In Our Time - Spinoza

Episode Date: May 3, 2007

Melvyn Bragg discusses the Dutch Jewish Philosopher Spinoza. For the radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, he was the first man to have lived and died as a true atheist. For others, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he provides perhaps the most profound conception of God to be found in Western philosophy. He was bold enough to defy the thinking of his time, yet too modest to accept the fame of public office and he died, along with Socrates and Seneca, one of the three great deaths in philosophy. Baruch Spinoza can claim influence on both the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century and great minds of the 19th, notably Hegel, and his ideas were so radical that they could only be fully published after his death. But what were the ideas that caused such controversy in Spinoza’s lifetime, how did they influence the generations after, and can Spinoza really be seen as the first philosopher of the rational Enlightenment?With Jonathan Rée, historian and philosopher and Visiting Professor at Roehampton University; Sarah Hutton, Professor of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth; John Cottingham, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, for the radical thinkers of the Enlightenment, Spinoza was the first man to have lived and died as a true atheist. For others, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he provides the most profound conception of God to be found in Western philosophy.

He was bold enough to defy the thinking of his time, yet too modest to accept the fame of public office, despite numerous offers, and he died, as did Socrates and Seneca, one of the, what's called one of the three great deaths in philosophy. Baroque Spinoza, a Dutch Jewish philosopher of the 17th century, who changed his name to Benedictus Spinoza, when he was excommunicated by the Jewish community and fell among Christians, can claim influence on both the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century

and great minds of the 19th, notably Hegel. His ideas were so radical, they could only be four, published after his death. What then were these ideas that caused such controversy in Spinoza's lifetime? How did they influence the generations after? And Kansipinoza really be seen as the first philosopher of the rational enlightenment. Joining me to discuss Finoza are the historian and philosopher, Jonathan Ray, visiting professor at Roehampton University,

Sarah Hutton, Professor of English at the University of Wales, Arsworth, and John Cottingham, Professor at Philosophy at the University of Reading. Jonathan Ray, Spinoza is born in Amsterdam in 1632, a place you associate with Protestantism, with trade, that's the Holland of Rembrandt. How did his family come to be living there? They were Portuguese Jews. They'd got there in the 1590s or so,

and they were part of a community of about 1,000 Jews in Amsterdam. Amsterdam then being probably the most exciting city in the world. There was trade with South America, with the East Indies, with the Mediterranean. It was a massive centre of attraction for people seeking asylum from political and religious persecution all around Europe. It was a great centre for science and learning. There were some 400 booksellers and publishers there. It was incredibly prosperous and expanding.

You could lose, famously, you could lose a fortune on tulips in a day if you wanted to. But if you wanted to make a more wise investment for a fraction of the price, you could get your portrait printed by Rembrandt. It was a terrific place to be. And I think it was not at all a bad place to be a Jew in. The Jews weren't confined to a ghetto. They were welcomed as part of this extraordinary liberal city, a city, but it should be added,

where it had the reputation of being a place where sexual freedom could be exercised, and most strikingly of all, where servants could not be distinguished from their masters. They behaved in the same way, they looked the same. It was the California of the 17th century. It does sound very alluring, doesn't it? His family were expelled in a curious way,

because from Portugal, they'd adopted, Christianity, as many people did, forced to, they've been forced into Christianity, be Christians or or die or leave, and they'd become Christians. But does one understand that they'd still, as it were, kept to being Jewish, and when they were finally challenged by this or exposed by this, they fled to Amsterdam. So he came into a Jewish community there from, but have there some Christian inheritance, I don't mean, around the place, in the culture, wasn't it, in his family's culture? Indeed, I mean, there were conversers, they were supposed to be Christians, but the Spanish authorities had doubts probably justified

about the sincerity of that conversion and so they came first to Nantes and then to Amsterdam where they genuinely were able to enjoy freedom. They had a community where they I think they spoke Portuguese amongst themselves. They knew a little Dutch, they read Spanish and they learnt Hebrew in school. They were excluded therefore from the

learned languages. Latin was not spoken amongst them. That was something that Spinoza only acquired much later. Sarah Hutton, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community in 1656. Why was that? He was about 24. How is it? Well, nobody really knows why. This, what we've described as excommunication, the harem, was used to impose discipline on the Jewish community and was used quite a number of times.

