Spinoza’s Christology A Brief Summary

Abstract

This article summarizes a number of Spinoza texts relating to his Christology and soteriology based on his Christology. The texts show that Spinoza’s Christology underpins his formulation of human nature or the constitution of the essence of the human mind. Considering Spinoza’s texts concerning God or Nature, “Christ according to the spirit”, the spirit or mind of Christ, and human salvation or blessedness; this article illustrates that given the texts, the study of Spinoza’s Christian religion is skewed and ought to be more balanced. The author’s reading of Spinoza and its application to his work presented in this article provides a coherent and tenable understanding of Spinoza’s efforts “to commend and establish the authentic purpose of the Christian Religion”.     

Mixing Bodily Fluids: Hobbes’s Stoic God

The pantheon of seventeenth-century European philosophy includes some remarkably heterodox deities, perhaps most famously Spinoza’s deus-sive-natura. As in ethics and natural philosophy, early modern philosophical theology drew inspiration from classical sources outside the mainstream of Christianized Aristotelianism, such as the highly immanentist, naturalistic theology of Greek and Roman Stoicism. While the Stoic background to Spinoza’s pantheist God has been more thoroughly explored, I maintain that Hobbes’s corporeal God is the true modern heir to the Stoic theology. The Stoic and Hobbesian gods are necessitarian, entirely corporeal, and thoroughly intermixed with ordinary bodies, while also supremely intelligent, providential, and good. And both gods serve as the ultimate source of diversity and change in a material world divested of Aristotelian forms and causes. Unfortunately, scholars on both sides of the long debate about the sincerity of Hobbes’s theism have not taken very seriously his late articulation of a corporeal theology. One probable reason for this dismissive attitude is a lack of thorough investigation of the historical precedents for such an unusual godhead available to Hobbes. The first part of this article attempts to establish a close congruence between the Stoic and Hobbesian gods. The second part traces the likely sources for Hobbes’s Stoic theology in his intellectual context.     

The presence of Spinoza in the exchanges between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland1

Although Freud recognized his profound affinity with Spinoza, we seldom find explicit and direct references to the philosopher in his works. The correspondence between Romain Rolland, the ‘Christian without a church’, and Freud, the ‘atheist Jew’, is full of Spinozian reminiscences that nourish their works of this period and are underpinned by their mutual transference. The Future of an Illusion is written according to a Spinozian blueprint and aims at replacing religion, qualified as superstition, by psychoanalysis. A quotation from Heine, ‘brother in unbelief’, is a direct reference to Spinoza. Concurring with Freud’s critiques of dogmas and churches, Rolland proposes an analysis of the ‘oceanic feeling’ as a basis of the religious sentiment. Freud replies with Civilization and Its Discontents. In 1936, on the occasion of Rolland’s 70th birthday, Freud sends him an open letter, A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis, where the strange feeling that he has experienced in front of the Parthenon refers inter alia to his double culture: Jewish and German. In the light of this correspondence, the creation of psychoanalysis turns out to be a quest for the sacred that has disappeared in modernity; Freud, though, was able to find it inside man’s unconscious.     

Part IV: Prophecy,Knowledge and Study of Religion

The historical connection between the study of the Bible and the study of religion is examined through Spinoza's application of his anthropomorphic theory of religion to his analysis of biblicalprophecy. Drawing on current epistemological discussion, Spinoza shows in the Ethics how the pervasive anthropomorphism of popular explanations of the world, rooted in imagination, develops into religious systems. This theory informs Spinoza's analysis of biblical prophecy in his Treatise, in which he displaces the philosophical hermeneutic of Maimonides in favor of an historical-critical analysis. The result is a consistency of method—historical, critical, comparative — between his study of the Bible and the study of religion generally.     

Spinoza on the Conditions that Nominally Define the Human Condition

ABSTRACT

In ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,’ Harry Frankfurt argues that a successful analysis of the concept ‘human’ must reveal something that distinguishes humans from non-humans, as well as indicate something informative about ‘those attributes [of ourselves] which are the subject of our most humane concern.’ In this paper, I present an analysis of Spinoza’s concept of ‘human’ as it is employed within his Ethics. I show that Spinoza’s concept of ‘human’ satisfies Frankfurt’s desiderata because I show that Spinoza’s concept of ‘human’ is, at core, a version of Frankfurt’s own. I argue that Spinoza’s account of human bondage and human freedom indicate that Spinoza sees humans as beings that possess higher-order volitions, and that comments Spinoza makes throughout his corpus shows that he views beings that lack higher order desires to be, in an important sense, non-human. The analysis here sheds light upon the community of entities that Spinoza’s Ethics is written for, as well as upon issues concerning the nature of Spinoza’s Free Man.     

