Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud Horst Lange Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud. By Michael Mack. Continuum: New York, 2010. 222 pages. $34.95. This book has a thesis as compact as it is attractive: whereas mainstream Enlightenment, culminating in German Idealism, posits reason as something that always excludes, suppresses, and erases the particular (a claim the author asserted in his previous book German Idealism and the Jew), there exists an alternative Enlightenment, inaugurated by Spinoza, in which reason is the champion of diversity and inclusion. Since the bulk of the book is about Herder and Goethe—and since Spinoza’s concept of conatus, almost unknown in Herder and Goethe scholarship, is put front and center—one relishes the prospect of getting a completely new account of Herder’s and Goethe’s debt to the Jewish-Dutch philosopher. Alas, as much as one would want this book to succeed, it is so poorly argued that one scarcely knows where to begin listing its shortcomings. A fog of imprecision hovers over the entire proceedings. Why, for example, is this alternative Enlightenment called “hidden” when its proponents (Mack discusses Spinoza, Herder, Goethe, Eliot, and Freud) are household names, and there is no controversy around the widely-accepted claim that Herder and Goethe were champions of diversity? And what do sentences like the following mean (to choose from hundreds such examples)? “Religion introduces a new space for the allocation of time and attention, one that transcends goal oriented forms, be they the search for treasures or the calculation that goes for financial transaction, or military planning or other forms of teleology” (151). Maybe we can vaguely agree with this since religions generally try to elevate us above the mundane concerns of our everyday life: but then again, we might remember that Christianity, for example, is a terribly goal-oriented affair, trying to structure every aspect of a believer’s life through the telos of a great treasure called eternal life. In so doing, moreover, it regularly uses the language of financial transaction (one might only think of Paul’s “Death is the wages of sin”) or calculations (as when good and bad deeds are weighed on Judgment Day). And that religions have sparked military campaigns is well known as well. So what is the “religion” the author is talking about if Christianity does not fall under it? Many paragraphs are so unfocused that they would frustrate any attempt to find their purpose. Here is just one example: the paragraph beginning at the bottom of page 116 starts out with the titillating thesis that Herder has a “postmodern sensibility.” But instead of explaining this claim to us, the author feels the sudden need to ask, “What precisely differentiates Herder’s thought from that of his French intellectual predecessors?” What does postmodernism have to do with these French thinkers? Mack now [End Page 276] adds a brief and not particularly lucid discussion of Jerrold Seigel’s interpretation of Condillac’s treatment of the mind-body-problem, only to state abruptly, without argument, that Herder’s opposition to the mind-body divide caused him “uneasiness with prerevolutionary French society.” What does prerevolutionary France have to do with the mind-body-problem, and how did we get from Herder’s postmodernism to his attitude toward the ancien régime? And how does all of this fit into the purpose of the chapter; namely, an elaboration of Herder’s concept of the transnational? Occasionally, the author rolls up his sleeves and argues for a point. But, particularly in the discussion of Spinoza, such arguments involve little analysis of primary texts (which are rarely quoted): instead the arguments entail quoting secondary literature and attaching footnotes. Since we know that secondary literature is full of incompatible claims (particularly in all matters Spinoza), the dry assurance that a certain writer “astutely observed” something (this is the repeated phrase) does not help us one whit in sorting out what claims we should buy into or reject. Scholarly books are supposed to distill the complexity of a set of texts into a...