Theologico-Political Treatise Research Articles

Leo Strauss’s Reading of Spinoza and the Art of “be Alert to the Art of Writing”

Leo Strauss’s way of reading of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise got changed after his rediscovery of exotericism. As early as in the comment article on Hermann Cohen’s analysis of Spinoza’s Bible science, Strauss put forward that the Treatise should not be understood on the basis of our readers’ own presupposes of Spinoza’s personal motives. Later, in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1930), Strauss indeed read the Treatise literally, trying to understand it on the basis of Spinoza’s explicit statements. After the rediscovery of exotericism in 1930s, however, Strauss’s way of reading got changed. Strauss became very alert to Spinoza’s way of writing. Strauss found that Spinoza spoke with a view to the capacity of the vulgar and practiced exoteric writing. Some of Spinoza’s explicit statements were addressed to the non-philosophic majority and were not Spinoza’s true teachings. Based on this, Strauss regarded not all of Spinoza’s explicit statements, but those most opposed to what Spinoza considered the vulgar view, as well as those with an implication of a heterodox character, as expressing Spinoza’s true views. Strauss shows that “be alert to the art of writing” means two things. First, understand the author’s explicit statements. And second, try to find whether there are teachings that are different from or even opposed to the explicit statements. Keywords: Leo Strauss, exotericism, Spinoza, theologico-political treatise

Spinoza’s Defense of Democracy and the Emergence of Secularism

Prof. Stephen Strehle’s recent study suggests that modern politics is informed by secularism, which tends to promote hostility toward religion and the desire to purge religion from the public sphere. This essay considers one of the founding documents of secularism and modern political thought, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise. Spinoza’s account is ambiguous: his theology raises doubts about the truth of revelation even as he argues that salvation, as taught by the Bible, requires the practice of caritas. Spinoza also attempts to separate religion and politics. He grounds political life on universal natural rights and directs it toward the pursuit of comfort and security rather than salvation. This teaching appears to neglect the extraordinary possibilities and peaks of human life, both intellectual and spiritual. Spinoza’s account appears to support Prof. Stehle’s concern that such a single-minded focus on material comfort will lead ultimately to a debasement of humanity, and a confusion or denial of the distinction between high and the low.

Logical Polis. The Philosophical Foundation of Democracy According to B. Spinoza

Benedict Spinoza, the seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher, is, according to some authors, the first theorist to offer serious philosophical arguments justifying the idea of democracy as the best (and most natural) political system. Spinoza’s political philosophy is, therefore, one of the first to be examined in today’s political situation, which is often characterized by the phrase “crisis of (liberal) democracy”. This study attempts to capture the philosophical arguments used by Spinoza to support his pro-democratic conclusions, detects his initial assumptions, and illuminates what specifically should characterize a democratic regime in his imagination. Among the primary sources used for this purpose are both those writings of Spinoza that are traditionally understood as political-philosophical (Theologico-Political Treatise and Political Treatise) and Spinoza’s most famous work (Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order). Although the latter may appear distant from the issue at hand, some of the most strongly formulated relevant positions are found in it. The intention of the present study is twofold: first, to demonstrate on the example of Spinoza’s thought how inextricably the preference for a democratic regime is linked to certain philosophical premises, not only ethical and axiological but also gnoseological and ontological ones; and more importantly, second, to formulate a hypothetical answer that Spinoza would have given to the question of the crisis of democracy and the possibilities of its solution.

