Steven Nadler's Reading List

"Almost complete. Volume I and volume II were translated by Edwin Curley. Volume I includes the early writings, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the Short Treatise on God, Man and his Wellbeing and the Ethics , plus all the correspondence up to, I think, 1665. The second volume includes the Theological-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise and all the correspondence up to his death in 1677. The only things that Spinoza published in his lifetime were: his summary presentation of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy . That’s in volume I and he did that under his name, in Latin. Then, in 1670, he published the Theological-Political Treatise anonymously, because I think he had a sense of how scandalously it would be received. Everything else remained unpublished in his lifetime and appeared only after his death. The reason why I say this is not the complete works is because Curley decided not to include Spinoza’s Compendium of Hebrew Grammar . He wrote this in the 1670s. I am actually in the process of translating that, so there will be a volume III in the Princeton edition, which will include the Hebrew grammar, plus the herem document. That will be a more accurate and, I hope from now on, the standard translation. There will also be some other relevant documents, including the inventory of his library, which was made when he died. As herem documents go, it was quite long. Usually a herem document in Amsterdam in this period was just a couple of sentences saying ‘so-and-so has been put under herem for assaulting a rabbi’, or something like that, and you’re told how the person will be able to make amends and reintegrate themselves into the community. In Spinoza’s case, by contrast, it’s a relatively long document, full of curses and damnations, expelling him from the people of Israel, seemingly for good, without offering any means of restitution or reintegration. It’s in Portuguese. The original document is in the Jewish archives in the Amsterdam municipal archives. A lot of translations have been very loose, for example, they use the word ‘excommunication’. In fact, that word doesn’t appear. The Amsterdam Portuguese invented a word, ‘ enhermar ’, which means to put under herem , combining the Hebrew with Portuguese. So I think a more literal translation is better. Yes. He really pissed people off. But there is a debate about why. Some people think that his offences were not matters of ideas and heresy, but that he had engaged in business practices that undermined the Jewish community in the eyes of the Dutch. When his father died he inherited a great deal of debt because the business wasn’t doing well. In order to relieve himself of the debt, rather than going to the leaders of the Jewish community, he went to the Dutch authorities and had himself declared an orphan, which he could legally do because he was under the age of 25. By being declared an orphan, he was no longer responsible for those debts, many of which were owed within the Jewish community. He became a preferred creditor on his father’s estate. So, he breached the regulations of the Jewish community, which stated that all such legal matters had to be resolved within the community. But, also, if a member of the Jewish community could avoid paying their debts in that way, that wasn’t good for business with the Dutch. Exactly. There’s a Princeton paperback edition of Curley’s translation of the Ethics along with selections from other items in volume I, and a Hackett paperback edition of the Theological-Political Treatise , translated by Samuel Shirley. I want to say you should go for the Ethics first because that is his philosophical masterpiece. But it’s a really tough book to read because it’s in the geometrical Euclidean format. So I would suggest the Theological-Political Treatise . It’s a very different kind of book. It’s a political work. It’s a treatise on religion and politics and it’s much more accessible. It’ll start to give you a sense of what Spinoza is about. And then you’ll be ready for the Ethics ."

"Yes. This is Curley’s book, Behind the Geometrical Method: a Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics . It’s relatively short, only about 130 pages, and it’s a nice accessible introduction to the main themes of Spinoza’s philosophy. He doesn’t devote a lot of time to the political stuff or even the religious stuff. It’s focused mainly on the Ethics . There’s a chapter on God. There’s a chapter on the human being – about the mind-body relationship. And then the third chapter’s on human well-being, which is moral philosophy. You’re not going to get the full sense of Spinoza’s very broad system, but I think it’s a nice entry portal to the basic ideas of the Ethics . He describes it as a reading of Spinoza’s Ethics , not of Spinoza’s whole philosophy. I think partly it’s a way to ensure that he’s establishing his conclusions with mathematical certainty. No. In fact, he was under no illusions about that, either. But, one of his views is that nature is governed by an absolute necessity. He’s not just a causal determinist: he’s a necessitarian. For him things could not possibly have been any other way because events are causally determined. The laws of nature themselves are also absolutely necessary. So, what better way to capture the relationships that exist in nature than by a body of propositions that are themselves related by logical necessity? I think he also just thought it was an effective way to convey fairly complex ideas in a clear and distinct manner. Descartes did it, too. You mentioned Hobbes. In his response to the second set of objections in Hobbes’s Objections to the Meditations, Descartes presents some of the conclusions in the Meditations in a geometric format. True, yes, and a geometer. Remember, too, that Spinoza was a Cartesian, at least in his early years. He was inspired by Descartes and his first published work was that summary of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy . So, he may have been inspired by Descartes’s own attempt to present philosophical matters in geometrical format. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Curley’s other book, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation , has been very influential and it’s hard to write about Spinoza’s views on God and nature without taking into account his important interpretation. There’s the question of whether he is a pantheist or an atheist, but also the technical vocabulary that Spinoza uses. Spinoza says that whatever is, is in God, and he uses this Cartesian language of ‘substances’, ‘attributes’ and ‘modes’ and says that ordinary things in the world are ‘modes’ of God or substance. What does he mean? In what sense are all things ‘in God’? ‘Modes’ we usually think of as properties inhering in a substance. This book might be the substance and the green is the mode. So, when Spinoza says ‘whatever is, is in God’ and ‘God is the only substance’ are we supposed to think that we are just pimples on God’s skin, that we are ‘in God’ as properties are in God? And Curley argues that that’s just awkward metaphysics. Now, I think that’s not an objection to a reading of Spinoza to say, ‘well that makes him awkward’, because Spinoza is awkward. He is trying to get us to radically rethink the way we look at the world. So, there’s a lot of debate about how we are supposed to understand this relationship between finite things, which includes ourselves, and infinite eternal substance—God. And in his book on Spinoza’s metaphysics, Curley tries to reinterpret it in terms of laws and facts and to make it seem a little bit more palatable to our modern scientific philosophical way of thinking. I think it’s brilliant, but I don’t think it’s the right way to read Spinoza."

