Paul
Vernière schreef, zoals bekend, een gezaghebbende tweedelige studie over Spinoza
en diens receptie in Frankrijk vóór de Franse Revolutie:
Paul
Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française
avant la révolution. Tome premier, Le XVIIe siècle
(1663-1715). Tome second, Le XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1954
In het blog van 04-06-2014, "Spinozana op Yumpu," liet ik zien dat het eerste deel naar Yumpu was geüpload. Over
dit boek vinden we e.e.a. bij Jonathan Israel, maar ook zo ontdekte ik vandaag
in het boek van
Alan
Charles Kors, Naturalism and Unbelief in
France, 1650–1729. Cambridge University Press, 2016 – books.google.
"This is the long-awaited sequel to his classic Atheism in France, 1650-1729. [Volume I: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief. Princeton University Press, July 14, 2014]. The sequel shows how the development of atheism in 18th Century France emerged from philosophical and theological disagreements between different schools of orthodox theologians. Modern atheism, Kors argues, is largely the unintended end result of these debates. [cf.] Tegelijk verscheen van Kors bij CUP Epicureans and Atheists in France, 1650-1729 - books.google.
In
Chapter 2 of Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650–1729, "Reading the Ancients and Reading Spinoza," gaat Kors
uitgebreid in op dit boek van Vernière. De betreffende passage op de pagina’s
69 - 71 neem ik, daar ze mij zeer informatief voorkwam, hier graag over (mét de cijfers der voetnoten voor de inhoud
waarvan ik echter naar books.google verwijs):
Singular
minds attract singular inquirers, and Spinoza's qualities and complexity have
drawn so many deep scholars to the study of his ideas, his texts, his milieu,
his influences and his influence. Modern debates about the most coherent
reading, the inherent logic, or the intended meaning of Spinoza, and about his
precise relationship to prior or subsequent epistemology and ontology, reflect
philosophical and critical perspectives of great significance and rigor. My
interest here, however, is purely (or, if one insists, merely) historical, and,
within that confine, yet further limited to his relationship to the problem of
naturalism as part of the inheritance and debates of early-modern French
learned culture. Beyond those questions, there lies a vibrant world of Spinoza
scholarship.80 All who discuss Spinoza in this historical context
are deeply indebted to Paul Verniere's rich and suggestive Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution (1954), which
illuminated so many responses to Spinoza in France during the late seventeenth
and, above all, eighteenth centuries.81 Vernière well understood how
Spinoza touched (and was useful to) the debates that swirled around
Cartesianism in the late seventeenth century. For Vernière, however, much of
the Cartesians' criticism of Spinoza was purely defensive, a response to their
rivals' attempts to equate them with the Dutch philosopher.82
While
sensitive to context, Vernière's formulation perhaps missed the full confidence
of the Cartesian enterprise in the late seventeenth century. The Cartesians, in
fact, were sufficiently astute and self-assured to see all of their differences
with Spinoza, even without the presence of opponents who tried to tar them with
the brush of "Spinozism"; they attacked Spinoza directly for what
they understood as his faults, not merely to defend themselves. Indeed, they
were assertive enough to use polemically the specter of Spinoza (although the
ancients alone often sufficed for them in this regard) against their own
enemies, as their critics were doing to them.
One
must be cautious, thus, not to assign too great an historical role to Spinoza
and too small an historical agency to both the early-modern classical
inheritance and to early-modern discussions of that inheritance. For Vernière
(I do not think that I caricature his argument here, but I am sensitive to that
possibility), Spinoza's contemporaries cast about for "obscure"
ancients such as Strato through whom to denigrate a Spinoza whom they read as
atheistic. For Verniere, they played "erudite games [les jeux érudits],"
arising from an ignorance of Spinoza's "Cartesian" origins. In such a
state of ignorance, "The general error of all these érudits is to relate Spinozism to hylozoism ... For them, Spinoza
seems to defend a strange doctrine in which every living thing is matter and
all matter is animate [L’erreur générale de tous ces érudits est de ramener le
Spinozisme à l'hylozoïsme ... Spinoza semble défendre pour eux une étrange
doctrine où tout vivant est matière et toute matière animée]."83
There is an immense problem here, however: The ancients, even including Strato,
were not at all "obscure" to Spinoza's audience. Indeed, the ancients
provided the prism through which Spinoza was seen and read (explaining,
perhaps, why so many moderns are convinced that the early-moderns could not
"understand" him). Vernière, in a work of countless virtues, held a
sometimes elastic, some-times rigid view of Spinoza's perspective, labeling as
specifically "Spinozist" a very broad set of phenomena, as if, at
times, Spinoza were the ubiquitous nature
naturante of which all subsequent naturalist free-thought were but the nature naturée.84 Much of
what Vernière saw as "Spinozist" was demonstrably already in the
culture, both by common inheritance and by debates engaged or emergent before
he wrote.
Scholars
with interests in French intellectual history have produced a remarkable series
of studies on the relationship of Spinoza to specific thinkers, specific texts,
and, indeed, specific arguments.85 These works are almost always
impressive, but burdened by too awkward an empirical case. It is, to say the
least, problematic to distinguish between, on the one hand, Spinoza's
influence, and, on the other, that of a critic, or, indeed, a thinker
independently pursuing related questions, or, for that matter, a predecessor of
both Spinoza and his critics or contemporaries. Further, it is problematic to
specify "influence" when any given text itself may have been
influenced by the classics, by more recent predecessors, by Spinoza, by his
critics, and by independent contemporaries simultaneously.
Hierna
gaat Kors in op Jonathan Israel’s boek over de Radicale Verlichting.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten