Isaiah Berlin (1909 - 1997) maakte een karikatuur van Spinoza
Isaiah Berlin, geboren in een joods gezin in Riga, maakte als kind de Russische Revolutie van 1917 mee in Sint-Petersburg (toen Petrograd), waarna de Berlin’s in 1921 naar Engeland vluchtten. Berlin studeerde aan Corpus Christi in Oxford waar hij ook zelf les gaf. Hij heeft als breed geïnteresseerde intellectueel, ideeënhistoricus en politiek filosoof veel geschreven, maar is vooral bekend geworden om zijn Two Concepts of Liberty: de 'negatieve' (vrij van) en 'positieve' vrijheid (vrij tot), waarover hij bij de aanvaarding van het hoogleraarschap aan de Universiteit van Oxford in 1957 sprak.
Had hij ook wat met Spinoza?
Zijn nagedachtenis wordt in ere gehouden met een zeer goede website, waarop diverse van zijn teksten zijn te vinden. En dan blijkt dat hij zich niet veel met Spinoza heeft bezig gehouden, maar toch wel af en toe iets over hem beweert - soms op een wat discutabele wijze.
In zijn vele publicaties is er geen over Spinoza. Nou ééntje dan: "Review of George L. Kline, Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy", maar dat zal eerder geweest zijn vanwege de Sowjet Unie, dan om Spinoza. 1) Van de best vele dissertaties, boeken en artikelen over Berlin is er geen die gaat over 'Berlin en Spinoza'. Eén enigszins indirect: David West, ‘Spinoza on Positive Freedom’ kreeg een antwoord van Berlin. 2)
Tussen zijn ongepubliceerde papers zat volgens de lijst niets over Spinoza. Geen van de inmiddels twintig gehouden Isaiah Berlin Lecture’s behandelde Berlin’s eventuele relatie met of kennis van Spinoza.
Maar toch... enige snippers:
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TWO ENEMIES OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 3) 2 The First Onslaught: J. G. Hamann and his Disciples"Anything which is ordered, anything which is finite, he [Hamann] seeks to reject. I think it was Spinoza who said: Nature – the purpose of nature is uniformity. There is nothing that Hamann believed less."
Dit is een merkwaardige opmerking! Als er iemand niet teleologisch dacht en vond dat de natuur geen doelen kende, was het Spinoza wel. Hamann was hierin dus eerder een volgeling van Spinoza.
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The Counter-Enlightenment
"Jacobi, a mystical metaphysician deeply influenced by Hamann, cannot reconcile the demands of the soul and the intellect: 'The light is in my heart: as soon as I try to carry it to my intellect, it goes out.' Spinoza was for him the greatest master since Plato of the rational vision of the universe; but for Jacobi this is death in life: it does not answer the burning questions of the soul whose homelessness in the chilly world of the intellect only self-surrender to faith in a transcendent God will remedy." 4)
Berlin geeft hier fraai in het kort zowel Jacobi's fascinatie voor als angst voor en verwerping van Spinoza's filosofie weer.
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THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL HISTORY 5)
"Nature was a harmonious whole and it was understood as such: once the mind penetrated its interconnections it would see where everything fitted. This is certainly the kind of view which, for example, is to be found in Spinoza, who supposes that nature in general makes for uniformity. Everything in nature is systematic, everything in nature ultimately belongs to a single unified systematic whole. The only difficulty is to discover what this whole is, and to do this you apply rational methods which will presumably supply you with a correct answer to your question."
“Let me quote some lines from Hamann and you will see a certain affinity between him and Herder’s doctrines. ‘Every court, every school, every profession, every closed corporation, every sect – each has its own vocabulary.’ How, asks Hamann, does one enter these vocabularies? With the passion of ‘a friend, an intimate, a lover’, with faith, and not by rules – this was written in the late 1760s. As I said before, he thinks that God is a poet, not a geometer. Only spiders like Spinoza make systems which strut over the real world, catch flies and build ‘castles in the air’. [Noot] In Holbach’s world there is no colour, no passion, no joy, no imagination – it is a corpse."
