Spinoza 1/3
Or how life feeds a philosopher’s mind (and our own) and vice versa
1. Banishment as a new beginning
While it sometimes happens that a philosopher ends up on trial, rarely does a philosopher begin with an excommunication and an attempt on his life.
Gilles Deleuze: Spinoza, Practical Philosophy
It is a well-known scenario in which a thinker pays for the seditiousness of his writings or research with his life or his freedom. Examples are numerous, often notorious as among them are a majority of scholars and philosophers whose works or actions, as later discovered, heralded a new age, a threshold beyond which nothing would be the same.
One man’s destiny stands out from the fresco of ill-fated thinkers, subsequently recognized as beacons in the history of science. They say a stranger once attempted to assassinate Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), having waited for him outside either a Synagogue or a theatre, as per the different versions of biographers, inspired by one another’s accounts of some initial story. Luckily, the attempt on his life ravaged nothing more than his coat, which the philosopher quite philosophically kept as a reminder of the world’s uncertainties.
Whether or not the story is true, it was inconsequential beside the crushing affair of 1656 that led to the young member of Amsterdam’s Jewish community’s excommunication, through this since-famous statement:
The Senhores of the Ma’amad (Jewish authority for Amsterdam’s Jews) announce that having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways (…) After all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable Hakhamim, the Senhores of the Ma’amad have decided, with the rabbis’ consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel following the Herem we shall now pronounce in these terms :
By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of the entire holy congregation (…) Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up (…)
And the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law.
These were the words that expulsed Baruch Spinoza, on 27 July 1656, from the Jewish community of Amsterdam where he was raised and educated. Why such a scathing excommunication, other than perhaps his strong spiritedness? Herem, a strong word indeed, means “destruction” or “annihilation.” The Herem, which as we know did not wipe Spinoza’s name off the face of the Earth, was sent out to all European cities with Jewish communities and is still technically active today: in 1948, Ben Gourion attempted to have it lifted, but the Rabbis of modern-day Israel refused. In 2012, the Chief Rabbi of Amsterdam, Pinchas Toledano, looked into the “Spinoza Case.” The problem is that, for a Herem to be lifted, the individual against whom it was pronounced must express their sincere repent and will to regain a place in the community. Although somewhat of hazardous pursuit, three and a half centuries later, it was decided that the texts Spinoza left as his legacy testified to the fact that neither of the two conditions had been met. In July of 2013, deeming that the philosopher has been indifferent to the excommunication to the last breath of his life, the Chief Rabbi delivered the sentence that the Herem could not be overturned.
You may be tempted to smirk at the seriousness of debates over upholding such a bygone ruling — a ruling about a philosopher whose significance for exploring the humanities is being discovered only now, in the 21st century. Nonetheless, the excommunication undoubtedly played a major role in the elaboration of Spinoza’s philosophy, largely influenced by his expulsion, which he endured not without danger and without ever turning back.
How could a young man of 24, an Amsterdam-born Portuguese Jew with no publications to his name at the time, trigger such drastic measures, so seldom utilized by the legal authorities of the Jewish community?
The answer lies in the same reasons why Europe’s great thinkers of the time, such as Bayle and Leibniz, also decided to distance themselves from him, for the same reasons the philosopher faced accusations of atheism from left and right from the moment he published his first book. Given the scale of the misinterpretation, he ardently refuted such accusations: what Spinoza called into question was nothing more than the God of the priests and His direct exploitation, namely the enslaving potential of religious dogma.
Of his eight works, Spinoza published only one under his own name during his lifetime: Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy. Another of his works, the Tractatus Theologico Politicus (TTP), was published in 1670, during his life indeed, but anonymously and under another title. For good measure and as the title suggests, the text was written in Latin rather than Dutch to avoid potential problems Spinoza (whose motto was “caute,” meaning ‘cautiously’) could have encountered had he not used a savant language.
His other texts, including the unparalleled Ethics, were published in 1677 by his friends, in the wake of his passing.
