Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 - 1991) nam almaar meer afstand van Spinoza

Over Isaac Bashevis Singer had ik op 8 februari 2009 het blog “Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904 - 1991) had iets met Spinoza”. Daarin behandelde ik hoe hij als jongeman bij zijn vader thuis moeite deed om méér van Spinoza te weten te komen en verder vooral zijn verhaal “The Spinoza of Market Street.”
Door de lezing van het boek van Daniel B. Schwartz: The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image [Princeton University Press, 2012], waarin, zoals ik schreef, het zesde hoofdstuk, over Isaac Bashevis Singer, voor mij de grootste verrassing vormde, houd ik mij af en toe weer met Singer bezig.
Isaac Bashevis Singer had geen bezwaar tegen geïnterviewd worden, integendeel. Er bestaan dan ook een aantal interviewboeken. In het boek Isaac Bashevis Singer & Richard Burgin, Conversations [Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986] spreekt Richard Burgin uitgebreid met Singer over o.a. Spinoza.

In een andere bundel die Grace Farrell samenstelde, Isaac Bashevis Singer Conversations [Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1992], is ook het lange interview opgenomen dat Cyrena Pondrom in 1969 met hem had, "Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Interview", waarin zij Singer uitgebreid ondervroeg over zijn kennismaking met en appreciatie van Spinoza. [books.google]
Daaruit neem ik hier graag enige passages over, waaruit duidelijk wordt dat Singer aanvankelijk nieuwsgierig was naar Spinoza, maar dat zijn interesse danig bekoelde. Hij ontwikkelde een meer idealistische kijk op mens en wereld en geloofde in de vrije wil.

Over zijn wens een derde attribuut te ontdekken [p. 66]
Q: Would you say that Spinoza has had a strong influence on your thinking?
A: In the beginning he had an influence. I have a story called "The Spinoza of Market Street." Actually Spinoza preached the very opposite of what I think.
Q: It wasn't scepticism in any case, was it?
A: No, he considered himself a rationalist, but like all rationalists he became mystical against his will. Because, according to Spinoza, substance has an endless number of attributes and we only know two of them, thought and extension. So by giving substance an endless number of attributes he has already called millions and trillions of powers which we don't know. What are the other attributes of God? If we don't know them—and we will never know them according to him—they may be mercy, and they may be anything. So many of the rationalists talk so long, they talk themselves out of business.
Q: Would you agree with Rabbi Benish in Satan in Goray that it's a sin to delve too deeply into things that were really meant to be hidden?
A: Well, in a way yes and a way no, because this Rabbi Benish was a leader of his community, and he knew that these people have weak little brains, and if they go into mysticism, it will only bring evil, which it really did in this particular case If mysticism becomes a mass movement, it's always bad, because it's not for the masses, it's not for many. It should be an esoteric thing.
Q: Do you believe that there are absolute limits on what a man can know?
A: No question about it. Not only are they there, but they are very near to us. Wherever we go we touch these limits. However, I would say that men can a little bit stretch these limits, and whatever stretching he does is already a great gain. We know that man has stretched his limits in science to a great extent. We have learned in the last two hundred years things which humanity hasn't grasped in a hundred thousand. Perhaps we can also stretch the limits of our psychic knowledge, psychic powers, which are even stiffer limits and not so easy to push. But at least there is the desire in some of us to try.
Q: But this is still knowledge, within thought and extension, isn't it? This is not knowledge of all the myriad attributes that are possible?
A: No. I have a hope some way that perhaps you can find a third attribute if you try very hard. That is, it's not written in any book that these are all - although Spinoza said that these are the two, actually they are arbitrary. You could call them by different names. I'm sure that man knows more than what Spinoza said we are able to know.
Q: Can fiction help to stretch the limits?
A: Real fiction, or at least I would say the type of fiction which I like.

Over het verhaal "Alone" en Singer’s kritiek op Spinoza vanuit een meer idealistische visie [p. 91]

