Following are excerpts from 'God-intoxicated man
The philosopher who questioned the existence of the world'
CLARE CARLISLE AND
YITZHAK Y. MELAMED
MAY 15, 2020
“Despite many readings of the Ethics which make
the phrase Deus sive Natura a cornerstone of Spinoza’s metaphysical system, to say that everything,
including the world as a whole, is in God – a position
now labelled “panentheism” – is quite different from
claiming that the world is God, the view usually
known as “pantheism”. Spinoza’s panentheism
leaves room for the idea that God exceeds, or transcends, the sum total of all things (or “modes”). The
God of the Ethics certainly transcends what we normally call “nature”. This is inseparable from the fact
that Spinoza’s God transcends human knowledge
and experience. God’s essence is expressed through
an infinity of attributes (or distinct ways of being),
and we have access to just two of these attributes:
thought and extension.”
“By the end of the eighteenth century, however, a
new assessment of Spinoza’s religiosity had
emerged. The Lithuanian philosopher Salomon Maimon – admired by Kant as “the sharpest and deepest
of his critics” – came to Spinoza after studying the
Talmud, the Kabbalah and Maimonides. In 1792 Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte, or Autobiography, shocked
readers with the claim that “it is hard to fathom how
Spinoza’s system could have been made out to be
atheistic, since the two systems are diametrically
opposed. The atheist system denies the existence of
God; Spinoza’s denies the existence of the world.
Thus, Spinoza’s system should really be called acosmism”.“
“Maimon helped inspire a new German Spinozism,
which found memorable expression in Novalis’s
description of Spinoza as a “God-intoxicated man”.
Suddenly the damned atheist became the hero of a
radical Romantic religiosity, which could claim to be
more religious than traditional orthodoxy (insofar as
it discovered God’s presence in all things), yet free
from the old illusions of an anthropomorphic God
and an anthropocentric faith, and from the abuses
of clericalism. Heinrich Heine summarized this view
in his Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in
Deutschland (1835): “Only malice or lack of judgement could describe Spinoza’s teaching as ‘atheistic.’
No one has ever expressed himself more sublimely
about the divinity than Spinoza”.”
“In the Ethics the difference between God and the
world lies in that humdrum yet cryptic word “in”:
“Whatever is, is in God [in Deo est]”. In 1943, Étienne Souriau, a brilliant yet now overlooked philosopher who contributed to a remarkable revival of
Spinoza in France, suggested that “the meaning of
the little word ‘in’ is the key to all Spinozism”. Is
the world dissolved (acosmism) or deified (pantheism) in God-or-Nature? Or is the world grounded in
a transcendent God in which real entities “live and
move and have their being”? And what difference
does this make to the way we understand ourselves,
and to how we live – which is the ultimate question
of the Ethics?”
“The recent explosion of Spinoza studies –
and of contemporary metaphysics and epistemology inspired by Spinoza – has resulted in a deep
reorientation in analytic as well as continental philosophy. In many ways, Spinoza is now replacing
Kant and Descartes as both the compass and the
watershed of modern thought.
Part of Spinoza’s allure is his willingness to follow
reason wherever it led him. Deliberately remaining
outside both Jewish and Christian communities, Spinoza gained a remarkably perspicacious insight into
taken-for-granted intuitions and prejudices. Recognizing no authority beyond the power of his arguments, he presented his reasoning in the most transparent manner, as if daring his opponents to
challenge the validity of his inferences.
While philosophical boldness and precision
underwrite the intellectual power of Spinozism, the
religious element of his thought remains crucial. For
centuries the Ethics has been religiously questionable, and when we read it today we should take the
question of religion seriously. This is best treated as
a genuinely open question, since Spinoza’s religion
does not fit easily into any pre-existent category.
Like Thomas Aquinas, he treated religio not as a
system of beliefs but as a virtue – the virtue of honouring God. In the Ethics he considers religio alongside other virtues such as piety, nobility, generosity
and fortitude. Without concealing his contempt for
superstitious, anthropomorphic images of God, Spinoza asks what it means to know – and love – the
God which grounds our being.”
