Gilles Deleuze’s schets van leven en betekenis van Spinoza

Iemand heeft Gilles Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy [vert. uit 1988; oorspr. Spinoza - Philosophie pratique, 1970, 1981] als PDF op internet geplaatst.

Een ander heeft het eerste hoofdstuk, “Life of Spinoza”, daaruit als tekst op internet gebracht [cf.]. Ik heb deze tekst heden voor hier aangepast en breng deze in dit blog. Eigenlijk te lang voor een blogtekst, maar ik doe het toch, gewoon omdat dit nog steeds een interessant stuk is – heel anders dan hoe anderen Spinoza neerzetten.

 

Chapter One

LIFE OF SPINOZA

from Gilles Deleuze, "Life of Spinoza", ch 1 in Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, 1988, pp 3-14.

Nietzsche understood, having lived it himself, what constitutes the mystery of a philosopher's life. The philosopher appropriates the ascetic virtues – humility, poverty, chastity – and makes them serve ends completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all; in fact.[1] He makes them the expression of his singularity. They are not moral ends in his case, or religious means to another life, but rather the "effects" of philosophy itself. For there is absolutely no other life for the philosopher. Humility, poverty, and chastity become the effects of an especially rich and superabundant life, sufficiently powerful to have conquered thought and subordinated every other instinct to itself. This is what Spinoza calls Nature: a life no longer lived on the basis of need, in terms of means and ends, but according to a production, a productivity, a potency, in terms of causes and effects. Humility, poverty, chastity are his (the philosopher's) way of being a grand vivant, of making a temple of his own body, for a cause that is all too proud, all too rich, all too sensual. So that by attacking the philosopher, people know the shame of attacking a modest, poor, and chaste appearance, which increases their impotent rage tenfold; and the philosopher offers no purchase, although he takes every blow.

Here the full meaning of the philosopher's solitude becomes apparent. For he cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them. Doubtless it is in democratic and liberal milieus that he finds the best living conditions, or rather the best conditions for survival. But for him these milieus only guarantee that the malicious will not be able to poison or mutilate life, that they will not be able to separate it from the power of thinking that goes a little beyond the ends of the state, of a society, beyond any milieu in general. In every society, Spinoza will show, it is a matter of obeying and of nothing else. This is why the notions of fault, of merit and demerit, of good and evil, are exclusively social, having to do with obedience and disobedience. The best society, then, will be one that exempts the power of thinking from the obligation to obey, and takes care, in its own interest, not to subject thought to the rule of the state, which only applies to actions. As long as thought is free, hence vital, nothing is compromised. When it ceases being so, all the other oppressions are also possible, and already realized, so that any action becomes culpable, every life threatened. It is certain that the philosopher finds the most favorable conditions in the democratic state and in liberal circles. But he never confuses his purposes with those of a state, or with the aims of a milieu, since he solicits forces in thought that elude obedience as well as blame, and fashions the image of a life beyond good and evil, a rigorous innocence without merit or culpability. The philosopher can reside in various states, he can frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveler or boarding house lodger. That is why one should not imagine Spinoza breaking with a supposedly closed Jewish milieu in order to en­ter supposedly open liberal ones: liberal Christianity, Cartesianism, a bourgeoisie favorable to the De Witt brothers, and so on. For, wherever he goes he only asks, demands, with a greater or smaller chance of success, to be tolerated, himself and his un­common aims, and from this tolerance he judges concerning the degree of democracy, the degree of truth, which a society can bear, or on the contrary, concerning the danger that threatens all men.

