Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Time for a @threadapalooza about Spinoza, a giant thinker and iconoclast ahead of his time whose criticisms of religion and traditional theology in 17th century Amsterdam earned him censorship and excommunication. A would-be-rabbi, he made a living as a lens grinder.

Spinoza, whose family had fled the Spanish Inquisition, held many contrarian views, but he was not a contrarian because he wanted to annoy.

He believed that a serene, good life was one ruled by reason rather than passion, superstition or chance experience. 2

His magnum opus is called "Ethics" which is significant, because he makes many claims in the book that are not about ethics but about metaphysics and the nature of the world. Why call the book ethics? 3

Aristotle's first lectures were "physics." after that, people studied "metaphysics" (meaning that which you study after physics). Ethics and politics were secondary to the foundational curriculum. 4

You could argue that by naming his main book "Ethics" Spinoza was raising our attention to the fact that philosophy must help us live well; truth is a means to an end, serenity, thriving, harmony, not something we should sacrifice for. 5

In other words, Spinoza was expelled from his community of origin, but we shouldn't project our discomfort with that onto him. Spinoza practiced amor fati; he was happy--his name Baruch/Benedict means "Blessed"--to pursue a life of reason regardless of social cost. 6

Spinoza is kind of stoicism 2.0 if you have enlightenment you won't be ruled by passion, b/c you'll see your emotions as giving you thoughts which are true or false. If false, reject the emotion. If true, be grateful for the message the emotion is giving and discard it. 7

It's not sad for Spinoza that he was "cancelled"; rather, he would argue that it's simply not great for society to cancel philosophers as it looses the opportunity to discover how things really are and instead to be ruled by superstition and unearned authority. 8

His Theological Political Tractatus argues that society suffers from making great ideas off limits. He's not concerned with protecting the dignity or the right to free speech of the iconoclast per se; he's making an appeal to the common good. We need critics to be better off. 9

So, I'm a religious person, a "believer," in some broad sense, a teacher of Torah; yet I benefit from living in a liberal (non theocratic) society. I owe the quality of my life and ability to practice religion to Spinoza, not the community that understandably threw him out. 10

It's mistaken, in my view, to try to make Spinoza into a religious guy who was misunderstood; it's also a distraction to imagine a world in which he wouldn't have been expelled for heresy. Something is indeed at stake in his excommunication. 11

If he hadn't been shown the door, he would have left himself. I agree with many things Spinoza says, many things he aspires to, but I respect his secularism and would not want to pretend that being more religiously "inclusive" would solve much. 12

Before I give my critique, let's give the man his tribute. Spinoza was a reductionist; the ultimate cause of everything is God. But unlike in theistic religion in which God is an actor or agent or personality, for Spinoza, God is Nature as a whole. God is all that is. 13

You might say that this sounds mystical; some do read Spinoza in this way; but his vibe is more scientific. There's no need to worship God, sacrifice to God. God doesn't need anything from us. Rather, if you understand how things really work that is understanding God. 14

To the extent that God can be known God is just a synonym for the way of the world. 15

We should seek knowledge of God because it will help free us from distortion, but the knowledge isn't disclosed especially through Revelation or miracles --but through reason. I'm with the scholars who say that Spinoza is basically an atheist. 16

Rather than being one who divinized nature, I see Spinoza as someone who naturalized God. Either way, God is immanent but not "holy." The proper response to things is to seek to understand not to stand back in awe. 17

You can chalk this sensibility up to Spinoza's modernism. Even Plato thought philosophy begins in wonder; you could argue that there is a part of Socrates that seeks to preserve the wonder (wisdom is knowing that we don't know).

But for folks like Spinoza, Descartes, Bacon...18

The goal is not to love wisdom, but to have it. Moderns don't let things be. They seek to understand, to capture. This is Heidegger's critique of the moderns (and also the post-colonial critique of Western rationalism). 19

This is incidentally why Heideggerians, postmodernists and religious fundamentalists often make common cause--they all see rationalism and especially rationalist reductionism--as the enemy. Critics of reason make strange bedfellows. 20

Rationalists tend to think that religious folks are anti-scientific, leading to unnecessary misery. They see religious authorities as con artists and pseudo scientists. Some religious folk really are anti scientific, arguing that faith/God alone saves. 21

But faith and reason needn't be opposed and many religious people find them to be compatible or at least to believe in an unsteady compromise or "hot peace" between them. That reason isn't the be all end all doesn't mean it can't do great things. It's a tool. 22

There's a wide middle between zealous rationalism and zealous anti-rationalism. Is Spinoza a zealous rationalist? In some sense yes. But in another sense no. Spinoza isn't a zealot; he's just a guy trying to do his thing and live well. Zealous rationalism is a contradiction. 23

