Term 'radikale Aufklärung' door Leo Strauss op Spinoza toegepast
Wat zou ik graag een tekst van Jonathan Israel lezen over bijvoorbeeld de Weimar-periode, waarin diverse joodse intellectuelen zich met Spinoza (voor en tegen hem) hebben bezig gehouden; zoals Herman Cohen en vooral Leo Strauss. Maar ja, het is nu eenmaal niet de periode waarover hij schrijft. Maar nu zag ik tot mijn vreugde dat hij in zijn "A Reply to Four Critics" in het winternummer van H-France Forum, waarop ik gisteren in een blogje wees, een passage wijdde aan Leo Strauss, die hij dus wel heeft bestudeerd. Die twee alinea's [op p. 88 en 89] neem ik hier graag over (waarbij ik de eindnoten hernummerde). Het volgende is dus van Jonathan Israel:
"The term Radical Enlightenment [radikale Aufklärung], as explained by the Danish scholar Frederik Stjernfelt,1 first appeared in German in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and features prominently in Leo Strauss’s study of Spinoza commenced in 1925. “Radical Enlightenment” for Strauss chiefly denoted atheism and repudiating religious authority. In his introduction to the 1965 English version of his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion Strauss again highlighted the significance of treating the Bible as “a literary document like any other.”2 Denying the Bible is a divinely given revelation, held Strauss, is “the true foundation of Biblical science in the modern sense. It is for this reason and only this reason that Spinoza’s work is of fundamental importance.” Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was less an intellectual revolution in itself, though, he pointed out, than part of a broader context—namely, the “critique of Revelation of the radical Enlightenment in the service of which it arose.”3
Three features of Strauss’s 1920s “radical Enlightenment” conception are worth noting: first, the idea that rejecting Revelation along with Creation and miracles is the backbone of the radikale Aufklärung; second, that this critique is only a stage in the philosophical demolition of religious authority which Strauss traced back originally to Epicurus; and third, that underlying Spinoza’s critique of religion lodges a basic assumption shared with the wider “radical Enlightenment.”4 This collective intellectual culture Strauss delineates in chapter five of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion where he argues that, for Spinoza, only science and scholarship provide a universal and objective grounding which religious believers lack and that validates his critique of revealed religion: “only to the extent that Spinoza can construct his system in the spirit of positive science, […] and subjects himself to scientific [ie. wissenschaftlich] scholarly scrutiny in consequence,” does he proceed “with greater right than his opponents who believed in revealed religion.”5 For Strauss, underlying Spinoza’s philosophy and the radikale Aufklärung is the belief their standpoint was more objectively true and subject to scholarly verification than that of their opponents.6
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1 Frederik Stjernfelt, “The Emergence of the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ in Humanist Scholarship,”
2 Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion [English translation (1965), original edition Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft. Untersuchungen zu Spinozas Theologisch Politischen Traktat [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1930], new ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p.35; see also Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 191.
3 “Der Zusammenhang, in den sie gehört ist die Offenbarungs-Kritik der radikalen Aufklärung, in deren Dienst sie entsteht.” See Leo Strauss, Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage seiner Bibelwissenschaft, new ed., with foreword by Norbert Altwicker (Darmstadt: Georg Olms, 1981), p. 2.
4 Strauss, “Preface” (1962) to Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion [1930] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 15, 17.
5 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critque, p.140.
6 Strauss, Spinoza’s Critque, p. 143.
