Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

by Rebecca Goldstein

  All the emotions involve feelings of our self ’s either expanding — our flourishing, our endeavor to persist in the world succeeding — or diminishing, which explains why emotions grip us as they do; and, too, emotions involve our judgments as to what is causing this modification in our life’s project and the reason why it is so affecting us. The greater portion of Part III of The Ethics goes through basic emotions — love, hate, anger, remorse, envy, vengeance, pity, shame, scorn, complacency (he tells us, rightly, that there are far more emotions than there are names to showcase them) — showing them first of all as species of pleasure (the sense of expansiveness) or pain (the sense of contraction) and then the propositional judgments that complete them.

  Things can get complicated, in fact lurid, given the combinatorial possibilities. So, for example, Proposition XLI is If anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return. However, the corollary of this is He who imagines that he is loved by one whom he hates will be a prey to conflicting hatred and love. And the note to this corollary is truly of potboiler potential: If hatred be the prevailing emotion, he will endeavor to injure him who loves him; this emotion is called cruelty, especially if the victim be believed to have given no ordinary cause for hatred.

  The deduction of our emotional responses from our very sense of ourselves might suggest that we are helpless, if front-row, spectators at the play of our own lives: “I think,” he says toward the end of Part III, “I have thus explained, and displayed through their primary causes, the principal emotions and vacillations of spirit, which arise from the combination of the three primary emotions, to wit, desire, pleasure, and pain. It is evident from what I have said, that we are in many ways driven about by external causes, and that like waves of the sea driven by contrary winds, we toss to and fro unwitting of the issue and of our fate.”

  But the suggestion of our impotence, contained within the vivid image of waves tossed about by contrary winds, is false. As mentioned before, Spinoza is no fatalist. Because our emotions intrinsically involve judgments — it is part of their very makeup — we don’t have to accept them lying down. Rather, we can critically evaluate the judgments that they contain and, if they are wrong, correct them, thereby transforming the content of the emotions themselves, transforming the emotions. Since the very process of correcting erroneous judgments is expansive — to understand is to expand ourselves into the world, reproducing the world in our own minds, appropriating it into our very selves — to understand one’s emotions, even the most painful of them, is necessarily pleasurable. It requires one’s getting out of oneself, seeing oneself clearheadedly as just another thing in the world, treating one’s own emotions as dispassionately as a problem in geometry.

  This maneuvering outside of oneself is a difficult thing to do, given the terrifically powerful centripetal forces of conatus, keeping one, quite literally, together, in the process warping one’s worldview, making one’s vision of the world conform to one’s commitment to oneself. But the dispassionate knowledge of oneself is also, to the extent that we can achieve it, 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: Deus sive natura. To see one’s own self from the vast and intricate scope afforded by the View from Nowhere is almost to lose the sense that that one thing in the world — so hell-bent on its own existence among all the other things so hell-bent on their existence — is one’s very own self. One can never inhabit one’s own self quite the same way again, which is to say that one has changed. Among all the wrong things Mrs. Schoenfeld said when she spoke to us about Spinoza, none was more wrong than her charge that Spinoza cynically entitled his work The Ethics. Spinoza’s system is meant to do the hard work of ethics: insinuate itself inside the self and change it from the inside out.

  There is an inverse relationship, somewhat paradoxical, between expanding to become more than what you were and the degree of importance with which you regard yourself. The more expansive one’s self, the less the sense of self-importance. The tendency to overinflate one’s significance in the world, simply because of the forces of inward attention and devotion keeping one oneself, undergoes corrective adjustments in the light of the objective point of view. Virtue follows naturally; supernatural directives are not required. One won’t behave as if other people matter in precisely the same way that one’s self matters only because it has been engraved on tablets of stone, and one fears the consequences of incurring the wrath of the Engraver. Rather, one will behave with what he calls “high-mindedness”—the desire “whereby every man endeavors, solely under the dictates of reason, to aid other men and to unite them to himself in friendship”2—because, having stood beside oneself and viewed the world as it is, unwarped by one’s identity within it, one will understand that there is nothing of special significance about one’s own endeavor to persist and flourish that doesn’t pertain to others’ same endeavors. One will therefore, simply as a matter of reason, want for others precisely what one wants for oneself. “The good which everyman, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men, and so much the more, in proportion as he has a greater knowledge of God.”3

  The world is such, he argues, that it can be known through and through by the faculty of reason, the faculty of grasping necessary connections, logical entailments. A priori reason alone can give us the world because the world itself is nothing but logic, an infinite system of logical entailments that is aware of itself, and that can be conceptualized alternatively as God or nature: Deus sive natura. Mrs. Schoenfeld was seriously mistaken in thinking that, for Spinoza, nature is nothing but nature. “Who doesn’t believe in nature,” she had demanded, “since it’s what we see all around us?” Not Spinoza’s nature, Mrs. Schoenfeld. Spinoza’s nature can be grasped only through the faculty of pure reason, thinking its way through proofs. “For the eyes of the mind, whereby it sees and observes things, are none other than proofs.”4

