That, which I could scarcely believe when told me by others, I learn at last from your own letter; not only have you been made a member of the Romish Church, but you are become a very keen champion of the same, and have already learned wantonly to insult and rail against your opponents.
At first I resolved to leave your letter unanswered, thinking that time and experience will assuredly be of more avail than reasoning, to restore you to yourself and your friends. … But some of my friends, who like myself had formed great hopes from your superior talents, strenuously urge me not to fail in the offices of a friend, but to consider what you lately were, rather than what you are, with other arguments of the like nature. I have thus been induced to write you this short reply, which I earnestly beg you will think worthy of calm perusal.
Spinoza’s reply is not so short that it does not contain a fair number of fascinating nuggets. A few times Spinoza loses his famous philosophical cool and shows flashes of fire:
And, poor wretch, you bewail me? My philosophy, which you never beheld, you style a chimera? O youth deprived of understanding, who has bewitched you into believing, that the Supreme and Eternal is eaten by you and held in your intestines?
This is followed by a statement that seems to support the oft-repeated charge of arrogance, made by far weightier minds than Albert Burgh’s, and even Mrs. Schoenfeld’s, who had also declared that Spinoza’s rationalism rested on arrogance.
Yet you seem to wish to employ reason, and ask me, “How I know that my philosophy is the best among all that have ever been taught, or ever will be taught?” a question which I might with much greater right ask you; for I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false.
Spinoza is claiming here that since he has relied on nothing but a priori reason to deduce his system, just as mathematics relies on nothing but a priori reason, his conclusions (granted that his deductions are valid) enjoy precisely the same degree of certitude as mathematics. His conclusions, just as those of mathematics, must be necessary truths, those which could not possibly have been otherwise. We’ll return to this claim in the next chapter.
But another aspect of Spinoza is revealed in the next stage of his reply to Burgh. Burgh had argued that Catholicism must be true since it has been attested to by a continuous lineage, supposedly reaching back to the witnesses of the miraculous events themselves. Spinoza, in answering Burgh, begins by pointing out that this is just the way “the Pharisees” also argue, meaning by this punitive word to indicate the rabbis. Spinoza is adopting here the terminology common to Christian critics of Judaism. He adopted the same terminology in his Tractatus, probably for a multitude of complicated motives, the most pragmatic of which would be that he was addressing himself to Christian readers (as he is here), and he does not want to have his arguments dismissed as being put forward by a Jew, even an excommunicated one. So it is that in the Tractatus he makes certain to refer to Jesus the Nazarene as “Jesus Christ,” and does him the honor of making him the most important among the prophets, the best example of the virtuous man.
In this paragraph to Burgh, too, he is distancing himself from the Jewish point of view, calling attention to the fact that he speaks of it as an outsider by speaking of the rabbis as the Pharisees.
As to what you add of the common consent of myriads of men and the uninterrupted ecclesiastical succession, this is the very catch-word of the Pharisees. They with no less confidence than the devotees of Rome bring forward their myriad witnesses, who as pertinaciously as the Roman witnesses repeat what they have heard, as though it were their personal experience. Further, they carry back their line to Adam. They boast with equal arrogance, that their Church has continued to this day unmoved and unimpaired in spite of the hatred of Christians and heathens. They more than any other sect are supported by antiquity. They exclaim with one voice, that they have received their traditions from God Himself, and that they alone preserve the Word of God both written and unwritten. That all heresies have issued from them, and that they have remained constant through thousands of years under no constraint of temporal dominion, but by the sole efficacy of their superstition, no one can deny. The miracles they tell of would tire a thousand tongues. But their chief boast is, that they count a far greater number of martyrs than any other nation, a number which is daily increased by those who suffer with singular constancy for the faith they profess; nor is their boasting false. I myself knew among others of a certain Judah called the faithful, who in the midst of the flames, when he was already thought to be dead, lifted his voice to sing the hymn beginning “To Thee, O God, I offer up my soul,” and so singing perished.
Spinoza begins this paragraph by disassociating himself from the Jews; but by the end he has placed himself inside the Jewish narrative — homing in on one of those tales of heartbreaking martyrdom with which his community was constantly being racked. These were the tales of horror and heroism that Baruch Spinoza had been raised on, the communal drama he had participated in as a child.
In May 1655, just fourteen months before Spinoza’s excommunication, news had arrived that a Marrano named Abraham Nuñez Bernal, who had friends and relations in Amsterdam, had fallen victim to the Inquisition in Córdoba and been burned at the stake. Two months before this tragedy, Yithak da Alameida Bernal had been burned at the stake in Galicia. In 1647, when Spinoza was fifteen, the fate of one Isaak de Castra-Tartos had hit the community particularly hard. For he had been one of its own, a member of the Portuguese Nation, La Nação, who had left Amsterdam as a young man, returning to Spain and Portugal to try to convert the Marranos back to Judaism. He was caught, tried, and confessed to his “sins.” As he stood on top of his funeral pyre, he reportedly screamed out the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” A funeral service was conducted for him by Rabbi Morteira, with the entire community participating.
