Steven B. Smith ziet Spinoza in eerste instantie als jood - #Spinoza

Boeken van Steven B. Smith

In het vorige blog bracht ik een citaat van Michael S. Kochin uit diens review van Steven B. Smith’s Spinoza's Book of Life de Ethica. Ik verwijs hier ook nog naar het review van Robert Leventhal, "The Paradoxes of Spinoza's Ethics and the Ethics of Reading" [in: H-Net Reviews. February, 2005].  
In dit blog wil ik wat meer informatie over Smith en enige van zijn boeken brengen. Over hem: zie zijn pagina bij zijn Yale University en en.wikipedia.
Om de titel te onderbouwen: zo noemde hij in zijn Spinoza's Book of Life de Ethica "a profoundly Jewish book." [p. 29] Nancy Levine die in haar review van dit boek hierop wijst, zegt dat Smith “makes a direct claim that Spinoza's work is intrinsically Jewish.” [1]

Justin Steinberg legt in zijn review een ander accent: “The aim of Steven B. Smith's Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics is to present the Ethics 'as a work of practical philosophy' (p. xiii). While it might seem odd that one would need to stress the practical character of a work entitled the Ethics, Smith is right to suggest that this has been under-emphasized in the literature. This makes Smith's work a salutary contribution to existing scholarship; and while he attributes to Spinoza a number of positions and concerns that seem to run counter to the letter of the Ethics, this book makes a provocative read, even when unconvincing.” Smith hangt een niet-naturalistische interpretatie van Spinoza aan. “Smith closes this chapter [Two] by considering the question of whether Spinoza can admit any sense of teleology into his mechanistic, deterministic worldview. While there is a fair amount of good scholarship that supports Smith's view that Spinoza does allow for human purposiveness, Smith eschews the careful arguments of Ed Curley, Don Garrett and Michael Della Rocca, relying instead almost exclusively on the fact that Spinoza's explicates his account of motivation in teleological terms. More troubling than the lack of support for his reading is that Smith seems to think that by introducing teleology, Spinoza is breaking with his naturalism, a move that Smith applauds, since 'a consistent naturalism would rule out of bounds moral concepts like freedom, choice, guilt and responsibility' (p. 60). This jars with Spinoza's explicit denial that humans constitute an imperium in imperio, a dominion within a dominion (Ethics III preface). If Smith is right, then, we must forsake what is generally considered a central feature of Spinoza's worldview.”

Steinberg sluit zijn bespreking aldus af: Spinoza's Book of Life is an extremely ambitious book, offering a highly original interpretation of the Ethics, which would have 'responsibility', 'choice' and 'individuality' among its central concerns. In making the case for this new Spinoza, Smith pays little need to current interpretations, embodying the very anti-establishment spirit that he attributes to Spinoza. While this is somewhat refreshing, in the end one is left to wonder whether a bit more contact with the orthodoxy would have made for a more faithful Spinoza. [2]
Grappig is dus dat Steinberg de interpretaties van Ed Curley, Don Garrett en Michael Della Rocca tot de orthodoxie van het secundaire Spinozisme rekent – ook het Spinozisme kent kennelijk een orthodoxie en dan dus ook ketterse interpretaties...  Justin Steinberg ziet Steven B. Smith als zo'n heretic.

Directe aanleiding voor dit blog is de paperbackuitgave van zijn laatste werk die onlangs verscheen:
Steven B. Smith, Modernity and Its Discontents. Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois From Machiavelli to Bellow [Yale University Press, 2016 – books.google].
Daarin luidt de titel van Chapter 5: "What Kind of Jew Was Spinoza? p. 88-108

Abstract: Modernity is inseparable from what has been called the “Jewish Question.” Baruch Spinoza was the first writer to make Judaism central to modern politics. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise helped to launch the Enlightenment’s war on religion—what Voltaire would later describe as écrasez l’infâme—while at the same time hoping to place toleration at the core of his philosophy. He undermined the beliefs of traditional Judaism, especially the belief in the chosenness of the Jewish people, while advocating a state that was neutral to and therefore accepting of both Christians and Jews. He exemplifies the modern paradox of espousing a radical critique of traditional religion while teaching complete freedom of belief and opinion. Spinoza created a new type of Jew that is central to modernity: the liberal or secular Jew. [Cf.]