  The Ethics opens with a definition that will eventually, through systematic deduction, unveil Spinoza’s vision of that vast and infinite system of logical entailments that constitute reality itself: By that which is self-caused (causa sui) I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent. The Ethics closes by speaking of our own salvation: If the way which I have pointed out, as leading to this result, seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

  From causa sui to salvation. 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, and, with that vision reconstituting oneself, henceforward living, as it were, outside of oneself. The point, for Spinoza, is not to become insiders, but rather outsiders. The point is to become ultimate outsiders.

  The word “ecstasy” derives from the Greek for “to stand outside of.” To stand outside of what? Of oneself. It is in that original sense that Spinoza offers us something new under the sun: ecstatic rationalism. He makes of the faculty of reason, as it was identified through Cartesianism, a means of our salvation. The preoccupations of his inquisitorially oppressed community come together with the mathematical inspiration of Cartesianism to give us the system of Spinoza.

  The ecstatic impulse in Spinoza’s rationalism distinguishes him from the other two figures with whom he shares equal billing in such courses as the one I teach, “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.” But then René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were members of the European majority. They were Christians. Th
ey were rationalists who had the luxury of taking their own religious ideas for granted. Neither Descartes nor Leibniz had to solve, as Spinoza did, especially brought up in that particular community, the wrenching problem of Jewish identity, of Jewish history and Jewish suffering. Only Spinoza needed to fight his way clear of the dilemmas of Jewish being, fighting all the way to ecstasy.

  Spinoza names the ecstasy his system delivers Amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God. This love, as its name suggests, is at once a cognitive and an emotional state, and it is the very highest state achievable, whether measured on the scale of cognition or emotional well-being.

  It is, first of all, maximally knowledgeable, constituting the third, and highest, level of knowledge, scientia intuitiva, or intuitive knowledge. (Below intuitive knowledge lies ratio, or scientific knowledge, which involves the explanation of finite things by their necessary connections to their finite causes. Using ratio, [configurations of] bodies are derived from other [configurations of] bodies via the mathematically expressed laws of nature. And below scientific knowledge lies imagination, which, for Spinoza, includes all the passively received data of the senses, devoid as they are of any inkling of the necessary connections that constitute reality. For Spinoza, unlike Descartes, the distinction between the imaginative and the veridically perceptual is no consequential distinction at all.) In intuitive knowledge, the highest level of knowledge, each thing is grasped in the context of the infinite explanatory system, Deus sive natura, that is, the world, the details of which cannot — precisely because they are infinite — be exhaustibly grasped in their inexhaustible entirety but can nevertheless be holistically intuited. In intuitive knowledge, the whole entailed system — for each implicated thing entails the whole implicative order — is made palpably, if intuitively, present. We can only approach this third level asymptotically. We can never achieve it fully, since to do so would be to possess the mind of God, the thinking with which the infinite order of necessary connections thinks itself.

  In addition to being the highest cognitive state, the intellectual love of God is an emotional state (for Spinoza the cognitive and emotional are constantly, necessarily, merged), and, again, it ranks as the highest state possible, this time judged in terms of one’s emotional well-being. This outward absorption of the self into a vision of Deus sive natura, being maximally expansive, is also maximally pleasurable. The very activity of explanation, the exhilarating sense of expanding one’s ideas to take in more of the world, and thus the exhilarating sense of one’s own outward expansiveness into the world, is, in itself, a sort of love, only now with the explanation of the world — which is the world — as its object. And the exhilaration is aided and abetted by the sense of firm control, the activity of loving expansiveness not to be cut short by the loved object’s independence of (finite) mind and fickleness of spirit. The painful urgency and insecurity of love are eliminated when it no longer seeks to complete itself in another person but rather in the understanding of God, that is, of the vast infinite system of implications from which we ourselves are implied.

  Conatus, our essence, which dictates that all of our intentions derive from our concerns with our own selves, leads us, if we truly attempt to fulfill ourselves, to see ourselves from the outside, as it were, from the point of view of the infinite system that explains all. True devotion to ourselves will lead us to an objectivity so radical that even our own demise can be contemplated with equanimity. “A free man,” Spinoza tells us in Part IV of The Ethics, “thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”

  One of Spinoza’s uncompleted manuscripts is called The Treatise on the Emendation of the Understanding. Its subject is knowledge — what it is and how we acquire it — and Spinoza presumably left off completing it because he realized that his hierarchical theory of knowledge would have to be shown to follow — as all else, for him, follows — from the infinity of necessary connections that is the world.