"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."

"Yes, she’s our contemporary. Her book, The Explainability of Experience , was originally published in German. A translation came out a couple of years ago and we should be really grateful for that. On the face of it her theme is narrow: does Spinoza offer us an explanation for our experience of the world? But, in pursuing that thesis across various topics in the Ethics , she offers us a very broad vision of Spinoza’s system, which I think is the right one: that Spinoza was both a rationalist and a realist. By rationalist, I don’t mean—and she doesn’t mean—this caricature of somebody who thinks that you can come to all knowledge deductively with reason, but that, for a moral rationalist, well-being, human flourishing and happiness are a matter of living a life according to the guidance of reason. So, in her reading, Spinoza is a rationalist both about knowledge and about ethics. “Spinoza gets more and more difficult every time you read him because new questions emerge, and you notice things you didn’t notice before” But she also argues he’s realist. Here, she’s combating a certain interpretation of Spinoza that goes all the way back to Hegel , that for Spinoza the only thing that’s really real is God, or nature itself, and all the finite things around us are merely subjective phenomena by which we try to understand or make sense of nature. She says that Spinoza really did believe that the world around us is real and there are finite durational things and that the basic metaphysical and epistemological grounds for our knowledge of them requires their reality. So, I think her book is a nice counter to subjectivist readings of Spinoza’s metaphysics. It’s a kind of Parmenidean theory that the only thing that’s real is ‘the one’, ‘the whole’—in Spinoza’s terms, ‘God’ or ‘nature’. We seem to see around us items in nature that have metaphysical integrity—tables, chairs, trees, giraffes. Are these things real things that exist as durational beings—although they’re part of nature and everything is a part of nature—or is the breaking up of nature into discrete individuals illusory?"

