before we get to the books you have recommended, who was spinoza and why is he so important?
It was important in its own time and I think it’s important for our time. he was the most radical and independent thinker of the seventeenth century. He was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a Portuguese Jewish family, but by the age of 23 it was clear that he had lost his faith and in 1656 he was herem (in effect, excommunicated) with extreme prejudice by the Portuguese of amsterdam. Jewish congregation. we don’t know exactly what the charges were because the herem document speaks only of “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”. But, at the same time, anyone who has read Spinoza’s mature treatises should have no problem understanding what he was saying and communicating: denying the immortality of the soul; rejecting the possibility of miracles; saying that Jewish law was no longer valid; and insisting that the bible was just a work of human literature.
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was he on his way to becoming a rabbi before his excommunication?
no, it wasn’t. There are many myths about Spinoza and one of them is that he was training to be a rabbi. but we know from the documents of the time that he had to interrupt his formal education because his father died and he was needed to take over the family import business. So, he went through the primary levels of the Jewish community school and the middle levels, but we know that his name does not appear anywhere in the lists of the upper classes, where the Talmud was taught.
that makes its brilliance even more remarkable.
yes. I think he was precociously brilliant. not that it shortened his education; he only cut short his formal Jewish education. He may have continued to attend one of the community’s yeshivot, or adult learning groups, but he also studied Latin with a local former Jesuit priest, Franciscus van den Enden. we also know that around this time, when he was beginning to feel dissatisfied with the life of a merchant, he began to read philosophy. so he was, in many ways, what one early scholar called an “autodidact” but, at the same time, he had a very good grounding in Jewish texts, including Jewish philosophy.
“There is an aura about Spinoza. It was heroic and we’re still trying to figure out why.”
he left the jewish community and left amsterdam and went on to write a series of extremely important philosophical treatises offering surprisingly modern and reasonable views on religion, politics and ethics. his views on god and his views on human welfare are truly extraordinary. he is of continuing importance and relevance today because, although you will not, walking down the street, meet someone who is Leibnizian or Cartesian, you are likely to meet someone whose views on the role of religion in the state, or whose views on free thought and freedom of expression are exactly those that Spinoza defended in the seventeenth century.
And I would also say about the relationship between religion and science.
absolutely. yes.
so maybe we could, very briefly, look at those three things. What was his broad view of religion in the state, freedom of thought, and the relationship between science and religion?
He was not against religions, but there was no love lost between Spinoza and the organized religious authorities. he thought they were repressive and encouraged superstitious ceremonies. at the same time, he was not opposed to people believing what they wanted and even engaging privately, or in groups, in whatever religious devotions they wanted. what he opposed was a form of religious organization in civil society that, in a way, creates a separate focus of allegiance. when you have a strongly organized religion, especially an established religion, then you wonder if the citizens are devoted to the civil authorities or if they are more devoted to the religious authorities. this was a very hot topic in the dutch republic. One of the reasons Catholics were initially repressed, but later tolerated but never fully trusted, was because the question arose as to whether they were more dedicated to the welfare of the Dutch Republic or to the pope in Rome.
which was something that john locke raised in his letter on tolerance.
yes. for locke, neither catholics nor atheists.
Locke didn’t trust any of them: Catholics because they were enslaved by a foreign prince and atheists because they had no book to swear on.
Another myth about Spinoza is that he was a proponent of the separation of church and state. in a sense that is true. he thought that people should be free to believe and worship as they pleased. but he did think that any organized religion in the state had to be instituted and governed by civil authorities. So, if there was going to be a church, it had to be subordinate to the sovereign, because the sovereign was in charge of everything that he had to do with public welfare and public ceremonies of religion are matters of public welfare.
That’s clear about Spinoza’s view of the state and religion. What was his line on freedom of expression?
Spinoza’s views were apparently simple, but in reality a little more complex. the theological-political treatise has this amazingly bold and remarkable statement that in the state people should be free to think what they want and say what they think. it seems that there you have total tolerance and freedom of expression: freedom of thought is easy, because you can’t control people’s thoughts anyway.
