Betraying Spinoza (19 page)

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.

I
t 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

S
pinoza 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.

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. They 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.