So he was not an exception in having one served on him. The wording of the harem in his case is particularly vehement. And he, unlike many other people against whom it was served, never sought to return to the community. At this time, he seemed to have been mingling with Gentiles, with... Christians of a rather open variety whom he may have met through business in Amsterdam. He was actually originally destined to follow his father as a merchant. And then he moved to Rainsburg because of that, and he joined a sort of rather free-thinking Christian group called the Collegence. Who were they?

He became associated with this group who were a sort of equivalent of what we might call, the Quakers in England nowadays. They were a group of open-minded Christians without a closed church organisation, without a specific creed, very much taking the view that Reason had a very important role in trying to understand God, and they were very accepting of Spinoza, whom they regarded as a pious man like themselves. John Cottingham, what might be called the philosophical weather, I'm sorry to be so, a period of being said by the French philosopher René Descartes.

He died in 1650. What were the key ideas that Descartes had left behind? and can you tell us how greatly he obviously did appeal to Spinoza? Yes, Descartes appealed to a lot of people. His idea has kind of burst forth on Europe when Spinoza was growing up. In his discourse on the method in 1637, Descartes had stressed mathematics and in particular geometry and said the long chains of reasoning that geometers use

had given him the idea that the whole of science could be fitted into a similar pattern. but it wasn't just the methods of mathematics that appealed to him. Descartes' programme really was the mathematicisation of all of science. And like Galileo, he saw quantity as the key to proper scientific explanations. Can you say it more, though? In place of the previous worldview dominated much of Middle Ages, thought of the world as composed of separate substances,

each with its special qualities. So heavy stuff, earthly matter had the property of heaviness, so moved downwards. Fiery matter moved upwards. So lots of distinct items with their properties. For Descartes, there was really only one type of stuff, what he called raise extensor, extended substance. And really chairs, tables, mountains, trees, plants, these were all modifications of the same homogenous extended substance, which could be explained in terms of mathematical covering laws, laws specifying size, shape and motion. That was really the key. But there was one big

exception for Descartes, namely mind consciousness. That was for him entirely different from matter, from extended substance. It couldn't be described to mathematics. It wasn't a subject for mathematical science. So whereas there's just this one homogenous material stuff which mathematical physicists investigate, there are lots of individual souls, minds, your mind, my mind, and these are not described by mathematics. They're unique individual immaterial substances.

So this is dualism, I mean very simplistically. Mind, body, and probably the most famous quotation in philosophy, I think therefore I am. So we have that. Now, what, can you briefly tell us, Spinoza's first early work as the principles of a Cartesian philosophy? What is he taken from it? He says at one stage

debautee, tell us how they can move on to Spinoza's own ideas. Well, his first work, as you say, was really just an exposition of Descartes' principles. Descartes' principles was published in Latin in 1644 and was a complete compendium. So it of science and philosophy, offered a unified vision with metaphysics at the root and then physics

and then various other sciences like psychology and physiology. Spinoza followed Descartes in many respects, but I should have said in connection with Descartes, that in addition to mind and matter, the dualism which you picked up on, there's also God for Descartes, a separate, uncreated, infinite science. substance, and that is quite a part from mind and matter. And Spinoza was in a way to reduce, so for Descartes there are really three types of substance, God, mind, matter.

And Spinoza, though, picking up on the general structure and method, the kind of geometrical method, reduces it all down, as we'll be discussing, to one, just to one. Let's start discussing that now, because it's a fascinating subject, and we might as well get to the heart here, but it's been well set up, So here we go. Jonathan Ray, let's talk about his major work, published after his death. One important idea in it, but I need a steer on this from you three. But one important idea in this is encapsulated in the phrase,

Deus Siva Natura, God or Nature. What was he getting out with that phrase? The starting point of Descartes' revolution in philosophy was the idea that everything is going to become intelligible. And I think Spinoza thought that Descartes hadn't taken that far enough. If everything was going to be intelligible, and everything had to be related to everything else. And in the end, I mean, the ethics begins by talking about how there is just one thing in the universe,

which is the cause of itself. And that is, in fact, the universe itself. So that if the universe is going to be intelligible, then everything has to be related to everything else. And that means in the end, everything we take to be separate entities are really just aspects of this universal thing. So I have a selfless idea of many substances and day cards are two or three substances. are now reduced to, or elevated to, whatever, transformed to by one substance. To one substance, and Aristotle's view and Descartes' view are regarded as kind of partial perceptions, partial misperceptions of this elusive grand totality.

