Everybody loves Spinoza

As Goldstein sees it, Spinoza developed a philosophy that renounced identity because his Jewish identity was too painful, both in his own excommunication and in the history of his people, the Sephardic Jews. Much of "Betraying Spinoza" follows the history of this people, beginning with a golden age in the tolerant, culturally sophisticated, Muslim-ruled Spain of the early Middle Ages. When European Christians finally regained control of Spain in the 15th century, a bloody campaign of persecution and eventually expulsion against Spanish Jews began. Spinoza was descended from Sephardim who were driven by the Inquisition out of Spain and into Portugal, and eventually out of Portugal to Amsterdam.

Spinoza, Goldstein suspects, could no longer countenance the Jews' insistence on their status as the people chosen by God and their efforts to reconcile this belief with the seemingly endless sufferings they had endured. According to Spinoza's philosophy, the idea of a special or chosen people is absurd -- even the idea that humanity constitutes some special category of creation, in fact even the idea of creation is absurd. Spinoza's vision of the world as "the all-embracing web of necessary truths, intelligible through and through," countered the Jewish notion of a God of arbitrary laws and murderous rages and kabalistic fantasies of unfathomable mystery. In effect, Goldstein is claiming that the fact of Spinoza's Jewishness makes itself most felt in the way his philosophy seems custom-designed to refute the premises of Judaism as he knew it.

For Stewart, on the other hand, Spinoza's Jewishness is an ancillary issue. He sees the philosopher as a fundamentally political thinker. Looking around him, at the prospering and religiously tolerant Dutch Republic, Spinoza formulated a vision of the ideal state as a secular, democratic authority that ensured what he christened "freedom of conscience." Spinoza's "advocacy of democracy on the basis of individual rights was extraordinarily bold for its time," Stewart writes, "and it qualifies him as the first truly modern political philosopher." This aspect of Spinoza's work would eventually influence the British philosopher John Locke, who was in turn a major influence on the creators of the U.S. Constitution. In a way, Spinoza was a proto-American.

Stewart is so taken with this aspect of Spinoza's legacy that he makes the not very credible claim that it is the true root of the philosopher's thought. "Inasmuch as Spinoza's God is easier to understand in the negative -- that is, in terms of what it is not: a personal, providential, creator deity -- than in the positive -- what it is -- then to that extent his political commitments would seem to be prior to his philosophy. That is, his metaphysics would be intelligible principally as the expression of his political project, to overthrow theocracy."

If only we could always assume that the easiest part to understand in a philosopher's work is also the most important part! A Spinoza whose dearest goal is to overthrow theocracy and ensure the freedoms of a democratic secular state is certainly more appealing nowadays than the one who insists on his own weird, impersonal, indifferent "God" and the supremacy of reason over passion. But it seems more likely that Spinoza's quest to discover the nature of reality came first, and that it was the efforts of various religious authorities to squelch his questions and ideas that led him to conceive of the ideal of a secular, tolerant state.

Likewise, a Spinoza who honored his Jewish heritage enough to devote his life to transcending it seems more sympathetic than a Spinoza who cold-bloodedly tossed it out as a collection of absurd superstitions and tribal delusions of grandeur. Both versions of Spinoza -- the crusader for freedom of conscience and the tragic Jewish intellectual -- humanize the philosopher in ways congenial to our modern principles of liberal individualism. And certainly Spinoza, as both Goldstein and Stewart point out, is one of the prophets of modernism.

But there is also Spinoza's materialism, which makes him a "protobiologist" in Damasio's view, and perhaps a deterministic proto-Darwinian to others. Some might see the philosopher's advocacy of "radical objectivity" as harmonious with the Buddhist doctrines of non-attachment -- even if Spinoza's geometrically derived rationalism has little in common with the mind-emptying practice of meditation. Maybe someone will even eventually come along to admire the philosopher's "ruthless high-mindedness." For reasons that may always remain an enigma, when we look deep into Spinoza's (famously beautiful) eyes, what we see is very often a reflection of ourselves, perhaps even our best selves. If Spinoza was right about the universe, he's not around (anywhere) to either appreciate the irony of this or to rail against our solipsism. And that's just one more reason for us to love him so much.

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