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- [01:26]
Steven Nadler
the New Books Network
- [01:30]
Abe Silberstein
hi, welcome to the New Books Network podcast in Jewish Studies. I'm your host, Abe Silberstein. Today we're pleased to be joined by Steven Nadler. Steven Nadler is Velos Research professor and the William H. Hay II professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He's the author of numerous books, including several seminal monographs on Spinoza, including two editions of a biography, Spinoza A Life, as well as a book, Forged in Hell, Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age. Professor Nadler has also written books on Manassha Ben Israel and Rembrandt. Professor Nadler, thank you so much for coming.
- [02:13]
Steven Nadler
Well, thank you for having me.
- [02:16]
Abe Silberstein
So most of our listeners will be broadly familiar with Spinoza, mainly through the controversy over his excommunication from the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656. But as a broad introduction for those who may be uninitiated who was Baruch or Benedict Spinoza?
- [02:36]
Steven Nadler
He was a philosopher, perhaps the most radical philosopher of the 17th century. He he was born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a former Converso family, that is a family that had been forced to convert from Judaism to Catholicism in Portugal in the 16th century. Eventually, many of these conversal Families fled Spain and Portugal, and Spinoza's family, like so many others, ended up in Amsterdam in the early 17th century, where they were allowed to return to the open practice of Judaism. So was born and raised in an open Jewish community in Amsterdam, a community founded by former conversos. We know very little about his early years, but what we do know is that in 1656, in July of that year, he received the harshest harem or ban, or excommunication, if you like, that term ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community for what the ban document calls horrible heresies and abominable deeds. But without telling us what those were, Spinoza left the community. He had no choice and proceeded to begin writing his philosophical treatises. The two main philosophical treatises are the Ethics, which he began writing within seven years or so of the ban, and the Theological Political Treatise, which he published in 1670. The ethics is a metaphysical and moral treatise in which he lays out his views on God. And these are, for the 17th century, quite heretical views. For Spinoza, God is just nature. There's no such thing as a transcendent supernatural being exercising providence. All there is is nature, and everything that happens, happens by the necessary laws and processes of nature. In the Theological Political Treatise, which caused a great scandal when it was published all over Europe, Spinoza argues that the Bible is not literally divine. It's just a work of human literature, in fact, a compilation or anthology of human writings. He argues that miracles are absolutely metaphysically impossible because nature, being all there is, couldn't possibly violate its own processes and laws. He argues for democracy as the best form of government, and he especially argues for freedom of expression and freedom of association as being essential to the well being of the state. The Theological Political Treatise really is a tremendously important and influential book. The Ethics is a much more difficult book. But there too, we get a very clear sense of how far Spinoza was willing to go away from traditional views of an Abrahamic God.
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Abe Silberstein
And from, from an early age, it seems that Spinoza was determined to chart an independent path as a philosopher who critiqued the community commonly held religious worldviews that surrounded him. And what, what were the prevailing ideas about God and religion in both the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in which he was raised, and from which he was unceremoniously expelled or ceremoniously expelled. Given that the harem was its own affair and the larger Dutch Republic that Spinoza came into conflict with, well, it's
- [06:13]
Steven Nadler
hard to say whether there was a single view about God either within the Jewish community or within the Dutch Republic. So within the Portuguese Jewish community, the rabbis there tended to vary between rationalist thinkers like the Chief Rabbi Martera, and more kabbalistically inclined thinkers like Isaac Abu Abdel Secka. They generally healed to a. I would say, what we might call a rabbinic view of the Abrahamic deity, not necessarily as an anthropomorphic deity, but as a being who is endowed with free will and who exercises providence over creation and yet is distinct from. From that creation. Kind of like the picture you get of the Abrahamic God from reading the Hebrew Bible. The Dutch Republic was a much more complex affair because you had orthodox Calvinists, you had dissident Calvinists, dissident Reformed thinkers, Mennonites, collegians, what were called remonstrants, who departed from the harsh Calvinist line on predestination. You also had Catholics in the Dutch Republic. So it really was perhaps the most cosmopolitan place in Europe at the time in terms of the variety of views, variety of religious views, variety of political views. You can get things who get a hearing in the Dutch Republic that can be published there that wouldn't see the light of day elsewhere in Europe. It was a relatively tolerant place, and radical ideas, radical theological ideas, radical political ideas really flourished in the cosmopolitan environment of the Dutch Republic and especially the province of Holland. Yeah.
