Judging from Spinoza’s biography, correspondence, personal library, and philosophical works, he read neither English nor French. It’s safe to assume that aside from what he learned by corresponding (in Latin) with Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, or by reading Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes (both in Latin, again), Spinoza knew little of the English-speaking peoples and their preoccupations. Likewise, Spinoza’s first-hand knowledge of the French was, presumably, limited: he read Descartes (once more, in Latin), and, perhaps, encountered French soldiers garrisoned in Utrecht under the command of the prince of Condé during the French invasion of 1672, though it is doubtful he met the prince himself.1
It’s odd, then, to see that Spinoza’s afterlife is so tied up with his reception in English and in French. Many of these English-speaking scholars are today to be found in the United States. Suggestively, comparing Spinoza research produced in the Franco-American contexts shows how broader concerns shape narrower discussions. Our aim with this volume is to facilitate a dialogue between these outstanding traditions of Spinoza research.2
In France, it has long been the case that Spinoza attracts attention quite unlike any other seventeenth-century philosopher. In recent years, this excitement has reached a well-nigh feverish pitch: when glossy-image magazines destined for sale in kiosks publish special issues dedicated to Spinoza, you know that Spinoza has, at last, truly become a pop icon in the mold of Freud or Nietzsche. But this mass commodification has only coat-tailed recent French Spinoza scholarship, a highly developed and professionalized national tradition, as it were, of Early Modern studies. The ongoing publication of Spinoza’s Œuvres with the Presses Universitaires de France, for which contributors from across France, Italy, and the Netherlands work under the editorial direction of Pierre-François Moreau to create state-of-the-art scholarly editions of the primary texts and make new French-language translations available for the twenty-first century, is exemplary in this respect.3 As a matter of fact, what the historian Jonathan Israel has shown to be true of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western Europe—that Spinoza’s philosophy was the source and spring of the Radical Enlightenment—can be said of twentieth-century France: Spinoza’s philosophy was the source and spring of Radical French Theory.4 Thanks to the work of scholars such as Warren Montag, Knox Peden, and Ted Stolze, there is now even a sizeable body of literature available in English about the story of recent Gallic enthusiasm for Spinoza.5
The most famous among Spinoza’s more recent French readers, whose names are themselves just about as recognizable as Spinoza’s own, like Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Macherey, to name but a few, were accompanied by figures perhaps less well-known within the wider English-speaking world, but whose reputation as Spinoza scholars is very strong. Among these, Martial Gueroult (b. 1891–d. 1976) and Alexandre Matheron (b. 1926) stand out as the towering figures. Gueroult’s massive two-volume commentary on Spinoza’s Ethics Parts 1 and 2 is often admired for setting the gold standard for super fine-grained, high-resolution readings in Spinoza scholarship, whereas Matheron’s impressive Individu et comunauté chez Spinoza played—and continues to play—an important role in making Spinozism relevant to the concerns of contemporary French philosophy.6
Granted, there is also a story to tell about Spinoza’s reception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, some of which explains what would later come about and an interesting episode of French Spinoza scholarship in its own right. This is a story about how, for instance, Émile Saisset (b. 1814–d. 1863), philosopher at the Sorbonne, was the first to translate Spinoza’s works in French, but only did this so as to more easily admonish and censure Spinoza’s philosophy. It is a story about how Jules Prat (b. 1823–d. 1895), a lawyer and communard in 1871, saw in Spinoza a militant of anti-clerical Republican ideals, and whose early attempt at drawing up a Spinozist constitution for democracy would likely have remained totally forgotten by posterity were it not for Bernard Pautrat’s very recent historical work.7 Another important figure in this story is Charles Appuhn (b. 1862–d. 1942), whose translations of Spinoza’s works, readily available in an inexpensive paperback edition since the 1960s, are still the most frequently read in France. Our reader will forgive us if we do not go into the details of this earlier period in the history of Spinoza’s French reception. Suffice it to say that the sudden swelling of Spinoza scholarship did not emerge ex nihilo.
Still, what was it about Spinoza that spoke so compellingly to these more recent generations of French philosophers? As is often the case in the history of philosophy, a mixture of factors, some only tangentially related to philosophy itself, were responsible for putting Spinoza on center stage. To isolate but one rather idiosyncratic feature of Spinoza’s late-twentieth-century French reception, namely, the way that Spinoza was held by many of his French readers to be a genuine precursor of Marx, specifically political factors help explain this development and its importance to twentieth-century French philosophy writ large. Looking back to the 1960s, when the French Communist Party, still true to the Soviet doxa, fought in vain to propagate the view that dialectical materialist thought, allegedly Hegelian in inspiration, was the sole resource of philosophical worth, Spinoza appeared to wayward French Marxists, such as Althusser, like an oasis in this great Sahara of dialectical materialism.8 Suddenly, before their eyes, there Spinoza was, the very thing French Marxists believed they had been looking for all along: a philosopher whose refusal in the name of political freedom to submit to scriptural authority could mirror their own heresy and rebellion.
