The Senhores of the ma’amad,1 having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavored by various means and promise, to turn him from his evil ways. But having received more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and borne witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of this matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable hakhamim2 they have decided, with their consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel.
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 God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation, and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written therein, cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations that are written in the Book of the Law. 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. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smote against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, 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. But you that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day.
We warn that none may contact him orally or in writing, nor do him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor read any paper he made or wrote.
— Congregation Talmud Torah, July 27, 1656
Without intelligence there is not rational life, and things are only good in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life which is defined by intelligence. Contrariwise, whatsoever things hinder man’s perfection of his reason, and capability to enjoy the rational life, are alone called evil.
— BENEDICTUS SPINOZA
The Ethics, Part I V, Appendix V
I first heard the name Baruch Spinoza uttered as an admonition, a cautionary tale of unbridled human intelligence blindly seeking its own doom.
This is what happens, the voice of my teacher warned, when someone thinks that human reason is sufficient unto itself and that the truth divinely given to us can be ignored. This is what happens when philosophy takes the place of Torah.
Baruch Spinoza had come from a good family of God-fearing Jews, similar to your families, girls — all too similar in certain ways. Like so many of your parents and grandparents, your aunts and uncles and cousins, Spinoza’s family had suffered al-Kiddush ha-Shem, for the sanctification of the Holy Name. No, not in Germany or Austria or Poland. Not in Hungary, Rumania, or Russia. The persecution had been in Spain and Portugal, starting in the fifteenth century and continuing for hundreds of years.
The Espinozas, the philosopher’s family, had been Marranos, those who, even though they had been forced by the Church to convert to Christianity, still continued to practice Judaism in secret, hiding their observance of the Torah from the cruel edicts of the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The slightest suspicion that they still obeyed the Torah — that they remembered the Shabbos and kept it holy, that they would not eat pig — and they would have been subjected to brutal torture and horrible death. In Spanish, auto-da-fé means “act of faith.” What it really meant was the mass trial of those accused of being secret Jews, and then the mass burning to death of all those who were condemned.
And still, as you well know, girls, many of you, from the examples of your own families, not even this terror was able to extinguish the spark of Yiddishkeit from their souls. Look at what your own families went through under Hitler, and yet one of the first things that concerned them when they got to this country was to make sure that the next generation — your generation, girls — would still learn To-rah. They never lost their faith.
And that was how it was for Spinoza’s family. After generations of their dangerous secret Jewish allegiance, his family, like many others before them and after, managed to make their way to the Dutch city of Amsterdam, where a community of Portuguese-Jewish exiles was thriving as it could in few other European cities of that day.
Amsterdam was the most tolerant city in all of Europe. But don’t think that it was as free as what you girls have come to take for granted here. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it was as tolerant as New York City in 1967.
Baruch Spinoza had reaped the benefits of the long years of danger and suffering that his family had endured. He had been born into blessed circumstances, had been educated at the yeshiva the community of Portuguese refugees had organized almost as soon as they got to their new shores. It was, by all accounts, an excellent school. Rabbis from other parts of Europe who visited the Talmud Torah of Amsterdam marveled at the level of learning attained there. Baruch had studied under worthy rabbis, including the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, Rabbi Morteira, and he had distinguished himself. He was a brilliant student, a boy born with blessings. His very name, of course, means “blessed” in the holy tongue.
Yet this misguided young man, my teacher continued, ascending toward the climax, who might have used his superior mind to increase our knowledge of the Torah, had died with the pagan name of Benedictus, excommunicated and cursed by his own people, condemned and reviled as a dangerous heretic even by believing Christians. Let the history of the philosopher Spinoza serve as a warning to you, girls, against the dangers of asking the wrong questions.
In my teacher’s telling, this Baruch Spinoza might have been one of the no-goodnik boys attending one of the several yeshivas in the neighborhood, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Mrs. Schoenfeld taught at an all-girls yeshiva high school. There was only one such girls’ school in the neighborhood, but there were several boys’ schools, anachronistic reminders of the once teeming Jewish immigrant neighborhood that was largely dismantled by then. I had a long commute to it from a suburb out in Westchester, where my father served as the community’s cantor.
It was an extremely Orthodox school, the sort that had to be single-sex, since its outlook included the dictum that there be no mixing of girls and boys until it was time to think of marriage, and then the necessary encounters would be carefully supervised. And yet, despite the many oughts and ought-nots drilled into us, some among us still managed to achieve waywardness. There were girls who were not as pious as they might have been. There was a certain kosher pizza shop on East Broadway that was favored by certain girls from my school, the kind who rolled their skirts of regulation length (down at least to the calf) up above their knees as soon as they were out of the sight of our teachers. These girls would go to the infamous pizza shop for the purpose of flirting with “bumulkes,” as my father used to call them, bums with yarmulkes, yeshiva boys who were out on the streets or in pizza shops, up to no good, when they ought to have been in the beit midrash, the house of study, bent over their Talmudic tomes from morning until night.
Mrs. Schoenfeld’s discussion of Baruch Spinoza suggested that she had seen his type before, and so, she feared, had we. A boy who thinks he knows better than his rabbis and the Torah, who flaunts the Law and flirts with girls. Baruch Spinoza, a bumulke.
Mrs. Schoenfeld was a serious woman of middle age. At least I remember her as middle-aged. I was of an age when middle age might have meant late twenties. She wore matronly suits with calf-length skirts, and her prim head was topped by both an unbecoming wig and an unbecoming felt hat, a double precaution against committing the sin of a married woman’s hair being seen in public. (Actually, the double precaution is taken so that nobody fooled by the verisimilitude of her wig, might mistakenly think a married woman’s hair is uncovered. From what I remember of Mrs. Schoenfeld’s wig, there was little reason for the hat.) Mrs. Schoenfeld’s students were not yet married (though many of us, including me, would become engaged in our senior year of high school), and so our hair, unlike our teacher’s, was still exposed in all its maidenly glory. Otherwise, we were dressed not unlike her, in skirts that modestly hid most of our legs and blouses with cuffs that nestled our wrists, even though the scandalous sixties were raging all around us. The psychedelic swirl of Washington Square Park was no more than a twenty-minute walk from the door of our little school world, and sometimes I walked through this foreign land to watch the blissful braless girls and long-haired boys, forever at play.
Mrs. Schoenfeld taught various of the limudei kodesh, or sacred subjects, at the school, but this was the first time I’d ever had her as a teacher. The subject she was teaching was historia, or Jewish history. I had high expectations for this class, and for this teacher. I was encouraged not only by the seriously unattractive black glasses perched on her nose, but also by her English accent, so different from the nasal singsongese that prevailed in the school. I liked the cool, crisp tones of her voice, admired the way she used the English language, distinguishing between “who” and “whom,” using the occasional polysyllabic word that sent me to the dictionary.
And I liked the subject, too, at least that year, which was devoted to the modern European period. This was exciting for me. Not only did I have a teacher who appeared to be smart, but I was finally learning some historia that seemed more like “regular” history, less like the other le-mudai kodesh subjects that I had already come to doubt counted as genuine knowledge at all, which was a dispiriting thought, given the high percentage of my student life that was taken up by them. I felt the doubt as a sensation in my chest, gnawing away like some sharp-toothed rodent.
I had an urgency in me to become knowledgeable. I had stared into the hideous face of my ignorance and confusion and grown sick at the sight. I wasn’t at all certain that the large portion of each school day that was devoted to holy scholarship was redressing my lack of knowledge in the least. Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class seemed the one exception offered to me that year.
