Baruch Spinoza

To: Rebecca Goldstein
From: Michael Weiss
Subject: Spinoza and Life of Quiet Seclusion

Dear Rebecca,

I’m sure my editors will be thrilled that I managed to coax a little fiction out of you for nothing – certainly not my intention but now everyone’s reward. I will admit that I did have your beau Pinker in mind when I gave that Spinozist spin on evolutionary psychology. I’m gratified it provoked such a Vidal Sassonish response. A linguist ex-girlfriend once made me read The Language Instinct, the value of which long outlasted the relationship. (I’m still not ready to concede that Spinoza was right about putting logos before ladies, however.) But if I may say so, it’s nice to see another great meeting of the minds take place in the 21st century, even if who does the dishes tonight is what they have to meet over.

However, I have a quibble with your play. I can’t see Spinoza being so high on his own supply before even a wilting and obnoxious intruder like Leibniz. Wasn’t he the consummate gentleman even to those he disdained or wished would let him get back to his lens crafting and mind expanding? He had plenty of friends and admirers, even in purdah. Granted, guests, like fish, begin to stink on the third day, but we are talking about one of the most impressive stoics of all time here… (Also, I’d change “dickens” to “devil” in your clincher. Stewart at one point has Leibniz facing his own “Waterloo” a full century before Napoleon set sail from Corsica.)

Cold Water on Bakunin: Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers" gave Stoppard a good ideaI quite enjoyed your shadow-bathed collapse of the fourth wall, and as for your preferred playwright, I’m inclined to agree that Stoppard beats Frayn for these purposes. I’m dying to see The Coast of Utopia and I really don’t understand the critics who say being wheedled into picking up Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers in order to “get” the references is somehow the fault of the playwright. Good art, like good philosophy, ought to be challenging.

And Stoppard has a knack for making the esoteric if not quite accessible, then very enjoyable. He did this with The Invention of Love, with Greek and Latin philology. One scene that now reminds me of our Baruch is set in the Underworld and features Oscar Wilde – prior to this a whispered rumor on the quadrangles of Victorian Cambridge – confronting the repressed poet A.E. Housman. Wilde bangs on in the spirit of, I did this and I did that, I suffered for my genius, and where the hell were you? “In my room,” comes the reply.

My attraction to books like yours, Rebecca, have to do with recognizing that rebellions that happen behind closed doors can be just as costly, in human terms, as the ones that happen at the barricades. For Spinoza, the choice between being a man of ideas and a man of action was no choice at all, really. This offers posterity a number of interesting what-ifs.

Consider: Spinoza’s landlord physically restrains him from running out the door to protest the brutal murders of the liberal de Witt brothers by a Dutch mob. His famous Caute, then, is preserved, if involuntarily. Does that make Spinoza more or less heroic as a case study? Pre-Enlightenment Victims: Johan and Cornelius de WittTwo luckless victims of a hysterical medievalism had the power to stunt the progress of civilization, by causing one of civilization’s brightest lights to be extinguished; that they didn’t is almost enough to lend credence to the idea of providence. Certainly the centrality of the individual in history can’t be ignored. If there’s one failing in Spinoza’s philosophy, it’s that it scants on the importance of people like Spinoza. Arthur Koestler called the death of Rubashov in Darkness at Noon the “shrug of eternity.” Our philosopher would have liked that, but nuts to poor Rubashov!

Mention of this anti-Communist classic brings up another topic you touched on in your last letter. The insistence that all facts have reasons for being facts has wreaked havoc on the recently departed century. Not least among the tragedies has been the transformation of Spinoza into a forerunner of such havoc – his rationalism transformed into a license to kill by those who sapped the humanity right out of his worldview.

It was all there in black and white, in The Ethics, the guide on how to be good that made Bertrand Russell see its author as the primus inter pares of deep-thinking mensches. Yet Marxism-Leninism glorified Spinoza, just as Nazism did Nietzsche. (Old Communist way of beginning a sentence: “It is no accident that…” Talk about making a hash of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.)

