Henry M. Rosenthal (1906 - 1977) wat hij schreef over de Ethica “did not fit the recognized niches.” - #spinoza

Het eerste blog dat ik schreef over Henry M. Rosenthal (1906 - 1977) gaf ik als titel mee een passage uit de korte obituary van zijn dochter Abigail L. Rosenthal, waarin ze het manuscript waaraan haar vader voor zijn overlijden werkte, omschreef als: “an original and emancipated religio-philosophic meditation.”

Abigail L. Rosenthal bracht haar prachtig geschreven inleiding op het boek van haar vader op haar pagina bij academia.edu. In een boek dat twee jaar eerder uitkwam - en waarvoor zij een Pulitzer Prize nominatie ontving, wat wel aanduidt dat ze goed kan schrijven – vertelt ze een verhaal over haar leven, waarin ook haar redigeerwerk aan dit boek meermalen aan de orde komt. Ik ontleen er opnieuw de titel van mijn blog aan. In het eerste blog schreef ik al dat mij opviel dat dit boek – voor zover ik kon nagaan - nergens in de secundaire Spinozaliteratuur besproken wordt of zelfs maar in bibliografieën wordt genoemd. Die collega’s van Abigail L. Rosenthal hadden al goed aangevoeld: het “did not fit the recognized niches.”

Welnu, in het laatste hoofdstuk, Chapter NINE, “God and the Care for One’s Story,” van haar

Abigail L. Rosenthal, A Good Look at Evil [Temple Univ Press, 1987; reprint Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2018 – books.google]

vertelt ze een aantal ervaringen die ze opdeed in haar leven en die haar de indruk gaven dat God de co-Autor van haar levensverhaal is. Dat probeert ze aan haar lezers over te brengen. Ze vertelt over moeilijkheden die ze ondervond om serieus genomen te worden in haar eerste banen bij de universiteit; hoe ze meermaals ontslagen werd; hoe ze het gevoel had dat ze door een soort figuren (engelen?) begeleid werd. Op een keer kwam bij een volgeboekte studiebijeenkomst een gerenommeerd spreker die het zou hebben over Spinoza niet opdagen. De oudst aanwezige hoogleraar vond dat de aanwezigen dan maar naar huis moesten worden gestuurd, maar daar was een bestuurder het niet mee eens die vond dat iemand van de Filosofieafdeling de spreker moest vervangen.

Zij nam die uitdaging aan en gaf spontaan een kort college over Spinoza. Mij gaat het hier over wat ze vanaf p. 264 over haar werk aan het boek van haar vader schrijft (om die passages te laten opvallen, zet ik ze vet).

My father had died midway in the years of my grievance. While I struggled to regain professional footing, his last manuscript lay unattended. In the first years after his death, several people with expertise in the business let me know that his work did not fit the recognized niches. With this advice came a flurry of gentle "Freudian" hints: my "filial piety" might be a mere deposit from the Oedipal abyss that reportedly lies far beneath the surface of consciousness. "Your career dictates that you look to personal interest. Your psychological health tells you that life is for the living! Say yes to life!" Having heard all that, there was another note I could hear, though my advisors did not hear it.

My father had been one of the few interesting, truthful, and original men I had known in my life. His unspoken expectation that I would edit his final work and get it published had, for me, the force of a deathbed promise. My honor was bound up in it. That was the reason I would ask to teach Modern Philosophy whenever the Department offered it.

Such was the background when the distinguished speaker failed to show up for a widely-attended lecture on Spinoza and circumstances combined to drag me forward in his stead. In that context, for me to have supposed that my standing on the stage to vindicate filial piety and give the Spinoza speech before the upswept faces of the whole College was a coincidence, would have felt like sheer—almost unimaginable—obtuseness.

So much for my attitude. But what permits me rationally to assume that there is a Person called God who co-authors such stories, or somehow lives them through, along with their human actors? I do suppose that the Bible is right, in that it begins with this assumption. This is why it is still read round the world. Not just because it may be taken to support this or that creed or tradition, but because real life is still like that.

[…]

In the persistent attempt to live what I here termed "the argument," a plotline emerges, and we are not found to be its only authors. There are hinges on which the plot turns, and I could not have thought of them. The College's decisions to deny my applications for promotion were defensible. In the seven years of grievance, I had done no significant published work and the deciders were not about to share the responsibility for that. Nobody much cared whether I persisted in the project of editing and writing an introduction for my father's book, though it was later published and well received. There was no discernible link between the long job struggle, the seemingly thankless filial effort, and the asymptotically-receding academic promotion. I had no power to make our speaker miss his lecture and zero desire to fill in for him. All I could see was that our department had to accede to the wishes of the Provost, and—for unrelated reasons—I had just come from teaching a class on Spinoza.

What I could never have imagined or foreseen was that all these threads would be woven together to compose a single story. Here are some of its enrichments. While speaking, I had the pleasure of explaining (to any former adversaries who might have wondered how I did it) Spinoza's recipe for avoiding resentment. Insofar as the talk had merit, I also had the opportunity to show that my firing had likely not been deserved. A student said to me later, "when you spoke about Spinoza, it was like you were speaking about your brother. Your brotha," she repeated, in the plainest accents of the Big City.

Meanwhile, my decision to take more time out from my own, long-frustrated work to prepare for the publication of my father's posthumous book, (which I had been advised to regard as irrelevant to any ambitions of my own), turned out to be the very thing that hastened my invitation to step up the academic staircase.

What kind of design features are we seeing here? Compare an analogous case from nature. We know that the typical one-celled organism is not a microscopic blob, but rather a composite of many distinct functions that combine with each other in "nested hierarchies." The simpler components do not explain the operations achieved at the interactive level, but rather the reverse is true. The higher-order relations explain why the parts are disposed as they are, while there is nothing in the parts taken separately that explains their functional integration within the whole. The same goes for the components of this particular Annual Lecture. They worked together with precision to effect the plotline of the whole narrative, but the components did not explain the plotline.

Het thema van haar verhaal (dat een persoonlijke God de co-Author is van je levensverhaal) laat ik uiteraard rusten.

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Een 'coïncidentie'

Nadat ik het vorige geschreven had ontdekte ik zojuist – toen ik eens ging kijken naar wat Abigail L. Rosenthal eventueel over Spinoza had op haar blog - dat ze bovenstaand verhaal uit haar 1989-boek juist een paar dagen geleden, op 3 juli 2018 om precies te zijn, nog eens vertelde in haar recentste blog getiteld Sacrificial Acts. Een coïncidentie, waarin zij de voorzienige hand van haar persoonlijke God zou zien, en ik de deterministische 'hand' van de Spinozistische God.