Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

by Rebecca Goldstein

  Aboab, however, made it safely back to Amsterdam, there to resume his post as khakham. He was therefore one of the rabbis who was involved in the harsh decree of excommunication that was imposed on Baruch Spinoza in 1656. In fact, we don’t know which of the two rabbis actually read out the writ of excommunication to the gathered congregants. Most have assumed that it was the chief rabbi, Morteira, though Colerus, the man who rented Spinoza’s rooms in the Hague after he died and then wrote a sanctimoniously indignant biography of the philosopher, tells us that some “Jews of Amsterdam” told him that the “old khakham Aboab”—who happened to have been the presiding head of the Beth Din, the rabbinical court of law, in 1656—provided the voice of official banishment.

  Whether a Jewish soul is, by the very fact of its Jewishness, ipso facto saved was a question that deeply divided the two Amsterdam rabbis, with the Sephardic Aboab, himself born in Iberia, not surprisingly inclined to interpret “Jewish soul” in redemptive terms. But even though they were sharply adversarial on the fate of the Jewish soul after death, concerning the fate of Baruch Spinoza, the two rabbis agreed.

  Aboab’s position in the rabbinical controversy with Morteira only deepens the mystery surrounding Spinoza’s harsh excommunication. If, according to Aboab’s mystical lights, all Jewish souls are redeemable, what about the soul of the twenty-three-year-old philosopher? Why didn’t it make a claim on Aboab’s inclusiveness? “Though he sinned, he is still an Israelite.” What was the conceived nature of Spinoza’s offense that caused Aboab to unite with Morteira in decreeing Spinoza irredeemable, decreeing him, in effect, no longer an Israelite? Was it an offense that went to the very heart of those coiled questions concerning identity and salvation?

  Of course, the mature philosopher, the author of The Ethics, would have even less sympathy for Aboab’s Jewish essentialist position than for Morteira’s. He would have spurned any clemency the kabbalist might have offered him on its grounds (though the words of David ibn Abi Zimra, approvingly quoted by Aboab, in some strange sense shadow Spinoza’s own mature view of the relation between individual finite minds and the Infinite Intellect of God, so long as one removes the reference to “Israelites”).

  Still, the question remains as to why the rabbi who was prepared to offer universal inclusion to untold Jewish apostates was irreconcilably opposed to the profound thinker who had emerged from within. Had Spinoza somehow managed to suggest to the community, even at this early stage of his life, the position that would follow from his mature philosophy, namely that the question of personal salvation, which was of true consequence, should be pried apart from the question of Jewish identity, which was of no consequence?

  Personal identity poses philosophical questions that are bafflingly abstract, even though our prephilosophical sense of personal identity is as firm as the fear of death and the grief for those we’ve lost. The distinction between one’s own self and all that is not one’s self provides the invisible scaffolding of the emotions. One cares about one’s self simply because one is one’s self. A person is committed, immediately and unthinkingly, to the survival and flourishing of that single thing in the universe that she is. There is no reason, external to one’s own identity with that thing — one’s self — that one should be so single-mindedly, unswayingly committed to it. What explains this commitment is nothing over and above the bare fact that one is who one is. Implicit in being oneself is the commitment to oneself. One pursues one’s life. One doesn’t need a reason to pursue it. One pursues it, quite obsessively, because it’s one’s life. Who else’s life is one supposed to pursue anyway?

  There is an absurdity in even asking for a reason as to why we should care about ourselves. Identity itself explains the self-concern. We don’t require any persuasion in taking a special interest in what will befall us. The persuasion we require is to take an interest in others as well. That’s the business of ethics, and the business, too, of The Ethics.

  Spinoza tries to capture this fundamental fact — that our commitment to ourselves is unlike the commitment to anything else, since it is tantamount to simply being oneself — in his concept of conatus. Conatus is simply a thing’s special commitment to itself. It is its automatic concern about its own being and its intent to do what it thinks it takes in order to further its well-being. There is nothing that explains this commitment to this one thing that one is other than one’s being that thing, and this is Spinoza’s reason for saying that the very essence of each thing, the thing that makes that thing that thing and not another, is nothing over and above its conatus: “The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.”6

  It is important that Spinoza not be understood here as asserting some sort of Nietzschean will-to-power ethics, or precursor to the “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. Spinoza has not yet begun, at this point in The Ethics, to make any ethical claims. What he’s making, at this point in The Ethics, is a metaphysical statement, not an ethical one, trying to explain what makes an individual thing that individual thing that it is. His claim about conatus is meant to capture the mysterious connection a person feels with that one thing in the world that happens to be itself, and it is compatible with a whole spread of different ethical points of view, going all the way from Ayn Rand’s to Mother Teresa’s. A saint will perhaps feel that her life of, say, ministering to the needs of others, ignoring perhaps her own material benefits, is nevertheless, because it is the ethical thing to do, benefiting herself. Even a saint is not indifferent to who performs the acts of saintliness. If I were a saint, I wouldn’t say: Look, I just want someone or other to commit these righteous deeds; it’s all the same to me whether it’s me or someone else. That would make being a saint too easy. A saint, just like each of us, is identical with the thing that she is, and this identity is tantamount to a certain interest in that thing. Spinoza is trying to capture this extraordinarily elusive situation in his concept of conatus.

