Enlightenment

Baruch Spinoza – The Prince of Philosophers

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Baruch Spinoza, born Benedito de Espinosa, 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677,  was a Jewish-Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardi origin. His family moved to the Netherlands during the inquisition to escape persecution and he was raised in a Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam. There he received a traditional Jewish education and developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible, the nature of free will, good and evil and of the Divine. He was offered 1000 florins a year to conceal his doubts; when he refused, Jewish religious authorities issued a herem (חרם‬) against him, causing him to be effectively shunned by Jewish society at age 23.

Spinoza spent his remaining 21 years writing and studying as a private scholar. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

Spinoza lived an outwardly simple life as an optical lens grinder. His wants were few and simple, and he showed throughout his life a rare indifference to money, turning down rewards and honours, including prestigious teaching positions. 

Spinoza’s magnum opus, the Ethics, was published posthumously in the year of his death. The work opposed Descartes’ philosophy of mind–body dualism, and earned Spinoza recognition as one of Western philosophy’s most important thinkers.

Spinoza wrote the … masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely.

Medieval philosophy places heavy emphasis on the theological. One of the most heavily debated topics of the period was that of faith versus reason. Avicenna and Averroes both leaned more on the side of reason, whereas Augustine stated that he would never allow his philosophical investigations to go beyond the authority of God, stating first believe, and then second, seek to understand (fides quaerens intellectum). Anselm attempted to allow for both faith and reason. 

Spinoza contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e., everything in the Universe) is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality that surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza’s system also envisages a God that does not rule over the universe by Providence, by which it can and does make changes, but a God that is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Spinoza argues that

things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case, 

In writing such, he directly challenges a transcendental God that actively responds to events in the universe.  In his view, no amount of prayer or ritual will sway God. Spinoza influenced many later thinkers including Einstein  who named Spinoza as the philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view. Einstein once wrote:

I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Interestingly, Spinoza did not argue that humans were primarily rational creatures. Since to Spinoza everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will, despite strongly believing that they do. This illusionary perception of freedom stems from human consciousness, experience, and indifference to prior natural causes. Humans think they are free, but they ″dream with their eyes open″.

This picture of Spinoza’s determinism is illuminated by this famous quote in Ethics:

the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. … All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak.

Spinoza held good and evil to be relative concepts, claiming that nothing is intrinsically good or bad except relative to a particularity. Things that had classically been seen as good or evil, Spinoza argued, were simply good or bad for humans.

Despite his alleged atheism, according to Spinoza, the highest virtue is the intellectual love or knowledge of God/Nature/Universe. 

Blessedness, which consists of love towards God, is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; we do not rejoice in it because we control our lusts, but we control our lusts because we rejoice in it.

He also meditated on the transformative power of love over pure reason. 

Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love. Hatred which is completely vanquished by love, passes into love; and love is thereupon greater, than if hatred had not
preceded it.

Besides the religious controversies, nobody really had much bad to say about Spinoza. Even those who were against him “had to admit he lived a saintly life”.  Spinoza died at the age of 44 in 1677 from a lung illness, perhaps tuberculosis or silicosis exacerbated by the inhalation of fine glass dust while grinding lenses. He is buried in the churchyard of the Christian Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.

Along with René Descartes, Spinoza was a leading philosophical figure of the Dutch Golden Age. By laying the groundwork for the Enlightenment including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy.

His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted Gilles Deleuze to name him “the ‘prince’ of philosophers’.“

The Sorrows of Young Werther

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was only 24 years of age when he wrote and published the autobiographical and highly emotive work, The Sorrows of Young Werther [1774]. He wrote the work in just 6 weeks and its instant success made him an international celebrity.

The novel recounts the love of sentimental young Werther who dresses in a characteristic  blue coat with a yellow vest. He loves nature and is enchanted by the peasants of a rural township in Germany where he falls in love with Charlotte [Lotte]. She is a beautiful young woman who must look after her younger siblings after her parents death.

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Werther’s love is thwarted however, for Lotte is betrothed to a much older man Albert. The Sorrows of Young Werther are recounted in a series of letters to his friend Wilhelm and the melancholy depths the young man reaches, affected Goethe’s readership profoundly.

So significant was the novel that it stimulated a flood of Werther merchandise including a perfume called “Eau-de-Werther”, a craze for yellow waist-coats, and at least one copy-cat suicide.