Spinoza, addressing the New Catholic bent on saving him, can distance himself sufficiently from the Jews to speak of their habit of “boasting” of suffering. He is the evil son at the Passover seder: what has their story to do with me? But then, on a phrase, he turns himself around: “nor is their boasting false.” Suddenly he pulls out from his extensive knowledge of Jewish suffering, a knowledge that went with the territory in which Spinoza had been raised, a single tale of martyrdom, which he relates in a tone that betrays his own awe and affinity.
The martyr to whom Spinoza refers in his reply to Burgh as “Judah the faithful” was actually known as Judah the Believer.7 He was Don Lope de Vera y Alarcon de San Clemente, a Spanish nobleman who was not a Marrano but an Old Christian, converted to Judaism through the study of Hebrew. He had himself circumcised, was arrested by the Inquisition, refused to recant, and was burned at Valladolid on July 25, 1644. Spinoza was then twelve years old, a boy in Amsterdam, not in Spain. But he was a boy whose participation in this story was so vivid that years later, at the end of his life, he would write of the martyr in a tone so personal that it misled at least one scholar, the eminent German Jewish historian Heinrich Grätz (1817–91), to infer that Spinoza himself must have begun his life in Spain. Of course, he did not. He was born a Jew, not a Marrano, but within a community consisting almost entirely of Marranos.
The meaning of Jewishness was, at least partly for this community, expounded in the historical narrative of suffering — partly, but of course not entirely. They did not try to compress the entire meaning of Jewishness into these tales of persecution and woe, as some contemporary Jewish writers today do, insisting that the Holocaust provides the culminating Jewish experience. Spinoza’s community was actively resisting the reductive definition
of the Jewish experience that Christendom had tried to impose, a definition that not only predicted suffering for the nation that had rejected Jesus as savior, but also ensured that the suffering came to pass. The self-realizing logic of Christian persecution is, in its own way, impeccable.
Spinoza’s community did not succumb to that usurpation of the meaning of their history. Judaism is not a religion that exults in suffering, and Spinoza’s community, in actively reconstituting itself as a Jewish community, was actively resisting the claim that the culminating Jewish experience is some form of suffering.
And yet, of course, Jewish history runs thick with martyrs, with, as Spinoza himself says, “a number which is daily increased by those who suffer with singular constancy for the faith they profess.” As misguided as this “singular constancy” in suffering is for Spinoza, it is sublime as well. It is sublime precisely because there is no Jewish virtue per se in suffering. Like Spinoza, Jews are far more focused on the rewards of this life than on those of the afterlife. Martydom is not glorified; it is not a state to be desired. So for a Jew to risk his life for the faith he professes, as the Marranos still on the Iberian Peninsula were doing, for him to give up his life in a terrible blaze of suffering, as Judah the Believer did, is a delusion most sublime. One can hear Spinoza’s paying his respects to the sublimity, in his terse and emotional phrase “and so singing perished.”
Spinoza, almost despite himself, cannot fail to be moved. Faced with Burgh’s claim that Christianity presents the only authentic experience, he speaks of the authenticity, if also deludedness, of Jewish experience. And the authentic Jewish experience he narrates is that of heroic martyrdom at the hands of the Inquisition. He manifests a certain reflexive protectiveness that belies his distancing talk of “the Pharisees” and the Jewish “boast” of suffering. Spinoza the philosopher can’t countenance the source for such acts of self-annihilation, grounded on superstitious beliefs in a people’s election. But, at the same time, Benedictus retains the memories of Baruch, who himself retains the long memory of the Amsterdam Jewish community. And so not even Benedictus can help being stirred by the spectacle of transcendence in the face of crucifying injustice.
He himself, in answering the impertinence of his young would-be savior, who had ended his letter to him beseeching that both he and his “most unfortunate and adulterous followers” be born again through Jesus Christ, had succumbed to the Pharisees’ habit of “repeating what they have heard as though it were their personal experience.” Despite himself, he has assumed the role of the wise son at the Passover seder, who enters so personally into shared Jewish experience that its history becomes his memoir.
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 out would set him at irreconcilable odds with that community. The history of suffering, a living palpable history with conversos arriving every day and new incidents of the Inquisition’s avenging power taking place throughout Spinoza’s life, together with all the psychological devastation that had been wrought, posed the initial problem for which the impersonal grandeur (some might say frigidity) of Spinoza’s conceptual scheme is the answer.
Though we know few details of Spinoza’s early experiences, we know, from the evidence of his writings, that he was acutely sensitive to the nuances of human nature. The third part of The Ethics bears witness to Spinoza’s close observations of his fellow creatures. His admiration for the mathematical methodology and abstract systems did not preclude his fascination with human types and to psychological depths.8
He is fascinated by what makes people tick, excruciatingly attuned to the ticking. How likely is it that a person of Spinoza’s makeup, both observant and reflective, disposed to take in his environment and to subject it to relentless rethinking, would not have responded to the obsession with Jewish identity that his community’s extraordinary experience had bequeathed to it? How likely was it that he failed to agonize on this question himself?
