Anthony Gotlieb over de TTP (en Spinoza’s God)
Elke week brengt de website Five Books - The best books on
everything - een interview waarin een schrijver of wetenschapper zijn of haar
aanbevolen vijf boeken toelicht. Zo verwees ik al eens in een blog naar zo’n interview dat door Anthony Gotlieb werd
gedaan met Jonathan Israel en in een blog over de door Rebecca Goldstein aanbevolen vijf Best
Philosophical Novels; zij werd door Nigel Warburtonz geïnterviewd. Nu zie ik
vandaag (op Spinoza
Now) dat in op 7 mei 2009 zo’n interview op Five
Books werd geplaatst waarin “Anthony Gottlieb recommends the best books on
God.” Het eerste boek dat hij aanbeval was de Tractatus Theologico-politicus. Dat deel van het interview neem ik
hier over.
Anthony, we’re going
to talk about five books which weigh religion and secularism. I think that’s
how we’ve decided to frame this discussion?
The first book that I’ve chosen is from a long time ago:
1670. It was written by Spinoza and published after his death [sic!]. It’s
called “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” and there are a number of reasons why I
think people should read it.
One is that it is way ahead of its time in its understanding
of the human nature of traditional religion, and on the place of religion in
society. Another reason, which has nothing particularly to do with religion, is
that it’s intelligible, unlike Spinoza’s “Ethics“, which you really need to
have studied quite a lot of philosophy to understand. The “Ethics” is the work
of Spinoza’s that people try to read, but most of them get very little out of
it. His “Tractatus“, by contrast, is intelligible to everybody, doesn’t require
any philosophical background, and does give you many of the main themes of
Spinoza’s thought.
And what are those
themes?
Well, with regard to God, I suppose the most famous ideas
expounded in the “Ethics” is that God is equivalent to nature, in some sense, and
so should not be thought of as a personal being.
So God is not like
us?
God is certainly not like us: he doesn’t have emotions and
wishes in the normal sense. So that’s one thing. But the first task Spinoza set
himself in the “Tractatus” is to undermine the traditional notion of the Bible
as the inerrant word of God. (In fact, the “Tractatus” is arguably the first
serious work of biblical criticism.) He takes the five so-called books of Moses
and shows why they probably aren’t by a single person, and certainly not by
Moses. As he goes through the various
books of the Old Testament, what he’s out to establish is that these writings
reflect human ideas, and that they are
the ideas of particular people expressed at a particular place and a
particular time. Most educated people accept that now, but it was a horrifying
idea to the religious establishment in Spinoza’s time.
So the Bible is
man-made, and for this reason, nobody can use it to claim ownership of a divine
authority.
No, and certainly not the Jews. Spinoza was Jewish by birth,
though he was famously excommunicated by his synagogue, and one of the things
he sets out to do in the book—and does, I think, very well—is attack the idea
that the Jews were the chosen people, or more beloved by God than anybody else.
I think his books
were also banned by the Catholic church?
Yes, because he was generally thought of as an atheist,
though he certainly wouldn’t have described himself as one. He thought he was
just trying to show what God was really like, and in fact the German poet
Novalis called him a “God-intoxicated man,” with some justice, because Spinoza
never stops talking about God. Well, you can’t be both God-intoxicated and an
atheist. But you can, of course, be both
God-intoxicated and yet unimpressed by traditional Judaism. Spinoza thought
that the rules by which Jews lived, as derived from the bible, merely reflected
the circumstances of the early state of Israel, and because Israel no longer
existed, and times had moved on, he thought these rules had become irrelevant.
The dietary laws and so forth, that bound the religious community of his time,
and which continue to bind the orthodox, were all based, he felt, on a
misunderstanding. It was a mistake to suppose that God wanted you to go on
living like that even today.
Didn’t he choose
circumcision in particular to exemplify the man-made nature of divine law?
Yes, and interestingly he thought that circumcision was
actually key to the survival of the Jews: it was a way in which they marked
themselves out and bound themselves together.
This was shocking at the time. Another thing that people found shocking
was Spinoza’s notion of religious toleration and of the separation between
church and state. So whether or not you think he was an atheist or a theist, he
was certainly a secularist. He thought that religion had no part to play in
politics. He was, by the way, writing in one of the most secular states at the
time, where there was most religious freedom: Holland.
Can you tell me
briefly how Spinoza did conceive of God?
He thinks of God as identical with nature, which is a slight
simplification of what he said, but will do for now. That is a radical
reinterpretation of the idea of God, but on the other hand Spinoza thinks that
there is a supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent—which
are the traditional attributes of God. Because he does not think of God as a
personal being, however, morality ends up being secularised—because if God is
not like a person, then we should not think of him as having desires in the
ordinary sense, or as issuing commands, so we have to think of the relation
between God and morality in a new way. And Spinoza’s way is to say that God’s
law is justice, charity and the love of one’s neighbour, and if you let those
things govern your life, then you are in fact following God’s law. That’s all
it takes to be godly. One thing that follows from that, of course, is that you
can live a godly life while being an atheist. You might just want to do those
things anyway, even if you think there is no God. Just so long as you are
living a just and loving life, that’s the important thing about being godly.
And I think it’s pretty plain that educated, moral, people today who are not
religious would say, yes, that’s roughly what I think: if you want to talk
about “God’s will”, you can say that living a moral life and doing God’s will
come to the same thing. So Spinoza was a very modern thinker, a long, way ahead
of his time.
Before we talk about
Hume, who is the author of the next book you’ve chosen, one of the things that
interested me about Spinoza was his rejection of Descartes’ mind/body dualism.
He collapses the difference between the material and the spiritual world and in
doing so he invites us to reject divine providence – the notion of a God who is
different from nature and who is organising nature from outside. And by the
same token he invites us to see that our own freedom is not so much the freedom
to change what happens to us as to understand why it happens. Spinoza argues
that once we understand this properly, we will understand that reality is the
only perfection, and this is also what it means to become more godly.
Spinoza certainly had an unusual conception of freedom. To
be free, for him, is to understand the ways in which you are determined. That
is one of the hardest things to understand in Spinoza.