In other words, the late-twentieth-century outpouring of French-language readings of Spinoza was in large part motivated by the belief that Spinoza’s philosophy was unusually subversive, along with a belief that, with Spinoza, theoretical matters could somehow be put to practical use. The zeroing-in on Spinoza’s boldest claims, such as those built into his anti-anthropomorphic naturalism or his rejection of Cartesian mind-body interactionism, some of which were even rebranded as philosophical rallying calls—as with Deleuze’s oft-quoted Spinozist declaration that “nul ne sait ce que peut un corps” [nobody knows what a body can do]—meant, however, that many scholars felt left with the evermore urgent task of spelling out how these claims are part of a philosophical system, and how they are not mere assertions but are backed up by strong arguments which alone make them compelling.9
Unsurprisingly, then, Spinoza scholarship in France was at the same time marked by its preoccupation with the rigorously deductive structure of Spinoza’s philosophy. Gueroult’s fastidious commentary showed French readers of Spinoza just how such a study of philosophical structures might be effectively carried out. Characteristically, for Gueroult, nothing about the Ethics is incidental to it, and there is always some reason or another why Spinoza writes things in the exact order he writes them in: Spinoza’s mos geometricus is what makes Spinoza’s particular claims intelligible and powerful. Gueroult’s death brought his commentary of Spinoza’s Ethics to an abrupt end; he did not have the final word about the interpretation of Spinoza’s texts, and there have been critical responses to Gueroult’s approach, both from within France and without it. More unexpectedly, it seems fair to say that analytically trained philosophers working in the United States, with their typically careful treatment of Spinoza’s arguments and their full-fledged commitment to the intelligibility of Spinoza’s system, have in reality come closest to adopting Gueroult’s approach to the study of Early Modern philosophy. (More about the American reception of Spinoza in a moment.)
Another, perhaps unexpected consequence of the way that Spinoza’s reception in twentieth-century France was marked by a climate of ideological—and philosophical—turmoil is that unlike with respect to many other episodes of Spinoza’s reception, it was less his metaphysics per se that became the centerpiece of the story, and more his moral and political philosophy, or the metaphysical underpinnings of the latter. Of course, these distinctions are very fuzzy for Spinoza: part of the pleasure for anybody who studies Spinoza is that when you discuss his political philosophy, you also get to discuss his metaphysics, and vice versa. Nevertheless, if by way of comparison we contrast the late-twentieth-century French reception of Spinoza to the late-eighteenth-century German reception of Spinoza, the latter being the time and place of the extremely significant Pantheismusstreit, one distinguishing feature of the French reception is that, in the spirit of the Radical Enlightenment perhaps, Spinoza’s claims in moral or political philosophy receive, relatively speaking, significantly more treatment.10 One way we can see this is if we turn to Matheron’s influential commentary. Nothing could be further from Matheron’s interpretation than the idea that Spinoza is, as the German Romantic Novalis waxes poetically, “drunk on God”; rather, Spinoza’s philosophy, for Matheron as for many of his followers in France, is a philosophy of finite, singular things. With this in mind, Spinoza’s genuine moral and political intentions are brought into relief.
As a matter of fact, this shift in emphasis stems from the same root as another salient trait of contemporary French Spinoza literature, to wit the frequent insistence on the meaningfulness of Spinoza’s conatus doctrine. Again, looking to Matheron, we can identify the emergence of this trend. The very first paragraph of Matheron’s Spinoza commentary begins by underlining the centrality of conatus for making sense of the big picture of Spinoza’s philosophical efforts; a good grasp of the conatus doctrine and an awareness of its all-encompassing importance, Matheron suggests, allow us to make short work of the apparent barriers to Spinoza’s practical usefulness.11 This has now arrived at the point where talk of conatus has begun to seep into the mainstream, becoming synonymous with Spinoza’s philosophy writ large.
For the uninitiated, it is by no means self-evident what conatus is, so a few words about it are in order. The canonical statement about conatus (which can be translated as “endeavor,” “striving,” or “tendency”) consists in a claim Spinoza makes in Proposition 6 of Part 3 of the Ethics [E3p6]: “Unaquæque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur” [each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being]. In the immediately following proposition, Spinoza proceeds to qualify the “striving” as the “actual essence” of each thing. Notwithstanding the veritable minefield of interpretative debate surrounding Spinoza’s conatus today, one thing all parties can likely agree on is that the more we put the accent on these and other intimately related notions, the less likely we are to construe Spinoza as taking finite, singular things to be somehow illusory and unreal. On the contrary, the conatus doctrine—the universal striving for self-preservation—teaches us that, for Spinoza, all things, organic or inorganic, great or small, are endowed with an inalienable and intrinsic power of acting, for they will resist whatever would destroy them; Spinoza, therefore, does not deny the finite any reality, pace Hegel and the German Idealists (or so the story goes). Moreover, in virtue of the fact that the conatus doctrine is built into the heart of Spinoza’s accounts of desire, natural right, and virtue, giving it pride of place amounts to jump-starting the machinery of Spinoza’s moral and political philosophy.