Sometimes my students, when they have progressed deeply enough into Spinoza’s system to grasp the radical remedy he is offering us to the problem of being human, will muse, in ways that I cannot quite condone, about Spinoza’s love life. There must have been some woman who broke his heart, one or more of them will speculate aloud. Some experience with a woman must have made him believe that love was a thing too heartbreaking to bear. What else could have driven him to such extremes of rationalism? I will share with them, though without much conviction, the rumor of van den Enden’s daughter. Perhaps there’s a story here, but I’m dubious that it’s the story. If there is some missing element of biography that must be summoned in order to explain the philosopher’s vision of radical objectivity, his abjuring any love other than that for objectivity itself, I very much doubt that it lies in disappointed romantic love. If it lies anywhere, it’s in Jewish history. Spinoza has forsworn the Jew’s love of that history. That was the love that was too heartbreaking to bear.
The final vision of reality that he arrives at is so dauntingly universal, so large and impersonal, that it is strange to contemplate that perhaps the original psychological drama that pointed him on the path that was to take him so far away from his community was to try to think of himself as outside of the awful dilemmas of Jewish identity.
And if this is so, then Spinoza is something of a Jewish thinker after all. He is, paradoxically, Jewish at the core, a core that necessitated, for him, the denial of such a thing as a Jewish core.
For what can be more characteristic of a Jewish thinker than to use the Jewish experience as a conduit to universality?
V
For the Eyes of the Mind
Spinoza defines “finitude” as being subject to forces beyond one’s control. We are incurably finite, despite delusions to the contrary. We don’t bring ourselves into being and we can’t prevent ourselves from going out of being.
In between our helpless entrance and inevitable exit we experience events that also lie beyond our control and that affect us deeply, in our souls. That is to say, these events seem either to facilitate our essential project to persist in our being and flourish in the world — our essential conatus— or to hinder that project.
To experience what seems to be an increase in one’s endeavor to persist, to feel oneself flourishing, expanding outward into the world, is pleasure; and to experience a decrease in one’s power to persist, to feel one’s self diminishing, contracting out of the world, is pain. Desire, the third of the “primary emotions,” is the consciousness of our endeavor to persist and thrive, and specific desires, too, just like specific pleasures and pains, come adjoined with judgments; in the case of desires, these are judgments as to what will further our lifelong project to persist and flourish. The judgments adjoined to desires often make for character traits, such as ambitiousness, avariciousness, depressiveness, pridefulness, and humility.
One can’t help being committed in a special way to one’s self. One’s special interest in, and concern for, the one thing that one happens to be is part and parcel of just being that thing. No one else can do for me what I am doing in being me. When there will be no one that has this same stake in my persisting, then there won’t be me.
None of these remarks, remember, are yet ethical. He has not yet moved from “is” to “ought.” He’s simply trying to capture one of the most elusive of all “is” facts: the fact of one’s identity. To be this thing is to be interested in this thing in a way unduplicated by my interests in other things, as vivid as these may be. And nothing else can explain this special interest in myself that I have other than my simply being myself. My keen interests in other things, including other specific people, will call for some additional facts about me and my relation to these others. For example, there are two young women in whose thriving my whole being is involved so that the increase in their pleasure is my pleasure, the increase in their pain my pain. The additional facts
that explain this keen participation in their well-being is that these two young women are my daughters.
Spinoza will of course try to close the gap between “is” and “ought,” just as he tries to close the gap between “if ” and “is.” His comments about conatus will serve as the original stance from which morality will be deduced. Just as God is immanent within nature, morality is immanent within human nature. But first, there is human nature to be explored. To this end, Spinoza produces, out of the implications of conatus, a theory of the emotions. “I shall, therefore, treat of the nature and strength of the emotions according to the same method, as I employed heretofore in my investigations concerning God and the mind. I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.”1
All the emotions, Spinoza reasons, must follow from this basic situation: that I am committed to my life’s going well, since that commitment, in all the myriad ways in which it manifests itself, is irrepressibly me; that my life’s going well or not is subject to things beyond my control (just another way of saying that I’m finite); that I make judgments about how various things affect my life for better or for worse, and these very judgments (which may, like all judgments, be either true or false) themselves affect me as experiences of pleasure and pain.
The feeling of love, for example, is simply the sense that things are going pretty damn well, that, at least in some respects, I am flourishing, together with the judgment that there is a certain thing, the beloved object, that is responsible for this flourishing. The judgmental component may be seriously, tragically wrong, of course. I can even be deluded in thinking that I’m really flourishing. The nonpropositional and propositional components of emotion — the raw feelings of pleasure or pain versus the various judgments — are reciprocally interactive. Just thinking that I’m flourishing gives me the feeling of pleasure that reinforces the judgment that I’m flourishing.
Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Page 15