According to Spinoza, "Euclid...wrote only about things which were quite simple and most intelligible." (Theological Political Treatise 7:67; [III/111]; hereafter TTP--I am using a draft of Curley's translation [res admodum simplices et maxime intelligibiles scripsit]--ES) One may wonder what's so "simple" about Euclid? Here Spinoza is relying on the thought that the essences of geometric objects lack power. (These essences are formal causes (see Hübner on the significance of formal causes in Spinoza.)) This means that their (necessary) consequences/effects are negligible in various ways. By contrast, from the essence of God or Substance "an infinite number of modes" follow "in infinite ways." So, on my reading of the Ethics, unlike in his earlier work, Spinoza does not embrace Divine simplicity (while he does embrace doctrines that are often related to it).
Now, Spinoza offers his remark on Euclid to offer a distinction between two kinds of interpretive practices: books that require no contextual knowledge of the author and those that do. To paraphrase Spinoza, books about simple natures can be read straight up and circumstances of composition are irrelevant; the author behind the text is irrelevant (even effaced by the text). To put it as a serious joke: the author of Euclid is a mere name and is rigidly so designated. But books about the most powerful (that is most complex) natures can only be interpreted in light of a lot of contextual knowledge about the author's life and the production of the book. If crucial details go missing, the author's name functions as a placeholder for possible counterparts of the authorial persona behind the text.
Given that Spinoza's Ethics is about the least simple, that is, the most powerful essence, Spinoza demands from his reader to be fully aware of his life and times. And, in fact, it is often forgotten that the Ethics was published in the Opera Posthuma at the completion of his life alongside a fully controlled presentation of the details deemed relevant to Spinoza's life--a carefully controlled selection of letters as well as showcasing his interest in Hebrew Grammar, his interest in political theory, the Tractatus Politicus (with its debts to Machiavelli) and his programmatic embrace of the emendation of the intellect (with its debts to Seneca). And from these documents the identity of the author of the TTP could also be inferred (so my appeal to it in reading the Ethics is not illicit).
My stage is set.
In the Ethics Spinoza informs his reader that his metaphysics of substance and his so-called parallelism doctrine(s), in particular, are sophisticated -- that is, properly emended -- versions of confused Jewish theology. (As he writes "Some of the Hebrews seems to have seen this, as if through a cloud, when they maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same."--Spinoza (E2P7S) [in Curley's translation]--recall my discussion back at NewAPPS).)
As I have argued at length elsewhere, it is easy to be dazzled by the geometric presentation of the Ethics and to overlook what I tend to call the 'holistic character' of the Ethics. Many of the scholia (as well as the corollaries and appendices/prefaces) are polemics with theologians (amongst the metaphysicians and, I note with heightened awareness, satirists so mentioned). But many are also a privileged commentary on the text (as is E2p7s). Outside a mathematical context, a scholium can also mean a discussion or commentary. Some of the commentaries are, in fact, dialogic (in Bakhtin's sense) in character where alternative interpretations are explored.
That is to say, Spinoza's Ethics is both in subject matter and in presentation closer to the Hebrew Bible than one might imagine at first glance. (No, I am not claiming it is identical.) So, in addition to offering arguments (and insights) he also leaves behind a document of alternative positions to his own familiar to anybody who has opened a Hebrew Bible with commentaries. I do not want to exagerate this claim, of course. (But then again, it may be worth experimenting with an edition of the Ethics that contains the most important commentaries on the Ethics in the margins--imagine Clarke, Toland, Hegel, Schelling, Joachim, etc. Mogens's Lærke's book on Leibniz's responses to Spinoza is very instructive exemple of the the gains of such an approach.)
In fact, Spinoza himself contributes to the commentary of the Hebrew Bible in the Ethics. Despite the fact that the TTP is one long argument that Moses ought not to be understood as the author of the Hebrew Bible (Spinoza argues that Ezra put the Hebrew Bible together at, and to constitute thereby, the re-founding of the Hebrew polity [recall]), in the Ethics he accepts the trope that "Moses" is the author of the "history of the first man." (Mose significari in illa primi hominis historia). This is one of several ways in which Spinoza is more pious (in Spinoza's sense) in the Ethics than he is in the TTP.
Later in the week, I'll address some of the details of Spinoza's re-interpretation of the Fall. But I close by noting some remarkable features of E4p68. The official proposition is explicitly a false and inconceivable hypothesis (Huius propositionis hypothesin falsam esse, nec posse concipi). I am not sure what the status of an inconceivable claim is in Spinoza's machinery. But Spinoza immediately limits the claim by noting that it is true of the nature of (finite) man. And to talk of the essence of man is, according to Spinoza, just to talk of God as the cause of humanity existence.* Now, this raises complicated questions about the metaphysical-epistemic status of finite modes in Spinoza's metaphysics familiar since Hegel. Again, I set these aside.
Here I just note that Spinoza goes on to bring together (a) his elucidation (or reinterpretation) "Moses" account of cosmogony and creation. Spinoza is explicit that quite a bit of the Ethics bears on the re-reading of "Moses" account ("other matters which we have already proved,"). (b) Spinoza claims that the very "freedom" that was lost in the "Fall" was recovered by the patriarchs (that is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). From (a)-(b) alone we learn that suitably reinterpreted, Adam before the fall, as well as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are free men in Spinoza's sense (that is, as the previous proposition suggests): "A free man is one who lives under the guidance of reason, who is not led by fear (IV. lxiii.), but who directly desires that which is good (IV. lxiii. Coroll.), in other words (IV. xxiv.), who strives to act, to live, and to preserve his being on the basis of seeking his own true advantage; wherefore such an one thinks of nothing less than of death, but his wisdom is a meditation of life." (I have used the Elwes translation here.) This is another sense in which the Ethics is more pious than the TTP. But that's not the end of it. For (c) Spinoza reinterprets the narrative about the Patriarchs, too. These are said to exhibit the "spirit of Christ." That is to say, this spirit can exist before the historical Christ exists. As I have pointed out before, in the TTP Spinoza allows that a historically distant predecessor is a unique anticipation or exemplar (recall my analysis and the role of the Quran in this). But he also allows a kind of backward projection of the exemplar onto earlier anticipations. And (d) what Spinoza means by "spirit of Christ" is not intelligible from the Ethics alone, one needs to turn to the TTP for that (my PhD student Jo Van Cauter is working on this). So, here is a non-trivial sense in which the meaning of the Ethics relies on the TTP, that is, one needs to know something about the author.
*I leave aside the role of the Conatus doctrine here.
* I thank Omri Boehm and Claire Katz for very useful suggestions in approaching this topic; I assure both I am at the start of investigations and I will follow more of their leads!
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