- [08:06]
Abe Silberstein
Although, of course, Spinoza's ideas in the end, proved too radical even for the tolerant environment in which, or the relatively tolerant environment in which he resided. I guess the next question I would have is, what was so controversial about the theologico political treatise which was published in Spinoza's lifetime, which wasn't the case with the ethics that caused such a stir throughout the Dutch Republic, but also the Continent.
- [08:33]
Steven Nadler
Well, the purpose of the theological political treatise, as I see it, was to undermine the increasing influence that the orthodox wing of the Dutch Reformed Church was exercising in civic and political affairs. And so you had preachers and other sorts of prelates insisting that the laws of the state should reflect theological dogma, the Sabbath should be made legally sanctified, and so on. And Spinoza was deeply concerned that what was a fairly secular, relatively tolerant and liberal state was coming under the sway of more intolerant and repressive religious authorities. And so the point of the theological political treatise was to undermine or to try to undermine that increasing influence. And of course, one of the things that these orthodox preachers held up as the source of their authority was the Bible. One of the central planks of. Of the Reformation, especially the Reformed Church, is that The Bible is literally divine, and it expresses without error the word of God, and people should be able to read it for themselves, as opposed to the kind of mediation that the Catholic Church imposed through priests and the pope and bishops by arguing that the Hebrew Bible is not literally divine. It's just the work of the ancient prophets. And now the ancient prophets, he argues in this treatise, were not especially educated people. They were not philosophers, they weren't really theologians. They had relatively unsophisticated views about God and about nature and about the cosmos. Therefore, what they have to say in their writings, that is what the Hebrew Bible, as a compilation of their writings, edited centuries after they'd written them and handed down from copy to copy, Spinoza says, what we end up with is a partial and mutilated book that may or may not reflect many of the original writings, and especially not the writings that the editorial committee decided to include. So this really does undermine, and this is Spinoza's point, this really does undermine the authority of the Hebrew Bible as a source of truth. What the Bible does best, Spinoza argues, is that through its imaginative storytelling, it inspires readers to lives of virtue, that is, lives governed by justice and charity towards others. And that's the sense in which it is, in a kind of figurative way, divine, because it expresses the divine word, God's commandment, treat others with justice and loving kindness. But it does this only because its authors, despite not being philosophers, were ethically superior individuals. So by treating the Hebrew Bible in this way and making it a very mundane document, just words on paper, handed down generation after generation, one of the things that Spinoza could do is undercut the authority of those who hold up the Bible as the source of their influence. Then again, too, by denying that miracles are possible because nature's laws are inviolable and everything is a part of nature and governed by nature's laws, there's no such thing as a God outside of nature who can interfere with nature. By denying the possibility of miracles, the Spinoza really is denying any kind of intentional providence by God. And this, too, would have been regarded by the Dutch Reformed Church and by Christians all over Europe as blasphemous.
- [12:35]
Abe Silberstein
Right. So would it be right to say that Spinoza was an early practitioner of biblical criticism?
- [12:42]
Steven Nadler
Yeah, I would say, in fact, he was among the first, most systematic practitioners of biblical criticism. By looking at the text, trying to determine who its authors were, by focusing not on the truth of what the Bible says, but on its meaning. And one of the things that the theological political treatise does is Spinoza offers us a hermeneutical method, how to read the Bible. What we can know about the Bible, what we cannot know, the importance of knowing Hebrew, and yet the obstacles to being able to really fitfully translate the Hebrew Bible as well as we could. So both a way of reading the Bible which will reveal its true message without having to worry about whether what the Bible says about the cosmos or about God, even without having to worry about whether that's all true or not. That's not the point of the Bible. Galileo himself put this. Well, the Bible is there not to tell us how the heavens go, it's to tell us how to get to heaven. Now, Spinoza does not believe there is such a thing as heaven, so he wouldn't go as far as Galileo, but he does think that the Bible's message is all about how to live well and virtuously here and now in this world, and to give up such superstitious beliefs about the world to come and about divine reward or punishment. These are just babimysis, which have nothing to do with living a good life.