Baruch Spinoza is born in 1632 in the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, into a family of well-to-do merchants of Spanish or Portuguese extraction. At the Jewish school he studies theology and commerce. From the age of thirteen he works in his father's business firm while he pursues his studies (on the death of his father in 1654 he will manage the business with his brother, un­til 1656). How does the slow philosophical conversion come about that causes him to break with the Jewish community, with business, and brings him to the excommunication of 1656? We should not imagine that the Amsterdam community is homo­geneous during this period; it has as much diversity, as many in­terests and ideologies as the Christian milieus. For the most part it is made up of former "marranos," that is, of Jews who out­wardly practiced Catholicism in Spain and Portugal, and who were obliged to emigrate at the end of the sixteenth century. Even those sincerely attached to their Jewish faith are imbued with a philosophical, scientific, and medical culture that cannot easily be reconciled with the traditional rabbinical Judaism. Spi­noza's father is apparently a skeptic himself, who nevertheless plays an important role in the synagogue and the Jewish commu­nity. In Amsterdam some go so far as to question, not merely the role of the rabbis and tradition, but the meaning of the Scrip­ture itself: Uriel da Costa will be condemned in 1647 for deny­ing the immortality of the soul and revealed law, recognizing natural law alone; and, more important, Juan de Prado will be made to repent in 1656, then excommunicated, accused of hav­ing held that the soul dies with the body, that God only exists philosophically speaking, and that faith is unavailing.[2] Recently published documents testify to Spinoza's close ties with Prado; one may suppose that the two cases were linked together. If Spi­noza was judged more severely, excommunicated as early as 1656, this was because he refused to repent and sought the break himself. The rabbis, as in many other cases, seem to have hoped for an accommodation. But instead of repenting, Spinoza wrote an Apology to Justify His Leaving the Synagogue, or at least a rough draft of the future Theological-Political Treatise. The fact that Spinoza was born in Amsterdam itself, a child of the com­munity, must have made his case worse.

Life becomes difficult for him in Amsterdam. Perhaps following an assassination attempt by a fanatic, he goes to Leyden in order to continue his philosophical studies, and installs himself in the suburb of Rijnsburg. It is said that Spinoza kept his coat with a hole pierced by a knife thrust as a reminder that thought is not always loved by men. While it sometimes happens that a philosopher ends up on trial, rarely does a philosopher begin with an excommunication and an attempt on his life.

Hence one fails to consider the diversity of the Jewish commu­nity, and the destiny of a philosopher, when one believes that liberal Christian influences must be invoked to explain Spinoza's break, as if it were due to external causes. Already in Amster­dam no doubt, and while his father was alive, he had followed courses at the school of Van den Ende, which was attended by many young Jews who learned Latin in it, along with the rudi­ments of Cartesian philosophy and science, mathematics and physics. A former Jesuit, Francis Van den Ende quickly acquired the reputation of being not only a Cartesian but also a freethink­er and an atheist, and even a political agitator (he was to be ex­ecuted in France, in 1674, following the revolt of the chevalier de Rohan).[3] No doubt Spinoza also frequented liberal and anti­-clerical Christians, Collegiants and Mennonites, who were in­spired by a certain pantheism and a pacifist communism. He would encounter them again at Rijnsburg, which was one of their centers: he becomes friends with Jarig Jelles, Pieter Ball­ing, Simon de Vries, and the "progressive" bookseller and pub­lisher Jan Rieuwertz (a letter from Spinoza to Oldenburg, in 1655, evokes the pacifism, and the communitarian theme ap­pears in a letter to Jelles, in 1671). However, it seems that Van den Ende remained attached to a form of Catholicism, despite the difficulties of that religion in Holland. As for the philosophy of the Mennonites and Collegiants, it is completely surpassed by that of Spinoza, in religious criticism as well as ethical concep­tion and political concerns. Instead of thinking of an influence by the Mennonites or even the Cartesians, one can think that Spinoza was naturally drawn to the most tolerant circles, those most apt to welcome an excommunicated Jew who rejected Christianity no less than the Judaism into which he was born, and owed his break with the latter to himself alone.