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The importance of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to Leo Strauss’s intellectual development is well established.1 Indeed, Strauss was open about the unparalleled influence Heidegger exerted over him. In one lecture Strauss proclaimed that “the only question of importance . . . is the question whether Heidegger’s teaching is true or not.”2 It is also widely acknowledged that Heidegger, the “radical historicist” and philosophical collaborator with the National Socialist Party, served as the foil to Strauss’s constructive project. Strauss nicely captured the paradoxical position Heidegger came to occupy in his mind when he said: “Only a great thinker can help us in our plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.”3 But while the fact of Heidegger’s importance and notoriety is beyond doubt, we are still a far cry from reaching a satisfactory understanding of how these two assessments relate to each other. This may be, in part, because Heidegger scholars rarely read Strauss, and those scholars of Strauss who read Heidegger tend to take Strauss’s reading of Heidegger at face value. One area in which scholarship still lags pertains to the role of religion in Strauss’s interpretation of Heidegger. It is no longer debated that Strauss’s political philosophy cannot be genuinely understood without taking into account his reflections on revealed religion. Jacob Klein’s testimony, that in his early years Strauss was obsessed “with two questions: one, the question of God; and two, the question of politics,” stands true with respect to Strauss’s mature thinking as well.4 How, then, does Strauss’s intense concern with religion and revelation relate to his persistent occupation with Heidegger? And how does it figure into the larger context of his political philosophy?The argument I wish to develop here is that we cannot fully grasp Strauss’s understanding of his former teacher without appreciating the religious horizon and connotations that he identified in Heidegger’s philosophy. More specifically, Strauss’s engagement with Heidegger is bound up with the former’s critical attitude toward Christianity and what he took to be its detrimental impact on (political) philosophy and religion. To illustrate this, I focus on a single motif that Strauss evoked several times and developed over three decades: the call. This motif is taken from Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, where it is introduced at a critical moment in the portrayal of Dasein’s achievement of authenticity. Strauss followed a prevalent reading of Heidegger’s early philosophical anthropology, interpreting the Heideggerian call as a secularization of the Christian category of revelation, and this played into Strauss’s more general conceptualization of the impoverished turn toward historicism, experientialism, and ultimately nihilism in modern philosophy and religion. Tracing and analyzing the occasions in which Strauss evokes this motif shed invaluable light on the place Heidegger occupied in Strauss’s understanding of what he famously termed the “theologico-political predicament” of modernity.Some of the texts examined below have been discussed by Heinrich Meier in his chapter “Death as God: A Note on Martin Heidegger” in his work Leo Strauss and the Theologico-political Problem.5 However, my analysis diverges significantly from Meier’s. This counterinterpretation is rooted in a competing understanding of the relationship between revealed religion and philosophy in Strauss. It is thus worthwhile, by way of introduction, to unpack in brief the contours of this interpretive difference.From early on Strauss held that there is a radical distinction between philosophy and religion, and any form of synthesis between the two was anathema to him. Later on, he conceptualized this distinction by asserting that there exist two basic alternatives to approaching the knowledge of the good: “human guidance or divine guidance”—the unaided effort of natural human reason, which he termed symbolically “Athens,” or divine revelation, “Jerusalem.” “No alternative is more fundamental than this.”6 Strauss believed that these alternatives are incompatible, but the dialectical tension between them is the secret to the West’s vitality. In modern times, however, the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem had been repressed because it was mistakenly thought to have been resolved. Disqualifying Jerusalem through mockery, demonstrating its irrationality by rational means, or attempting to synthesize it with Athens, the conflict was rendered inane and the fundamental irreconcilability of the two “cities” nullified. Since this is a dire situation in Strauss’s view, he sought to revive the confrontation between revelation and philosophy in order to attend again to the most fundamental question of political philosophy, namely, that of the just life. While there is no doubt that Strauss himself was a “citizen of Athens,” that is, a philosopher, his aim was, at the very least, a return to an admittance of the gravity, and insolvability, of this question. It was his contention that “no one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, or, for that matter, some possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology, or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.”7 Meier claims that while Strauss appears to be attempting to revive the confrontation between revelation and philosophy, we should not deduce from this that he actually believed that revelation can challenge philosophy. To the contrary, Strauss hoped his readers would understand from his writings that revelation cannot offer a compelling alternative to philosophy. The “quarrel” Strauss set up, according to Meier, is between revelation, defined as blind and irrational faith, and philosophy. Thus defined, revelation cannot be considered a serious position from a philosophical perspective and, as a result, cannot call philosophy into question. In Meier’s depiction, revelation served as a straw man endowed with the purpose of emboldening philosophy correctly understood. Accordingly, there is no difference for Meier’s Strauss between Jewish, Christian, or Islamic revelation, and the problematic of interpreting the content of revelation is of no concern to him. Strauss was interested in the category of revelation only insofar as it served the purpose of bolstering philosophy’s self-recognition.8While it must be admitted that Strauss’s statements on the matter are not always clear-cut, Leora Batnitzky has convincingly argued that Meier’s interpretation implicates Strauss in the very flaw he chastised modern philosophy for, namely, the rendition of revelation as refutable theoretical knowledge. This, Strauss claimed, was a caricature of revealed religion. It also amounts to the denial of the incommensurability of revelation and philosophy and the rejection of the distinction between the two symbolic cities as a problem to be reckoned with in the first place.9 In Strauss’s view, the misguided assumption that revelation can be disproved has taken philosophy (and religion) on an erroneous path culminating in the modern nihilistic state of crisis that he himself sought to rectify. The way he believed that the present crisis could be addressed was by reinstating the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, which he defined in the following way: “A philosophy