Graag mag ik
kennis nemen van lemma’s over Spinoza, zoals ze voor encyclopedieën worden geschreven.
Ik heb er intussen al heel wat in blogs verzameld. Misschien maak ik er ooit
nog eens een inhoudsopgave van. Vooral heel beknopte vind ik vaak knap en plezierig om te lezen.
Zo ontdekte ik heden dat Steven Nadler het lemma aanleverde voor
Europe 1450
to 1789 - Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, Vol 5 - Jonathan Dewald,
Editor in Chief. Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004 - 557 pagina’s
Uit het PDF dat op internet wordt aangeboden, heb ik de tekst die
staat op de pagina’s 505-506 opgediept om hier door te geven en te bewaren; ook
de afbeelding neem ik mee (inclusief de onzinnige ©-claim in het onderschrift).
SPINOZA,
BARUCH (Benedictus
de Spinoza; 1632–1677), Dutch philosopher. Baruch Spinoza’s radical metaphysical, theological, moral
and political ideas made him one of the most vilified thinkers of his day.
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a Portuguese-Jewish family. He was raised and educated
within the city’s community of Sephardic Jews, many of
whom had once been forced converts (conversos) to Christianity in Spain and Portugal. At the
age of twenty-three, however, Spinoza, now a young businessman, was expelled
from the congregation. The writ of cherem, or ban, the most vitriolic ever issued by
the community’s leaders, speaks only of his ‘‘abominable heresies and monstrous deeds,’’
and the specific reasons for his expulsion remain vague. It is fairly
certain, however, that among the offenses for which Spinoza was punished were
his ideas on God, Jewish law, and immortality.
Spinoza’s earliest philosophical
writings, dating from the late 1650s and early 1660s, include the Treatise
on the Emendation of the Intellect and the aborted Short
Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. He first came to public attention with the
publication of a critical exposition of Descartes’s Principles
of Philosophy (1663).
It was the anonymously published Theological-Political
Treatise of 1670,
however, that brought him great notoriety. The reaction to this stunningly bold
work of Bible criticism and political thought was immediate and harsh; it was
banned by numerous political and religious authorities, and its author was
excoriated as a blaspheming atheist. As a result of the outcry, Spinoza decided
not to publish his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics;
it did not appear in print until
after his death, together with other unpublished writings, including A
Compendium of Hebrew Grammar, some correspondence, and the nevercompleted Political
Treatise.
In the Ethics Spinoza rejects the traditional providential
God of the Jewish and Christian religions. The notion of a benevolent, wise,
purposive, judging God is, he insists, an anthropomorphic fiction, one that
gives rise only to superstition and irrational passions. God, according to
Spinoza, is nothing but the active, generative aspects of nature. In an
infamous phrase, Spinoza refers to Deus sive Natura
(God, or Nature), and
identifies it with the substance, essential attributes, and causal principles of
the universe. All beings are ‘‘in’’
God, but only in the sense that Nature is all-encompassing, and nothing stands
outside Nature’s laws. Everything happens in Nature
with a deterministic necessity. Even human beings, often (he alleges) regarded
as autonomous creatures whose freedom puts them outside Nature’s
dominion, are a part of Nature and thus subject to its rigorous determinism.
Some measure of freedom or ‘‘activity’’
is obtainable for human beings but only insofar as they can achieve an
intellectual understanding of Nature and themselves and thereby exercise
control over their passions. Spinoza adopts a Stoic conception of human
well-being. Happiness is the result of virtue and consists in success in the
pursuit of knowledge and self-mastery. Moreover, the rewards of virtue are to
be found in this life. While human beings do ‘‘participate’’ in eternity, particularly through the knowledge they acquire,
there is no personal immortality. Spinoza’s metaphysics,
epistemology, and moral philosophy reveal a variety of influences, especially
Descartes, medieval Jewish philosophy, and ancient sources. However, there can
be no denying the originality of his thought.
Baruch Spinoza. Undated portrait engraving. ©BETTMANN/CORBIS |
In the Theological-Political
Treatise Spinoza
turns to a critique of organized religion and an investigation into the status,
history, and interpretation of the Bible. He begins with a deflationary account
of prophecy (the prophets, he insists, were simply people with highly active
imaginations) and a denial of the possibility of miracles (since Nature’s laws admit of no exceptions). He insists, moreover, that
Jewish ceremonial law was only of temporary validity (that is, during the
Temple period) and is no longer binding on contemporary Jews. His most stunning
theses, however, concern Scripture. Spinoza argues that the Bible is not
literally of divine origin and that its first five
books (the Pentateuch) are not the writings of Moses. Rather, Scripture as we
now have it is simply a work of literature, a compilation of human writings
passed down through generations and edited in the Second Temple period. Others
before Spinoza had suggested that Moses was not the author of the entire Pentateuch,
but no one had taken that claim to the extreme limit that Spinoza did, arguing
for it with such boldness and learning and at such length. Nor had anyone
before Spinoza been willing to draw from it the conclusions about the
interpretation of Scripture that Spinoza drew. The meaning of Scripture is to
be sought not by appeal to theological dogma or to demonstrated truth—after all, the authors of Scripture were neither theologians
nor philosophers—but by a close examination of the
texts themselves and by a historical investigation into the backgrounds and
intentions of its authors. If there is a universal truth conveyed by Scripture,
it is a simple moral principle: love God and your neighbor.
Spinoza’s discussion of Scripture takes place in the broader
political context of his argument for a liberal, tolerant secular state, one in
which the freedom to philosophize is defended against attempts to make it
conform to so-called religious truth. For it is the ‘‘excessive
authority and egotism of preachers,’’ he tells one of
his correspondents, that most threatens the freedom ‘‘to
say what we think.’’ The key to diminishing the undue
influence of the clergy, who justify their abuses by appealing to the holiness
of a certain book as the Word of God, is to demonstrate the true nature of
Scripture and its message and eliminate the ‘‘superstitious
adornments’’ of popular religion. By naturalizing
Scripture, Spinoza hopes to redirect the authority invested in it from the
words on the page to its moral message; and by formulating what he takes to be
the proper method of interpreting Scripture, he seeks to encourage his readers
to examine it anew and find therein the doctrines of the true religion. Only
then will people be able to delimit exactly what needs to be done to show
proper respect for God and obtain blessedness.
See also Atheism; Bible: Interpretation; Conversos; Descartes, Rene´; Stoicism.
B
I B L I O G R A P H Y
Primary
Source
Spinoza,
Benedictus de. The
Collected Works of Spinoza. Translated by Edwin Curley.
Princeton, 1984.
Secondary
Sources
Allison,
Henry. Benedict
de Spinoza: An Introduction. Rev.ed. New
Haven, 1987.
Garrett,
Don, ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge,
U.K., and New York, 1996.
Nadler,
Steven. Spinoza:
A Life. Cambridge, U.K., and New York. 1999.
STEVEN NADLER
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