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The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities 6)
"Descartes made an epoch with his attempt to systematise these methods - notably in his Discourse on Method and its application in his Meditations - his two most popular and influential philosophical treatises. Spinoza's Treatise on the Improvement ofthe Mind, his quasi-geometrical method in the Ethics and the severely rationalist assumptions and rigorous logic in his political works and his criticisms of the Old Testament, had carried the war further into the enemy's camp. Bacon and Spinoza, in their different ways, sought to remove obstacles to clear, rational thinking. Bacon exposed what he considered the chief sources of delusion: 'idols' of 'the tribe', 'the den', 'the market-place' and 'the theatre' - effects, in his view, of the uncritical acceptance of the evidence of the senses, of one's own predilections, of misunderstanding of words, of confusions bred by the speculative fantasies of philosophers, and the like. Spinoza stressed the degree to which emotions clouded reason, and led to groundless fears and hatreds which led to destructive practice ; from Valla to Locke and Berkeley there were frequent warnings and examples of fallacies and confusions due to the misuse of language.(p. 4)
[..]
Moreover, the scientific model (or 'paradigm') which dominated the century, with its strong implication that only that which was quantifiable, or at any rate measurable - that to which in principle mathematical methods were applicable - was real, strongly reinforced the old conviction that to every question there was only one true answer, universal, eternal, unchangeable ; it was, or appeared to be, so in mathematics, physics, mechanics and astronomy, and soon would be in chemistry and botany and zoology and other natural sciences; with the corollary that the most reliable criterion of objective truth was logical demonstration, or measurement, or at least approximations to this.
Spinoza's political theory is a good example of this approach: he supposes that the rational answer to the question of what is the best government for men is in principle discoverable by anyone, anywhere, in any circumstances. If men have not discovered these timeless solutions before, this must be due to weakness, or the clouding of reason by emotion, or perhaps bad luck: the truths of which he supposed himself to be giving a rational demonstration could presumably have been discovered and applied by human reason at any time, so that mankind might have been spared many evils. Hobbes, an empiricist, but equally dominated by a scientific model, presupposes this also. (p. 8)
Hier is opmerkelijk dat Berlin het heeft over Spinoza's quasi-geometrical method. Uit de hele tekst blijkt een behoorlijke afstandelijkheid t.o. Spinoza._ _ _ _ _
In hoofdstuk 3 (The philosophy of the Spirit) van zijn Karl Marx heeft Berlin, waar hij de tegenstelling tussen gedetermineerdheid en vrije wil behandelt, deze passage:
"Spinoza had observed that if a stone falling through the air could think, it might well imagine that it had freely chosen its own path, being unaware of the external causes such as the aim and force of the thrower and the natural medium which determine its fall. Similarly, it is only his ignorance of the natural causes of his behaviour which makes man suppose himself in some fashion different from the falling stone: omniscience would quickly dispel this vain delusion, even though the feeling of freedom to which it gives rise may itself persist, having lost its power to deceive." 7)
Enigszins merkwaardig is dat Berlin schrijft "Spinoza had observed", terwijl Spinoza slechts een gedachtenexperiment voorstelde.
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Uit de oudste tekst (uit 1940), die ook de langste is waarom ik heb geaarzeld of ik 'm wel zou citeren (wat ik toch maar doe), blijkt dat hij studie moet hebben gemaakt van Spinoza's filosofie, maar dat hij er in mijn ogen een karikatuur van maakt.
INTRODUCTION: INDUCTION AND LOGIC 8)"If we are to avoid a [ ] of non-intercommunion substances, composed out of isolated substances, we must turn to Spinoza’s single world substance, capable indeed of interaction and intercommunication because it is one and its parts are connected by an infinite network of necessary relations; but for this we have to pay with (a) the view that false = coupling of incompatibles = meaningless and (b) the admission that our everyday assumption that disconnections – absence of relations – is as real as relations, that the fact that I am not this desk, that I am not identical with any of you, that this desk has a history independent of the history of the Martyr’s Memorial, all this is an illusion, for nothing is independent of anything. But the only proposition which really corresponds to reality [ ] a proposition which asserts the necessary connection between attributes and the substances; if there is only one substance and one lot of attributes – the universe – and all it contains – there is only one true statement which can be made and that statement would state everything that could be stated and, ex hypothesi, no finite creature could assert it, for then it would no longer be finite but would see itself as part of the infinite whole and, therefore, only the universe itself could think it or assert it about itself; all our statements are necessarily incomplete, and in so far as they purport to be complete, over-ambitious and erroneous.