I think you can control people’s thoughts, but usually not directly.
in Spinoza’s mind you can’t.
but that’s a very radical position on freedom of expression, even for today: that anything goes.
yes. However, Spinoza backed down somewhat because he also said that civil authorities should not tolerate speech that would incite political subversion. that is, he must not allow people to say things that disturb the public peace and undermine the authority of the sovereign. that, of course, opens up a huge can of worms. who is going to decide what kind of speech is subversive? well, the sovereign.
I think what he means is that, like in the US, you can’t yell “fire!” in a theater full of people; you can’t engage in what the supreme court called “fighting words.”
that’s also john stuart mill’s line on the limits of free speech. maybe there is a causal story there. I don’t know.
I think Mill has a much broader idea of freedom of expression than Spinoza. Mill believes that there are very narrow limits within which free speech should be restricted; fighting words that cause imminent danger, things like that. Otherwise, the pursuit of truth requires almost complete and utter freedom of expression, or what we in the United States call “first amendment rights.”
How is Spinoza different? where do you put the limit? limit speech to prevent social violence sounds a lot like mill.
anything that serves to undermine the authority of the sovereign or the social contract.
so, that could be mockery or humor.
exactly. i guess if i had pushed spinoza i would be closer to mill’s position. but the affirmations that he gives us in the theological-political treatise leave room for a very conservative interpretation, that the sovereign will decide what kind of speech is subversive, what kind of speech threatens his own authority and therefore on which one can be imposed . limits.
You wrote an excellent book on the theological-political treatise, called a book forged in hell. why did you call it that?
one of spinoza’s critics said that it was “a book forged in hell by the devil himself”. nice review!
You would want that on the back cover of your book! why did they think it was so subversive, given what you said?
There are a couple of theses in that book that were really unacceptable, not only to 17th century churchmen, especially Dutch Reformed churchmen, but also to sovereign authorities. for example, the denial that miracles are possible. Spinoza goes much further than David Hume about a century later. Hume has just said that it is never justified to believe that an event was miraculous. Spinoza’s view was that miracles are metaphysically impossible because God is nature, and if a miracle is defined as God acting against nature, that is logically impossible. so miracles are simply events for which we do not know the natural cause.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Hume agreed with him on that, he just didn’t necessarily express that opinion. It is an extremely radical position and answers the question, in a certain way, about what was Spinoza’s vision of the relationship between science and God, which I consider that, because he speaks of ‘god or nature’, the scientist is, effectively, revealing the mind of god, but of course if you’re religious you’ll think it’s just a secret way of being an atheist.
yes, and actually i think spinoza was an atheist, but my point of view is minority. your point is correct: science and philosophy on the one hand, and religion and theology on the other, are different disciplines.
The goal of religion and theology is essentially to interpret the message of the Bible and prophetic writings. and the message of the prophetic writings is to “treat other human beings with justice and charity.”
The goal of philosophy and science is to understand nature. Well used, philosophy will also lead you to the conclusion that you must treat other human beings with justice and charity. but, in that case, you know why. while in religion and reading the bible, these wonderfully imaginative and uplifting stories inspire you to do so. religion should not put limits on what science and philosophy can achieve. but again, neither should philosophy and science be used to determine what religion is all about. they are separate spheres.
“Actually I think Spinoza was an atheist, but my point of view is a minority”
There are two other important theses in the theological-political treatise. One is that the Bible is just one work of human literature, compiled over generations. it is a mutilated and corrupted text that was passed down through the centuries and only compiled by a few publishers under very specific historical and political circumstances. TRUE. is simply a collection of inspiring and morally uplifting stories.
That’s just amazing, isn’t it? it’s such a modern sight.
yes. It was not uncommon for someone to claim that God was not the literal author of all scripture. And it was also not unusual to claim that Moses did not write every word of the Torah, because there are passages about his own death and what happened after his death. So even authoritative Jewish rabbinical figures like Abraham ibn Ezra said that Moses could not have written every word, and Thomas Hobbes also pointed out those passages that Moses could not have written. But what Spinoza said was, ‘It’s just a novel, essentially, except there are a lot of authors who don’t always agree.’ it is an anthology of short stories.’