  To be oneself, then, is to be involved, Spinoza is saying, in an ongoing project of pursuing the interests of this one thing in the world (though, again, those interests may involve making enormous ethical sacrifices). But when one stares at this whole situation — one’s ongoing commitment to this one thing in the world — from the outside, as it were, one can seem to lose one’s grip on it. Nothing can explain this ongoing project other than the bare fact that that’s who one is — Spinoza’s very point in making this conatus one’s actual essence. But step out of that ongoing project that constitutes one’s identity and reflect upon it from the outside, as it were, and it can give the appearance of vanishing under one’s gaze.

  What sort of a fact is it that one is who one is, that very thing in the world and no other? How can one even isolate this fact when one inhabits, with great mental effort, the View from Nowhere? From out there, the remotest point from which to behold the world, the fact of who one is within the world seems to disappear; one can gain no purchase on it. This is what happens when one assumes the view sub specie aeternitatis, and this is the view that Spinoza recommends to us as the means of attaining salvation. Our very essence, our conatus, will lead us, if only we will think it all through, to a vision of reality that, since it is the truth, is in our interests to attain, and will effect such a difference in our sense of ourselves that we will have trouble even returning to the prephilosophical attachment to ourselves. It will appear almost too contingent to be true that one just happens to be that thing that one is. After all, contingency, for Spinoza, is just a ignis fatuus, a false fire cast by our finitude.

  When, in the true light of objectivity, one is overtaken by the sense of near-estrangement from one’s own self, then one is saved. One can then regard even one’s own personal death, the thought we dare not even think since it negates the very process that keeps us together, with a degree of philosophical detachment. Our inability to realistically contemplate our own demise accounts, for Spinoza, for the otherwise incomprehens
ible power that the superstitious religions exert on us. Only reason, as rigorous as we can muster it up, can truly save us, both give us the truth and also deliver us from our primal fear of the truth. This is the state of blessedness toward which The Ethics will, through its severe formal proofs, try to deliver us.

  The fraught altercation between the two rabbis of Amsterdam brings to light the underlying ferment within the community, swirling around the entangled questions of Jewish identity and personal salvation that the Inquisition had made urgent. For this community, such theological questions were painfully close. Spinoza’s philosophy systematically rethinks these questions. His community’s travails might very well have impressed on him the necessity for such systematic rethinking.

  What is it to be Jewish? Are those who choose other gods still Jewish, of the same body, hewn from the place of Unity, so that one’s personal identity is supervenient on one’s Jewish identity? Is it true that one might carry in oneself, for no other reason than the conditions of one’s birth, the causal link between that birth and the long causal link of others’ births that has a role to play not only in one’s own salvation but in tikkun ha-olam, cosmic redemption?

  How would an exquisitely sensitive soul such as Spinoza’s have reacted to this hum of impassioned obsession, the omnipresence of a seemingly irresolvable dilemma that was charged with centuries of ongoing anxiety and suffering? Like the lover of mathematics that he was, he would try to seek a clear and definitive solution, the deepest sort of solution, the sort that reframes the original question entirely, that in fact makes the original question altogether impossible. His solution would be to dissolve all sectarian frames of reference, to point the way to a concept of personal identity in which the question of who is Jewish and who is not simply could not meaningfully arise. Growing up in an atmosphere in which the question of personal identity throbbed with all the cumulative tragedy of the Sephardic experience, he would be the philosopher who would radically rethink the very notion of personal identity itself.

  Spinoza looked toward the new rationalism of Descartes, which had thrust the rigorous necessity of mathematics forward as the model for all knowledge, and found a way of once and for all putting the tortured question of his community to rest. Spinoza’s brave new revisioning of the world was an answer to the centuries of Jewish suffering. In his own way he was tackling the question of Jewish suffering toward which the Lurianic tale was also directed. Only, of course, Lurianic kabbalah told its tale in terms that singled out the special role the Jewish people have to play in the world’s redemption.

  For this particular community, seeking its Jewish identity with such passion, Spinoza’s solution was the most damnable betrayal one of their own could commit. It was to deny that he was one of their own. It was to deny meaning to the very phrase “one of their own.”

  Spinoza’s response, on being delivered the verdict of his excommunication, was reported to be, as my old teacher had faithfully, if partially, quoted: “All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal; but, since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me.” The path he was to follow was to reconstruct his identity, shedding as inessential all the passive markers of who he was, the accidents of his identity come to him by way of history, instead identifying himself in terms of what he was in relation to the infinite system that is reality. And of course what he was in relation to that infinite system is precisely the same as that which any of us is in relation to the infinite system. The only significant way we differ from one another is the degree to which we know the infinite system, and this is a difference that can be eradicated through rational thought. It is precisely in these cognitive processes that we reconstruct ourselves; we are what we know, and what we know depends on the active exercise of our rational faculties, seeking after necessary explanations, assimilating the objective necessity of Deus sive natura to the thinking matter of ourselves, becoming more consciously a thing hewn from the place of Unity by comprehending ever more of that inexhaustible Unity.