How does you follow this through then, Jonathan? So we have got that which is can be called God or Nature. It's a very striking phrase, and of course everybody used it as they want to. but can you just tell us a bit more about what is really... But I think listeners will be fascinated by this. You mean everything, you mean particles, planets, fingers, thumbs, desks and so on. Right. Well, I suppose planets, fingers, desks and thumbs are things

which only seem important to us from our point of view, from God's point of... I mean, perhaps you just have this distinction between seeing things from the point of view of eternity, subspecatea Eternititis, and from the point of view of duration. We finite people tend to see things from the... point of view of duration. We see things in terms of particulars. But the wiser we get, the more we learn to connect things up. And there's a sort of, then we can imagine that eventually we would become sufficiently wise to see everything all as one. And that one thing, Spinoza says,

is, well, it's the, it's the cause of itself, and it is what the religions have always referred to as God. But it's also what Descartes had referred to as extended substance. So all these things kind of tend at a kind of vanishing point that we probably will never reach in our own intellectual lifetimes. They all eventually coalesce into one. From God's point of view, they always were one. From our finite points of view, we can only vaguely grasp that they, that if we were clever enough, we would be able to see that they are? And in fragmented ways. John Cottingham, as I understand it, would you be right to say this of Minerza's universe is powerfully deterministic and therefore free will, as we, as is discussed,

how does he counterfeit? Is virtually exist? He's non-existent. Yes, Leibniz, the young German philosopher Leibniz who visited Spinoza as a young man, said he has a strange metaphysics full of paradoxes. He thinks that God and the world are one thing and that all created things are only modes of God, let's say modifications of God.

I guess the common sense for you is that things are contingent. They might have been otherwise. We might not have been here this morning. It's cloudy this morning, but it might have been sunny. For Spinoza, contingency is out. There is no, it happens to be, but it might have been other. Everything is necessary, determined. In other words, if we knew the nexus of causes, the complete chain of causes,

we would see that everything that happens, including our decisions, including our choices and beliefs and everything, is all necessitated. So he actually says there's nothing in nature that can be called contingent. So he's very, this is very important because I think a lot of people feel, as I do, that you have choice. You can go left or right. You can do this or that. And he is saying if you go left, it's because the conspiracy of the universe was that you would go left,

and that's that. Yes, he was very scathing about the idea that we, humans, are, as he put it, a dominion within a dominion, a kind of autonomous island of contra-causal, that we have the ability to buck causation. We are part of the whole for Spinoza. And so when we think we can have this contra-causal choice, that's actually an illusion.

If we knew everything, if we knew the chain of causes, we'd know it could only go one way. And so there isn't this infinite multiplicity. It's interacting all the time to produce a way that is determined by it, whether we know it or not. And part of our intellectual interest and enjoyment is through reason to find an understanding of that. Exactly. I mean, he's not saying we're not free in the sense we're puppets.

We can use our reason, we can use our understanding, and therefore to that extent make ourselves free from external causes, but we're still determined. Jonathan, John Leroy, Spinoza talked about this wonderful place, the intellectual love of God, which caught your fancy or fancy interest, attention, greatly, as I understand it. Can you just develop that? It's to do with the idea that we're all kind of on an intellectual journey.

He distinguishes between three great. of knowledge. There's the first grade of knowledge which most of us are involved in all the time, which is just knowing particulars and having a sort of direct acquaintance with a direct sensory acquaintance with the yellowness of your tie or something like that. And then there's the general sort of scientific, empirical scientific view. This is the second grade is the scientific view where you generalise about things. And there's an idea of a third grade of knowledge, which is, as it were, a kind of synthesis of grade one and grade two. You understand the universe as a whole, but you understand it direct. not, as it were, mediated by concepts. That's what we're all, as it were, on the way to. And it's not just an intellectual matter. It's also a passion. And we're driven in our knowledge by a discontent with the inadequacy of our everyday concepts.

