Er
blijkt een hele wereld te ontdekken over – veelal Hebreeuws schrijvende –
rabbijnen die zich met Spinoza hebben bezig gehouden. Het begon ermee dat ik
covers van Yosef Ben-Shlomo over Spinoza tegenkwam (en over Rabbi Kook).
Professor
Yosef Ben-Shlomo* teaches Jewish Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He has
published research Yosef Ben-Shlomo studies on the history of Jewish Mysticism
as well as papers on the teachings of Rabbi Moses Cordoba, Spinoza and Hermann
Cohen. For the translation of the books of Gershom Shalom, YBS was awarded the
Tchernikovsky Prize. Professor Ben-Shlomo is completing an extensive research
of the complete doctrine of Rabbi Kook. [Cf.] Van hem
verscheen, om bij dat laatste aan te sluiten:
Yosef
Ben-Shlomo, Poetry of Being: Lectures on
the Philosophy of Rabbi Kook. Jewish Lights Pub (July 1, 1997) [cf. goodreads]
Van
hem verscheen eerder ook:
Yosef
Ben-Shlomo, Lectures on the Philosophy of
Spinoza (Jewish Thought). Oorpr. Hebreeuws, 1983. English transl. by Shmuel
Himelstein. MOD Books, 1992. - 124 pp. Reprint edition Jewish Lights Pub (February 1, 1996 [cf. Spinoza Bibliografie, cf. Amazon]
Toen
ik probeerde na te gaan of Yosef Ben-Shlomo ook schreef over wat rabbijn Abraham Isaac
Kook van Spinoza vond, vond ik aanvankelijk niets, maar later kwam ik nog
tegen dat van zijn hand het volgende Hebreeuws werk verscheen Joseph
Ben-Shlomo, The Challenge of Spinoza and
Spinozism. Edited by: Dalia Tesler. Jerusalem: Carmel Publishing House,
juli 2012 (Hebreeuws) [cf.]
Zeker vermeldenswaard is nog dat hij de inleiding en noten verzorgde bij de vertaling van de KV in het Hebreeuws:
Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, translated into Hebrew by Rachel Hollander Steingardt with introduction and notes by Yosef Ben-Shlomo. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987. Dit gegeven trof ik aan in een noot van Yuval Jobani, The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza's Philosophy: The God-intoxicated Heretic [Routledge, 2016] die uit die inleiding oppikte: "at this point [the question of the good life' the Spinozian philosophy opens, at the beginning of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and it ends in the final part of the Ethics." (p. 60 noot 3, books.google)
Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, translated into Hebrew by Rachel Hollander Steingardt with introduction and notes by Yosef Ben-Shlomo. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1987. Dit gegeven trof ik aan in een noot van Yuval Jobani, The Role of Contradictions in Spinoza's Philosophy: The God-intoxicated Heretic [Routledge, 2016] die uit die inleiding oppikte: "at this point [the question of the good life' the Spinozian philosophy opens, at the beginning of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and it ends in the final part of the Ethics." (p. 60 noot 3, books.google)
Wayne Boucher schrijft hem in Spinoza In English, A Bibliography foutief toe het hoofdstuk "Spinoza's Metaphysics" in Don Garrett (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza te hebben geschreven, maar dat was van Jonathan Bennett. [cf. books.google]
Wel
schreef Yosef Ben-Shlomo nog: „Substance and Attribute in the Short Treatise and in the Ethics : An
Attempt at an "Existentialist" Interpretation.“ In: Yirmiyahu Yovel
& Gideon Segal (Eds.), God and Nature - Spinoza's Metaphysics ; Spinoza by 2000 - The Jerusalem
Conferences, Volume I. Leiden [e.a.]: E. J. Brill, 1991: 219-229. Zie verder de
Duitse Spinoza Bibliografie]
En
vervolgens vond ik dat
Richard
A. Cohen in zijn boek Out of Control:
Confrontations between Spinoza and Levinas [SUNY Press, 2016 – books.google]
een
uitgebreide paragraaf heeft over Joseph Ben-Shlomo die hij ontmoet had tijens
een conferentie die op 9 juni 1999 gehouden werd aan de Universiteit van Tel Aviv
over “Jewish Responses to Modernity: Spinoza, HaRav Kook, Levinas,” waar hij en
Yosef Benn-Shlomo onder anderen sprekers waren. Het was voor hem aanleiding het
Spinoza-boek van de laatste te bestuderen en daarvan maakte hij gebruik in dit
boek over Levinas. Ik neem die paragraaf hier over, waarbij duidelijk blijkt
dat Benn-Shlomo’s boek een kritiek op en verwerping van Spinoza’s filosofie is.
