A Study of Spinoza's Ethics

"It’s longer. Bennett’s book is a book that Spinoza scholars love to hate because it’s so fascinating, so interesting and stimulating, and yet it’s so wrong in so many ways – wrong both in the way he goes about doing it, and in many of the conclusions he draws. At the same time, you can’t help being drawn in by the readings he offers of particular claims and arguments by Spinoza. And he’s an entertaining writer, as well. So, for example, he wants us to think of the substance/attribute/mode relationship in terms of field theories in physics, which is a really interesting and stimulating idea. Whether it works or not, who cares? It’s just great fun to see a mind like Bennett’s at work on a mind like Spinoza’s. Yes, to a fault. Here’s why: right at the beginning of his book on Spinoza’s Ethics he says, ‘I’m not going to discuss any of Spinoza’s political or religious writings or views because I find them of no help whatsoever in understanding the ethics.’ That is a tremendous mistake because Spinoza’s metaphysics and epistemology were in the service of this large-scale philosophical, political, religious and moral project. Not using those political and theological writings to help him understand the Ethics is why Bennett, in the final chapter of his book, says, essentially, ‘I can’t make sense of Part V of the Ethics .’ Well, of course, he can’t make sense of it. If you’re not looking at the broader context, for example the Jewish philosophical context of Part V— which is, in my view, a kind of dialogue with Maimonides—you’re not going to be able to make sense of it. So yes, Bennett’s approach is anachronistic, both in the sense of being ahistorical and of not looking at context. It’s also anachronistic in that it doesn’t consider Spinoza’s own philosophical training. Especially when it comes to deeply historically embedded philosophers like Spinoza and Hume. It’s nice to think that they were writing for us, but they were writing for their contemporaries. Neither, I would say. I don’t need Bennett to tell me what Spinoza said. I have my own views on that. I’m not saying I don’t need anybody to help me, because Spinoza gets more and more difficult every time you read him because new questions emerge, and you notice things you didn’t notice before. I’m always turning to fellow scholars to help me understand it. I would say that sometimes Bennett is helpful in that. He gives you a really interesting, imaginative way of thinking about some things. I will turn to Bennett’s book to help me to understand something of Spinoza. But it is one of those books, like Curley’s book, that you really can’t avoid dealing with if you’re going to write about a certain topic—what Bennett has to say, or Curley or Margaret Wilson has to say about that topic. That’s just what scholarship is. When I was the editor of The Journal of the History of Philosophy , if we got a submission on Plato or Spinoza or Kant and it didn’t engage with scholarship at all, we wouldn’t even bother sending it out to reviewers, because philosophy is a dialogue and the history of philosophy is still a dialogue. It’s just that many of the people you’re in dialogue with are long dead. But you can’t avoid the dialogue with fellow scholars. And Bennett is somebody who’s made himself indispensable in that regard because he has written such a stimulating, entertaining book. Yes."