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.
Notes
1 See Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018). Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s (Ethics, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988). Susan James, Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014). Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vols. 1 and 2 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992).
2 While a number of
articles have appeared related to Spinoza and individual artists, there has
been little attempt to date to focus on the importance of his ideas across the
arts in general. Other engagements so far include Studia Spinozana, Vol.
5. ‘Spinoza and Literature’ Special ed. team: Martin Bollacher, R. Henrard, and
Wim Klewer … (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1989), p. 475; Filippo
Mignini, Ars Imaginandi (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1981);
Franz Schlerath’s, Spinoza und die Kunst (Hellerau bei Dresden, 1920);
Howard Selsam, ‘Spinoza: Art and Geometry’, in Studies in the History of
Ideas, Vol. III (Columbia University Press, 1935).
3 See David Bell, Spinoza
in Germany 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London: Institute of Germanic
Studies, U of London, 1984). Richard Berkeley, Coleridge and the Crisis of
Reason (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). Rosalie L., Colie, ‘Spinoza and
the Early English Deists’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20.1
(January 1959). Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (eds), Spinoza and
German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012). William R. Hooton III,
‘Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Politics of Pantheism’, Coleridge Bulletin:
The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge, (1999 Autumn), p. 14. Marjorie
Levinson, ‘A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza’, Studies in Romanticism,
46.4 (2007). Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French rationalism
from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford University Press, 2014).
4 See Selsam, ob.
Cit.
5 S. T. Coleridge, The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments,
Vol. 11.1, in H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson (eds), (Princeton:
Princeton UP), p. 620. This is cited in Berkeley, ob. cit. 38.
De artikelen
Anthony Uhlmann, Spinoza, aesthetics, and Percy Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’, Pages 721-738
Abstract: This paper focuses on the relation between Spinoza’s philosophy and the aesthetic theories and pronouncements developed by Percy Shelley in his well-known essay ‘A Defence of Poetry’. It begins by briefly considering questions of influence, before developing a critique of James. C. Morrison’s argument that Spinoza’s philosophy does not engage with aesthetic questions. It argues, against Morrison, that clear lines of argument can be found in Spinoza that open understandings of how artistic practice might have real effects in the world. It then develops a reading of ‘A Defence of Poetry’ in light of Shelley’s interest in Spinoza’s philosophy. [tandfonline]
Moira Gatens, Frankenstein, Spinoza, and exemplarity, Pages 739-752
Abstract: This paper reads Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, through the lens of three themes in Spinoza’s philosophy. First, the bondage of the passions; second, the importance of the imitation of affects as grounding sociability; and, finally, the problematic relationship between human normative life and the rest of nature, posed by Spinoza’s immanent ontology. Like Spinoza’s exemplars in the Ethics and in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Shelley’s presentation of the modern Prometheus is intended to provide her readers with a vivid salutary lesson: hubris and narcissism engender disastrous forms of sociability. In contrast, the ars vivendi of the wise person centres on strength of character (fortitudo) which consists in achieving a balance between the care of one’s self (animositas) and the care of others (generositas). [tandfonline]
Michael Strawser, The true Spinoza of Market Street, Pages 753-770
Abstract: Spinoza is commonly viewed as a rationalist philosopher emphasising abstract metaphysical truth over concrete human emotions and relations. This view permeates Isaac Bashevis Singer’s ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, which ridicules the intellectualism of Dr Nahum Fischelson, who had studied Spinoza’s Ethics ‘for the last thirty years’ and provocatively asked Spinoza’s forgiveness for becoming a fool after consummating his marriage. But is love a thing for fools? Is it accurate to view Spinoza’s philosophy in this way? Here I argue that Singer’s view of Spinoza is a misleading caricature, for it fails to appreciate Spinoza’s emphasis on emotional well-being, which clearly involves a recognition of love’s binding force. Spinoza’s perfectionist ethic not only allows for a life of love and emotional commitment, as in marriage, but it even goes further in showing us how noble love has the power to make us truly free. Ultimately, I argue that the true Spinoza of Market Street is not Dr Fischelson, but rather Black Dobbe, and that this reading rightly expresses the progressive nature of Spinoza’s ethics of love and view of freedom. [tandfonine]
Dimitris Vardoulakis, The figure of Moses: the origins of authority in Spinoza, Pages 771-785
Abstract: How baroque was Spinoza in his treatment of the prophets? I examine this question by comparing the pictorial treatments of Moses from the Netherlands to Spinoza’s treatment of Moses at the beginning of the Theological Political Treatise. I concentrate on two representations of Moses descending from mount Sinai, one by Ferdinand Bol and the other by Rembrandt. Of particular importance is the idea of hierarchy. I will argue that Spinoza takes an ambiguous position in relation to baroque, on the one hand following the baroque’s drastic spatiotemporal condensation that questions hierarchies, but on the other refusing the baroque’s representation of unmediated or unjustified sovereign violence. [tandfonline]
Peg Rawes, Aesthetic geometries of life, Pages 787-802
Abstract: Aesthetics in the Ethics examines life which is composed of powers of relation. Human and other beings, whether they identify as human or an other form of life, are expressed through the entity’s powers of existence. Spinoza’s thinking is located historically before the formal philosophical science of aesthetics, as well as our contemporary understanding that aesthetic self-determination is a mode of ‘care’. However, this article suggests that the Ethics provides a fascinating early-modern example of these powers. In the second part of the article, I show that they are also questions central to the work of the architect, Buckminster Fuller, and artist, Agnes Denes. Their designs and art-works, especially their planetary maps, highlight how Spinoza’s aesthetics corresponds with modern visualisations of life and non-life, for the individual, society, and also at a planetary scale. [tandfonline]
Marie Thompson, Spinoza and musical power, Pages 803-820
Abstract: In one of the few places in which musical experience is discussed in Spinoza’s Ethics, it is used as a means of exemplifying the ways in which an entity, in itself, is not ‘good or evil’: it is neither, or both, depending on the relations into which it enters with other bodies. In this article, I consider what a Spinozist theory of musical power might entail. I argue that the particular, immanent and materialist notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that can be found in Spinoza’s work and are exemplified via music enable a departure from both ‘aesthetic moralism’ and ‘aesthetic relativism’. With reference to contemporary discourses of musical violence, as well as Pauline Oliveros’ praxis of Deep Listening, I assert that Spinoza makes space for music’s ethico-affective ambivalence. Drawing attention to Spinoza’s citation of deaf experiences of music, I also consider the extent to which a Spinozist model of musical power allows for ‘auraldiversity’. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which musical experience might exemplify some of the key tenets of Spinoza’s thought. [tandfonline]
Christopher Davidson, Producing marks of distinction: hilaritas and devotion as singular virtues in Spinoza’s aesthetic festival, Pages 821-838
Abstract: Spinoza’s concepts of wonder, the imitation of affects, cheerfulness, and devotion provide the basis for a Spinozist aesthetics. Those concepts from his Ethics, when combined with his account of rituals and festivals in the Theological-Political Treatise and his Political Treatise, reveal an aesthetics of social affects. The repetition of ritualised participatory aesthetic practices over time generates a unique ingenium or way of life for a social group, a singular style which distinguishes them from the general political body. Ritual and the imitation of affects explain why specific styles of art are associated with consistent styles of bodily modifications, clothing, and affects. This paper claims, not that already similar people flock to the same art, but rather, that immersion in the same art is what produces their similarity. Art (especially in the immersive, festival-like experience of live performance) can generate the affect of devotion, which intensifies in-group love, temporarily blocks affects of sadness, and focusses one intently on the aesthetic experience due to devotion’s connection to wonder. Cheerfulness shows that, through variation of aesthetic objects, art can cause pleasure without risking excess. In addition, while politics’ central affect is sad fear, aesthetically-united groups are bound by joyful affects. [tandfonline]
Janice Richardson, Spinoza, Kant and the sublime, Pages 839-857
Abstract: In this article, I draw out the implications of understanding Kant’s influential analysis of the sublime through Spinoza’s framework. By delineating different stages in the sublime experience, I map Kant’s description of the dynamic and mathematical sublime, with their associated pleasure in pain, onto Spinoza’s analysis of our encounter with any (art) object. Both describe experiences that start with imagination and sad passions turning to joyful affects with our employment of reason. In addition to joyful affects, both describe experiences that hold deeper implications for our self-understanding in relation to God/Nature. However, the meanings of these terms and the conceptual frameworks are radically different. From Spinoza’s position, experience of the Kantian sublime would prompt superstition and diminish us, reducing our power and virtue. I then consider what would be the equivalent of the sublime experience for Spinoza that would be associated with joy. Finally, I draw on both Spinozist and feminist critique to rethink the Kantian tradition of the sublime. [tandfonline]
Keith Green, Spinoza and the ‘outsider’ prophet, Pages 859-877
Abstract: Since the middle of the twentieth century, partly through the wide influence of Abraham Heschel’s work on the prophets and prophesy in Ancient Israel, an image of the prophet as an ‘outsider’ has emerged. This image contrasts, in critical ways, with an image of ‘the prophet’ that appears central in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise. Spinoza’s Treatise, however, is an inaugural text for the historical-critical study of prophesy in ancient Israel; and it casts a long shadow over Heschel’s view of prophesy. I identify three areas of tension between their images of prophets. The contrasts reveal that Heschel, and other twentieth century theorists of prophesy invest prophetic authority and authenticity in religious experience whose transformative power is a function of its ‘breaking through’ oppressive social/religious institutions and norms ‘from the outside.’ Spinoza, by contrast, accounts for prophetic authority via ‘immanence’: the location of prophets within a tradition of law and common ‘usage’ with the political institutions which they criticise and challenge. I argue, finally, that Spinoza’s image can accommodate the prophetic ‘outsider’ and rebel, and in a way that suggests that prophesy must now be conceived as encompassing social critique within the context of the arts. [tandfonline]
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