Ever since I could remember, historia had gotten no further than the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 7 °C.E. Jewish history that was so remote had felt to me continuous with khumash and navi, the Five Books of Moses and the books of the prophets. This impression was underscored not only by historia’s being taught in the mornings, together with all the other religious subjects, but also taught in Hebrew, while our secular subjects were taught in English, mostly by moonlighting public school teachers.
The public school teachers brought, at least for me, the sweet breath of real knowledge into the classroom, even though I knew they had to censor themselves. I had caught the look of discomfort on my tenth-grade biology teacher’s face, listening to our rabbi-principal explain to us that, because of the New York State Regents exam, we were going to have to study an untrue theory fabricated by Charles Darwin, but that we should not forget for a single moment that it was scientifically unproven and, more important, contradicted by Torah.
Studying the Jews of modern Europe seemed to carry the subject of historia a thrilling distance away from the religious sphere and closer to the domain of credible secular fact. With relief, I felt that I could put aside my spiky doubts in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class, reassured by her intelligent accent and syntax. And because of the complexity of the material that year, we were being taught historia in English, again reassuring me of its proximity to trustworthy temporality.
It would be some while into the school year before I would hear tell of the apikorus, or heretic, Spinoza. Spinoza’s introduction into our classroom awaited the discussion of the touchy subject of the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment. Only, in our classroom it wasn’t called by the approbatory term Haskalah. We called it “modernity,” pronouncing it with a Hebrew accent.
The pivotal figure in modernity was the late-eighteenth-century thinker Moses Mendelssohn, grandfather of the famous composer, both of whom were also mentioned as part of the extended cautionary tale. Moses Mendelssohn had urged that Jews not keep themselves intellectually and culturally separate. He had argued that adherence to the Torah, to which he held firm — he was not an apikorus, girls — did not exclude participation in the arts and sciences. He had urged that Jews educate themselves in the accomplishments of Western civilization. So had argued the grandfather. And the grandson, Felix, was a great musician. His compositions are still played by famous orchestras all over the world. But, girls, he was also a convert to Christianity. The descendents of this illustrious family probably don’t even remember that they were once Jewish. They probably don’t know the first thing about the Yiddishkeit of their ancestors.
Mrs. Schoenfeld’s expressions, both on her face and in her voice, made the articulation of the moral of the Mendelssohn story gratuitous: admiration leads to accommodation, which leads to assimilation, which leads to the worst. The so-called Haskalah had wanted to mix the immiscible: the insular Torah Jew into the modern world, the modern world into the Torah Jew. We were in favor of insularity, and Mrs. Schoenfeld was no exception, despite her fancy way around English syntax. I still unconsciously think of the word “modernity” as being a Hebrew word, hearing it pronounced with its r rolled and with a tone of stern admonition.
Spinoza predated Moses Mendelssohn by a good century and a half, but Mrs. Schoenfeld spoke of him as a precursor. He was, she very rightly suggested, the first modern Jew. Spinoza headed the long line of yeshiva boys who were not as pious as they might have been. He was one of the so-called enlightened Jews, a so-called maskil, long before the term had been introduced. (I remember a student in the class once mistakenly saying masik—which means “a little devil,” often used affectionately for children — for maskil, an error which propelled sober Mrs. Schoenfeld to the very verge of laughter.) This Benedictus-né-Baruch was an early sign of the sickness to come, and his own community had tried to keep the contagion from spreading. That is why they took the drastic step of putting him into kherem, girls, excommunicating him when he was only twenty-three years old. Had Moses Mendelssohn studied the case of Spinoza a little better, he might have saved himself, his family, and the Jewish people a lot of tzurris.3
Mrs. Schoenfeld suggested that a lot could be learned from understanding the case of Spinoza, as opposed to the philosophy of Spinoza. About the latter she said very little; only that he had had two basic beliefs: The first was that the Torah was not a divine revelation but rather written by man — written in fact by several men who came much later than Moshe Rabbenu, Moses Our Teacher. And the second was that God was identical with nature.
Mrs. Schoenfeld used the English word “God,” which was not a word we normally used. Instead we said Ha-Shem, Hebrew for “The Name,” a designation that at once circumvents and underscores the prohibition against uttering God’s true and awful name. If His true name were transcribed, then the paper on which it was written would be too holy to be thrown away. It would have to be buried like a human corpse. Even the English word radiated sanctity, which is why we were taught to write “G — d.”
As brief as it was, Mrs. Schoenfeld’s synopsis of Spinoza’s philosophy intrigued me, by reason of its very incomprehensibility, so that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. First of all, if Spinoza thought that God was identical with nature, then of course he didn’t think the Torah was revealed by God. The denial of divine authorship seemed barely worth mentioning, once one had made the astounding claim that God and nature were one.
But what did the man mean by this inscrutable identification?
Did he mean that nature had hidden mystical qualities, that it was imbued with nefesh, with spirit, the very spirit of God? Did he think that nature was a great deal more than what we normally think of it as being?
Or was Spinoza saying that nature is only nature — that it was all those things that the Torah taught were created on the first five days (light and dry land and the heavenly bodies and plants and animals) — and was his assertion that God is nature just a sneaky way of denying the existence of God?
I rarely posed questions in class, preferring to try to think things out for myself, but I was intrigued and confused enough to ask Mrs. Schoenfeld to explain more about what Spinoza had meant by saying that Ha-Shem was nature. Ironically, given how happy I was that historia was being taught in English, I had used, out of habit, the Hebrew designation for the Unutterable.
Mrs. Schoenfeld’s response came mainly in the form of rebuking me for saying Ha-Shem. She had deliberately said “God” and not “Ha-Shem” because whatever Spinoza meant by the word, it certainly wasn’t Ha-Shem. Berayshis barah Elokim es ha-shemayim vi’es ha-eretz—In the beginning the Lord created the heavens and the earth. This is the first sentence of the Torah, and if someone doesn’t know this about Ha-Shem, he doesn’t know the first thing about Ha-Shem. Elokim—the Lord. Ha-Shem is the Lord over all He creates. He chose to create nature. He chose that it should be and what it should be. If someone says that God is nature — is the heavens and the earth — then he is not talking about Ha-Shem.
Then Spinoza was an atheist?
Yes, she answered me, an atheist. Why do you look so baffled by that? Do you still have a question, Rebecca?
I did, and since she was pushing me, I asked it: Why did he take such a roundabout way just to say that God doesn’t exist? It sounds like he was trying to say something more by saying that God is nature.
No, Mrs. Schoenfeld answered me, and so assertively that I thought to ask her if she herself had read the works of the heretic. Of course, I didn’t pose the question that rose to my lips, since it could have been heard as disrespectful of her, a veiled challenge, and derekh eretz—literally, “the way of the land,” a phrase meaning “respect for parents and teachers”— was a virtue drilled into us from an early age.
Spinoza, my teacher reiterated, was an atheist, even though when the Amsterdam community excommunicated him he hadn’t yet revealed the full extent of his godless immorality. He had left the yeshiva when he was a teenager. We don’t know why exactly, since a student of his caliber would have been expected to go on and get smikha (the ordination for the rabbinate). His teachers, including Rabbi Morteira, an Ashkenazic scholar who had come from Vienna to lead this Sephardic congregation (Ashkenaz means “Germany” in Hebrew), had permitted themselves to indulge the highest expectations for him, a true talmid khokhem (a gifted scholar, literally a “disciple of the wise”), emerging out of this community of first-and second-generation former Marranos. But Spinoza left the yeshiva and instead went into his father’s business, importing dry fruits. Maybe his father’s business was suffering and he had to help him out — his younger brother also went into the family business — or maybe, despite his brilliance in the yeshiva, he had already begun to think like an apikorus and that’s why he didn’t pursue his yeshiva studies.
