Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity Read online

  To give some sense of Spinoza’s audacity on behalf of reason, let’s consider just the first claim for now, his denying that there is what I have just christened the “if-is gap.” A cosmologist I once read (I wish I could remember who or where) compared two different sorts of deterministic necessity that might hold in cosmology.

  The first sort of necessity involves there being various possible cosmological dial settings, so to speak, corresponding to different possible initial conditions at the beginning of the world, the Big Bang; in addition to these settings, there’s also an on-off switch. The laws of nature don’t in themselves determine which of the possible dial settings the universe got set to, and, too, the laws of nature don’t force the on-off switch to either position. But once the dial is set, and once the switch is turned to on, the laws of nature determine everything that follows from there on in. That’s the first level of deterministic necessity. It says that if the dial was set to so-and-so, and if the on-off switch was switched to on, then, given the laws of nature, this is the way the world would be.

  The second, and stronger, sort of necessity that the cosmologist distinguished was this: there is only one dial setting, and then there’s the on-off switch. Once the switch is turned to on, everything follows from the laws of nature. But the laws couldn’t, of themselves, force the switch to the on position. So this second sort of determinism says: if the switch is turned to on, then, given the laws of nature, this is the way the world would have to be.

  Spinoza’s claim of deterministic necessity exceeds even this second alternative. Spinoza claims that the laws of nature are such that not only is there one dial setting, but the switch must, of necessity, have been pointed to on. It’s been pointed to on for all eternity. Nature, meaning the laws of nature, needs nothing outside of itself to explain itself. There is no “if-is gap” because there’s just no if about it. This world, exactly as it is, necessarily exists. Its very nature, captured in its laws (in Spinoza’s terminology, its “essence”), entails its existence. It is, in his language, causa sui, the cause of itself, both in terms of what it is (there’s only one dial setting) and that it is (the switch is permanently turned to on). Nature itself satisfies the opening statement of The Ethics: “By that which is self-caused (causa sui) I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.”

  Nothing outside of the world — no transcendent God, in other words — explains the world. Its explanation is immanent within itself. To conceive of the world in terms of its explanatory immanence is to conceive of God. God, he will therefore say, is immanent in nature, not transcendent.

  Of course, denying the “if-is gap” means defusing one of traditional religion’s major arguments for God’s existence: the need for a Transcendent Something to have, at the very least, turned the cosmological switch to on. So, too, Spinoza’s denial of the “is-ought gap” defuses a second of traditional religion’s major arguments, the need for a Transcendent Something to have established the difference between right and wrong. Just as the explanation of the world is immanent within its own nature, so, too, he will argue, the difference between right and wrong is immanent within our human nature.

  His denial of both gaps derives from the stringent requirements he places on explanation. An explanation can have no inexplicable danglers protruding from it. Appealing to a Transcendent Something in both cases, the cosmological and the ethical, commits one to inexplicable danglers. What were the reasons the Transcendent Something had for His choices, both cosmological and ethical? If He had none, then there is inexplicability. If He did have reasons, then those reasons in themselves provide the explanation, and the appeal to Transcendence is redundant. So it’s either, in both cases, immanence or inexplicable danglers. Therefore it is, in both cases, immanence: there is no “if-is gap” and there is no “is-ought gap.” A priori reason executes both leaps, and The Ethics aims to show us how.

  Mrs. Schoenfeld had accused Spinoza of arrogance — the arrogance of thinking that the human mind exceeds all forms of intelligence. She happened to have been wrong about this. Spinoza believes that our finite minds are limited because of their necessary finitude. Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself. We know the truth only to the extent that our ideas approach asymptotically closer to congruence with God’s infinite mind, which divine mind we should think of as the world’s being aware of its own explanation. As this infinite explanation exceeds any that we can arrive at by orders of magnitude, so, too, God’s mind exceeds ours by orders of magnitude. Be that as it may, analytic philosophers, too, a bit like Mrs. Schoenfeld, see a system like Spinoza’s as hubristically oblivious to the limits of human reason.

  And so I can imagine one of my philosophy professors— say, Peter Hempel, at that time one of the last of the original members of the legendary Vienna Circle, which had propounded a radical form of empiricism known as logical positivism — translating Mrs. Schoenfeld into the language of positivism:

  “A priori reason can yield only empty tautological truths. ‘All bachelors are unmarried.’ Yes, that is a priori, but only because it is analytically true. Its truth is a function of its meaning alone, and therefore it says nothing at all about the nature of the world. All analytic truths are empty of descriptive content, and all a priori truths are analytic. To know the nature of the world we must depend on experience. So yes, ‘it is either raining or not raining.’ Or ‘if there is a God, then there is a God.’ Or ‘since matter is composed of elementary particles it is not the case that it is not composed of elementary particles.’ True, true, and true, but completely devoid of descriptive content! To know whether it is raining, whether there is a God, whether matter reduces to elementary particles, we must look for empirical evidence. A priori reason alone lays out only what is logically true, therefore true in all possible worlds and simply because of what the proposition means. To know what is true in this world, we must make contact with it, through experience. To even know what a descriptive proposition is asserting, to grasp its meaning, is to know how we would go about empirically confirming or disconfirming it, the sorts of experiences that would show us whether it was true or false. If no experiences could, in principle, count for or against a proposition, then it is not only unknowable. It is devoid of content! A priori reason is certain, yes, but only because it tells us nothing of what is, much less of what ought to be. And if one thinks otherwise, one is doomed to uttering nonsense!

  “Think about it, philosophy graduate students. What are the experiences that could possibly confirm or disconfirm such propositions as these — and I choose now randomly from the work entitled The Ethics: The more reality or being a thing has the greater the number of its attributes. This is from part one, and it is the ninth proposition. God or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists. This is part one, proposition eleven. Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner. Part one, proposition twenty-five, corollary. Or — and here Spinoza passes from meaningless metaphysics to meaningless ethics: The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s virtue is to know God. This is part four, the twenty-eighth proposition. Or — and now I flip toward the end of this deluded exercise to part five, proposition twenty-two: Nevertheless in God there is necessarily an idea which expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity.

  “Is any of this in principle verifiable? Does any of this have a precise meaning such that we could know what to look for in the world to determine whether it is true or false?

  “Let the name of Benedictus Spinoza serve as a warning to you against the folly of metaphysics, which can only end in systematic semantic nonsense, compounded by the fallacy of ignoring the is-ought gap!”

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bsp; In other words, none of my education, running the gamut from Mrs. Schoenfeld to Peter Hempel, had prepared me to appreciate the philosophical system of Spinoza.

  But my interest in the famous “mind-body problem” got me interested in Descartes, so that when the chairperson of the Barnard philosophy department, in which I was then teaching, suggested that I take over the course titled “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz,” I agreed, mostly because I was a young assistant professor who found it pragmatic to agree with most of the suggestions of my chairperson. I read The Ethics for the first time the semester I was teaching it, and I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the students who took that course with me that year, as well as for the next couple of years.

  But at some point, The Ethics began to make sense to me, despite my first-rate analytic education. I’m not saying that I actually believed the system to be true, but only that it all made sense: each of its individual proofs, and how they all hung together into one structure. The insight came when I grasped that the fundamental intuition underlying Spinoza’s thinking was simply this: all facts have explanations. For every fact that is true, there is a reason why it is true. There simply cannot be, for Spinoza, the inexplicably given, a fact which is a fact for no other reason than that it is a fact. In other words, no inexplicable dangling threads protrude from the fabric of the world.

  This intuition, which we can call the “Presumption of Reason,” is the fundamental metaphysical intuition for Spinoza, so fundamental that it is never stated as an axiom, just as the laws of logic are not explicitly stated as axioms13 but rather only make themselves known in their application. Spinoza treats the Presumption of Reason as on a par with a law of logic, as a rule of inference that he avails himself of in the course of deriving his propositions. It is the invisible piece that closes the lacunae in proof after proof. It is the assumption about the world from which his rationalism follows.

  He was wrong in simply treating the Presumption of Reason as a law of logic. The laws of logic are such so that they cannot be logically denied: if you deny them, you end up contradicting yourself. The logical laws therefore stake no claim on the way the world is. Their negation describes no possible world. The Presumption of Reason is not like that. It stakes a claim — a reasonable claim, but a claim nevertheless — on what our world is like, and that claim may be true or it may not. Spinoza would have liked to have proved — he thought he had — that he had deduced the only logically possible world. This is why he could write with such consummate confidence to a young man he had once taught, who had just converted to Catholicism and was now challenging Spinoza’s philosophy in an admittedly obnoxious way.14 “I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy,” Spinoza wrote back. “I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.” If there are no arbitrary aspects of reality, he argues, and there can’t be, he asserts, then logic itself must—logically must—explain the world.

  What he will assert, in fact, is that logic itself is the world, which can be conceptualized alternatively as God or nature. The world is self-aware logic. The appearance of contingency — of things being the way they are for no other reason than that’s the way they are — is merely that: appearance, a product of our finite mind’s inability to assimilate the infinite sweep of the logical implications that comprise reality. The infinite intellect of God is aware of the whole infinite sweep. Its awareness and its being are one and the same.

