary physicists and cosmologists who have Spinozistic aspirations to banish chance and contingency in “the theory of everything.” String theorists, in particular, are Spinozistic in their goal of having their physics emerge fully formed from their mathematics. Recall, too, the famous final sentences in Stephen Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time:
“If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.” Hawking’s statement eloquently attests to the fact that Spinoza’s understanding of what the laws of nature could tell us, if only we were capable of assimilating them in their entirety, is not foreign to modern scientific sensibilities.

Signature of Albert Einstein in the visitors’ book in Spinoza’s house in Rijnsburg. It is dated 2 November 1920.

But of all great modern scientific minds, Albert Einstein’s stands out as having been the most self-consciously influenced by Spinoza. (The guestbook at the little house in Rijnsburg where Spinoza had lived, now a museum, has Einstein’s signature, signed 2 November 1920.) He often described himself as a “disciple of Spinoza,” and speaks of him often, either explicitly or implicitly, as when he refers to “the grandeur of reason incarnate.” His views on nature and our knowledge of it were clearly informed by a deep study of the philosopher. “The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image—a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being.”
¹⁵
Almost every answer that Einstein ever gave when asked to expound on his philosophy of science and his views on religion echoes with strains of Spinoza.

Despite Spinoza’s extreme rationalism, the most extreme in the history of thought, he remains of scientific relevance, from brain science to string theory, from Damasio to Einstein and Hawking.

With time, “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz” became my favorite class to teach, and Spinoza my favorite among the mighty triumvirate. We would work our way through the whole of
The Ethics
. My students would always begin as I had begun, with unmitigated bafflement before the eccentricity—both in form and content—of this seemingly impenetrable work. I would witness, year after year, the transformation that would come over the class as they slowly made their way into Spinoza’s way of seeing things, watching the entire world reconfigure itself in the vision, no matter how unsustainable over the long run that vision proves to be for most of us—no matter how unsustainable we would even want it to be, since, in its ruthless high-mindedness, it asks us to renounce so many passions. (Among the passions we must renounce is romantic love, which, Spinoza deduces, will almost always end badly: “Emotional distress and unhappiness have their origin especially in excessive love towards a thing subject to considerable instability, a thing which we can never possess. For nobody is disturbed or anxious about anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, enmities, etc. arise except from love towards things which nobody can truly possess.” Paramount among “things which nobody can truly possess,” of course, are people.)

And no matter how unsustainable that final vision is, no matter how taxing the leap of faith in the Presumption of Reason one must make in order to get there—still the rigorously intellectual process of beholding Spinoza’s vision of the world is also, always, an emotional one, just as Spinoza promises. One feels oneself change, however impermanently, as one beholds Spinoza’s final point of view—the point of view that approaches, though it can never match, “the Infinite Intellect of God.” One’s whole sense of oneself, and what it is one cares about, tilts—in a direction that certainly feels like up. Year after year, I’ve watched what happens with my students when Spinoza begins to take hold, and it’s always moving beyond measure.

Still, no matter how intimate with Spinoza’s formal and formidable system I’ve come to feel over the years, Spinoza himself, the man behind the system, has remained remote. This is just as he would have wanted it to be, since “Spinoza himself ” is of no account within that system, just as each of us, in our singular individuality, is of no account. The ultimate insignificance of the personal self emerges, as we will see, in the immanence of ethics. (As one of my friends quipped, when I was explaining this aspect of Spinoza to him, Spinoza was the original Bu-Jew.)

I certainly never thought to connect the philosopher I taught in my course on seventeenth-century rationalism with the Baruch Spinoza I had first encountered in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s
historia
class. I taught Spinoza in the context of Western philosophy, in particular in the context of that fascinating movement represented by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I never connected the middle philosopher of the lineup, not in my class and not even in my head, with that “bumulke” I’d first heard tell of in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class. Spinoza was the philosopher who came after René Descartes and before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I traced the development of his ideas from the Frenchman who had influenced him, most especially with the inspiration to look to mathematics as the model for all knowledge, to his slightly younger German contemporary, whom he had strongly influenced, most especially with the intuition that all facts have explanations, the assumption that I am calling the Presumption of Reason, and which Leibniz formalized as “The Principle of Sufficient Reason.”

The personal sense of the philosopher that had come upon me in the moment of hearing the phrase
shalom bayis
inserted into his tale had long ago disappeared. That phrase had carried all the heavy intimacy of the life that was then closest to me. In the moment of hearing it I had thought that I grasped something immediate and essential about a great philosopher, something that brought him home to me, making him a figure of piercing sympathy. Now, too, strangely enough, given my antimetaphysical tendencies and training, I believed I had come to have an intuitive understanding of him, could study each of the proofs of
The Ethics
and shadow his thought processes. But the two understandings of him— the first in terms that were both personal and Jewish, the second in terms that were strictly philosophical—didn’t intersect with each other. If anything, they were at odds.