--------------------
Yosef
Ben-Shlomo
At
the conclusion of the last of his thirteen Lectures
on the Philosophy of Spinoza, Yosef Ben-Shlomo briefly presents five
oppositional "differences" between "Spinozism and . . .
monotheism of the type of Judaism, Christianity or Islam."[6]
In each case only one of the two alternatives can be correct. As with Wolfson's
list of Spinoza's four acts of daring, if Spinoza is right then Judaism is
wrong and if Judaism is right then Spinoza is wrong. In his presentation,
Ben-Shlomo refrains from making overt evaluations, but it is perfectly clear
all the same that adopting Spinoza's viewpoint is contrary to Judaism. The
first three points of difference—that Spinoza's intelligible God is without
personality, that his pantheist God is without transcendence, and that his necessary
world is without freedom[7]
—are close enough to Wolfson's four points that here I will concentrate on
Ben-Shlomo's fourth and fifth points of difference.
The
fourth has to do with ethics. Judaism conceives of ethics, he writes, in terms
of "obeying God's command, as an obligation which is imposed" on
humans. "Defiance of this obligation is regarded as non-ethical."
Spinoza in contrast, who rejects both free will and ethics, obviously has
"no such concept as an obligation." For Spinoza, whose philosophy is
based on reality, knowing what is, and not on morality, achieving what ought to
be, "there is only a striving for power, and the one who is strong is
'moral.'" In this regard, we can see that for Ben-Shlomo too Spinoza and
Nietzsche are in agreement, both being "beyond good and evil."
For
Ben-Shlomo the fifth point of difference, however, "is the most important
in the results and conclusions which stem from Judaism and which are not
included in Spinoza's philosophy." It has to do with "the importance
attached in Judaism to the factor of time in general and to historical time in
particular." "To Spinoza," Ben-Shlomo writes, "there is no
importance to history. There is importance to the state, and that is why
Spinoza has a political theory, but he has no philosophy of history."
Again we saw exactly this in the previous chapter: history has no truth; power
and hence "justice" are matters of state. Finding reality and truth
exclusively in "adequate ideas," as he conceives them, Spinoza is
interested only in the necessary; immutable, and eternal. His philosophy
presents reality, as he says, sub specie
aeternitatis. Ben-Shlomo: "Spinoza does not accept the Jewish and
Christian view that man can and must change the course of history on the road
to redemption, and thereby participate in God's plan. In this, Spinoza is
'Greek': the concept of redemption remains to him a concept of salvation that
only applies to the individual." I would add, in support of Ben-Shlomo's
comments, that we should not be misled by Spinoza's use of the term
"beatitude" to characterize what he calls "intellectual love of
God." For that matter, we should not be deceived with any of Spinoza's
appropriations of religious terminology. In truth, both "intellectual love
of God" and "beatitude," according to Spinoza's conception, mean
nothing other than a vision of complete knowledge, science, or "adequate
ideas" in their totality.[8]
There
is little doubt that Levinas would agree with the validity of all five of
Ben-Shlomo's points of critical difference from Spinoza. He would also agree, I
think, to the relative importance of the fifth difference regarding time and
history. For Levinas, Judaism is deeply committed to time and history, not
simply as historiography, however, but as a juncture of ethics and history that
Levinas, in the name of Judaism, calls "holy history." Judaism for
Levinas is precisely lived as an ethical-religious commitment not only to the
salvation of individuals alone or individually, nor only to the redemption of
the Jewish people, without disparaging the nobility of its election, but
finally and most deeply, and based in Jewish election, the mission of Judaism
is precisely its commitment to the collective redemption of all humankind.
Judaism, in its every fiber, in every nuance of its every behavior and belief,
in its very bones and sinews, as well as its pots and pans, is a commitment to
the redemption of humanity through the concrete work of morality and justice
through time and history. As such it must and can only reject Spinozism
categorically.