- [14:20]
Abe Silberstein
Babamysis is Yiddish for grandmother's tales, for those who aren't that familiar. So going on that thread of Spinoza looking for ways to suggest paths to living well without recourse to superstition, this seems to be the purpose of the Ethics, which, as you noted earlier, he had started writing early on, but of course, it was not published until after his death. Could you describe. Because the Ethics, for anyone who's tried to read it, is a very complex text that often makes one return to past pages and to look at propositions and put them together. And so can you describe what this book is and how it came about?
- [15:07]
Steven Nadler
Yeah, it is a very formidable, even intimidating text, because when you open it, what you see first are definitions and then axioms, and it looks very much in format, like Euclid's work on geometry, which is the model, it's explicitly presented in the geometric format. There are five parts to the Ethics. Part one is called On God. Part two is on the human mind. Part three is on the passions. Part four is on what he calls human bondage, or the way in which we are enslaved by the passions. And part five is on human freedom, how we can move away from a life governed by the passions. So the part one on God is where he lays out his heretical conception of God. I think there really is no way of reading this that's not simply an atheism, even though throughout the centuries, Spinoza's been held up as the model pantheist. I don't think he's a pantheist, I think he's an atheist. And then in part two on the human mind, Spinoza shows us that the human mind and the body are not unlike what Descartes had said, two distinct substances that get united together, but rather they are one and the same thing. The human mind reflects the body and the body reflects the mind. A human being is one person, but has two aspects, a mental aspect and a physical aspect. Then in part three, we see how the physical aspect, and therefore as well the mental aspect of the human being, is, I would say, even assaulted by the influences of external things that we live in the world. We are part of nature and we are constantly being impinged upon by the effects of external things in us. Pleasures and pains, and our desires are directed towards those pleasures and away from those pains. And to the extent that our lives are governed by these passive affects, by these passive emotions, we are enslaved by them. We do what we do not because of what we know, but because of how we happen to feel or how we are made to feel by external things. So in part four, he holds up this picture of human freedom. Human freedom is not, as many people might think, a matter of freedom of the will. There is no such thing as free will for Spinoza, because the will, being a part of the human mind, is as much a part of nature as the human body, and so is subject to causal factors. Human Spinoza's universe is a causally deterministic universe, and everything, including mental events, including acts of volition or acts of will, are causally determined by other things. However, what we can do is achieve some kind of freedom in the sense of a liberation from the baleful influence of the passions, where we become autonomous or self directing. And we do what we do not because of how we feel or how we hope to feel or how we anticipate things, might affect us, but we do what we do because of the ways in which we know what is truly in our own best interest.
- [18:24]
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- [19:14]
Abe Silberstein
Yes, to track back on something you were mentioning during your answer. Your new book, Spinoza Atheist, which is the occasion for this interview, of course, argues pretty succinctly what the title says. And of course, many scholars deem Spinoza's philosophy to be pantheistic, or, more recently and more, you know, I would say maybe even more persuasive, panentheistic. What do these terms mean and what support is found for them in Spinoza's corpus, and particularly in the ethics?
