#67: Steven Nadler: Virtue is its Own Reward

Episode Transcript
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(00:14):
Hi, welcome to the Fools and Sages podcast.
We are honored and excited and grateful today to have Steven
Nadler with us. Steven is the vilest professor
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
He he teaches philosophy and he's also the author or editor
of 19 books in the area of philosophy, especially focused

(00:38):
on 17th century philosophers, the Cartesian Revolution and
Descartes himself, Spinoza, and also medieval Jewish philosophy,
which I'm really interested to touch on today.
Steven, welcome. Why don't you tell us a little
bit about yourself? Sure.
Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm a New Yorker by birth,

(01:01):
and I've been living in Madison,WI, since 1988.
Was an undergraduate at Washington University in Saint
Louis, and then went back to NewYork to Columbia for my PhD in
86. And I've been at the University
of Wisconsin since 1988, teaching in the philosophy

(01:22):
department. I'm presently, as you mentioned,
Violas Research Professor of philosophy and also director of
the Institute for Research in the Humanities here at
Wisconsin. Great.
Thank you. So, so I know Brian has been
reading up on Spinoza and Descartes and and is especially

(01:43):
excited to have you. So I'll kick it off to him to
get the conversation started. All right.
Great. Thank you, Doctor Nadler, for
for coming on and talking with us.
I've been really excited. I, I'm probably over
complimenting myself to say thatI feel like we are brothers in

(02:04):
arms. And that's because I think, you
know, going back to the 17th century, there was this famous
argument that I think was just intended to send Barb's at
Thomas Aquinas. But the argument was about how
many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

(02:24):
And I guess I feel like today a lot of people look at
philosophers as if they are onlyfocused on these obscure, kind
of non relevant, pointlessly argumentative trivialities.
And, and I couldn't, couldn't disagree with that position

(02:45):
more. I think it's super relevant.
And from reviewing your work, I suspect that you, I think that's
more than a suspicion. You must feel the same way.
And so in looking at your work, I think that it's really
important in ways that the average person might not grasp.

(03:07):
And so that's what I kind of wanted to go into today.
You're you're known as a as as one of the leading experts in
the work of Spinoza. And Spinoza is I consider him
one of the goats, one of the greatest of all times.
He's on unrecognized, I think, for the status that he deserves.

(03:31):
And Spinoza was part of this transformation in in human
intelligence, trying to figure out the universe at a real
important crossroads. Could you give us a little the
insight into the world before Spinoza?
You know, we tend to look at philosophers through our own

(03:51):
lights, through our own use of language.
And I think often it's such a stretch that we miss a lot
there. Could you give us a little
background of the world that Spinoza was immersed in and
reacting to? Sure, although first let me say
I agree with you completely thatphilosophy is not an irrelevant,

(04:13):
purely abstract exercise. Although there is an answer to
the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin,
it depends upon whether they arematerial or immaterial.
If they're material, then only one can dance on the head of a
pin. If they're immaterial, then
infinitely many can. But the philosophers I find
myself most interested in teaching and studying are those

(04:39):
philosophers who are not concerned with strictly abstract
metaphysical questions, but regard philosophy as a way of
life, and especially as a means of discovering and living the
best kind of life for a human being.
So philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides,

(05:04):
Spinoza, these are philosophers who are not simply interested in
epistemological and metaphysicalquestions for their own sake,
but rather as a way of increasing our understanding of
ourselves and of the world around us.
The the world that Spinoza grew up in was very different from

(05:28):
the world in which many of the other philosophers we study grew
up in for a number of reasons. First of all, he was raised in
the community in Amsterdam that was established in the Dutch
Republic by Jewish refugees fromSpain and Portugal.
These were people who had been forced in the 15th and 16th

(05:50):
centuries, forced to convert to Catholicism, but we're always
suspect of being insincere in their conversion and of
continuing to practice Judaism in secret.
And finally, the Inquisition became so harsh that a number of
these families fled both Spain and Portugal, heading to

(06:13):
different ports around the Mediterranean.
But a number ended up eventuallyin Amsterdam, where they were
able to return openly to the practice of Judaism.
And so by the time Spinoza was born in 1632, you have a a a
vibrant, well off community of Sephardic, that is Spanish and

(06:38):
Portuguese Jews who are not forced into a ghetto and who are
educating their children in the norms of Judaism.
The broader world that Spinoza faced was, I think in many ways
transformed from the world you would have found 100 years
earlier with the discoveries by Galileo.