He hadn’t yet published any of his blasphemous works when he was put into kherem, but he had spoken to people about some of his ideas. It was a very close community, as you can well imagine, girls, since such hardship as they had suffered, and over generations, make for very strong bonds. They had clung to Yiddishkeit under cover of silence and secrecy, risking their lives, but much had been lost, forgotten, sometimes confused with Christian beliefs. Some of the Sunday prayers of the Christians had gotten mixed up into their own liturgy. They would refer to Queen Esther (the heroine behind the Jewish festival of Purim) as St. Esther, just like the Catholics, who have official saints. Now they were relearning what it means to be good Jews, the centerpiece of their efforts being the yeshiva, the Talmud Torah, where Baruch had studied. Because of his brilliance, people were interested in him, in what he thought.
But soon rumors of Spinoza’s strange ideas began to emerge, so that his community began to be afraid for him and also afraid of him. Some of his former schoolmates from the yeshiva, knowing how he was straying into alien goyisha ideas, asked him whether he thought, as they had heard he did, that God is made out of matter, and that there are no angels, and that the soul isn’t immortal. Remember, girls, that Maimonides, the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, had laid it down in his Thirteen Articles of Faith that we must never think of God in bodily terms and that we must believe in tekhiyas ha-maysim, the resurrection of the dead.
Think about it, girls: Of course the soul must be immortal, must survive bodily death; otherwise, how could there be an olam haba—a world-to-come? And if there is no olam haba, then how can the soul come before the Ultimate Judge and be held accountable for its conduct during its life? How could the good who had suffered during their lives receive their reward, and how could those who were evil and had gotten away with it get their divine punishment? Think of the tzadikim (the righteous) who died in Hitler’s ovens. Think of the innocent children. And think of the Nazis who escaped, who are enjoying life right now in Europe or South America. Without olam haba, we can’t make any moral sense out of the world; without olam haba, there is no moral sense to the world. This is why denying the soul’s immortality is tantamount to denying Ha-Shem.
Spinoza tried to evade the young men who asked him his views, and when they continued to press him, he used his Torah learning to confuse and mislead, making it seem as if he were still a good Jew, citing the Torah. He said that since the Torah says nothing about noncorporeality we are free to believe that God has a body; and also that the Torah says nothing about the creation of angels, which is why the Sadducees4 were never declared heretics even though they didn’t believe in angels. As for his thoughts on immortality, here Baruch let slip out probably more than he intended. He argued that the Torah uses the Hebrew words for “soul”—ruakh or nefesh or neshama—only to mean life or anything that is living, and that it nowhere commits us to believing that the soul survives the body’s death. On the contrary, he said, there are many places in the Torah where the exact opposite of immortality can be shown, and nothing is easier than to prove this.
When word of Spinoza’s ideas got back to the rabbis, they were stricken with horror. Here was one of their most brilliant students spouting ideas that not even the non-Jewish apikorsim would dare to contemplate. It was terrible to think that a boy who had shown so much promise and who had received such a fine education from the best rabbis in the community — learned rabbis, who had published books of their own — could reject everything. And the community also had to worry about what the goyim would think if word got out that such a wild heretic was living among them.
Remember, girls, these were former Marranos who had seen the very worst of what Christian intolerance can mean for the Jews. Amsterdam was a relatively tolerant city, Protestant rather than Catholic. Still, who knew how far their tolerance could be extended? It was true that the seventeenth-century Dutch were a very practical society, concerned at least as much with their economy as with their theology, and this practicality was good for the Jews. At the time of Spinoza’s birth, 1632, the Jews had been living in Amsterdam only a few decades, but they were already contributing to the thriving Dutch economy, using their connections to other Marranos scattered around the world, including those still back in Spain and Portugal, to import and export. Still, there were Protestant theologians even in Amsterdam, particularly the Protestants known as “Calvinists,” who weren’t thrilled about the Jewish newcomers. The Calvinists were not as tolerant as some of the other Protestant sects. And it had been a condition of the Jews being allowed to reside in Amsterdam — because, of course, they had had to get official permission — that they keep order and decorum among their own, in regard not only to behavior but to beliefs as well. Strangely enough, the Dutch authorities wanted the Amsterdam Jews to abide by the Torah. They wanted Amsterdam’s Jews to be frum (pious).
So the community leaders approached Spinoza and gently tried to change his mind. When he showed his stubborn arrogance, they begged him at the least to keep his ideas to himself, lest the Christian authorities learn of them and bring sanctions against the whole community. But apparently it did no good. The community met together in the synagogue. It was the parnassim, the community’s lay leaders, who, strictly speaking, had the power of excommunication, rather than the rabbis. The rabbis were also present in the synagogue, except for the chief rabbi, Rabbi Morteira, who had an obligation elsewhere.5 The community met to give Spinoza an opportunity to answer his accusers.
The two young men who had questioned Spinoza stood before the congregation and told them that they had spoken with Spinoza several times and that his views were full of heresies, and that he didn’t deserve to be held in such high esteem as a brilliant scholar by his former teachers. They said that Spinoza had spoken of the Jews as “a superstitious people born and bred in ignorance, who do not know what God is, and who nevertheless have the audacity to speak of themselves as His people, to the disparagement of other nations.”6 Spinoza had said that so far as the authorship of the Torah was concerned, it had been by someone other than Moses. The Five Books of Moses, he was saying, weren’t written by Moses, but rather by someone who had come many generations later, and someone who had known more about politics than about religion. It would take only some small good sense to discover the imposture, this apikorus said, and whoever continued to believe in it was as naïve as the Jews of Moses’ time.
This is how it often is, girls — that the vilest accusations against the Jews come from irreligious Jews themselves. It is as if, betraying the special task of holiness that Ha-Shem bestowed on the Jewish people, they must go to the opposite extreme, become leaders of godlessness among men.
I don’t have to remind you girls that Karl Marx was Jewish.
Spinoza refused to defend himself against his accusers. He said only that he was sorry for everyone there who had chosen to judge him so hastily and so harshly. Rabbi Morteira, informed of how his former prize student was accounting for himself at the synagogue, now rushed there and confronted the apikorus himself. He asked Spinoza whether this was to be the fruit of all the pains that he, his former teacher, had taken with his education, and whether he wasn’t afraid of falling into the hands of the living God? The scandal was great, but there was still time to repent. But if there was to be no sign of contrition, then the community would have no choice but to excommunicate him.
And do you know, girls, how this so-called philosopher, whom the world has decided to call great, answered his former rebbe, how he threw off his derekh eretz together with all else that he had been taught? He answered his teacher that he understood very well the seriousness of the charges against him and the nature of the threats that were hanging over his head, and in return for the trouble Rabbi Morteira had taken to teach him the Hebrew language, he, Spinoza, was quite willing to show him the proper method of excommunicating someone.
When Rabbi Morteira heard the way this young man spoke to him, with so much chutzpa, he dismissed everyone and left the synagogue. He saw that he had been completely mistaken in who this young man was. Before, he had told people that he was as impressed with Spinoza’s character as with his mind,7 that it was rare that one so brilliant would also be so modest. But now he saw that the situation was exactly the reverse. Baruch Spinoza was a monster of arrogance. There was no way of reasoning with this young man, as brilliant as he no doubt was.
Human intelligence is the greatest gift that Ha-Shem gave to human beings, making us closer to the malakhim—the angels — than to the beasts of the field. But if we forget from Whom we got this divine gift, if we begin to believe that we are somehow the source of our own intelligence and that we are capable of figuring out everything for ourselves without relying on the Torah, then we fall even below the animals. This is why all philosophy is apikorsus. The very word apikorsus, girls, comes from the name of a Greek philosopher, someone who was called Epicurus, who believed that pleasure is all that people have to live for.