Returning to Spinoza’s French reception, then, one upshot of the abundant literature on Spinoza’s conatus doctrine and its meaningfulness is that, in contrast to this, commitments and tensions in Spinoza’s metaphysics that really may, in fact, push it toward some variety of acosmism, idealism, or mysticism have for some time now gone largely overlooked within the French context, as if such words were undecipherable hieroglyphs of a bygone era. Indeed, in this context, even the very word “metaphysics” carries with it, often enough, the same archaic connotation. This is in part due to the lasting effect of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza. In keeping with his understanding of Nietzsche, Deleuze went about drawing the strongest possible distinction between metaphysics, construed as the study of that which lays behind or beyond Nature—and, thus, the study of transcendence—and ontology, which contents itself with immanence. Deleuze then further argued that Spinoza refuses any transcendence, and as the philosopher of immanence par excellence, Spinoza therefore does not (thankfully, on Deleuze’s view) do metaphysics strictly speaking.
Deleuze’s dismissal of metaphysics along with Matheron’s preoccupation with conatus inaugurated broader trends. Today, this means that French scholars tend, invariably, to gravitate away from the more well-respected and well-tilled terrains of debate in Spinoza studies, debates about the status of the attributes or Spinoza’s necessitarianism, for example, and toward somewhat more outlying terrains of debate, wherein Spinoza’s lesser-known works, like the Political Treatise, for instance, have a central role to play.
During the last twenty or so years of the twentieth century, several additional well-respected French philosophers—such as Blandine Kriegel, Henri Laux, and the recently deceased André Tosel, as well as others already mentioned—watched over the further maturation of Spinoza scholarship, attending to its needs, spurring on its growth, and ensuring its lasting institutional respectability. Likewise, the important 1986 Chicago Spinoza Conference, co-organized by Edwin Curley and Pierre-François Moreau, bore witness to the budding globalization of Spinoza studies, the early effects of which were manifest in France.12 Yet there is a sense in which French Spinoza studies are, once more, undergoing a sea-change. A new and popular trend consists in bringing the interpretation of Spinoza to bear on some relatively extra-philosophical field of study, and then, in turn, seeing what the applicability of Spinoza might tell us about Spinoza’s philosophy itself. The influence of scholars as diverse as Henri Atlan (a biologist), Bruno Latour (a sociologist), and Frédéric Lordon (an economist), all of whom have made their Spinozist credentials clear in recent work, may be responsible for cementing this trend’s place in France, though the influence of the work of American scholars like Antonio Damasio (a neuroscientist) or Irvin D. Yalom (a psychiatrist) may also have been decisive in this respect. It should come as no surprise that our volume finds inspiration in the fact that cross-cultural dialogues and the ongoing globalization of research agendas continue to yield ripe harvests.
With this, at last, we are brought to discussing Spinoza’s reception in the English-speaking world. An Anglophone readership will be, presumably, more familiar with works on Spinoza written in English and with the history of philosophy in the English-speaking world. Among the important figures in the history of English-language Spinoza scholarship must be counted the British Idealist Harold H. Joachim (b. 1868–d. 1938), whose broadly Hegelian reading of Spinoza’s metaphysics has received much attention as of late, as well as the analytic philosopher Jonathan Bennett (b. 1930), whose 1984 work A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics remains a classic in the field. Another very well-known figure is the American scholar Harry Austryn Wolfson (b. 1887–d. 1974). Wolfson’s 1934 classic two-volume commentary, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, begins on a provocative note: claiming to have been asked by a group of friends whether Spinoza was a “bookish philosopher,” Wolfson writes that he replied that “if we could cut up all the philosophic literature available to him into slips of paper, toss them up into the air, and let them fall back to the ground, then out of these scattered slips of paper we could reconstruct his Ethics.”13 Wolfson pulls no punches in his effort to follow through on this project, engaging with Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin texts, all of which help put Spinoza into a significantly larger philosophical context. On Wolfson’s account, we must pull away the curtain and peer behind the geometrical method of Spinoza’s philosophical magnum opus if we are to grasp the implicit meaning of the work of “the last of the medievals”14; in this way, claims Wolfson, we glimpse how the Ethics would have looked were it to have been written the way it in fact appeared in the mind of Spinoza, more scholastico rabbinicoque.15 However, almost as if because of Wolfson’s very own “bookishness,” the philosophical value of Wolfson’s commentary on Spinoza can be found lacking by some, the study of Spinoza sometimes becoming, in his hands, a merely comparativist survey of Spinoza’s myriad ancestors. Gueroult, a full-throated opponent of Wolfson’s approach, claims for his part that it ends up turning Spinoza’s philosophy on its head and reducing it “to an understanding of the lowest kind.”16 Wolfson’s fortunes have somewhat faded with time, but there is an undeniable beauty to the Wolfsonian mosaic. Regardless, Wolfson’s place in the canon of most widely read, and therefore most influential, American Spinoza scholars is unquestionable. Additionally, Wolfson should be praised for having drawn attention to Spinoza’s debts to Islamic and Jewish philosophy, an insight that is pursued today in the work of noted Spinoza scholars such as Warren Zev Harvey, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Steven Nadler, and Michael A. Rosenthal, among others.17
