#Spinoza en de olifant

#Spinoza op z'n Russisch: Бенедикт Спиноза, Этика

Trouw: Een legohuisje verbinden met de ideeën van #Spinoza is lastig

17 febr. 2020: John Carriero over 'Descartes (and #Spinoza) on Intellectual Experience and Skepticism'

John Carriero spreekt 17 febr. 2020 voor de London Cartesian Circle over: 'Descartes (and #Spinoza) on Intellectual Experience and Skepticism'

Heruitgegeven: Benjamin DeCasseres's #Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man & #Spinoza Against the Rabbis

 

 

Cf. ook blog van 18-10-2012: "Benjamin de Casseres (1873 - 1945) zag zich van de koude kant met Spinoza verwant"

6 febr. 2020: Martin Lenz bij de London Spinoza Circle: #Spinoza over interactie van ideeën

#Spinoza terracottabuste van Tartie

2 februari 2020 #Spinoza in 't kerkje van de vrijzinnigen in de Hoeksche Waard

In dit Kerkje van de vrijzinnigen in de Hoeksche Waard aan de Molendijk 35 in Oud-Beijerland [foto van hier]

vertelt Ton de Kok a.s. zondag 2 februari 2020 over de God van Spinoza. [Cf.]

Type voor meer info over zijn boekje zijn naam in het zoekvenster.

Michael Della Rocca over Don Garrett's "greatest hits" on #Spinoza

Na het review door Yitzhak Melamed van Don Garrett's boek, Nature and Necessity  in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018 - cf. blog) dat nog zal verschijnen in The Philosophical Review en dat ik kon melden in het blog van 20 augustus 2019, kan ik hier melden dat heden in de NDPR het review staat dat Michael Della Rocca maakte van dit boek. Hij is zeer enthousiast over de bijdragen aan het spinozisme van Don Garrett – in het verleden (waarvan dit boek het resultaat is) en nog steeds.

Binnenkort hebben we VIJF vertalingen van het Politiek Traktaat van #Spinoza

[1] Er was al sinds 1678 de De Nagelate Schiften van B.d.S., met daarin de Staatkundige Verhandeling [Daar in getoont word hoe een Staat, in de welk d' Eenhoofdige Heerschappy plaats heeft, gelijk ook de geen, daar in de Voornaamsten 't gezach hebben, ingestelt moet worden, op dat de zelfde in geen Tyrannie zou vervallen, en de Vrede en Veiligheit der Burgeren daar in ongeschonden blijven.]
Hoogstwaarschijnlijk is deze vertaling van Jan Hendriksz Glazemaker [het Spinozaweb heeft hier niets over, ook niet over zijn vriendschappelijke relatie met Spinoza…]
Cf. PDF bij DBNL vanaf p. 301

[2] Er was de vertaling van Dr. Willem Meijer uit 1901 van
STAATKUNDIG VERTOOG OF VERHANDELING WAARIN WORDT AANGETOOND, HOE EEN MAATSCHAPPIJ WAAR EEN VORST REGEERT ZOOWEL ALS EEN GEMEENSCHAP WAAR DE REGEERING AAN EENIGE DER AANZIENLIJKSTE BURGERS IS TOEVERTROUWD, MOET WORDEN INGERICHT OM ALLE DWINGELANDIJ TE VOORKOMEN EN ONGESTOORDE RUST EN VRIJHEID AAN ALLE BURGERS TE WAARBORGEN. 
Cf. DBNL en de door C. Verdult OCR-gecorrigeerde PDF.

De Spinoza-vertalingen van Dr. Willem Meijer bij S.L. van Looy, 1894-1905

[3] In maart 2014 verscheen
Benedictus de Spinoza, Staatkundige verhandeling. Uit het Latijn vertaald en toegelicht door Karel D’huyvetters; met een inleiding van Jonathan I. Israel. Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam, 2014 [cf. blog]



[4] Intussen heeft Willy Schuermans van  de Spinoza Kring Lier op de door hem bijgehouden website van die Kring een  vertaling met/naast de Latijnse tekst gebracht. Alleen hoofdstuk 11 is nog in de maak.

[5] In het blog van 7 december 2019 kon ik melden: maart 2020 verschijnt - vertaald, ingeleid en toegelicht door Maarten van Buuren - Spinoza: Politiek traktaat

De Engelse vertaling van Berthold Auerbach's #Spinoza, a Novel staat op internet

Hierbij meld ik even dat (al geruime tijd overigens)
SPINOZA, A NOVEL BY BERTHOLD AUERBACH. FROM THE GERMAN BY E. NICHOLSON. NEW YORK: HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, 1882 naar wikisource is geüpload [cf. ook als djvu]  - wat nog niet het geval was toen ik het blog schreef van 13-03-2015: "Inutilis scientia Spinozana [88] Spinoza in de Leisure Hour Series" [waar ik de cover vandaan haal]

#Spinoza-portret 'more geometrico' van Rinie Hoogendoorn

Het schilderijtje, gemaakt door Rinie Hoogendoorn, is bedoeld als inzending voor een Mondriaan wedstrijd. Hij schrijft: "Omdat ik toevallig bezig was met wat 17e eeuws geïnspireerde portretten lag de associatie met die andere geometrische denker, Spinoza, voor de hand."