Now, you spilled a great deal of ink in your last bio rescuing Gődel from the postmodernists, who had co-opted his theorem as a vindication of there being not just an infinity of possible realities, but no “best” of the bunch. What can be done about keeping Spinoza away from future line cooks who read Deus sive nature as a recipe for omelets requiring so many broken eggs?

Obviously, you’ve got a vested interest in this operation since you’re head over heels for Baruch. Love remains a strong ingredient in your biography writing, indeed, in all of your writing. (Your novel The Mind-Body Problem cleverly nourishes this motif across two genres.)

Is it more natural, do you suppose, that a woman be guided by these strong emotional attachments, which she freely confesses to having, to the figures she profiles? That you stifle your own instincts to “cozy up” too much to your subjects – my first reaction to this was that it was self-conscious check on appearing too girly.

Living Sub Specie Aeternitatis: Rebecca GoldsteinI say this not out of sexism but for a very specific reason. We just got into the office The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt. As there was simply no way I’d be letting that volume slip unnoticed into the dust pile, I opened it to find a touching and funny essay by you entitled, “Philosophers With Wombs.” It’s all about the delicate balancing act of living the life of the mind while being a young bride and getting pregnant.

You had to put up with the obvious Jewish pressures, from your mother and mother-in-law to go domestic, but more intriguing (to me) was how your female department chair gave you the kind of feminist guilt-trip that gets Caitlin Flanagan knocking down her nanny to get the keyboard each morning. In light of our correspondence, I was struck by the following:

“I’d always been able to place myself at a rational distance from life, viewing it from the outside, as it were, abstracting from the identities of the various agents in the situation, even if I were one of them. This sort of extreme objectivity is what the philosophers call the view sub specie aeternitatis – under the guide, or the form, of eternity. The view has much to recommend it, but not if you want to be a mother. Just try keeping your baby alive and contentedly gurgling while living sub specie aeternitatis.”

Who but the author of Betraying Spinoza could have written that? Somewhere I think Mrs. Schoenfeld, your old yeshiva teacher, is smiling.

This was a real delight, Rebecca.

Thank you,

Michael

To: Michael Weiss
From: Rebecca Goldstein
Subject: The Insistently Rational are Dunces at Life

Dear Michael,

Well, I did take note of, and distinct pleasure in, your allusion to evolutionary psychology in your last go-round. You’re quite right that there's a sort of parallelism in the fallacious accusations hurled against both Pinkerism and Spinozism; to wit that they both recklessly throw open the window to let in the poisoned fumes of fatalism, not to speak of putting out the welcome mat for that stinking rotter, relativism. And it's interesting, too, how both points of view rile people up by insisting that the facts, being facts, must be faced, not to be shouted down by "moral" objections. What kind of morality would that be that has to insist on a false view of the facts? A priori moralizing does not make for much of a research program. Spinoza was insistent that the facts of the world and moral facts form one seamless whole.

The Play's the Thing: Stoppard v. MendelsohnYou bring up The Invention of Love. Do you remember Daniel Mendelsohn's argument with Tom Stoppard in the pages of (where else?) The New York Review of Books? It was an amusing back-and-forth, as I remember it, which means, of course, that it got personal and downright nasty. Mendelsohn had accused Stoppard, in his review of The Invention of Love, of being, at heart-- despite his razzle-dazzle display of familiarity with the language of philosophers, classicists, and such—a lowdown philistine, siding with the "the-heart-has-its-reasons-of-which- reason-is-ignorant" crowd, which is, of course, an enormously large crowd, containing almost everyone except you and me—and I'm not so sure about you. This explains, Mendelsohn intimated, Stoppard's staggering popularity, despite his grand allusions.

I don't agree with Mendelsohn in his damning verdict of Stoppard's ouevre, though he did make a valid point, which is that Stoppard (I would say like so many artists—like even myself in certain [early] novels) sometimes sets up a false dichotomy between sterile reason, on the one hand, and the ardent emotions, on the other, with, quite predictably, the ardent emotions triumphing by story's end as the true wisdom.

