Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's "Ethics" (review)

BOOK REVIEWS ~99 edge of Hebrew and Hebrew texts, from encounters with Iberian Jews, and from polemical Christian concerns. The changing situation within German Christendom greatly influenced the wayJews, their history, and their customs were seen. Arthur Williamson, an expert in Scottish intellectual history, treats a somewhat amazing phenomenon: the Scots from the Reformation onward saw themselves as Jews, and developed a Judaized political history. From sometime in the late Middle Ages, the Scots were notorious with their southern neighbors for not eating pork. They were even accused of being the descendants of the Jews expelled from England in 129o. During the Reformation some of their leaders saw themselves as recreating the Hebrew Commonwealth and the Jewish Covenant with God. This Judaized politics played a very significant role in the emergence first of Great Britain, and then of the United Kingdom. In the closing essay James E. Force develops his Judaized interpretation of Isaac Newton's theology, stressing the role ofJewish monotheism in Newton's anti-Trinitarian Christianity and in his science. Most Newton commentators have been content to exile Newton's theology to his infancy or his senility, and to insist, no matter what the great man believed about the Book of Revelation, that it had nothing to do with his scientific theories. Force both expounds a crucial center of the religious views, and shows how they explain what Newton thought he was doing as a religious scientist, as well as how this related to his overall understanding of Nature and Scripture, the two waysin which God has revealed Himself. There are other worthwhile articles on historical and religious matters by Renre Levine Melammed, Robert Garfield, Howard Adelman, Winfried Schleiner, Zenon Guidon and Waldemar Kowalski and Stephen Burnett. This is a rich collection that deserves serious study. RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University University of California, Los Angeles Genevieve Lloyd. Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's "Ethics." Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. 182. Cloth, $26.5o. In her introduction to this compact but rewarding study, Lloyd distinguishes two "suggestions" of the idea that human beings are part of nature. On the one hand, it may suggest the Romantic doctrine that human beings can and should live in undivided unity with nature, without setting themselves apart from it. Yet the same idea can also suggest that human beings may be understood scientifically, by whatever general methods are appropriate to understanding other parts of nature. Lloyd sets herself the task of exploring both of these suggestions as they are developed by Spinoza, a philosopher who attached supreme importance to the idea that human beings are indeed a part of nature. The primary value of undertaking this task, she holds, lies in the fact that "to read Spinoza is to get glimpses of what we might have beenmof possibilities of self- 300 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL 1996 consciousness that run against the grain" (169). A considerable part of that "grain," in Lloyd's view, consists in the intellectual residue of Descartes's conception of the human being as an intermingling of soul and body--an intermingling whose superior element stands largely aloof from nature, inspecting and mastering it, while finding satisfaction in its own independent self-sufficiency. Spinoza's alternative conception thus constitutes for her an important road not taken; and her repeated procedure of explaining Spinoza by contrasting him with Descartes becomes, by implication, a way of explaining what we could have been by contrasting it with what we instead became. The book consists of five chapters, together with a brief introduction and a brief conclusion. Each chapter is a meditation--if that is not too Cartesian a term--on different aspects of the self, its self-knowledge, and its relation to nature. Chapter 1 takes up Spinoza's project of grounding the metaphysics of individuality without distinctions of substance, and the chapter easily achieves its stated goal of showing that Spinozisdc individuals are not simply swallowed up as illusory in the unity of substance. Chapter 2 explores various features of Spinozistic knowledge and error in relation to the perspective of the individual, and resolves the problem--parallel to Chapter l's problem of...