Turning the focus from Spinoza’s oft-analyzed Theologico-Political Treatise, this book has at its heart a nuanced analysis of his theory of human nature in the Ethics. Viewing this work in contrast to Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, it makes clear that Spinoza can no longer be thought of as the founder of modern Jewish identity, nor should Maimonides be thought of as having paved the way for a modern secular worldview. Maimonides and Spinoza dramatically revises our understanding of both philosophers.
Turning the focus from Spinoza’s oft-analyzed Theologico-Political Treatise, this book has at its heart a nuanced analysis of his theory of human nature in the Ethics. Viewing this work in contrast to Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, it makes clear that Spinoza can no longer be thought of as the founder of modern Jewish identity, nor should Maimonides be thought of as having paved the way for a modern secular worldview. Maimonides and Spinoza dramatically revises our understanding of both philosophers.
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Overview
Turning the focus from Spinoza’s oft-analyzed Theologico-Political Treatise, this book has at its heart a nuanced analysis of his theory of human nature in the Ethics. Viewing this work in contrast to Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed, it makes clear that Spinoza can no longer be thought of as the founder of modern Jewish identity, nor should Maimonides be thought of as having paved the way for a modern secular worldview. Maimonides and Spinoza dramatically revises our understanding of both philosophers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226645742 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Maimonides and Spinoza
Their Conflicting Views of Human NatureBy JOSHUA PARENS
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2012 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-64574-2
Chapter One
Desire (Shahwa) and Spiritedness (Ghadab) vs. Conatus
Spinoza's conception of conatus has long been viewed as highly novel and as central to his teaching in the Ethics. When one casts the mind's eye over Maimonides's oeuvre, no comparable term takes on such saliency. As the endeavor to exist (E 3p6), conatus is more than the tendency of human being to preserve itself and more than the tendency of human being to conceive ideas. Indeed, conatus, like Nietzsche's will to power after it, manifests itself in the most primitive kinds of beings (even what we would call "inanimate" beings) and in the highest activities of the most complex beings (such as Spinoza's putative metaphysical search for "salvation"). Conatus is the force "behind" all being and becoming—which really is to say that it is that force itself. Ultimately, conatus is the efficient cause of all activity whether viewed physically, metaphysically, or epistemologically. no term takes on comparable saliency in Maimonides because no single term or force plays so many roles in his thought. In other words, he does not seek a unifying principle—as opposed to a unifying first cause, God. Spinoza's method of inquiry and conception of the sciences go a long way toward guaranteeing the discovery of such a principle. The love of or longing for God plays an important, even a central role in Maimonides's thought. Yet Maimonides would resist the Spinozist insinuation that the highest form of love of God is an extraordinarily complex version of an endeavor to preserve oneself (cf. E 3p7 with 5pp3, 7, 5). Indeed, of an endeavor or desire to preserve oneself Maimonides says very little.
Part of the reason Maimonides does not seek a unifying principle such as conatus is that he does not view the sciences as so radically unified as does Spinoza. Like Aristotle, Maimonides places a premium on the differences between the sciences, as dictated by the difference in character of their various objects of inquiry, and the related need to approach them in the proper order. Aristotle often warns his readers not to expect the sciences to be undertaken in the same manner or according to the same method, or to be capable of achieving the same precision. on more than one occasion in the Guide, Maimonides states or hints that his student, Joseph ben Judah, needs to approach his studies in a more orderly fashion—first logic, then mathematics, then natural science (or physics), then divine science (or metaphysics) (epistle Dedicatory and 1.34). one of Joseph's most revealing failings is his having leapt over physics to pursue metaphysics prematurely. Although Spinoza might be thought to be a great proponent of orderly inquiry, based on the putatively rigid synthetic structure of the Ethics, he cannot be said to advocate the orderly study of sciences whose independence needs, at certain crucial junctures, to be maintained rigorously. on the contrary, the Ethics fulfills Descartes's early ambition to discover the mathesis universalis. Spinoza's was the first modern work to include physics, metaphysics, and ethics, so to speak, under one roof. For this reason, the Ethics is often referred to as containing Spinoza's "system"—even though this word was first popularized by Leibniz. (Just how much integration of the sciences Spinoza was able to achieve will become apparent especially in chapter 3.) An important result of Spinoza's pursuit of a universal method was the discovery of conatus, as a universal (proximate efficient) causal principle. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the method alone drove the discovery of it. on the contrary, Spinoza seems to have been aware of the mutual dependence of a unitary method and a unitary causal principle. Whether Maimonides or Aristotle was aware that the lack of such a method would tend to yield the lack of such a causal principle is less apparent. nevertheless, that seems to have been the case for them.