After this confrontation in the synagogue, Spinoza moved away from the community, taking rooms with a non-Jewish friend of his outside of Amsterdam. He had already, for some time now, been mixing with non-Jews, preferring them to his own people. He had been studying Latin with a former priest who had also become a heretic in his own religion, by the name of Franciscus van den Enden.
In fact, there are some who say that Baruch tried to marry van den Enden’s daughter but that she rejected him for another student of her father’s who wasn’t going to become an impoverished philosopher, like Spinoza, but rather a doctor. Some say that this young man gave the young lady in question a pearl necklace and that is what finally decided her. Whether it’s true or not that he had tried to marry this non-Jewish girl, Spinoza never did marry, and in fact it seems that he never again tried to.
He lived alone, very simply, supporting himself by grinding lenses for telescopes and other optical instruments, and writing his blasphemous works. He had a small group of friends with whom he discussed his ideas. These were all Christians, although renegades among the Christians. Once he moved away from his old home, he had nothing more to do with Jews, nor with his old yeshiva friends, or even with his family. Because of the kherem, which in his case was permanent, no Jews were allowed to speak with him for the rest of his life, so he really had no choice here.
He had been studying Latin, girls, because in those days all the goyisha scholars wrote in Latin. If Baruch wanted to reject his rabbayim and study apikorsus, then he would have to learn Latin. He was particularly interested in studying the works of René Descartes, who was a French-Catholic philosopher whom many of the so-called freethinkers in Europe were excited about.
Descartes believed that there is a God, but he had still made the Catholic Church angry enough to put him onto its list of banned writers, called the Index.8 The reason he was considered dangerous to the Catholics was that he had written that people should not believe in God unless they can prove His existence according to the strictest rules of logic. If there are errors in the proofs for God’s existence, then the believer should no longer believe. In other words, Descartes taught that there is no room for emunah, for faith.
Spinoza agreed with this heresy of Descartes, only he, the Jew, went much further. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza would go on and argue for atheism, saying that the God that we can prove is nothing over and above nature, which, of course, girls, isn’t God at all, not for the Christians and not for the Jews. For no one. Spinoza wasn’t fooling anyone by playing around with words, saying that he believed in God, only making God be nothing more than nature, which of course everybody believes in. Who doesn’t believe in nature, since it’s what we see all around us? Really, girls, when you think about it, it’s ridiculous.
It was ridiculous, at least the way that Mrs. Schoenfeld had presented it — which is why I found myself wondering whether she was doing justice to Spinoza’s thoughts. Otherwise, why would the goyim proclaim him a great philosopher? I knew enough to know that the thinkers whom the world called great weren’t stupid.
But none of these ideas of his were yet known at the time of his excommunication, Mrs. Schoenfeld was explaining. All that the Amsterdam community knew was what the young men had reported about Spinoza’s views and the way that he had conducted himself in the synagogue when the accusations had been brought before him; they had heard for themselves the terrible way in which he had spoken to his former teacher, Rabbi Morteira.
And so the parnassim voted to put Spinoza into kherem. Others from the Amsterdam community had also been placed in kherem, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for longer. It depended, of course, on the khayt (the transgression). This community of returnees, trying to find their way back to Judaism, relied on the kherem as a means of guidance. Sometimes it was a matter of not keeping the law the right way, of buying meat from an unauthorized butcher or cheating in business. Or if someone wrote a letter to a Marrano in Spain or Portugal that put the recipient into danger of being discovered by the Inquisition, then this, too, was grounds for excommunication.
Then, too, even before the famous Spinoza, there had been other heretical thinkers who had been placed in kherem because of their so-called philosophical ideas. There had been a very famous case, when Spinoza himself was a child, of a man named Uriel da Costa, who had been excommunicated. This da Costa had been born in Portugal into a family of converts from Judaism. His father was a very religious Catholic, and he himself had become a minor church official. However, from reading the Torah he became convinced that Judaism is the true religion and he went to Amsterdam to live as a Jew. But he wanted his Judaism to be based on the Torah alone; he didn’t accept any of the Talmud, any of the laws that derived from the Oral Law and from the rabbinical decisions. The way that he imagined Judaism, as a Christian back in Portugal, that’s the way he wanted it to be. You can see some of the difficulties that the rabbis of these former Marranos had to contend with. They had to be makhmir (strict) in order to impress on these sadly ignorant Jews the nature of halakha.
(Halakha means “Jewish law.” The term derives from the Hebrew root of the verb “to go,” and so connotes the right way to go. The sources of halakha are basically three. There are the 613 commandments — or mitzvahs — that are contained in the Torah, the work that is traditionally considered the “Written Law,” the author the divinely directed Moses. Then there are the writings in the classical rabbinical sources that are the discussions and debates about the written laws, especially in the Mishnah [referred to as the Oral Law, by tradition taught by Moses and passed down through the ages until it was written down in the third century c.e.] and the Gemorah [which is rabbinical commentary on the Mishnah, the first version authored in Jerusalem in the fifth century; the second, which is the one more commonly studied, authored in Babylonia in the sixth century]. The Mishnah and the Gemorah together comprise the Talmud. And then, third, there is the codified law as it is laid out in the Shulkhan Arukh, a work whose title literally means “The Set Table,” composed in the sixteenth century by the Sephardic kabbalist Joseph Karo. The Shulkhan Arukh culls from all the Talmudic discussions and controversies and sets forth [as in a set table] the redacted halakha. Orthodox Judaism is, for the most part, governed by the Shulkan Arukh, which is interesting since mainstream Judaism rejects the kabbalistic approach that was the [suppressed] inspiration for Karo’s work. To quote the great secular kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem, “R. Joseph Karo deliberately ignored kabbalism in his great rabbinic code Shulkhan Arukh, yet there is little doubt as to the secret eschatological motives of its composition.”9)
It’s not that the rabbis didn’t have rakhmones (pity) for these victims of persecution, Mrs. Schoenfeld explained, but it required a stern hand to pull them back into true Yiddishkeit.
Da Costa had been put in kherem not once, but twice. Both times he had begged the community to allow him back, and they had granted him this, once he had fulfilled the terms of his penance. However, eventually he committed suicide — he seems to have been meshugga, a lunatic— and this had been a terrible shock and tragedy for the community, as you can well imagine. And then, at the time of Spinoza’s excommunication, there was another man, older than Spinoza but his friend, a Spanish doctor by the name of Daniel de Prado, who also was excommunicated for questioning the basic beliefs of Judaism. He, too, was allowed to make his penance.
For everyone else the ban of excommunication had included ways in which the person in question could repent and have the ban removed when the allotted period was up. Baruch Spinoza’s kherem was declared permanent, with no possibility of his returning to the Jewish community. His offense was seen as being far deeper than any of the others’, perhaps because the young man’s arrogant behavior at the synagogue had shown the rabbis and parnassim that he was incapable of t’shuva, repentance.
When a messenger came to where he was now living with his non-Jewish friend and brought news of his excommunication to him, Spinoza reportedly said 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.”10
And what was this path, girls? Later he would publish his ideas and he would make the entire world angry — the Christians, too. The worst of his works he couldn’t even publish when he was alive. This was called The Ethics, and it was in this work that he would say that God is nothing but nature and he would deny that there is any moral truth beyond our own pleasure and he would deny that we have free will to choose what we do, and he would argue that there is no world-to-come when we stand before the Throne of Glory and are judged for the lives we lived here on earth. His false ideas were against every religion, not just Judaism.
Spinoza didn’t convert to any other religion. There had been Jewish apostates before him, those who converted to Christianity or Islam. But a Jew who believed in nothing at all? This was a new phenomenon. This is why he is called the first “modern Jew.” This, girls, is what “modernity” means: believing in nothing.