(07:02):
This new conception of the nature of the cosmos, the
heliocentric system, is being defended by figures, not just
Galileo, but in a sense Descartes with a a bit of with a
bit of a wink on his part. Descartes was not quite ready,

(07:22):
being a good French Catholic, topublicly proclaim that the sun
is the center of the solar system.
But it's also a world in which there's only one kind of matter,
as opposed to the varieties of matter that you find in the old
Aristotelian system. So medieval Aristotelian

(07:43):
philosophers believe that the matter of the heavens was very
different from the matter of ourterrestrial realm.
Whereas modern early modern philosophers like Galileo and
Descartes and Hobbes and Boyle regarded all of matter to be the
same, whether you're talking about the matter in the sky or

(08:04):
the matter on earth. And matter and motion are the
only allowable explanations for a good deal of natural
phenomena. So if you if you're thinking
simply of bodies that are not united with souls, the way in
which Descartes says human beingis a soul body combination.

(08:25):
But if we think of simply unsoldbodies, all natural phenomena
are the result of particles of matter, emotion operating
according to certain laws. This is a very different
physical world from the world ofmedieval scholasticism.
And Spinoza himself, though I don't think he made any major

(08:47):
contributions to what we'd like to call the scientific
revolution. It might be better called
scientific revolutions because it wasn't just a single
mechanistic picture of nature. There was a variety of ways of
understanding nature as a grand mechanism.
But Spinoza, though not really ascientist himself, although he
made some contributions to the study of optics and the

(09:11):
production of lenses, he was completely on board with this
new paradigm of looking at the cosmos and especially the world
around us. And and he was in this world.
I think that some of us have a hard time grasping that you
couldn't just think what you wanted or if you did think what

(09:32):
you wanted, you best keep it to yourself.
And, you know, it's almost a testimony.
I, I think of Spinoza in that list of, of philosophers like
Socrates, who felt the truth wasimportant enough to drink
hemlock or Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for his

(09:58):
heresy, or, you know, these people that really laid it on
the line. And that's one of the things I
love about Spinoza is he didn't just think fancy things.
He really was where the rubber meets the road kind of a guy,
wasn't he? Like he he lived his deal, and
it wasn't just thinking. Yes, I always loved the very

(10:22):
last lines of this theological political treatise, which caused
the the work caused enormous scandal and was is perhaps the
most vilified book in the 17th century.
And critics were calling it an atheistic book, a soul
destroying book. And one critic calls it a book
fortune held by the devil himself.
But the very last lines of the book are everybody should be

(10:45):
free to think what they want andto say what they think.
So if you know, if there is one theme that unites all of
Spinos's writings from the ethics is metaphysical ethical
work to the theological political treatise, that theme
is freedom. The ethics is about how to
achieve a kind of freedom as an individual, especially in a in a

(11:10):
causally deterministic world, how can we achieve some degree
of autonomy, virtue, rationalityand freedom.
The theological political treatise is about freedom in a
more political, social and religious domain.
What role is the state supposed to play in our private lives

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now? It it's, I think it's a little
misleading to regard the 17th century as under a single regime
of intolerance. It depended upon both where you
were living and what you were talking about.
And Spinoza had the good fortuneof growing up and publishing his

(11:54):
works in what is arguably the most tolerant milieu in the 17th
century, that is the Dutch Republic.
But even within the Dutch Republic there was an absolute
freedom, first of all, depended upon which province you were
living in and which city in thatprovince.
Amsterdam, in the province of Holland, was probably the most

