A Companion to Spinoza

Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Yitzhak Y. Melamed

• Verlag: Wiley-Blackwell
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119538691
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Modern Philosophy

An unparalleled collection of original essays on Benedict de Spinoza's contributions to philosophy and his enduring legacy

A Companion to Spinoza presents a panoramic view of contemporary Spinoza studies in Europe and across the Anglo-American world. Designed to stimulate fresh dialogue between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy, this extraordinary volume brings together 53 original essays that explore Spinoza's contributions to Western philosophy and intellectual history. A diverse team of established and emerging international scholars discuss new themes and classic topics to provide a uniquely comprehensive picture of one of the most influential metaphysicians of all time.

Rather than simply summarizing the body of existing scholarship, the Companion develops new ideas, examines cutting-edge scholarship, and suggests directions for future research. The text is structured around six thematically-organized sections, exploring Spinoza's life and background, his contributions to metaphysics and natural philosophy, his epistemology, politics, ethics, and aesthetics, the reception of Spinoza in the work of philosophers such as Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, and more. This unparalleled research collection combines a timely overview of the current state of research with deep coverage of Spinoza's philosophy, legacy, and influence.

Part of the celebrated Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, A Companion to Spinoza is an ideal text for advanced courses in modern philosophy, intellectual history, and the history of metaphysics, and an indispensable reference for researchers and scholars in Spinoza studies.

Part I
Life and Background

1
Spinoza’s Life

PIET STEENBAKKERS

Apart from his works Spinoza did not leave many traces. Though certainly not a recluse, he led an inconspicuous life. Some periods in it are hardly documented, so that any biography of the philosopher must to some extent be lacunary. The following account of his life is as coherent as the historical material and the format of this Companion permit. This chapter is an extract from a substantially longer, footnoted version that will appear in Garrett (2021), to which I refer for corroboration of the details presented here. My work on Spinoza’s biography has profited greatly from a standing collaboration with Jeroen van de Ven, who is preparing a detailed chronicle of the philosopher’s life.

1. Family

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. He died in The Hague in 1677. As far as we know he never left the Dutch Republic. His mother was born in Amsterdam, but his father and his grandparents on both sides were from Portugal. From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, many Sephardic Jews came to Amsterdam to escape from the persecution they suffered in Spain and Portugal. Medieval Iberia (Sepharad in Hebrew) had been ruled by Muslims for a very long time, and though it was not free from oppression, it had allowed Jews to profess their religion. After nearly nine centuries, however, the situation changed dramatically: in 1492 Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile (known as los Reyes Católicos) conquered Spain, and immediately expelled the Jews. Most of them went to Portugal, but in 1497 the Portuguese king Manuel I married the daughter of the Spanish ‘Catholic Monarchs.’ On their insistence, he forced all Jews to convert to Christianity. Those who continued to practice Judaism were, however, not actively persecuted until half a century later. Then many conversos (or ‘New Christians’), who were indiscriminately suspected of Judaizing in secret, fled Portugal to escape the Portuguese Inquisition. In 1580 Spain and Portugal were politically united under Philip II of Spain, and in the decades that followed many Jews sought refuge abroad, often in seaports – so as to stay in touch with their network of overseas merchants. Thus they came to French harbor towns (Bordeaux, Nantes, Rouen) and to Antwerp and Amsterdam in the Low Countries. Many Sephardi immigrants settled on Vlooienburg, an embankment in the river Amstel created in 1593 as part of the urban expansion of Amsterdam.

Michael de Spinoza, the philosopher’s father, was born in 1587 or 1588 in Vidigueira, Portugal. In 1605 his parents, Pedro Rodrigues Espinosa and Mor Alvares, fled to Nantes with their three children. Michael moved to Amsterdam in the early 1620s. Around 1623 he married Rachel de Spinoza, a first cousin. They had two children, both stillborn. Rachel died in 1627. Michael then married Hana Deborah Senior, with whom he had five children: Miriam, Isaac, Bento (or Baruch), Gabriel, and Rebecca. Michael and Hana Deborah named their third child Baruch, after his maternal grandfather (who officially received that name only when he was circumcised after his death in 1647). As a child he was called Bento, the Portuguese translation of Baruch (‘blessed’). The philosopher himself seems not to have used the Hebrew version of his name: he signed legal documents as ‘Bento,’ letters as ‘Benedictus,’ or just the initial ‘B.’ Just before Bento turned six, on 5 November 1638, his mother died. Michael’s third and last marriage, with Hester de Spinoza, remained childless.