The other important idea was that Spinoza reduced religion—true religion—simply to moral behavior. all the ceremonies of Judaism, Islam and Christianity are just superstitious practices that have nothing to do with true piety. true piety is justice and charity.
That’s another amazingly modern humanist vision. did he explicitly reject the idea of heaven and hell?
Yes, this is something else I have advocated for. Spinoza denies that there is such a thing as personal immortality. believing that there is an eternal heaven in which you will be rewarded, or an eternal hell in which you will be punished, simply gives rise to superstitious beliefs. your life in this world will be governed by irrational hopes and fears for what will happen in the next world. that is a life of slavery and servitude.
spinoza believed that when you’re dead you’re dead. therefore, whatever the rewards of virtue are in this life, and those are simply the happiness and flourishing you get from living the life of reason.
I can see why one thinker finds it so appealing and says it’s so relevant today. It sounds, the way you’ve paraphrased it, like he might be talking to me right now about what he believes about religion. doesn’t seem like much of a distance there.
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That’s why I think it’s also struck a chord in popular culture. You have novels and plays and operas and cafes named after Spinoza. There’s even a supermarket chain in the US that sells Spinoza bagels.
but he’s not a very easy to read writer in general, which is strange, because the opinions you’ve expressed are very clear. one would think that it should be possible to express those views clearly.
It’s true, it’s not an easy read. especially ethics. I think that adds to Spinoza’s attraction. but nevertheless it has a very broad appeal: everyone loves a radical and everyone loves a radical who has been excommunicated. and everyone loves a radical who has been excommunicated for mysterious reasons. there is this aura about spinoza. it was heroic and we’re still trying to figure out why.
Your first book choice is the best reading edition of Spinoza’s works in English. is the princeton edition of his works in two volumes, edited by e.m. Curley. Are the complete writings of him?
almost complete. Volume I and Volume II were translated by Edwin Curley. Volume I includes the Early Writings, the Treatise on the Amendment of the Intellect, and the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Welfare and His Ethics, plus all correspondence up to, I think, 1665.
the second volume includes the theological-political treatise and the political treatise and all the correspondence up to his death in 1677. all that spinoza published during his lifetime was: his summary presentation of the principles of descartes’ philosophy. that is in volume i and he did it under his name, in latin. then, in 1670, he published the theological-political treatise anonymously, because I think he had an idea of how scandalously it would be received. everything else remained unpublished during his lifetime and appeared only after his death. The reason I say this is not the complete work is because Curley decided not to include Spinoza’s Compendium of Hebrew Grammar. he wrote this in the 1670s. actually, i’m in the process of translating that, so there will be a volume iii in the princeton edition, which will include the hebrew grammar, in addition to the herem document. that will be a more accurate translation and, I hope, from now on, the standard one. There will also be some other relevant documents, including the library inventory of him, which was made when he died.
Is the herem document a very long document? what is the controversy about it?
According to the herem docs, it was quite long. usually a herem document in amsterdam in this period was just a couple of sentences saying ‘so and so has been put under herem for assaulting a rabbi’, or something like that, and is told how the person will be able to make amends and reintegrate into the community. In Spinoza’s case, by contrast, it is a relatively long document, full of curses and condemnations, expelling him from the people of Israel, seemingly forever, without offering any means of restitution or reintegration. it is in portuguese the original document is in the jewish archives in the amsterdam municipal archives. many translations have been very vague, for example, they use the word ‘excommunication’. in fact, that word does not appear. the portuguese from amsterdam invented a word, ‘enhermar’, which means to put under herem, combining hebrew with portuguese. so I think a more literal translation is better.