The insistently rational are dunces at life. All of that exercise at splitting hairs pumps up the brain and shrivels the, um, heart. If you're going to trot sesquipedalian intellectuals out on the stage then you'd better make sure they end up looking like losers and/or see the folly of their incessant cerebration before the curtain goes down if you want to win favor with the matinee crowd.

Mendelsohn, I remember, got off a wonderful line to the effect that Stoppard, intellectual playwright though he's perceived—and self-perceived—to be, seems to have no clue that the mind can be a passionate organ, too. This reminds me of one of my own better lines from one of those early novels that could be tarred with the same Mendelsohnian brush: "The problem with you, Renee, is that you seem to think that the male sexual organ is the brain."

Whether Stoppard is really guilty as Mendelsohn charges, I'm not prepared to say. Arcadia seemed to me to rouse the romance of reason quite wonderfully. But certainly there is a tradition in fiction of presenting thinking—when taken too far—as leading to a life devoid of feeling and passion. And this of course is a terrible lie, since thinking— especially when taken too far—is itself a passion. Mendelsohn described Stoppard as a romantic, meaning it unkindly, but this language itself undercuts what I think is Mendelsohn's very good point, which is that a thinker's relationship to reason can be utterly romantic.

Plato, of course, is very good on this subject, and so, for that matter, is Spinoza, though, since he reserves the word "passion" for our irrational emotions, he wouldn't put it in quite the same way. But Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, the Intellectual Love of God, is a swooningly passionate attitude. It's love, The Real Thing, to use one of Stoppard's titles. Spinoza's theory of the emotions denies the split between thinking and feeling. Thinking is always emotional and emotions are always making cognitive claims (which is why we can correct our emotions, circle them in red like errors in arithmetic).

A story like I.B. Singer's "The Spinoza of Market Street," which is one of my favorites, nevertheless has that anti-intellectual itch that Mendelsohn scratches at in Stoppard. That insufferably Spinozistic loftiness that's snuffing the life out of poor Dr. Fischelsohn is shown up for the pathetic hollow thing that it is by a sweet night of loving with Black Dobbe.

All This Philosophy, It's No Good: I.B. Singer“Dr. Fishelsohn lay down on the freshly made bed in his room and began reading The Ethics. Dobbe had gone back to her own room. The doctor had explained to her that he was an old man, that he was sick and without strength. He had promised her nothing. Nevertheless she returned wearing a silk nightgown, slippers with pompoms, and with her hair hanging down over her shoulders. There was a smile on her face, and she was bashful and hesitant. Dr. Fischelsohn trembled and The Ethics dropped from his hands. The candle went out. Dobbe groped for Dr. Fischelsohn in the dark and kissed his mouth. ‘My dear husband,’ she whispered to him, ‘Mazel tov.’”

Mazel tov, indeed, as Singer goes on to slyly tell us. Dr. Fischelsohn wins that windfall of a mighty fine mazel by yielding to his trembling and dropping The Ethics. That's what he gets that mazel tov for.

It's a great story, one of Singer's best, but the upshot is that there's reason, on the one hand, and there's life-affirming energy, on the other, and art is in alliance with the good stuff.

It's tempting for artists, in a certain sense it's even natural for artists, who after all are supposed to be masters and celebrants of passion and feeling, to fashion stories that demonstrate the superiority of feeling over reason. I think I once read Singer as actually saying that all stories are, at heart, about this. I think that comment might have been quoted in his Forward obituary. Anyway, what this dichotomy overlooks is that the devotion to reason, well, it's a passion, and it can be as destructive or as redemptive as the more literarily favored sort, as a night, say, with blushing Black Dobbe, and therefore it shouldn't be treated simplistically in fiction, and thanks for remarking that I don't.

But if the insistence on reason is itself a passion and can go as berserk as any other passion, then how can we protect Spinoza from perversion?

You ask me this, Michael, and damn if I know how to answer. Every means we have for trying to get at the truth can run afoul. Insistence on strict logical consistency, if it starts out in the wrong direction, will take us much deeper into the quagmire than carefree contradiction. How wonderfully you put it, and modestly depositing it in a parenthesis, no less: "Old Communist way of beginning a sentence: 'It is no accident that…' Talk about making a hash of the Principle of Sufficient Reason."