The philosophical understanding of Spinoza seems to forbid understanding him in terms that are personal and Jewish. To have indulged in a sense of a special bond with Spinoza, forged by reason of our shared Jewish experience, would have been to forsake the rational project as Spinoza understood it, and as he deeply influenced me to understand it as well. To have intimated an extraphilosophical intimacy with Spinoza, come to me by way of the sheer accidents of my and his precedents, would have amounted to a betrayal of his vision.

I spoke of his vision to my students as “radical objectivity,” and from its vantage point all the accidents of one’s existence, the circumstances into which one was born— including one’s own family and history, one’s racial, religious, cultural, sexual, or national identity—appear as naught, and the lingering emotional attachments to such accidents are only evidence of impartial rationality and obstacles in the way of achieving a life worth living.

To the extent that we are rational, merely personal matters matter not at all. To the extent that we are rational, personal identity itself shrivels away into insignificance. The fact of who I happen to be in the infinite scheme of things disappears altogether in the apprehension of the scheme itself.

I was being true to Spinoza in leaving behind the personal sense of him that had opened up to me within the space of one small Hebrew phrase; and yet it is back to that personal sense of him that I am trying now to return, even knowing what I know about his philosophy. I would like to recapture the sense of the man behind the formidable system, locate the pounding pulse of subjectivity within the crystalline structure of radical objectivity.

There was a moment long ago when I knew next to nothing about the magnificent reconfiguration of reality laid out in the system of Spinoza, and yet when I felt I knew something about what it was like to have been him, the former yeshiva student, Baruch Spinoza.

I would like to know that feeling again, even though I know that the desire amounts to betraying Spinoza.

III

The Project of Escape

T
he most characteristic literary genre of our day is the memoir. Unlike an autobiography, the author of a memoir needn’t have distinguished herself in her life in order to have earned the right to tell her life’s story. Many contemporary memoirs are written by people who are famous for having done nothing but write a memoir, often to much acclaim.

The appeal of the memoir says something about the temperament of our times.
What
, precisely, it says, I’m not prepared to say, though I suspect it’s nothing good. I suspect that what it says is mixed up with the nondecorous celebration of celebrity that is also such a salient feature of our days.

And who, after all, am I to condemn the memoirist turn in contemporary letters when I myself have seized upon it in approaching this very discussion of Spinoza? I have insisted on speaking in personal terms of the philosopher who insisted most on impersonality. To bring in the personal and the temporal—references to one’s self and one’s times— is to place oneself outside of Spinoza’s reason-sanctioned scheme of things, the view, as one contemporary philosopher has wonderfully put it, “from nowhere.”
¹
Spinoza himself puts it this way in
The Ethics:
“It is in the nature of reason to perceive things sub quâdam aeternitatis specie,” that is, under the guise of a certain form of eternity.
²

Still, the personal and the temporal is where we all begin. Even Spinoza began by being only himself. The question is whether that is where one ought to end. Spinoza tells us no. He urges one to forsake, in a sense, one’s own temporal identity as it has passively come down to one through the contingencies of what he calls “external causality,” contingencies that have nothing to do with one’s own true essence. He asks one to construct—through the
active
reflective work of philosophy, seeking the true explanations of all things— a new identity.

To become rational, believing only what we have good grounds for believing, is to transform the self so substantially as to change its very identity. His astounding conclusion: to the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity. (The rationally reconstructed cannot fail to get along: this provides the key to his political theory. Philosophy is good for the polity.)

To arrive at an identity that is not uniquely one’s own? Isn’t that, in a certain sense, to simply forsake personal identity altogether? Yes, it is, in a certain sense, and in that sense it is what he asks of us. To disinhabit our selves, and thereby save ourselves. It is in that sense that he will even offer us, at the end of
The Ethics
, a certain form of immortality, the immortality that comes from abandoning one’s own personal identity, giving it up for the infinite web of necessary connections that he identifies as the
causa sui
, the self-explained, the thing that can be conceived alternatively as God or nature and which he dubs
Deus sive natura
. It is that vast and infinite scheme of things that pure reason can get us to precisely because it is constituted of the very stuff of reason: logic. It consists of all logical implications spun out in their entirety.

We can survive our death to the extent that we have already let go of being our singular solitary selves. (But do we particularly care about that universalized self surviving? An
aperçu
of Woody Allen’s seems peculiarly pertinent at this point: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”)

Immortality, for Spinoza, is impersonal; I survive my necessary death to the extent that I have ceased identifying with that mere thing that I am, and identify with the whole intricate web I have assimilated in the knowing. The first-person point of view that I
am
is relinquished for the View from Nowhere, which is the same for all of us.