Stricken by the Herem, Spinoza had no choice but to give up the businesses inherited from his father, which he ran with his brother Gabriel. People no longer had the right to teach or to be taught by him. Aside from polishing spectacle and telescope lenses, which ensured him some livelihood, Spinoza took his excommunication as an opportunity to devote himself entirely to his studies and chose to live modestly. Jean Colerus, one of Spinoza’s main biographers and a Lutheran minister in the parish of The Hague where Spinoza spent his final years, took up residence in the philosopher’s former apartment a few years after his death, still owned by the same landlords who greatly contributed to his biography. Colerus insisted on the fact that Spinoza could easily have avoided his banishment given that, as stated in the prelude to the Herem, the rabbinic community did everything in their power to prevent it.
According to Colerus, the Rabbis offered him one thousand guilders to show up on occasion to the Synagogue, to which Spinoza reputedly declared that “even if they had offered him ten times as much, he would not have accepted of it, nor frequented their assemblies out of such a motive; because he was not a hypocrite, and minded nothing but truth.” Perhaps Spinoza could have avoided the ban, could have called out against the harshness of his sentence, but it would have been at the expense of his thinking. So, he did nothing, did not exercise his right. He simply left. Lucas, another biographer and friend of Spinoza, attributed these words to him: “All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal. But since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me…”
Does this mean the decision was easy to make? Nothing could be less certain. The first of Spinoza’s works, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, published unfinished after his death, gives a surprising account of its author’s need to find solid-enough knowledge, for instance, to establish a “method” for true good as “something which once discovered and acquired would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity”: “I saw that I was in the greatest danger, and that I was forced to seek a remedy with all my strength, however uncertain it might be, like a sick man suffering from a fatal disease who, foreseeing certain death unless a remedy is forthcoming, is forced to seek it, however uncertain it might be, with all his strength, for in that lies all his hope.” In other words: find a reason to live so powerful it can outweigh banishment, or nothing at all. Though Spinoza was banished for his budding thoughts, the violence of his expulsion was without a doubt what brought them to maturity. The opportunity was thus left to future generations to turn to good account the contributions of a thinker fed by the two cultures of the western world : Judaism and Christianism.
To go further
- Spinoza, Traité théologique et politique
- Spinoza,Traité de l’amendement de l’intellect (ou Traité de la réforme de l’entendement)
- Spinoza, Correspondance, traduction, présentation, notes, dossier, bibliographie et chronologie par Maxime Rovère, Flammarion, coll. « GF » no 1438, 2010 (ISBN 978–2–08–123138–2)
- Spinoza, Correspondance, traduction, présentation, notes, dossier, bibliographie et chronologie par Maxime Rovère, Flammarion, coll. « GF » no 1438, 2010 (ISBN 978–2–08–123138–2)
- Maxime Rovere, Exister. Méthodes de Spinoza, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2010
- Steven Nadler (trad. de l’anglais par Jean-François Sené), Spinoza : une vie, Paris, Bayard, 2003 (ISBN 2–227–47074–7)
- (en) Steven Nadler, Spinoza : a life, Cambridge University Press, 1999 (ISBN 0521002931)
- Pierre-François Moreau, Spinoza et le spinozisme, Paris, PUF, coll. « Que sais-je ? », 2003
- Pierre-François Moreau, Spinoza, l’expérience et l’éternité, Paris, PUF, 2009 (1re éd. 1993)
- Robert Misrahi, 100 mots sur l’Éthique de Spinoza, Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2005
- Robert Misrahi, Spinoza, Paris, Médicis-Entrelacs, 2005
- K.O. Meinsma (trad. S. Roosenburg), Spinoza et son cercle, Paris, Vrin, 2011
- Pierre Macherey, Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza : 5 tomes, Paris, PUF, 1994–1998
- Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, Paris, coll. « Minuit », 1968
- Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Philosophie pratique, Paris, Minuit, 1981
- Antonio Damasio, Spinoza avait raison, Odile Jacob, 2003
- Étienne Balibar, Spinoza et la politique, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1985
- Roger Scruton : Spinoza