De Los Angeles Review of Books had op 14 mei 2017 een uitgebreid en informatief review door Aurelian Craiutu van dit laatste boek van Smith.

Over het eerste boek over Spinoza van Steven B. Smith, Spinoza: Liberalism and the Jewish Identity (1997), bracht ik in het blog van 06-12-2011 twee reviews. Uit dat van Yishai Cordova neem ik dit citaat: het ging Spinoza er voor de joden om “to strive for absolute secularization. What Spinoza wanted, essentially, was to change Judaism from a religion into a modern secular identity. Seen in this way, Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologic-Politicus" becomes the first and most in-depth expression of a liberal approach that offers Jews, as a substitute for the Mosaic laws, a very different kind of "Promised Land" - one which is grounded in three basic freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of commerce and freedom of thought. This is a democratic outlook that is clearly anti-clerical in orientation.”

Ook is nog eenvoudig te vinden 't review van Alan L. Mittleman, "Spinoza’s Project," Review of "Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity" by Steven B. Smith; in: First Things, January 1998 [Cf.]   

Over Steven B. Smith, Political Philosophy. Yale University Press, 2012, het boek dat ontstond op basis van de inleidingscursus politieke filosofie die hij jarenlang op Yale University had gegeven, beschreef ik in het blog van 03-12-2012 mijn teleurstelling dat Spinoza als politiek filosoof er nauwelijks in voor leek te komen.

* * *

Tot slot breng ik nog één review, dat van Gregory Bruce Smith, over Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics waarvan het PDF hier te vinden is.

Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics. By Steven B. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 256p. $35.00.

— Gregory Bruce Smith, Trinity College

Steven Smith's book is not only an approachable and engaging interpretation of one of the most difficult philosophical works—Spinoza's Ethics—but an exemplary manifestation of philosophical exegesis. It gracefully positions Spinoza within the ongoing discussion that still constitutes the modernity that forms and informs us. Smith wants to position him within the tradition of modern political philosophy as one of the first to think through the prerequisites for modern, secular, democratic life and what is required morally and psychologically of a modern democratic individual. I would suggest, however, that in the end it is possible that the author comes just as close to positioning Spinoza as a proto-postmodern in the mode of Nietzsche or Heidegger.

Smith's Spinoza primarily reflected upon how to respond to a godless, soulless whole devoid of any natural or divine purpose or meaning, a whole into which man is integrated as just one part among many—not as a "kingdom within a kingdom." But the problem for Smith, and his Spinoza, is how the human in us, which requires some sense of agency, can be saved given these circumstances. He presents a Spinoza who is trying to respond to the twin issues of determinism and freedom simultaneously. In the process, Spinoza becomes more than just incidentally a precursor to Kant. Somewhat paradoxically, by reflecting upon the place of freedom in a largely deterministic whole, Spinoza was primarily trying to emancipate man from a moral and political whole determined by orthodoxy and nondemocratic regimes.

The author confronts competing interpretations that alternately see Spinoza as a soulless materialist or a mystical pantheist, a democratic individualist or a communitarian, a determinist or a philosopher of freedom and self-determination, and he concludes that Spinoza was all of these things, and more. In attempting to show how Spinoza squared what appear to be several circles in his thought, Smith ultimately transforms him not into a contradictory thinker but into a poet who was attempting to inform an indifferent whole with the will of a humanizing spirit. And hence, Smith suggests that the geometrical form that the Ethics takes on the surface is primarily just the poetic veneer that Spinoza chose for his project. Thus, the rigid rationalistic form of the book is far from the paean to rationalism it might appear at first sight. In the process, the author provides us with a richer and more nuanced Spinoza than the usual reductionist and monistic readings. This reading may not convince all of his interpreters but it is a challenging addition to the literature.

