Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

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Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

By Rebecca Goldstein

 

This was a great book! Every friend I gave it to was equally impressed. The author has written an engaging, personal reflection on Spinoza's thinking, life, and historical context.

 

“Spinoza’s ambitions on behalf of reason are staggering; he aims to give us a rigorously proved view of reality, which will yield us, if only we will assimilate it, a life worth living. It will transform our emotional substance, our very selves. The truth shall set us free. His methodology for exposing the nature of reality was inspired by one of the strands that the seventeeth century’s men of science were weaving into what we now refer to as the scientific method, that magnificently subtle, supple, and successful blend of mathematical deduction and empirical induction. Spinoza was keenly interested and involved in the intellectual innovations that we now look back on as constituting the birth of modern science. His inspiration came from the mathematical component of modern science, not it’s empiricism. The methodology he believed could reveal it all was strictly deductive”

 

“Logic alone, he argues, is sufficient to reveal the fabric of reality.”

 

“Spinoza himself puts it this way in The Ethics: It is in the nature of reason to perceive things sub quadam aeternitatis specie, that is, under the guise of a certain form of eternity.”

 

“For nature is nothing like what we experience. Nature consists in the whole infinite system of necessary connections that exist between things, which necessary connections are revealed only to pure reason. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”

 

“To become rational, believing only what we have good grounds for believing, is to transform the self so substantially as to change it’s very identity. His astounding conclusion: to the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity.”

 

“Nothing outside of the world, no transendent God, in other words, explains the world. It’s explanation is immanent within itself. To conceive of the world in terms of its explanatory immanence is to conceive of God. God, he will therefore say, is immanent in nature, not transcendent.”

 

After reading “Betraying Spinoza” I immediately went out and purchased Spinoza’s “The Ethics”. It is one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the history of Western Philosophy. It is structured in the form of axioms, propositions, corollaries and proofs. His deductions regarding the nature of God, the mind, the emotions, bondage, and freedom are a remarkable achievement. “Betraying Spinoza” serves as an excellent introduction to the man and his work, and makes it all more approachable.