The one quite practical piece of advice to be abstracted from Spinoza is to mistrust your reasoning if it leads you to a personally flattering cosmic view, one that grants you a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding, in the way that, say, certain religions tend to. Suspect that's just your conatus going cross-eyed with delusions of grandeur.

Spinoza, in merging thinking and feeling, and deriving our feelings from our conatus—our desire to persist in our own being, to flourish and expand ourselves into the world—also derives that our thinking tends to swerve dangerously toward self-aggrandizement. We've got that tendency. All of us. Keeping it in check would go a long way toward ridding us of some of the more dangerous perversions in reasoning.

Humor, too, always helps. Spinoza's humor, which I'm glad you appreciate as much as I, is a serious ploy. Eternity shrugs at us? Humor is our shrugging back at eternity.

The pleasure truly has been mine, Michael.

Here's shrugging,

Rebecca

Previous Entries for This Dialogue:

A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day One)

A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day Two)

RELATED: Zbigniew Herbert's poem "Mr. Cogito Tells of the Temptation of Spinoza." [The Daily Shvitz]

To: Rebecca Goldstein
From: Michael Weiss
Subject: All Philosophy is Self-Betrayal

Dear Rebecca,

So Gődel’s Mad Hatter routine was as constant off the page as on it. I know focusing on the private eccentricities of genius can easily degenerate into a kind of Good Will Hunting kitsch-fest. Einstein kibitzing with his barber is automatically judged worthy of the sententious Quote-a-Day treatment.

Another Acute Psychologist (With a "Great Personality"): George EliotBut this type of thing really can’t be avoided, can it? We need to know that the elect members of the species are made of the same damp clay as the rest of us, subject to the same passions and frailties. If anything, they suffer more acutely because of their gifts, as if nature meant to imprison them in a holding cell whose keys remain visible but just out of reach. (Anthony Lane had a great line recently that there’s something encouraging about the even distribution of endowments: we take comfort in knowing, for instance, that George Eliot looked like Sea Biscuit.)

I quite liked your narcissism quote, although my Penguin translation of The Ethics doesn’t put it so poetically as that – a shame, given the citations of Ovid with which Spinoza peppered a few of his axioms. This lure towards the romantic furnishes us with a clue, I think, about Baruch’s unacknowledged biases, since he thought the antique pangs of a fellow outcast fit for such a hyper-rationalist treatise on how best to stifle those pangs. Augustus likely gave Ovid the boot for his decadence and estimation of eros above the stuffy political conservatism and jingoism of imperial Rome. Spinoza had his own epicurean tastes, so I wonder if the frequent nods to the love poet aren’t further evidence of his inner warmth despite the outer carapace.

My suspicion is that his ethical scope was more sympathetic than he lets on, the result of remembering how quickly Rabbi Morteira turned on him and wondering what such an experience must be like for someone without the intellectual fortitude to cope with it. “Love conquers hate” may be reassuring, especially when “proved” by Euclidean means, but is it not also the projection of a horribly mistreated boy?

What’s amazing to me is that Spinoza didn’t grow up to be a misanthrope, but one of the kindest philosophers the West has ever known. I estimate humor pretty highly on the list of moral virtues, and it’s a good sign that the stuff is everywhere in his writing. Baruch is expert in gauging the different registers of laughter, from the sinister and mirthless to the ecstatic and transcendent:

“I recognize a great difference between mockery and laughter. For laughter and joking are pure joy. And so, provided they are not excessive, they are good through themselves. Nothing forbids our pleasure except a savage and sad superstition. For why is it more proper to relieve our hunger and thirst than to rid ourselves of melancholy?”

"Irony Is the Glory of the Slaves": Polish poet Czeslaw MiloszThe pedantic bores are always in this guy’s sights, as they have been in for the great anti-totalitarian writers of our time: Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz, Nabokov with his “laughter in the dark.” (Another favorite joke of mine from The Ethics is the quip about false modesty, where Spinoza quotes Cicero to the effect that those who object to ambition in others always seem to attach their own names prominently to the objections.)