Among its many meanings, Jewish excommunication had a meaning that was political and economic. It was a rather fre­quently applied, and often irreversible, measure. Deprived of the power of a state, the notables of the community had no other sanction for punishing those who refused financial contribu­tions or even political orthodoxies. The Jewish notables, like those of the Calvinist party, had kept intact a hatred of Spain and Portugal, were politically attached to the House of Orange, and had interests in the India companies (Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, one of Spinoza's professors, himself came close to being excommunicated in 1640 for criticizing the East India Company; and the members of the council that judged Spinoza were Orangist, pro-Calvinist, anti-Hispanic, and for the most part, shareholders in the Company). Spinoza's ties with the liberals, his sympathies for the republican party of Jan de Witt, which called for the dissolution of the great monopolies–all this made Spinoza a rebel. In any case, Spinoza broke not only with the re­ligious milieu but with the economic milieu at the same time. Abandoning the family business, he learned lensmaking, he be­came a craftsman, a philosopher craftsman equipped with a manual trade, capable of grasping and working with the laws of optics. He also began to draw; his early biographer Colerus re­lates that he drew himself in the attitude and costume of the Neapolitan revolutionary Masaniello.[4]

At Rijnsburg, Spinoza gives his friends an exposition, in Latin, of the work that will become the Short Treatise. They take notes; Jelles translates into Dutch; perhaps Spinoza dictates certain texts that he has written previously. In about 1661, he composes the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, which opens with a kind of spiritual itinerary, in the Mennonite manner, centered on a denunciation of wealth. This treatise, a splendid exposition of Spinoza's method, will remain unfinished. Around 1663, for a young man who lived with him and who both gave him hopes and irritated him a good deal, he presents The Principles of Des­cartes' Philosophy, supplemented by a critical examination of scholastic notions (Metaphysical Thoughts). Rieuwertz publishes the book; Jelles finances it; Balling will translate it into Dutch. Lewis Meyer, physician, poet, organizer of a new theater in Am­sterdam, writes the preface. With the Principles, the "professori­al" work of Spinoza comes to an end. Few thinkers avoid the brief temptation to become professors of their own discoveries, the seminar temptation of a private spiritual training. But Spino­za's planning and commencement of the Ethics, as early as 1661, transport him to another dimension, a different element which, as we shall see, no longer can be that of an "exposition," even a methodological one. Perhaps it is for this reason that Spinoza leaves the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect unfinished, and despite his later intentions does not manage to resume it.[5] One should not think that in his quasi-professorial period Spinoza was ever a Cartesian. The Short Treatise already exhibits a way of thinking that uses Cartesianism as a means, not to eliminate, but to purify all of scholasticism, Jewish thought, and Renaissance philosophy, in order to extract from them something profound­ly new which belongs only to Spinoza. The complex relationship between the exposition of the Principles and the Metaphysical Thoughts gives evidence of this double game in which Cartesian­ism is handled like a sieve, but in such a way that a new and pro­digious scholasticism emerges which no longer has anything to do with the old philosophy, nor with Cartesianism either. Cartesianism was never the thinking of Spinoza; it was more like his rhetoric; he uses it as the rhetoric he needs. But all this will re­ceive its definitive form only in the Ethics.