Unfortunately it would be a Jew, at least someone who had been born a Jew, who would take goyisha philosophy much further than it had ever gone before into godlessness and immorality. It would be a Jew who would make philosophy into one long argument against the existence of God and against the difference between right and wrong, so that philosophy, girls, has been, ever since modernity, the most dangerous subject that you can possibly study.
Once again I felt reluctantly compelled to ask a question. It seemed so glaringly obvious that I waited for someone else to ask it, but since no one did, I had to: If he didn’t believe in ethics, then why did he name his book The Ethics?
It was his malicious sense of irony, answered my teacher, with the linguistic facility that so delighted me. Just as he had taken on the name Benedictus after his excommunication, since Benedictus means “blessed” in Latin as Baruch means “blessed” in Hebrew, with that same cynicism he would call this book of his The Ethics. But there is nothing ethical about the book. Spinoza goes out of his way to deny that there is anything like the true knowledge of good and evil that the Torah gives us. The ideas in this book were so irreligious and unethical, not only for Jews who wouldn’t have read him anyway, but also for Christians, that he never dared to publish it during his lifetime.
Did he ever publish anything? another student asked.
Yes, he did. While he was still working on The Ethics, he broke off for a few years in order to write another book, which he did publish, although anonymously. But it became known who the author was and all those who had a fear of God, Christian people, condemned him. On the title page he listed a fictitious author.11 But once again nobody was fooled by his sly tricks. Everyone who read it — who of course were only non-Jews, since the kherem forbade that any Jew read Spinoza’s works — immediately guessed who the real author was. That’s how notorious he had already become, how much shame he had already brought on the Jews.
Are Jews still forbidden to read Spinoza?
I remember how strangely she looked at me when I asked her this question (provoked partly out of my wondering whether my teacher had read Spinoza herself). I remember thinking, as she stared at me for several long seconds before answering me, that she liked neither me nor my questions very much. The discovery upset me, since she was by far my favorite teacher.
The kherem against Spinoza has never been rescinded, she said, impressing me once again with her mastery of the English language (I’d read words like “rescinded” but never heard anybody use them), even as her tone of voice foreclosed further questions along these lines. I understood her to be saying that yes, Jews were still forbidden to read this philosopher’s works, an answer that upset me almost as much as the discovery that my favorite teacher didn’t like me.
The roots of this treatise that he published under a false name went back to his kherem. Right after he was excommunicated, he had started to write, in Spanish, what is called an apologia, defending his ideas. You should understand, though, girls, that even though such a work is called an apologia, there was going to be nothing apologetic in the work. No t’shuva, no remorse. We know this because instead of publishing his so-called apologia, he eventually turned his ideas into this treatise, written not in Spanish, which was the language that the Portuguese Jews often used for scholarly and literary works, but rather in the goyisha Latin. This treatise vindicated the two former friends of his who had first brought the charges against Spinoza. His treatise showed that all the rumors and suspicions about him had been justified. The treatise was a twisted perversion of all that his rabbis had tried to teach him. Spinoza denied that there could be any sort of prophecy or revelation. He denied that miracles were possible. He claimed that the Torah didn’t come from Ha-Shem, that it hadn’t been dictated by Ha-Shem to Moshe Rabbenu, but rather that it had been written by several men over an extended period of time and that it suffered from internal inconsistencies.
Of course, what seem like inconsistencies are nothing new to you, girls. You know much better than that. You know that sometimes the Torah teaches us through what seem like contradictions. The Torah has endless ways of teaching us, and the appearance of inconsistency itself transmits knowledge. Rashi and the other commentators explicate all this for us, she said, mentioning the famous acronym for Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (1040–1105), the leading exegete of Torah and Talmud of all times, at least for the Orthodox. We had been learning Rashi’s commentaries since elementary school.
But Spinoza had the arrogant love of his own mind, Mrs. Schoenfeld continued, and he seized on these apparent contradictions so that he would not have to recognize the authority of any mind over his, not even Ha-Shem’s.
Atheism always comes down to arrogance. Remember that, girls. It might dress itself up as careful thinking, but underneath it is the vanity and arrogance of thinking that human beings are the highest forms of intelligence in the universe.
However, continued Mrs. Schoenfeld, Spinoza did retain one Jewish virtue, and a very important one at that: Respect for his parents. Just think about that for a moment, girls. Even a man like that, completely godless, still honored his parents. He waited until both his parents had passed away before he revealed his apikorsus. His mother had died when he was a young boy. He had been brought up by a stepmother. By the year of his excommunication, 1656, she, too, had died, as had his father. In fact, he had only sat shiva for his father a year before he was put into kherem. He had followed exactly the prescribed mitzvahs for mourning a parent, going every day to the synagogue, saying Kaddish. And while his father lived, he had kept his silence because of shalom bayis.
Shalom bayis means peace within the household, within the family. It was an exceedingly familiar phrase to all of us. So important is shalom bayis, so constitutive of the Jewish way of life, that sometimes, for its sake, you can do things that otherwise wouldn’t be allowed. For example, say a Talmudic scholar, who ought to be devoting his hours to study, has a wife who doesn’t see the point of a devotion that keeps him away both from the house and from a good parnosa, or living. She doesn’t recognize that to “sit and learn,” as the expression goes, is the most sanctified activity in which her husband can engage. For shalom bayis, the man can forsake his studying, as he himself will know if he is a true scholar, a talmid khokhem, which in Judaism entails not only intellectual but moral merit. A talmid khokhem will know the fundamental importance of a household free from resentment, rancor, discord: he will sacrifice even learning Torah for the sake of shalom bayis.
Mrs. Schoenfeld’s choice of this particular phrase suddenly brought the story of Baruch Spinoza home to me in a startlingly immediate way. All along, I had listened with special interest to this tale of a man whose trajectory of philosophical reasoning had brought him into disastrous collision with his close-knit Jewish community, a collision that inaugurated this intriguing thing called “modernity,” of which I was uncertain whether to approve or disapprove.
But now, with this phrase, Spinoza burst into vivid life before me. It was as if I suddenly knew him, knew the manner of person he was. I certainly felt that I understood him better than I did those bumulkes lurking around the kosher pizza shop. “That’s how it was,” I thought, with that familiar phrase peircing me inside, “that’s how he was.”
He had not wanted to hurt his family by speaking his doubts aloud. Though he was a man who had given himself over entirely to the search after truth — I knew this instinctively — still he would not speak the truth so long as his doing so might hurt those whom he loved.
And from this one fact about Spinoza I knew that Mrs. Schoenfeld was mistaken in thinking that it was his arrogance that explained his departure from Orthodoxy. An arrogant person would not have shown such heightened consideration for others’ sensibilities. He would not have waited until his father had died before revealing how deeply he questioned the beliefs of the fathers. The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man.12 I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class and I felt that I loved him.
My teacher had tried to make us feel Spinoza’s betrayal as our own, as if we, too, were part of that close-knit community of former Marranos, which in some sense we were. She had tried her best to put the seventeenth-century philosopher into familiar terms, and she had succeeded, though, at least in my case, not exactly as she had intended. Though I could not fathom what his ideas truly were, had no sense of what he might have meant by saying that God was nature, still, I felt that I knew him. An ignorant little girl in a calf-length skirt, I felt myself astonished with the sudden sense of knowing this philosopher, Benedictus Spinoza, who held such a formidable position in a construct of which I had only the dimmest notion: the Western canon.
I remember one more thing that Mrs. Schoenfeld had to say about Spinoza. It was in her summation of him.