If you're passionate about rationalism--for Spinoza--you are insufficiently rational. 24

Here's a recent poetic argument I made about why total rationalism is at odds with being in relationship; tldr you can't be in control and be responsive and receptive to the Other.

etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/carrying-the…

25

Spinoza seems to assume that all humans have a capacity for reason even if it's unexercised or hampered by passion and superstition and distortion. He's optimistic in that we all have a rational faculty; and empirically pessimistic in that it's human nature to refuse reason. 26

If Spinoza weren't cancelled for his naturalization of God, he'd likely have been for his arguments that the prophets were just human beings whose view of things was imaginative, insightful, but not always rational (or true). 27

This goes hand in hand with other arguments he makes in the Tractatus:

1) the Torah/Scriptures are human documents, evidence of human reason (and its misfires).

2) there are no miracles in the sense of supernatural events.

3) theology and law are a function of politics. 28

Spinoza was one of the first to grasp the concept of civil religion. Religion expresses the values of society and is instrumental. When Rousseau argues for the need for pageantry during Revolution he basically updates Spinoza; likewise, Burke’s notion of politics as theatre. 29

In History Has Begun @MacaesBruno argues that American politics is a politics of the virtual spectacle: yet the lineage of this notion of politics as entertainment may go back to Spinoza for whom sacrifices are a form of political expression , not worship. 30

Does Spinoza sound like Marxist; in a way, yes. The notion that religion is an opiate or not really about what it says it's about is a hallmark of most rationalist critics of religion; 31

Though remember Marx actually compliments religion saying it's a "haven in a heartless world." Spinoza isn't simply hard on religion; he respects that religious thinkers can be rational even as they are constrained. Religion per se is not anathema; the foe is superstition. 32

In this regard, Spinoza need not be seen as outright hostile to religion; there's a way in which his iconoclasm continues the negative theology and critical mode of Maimonides. 33

Some of Maimonides's contemporaries sought to burn his work. It's a matter of contingency (or, providence) that Maimonides ended up defining modern Judaism and Jewish thought rather than suffering the fate of a Spinoza. 34

Strauss would say this is b/c Maimonides kept his true thoughts to himself and was more moderate in his respect for mainstream religion even as he used philosophy to subvert the Torah's anthropomorphic view of God. 35

But iconoclasm isn't the enemy of religion; in a literal sense, look at the Islamists who smash statues of the Buddha or other antiquities; are they not giving physical (if horrifying) expression to the monotheist dream of destroying all idols? 36

Jewish children grow up reading Midrashim about Abraham smashing his father's idols. Reductionism may end up destroying religion, and yet the destruction of false religion is itself a religious, Biblical imperative, be it literal or metaphorical. 37

There'a Jewish joke I once heard from @RabbiWolpe: "Jews believe in one or fewer Gods."

Well, Spinoza meets that criterion. Marx does. Freud and Einstein do. Now you can cast these iconoclasts as anti-religious, but the picture is more complicated. 38

Did Maimonides believe in one God; or did he define God as that which we can't really know? The line between that and saying there is no God is sort of thin. Perhaps the last idol is the God we believe in. This is why Franz Rosenzweig says "mysticism and atheism shake hands." 39

The interpenetration of secularism and religiosity--rather than outright opposition--is common amongst great Jewish poets; Shaul Magid argues it's the hallmark of Hasidic masters for whom piety is rebellion and rebellion is pious. 40

Here's Yehuda Amichai:

I declare with perfect faith
that prayer preceded God.
Prayer created God,
God created human beings,
human beings create prayers
that create the God that creates human beings.

41

Spinoza was ahead of the curve on many trends. He's the reason students at Columbia can read the Bible as literature or as a work of human civ. in their core curriculum classes. He doesn't toss the Bible; he simply argues for reading it as an artifact of human culture. 42

He was also arguably a proto-Zionist. The laws of the Torah are operative only insofar as Israelites have sovereignty. They are moot in exile. You have to be in the land, with sovereignty, for the Torah to be a living manual. This belies the experience of religious Jews. 43

It also highlights, though, some of the contradictions in religious Zionism, given that rabbinic Judaism is fashioned in exile and really about transporting and cultivating Jewish life in a state of exile. 44

Secular Zionism makes a lot of sense--since sovereignty is the point. Religious Diasporism makes a lot of sense, too, making the best with what one has by means of following divine commandments. Religious Zionism raises the question of what's primary: politics or theology. 45

Ie are religious Zionists first or religious first? You'll probably find this rift throughout the religious zionist world. The politics first people, it should be said, owe a debt to Spinoza. 46