Since you brought it up, I very much wonder about that Nietzsche swipe. It reeks of the anxiety of influence, doesn’t it? God’s better-marketed obituarist once described a joke as the “epitaph on the death of a feeling.” Yes, well, Spinoza performed the major inquests two hundred years earlier.

Even if The Ethics does come off a tad baroque at times, the initial damage it inflicts is a healthy one. It forces you to become self-aware because you feel as if you’re the one slipped under the microscope. Spinoza’s greatest achievement is precisely the one you implicate by “betraying” him: in order to have examined human nature with such high levels of magnification, the technician must have ground his lenses by using his own foibles and prejudices as ready test specimens. All philosophy is self-betrayal in this respect.

Of course, the very idea of human nature gets us into trouble in the age of postmodern gobbledygook, cultural relativism, and endowed chairs in Anthropology. Evolutionary psychologists have a tough time explaining what should be commonsensical to all: that we are beholden to our genetic wiring. Oh, no! How pessimistic to think in terms of “determinism.” But determinism, properly understood, is actually closer to probability, which means that a chromosome is not slavery so much as indentured servitude. Reason, and the constant struggle against impulses, is the price one must pay for manumission, as Spinoza realized long before “chromosome” was a term in the lexicon. Notice, for instance, how he inveighs against the concept of cognitive free will by showing that we have no control over the content of our dreams:

[T]hese decisions of the mind arise by the same necessity as the ideas of things which actually exist. Those, therefore, who believe that they either speak or are silent, or do anything from a free decision of the mind, dream with open eyes.

“Dream with open eyes” sounds like the title of a symposium on Freud.

This hardly exhausts Spinoza’s modern relevance. The brave Somali dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali has fled her adopted homeland of Holland after becoming too high-profile a critic of a religion she was raised to believe in unquestioningly. Sounds familiar. And, in addition to your book, Matthew Stewart has recently come out with a shrewd Straussian re-evaluation of Spinoza’s influence on Gottfried Leibniz, that Hanoverian yes-man of the monad and summer crusade.

Spinoza Fever: Matthew Stewart's re-evaluation of a famous antagonismHave you read The Courtier and the Heretic? Stewart argues persuasively that Leibniz, for all his outward scorn toward the heretic Jew disrupting the status quo, was a covert atheist himself. He never recovered from Spinoza’s arguments, nor from the weeklong conversation the two men had in The Hague. (Am I the only one who desperately wants Michael Frayn to adapt this exchange for the stage?)

As The Ethics might have demonstrated, “hating” Spinoza was Leibniz’s way of dealing with the shock of spotting something of himself in the braver, better philosopher.

So I wonder how misguided the current refrain “Why they hate us” is with respect to Islamic fundamentalists. How many of our blood-boltered enemies abroad really pine for the principles of an open society they claim to deplore? Spinoza gives us hope that there might after all be a few unacknowledged unbelievers scurrying through dark caves in Waziristan, even as I write this.

As ever,

Michael

To: Michael Weiss
From: Rebecca Goldstein
Subject: Et in Arcadia Non Ego

Dear Michael:

Utopia Is Undisturbed Study: Tom Stoppard presents "Leibniz and Spinoza"?I agree that the four or so days that Leibniz and Spinoza spent holed up in the Hague, throwing back Dutch brewskies and comparing proofs for God's existence, could make for intriguing theater. But Lord, do please keep Michael Frayn away from it! Anyone who mangled Einstein as Frayn did in Copenhagen—-making that redoubtable scientific realist out to be the leader of the simpering "physics-isn't-really-about-reality-after-all" pack—-is not the right sort to treat the über-realist, über-rationalist likes of Spinoza and Leibniz. I wouldn't mind Tom Stoppard's having a go at it, though. Stoppard's got the intellectual goods to see what those two really had going between them.

And by the way, it's not at all obvious to me, as passionately attached as I am to Spinoza, that he was the better philosopher compared to Leibniz. Perhaps our light-hearted communication isn't the right forum for exploring the subtle intricacies of their philosophical relationship. To really see the way in which they deeply disagreed, but even more deeply agreed, involves more technical analysis than most people can stomach, unless maybe they're going to get graded on it at the end of the semester.