Rinie Hoogendoorn, zoon van Adrie Hoogendoorn, zond het mij toe, daar zijn vader mij een eerder Spinoza-schilderij van hem had toegezonden. Dat zal ergens in 2008 geweest zijn. Het blog, waarin ik dat opnam, blijkt verdwenen. En ook het blog met "Spinoza op schilderijen, etsen, gravures, illustraties", waarin ik het had opgenomen, was op een gegeven moment kennelijk te vol geraakt, zodat het - met andere - ook daaruit verdween - Blogse kon het niet aan.
Gelukkig had ik wel een kopie op m'n harde schijf bewaard. Ik breng het hieronder - na het Spinoza-portret 'more geometrico'.

Meer werk van Rinie Hoogendoorn op Exto.nl. Hij noemt er zich "Zondagscaravaggist uit Utrecht." Ook deze "Spinoza op geometrische wijze" [28x28 cm] is er te zien.

Michael Della Rocca gaat het zgn "idealisme" van #Spinoza sterker benadrukken

Michael Della Rocca is bezig met een tweede editie van zijn Spinoza, waarin hij Spinoza's 'idealisme' nog eens sterker wil benadrukken dan hij al deed [Cf. blog van  14-07-2015: "Spinoza wordt een soort idealist bij Michael Della Rocca"]

Dit is te lezen in het uitgebreide interview dat Richard Marshall op 3:AM Magazine met Michael Della Rocca had onder de titel: Parmenides and Spinoza.
Daarin is tamelijk op 't eind te lezen:
3:16: How does Spinoza avoid being an idealist? Does the fact that he thinks the conceptual outstrips the mental help him achieve this?
MDR: He doesn’t avoid being an idealist. In one important sense of idealism—the sense according to which the existence of anything depends on its being conceived or being thought of by a thinking thing—Spinoza is an idealist. His commitment to a version of the PSR pretty much guarantees that he is this kind of idealist. I will stress the connection between Spinoza and idealism in the second edition of my book, Spinoza, which I am preparing now.

3 febr. 2020 spreekt politiek filosoof en #Spinoza scholar Etienne Balibar in Kent over migratie en hedendaags kapitalisme

Huston Smith (1919 - 2016) schreef div. voorwoorden voor boeken over #Spinoza

Religiewetenschapper Huston Smith kreeg zijn eerste religieuze ervaring door hallucinerende paddestoelen. Sindsdien bestudeerde hij alle religies met evenveel interesse en pleitte hij voor interreligieuze tolerantie. Van zijn standaardwerk The Religions of Man (1958), later The World's Religions, werden meer dan drie miljoen exemplaren verkocht (Trouw 9 januari 2017)

Smith was born in Suzhou, China to Methodist missionaries and spent his first 17 years there. He taught at the Universities of Colorado and Denver from 1944–1947, moving to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri for the next ten years, and then Professor of Philosophy at MIT from 1958–1973. While at MIT he participated in some of the experiments with entheogens that professor Timothy Leary conducted at Harvard University. He then moved to Syracuse University where he was Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy until his retirement in 1983 and emeritus status since. he lived in the Berkeley, CA area, as Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

During his career, Smith not only studied, but practiced Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism (studying under Goto Zuigan), and Sufism for over ten years each. He is a notable autodidact.

As a young man, Smith, of his own volition, after suddenly turning to mysticism, set out to meet with then-famous author Gerald Heard. Heard responded to Smith's letter, invited him to his Trabuco College (later donated as the Ramakrishna Monastery) in Southern California, and then sent him off to meet the legendary Aldous Huxley. So began Smith's experimentation with meditation, and association with the Vedanta Society in Saint Louis under the auspices of Swami Satprakashananda of the Ramakrishna order.

Via the connection with Heard and Huxley, Smith eventually experimented with Timothy Leary and others at the Center for Personality Research, of which Leary was Research Professor. The experience and history of the era are captured somewhat in Smith's book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. In this period, Smith joined in on the Harvard Project as well, an attempt to raise spiritual awareness through entheogenic plants.

He has been a friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama for more than forty years, and met and talked to some of the great figures of the century, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Thomas Merton.

