In vervolg op het vorige blog over Dunner, wil ik in dit blog aandacht geven aan twee recensies van Joseph Dunner, maar voor ik daartoe overga eerst deze informatieve passage over twee nogal uiteenlopende interpretaties onder Spinoza scholars van Spinoza’s staatsopvatting [dit in een overigens uiterst Spinoza-vijandige tekst] *)
For Spinoza, the individual's highest loyalty must not be
either for God or religion, or even for family and community, but rather for
the state. As we know, Spinoza's discussion of politics in the concluding six
chapters of Tractatus has divided
commentators into two apparently opposed camps. One reading sees Spinoza
genuinely defending a liberal state, hence defending the individual's political
freedom.12 The other reading, in contrast, sees him only apparently
defending a liberal state, but in reality defending the totalitarian authority
of the state, regardless of its particular form of government, in order to
defend the value not of freedom but of security and stability.13 Each
camp cites relevant but opposed supporting statements by Spinoza, sometimes
taken from the very same paragraph. For instance, in the fifth paragraph of
Chapter 20, to support the liberal view, we have Spinoza saying: "Thus,
the purpose of the state is, in reality, freedom." But in the very same
paragraph, to support the totalitarian view, we find Spinoza writing: "Its
[the state's] ultimate purpose is ... to free every man from fear so that he
may live in security as far as is possible" (TTP 292-3).14
_______________
12. Three examples of
the "liberal" reading of Spinoza are Lewis Samuel Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); see esp., The Impasse of Authoritarian Liberalism,"
175-9; Joseph Dunner, Baruch Spinoza and
Western Democracy: An Interpretation of his Philosophical, Religious and
Political Thought (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955); and S. Paul
Karshap, Spinoza and Moral Freedom (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1987).
13. Sir Karl Popper has
made a strong case for the "totalitarian" reading of Spinoza; but see
also Edwin Curley, "Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan," in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed.
Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 315-42.
14. Cf. ch. 18:
"Every state [including the tyrannical state] must necessarily preserve
its own form, and cannot be changed without incurring the danger of utter
ruin" (279).
_________________
*) Uit Richard
A. Cohen, "Levinas on Spinoza's Misunderstading of Judaism," In:
Melvyn New, Robert Bernasconi & Richard A. Cohen (Eds.), In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the
Eighteenth Century. Lubbock, Tex.: Texas Tech University Press, 2001,
23-51, hier p. 4 - books.google.
Uit
noot 12 hierboven blijkt dus dat Dunner met zijn genoemde boek, met die van
Feuer en Karshap, te zien is als “liberale lezing” van Spinoza’s
staatsopvatting.
Hoe
merkwaardig is het dan dat hij van Feuers boek zo’n korte recensie schreef [in:
Books Abroad, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Spring,
1960), p. 185].
Dan hier
Dunner’s bespreking in Jewish Social
Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (Jan. - Apr., 1957), pp. 78-81, van
ROTH,
LEON. Spinoza. New York. Barnes and
Noble, Inc. 1955. Pp. 250.
[Over Leon Roth had ik een blog van 18-10-2013: "Leon Roth (1896 – 1963) was een groot kenner en goed uitlegger van Spinoza;" Dunner schreef:]
[Over Leon Roth had ik een blog van 18-10-2013: "Leon Roth (1896 – 1963) was een groot kenner en goed uitlegger van Spinoza;" Dunner schreef:]
When
George Eliot was engaged in writing her translation of Spinoza's works, she
wrote to her friend Charles Bray in December, 1849: "What is wanted in
English is not a translation of Spinoza's works, but a true estimate of his
life and system." In re-publishing his book on Spinoza, Professor Roth,
who has just retired from the chair of Philosophy at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem, trys to offer such a "true estimate." Rightly assuming
that Spinoza, like all great thinkers, is his own best interpreter, Roth
develops his analysis of Spinoza's central ideas from quotations of Spinoza's
works and from some of his letters to various friends, in particular, to Henry
Oldenburg, one of the secretaries of the Royal Society in London.
