A review of Ian Buruma's Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah, and an overview of Spinoza's concept of freedom
Baruch de Spinoza
Of the several very short introductions to Spinoza, Ian Buruma’s Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah, part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, is the most useful for those entirely new to the philosopher. Buruma, a journalist and historian, acknowledges in the book’s introduction, “I’m not an expert in philosophy and I cannot propose to offer any fresh insights in to Spinoza’s thinking”. Buruma’s book is a biography, though he graciously acknowledges Stephen Nadler as ‘Spinoza’s biographer’ (Nadler’s biography is only for serious students of Spinoza). Where Buruma does explicate Spinoza’s philosophy he does so with clarity and concision, with no assumption of any familiarity with the discipline.
Philosophy is best read in short draughts, and understood through discussion and debate, rather than through solitary reading; clear, short introductions like this are invaluable. Spinoza himself worked his own philosophy out not just through reading, but through debate, discussion, and correspondence. There is no getting around the difficulty of Spinoza. His austere style, with its at-first bewildering ‘definitions’, ‘axioms’ and ‘scholia’, his fundamental notions of ‘substance’, ‘attributes, ‘the infinite’, ‘attribution’, ‘mode’ and so on, has had all imaginative and figurative language expunged from it, everything that derives from images, from sense experience, or that can have subjective associations, so that words become like logical counters or numbers. He is only partially successful in this, as discursive language can never be fully divested of subjective associations.
The clarity and finality of Euclidean geometry was his model, and his style cannot be separated from his philosophy which, in very crude short, is that we can access freedom only through rational thought and adequate ideas (an adequate idea is one that is so logically unassailable that it is safe to proceed to the next without error), and by freeing ourselves from illusion, and the tyranny of emotions. Each proposition in his complex edifice the Ethics follows precisely on from the one that precedes it, and all are intended to mutually support one another. Spinoza created a model of what constitutes “clear and consecutive” thought in the Ethics, and the style and manner of thinking he prescribes is closely linked to his idea of ‘God’ (in his metaphysical system God is indistinguishable from Nature, is Nature) who cannot be thought of in terms of any image or analogy or figurative language, and all of whose actions proceed with absolute Necessity, like stages in the unfolding of a geometrical proposition.
Yet the purpose of the Ethics is to aid the reader in living the ‘Good Life’, to be a guide to the “right conduct of life”, going back to the ancient roots of philosophy. One does get acclimatised to his style, and the final three chapters - Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions, Of Human Bondage, or the Nature of the Emotions, and Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom - have, and were intended to have, a ‘self-help’ feel to them. The relative ease of reading of these chapters is partly due to their vocabulary being largely familiar to us, that of the emotions, whereas the opening two chapters that introduce his metaphysics are couched in his taxing philosophical idiolect. It’s recommended, then, if you want to tackle the Ethics, to begin with the final three chapters.
Spinoza was Portuguese Jew born in 1632 in Amsterdam, the son of a successful dealer in Mediterranean foods, but was cast out of the Portuguese synagogue in 1656 after falling out with Jewish biblical scholars and disputing core elements of Judaism, such that he was considered an atheist. However, as Buruma points out he was, both during and after his life, “identified by his Jewishness”, and he discusses the reception of Spinoza by Jewish intellectuals across the centuries, “to Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without Judaism”. Spinoza was completely detached from the Jewish faith, laws and community following his expulsion, yet his regular relocations (moving between Amsterdam, the countryside nearby, Rijnsburg, The Hague, and Voorburg), his autonomy, and his indigence make him the archetypal rootless, cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual, precursor of figures such Eric Auerbach and Walter Benjamin.
In Voorburg, to where he moved in 1644, he was known as ‘the Israelite’, and ‘the Jew of Voorburg'. “His dedication to reason and freedom of thought” Buruma writes, “and his idea that there were universal goods, owed something, perhaps a great deal, to his being born a Jew in a Gentile society”. Spinoza, still looked askance by Orthodox Jews, nevertheless had a basalt tombstone erected to him by Jewish admirers in Amsterdam in 1956 with the Hebrew word ‘amcha, ‘your people’, carved beneath his face.
Short history books covering a long span of time are often soporifically list-like, but Buruma keeps the book lively throughout. He gives an account of the persecution and ghettoisation of Jews in seventeenth century Europe and Jewish life in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age, describes the tangled skein of seventeenth century Dutch politics, gives us a sketch of Descartes’s thought and its reception, of the Dutch reformed Church, and portraits of various characters from the period, such as Spinoza’s friend the republican Grand Pensioner Johan de Witt, who once offered Spinoza an annual stipend of 200 guilders, which he declined.