He developed an interest in the Traditionalist School formulated by Rene Guenon and Anana Coomaraswamy. This interest has become a continuing thread in all his writings. [goodreads]

Het Spinozisme beschreef hij niet als een soort godsdienst. Wel schreef hij in The Worlds Religions: “Among Western philosophers, Spinoza stands closest to the Buddha on the mind’s potential. Spinoza’s dictum—“to understand something is to be delivered of it”—comes close to summarizing his entire ethic. The Buddha would have agreed. If we could really understand life, if we could really understand ourselves, we would find neither a problem. Humanistic psychology proceeds on the same assumption. When “awareness of experience is fully operating,” Carl Rogers writes, “human behavior is to be trusted, for in these moments the human organism becomes aware of its delicacy and tenderness towards others.” The Buddha saw ignorance, not sin, as the offender. More precisely, insofar as sin is our fault, it is prompted by a more fundamental ignorance—most specifically, the ignorance of our true nature." [p. 109-110]

ZIJN VOORWOORDEN voor boeken over Spinoza
●  Huston Smith schreef het voorwoord voor het boek dat Siegfried Hessing redigeerde: Speculum spinozanum 1677-1977 [London [e.a.]: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977 [1978]

Ook schreef hij het voorwoord voor
●  Neal Grossman, Healing the Mind: The Philosophy of Spinoza Adapted to a New Age [Plainsboro: Susquehanna University Press, 2003]. Opnieuw uitgegeven als The Spirit of Spinoza: Healing the Mind [Princeton, NJ: ICRL Press, 2014 - cf. blog van 27-05-2014: "Spinoza gezien als spirituele psychotherapeut"] Dit laatste, vooral vanaf § III interessante, voorwoord neem ik hier over:

Koen Tanghe in Doorbraak.be over #Spinoza en z'n religieus diverse samenleving

Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol. IV - met 2 hoofdstukken #Spinoza - online

Vandaag kwam ik tegen dat ene Alexandra Ciacîru op academia.edu plaatste:

G.H.R. Parkinson (ed.), Routledge History of Philosophy, Vol IV - The Renaissance and Seventeenth-century Rationalism. London & New York: Routledge, 1993

met o.a.

Chapter 8 -Spinoza: metaphysics and knowledge - G.H.R.Parkinson

Chapter 9 - The moral and political philosophy of Spinoza = Hans W.Blom


N.B. Het boek wordt ook genoemd in het blog  van 07-08-2015: :G. H. R. Parkinson (1923-2015) Was een gerenommeerd Spinoza scholar.

                           * * *
N.B. Ik had hierover al een blog van 25-03-2015 "Spinoza in de Routledge History of Philosophy," maar de daarin vermelde links naar Pdf's werken niet meer.

Julien Gelas schreef het toneelstuk Le rêve de #Spinoza

in opdracht of op verzoek van het Brusselse theater Le public, schreef Julien Gelas het toneelstuk Le rêve de Spinoza. Het zal komende juni 2020 in Boston (Verenigde Staten) in het Engels worden opgevoerd. [Meer is er momenteel niet over te vinden].

Samen met zijn vader voert Julien momenteel de directie van het Théatre du Chène Noir in Avignon. [Cf.]

 

23 januari 2020 spreekt Valtteri Viljanen bij de London #Spinoza Circle

[cf. ook]

Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) & #Spinoza [3]

Er is niet veel over Popper & Spinoza geschreven. De Duitse Spinoza Bibliografie geeft alleen:

Alain Boyer, "Spinoza et Karl Popper: rationalisme absolu ou rationalisme critique?"
In: Olivier Bloch (dir.), Spinoza au XXe siècle. Actes des Journées d'études organisées les 14 et 21 janvier, 11 et 18 mars 1990 à la Sorbonne par le Centre de recherche sur l'histoire des systèmes de pensée modernes de l'Université de Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne (UFR de philosophie), Presses Universitaires de France [PUF], 1993