- [19:47]
Steven Nadler
Well, let me start with the question of support. I mean, Spinoza's Ethics is such a dense and difficult text that I would say anybody can find any support for any reading they want in there, because it really does take a good deal of close, careful scholarship. Pantheism is the view that God is everything and everything is God. All there is is nature. And the pantheist would say that nature is God, nature is divine. The panentheist says it literally. Panentheism means everything is in God, but it doesn't mean that God is nothing but everything, but that there's more to God besides what there is. Or to put it more crudely, nature is a part of God, but there's more to God than nature. That can't be Spinoza's view, despite the fact that many people have recently argued for that. Because it's quite clear for Spinoza that God and nature are one and the same thing. He uses the phrase God or nature, and that. Or is that is God. That is, I mean, nature. So I think entheism just simply doesn't make sense if you think there's more to God than nature. The problem with both pantheism and panentheism is that they're theisms. So the way I look at it, the pantheist and the atheist both agree all there is is nature. The pantheist rejects any kind of transcendent supernatural being as well. So then, what's the difference between pantheism and atheism? Well, as far as I can figure it out, the only difference is that the pantheist believes that there truly is something divine about nature. And what that means is that nature is deserving of worshipful awe, reverence, adoration, prayerful respect, or whatever might be the appropriate religious attitude. And that is so far from Spinoza's philosophy, because for Spinoza, the only appropriate attitude to take towards Nature is to seek to understand it through reason and the intellect. And so for me, that's that just to me, that speaks of atheism. Spinoza does not believe in divinity. There is no divinity for Spinoza. If by divinity you mean something, anything, worthy of worship or wonder or adoration.
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Abe Silberstein
And there, and at one point you note in the book, and I seen this myself in my reading of the Ethics, is that there are times when Spinoza seems to not quite denigrate, but put lower on the scale of thinking, certain forms of interacting with nature. And one of those is wonder, which is roughly how one might approach an object of religious adoration.
- [22:50]
Steven Nadler
Yeah. Wonder for Spinoza is bred in ignorance. We wonder about things where we either don't understand the causes that have brought them about or don't understand the effects that we might anticipate from them. So wonder is generated by an inadequate knowledge of things. And again, the proper attitude to take towards nature is to develop as adequate an understanding of things as we possibly can for Spinoza.
- [23:22]
Abe Silberstein
So in distinguishing all of these different terms for how to describe Spinoza's view of nature and God, one thing that you note is that Spinoza was called an atheist in his time. But of course, this does not tell us much beyond that he rejected popular theisms that we discussed earlier. Because even if Spinoza had embraced Deism, for example, it's likely his contemporaneous detractors would have still called him an atheist. So what exactly do you mean when you call Spinoza an atheist? And I think you've already answered this part of the question, but it might be worth reiterating. Why do you think this is the best description of his philosophy as opposed to pantheism and panentheism?
- [24:07]
Steven Nadler
Well, to go back to the first part of your question, yeah. In the 17th century, to call someone atheist simply meant your God's not my God. And so the collegians, or were atheists to the more orthodox Reformed, it was just an all purpose epithet to use against your religious opponents. Just in the same way in which the term communism was or still is an epithet, an all purpose epithet to use against your political opponents in the United States. It just means that you are politically heretical, or in religious terms, in terms of atheism, it's you are religiously heretical. He didn't become a Pantheist until the 18th century, when the concept existed, or at least the label existed, because there was a tradition, I believe, of pantheism in some traditions of Jewish thinking. With Spinoza's Atheism. Why I want to focus on the Spinoza's atheism is because it's, as I said before, Spinoza is so hard to interpret that he functions as a kind of Rorschach. People see in him exactly what they want to see. And when you start seeing him as a pantheist or panentheist, then you're committed. And some of the people who defend this reading explicitly say then for Spinoza, it's appropriate to stand before nature with horror or wonder or mystical, some kind of mystical attitude. And once you go down that path, you are so far from what I think Spinoza is truly recommending. And so I think it's important to get this right, to call him a pantheist. Once you understand what that implies, what it is to be a pantheist, and how pantheism must differ from atheism, then I think it's especially important to see what Spinoza does believe to be the appropriate attitude to take towards God or nature, and what he rejects as the kind of attitude that is grounded in superstition.
- [26:19]
Abe Silberstein
So why do you think Spinoza uses the word God and theorizes with the word God throughout the ethics, if indeed his position is that of an atheist?
- [26:30]
Steven Nadler
Well, the word God, he really couldn't do without it because he's writing for an audience of people with whom he's trying to share a vocabulary. And what he wants to do, as I read him, is say, look, you and I agree about what God is. I'll come back to that in a second. We agree about this definition of God. Now, I'm going to use that vocabulary and show you where that leads. And where it leads in the end is the ultimate conclusion of Spinoza's philosophy. Now, what that definition of God is that I think all parties to the debate might. That Spinoza believes all parties to the debate might agree is God. By God, we mean an infinite eternal being, an infinite eternal substance. Spinoza says that's what God is. He expects his opponents to agree with that. Now, let's see. If you believe that God is defined as the infinite, eternal, all powerful substance. Let me show you that you must conclude that God and nature are one and the same thing, and that everything is in God, and so on, for all the other propositions that follow from it. And so to have not used the vocabulary of God and what comes with that, I don't think he would have had a hook for his readers.
