Spinoza, Life and Legacy




Jonathan I. Israel
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2023. 1313 pp. $ 49.95
ISBN 978-0-19-885748-8

Reviewed by Vesa Oittinen

About the reviewer
Vesa Oittinen is Professor emeritus at Aleksanteri Institute/University of Helsinki. …


Several Spinoza biographies have been published since Jacob Freudenthal’s classical exposition of which the most recent have been those by Gullan-Whur (1998) and Nadler (1999). But Jonathan Israel’s tour-de-force outdoes them all, not only by its sheer volume (over 1300 pages!) especially thanks to its meticulous survey of Spinoza’s background, the Dutch political history, and his intellectual life in the seventeenth century. As Israel himself notes in the preface to his book, ‘there cannot be a comprehensive biography of Spinoza not enmeshed in analysis of the deep-seated religious and political tensions and conflicts of the Dutch Golden Age as well as the central issues debated by its philosophers, scientists, religious leaders and statesmen’ (v).

Israel’s biography offers a plethora of detailed information so that the reader might think that this is the definitive biography of Spinoza, after which there remains at most only some minutiae to add. However, so admirable Israel’s prestation is, one gets the impression that the main hero of the story is not Spinoza, but Spinoza’s age. There are long passages in which Israel deviates for tens of pages to descript phenomena of secondary importance without mentioning Spinoza at all. He gives an excellent picture of the epoch, which forms the background for understanding Spinoza’s thought, but does not delve very deep in the actual philosophical problematics we encounter in his works. Maybe it is too much demanded that he should do both things; all depends on what one expects from a biography. The book proceeds in chronological order and explains Spinoza’s intellectual development in exchange with his political and social milieu.

What astonishes the reader positively is that Israel has found so much to tell about Spinoza’s personal circumstances. The common opinion yet today is that Spinoza was a loner who led a secluded life with few if any notable events. The more recent research has already begun to dismantle this picture of a solitary Jew in the fringe of the established society, but Israel manages to crush the legend convincingly. As he remarks, Spinoza ‘was an activist believing revolutionary sedition in certain circumstances and places’ where there already existed a tradition of restricting the monarchical power, as in the Netherlands.

There is an antinomy in Spinoza’s political thought: on the one side, a democratic conviction and antipathy to monarchy and religious authority, but on the other side, the insight that there does not exist a revolutionary subject mature enough to carry out the desired changes dictated by reason in the political and social structures. According to Spinoza, most of the people, the so-called multitudo, were more or less incapable to grasp the truth of philosophy and thus their own true interests. The irrational ‘multitude’ should, therefore, be excluded as far as possible from the revolutionary scenario Spinoza proposes (109-110). A standard Marxist interpretation of this situation would be that the Dutch capitalism, in the 17th century still at its mercantile stage, was not yet developed sufficiently to produce its gravedigger, the proletariat. Indeed, this is the position that for example many Soviet scholars have taken. But Israel is not a Marxist and so he acquiesces with leaving the problem open. However, Israel is quite right in viewing the multitudo as a problem for Spinoza, as an obstacle on the way to a rational politics for obtaining the common good. The contrary interpretation of the multitudo as an active, unmediated and revolutionary collective subject, made famous by Antonio Negri, is clearly too optimistic. Spinoza would not have shared it, in every case not after he had in 1672 experienced the bestial lynching of the de Witt brothers by an infuriated mob. The story goes that Spinoza would have rushed to the scene of the atrocity and post up a placard with the text Ultimi barbarorum, but was prevented by his landlord Van der Spijck, who was afraid of the consequences (884).

The problematic perspectives of a democracy in 17th century Netherlands explain quite sufficiently why Spinoza restricted his activities in a smaller circle of congenial enlightened friends. This began in the 1650s, when Spinoza was ‘embarking on the most decisive and formative phase of his life’ (328). His Latin teacher Franciscus van den Enden was one of the central figures at this early stage. Spinoza discussed his philosophical ideas with other members of the ‘collegium’ (as it was called in Latin). A letter from his friend Simon de Vries from 1663 attests that the circle was reading the propositions of a text which was to become Spinoza’s main work, the Ethics. However, after his death in 1677, the publishers of his Opera posthuma decided that it is advisable to conceal the existence of such a radical group. Undoubtely, this move did contribute to the later legend of Spinoza as a reclusive thinker.