This last view, while it corresponds to something which we feel about the development of the sum of human knowledge as an interconnected and expanding whole rests on two premises, both [41] of which I hold to be false: One is that all true propositions are necessary: otherwise I cannot prove them true. The second is that all true propositions copy reality. (1) [ ] – Spinoza – Hegel – Bradley. That to say of a proposition that it is true, indeed to say of the symbols that they mean anything – is to claim that it asserts a necessary relation, i.e., something guaranteed by a logical method, although there are no de facto, only de jure truths. This is not true if only because when we speak of necessary propositions, we mean to distinguish them from other kinds of propositions, otherwise the word ‘necessary’ would have no application. Leibniz recognised this by distinguishing between truths of reason which were necessary and truths of fact which were contingent. If all truths are in some ultimate sense necessary, what do we think we are saying when we are consciously uttering a contingent truth? Spinoza says that I must always be seeking to make my truths true by a logical necessity: if I say that this desk is brown, not necessarily brown, but brown as it happens, and do not claim to suppose that this can be proved, or that it is necessitated to be as it is either causally or logically, and if I am then told that I am making a mistake, that all propositions must be necessary if they are to be true at all, what sort of mistake am I making? I am certainly saying something intelligible in the ordinary sense of ‘intelligible’, even if what I am saying is false; but provided it is intelligible, it must be such as could be true: this desk may have to be necessarily brown or necessarily not brown, but if I mean anything by saying that it is just brown and refuse to say what it must or must not be, I am, if I mean anything, referring, at any rate, to a logically possible state of affairs. If I am told that I am not, meaning anything, I must here take a stand and stoutly maintain that I do mean something very normal and intelligible when I say that the desk happens to be brown; that it might not, need not, could have been not brown but that it is brown. Even if I am wrong, and it is not brown, even if I am deeply wrong and in some sense it could not have been brown – still it makes sense to say, however falsely, however rashly, that it is brown, and to say that this is meaningless is to confuse what is meaningless and what is false, which deprives both of any use; finally that the confusion between what is false and what is meaningless, which always seems so queer, is almost invariably due to the same original sin – the supposition that symbols directly correspond to entities and that they break down, so to speak, when the entities to which they are [42] supposed to correspond, are absent. This breakdown is sometimes suppose to be what makes a sentence state a falsehood, sometimes a piece of nonsense. Hence, the confusion. 8)
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Bronnen
1) "Review of George L. Kline, Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy." Oxford Magazine 71 (1952–3), 232–3, [hier PDF]
2) Thesis; books; David West, ‘Spinoza on Positive Freedom’, [Political Studies 41 (1993), 284–96]. ‘A Reply to David West’, Political Studies 41 (1993), 297–8.
3) TWO ENEMIES OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT [Woodbridge Lectures, Columbia University, New York, 25–8 October 1965] (This was the second of the four Woodbridge Lectures, ‘Two Enemies of the Enlightenment’ (Hamann and Maistre), delivered in the fall of 1965 at the Harkness Theater, Columbia University.), (p. 3 - PDF)
4) The Counter-Enlightenment. Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1968–73: Scribner’s), vol. 2 (1973),100–12 [PDF]
5) THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL HISTORY [Gauss Seminars, Princeton, 1973. 36,698]
Eerste citaat uit: 1 Two Notions of the History of Culture: The German versus the French Tradition (p. 5, PDF)
Tweede citaat uit: 2 ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ and the Natural Sciences: Vico versus Descartes (p. 9-10, PDF) Met daarin deze noot: Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel (Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, 1955– ), vol. 5, p. 265, line 37.
6) The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities, 2nd Tykociner Memorial Lecture (Illinois, 1974: University of Illinois) [PDF]
7) The original text of Karl Marx [DOC]
8) INTRODUCTION: INDUCTION AND LOGIC [Lectures in in a mixture of (mainly) prose and full notes, Hilary Term 1940. 32, 450] [PDF]