Inhoud Spinoza au XXe siècle

Pierre TROTIGNON, "Bergson et Spinoza" (p. 3-12);
André COMTE-SPONVILLE, "Le dieu et l'idole. Alain et Simone Weil face à Spinoza" (p. 13-38);
Didier GIL, "Le `vrai´ spinoziste de Brunschvig à Bachelard" (p. 41-69);
Bruno HUISMAN, "Cavaillès et Spinoza" (p. 71-87);
Wim KLEVER, "Annotations sur Gueroult" (p. 89-101);
Gerassimos VOKOS, "Ferdinand Alquié, lecteur de Spinoza" (p. 105-112);
Jean-Toussaint DESANTI, "Spinoza et la phénoménologie" (p. 113-127);
Robert MISRAHI, "Le désir, la réflexion et l'être dans le système de l'Éthique. Réflexions sur une appréhension existentielle du spinozisme aujourd'hui" (p. 129-139);
Hélène POLITIS, "Déplorer ou comprendre : le Spinoza de Chestov" (p. 143-157);
Jean-Jacques SZCZECINIARZ, "Spinoza et Koyré" (p. 159-173);
Laurent BOVE, "Spinoza dans le cours d'Alexandre Kojève" (p. 177-201);
Antonio NEGRI, "L'antimodernité de Spinoza" (p. 203-220);
Jean-François REY, "Lévinas et Spinoza" (p. 225-235);
François ZOURABICHVILI, "Deleuze et Spinoza" (p. 237-245);
Manlio IOFRIDA, "La fonction de l'écriture dans la pensée de Spinoza, ou Spinoza après Derrida" (p. 247-257);
Bernard ROUSSET, "Spinoza et l'enseignement de la philosophie en France au XXe siècle" (p. 259-265);
Alain BOYER, "Spinoza et Karl Popper : rationalisme absolu ou rationalisme critique ?" (p. 269-281);
Pierre MACHEREY, "La dissociation de la métaphysique et de l'éthique. Russell lecteur de Spinoza" (p. 285-305);
Bernard BALAN, "Spinoza et la théorie de l'identité dans la philosophie de l'esprit" (p. 307-325);
Etienne BALIBAR, "Heidegger et Spinoza" (p. 327-343);
Günther MENSCHING, "Spinoza dans l'école de Francfort" (p. 345-359);
Manfred WALTHER, "Carl Schmitt et Baruch Spinoza ou les aventures du concept du politique" (p. 361-372);
Myriam REVAULT D'ALLONNES, "Hannah Arendt et Spinoza : le politique sans la domination" (p. 375-390);
Paolo CRISTOFOLINI, "Spinoza dans les ouvrages italiens d'histoire de la philosophie" (p. 391-404);
Emilia GIANCOTTI, "Giovanni Gentile, éditeur et exégète de l'Ethique" (p. 405-417);
Jacques MOUTAUX, "Exotérisme et philosophie : Leo Strauss et l'interprétation du Traité théologico-politique" (p. 421-441);
Elhanan YAKIRA, "Spinoza et les sionistes" (p. 445-457);
Anne LAGNY, "Spinoza personnage de roman chez B. Auerbach (Spinoza. Ein Denkerleben) et E. G. Kolbenheyer (Amor Dei)" (p. 459-482);
Jacques DAMADE, "Le Saint et l'Hérétique. Borges et Spinoza" (p. 483-492);
René ZAPATA, "Spinoza en URSS" (p. 495-498);
Jean-Pierre COTTEN, "Althusser et Spinoza" (p. 501-513);
André TOSEL, "Des usages `marxistes´ de Spinoza. Leçons de méthode" (p. 515-524);
Frank BURBAGE et Nathalie CHOUCHAN, "Freud et Spinoza : la question de la transformation et le devenir actif du sujet" (p. 527-545);
Bertrand OGILVIE, "Spinoza dans la psychanalyse" (p. 549-571);
Elisabeth ROUDINESCO, "Lacan et Spinoza. Essai d'interprétation (1916-1964)" (p. 577-586).
{Hier gevonden op Index du Bulletin de Bibliographie Spinoziste]

Ik kan deze teksten (of dit boek) nergens op internet vinden [alleen het hoofdstuk van Antonio Negri uit dat boek, kom je tegen - cf. PDF] .
Meer studies van Alain Boyer over Karl Popper zijn te vinden in de PDF Bibliography Karl R. Popper. N.B. aldaar is ook te zien dat die van Alain Boyer de enige is die over Spinoza gaat.

Gisteren verscheen: #Spinoza et les arts

Pierre-François Moreau & Lorenzo Vinciguerra (dir.), Spinoza et les arts. Éditions L'Harmattan [Collection: La philosophie en commun], 15 janvier 2020 • 294 pages

Ik neem aan dat het boek is ontstaan n.a.v. de conferentie "Spinoza et les arts" die in mei 2014 in Amiens en Parijs werd gehouden

[ cf. - cf. en blog van 23-04-2014

Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) & #Spinoza [2]

Karl Popper raakte al jong teleurgesteld in het marxisme. Stalin en Hitler zag hij als één pot nat. Rotsvaste zekerheid sluit volgens Popper de geest, het levert mensen over aan totalitaire systemen. Als wetenschapsfilosoof en aanhanger van de falsificatietheorie zag hij meer in twijfel en scepsis.

In 1937 sloeg de Oostenrijks-Joodse Popper op de vlucht voor het fascisme. In Nieuw Zeeland schreef hij zijn boek The Open Society and its Enemies (dat in 1945 in twee delen werd uitgegeven). Daarin kwam hij met een fundamentele aanval op het denken van Plato, Hegel en Marx die hij van totalitair denken betichtte en waarin hij de liberale democratie bepleitte . Hij zou ermee de ineenstorting van het communisme in Oost-Europa hebben voorzien.
[Cf. en cf. cf. ook het artikel van William Gorton, "Karl Popper: Political Philosophy" Op Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
 

Ik breng hierna twee citaten over Spinoza [beide delen hebben elk één citaat]: 

Ook Arnon Grunberg doet aan goochelen met #Spinoza

zoals blijkt in zijn nieuwe column die zojuist in de Volkskrant verscheen

Clare Carlisle over: George Eliot Meets #Spinoza

Illustration of Dorothea from an 1887 edition of Middlemarch. Flickr, Internet Archive.

Yuval Noah Harari [Sapiens] won VI edición Premio Bento Spinoza de ensaio

[cf. twitter & ook dit bericht uit Santiago de Compostella]

Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) & #Spinoza [1]

Aanleiding voor dit en volgende blogs is een recente blogtekst van ene Minucias Göngorinas die enige conclusies trok over Karl Popper's zgn. negeren van Spinoza. Ik neem diens tekst, "Popper and Spinoza. The Enlightenment that Failed" hieronder over.