The
key to Spinoza's philosophy is his approach. Spinoza came to philosophy from
the problem of human conduct. While no philosopher of name has been insensible
to this problem, few have felt it as intensely as Spinoza. The Theological-Political Treatise, the only
original work published in his lifetime, was conceived in order to demonstrate
that no society could exist in the long run without political freedom. The Political Treatise, on which he was
working when he died in 1677, at the early age of 44, was an effort to show how
political government could be prevented from becoming despotic. Even the
translation of the Bible which he destroyed before his death was undertaken
because he believed that the old Hebrew wisdom was of special significance for
the right way of life. The fullest elaboration of his essentially moral
philosophy he called expressly by the name of Ethics, his posthumous and most out-standing work.
The
problem of the Ethics, how to attain
the true good for man, is linked to the epistemological problem of true knowledge
and the ontological problem of the knowledge of the unity of mind and nature.
Man is a part of nature; and if we want to understand ourselves, we must seek
to understand nature. But an understanding of the universe and its natural
divisions has been largely obstructed by the habit, of which we are rarely
aware, of interpreting everything in terms of our own needs and values. A
dispassionate, scientific approach will show us that "for instance fishes
are determined naturally to swim, and the greater to devour the less . . . that
the right of each individual thing extends exactly so far as does its
determinate power." The essence of all nature is a conatus, the striving
to persist. We may kill a poisonous snake in accordance with the laws of human
nature and for our selfpreservation. But for us to call the snake
"evil" indicates that we want the snake to serve our needs rather
than its own. If we remember that the "good" for man is that which
helps man, just as the "good" for fishes and snakes is that which helps
fishes and snakes, if, in other words, we overcome the anthropocentric tendency
to interpret the universe through categories drawn from our narrow human
experience, we shall also understand that man is not exempt from the laws which
are in force throughout the universe.
These
points expressing his methodological creed have made of Spinoza the protagonist
of modem philosophical naturalism. But Roth is right in stating: "Yet, he
is by no means a mere naturalist." Unlike Hobbes and the dialectical materialists
of the Marxist-Leninist school, Spinoza does not understand by nature
"only matter and its modifications" or "a mere mass of corporeal
substance"; and by human life he does not merely understand "the
circulation of the blood and other things common to all animals but more
especially reason and true virtue of mind." Man, a mode of eternal
attributes of an all-embracing universe, can look no further than his finite
character permits. It is, therefore, idle to pretend that we have full
knowledge of the purposes of God. Just because they are God's purposes and not
man's, they must take into account factors which to man, a finite instrument of
infinite nature, are hidden.
To
the mystic the universe is incomprehensible. He can only express his awe. To
Spinoza, the universe (God) is fundamentally rational; and human reason is a
part, although an infinitesimal part, of the infinite reason of God. Spinoza's
God is not the God of revelation but a God who is revealed. For, he says,
"it pertains to the essence of the human mind to have an adequate
knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God." Against the dualism
of Descartes and traditional religion, Spinoza asserts what Roth calls
"the unitary system of all things" and what Spinoza calls Deus sive natura (God or nature). Thus
God is not a cause outside of his creation. He is immanent, dwelling within and
impregnating all things. God is the universe. Since divine and natural forces
are one, there are no such phenomena as miracles. Something happening contrary
to nature would be something happening contrary to God, and, as Professor Roth
emphasizes, would actually afford an argument not for the existence of God but
for atheism. By rejecting the traditional concept of God's transcendence,
Spinoza is enabled to study God as "he is himself." In natura naturans (nature as creative)
Spinoza apprehends God as free cause, as process. In natura naturata (nature as created) he apprehends God as effect, as
result. The world proceeds from God in the same timeless manner as the
properties of a triangle proceed from the character of the triangle. Yet this
timeless flow reveals itself to the human mind as a temporal process. What
seems to us absurd, bad or contingent arises from defects in our knowledge,
from the fact that we are for the most part ignorant of the order of the whole
of nature, of its coherence and complete interrelationship.
A
philosophical monist who saw the world as a single, all-embracing whole,
Spinoza remained a monist in his treatment of ethical problems.