which believes that it can refute the possibility of revelation—and a philosophy which does not believe that: this is the real meaning of la querelle des anciens et des modernes.”10 Moreover, Strauss most definitely was not indifferent to the content of revelation or to the problem of its interpretation. He contrasted what he took to be the characteristically Christian idea of revelation as doctrinal knowledge with the medieval Jewish and Islamic accounts of revelation as divine law. The distinction is crucial: by taking revelation to be dogmatic doctrine, historical Christianity committed the fallacy of attempting to reconcile philosophy and revelation by placing them in a single domain. The making of revelation into knowledge contributed to the rise of the modern conviction that reason refuted revelation, which in effect gave rise to impossible expectations of reason that caused the mistrust and ultimate self-destruction of modern rationalism. The modern belief in the self-sufficiency of reason led to the eschewing of prudence and moderation, to the reducing of knowledge to history, and to the relativizing of truth. In Strauss’s narrative, the collapse of modern philosophy is exemplified by Friedrich Nietzsche and even more so by Heidegger’s historicist philosophy and nihilistic Nazi politics. While it is easy to see that Strauss’s reading of Christian theology is overschematic, his philosophical point is that much of the ills of modern European thought spring from inherited religious assumptions pertaining to the possibility of synthesizing Athens and Jerusalem.11 Thus, while claiming to refute religion, modern thought is made possible by, and indeed has not entirely liberated itself from, its religious Christian past. Over against this, Strauss’s restorative effort consisted partly in positing the medieval Jewish and Islamic traditions and their conception of the insufficiency of reason and revelation as divine law, which, he claimed, does not succumb to the aforementioned pitfall because it coordinates between, while maintaining the distinction and incommensurability of, revelation and philosophy.This distinction stands at the heart of his claim that the medieval Jewish and Islamic tradition, based as it is on ancient Greek philosophy, offers itself as a corrective to the modern crisis-laden theoretical framework. According to this tradition, in Strauss’s view, revealed religion was not “culture,” “science,” “consciousness,” “experience,” or “a ‘field of validity.’” Rather, it upheld an account of revelation as public and political divine legislation. Strauss articulated his fundamental position on this matter in a footnote to the chapter of his Philosophy and Law (1935) dedicated to criticizing Julius Guttmann’s interpretation of medieval Jewish philosophy. “We do not deny . . . that the problem of ‘belief and knowledge’ is the central problem of medieval rationalism,” he declared. “Our quarrel with Guttmann is only about the meaning of ‘belief’ here, and it seems to us more precise to say ‘law and philosophy’ rather than ‘belief and knowledge.’”12Once revelation is understood primarily as ceremonial law and not as knowledge, it follows that belief in revelation does not resort to scientific standards for its justification. Obedience to divine law is not based on demonstration, so it cannot be proved or refuted by philosophical argumentation. But this does not mean that revelation is irrational blind faith or that the distinction between revelation and reason is equal to the distinction between irrationalism and rationalism. Rather, Strauss called for a return to an account of rationalism that does not perceive reason as self-sufficient and that does not expect it to comprehend the “whole” unassisted. The representative of this premodern tradition of rationalism is Maimonides. In the center of the thesis that Strauss offered in Philosophy and Law and that he would continue to develop in the ensuing years was the claim, based on Alfarabi’s Platonic political perspective, that the meaning of prophecy for Maimonides was fundamentally political and that Moses, whose prophecy was equal to none, is best understood as the Platonic legislating philosopher. Within this framework, philosophical inquiry was licensed and even required to interpret the law, which is public and aimed at the perfection of the body and soul. This inquiry was guided by reason, but its rationalism was checked. “Not the mystery of [the Torah’s] origin, the search for which leads either to theosophy or ‘Epicureanism,’ but its end, the comprehension of which guarantees obedience to the Torah, is accessible to human reason.”13 For the sake of the discussion below, it should be added that according to this account, the effort to reach the true meaning of revelation was easily verified, for it had to be, at least outwardly, justified by and in accordance with the demand for obedience to the heteronomous divine law, the highest authority of the religious community.14 Since philosophical inquiry into the meaning and truth of the law can jeopardize social stability, the conflict between philosophy and society necessitated a dual mode of interpretation: one directed at the masses and one directed at philosophers. This premodern theologico-political structure, Strauss asserted, avoided an illegitimate synthesis of philosophy and faith.Once it is recognized that Strauss sought to pose anew the Athens-Jerusalem confrontation—best represented, in his mind, by ancient Greek philosophy and the ethical monotheistic tradition of the Hebrew Bible—it can be seen that he accepted that revelation presents a continual challenge to philosophy. This challenge does not take the form of a scientific claim but of a contesting and incompatible worldview, grounded in a competing answer to the question of the life worth living. Both Athens and Jerusalem operate through reasoning, but the core of their dispute pertains to what constitutes the criteria for the starting point of truthful reasoning.This introduction puts us in a more informed position to examine how Strauss’s use of the motif of Heidegger’s call is tied to his reflections on revelation and how it illuminates his thought as a whole. Unlike Meier, who in his analysis of the call focuses on the issue of “death as God,” I argue that Strauss’s repeated employment of this motif is driven by his attempt to come to terms with, and criticize, the various ills that secularism, historicism, and the privatization of philosophy and religion in modernity have brought about—ills, which he believed, are exemplified by Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus Strauss’s assessment of Heidegger’s “call of conscience” becomes the crucial foundation for his own philosophical project, beginning in the 1930s, to return to a pre-Christian or non-Christian assessment of the conflict between philosophy and revelation.15_________The first reference to this motif is recorded in an early stage of Strauss’s intellectual career, in a letter to his friend Gerhard Krüger from 1930, when Strauss began developing many of the views outlined above. Here Strauss offered a condensed account of the main argument of his recently published book Spinoza’s Critique of Religion.16 Seeking to clarify “the actual core of my reflections,” which he suspected was inadequately conveyed in the book, Strauss explained that the main question he was grappling with was this: in its confrontation