Following my success with this writer on Berlin during the war, I tried my luck with his book on Spinoza, Freedom’s Messiah.  (I have ordered one on Japan during the war.)  It is certainly up to scratch.  This man knows how to put such a book together, on a subject that can be both tricky and touchy. 

Spinoza was a most extraordinary man – who managed to wind up all sorts of people – to the extent that he got expelled from his own community in a country that was pleased with its own level of toleration.  As it happens, I idolize Spinoza – for the reasons given in the note on his most read work that is set out below.

I commend this book by Ian Buruma.  I think he has handled a difficult subject extremely well.  He is like a good lawyer sifting the material and getting to the point in a coherent and persuasive manner.  It is a most useful gift.

I will not review the book, but focus on one point that bears on the current discussion about what some call hate speech. 

We have long had laws that enable police to intervene when someone is offending others in public in a way that may lead to a fight.  The primary driver of the growth of the common law was the felt need to maintain the king’s peace and end the vendetta. 

But once you seek to go beyond that and control what people may lawfully say about religious, political or tribal issues, you get into trouble with that very sensitive notion called freedom of speech.  (I see it is about to be tested in the U S in the case of a man indicted for sending a photo of sea shells – a case brought by dull bigots with a straight face and no sense of shame – all desiderata in the current federal government.)

In the note below I referred to ‘doctrinal dynamite’.  The dynamite went much further than doctrine – in a community where the author had been kicked out of a community by a community that had been kicked out of another country.

Mr Buruma gives one example.  In the Treatise referred to, Spinoza said the Hebrew nation was not chosen by God because of intellect or peace of mind, but because of its social order and the fortune by which it came to have a state.  Mr Buruma says the ‘idea of the Jews as chosen people was nonsense.’

That they had survived for so long was no surprise, since they had ‘separated themselves so from all nations that they have drawn the hatred of all men against themselves, not only by having external customs contrary to the customs of the other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they maintain most scrupulously.’

That makes dynamite look like mother’s milk.  Mr Buruma says:

It is hard to think of anything that would cause greater offense to Jews, and particularly to Jews of his own family, who had suffered persecution, forced conversion, and were trying so hard in Mokum, the Safe Place, to become practising Jews again…. his suggestion that Jews had brought the hatred of others upon themselves by refusing to give up their own traditions was especially hurtful…. Spinoza’s argument for assimilation is naïve, and if it had been made by a gentile, it could easily be construed as a form of anti-Semitism.

Well, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  But if we have learned anything in three thousand years of Western philosophy, it is that there is no such thing as the answer. 

And from where I sit, those who think they may get lasting relief on issues like these from a group of civil servants sitting as a royal commission may feel let down.  The Holy Grail may be a phantom outside of Wagner, and whatever else you may say of him, he was not a model politician.

There are limits to the extent to which we should either expect or wish the State to control how we think or talk about others.  The law can only deal with what it can – the rest belongs to the grind or mire of politics.  And the law is not good at politics.

I commend the book.  It is well presented by Yale University Press in the series Jewish Lives, and it comes with luscious rough-cut pages and a French style dust jacket with a portrait – which shows a much softer version of the subject than the one looking down on me in my study.

As for Spinoza, if you wish to join issue with him on any issue of religion or philosophy, gird yourself well, because he has more intellectual firepower in one toe than the rest of us in our whole frame.

BOOK EXTRACT

TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS

Benedict de Spinoza (1670)

Translated R H M Elwes Second Edition, Revised; George Bell and Sons, Covent Garden, 1889; republished in facsimile by Kessenger Publishing, U S; rebound in half yellow leather and yellow cloth with black label embossed in gold.

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.

The main text that the Inquisition invoked against Galileo was the miracle of the sun standing still for a day to enable Joshua and the Israelites to kill a lot more of the indigenous people whose land God had promised to his chosen people.  This is one of those parts of Scripture that makes a lot of people very nervous about miracles and an all too human God – nor did it do much for Galileo.  Do we really want a God who intervenes in Middle Eastern wars by suspending his own laws to help one tribe kill more of others because he has chosen them as his favourite?  Do we want a God who is so exclusive and so lethal?  If you do not, you may wish turn to Spinoza and Kant.

