Everybody loves Spinoza

Of course, even saints -- perhaps especially saints and everyone else who seems above fractious, ordinary human travails -- can be insufferable. And yet Spinoza, apparently, was not, even if Stewart tries to convince us that the philosopher had a certain infuriating, supercilious look that he unleashed on rare occasions and that revealed how little he thought of most people's intellectual powers. The love so many people feel for Spinoza, like all love, is a bit of a mystery, and it should be added that love itself was not something Spinoza particularly endorsed, with the sole exception of what he called "the intellectual love of God." This love, the only real form of, in Spinoza's words, "continuous, supreme and unending happiness," can be attained by applying oneself to the pursuit of reason, the apprehension -- however human and therefore imperfect -- of the infinite and perfect cathedral of laws and logic that is, for him, the essence of God.

Surely one reason so many thinkers remain smitten with Spinoza is the fabled beauty of his vision of the universe and God. Goldstein, a professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., writes of seeing her students transformed by Spinoza's "Ethics." At first, they're put off by the "eccentricity -- both in form and content -- of this impenetrable work." But eventually, they make "their way into Spinoza's way of seeing things, watching the entire world reconfigure itself in the vision ... One feels oneself change, however, impermanently, as one beholds Spinoza's point of view -- the point of view that approaches, though it can never match, 'the Infinite Intellect of God.' One's whole sense of oneself, and what it is one cares about, tilts -- in a direction that certainly feels like up. Year after year, I've watched what happens with my students when Spinoza begins to take hold, and it's always moving beyond measure."

Although Spinoza's vision is ultimately "unsustainable," it does sound breathtaking. Goldstein's description reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson's historical novel "Quicksilver," in which a fictional character has an intimation about a friend, a real genius and contemporary of Spinoza's: "[He] experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears."

What makes Spinoza's philosophy unsustainable in Goldstein's view is the fact that "in its ruthless high-mindedness, it asks us to renounce so many passions. (Among the passions we must renounce is romantic love, which, Spinoza deduces, will almost always end badly...)" Any love that is dependent on something that must inevitably change and cannot truly be possessed -- such as another person -- Spinoza explains, is asking for trouble. With a dazzling comprehensiveness, the philosopher seemed driven to topple every species of sacred cow. Anyone who isn't disturbed by his refusal to believe in the conventional notion of God as a person will surely be put off by his skepticism about the secular religion of our own time, true love.

Key to Spinoza's heresy was his monism, his belief that everything that exists is essentially a single thing, "nature" (that is, the infinite universe), and that this is identical with God. (As a girl, Goldstein was taught that Spinoza wickedly equated God with nature, when Jews and Christians agreed that God is supernatural, outside of nature, and a person.) Everything we experience -- people, events, objects -- is simply a "mode" of that single "Substance" or essence. Because God/Nature is infinite and we are finite, we perceive these things to be separate when they are not; all separate identities, including our own individuality, are merely an illusion or misperception. We perceive good and evil when neither really exists, from the perspective of God. The only way we can come to understand the true unity of the world is through the understanding of pure reason, which is integral to Substance in the same way that roundness is integral to a circle.

We can't fully grasp this -- our minds aren't adequate to the task -- but with a dash of intuition, we can glimpse it and experience Spinoza's notion of true happiness. We can then attain what Goldstein calls a "radical objectivity," a perspective that's outside of our own limited identity. This objectivity will enable us to see the insignificance of our own pains, pleasures and losses except insofar as they help or hinder our ability to reason. We will realize that a life of restraint and peaceful coexistence with our fellow man is exactly what will sustain us in this cause; self-interest and virtue will be revealed as identical. Finally, we will be able to regard with tranquility the fact that we are mortal, that our minds, like our bodies, are simply a mode of the great infinity of Substance, and will someday end.

While Spinoza was no Puritan -- he believed that pleasure, when properly understood, guides the philosopher toward self-preservation and the path of reason -- he did advise the renunciation of "passions," that is, any powerful emotion that interferes with the enlightened self-interest epitomized by a life of virtue and the pursuit of reason. Yet, strangely enough, he was admired by many of the Romantics of the 19th century, who were votaries of individualism and overpowering emotion. If his contemporaries called him an atheist, the German romantic poet Novalis would later swoon over this "God-intoxicated" visionary. It seems that everyone tends to see in Spinoza what they find most compelling.

No surprise then that Goldstein's young students, preoccupied with their own love lives, will suggest that "there must have been some woman who broke his heart" and caused Spinoza to take such a dim view of romance. There have been some feeble rumors to this effect, but they don't convince Goldstein, who "cannot quite condone" this sort of speculation. "If there's 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 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."

Next page: To Spinoza, a Jew, the idea of a special or chosen people, is absurd