In 1663, Spinoza moves to Voorburg, a suburb of The Hague. He will later establish himself in the capital. What de­fines Spinoza as a traveler is not the distances he covers but rather his inclination to stay in boarding houses, his lack of attach­ment, of possessions and property, after his renunciation of the paternal inheritance. He continues to work on the Ethics. As ear­ly as 1661 the letters of Spinoza and his friends show that the latter are acquainted with the themes of the first book, and in 1663 Simon de Vries mentions a study group whose members read and discuss the texts sent by Spinoza. But at the same time that he confides in a group of friends, he asks them to keep his ideas secret, to be careful of strangers, as he himself will be, even with respect to Leibniz in 1675. The reason for his settling near The Hague is probably political: nearness to the capital is neces­sary if he is to draw close to the active liberal circles and escape the political indifference of the Collegiant group. As to the two major parties, Calvinist and republican, the situation is as follows: the first remains committed to the themes of the struggle for independence, to a politics of war, to the ambitions of the House of Orange, to the formation of a centralized state; and the second, to a politics of peace, a provincial organization, and the development of a liberal economy. To the impassioned and bellicose behavior of the monarchy, Jan de Witt opposes the ra­tional behavior of a republic guided by a natural and geometric method. Now, the mystery seems to be this: the people remain faithful to Calvinism and the House of Orange, to intolerance and warmongering. Since 1653, Jan de Witt is the Grand Pen­sionary of Holland. But the republic nevertheless remains a re­public by surprise and by accident, more for the lack of a king than by preference, and it is poorly accepted by the people. When Spinoza speaks of the harmfulness of revolutions, one must bear in mind that revolution is thought of in terms of the disappointments that Cromwell's revolution inspired, or the anxieties caused by a possible coup d'état by the House of Or­ange. During this period "revolutionary" ideology is permeated with theology and is often, as with the Calvinist party, in the ser­vice of a politics of reaction.

So it is not surprising that Spinoza, in 1665, temporarily sus­pends work on the Ethics and starts writing the Theological-Politi­cal Treatise, which will be concerned with the questions: Why are the people so deeply irrational? Why are they proud of their own enslavement? Why do they fight "for" their bondage as if it were their freedom? Why is it so difficult not only to win but to bear freedom? Why does a religion that invokes love and joy inspire war, intolerance, hatred, malevolence, and remorse? In 1670 the Theological-Political Treatise appears, without an author's name and credited to a fictitious German publisher. But the au­thor is soon identified; few books occasioned as many refuta­tions, anathemas, insults, and maledictions: Jews, Catholics, Calvinists, and Lutherans–all the right-thinking circles, includ­ing the Cartesians themselves–competed with one another in denouncing it. It was then that the words "Spinozism" and "Spi­nozist" became insults and threats. And even the critics of Spi­noza who were suspected of not being harsh enough were denounced. Doubtless among these critics there were some em­barrassed liberals and Cartesians who nonetheless gave proof of their orthodoxy by participating in the attack. An explosive book always keeps its explosive charge: one still cannot read the Treatise without discovering in it philosophy's function as a radi­cal enterprise of demystification, or as a science of "effects." A recent commentator is able to say that the true originality of the Treatise is in its considering religion as an effect.[6] Not only in the causal sense but also in an optical sense, an effect whose process of production will be sought by connecting it to its necessary ra­tional causes as they affect men who do not understand them (for example, the way in which natural laws are necessarily per­ceived as "signs" by those who have a strong imagination and a weak understanding). Even when dealing with religion, Spinoza polishes glasses that reveal the effect produced and the laws of its production.

It is his ties with the republican party, and perhaps the protec­tion of De Witt, that save Spinoza from a more specific kind of worry. (As early as 1669, Koerbagh, the author of a philosophi­cal dictionary denounced for its Spinozist leanings, had been ar­rested and had died in prison.) But Spinoza has to leave the suburb, where his life is made difficult by the pastors, and take up residence in The Hague. And, above all, this is at the cost of silence. The Netherlands are at war. After the De Witt brothers are assassinated, in 1672, and the Orangist party has returned to power, there can no longer be any question for Spinoza of pub­lishing the Ethics; a brief attempt in Amsterdam, in 1675, easily convinces him to give up the idea. "Certain theologians took the occasion to complain of me before the prince and magistrates; moreover, the stupid Cartesians, being suspected of favoring me, endeavored to remove the aspersion by abusing everywhere my opinions and writings, a course which they still pursue."[7] For Spinoza, there is no question of leaving the country. But he is more and more alone and ill. The only milieu in which he might have lived in peace fails him. Yet he receives visits by enlightened men who want to know the Ethics, even if this means join­ing with its critics subsequently, or even denying that these visits were paid to him (as in the case of Leibniz in 1676). The profes­sorship of philosophy at Heidelberg, which the Elector Palatine offers him in 1673, does not tempt him: Spinoza belongs to that line of "private thinkers" who overturn values and construct their philosophy with hammer blows; he is not one of the "pub­lic professors" (who, according to Leibniz's approving words, do not disturb the established sentiments, the order of Morality and the Police). "Since it has never been my wish to teach in public, I have been unable to induce myself to accept this splendid oppor­tunity, though I have long deliberated about it."[8] Spinoza's thinking is now taken up with the most recent problems: What are the chances for a commercial aristocracy? Why has the liber­al republic foundered? Is it possible to change the multitude into a collectivity of free men instead of a gathering of slaves? All these questions animate the Political Treatise, which is left unfin­ished, symbolically, at the beginning of the chapter on democracy. In February of 1677, Spinoza dies, probably of a pulmo­nary disease, in the presence of his friend Meyer, who takes pos­session of the manuscripts. By the end of the year, the Opera posthuma are published at the expense of an anonymous donor.

