Joseph Dunner (1908 – 1978) zag Spinoza als the founder of the modern philosophy of free democracy [2]

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

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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).

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*) 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:]

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…