(12:16):
liberal, cosmopolitan and tolerant city in Europe at the
time. And you could publish things in
Amsterdam that couldn't possiblybe published, say, in Paris or
other cities. So he did have that that benefit
of growing up there. And he was in this age post

(12:37):
Martin Luther, post Bruno, whereit seems like the, the bulwarks
of institutional authority or start were shaking at their very
roots. So, so he really was at this
crossroads in, in the ways of thinking.
I, I, I think it's, I was impressed when I saw the degree

(13:02):
that they went to, to try to cancel Spinoza.
I mean, I mean, a heavy metal band would love to get the kind
of reviews that Spinoza got forged in hell.
We want you cursed when you're facing the east, cursed when
you're facing the West, sitting down, standing up, that, you
know, social distancing applied to him.

(13:25):
You know, can you fill us in about the grief that he that he
bore for his thoughts at the at the age of 23, which itself
blows my mind. Yeah.
So at the at a relatively young age, when he was still a a
businessman, A merchant within the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish
community, it was an importing business.

(13:50):
He received from that community what is called a harem.
That is an ostracism or ban. Essentially.
He was kicked out of the community, but this was
something that happened rather frequently, or I should say not
infrequently, in the Amsterdam Jewish community.
The difference is that most of the harems that were issued by

(14:13):
the directors of this community were for relatively minor
offenses. You could be put under the ban
for sexual indiscretions, for engaging in theological
discussion with gentiles, even for taking a book out of the
library without permission, for insulting a rabbi.

(14:34):
And typical bans would last a couple of days, maybe a couple
of weeks. But there was always a means of
reconciling yourself to the community by apologizing for
your offense and paying a fine. The text of Spinoza's Heram is
so much longer and so vitriolic compared to the other Herams.

(14:55):
It's full of curses and damnations, and it's clear that
Spinoza, in the eyes of this community, is out for good.
There are no there's not a temporary ostracism.
He is expelled from the people of Israel, according to this
document. The the mystery, though, is that
the document, while it refers tohis abominable heresies and

(15:19):
horrible deeds, does not tell uswhat exactly those were.
And so one very a fascinating game that Spinoza's like Spinoza
scholars like to play as well. What was the reason for the ban?
So one scholar suggests that in fact the the reasons were
financial irregularities. It's true that Spinoza did use

(15:44):
the mechanism of Dutch law to relieve himself of debts that he
had inherited through his father's business.
And that was both a violation ofthe Jewish community's
regulations, where such disputesare supposed to be handled
within the community. But he went outside the
community. The the Dutch law had himself

(16:05):
declared an orphan, which he could do legally because he
wasn't 25 yet, and therefore be relieved of the debts and become
a privileged creditor on his father's estate.
The the other problem with that is that the Jewish community
felt it undermined by using the law to evade your debts in this

(16:26):
way, it undermined the trustworthiness of Jewish
merchants in the city. And these Jewish merchants were
very well connected with Dutch merchants.
They relied on commercial relationships.
And so this scholar argues that the reason for the ban was
Spinoza's using this means to, to relieve himself from heavy

(16:49):
debt burdens. I'm, you know, I think it's a
fascinating theory. I'm not convinced, mainly
because first of all, the harem document talks about his, his
heresies. And when you mention heresies,
you're talking about ideas, you're not talking about
financial actions. Moreover, there the length of

(17:13):
this harem, the curses directed at Spinoza, tell us there's
something much deeper going on here.
And in fact, we have reason for thinking that there were three
philosophical themes that Spinoza was talking about around

(17:34):
the time of the harem that plausibly explain it.
Now, first of all, Spinoza, thiswas in 1656.
Spinoza, as far as we know, had not written anything, that he
certainly had not published anything yet.
He was not the philosopher Spinoza, he was just this this
merchant. However, in 1658, some visitors

(17:57):
from Spain were travelling through Amsterdam and they
happened to engage in a discussion with Spinoza.
They must have met up with him in some way.
And when these visitors went back to Spain, they were
interviewed by the Inquisition because the Inquisition was
always interested in what was happening with these former
conversos living elsewhere, people who still had relatives