But let me just say that Leibniz had very sound reasons for rejecting Spinoza's proffered solution to the problem that occupied them both, which is basically: why is there something rather than nothing?

Both of them were committed to there being an ultimate answer to that question. That question could serve as a fine way of dividing up philosophers, according to those who think that that question has an answer, even if it's one we can't get at, and those who think that there's simply no answer out there at all to that question. On this score, Spinoza and Leibniz were playing in the same band, tooting on the same horn and singing the same lyrics, to wit that there is, because there has to be, an explanation for the world at large.

The question that divided them was whether logic alone provided that explanation. Spinoza said it did, thus committing himself to the claim that this is the only logically possible world. Leibniz, who was by far the better logician—-in fact, the advances he made in mathematical logic are staggering, though he kept almost all of them to himself—said there was an infinite plurality of logically possible worlds, so logic itself can't answer the question of why this particular world is the one that got realized.

For Spinoza, logic has generative powers; logic is the only thing that explains itself, the very causa-sui itself—that's his famous Deus sive natura. But for Leibniz, the logician, logic isn't generative. Logic is perfectly inert insofar as existence is concerned, which is why he brings a transcendent God—a God over and beyond logic itself— back into the picture, though Transcendent God had to have his reasons for choosing to realize this world among all the logically possible worlds, and that's why the mockable, Voltairean notion of the "the best of all possible worlds" gets put into play.

Stewart's claim that Leibniz was just too much of a philosophical wuss and company man (where the company is Christendom, Inc.) to swallow Spinoza's no-helpings-of-God-on-the-side universe isn't doing justice to the issue that joined them. Leibniz accepts Spinoza’s intuition that there's an ultimate answer for everything but can't accept Spinoza's claim that logic itself is the causa-sui.

Their disagreement is perched on top of a towering assumption—shared by both, but which Leibniz went ahead and named, thus appropriating it for himself, "The Principle of Sufficient Reason''—and that went like this: for every fact, there's a reason why it's a fact. There simply is no brute contingency in this world. By the way, this is an assumption to which Kurt Gődel also ascribed, which is why he identified so strongly, to the point of doing him the great honor of extending his paranoid delusions to him, with Leibniz. His Princeton walking partner, on the other hand, famously identified his own views with Spinoza's, though it's not clear to me that Einstein actually agreed, as Gődel actually did, with that fundamental rationalist assumption.

Anyway, if you miss understanding how seriously Spinoza and Leibniz took this assumption, the very one that holds up their rationalism, then all you see is two guys with fabulous hair prancing about in an elaborate seventeenth-century dance, suspended in the middle of what looks for all the world like empty air.

Spinozist Coiffure: Bernard Henri-Levy's got nothing on Pinker's 'doSpeaking of hair, the seventeenth-century was, among all its other virtues, the preeminent age for male hair. One of my students recently accused me of favoring it for that very reason, pointing out that my partner is the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who, among many other fine attributes, has very good hair. You can tell how carefully I train my students in the art of argument.

A very interesting mathematician, Gregory Chaitin—I highly recommend his book Meta- Math!: The Quest for Omega—suggested to me by email that my next intellectual biography should be on Leibniz. Chaitin has studied Leibniz and believes, as Gődel did, that the man was even more of a polymathing seer, or searing polymath, than he's been acknowledged to be. But as I explained to Gregory, I need to identify strongly, emotionally as well as intellectually, with someone in order to write about them. To be perfectly honest, I need to fall a bit in love with them. And the sine qua non for me in this weird process is that whoever it is be an incurable outsider, resenting, and being resented by, the intellectual Keepers of The Gate.

I just can't overstate how much this condition of Outsiderhood, or Einzelgängerheit (made-up nouns are always better in German) matters to me. Personally speaking, whenever things start getting just a bit too cozy for me, and it appears that I might be in danger of getting within the comfort zone of the Inside, I do something decisively alienating to piss everyone off. Given this quirk of mine, that smoothie Leibniz, a careerist if ever there was one, is just not a guy I can bond with. But that doesn't mean I think he had any but the soundest of reason in diverging from Spinoza's metaphysics.