This frugal, propertyless life, undermined by illness, this thin, frail body, this brown, oval face with its sparkling black eyes­–how does one explain the impression they give of being suffused with Life itself, of having a power identical to Life? In his whole way of living and of thinking, Spinoza projects an image of the positive, affirmative life, which stands in opposition to the sem­blances that men are content with. Not only are they content with the latter, they feel a hatred of life, they are ashamed of it; a humanity bent on self-destruction, multiplying the cults of death, bringing about the union of the tyrant and the slave, the priest, the judge, and the soldier, always busy running life into the ground, mutilating it, killing it outright or by degrees, over­laying it or suffocating it with laws, properties, duties, em­pires–this is what Spinoza diagnoses in the world, this betrayal of the universe and of mankind. His biographer Colerus reports that he was fond of spider fights: "He looked for some spiders, and made them fight together, or he threw some flies into the cobweb, and was so well-pleased with that battle, that he would sometimes break into laughter."[9] Animals at least teach us the irreducibly external character of death. They do not carry it within, although they necessarily bring it to each other: an inevi­table bad encounter in the order of natural existences. But they have not yet invented that internal death, the universal sadomasochism of the tyrant-slave. In the reproach that Hegel will make to Spinoza, that he ignored the negative and its power, lies the glory and innocence of Spinoza, his own discovery. In a world consumed by the negative, he has enough confidence in life, in the power of life, to challenge death, the murderous ap­petite of men, the rules of good and evil, of the just and the un­just. Enough confidence in life to denounce all the phantoms of the negative. Excommunication, war, tyranny, reaction, men who fight for their enslavement as if it were their freedom–this forms the world in which Spinoza lives. The assassination of the De Witt brothers is exemplary for him. Ultimi barbarorum. In his view, all the ways of humiliating and breaking life, all the forms of the negative have two sources, one turned outward and the other inward, resentment and bad conscience, hatred and guilt. "The two archenemies of the human race, Hatred and Re­morse."[10] He denounces these sources again and again as being linked to man's consciousness, as being inexhaustible until there is a new consciousness, a new vision, a new appetite for living. Spinoza feels, experiences, that he is eternal.