And so it's a passion as well as an intellectual matter. John's already touched on the fact that there's something very intellectual about Spinoza. But there is something also, I mean, there is something passionate about his intellectualism. And this idea of the intellectual love of God, that's another way of saying, the most, you know, the comprehensive science of the universe

is the intellectual love of God. And it's a way of saying, and what Spinoza is doing is not just kind of intellectualizing the passions, but eroticizing the intellect. We are all desperately keen to somehow unify our minds with the mind of God and learn to see things in the same way that God does. By saying God, we must tell that he also means the universe, he means nature, he uses God or nature, God or nature, because I think that it almost might be

a wrong signal to use God in the tense of the God of the Catholic Church, the God of one church or another. He's not using God in that sense. He's absolutely right about that. It isn't that sort of, that isn't the God he's talking about. Well, I think he thought that all the religions of the world were kind of approximation. They had fragmentary to do this. exactly, they're fragments of it. Sarah Houghton, can you tell us about his political life at this time and what he was doing, his relationship, for example, Jan De Witt and so on? Yes, the political setup in the Netherlands was a republic,

and he was certainly sympathetic with the kind of republicanism that Jan DeWitt and Cornelius DeWitt stood for. Certainly his criticisms of the interference in politics of churchmen were very much in sympathy with De Witt's aim for a tolerant society in Holland, this estate which was strong enough to guarantee freedom of thought to all its citizens. And I think that is the key issue for him, what he would call the freedom to philosophies. But DeWitt certainly dissociated himself from Spinoza, particularly after the publication of his Tractatus Thelogico Politicus, which appeared in 1670 and which Spinoza published partly in order

to try and explain his position to the world. Is he questioning the Bible, isn't he? It's questioning that whether we can... It's saying it's just a book written by man. You're saying it much better. Yes. Balsary is saying, so we're therefore entitled to examine it. We're entitled to...

It is not the word of God. And that, obviously, at the time, in some areas, even in Liberal Holland, is going to cause a lot of trouble. And we were talking about his politics. He was quite ferocious. I mean, his friends were assassinated in the same street in which he lived and so on and so forth. So trouble is around.

if you have the wrong opinions. What was his reputation then? How was he placed when the Tractus came out in 1670? Well, the Tractatus is, in one sense, a work of Bible criticism. Others had previously questioned the text of the Bible, but Spinoza takes this much further and says this is just a book. It's not the unquestioned word of God. To question the Bible was a very, very dangerous thing to do,

especially in a Protestant country where the Bible is the rule of faith, and even among the community that had taken him in, many of them were very disturbed by his treatment of the Bible as just a historical book. The trend of Spinoza's philosophy generally is very anti-religion in the traditional sense. And here I pick up something Jonathan said earlier about the passionate side of Spinoza

and the intellectual love of God. I'm not entirely sure there's anything much religious or passionate in that sense about it. it. We have to remember, although he says God or nature, this is not a personal God. There's no providence. There's no, as it were, love of God manifested towards mankind. There is simply this austere, rationally discoverable structure of the whole. So when Spinoza talks about the intellectual love of God, he's really talking about a kind of joyful knowledge that puts me in touch with the rational order of all things.

And that's not really religious. So in my view, at any rate, so he's, I think the general tenor of his philosophy is anti-religious in any normal sense of the word. I want to defend myself against him. I mean, I think John was suggesting that I was seeing too much in the idea of him being passionate to the religious. And I guess we do have rather different readings of Spinoza's thought in that respect. One thing to say about the ethics as a whole, the feeling you get is of a thinker who is desperately trying to bring order to a torrent of thoughts that's resisting. And I do think there was a lot of passion in it, but it was a passion for a sense of, and I would say, of religion, although John doesn't think it truly counts as religion.

But religion of a very, very generalized kind, certainly utterly impersonal. There's no future for the personal soul. There is no, and God himself is an impersonal being. doesn't have a left hand or a right hand or a will or anything. But what suffuses it is a sense that religion is about reverence for the universe as a whole. Obviously, if you were a true-believing Catholic or a Protestant, then you would think that this is an atheistic point of view. And a lot of people in his lifetime and for a hundred years afterwards did regard him as an atheist

and said that he used the word God in his philosophy as a cover for his impious atheism. But I think I don't agree with that. It seems I'm much more in line with the 19th century romantic lovers of Spinoza who thought that he really was obsessed with God, in love with God, and that he thought that the main religions of the world didn't love God enough. Can I say, oh, John, you come in there. It's just that the romantic view of Spinoza is that there's plenty of room for reverence and awe that somehow he saw the cosmos as infused with this inspiring

