Steven Nadler schreef het Lemma SPINOZA, BARUCH voor de Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World - #Spinoza

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