There was nothing at all of Yiddishkeit that remained in Spinoza, she said. If you, God forbid, were to read any of his works, you would not find anything that would betray who Spinoza really was, that he had been brought up as a God-fearing Jew, a brilliant student who had once been a favorite of his rabbis, who were themselves great Torah scholars. He had learned to write in the language of goyisha philosophy, Latin, and this language pervades all his thinking, so that none of Torah’s truth could survive in it.
Think about it, girls: If he were a true Jewish thinker, then would he have found his place among the philosophers? If he hadn’t betrayed Yiddishkeit, would the world have called him great?
It would be some years before I would find my way back to Spinoza, even though I did go on to become a professional philosopher. But my studies in philosophy were confined to what is called analytic philosophy, which is generally quite opposed to the very possibility of metaphysics, meaning here by “metaphysics” the attempt to use pure reason (as opposed to experience) to arrive at a description of reality. (“Metaphysics” can be used in a wider, looser sense, referring just to ontological commitments — commitments concerning what sorts of things exist in the world. In the latter sense of “metaphysics,” even analytic philosophers have a metaphysics. The sense in which they reject the very possibility of metaphysics is in the sense of a nonempirical deduction of the nature of reality.)
And Spinoza’s project is metaphysics on a grand scale— the very grandest, in fact. Never had there been quite so ambitious a metaphysical project as Spinoza’s. He is audacious in the claims he makes for pure reason. Logic alone, he argues, is sufficient to reveal the very fabric of reality. In fact, logic alone is the very fabric of reality. And into this fabric are woven not only the descriptive facts of what is, but the normative facts of what ought to be.
In the philosophical tradition toward which I gravitate, such overinflated talk of reality — of, even more preposterously, Reality, and a Reality enriched with ethics, no less — is philosophically absurd. Or, as my old yeshiva mentors would have put it, such talk is assur, forbidden.
The new mentors with which I replaced the likes of Mrs. Schoenfeld might well, much like her, have alluded to Spinoza by way of a cautionary tale, and one, too, that bespeaks a certain arrogant overconfidence in the powers of human reason. Of course, my new teachers wouldn’t be arguing that reason’s powers must be augmented by divine revelation, but rather by observation and scientific explanations. We learn the nature of reality — though that word itself, even uncapitalized, was slightly off-color in the analytic circles I frequented — through the laborious, peer-reviewed, one-step-forward-three-steps-backward collective efforts of science. A project such as that of Benedictus Spinoza’s, metaphysical to the heights, was one upon which I was trained to look askance, as exceeding not just the limits of knowability but the very conditions for meaningfulness. Such a system was composed of not just unsubstantiated speculations, but of highfalutin nonsense. It was presumptuous to think that we might be able to use pure reason to deduce, with absolute certainty, not only the nature of Reality but even the nature of our ethical obligations: how we ought to go about living our lives, what we ought to care about. Such claims impute far too much power to the faculty of reason.
Spinoza had made such claims — all of them. In fact, in the panoply of Western philosophers, Spinoza stands out as having made the strongest claims for the powers of pure reason, unassisted by empirical observation and induction. Anything which we can truly know is to be known through purely deductive thought, which begins with axioms and definitions (which capture the very essence of the things defined) and proceeds onward by strict logical deductions. Spinoza took as his model the system of Euclid’s geometry, which is what gives the strikingly eccentric form to his philosophy. All the truths arrived at in this way are necessarily true, and we know them with absolute certainty. Though we cannot know all truths, since these are infinite and we are finite, still reason can take us far indeed. It can take us all the way to our salvation.
Reason reveals, according to him, the surprising nature of reality, which is so extraordinarily different from what our senses misleadingly present. And reason, too, shows us where our true salvation lies: the truths we must think about ourselves in relation to reality, which truths shall change our very nature in the knowing, setting us free.
Mighty claims indeed for the power of pure thought, and claims that my philosophical training led me to condemn as the height of philosophical delusion. The philosophical tasks we analytic philosophers set ourselves were far more modest. We entertained no metaphysical delusions about bypassing science to arrive at a priori certainty about the nature of Reality; and, too, we believed it to be a fallacy— sometimes referred to as the “naturalist fallacy,” or that of ignoring the “is-ought gap”—to think to derive, as Spinoza claimed to have derived, normative statements from descriptive statements. Conceptual truths (which trace the logical connections between concepts and can be known a priori) do not entail descriptive truths — concerned with what exists; and descriptive truths do not entail normative truths— concerned with what ought to exist, what values ought to guide our actions and lives. Spinoza, outrageously, makes claim to all of these entailments.
Not even reason can produce something out of nothing. It can’t get more out of the premises than what is already implicitly deposited within them. But this would seem to imply, or so an analytic philosopher is apt to argue, that conceptual truths — stating the logical possibilities — can’t entail descriptive or ontological truths — describing the way the world really is, what sorts of things exist, what properties they have; and, in turn, descriptive truths can’t entail normative truths — proclaiming what ought to be. The putative divide between the descriptive and the normative is famously referred to as the “is-ought gap.” The putative divide between the conceptual and the descriptive might be dubbed, though so far as I know no one ever has, the “if-is gap.”
To give some sense of Spinoza’s audacity on behalf of reason, let’s consider just the first claim for now, his denying that there is what I have just christened the “if-is gap.” A cosmologist I once read (I wish I could remember who or where) compared two different sorts of deterministic necessity that might hold in cosmology.
The first sort of necessity involves there being various possible cosmological dial settings, so to speak, corresponding to different possible initial conditions at the beginning of the world, the Big Bang; in addition to these settings, there’s also an on-off switch. The laws of nature don’t in themselves determine which of the possible dial settings the universe got set to, and, too, the laws of nature don’t force the on-off switch to either position. But once the dial is set, and once the switch is turned to on, the laws of nature determine everything that follows from there on in. That’s the first level of deterministic necessity. It says that if the dial was set to so-and-so, and if the on-off switch was switched to on, then, given the laws of nature, this is the way the world would be.
The second, and stronger, sort of necessity that the cosmologist distinguished was this: there is only one dial setting, and then there’s the on-off switch. Once the switch is turned to on, everything follows from the laws of nature. But the laws couldn’t, of themselves, force the switch to the on position. So this second sort of determinism says: if the switch is turned to on, then, given the laws of nature, this is the way the world would have to be.
Spinoza’s claim of deterministic necessity exceeds even this second alternative. Spinoza claims that the laws of nature are such that not only is there one dial setting, but the switch must, of necessity, have been pointed to on. It’s been pointed to on for all eternity. Nature, meaning the laws of nature, needs nothing outside of itself to explain itself. There is no “if-is gap” because there’s just no if about it. This world, exactly as it is, necessarily exists. Its very nature, captured in its laws (in Spinoza’s terminology, its “essence”), entails its existence. It is, in his language, causa sui, the cause of itself, both in terms of what it is (there’s only one dial setting) and that it is (the switch is permanently turned to on). Nature itself satisfies the opening statement of The Ethics: “By that which is self-caused (causa sui) I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.”
Nothing outside of the world — no transcendent God, in other words — explains the world. Its explanation is immanent within itself. To conceive of the world in terms of its explanatory immanence is to conceive of God. God, he will therefore say, is immanent in nature, not transcendent.
Of course, denying the “if-is gap” means defusing one of traditional religion’s major arguments for God’s existence: the need for a Transcendent Something to have, at the very least, turned the cosmological switch to on. So, too, Spinoza’s denial of the “is-ought gap” defuses a second of traditional religion’s major arguments, the need for a Transcendent Something to have established the difference between right and wrong. Just as the explanation of the world is immanent within its own nature, so, too, he will argue, the difference between right and wrong is immanent within our human nature.