For now, we must set aside these issues of method and causality, to which we will return in chapter 3. The central concern of this work is to compare and contrast Maimonides's and Spinoza's views of human nature. We must also turn from Spinoza's conception of conatus to consider the closest parallel to conatus in Maimonides's understanding of the human realm. As I have already suggested, the closest parallel is more multifaceted than conatus. At a minimum, Maimonides sees in human being two related but irreducible, primary components, desire (shahwa) and anger or spiritedness (ghadab) (3.8, p. 434, 13a). Although spiritedness tends to result from frustrated desire, the former is not reducible to the latter. Here, again, Maimonides is no stranger to the Greek philosophic tradition. The greatest challenge for Plato and Aristotle in the human realm was the education of love (eros) and spiritedness (thumos). Indeed, the general continuity of Maimonides's views on love and spiritedness with those of his predecessors accounts, at least in part, for the lack of a salient parallel to Spinoza's conatus.
Although conatus is so salient in Spinoza's Ethics, it appears relatively late in that work (E 3pp6–9). In contrast, the challenge and promise posed by human love or longing appears from the very beginning of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed. From the opening lines of the epistle Dedicatory, Maimonides highlights the challenge posed not only by human longing in general but also by the longing of Joseph ben Judah for knowledge in particular. The educative character of the Guide, evident in both its epistolary form and its very puzzling character, appears from the very first. Many have joked that the Guide leads into perplexity as much as out of it. Far fewer realize just how difficult it is to induce the right kind of perplexity in the right kind of audience. Perhaps as few realize that perplexity leads to nothing more than frustration if it is motivated by anything less than an intense desire for knowledge. only the consummate educator, an educator such as Maimonides, is capable of both educating his audience and enabling that same audience to inquire into the very heart of education itself, namely, the desire to know.
The Ethics cannot be said to burn with the fire of the Guide. It has been described aptly as cool or even cold. This should come as little surprise both because of its geometric form and because of the long delay in arriving at the core teaching, conatus. Unlike the Guide, the Ethics strives for the compulsory character of deductive argument. As I will explain later in greater depth, following Richard Kennington, Spinoza demonstrates through his Descartes's "Principles of Philosophy" that deductive or synthetic argument is intended to compel assent. Part 1 of the Ethics is devoted almost solely to compelling readers to accept new meanings for the old key terms of the Scholastic tradition. Beginning in part 2, Spinoza starts to show some of his cards in what David Lachterman first called the "Physical Digression," which I will refer to as the Physical Treatise (the material following E p13s and preceding 2p14). Not until part 3, the center of the work, however, does he bring out into the open his central concept, conatus. His project in the Ethics is not educational in any traditional, dialogic sense. Rather, in a complex scheme to win acceptance, Spinoza evinces his own view that knowledge is less a matter of desire, love, and persuasion than a matter of compulsion and force. His reader can be won over to his view of conatus only through a many-phased battle. The old erotic, educative story about philosophy must be supplanted by a far colder and "more realistic" story: love of wisdom is the endeavor to preserve oneself, even if by other, more complex means.
