Spinoza’s Failed Rhetoric of a Supposedly Inconspicuous Transition to Secularity

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to trace rhetorical misjudgments in Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. For instance, Spinoza’s revelation in Letter 30 (written to Henry Oldenburg) that one of the things motivating him to write the Theological-Political Treatise was setting to rest popular conceptions of him as an atheist suggests that his efforts to blunt or muffle the radicalness of his challenges to conventional religion were rhetorically much less effective than he may have hoped. He deploys “devices of prudence” such as conventional images of God, revelation, and prophecy that he knows to be sub-philosophical, but seems to underestimate the capacity of his readers to see through these devices. But it is not my view that such rhetorical misjudgments (if that is what they were) were a bad thing. On the contrary, this chapter suggests that Spinoza’s overestimation of the efficacy of his prudential devices, and corresponding underestimation of how readers would react to his work, made it possible for him (whether he intended it or not) to deliver a truly radical work that contributed decisively to the origins of the Enlightenment. Would he have done this if he had more correctly judged the rhetorical impact?