And from what you’ve said, this is a stronger document than most people who were removed under this document received. so there was something really provocative about what he did. it wasn’t just that the ordinary was difficult. some people really wanted him to burn in hell.
yes. it really pissed people off. but there is a debate about why. Some people think that his crimes were not questions of ideas and heresies, but that he had engaged in business practices that undermined the Jewish community in the eyes of the Dutch. when he died his father inherited a large amount of debt because the business was not doing well. To get rid of the debt, instead of going to the leaders of the Jewish community, he went to the Dutch authorities and declared himself an orphan, which he legally could do because he was under 25 years old. by being declared an orphan, he was no longer responsible for those debts, many of which were owed within the Jewish community. he became the privileged creditor of his father’s inheritance. therefore, he broke the rules of the Jewish community, which stated that all such legal matters should be resolved within the community. but, furthermore, if a member of the Jewish community could avoid paying his debts in that way, that was not good for business with the Dutch.
Presumably, there were also creditors who would not have been paid, people who resented what he did because otherwise they might have been paid eventually.
exactly.
Is there a cheaper option for ethics and treatise for those who can’t afford the full scholarly editions of princeton?
There is a Princeton paperback edition of Curley’s translation of Ethics together with selections from other articles in Volume I, and a Hackett paperback edition of the Theological-Political Treatise, translated by Samuel Shirley.
so if you’re talking to someone who has never read anything by spinoza, which book should they go to first?
I mean you should first look at ethics because that’s his philosophical masterpiece. but it’s a really hard book to read because it’s in the geometric Euclidean format. so I would suggest the theological-political treatise. It’s a very different kind of book. it is a political job. it is a treatise on religion and politics and is much more accessible. It will start to give you an idea of what Spinoza is all about. and then you’ll be ready for ethics.
presumably, given the difficulty of ethics, most readers will not understand it without help, but it is the core of his philosophy. Have you chosen a book that can be read alongside it to try to contextualize it to some extent?
yes. This is Curley’s book, Behind the Geometric Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. It is relatively short, only about 130 pages, and is a good accessible introduction to the main themes of Spinoza’s philosophy. he doesn’t spend much time on political or even religious things. focuses primarily on ethics. there is a chapter on god. there is a chapter on the human being, on the mind-body relationship. and then the third chapter on human welfare, which is moral philosophy. You won’t get the full sense of Spinoza’s very broad system, but I think it’s a good gateway to the basic ideas of ethics. he describes it as a reading of Spinoza’s ethics, not all of Spinoza’s philosophy.
why did spinoza use this somewhat strange way of writing about philosophy, as if it were a geometric proof?
I think part of it is a way to make sure you’re establishing your conclusions with mathematical certainty.
but the method does not ensure it. it has the frills but it’s not the same.
not. in fact, he had no illusions about that either. but, one of his views is that nature is governed by absolute necessity. he is not just a causal determinist: he is a needy. for him things could not have been otherwise because events are causally determined. the very laws of nature are also absolutely necessary. so what better way to capture the relationships that exist in nature than through a body of propositions that are related by logical necessity? I think he also thought it was an effective way of conveying quite complex ideas in a clear and distinct way.
It’s interesting. thomas hobbes talks about finding a geometry book and wanting to put philosophy on the same plane as euclid’s proofs. it seems to be a common touchstone for logical reasoning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. if you were looking for a model of what it is to reason clearly from incontrovertible premises, geometry was that model, just as thinkers took clockwork as a model of sophisticated machinery.
discards did too. you mentioned hobbes. In his response to the second set of objections in Hobbes’ Objections to the Meditations, Descartes presents some of the Meditations’ conclusions in a geometric format.
We could excuse Descartes more for being a mathematician.
right, yes, and a geometer.
then, you can understand, biographically, why he might look for that model. but it is still interesting to find it in Spinoza. it is peculiar, at least, and is a bit like ludwig wittgenstein’s tractatus logico-philosophicus. there is an organizational plan that makes it feel very different from any other book you have read.
Remember, too, that Spinoza was a Cartesian, at least in his early years. he was inspired by descartes and the first published work of his was that summary of the principles of descartes philosophy. therefore, it may have been inspired by Descartes’ own attempt to present philosophical issues in a geometric format.
Curley’s other book, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay on Interpretation, has been highly influential, and it is difficult to write about Spinoza’s views on God and nature without considering his important interpretation.
why is that? What is so complicated about Spinoza’s ideas about God and nature? that seems to be the simplest part of his philosophy.