"Virtue," he boldly declared, "is nothing else than activity in
accordance with the laws of our own nature. Insofar as a thing is in harmony
with our nature, it is necessarily good." It is therefore "of very
little use to write fine things about the way in which men ought to live
without first determining the nature and strength of the emotions."
Anticipating Freud and modern psychology, Spinoza gave a philosophical sanction
to man's animal egoism, to the fact that we are determined to exist and that we
act in a given determinate manner suggested to us by external causes. While
God, understanding his own nature, is truly free, we humans are conscious of
our acts and desires but largely ignorant of the causes by which they are
determined. We follow certain ends and ideals. But these ends and ideals are so
to speak projected from behind us. Here, Roth asks the crucial question. What
sort of value is possible in a world based on man's instinct of
self-preservation? The answer which Spinoza gives is: The more we study the
sciences, the more we know, the nearer we shall be to our perfection. In
deriving morality from the striving for self-preservation, Spinoza realized
that man gains the greatest advantage from association with others of his kind.
"To the envious person," he says, "nothing is more pleasant than
the misfortune of another, and nothing more disagreeable than the prosperity of
another." The envious person is obviously at war with all others, and he
is at war with himself. Being in bondage of his passion, he is a slave,
although he may imagine that he does what he does and thinks what he thinks in
complete freedom. Nevertheless, we have no more justification in calling him or
a thief "evil" than in calling a man born blind "evil." For
to blame a person for a deficiency is absurd. This does not, as is sometimes
supposed, preclude the imposition of legal sanction; just as we kill a
poisonous snake or at least remove it from our neighborhood, although we know
that it only does what it cannot help doing.
The
essential part of the problem still remains, namely, how to persuade men of the
need of mutual assistance and a cooperative attitude. The mere intellectual
recognition of what is right and beneficial — so important to Kant — will not
do. For no amount of theory and sermons will enable us to control our emotions.
"An emotion," says Spinoza 300 years before Freud, "cannot be
restrained or removed except by an emotion contrary to and stronger than the
emotion which is to be restrained." Without the clinical knowledge that
Freud possessed, Spinoza could go no further; all he could say, was that
"to man there is nothing more useful than man"; and that "a man
who is guided by reason is freer in a state where he lives according to the
common laws than in a solitude in which he obeys himself alone." The
political consequence of this view is democracy, as this reviewer has attempted
to demonstrate in his Baruch Spinoza and
Western Democracy. Roth, though obviously aware of this development,
prefers to pursue Spinoza's approaches to the model of human nature, Spinoza's
fusion of religion and science, effected through the dissociation of our
emotions from the trivial objects of everyday life and their attachment to what
alone is "eternal." In Spinoza's words, "knowledge of God and of
ourselves," is "the principal thing" which makes us "the
most free and truly ourselves." There is no reward for right living in the
sense in which most people hope to receive a reward after death for their piety
and ethical behavior as if piety and ethical behavior were burdens that need
some special compensation.
In
summing up his evaluation of Spinoza's philosophy Roth concludes:
"Spinoza's interest in morals comes to him by inheritance. He is a
descendant of a people which, from the earliest times, had cared little for
abstract theories, everything for practical conduct; he is the product of a
literature dominated by the ideal of righteousness, of a history which is one
long appeal for justice. In spite of himself, and in spite of the Amsterdam
community, he remained in his innermost being a son of the People of the Book .
. . Brought up in the most intense and ethical of religions, Spinoza passed his
life in a great age of science. It is hence not extraordinary that his thought
should represent the blending of the ideals of the one with those of the other.
. ." Roth's Spinoza deserves a much more adequate treatment than can be
given within the framework of a conventional book review. Had the reviewer been
familiar with this book (the original edition had been out of print for several
years), he would have made good use of it in his own writings on Spinoza and
avoided a number of mistakes of which he became aware only after reading Roth's
remarkable and stimulating volume.
Grinnell
College. JOSEPH DUNNER.
Een
aardige, herkenbare uitleg. Maar waar toch die telkens terugkerende
gelijkstelling van God met het universum vandaan komt…
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