(18:21):
in Spain and Portugal. And so if you have a family of
former conversos in Amsterdam openly practicing Judaism and
they have relatives in Spain or Portugal, they're more likely to
be themselves practicing Judaismin secret.
So these guys were interviewed by the Inquisition.
Who did you meet in Amsterdam? What's going on in the Jewish

(18:43):
community there? And they say we met a man, a man
named Spinoza, and these are independent interviews.
And this man, Spinoza, tells us that he was kicked out of the
Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam.
For first of all, saying that God exists, but only

(19:04):
philosophically. Secondly for saying that the law
is not true, that is, the commandments of the Torah are no
longer valid. And thirdly, for saying that the
soul dies with the body or denying personal mortality.
And in fact, those are three themes that we see in Spinoza's

(19:24):
more mature writings. So on the one hand, yeah,
there's a great mystery here because the documents, the harem
document does not specify what the defenses were.
But for anybody who's actually read Spinoza's works, and the
fact that we have evidence for thinking that the things we find
in his later philosophical works, which he began just a few
years after the harem, were things he might have been saying

(19:47):
around the time of the kharam, there's really not much mystery
here, I think. He poked the tiger.
He certainly did, yes. And the kinds of things he was
saying, no 17th century rabbi could possibly tolerate.
I mean I, I think the, you know,I am not in favour of.
Banning people for their ideas. Let's let me get that out there

(20:07):
on the table. I am against theorems.
I do not think that people should be excommunicated,
banned, ostracized, or punished for ideas.
That said, that said, I don't see that the community had
really any alternative to banning Spinoza.
Right. And and you know, the facing all

(20:31):
of that push, I mean, they basically tried to cancel them
and facing all that from the outside, especially at that in
your 20s is, is shows a formidable type of self
assurance. But it's not the thing that most
impresses me about Spinoza. The thing that most impresses me

(20:54):
about Spinoza is that when he when we talked about the idea of
freedom, he doesn't just mean freedom from external
influences, but he also means a kind of an internal freedom that
we have won through the application.
I guess he would say of reason to our own selves, almost almost

(21:17):
sensing the the the idea of the phenomenology, saying that we
have to look at ourselves and not just the outside.
World. And he really seems to be a
product of that process. He's someone that was, they
tried to bait him out of that with cash.
They tried to attack him physically.
They I mean. Every.

(21:38):
So those are actually myths thatwe have, you know, Are they?
Yeah. You know, there's no evidence
that they tried to pay him off. And the tale about the alleged
assassination attempt is. That's only in one source and
I'm a little skeptical of those,but anyway, I just wanted to get
that out there. OK, how about the Heidelberg
offering him a chair at Heidelberg?

(21:59):
That we had, yeah, no, that's true that we have a documented
letters for that. OK.
And that. But that also had the caveat
Shut up about all the stuff thatmakes everybody uncomfortable.
Yeah, don't disturb the peace, Right, right.
And he said, well, what do you mean, disturb the peace?
Yeah. And you know, one of the other
interesting things about Spinozais that while the public doesn't

(22:22):
know him that well, almost everyphilosopher after Spinoza
recognizes him as one of the real greatest of all times from
from Hegel all the way down. You know, we just did an episode
talking about Andre Bergsen and Bergsen tremendously influenced
by Spinoza. It's actually a part of a

(22:44):
chapter on Spinoza and Leibniz in his creative evolution, all
the way down to Sigmund Freud, who really did take that idea
that we have to look at ourselves before we can perceive
truth. Is that is that fair to say?
Yeah, I don't know much about Bergson, but you know, it's, it

(23:04):
was once said that all of the history of philosophy is just a
footnote to Plato. I think Spinoza plays a
similarly important role in the evolution of modern philosophy
because first of all, the some of the things he said, he was
the first to say and set the tone or set the well, set the

(23:28):
standard for free thinking and also set a lot of the questions
and problems. Descartes, of course, plays an
important role here too. I'm always fighting against two
tendencies. First of all, there's a tendency
to distinguish rationalism from empiricism.
You know, that's an old division.