- [27:54]
Abe Silberstein
Interesting. So this was God was almost a placeholder for the, for the infinite eternal substance. That he's laying out throughout the text.
- [28:05]
Steven Nadler
Yeah. And the way he speaks of God, this is not a God that you would pray to or from which you would expect any kind of rewards or fear any kinds of punishments. And he doesn't use the phrase God or nature until late in the book, which I suppose rhetorically is a smart move because he wants to hook those readers. But by that point, by Part four, where we see the phrase God or nature, Spinoza has shown us all the metaphysical conclusions of Part one and revealed to us that whatever is, is in God in the way in which things are in nature, are part of nature and are determined by nature. There's laws and processes.
- [28:57]
Abe Silberstein
So, just to reach back into your working on Spinoza's biography, do we know why Spinoza did not publish the Ethics in his lifetime and why it was set aside to be put in his collected works after his passing? Because he clearly was a subject of controversy during his life. It was presumably something he was used to. But was the Ethics even a step too far for him to endure the response to that?
- [29:26]
Steven Nadler
Yeah, well, we do know in one of his letters, we know that he was preparing, after the appearance of the theological political Treatise, he was preparing the Ethics for publication. Some of his friends were also preparing a Dutch translation of the Theological political Treatise. Both works were written in Latin. Spinoza put a halt to the Dutch translation of the Treatise because that would have made it more accessible to a broader audience. And I think he was afraid that the backlash was already so strong he didn't want to exacerbate things. He also thought that the Treatise might ease the way for the publication of the Ethics, which in many respects is a more radical work. The Treatise was published without his name on the COVID and even with the false publisher and city on the COVID And so the authorities, because it was published written in Latin, the authorities could say, well, look, we don't really know who the author is, so we can't do anything about this. Even though the Church was pressing them to ban the book, which eventually they did. And by the early 1670s, the backlash against the Treatise was so strong that Spinoza realized that he couldn't. There was no room to publish. The Ethics he couldn't do would have made things even worse. And so it was left among the papers when he died, and his friends, shortly after his death, published the Ethics along with other unpublished writings. Now, what's interesting is that before Spinoza died, in fact, one of his friends who had a copy of the manuscript of the Ethics was in Rome, and that copy eventually ended up in the hands of the Roman Inquisition, and it was placed on the index of prohibited books. So by that point, Spinoza had been condemned by the Catholic Church and not just the Dutch Reformed Church.
- [31:29]
Abe Silberstein
Your book begins and ends with Pierre Bela's description of Spinoza as, quote, the greatest atheist there ever was. I think you convincingly show that Bela may have intended a double meaning to greatest, and that he was both condemning Spinoza's extraordinary heresies, but also affirming, through the example of Spinoza, the possibility of living a good life without recourse to superstition. Might this be Spinoza's enduring contribution to thought?
- [32:01]
Steven Nadler
Well, I do think you're right that BAAL always writes with multiple meanings.
- [32:08]
Abe Silberstein
And
- [32:10]
Steven Nadler
BAAL was no fan of Spinoza's philosophy, that's for sure. But he also held Spinoza up as the model of the virtuous atheist. Part of Baal's point is that people's lives are not led according to their beliefs, they're led according to their feelings. And so whether or not one believes in God or not, whether or not one believes in God or, you know, the Abrahamic God, the providential God, really has no bearing on one's morality. There are evil atheists and there are virtuous atheists, but there are also evil believers, evil people of faith and virtuous people of faith. It's not your intellectual ideas that determine how you act, it's your desires and your feelings, your character.