There is the question of whether he is a pantheist or an atheist, but also the technical vocabulary that Spinoza uses. Spinoza says that everything that is, is in God, and he uses this Cartesian language of “substances”, “attributes” and “modes” and says that the ordinary things in the world are “modes” of God or substance. What does it mean? in what sense are all things ‘in god’? “modes” that we usually consider as inherent properties of a substance. this book could be the substance and green is the mode. so when spinoza says ‘all that is, is in god’ and ‘god is the only substance’, are we supposed to think that we are just pimples on god’s skin, that we are ‘in god’ as the properties are? in god?
and curley argues that this is just awkward metaphysics. Now, I think it’s not an objection to a reading of Spinoza to say, ‘Well, that makes him uncomfortable,’ because Spinoza is uncomfortable. he is trying to make us radically rethink the way we see the world.
So, there’s a lot of debate about how we’re supposed to understand this relationship between finite things, which includes ourselves, and the infinite eternal substance: god. And in his book on Spinoza’s metaphysics, Curley tries to reinterpret it in terms of laws and facts and make it seem a bit more acceptable to our modern scientific philosophical way of thinking. I think it’s brilliant, but I don’t think it’s the right way to read Spinoza.
interesting. Jonathan Bennett has done a lot of work helping people understand difficult texts by paraphrasing the language on his Early Modern Texts website. It’s a really interesting project. the book you have chosen from him is a study of spinoza’s ethics. again, focusing on the key work ethics. how does this compare to curley’s book, the first book you recommended?
is longer. Bennett’s book is a book that scholars of Spinoza love to hate because it is so fascinating, so interesting and thought-provoking, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways, both in the way it does it and in so many of the things it does. conclusions you draw. . At the same time, you can’t help but be drawn to the readings it offers of Spinoza’s particular claims and arguments. and he is also an entertaining writer. so, for example, he wants us to think about the substance/attribute/mode relationship in terms of field theories in physics, which is a really interesting and exciting idea. whether it works or not, who cares? It’s a lot of fun to see a mind like Bennett’s at work in a mind like Spinoza’s.
Are you implying that he is ahistorical in his approach?
yes, excessively. Here’s why: Right at the beginning of his book on Spinoza’s ethics, he says, “I am not going to discuss any of Spinoza’s political or religious writings or views because I find them to be of no help in understanding ethics.” tremendous error because Spinoza’s metaphysics and epistemology were at the service of this great philosophical, political, religious and moral project. Bennett, in the final chapter of his book, says, essentially, “I can’t understand part v of ethics.”
Well, of course, he can’t understand it. if he is not looking at the larger context, for example the Jewish philosophical context of part v, which is, in my opinion, a kind of dialogue with Maimonides, he will not be able to make sense of it. So yes, Bennett’s approach is anachronistic, both in the sense of being ahistorical and not looking at the context. He is also anachronistic in the sense that he does not consider Spinoza’s own philosophical background.
that’s very similar to something that paul russell has written about in relation to david hume, that most people read david hume’s works and don’t read his contemporaries, so they don’t appreciate how many of his works apparently non-religious arguments are directed at specific theological positions, but not overtly. and, if you read his work in context, this becomes obvious. even when he talks about causality, for example, it is not just because he is interested in abstract questions about causality or in certain positions that people have taken on it. the underlying interest is in the ‘first cause argument’. it is a common and strange defect of philosophy that many philosophers are too ready to think that the texts reveal themselves to an intelligent reader, that because you are a philosopher, you can understand a philosopher of any period without immersing yourself in that period. It seems pretty obvious to me that you should at least take all the available evidence, or dive into it a bit, and get a sense of the setting in which the person was saying these things and why he or she might have said them.
especially when it comes to deeply rooted historical philosophers like spinoza and hume. it’s nice to think that they were writing for us, but they were writing for their contemporaries.
absolutely. they won’t necessarily write for anyone beyond the next week. if the evidence is there, it seems really perverse to say, ‘I don’t need to look at it, it doesn’t affect me’, but the book is interesting nonetheless. is that the kind of book you read to focus on what you really think about spinoza instead of learning what spinoza said?