For some, the only black mark against Spinoza is that Bertrand Russell said that he was ‘lovable.’  This is what Russell said.  ‘Spinoza (1632-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.  Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.  As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.  He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him.  Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism.  Leibniz, who owed much to him, concealed his debt, and carefullyabstained from saying a word in his praise; he even went so far as to lie about the extent of his personal acquaintance with the heretic Jew.’

Spinoza’s parents were Portuguese Jews forced to ‘confess’ Christianity by the Inquisition.  They migrated to Amsterdam where Baruch (or Benedict) was born.  He was very bright as a child and so intellectually precocious that his own community eventually excommunicated him.  The terms of the cherem chill the blood.  He was described when young as having a beautiful face with a well-formed body and ‘slight long black hair.’  He polished lenses by day and wrote philosophy at night.  He died young of a lung condition that was not helped by his work. 

The Tractatus was published anonymously and was immediately condemned on all sides.  His master-work, Ethics, was not published until after his death.  He lived alone, and frugally – although he enjoyed a pipe and a glass of wine, he could go for days on milk soup made with butter and some ale. 

Spinoza says that his chief aim in the Tractatus is to separate faith from philosophy.  He says that Moses did not seek to convince the Jews by reason, but bound by them a covenant, by oaths, and by conferring benefits.  This was not to teach knowledge, but to inspire obedience.  He then says, ‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Him implies’. 

As doctrinal dynamite goes, there is enough in his exposition for believers and unbelievers of all kinds to inflict a lot of damage on each other.  And Spinoza gives intellectuals another slap in the face: ‘The best faith is not necessarily possessed by him who discloses the best reasons, but by him who displays the best fruits of justice and charity’.  You might think that a lot, or even most, believers of good will would go along with that proposition, but Plato and Aristotle would have been very, very unhappy, and deeply shocked.

Reason, Spinoza said, was ‘the true handwriting of God.’  His belief is evidenced by the following extracts from the Tractatus.

I have often wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion … should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

Spinoza corresponded widely on a very high plane, but some letters show homely insights from the least sect-bound of men.  Christ gave ‘by his life and death a matchless example of holiness’; if the Turks or other non-Christians ‘worship God by the practice of justice and charity toward their neighbour, I believe that they have the spirit of Christ, and are in a state of salvation’; the ‘authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates does not carry much weight with me’; and ‘Scripture should only be expounded through Scripture.’  He also asked question similar to one asked by Darwin: whether ‘we human pygmies possess sufficient knowledge of nature to be able to lay down the limits of its force and power, or to say that a given thing surpasses that power?’

The little Dutch Jewish outcast also said:

Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others

Many of those words will ring true for those who have become estranged from religion, and just as many who are struggling to stay with it.  The last citation alone would justify the whole life and work of this very great and holy man.  That sentiment should be put up in neon lights outside every exclusive institution in the land.

Spinoza was a very holy man who crossed on to the turf of less holy men.  Turf wars are the scourge of religion.  The great gift of Spinoza and Kant to mankind was to stand up and stare down those clever and subtle men – alas, they were all men – who claimed to have exclusive rights to the box of tricks without which the rest of us could not get near God or enjoy the grace of true religion. 

They both should be remembered as two of our greatest liberators.  Their legacy is worth so much more than the brackish howls of those bothered God-deniers whose very loudness bespeaks the bankruptcy of philosophy.  Just what does philosophy have to show for itself?  And, just before dawn, did Bertrand Russell see himself as one of those who were intellectually superior to Spinoza?

Buruma on Spinoza

Following my success with this writer on Berlin during the war, I tried my luck with his book on Spinoza, Freedom’s Messiah.  (I have ordered one on Japan during the war.)  It is certainly up to scratch.  This man knows how to put such a book together, on a subject that can be both tricky and touchy. 