But I do like your idea of a play bringing together those two wünderboychiks of seventeenth century rationalism. And so, without further ado, I bring you the first stunted scene of Holed Up In The Hague.

As the audience members straggle into the theater to find their seats, settling down and looking through the Playbill for those unwelcome bits of papers announcing performance substitutions, they will not realize right away that the dimly lit stage is already occupied by a solitary figure in a tattered albeit scrupulously clean dressing gown.

He is sitting in a sparsely furnished room, although it does contain the large four-poster bed that he had inherited from his parents, as well as a simple wooden chair and table, where he is seated. His long silken black wavy hair partially obscures his face as he leans over the table, quietly scribbling with a quill. He will remain there the entire time, intent at his writing, as ushers continue to show the audience to their seats.

The audience members will either discover his silent presence for themselves, or be directed by the bemused gesturing of their neighbors to the figure on the stage. Eventually, it is to be hoped, all of them, even the most distracted, will become aware of him and be swathed in the hush of anticipation as well, most importantly, of confusion.

Thus, even before a word of dialogue is spoken, the audience will be entangled in theatrical-ontological uncertainty, each onlooker forced to consider for himself the fundamental metaphysics of the situation: is the play in progress or is it not? And if it is not, at what point will it be? And if it is, then was it even before there was anyone there in the theatre to see it?

At some point, Benedictus Spinoza will look up, pushing away his luxurious locks from his brow and squinting out at the audience. He will pick up one of the lenses that lies, quite naturally, near to hand, and place it before his eye, studying the audience for a long uncomfortable time, provoking uneasy laughter, at which noise he will scowl. This can be drawn out for as long as it remains funny, which may amount to absolutely no time at all.

Spinoza (gruffly): What, then? Yet another intrusion? These social events are becoming intolerably regular. I just had a visitor, not three or four months ago. (Considering) Well, at most five. Could have been six. In any case, it was within recent memory, which is, by my accounting, a ration radically exceeding the rational. I've become so popular I ought to be running for Grand Pensionary. How can a man aspire to the everlasting contemplation of the view sub specie aeternitatus if his front door is constantly being pounded into splinters?

(There is soft, polite knocking, which the philosopher pointedly ignores, continuing to muse).

Only last year, or maybe the year before, I had to put up with that German busybody, Heinrich Oldenburg. He stayed a week if he stayed a day. He becomes secretary of London's Royal Society and makes of his position an excuse to impose himself on every working mind in greater Europe. Those who would be known as thinkers in their day, but who cannot see their way clear to tracing out the order and connections of ideas, try to make their connections by pounding on doors.

More knocking, more assertive.

Spinoza, suddenly standing: Why, it could be him again! I thought I'd heard the last of that meddling bore after he'd read the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and came to the conclusion that I was not the good Christian that an excommunicated Jew ought to be. He'd seen for himself, for to spy me out was no doubt one of his aims, that I live an austerely simple existence, with no signs of those morbid sensual indulgences that the churchified believers assume all others plunge into the moment they give up belief in an hereafter. For all their extolling of virtue they seem to think it the heaviest of adornments, which none would be inclined to possess of their own free will. Oldenburg, seeing no signs of unseemly pleasures, immediately inferred I must believe as he and all of Christendom believes, otherwise why no unseemly pleasures?

He starts to laugh at the thought, slowly sinking back down into his chair, and ending with a resigned chuckle:

Spinoza: Ah me. How human nature doth amuse. Though I have resolved never to mock, or bemoan, or belittle, but only to understand.

He bends again over his work, dipping his quill into the inkstand and writing, while the knocking continues, with various alternating rhythms.