none, I would say. I don’t need Bennett to tell me what Spinoza said. I have my own views on that. I’m not saying that I don’t need anyone to help me, because Spinoza becomes more and more difficult every time you read it because new questions arise and you notice things that you hadn’t noticed before. I always turn to my fellow academics to help me understand it. I would say sometimes bennett helps with that. he gives you a really interesting and imaginative way of thinking about some things. I’m going to turn to Bennett’s book to help me understand some of Spinoza.
but it’s one of those books, like curley’s book, that you really can’t help but read if you’re going to write about a certain topic: what bennett has to say, or what curley or margaret wilson have to say about it theme. that’s exactly what the scholarship is. when i was the editor of the history of philosophy journal, if we got a submission on plato, spinoza, or kant and it didn’t relate to scholarship at all, we wouldn’t even bother sending it to the reviewers, because philosophy is a dialogue and the history of philosophy remains a dialogue. it’s just that a lot of the people you talk to are long dead. but dialogue with fellow academics cannot be avoided. and bennett is someone who has become indispensable in that regard because he has written a very thought-provoking and entertaining book.
Am I right that curley and bennett are more or less from the same generation? were prominent in the 1960s and 1970s?
yes.
what about the explainability of experience: realism and subjectivity in spinoza’s theory of the human mind by ursula renz, your next pick? I don’t know, renz, is she a contemporary writer?
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yes, she is our contemporary. Her book, The Explainability of Experience, was originally published in German. a translation was published a couple of years ago and we should be very grateful for that.
At first glance, his topic is limited: Does Spinoza offer us an explanation for our experience of the world? But, continuing that thesis through various topics in ethics, he gives us a very broad view of Spinoza’s system, which I think is the correct one: that Spinoza was both a rationalist and a realist.
By rationalist, I do not mean, and she does not mean, this caricature of someone who thinks that all knowledge can be arrived at deductively with reason, but rather, for a moral rationalist, well-being, human flourishing and happiness are a matter of living a life according to the guidance of reason. So, on her reading, Spinoza is a rationalist both about knowledge and about ethics.
“spinoza gets harder and harder every time you read it because new questions arise and you notice things you didn’t notice before”
but she also argues that he is a realist. here, she is combating a certain interpretation of spinoza going back to hegel, that for spinoza the only thing that is really real is god, or nature itself, and all finite things around us are merely subjective phenomena by which we deal to understand or make sense of nature. She says that Spinoza really believed that the world around us is real and that there are things of finite duration and that the basic metaphysical and epistemological bases for our knowledge of them require their reality. So, I think her book is a good counterpoint to the subjectivist readings of Spinoza’s metaphysics.
what is the ‘subjective interpretation’ of your metaphysics?
is a kind of Parmenidean theory that the only thing that is real is “the one”, “the whole”, in Spinoza’s terms, “god” or “nature”. we seem to see around us elements of nature that have metaphysical integrity: tables, chairs, trees, giraffes. Are these things real things that exist as enduring beings, although they are part of nature and everything is part of nature, or is the division of nature into discrete individuals an illusion?
understood. How about your fifth choice: Spinoza on Susan James’s Philosophy, Religion, and Politics? tell me about this book.
For a long time, Spinoza was considered, especially by professional philosophers, to be of interest mainly for his metaphysics and epistemology. and I think this was pedagogically motivated. we would give courses on the history of modern philosophy where descartes establishes the epistemological and metaphysical foundations, spinoza responds to them and leibniz responds to spinoza and so on. So, students, if you read Spinoza, you read the Ethics, but only Parts I and II. they wonder why on earth this book is called ‘ethics’, when there is nothing ethical in it. it’s just about god, nature, free will, etc. Thus, for a long time, Spinoza was not taken seriously as a moral philosopher or as a political philosopher. in fact, he still isn’t in many ways. Alan Ryan, in his great two-volume history of political philosophy, has nothing to say about Spinoza, not a word.
