Hier nog eens gepubliceerd, daar Spinoza er zo fraai mee omlijst is. Zulke versierselen worden niet meer gemaakt.
Cf. blog over John Caird. De heruitgave is te bestellen bij Amazon.
Hieronder neem ik zijn niet onaardige "Introduction" over:
INTRODUCTION.
A GREAT system of philosophy is exposed to that kind of injustice which
arises from the multiplicity of its interpreters, and from the fact that these
interpreters are apt to contemplate and criticise it, not from the point of
view of its author, but from their own. Critics and commentators of different
schools and shades of opinion are naturally desirous to claim for their own
views the sanction of a great writer's name, and unconsciously exercise their
ingenuity in forcing that sanction when it is not spontaneously yielded. If any
ambiguities or inconsistencies lurk in his doctrines, they are sure to be
brought to light and exaggerated by the tendency of conflicting schools to
fasten on what is most in accordance with their own special principles. And even
when a writer is on the whole self-consistent, it is possible for a one-sided
expositor so to arrange the lights and shadows, so to give prominence to what
is incidental and throw into the shade what is essential, as to make him the
advocate of ideas really antagonistic to his own.
More, perhaps, than most systems of philosophy, that of Spinoza has been
subjected to this sort of misconstruction. Doctrines the most diversified and
contradictory have been extracted from it. Pantheism and atheism, idealism and
empiricism, nominalism and realism, a non-theistic naturalism as uncompromising
as that of the modern evolutionist, and a supernaturalism or acosmism which
makes as little of the world as the Maya of the Buddhist have all alike found a
colourable sanction in Spinoza's teaching. A philosophy apparently as exact and
logically coherent as the Geometry of Euclid or the Principia of Newton, has
proved, in the hands of modern interpreters, as enigmatical as the utterances
of the Jewish Kabbala or the mystical theosophy of the Neo-Platonists. To the
vision of one observer, it is so pervaded and dominated by the idea of the
Infinite, that he can describe its author only as "a God-intoxicated
man." To the acute inspection of another, the theistic element in it is
only the decorous guise of a scientific empiricism a judicious but unmeaning
concession to the theological prejudices of the author's time, or an
incongruous dress of medieval scholasticism of which he had not been able
wholly to divest himself.
"Whilst some at least of those heterogeneous notions which have been
fathered on Spinoza have no other origin than the mistakes of his modern
critics, there arc, it must be acknowledged, others which indicate real
inconsistencies. It is true, indeed, that the controversies of subsequent times
may easily read into the language of an early writer decisions on questions of
which he knew nothing. " Philosophers of an earlier age," it has been
said, "often contain, in a kind of implicit unity, different aspects or elements
of truth, which in a subsequent time become distinguished from and opposed to
each other."
They make use, in a general and indeterminate way, of terms which later
controversies have stamped with a special significanc ; they may thus seem to
answer questions which they never put to themselves, and may easily be got to
pronounce seemingly inconsistent opinions on problems which they never thought
of solving. The eager controversialist catches at his pet phrase or mot
d’ordre, and hastily concludes that the old writer speaks in the
distinctive tone of the modern polemic. But obviously the inconsistencies which
thus arise are inconsistencies only to the ear. It may be possible to get
Spinoza to side in appearance with the modern evolutionist or with the modern
spiritualist, to make him an individualist after the fashion of Mill or
Spencer, or a universalist who speaks by anticipation with the voice of
Schelling. But if such attempts are made, they are mere philosophical
anachronisms. The problems which they seem to solve are problems which, when
the supposed solutions were given, could not even be propounded.
Yet it is impossible to ascribe the discordancy of Spinoza's modern
interpreters only to the necessary ambiguity of their author's language. His
philosophy is not a completely homogeneous product. It may rather be said to be
the composite result of conflicting tendencies, neither of which is followed
out to its utmost logical results. If we say in general terms that philosophy
is the search for unity, the effort of thought to gain a point of view from
which the contrast variously expressed by the terms the One and the Many, the
Universa! and the Individual, the Infinite and the Finite, God and the World,
shall be reconciled and harmonised, then we shall look in vain, in the
philosophy of Spinoza, for one consistent solution of the problem. No solution
can be regarded as satisfactory which suppresses or fails to do justice to
either of the extremes, or which, though giving alternate expression to both,
leaves them still in merely external combination without being reconciled for
thought. Yet, at most, the latter result is all that the philosophy of Spinoza
can be said to achieve. There are parts of his system such as the reduction of
all finite individuals to modes or accidents of the absolute substance, and the
assertion that all determination is negation in which the idea of the infinite
is so emphasised as to leave no place for the finite, or to reduce nature and
man, all individual existences, to unreality and illusion. There are parts of
his system, on the other hand such as his assertion that the individual is the
real, his ascription to each finite thing of a conatus in suo esse
perseverandi, his rejection of general ideas as mere entia rationis, his
polemic against teleology, his use of the term "Nature" as a synonym
for "God" which seem to give to the finite an independent reality
that leaves no room for the infinite, or reduces it to an expression for the
aggregate of finite things. Thus the system of Spinoza contains elements which
resist any attempt to classify him either as a pantheist or an atheist, a
naturalist or supernaturalist, a nominalist or a realist. As he approaches the
problem with which he deals from different sides, the opposite tendencies by
which his mind is governed seem to receive alternate expression ; but to the
last they remain side by side, with no apparent consciousness of their
disharmony, and with no attempt to mediate between them.