Spinoza and Luther make for a worthwhile comparison. Both thought the individual could come to his or her own conclusions about what the Bible is saying, independent of official religious readings. 47

Sola Scriptura--reading Scripture on its own terms using one's own resources--is going to chafe against those for whom the Bible can only say what Rashi, the sages, or the local cleric say it means. 48

Yet Luther was fundamentally suspicious of human nature and of human reason. We are basically corrupt and distorted, so our readings are vindicated only through faith, if vindicated at all. The goal of study is pious: a personal relationship to God. 49

For Spinoza, there is no devotion in reading the Bible or any text; rather, one seeks to learn something scientific. The prophets might know better than us, but they may not. The editor may know better but also may not. Reason is the final judge. 50

500 years later the tides have turned. The average college first year assumes any old text is "problematic" and that we know better. The onus is on the past to prove it ISN'T outdated. In Spinoza's time the onus was on the reader to prove the text less than untrustworthy. 51

Arendt wrote about the decline of authority in this regard. It used to be that old things, by virtue of being old, were authoritative. Add onto that the fact that he had been written down--in a time when writing was scarce... 52

in the digital age, where everything can be written and stored, authority is increasingly decentralized. 53

some see this as a step forwards towards democratization; others recognize in it the dangers of an anomic void that ends up empowering populist demagogues. 54

Regardless, Spinoza won. He was a disruptive innovator. Now, he's the incumbent. It's counter cultural today in academia and liberal circles to assume a text or elder is anything other than flawed. We have a knee jerk suspicion of everything. 55

That knee jerk suspicion has extended even to rationalism itself so that now Spinoza is largely regarded not as a daring hero but as someone who is "out of touch" (I half kid). 56

Remembering that Spinoza entitled his main work "ethics" is helpful in keeping our eye on the prize: Spinoza wants us to be able to live well. The philosophical-rational life that sifts what's useful from what's woo woo is the best life, even if it's a solitary one. 57

The great question which Spinoza doesn't answer, and which Hegel also doesn't quite answer--is why God has chosen him to be the one to have figured it out? The question is non sensical since Spinoza's God lacks a personal will 58

but how is it that Spinoza is the only one or the rare one to have figured it out. Is he just lucky? More virtuous than everyone else? Why did it take until the 17th century for God to know Godself as "Nature naturing"? 59

Matters of personality or accidents of life events are not of interest to a philosopher, especially to whom who comes close to denying free will (seeing the universe as one entire system of cause and effect going back to god as self-caused cause). 60

So why is Spinoza fated to know that everything is fated? Why is he the one to know that life is serene if we can accept our fate and eschew our irrational passions? And why is he writing a book called Ethics, whose title affirms our agency if freedom is a mirage? 61

I think Spinoza is paternalistic. Just because reason is great doesn't mean that it should make us incapable of being in relationship with people we deem superstitious. 62

The pursuit of reason should lead one to be moderate and tolerant of others even when one considers them less reasonable. 63

And yet Spinoza has some noble fights to pick-- for good reason. Society suffers when the powerful are anti-rational, he thinks. 64

This view implicitly continues the Platonic argument that society is best ruled by philosopher kings; but with a twist. The philosopher king is a liberal not a king. 65

Throwing shade at the theocrats, Spinoza writes "They will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, i.e., the sanctuary of ignorance."

I take him to be saying that it's wrong to presume that a personal God rewards or punishes. 66

It's wrong not just in the sense that it is unscientific but that it ends up unfairly blaming or praising people for outcomes that have nothing to do with their merits. 67

If you're appalled every time a pastor says a hurricane is punishment for our sins you have Spinoza to thank for normalizing your revulsion (though you might find it already expressed in the Book of Job and grappled with in Tamludic texts like Brachot 5a). 68

That God doesn't reward or punishment means that one's motivation for being virtuous must be intrinsic rather than extrinsic. Spinoza is a virtue ethicist. We should care about pursuing virtue for its own sake. 69

Pirkei Avot commends us to serve the master not to receive a reward. In Spinoza there is no master to serve, but the good plays the same role--virtue is its own reward. 70

I believe Spinoza did not believe in the afterlife, but believed we decompose into nature. Yet even if he did believe in heaven I believe he would have thought heaven largely irrelevant to our moral calculus. He's on the opposite side of the spectrum as Pascal's wager. 71

Do good because it is reasonable and be reasonable because it is self-evidently good. The "upside" of such a commitment is an obviously blessed this-worldly life. That is enough. Worrying about the after life and matters of speculation detracts what can be known. 72

The jury is out on whether Spinoza's view scales. Maybe it doesn't and the wisdom of traditional moral systems is in their ability to persuade people to do right, if for the wrong reasons (the alternative being that they pursue unsustainable hedonism). 73