In Spinoza's thought, life is not an idea, a matter of theory. It is a way of being, one and the same eternal mode in all its attri­butes. And it is only from this perspective that the geometric method is fully comprehensible. In the Ethics, it is in opposition to what Spinoza calls satire; and satire is everything that takes pleasure in the powerlessness and distress of men, everything that feeds on accusations, on malice, on belittlement, on low in­terpretations, everything that breaks men's spirits (the tyrant needs broken spirits, just as broken spirits need a tyrant). The geometric method ceases to be a method of intellectual exposi­tion; it is no longer a means of professorial presentation but rather a method of invention. It becomes a method of vital and optical rectification. If man is somehow distorted, this torsion effect will be rectified by connecting it to its causes more geome­trico. This optical geometry traverses the entire Ethics. People have asked whether the Ethics should be read in terms of thought or in terms of power (for example, are the attributes powers or concepts?). Actually, there is only one term, Life, that encompasses thought, but conversely this term is encompassed only by thought. Not that life is in thinking, but only the thinker has a potent life, free of guilt and hatred; and only life explains the thinker. The geometric method, the profession of polishing lenses, and the life of Spinoza should be understood as constitut­ing a whole. For Spinoza is one of the vivants-voyants. He ex­presses this precisely when he says that demonstrations are "the eyes of the mind."[11] He is referring to the third eye, which en­ables one to see life beyond all false appearances, passions, and deaths. The virtues–humility, poverty, chastity, frugality–are required for this kind of vision, no longer as virtues that muti­late life, but as powers that penetrate it and become one with it. Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy, and in vision. He let others live, provided that others let him live. He wanted only to inspire, to waken, to reveal. The purpose of demonstration functioning as the third eye is not to command or even to convince, but only to shape the glass or po­lish the lens for this inspired free vision. "You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grind­ing lenses. It' s all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we're all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is. ..." (Henry Miller).

 

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[1] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III.

[2] Cf. I. S. Révah, Spinoza et Juan de Prado, Mouton, 1959

[3] The novel by Eugène Sue, Lautréamont, depicts Van den Ende in his activities as a democratic conspirator.

[4] An engraving preserved in Amsterdam (Print Collection of the Rijksmuseum) is thought to be a reproduction of this portrait.

[5] The most precise reason for the abandonment of this treatise is to be sought in the theory of the "common notions" as it appears in the Ethics, a theory that makes some arguments of the Treatise inoperative or unnecessary.

[6] Cf. J.-P. Osier, preface to L'Essence du christianisme by Feuerbach, "Ou Spinoza ou Feuerbach," Maspero, Paris.

[7] Letter LXVIII, to Oldenburg.

[8] Letter XLVIII, to Fabritius. On the Spinozan conception of teaching, cf. the Political Treatise, chap. VIII, 49. "Everyone who asked permis­sion would be allowed to teach openly, at his own expense, and at the risk of his reputation. ..."    

[9] This anecdote appears authentic because it has many Spinozan resonances. Spider fights, or spider-fly fights, could have fascinated Spino­za for several reasons: 1. from the standpoint of the exteriority of necessary death; 2. from the standpoint of the composition of relations in nature (how the web expresses a relationship of the spider with the world, one which appropriates, as such, relations peculiar to the fly); 3. from the standpoint of the relativity of perfections (how a state that marks an imperfection of man, e.g., warfare, can on the contrary testify to a perfection if it is related to a different essence such as that of in­ sects: cf. Letter XIX to Blyenbergh).

[10] Short Treatise, first dialogue.

[11] Theological-Political Treatise, chap. 13; Ethics, V, 23, scholium.

 

 Toevoeging zelfde dag:
“Een wel merkwaardig soort inleiding op Spinoza's denken vormt het boekje van Gilles Deleuze over Spinoza [Deleuze G., Spinoza (SUP-Philosophes). Paris, Presses Univ. de France, 1970]. Het geeft niet de traditionele “globale” uiteenzetting over Spinoza's leven en werk, maar wekt interesse op voor Spinoza door het eigen-aardige van zijn leven en denken in het licht te stellen aan de hand van enige van zijn „revolutionäre" Stellingen; Spinoza wordt hier (enigszins eenzijdig maar toch boeiend) voorgesteld als de „ware" materialist, amoralist en atheist. Zols opgemerkt bevat dit werkje tevens een interessant werkinstrument in de vorm van een verklarende index van Spinozistische koncepten.”

H. DE DIJN, KRONIEK VAN DE SPINOZA-LITERATUUR 1960-1970. In: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 34ste Jaarg., Nr. 1 (MAART 1972), pp. 130-139