How love can be reinterpreted as endeavor (conatus) is one of the challenges of the Ethics. Indeed, were one to trust common sense at all, one might wonder whether such a thing were conceivable. How can something as apparently teleological as love be reinterpreted nonteleologically as endeavor? It should come as little surprise that Spinoza attempts just such an inversion of common sense within the opening presentation of conatus (3pp6–9). There he argues that we believe mistakenly that we desire things because they appear good to us. In fact, we judge or deem things good because we desire or tend toward them—by instinct, as we moderns say (3p9s). The pattern for such an inversion of common sense had already been set forth as early as Ethics 1app, in the subversion of teleology—which brings us to another element of our argument, at least as important as the matters of method and causality discussed above. In the appendix to part , Spinoza argues that not only do we project teleology upon the rest of nature but also the belief in our own teleological character derives from our ignorance of the true (at least in part, nonconscious) causes of our own actions (cf. E 1app with 3p2s and 4pr). Maimonides's teleological understanding of love is complemented by his understanding of spiritedness or anger. As for Plato and Aristotle, eros seems to require thumos as a complement. Anger is too directly opposed to love to be derived directly from it, even if anger arises in the wake of frustrated love. In contrast, for Spinoza, the demise of a teleological conception of love will at least temper the proclivity of spiritedness or anger to being inflamed by love (especially of the beautiful). Love and spiritedness can be traced back to a common root, conatus; they both aid in preservation, especially of the individual but also of the species. Ironically, spiritedness is more easily reduced to conatus than is love. one could go so far as to say that conatus (like the will to power) is thumotic. As the endeavor to preserve itself, conatus tends inevitably to thrust outward and assert itself.
Spinoza depends upon the disjunction between love and conatus to insinuate conatus only very subtly and indirectly into his account of the highest kinds of love—above all, amor Dei intellectualis. Without this large gap between our commonsense view of love and the conception of love Spinoza puts in its place, he could never have acquired the romantic moniker "God intoxicated." even though Spinoza was not a romantic, he sought to perpetuate the image of the contemplative life as filled with erotic longing for the divine. How else could he hope to win over the Scholastic opponents of Cartesianism? Certainly, he could not by a forthright repudiation of the premodern image of the contemplative life any more than Descartes had.
We need to clarify why Spinoza would adopt such a counterintuitive understanding of love as endeavor. Lest we become confused by the details, I will state preliminarily that the reduction of love to endeavor, which renders love in a sense more thumotic than in the traditional erotic conception of love, is indispensable in defusing religious intolerance. Once again, common sense is undermined: Refashioning love in the image of spiritedness appears intended to reduce spiritedness. And as a corollary, if all thoughts and affects (especially both anger and love) can be traced to this common root, conatus, then religious tolerance is enhanced. Why doesn't Spinoza's more thumotic view of human desire make human beings more intolerant? Again, I offer a preliminary explanation, based on Spinoza's most explicit attack on premodern views on love or on the objects of love, namely, the premodern objects of intellectual inquiry, the forms. According to Spinoza, ideas and universals lack reality. They arise because the imagination is overwhelmed by the sheer multiplicity of particulars (E 2p40s1). Ideas such as those of beauty or the beautiful and the good are surely more problematic than forms such as those of dog and cat. Few things fuel spiritedness or anger quite as much as the love of the beautiful or noble. Perhaps Spinoza promotes the reduction of all appetites to conatus because only by doing so can he undercut that which inflames anger, namely, love of (images) of beauty or nobility. A great deal must be argued before one can even begin to find plausible the Spinozist claim that human beings are moved, not as they imagine themselves to be by erotic desire toward objects of desire as final causes, but ultimately by more or less complex forms of conatus.
