Spinoza had argued that our capacity
for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable
worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and compassion. That
each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself
a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine
revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first
proposed it in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation
of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the
minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of
which had never before been seen on this earth.
Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the
voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic at this moment,
with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how
much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day
350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our
sorry world would have been without it.
REASONABLE DOUBT [7.29.06]
By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Introduction
History illuminates our origins and keeps us
from reinventing the wheel. But the question arises: History
of what? Do we want the center of culture to be based on a
closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical
contact with the real world? One can only marvel at, for example,
art critics who know nothing about visual perception; "social
constructionist" literary critics uninterested in the
human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of
genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues
who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology.
 In
the seventeenth century, people not only believed in that constricted
past but thought that history was near its end: The apocalypse
was coming. A realization that time may well be endless leads
us to a new view of the human species—as not being in
any sense the culmination but perhaps a fairly early stage
of the process of evolution. We arrive at this concept through
detailed observation and analysis, through science-based thinking;
it allows us to see life playing an ever greater role in the
future of the universe.
There are encouraging signs that the third culture
now includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists
do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe there
is a real world and their job is to understand it and explain
it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory
power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to
intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged,
and understanding and knowledge accumulate through such challenges.
They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical
principles, but they do believe that art, literature, history,
politics—a whole panoply of humanist concerns—need
to take the sciences into account.
As the Italian scholar Gloria Origgi, writes:
No matter what your attitude is towards science,
no one in the humanities can ignore that something has changed
in the way we think about a number of key oppositions such
as: nature-nurture, rational-irrational, conscious-unconscious,
individual-social, mind-body, digital-analogical, masculine-feminine,
etc. To discuss such matters today, we have to overcome the
Freudian-Lacanian-Foucaultian vulgata and take a look at
what science has to tell us.
Enter Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a novelist
trained as a philosopher, who is one of the leading science-based
humanities scholars: intellectually eclectic, seeking ideas
from a variety of sources and adopting the ones that prove
their worth, rather than working within "systems" or "schools." Goldstein
knows science, and easily communicates with scientists. Her
novels, and her studies of nonfiction studies of Gödel
and Spinoza, are excellent examples of science-based thinking
by an enlightened humanities scholar.
And now, Rebecca Goldstein on Spinoza and the
voice of reason.
— JB
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Edge, in
partnership with the Genoa Science Festival (Festival
Della Scienza 2006), has organized a panel to explore the
role of science-based humanities scholars in the evolution
of the third culture. The panel, featuring Rebecca Goldstein
and Gloria Origgi (and others, to be announced) will take place
on Tuesday, October 31 at 3pm in Genoa. (Among the other Edgies in
Genoa for this year's Festival are Sue Blackmore, Seth Lloyd,
Steven Pinker, Robert Trivers, Lisa Randall, Dan Sperber, and
Chris Stringer). Stay tuned for further information.
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN is the author, most recently, of Betraying
Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. She is
a Radcliffe Fellow, Harvard.
REBECCA GOLDSTEIN'S
Edge Bio Page
REASONABLE DOUBT
[REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN:] Thursday marked the 350th anniversary
of the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese
Jewish community of Amsterdam in which he had been raised.
Given the events of the last week, particularly those emanating from the Middle
East, the Spinoza anniversary didn't get a lot of attention. But it's one worth
remembering — in large measure because Spinoza's life and thought have
the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable
and overwhelming.
The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain
murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are
not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible
knowledge of the Creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication,
he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying
the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of
dismaying relevance.The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims
of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition.
The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity
at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept
under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the "New Christians," as
they were called even after generations of Christian practice, of carrying
the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the Iberian
Inquisition was Europe's first experiment in racialist ideology.
Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try
to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful
tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the
circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement
can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.
Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of
reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments
that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically
important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us — whether
Jew or Christian or Muslim — a privileged position in the narrative of
the world's unfolding.Spinoza's system is a long deductive argument for a conclusion
as radical in our day as it was in his, namely that to the extent that we are
rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.
Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his
system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political.
Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our
responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities
of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.
Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of government — only
democracy can preserve and augment the rights of individuals. The state, in
helping each person to preserve his life and well-being, can legitimately demand
sacrifices from us, but it can never relieve us of our responsibility to strive
to justify our beliefs in the light of evidence.
It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the development
of the sciences subverts the very grounds for state legitimacy, which is to
provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full potential. And this,
too, is why he argued so adamantly against the influence of clerics in government.
Statecraft infused with religion not only dissolves the justification for the
state but is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of
the truth against all others.
Spinoza's attempt to deduce everything from first principles — that
is, without reliance on empirical observation — can strike us today as
quixotically impractical, and yet his project of radical rationality had concrete
consequences. His writings, banned and condemned by greater Christian Europe,
but continuously read and discussed, played a role in the audacious experiment
in rational government that gave birth to this country.
The Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document first drafted
by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza's contemporary — both
were born in 1632 — is a more obvious influence on Jefferson than Spinoza
was. But Locke had himself been influenced by Spinoza's ideas on tolerance,
freedom and democracy. In fact, Locke spent five formative years in Amsterdam,
in exile because of the political troubles of his patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Though Spinoza was already dead, Locke met in Amsterdam men who almost certainly
spoke of Spinoza. Locke's library not only included all of Spinoza's important
works, but also works in which Spinoza had been discussed and condemned.
It's worth noting that Locke emerged from his years in Amsterdam a far more
egalitarian thinker, having decisively moved in the direction of Spinoza. He
now accepted, as he had not before, the fundamental egalitarian claim that
the legitimacy of the state's power derives from the consent of the governed,
a phrase that would prominently find its way into the Declaration.
Locke's claims on behalf of reason did not go as far as Spinoza's. He was
firm in defending Christianity's revelation as the one true religion against
Spinoza's universalism. In some of the fundamental ways in which Spinoza and
Locke differed, Jefferson's view was more allied with Spinoza. (Spinoza's collected
works were also in Jefferson's library, so Spinoza's impact may not just have
been by way of Locke.)
If we can hear Locke's influence in the phrase "life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness," (a variation on Adam Smith's Locke-inspired "life,
liberty and pursuit of property"), we can also catch the sound of Spinoza
addressing us in Jefferson's appeal to the "laws of nature and of nature's
God." This is the language of Spinoza's universalist religion, which makes
no reference to revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be discovered
through human reason.
Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a
thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and compassion.
That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable
law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had
caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it in the 17th century, adding fire
to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into
the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had
never before been seen on this earth.
Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem
hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the
march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on
that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world
would have been without it.
[Editor's Note: First published as an Op-Ed Page article in The New York
Times on Saturday, July 29th]
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