with revelation, “how was it possible for the Enlightenment to have been victorious?”17 As he understood it, the heart of the matter is encapsulated in the Enlightenment’s rejection of miracles. He considered Franz Rosenzweig’s treatment of the matter as the “typical view” of the modern religious person. In The Star of Redemption Rosenzweig admitted that while for moderns the belief in miracles is “an embarrassment,” he set out to reinterpret them as signs or predictions that verify divine providence and revelation and as such legitimate religious categories.18 However, Strauss contended, in his attempt to revitalize miracles, Rosenzweig actually internalized the very post-Enlightenment assumptions that had rendered miracles embarrassing in the first place, thereby exhibiting his admittance that the traditional understanding was no longer acceptable. The argument he tried to offer in his Spinoza book, Strauss explained, is that the Enlightenment did not in fact refute the possibility of miracles. This is because “a miracle, according to its own meaning, can be experienced as a miracle only on the basis of faith,” and it cannot, by definition, be refuted through presuppositions external to faith. Rather than refute miracles, the Enlightenment “only succeeded in securing itself, i.e. the already enlightened human being, against miracles. It created a position that is unattainable for miracles.” This means that the project of modern philosophy that sprang from the Enlightenment celebrated a victory over revealed religion that it believed had been achieved through scientific refutation, but no such victory was actually achieved, as no such refutation is possible. Instead of offering an argument to refute miracles, it in fact only expressed a will against revealed religion. Modern philosophy’s foundation is an unproved decision, not knowledge.It is at this point in the letter that Heidegger is drawn into the analysis. “I see indications of such a will in Machiavelli, Bruno, and Spinoza,” Strauss wrote to Krüger, adding that “its most extreme representation is reached in Nietzsche, and its completion attained in—Being and Time.” The example he culled to demonstrate that Heidegger’s early masterpiece represents the completion of the modern tradition of antireligious will is the notion of the call. “I mean,” he continued, “in the interpretation of the call of conscience and in the answer given there to the question of who is calling. It is only on the basis of Heidegger’s Dasein interpretation that an adequate atheistic interpretation of the Bible should be possible.” According to Strauss, Heidegger’s philosophy reflects an important truth about modern philosophy’s attitude toward religion. The analysis of human existence—Dasein—in Sein und Zeit, which Strauss interpreted as an atheistic work of “existence philosophy,” is the culmination of the tradition that emerged from the inadequate charge against revealed religion initiated in the seventeenth century. More specifically, the precise moment reflecting the completion of this atheistic modernist tradition is Heidegger’s notion of “the call of conscience.” To understand why this is so, we must turn to Sein und Zeit.The notion of “the call of conscience” is introduced and developed in sections 54–60 in division 2 of Sein und Zeit as part of the discussion of Dasein’s existence as a structural totality.19 According to Heidegger, in its average everydayness, Dasein’s default manner of being, its “who,” is the “who” of the “they” (Das Man). Its possibilities of being have been predetermined by the anonymity of Das Man, and thus it is held back from “taking hold” of these possibilities. Heidegger’s general term for this mode of existence is “inauthenticity.” To take itself “back to itself from the lostness in the ‘they’” (BT, 312; SZ, 267–68), Dasein must choose to own, or own up to, the totality and particularity of its existence. Doing so amounts to what Heidegger terms “authenticity.” What prompts this existential transformation is the “call of conscience” (Ruf des Gewissen) or the “voice of conscience” (Stimme des Gewissen). If the they conceals Dasein’s ownmost possibilities, the call reveals them. “Conscience,” Heidegger explains, “gives us ‘something’ to understand; it discloses” (BT, 314; SZ, 269). It appeals, summons Dasein to its ownmost potentiality of being, that is, to resoluteness, to authenticity. Importantly, while characterized as a call, Heidegger does not have in mind an actual, ontic “vocal utterance.” Ontologically construed, the call is the primordial openness of Dasein’s ownmost interiority that has been concealed by the chatter of the they. “We are not comparing this phenomenon with a call,” he insists. Instead, it is “a giving-to-understand,” a “kind of discourse” featured by disclosedness. “Conscience” is “the call of Care,” Dasein’s most fundamental ontological structure. In its calling, it reasserts the integrity of Dasein’s being by revealing that its lostness in Das Man has covered over the possibilities of its own existence and, most notably, the possibility of impossibility, its death. The call individuates Dasein by alerting it to its nullity, its constitutive negativity, its being-toward-death. Loosening the fetters of Das Man, the call calls Dasein to its uncanniness and anxiety and lays bare the “guilt” or “in-debtness” (Schuld) of its existence.As Strauss related in his letter to Krüger, the reason he identified this Heideggerian notion as a crucial moment in the tradition of modern atheism is “the answer given there to the question of who is calling.” Dasein is called, but by whom? Heidegger’s answer is clear: “In conscience Dasein calls itself” (BT, 320; SZ, 275). What is the content of the call? Here, too, the answer is straightforward. “Taken strictly,” Heidegger states, “nothing” (BT, 318; SZ, 273). But while it is Dasein who summons itself in this silent call, void of content or information, this does not mean the call is voluntarily performed or can be anticipated. To the contrary, it is something that happens to Dasein. Heidegger expresses this complex feature as follows: “‘It’ [Es] calls, against our expectations and even against our will. On the other hand, the call undoubtfully does not come from someone else who is with me in the world. The call comes from me and yet from beyond and over me” (translation amended). Strauss’s remark that Heidegger’s answer to the question of “who is calling” constitutes a milestone in the philosophical tradition of atheism directs our attention to the distinct religious overtones of the call. For what is presented is the familiar religious structure of the transition from foresakenness (Verlassenheit) and being-abandoned (Überlassenheit) to existential redemption through an eruptive and transformative revelatory summoning. Strong religious reverberations mark the description of this call: it is “an abrupt arousal,” coming “from afar unto afar” and “reaches him who wants to be brought back” (BT, 316; SZ, 271), and it is “something like an alien voice” (BT, 321; SZ, 277). At the same time, this religious imagery is employed in an otherwise strictly philosophical context. Indeed, Heidegger explicitly asserts that what he is concerned with “is prior to any description and classification of experiences of conscience” (BT, 313; SZ, 269), particularly warning against misinterpreting the call as a theological referral. “It is no less distant,” he