Still, much of the story of Spinoza in the English-speaking world has yet to be told. We are fortunate to present in this collection a significant contribution by one of the most important figures in the history of English-language Spinoza scholarship, Edwin Curley. His contribution is especially valuable for spelling out the kinds of concerns and motivations that could bring a young American philosopher working in the second half of the twentieth century to study Spinoza’s metaphysics. The historic publication of the second volume of The Collected Works of Spinoza with Princeton University Press in 2016 marks the culmination of a project Curley began some forty years ago.
Today, Spinoza scholarship in the United States is a highly developed and increasingly à la mode field of study. As Michael Della Rocca notes in his introduction to the recent Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, some of what happened is that metaphysics as a domain of philosophical inquiry came back into vogue, and this, in part, meant that Spinoza was bound to as well.18 As a matter of fact, due to the impetus of Della Rocca’s own influential work, discussions of Spinoza’s Principle of Sufficient Reason and whether Spinoza’s metaphysics commits him to deny the possibility of any brute fact whatsoever are now at the center of American Spinoza scholarship. The difference in linguistic and national philosophical cultures here is striking. In the United States, metaphysics became a dirty word during the first half of the twentieth century, due largely the impetus of the logical positivists, and was only later resuscitated by philosophers like Saul Kripke and David Lewis to become, at present, the site of some of the most exciting debates in Spinoza scholarship. In France, metaphysics became a dirty word during the second half of the twentieth century, though for entirely different reasons, as we have seen. Yet, to the outsider, it may appear that metaphysics never really went away in France, and that, for instance, many studies in Spinoza’s political theory, with their typically strong insistence on the role that the conatus doctrine plays in grounding Spinoza’s political claims, are actually studies in Spinoza’s metaphysics. It would seem that Spinoza’s no-holds-barred brand of metaphysical rationalism is in fact fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic.
Another salient trend in Early Modern scholarship in the English-speaking world, which, in turn, has motivated certain trends in American Spinoza studies, is the wider adoption of contextualist approaches to the history of philosophy. Daniel Garber has long been one of the leading proponents of this approach, and many have since taken his cue to practice a disinterested history of philosophy, both within and without the United States. Lastly, in stark contrast to the relative neglect they once suffered, and in part due to the influence of the French reception of Spinoza, it is clear that Spinoza’s moral and political philosophy are now seen in the United States as being undeniably important areas of inquiry as well.
Here, then, are short summaries of the volume’s chapters.
The way that Spinoza’s earliest philosophical readers interpreted him has proven extremely consequential for later efforts in understanding Spinoza’s philosophy. This is particularly true with regard to the understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics, where misunderstandings have run amok. Yet until 1969, when Edwin Curley published Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, no recent commentator had thought to contest the interpretations of Spinoza’s metaphysics found in two of his earliest and most important commentators, Pierre Bayle and G. W. F. Leibniz. Bayle and Leibniz alike, Curley claimed, had made grave mistakes in their respective interpretations. Challenging Bayle, Curley put forward the view that, for Spinoza, the relation of modes and substance is causal, not predicative; likewise, challenging Leibniz, Curley maintained that Spinoza does not embrace strict necessitarianism, or the belief that the actual world is the only possible world. (In fact, as Curley will show in his chapter, though Leibniz did generally view Spinoza committed to strict necessitarianism, Leibniz also believed that Spinoza, forced to make the occasional concession, sometimes holds a softer view.) Since 1969, much ink has been spilled about Curley’s interpretation of Spinoza’s metaphysics. In his paper “Spinoza’s Metaphysics Revisited,” Curley returns to his historic work and sets the record straight on what led him to make the claims he made, many of which, he believes, have been misunderstood in important recent literature on Spinoza. Along the way, Curley also addresses the issue of Spinoza’s so-called pantheism and the meaning of essence in Spinoza, as well as other related problems in the interpretation of seventeenth-century metaphysics. In “On Spinoza, Possible Worlds, and Pantheism,” Pierre-François Moreau celebrates Curley’s achievement in having successfully brought together Spinozists from across the globe during the course of his career, such as when he hosted the 1986 Chicago Spinoza Conference. Moreau then further looks at Bayle’s and Leibniz’s readings of Spinoza, and he examines why Spinoza could not have ever admitted of Leibnizian possible worlds.