On the one hand Spinoza is a critic of religion, cutting it down to size; on the other hand, much in his thought seems compatible with certain conceptions of religion, especially existentialist and mystic forms. 74

Spinoza's denial of free will and presentism are values one can find in religious thinkers. Serenity and peace with the world can be religious emotions if less common ones (for a contrast, see the tumultuous Psalms). 75

In the 19th century the great insult you could hurl at someone as a slur was Spinozist, which means Spinoza continued to scandalize centuries later. 76

My challenges to Spinoza are as follows:

I don't think the pursuit of rational truth and rational explanation is always possible or desirable. Other endeavors also matter and sometimes conflict with this value. 77

Likewise, I don't think Spinoza's work proves or disproves anything about God or nature--instead I see at as a reductio that exposes the limits of squaring a mechanistic worldview with a personal theology. 78

Spinoza's affirmation of serenity is compelling, but I'm not persuaded serenity is the goal, nice as it sounds. I don't quite buy the Stoic claim that having truth means being calm and vice versa. I see a value and an inevitability in a life of yearning. 79

The fact that the prophets were biased and all too human needn't be presented as a knockdown critique of Scripture; one can affirm that their humanity and limitations is precisely what Scripture intentionally highlights. See for example A.J Heschel's The Prophets. 80

Spinoza may be right that we have to choose between theology and politics, seeing one as a function of the other. I'm not ready to make theology a function of politics even as I realize the dangers of doing the opposite. So there's a tension for me. 81

That Spinoza divinizes nature raises interesting questions about those who follow his liberal political thought—does being a classical liberal presuppose a metaphysics of atheism? That would mean conservatives are right to suspect liberalism of being anything but neutral. 82

Spinoza's discounting of non rational ways of being in the world leaves little room for a spiritual or aesthetic or romantic sense. It makes sense if you are a STEM type but tends to diminish nonscientific modes of being. 83

The stoic ideal which sees reason as superior to emotion makes sense in a context in which conceptual clarity is the goal; but where expression and connection are goals, emotion is critical. Rationalism discounts the value of EQ or relatability 84

This makes sense because rationalists tend to be highly disagreeable and disagreeability tracks with contrarianism, innovation, but also social alienation. 85

It takes a confidence in oneself to depart from the consensus —and that confidence is often the lemonade squeezed from the lemon of having been excluded. 86

One thing I deeply agree with Spinoza on is that we should read Scripture guided by our sense of what’s true about the world—Scripture by definition can’t contradict our sense what is true. 87

Maimonides makes a similar move. He says that if Aristotle is right about the world the Torah can’t contradict him. This is a deep and radical point. 88

One could criticize Spinoza for conflating God and Nature from two directions—a scientific perspective might say he should drop the God part while a mystical one would want to drop the nature part 89

Maybe the conflation though is just saying that religion, philosophy and science at the highest most levels are one—they converge. What appears to outsiders as reductionism or an insult to faith reveals itself to the initiate as it’s own kind of profound experience. 90

The feeling one gets seeing all things interconnected is a sublime experience—and the greatest part is often that one is there to witness it.

“Amazing! Things make sense!” Is how Thomas Sheehan puts it. 91

Despite the official preference of reason to passion Spinoza seems to be a passionate advocate for the life of reason. 92

Expand what counts as reason and I’m sympathetic. 93

Yet as I point out in my threads on Heidegger and Levinas, the basic divide amongst thinkers comes down to whether we believe in seeking to know what is or instead letting it be, letting it stay unknown, reveal itself as unknowable. 94

Spinoza is modern in his arguments for tolerance and naturalism but still quite metaphysical in his belief that we can KNOW what is...if only we had the right tools and commitment. 95

That puts him at odds with philosophy after Kant which says that nature itself is something beyond our knowledge. As I see it, Maimonides says the problem is God is ontologically opaque, and Kant says things as they are are opaque. Spinoza did not accept that opacity. 96

Spinoza knew about optics hands on, so he knew that our filters are limiting—but he dreamed of being able to wear the perfect pair of glasses, to achieve perfect vision. 97

Heidegger knew that you can’t wear glasses and look at them at the same time—the eyes that look are not the same as the eyes we can see.

For post Kantians, the best we can hope for are multiple pairs of glasses (and/or a veneration and acceptance of our blurry vision). 98

That said, I wear glasses that help me drive (and read Spinoza) and I have Spinoza and his rationalist clan to thank, not Isaiah who says “come and see.” 99

There are times, though, when I do not need or want clarity and that is one reason I part ways from the Blessed Spinoza.

May his memory be for a blessing.

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