But though it may be conceded that the philosophy of Spinoza is not self-
consistent, or contains elements which, if not irreconcilable, are
unreconciled, it does not follow that the task of the expositor of Spinoza is
limited to what is involved in this concession. Inconsistency may arise not so
much from incompatible principles as from defective logic. Contradictory
elements may have been admitted into a system, not because its author looked at
things from different and irreconcilable standpoints, but because he failed to
see all that his fundamental standpoint involved; not because he started from
different premisses, but because he did not carry out what was for him the only
true premiss to its legitimate results. As moral defects assume an altogether
different aspect according as they are regarded as the expression of a
retrograding or of an advancing moral nature as willing divergences or as
involuntary shortcomings from its own ideal so intellectual inconsistencies may
mean more or less according to the attitude of the mind from which they
proceed. It may be possible to discover, through all a man's thoughts, a
dominant idea or general tendency, and to explain his inconsistencies as only
unconscious aberrations from it. It may even be possible to discern, underneath
apparent contradictions or abrupt transitions from one point of view to
another, an implicit unity of aim the guidance of thought by an unconscious
logic towards a principle of reconciliation not yet fully grasped. And if any
such dominant idea or implicit aim can be detected in a great writer, it cannot
fail to throw light on the general character and bearing of his speculations,
and it may enable us to pronounce whether and to what extent in his seeming
inconsistencies he is only unfaithful to himself, or inadequately representing
his own idea.
Now there are various conceivable indications by which we may be aided in
detecting this undercurrent of tendency in the mind of a philosophical writer.
We may be able, for instance, to learn something of the motive of his speculations
to discover in his previous spiritual history what it was that constituted for
him, so to speak, the original impulse towards philosophy, and that secretly
guided the process by which intellectual satisfaction has been sought. Or
again, we may know something of the helps which have been afforded him in the
search for truth, of the studies on which his opening intelligence has been
fed, of the sources from which he has derived inspiration, of the books or
authorities which consciously or unconsciously have moulded the substance or
form of his thoughts. Or finally, we may have the means of viewing his system
in the making, of watching the working of his mind and the development of his
ideas from their earlier and crader shape to the form which they have finally
taken. We may be able thus to see which, if any, of the conflicting elements in
his thought has gradually tended to prevail over the others, and to which of
them therefore, though the victory to the last may be incomplete, the place of
the ruling or characteristic principle must be ascribed. We may find it
possible in this way to pronounce of the blots which disfigure his system in
its final form, that they are not radical inconsistencies, but only
irrelevances or excrescences foreign to its essential character.
Now we are not without such helps to the understanding of the Spinozistic
philosophy. In the first place, we possess in the preface to the treatise
'Concerning the Improvement of the Understanding ' an autobiographical fragment
in which Spinoza narrates what may be termed the origin and development of his
spiritual life, and from which we gain a clear insight into the motive and
genesis of his philosophical system. In the second place, we have information,
direct and indirect, as to Spinoza's early studies in philosophy. From his own
testimony, from the internal evidence supplied by his writings, and from other
sources, we know something as to the authors he had read, the intellectual
atmosphere in which he grew up, the authorities which may have influenced the
formation of his opinions. Lastly, we have in Spinoza's earlier works the means
of tracing the gradual development of those ideas which took their final
systematised form in the ' Ethics.' Especially in the 'Treatise concerning God
and Man,' which has been brought to light only in our own time, we possess what
may be regarded as an early study for the ' Ethics,' embracing the same
subjects and dealing with the same fundamental ideas, but presenting them in a
cruder and less coherent form, and exhibiting the conflicting tendencies of the
later work in harder and more unmodified opposition to each other. From these
various sources some help may be derived towards the right apprehension of
Spinoza's philosophy and the explanation of its apparent ambiguities and
inconsistencies.
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