In some sense, most interpreters will agree, Spinoza is a monist. Substance, or God, is conceptually and ontologically independent and unique, whereas modes, however we interpret them, are dependent on substance. But what does Spinoza understand by multiplicity, uniqueness, or even number, for that matter? Michael Della Rocca, in “The Elusiveness of the One and the Many in Spinoza: Substance, Attribute, and Mode,” carefully unpacks Spinoza’s various statements on number. With characteristic philosophical rigor, he reveals the dramatic consequences Spinoza’s views on number have, when correctly construed, for making sense of Spinoza’s metaphysics. On Della Rocca’s bold interpretation, we discover that only improperly speaking can we say that God is one, only improperly speaking can we say that the attributes are one and the same, and only improperly speaking can we affirm that modes are many and that there are distinctions among them. Attuned to the broadly idealist undertones of Della Rocca’s contribution, Pascal Sévérac, in “In What Way It Exists,” challenges the belief that idealist interpretations are congenial to Spinoza’s philosophy. Raising a series of difficult questions for interpreters of Spinoza sympathetic to some variant of idealism, Sévérac points to evidence in Spinoza’s metaphysics that seems irreconcilably materialist.
The Short Treatise is one of Spinoza’s earliest and most understudied works. In particular, the First Appendix to the Short Treatise has gone almost entirely unnoticed in the literature, and this despite the fact that it outwardly resembles the Ethics in virtue of its being written in a geometric style. Yitzhak Y. Melamed’s contribution, “The Earliest Draft of Spinoza’s Ethics,” sheds entirely new light on this neglected early work. Melamed scrutinizes the Appendix’s hidden riches, comparing side by side the First Appendix’s axioms and propositions with their mirror texts in the Ethics. Among other things, he shows that Spinoza substantively engages with Early Modern Kabbalism in the First Appendix on the matter of divine withdrawal or zimzum. Melamed then establishes that the First Appendix must be, as a matter of fact, the earliest draft of Spinoza’s Ethics that we currently possess. From this, he draws important consequences for measuring the significance of the fact that Spinoza will later adopt a geometric method in the Ethics that includes definitions as well as axioms. In response to Melamed’s chapter, Mogens Lærke’s contribution, “Accidents and Modifications: An Additional Note on Axioms 1 and 2 in Appendix 1 of the Short Treatise,” returns to the comparison of the Short Treatise and the Ethics. Lærke further examines the matter of why Spinoza abandons talk of accidents in favor of talk of modes, while also pointing to persistent issues in the translation of Spinoza’s Short Treatise.
One very influential trend in recent interpretations of Spinoza in the United States is that Spinoza’s explanatory rationalism is extraordinarily strong, so strong that Spinoza will not countenance any brute facts whatsoever, making it perhaps stronger than any other in the history of philosophy. Such interpretations are often brought under the heading of discussions of the power and scope of Spinoza’s Principle of Sufficient Reason. For Martin Lin, however, as he shows in his chapter “Metaphysical Rationalism,” Spinoza’s Principle of Sufficient Reason cannot do all the work that some interpreters would have it do. Contrasting Spinoza’s Principle of Sufficient Reason with Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, Lin rigorously examines the various roles that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is putatively meant to play in Spinoza’s philosophy. For one thing, notes Lin, the Principle of Sufficient Reason does not motivate Spinoza’s necessitarianism. For another, Lin maintains, Spinoza does not identify conceivability with existence, and, therefore, he does not reduce all existential facts to explanatory ones. Lastly, Spinoza’s belief in the Identity of Indiscernibles is not, indeed could not be, grounded in an appeal to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, claims Lin. On Lin’s reading, consequently, Spinoza’s optimism about the mind’s powers may be great, but it is not so wild as to ignore that some facts simply do not admit of reasons, not because they are brute, but because they are fundamental. Valérie Debuiche’s response, “Leibniz’s Principle of (Sufficient) Reason and Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles,” revisits Lin’s exploration of Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason and whether it is intended to explain all existential facts as well as non-existential facts. In this regard, Debuiche shows that Leibniz makes a subtle yet crucial distinction between the principium reddendae rationis and the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
Turning to important trends in the recent French reception of Spinoza, Simon B. Duffy’s chapter, “The Transformation of Relations in Spinoza’s Metaphysics,” takes up the current debate about the status of essence in Spinoza’s metaphysics, and whether the essences of things are variable or fixed. Does conatus, construed as a power of acting, admit of variability, in virtue of the fact that, for Spinoza, all action is grounded in some interaction? Or, rather, is conatus a fixed and determinate quantity of power that remains the same, no matter how its bearer is affected by external things? Re-examining a number of influential interpreters of Spinoza’s metaphysics in France (Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Macherey, and Charles Ramond), Duffy sheds new light on Spinoza’s discussion of relations and the body’s capacity to enter into relations with other bodies, thereby exercising its essential powers. In response to Duffy’s chapter, Céline Hervet, in “Essence, Variations in Power, and ‘Becoming Other’ in Spinoza,” challenges the claim that seemingly underpins Duffy’s interpretation of Spinoza, according to which Spinoza’s metaphysics can be divorced from and studied in isolation from his anthropology, his psychology, and his practical aims more generally construed. Rather, Hervet argues, Spinoza’s Ethics is only intelligible as a totality and, likewise, his theoretical views on bodily essence and powers only become meaningful in light of his practical philosophy.