Spinoza’s family lived on the edge of Vlooienburgh. The house in which Bento was born and raised, a handsome merchant’s residence on the north quay of the Houtgracht, close to the old Amsterdam synagogue, was pulled down in the nineteenth century. On its premises the Mozes en Aäronkerk was built. The former island of Vlooienburgh has become a square, the Waterlooplein. Michael de Spinoza and his family stayed in the same house for decades, so Bento lived there from his birth on 24 November 1632 up to at least 1656, when he was expelled from the Portuguese‐Jewish community of Amsterdam.

2. The Amsterdam Years (1632–ca. 1660)

As a child Spinoza attended ‘Ets Haim’, a nearby cheder (elementary school). He received a solid Jewish education, though he did not attend the school’s highest forms. He was never trained to become a rabbi, but joined his father’s trading firm in his early teens. Michael de Spinoza was a respected and active member of the Jewish community in Amsterdam. He imported and exported commodities such as raisins, almonds, wine, and olive oil. Bento’s stepmother Hester died in 1652, and his father Michael in 1654. Isaac had died in 1649, Miriam in 1651, and Rebecca moved out in 1650, so after 1654 the two brothers Gabriel and Bento were the only remaining family members still living in the parental home on the Houtgracht. They took over their father’s firm, but it soon became clear that it was weighed down with debts as a result of severe losses in the years 1651–1653, owing to piracy and war. In order to escape bankruptcy, Bento, then 23 years of age, had himself declared a minor under Dutch law and placed under tutelage on 16 March 1656. By this maneuver he was released from the insolvent estate. Apparently Gabriel managed to continue the company on his own until October 1664: he then granted power of attorney to the merchant brothers Moses and David Juda Lion, and set off to Barbados.

On 27 July 1656, just a few months after Spinoza’s spectacular legal escape from the family business, he was ritually expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community, with a formal ban (herem) pronounced in the synagogue of the Talmud Tora congregation. The exact reasons for the ban are not specified in the archival record we have of it – presumably a summary (in Portuguese) of a lost official text in Hebrew. It states that the synagogue’s board of governors (the Mahamad) expelled ‘Baruch espinoza’ because of his evil opinions and activities, and of the horrible heresies he had practiced and taught, as well as the monstrous acts he had committed. As far as we know, Spinoza had not yet published anything at the time when the herem was promulgated. Yet the wording of its record indicates that teaching heretical ideas was among the abominations he was accused of. To all appearances, Spinoza’s philosophy was already gestating in the middle of the 1650s, in some form or another. As the earliest letters show, he had acquired a reputation as a redoubtable philosopher by 1661. He obviously flourished in the heterodox circles in which he moved in the latter half of the 1650s. Unfortunately, this formative period in Spinoza’s life is very poorly documented. That his philosophical views had something to do with the heresies imputed to him is also asserted in testimonies of two Spanish travelers who had associated with Spinoza in Amsterdam in 1658–1659. Tomás Solano, an Augustinian monk from Tunja (in Colombia, then part of the Spanish empire) and Captain Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla were part of a group that frequently gathered in the residence of Joseph Guerra, a nobleman from the Canary Islands, who was in Amsterdam to be cured of leprosy. Spinoza and another excommunicated Jew, Juan de Prado, often attended these gatherings. In August 1659, Solano and Pérez de Maltranilla were interrogated by the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid, primarily about a Spanish actor who had converted to Judaism in Amsterdam. They also told the Inquisition about their meetings with Spinoza and Prado; according to them these men had been expelled from the Jewish community because of their rejection of Jewish law. Solano in addition mentioned their views that the soul is mortal and that God exists only philosophically.

It would have been possible for Spinoza to be readmitted to the community, if he had made amends. That was a price he did not want to pay. Spinoza accepted the herem as a fact: for him, the break with Judaism was definitive. He never joined another religious denomination either. There are some indications that he reacted to the ban with a written statement, a vindication of his dissent from Judaism. If that is true, it is tempting to assume that part of it may have found its way into his works, particularly the Theological‐Political Treatise.

The five years after Spinoza’s excommunication from the synagogue are shrouded in haze. All contacts with relatives (including his brother and business partner Gabriel) and Jewis...