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Spinoza’s Heresy This page intentionally left blank Spinoza’s Heresy Immortality and the Jewish Mind Steven Nadler CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Steven Nadler 2001 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2001 First published in paperback 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nadler, Steven M., 1958– Spinoza’s heresy : immortality and the Jewish mind / Steven Nadler. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677—Views on immortality. 2. Immortality—Judaism. 3. Future life—Judaism. 4. Portugees-Israelietische Gemeente te Amsterdam—Membership. 5. Philosophy, Jewish. 6. Philosophy, Medieval. I. Title. B3999.I4 N33 2002 199′.492—dc21 2001036731 ISBN 0–19–924707–2 (hbk.) ISBN 0–19–926887–8 (pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd., Guildford For Samuel Nadler -@$ and Louis Hertz -@$ This page intentionally left blank Preface Despite Spinoza’s firm recommendation of the life of reason as the path to true happiness and his warning against allowing ourselves to be ‘tossed about’ by the passions, by the constantly changing emotions that, as passively affective responses to the world around us, altern- ately sway us this way and that, it is easy to become passionate about —even obsessed with—Spinoza’s philosophy. His is a rich and multi- faceted system, one that rewards long and careful study. He also basically got it all right. This book is, in a sense, a sequel to my biography of Spinoza (Spinoza: A Life, Cambridge University Press, 1999); it is probably also a prequel to further projects. My goal in this work is to look more closely at his cherem, or expulsion, from the Portuguese Jewish con- gregation in Amsterdam, and to situate his views on one of the issues that reportedly occasioned that extreme punishment within a broad Jewish context. In the biography I purposefully avoided engaging any scholarly debates over the interpretation of his philosophy or the understanding of the events of his all too brief career. That book was written for a general audience interested in the life, times, and thought of one of his- tory’s most fascinating and radical thinkers, and it did not seem appropriate or useful to the purpose at hand to get bogged down in deep philosophical detail or academic polemic. Thus, when discussing what may have been the reasons behind Spinoza’s cherem, I opted to maintain an appearance of neutrality and evenhandedness. I laid out the numerous hypotheses that scholars have offered to explain his expulsion from the synagogue, made some cursory remarks of my own about what seemed to be the likely causes for the event, and then moved on. It was not the right occasion to argue at length for or against any particular interpretation of the cherem or to show in Preface detail how and why certain issues would have mattered to the parties involved. This present book is both more focused and broader in scope than the biography. It is more focused in that the question that frames the discussion is simply: Why was Spinoza excommunicated? More particularly, I am interested in exploring why this particular seventeenth- century Jewish community felt it necessary to ban, with a writ of cheremharsher than any that it had ever used before or would ever use again, a remarkably intelligent and promising member of one of its more prominent families. Even more particularly, I want especially to try to understand why one of the issues that is alleged to have played a role in the decision to excommunicate Spinoza—his denial of the immortality of the soul—didplay such a role. Given the nature of the question of immortality and the tradition of Jewish thinking on this issue, it seems an unlikely candidate for the cause of such a vitriolic ban. The book’s scope is broader than that of the biography, however, in that Spinoza’s philosophical thinking on the human being, and in particular on the human mind—its nature, its well-being, and its eternity—is considered in the larger context of both the Jewish religious and textual tradition and medieval Jewish philosophy. I hope to show how Spinoza’s denial of the immortality of the soul is not only an outgrowth of his own highly idiosyncratic but well-reasoned meta- physical principles, but also the culmination—indeed, the logical and natural conclusion—of a certain intellectualist trend in Jewish rationalism. Because of the attention given to the Jewish context, some readers may feel compelled to complain that I ignore the many other important philosophical and cultural influences on Spinoza, especially Descartes and other early modern thinkers, but also the radical and iconoclastic figures that populated the contemporary (and volatile) Dutch intellectual scene. My response to this is simple: It is not my intention to deny or even minimize the role that Descartes, Hobbes, and others (moderns and ancients) played in Spinoza’s intellectual development. Rather, I aim only to place Spinoza’s thought on one particular issue within a different philosophical and religious tradition. viii Preface It is a tradition that is too often neglected in philosophical scholarship on Spinoza; rare is the book written on him by a philosopher that considers with any depth his relationship to and standing within Jewish philosophy. And yet, if one does not pay attention to this context, much of what he has to say cannot make any sense; indeed, I believe that the many scholars who profess not to understand— or, worse, who dismiss as incoherent—what Spinoza is claiming about the eternity of the mind are not taking seriously the Jewish philosophical tradition in which his thought on this question needs to be placed. While it is true that the Cartesian context is the truly important one when it comes to understanding Spinoza’s metaphysics and epistemology—essentially, Parts One and Two of the Ethics—this is not the case with respect to his moral philosophy, and particularly his account of virtue, human happiness, and the eternity of the mind. Cartesian philosophy may have laid the ‘first principles’ for the con- clusions that Spinoza draws in Parts Four and Five of the Ethics, but the doctrines that we find embedded in the propositions of those parts are a response to a far different tradition, one that has as its most prominent members the medieval Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides. So if Descartes and others seem to be slighted in this study of Spinoza’s approach to the problem of immortality, then I plead nolo contendere: they simply did not, I believe, play the most important role in Spinoza’s thinking on this question. Other readers may complain, however, that I have left out of this book a good deal of important Jewish material, that I have been overly selective in my choice of Jewish texts and thinkers that are relevant to the question of immortality. I have indeed been very selective in this regard. But I must stress that I do not intend for this book to be a broad, general, and exhaustive survey of Jewish views on immortality and the afterlife. The Jewish opinions I do discuss (some briefly, others at greater length) are presented only in order to provide some religious background as well as the immediately relevant philosophical context for what is my (admittedly narrower) main project: understanding both Spinoza’s approach to the problem of immortality and the role this issue played in his community’s decision to ban him. ix