As it in some ways foretold Spinoza’s fate, there is a long account of the suicide of Uriel da Costa who, when Spinoza was ten, was given 31 lashes publicly, and afterwards had his body trampled upon by the synagogue congregation for saying that Mosaic law was a human invention and that Judaism and Christianity both made up merely of useful fictions. It was for making the same claims that Spinoza was expelled, but in addition Spinoza claimed that God and Nature were indivisible, which was tantamount of atheism. He said that angels are imaginary, that the immortality of the soul is false, and that there was no transcendental cause of things, everything being part of a single and all-inclusive Nature.
Expulsions from the synagogue (called cherem) were quite common but, typically, were temporary and couched in mild language, whereas Spinoza’s read: “By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematise, cut off curse and execrate Baruch Spinoza … with all the curses written in the book of law, cursed be he by day as cursed he be by the night, cursed when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up … the Lord shall not pardon him, the wrath and fury of the lord shall henceforth be kindled against this man, and shall lay upon him all the curses written in the book of Law”. Buruma suggests that the viciousness of Spinoza’s anathema (afterwards, he was not allowed to do business, or even to meet his own siblings) was because Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, Spinoza’s former tutor, was trying to negotiate a return of the Jews to England with Cromwell, or because he had been doing too much business with Gentiles. Spinoza was even offered a huge sum of money to recant but he refused it, choosing instead to earn a living by lens grinding and the generosity of rich admirers, preferring “a life of quiet contemplation to the rough and tumble of commerce”. Spinoza didn’t publish his views on the bible in his lifetime and his Ethics was passed around between friends from 1665, but not published until 1677, and then in Latin.
Monument to Spinoza by Jewish artist Job Wertheim, erected in Amsterdam, 1956
It is in part this life of “quiet contemplation” that has made Spinoza the philosopher’s philosopher, such an exemplum. He ate with consistently spectacular frugality throughout his life and seems to have been asexual. Buruma puts Spinoza’s lifelong celibacy down to his “total commitment to individual autonomy and freedom”; he was as far from being the 'average sensual man' as it’s possible to be, dismissing sex as without significance, ‘mere titillation', and romantic love as illusory. He led a life of reading, writing, study, discussion and corresponding. He corresponded with many acolytes and some of the leading minds of the age. He had many friends, mostly Mennonites and Collegiants, as well as some of Holland’s leading military and political figures. He enjoyed chess and sketching, making a little extra money from drawing portraits (he also had the strange hobby of watching spiders fight in a little box, or sticking flies on a spiderweb to observe the results). At his final lodging, with the painter Van der Spyck in Voorburg, he would often not emerge from his room for days, but when he did, would often sit with the family and chat over a pipe. He aimed for a life of moderation and complete equanimity and clarity of thought, untroubled by emotional upheaval or the suffocating foetor of intimacy.
Spinoza hated conflict, violence and mobs, and was an enemy of conformity, superstition, pseudoscience, belief, and dogma, as opposed to reasoned argument and adequate fact, and he has been described as an model for all of those “individuals who have had to be self-reliant, who work for complete independence”. In an age in which social contagions spread with the speed of wildfires, in which large swathes of the middle class, in a hapless state of propaganda induced irreality, go on online witch hunts and profess to belief in an ideology that makes a belief in magic or the flatness of the earth look sophisticated, in which facts and science are superseded by emotion and ‘lived experience’, in which pseudoscience and fascistic racialised ideologies reign, universities become vomitoria of specious verbiage, and in which the enlightenment is in retreat, Spinoza is surely the philosopher for our age.
“Even scientific thinking today is condemned”, Buruma writes, “if it fails to affirm particular beliefs in social justice”, adding, “this poses a similar threat to intellectual life that the church did in Spinoza’s time, because it leads to timidity and conformity”. Buruma refrains from any discussion of contemporary issues but does explain that it was these that led him to take on the subject: “… my curiosity was piqued because intellectual freedom has once again become an important issue ... if one thing can unequivocally be said about Spinoza, it is that freedom of thought was his main preoccupation, “Not only did he think the best political order was one that protected the right to think and write in peace, but also that this very freedom would help maintain such an order”.
Essential for freedom, according to Spinoza, is freedom of speech, “If a state extends to man’s minds and speech it is a tyranny”, he wrote, insisting that “in a free state everyone is allowed to think what he will and say what he thinks”, though he distinguished between of freedom of thought and freedom of action, exempting from free speech incitements to violence and anything intended to deceive. Few could be more suitable to write an introduction to Spinoza at this moment in the West’s history than Ian Buruma, who discreetly does not mention his own recent victimisation by enemies of free speech, though many will be familiar with the episode.