posits, “from a theological exegesis of conscience or any employment of this phenomenon for proofs of God or for establishing an ‘immediate’ consciousness of God” (BT, 313; SZ, 269). He also cautions against understanding “the voice of conscience as an alien power by which Dasein is dominated,” a power that could be understood “as a person who makes himself known—namely God” (BT, 320; SZ, 275).The presence of identifiably religious markers amid explicit denial of confessional interpretation is repeated throughout Sein und Zeit and led many to interpret the Dasein analytic as a secular philosophical anthropology deeply imprinted by Christian texts, structures, and assumptions, wherein Christian categories are divested of their original content and formulized ontologically as universal structures. From this perspective, the Heideggerian call is a secularization of the theological notion of divine revelation. Retaining its structure but stripped of its content, this secularized category involves the immanentization of the transcendent origin of the caller and the internalization of the impact of its summoning. As the mark of Augustine on Heidegger’s thought is well recorded, the “call of consciousness” may be said to betray, in a secular register, a trace of the Augustinian idiom regarding God’s voice being “more intimate to me than I am to myself.”20 The secularized overtones of the call are accentuated when the undeniable parallels to Søren Kierkegaard’s thought are taken into account. Heidegger evidently emulates the features of the Danish thinker’s discussion of being lost in the “crowd” and found by divine grace, albeit while omitting its overt theistic import.21 Accordingly, the Heideggerian distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity emerges as a secularized equivalent of the Christian distinction between sinful unredeemed existence and graced redeemed existence. Heidegger, it must be noted, rejected this interpretation in toto. He insisted that interpreting the call ontically as a secularized event of divine revelation is mistaken on a number of fronts, not the least because the ontological nature of his philosophical project means that it is to be distinguished from, and indeed intends to undergird, the ontic contours of both existential thinking and traditional theology.What is evident from Strauss’s letter, however, is that he was attuned to this interpretive trend and harnessed it in the service of his own concerns. For him, the Heideggerian call constituted the replacement and secularization of a transcendent God revealing himself to human beings with a Dasein-centered immanent call from itself to itself. But why is the Heideggerian call the ultimate fulfillment of the antireligious philosophical attitude that commenced with the early modern thinkers? According to Strauss’s logic, the historicization and psychologization of biblical revelation that was accomplished in Baruch Spinoza’s Theologico-political Treatise deprived the law of its divine and absolute authority and of its public political function. What remains in the post-Spinoza age is a notion of revelation as a personal experience of a call that gives itself to Heidegger’s secularized, interior, subject-centered, and atheistic call from Dasein to itself. Following his study of Spinoza, Strauss believed that the victory of philosophical thinking over revealed religion can be accomplished only if the “whole” can be interpreted without resort to God. With the godless depiction of human existence offered in Sein und Zeit and the existentially salvific call cut off from its divine origin, it appears that Heidegger had done just that.It should be pointed out that Strauss’s characterization of Heidegger’s philosophy as atheistic is misleading if it is intended to denote an affirmation of godlessness or a positivistic rejection of the possibility of revelation. This appears to be the case here, for Heidegger is said to perpetuate the Enlightenment’s atheism, which for Strauss meant the belief that revelation has been refuted. The truth of the matter is that while Heidegger was deeply critical of Christianity, he did not argue for the impossibility of revelation, nor did he perceive the world as definitively godless. Rather, he delimited the relevance of the content of revelation to the domain of faith and claimed that philosophy ought to bracket the question of God without taking a definitive stand on the matter—either affirmative or negative. He believed that philosophy and theology were categorically distinct and that the self-attestation of faith “remains closed off in principle from any philosophical experience” (BT, 496; SZ, 306).22 In other words, claiming that philosophy has refuted revelation would make little sense to him. There is, moreover, much indication that in his own way, Heidegger was a god seeker. In the winter semester of 1921–22, lecturing on Aristotle, he claimed that “the more radical philosophy is, the more determinately is it on a path away from God; yet, precisely in the radical actualization of the ‘away,’ it has its own difficult proximity to God.”23 More than three decades later, in 1957, he expressed a similar sentiment when he noted that “the godless thinking . . . is thus closer to the divine God. Here this means only: godless thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.”24 Indeed, in his philosophy he sought to prepare for a time when “the gods” would return and establish a new ordering in which the holiness of being would radiate once more. However, even as Strauss misrepresented Heidegger’s position, we should not lose sight of the gravity of his claim: Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and its notion of the call represent the zenith of modern philosophy. This assessment is both striking and revealing, as it helps us appreciate the motivation and strategy of Strauss’s own philosophical project: insofar as Heidegger occupies this momentous status in the history of philosophy, overcoming his thought would amount to breaking free of the impasse of modern thought and enable the reopening of the dispute over the fundamental questions once again.But there is some uncertainty in Strauss’s position as it is expressed in this letter. Strauss wrote that “it is only on the basis of Heidegger’s Dasein interpretation that an adequate atheistic interpretation of the Bible should be possible.” This seems to entail that until Heidegger’s Dasein interpretation, modern philosophers presented only inadequate atheistic interpretations of the Bible. Strauss certainly held this to be true with regard to, for example, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza, who leveled a critique against religion but who were still bound by its determinations.25 It follows that unlike his predecessors, Heidegger’s atheism is completely liberated from the directives of any theological past and hence allows for an “adequate” atheism. This would mean that his philosophy—and emblematically his account of the call—is utterly secular, and any secularization that may have occurred has left no remnants of its past religious making. It is in this sense, it seems, that it represents the “completion” of the modern atheistic tradition. The difficulty with this interpretation is that the Heideggerian moment that Strauss claimed exhibits the final overcoming of the religious impact on philosophy is precisely one in which the detheologization of its religious orig

