The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza ed. by Richard Kennington (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 9l81 The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Edited by RICHARD :KENNINGTON. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1980. Pp. vi+ 323. From a distance this book appears to be a fictionalized biography. One sees only "Baruch Spinoza" (in very large letters) and not "The Philosophy of" (in tiny letters), and the charcoal-gray jacket presents a sensual rather than sapient young Baruch in seventeenth-century garb. Coming closer, however, one is relieved-or disappointed-to find a collection of sixteen scholarly articles on the philosophy of Spinoza. The collection is based upon a lecture-series held at The Catholic University of America in 1977 to commemorate the three-hundredth anniversary of the philosopher's death. (Oddly enough, this is nowhere stated in the book or even on the jacket.) With such books it is, I suppose, almost a conditioned reflex for veteran reviewers to say that the articles are of uneven quality. That is always a safe statement, but in the present case it is relatively inappropriate: all the entries are respectable contributions from able scholars, and none deserves to be curtly dismissed or ignored. There is a problem, however, about how to proceed with one's nonignoring. The editor has arranged the articles under five headings which are helpful but also somewhat arbitrary , except perhaps for " Spinoza's Philosophy of Politics and Religion " and " Spinoza and German Philosophy." The essays under the other three headings-" Spinoza's Ethics," " Spinoza's Metaphysics,'' and " Alternative Approaches to Spinoza "-are mostly concerned at once with the Ethics, with metaphysics, and with approaches. So I have found it expedient to organize my remarks, not according to those divisions, but in relation to five themes: (1) Spinoza's method; (2) God and the ontological argument; (3) the body-mind problem; (4) Spinoza on human society: politics, religion, and history; and (5) later philosophers' views of Spinoza. Only the penultimate theme will correspond quite precisely with one of the editor's rubrics: " Spinoza's Philosophy of Politics and Religion." I may have to be a bit arbitrary myself in sticking fairly faithfully to a policy of discussing each article in only one place. Before proceeding to our themes, we might note the happy choice of Paul Weiss's" Some Pivotal Issues in Spinoza" as the first essay. It is in fact a sort of overture to the whole book, anticipating most of the themes that are more lengthily treated in the articles that follow. Weiss states the pivotal issues in a sharp, pungent manner, though a few of his statements, e.g., that Spinoza was not a pantheist, with the phrase Deus sive natura cited in support, may leave some readers uncomfortable. Our first theme, Spinoza's method, is treated most extensively in the 282 BOOK REVIEWS final section, "Alternative Approaches to Spinoza." (The unstated but sound assumption here is that our approach to Spinoza should answer to Spinoza's own approach to his subject-matter.) But most of the articles elsewhere in the book speak of this or at least bear upon it; Weiss's article , just mentioned, has a brief, sensible section on method. The ques.tion of method is mainly the question of the "geometric " or " synthetic" method seemingly employed in the most famous of Spinoza's works, the Ethics. We can begin by leaping to the final article of the book, by the editor, Richard Kennington: " Analytic and Synthetic Methods in Spinoza 's Ethics." Kennington keeps the whole ·corpus Spinozanum in sight as he examines particular passages germane to his investigation. His is a clearly written and clearly thought out article which takes us beyond simplistic accounts stressing the " analytic " method of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus or the "synthetic" method of the Ethics and, with Itispect to the content that is so closely linked with the method, beyond crudely naturalistic and crudely pantheistic interpretations. (Kennington even notes, and I think overstates, possibilities of a theistic reading of Spinoza; the theistic attributes cited are truly such, it would seem, only if God is distinguished from the world in a way in which He is not di&tinguished by Spinoza). Kennington concludes that Spinoza needs and uses both an analytic...