THE PUREST PHILOSOPHER

[Spinoza (1634-1677) deserves a lot of personal attention on several fronts, which in no way can fit into one entry or inside a single section. A very large separate entry Ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch all devoted to him, already exists in the Tikkun Olam section, and to it I am now eagerly directing my reader for reference. The epithet “purest philosopher” was applied to Spinoza by Nietzsche.]

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Baruch/Benedict Spinoza is universally considered among the greatest philosophers of the Western world. Not only that, but he also appears to be among the best-loved personalities in history. Let us therefore start the roster of his character references providers with our much-beloved source Bertrand Russell: “Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.” In another place, Russell observes: “We may, again, take philosophy aesthetically, as probably most of us take Spinoza.” (From his 1899 essay Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is.)

As I had a chance to observe elsewhere, Nietzsche goes out of his way in his praise for Spinoza calling him a “learned genius” (in Menschliches 157), or making the following comment in Menschliches 475, which I am quoting in a broader context in the entry Nietzsche And The Jews: I’d like to know how much one must excuse in the overall accounting of a people (the Jews), to whom we owe the noblest human being (Christ), the purest philosopher (Spinoza), the mightiest book, and the most effective moral code in the world.

In fact, Nietzsche’s lavish tribute to Spinoza can be called exorbitant, as the latter is most unusually being included into a number of elite “sets of greatness,” which, when reduced to a common denominator, leave a peculiar club, more exclusive than any other club on earth:

From Nietzsche’s 1879 Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (408). The Journey To Hades: I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me, if occasionally they appear to me as shades, while those men seem so alive to me. In another note, Nietzsche calls four names: My ancestors: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe. In the cross-section of these two sets we are now left with just Goethe and Spinoza, but after Spinoza receives an honorable mention in the company of his fellow philosophers per se, this leaves Spinoza by himself in the most exclusive and infinitely elite club of one! And there are, indeed, an unusually high number of usually positive references to Spinoza throughout Nietzsches Werke, to mention just this one, as an illustration: For, this overestimation of, and predilection for, pity is something new: hitherto philosophers have been at one as to the worthlessness of pity. I name only Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld, and Kant--- four spirits, as different from one another as possible, but united in one thing: in their low estimation of pity. (Preface to Genealogie [#5]). Knowing, as we do, that Nietzsche was himself an anti-pity Crusader, he ought to appreciate the low estimation of pity in any philosopher, and the choice of these four, as exemplifying such an attitude, is a mark of their particularly high status, in his eyes.

Apparently, Spinoza’s genius was not explicitly recognized either in his time or in the century following his death. Quoting Bertrand Russell again, “He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him. Christians abhorred him equally; although his philosophy is dominated by the Idea of God, the Orthodox accused him of atheism. Leibniz, who owed so much to him, concealed his debt, and carefully abstained from saying a word in his praise.”

In a curious historical “tit-for-tat” (I am alluding to the famous rediscovery of the German Bach by the Jew Mendelssohn-Bartholdy), Spinoza’s genius was first rediscovered for posterity by the Germans Lessing and Goethe (as well as by the Englishman Coleridge, whose admiration for Spinoza saved his reputation in the English-speaking world from David Hume’s stigma, the latter branding Spinoza’s philosophy “an hideous hypothesis.”)

Spinoza’s main philosophical value lies in his ethics. He was also writing on the subject of politics, but his political theory was derivative from Hobbes, with whom he agrees on many things, but disagrees on which form of government is the best, preferring democracy. His psychology is also reminiscent of Hobbes, while his metaphysic is a modification of Dèscartes. (See Bertrand Russell on this!) But his ethic is original, and it is his ethics, going hand in hand with theology, which is by far of the greatest interest to us in this series and elsewhere.