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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[1]
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

#Spinoza-portret van İhsan Bayar

[cf. ook de twitter-account van deze Turkse illustrator]