Dossier “interpreteren van 1/17s” - 5. Yuval Jobani ziet het als Spinoza’s bewuste contradicties

De zoektocht naar Spinoza’s  - zoals ik het zie –  aan het hoofd-axioma wat betreft de relatie oorzaak-effect tegengestelde axioma, n.l. “what is caused differs from its cause precisely in what it has from the cause,” bracht me bij Yuval Jobani die een heel (duur €135,70) boek heeft gewijd aan de - niet schijnbare paradoxen, maar – zijns inziens ware contradicties in Spinoza’s filosofie:

Yuval Jobani, The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza's Philosophy: The God-intoxicated heretic. Routledge, 2016 – books.google

Eerst had ik een blog van 12-09-2015 over Yuval Jobani, getiteld “Nu nog steeds ondervindt Spinoza zijn bestrijders.” Maar ik kon mijzelf tegenspreken in mijn blog van 26-09-2016: “Yuval Jobani over the towering figure of Spinoza.” In dat blog geef ik de hoofdstukken van zijn boek.

Vandaag bracht google mij in mijn zoektocht weer bij zijn boek, en wel bij de § The second contradiction in the application of the axiom of causality to God: the contradiction between immanence and transcendence. Het gedeelte dat books.google mag laten lezen, gaat juist over deze twee geheel verschillende oorzaak-gevolg axioma's en met name over wat 1/17s te lezen geeft: “For what is caused differs from its cause precisely in wat it has from the cause."  Het is teveel om allemaal naar hier te halen (zonder het auteursrecht te schenden – wat ik wellicht al wel doe met de concluderende paragraaf). Ik raad u aan die tekst aldaar te lezen. Ik neem hier alleen deze tussentijdse conclusie over

The status of contradiction in Spinoza's philosophy:
an initial discussion

Regarding the orders of magnitude of cause and effect, as well as regarding the relations between cause and effect in the context of the relation between God and what follows from him, we discovered that by connecting Spinoza's different assertions we are faced with two groups of inconsistent claims. Yet it is important to note that this is not a matter of a random bundle of incoherent claims. In fact, in the two instances Spinoza's group of claims split into two well-distinguished sub-groups, each of which maintained consistency among its different elements while each one clashed head-on with the other. The first affirmed a specific claim and the second negated that very claim. In the matter of finiteness and infiniteness we found, on the one hand, a group of claims positing that the order of magnitude of the cause (God) must be equal to that of the effect (what follows from God); on the other hand, we found a group of claims positing that the order of magnitude of the cause (God) must be the opposite of that of the effect (what follows from God). In the matter of immanence and transcendence we found, on the one hand, a group of claims positing that each thing found in the cause (God) is also found in the effect (what follows from God); on the other hand, we found a group of claims positing that there is nothing in the cause (God) that also appears in the effect (what follows from God).

If, moving forward, we find that other issues in Spinoza's philosophy are dealt with in a similarly contradictory fashion to that of the subject of causality, the inescapable conclusion will be that Spinoza's philosophy is none other than the philosophy of contradiction. In other words, it is a unique philosophy in that when one gathers together the various claims scattered throughout the text on a particular philosophical issue, it turns out those claims can be assembled as two opposite poles that exclude one another logically. Obviously, we cannot be satisfied with a philosophy structured according to the geometrical method but replete with what can be called "consistent inconsistency," i.e., the consistent appearance of a contradiction every time Spinoza delves to the depths of a philosophical issue. It is still too early to determine the intent and meaning of contradiction in Spinoza's philosophy; however, two possible explanations should be rejected out of hand:

a. Perplexed as we might be by the contradictions that we illuminated in our study, we should not blame our own lack of understanding and suggest that Spinoza's conception of causality is sound yet beyond our ability to grasp. We would then be turning the Ethics into a holy text and ourselves into pseudo-theologians who enslave "reason, the greatest gift and the divine light, to dead letters [mortuis literis]" (TTP, XV, p. 188 [182], translation slightly altered); indeed, there was no philosopher in the history of Western thought who opposed the consecration of texts, canonical though they may be, more than Spinoza.

b. It is not possible to rid ourselves of the problem of inconsistency in Spinoza's conception of causality by claiming the matter to be merely a local deficiency that does not extend to the entirety of the systematic structure. As causality is the organizing principle of existence in that existence is a cause of itself, the deficiency cannot but affect the entire philosophical system.

The fact that we find within the same text two conceptions of causality that exclude one another and that apply to existence in its entirety, that is to say to God, testifies that the philosophy being conducted in the Ethics has two masks. Behind one of them, Spinoza attempts to raise a partition between God and the things that follow from him, and behind the other he is occupied with completely shattering that very partition. In other words, Spinoza's philosophy appears before us simultaneously as a philosophy of transcendence and as a philosophy of immanence.