Q: It seemed to me also that the main character may have seen more clearly than usual. He says, "Through the heavenly channels, which, says the Cabala, control the flow of Divine Mercy, came truths impossible to grasp in a northern climate." And further, "At the same time the eternal questions tapped in my brain: Who is behind the world of appearance? Is it Substance with its Infinite Attributes? Is it the Monad of all Monads? Is it the Absolute, Blind Will, the Unconscious?" Is this sense of truth the illusion of a character in special circumstances, or is this a penetration to reality by a character who would otherwise not be able to see so clearly?
A: I gave in this story my own feelings, but the feelings in a special case, because when one is alone, one is more inclined really to phil-osophize than when one is in company and everything is in order. When you are alone, contact with other people is broken, and you begin to brood about something higher or lower. I mentioned here, actually, a number of philosophers, although not by name. The Sub-stance with Infinite Attributes is Spinoza; the Monad of all Monads is Leibnitz. The Absolute can be Schelling or Fichte. Blind Will is Schopenhauer, and the Unconscious is von Hartmann. And the question, who is behind the world of appearance: this can be Plato, [92] and Kant — and anything. Naturally I mentioned only the idealistic philosophers. I did not mention, let's say, Feuerbach, or others. I don't even have the feeling that I have to dispute with them. I don't believe in materialism.
Q: Thus in this section you simply indicate the spread of idealistic philosophy rather than suggest a position. Do you, yourself, ever adopt a position discriminating between the world as a conception of the mind and the world as a poor imitation of an absolute form?
A: I feel, like the most idealistic philosophers and actually like everybody else, that what we see here is only kind of an image, a picture, which is fitted to our power of conception. To me, and I think to many others, we are living in a kind of a dream, even when we are awake. The only difference is that this dream seems to have a certain consistency. If you dream at night that you have a house, you wake up in the morning and there is no house, but your dream of a house in the day as a rule goes on day after day. So it is a consistent dream; a dream behind which there is a reality. But what reality is, we don't know and we will never know. The thing-in-itself will always be a puzzle to every human being. And when a person is alone, he's brooding, he feels these things even more than when he is with people, where the illusion of reality is a little stronger.
Q: Interpreting the story "Alone," do you think a man gets closer to intuition of the Ding-an-sich when he is alone and brooding?
A: Very much so. He has no choice, because when a person is completely alone for a time, he feels that the day is almost as dreamy as the night. Things become almost without substance. This feeling that things lose their substance is very strong when a person is alone, or in times of tragedy, in times of great confusion. And also when you come to a strange city you already feel that there is something wrong with your conception of reality, because here are people living with-out knowing you. You don't exist for them, and they almost don't exist for you either. The feeling of reality is actually strongest when a man sits in one place among his family or among his friends, among the things he is used to. The more you move away from your things—you don't have to be Immanuel Kant to feel that things just melt between your fingers.
Q: The discussion of idealism leads me to an historical question. In your memoir, In My Father's Court, you comment that you are now [93] "familiar with all the defects and hiatuses of Spinozaism. But at that time I was under a spell which lasted many years." How long did the spell last?
A: Really many years. I used to carry around Spinoza's Ethics wherever I went. But later on I began to see that Spinoza is in his own way a realist, which I did not like too much. After I read David Hume, Kant, and others, I felt that something is wrong with Spinoza's belief in reality, because to him what we see is real. And then there is his rationalism and his idea that God has no will and no purpose. I did not like that. As I became older I became more inclined to mysticism and to religion, and I felt that to say that the universe is nothing but a huge machine with no will or no purpose is minimizing creation. I will take from Spinoza his pantheism; I believe like Spinoza that everything is God. But to be sure that God has only these two attributes which we know (though he says He has endless attributes) and that He has no will and has no purpose is wrong; it is to be too sure about things where men cannot be sure. I could just as well say that will and purpose are also attributes of God—and so is beauty, and so is, maybe, morality. The Cabala has both sides: it has all the good sides of Spinoza and all the good sides of Plato. This is the reason I admire so much the Cabala.
Q: In other words, your dispute with Spinoza really turns on this question of the ideal versus the real?
A: Exactly. And about the question of free will and purpose. Once we assume that God has will and purpose, then there is no limitation to what God can do with His creation; it may have the most wonderful purpose and the most wonderful direction. Spinoza was actually a materialist. He called matter God, because he also says that matter (extension) and thinking are two sides of the same coin, which means to him there is nothing but matter, that matter itself thinks. Since I moved away from materialism, I began also to move away from Spinoza, although he fascinates me just the same. He was a great and a deep thinker in his own terms.
Q: Did you begin to move away from Spinoza before you came to this country or later?
A: Before.
Q: That means that most of what you have written was written after you became critical of some of his basic thinking.[94]
A: Yes, I would say so—even the story "The Spinoza of Market Street" is a Spinoza story I have written in later years. At the end the main character (who has finally married) says, "Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool." Well, I don't believe that a man who lives with a woman is a fool. Spinoza compares people who love to the insane. He did not believe in love; at least he says so.
Q: Thus, as it seems, the whole story is extremely ironic.
A: It is in a way. First! describe this man who is—even though he is a Spinozaist—a deep thinker. But what I wanted to say is that if you are a human being, if you are alive, you cannot live according to Spinoza. And another thing: Spinoza belittles very much the emo-tions. To him the emotions are very negative. His ideal man must get rid of his emotions, at least as much as possible. Only then could he be a real thinker, and could he have what he calls the amor dei intellectualis-the intellectual love for God. I dispute this. I consider the human emotions a great treasure—not only a material treasure, but also a great treasure of revelation, because our emotions reveal to us things which we cannot grasp with our intellect. The only thing is that the emotions, because they are so many and because they are so intense, can also be very dangerous. They are a weapon which can be used in many ways. Man can kill himself with emotions, kill others with emotions, so he has to control them, to curb them—but not to get rid of them, not really to dismiss them, as Spinoza says.
Q: So in "The Spinoza of Market Street" the emotions really conquered the intellect and the man was better off, or wiser.
A: Yes. I think so, although he says he became a fool, I think he became wiser—that he had sense enough in his old age to get a woman, even though she was such a woman. To his heart, she was a vulgar piece, but still he had somebody.
Q: Now what about the Cabala: this was also something which you studied as a boy, wasn't it? At about the time you discovered Spinoza?
A: Almost in the same time or a little earlier—although one is not allowed to study the Cabala, from a Jewish point of view, before one is thirty years old, because it's esoteric and dangerous, according to tradition. But I stole these books from my father's bookcase and I studied them. Spinoza was not in my father's library, but I once heard my father curse Spinoza. He said he was a heretic, a disbeliever, and  [95] I became curious. My father even mentioned that what he said was also said in a different way by the famous saint, Baal Shem. Baal Shem said the world is God and God is the world. From these words I got a notion what Spinoza is. In my kind of education, in my kind of circumstances, we had to learn things very quickly and from hints. In the time when I heard the name, there wasn't anything about Spinoza in Yiddish—and also, my father forbade me to read worldly books, secular books. If my father would have caught me reading Spinoza, I don't know what would have happened in our house; there would have been a scandal. We had to steal ideas, steal emotions.
Q: About what time did you begin, then, to get rather widely acquainted with secular books?
A: Not until I left really my father's house, although I read a lot while I was in my father's house. But I had always to hide, to go up to an attic, or to the fields somewhere. Reading was an illegal business, except reading holy books. Only when I went to Warsaw to live with my brother in the early 'twenties could I study. But since I had then all the books which I wanted, my desire to read became smaller, you know how it is. But still, I read. Then I read Kant and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and David Hume, whom I admire very much.
Q: During this time you must have been in your late teens and in your twenties. [Singer: Yes.] Did you stay with your brother then?
A: My brother was there, but I had a furnished room. I didn't live with my brother, but we were attached. I saw him all the time. There was a Warsaw writers' club, and at this writers' club they all came, the painters and even the actors and naturally the writers. I even met there a number of European writers, including Galsworthy.