  But the interrupted Treatise is of special interest because of its opening paragraph, which is often cited to be the most revealingly autobiographical passage Spinoza ever gave us:

  After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else; whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

  This is the only place in his writings where he seems to reveal to us something of the person who stands behind the formidably impersonal system, seeming to share the motive that lay behind its production. Spinoza tells us that he, like all of us, was searching for happiness. He even appears to confess that he had a normal appreciation for the sorts of goods that are commonly supposed to bring us happiness: riches, fame, and sensual pleasure. The problems with the three goods, he discovers, is that they fail to deliver maximum pleasure. They fall far short of yielding continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

  The problem, for example, with sensual pleasure is that, while we desire it, it so enthralls us that it blocks our vision of all other goals, but once the pleasure is sated “it is followed by extreme melancholy, whereby the mind, though not enthralled, is disturbed and dull.”

  (This observation raises a question that I will parenthetically raise merely to parenthetically drop, namely, on what was Spinoza’s knowledge of sexual experience based? I think it’s fair to say that none of us has the slightest idea. It could have involved another person — maybe a prostitute? maybe the Clara Marie who might have rejected him for the suitor with the pearl necklace? — or maybe not. Having another person present isn’t required in order to experience that extreme melancholy that follows sexual satiety. The third part of The Ethics seems to demonstrate some familiarity with the misery of sexual jealousy: for example, the scholium to Proposition XXXV reads: “He who thinks of a woman whom he loves as giving herself to another will not only feel pain by reason of his own appetite being checked but also, being compelled to associate the image of the object of his love with the sexual parts of his rival, he feels disgust for her.” However, since this is a deductive system, this scholium, like any other proposition in The Ethics, might in principle have been inferred a priori, with no experience necessary.)

  Then, too, if this sensual pleasure involves another person it exposes one to the problems that likewise plague the pursuit of riches and fame, namely making one vulnerable to factors beyond one’s control. “If our hopes are frustrated, we are plunged into the deepest sadness.” Fame has “the further drawback that it compels its votaries to order their lives according to the opinions of their fellow-men.” And we have seen what Spinoza thinks of the opinions of the multitude. Given that these opinions are, according to his theory of knowledge, basically worthless, since their ideas remain on the level of imagination, why should the esteem of the many, which is what fame is, constitute a good?

  The ecstatic rationalism that Spinoza works out for us in The Ethics claims not only to deliver us a world woven out of the very fabric of logic, unlike any that we could perceive by way of our so-called experience of the world, or even by way of our scientific explanations of our experience; it also claims to provide us with an ecstatic experience, the intellectual love of God, unlike any that we could have arrived at in any other way. It is the desire for that continuous, supreme, and unending happiness which Spinoza cites as his motive for his system.

  But though this opening paragraph of the unfinished treatise might seem to speak in Spinoza’s most personal voice, the desire for “happiness” to which he confesses is blandly impersonal, a one-size-fits-all motivation for what is the most rigorous project of rationalism in the history of Wes
tern thought. The motivation Spinoza was prepared to put to paper was as universal and impersonal as the finished system it supposedly provoked. What he does not tell us — what he cannot tell us — is that his ecstatic rationalism is a solution to a far more particular problem.

  It is the problem of Jewish history.

  If the supposedly most autobiographical passage in Spinoza’s writings — the opening paragraphs of the unfinished Treatise—yield precious little of the person behind the system, where then can we find him? Certainly not in the sculpted formalism of The Ethics. Here is the View from Nowhere, still and calm, ordered as reality itself is ordered, a matrix of logical entailments, timeless as mathematics and just as impersonal.

  The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, however, is a slightly different story. Spinoza interrupted his work on The Ethics to compose the Tractatus, which — as Mrs. Schoenfeld rightly suggested — scholars believe was partly based on the apologia he composed in Spanish immediately after his excommunication. Perhaps that explains the somewhat less guarded tone that pervades it. His anti-clerical denunciations palpably tremble with outrage. Spinoza somehow or other hoped that this work, which argues against the existence of miracles—So those who have recourse to the will of God when there is something they do not understand are but trifling; this is no more than a ridiculous way of avowing one’s ignorance5—and against the special role of the Jews—Therefore at the present time there is nothing whatsoever that the Jews can arrogate to themselves above other nations6—and that the Bible was written by many authors, whose gifts for prophecy resided not in their more perfect mind, but with a more perfect power of imaginations,7 would convince his contemporaries to give him a clean bill of theological health so that he might be allowed to publish his philosophical masterpiece.8 (There is probably a falsifying optimism that accompanies any ambitious writer’s undertakings. A realistic assessment of the chances that one’s labors will produce the desired response would advise one to give up before beginning.)