[MLUG - DISCUSSION] [RELIGION] the intellectual influence of Baruch Spinoza

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

This is a great article.  It really makes me want to read Goldstein's new 
book about Spinoza.  I had a friend in high school (30 years ago now) who 
used to talk a lot about the greatness of Spinoza but I never really knew 
of Spinoza's greatest achievements until I read this article.  I 
definitely share aspects of his view on religion such as this one:

  Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible
  knowledge of the Creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways.

I take the stronger position that no group or religion can claim *any* 
knowledge of the Creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways.  I would 
also say that no one can rightly claim to know that we have a "Creator." 
--Mike

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/opinion/29goldstein.html

N.Y. Times
July 29, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

Reasonable Doubt

By REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN

Boston

THURSDAY marked the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the 
philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of 
Amsterdam in which he had been raised.

Given the events of the last week, particularly those emanating from the 
Middle East, the Spinoza anniversary didn't get a lot of attention. But 
it's one worth remembering -- in large measure because Spinoza's life and 
thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment 
seem so intractable and overwhelming.

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza 
remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of 
Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly 
claim infallible knowledge of the Creator's partiality to its beliefs and 
ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life -- he died 
in 1677 at the age of 44 -- studying the varieties of religious 
intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.

The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, 
refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews on the Iberian 
Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the 
15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept under the 
vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the "New Christians," as 
they were called even after generations of Christian practice, of carrying 
the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the 
Iberian Inquisition was Europe's first experiment in racialist ideology.

Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to 
try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the 
powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that 
favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. 
Self-aggrandizement can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics 
or ideology.

Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of 
reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments 
that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more 
cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us 
-- whether Jew or Christian or Muslim -- a privileged position in the 
narrative of the world's unfolding.

Spinoza's system is a long deductive argument for a conclusion as radical 
in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent that we are 
rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.

Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of 
his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including 
the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our 
right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty 
to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is 
neither a rational nor an ethical option.

Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of 
government -- only democracy can preserve and augment the rights of 
individuals. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and 
well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never 
relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the 
light of evidence.

It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the 
development of the sciences subverts the very grounds for state 
legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize 
our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued so adamantly against 
the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion 
not only dissolves the justification for the state but is intrinsically 
unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all 
others.

Spinoza's attempt to deduce everything from first principles -- that is, 
without reliance on empirical observation -- can strike us today as 
quixotically impractical, and yet his project of radical rationality had 
concrete consequences. His writings, banned and condemned by greater 
Christian Europe, but continuously read and discussed, played a role in 
the audacious experiment in rational government that gave birth to this 
country.

The Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document first drafted 
by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza's 
contemporary -- both were born in 1632 -- is a more obvious influence on 
Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself been influenced by 
Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy. In fact, Locke spent 
five formative years in Amsterdam, in exile because of the political 
troubles of his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury.

Though Spinoza was already dead, Locke met in Amsterdam men who almost 
certainly spoke of Spinoza. Locke's library not only included all of 
Spinoza's important works, but also works in which Spinoza had been 
discussed and condemned.

It's worth noting that Locke emerged from his years in Amsterdam a far 
more egalitarian thinker, having decisively moved in the direction of 
Spinoza. He now accepted, as he had not before, the fundamental 
egalitarian claim that the legitimacy of the state's power derives from 
the consent of the governed, a phrase that would prominently find its way 
into the Declaration.

Locke's claims on behalf of reason did not go as far as Spinoza's. He was 
firm in defending Christianity's revelation as the one true religion 
against Spinoza's universalism. In some of the fundamental ways in which 
Spinoza and Locke differed, Jefferson's view was more allied with Spinoza. 
(Spinoza's collected works were also in Jefferson's library, so Spinoza's 
impact may not just have been by way of Locke.)

If we can hear Locke's influence in the phrase "life, liberty and the 
pursuit of happiness," (a variation on Adam Smith's Locke-inspired "life, 
liberty and pursuit of property"), we can also catch the sound of Spinoza 
addressing us in Jefferson's appeal to the "laws of nature and of nature's 
God." This is the language of Spinoza's universalist religion, which makes 
no reference to revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be 
discovered through human reason.

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a 
thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and 
compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is 
itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine 
revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it 
in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless 
immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create 
a government the likes of which had never before been seen on this earth.

Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem 
hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the 
march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed 
on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our 
sorry world would have been without it.

  ---

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of "Betraying 
Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity."


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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