Spinoza, Life and Legacy
by jonathan i. israel
oxford university, 1,344 pages, $49.99
Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he awakens. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. . . . May the Lord blot out his name from under heaven. . . . Nobody may communicate with him, neither in writing nor accord him any favour nor stay with him under the same roof nor within four cubits in his vicinity, nor read any treatise composed or written by him.
Thus reads the litany of thunderous curses pronounced by the members of the Ma’amad (governing council) of the Jewish community in Amsterdam in July 1656. Part of a Herem, or Jewish writ of excommunication, threats of this kind were frequently used within the beleaguered, apprehensive, and largely autonomous Jewish communities of premodern Europe. The threat of complete isolation from the social and financial structures of the community was usually sufficient to bring all sorts of miscreants—petty criminals, abusive spouses, heretics—back into line, at which point the Herem would be annulled and the recipient welcomed back into the community.
Yet this time was different. The target in 1656 was no ordinary miscreant, but a mild-mannered and precociously talented student in his early twenties, who until recently had been one of Amsterdam’s most promising rabbinical candidates. Alas, history does not record the offense for which he was ejected from his community with such gusto, but it does record his quite extraordinary reaction to it. With unprecedented insouciance and self-assurance, the student simply left the community and continued his life as a private, nonreligious citizen. What the gentlemen of the Ma’amad could not have known was that this act of expulsion irrevocably altered the course of intellectual history. They had given the world Spinoza.
The life of Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza is something of a paradox. On one hand, it is difficult to imagine a more retiring, pedestrian existence. A confirmed bachelor, Spinoza spent his relatively short life mostly secluded in his modest apartment in The Hague, polishing lenses, keeping up with correspondence, and receiving the occasional admirer. His meager output of writing would have failed to earn him tenure in today’s academic market, with his major work of philosophy (the Ethics) published only after his death at the age of forty-four. This is hardly the typical vita of one of humanity’s great revolutionary thinkers. Yet, shortly after his demise, Spinoza would gain one of the most consequential reputations in all of Europe, as the apostle of reason.
He became an emblem of the growing division between freethinkers and those cleaving to orthodoxies of any sort. Clandestine groups of dissident intellectuals within the Cercle Spinoziste revered him as a quasi-messianic figure who shone the light of reason into the dark realms of priests and tyrants. By contrast, for all proponents of conventional religious or political beliefs, Spinoza’s name was reviled and accursed more than any other. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, “Spinozist” was hurled as a term of abuse, sufficient to damn its target as a radical who denied all conventions regarding church and state. Even today, within the Orthodox Jewish educational system in which I was raised, Spinoza is referenced—when at all—with the vituperation reserved for a backslider who abandons the sublime majesty of God’s word for the fragility of human reason.
Why was Spinoza perceived as such a threat, in his day and in ours? We can best answer the question by considering not what Spinoza’s philosophy affirmed but rather what it precluded. In identifying the totality of the universe, with its infinite substance and perfectly self-perpetuating mechanisms, with God himself, Spinoza divested the deity of all the qualities generally attributed to him by religious traditions: personhood, intervention, revelation, and salvation. In depicting the workings of nature as eternally fixed and unalterable, he precluded miracles and freedom of the will. In his account of the apparently fractious and anachronistic features of the Hebrew Bible, he precluded its unity, antiquity, and authority as a divine document. In championing the viewpoint of sub specie aeternitatis, the perspective only of eternal truths, he precluded loyalty to tribes, nations, kings, or religious communities. In insisting on the right of each individual to pursue rational inquiry, he denied the right of any political or religious authority to limit the free thought and opinions of its citizens.
Above all, in asserting philosophical inquiry—understood to produce logically inescapable conclusions, akin to geometry—as the exclusive road to truth, Spinoza precluded man’s gaining enlightenment from divine inspiration or received wisdom. In the formulation of Harry Austryn Wolfson (1887–1974), the legendary Harvard sage and historian of philosophy, it was Spinoza who conclusively dissolved any partnership between philosophy and religion, thus shattering the fifteen-century-long endeavour to unite Athens with Jerusalem.
To compose a truly exhaustive account of Spinoza’s work and its impact on the West is a task beyond most mortals, given the breadth of expertise and scope of research necessary to it. Fortunately, Jonathan Israel, for many years a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, is no ordinary mortal. A leading intellectual historian and doyen of Enlightenment studies, Israel has devoted several decades and many vast books—in some cases more than a thousand pages in length—to detailing the intellectual basis of the modern world. The remarkable scope, granularity, and analytical depth of Israel’s 2,500-page trilogy on the Enlightenment is unlikely to be surpassed in this century.