The Karl Rove of the Calculus: Gottfried LeibnizSuddenly, the door opens a crack, and a man with even longer and more luxurious hair pokes his head in. Spinoza remains resolutely oblivious. An elegant leg is extended into the room, followed by the whole of the decked-out form of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Leibniz stands there smiling quite formally, arranging his truly magnificent cape-like mane carefully around his shoulders, but he continues to be ignored. Leibniz shrugs exaggeratedly and walks across the stage to stand directly in front of Spinoza, who rigorously persists in his acute inattention. Leibniz finally puts an elegantly fluttering hand to his lips and delicately clears his throat. Spinoza resignedly sighs, carefully replaces his quill in whatever the hell they used to keep their quills in, and only then looks up, with a quizzical look.

Leibniz executes an elaborate bow in best courtier fashion.

Leibniz: I offer, most noble among philosophers and therefore (suppressing the major premise) most noble among all men, a plurality of apologies for forcing you to abandon, albeit however temporarily, both your quill and the incomparable line of reasoning that you were no doubt in the very act of pursuing. I would not have presumed on your famous patience, which all who speak of you do not fail to mention alongside your other estimable virtues of both mind and soul, were it not the case that I know, with an indubitability almost Cartesian, that you are eagerly expecting me, your most humble servant, who nevertheless proclaims himself a fellow quester for the truth and consequently as eager to make your esteemed acquaintance as you are to make his.

Spinoza: Expecting you, you say? And eagerly, too?

Leibniz: Why yes, Herr Philosopher.

Spinoza (considering for several moments): Perhaps it's true. That is, I don't know that it's demonstrably not true. But it was to be today? You're sure about that?

Leibniz: Undoubtedly! November 17, 1675.

Spinoza: Well, you seem quite confident of yourself in that.

Spinoza looks Leibniz up and down, smiling in a slightly amused but not grossly disdaining manner, obviously storing away his character assessment of this self-possessed young man for further reference. And then he laughs in such a way that one can't know whether he's laughing at his visitor or at himself.

Spinoza: There's no doubt at all about your confidence. And since I myself possess no confidence at all on this matter, I mean of the date, I'll help myself to a portion of yours. You've so much confidence, I wager you'll hardly miss my small borrowing.

The two laugh together, though Leibniz in a way that indicates his uncertainty regarding Spinoza's precise intent.

Spinoza: Only one more question, then, I beg to put to you, if I may be permitted, O' fellow seeker after truth.

Leibniz, again bowing magnificently: It will be my greatest pleasure to enlighten you.

Spinoza: Just who the dickens are you?

Best,

Rebecca

NEXT: How Spinoza is like A.E. Housman, the role of the individual in history, and why The Ethics is hell on your sex life: A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day Three)

Previous Entries for This Dialogue:

A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day One)

That the radicalism of his philosophy was tied into the radicalism of his life is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s subject in her excellent philosophical biography, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. One of the enticements of this book is that it places The Ethics, Spinoza’s most self-revealing disquisition on nature and human conduct, center-stage. How do we account for the experiences and material conditions that shaped one of the most important minds since antiquity? To even endeavor such a task is to run counter to Spinoza’s objective philosophy, which has it that human behavior is predetermined by nature; our only challenge while we’re still breathing is to understand the sheer necessity of our being. That’s how reason can liberate man from superstition and myth.

Rebecca had kindly agreed to participate in a dialogue with me that, as I explained it, would be a sort of epistolary book review and kibitz on Spinoza’s life and philosophy, and how both are still relevant today. (Theo van Gogh’s murder in 2004, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s flight from Amsterdam, both caused by the forces of religious reaction, spring immediately to mind.)

More than that, however, I also wanted to know about the author of Betraying Spinoza, who I’ve been reading for years, both in fiction and non-fiction. (Rebecca’s novel The Mind-Body Problem is probably the best academic satire since Lucky Jim.) Her profile of Baruch is a kind of cerebral love affair at a distance. As a work of biography, it’s tinged with Rebecca’s own intimate experiences, beginning with her girlhood as a skeptical and precocious yeshiva student who first heard the name of this dead heretical Jew pronounced with accented scorn by an orthodox instructor.

I had no idea how enjoyable this exchange would be when I began it, or that I’d manage to coax a little one-act play out of Rebecca in her second letter, a gratis contribution to Jewcy’s pages that had us rethinking our No Fiction policy.

– Michael Weiss