The Vocation of Moses and the Election of the Hebrew People in the Theologico-Political Treatise

Loin de nier l’election des Hebreux, Spinoza la naturalise et l’universalise, au moins a titre de virtualite, la vocation n’en etant qu’une specification. Son analyse permet surtout de rendre compte, d’un point de vue mnemo-affectif, symbolique et strategique, de la nature du pouvoir qu’un chef exerce sur son peuple, et de l’articulation de leurs ingenia respectifs. Enfin, elle eclaire le caractere exceptionnel de la destinee singuliere de Moise comme figure symbolique du bon politique, tout en permettant a Spinoza de penser, a travers l’exemple hebreu, ce qu’est une destinee collective.

Mary Shelley’s ‘Romantic Spinozism’

ABSTRACTMary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelley’s reception of Spinoza begins with the fragment of the otherwise lost translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) on which she collaborated. It extends through her journals, letters, poetry, and her second great work of speculative fiction after Frankenstein (1818): a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2100, The Last Man (1826). Through a creative synthesis of Spinoza with Plato, Cicero, Wollstonecraft, and Glasite Christianity, Shelley developed an anti-apocalyptic conception of love as apocatastasis: a cyclical restoration of an ethical attitude of stewardship toward the whole world and its necessity. Through this recovery of a vital chapter in the history of European ideas, Shelley emerges as a central figure in Spinozan philosophy, especially the ethics and political philosophy of love.

Spinoza and the ‘outsider’ prophet

ABSTRACTSince the middle of the twentieth century, partly through the wide influence of Abraham Heschel’s work on the prophets and prophesy in Ancient Israel, an image of the prophet as an ‘outsider’ has emerged. This image contrasts, in critical ways, with an image of ‘the prophet’ that appears central in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise. Spinoza’s Treatise, however, is an inaugural text for the historical-critical study of prophesy in ancient Israel; and it casts a long shadow over Heschel’s view of prophesy. I identify three areas of tension between their images of prophets. The contrasts reveal that Heschel, and other twentieth century theorists of prophesy invest prophetic authority and authenticity in religious experience whose transformative power is a function of its ‘breaking through’ oppressive social/religious institutions and norms ‘from the outside.’ Spinoza, by contrast, accounts for prophetic authority via ‘immanence’: the location of prophets within a tradition of law and common ‘usage’ with the political institutions which they criticise and challenge. I argue, finally, that Spinoza’s image can accommodate the prophetic ‘outsider’ and rebel, and in a way that suggests that prophesy must now be conceived as encompassing social critique within the context of the arts.

Spinoza on Free Speech

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was arguably the fi rst modern liberalist. His Theologico-Political Treatise (henceforward, “TPT”, followed by chapter number), which contains among other things a principled defense of free speech, was published anonymously in 1677, twelve years before John Locke’s charter of liberalism, Two Treatises on Government (1689), but it has been unduly, although understandably, neglected. It is also true that Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes had a huge infl uence on Spinoza, but neither of them can be called a liberalist, let alone a defender of free speech. In this article, I will try to show that Spinoza’s argument for free speech is, despite its interpretative diffi  culties, an important milestone in the development of the doctrine of free speech.

REFLEXIONES ACERCA DEL ESPÍRITU DE LA FILOSOFÍA DE SPINOZA

Este artículo se concentra en la concepción spinoziana de la filosofía. A partir de lo afirmado en el Tratado de la reforma del entendimiento y el Tratado teológico-político, proponemos que Spinoza no considera la filosofía como un saber ya poseído sino como la búsqueda de la verdad, íntimamente ligada a la búsqueda de la felicidad. La filosofía es, según esto, una práctica que consiste en el proceso mediante el cual los seres humanos se liberan de los prejuicios y errores que impiden aprehender la verdad, que obstaculizan el pensar y el actuar. Este camino de auto- emancipación del error es, según nuestra propuesta, el auténtico espíritu de la filosofía spinoziana, que, según mostraremos, se encuentra explícitamente expresado en ciertos pasajes de la Ética.