  What his system amounts to, in effect, is a working out of the Presumption of Reason. The world as it is described in The Ethics is one of the two ways that the world would have to be were the Presumption of Reason true. (The other possible way is the one that Leibniz pursues in his Monadology.) The fact that it is a strange world (as is Leibniz’s), not much at all like the world of our experiences, demonstrates that this intuition, in itself quite reasonable — after all, it is simply the assertion that the world is, thoroughly, reasonable— is not so easy to uphold. It leads us far afield of common sense.

  In a sense, here are our choices. If we want to retain the intuition that the world is thoroughly rational, with an explanation for all facts, we can go either the Spinoza way or the Leibniz way, which will lead us to maintain that the real world — Reality, God help us — corresponds nary at all to our experience of it. We will be inclined, like Spinoza, to file away experience, our seeming contact with the world, as just a species of imagination, the lowest step on the cognitive ladder. Or we can give up the Presumption of Reason; but that move, too, leads to some unpalatable conclusions, as the Scottish empiricist David Hume conclusively demonstrated. It leads to a conclusion that makes it deucedly difficult to distinguish at all between justified and unjustified beliefs about the world, at least insofar as those beliefs extend beyond the immediate content of our present experiences. What we are left with is — this is the conclusion of Hume, the most rigorous working out of the consequences of the rejection of the Presumption of Reason — a sort of hollowed-out solipsism, with not even an ongoing subject of experience to console us, but only the experience itself, and only while it is happening. I can’t know about anything outside my own mind, and that mind itself reduces to a series of mental events. All that I can really know to exist is the mental event I happen to be having at the time. Just try confining yourself to that parsimonious ontology when you are doing anything but philosophy.

  So the rigorous consequences of accepting the Presumption of Reason and the rigorous consequences of rejecting the Presumption of Reason both lead us to counterintuitive points of view. Perhaps rigor is just not in our cards. But that’s a pretty unpalatable conclusion, too.

  One could perhaps be inclined to counter Spinoza’s Presumption of Reason by enumerating all the ways in which our contemporary knowledge seems to belie it. Our most powerful scientific theories — evolution in the biological sciences, quantum mechanics in the physical sciences— enshrine chance and contingency at their most fundamental explanatory levels. And when it comes to our accounts of human behavior — history, psychology, economics — then there is even less appearance of deterministic necessity. A Spinozist response would be to say that these explanations— whether in physics, biology, or the human sciences — appear fundamental only from the human point of view, which by its nature must be limited. From the point of view of God, of logic itself, there is neither chance nor contingency.

  As mentioned in the last chapter, there are contemporary physicists and cosmologists who have Spinozistic aspirations to banish chance and contingency in “the theory of everything.” String theorists, in particular, are Spinozistic in their goal of having their physics emerge fully formed from their mathematics. Recall, too, the famous final sentences in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: “If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.” Hawking’s statement eloquently attests to the fact that Spinoza’s understanding of what the laws of nature could tell us, if only we were capable of assimilating them in their entirety, is not foreign to modern scientific sensibilities.

  Signature of Albert Einstein in the visitors’ book in Spinoza’s house in Rijnsburg. It is dated 2 November 1920.

  But of all great modern scientific minds, Albert Einstein’s stands out as having been the most self-consciously influenced by Spinoza. (The guestbook at the little house in Rijnsburg where Spinoza had lived, now a museum, has Einstein’s signature, signed 2 November 1920.) He often described himself as a “disciple of Spinoza,” and speaks of him often, either explicitly or implicitly, as when he re
fers to “the grandeur of reason incarnate.” His views on nature and our knowledge of it were clearly informed by a deep study of the philosopher. “The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image — a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being.”15 Almost every answer that Einstein ever gave when asked to expound on his philosophy of science and his views on religion echoes with strains of Spinoza.

  Despite Spinoza’s extreme rationalism, the most extreme in the history of thought, he remains of scientific relevance, from brain science to string theory, from Damasio to Einstein and Hawking.

  With time, “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz” became my favorite class to teach, and Spinoza my favorite among the mighty triumvirate. We would work our way through the whole of The Ethics. My students would always begin as I had begun, with unmitigated bafflement before the eccentricity — both in form and content — of this seemingly impenetrable work. I would witness, year after year, the transformation that would come over the class as they slowly made their way into Spinoza’s way of seeing things, watching the entire world reconfigure itself in the vision, no matter how unsustainable over the long run that vision proves to be for most of us — no matter how unsustainable we would even want it to be, since, in its ruthless high-mindedness, it asks us to renounce so many passions. (Among the passions we must renounce is romantic love, which, Spinoza deduces, will almost always end badly: “Emotional distress and unhappiness have their origin especially in excessive love towards a thing subject to considerable instability, a thing which we can never possess. For nobody is disturbed or anxious about anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, enmities, etc. arise except from love towards things which nobody can truly possess.” Paramount among “things which nobody can truly possess,” of course, are people.)