His denial of both gaps derives from the stringent requirements he places on explanation. An explanation can have no inexplicable danglers protruding from it. Appealing to a Transcendent Something in both cases, the cosmological and the ethical, commits one to inexplicable danglers. What were the reasons the Transcendent Something had for His choices, both cosmological and ethical? If He had none, then there is inexplicability. If He did have reasons, then those reasons in themselves provide the explanation, and the appeal to Transcendence is redundant. So it’s either, in both cases, immanence or inexplicable danglers. Therefore it is, in both cases, immanence: there is no “if-is gap” and there is no “is-ought gap.” A priori reason executes both leaps, and The Ethics aims to show us how.
Mrs. Schoenfeld had accused Spinoza of arrogance — the arrogance of thinking that the human mind exceeds all forms of intelligence. She happened to have been wrong about this. Spinoza believes that our finite minds are limited because of their necessary finitude. Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself. We know the truth only to the extent that our ideas approach asymptotically closer to congruence with God’s infinite mind, which divine mind we should think of as the world’s being aware of its own explanation. As this infinite explanation exceeds any that we can arrive at by orders of magnitude, so, too, God’s mind exceeds ours by orders of magnitude. Be that as it may, analytic philosophers, too, a bit like Mrs. Schoenfeld, see a system like Spinoza’s as hubristically oblivious to the limits of human reason.
And so I can imagine one of my philosophy professors— say, Peter Hempel, at that time one of the last of the original members of the legendary Vienna Circle, which had propounded a radical form of empiricism known as logical positivism — translating Mrs. Schoenfeld into the language of positivism:
“A priori reason can yield only empty tautological truths. ‘All bachelors are unmarried.’ Yes, that is a priori, but only because it is analytically true. Its truth is a function of its meaning alone, and therefore it says nothing at all about the nature of the world. All analytic truths are empty of descriptive content, and all a priori truths are analytic. To know the nature of the world we must depend on experience. So yes, ‘it is either raining or not raining.’ Or ‘if there is a God, then there is a God.’ Or ‘since matter is composed of elementary particles it is not the case that it is not composed of elementary particles.’ True, true, and true, but completely devoid of descriptive content! To know whether it is raining, whether there is a God, whether matter reduces to elementary particles, we must look for empirical evidence. A priori reason alone lays out only what is logically true, therefore true in all possible worlds and simply because of what the proposition means. To know what is true in this world, we must make contact with it, through experience. To even know what a descriptive proposition is asserting, to grasp its meaning, is to know how we would go about empirically confirming or disconfirming it, the sorts of experiences that would show us whether it was true or false. If no experiences could, in principle, count for or against a proposition, then it is not only unknowable. It is devoid of content! A priori reason is certain, yes, but only because it tells us nothing of what is, much less of what ought to be. And if one thinks otherwise, one is doomed to uttering nonsense!
“Think about it, philosophy graduate students. What are the experiences that could possibly confirm or disconfirm such propositions as these — and I choose now randomly from the work entitled The Ethics: The more reality or being a thing has the greater the number of its attributes. This is from part one, and it is the ninth proposition. God or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists. This is part one, proposition eleven. Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner. Part one, proposition twenty-five, corollary. Or — and here Spinoza passes from meaningless metaphysics to meaningless ethics: The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s virtue is to know God. This is part four, the twenty-eighth proposition. Or — and now I flip toward the end of this deluded exercise to part five, proposition twenty-two: Nevertheless in God there is necessarily an idea which expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity.
“Is any of this in principle verifiable? Does any of this have a precise meaning such that we could know what to look for in the world to determine whether it is true or false?
“Let the name of Benedictus Spinoza serve as a warning to you against the folly of metaphysics, which can only end in systematic semantic nonsense, compounded by the fallacy of ignoring the is-ought gap!”
In other words, none of my education, running the gamut from Mrs. Schoenfeld to Peter Hempel, had prepared me to appreciate the philosophical system of Spinoza.
But my interest in the famous “mind-body problem” got me interested in Descartes, so that when the chairperson of the Barnard philosophy department, in which I was then teaching, suggested that I take over the course titled “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz,” I agreed, mostly because I was a young assistant professor who found it pragmatic to agree with most of the suggestions of my chairperson. I read The Ethics for the first time the semester I was teaching it, and I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the students who took that course with me that year, as well as for the next couple of years.
But at some point, The Ethics began to make sense to me, despite my first-rate analytic education. I’m not saying that I actually believed the system to be true, but only that it all made sense: each of its individual proofs, and how they all hung together into one structure. The insight came when I grasped that the fundamental intuition underlying Spinoza’s thinking was simply this: all facts have explanations. For every fact that is true, there is a reason why it is true. There simply cannot be, for Spinoza, the inexplicably given, a fact which is a fact for no other reason than that it is a fact. In other words, no inexplicable dangling threads protrude from the fabric of the world.
This intuition, which we can call the “Presumption of Reason,” is the fundamental metaphysical intuition for Spinoza, so fundamental that it is never stated as an axiom, just as the laws of logic are not explicitly stated as axioms13 but rather only make themselves known in their application. Spinoza treats the Presumption of Reason as on a par with a law of logic, as a rule of inference that he avails himself of in the course of deriving his propositions. It is the invisible piece that closes the lacunae in proof after proof. It is the assumption about the world from which his rationalism follows.
He was wrong in simply treating the Presumption of Reason as a law of logic. The laws of logic are such so that they cannot be logically denied: if you deny them, you end up contradicting yourself. The logical laws therefore stake no claim on the way the world is. Their negation describes no possible world. The Presumption of Reason is not like that. It stakes a claim — a reasonable claim, but a claim nevertheless — on what our world is like, and that claim may be true or it may not. Spinoza would have liked to have proved — he thought he had — that he had deduced the only logically possible world. This is why he could write with such consummate confidence to a young man he had once taught, who had just converted to Catholicism and was now challenging Spinoza’s philosophy in an admittedly obnoxious way.14 “I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy,” Spinoza wrote back. “I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.” If there are no arbitrary aspects of reality, he argues, and there can’t be, he asserts, then logic itself must—logically must—explain the world.
What he will assert, in fact, is that logic itself is the world, which can be conceptualized alternatively as God or nature. The world is self-aware logic. The appearance of contingency — of things being the way they are for no other reason than that’s the way they are — is merely that: appearance, a product of our finite mind’s inability to assimilate the infinite sweep of the logical implications that comprise reality. The infinite intellect of God is aware of the whole infinite sweep. Its awareness and its being are one and the same.
What his system amounts to, in effect, is a working out of the Presumption of Reason. The world as it is described in The Ethics is one of the two ways that the world would have to be were the Presumption of Reason true. (The other possible way is the one that Leibniz pursues in his Monadology.) The fact that it is a strange world (as is Leibniz’s), not much at all like the world of our experiences, demonstrates that this intuition, in itself quite reasonable — after all, it is simply the assertion that the world is, thoroughly, reasonable— is not so easy to uphold. It leads us far afield of common sense.
In a sense, here are our choices. If we want to retain the intuition that the world is thoroughly rational, with an explanation for all facts, we can go either the Spinoza way or the Leibniz way, which will lead us to maintain that the real world — Reality, God help us — corresponds nary at all to our experience of it. We will be inclined, like Spinoza, to file away experience, our seeming contact with the world, as just a species of imagination, the lowest step on the cognitive ladder. Or we can give up the Presumption of Reason; but that move, too, leads to some unpalatable conclusions, as the Scottish empiricist David Hume conclusively demonstrated. It leads to a conclusion that makes it deucedly difficult to distinguish at all between justified and unjustified beliefs about the world, at least insofar as those beliefs extend beyond the immediate content of our present experiences. What we are left with is — this is the conclusion of Hume, the most rigorous working out of the consequences of the rejection of the Presumption of Reason — a sort of hollowed-out solipsism, with not even an ongoing subject of experience to console us, but only the experience itself, and only while it is happening. I can’t know about anything outside my own mind, and that mind itself reduces to a series of mental events. All that I can really know to exist is the mental event I happen to be having at the time. Just try confining yourself to that parsimonious ontology when you are doing anything but philosophy.