Tijdens mijn studie heb ik veel "aan Popper gedaan." Ik las vooral zijn wetenschapsfilosofie, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, en The Logic of Scientific Discovery; maar ook zijn The Open Society and its Enemies en The Poverty of Historicism. Die spraken mij toen zeer aan, vooral daar het om mij heen op die opleiding allemaal marxisme was dat de klok sloeg...
Met Spinoza was ik toen nog geheel niet bezig.
Ik vond het langzamerhand wel tijd worden voor blogs over Popper & Spinoza. In bovenvermelde tekst, die ik hieronder dus overneem, vond ik een mooie aanleiding tot enig onderzoek ernaar.

Zondag 19 januari 2020 in Heerlen: Jan Snel over #Spinoza

[Cf.]

Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020) is gisteren op 75-jarige leeftijd overleden

Van zijn meer dan 50 boeken over esthetica, moraliteit en politiek is ons vooral zijn Spinoza-boek bekend.
Cf. mijn blog van 13 november 2017: Heroverweging van mijn eerdere commentaar op het Spinoza-boekje van Roger Scruton.

Het vierde artikel van Henk Keizer over #Spinoza in een internationaal wetenschappelijk tijdschrift is verschenen

Henk Keizer liet mij gisteren weten: "Gisteren ontving ik aflevering 4 van 2019 van Rivista di storia della filosofia met daarin het openingsartikel 'Spinoza's Idea of Idea Doctrine: A Theory of Consciousness' van Henk Keizer.
Daar ik de cover en inhoudsopgave van dat 4e nummer van 2019 nog niet heb, plaats ik hiernaast dat van het 3e nummer.

En, Henk, bij dezen hartelijk gefeliciteerd met dit resultaat!

 

Het is zijn vierde artikel in een internationaal wetenschappelijk - peer reviewed - tijdschrift. Hierna meld ik de eerdere:

Spinoza-schets van Renesmee Cullen

Recent review van Michael Della Rocca (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of #Spinoza.

 

Een jaar na het eerste review door Michael LeBuffe [cf. blog] verscheen - licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License - het volgende review door Giacomo Borbone in Philosophy in Review XXXIX (November 2019), no. 4 [cf.] van

Michael Della Rocca (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza. Oxford University Press 2018. 687 pp. $150.00 USD (Hardcover ISBN).

Lessing’s claim that the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza was ‘a dead dog’ (ein toter Hund) is well known. But there is no doubt that this extreme judgement does not do justice to the author of the Ethics. His thoroughgoing rationalism and his deep analysis of the passions are only a few aspects of the impressive richness of Spinoza’s philosophy. Though in Anglo-American circles there has been a kind of deafness concerning Spinoza’s philosophical system, there is now a steadily growing interest in Spinoza’s work. The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza is proof of this revival of interest. Obviously, Spinoza is important not only for his metaphysics, but also for his political philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and so on. In any case, all these aspects – as Della Rocca says in his introduction to the volume – have their ‘underpinnings in Spinoza’s rationalism and his demand for metaphysical explanation’ (3). According to Della Rocca, one can find in Spinoza’s philosophy two pillars that support his entire philosophical structure: his rationalism and his naturalism. The latter, as Della Rocca says, ‘makes Spinoza especially attractive to empirically minded philosophers’ (3). One of the main aims of this volume is to provide a detailed analysis of Spinoza’s systematic thinking and the way it works in all areas of his thought. Another aim is to clarify the influences on Spinoza’s thought, above all Descartes and Jewish philosophy prior to the seventeenth century.

Nog eens Justin Steinberg's #Spinoza’s Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear

Recent nummer van Textual Practice gaat over #Spinoza en de kunsten

Textual Practice, Vol 34 (2019), #5 (June), Spinoza's Artes [Cf.]

Moira Gatens & Anthony Uhlmann, Introduction, pages 715-719 - neem ik hier over:

In recent years the philosophy of Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) has had an increasingly significant impact on Enlightenment history, political and ethical theory, metaphysics, and moral psychology.¹ However, very little has been published on Spinoza and aesthetics and this is despite his profound influence on artists, poets and novelists as diverse as Goethe, Mary and Percy Shelley, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Jorge Luis Borges. How is it that Spinoza inspires artists while philosophers have mostly ignored or dismissed the relation of his thinking to the arts? This special issue aims to be among the first to respond to this question through deep engagement with Spinoza’s philosophy and its relation to a range of specific art works and practices.²
This issue highlights the distinctiveness of a Spinozistic approach to art in relation to literature, music, painting, and architecture. In a new path of study, we demonstrate that for Spinoza the ultimate value of art lies with the essential and integral role it plays in the art of living, or the ars vivendi. Papers in this issue explore how Spinoza’s unique worldview connects art and life in terms of what it means to be free, the power of the imagination, how to live well, the ontology of music, the idea of progress, and the role of fictions in understanding the world. As such it represents an innovative contribution to a reimagining of the role and value of art in contemporary life.
The underlying and unifying thesis of the several articles in this issue is that in his approach to fictions, music, and human creative endeavour, Spinoza held a positive view of the right use of the imagination and art to aid human beings in the achievement of the good life. Refuting traditional claims about Spinoza’s irrelevance to the development and character of modern and contemporary art, the authors collected here offer robust theoretical arguments, close readings, and empirical evidence to confirm our thesis. The essays demonstrate how his work contributes to the world-making that informs and drives artistic practice.
The issue is largely but not wholly philosophical in its orientation. The specific approach taken by each author varies depending on her disciplinary base, but all contributors engage with Spinoza’s major philosophical works to substantiate the scholarly claims made for his influence on the specific art under consideration (e.g. music, literature, architecture, painting). Each contribution also provides ample empirical materials from the relevant discipline (for e.g. through the provision of textual support from novels or archival material, through evidence of Spinoza’s influence from artists’ letters, or through drawing out the pertinence for art practices of Spinoza’s theory of the affects as outlined in the Ethics, and so on).
The general orientation is to demonstrate, across a range of arts, that a Spinozistic approach to the philosophy of art affirms that human beings are part of nature and that art does not transcend nature. Rather, art is a product of causal interactions explicable through the natural forces from which it emerges. For Spinoza, the ars vivendi involves striving to increase our understanding in order to increase our power and joy, and the creation and enjoyment of art is fully part of this commonplace life. We see this non-elitist approach to the role of art in everyday life to be a consequence of Spinoza’s democratic political views. Understanding ourselves, others, and nature, must include the enjoyment of a range of arts that augment the capacities and skills necessary for human beings to live and flourish.
The key questions we seek to address include: why has Spinoza’s contribution to a theory of art and life been obscured? What would a Spinozistic theory of art look like? Is Spinoza’s philosophy as rationalistic as traditional critics have insisted, or rather, does it innovatively grasp the cognitive dimension of affect as well as the affective dimension of cognition? In addition to addressing these organising questions explicitly, implicit responses to the key questions will emerge through each contributor’s expert treatment of the given art work or practice that he treats.
On the first question, concerning the obscurity of Spinoza’s philosophy in relation to artistic practice, we note that sporadic engagement with the issue of Spinoza and art can be traced back to Leibniz in the late seventeenth century and is present in the writings of Kant and Hegel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in the work of thinkers such as Thoreau, Pater, Santayana and Bergson in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jonathan Israel has provided a ground-breaking overview both of the importance of Spinoza’s contribution to Enlightenment thinking and how it was savagely suppressed due to its affront to the established theological and political orders. Certainly, Leibniz assumed that a universe without design and beauty amounts to a Godless universe. But can Spinoza’s heretical reputation explain the scepticism of contemporary philosophers concerning Spinoza and art? All those who assume that aesthetics requires an engagement with beauty will inevitably be disappointed by his philosophy (e.g. Morrison). Spinoza barely mentions beauty and it is true that beauty has no intrinsic value in his philosophy. Nevertheless, we are left with the puzzle of Spinoza’s powerful influence on artists, writers and poets.
Recent scholarship has established beyond doubt Spinoza’s importance to the development of English and German Romanticism, to German Idealism, French rationalism, as well as to Kantian aesthetics.³The papers collected here show that Spinoza’s account of the imagination and of our affective lives can provide alternative pathways to explaining the power of art to enlighten us. As others have argued, reason and imagination are potentially mutually beneficial rather than at war. The Ethics works not merely through the rational argumentation of the geometric method but also, and at the same time, through artistic or aesthetic methods.⁴The Ethics does not only offer demonstrations of truth, it also causes us to feel or sense the true, arousing affects as well as understanding, and so linking the imagination and sensation to reason. In short, Spinoza develops both a rational and an artful method in the Ethics.
Taken together, the essays in this issue present a coherent view of what a Spinozistic theory of art might look like. For Spinoza it is not only categories of beauty and the sublime that are fictional and based in the human imagination. Other notions such as good and evil exist only in relation to human judgment and the power of things to aid (‘good’) or harm (‘evil’) us. But on his account these fictions are absolutely necessary to living a meaningful human life. Uhlmann in his contribution, begins by developing arguments that refute Morrison’s claim that Spinoza’s philosophy is hostile to aesthetics, following Selsam in underlining the importance of Spinoza’s affirmation that a negative affect cannot be overcome by an idea, but rather only by another (positive) affect. This in turn affirms the importance of the affects to ethics, and therefore the kinds of thinking through the affects developed by art. Uhlmann goes on to examine Percy Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’ considering how Shelley’s argument for the importance of art to the creation of possibility aligns with his own reading of Spinoza. The use of fictional exemplars or models – for example, in literature, architecture, or politics – may serve as useful guides to human ethical, political, and practical action. Gatens develops this argument in relation to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. Here the figure of Prometheus is understood in terms of exemplarity; offering both negative and positive examples that lead readers to thought. Essential to a consideration of Spinoza’s influence on art and artists is a recognition of the possibility of misreadings, even egregious misreadings of Spinoza, by those who claim to follow him. Writing about Spinoza in his Notebook, the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge states:
I never yet knew (said an Englishman extensively acquainted with the Literature and Literary Men of the North of Europe) a single person, whom Spinoza had ever converted to his way of thinking; but I know half a dozen at least who have converted Spinoza to theirs!⁵
In his contribution Michael Strawser examines a story by Isaac Singer which offers a misreading of Spinoza. Strawser, however, draws out how Singer’s story both includes this misreading, and offers an alternative point of view, aligned to another character, which more closely corresponds to Spinoza’s positions. Fiction, unlike philosophy, accommodates conflicting, even contradictory perspectives, and in doing so remains consistent with Spinoza’s own views as to the range of perspectives (both true and false) that an all-powerful God (who can and does realise every degree of perfection in creation) allows. Dimitris Vardoulakis demonstrates another way in which Spinoza might be read alongside art, showing how one can use artistic representations (in this case of prophets) from the baroque period in which Spinoza wrote to re-read Spinoza’s discussion of the figure of the prophet. Peg Rawes, working from the discipline of architecture, returns to the ars vivendi, arguing that in focusing on the corporeal nature of affects, life can be understood as a form of aesthetic experience. Again, beginning from a recognition that Spinoza has little explicitly to say about music except that it can be either good or bad depending on the disposition and situation of the one who listens, Marie Thompson engages with this ambivalence, arguing that it offers a powerful way of understanding the nature of musical expression, and the uses made of it. Chris Davidson examines how Spinoza’s understanding of the imitation of affects might be applied to an analysis of how artistic forms serve to create social groups and bind them together, in a reading that returns us to a concept of the ars vivendi and makes us question the extent to which life itself can be constructed by our responses to representations. Janice Richardson turns to a central figure in aesthetic theory, reading Spinoza against Kant, and developing an understanding of how the concept of the sublime might be applied to, and refracted through Spinoza’s philosophy, thereby changing our perspective on the nature of aesthetic experience. Joe Keith Green returns to the figure of the prophet who sheds light on the role of storytelling and affective representations in communicating ideas. Green considers the challenges posed by Spinoza’s accommodation of a distinction between ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ prophets, arguing that the power of the prophets resides precisely in materials proper to art and artists: words and images and the affective power these words and images can carry so long as their meanings remain distinct.
The articles in this special issue show how Spinoza’s philosophy offers new understandings of art as well as how artists might creatively engage with Spinoza’s thought. Most importantly, however, all of the pieces published here show how the idea of art that emerges through an encounter with Spinoza’s thought is not exclusive and rarified. Rather, it is integral to the art of living well, the ars vivendi.

