Reconstructing Spinoza

By GOCE SMILEVSKI

BETRAYING SPINOZA
The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
By Rebecca Goldstein
304 pages. Nextbook/Schocken. $19.95.

Rebecca Goldstein’s latest book betrays the notion of genre. It’s a novelistic biography of the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza, an historical outline of the issues facing our people in the 17^th century, a treatise on the genesis of the rationalistic philosophy, a theoretical analysis of the Jewish religious currents, a memoir-like description of the sensibility and the spirit of an era... in other words, Betraying Spinoza is a book that surfs several styles of writing, riding each narrative and philosophical wave with ease and grace.

Why Spinoza? Why now?

The answer to these questions isn’t just that Nextbook has commissioned a series of books called “Jewish Encounters.” No, this volume is important because it transforms Spinoza into a man of our time. His questions—about the relations between religion and life, philosophy and the meaning of existence, the relations between state and religion, the need for ethics that will be general and will function based on reason—become, in Goldstein’s prose, our questions.

Even though Goldstein possesses a superior knowledge of Spinoza’s life and work, our author is sure that the search for Baruch Spinoza, the human being, is almost an impossible mission: “no matter how intimate with Spinoza’s formal and formidable system I’ve come to feel over the years, Spinoza himself, the man being a system, has remained remote,” she writes. For Goldstein, the identity of the other, its essence, remains both distant and close at the same time.

With a subtle sense about the time in which Spinoza’s life took place, the social and historical context, and the political and value clashes that are the basis of the community from which Spinoza was excommunicated, Goldstein makes a fascinating sketch of Spinoza as a man who successfully balanced the ability to discover his own philosophical system and the strength to apply that system to his life.

Goldstein sees Spinoza as a man who absolutely refused to compromise his philosophical belief that the truth has to be hunted down, despite the consequences and prohibitions against such a hunt. He was uninterested in the negative consequences that might be visited on successful hunters, who managed, even for a moment, to touch truth.

Betraying Spinoza is one of the few significant books that appeared in the last few decades featuring Baruch Spinoza. In another one, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze states: “The Ethics is a book written twice simultaneously: once in the continuous stream of definitions, propositions, demonstrations, and corollaries, which develop the great speculative themes with all the rigors of the mind; another time in the broken chain of scholia, a discontinuous volcanic line, a second version underneath the first, expressing all the angers of the heart and setting forth the practical theses of denunciation and liberation.” If we want to experience the encounter—or, rather, the clash—between the mind and the passion in the writings of the great philosopher, it is necessary to read his works; above all, Ethics. Rebecca Goldstein’s book is a strong enough encouragement for the readers to do so.