People
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)
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