Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. -- Spinoza
Writers are flirts. Our words sashay, preen, plead to be taken home. What we write about and how point to the targets of our attention. Some angle for a hasty embrace, others for long involvement. Some seek multitudes, others a few.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), whom his intimates called Bento, may be the least flirtatious great writer ever. His few texts exude the charm of differential calculus. He ground lenses for a living – an exact, exacting craft in a pre-industrial age – and his prose reflects that painstaking precision. He could have written more affably but no, he dreaded the notice of anyone who might misunderstand him. All but one of his works he embargoed till after his death, lest he be punished for his thoughts. His was an age of religious rancor, in which heretics – including anyone who said what they saw – might mortally offend. Spinoza wanted to live. He also wanted to say what he saw. So he wrote polished prose – in esoteric Latin – for the hardy few whom he might encounter in eternity, where they could converse safely.
It’s taken me more than half a century to risk his fearsome rectitude. Now and then, I’d unshelve his most famous book, the Ethics, and have another go. After its first two paragraphs --
I. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.
II. A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body
— a somniferous mix of torpor and bewilderment would overtake me. Many I admired admired Spinoza – Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, George Eliot, Flaubert, I.B. Singer, Santayana, Einstein, to name a few; no doubt he was the real deal, but oy, I would never be that smart. Besides (I growled in my defense), wasn’t the purpose of language to convey intelligence pleasantly to the reasonably intelligent? If the foregoing (which continues in this vein) was pleasant, I’d eat my hat.
Then the friend of a friend wrote a little book about Spinoza – in simple English – which I thought I’d sample. In preparation for the book, I consulted quotation compendiums for Spinoza’s best bits. Here were sentences I really liked, even though the guy’s paragraphs defeated me. Sentences are invitations, not arguments. They invite you to react – true or false, agree or disagree? They may reveal aspects of a speaker’s character in a flicker. Some of Spinoza’s sentences spoke to me, as his pages hadn’t. Excerpts transformed Spinoza into Bento, a pal. I arranged a selection of his sentences into a sort of bouquet. Maybe I would never “get” Spinoza; but now I could at least sniff him, pondering what he meant.
I can’t really tell you about Spinoza’s philosophy – what he thought, where he fits, his influence: I’ve neither the standing nor the understanding. Abstract dissections of truth never enticed me. The thinkers I’ve loved – Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau, Santayana – wrote more melodically than methodically. I loved them as much for their sound as their soundness.
I can tell you, though, about my new friend.
New friends come less frequently in later years. One already possesses more than one can keep up with. What a surprise, then, in my eighth decade, to observe myself sidling into intimacy – not with a living chum, but with one more alive, complex, quivering than most we meet; who had time for me, to prod, suggest, engage; in whose published utterances I could detect an incompletion beckoning.
I commenced our acquaintance with Wiki and other handy summarizers to get the gist – in newsroom lingo, the nut graf. Next stop, quote compilers who excavate from dense texts palatable pellets. I read the little book by my friend’s friend – bless his concision; consulted my pal Santayana, who never wastes words (“Spinoza is one of those great men whose eminence grows more obvious with the lapse of years. Like a mountain obscured at first by its foothills, he rises as he recedes”). Gradually, an impression formed in mind not of a prodigious professor lecturing, but of a modest, self-effacing, meek soul, the gentlest of gentlemen, alone but not lonely, affable, polite, wondering.
Who could not love such a voice!
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.
No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
I was hooked – by a Spinoza extrapolated from a few shavings. Who else can we love but our dream of someone? Only humans fall in love because only humans imagine. “What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter,” said Spinoza.
This is the second of seven reflections on my new pal.