That
the wide chasm separating Spinozism from Judaism, as indicated by Wolfson and
Ben-Shlomo alone, makes manifest a profound, indeed an unbridgeable,
antagonism, is already evident. Such opposition to Judaism was already
sufficiently evident more than three hundred years ago in Amsterdam.
Nonetheless, it is important for us to recall the points of separation in their
specificity, as per the aforementioned, since they remain, despite the dangers
they pose for Judaism, intellectual temptations to this day. Naturalism,
pantheism, scientism, positivism, and thus Spinozism remain great temptations.
There is much in their favor, even if ultimately Spinozism fails as a
philosophy as it fails in its representation of Judaism. We must therefore
remain mindful of the differences just elaborated, which are of themselves
important, but also because taking the positions he takes in their regard
provides the philosophical background to the additional points of difference to
which we now turn, points of no lesser antagonism, though perhaps of even
greater relevance and urgency with regard to our question about Spinoza's
understanding of Judaism.
[6] All five points
are elaborated on pages 122-123, so in the following I will not document
citations.
[7]
Ben Shlomo's first three points of difference
are: First, for Judaism, based in the Bible, God is personal. "This is a
God," as Ben-Shlomo puts it, "with willpower, who demands various
things of man, gives him commandments, and one is able to worship and love Him
in a personal way." What Spinoza presents, in contrast, "is a concept
of an impersonal God," a purely rational or scientific intelligibility.
God, for Spinoza, is reality and, more deeply, the truth of reality,
"adequate ideas." He is nothing less than the systematic whole of
true ideas. Spinoza's God, therefore, neither loves nor wills. Nor, in return,
do humans serve or love Spinoza's God. Humanity's only link to the
philosophical God of Spinoza is knowledge. Indeed, true knowledge is nothing
other than the "mind" of God.
Second,
for Judaism, God creates the world in an act of free will. The Creator God is
thus separate from (though not indifferent to) the world. And the world is
separate from God. Furthermore, for Judaism, the human "soul, too, is not
part of God; it can only worship God, or even 'adhere' to Him." For
Spinoza, in contrast, God is not apart from the world or the soul, just as they
are not apart from God. This is because for Spinoza God does not freely will
creation. (Let me interject here that it is rather difficult to say positively
with any precision how, according to Spinoza, the finite world is related to
perfect intelligibility. The two best possibilities, it seems to me, though
both have their problems, are: (1) "expression" [see Deleuze], that
is, that the finite is the expression of the infinite, even though such an
approach would require an unacknowledged anthropocentrism both Spinoza and
Deleuze prefer to vacate; and (2) "actualization" [see Hallett], that
is, that the finite is the actualization of the infinite, even though making
the notions of "actuality" and "potentiality" so central
would reintroduce a metaphysics that Spinoza aimed precisely to leave behind. Be
that as it may, there is no doubt about the correctness of the second point of
difference. For Spinoza, there is no Creation in the Jewish sense).
Ben
Shlomo's third difference follows from the second. insofar as the world is
created, and hence is contingent for Judaism, it is amenable to human free
will. For Spinoza, in contrast, "God or Nature" (Deus, sive Natura) is necessary. Thus for Spinoza "there is no
place for freedom in the sense of free choice between various possibilities."
Because there is free will, Judaism regards man as responsible for his deeds
ethically." For Spinoza, "this idea is absurd."
[8]
Ben-Shlomo, for his part, prefers a mystical reading of Spinoza, whereby the
scientific and systematic character of knowledge (the ongoing research of
"knowledge of the second kind"; Kant's "understanding"),
along with its ostensive (but pre-Kantian) vision of the whole ("knowledge
of the third kind"; Kant's "reason") is interpreted as mystical
union with God. While I can see why one might be tempted by such a reading,
that is, because it makes what sense it can of a philosophy that at bottom is
incoherent, nevertheless I entirely reject it, because Spinoza, as is clear
from all his writings, wants only to be a philosopher of science, an advocate
of science and science alone, science as comprehensive totality—such for
Spinoza is the ultimate intelligibility, such is the "divine" mind,
even if critical readers of Spinoza can see that he was unsuccessful and unable
to justify such a scientistic program.
*)
N.B.: niet te verwarren met Shlomo Ben-Yosef (die Google als eerste geeft).
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