great spirit or something which called forth worshipful and reverential feelings. But I don't think really there is much room for that romantic conception in Spinoza. The intellectual love of God of which he spoke is a purely intellectual matter. It's a matter of understanding how everything slots into the whole. And that's a bit different from an awestruck, mystical feeling of the kind that you see in the 19th century. Can I just

ask John, then can you tell us what was at the root of the way he thought? We've used the word well we haven't yet. We haven't come to the word reason which is very important. More, much as it could possibly be an understanding in other words. Can you bring us to where he

is a rotten phrase, where he started from and how he developed from that? Okay, I hope John won't interrupt two things. I think he's going to disagree with me. His definition of humanity is not rational animal, not that, but an animal with appetite or desire. And that's one of the things that I think a lot of contemporary philosophers have found particularly inspiring about him. But his starting point, you might say, is that to be a human being is to constantly want to be somewhere else than you currently are.

that there's a kind of negation built into the very experience of being a human being, that there's a sense of the inadequacy of what you've got. Which is, it's true, John's right, that it is an intellectual inadequacy, but your restlessness with it is a matter of passion and not just of dispassionate reason. And you didn't interrupt for a moment.

I think it's, I mean, I think there's a lot in that, but I think the general flavour is a bit more stoical, You know, the Roman stoic, Marcus Aurelius, said, In the thought that I am part of the whole, I will be content with all that comes to pass. That stoic sense of being part of a structure, of an infinite, eternal, rational structure. And I think that's where Spinoza is leading us.

Admittedly, there's this drive to reach that state. He thinks all things have this conatus or drive, including us, because we're modifications of the whole. but yes it's true he thought we could never escape from the passions but my sense of that is he felt that it was a bit of a pity passions are often associated with the sense of contingency if only it had been different if only I hadn't done that and all that for Spinoza is a sign of ignorance

if we knew all the connections we'd realize there was no possibility except the one that must happen but there was a sense of to probably abuse the liberation of the Bible. He did believe that perfect understanding would result in sort of the pieces falling into place, didn't he really? It was perfect understanding we're in for. And if we understood

why we were angry, why we were obsessed, then as soon as we understood it and thought it through, we'll be able to live with it quietly and go on to the next stage. Yes, I mean, the goal of it all is to achieve peace of mind and to achieve unity with God. But the point

is that as long as we're human beings, as long as we're embodied, we're not going to achieve that goal. So there is this restlessness built into everything short of death. Sarah Hutton, he was said to be the first think of the ration and enlightenment whose influence can be traced back down. There's Voltaire and Didro and so on. Would you agree with that?

Do you think there's proof of that? Well, I think there's no doubt that he was enormously influential after his death. But in all kinds of rather contradictory ways, he was seen by many to be an art rationalist and therefore an atheist. Deoci ve natura, God or nature is interpreted as meaning that God is infinite matter. There is no soul and therefore no God, therefore he was an atheist. And he was taken up by many of the anti-clerical, anti-religion thinkers of the 18th century, especially in the clandestine underground, a figure who really made a tremendous image.

impact on our image of Spinoza was, of course, Pierre Bale, whose article in his dictionary paints a portrait of Spinoza as an atheist. Can you, Jonathan, pick out one figure on whom his influence was profound and who, as it were, kept his ideas in the intellectual domain? How about George Eliot?

Can I have George Eliot, please? It's a bit like Der Leis Island just, didn't you? George Eliot. I mean, before she became a novelist, she produced a actually rather splendid translation of the ethics, which she couldn't get published. She couldn't get a feel she thought was adequate to the work that was involved. It only came out to about 10 years ago, I think.

But she regarded this, and perhaps in Middlemarch, you get, she thought of her novels as kind of moral experiments. I think everyone knows that. She was trying to teach some kind of post-referencing, Christian morality through her novels. And you remember the end of Middle March, which says, you know, we must be forgiving to people

because, you know, what people do is not really up to them. It's much more influenced by the outside than they expect. But also that things are better with us than they might be is due to many unhistoric, unremembered acts by people who sleep in unvisited graves. I think that's a very, that was her producing a, you know, translating Spinoza from his, steer Latin into the language of a 19th century novelist very effective.

Well, and that's a very happy ending. Thank you very much, Jonathan Ray, John Cottingham and Sarah Hutton. Thank you for listening, and next week we're talking about Victorian pessimism. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.