All of this is to say that we, whose distinctive literary voice is the memoir, are perhaps peculiarly ill placed to grasp the vision of Spinoza. Where we are endlessly captivated by the drama of the self in all its distinctive singularity, Spinoza sought only to escape it. The priority of that fascinating singularity, that problematic and precious “I,” is, for Spinoza, a symptom of a passivity, the acceptance of the contingently given, that weakens our capacities, drains and stunts us, impedes our driving force to persist in our own being, to flourish in the world. Paradoxically, the only way to flourish in one’s being is to cease being only that being. That singular self, that localized “I,” that “me” which is “me” and no other, that tantalizingly elusive but inescapably ubiquitous reality that is my substance, my identity, my very being, yes,
that
thing is, for Spinoza, a thing to be cast off into the mists of unreality, outgrown as one stretches outward into reality. Escape from it in order to save it. (But then, if we truly escape from it, why care about it enough to want to save it? Is the way to his salvation barred by paradox? Are we in Woody Allen Land again?) The distinctive singular self is not what we ought to think about. It is not even what we ought to
be
.

Spinoza wrote the only story of himself of which he would have approved, and it is called
The Ethics
.

This is the way his self-approved memoir begins: “Definition 1: By that which is self-caused I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.”

That is as personal as he wanted his story to get (see the next two pages to see how his story continues). It doesn’t sound, on the face of it, as if it is about Spinoza at all, and it isn’t, on the face of it. It is of the whole world that he is speaking in that definition of the
causa sui
, the vast system of logical implications that is the necessary expression of necessary existence itself. Spinoza is, as each of us is, but one of the implications in the implicative order that is the world. So, in a sense, Spinoza is implicitly speaking of himself in that first definition. To the extent that he—that any of us— becomes rational, he will cease to identify with that one implication and identify instead with the vast implicative order itself.

So the
causa sui
is where he begins
The Ethics
. But the
causa sui
is not where
he
begins, Baruch Spinoza, who sought topurge his point of view of the personal, to become one with the radical objectivity that he dubs
Deus sive natura
. But that passive identity, the one he aimed to discard? That is the one I’m searching for now, the identity come to him by way of the contingencies of external causality. What were those contingencies that passively shaped him, a passivity he sought to wrest back and dissolve in the pure activity of philosophy? How far back must we go to get a sense of the man who did
not
identify himself with
Deus sive natura
—the purely personal part that was left over, dangling outside of the rational enterprise, the finite modification, the isolated implication, the son and brother and teacher and friend? The Jew.

THE ETHICS.

____

PART I. CONCERNING GOD.

D
EFINITIONS
.

I.
BY THAT
which is
SELF-CAUSED
, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.

II. A thing- is called
FINITE AFTER ITS KIND
, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.

III. By
SUBSTANCE
, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.

IV. By
ATTRIBUTE
, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.

V. By
MODE
, I mean the modifications
^*
of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.

VI. By
GOD
, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.

Explanation
.—I say absolutely infinite, not infinite after its kind: for, of a thing infinite only after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied; but that which is absolutely infinite, contains in its essence whatever expresses reality, and involves no negation.

VII. That thing is called free, which exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing is necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and definite method of existence or action.

VIII. By
ETERNITY
, I mean existence itself, in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal.

Explanation
.— Existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal truth, like the essence of a thing, and, therefore, cannot be explained by means of continuance or time, though continuance may be conceived without a beginning or end.

A
XIOMS
.

I. Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.

II. That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.

III. From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.

IV. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.

V. Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.

VI. A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object.

VII. If a thing can be conceived as non-existing, its essence does not involve existence.

P
ROPOSITIONS
.

P
ROP
. I. Substance is by nature prior to its modifications.

Proof
.—This is clear from Def. iii. and v.

P
ROP
. II. Two substances, whose attributes are different, have nothing in common.

Proof
.—Also evident from Def. iii. For each must exist in itself, and be conceived through itself; in other words, the conception of one does not imply the conception of the other.

Spinoza’s “memoir”: the opening pages of
The Ethics
, stating definitions, axioms, and the first two propositions.

The community into which he was born was also, as he would be, obsessed with issues of identity. They, too, were in the process of trying to construct a new identity, to save themselves by realigning their identities with what they took to be their essential selves. The confluence of preoccupations with identity and salvation can’t be irrelevant. It can’t be irrelevant to the way that Spinoza would react to his community, to the way that they would react to him, to the ferocity of their mutual disavowal.

For the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, too, questions of identity were meshed into the project of escape, of bringing out into the open the secret but true identity that they had been forced for a century to conceal, the Jewishness they took to be essential to themselves. The contingencies of external causality had shaped their passive identity as well, and they, too, sought to wrest that passivity back and reshape it, to actively and freely redefine themselves.

They lived in Amsterdam, mainly concentrated into two districts, the Vlooienburg and the Breestraat (later called the “Jodenbreestraat”—“Jews’ Broad Street”), but not because they were required to live in a ghetto, as in the Jewish community of Venice, which was also predominantly Sephardic, but simply because their communal life necessitated it. There were synagogues, kosher butcher shops, and of course the Talmud Torah, that model school that Mrs. Schoenfeld had praised to us, even though it had failed to inculcate its Jewish values into its most famous graduate. A Polish scholar named Shabbethai Bass visited Amsterdam and came away even more impressed with it than Mrs. Schoenfeld had been: