I just got invited to a Jewish discussion group tomorrow. Last time I was there, we discussed Maurice Sendak. This time, the topic is Spinoza. Apparently there was a recent play about him. I didn’t see it. I read Spinoza’s Wikipedia article. It wasn’t much help. For one, it has a pro-Spinoza bias. More importantly, it’s filled with terms I don’t understand. Some of those terms have their own articles, but if I read every article on a term I don’t understand it would take hours.
I don’t think that you are going to master Spinoza in one night for a discussion group, but neither does it seem likely that many others there will have his philosophies completely understood either! Nodes, schmodes … anyone who really “gets” that has spent a lot more time on it that I have anyway (or has a deeper mind).
Luckily, the crude understanding that most of us have is enough for a discussion group -
A Jew excommunicated - who knew Jews ever did that? What was going on in Jewish culture of the time that such a thing occurred? For what? Not for worshipping another god, not even for denying that God exists or is One. But for articulating a sophisticated concept of God as something too big to be anything less than the universe itself and perhaps beyond, a God that is not interventional. Expressed in terms of mathematics of the time. Articulated that understanding how the universe works is understanding God and is the path to happiness. Why was that so threatening?
That’s enough to pose a few questions and hope that there is someone there who knows enough to do more than BS their way through a considered response. And the rest of us can enjoy just trying to follow the explanations.
Anti-Spinoza? That his writing was dense. The POV that saying God is everything (and possibly more) and not an entity that cares about us or what we do, is functionally atheism, I guess.
Unkie Spinoza? Would have not been much fun at Thanksgiving I’d think.
I don’t know if that helps at all but good luck in any case.
I know I can’t master his works in one night and I am NOT looking to pass myself off as an expert. I just want to know enough to follow the conversation and contribute something to it.
The founder of the chasidic movement, his name escapes me at the moment, was excommunicated by many of his peers. I’ve also read cases of rabbis with profound disagreements mutually excommunicating each other.
I am puzzled as to what you think is biased about the Wikipedia article. Is there a faction that contends that he was a horrible human being or an incompetent philosopher? I have never heard of them.
Your question is too non-specific to be answered usefully in a Dope post (and perhaps it is too late anyway). If the Wikipedia article did not help you, there is not much to be done.
Two anecdotes about Spinoza’s reputation:[ul]
[li]Jeeves was a Spinoza enthusiast. He once asked Bertie Wooster to buy him a copy of a new edition of Spinoza’s works. This, I think, is one of the few real clues in Wodehouse’s oeuvre suggesting that Jeeves was a genuine intellectual, rather than just being such in the eyes of Bertie and his twit friends.[/li][li]A British government agent one reported that the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, already known for their radical, pro-French-Revolution views, were probably French spies, because, he claimed, he had over heard them discussion someone referred to as the “spy nosy”.[/li][li] Hi Opal!:o[/li][/ul]
Basically, Spinoza was excommunicated for asserting that God was synonymous with Nature - which is one way lifts God up to the highest level, but also carried an implication that God was not a separate, anthropomorphic being - and in fact did not need to be worshipped separately.
It was generally seen as part of The Enlightenment - a variant of Deism (i.e., if there was a God, he set the universe in motion but is not currently engaged with it and need not be actively sought…)
A “pro-Spinoza” bias on Wikipedia? I never heard of anyone anti-Spinoza, except maybe Leibniz, and obviously, those who excommunicated him.
Gilles Deleuze has a very short (fifty pages, maybe) little book published in English by City Lights which is a helpful place to get started. His larger book Spinoza: Philosophy and Expressionism is a superb commentary accessible to the general citizen if you want more.
His Latin prose is very workmanlike, as well, if you want to show off a bit at your group – at the very least, some of his particular terms are usually left in Latin, so you need to know what they mean to understand him. I found my text of the Ethica online somewhere and printed a good bit of it out in “pamphlet” form. I don’t believe it’s in print anywhere. It’s also, “more geometrica,” so it can be demanding to work through, since he wasn’t kidding – it’s a deductive presentation, built on axioms, a la Euclid. You have to pay attention, or you’ll end up confused pretty quickly.
Ethics, Geometrically Demonstrated is exactly as accessible as its title makes it sound. I think its the only book I’ve given up on reading midway through.
[QUOTE=Spinoza, The Ethics & Selected Letters, Hackett Edition, p. 60]
I must not fail to mention here that the advocates of this doctrine, eager to display their talent in assigning purpose to things, have introduced a new style of argument to prove their doctrine, i.e. a reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance, thus revealing the lack of any other argument in its favor.
For example, if a stone falls from the roof on somebody’s head and kills him, by this method of arguing, they will prove that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for if it had not fallen for this purpose by the will of God, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many coinciding circumstances) have chanced to concur?
Perhaps you will reply that the event occurred because the wind was blowing and the man was walking that way. But they will persist in asking why the wind blew… And so they will go on and on asking the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God that is, the sanctuary of ignorance.
[/quote]
See? Discussion started, one that you have something at the ready to contribute to. The rest you can probably follow if all you knew was what I referenced in my post; it is doubtful that too many there really know all that more than that unless you are hanging with a seriously philosophically informed intellectual crowd.
So how did the discussion group go? Did it cover much other than the subjects I mentioned*? If so what were they?
*Spinoza’s concept of God as being the all rather than as an anthropomorphic entity that rewards, punishes, creates, and actively performs miracles; that the study of the nature of the universe is the study of God and is the path to happiness; the nature of his arguments in terms of mathematical proof (and why philosophers of the time did that); and his excommunication (and by extension, the place of excommunication in Jewish culture historically).
This article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good introduction to Spinoza’s life and to his works, including a short but detailed description of his most famous work, the Ethics. This is the personal biography:
The very boiled-down summary of the Ethics is that, in section 1, Spinoza presents a number of propositions about the world from which he concludes that the world is made of one substance only, and that substance is God. Everything we see around us is just a different attribute, or “mode”, of God: our bodies are one mode of God, our minds are another mode, and so on. This means God, for Spinoza, is not anthropomorphic. He’s not a benevolent father in the sky who created the world out of his free will and watches over it, God is the world and everything in it. This basically rejects the traditional Judeo-Christian conception of God and it was the part of his philosophy that was deemed so heretical by his Jewish contemporaries. It also means that everything in the world is necessary; everything that has happened and will happen is part of God, so it could never have been different. Our fate is set, if you like.
After section one he goes on to address a number of other issues with this knowledge in hand. For instance, a traditional problem with Descartes’ theory of dualiam - that the mind is a non-physical thing, completely distinct from the body - is the question of how our minds manage to interact with our bodies if they’re not physical. Spinoza’s answer is to reject the idea that the body and mind are made of different substances, because they’re both just modes of God. Later in the text Spinoza outlines his theory of virtue, vice and happiness, which is essentially a Stoic one; that we cannot change the course of events, so the key to happiness is to learn to let go of our lust for material things we have no control over and to pursue rational wisdom instead.
I think I acquitted myself well at the group. I disagreed with somebody saying that Spinoza was not a pantheist. I introduced several members to the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
I also learned, from an Israeli immigrant, that David Ben Gurion upset many Jews when he visited Spinoza’s grave- the excommunication never having been lifted. He also said that rarely a day passes in Israel without some rabbi or another excommunicating some one.
Albert Einstein subscribed wholeheartedly to Spinoza’s philosophy.
It was in keeping with Einstein’s view of an impersonal creative entity responsible
for the existence of Nature and for Nature’s laws, but having no role in the personal
lives of human beings.