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Aanvulling 2 jan. 2013

Op 31 december 2012 bracht Tablet, A new read on Jewish life, een uitgebreide column van John Isaac Lingan: "Searching for I.B. Singer", waarin hij zijn ervaringen beschrijft over zijn voornemen, nadat zijn ouders hem in z'n tweede voornaam naar Isaac Bashevis Singer hadden genoemd, in 2012 eindelijk eens flink wat van Singer te gaan lezen. Ondertitel: "A yearlong first encounter with the great Yiddish author who gave me my middle name."

Hij herinnert eraan dat Isaac Bashevis Singer "the only Yiddish-language Nobel laureate for literature" was. Hij schrijft o.a.:

"He harps endlessly on his existential torment as a young man, describing the anguish of years spent flitting guiltily between Spinoza and the Torah. As a boy, Singer was obsessed with fate and God’s will, like a prepubescent Woody Allen without the jokes. As a young man, he carried that same sense of shame and self-hatred into multiple unsatisfying relationships with women who, by his telling, attached themselves to him like barnacles. The drama of Singer’s early life was the kind of thing I feared it might be: struggles with a God I didn’t believe in, and with a berserk and joyless bachelorhood that couldn’t have borne less of a resemblance to my current life. So, I excused this book as a throat-clearing exercise and waded into Singer’s real work, the fiction."

"Flitting": flitting between fear and hope...