It is important to know this background of Spinoza’s philosophy, since it gives us new keys to its interpretation. The standard reading of the Ethics has seen in it a metaphysical theory starting from general definitions concerning God, His attributes, the human mind, and proceeding from these to more specific questions of philosophy. Already Leibniz took this stance. His correspondence reveals that he was very curious to get the manuscript of the Ethics yet before it was printed, and when he finally received the book, his sole interest was focused on the two ‘metaphysical’ initial parts of the Ethics. Of the remaining three parts, which dealt with the right way of life and human freedom, he made no notes at all. It is apparent that Spinoza’s final goal was not to focus on metaphysics as an end in itself. The two first parts of the Ethics deliver only a sketch of the general principles, on the basis of which Spinoza was able to develop his radical vision of human emancipation and freedom under the guidance of reason. This fact explains why there are so many lacunae and open questions in Spinoza’s metaphysics which have embarrassed later scholars – in fact, already Leibniz was embarrassed and noted: ‘une étrange Métaphysique, pleine de paradoxes’ (a strange metaphysics, full of paradoxes).

The primacy of practical philosophy is further seen in the fact that Spinoza interrupted his work on the Ethics in 1665. This earlier, incomplete version of the Ethics consisted of three parts instead of the five in the final makeup. The reason for the interruption of work on theoretical philosophy was the outbreak of a war between England and the United Provinces, which led Spinoza to ‘fix his new focus on politics, how to secure social stability and theology’s role in the society’ (510). Spinoza was ‘keenly aware … that monarchical tyranny allied to contempt for the toleration and republican system of the Dutch now imperiously dominted the European scene, laying toleration, freedom of expression, and republican thinking under siege’ (515). These considerations moved him to begin to write a book on the foundations of human society, on which he worked the latter half of the 1660s. The book was finally published in 1670 with the title Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, anonymously and with a fictitious publisher’s name. The book received a ‘double response’: immediately after its publication it was furiously condemned by political and ecclesiastical authorities, but soon it proved that to refute Spinoza’s arguments was much more difficult than expected. ‘Whole armies of theologians at home and abroad failed to come up with anything concrete or scathing in reply’ (774). Even such a non-ordinary mind as Leibniz was deeply alarmed because he could not find convincing counter arguments against Spinoza’s ideas.

What, then, did Tractatus teach? The book is a critique of religious intolerance, in which Spinoza uses above all the early history of the Jews as an example. His thorough knowledge of Hebrew renders authority to his analyses of the passages from the Old Testament, on which he builds his argumentation. The Tractatus presents the same philosophical ideas as the yet unpublished Ethics: the Holy Scripture must be interpreted only in the light of reason, and so it turns out that there are no miracles nor supernatural things, but everything in the world obeys only the laws of nature. God does not want or aspire anything, but acts only according to the laws of his own nature. The people, however, have all kinds of prejudices and false ideas concerning God and religion, and so the task arises to make them conscious of the precepts of reason. Further, Spinoza insisted that democracy is the best type of government.

Already at the outset when the Tractatus was published, many readers thought that Spinoza’s theory of the state or the commonwealth is similar to that of Hobbes. This was understandable, since Hobbesian ideas were courant in the Dutch republican milieu of the age. However, as Israel notes, a closer look reveals a wide gulf between Spinoza and Hobbes. Although Hobbes famously defined religion as a form of superstition approved by the state, he never explicitely rejected the idea of revelation and thought that the Bible is divinely inspired. Further differences can be discerned in the political philosophy. For Spinoza, only those who act according to reason can be called free, whereas for Hobbes the freedom consists of absence of personal constraint. Where Hobbes has a negative concept of freedom, Spinoza has a positive one.