The same may be said of Spinoza, Life and Legacy, in which Israel comes about as close as possible to providing the most comprehensive picture of his subject. This immense work covers a wide array of complex themes, including Spinoza’s familial and communal background of converso Jews from Spain and Portugal; the socioeconomic, technological, and military developments that marked the age of mercantile and imperial expansion; the stormy, millenarian political and religious climate of seventeenth-century Protestant Europe; the intellectual backdrop of Cartesian, Newtonian, Hobbesian, and assorted heterodox trends, and the nature of Spinoza’s interventions within them; the development of Jewish and Christian rationalism; and, of course, the continent-wide controversies occasioned by Spinoza’s works, which occupied members of the European intelligentsia for centuries. That Israel not only covers all of these topics in prodigious detail, but manages to do so in a single volume, is a wondrous achievement.
Of course, this book presents a very specific picture of Spinoza, one that fits within the major thesis that Israel has advanced over the past quarter century: the presence, centrality, and lasting impact of what he terms the “radical enlightenment.” Unlike the vast majority of more moderate Enlightenment writers, radical thinkers such as Condorcet, Diderot, and d’Holbach—a group that enjoyed a brief ascendancy in mid-eighteenth-century France—sought to uproot all prevailing norms regarding religion, science, politics, freedom, and the relationship between individual and state.
In Israel’s account, it was to this uncompromising intellectual tradition, which demanded nothing less than the wholesale reorientation of humanity from superstition to reason, that we owe the benefits of modern democracy, liberty, science, and human rights. At the apex of this tradition, which Israel venerates as the true genesis of modern civilization, he places the renegade Jew. It was precisely Spinoza’s pure rationalism, which he articulated in rigorous form, that spurred the radical enlightenment and allowed it to flourish. In addition to being an exhaustive investigation, therefore, Spinoza, Life and Legacy is also an epic paean, a historian’s offering at the altar of progress.
Israel, therefore, resolutely refuses to sanitize Spinoza, as many later commentators have sought to do, or to reconcile him with more conventional beliefs. Spinoza’s principles, insists Israel,
contradicted all existing religions and codes of conduct . . . Spinoza’s morality amounted to a new outlook on life, a new concept of what human happiness is, and undeniably stood in every way opposed to every Christian principle, belief, and tradition as taught by the churches . . . as well as all revealed religion of whatever kind, every hierarchical social order, all custom, tradition, and received morality.
Put otherwise, the Jews of Amsterdam were correct to see this upstart as a mortal threat to their way of life.
As with its author’s “radical enlightenment” thesis, this book will have its fair share of critics. Some may carp at the length and complexity of some of Israel’s sentences, while others might decry unnecessary tangents into obscure elements of Spinoza’s backstory (a habit that breaks the cardinal rules of composition laid out by Israel’s adviser, the great English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper). Others may scoff at Israel’s old-fashioned method, in which ideas constitute a central animating force in the processes of history.
I do not find myself moved to level such charges. Rather, the most grievous failing of which one may accuse Israel is one of omission. Yes, it is perfectly true that numerous important modern intellectuals—such as Goethe, Shelley, George Eliot, and Einstein—lauded Spinoza and acknowledged his foundational influence. Yet it is equally correct to note that the history of modern philosophy constitutes an extensive rebellion against Spinoza’s austere, omniscient rationality.
Kant’s epistemology undermined the notion that human reason could account for all things, physical and metaphysical. Hegel and the historicists undermined the ambition to formulate a philosophical framework sub specie aeternitatis, untethered to any historical or national moment. Darwin undermined the idea of the human mind as a kind of truth-detection software, by presenting it as an evolutionary tool for genetic self-perpetuation. Freud, along with many of the postmodernists, undermined the idea that our rational selves can be distinguished from our drive for power, prestige, or carnal satisfaction.
A more balanced assessment of Spinoza’s legacy, therefore, must note that the Western tradition has decided against his particular brand of relentless rationalism, and has recognized that a satisfactory account of religion, ethics, and politics must include other modes of understanding. It is in this light that even the religious traditionalist could develop an appreciation of Spinoza—when he is read as one important voice in the polyphonic ensemble of ideas that gave rise to the principles and institutions that permit the creation of a harmonious society. Rationality, when tempered by the empirical, aesthetic, sentimental, and numinous facets of the human experience, is indeed indispensable to human flourishing.
Criticisms aside, Israel’s magisterial work is, for the foreseeable future, the best and most authoritative study of Spinoza. Though most writers are admonished against writing vast, comprehensive works, we may be very glad that Israel ignored such advice and made the effort to write a work on Spinoza that seeks to cover everything. Indeed, he almost succeeds.
J. J. Kimche is a PhD candidate specializing in Jewish intellectual history at Harvard University.
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