Spinoza’s views on embodiment and the mind-body relation are notoriously idiosyncratic. Spinoza willfully makes two apparently incompatible claims: on the one hand, the mind and the body must be conceived under two distinct attributes, neither of which can have any effect on the other; however, on the other hand, the mind is the idea of the body. With great care, Alison Peterman, in “Spinoza’s Two Claims about the Mind-Body Relation,” looks at the precise content of the arguments Spinoza gives for each of these claims. Of special interest to Peterman is clearing up the movement that brings Spinoza from advancing his inter-attribute parallelism to maintaining that the mind is the idea of the body. By her reckoning, however, though Spinoza may want to square a broadly metaphysical account of the nature of embodiment (an account that tells us something about the how the mind-body relation is grounded in fundamental features of reality) with a broadly first-personal account of the nature of embodiment (an account wherein the mind’s capacity to represent to itself ideas of external things via the affections of its body plays an essential role), Spinoza cannot, in fact, do this. In his response, “A Puzzle in Spinoza’s Views on the Mind-Body Problem,” Jack Stetter further examines Spinoza’s claims about embodiment in light of Spinoza’s views on the nature of representation. In particular, Stetter unpacks the significance of the fact that, on Spinoza’s account of the mind as the idea of the body, the mind involves the ideas of other bodies, examining what this tells us about the complex and subtle interplay of relations of inherence and involvement in Spinoza’s philosophy of mind.
An equally complex matter in Spinoza’s philosophy of mind concerns his views on true knowledge. As before, Spinoza seems to straddle two distinct and difficult to reconcile views on truth, one which is in keeping with coherence theories of truth, and another which is in keeping with correspondence theories of truth. Spinoza’s bold effort at reconciling his two accounts of truth has not gone unnoticed in the history of philosophy. Knox Peden, in his contribution “Spinoza’s True Ideas: Suggestive Convergences,” revisits two important episodes in the history of the reception of this theoretical effort, and he shows how, in fact, Spinoza’s philosophy of mind can even bridge the gap between analytic and Continental schools of philosophy. In this case, the parallel figures are philosophers Louis Althusser and Donald Davidson, each of whom developed unmistakably Spinozistic and rationalist accounts of true knowledge as a means of combatting rival pragmatist schools of thought. Pascale Gillot, in “Althusser, Spinoza, and the Specter of the Cartesian Subject,” develops the analysis of Althusser’s rationalist Spinozist commitment to an account of truth as adequation. She shows how the French school of rationalist epistemology, championed by Althusser and others, challenged the Cartesian postwar orthodoxy, and why Spinoza therefore remains important for understanding the history of French thought in the twentieth century.
Given the saliently nominalist tendencies of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind, it is surprising to learn that so-called beings of reason have a decisive, regulatory role to play in his philosophy. Michael A. Rosenthal, in “Beings of Reason and the Analogical Imagination,” examines this problem in light of the late Scholastic authors Spinoza would have read. Rosenthal shows that the status of beings of reason, for Spinoza, subtly touches on a number of other interconnected problems in his philosophy, most notably his views on analogical thinking, mereology, and the model of human nature. Jacqueline Lagrée, in her response “Analogia and Ens Rationis,” further examines the background of Early Modern views on beings of reason. She likewise examines Spinoza’s treatment of mythological creatures, metaphysical inventions, and the pedagogical or practical utility of fictions in Spinoza’s philosophy.