Book Review: Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise

Book Review: Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise

James, Susan: "Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics. The Theologico-Political Treatise,"

James, Susan: "Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics. The Theologico-Political Treatise,"

Spinoza’s Liberal Republicanism and the Challenge of Revealed Religion

Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise is a foundational liberal work whose republican teaching also anticipates today’s communitarian critiques. Those critiques reopen the Treatise’s guiding question of whether politics must be grounded in a religious teaching, and they compel us to reconsider Spinoza’s claim that civic dedication can be rooted in an attachment to intellectual freedom. I assess Spinoza’s liberal republicanism by examining how it emerges from a critique of the Bible. I conclude that Spinoza’s attempt to reconcile individual liberty with civic dedication clarifies liberalism’s moral power and ultimate vulnerabilities—vulnerabilities which help explain why revealed religion has reemerged to challenge it.

Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise, by Susan James.

Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise, by Susan James.

What if Ilyenkov Had Known Marx’s Notes on Spinoza?

In the Name Index of the Collected Works of Marx, Engels and Lenin published in English, Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677) is always referred to as “outstanding Dutch materialist philosopher, rationalist, atheist”. The word “outstanding” denotes a special commendation – the highest honour bestowed is “great”. For Moses Hess, Spinoza was the prophet of the French Revolution. My own interest in Spinoza was sparked by reading, in the early 1980s one of the later works of E. V. Ilyenkov (1924-1979), Dialectical Logic (DL), especially Essay Two, “Thought as an Attribute of Extension”. Ilyenkov also made extensive reference to Spinoza in the first two sections of Chapter One of the revised version, for translation into German in 1979, of The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital (DAC), first published in Russian in 1960. Ilyenkov was as far as I know not aware of the fact that in March to April 1841, at the age of 22, Karl Marx made extensive transcriptions from Spinoza. These notebooks were published by Dietz Verlag in the GDR in 1976, a year before Ilyenkov’s death, in two volumes. Volume 1 contains Marx’ transcriptions in Latin and German; Volume II contains translations from Latin into German, and notes, the “Apparat”.It is a curious fact, to which I will return, that all Ilyenkov’s references in DL but one are to Spinoza’s Ethics, with one reference to On the Improvement of the Understanding (OIU), while all the references in DAC are to Spinoza’s OIU. I wonder whether Spinoza only had Volume 1 of the two volume Selected Works, though this seems unlikely.Marx on the other hand transcribed at length in Latin, using the 1802 edition of Spinoza’s works published in Jena, from the Theologico-Political Treatise, and from the Correspondence, but not at all from On the Improvement of the Understanding or Ethics. The following questions arise for consideration in this paper. Were Marx and Ilyenkov reading, in effect, two quite different Spinozas? Or was each of them reading Spinoza instrumentally, in order further to develop their own ideas?

Dodatki i Przypisy w Etyce. Rozum, wyobraźnia, rozumienie

This sketch contains a rough analysis of Spinoza’s reasons for adding ”Footnotes” and ”Supplements” to his ”Ethics”, both of which containing many undefined words disrupting the coherence of the deductive order of exposition used in the main body of the work. Doubts raised by readers of the early versions of ”Ethics” and ”A Theologico-Political Treatise” and, most of all, several difficulties understanding the exposition, occasioned by the same parts of the work, independent of readers’ education, induced Spinoza to a more detailed survey into the cognitive process and the role of its particular elements. The ability to understand depends on ratio and intellect, whereas the real understanding is the result of association, recognition, imagination and memory. When referring to such ”ideal” object as the objects of geometry, these factors do not introduce any previously known content to the process of cognition, but when referred to previously gained experience they easily draw the activity of ratio and intellect away from the course of the deduction delineated in the text.

Noachisme et philosophie

Résumé Visant à contester la possibilité même d’une philosophie juive, Spinoza cite, dans son Traité théologico-politique , un jugement particulièrement restrictif de Maïmonide au sujet du noachisme, institution universaliste et rationaliste du judaïsme rabbinique. Cet article propose une étude des tentatives, paradoxalement conjointes, de réhabilitation de la figure philosophique de Maïmonide et de la compréhension universaliste du noachisme par M. Mendelssohn et H. Cohen, initiateurs de la refondation post-spinoziste d’une philosophie juive.

Does Spinoza Think the Bible Is Sacred?

Does Spinoza think the Bible is sacred? One does well at first to notice the obvious, that it is Spinoza himself who asks the question in what sense the terms "sacred" and "divine" should "be applied to Scripture and to any inanimate thing." Yet his reply is considerably less obvious. Readers of Spinoza know that he contests God's authorship of the Bible, seems to find indifferent much of its contents, disparages rabbinic and medieval Jewish philosophical interpretations, relegates biblical commandments to the ancient world, and locates the Bible among things inanimate. Yet he also argues that the Bible is divine, grounding this judgment in the hermeneutical principle that "nothing is sacred or profane or impure in an absolute sense apart from the mind, but only in relation to the mind." My paper considers the structure and implications of Spinoza's argument relating the divinity of a text, of this text, to the mind, taking seriously the multiple stakes involved in his day and in ours, as well as the sheer complexity of and tensions in Spinoza's view. While there are many dimensions to Spinoza's attitude towards Judaism, Jewish thought, religion, and the politics of religion, I claim that there is something fundamental about his concept of the Bible and his question concerning the sacred that grounds all of these regions of interest and that renders the Theologico-Political Treatise a single, complexly balanced work, albeit one whose measure we are still assessing.

