|
 Philosopher
of the Month
January
2002 - Baruch Spinoza
Margaret
Gullan-Whur
Spinoza
is acknowledged in all philosophical traditions as a great thinker,
yet his work is seldom studied. Here is a paradox that, like his
doctrines, is explicable on several levels, each giving rise to
further paradoxes. Small wonder that those who think the beautiful
theory is the simple one shun him.
Some
textual ambiguities spring from the complexity of his cultural background.
Born in Amsterdam in 1632 of Portuguese Jews who had fled the Inquisition,
Spinoza was expelled at twenty-four from his orthodox community
for 'horrendous heresies'. Bento de Espinosa (Baruch in the synagogue
and seminary) became Benedictus, Western scholar and opinionated
proponent of the 'new philosophy' that threatened all theistic religions
with its assertion of a mechanistic universe. Yet Spinoza would
never speak good Dutch, or marry, and in some ways remained a thinker
in the Jewish rationalist tradition. His largely self-taught classical
education never displaced his love for Hebrew studies and Spanish
mystical literature. His Theologico-Political Treatise, challenging
Hobbes's pronouncements in De Cive on human nature and reason,
is presented through the medium of biblical exegesis, in the style
of his forebears.
Most
of his texts, but especially the early Short Treatise, contain
esoteric themes and assumptions that baffled even those who regularly
debated or corresponded with him. While enigmatic enough to be labelled
both atheist and spiritual guru, he insisted from the start that
he combatted confused thinking and supernaturalism solely through
deductive reasoning. After explaining his cognitive 'Method' in
his The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and
testing formal arguments on friends, he wrote his masterwork Ethics
as a Euclidean demonstration in which propositions and proofs are
accompanied by insightful, tortuous or impassioned explanatory notes.
Spinoza's
first published bid to knock the recently-dead Descartes (himself
one of Holland's religious refugees) off his philosophical pedestal
came in his Principles of Descartes's Philosophy. Here, dissension
intrudes with subtle wit, necessarily subtle because Spinoza's belief
that there existed just one absolutely infinite substance, named
God, or Nature, entailed that God could not lie outside the
material world - a heresy that eclipsed Descartes's. For Spinoza,
every existing thing is an aspect or mode of the one substance,
God, or Nature, and every mode has thinking and material
aspects. This doctrine, expounded in Ethics, would be published
only posthumously.
Why
should such a dated thesis, or any of the extrapolations Spinoza
makes from it, interest people today?
Spinoza's
work is perennially important because many tensions in his texts
represent genuine and still-unresolved philosophical problems, on
which he sets useful agendas for inquiry.
In
the case of the mind-body problem he presses the necessary and sufficient
conditions for mental irreducibility (Ethics Part 2). Any
non-reductive monist must sustain unique and diverse characters
for mental and physical states if the mind is not to dissolve into
body, or the body be reduced to a phenomenal or semantic experience.
The interest in Spinoza's mind-body tension is his logical battle
to preserve both identity and mental autonomy. He concludes that
while mind and body are "the same thing", a mind-body
mode must, to preserve mental irreducibility, comprise two really
existing aspects, not merely be seen two ways.
The
doctrine of 'common notions' (also Ethics Part 2) asks us
to concentrate on what any thinking and material thing must have
in common with all other modes of its kind, and thereby how we discover
laws of nature. Once we start working with a priori conditionals
grounded in common properties, we dissolve divisions artificially
created by human convention in are nas ranging from physics and
biology to psychology, society and politics. Ethics Part
3, treating emotions as natural phenomena governed by laws of human
nature (accessed through common notions) extends Descartes's theory
of basic human passions into a system of cognitive therapy.
Among
Spinoza's political arguments (Ethics Part 4; Theologico-Political
and Political Treatises) his social contract theory
(Theologico-Political Treatise Ch. XVI) stands apart as one
of the earliest to have collapsed under the strain of trying to
preserve, within a general will theory, the right of the individual
to pursue self-interest or dissent on rational or ethical grounds.
Still
considering the individual as a member of society, Spinoza's own
life invites reflection. In one dimension a study in elected loneliness,
it also displays the unquestioning self-regard conferred by accepting
determinism (Ethics Part 2). The obstacle this creates for
a scholarly exchange of ideas is evident in his letters, and in
the Ethics Part 5 tension between reason, which unites minds,
and private intellectual satisfaction.
Suggested
Reading
The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume 1, ed. and trans.
Edwin Curley, (Princeton University Press)
Within Reason: A life of Spiniza, Margaret Gullan-Whur, (Jonathan
Cape)
A
new philosopher of the month will be featured mid-February 2002
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