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Characteristic of the Sturm und Drang movement of the late 1700s, it gained popularity for being a direct reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Roughly translated as “Storm and Stress” the movement was characterised by emotional turbulence, individuality and sentimentality.

Goethe had experienced terrible pain in love with a young woman Charlotte Buff two years earlier, who was engaged to a friend Albert Kestner. The writing of this novel was therapeutic because he admitted years later that he,

shot his hero to save himself..

…a reference to his own near-suicidal obsession over Charlotte. Moreover, an acquaintance of Goethe’s named Jerusalem who was similarly infatuated with a married woman, shot himself.

Goethe combined Jerusalum’s sufferings to his own experiences, and wrote the novel, Werther.

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Goethe treated the writing of the short novel as a cathartic exercise, hoping to exorcise some of his intense feeling.

Rather than releasing him, however Goethe’s novel was to have an significant impact disproportionate to its size. It not only helped to create Romanticism, but also articulated adolescent turmoil in a manner which has continued in popular format, to this day.

There would be no Catcher in the Rye and no Rebel Without a Cause without Werther.

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Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature and carried Werther with him on his campaigning to Egypt. The work influenced the later Romantic period particularly Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster finds the book in a leather portmanteau, along with two greats — Plutarch and Milton. Shelley equated Werther’s case to the monster, of one rejected by those he loved.

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Goethe described the powerful impact the success of the book had on him, writing that even if Werther had been a brother of his whom he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by his vengeful ghost.

Yet he also acknowledged the great personal and emotional impact that The Sorrows of Young Werther exerted on forlorn young lovers who discovered it. As he commented to his secretary in 1821,

It must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life, when he felt as though Werther had been written exclusively for him.

What was he hoped, closure for him, opened a wound in Europe’s collective consciousness and effectively haunted him the rest of his days.

 

 

 

Candide and ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’

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François-Marie Arouet [1694 – 1778], known by his pen name, or nom de plume, Voltaire, was a French Englightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Voltaire was a prolific writer, despite the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of  his day.

Candide, also L’Optimism,  is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire. It begins with a young man, Candide, who has lived a sheltered life and indoctrinated with Leibnitzian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss. The work describes his slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world.

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Written as a playful comedy, behind its amusing façade, there lies very harsh criticism of contemporary European civilization. European governments such as France, Prussia, Portugal and England are each attacked ruthlessly. Organised religion, is also harshly treated. For example, while in Paraguay, Cacambo remarks, “[The Jesuits] are masters of everything, and the people have no money at all …”. Voltaire depicts the Jesuits holding the indigenous peoples as slaves while they claim to be helping them.

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Moreover, Candide was written into the context of mid 1700s natural disasters and war. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 led to a tsunami and city fires which rattled the philosophical optimism of the day, particularly that of Gottfried Leibnitz and his optimist worldview. Voltaire actively rejected Leibnizian optimism after the natural disaster, convinced that if this were the best possible world, it should surely be better than it is, describing the catastrophe as one of the most horrible disasters.

Voltaire concludes with Candide, advocating a deeply practical precept, “we must cultivate our garden“, in stead of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, “all is for the best” in the “best of all possible worlds“.

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Candide has enjoyed both great success and great scandal. Immediately after its secretive publication, the book was widely banned because it contained religious blasphemy, political sedition and intellectual hostility hidden under a thin veil of satirical amusement. Today, Candide is recognized as Voltaire’s magnum opus and is often listed as part of the Western canon; it is arguably taught more than any other work of French literature. Candide has been listed as one of The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written.

Voltaire’s Bastards

In 1992, Candian born political scientist Jonathan Ralston Saul published “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.” Part of a trilogy of political essays, Saul points out the ills of a dictatorship of reason, unbalanced by other human qualities.

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Saul points out that Voltaire and his contemporaries believed reason was the best defense against the arbitrary power of monarchs and the supersititons of relgious dogma. It was the key not only to challenge the powers of kings and aristocracies but also to creating a more just and humane society. This emphasis on reason has become central to modern thought. However, unfortunately, today’s rational society bears little resemblance to the visions of the 17th and 18th century humanist thinkers.