Spinoza was a most extraordinary man – who managed to wind up all sorts of people – to the extent that he got expelled from his own community in a country that was pleased with its own level of toleration.  As it happens, I idolize Spinoza – for the reasons given in the note on his most read work that is set out below.

I commend this book by Ian Buruma.  I think he has handled a difficult subject extremely well.  He is like a good lawyer sifting the material and getting to the point in a coherent and persuasive manner.  It is a most useful gift.

I will not review the book, but focus on one point that bears on the current discussion about what some call hate speech. 

We have long had laws that enable police to intervene when someone is offending others in public in a way that may lead to a fight.  The primary driver of the growth of the common law was the felt need to maintain the king’s peace and end the vendetta. 

But once you seek to go beyond that and control what people may lawfully say about religious, political or tribal issues, you get into trouble with that very sensitive notion called freedom of speech.  (I see it is about to be tested in the U S in the case of a man indicted for sending a photo of sea shells – a case brought by dull bigots with a straight face and no sense of shame – all desiderata in the current federal government.)

In the note below I referred to ‘doctrinal dynamite’.  The dynamite went much further than doctrine – in a community where the author had been kicked out of a community by a community that had been kicked out of another country.

Mr Buruma gives one example.  In the Treatise referred to, Spinoza said the Hebrew nation was not chosen by God because of intellect or peace of mind, but because of its social order and the fortune by which it came to have a state.  Mr Buruma says the ‘idea of the Jews as chosen people was nonsense.’

That they had survived for so long was no surprise, since they had ‘separated themselves so from all nations that they have drawn the hatred of all men against themselves, not only by having external customs contrary to the customs of the other nations, but also by the sign of circumcision, which they maintain most scrupulously.’

That makes dynamite look like mother’s milk.  Mr Buruma says:

It is hard to think of anything that would cause greater offense to Jews, and particularly to Jews of his own family, who had suffered persecution, forced conversion, and were trying so hard in Mokum, the Safe Place, to become practising Jews again…. his suggestion that Jews had brought the hatred of others upon themselves by refusing to give up their own traditions was especially hurtful…. Spinoza’s argument for assimilation is naïve, and if it had been made by a gentile, it could easily be construed as a form of anti-Semitism.

Well, as someone said, there is nothing new under the sun.  But if we have learned anything in three thousand years of Western philosophy, it is that there is no such thing as the answer. 

And from where I sit, those who think they may get lasting relief on issues like these from a group of civil servants sitting as a royal commission may feel let down.  The Holy Grail may be a phantom outside of Wagner, and whatever else you may say of him, he was not a model politician.

There are limits to the extent to which we should either expect or wish the State to control how we think or talk about others.  The law can only deal with what it can – the rest belongs to the grind or mire of politics.  And the law is not good at politics.

I commend the book.  It is well presented by Yale University Press in the series Jewish Lives, and it comes with luscious rough-cut pages and a French style dust jacket with a portrait – which shows a much softer version of the subject than the one looking down on me in my study.

As for Spinoza, if you wish to join issue with him on any issue of religion or philosophy, gird yourself well, because he has more intellectual firepower in one toe than the rest of us in our whole frame.

BOOK EXTRACT

TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS

Benedict de Spinoza (1670)

Translated R H M Elwes Second Edition, Revised; George Bell and Sons, Covent Garden, 1889; republished in facsimile by Kessenger Publishing, U S; rebound in half yellow leather and yellow cloth with black label embossed in gold.

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved and fostered by fear.

The main text that the Inquisition invoked against Galileo was the miracle of the sun standing still for a day to enable Joshua and the Israelites to kill a lot more of the indigenous people whose land God had promised to his chosen people.  This is one of those parts of Scripture that makes a lot of people very nervous about miracles and an all too human God – nor did it do much for Galileo.  Do we really want a God who intervenes in Middle Eastern wars by suspending his own laws to help one tribe kill more of others because he has chosen them as his favourite?  Do we want a God who is so exclusive and so lethal?  If you do not, you may wish turn to Spinoza and Kant.