That’s interesting. in your case it must be a deliberate omission. I was surprised to see that AC Grayling did this great history of philosophy that doesn’t have a single reference to Kierkegaard. this happens sometimes by accident.
Grayling’s recent book on philosophy in the 17th century barely mentions Spinoza and no mention of Leibniz at all.
but ryan is more of a scholarly philosopher. It must have been a deliberate decision of his, I imagine.
terry irwin, in his two volume history of ethics, has a whole chapter on spinoza.
Perhaps it reflects teaching, because the perceived difficulty of teaching Spinoza means that he is not easily read in depth in undergraduate courses. It may be somewhat pragmatic that philosophy professors, if they are not Spinoza specialists, have not had to read Spinoza in depth for didactic purposes. and if they are writing a synoptic book, it may not occur to them that there is anything interesting there.
For a long time, Spinoza was not taken seriously as a moral philosopher or a political philosopher. only recently have we begun to see real work done on his moral and political philosophy. in particular, the theological-political treatise is rarely taught in philosophy departments.
I know. I’m ashamed to say that I wrote a book on free speech and I didn’t include Spinoza and I should have. But I hadn’t read your book Forged in Hell, and I hadn’t read Spinoza’s treatise. If I were to rewrite it now, there would be a section on Spinoza. but there is something weird going on. historically there might be some anti-Semitism in British and American, particularly British, philosophy departments, an almost unquestioned anti-Semitism, an idea that “there is nothing for us”. Why else would Spinoza appear so small in the syllabus?
for a long time, spinoza was out of the picture in general, especially in anglo-american philosophy, because metaphysics was out of the picture and, as a metaphysician, there was the idea that spinoza could not be taken seriously. thanks, aj yesterday.
but before him we know that george eliot translated his ethics. he massively inspired middlemarch, which is highly regarded by both philosophers and literary specialists. eliot is such an important writer and he saw a lot in spinoza. I wonder how he came across it.
there has been a new edition of its translation by clare carlisle. is an interesting question. Elliot was obviously a skilled linguist. He obviously felt a certain affinity for Spinoza. she did the translation before writing any of her novels.
It is very interesting, if he was not a well-known figure, that of all the people to translate, she chose him.
yes. it’s a really interesting question why he did it. I don’t know the answer.
so, sue james is putting spinoza back on the map in terms of ethics…
When it was published, his was one of the few books dedicated to the theological-political treatise. What philosophers are really discussing if they talk about Spinoza is ethics. the theological-political treatise is usually addressed in religious studies or Jewish studies courses. Sue James’s book was, along with an earlier book by the Dutch scholar Theo Verbeek, one of only two books on the theological-political treatise. the book of james is very readable. it covers all the right things and it really brings us back to spinoza as a large scale systematic thinker and not just someone who is doing metaphysics and epistemology between descartes and leibniz.
and sue james is very much a historian of ideas as well as a philosopher. then presumably the context is reliably explained, rather than simply taken for granted or ignored. She is a very different style of thinker than Jonathan Bennett, for example.
exactly. has a great sense of history and sensitivity to context.
Is your interpretation controversial in any way? Are you putting it in context or are you discovering something in the book that other people hadn’t seen?
I don’t see that it has controversial issues to grind, but it does bring up some of the issues in the work that I think have gone unnoticed, especially the coherence of the theological-political treatise with ethics. In that sense, it is a response to Bennett, and shows that these are an integral part of the same project. indeed one can see ethics itself as a continuation of the theological-political treatise because, by undermining in ethics beliefs in miracles and in an immortal soul and offering us this conception of human flourishing and virtue, happiness, reason and freedom, there is a political objective there, which is to undermine superstitious beliefs. and by undermining superstitious religious beliefs, such as the belief in immortality, it is undermining the political influence that churchmen wielded in the Dutch republic at the time.