  The path opened up to him by his excommunication was, in a certain sense, the same that those who were excommunicating him had followed: the path of actively and ardently refashioning identity. Only his would be a notion of personal identity that could not be fit into the terms of Jewish identity, nor of Christian identity, nor of any specific religious or ethnic or political identity. He was to define himself by his rational activity itself, and to try, in as cautious a way as possible, to help others seek this same active identity as well.

  So for Spinoza, like for the tormented Marranos from whom he derived, personal identity is a purely private affair, enacted within the unobservable regions of our innermost minds, a project that one can undertake for oneself, with no need of external validation or acknowledgment, which of course was out of the question for Marranos. And, too, like them, he saw in the purely inward activities of identity-formation the way to salvation, though for him salvation rests in the dissolution of one’s personal identity, in a merging into the whole. So the solution will come in dissolution.

  But the problem for which dissolution is the solution was posed by his community’s anguish. Sanguine Cartesian rationalism, somewhat chill in temperament, becomes, in the system of this son of Marranos, a solution to the horrors of Jewish suffering that some of his surviving letters show us he never ceased to respond to in a way that we might almost call, despite the rationalist’s best attempts, a Jewish sensibility.

  One of the last letters he wrote in his short life, in December 1675, only two months before his death, betrays his emotional affinity with the narrative of Jewish history. There it is suddenly: the sympathetic participation in the story of heroic martyrdom that a scion of the Portuguese Nation, no matter how he might philosophically remake himself, instinctively feels. Instinctive feeling is of course part of that passive identity that the philosopher qua philosopher must resist and transcend. But it is there to be resisted.

  It is December 1675 and he is reluctantly responding to a former pupil of his, Albert Burgh, whose parents Spinoza knows (the father, Conraad Burgh, is the treasurer of the Republic of the Netherlands) and whom he had privately tutored on the foundations of philosophy. On a trip to Italy, young Burgh had dramatically seen the light and converted to Catholicism. He wrote to Spinoza, exhorting him, in the most impudent of terms, to follow his example:

  Even as I formerly admired you for the subtlety and keenness of your natural gifts, so now do I bewail and deplore you; inasmuch as being by nature most talented, and adorned by God with extraordinary gifts; being a lover, nay a coveter of the truth, you yet allow yourself to be ensnared and deceived by that most wretched and most proud of beings, the prince of evil spirits.

  Young Burgh’s letter is long and the vehemence keeps mounting:

  If you do not believe in Christ, you are more wretched than I can express. Yet the remedy is easy. Turn away from your sins, and consider the deadly arrogance of your wretched and insane reasoning. You do not believe in Christ. Why? You will say: “Because the teaching and the life of Christ are not at all in harmony with my teaching.” But again, I say, then you dare to think yourself greater than all those who have ever risen up in the State or Church of God, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, doctors, confessors, holy virgins innumerable, yea, in your blasphemy, than Christ himself. Do you alone surpass all these in doctrine, in manner of life, in every respect? Will you, wretched pigmy, vile worm of the earth, yea, ashes, food of worms, will you in your unspeakable blasphemy, dare to put yourself before the incarnate, infinite wisdom of the Eternal Father? Will you, alone, consider yourself wiser and greater than all those, who from the beginning of the world have been in the Church of God, and have believed, or believe still, that Christ would come or has already come? On what do you base this rash, insane, deplorable, and inexcusable arrogance?

  This is a depressing sort of letter to get from a for
mer student in the final months of one’s life. Here is an intelligent former disciple, who has had the benefit of hours of private explanation and discussion, falling victim to the crucifying passions of superstitious religion. It tolls a terrible message, bespeaking the futility of one’s life work, for which one had forsaken so much: excommunication from one’s own people, vilification from far and wide. What hope is there for reason’s ever finding an audience? (Every teacher probably has these moments of despondency. As one of my colleagues once remarked to me, in a black moment of pedagogy, “Just what the hell do we think we’re doing? Having some sort of effect?”)

  But Spinoza has his methods of always regaining his equilibrium. The first and foremost rule to remember is 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. We don’t have control over the progress of others’ understanding, no matter how hard we may try to help their advance. In the end, it had not been in Spinoza’s power to keep Albert Burgh from descending into narrow-minded confusion; that power would have belonged to the young man himself. Spinoza will do what he can do. But he will not allow his own sense of failure and futility to become inflamed by another’s weaknesses.

  Burgh’s letter arrived in September. For several months Spinoza didn’t answer. But then in December, in the dead of his final winter, from out of the leaden tiredness and malaise of the final stages of tuberculosis, he writes back. Albert’s distressed Calvinist father had urged the philosopher to try and exert whatever influence he still might have, and so Spinoza summons the strength to respond: