In het blog van 9 juli 2017 “Stanislaus von
Dunin-Borkowski SJ (1864-1934) - "Das Studium über Spinoza wurde für ihn
zur Lebensarbeit," gaf ik links naar vele eerdere blogs die ik aan hem en
zijn werk wijdde. Daarna meende ik dat de blogs van 12 augustus 2017 en 14 augustus 2017 wel de laatste zouden zijn “over deze
jezuïet die zoveel over Spinoza publiceerde, tenzij ik ooit nog eens iets heel
fraais over hem tegenkom.”
En zie, toevallig kwam ik onlangs
het review tegen dat R.
McK. over de laatste twee van de vier delen van Dunin-Borkowski gaf in: The Journal of
Philosophy, Vol. 34, No. 14 (Jul. 8, 1937), pp. 380-383. Daar het zeer
informatief is over de inhoud van al deze werken, neem ik het hier over.
Spinoza. Band III. Aus den Tagen
Spinozas. Geschehnisse, Gestalten, Gedankenwelt. II. Teil: Des neue Leben.
Band IV. Aus den Tagen Spinozas. Geschehnisse, Gestalten, Gedankenwelt. III.
Teil: Das Lebenswerk.
STANISLAUS VON DUNIN BORKOWSKI, S.J.
Münster i. W.: Aschendorffschen Verlagsbuchhandlung. 1935, 1936. 444 pp., 587
pp. 15.60 M., 20 M.
The first of the four volumes of Father Dunin Borkowski's monumental
study appeared in 1910 under the title, The
Youth of Spinoza; when the learned Jesuit scholar died on May 1, 1934, the
second volume had been published, the third was on the press, and the fourth
ready for publication. Even the space of several decades and the labor of a
long lifetime seem short when viewed in terms of the erudition he has been able
to crowd into those 2000 pages. Data and explications important to the study of
the seventeenth century and its intellectual background, bibliographies,
recondite information concerning men, movements, and places, brief histories of
concept, problems, and methods, frequently carried far beyond the immediate
scope of Spinoza's usage or his knowledge, make Dunin Borkowski's work
indispensable in the study of Spinoza or of the seventeenth century.
Father Dunin Borkowski's historical method is directed to
reconstructing, as means of elucidating Spinoza's philosophy, the historical,
moral, and intellectual atmosphere in which he worked. The places and people
among which he lived, the men he knew or might have known, the books he read or
might have read, the problems he dealt with or might have considered
preliminary to his work, are reconstructed with minute care. Usually one begins
with the specific persons or things with which Spinoza had known connections:
the persons with whom he corresponded or whom he mentioned in his letters or
the books in his library; to these are added the persons or things that he
might conceivably have known: the professors of philosophy in the neighboring
University town, the well-known figures of the day, the religious or political
movements of Holland, or the books in the nearby University library; finally,
the history of questions and the bibliographies are sometimes pushed further to
origins and backgrounds important for the understanding of the problem but
which, the reader is warned, Spinoza could never have known. The effect of this
meticulous accumulation is to create a rich and dense picture of the
seventeenth century in which detail after detail of the thought of Spinoza (who
like Aristotle in the Middle Ages appears as the Philosopher in the pages of Dunin Borkowski) takes on clarity
and definition from associations unsuspected to the modern mind coming to
Spinoza's pages without con-temporary references.
Volumes III and IV are concerned with the mature period of
Spinoza's work (1660-1677) following the completion of the Short Treatise. The problems of this period are considered in
general in terms of five stages of development: (1) the formulation of a
theory of truth as fundamental to the possibility of accurate knowledge, (2)
the recognition of the necessity of understanding the problems of the
Scholastic, Cartesian, and other intellectual groups, (3) the construction of a
system in which the conception of eternal being is brought into relation with a
conception of human life, freedom, and happiness with a consequent organization
of moral problems, (4) a resultant consideration of the problem of the freedom
of philosophizing, and (5) an examination of the problem of scriptural
interpretation. Volume III opens, after a vivid account of the country and
people about Leyden, with a consideration of the first stage. As introduction
to the examination of the De Intellectus
Emendatione the works in Spinoza's library dealing with subjects there
treated are analyzed (involving a much needed formulation of the influence of
Stoic doctrines on Spinoza) ; the treatise itself is considered in terms of
four groups of questions, those concerned with idea and ideatum, with res fixae et aeternae, with notions
communes, and with the rationalism of Spinoza. The Principles of Descartes' Philosophy is considered very briefly, but
on the other hand the Cogitata Metaphysics
is made the subject of a long and very enlightening commentary on the influence
of Scholasticism and Cartesianism on Spinoza, in the course of which
Freudenthal's notions are subjected to criticism and correction, the doctrines
of two philosophers of Leyden, Arnold Geulincx and John de Raei are expounded,
and the bearing of Niels Stensen's work upon that of Spinoza is set forth at
length. The problem of the unity of being is broached by a short statement of
the problem in the Renaissance followed by an examina-tion of its discussion in
popular philosophers, scientific philosophers, and free-thinkers in the
seventeenth century. The volume closes with an admirable brief history of the
discussion of the freedom of thought as it leads to Spinoza. Volume IV, opening
with a consideration of the correspondence from 1660 to 1677, devotes some 270
pages to the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus and to the problems of textual and historical
criticism. The history of these problems which Father Dunin Borkowski has
prepared is a valuable contribution to scholarship in itself; his survey
involves the examination of six kinds of treatises which have contributed to
the development of historiography and text criticism: (1) theoretical treatises
on criticism, historical method, and history itself, (2) the antes criticae,
(3) introductions and notes to editions based on reexamination of manuscripts,
(4) critical treatises on individual authors, (5) writers of contemporary
history, (6) treatises concerned with the paleography of documents as such. The
final 130 pages of the last volume are devoted to problems connected with the
Ethics. Throughout both volumes the notes are full of highly compressed
information, lists of men and books and brief treatises on a vast variety of
subjects.
Despite their similarity of purpose and their comparable
solidity of achievement, the work of Father Dunin Borkowski has surprisingly
little in common with that of another historian of philosophy who has recently
brought great erudition and a conscious historical method to bear on the
interpretation of Spinoza. Wolfson's two volumes on the Ethics were published
too late, apparently, to have come to the attention of Dunin Borkowski, but it
is significant that the latter makes no reference even to the early chapters of
Wolfson's work, which appeared in the Chronicon
Spinozanum, although he quotes abundantly from that collection. Wolfson
finds elucidation on all points in the Hebrew Medieval tradition with
occasional excursions into the Latin Middle Agee; the Spinoza of Dunin Borkowski
is wholly native to the seventeenth century and historical lines lead back only
to Cartesian, Renaissance, and Latin Scholastic writers. Wolfson is concerned
with the significance and sequence of the propositions and their demonstration
and he finds both the words and the proofs in earlier writers; Dunin
Borkowski's method is rather to assemble many names, titles, and generally
relevant citations in order to sketch the background and indicate the nature of
the problems envisaged. As a natural consequence the points which are clearest
in the one, even limiting consideration to the Ethics, which is examined by both historians, are untouched in the
other. The future student of Spinoza would do well consequently to supplement
the one with the other. He should derive from them, as well as a vast composite
fund of information invaluable for the understand-ing of the philosopher, an
insight into the nature of the history of thought and an accompanying realization
that when the scholar has succeeded in rendering a time or a doctrine
intelligible, the philosophic problems which were the main concern of the
philosophers studied remain, rendered accessible but otherwise untouched by
labors of historical reconstruction. That two works which contribute so
successfully to the understanding of a single philosopher by means of the
historical background of his work should have so little in common involves no
contradiction, for the work of discovering what a philosopher meant, though
distinct from, is preliminary to recovering what he achieved, the one an
historical, the other a philosophic undertaking.
R. McK.
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