In 2007 Buruma became editor of the New York Review of Books, to which he’d been a regular contributor for over 25 years. In 2017 he planned an issue devoted to the aftermath of #MeToo, with the theme The Fall of Man. Included in the issue was the essay Reflections on a Hashtag, by Jian Ghomeshi. Ghomeshi, radio host of Canada’s culture programme Q from 2007-2014, was acquitted in 2016 on four counts of sexual assault and one of choking involving three women in 2104. Ghomeshi is no catch, to say the least, but not only was there insufficient evidence, but two witnesses were judged to be unreliable because of their shifting narratives, and because they had both lied and colluded.
The publication of the article led to a witch hunt which was directed more at Buruma than Ghomeshi. Journalists such as Vox’s Constance Grady, Erin Vanderhoof, Amia Srinivasan, Rebecca Solnit and many others led a very public campaign against Buruma for publishing Ghoreshi’s article, and the flurry of smearing, traducing articles and tweets clearly had no other aim than to ruin and oust him.
Buruma was forced to resign after some American university presses who advertised with the magazine threatened to boycott the magazine. He told an interviewer in Slate in 2018, “I have now myself been convicted on Twitter without due process”, and said that he had “become persona non gratis”. The magazine’s publisher Rea S Hederman claims that Buruma didn’t follow the magazine’s ‘high standards’, yet according to Buruma more checks were made than usual and Hederman himself read and signed off the article before publication. It’s easy to see why Buruma was attracted to the thinker who wrote: “What greater evil can be imagined for the Republic than that honest me should be exiled or considered wicked because they hold different opinions and don’t know how to pretend that they don’t.”
The title Freedom’s Messiah has a ring to it, but Buruma does not actually go very deeply into Spinoza’s theory of freedom, and Autonomy’s Messiah would have been more accurate. Firstly, Spinoza thought that rationality could only liberate certain self-willed and courageous individuals, not all of humanity, because, in his view, most of humanity is too feeble-minded for autonomous, rational thought. This may seem intellectually arrogant, yet Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 60s showed that only 20 per cent of people are capable of critical thinking, whilst nearly 2 billion people still believe in miracles and an anthropomorphic God; even belief in witchcraft is still widespread globally today, with around 200 witches being murdered in the Congo alone annually.
Spinoza thought, in fact, that reading his philosophy would be harmful for many and he approved of organised religion if it didn’t oppress with its dogmas, despite thinking all of its stories and the idea of an anthropomorphic god preposterous. He wrote that “the Wisdom of the Prophets is a great comfort for those whose powers of reason are not strong” and that many needed “religion’s moral guidance and system of rewards and punishments to keep them virtuous and peaceable”. It would be wrong to see this as social elitism, however. It was the elites and the texts they generated that were subject to his criticism, not ‘the masses’, for want of a better phrase, and he recognised the harm and violence to which toxic texts and inadequate and “mutilated and confused ideas” could lead, the horrors of the Thirty years War being withing living memory. Imbecility and lack of formal education are two entirely different things: The Hammer of the Witches, Gender Trouble, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, The Secret Doctrine, and White Fragility were written by and for contemporary social elites. In the modern age it is largely the soical elites who have followed asinine and dangerous intellectual fads, from Theosophy, Left Bank Maoism, Freudianism and the Recovered Memory Movement, to gender ideology and critical race theory.
Secondly, Spinoza thought that freedom is impossible, that we can only attain varying degrees of partial freedom, and that part of attaining this freedom is becoming aware of our unfreedom. Spinoza thought of freedom in terms of autonomy, and that one is free only to the extent that one is self-determining, with only god being fully self-determining and therefore fully free: “That thing is said to be free”, he wrote, “which exists by mere necessity of its own nature and is determined its actions by itself alone”. Everything less than God is affected by causes other than itself, but only humans can recognise and limit these causes, thus, via such insights, becoming more or less free.
One is unfree “to the extent to which one thinks on the basis of inadequate ideas”. ‘Inadequate ideas’ are those due imagination, unreliable testimony, ‘common notions’, propaganda, musings, dreams, superstition, “confused or mutilated ideas”, insufficient information, or utilitarian aims, ones that, rather than being the result of a sequence of previous ideas that could not have been otherwise, unaffected by outside influences. Freedom is inseparable from understanding and rational thought; freedom is insight, and the highest form of thought, beyond insight, is ‘intuition’, immediate perception of the truth (it’s a moot point whether Spinoza thought that only God was capable of true intuition).
We can come close to experiencing God’s autonomy by maximising our own autonomy – our minds being a “particular modification of god’s thought” – and by rejecting anything that reduces our autonomy or anonymises us. God, in Spinoza’s metaphysic, is Nature, and Nature God, so that when we experience partial freedom whilst engaged in rational thought, we become one with Nature.