Smith presents Spinoza as primarily a moralist and not a metaphysician. He was the quintessential teacher of modern democracy, especially of its psychological and moral needs. He wanted a "manly" humanity that was intellectually and morally tough and resolute, with an inner fortitude and self-reliance that would make it possible for man to affirm himself, including the life of the passions, and seek joy and the "enhancement of life." In many ways, Smith's Spinoza approaches the life-affirming teaching of Nietzsche. The discussion of "life enhancement" is more than a little reminiscent of Nietzsche's doctrine of the "will to power." Indeed, Smith explicitly points to this similarity, and others as well.

In the end, however, one cannot help but wonder if one really needs any of Spinoza's theoretical teaching to get to his moral, psychological, and political sentiments. If the theoretical veneer is a form of poetry, then the moral, psychological, and political sentiments rest on the will, and it is not clear that Spinoza is the best or most consistent theorist of the will to whom we might turn. The stance of fearless, clear-eyed, resolute fortitude that seeks joy and all the high things in life as an extension of egoistic drives may be better served on the basis of Nietzsche's teaching. The fiercely independent resolute action of a mind freed of all superstition and consolation may be better served by the teaching of Heidegger, who is never mentioned. Heidegger would appear to be the author sine qua non of the need for resoluteness, based on an act of the will exercised in full consciousness of the meaninglessness of the whole and the groundlessness of the choice.

Smith calls our attention to these issues in the final chapter in which he raises the issue of just how compelling Spinoza's critique of orthodoxy really is, given that reason itself ultimately rests on an act of faith, which is to say, on a groundless choice. The thinking that most straightforwardly confronts precisely how one must respond to groundless choosing is to be found in the Heidegger of Being and Time. Like Smith's Spinoza, Heidegger, too, in his own fashion, welds together a fearless, radical individualism and a form of communitarianism. Yet Heidegger clearly comes down more on the communitarian and nondemocratic side of the equation does than Smith or his Spinoza.

Smith seems to find more compelling the side of the argument that sees fortitude as the virtue par excellence of a free democratic individual. He sees the self-esteem that follows from a remorseless confrontation with an indifferent whole as essential to democratic life. Democratic man needs to be clear-eyed yet active, joyful, energetic, and "powerful," understood as striving to enhance life by reaching out to a union with others in a community founded on consent. One can at least reflect upon the question of whether Smith's Spinoza or Heidegger has more clearly understood the ramifications of resolute-ness and groundless choosing in the face of meaninglessness. Heidegger did not think that what followed was democratic politics. For that matter, Nietzsche's politics of joy and the will to power are anything but democratic. Has Smith's Spinoza really opened the door to the psychology of modern democratic individualism, and of the needs to the modern democratic soul, or does his teaching point more consistently toward something at the opposite end of the political and moral spectrum. And if reason rests on an act of faith, as Smith seems to affirm in the last chapter, then the orthodoxy Spinoza tried to rout remains standing, and with it the possibility of the return of superstition and obscurantism.

But of these complications Smith is well aware. He raises them himself. In the end, Smith's loving and creative interpretation is no more dogmatic than the Spinoza he presents for us. The great virtue of Spinoza's Book of Life is to raise fundamental questions, showing the alternatives and leaving the reader to resolutely engage them. That engagement itself may be what is most necessary for the democratic soul.

Review by Gregory Bruce Smith, in: Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 583-584

____________________________

Toevoeging: Ik houd hier vast de link naar zijn artikel:

STEVEN B. SMITH, "WHAT KIND OF DEMOCRAT WAS SPINOZA?" In: Political Theory, Vol. 33, [PDF hier te vinden] 

---

[1] In: AJS Review, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Nov., 2006), pp. 454-460

[2] In: History of Political Thought, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn 2006), pp. 545-547