Determined to Be Free: The Meaning of Freedom in Spinoza'sTheologico-Political Treatise

AbstractThe goal of this essay is to offer an alternative account to the view that political freedom and philosophical freedom are consistent, harmonious, and mutually reinforcing. Certainly, freedom is central to Spinoza's political thought, but to understand it properly, we need to explain how it alleviates, rather than encourages, superstition among the nonrational multitude. In light of his belief in the permanency of irrationality and superstition, Spinoza does not hope to expunge illusions from political life. Advocating freedom is an attempt to adapt the facts of the imagination to the needs of our political order and create stability. The belief in freedom—that is, the belief that we are individual actors who decide our actions and determine our fate—is the most powerful and abiding illusion in politics.

Espinosa e a liberdade de ensinar

Este pequeno trabalho pretende interpretar o parágrafo 49 do oitavo capítulo do Tratado político, de Espinosa (1632-1677), que versa sobre as academias fundadas às custas da República. Nesse curto parágrafo, constante de sete linhas, o filósofo holandês afirma que essas academias servem mais para constranger o espírito do que para cultivá-lo e que, ao contrário, em uma República livre, dar-se-á a cada um a licença para ensinar publicamente, às suas custas e com o perigo de sua reputação. Tal fragmento relaciona-se diretamente ao vigésimo capítulo do Tratado teológico-político, outra obra do mesmo filósofo, que aborda a liberdade de pensar e de dizer. Este trabalho, através de uma interpretação do parágrafo 49, evidenciará, finalmente, que a liberdade de ensinar, na república livre pensada por Espinosa, situa-se entre a organização do imperium e a iniciativa do professor.

Recent Work on Spinoza

Recent Work on Spinoza Kenneth Seeskin Keywords Kenneth Seeskin, Richard H. Popkin, Spinoza, Nancy K. Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, Reason, Martin P. Yaffe, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, Baruch Spinoza Richard H. Popkin. Spinoza. Oneworld Philosophers Series. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2004. Pp. 153. Nancy K. Levene. Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xxi + 256. Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise. Translated by Martin P. Yaffe. Focus Philosophical Library. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Publishing, 2004. Pp. xxiii + 433. More than any other thinker of his time, Spinoza continues to interest philosophers. This may be related to his variety of guises. There is Spinoza the atheist and Spinoza the “God intoxicated” philosopher so much loved by German Romantics; Spinoza the renegade Jew who preferred Jesus to Moses and Spinoza the precursor to political Zionism; Spinoza the defender of liberal democracy and Spinoza the proponent of “might makes right.” Each of these guises appears in the books under review, and each makes its claim on our attention. I begin with the late Richard H. Popkin’s Spinoza. Popkin writes about the Jewish influences on Spinoza and the religious milieu in which he grew up. His conclusion is that, when all is said and done, is that we are still not sure what caused Amsterdam’s Jewish community to expel a young thinker of genius. Excommunications were not uncommon in Amsterdam and were undertaken for a variety of reasons, practical and theoretical. A person could be excommunicated for failing to pay a debt, insulting a leader of the community, or making allegedly heretical statements. As Popkin indicates, all the community had to do was get a list of the standard curses, fill in the proper name, and proceed with the expulsion. On the other hand, the tone of Spinoza’s ḥerem was unusually harsh.1 Because other Jews associated or collaborated with Protestant [End Page 553] thinkers without causing upheaval, it is hard to believe that Spinoza’s ties would have shocked anyone. Much the same is true of his interest in Cartesianism. Although these ideas did threaten traditional ways of thinking, the community’s leaders did not express outrage. Popkin engages Steven Nadler’s claim that the root cause for Spinoza’s excommunication was his view on immortality but counters by saying that we do not know what his view was at the time of the excommunication and that Sephardic communities in northern Europe were less interested in doctrine and ritual than in preserving Jewish life in the midst of a wider Christian society.2 Unlike Uriel Da Costa, Spinoza did not attempt to get himself reinstated. Nor did he cite his excommunication as a reason for leaving Amsterdam. According to Popkin (p. 38): “Spinoza went off, not as a victim or a pariah but as an independent Portuguese person living in Amsterdam” and thus he “became one of the first people to live outside of any religious affiliation.” In short, he became secularized. It is in this context that we should approach Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (hence TTP). Based on its long subtitle (by means of which it is shown not only that Freedom of Philosophizing can be allowed in Preserving Piety and the Peace of the Republic: but also that it is not possible for such Freedom to be upheld except when accompanied by the Peace of the Republic and Piety Themselves), the TTP was written to show not only that freedom of thought does not threaten social harmony but that freedom cannot be maintained unless accompanied by it. Popkin considers reactions to the TTP, including the many calls that it be banned or refuted, and the claim that Spinoza was a Cartesian who pushed the master’s doctrine to its ultimate conclusion—pantheism, which for many was tantamount to atheism. Popkin himself twice says (pp. 80, 83) that according to Spinoza everything “is God and is in God.” This, I fear, is misleading. It is true that for Spinoza God is the only substance so that whatever else exists must exist in God or be conceived through God. But this does not mean that things exist in God in the way that...