It is a pity that Israel seems not to know Remo Bodei’s excellent book Geometria delle passioni (1991), where the comparison between Hobbes and Spinoza is carried further than Israel does, but quite in the same spirit. As Bodei shows, Spinoza’s views on the commonwealth and the perspectives of human agency are a direct antithesis to what Hobbes teaches. Spinoza is optimistic as to the perspective of human liberation. We are not hopelessly chained to our passions, since ‘the human mind can have adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God’ (Eth. II prop. 47) and thus has the possibility to overcome false ideas and illusions. Hobbes for his part thinks of men as nasty beasts struggling against each other and concludes that only the iron hand of a monarchical rule can keep in line the destructive impulses coming from the human nature itself. These different ‘anthropologies’ have, as Bodei notes, palpable practical consequences. For Spinoza, the state exists in order to guarantee the liberty of its members; for Hobbes, the state is there to engender fear.

An interesting claim made by Israel is that it was Spinoza, not Rousseau as generally assumed, who first coined the concept of ‘general will’ as one of the keys to his entire system (760). This claim can insofar be substantiated as for Spinoza it was the Reason that defined the ‘common good’, which often was not in concord with the individual wills determined by all kinds of passions and illusions but all the members of the society should follow it . However, the reader becomes soon aware that Israel has a strong bias against Rousseau, a bias known already from his earlier works on the history of the Enlightenment. He notes that Rousseau had taken his concept of volonté générale from Spinoza via Diderot, but accuses him that this form of general will is not based on reason as in Spinoza, but ‘on common sentiment, the instinct and feelings of the people’ (768). It remains unclear how big the difference between Spinoza and Rousseau actually is in this case, since Spinoza, too, insisted in Tractatus that the political leaders have to use the products of imagination as tools in order to steer the people’s opinion towards rational forms of conduct.

In discussing Rousseau’s ideas Israel comes to assert Spinoza’s importance for the subsequent European history of ideas. Spinoza’s ‘general will’ is purely secular and materialist in the same manner as expounded by Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, Condorcet, Destutt de Tracy and Volney (766). We come here to Israel’s well-known thesis that there exists two main currents in the Enlightenment thought of the 18th century: the moderate and the radical Enlightenment. While for example the English empirists Locke and Hume belonged to the moderate wing, the names just listed form the tradition of radical Enlightenment. The singularity of Israel’s position consists in the claim that Spinoza, and almost exclusively Spinoza, is the progenitor of radical Enlightenment ideas. In his previous books Israel has put forth this thesis with a great pondus, but in his Spinoza biography he has somewhat toned down the claims. Nevertheless, Spinoza was ‘the prime framer of the terms and concepts forming the underground opposition to the mainstream Enlightenment’ (1206). His critique of religion and insistence on rationality had ‘an undeniable centrality in the European Early Enlightenment’, although modern scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge it (1211).

This assertion is problematic at least in two ways. First, there is the risk that if all important innovations of the Enlightenment thought are reduced to Spinoza’s thoughts, he grows to such an overtowering figure in the modern history of ideas that it does not respond to the real historical facts. Already the existence of the radical circles of free thinkers in which Spinoza participated and which Israel himself describes in extenso, tell the story that the radical ideas that formed the foundation of next century Enlightenment were in much result of a collective work. Furthermore,Israel understands the radical Enlightenment in a peculiarly restricted way. Not only Rousseau is excluded, but even the Jacobins of the French Revolution — Robespierre and Saint-Just have, according to him, nothing to do with Enlightenment at all. From the names of the representants of the radical Enlightenment he lists it becomes soon obvious that they are representative above all for the Girondist fraction during the French Revolution, that is, the bourgeoisie. Should we really conclude from this that Spinoza is the philosopher of the bourgeoisie only?

4 April 2024

ReferencesRemo Bodei 2018 Geometry of the Passions Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Jacob Freudenthal 1927 Spinoza. Leben und Lehre Oxford: Oxford University Press
Margaret Gullan-Whur 1998 With Reason: A Life of Spinoza London: St. Martin’s Press
Steven Nadler 1999 Spinoza: A Life Cambridge: Cambridge University Press


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21452_spinoza-life-and-legacy-by-jonathan-i-israel-reviewed-by-vesa-oittinen/