As one might have expected, Maimonides's approach conforms more readily to common sense. He seeks to regulate, guide, and shape both love and spiritedness. He does not, however, insinuate either that love is merely deceptively teleological or that love is aimed primarily at illusory images. To do so would be to court the very weakening of religion at which Spinoza aims. Rather than deny the reality of love's objects, Maimonides seeks to reorient love from lower to higher objects. Rather than undermine spiritedness by eliminating its fuel in love of the beautiful, Maimonides guides us from lower imitations of the beautiful to higher ones, or from beauty toward the good. Aiming at higher objects is different from claiming that objects of love (understood as teleological objects) are as such illusory. In addition to changing the objects of love that one pursues, Maimonides acknowledges the inherent proclivity of desire toward excess. Indeed, the greatest root of evil in human life is not anything external—neither natural disasters nor the hostility of one group against another—but the individual's excessive desire (Guide 3.12, p. 445).
Although Spinoza cannot help but acknowledge that individuals are prone to excessive desire (cf. E 4pp43–4 with 3p11), his stress shifts from individuals' proclivity toward excess to the hostility of groups. Conatus, which follows pleasure as a rough and ready guide toward preservation, is less inclined toward "infinite" excess than is desire in Maimonides's more erotic account. According to Spinoza, many desires that appear excessive are so more because of the misguidance of the imagination than because of conatus as such. And if excess can be cured by a correction of the imagination, surely one of the gravest dangers of human life is that posed by religion, which, according to Spinoza, traffics in the inadequate ideas of imagination. (In contrast, Maimonides sees religion as the great ally of reason in curbing a natural tendency toward infinite excess in human beings.) In other words, according to Spinoza, the greatest root of evil in human life is less individual desire than the inflammation those desires undergo at the hands of communal images or illusions, known as "prejudices." (Even within Spinoza one can begin to see the outlines of doctrines such as Rousseau's perfectibility, which should not come as a great surprise since the seeds for it are already present in Machiavelli's reconception of human nature.) Human existence is torn asunder less by any inherent tendency of individual desire than by the corrupting influence of society. As soon as the failings of desire are linked more to the imagination than to desire itself, the prospect of an external savior for human failings becomes more plausible. As soon as the individual ceases to be the primary root of his own suffering, the causal burden for suffering shifts to the community and its conventions, and fantastic possibilities for amelioration of the human condition begin to appear on the horizon. History with a capital "H" lurks within the transformation of desire from a teleological appetite prone, in human beings, to excess to a self-preservative power, combative though it may be, which lacks an inherent tendency toward excess.
Now that we have a rough sketch of the opposition between Maimonides and Spinoza on love and spiritedness versus conatus, let us take a closer look at Maimonides's approach to desire, love, or longing, especially in the Guide. For the sake of orienting our inquiry, I begin by previewing the conclusion of his book. By the end of the Guide, passionate love ('ishq/hosheq) of God proves to be the most worthy human passion (3.51, p. 627). Maimonides notes in passing that such love follows upon knowledge of God (p. 621). Exactly what knowledge is required or even possible, especially when it comes to God, cannot be uncovered upon a first reading of the Guide. Upon a first reading, however, one is struck by the at least apparently irreconcilable alternatives: the unknowable and un- (or at least very rarely) speakable YHVH of the so-called negative theology (1.52–62) vs. the knowable Aristotelian god (1.68–69). The requirement that knowledge precede love could be said to be the watchword of Maimonides's approach to love. It is highlighted by the very structure of the Mishneh Torah: volume is the Book of Knowledge, volume 2 is the Book of Love (Ahavah). And Maimonides concludes the Book of Knowledge with the same claim we have found at the end of the Guide. As sensible as the suggestion that love follows upon knowledge might seem, it needs to be compared with the more obviously biblical suggestion that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Maimonides and Spinoza by JOSHUA PARENS Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionChapter 1. Desire (Shāhwa) and Spiritedness (Ghadab) vs. Conatus
Chapter 2. Veneration vs. Equality
Chapter 3. Forms vs. Laws of Nature
Chapter 4. Freedom vs. Determinism
Chapter 5. Teleology vs. Imagined Ideal
Chapter 6. Prudence vs. Imagination
Epilogue
Appendix: Richard Kennington’s Spinoza and Esotericism in Spinoza’s Thought
Index