#Spinoza scholar Alexandre Matheron is dinsdag 7 januari 2020 overleden

 

Alexandre Matheron is eergistermorgen 7 januari in zijn huis, op 93-jarige leeftijd gestorven. De filosoof was een specialist in Spinoza, en een van de grote Franse historici van de filosofie. Zijn twee belangrijkste boeken waren: Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Éditions de Minuit, 1969), en Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Éditions Aubier-Montaigne, 1971) voorts artikelen samengebracht onder de titel Études sur Spinoza et les philosophies à l'âge classique (ENS Éditions, 2011).
Na Martial Gueroult was hij een van de vertegenwoordigers van de structurele methode in de geschiedenis van de filosofie.
Lange tijd was hij professor aan de ENS van Saint-Cloud, vervolgens Fontenay / Saint-Cloud, tot 1992, en trainde hij hele generaties in de studie van klassieke filosofie. [Van hier -
Zie ook Le Monde
Cf. blog van 13-02-2016: Ted Stolze's fraaie analyse van Matheron over Spinoza's 'eeuwigheid van de geest'

#Spinoza's kennisleer

Iemand stelde mij de vraag of ik iets weet van de oorsprong/bronnen van Spinoza's kenleer? In dit blog verzamel ik enige teksten over Spinoza's epistemologie.

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Ik breng vervolgens een review van een van de eerste boeken over dit onderwerp. Parkinson schreef er veel over. Cf 't blog van 07-08-2015: "G. H. R. Parkinson (1923-2015) Was een gerenommeerd Spinoza scholar."

Spinoza's Theory of Knowledge. By G. H. R. PARKINSON. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1954. Pp. x + 197. Price 21s). [Review door A. G. WERNHAM in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 7 -July 1957]

Spinoza's theory of knowledge is a dark subject, and attempts to throw light on it deserve sympathetic consideration. Mr. Parkinson's essay has special claims to our respect: it is based on a wide and scholarly knowledge of Spinoza's text, and it attempts to discover what he meant by an unprejudiced examination of what he said. This is no small merit, for interpreters of difficult texts are notoriously prone to read their own preconceived notions into the author's words, and earlier commentators on Spinoza have not been immune from this temptation. That Mr. Parkinson’s interpretations are sometimes hesitant and tentative is only to be expected, for there are passages in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione and Part I I of the Ethics where it is hardly possible to be dogmatic about Spinoza's meaning.

