Nadat de review-site NDPR bijna twee maanden heeft
stilgelegen wegens een sterfgeval van een centrale redacteur, is de draad weer
opgepakt en als eerste review dat van Martin Lin geplaatst over het boek van
Samuel
Newlands, Reconceiving Spinoza. Oxford University Press, 2018, 283pp. [cf. NDPR]
[Cf. signalement in blog
van 1 jan. 2018]
Het is een
zeer gedegen en diepgaande bespreking van, zoals Lin het noemt: een “bold and
ambitious book,” waarin “Samuel Newlands develops a new and systematic
interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics.” Daarin legt Newlands het accent op: ‘conceiving’,
op het hebben van "a multiplicity of concepts" en ziet hij Spinoza een
“conceptualist strategy” uitwerken. Lin vindt het een ingenieuze en
veelbelovende aanpak, maar werpt er een aantal overtuigende bezwaren tegen
op.
Toevoeging 26-9-2019.
Door Steven Nadler werd het boek besproken in de
Toevoeging 26-9-2019.
Door Steven Nadler werd het boek besproken in de
Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 57, Number 2, April 2019, pp.
346-347 Ik neem het hier over:
Samuel
Newlands. Reconceiving Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Pp. x +
283.
Cloth, $65.00.
In 1969,
Edwin Curley published his Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation.
It was
a
groundbreaking book in which Curley offers a bold and original account of
Spinoza’s
metaphysical
theses. In his highly unorthodox but hugely influential reading, he tries to
mitigate
some of the ontological oddity of Spinoza’s claims that “whatever is, is in
God,”
that “from
God infinite things follow in infinite ways,” and that mind and body are “one
and
the same
thing,” by giving them a strictly causal reading. For subsequent scholars,
whether
they
agreed with Curley or not, there was no avoiding his interpretation.
Samuel
Newlands seeks likewise to transform our reading of Spinoza in an
unconventional—and,
as he recognizes, contentious—way. Like Curley, Newlands wants to
revise our
understanding of the fundamentals of Spinoza’s metaphysics. He takes his lead
from a
problem that Spinoza’s contemporaries, and even Spinoza himself, recognized—
what we
might call the one/many problem. It is expressed by a question that “Lust,” one
of the
characters in the dialogue that Spinoza inserts in his Short Treatise on
God, Man and
His
Well-Being, poses: How can we reconcile the unity of
nature with the great diversity
that
surrounds us? How to account for both the parsimony and plenitude of the world?
In
Spinoza’s
terms, how can Nature be both one (substance) and many (modes)?
Like
Michael Della Rocca, whose recent Spinoza (2008) attempted to
demonstrate that
the
principle of sufficient reason (PSR) lies at the basis of practically every philosophical
thesis and
decision that Spinoza takes, Newlands believes that there is a unique key
principle
to
understanding Spinoza’s metaphysics, as well as the moral philosophy that
follows from
it. The
key principle is not the PSR, however, but the CS, that is, the “conceptualist
strategy,”
including
its many and various but closely related offspring: conceptual dependence
monism
(CDM),
consistent conceptual variability, conceptual sensitivity, conceptual
identification
etc.
(Newlands’s book is a compelling and enjoyable read for Spinoza specialists,
who
will
appreciate the ambition of his project; but it is rather full of jargon,
neologisms and
abbreviations,
too much for my taste.) Newlands uses the conceptualist strategy to tackle a
number of
enduring textual and philosophical problems in Spinoza, all in order “to
preserve
the
consistency of [Spinoza’s] monisms and pluralisms” (54). The strategy involves
reducing
practically
every metaphysical status and relationship to a matter of conceptualization.
Thus,
Spinoza’s claims that God is Thought and God is Extension, that the world is
one
and the
world is many, that modes are necessary and modes are contingent etc., cannot
be properly
understood independently of how the subjects of such claims are conceived—
which,
Newlands insists, is distinct from claiming that it is all a matter of how the
subjects
of such
claims are epistemically or subjectively regarded.
To
take an example from one of the central chapters, Newlands insists that even
the
modal
status of the finite modes of Nature (the ordinary things that populate the
world)
is a
matter of conceptualization (Chapter 4). One might think that Spinoza’s view is
quite
simple:
there is no contingency in Nature, everything is necessary. However, Newlands
demurs.
“The modal status of a thing, such as whether it exists necessarily, is fixed
by how
that thing
is conceived with respect to certain intra-attribute features.” This is not to
say
that a
finite thing’s modal status is merely subjective. There is an objective truth
value to
propositions
about modality, but that truth is relative to some conceptual scheme.
The
crucial move that Newlands makes, and that sets up much of his subsequent
argument,
occurs in Chapter 3, where he insists that the various forms of dependence in
Spinoza’s
system—causation, inherence, explanation, following from etc.—are all, in fact,
conceptual
containment relations. It is not just a matter of coextension or covariation
between
the former relations and the conceptual one; nor is it simply a matter of all
such
relations
involving or including or being expressible by conceptual dependence. Newlands
does not
go for half measures. In his view, these are conceptual dependence
relations, they
reduce to
conceptual dependence—this is the central claim of conceptual dependence
monism. It
is, he insists, the only way to preserve the consistency of Spinoza’s ontology.
Newlands
pursues his case with great philosophical skill and admirable consistency.
Even the
essences of things (Chapter 5) and their individuation (Chapter 6) are a
function
of
conceptual framework. Outside of how things are conceived, there is . . . well,
nothing,
or at
least nothing that can be said truly about them. It does not follow, however,
that all
conceptual
schemes are equal. But the preference for one scheme over another is not to be
based on
its truth, on its capturing the way things “really are,” but on what Newlands
calls
“practical”
or moral grounds—on how a scheme better contributes to our power, activity,
freedom,
virtue and flourishing.
This
ambitious and stimulating book will be much discussed by Spinoza scholars, many
of whom
will dispute its claims. Nevertheless, this is what original scholarship in the
history
of
philosophy is supposed to do: get us to rethink our assumptions about the
philosophers
we study.
There is a lot in Newlands book I do not agree with, but I am very glad I read
it.
S t e v e n N a d l e r
University of
Wisconsin-Madison
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