Yosef Ben-Shlomo kritisch-afstandelijk over Spinoza

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)

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).