Our ruling elites justify themselves in the name of reason, but all too often their power and methodoloy is based on specialised knowledge and the manipulation of “rational strucutres” rather than reason. The link between justice and reason has been severed and our decision-makers, bereft of a viable ethical frameowrk have turned rational calculation into something short sighted and self-serving. This can and does lead to a directioness state that rewards the pursuit of power for power’s sake.

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Moreover, we live in a society fixated on rational solutions, management, expertise and professionalism in almost all areas, from politics and economics to education and cultural affairs. The rationalism Voltaire advocates, captured in Candide’s mantra, “we must cultivate our garden” has birthed has led to the rise of individualism with no regard for the role of society has not created greater individual autonomy and self-determination, as was once hoped, but isolation and alienation.

He calls for a pursuit of a more humanist ideal in which reason is balanced with other human mental capacities such as common sense, ethics, intuition, creativity, and memory, for the sake of the common good.

In brief

What interests me in this literary debate between political minds is that art and art forms are 100 years ahead of academic thought, most of the time.

The modernist writers of the turn of the century and their melanchology works, the surrealism and absurdism is art and literature and the nihilism produced by many of the war writers and poets – signalled he death knell that pure “rational frameworks” brought to society.  Lost and adrift without meaning, this generation saw the effects of reason driven ideology in Stalin and Hitler and its consequences.

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Children’s writers such as C S Lewis and J K Rowling have made as much sense as Raslton Saul in calling out western rationalism for its hollow promises. Harry Potter’s “muggles” a great example of the non-sense in seeing magical and spiritual things the cause of social ills.

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May we learn in this new generation, to balance celebrate learning and shun supersition without hiding within rational frameworks at the expense of ideology in the form of “truth”, intuition, creativity, spirituality and a framework for justice to work hand in hand with reason.

 

Science-fiction and permission to wonder.

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This week the Wall Street Journal and The Australian both ran an interesting article on the scientific evidence for the existence of a creator. Written by Eric Metaxas, biographer and journalist, the article raises the question of God using scientific arguments.

Metaxas cites the 1966  Time magazine headline, “Is God Dead?”, in which  the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life:

  1.  The right kind of star, and
  2. a planet the right distance from that star.

He goes on  to point out that given the roughly octillion — 1 followed by 24 zeros — planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion — 1 followed by 21 zeros — planets capable of supporting life. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely zero.

Is science showing there really is a God?

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/wall-street-journal/is-science-showing-there-really-is-a-god/story-fnay3ubk-1227167151847?nk=26f354557e2c6acf47e6a2d00c0e8baf

 

Metaxas continues to show that as knowledge of the universe has increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets plummets below zero. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability says that even we shouldn’t be here. Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life — every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface and so forth.

Metaxas concludes, the finetuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the finetuning required for the universe to exist at all. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction — by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 — then no stars could have ever formed after the Big Bang at all.

“Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense.”

What is curious to me about this dialogue is several points:

  1. Western tradition, stemming from the Enlightenment period has placed a sharp divide between discussion around faith or spirituality in relation to science. The religious wars of Europe at the time resulted in an uneasy truce based on the determination to separate church and state, science and religion from each other.  There is almost a ban on public discussion to this day of the combination of these ideas.
  2. However, scientists making strong athiestic statements of the ilk “God is dead” re-enter this debate as guiltily as any churchman or Musliman or Hinduman.
  3. Since the Romantic period of the late 1800s, art and culture has moved strongly towards a more spiritual dialogue, integrating what was denied during the rationalistic period of enlightenment debates. This re-ignited stories of spirits, other worlds, magic, time travel, dreams and re-opened questions of origin and being.
  4. Science fiction is a descendent of the romantic tradition, combining scientific knowledge with permission to wonder and imagine.

Science Fiction, not unlike ancient myth and legend, has long asked these questions with absolute permission. Unembumbered by rhetoric required to separate rationalism and spiritualism, questions of being, life, existence have been freely explored. 

Moreover, the harsh modern and pre-modern debates are largely out of date in contemporary society, a society in which most people and cultures acknowledge a spiritual realm, even if they do not agree to the nature or name of that realm.  Such an article, other than within the close circles of academia still bound to the strict mores of generations past, will not seem surprising at all.

In fact, I believe most people sigh a sigh of relief to hear that science is gradually catching up with the zeitgeist of the time to acknowledge it’s okay to discuss spirituality in the public realm again.