For some, the only black mark against Spinoza is that Bertrand Russell said that he was ‘lovable.’  This is what Russell said.  ‘Spinoza (1632-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers.  Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.  As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.  He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him.  Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism.  Leibniz, who owed much to him, concealed his debt, and carefullyabstained from saying a word in his praise; he even went so far as to lie about the extent of his personal acquaintance with the heretic Jew.’

Spinoza’s parents were Portuguese Jews forced to ‘confess’ Christianity by the Inquisition.  They migrated to Amsterdam where Baruch (or Benedict) was born.  He was very bright as a child and so intellectually precocious that his own community eventually excommunicated him.  The terms of the cherem chill the blood.  He was described when young as having a beautiful face with a well-formed body and ‘slight long black hair.’  He polished lenses by day and wrote philosophy at night.  He died young of a lung condition that was not helped by his work. 

The Tractatus was published anonymously and was immediately condemned on all sides.  His master-work, Ethics, was not published until after his death.  He lived alone, and frugally – although he enjoyed a pipe and a glass of wine, he could go for days on milk soup made with butter and some ale. 

Spinoza says that his chief aim in the Tractatus is to separate faith from philosophy.  He says that Moses did not seek to convince the Jews by reason, but bound by them a covenant, by oaths, and by conferring benefits.  This was not to teach knowledge, but to inspire obedience.  He then says, ‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God, without which obedience to Him would be impossible, and which the mere fact of obedience to Him implies’. 

As doctrinal dynamite goes, there is enough in his exposition for believers and unbelievers of all kinds to inflict a lot of damage on each other.  And Spinoza gives intellectuals another slap in the face: ‘The best faith is not necessarily possessed by him who discloses the best reasons, but by him who displays the best fruits of justice and charity’.  You might think that a lot, or even most, believers of good will would go along with that proposition, but Plato and Aristotle would have been very, very unhappy, and deeply shocked.

Reason, Spinoza said, was ‘the true handwriting of God.’  His belief is evidenced by the following extracts from the Tractatus.

I have often wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion … should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest criterion of their faith.

Spinoza corresponded widely on a very high plane, but some letters show homely insights from the least sect-bound of men.  Christ gave ‘by his life and death a matchless example of holiness’; if the Turks or other non-Christians ‘worship God by the practice of justice and charity toward their neighbour, I believe that they have the spirit of Christ, and are in a state of salvation’; the ‘authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates does not carry much weight with me’; and ‘Scripture should only be expounded through Scripture.’  He also asked question similar to one asked by Darwin: whether ‘we human pygmies possess sufficient knowledge of nature to be able to lay down the limits of its force and power, or to say that a given thing surpasses that power?’

The little Dutch Jewish outcast also said:

Every man’s true happiness and blessedness consist solely in the enjoyment of what is good, not in the pride that he alone is enjoying it, to the exclusion of others

Many of those words will ring true for those who have become estranged from religion, and just as many who are struggling to stay with it.  The last citation alone would justify the whole life and work of this very great and holy man.  That sentiment should be put up in neon lights outside every exclusive institution in the land.

Spinoza was a very holy man who crossed on to the turf of less holy men.  Turf wars are the scourge of religion.  The great gift of Spinoza and Kant to mankind was to stand up and stare down those clever and subtle men – alas, they were all men – who claimed to have exclusive rights to the box of tricks without which the rest of us could not get near God or enjoy the grace of true religion. 

They both should be remembered as two of our greatest liberators.  Their legacy is worth so much more than the brackish howls of those bothered God-deniers whose very loudness bespeaks the bankruptcy of philosophy.  Just what does philosophy have to show for itself?  And, just before dawn, did Bertrand Russell see himself as one of those who were intellectually superior to Spinoza?