Rebecca Goldstein, "Betraying Spinoza"

Rebecca Goldstein, "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade

Jew Who Gave us Modernity" (2006)

 

 

"[I] t is back to that personal sense of him that I am trying

now to return, even knowing what I know about his

philosophy. I would like to recapture the the sense of the

man behind the formidable system, locate the pounding

pulse of subjectivity within the crystalline structure of

radical objectivity.... I would like to know the feeling again,

even though I know that the desire amounts to betraying

Spinaza." (p. 66)

 

"Despite Spinoza's extreme rationalism, the most extreme

in the history of thought, he remains od scientific relevance,

from brain science to string theory, from Damasio to

Einstein and Hawking." (p. 62)

 

"All the emotions, Spinoza reasons, must follow from this

basic situation: that I am committed to my life's going well,

since that commitment, all the myriad ways in which it

manifests itself, is irrepressibly me; that my life's goin

well or not is subject to things beyond my control ...; that

I make judgments about how various things affect my

life for better or for worse, and these very judgments

... themselves affect me as experience

of pleasure and pain." (p. 181)

 

"The world is such, he argues, that it can be known through

and through by the faculty of reason, the faculty of grasping

necessary connections, logical entailments." (p. 185)

 

"In addition to being the highest cognitive state, the

intellectual love of God is an emotional state (for Spinoza

the cognitive and emotional are constantly, necessarily,

merged).... Conatus, our essence, which dictates that

all of our intentions derive from our concerns with

ourselves, leads us, if we truly attempt to fulfil ourdelves,

to see ourselves from the outside, as it were, from the

point of view of the infinite system that explains all. True

devoution to ourselves will lead us to an objectivity so

radical that even our own demise can be contemplated

with equanimity." (p. 188)

 

"Are the kabbalists, too making implicit and illicit reference

to final causes? Yes, of course. Such reference is

inseparable from superstitious religion." (p. 216)

 

"The world is the all-embracing web of necessary truths,

intelligible through and through ... purging our own

mind of the illusions of contingency, reconstituting our

minds with the devine necessity, then only peace will be

possible within each of us." (p. 236)

 

 

뉴욕 타임즈 서평

 

"Shelley, however, discovered in him another inspiration

for his essay 'The Necessity of Atheism.' Shelley was

right (as almost always). Spinoza is the death

of Biblical Revelation." -- 위 서평에서.

 

 

Rebecca Goldstein

 

 

---------------------------------------------------------

 

Dogobert David Runes 편집, "The Ethics of Spinoza: The

Road to Inner Freedom" (1957)

 

Rebecca Goldstein의 책에 이어서, 전에 도서관 책 세일에서

산, 이 책을 읽으려다 이 책에서 받은 'straightforward 솔직'

하지 않은 느낌 때문에, 그러나 책을 버리지는 않고,

도서관에 기증했다.

 

우선, 편집자 서문에서의 Spinoza 는, 잘못, 유대교적인 철학자

인상을 줄 수 있다. 또한, 책 표지와 "the subtitle of this book is

somewhat misleading; the text represents an abridged and

rearranged version of R. H. M. Elwe's translation of Spinoza's

Ethics, with some revisions made in the translation by the

editor ... the Ethics has in fact been reduced to a collection of

maxims with relevant short essays." 그런데 서문에는 편집

대한 언급이 없다.