Spinoza, on many accounts, is a moral subjectivist. He believes, it is often argued, that good and bad are merely mind-dependent realities and that all moral evaluations are subjective. In other words, he is a moral anti-realist. Not so, responds Steven Nadler. In his chapter, “Spinoza on Good and Bad,” Nadler shows that although Spinoza may be, in some sense, a relativist, he is not a subjectivist. Rather, someone’s having a “pro-attitude” toward some other thing is grounded in real, mind-independent features of the thing that make it congenial to his or her conatus. Likewise, Spinoza’s chief aim as an ethical theorist is to show what thing or things are, indeed, most congenial to any human conatus. Lorenzo Vinciguerra, in his response “The Knowledge of Good and Bad,” looks back over Spinoza’s philosophical corpus and shows how Nadler’s reading better suits the big picture of the evolution of Spinoza’s thought. He also looks to show how in the French literature similar interpretations have been defended, and what this says about the relation of American and French Spinoza scholarship. Lastly, he raises an important issue for measuring the meaningfulness of that which is bad or evil in Spinoza’s philosophy, namely, whether, for Spinoza, it is knowable to the same degree as that which is good.
Spinoza’s so-called free man is a hot button issue in interpretations of Spinoza’s moral philosophy. In virtue of the fact that Spinoza talks about the free man as the exemplar or model of human nature, and in virtue of the fact that no human being can be entirely free of inadequate ideas and passion, since no human being can exist without the aid and sustenance of other human beings, it has been maintained that Spinoza’s free man serves a purely regulatory role and is not, in fact, capable of real instantiation per se. In her chapter, “Generosity as Freedom in Spinoza’s Ethics,” Hasana Sharp challenges this view by examining Spinoza’s account of generosity. She argues that Spinoza’s views on a particularly militant form of generosity allow him to identify acting by oneself with acting with others, thereby short-circuiting any apparent barrier to effectively instantiating ethical, political, and social freedom. Indeed, Spinoza’s free man is, for Sharp, free in virtue of their generous love toward others. Drawing important comparisons of Spinoza’s work with such thinkers as diverse as Martin Luther King Jr., Sharp shows that Spinoza’s resources for thinking the need to respond to adversity with militant love are far from exhausted. In response to Sharp’s chapter, Ariel Suhamy, in “A Generous Reading,” shows that, for the French reader, such issues are particularly compelling and important to wrestle with. Suhamy turns then to the comparison of Spinoza’s moral philosophy with Descartes’s moral philosophy, and he points Sharp in the way of further pertinent questions that, if answered, may help shed light on the originality of Spinoza’s position.
Spinoza’s philosophy is celebrated for its scathing and unapologetic critique of anthropomorphism and the belief in teleology. For Spinoza, anthropomorphism and the belief in teleology are at the very root of superstition. Yet, as Daniel Garber shows in his contribution, “Anthropomorphism, Teleology, and Superstition: The Politics of Obedience in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” Spinoza did not merely content himself with some first-degree criticisms of anthropomorphism and teleology as philosophically unsound and politically dangerous. Rather, Spinoza sought ways to co-opt the two and put them to a positive use. Indeed, as Garber demonstrates, Spinoza even goes so far as to make use of them to ground obedience to the moral law by putting them at the center of the so-called dogmas of universal faith that he enumerates in Chapter 14 of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Chantal Jaquet, in her response “Logic of the Superstitious, Logic of the Pious,” takes up the problem of the delicate distinction that Spinoza draws between superstition and piety. Jaquet shows that, for Spinoza, whereas superstition is grounded in fear and ignorance, piety concerns the inherent positivity of the imagination and the need to adopt moral truths to the individual’s ingenium or mentality.
As noted earlier, the twentieth-century reception of Spinoza in France was heavily marked by the presence of Alexandre Matheron. Steven Barbone, in his chapter “Individual and Community and Its American Legacy,” looks to show that Matheron’s influence was not exclusively French and that, in fact, he has a strong following in the United States as well. He examines the way that Matheron’s discussion of individual and community framed many recent debates in Spinoza studies, and the direction that American Spinoza studies have taken under the impetus of their readings of Matheron. Lauren Bove re-examines the legacy of Matheron in France with his contribution, entitled “Between Spinoza and Matheron, Something Happens ….,” Bove elucidates the specific ways that French readers found Matheron’s interpretation to be important. He shows that, among other things, Matheron’s position on Spinoza was not always well-received and that, in fact, it was subject to many revisions and updates over time. He likewise examines the background of Matheron’s reading by contrasting it with the long tradition of French Spinoza studies, touching on the reading of Spinoza made by such figures as Victor Delbos and Martial Gueroult.