Perhaps the main theme of the book is that for Spinoza " knowledge constitutes a deductive system ". Now this, I think, is true : but I also think that Spinoza sometimes uses the word deducere in a rather peculiar way. In DIE par. 68 he says that ideae rerum, quae dare et distincte concipiuntur, sunt vel simplicissimae vel compositae ex ideis simplicissimis, id est, a simplicissimis ideis deductae. Again, in E iii, 52 Sch. he remarks : et ad hunc modum concipere etiam possumus odium, spem, securitatem et alios affectus admirationi junctos ; atque adeo plures affectus deducere poterimus quam qui receptis vocabulis indicari solent. These passages show that Spinoza conceives an idea to be "deduced " from others when it is formed by their combination, and " deductions " in this sense are common in the Ethics. For example, Spinoza combines the idea of sorrow with the idea of the idea of an external cause and gets the idea of hatred (E iii, App. 7); he then combines the idea of hatred with the idea of those who have injured others and gets the idea of indignation (E iii, App. 20). Similarly in Leviathan Hobbes combines the ideas of person, multitude, covenant, author and peace to get the idea of commonwealth. A deductive system as these thinkers conceived it involves an element of construction or " composition " which Mr. Parkinson fails to notice. This failure may help to account for his difficulty in understanding why Spinoza rejects the view that the mind is passive in knowledge (p. 93).

It seems to me that in interpreting Spinoza we must distinguish between the peculiar sense in which ideas are " deduced " from ideas and the ordinary sense in which propositions are deduced from propositions. To say that idea o is " deduced " from ideas a and 6 is to say that c is defined in terms of a and 6 : to say that proposition z is deduced from propositions x and y is to say that z follows from x and y as conclusion from premises. The " deduction " of ideas provides a basis for the deduction of propositions; it is because indignation is defined in terms of hatred, it is because indignation " involves " hatred, that, knowing hatred to be evil, Spinoza can deduce in the ordinary sense that indignation is evil (E iv, 45, Cor. 1). But it is in his peculiar sense, and not in the ordinary sense, that he " deduces " that indignation is hatred towards those who have injured others. I suspect that this definition is reached by scientia intuitiva, so Mr. Parkinson may be right in saying that scientia intuitiva is deductive knowledge. But not in the ordinary sense.

I conclude, then, that it is correct but misleading to call Spinoza's system of knowledge deductive. It is misleading because it is apt to encourage the view that from his premises, and particularly from his definition of God, Spinoza thought that he could deduce (in the ordinary sense) both the essences and the existences of finite things. Mr. Parkinson is inclined to accept this view. Spinoza, he tells us on p. 73, said that "all things follow from God ", but (p. 89) " he failed to note that their dependence on God was not a logical dependence in the sense that they could be deduced from the definition of God ". I suggest that Spinoza did not fail to note this. When he says that all things follow from God he is simply saying that all things are modes of God and are ultimately defined in terms of God (E ii, 45): he is not claiming that the essence or the existence of any finite thing can be deduced (in the ordinary sense) from his definition of God. For in E ii, 37 he explicitly says that " what is common to everything, and is equally in the part and in the whole, forms the essence of no individual thing ", and in Ep. x he implies that we need experience to discover the existence of modes. On p. 158 Mr. Parkinson tries to evade this implication, but on the following page he appears to acknowledge that in Spinoza's view spatio-temporal existents cannot be deduced from the definition of God.

This is not the only point on which Mr. Parkinson's views may be reasonably challenged. He complains on pp. 21 and ff. that the method sketched in the DIE will not enable scientists to make discoveries: but surely the primary object of that method is to clarify the nature of understanding. It is with self-knowledge that Spinoza is mainly concerned. On pp. 112-3 he says that " when Spinoza calls the body the ' object ' of the human mind, he not only means that the mind knows the body, but also that the mind is correlated with, or united to, the body ". This is a common view, but it is difficult to reconcile with Spinoza's denial that the human mind knows the human body itself and his assertion that it knows only the affections of that body (E ii, 19). I suggest that we must distinguish between the idea which the human mind is and the ideas which the human mind has. To be the idea of x is not to know x : to know x is to have the idea of x. The mind which has the idea of (i.e. knows) the human body is a mind superior to the human mind.

I shall conclude with some minor points. In most cases Mr. Parkinson has made his own translations of the passages he cites from Spinoza's works, and in most cases his renderings are clear and accurate. But I am not sure that ne mens inutilibus defatigetur [DIE par. 37) means " that the mind shall not be fatigued by laws which are useless " (p. 11 ; cf. pp. 15 and 20), or that data in the expression idea data (DIE par. 38 and elsewhere) means " given " (p. 18), or that vaga in the expression experientia vaga (E ii, 40, Sch. 2) means " vague " (pp. 138 and 147). Again, Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae (passim) is not the correct title of Spinoza's work, but a retranslation into Latin of a mistranslation of the correct title. Finally, the book has been produced with the care and accuracy characteristic of the Clarendon Press, and I have noticed only one misprint: on p. 158 " the definition of Modes " should read " the existence of Modes ".

A.G. Wernham