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"In 1656, Amsterdam's Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty-three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza's progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition's persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe's first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age."… (more)
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Rebecca Goldstein is a (Jewish) professor of philosophy who wrote an autobiography of Spinoza. She opens the book by telling us about a childhood experience of hers: being "taught" about Spinoza by a religious teacher in her school. It was the understandably highly critical position of this teacher with regards to Spinoza that sparked her interest in the man and his work. Goldstein went on to study Spinoza in depth and teach courses about his philosophy (and that of Descartes) at university. She shares with the reader the love she has for the philosopher and her emotions at seeing her students slowly opening up to gain appreciation of his notoriously difficult writings.
Most of this book tries to reconstruct Spinoza's life based on facts: what we know about him from his works and from what others have written about him. Goldstein introduces the reader to some of Spinoza's philosophy throughout the book and some parts are indeed heavy-going (especially the discussion about his magnum opus: The Ethics). But it is towards the end of the book that her narrative turns to be really interesting. She breaks from the strictly academic approach and tries to imagine what Spinoza would have felt towards the end of his life. She uses a historical event - the opening of the main synagogue in Amsterdam - to tell us an imaginary tale about Spinoza coming back to watch the ceremony from a distance. We read about his throughts as he ruminated about the fate of this community of Portugese Jews who fled the inquisition in their country to find a new life in this relatively tolerant Protestant country. To me, the story of this community, which Goldstein explains at length and in vivid colours, was an eye-opener. It made a lot of what Spinoza wrote about clearer and put his philosophy in the right context.
It seems to be disloyal, Goldstein’s historical approach. Spinoza himself wrote in the language of reason so pure that many casual readers (such as myself) give up after a few hours of struggle in the icy crystals of his logic. In approaching Spinoza’s reality, anything individual or personal evaporates into the purity of truth. How wrong, then, to join in Goldstein’s sisterly imagination! Doesn’t it obviate his whole premise, that one triangulates truth through deductive reason and what I understand to be a kind of logical intuition? As I gropingly understand Spinoza’s position, there appears to be no place for explanation by pointing to outcomes, and certainly not for hanging explanations on contingency. So how can Goldstein, who certainly grasps Spinoza’s works far better than most, dare to wonder what it felt like to be Spinoza?
By the end of the book, however, I came to understand Goldstein’s project better. Despite the title, she does not cheat Spinoza’s philosophy. She does not try to explain or justify Spinoza’s philosophy by his personal history or even his Jewishness. That, I think, would indeed have been a betrayal. Instead, she merely tags along with him, traces his path up the mountain towards God. To Spinoza, his uniqueness and his struggle are both irrelevant in the face of God, but to the rest of us, this tale, like a zen koan, may help us both see and see past.
Rebecca Goldstein has taken an interesting angle in her discussion on the rationalist philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. She has couched his work as a result of a specific Jewish journey, that of Jews who immigrated to Amsterdam during the Spanish
Goldstein calls that journey a world that "had acquired its distinctive characteristics by way of centuries-long exposure to what can go so tragically wrong in our efforts to justify our beliefs." In so doing, Goldstein makes Spinoza a particularly Jewish philosopher which seems to me somewhat of a turning away from Spinoza's precepts of making man unified in his sameness.
Spinoza, as Goldstein realizes, railed against the very absurdity of his ancestor Jews' conceit that they were the "chosen people". But, Goldstein drags him right back to that world, one even his own had cast him out from in his early adulthood.
I say this, not in criticism of Goldstein's book, but more in irony. For, to tell the life of Sipnoza is to delve into that very Jewish world from which he came. This Goldstein demonstrates quite well and she does so in a very approachable way.
She gives us just enough of Spinoza's main concepts of rational thought that one "gets" it, but not so much that the book seems a mere rehash of the philosopher's work. It is a very interesting and quick reading tome that is recommended to "place" Spinoza in his times.
Goldstein sums Spinoza's philosophical quest as that which might explain the "tragedy" that was his community's experience. "Within this system he south to demonstrate that the truths of ethics have their source in the human condition and nowhere else. He sought ti prove that our common human nature revels why we must treat one another with utmost dignity, and, too, that our common human nature is itself transformed in our knowing of it, so that we become only more like one another as we think our way toward radical objectivity."
And, in a time when much of man's doing revolved around determining which religion was "right" and which nation had the right to rule, and in a time when the rights of individual men were meaningless (though the Enlightenment was just dawning), Spinoza proved a prophet for change in hopes of creating a world based on rational thought and less on emotions.
I am not sure how much Spinoza's work influenced John Locke's work, but his thought process is a precursor to the flight of freedom and liberty that was launched in 1776 as Enlightenment influenced thinkers launched the American Revolution, but his ideas were certainly in sympathy with that era of thought.
Goldstein penned a fine book that will take the reader on an interesting and very personal journey to enlightenment. And at $20, it is not an expensive ticket.
Bertrand Russell describes Spinoza as "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers." I cannot disagree. As remarkable as his philosophy is, his conduct is even more so.
Goldstein titled her book Betraying Spinoza because she hopes to reconstruct his identity and demonstrate how it influenced his thinking, while recognizing that his formal philosophy endeavors to abrogate the concept of identity. Through an analysis of Jewish history at large (and the 17th century Amsterdam Jewish community in particular) and making the occasional educated guess, she makes the compelling case that Spinoza, in rejecting Judaism, was a sort of Jewish savior. By destroying the Jewish conceit of being God's "chosen people," he undercuts all forms of essentialism, religious or otherwise.
His impact on John Locke is noted. The leap to his influence on the deism that informed the thinking of those who would found the United States is short. When I am at my most pessimistic I think of the philosopher, and those like him, and I allow myself to hope.
In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’ s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’ s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism.
Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age.
Goldstein writes a deeply engaging biography of Spinoza, centering around his complicated identity as a first generation Dutch Jew of
It may be objected that, as we understand God as the cause of all things, we by that very fact regard God as the cause of pain. But I make answer, that, in so far as we understand the causes of pain, it to that extent, ceases to be a passion, that is, it ceases to be pain; therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of pain, we to that extent feel pleasure. [Really?]
That is what the problem of evil comes down to: the stubborn stupidity of mankind. [A weak answer before the Theory of Evolution, but certainly inadequate now.]
This book certainly held my attention and it is an outstanding and clever overall production.