Spinoza, it was once believed, did not enjoy the kind of widespread readership that other Early Modern philosophers like Locke did. Likewise, Enlightenment thinkers, so the story was told, were primarily indebted to a philosopher like Locke for the content of their philosophical positions. In his influential recent work, Jonathan Israel has challenged this view, advancing what he calls the Radical Enlightenment thesis. The latter thesis serves a double-purpose: it clarifies the true intellectual history and lineage of the Enlightenment, and it shows in what truly consists the Enlightenment, when we look at it in its most groundbreaking, revolutionary form. In both of these respects, Spinoza’s philosophy plays an absolutely crucial role, both as the earliest historical progenitor of and the continual source of inspiration to Enlightenment thinkers. In his chapter for this volume, “Spinoza’s Formulation of the Radical Enlightenment’s Two Defining Doctrines: How Much Did He Owe to the Dutch Golden Age Theological-Political Context?,” Israel reexamines the way that Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise spurred on the Radical Enlightenment by challenging the collusion of religious and political authority and by calling for the democratization of political life. Showing how the cercle spinoziste, composed of Dutch thinkers like Koerbagh and Van den Enden, played an equally important role in giving rise to the Radical Enlightenment, Israel then responds to recent criticisms of his Radical Enlightenment thesis. He shows how they have failed to appreciate the unprecedented approach to discussions of natural right characteristic of Spinoza’s philosophy in particular and of the Radical Enlightenment writ large. Charles Ramond, in his response “Spinoza’s Paradoxical Radicalism,” takes up the issue of Spinoza’s radical emancipatory power and his political views on authority. Carefully looking at both the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise, Ramond examines how Spinoza consistently valorizes both obedience and the longevity of states across these two texts. However, claims Ramond, these beliefs actually undergird the truly radical emancipatory power of Spinoza, a political philosopher ready to refuse all transcendence for the sake of real democracy.
Notes
1 To learn more about Spinoza’s life, Steven Nadler’s acclaimed biography remains the most detailed and trustworthy reference. See Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
2 However, let it also be said that Spinoza studies in the Netherlands, in Israel, in the United Kingdom, in Italy, in Australia, and in Brazil, for instance, are historically significant and highly sophisticated pursuits in their own right, and that research pursued in France or the United States frequently involves the work of scholars hailing from these various other linguistic and national contexts.
3 The volumes published in this collection thus far include Baruch Spinoza, Œuvres I: Premiers écrits, Dutch and Latin texts edited by Filippo Mignini, introduction by Pierre-François Moreau, translations by Michelle Beyssade [TIE] and Joël Ganault [KV] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009); Baruch Spinoza, Œuvres III: Traité théologico-politique, Latin text edited by Fokke Akkerman, bibliography, index, introduction, and translation by Jacqueline Lagrée and Pierre-François Moreau (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999); and Baruch Spinoza, Œuvres V: Traité politique, Latin text edited by Omero Proetti, bibliography, index, introduction, and translation by Charles Ramond, with supplementary notes by Alexandre Matheron (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005).
4 See Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment trilogy (soon to be a tetralogy), and in particular the first volume in the series, where Israel shows that Spinoza occupies an absolutely central place in the history of the Enlightenment: Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
5 Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford, 2014); The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
6 Martial Gueroult, Spinoza 1: Dieu (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968); Martial Gueroult, Spinoza 2: L’âme (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1974); Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, 2nd edn (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988 [1st edn 1969]).
7 See Bernard Pautrat, “Jules Prat, spinoziste,” in Baruch Spinoza, Traité théologico-politique, trans. J.-G. Prat, ed. Bernard Pautrat (Paris: Allia, 2015).
8 Contextual factors do not tell us everything, however, about Althusser’s affinity for Spinoza. Note that Althusser describes what he himself sees as the “profound reasons for [Althusser’s] attraction to [Spinoza]” in Louis Althusser, “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part 1: Spinoza,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Montag and Stolze.
9 For Deleuze’s own discussion of “what a body can do,” see Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 197–213.
10 Recent literature on Spinoza’s reception by the German Idealists has thankfully enriched and nuanced our understanding of what the latter saw as meaningful in the former. See in particular the papers collected in the volume Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. Eckhart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). A classic statement in the relation between Spinoza and Hegel is given by Macherey in Piere Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011 [1979]).
11 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 9.
12 Spinoza: Issues and Directions—The Proceedings of the Spinoza Chicago Conference, ed. Edwin Curley and Pierre-François Moreau (Leiden: Brill, 1990). The globalization of Spinoza research was also further stirred on by the historic “Spinoza by 2000” Jerusalem Conferences, organized by Yirmiyahu Yovel and the Jerusalem Spinoza Institute in cooperation with Hebrew University’s Spinoza Research Program. Other notable efforts in bridging cultural gaps in Spinoza studies include collections such as Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza, ed. Moira Gatens (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009) and Spinoza Now, ed. Dimitris Vardoulakis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
13 Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), vol. 1, 3.
14 Ibid., vii.
15 Ibid., 63.
16 Gueroult, Spinoza 1, 428–461, esp.
17 For more recent work on Spinoza’s relation to Judaism, see Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, ed. Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002) and Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
18 The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael Della Rocca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–17, esp. 1–4.