SPINOZA AS AN ICON
Wohl, R. Richard
Spinoza as an Icon Reviewed fry R. RICHARD WOHL ojpitiOZA: THE LIFE OF A SPIRITUAL HERO. By Rudolf Kayser. Translated \jrom A* German by Amy Allen und Maxim Newmark. New York: The...
...This is the grand stage on which Kayser should have enlister1 our interest and sympathy...
...To him, the world, and all the ideas entertained about it, were meaningless without God, and to Him our rigor would never penetrate...
...Such methods do not convince the reader but coerce hfia to an agreement so grudging that Ws sympathy with the subject is thin and vague...
...Could we but trace the threads of cause and effect we would, like God, see the grand pattern of the whole universe laid bare...
...This book attempts *<tO fill this gap...
...The main point of Spinoz-'s life he repeatedly asserts, but its significance escapes him, for he narrows it down so that it is trivial in some places...
...In his faith, simple and unqualified as it was, he stood close to the Church Fathers...
...AN English biography of Baroch Spinoza has long been needed...
...What little we know of the philosopher's life is challenge enough ¦it thii biographer, but even more so is the delicacy and insight required to make Just tjae of the available material...
...New York: The Philosophical Library...
...The author undertakes a psychological re-interpretatlen ef . 7 Spinosa'* character, and seeks to explain the development of Spinoza's motivation and problems so that they may provide a clue to the development of his philosophy...
...No heresy would offend Spinoza, today, more than the notion that there might be multiple causation...
...All his life, in the poverty of his house, and in the deep loneliness of his reflections Spinoza brooded on this thought, and idly by, despair held/his hand in company...
...It was complete and without qualification...
...Indulging in an orgy ol precienx, lachrymose, adjectival and mannered writing, he has, throughout the book, manufactured emotion and forced dramatic effects which lower the value of many of his passages to the level of a whine or sentimental snivel...
...Bis intellectual history, however, is the core of his life...
...To him, they were a clear and rigorous expression of an essence which represented the spirit of God in the universe.' The ethical ordinates he established to measure morals were God's geometry...
...Worst of all, much of the book is downright dull...
...He never married, his friends he knew only in correspondence, hie excitements and great experiences he found only in books and in Ideas...
...A biographer when confronted, by a character so complicated as Spinoza's has no right to evertfasrplify it...
...326 pages...
...He never imagined that his ideas were conditional upon hie- thinking of them...
...The best sentence in the book is one written by Spinoza himself: "He who loves God cannot expect God to love him in return...
...Be has not learned those essential rules of biographical writing which result ia a convincing "life...
...One irresistibly compares this declaration with TertuUiakfa proud boast...
...This was his tragedy...
...A good biographer must suggest character by implication, he most convey emotion indirectly, and build sympathy for his subject as if by accident...
...He has net done so because he chose rather to extend his book enormously with padding and reiteration...
...I have said that I believe but not that I know everything that God said to the prophets, etc.—because I absolutely believe but do not mathematically know that the prophets were the trusty councillors and emissaries of God...
...To call him a hero and a saint, and so to compel our admiration and ton mat to the author's attitude, is to practice verbal blackmail with the connotations we usually attach to these words...
...die has failed...
...But men are finite...
...As life has become more secular, and more knowing, it has loat the emotional security that came from implicit religious belief...
...They cannot know or see aiL This is so because men are lesser beings, weaker, preoccupied with the non-essential, so unlike the Grand Intelligence that designed all the world...
...Spinoza's intellectual preoccupation was of a kind not readily comprehended by moat men...
...For the rest it is a story without anecdote, without tragedy and without great joy...
...In all simplicity he declared...
...Creie quia absurdum out* (I believe that which ia absurd) with which he confuted skeptics...
...The faith and attitude toward the divine is identical in beth these contrasting thinkers^ The struggle ef Spinoza with his doubts has meaning for us all today...
...The most striking thing about the life of Spinoza ia that he combined intellectual , distinction of the highest Order .with moral purity so great as to be almost incredible...
...13.75...
...A biography which attempts to delineate the grand scale ef Spinoza's intellectual achievement should itself be a work of art, and here lies the mala failing of Xayser*s book...
...Between them lay the infinite web of cause and effect whereby the causal dependence of all things and all ideas was established...
...The story of his life, beyond his thought, is mainly a tale of changing addresses as he moved from place to place into ever greater solitude and obscurity...
Vol. 30 • January 1947 • No. 4