Do you think those two books had a similar audience or were they written for similar audiences?
i think there is some overlap, but i think the ethics was written for philosophers familiar with the cartesian vocabulary and conceptual scheme of the cartesians, like his friends in amsterdam who were studying it while he was writing it, and also philosophers in the universities and colleges. the theological-political treatise was aimed at a broader audience: liberal theologians and other educated members of Dutch society (for example, the regents who ruled the cities), people who would accept its message of tolerance and secularism and liberation from religious superstition . it’s a very angry book in some ways, because it was written after one of his friends was jailed for writing a Spinozist-themed book. The mistakes his friend made were that, firstly, he wrote it in Dutch to make it accessible to a wide readership, and secondly, he put his name on the cover.
spinoza wrote the theological-political treatise in Latin and did not put his name on the title page, but it was a response to what he saw as growing intolerance in the dutch republic and the growing influence of the dutch reformed church in civil society . and political issues.
now if i were recommending books for a general reader i would definitely recommend your book, a book forged in hell, which i loved. how did you come to write that book? It is not an academic book, it is a page turner in many ways. What motivated you to write in that genre?
A long time ago, after getting tenure and with young kids, I decided that if I was going to push myself to work on something, it should be a project that would be read by more than 12 people. And I thought Spinoza was interesting and important enough to try to reach a wide audience. it is a great pleasure to try to write general non-fiction. I still like to write occasional academic papers, which are more technical. and I think technical work allows me to write the most general non-fiction books.
my new book on spinoza’s moral philosophy, think less about death: spinoza on how to live and how to die essentially takes spinoza’s moral philosophy to heart and notes the lessons it offers us on how to deal with our emotions , how to treat other human beings, how to value life and the proper attitude towards death.
And do you think this is a livable philosophy now?
yes, but it’s not one of those self-help books, like ‘how to live like a stoic’. I think they often trivialize and oversimplify. I look at Spinoza’s arguments, but I try to make them accessible and take him seriously as a philosopher, not a self-help guru.
what is the implication, in relation to death, of believing that there is no afterlife and that there is no god apart from nature? If I understood correctly, we should live in a way that is in accordance with reason and control our passions.
In the case of death, the question is, “how should you approach death?” if you believe there is something to hope for or fear, then you are going to live your life governed by these irrational emotions. but death is nothing to fear. Epicurus is reported to have said: ‘where death is, I am not; and where I am, there is no death. So you shouldn’t be afraid of being dead, because you’re not going to be there when you’re dead. should not be a source of anxiety. the proper attitude would not be one of hope either—certainly not. as the title of the book says, you must not think about it at all, because there is nothing there. when you’re dead, you’re dead. you should focus on how to improve your life in the here and now, and on the joys that give us the greatest satisfaction in the search for the true good of this life, which is knowledge and understanding.
Finally, with his son, I think, he has written a comic in which Spinoza appears.
It’s a graphic book on the history of philosophy in the 17th century, from Galileo and Descartes to Leibniz and Newton, with many stops in between, but Spinoza has a whole chapter to himself.
how did you come to do that?
my fantastic editor at princeton university press, rob tempio, said, “would you like to write a history of 17th century philosophy?” and I said, “no, not really.” It would be a kind of cookbook. but at the time, my son had just graduated from art school and I thought it would be really fun to do something together and jump-start his career. So I said to Rob, “How about a graphic book on philosophy in the 17th century?” and, to my surprise, he said: “great!”
It was so much fun working with my son. he did most of the work. nine hundred drawings all made by hand and colored by hand. I think it came out really well, but I’m a partisan.
what’s your next book after the one that just came out? Is it Spinoza?
no, I think it’s going to be a biography of discards. You have written popular books on philosophy. What motivated you to start doing it?
To be honest, being a mediocre philosopher and producing articles to fulfill obligations was not very important to me. I was teaching and the teaching notes led quite naturally to introductory books. so I really caught up with that, and it’s quite satisfying because you sell more copies and you see your books in bookstores. I guess that’s why I got stuck in that vein. but then I think people should play to their strengths and I felt my strength was in communicating with a wide audience and through podcasts and so on, and not necessarily deep academic research. so that’s a self-assessment. some of my contemporaries just immerse themselves in trying to be original in very small areas that don’t really matter that much. I thought it was a waste of life in some respects.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s also very exciting when you get notes from non-academic readers.
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