EARLY SIKH HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this paper I explore how ‘doxa’ has influenced the historical study of medieval and early modern Sikhism. In particular the paper focuses on the reign of Guru Hargobind and his intellectual contest with his cousin and spiritual rival, Miharvan. The contest between Hargobind and Miharvan demonstrates how medieval Sikh society was not conveniently divided into ‘orthodox’ and ‘unorthodox’ sections. Rather, the Sikh community was influenced by a variety of socio-economic, political and intellectual factors that affected the way in which the community thought about Sikhism. Moreover, the paper examines how dialogical readings of primary sources can enable scholars to develop a more dynamic historical understanding of early Sikhism.     

Schiller and the Dance of Beauty∗

In the first volume of his Spinoza and Other Heretics entitled The Marrano of Reason, Yovel proposes a different cultural context for the study of Spinoza: the Marrano mentalité. Living as crypto‐Jews in a Catholic Iberian world, the Marranos developed a certain life‐style that had specific religious and literary modes of expression: heterodox tendencies, the use of equivocation, and the zealous search for salvation, which often assumed secular forms. These Marrano traits are, Yovel claims, found in Spinoza as well, who was the son of a Marrano and brought up in the Marrano milieu of the Amsterdam Jewish quarter. In this essay I challenge this interpretation of Spinoza by stressing both the generally orthodox character of Marrano religiosity and the significant differences between Spinoza and the few Marrano heretics by whom he was supposedly influenced. I argue that Spinoza not only rejected Marrano orthodoxy but was already inhabiting an intellectual framework that differed considerably from the marginal deviant Marrano pattern that Yovel focuses upon.     

Questioning mechanism: Fénelon’s oblique Cartesianism

Cartesianism appeared inexorably to produce disparate theoretical tendencies inside itself, and Spinoza’s philosophy was one of the most outrageous and strangest result of those tendencies. This explains why so many Cartesians felt the urge to deal with the thought of the Dutch philosopher, from time to time labelled as ‘monism’, ‘pantheism’, or ‘atheism’. The case of Fénelon, the Quietist theologian, tutor of the Princes of France and brilliant Cartesian philosopher, highlights the difficulties of such an operation. The Archbishop of Cambrai devotes not only various letters to the criticism of Spinoza, but even a whole section of the Démonstration de l’existence de Dieu – his most ambitious work, from a theoretical point of view. For apparently no reason, the Réfutation du spinozisme was inserted in the middle of the second part of the Démonstration, the more specifically philosophical (and Cartesian) section. This paper aims to show how Fénelon actually wanted to criticize Descartes’ radical tendencies by attacking them where they were to be found inside Spinoza, without directly compromising Cartesianism – or, first and foremost, his own ‘apologetic’ Cartesianism.     

A Spinozistic Model of Moral Education

Spinoza’s claim that self-preservation is the foundation of virtue makes for the point of departure of this philosophical investigation into what a Spinozistic model of moral education might look like. It is argued that Spinoza’s metaphysics places constraints on moral education insofar as an educational account would be affected by Spinoza’s denial of the objectivity of moral knowledge, his denial of the existence of free will, and of moral responsibility. This article discusses these challenges in some detail, seeking to construe a credible account of moral education based on the insight that self-preservation is not at odds with benevolence, but that the self-preservation of the teacher is instead conditioned by the intellectual deliberation of the students. However, it is also concluded that while benevolence retains an important place in Spinoza’s ethics, his causal determinism poses a severe threat to a convincing account of moral education insofar as moral education is commonly understood to involve an effort to influence the actions of students relative to some desirable goal.     

Religion and Mestrovic's postemotional society: The manufacturing of religious emotion

Work on the social theory of emotion has been growing in the last decade, but few have considered how these studies relate to the field of religion. This article is a detailed critical examination of the work of the Croatian‐American sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic and his idea of ‘postemotionalism’. It is an exploration of the implications of his work for understanding contemporary manifestations of religion. It first unfolds the context of Mestrovic's work on postemotionalism and then explores the development and meaning of the term. It follows a series of tensions in the concept between spontaneous and produced emotion and seeks to show how postemotionalism fails to consider adequately religious history, which has continually involved the process of repackaging ‘past emotions’. Despite these difficulties, Mestrovic's idea of postemotionalism is seen to provide not only a way to rethink emotion and rationality in religion, but a way of re-conceptualising so-called ‘individual’ religious emotion as part of wider political constructions developed through late capitalistic markets and the technology of mass media. Mestrovic's lack of concern with religion is considered, and the work of the French sociologist of religion Danie` le Hervieu-Le ger on ‘chain memory’ is introduced as a way of illuminating questions of religious tradition, memory and emotion in Mestrovic's work. The final section of the paper considers the ‘revivalist’ developments of Celtic Spirituality as an example of the micro-politics of postemotional religion.     