- [33:02]
Abe Silberstein
Yeah, and in reading Spinoza, I don't exactly recall where, but he does seem to suggest in places that even if something is a belief, belief is superstitious for a certain kind of person that might lead them to virtue. And in that case, there is certainly nothing wrong with it in their personal life.
- [33:22]
Steven Nadler
That's true. In fact, in the theological, political trias. I mean, he's aware that not everybody is going to become a philosopher. In fact, most people are not going to become philosophers. And so they're not going to be led to virtuous lives through reason. And the intellectual, the philosopher, acts virtuously and treats his or her fellow human beings with just in charity, because they know rationally, through intellectual ideas, that it's in their own best interest to do so. And so the virtue of the philosopher or the philosophically inclined person is well grounded in reason. But because most people are not philosophers, they're not going to be led to virtuous lives through reason. So they have to be inspired to virtuous lives through the imagination. That is through edifying narratives, storytelling like they find in the Hebrew Bible. And so Spinoza lays out what he calls the seven doctrines of universal faith. And these are seven principles, mostly about God, which, if one believes them, one will act virtuously. That is, one will obey God's command to love others and treat them with justice and kindness. And if one does not believe them, one cannot so act. So these principles of universal faith are both necessary and sufficient for obedience to God's word, God's command to love others. It doesn't follow that each of these seven principles is philosophically true. People will interpret them as they will. And Spinoza explicitly says it doesn't matter whether belief is true or false, as long as it moves you towards justice and loving kindness.
- [35:14]
Abe Silberstein
Thank you. To conclude, on a more biographical note, I'm interested in what attracted you as a scholar to Spinoza. You wrote your PhD dissertation on, I think it was Arnaud's theory of perception, a study of the Cartesian philosophy, philosophy of ideas. And of course, Spinoza is an interlocutor opponent of Descartes during the 17th century. And for my part, as a teenager growing up during the latter years of the New Atheist period, and dissatisfied with, let's just say, the intellectual limitations of the orthodox Judaism of my parents, I naturally gravitated towards Spinoza, but more as a symbol than someone whose work I read. And I'm curious to know where, as a philosopher, you came into contact with. With Spinoza's work.
- [36:02]
Steven Nadler
So it's true that my early work was on Cartesianism, that is, the philosophy of Descartes, in the 17th century. And it was, you know, it was fairly technical stuff about philosophy of mind, the theory of ideas, the theory of knowledge, and issues around causation. What is. What is a causal relationship? What does it mean to say that one thing causes another? Once I got tenure, though, and then also, at around the same time, had children, I decided that if I was going to squirrel myself away from my kids rather than play with them and write something, it should be for something that makes a more substantial contribution and gets read by more than 12 other people in my field. But I wanted to continue to work on philosophy in the 17th century, but I also wanted to work on something closer to my own Jewish heritage. So I noticed that there had never been a biography of Spinoza. I noticed as well, or I thought
- [37:02]
Abe Silberstein
as well, that's fairly shocking by the 1980s or so that there hadn't been.
- [37:07]
Steven Nadler
Yeah, I mean, there have been biographical studies, but no, no, you know, cradle to grave, Full, full length study in any language. But, you know, there was a good deal of biographical material and there were some early biographical works in the 19th century, but so much had been discovered in the 20th century about the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam, documents were uncovered that we knew a lot more, especially by the 1980s, we knew a lot more about the environment in which Spinoza was born and raised. So I figured, you know, knowing that people do like to read biographies, even if they don't like to read philosophy. Spinoza was, even outside of academia, a well known figure. And a biography of, so biography of Spinoza might get read by more than 12 other people. And it was also an opportunity to devote my study to a matter of Jewish intellectual history. And then the more I studied Spinoza, the more committed I got to him in the sense that I thought, okay, well, Spinoza got it right. You know, I think there's something heroic and true about Spinoza and his philosophy, and I still enjoy studying Descartes and Leibniz and other 17th century thinkers, but it's. My attitude towards him is very different. It's not. There's not a kind of fellowship I feel with them that I feel with Spinoza.
- [38:35]
Abe Silberstein
Stephen Naylor, thank you so much for coming on today to discuss your book and your career in writing on Spinoza.
- [38:43]
Steven Nadler
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
- [38:44]
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