So the rigorous consequences of accepting the Presumption of Reason and the rigorous consequences of rejecting the Presumption of Reason both lead us to counterintuitive points of view. Perhaps rigor is just not in our cards. But that’s a pretty unpalatable conclusion, too.
One could perhaps be inclined to counter Spinoza’s Presumption of Reason by enumerating all the ways in which our contemporary knowledge seems to belie it. Our most powerful scientific theories — evolution in the biological sciences, quantum mechanics in the physical sciences— enshrine chance and contingency at their most fundamental explanatory levels. And when it comes to our accounts of human behavior — history, psychology, economics — then there is even less appearance of deterministic necessity. A Spinozist response would be to say that these explanations— whether in physics, biology, or the human sciences — appear fundamental only from the human point of view, which by its nature must be limited. From the point of view of God, of logic itself, there is neither chance nor contingency.
As mentioned in the last chapter, there are contemporary physicists and cosmologists who have Spinozistic aspirations to banish chance and contingency in “the theory of everything.” String theorists, in particular, are Spinozistic in their goal of having their physics emerge fully formed from their mathematics. Recall, too, the famous final sentences in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: “If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.” Hawking’s statement eloquently attests to the fact that Spinoza’s understanding of what the laws of nature could tell us, if only we were capable of assimilating them in their entirety, is not foreign to modern scientific sensibilities.
Signature of Albert Einstein in the visitors’ book in Spinoza’s house in Rijnsburg. It is dated 2 November 1920.
But of all great modern scientific minds, Albert Einstein’s stands out as having been the most self-consciously influenced by Spinoza. (The guestbook at the little house in Rijnsburg where Spinoza had lived, now a museum, has Einstein’s signature, signed 2 November 1920.) He often described himself as a “disciple of Spinoza,” and speaks of him often, either explicitly or implicitly, as when he refers to “the grandeur of reason incarnate.” His views on nature and our knowledge of it were clearly informed by a deep study of the philosopher. “The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image — a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being.”15 Almost every answer that Einstein ever gave when asked to expound on his philosophy of science and his views on religion echoes with strains of Spinoza.
Despite Spinoza’s extreme rationalism, the most extreme in the history of thought, he remains of scientific relevance, from brain science to string theory, from Damasio to Einstein and Hawking.
With time, “Seventeenth-Century Rationalism: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz” became my favorite class to teach, and Spinoza my favorite among the mighty triumvirate. We would work our way through the whole of The Ethics. My students would always begin as I had begun, with unmitigated bafflement before the eccentricity — both in form and content — of this seemingly impenetrable work. I would witness, year after year, the transformation that would come over the class as they slowly made their way into Spinoza’s way of seeing things, watching the entire world reconfigure itself in the vision, no matter how unsustainable over the long run that vision proves to be for most of us — no matter how unsustainable we would even want it to be, since, in its ruthless high-mindedness, it asks us to renounce so many passions. (Among the passions we must renounce is romantic love, which, Spinoza deduces, will almost always end badly: “Emotional distress and unhappiness have their origin especially in excessive love towards a thing subject to considerable instability, a thing which we can never possess. For nobody is disturbed or anxious about anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, enmities, etc. arise except from love towards things which nobody can truly possess.” Paramount among “things which nobody can truly possess,” of course, are people.)
And no matter how unsustainable that final vision is, no matter how taxing the leap of faith in the Presumption of Reason one must make in order to get there — still the rigorously intellectual process of beholding Spinoza’s vision of the world is also, always, an emotional one, just as Spinoza promises. One feels oneself change, however impermanently, as one beholds Spinoza’s final point of view — the point of view that approaches, though it can never match, “the Infinite Intellect of God.” One’s whole sense of oneself, and what it is one cares about, tilts — in a direction that certainly feels like up. Year after year, I’ve watched what happens with my students when Spinoza begins to take hold, and it’s always moving beyond measure.
Still, no matter how intimate with Spinoza’s formal and formidable system I’ve come to feel over the years, Spinoza himself, the man behind the system, has remained remote. This is just as he would have wanted it to be, since “Spinoza himself ” is of no account within that system, just as each of us, in our singular individuality, is of no account. The ultimate insignificance of the personal self emerges, as we will see, in the immanence of ethics. (As one of my friends quipped, when I was explaining this aspect of Spinoza to him, Spinoza was the original Bu-Jew.)
I certainly never thought to connect the philosopher I taught in my course on seventeenth-century rationalism with the Baruch Spinoza I had first encountered in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s historia class. I taught Spinoza in the context of Western philosophy, in particular in the context of that fascinating movement represented by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I never connected the middle philosopher of the lineup, not in my class and not even in my head, with that “bumulke” I’d first heard tell of in Mrs. Schoenfeld’s class. Spinoza was the philosopher who came after René Descartes and before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I traced the development of his ideas from the Frenchman who had influenced him, most especially with the inspiration to look to mathematics as the model for all knowledge, to his slightly younger German contemporary, whom he had strongly influenced, most especially with the intuition that all facts have explanations, the assumption that I am calling the Presumption of Reason, and which Leibniz formalized as “The Principle of Sufficient Reason.”
The personal sense of the philosopher that had come upon me in the moment of hearing the phrase shalom bayis inserted into his tale had long ago disappeared. That phrase had carried all the heavy intimacy of the life that was then closest to me. In the moment of hearing it I had thought that I grasped something immediate and essential about a great philosopher, something that brought him home to me, making him a figure of piercing sympathy. Now, too, strangely enough, given my antimetaphysical tendencies and training, I believed I had come to have an intuitive understanding of him, could study each of the proofs of The Ethics and shadow his thought processes. But the two understandings of him— the first in terms that were both personal and Jewish, the second in terms that were strictly philosophical — didn’t intersect with each other. If anything, they were at odds.
The philosophical understanding of Spinoza seems to forbid understanding him in terms that are personal and Jewish. To have indulged in a sense of a special bond with Spinoza, forged by reason of our shared Jewish experience, would have been to forsake the rational project as Spinoza understood it, and as he deeply influenced me to understand it as well. To have intimated an extraphilosophical intimacy with Spinoza, come to me by way of the sheer accidents of my and his precedents, would have amounted to a betrayal of his vision.
I spoke of his vision to my students as “radical objectivity,” and from its vantage point all the accidents of one’s existence, the circumstances into which one was born— including one’s own family and history, one’s racial, religious, cultural, sexual, or national identity — appear as naught, and the lingering emotional attachments to such accidents are only evidence of impartial rationality and obstacles in the way of achieving a life worth living.
To the extent that we are rational, merely personal matters matter not at all. To the extent that we are rational, personal identity itself shrivels away into insignificance. The fact of who I happen to be in the infinite scheme of things disappears altogether in the apprehension of the scheme itself.
I was being true to Spinoza in leaving behind the personal sense of him that had opened up to me within the space of one small Hebrew phrase; and yet it is back to that personal sense of him that I am trying now to return, even knowing what I know about his philosophy. I would like to recapture the sense of the man behind the formidable system, locate the pounding pulse of subjectivity within the crystalline structure of radical objectivity.
There was a moment long ago when I knew next to nothing about the magnificent reconfiguration of reality laid out in the system of Spinoza, and yet when I felt I knew something about what it was like to have been him, the former yeshiva student, Baruch Spinoza.
I would like to know that feeling again, even though I know that the desire amounts to betraying Spinoza.