"For a long time Spinoza was regarded, especially by professional philosophers, to be of interest primarily for his metaphysics and epistemology. And I think this was pedagogically motivated. We would teach courses in the history of modern philosophy where Descartes lays the epistemological and metaphysical foundations, Spinoza responds to those and Leibniz responds to Spinoza and so on. So, students, if they read Spinoza, they read the Ethics , but only Parts I and II. They’re left wondering why the hell this book is called ‘Ethics’, when there’s nothing ethical in it. It’s just about God, nature, free will and so on. So, for a long time, Spinoza was not taken seriously as a moral philosopher, or as a political philosopher. In fact, he still isn’t in many ways. Alan Ryan, in his big two-volume history of political philosophy, has nothing to say about Spinoza, not a word. Grayling’s recent book on philosophy in the 17th century barely mentions Spinoza and doesn’t mention Leibniz at all. Terry Irwin, in his two-volume history of ethics, does have a full chapter on Spinoza. For a long time, Spinoza was not taken seriously as a moral philosopher or a political philosopher. Only recently have we started to see real work done on his moral and political philosophy. In particular, the Theological-Political Treatise is rarely taught in philosophy departments. For a long time Spinoza was on the outs generally, especially in Anglo-American philosophy, because metaphysics was on the outs, and as a metaphysician there was this idea that Spinoza could not be taken seriously. Thank you, A.J. Ayer. There has been a new edition of her translation by Clare Carlisle . It’s an interesting question. Eliot was obviously a skilled linguist. She obviously felt some affinity for Spinoza. She did the translation before she wrote any of her novels. Yes. It’s a really interesting question why she did. I don’t know the answer. When it was published, hers was one of very few books dedicated to the Theological-Political Treatise . What really gets discussed by philosophers if they talk about Spinoza is the Ethics . The Theological-Political Treatise is usually addressed in religious studies or Jewish studies courses. Sue James’ book was, along with an earlier book by the Dutch scholar Theo Verbeek, one of the only two books on the Theological-Political Treatise . James’ book is very readable. It covers all the right things and really brings Spinoza back to us as a large-scale systematic thinker and not just somebody who’s doing metaphysics and epistemology between Descartes and Leibniz. Exactly. She’s got great historical sense and sensitivity to the context. I don’t see that she has any controversial axes to grind, but she brings out some of the themes of the work that I think have escaped notice, especially the coherence of the Theological-Political Treatise with the Ethics . In that regard, it is a response to Bennett, and she shows that these are part and parcel of the same project. You can actually see the Ethics itself as a continuation of the Theological-Political Treatise because, by undermining in the Ethics the beliefs in miracles and an immortal soul and offering us this conception of human flourishing and virtue, and happiness, and reason and freedom, there’s a political goal there, which is to undercut superstitious beliefs. And by undercutting superstitious religious beliefs, like the belief in immortality, you are thereby undercutting the political influence that ecclesiastics were exercising in the Dutch Republic at the time. I think there’s some overlap, but I think the Ethics was written for philosophers familiar with the Cartesian vocabulary and the Cartesians’ conceptual schema, like his friends in Amsterdam who were studying it as he was writing it, and also philosophers in the universities and colleges. The Theological-Political Treatise was aimed at a broader audience: liberal theologians and other educated members of Dutch society (for example, the regents that governed the cities), people who would be amenable to its message of toleration and secularism and liberation from religious superstition. It’s a very angry book in some ways, because it was written after one of his friends had been thrown into prison for writing a book with Spinozistic themes. The mistakes his friend made were that, first of all, he wrote it in Dutch, so it was accessible to a broad readership and, second, he put his name on the cover. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Spinoza wrote the Theological-Political Treatise in Latin and did not put his name on the cover, but it was a response to what he saw as a creeping intolerance in the Dutch Republic and the growing influence of the Dutch Reformed Church in civic and political matters. A long time ago, after getting tenure, and with small children, I decided that, if I was going to squirrel myself away to work on something, it should be a project that gets read by more than 12 other people. And I thought Spinoza was interesting and important enough to try to reach a broad audience. It’s a great pleasure trying to write general nonfiction . I still like to do the occasional academic article, which is more technical. And I think that technical work allows me to write the more general nonfiction books. My new book on Spinoza’s moral philosophy, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die , is essentially taking seriously Spinoza’s moral philosophy and looking at the lessons he offers us on how to deal with our emotions, how to treat other human beings, how to value life, and the proper attitude to take towards death. Yes, but it’s not one of those self-help books , like ‘ How to Live as a Stoic .’ I think those often trivialize and oversimplify. I look at Spinoza’s arguments, but I try to make them accessible and to take him seriously as a philosopher, not as a self-help guru. In the case of death, the question is, ‘how should you approach death?’ If you think there’s something to be hoped for or feared, then you’re going to live your life governed by these irrational emotions. But death is nothing to be feared. Epicurus reportedly said, ‘Where death is, I am not; and where I am, death is not.’ So, you shouldn’t be afraid of being dead, because you’re not going to be there when you’re dead. It shouldn’t be a source of anxiety. The proper attitude wouldn’t be one of hope, either—certainly not. As the title of the book says, you shouldn’t think about it at all, because there’s nothing there. When you’re dead, you’re dead. You should focus on how to improve your life in the here and now, and on the joys that bring us the greatest satisfaction in pursuing the true goods of this life, which is knowledge and understanding. It’s a graphic-book history of philosophy in the 17th century, from Galileo and Descartes to Leibniz and Newton , with plenty of stops in between, but Spinoza gets a whole chapter to himself. My fantastic editor at Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio, said, ‘Would you like to write a history of philosophy of the seventeenth century?’ And I said, ‘No, not really. That would just be a kind of cookbook.’ But, at the time, my son had just graduated from art school, and I thought that it would be really fun to do something together and get his career going. So, I said to Rob, ‘What about a graphic book on philosophy in the seventeenth century?’ And, much to my surprise, he said, ‘Cool!’ It was great fun working with my son. He did most of the work. Nine hundred drawings all by hand and hand-coloured. I think it came out really well—but I’m partisan. No, I think it’s going to be a biography of Descartes. You’ve written popular books on philosophy . What motivated you to start doing it? I couldn’t agree more. It’s very exciting, too, when you get notes from readers who are not academics."