Pure reason and contemporary philosophy of religion: the rational striving in and for truth

This essay urges contemporary philosophers of religion to rethink the role that Kant’s critical philosophy has played both in establishing the analytic nature of modern philosophy and in developing a critique of reason’s drive for the unconditioned. In particular, the essay demonstrates the contribution that Kant and other modern rationalists such as Spinoza can still make today to our rational striving in and for truth. This demonstration focuses on a recent group of analytic philosophers of religion who have labelled their own work ‘analytic theology’ and have generated new debates, including new arguments about Kant bridging philosophy and theology. Cultivation of a reflective critical openness is encouraged here; this is a practice for checking reason’s overly ambitious claims about God.     

A Tale of Two Thinkers,One Meeting,and Three Degrees of Infinity: Leibniz and Spinoza (1675–8)

The article presents Leibniz's preoccupation (in 1675–6) with the difference between the notion of infinite number, which he regards as impossible, and that of the infinite being, which he regards as possible. I call this issue ‘Leibniz's Problem’ and examine Spinoza's solution to a similar problem that arises in the context of his philosophy. ‘Spinoza's solution’ is expounded in his letter on the infinite (Ep.12), which Leibniz read and annotated in April 1676. The gist of Spinoza's solution is to distinguish between three kinds of infinity and, in particular, between one that applies to substance, and one that applies to numbers, seen as auxiliaries of the imagination. The rest of the paper examines the extent to which Spinoza's solution solves Leibniz's problem. The main thesis I advance is that, when Spinoza and Leibniz say that the divine substance is infinite, in most contexts it is to be understood in non-numerical and non-quantitative terms. Instead, for Spinoza and Leibniz, a substance is said to be infinite in a qualitative sense stressing that it is complete, perfect and indivisible. I argue that this approach solves one strand of Leibniz's problem and leaves another unsolved.     

Natural religion,common notions,and the study of religions: Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648)

While the seminal role of Lord Herbert in the early modern study of religion has long been recognized, his legacy has most often been mistakenly identified with ‘natural religion’. This article provides evidence for Lord Herbert's repudiation of ‘natural religion’ and its inconsistency with his own theory of common notions. It also identifies those basic tools still used in the study of religions which emerged as unintended by‐products of his theory of common notions.     

Religion,Philosophy and Family Resemblances

Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances has been adopted by some writers either to explain the use of the word ‘religion’ or to advocate a use in the context of a definition. The purpose of this definition is supposedly to avoid an essentialist definition of religion such as ‘belief in God or gods’ which is seen as too parochially tied to Judaeo-Christian theistic origins of the word, while at the same time guaranteeing a distinctive role for religion as a universally applicable analytical concept. However, if an essentialist definition is not smuggled in for the purpose of maintaining a distinction between the ‘religion’ family and other neighbouring families such as ideologies, worldviews, values or symbolic systems, then the family becomes so indefinite that the word ceases to pick out any distinctive aspect of human culture. And this definitional dilemma in fact reflects the actual use of the word ‘religion’ by the scholarly community. Analysis of ‘religion’ texts shows that the word is used in such a large range of contexts that it is devoid of analytical value. Consequently, there is an obligation on the community of scholars to reconceptualize the wide and valuable range of work which is being carried out in ‘religion’ departments.     

Spinoza’s Announcement of Psychological Practice

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - Following Freud’s admission of his own ‘dependence on Spinoza’s doctrine’, the present paper extends psychoanalytic discernment of a...     