Freedom consists in acting and not being acted upon: the less one is acted upon, the less passive one is, going from a lesser to a greater degree of perfection, of reality, of fullness of being, and substantiality of existence. This striving to increase our power of thinking and acting Spinoza termed ‘conatus’. For Spinoza the aim of any human life is to live one of “cheerfulness and joy” and to avoid pain and melancholy, emotions Spinoza categorised as the ‘sad affects’ – jealousy, anger, hate, envy, depression, fanaticism, sadness and grief. These act upon us, reduce our power to act and think, put us in their bondage. Pity, for instance, he regarded as a ‘weakening affect’, though he wasn’t prescribing callous indifference: “…pity no one but do good and perform helpful actions”, he advised. Like Nietzsche, he not only regarded pity as essentially useless, but recognised it as often performative, with surreptitiously selfish motives, an emotion only ostensibly other-directed.
To be governed by emotions is to have one’s being weakened, to have a low level of existence, and to move farther from Nature, ordinary loves and hates, desires and aversions being illogical, often illusory, and succeeding each other without logical connection. “I assign the term ‘bondage’”, he wrote, “to men’s lack of power to control and check the emotions. For a man at the mercy of his emotions is not his own master but is subject to fortune”. The pleading weeper and the termagant shrieker advertise their unfreedom, weakened being and insubstantiality of existence just as much as the frothing fanatic, the Question Time seal clapper, and the lonely, cause-needing placard waver. Most unfree of all, most acted upon and least self-determining for Spinoza is the suicide.
Ian Buruma
To achieve equanimity, one must think rationally about one’s emotions, free yourself from your bondage to them, ascertain their true cause and source, and not be passive in relation to them, smothering them with the pillow of rational thought, burying them under the patio of logic. Even just by thinking about them one is already more ‘active’ and ‘powerful’. One must avoid anything, and anyone, according to Spinoza, that saps one’s power or disturbs one’s equilibrium: what discombobulates, banish.
Spinoza made a distinction between the force of outside compulsions and inner necessity, obedience to one’s true nature. This ‘becoming oneself’ is one of several ways that his thought overlaps with Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche called Spinoza a ‘sick hermit’ and a ‘poison brewer’ but added that “what is poison for the inferior type” is “for the higher type … nourishment and delectation”. Both had a similarly dim view of pity, for petty calculation, and for the desire to dominate others, and valued recognising the cold truth of a situation and accepting it with equanimity, if not joy. Nietzsche saw Spinoza as a kindred spirit and precursor, and Spinoza’s passive, affect-enslaved, ill-informed conformist is a cousin to Nietzsche’s Untermensch, and his unmediated, intuitive action cognate with Nietzsche’s ‘noble action’. For both, the nadir of being human, the most abject mode of being, is servility.
For freedom of thought, unlike Nietzsche, Spinoza regarded democracy as the least tyrannical option, “since sovereignty belongs to everyone”. “An assembly of reasonable men”, he wrote, “elected by reasonable people, acts reasonably”. However, he thought that to enjoy the benefits of democracy entailed the prid quo po of submitting to legitimate authority and largely giving up our individual powers. The key word here is ‘legitimate’, as he believed that unreasonable laws should be flouted and that unreasonable states, tyrannical states, and leaders without a mandate, should be overthrown.
Of Spinoza Karl Jaspers wrote: “In his work as in his life, he was a healthy normal man, free from psychological upheaval, free from the endless reflection that drains the mind, never touched by despair in the presence of the void. He must have incurred eclipses of reason, he must have experienced the affects of which he spoke so knowingly, but only as vanished states that vanish once they are understood”. I’m not so sure that Spinoza, who seems never to have been emotionally close to anyone, was normally and healthy, “reduced affect display” after all being a symptom of incipient schizophrenia. For many, equanimity and objectivity towards one’s emotions comes with age and experience, though CH Sisson once described the indifference that comes with old age as 'psychopathic'. Personally, I can’t imagine a life completely without youthful follies, one littered with intemperate buffooneries and ignominious farragos; emotions, including the ‘sad passions’ are, after all, not only things of the mind, but imperatives of the body, too, which doesn’t mean there should be no attempt to regulate, understand, and moderate them.
“I wish I were a thinking stone” the speaker of Wallace Stevens’s great poem Le Monocle de Mon Oncle cries out in despair, but a society of thinking stones is a hellish prospect, although one, thankfully, impossible. On the social, ethical, and political plane, not to think and act according to Spinoza’s dicta regarding rationality, the banishing of affect from decision making, and using only adequate ideas as much as one is able to is pure folly. Freedom on Spinoza's terms is not easy; attempting the maximum of self-determination and minimising the degree to which we are affected by anything outside of us necessarily involves a certain level of isolation, rejecting not just inadequate ideas, but also those who hold them; but as Spinoza wrote at the close of the Ethics, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”.
Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Jewish Lives) is published by Yale University Press, £16.99
.