Intermingling and confusion

Abstract

An understanding of Descartes’ concept of ‘confusion’ is important both for making sense of his epistemological enterprise and for grasping his doctrine of the union of mind and body. An analysis of Descartes’ notion of confusion is offered which is grounded in the (more or less controversial) theses that confused thoughts are thoughts, that confusion is confusion by a thinker of one thought with another, and that confusion both can and should be avoided or ‘undone’. This analysis takes its rise from his contrast between ‘confused’ and ‘distinct’ : it exhibits confusion as a failure to distinguish between meanings of systematically ambiguous expressions. This failure is sometimes due to ‘bad intellectual habits’ which in his view ought to be broken, sometimes to ‘nature’ (where the confusion is in general beneficial to our welfare). Paradigmatically these are expressions which refer ambiguously to substances (i.e. mind and body) which are ‘really distinct’. Moreover, his ‘disambiguations’ indicate a central but neglected aspect of his aim in philosophizing: he can be seen as engaged in a moral project of ‘philosophical therapy’.     

Author's Précis of Henry James and Modern Moral Life

The sheer complexity of Spinoza's thinking makes it impossible for any movement to use him as a patron. But philosophically engaged ecologists and environmentalists may find in his system an inexhaustible source of inspiration. This holds good even if he was personally a ‘speciesist’ and uninterested in animals or landscapes. Underestimation of his potential help is due to a variety of factors: failure to pay enough attention to the structure of his system, belief in its close resemblance to that of Hobbes, and interpretation of ‘understanding love of God’ as a contemplative, general attitude incompatible with environmentalist activism and interest in every living being. The system of Spinoza is compatible with activism ‐ like that of Jan de Witt ‐ and with respect for all things as ‘expressions of the power of God or Nature’.     

Learning from their Mistakes: Some Implications of International Relations Scholarship for the Study of Religion

The ‘resurgence’ of religion in global affairs has precipitated a new interest in sectors that have traditionally marginalised religion, exposing the pervasive influence of secularisation theory in the way religion is conceived. Increasingly cognizant of the limitations of their own intellectual heritage, political scientists have developed a number of new and fruitful approaches to religion. I argue that scholars of religion have much to gain from engaging with international relations theorists, in particular from an emerging trend to consider what religion does rather than what religion is. Combining insights from international relations theory and security studies with an analysis of the functional similarities between religion and security, I outline a new direction for the study of religion, suggesting that renewed attention should be paid both to functional accounts of religion and to its role as a system of social differentiation, orientation, and action.     

The Politics of Paradox: Leo Strauss’s Biblical Debt to Spinoza (and Kierkegaard)

The political philosopher Leo Strauss is famous for contending that any synthesis of reason and revelation is impossible, since they are irreconcilable antagonists. Yet he is also famous for praising the secular regime of liberal democracy as the best regime for all human beings, even though he is well aware that modern philosophers such as Spinoza thought this regime must make use of biblical morality to promote good citizenship. Is democracy, then, both religious and secular? Strauss thought that Spinoza was contradictory in teaching that reason and revelation should be separated from each other while also insisting that a secular democratic politics still requires the biblical morality of charity (love thy neighbor as thyself). The paradox that liberal democracy is both religious and secular, which is central to Spinoza, was dismissed by Strauss as a Machiavellian subterfuge or the cynical attempt to use religion for political purposes. In order to adhere to his dualistic separation of reason and revelation, Strauss turned to ancient Greek political philosophy, particularly the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, as the true ground of liberal democracy since this classical tradition was never exposed to biblical revelation. Yet, the illiberal and hierarchical implications of Greek political thought, which clash with Strauss’s modern views on human individuality and dignity, ultimately take him back to the biblically based philosophies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, who teach the paradox that the Bible is the true foundation of human freedom.     

Toward the Desegregation of Thought and Affect in Psychological Theorizing

This article interrogates the historical segregation of thought and affect in psychological theorizing. I note how, across a range of theoretical approaches to the study of thinking, the relations between thought and affect have been either negated or ignored or underemphasized. In the context of the recent ‘turn to affect’ in the social sciences, which has been seen as offering a new paradigm for conceptualizing social and psychological phenomena, this elision is all the more striking, and a selective overview of current writings illustrative of this literature is presented. Yet, reciprocally, it is noteworthy that the ‘turn to affect’ literature has not addressed the relation between affect and thought, and hence that it contributes to the theoretical segregation that I argue is problematic. I then discuss some recent proposals within psychology that, in each of their specific ways, dissolve the theoretical dualism between thinking and affect, and offer an integrative reformulation that synthesizes the affective, intellectual, and psychosocial constituents of thought, as well as some works outside of psychology that can be viewed as illustrating the fusion of thought and affect. I argue for an approach that recognizes the biographical intertwining of the affective and intellectual life of the epistemic agent and the way in which both are shaped by processes of social constitution and by transgenerational influences.