(23:50):
And this goes back to your earlier point about freedom.
It's a way of breaking up the history of philosophy into
Descartes, Spinoza, enliveness. They're the rationalists,
Lockbart being Hume, they're theempiricists.
I I think that's a false division.
There's a great deal of experimentation in Descartes
philosophy of science. Spinoza, on the other hand,

(24:12):
rejects the idea of innate ideasin in a sense.
So I don't think that that's a health and distinction.
However, when we do talk about such things like freedom and how
a person can achieve a a more superb condition by acting and

(24:33):
thinking not according to how other things affect them, but by
means of what they know to be true, what they truly know to be
true. There's a kind of rationalism
there that the guide to better living is reason itself.
The other campaign is against thinking that there is a father
of modern philosophy, usually identified as Descartes.

(24:57):
I think modern philosophy has a has a diverse parentage because
there are different streams of modernity in philosophy in the
17th century. So, you know, there's not
really, if I want to draw comparisons with art and
literature, there's not really a, they do Moiselle, they do
Moiselle d'avignon that sets the, the that sets the standard

(25:21):
for modern art or a Ulysses thatsets the standard for modern
literature. There's not a single work we can
pick on that would say, OK, here's where modern modernity
begins. Because you have Descartes, you
have Hobbes, you have Gessende, you have Spinoza, who I think
really is the first, most modernof all these philosophers.

(25:43):
Both because I believe he's an atheist, I don't think God as a
divinity plays any role whatsoever in his philosophy,
but also for his radical defenseof toleration, secularity, and
freedom. So, so I wanted to kind of drill
down into that a little bit. Spinoza's called an atheist,

(26:06):
he's called a pantheist, he's attimes called a nihilist.
And I, I, I don't think that when a modern person hears those
words, they understand what theymean in the, in the sense that
they were applied to Descartes or to, to Spinoza.
For example, when I looked at certain sections of Spinoza, it

(26:28):
seems very Buddhist to me. And I think that, you know, I
interpret his atheism as meaningthat there is no separate other
thing that's God, that's supernatural, but not that there
isn't something phenomenal goingon here that we need to tune

(26:51):
ourselves into, if that's fair to say.
And I think when people hear pantheism, they think of a
native with a bone in their nosethat's got a hyper superstitious
fide, if that's a word picture of the world.
But pantheism for Spinoza is quite a different thing, isn't
it? Well, let me so let me push back

(27:12):
a bit. We can, we can eliminate
nihilism off the bat. There's nothing nihilistic about
Spinoza. He believes there is truth, and
he believes that things truly are good and bad.
So we'll put that aside. You're right that he's almost
universally regarded as a pantheist.

(27:32):
And if you open up any book about pantheism, or you look at
any article, whether in the encyclopedia, philosophy, or in
a journal, Spinoza is always cited as the great pantheist.
Here's why I don't, here's why Ireject that label.
We could say that the pantheist,as, as you pointed out, the

(27:55):
pantheist rejects the idea of there some being, some kind of
transcendent supernatural deity.There's just nature.
And that's clearly Spinoza's view.
There all there is is nature. Whatever happens, happens in
nature and through the processesand laws of nature.
There's nothing beyond nature. So the pantheist and the atheist

(28:19):
can agree on that. The atheist too, would say all
there is is nature. There's nothing beyond nature.
There's no supernatural. But if we want to maintain a
distinction between pantheism and atheism, I think we should.
It comes down to this. Pantheism is still a kind of
theism. And the pantheist, even if we
reject that caricature of of an ignorant, an ignorant,

(28:45):
superstitious, very primitive individual, the pantheists still
regards what makes it a pantheist is that they regard
nature as divine. That is, there's something about
nature that makes it special, that makes it divine and
therefore worthy of reverence, adoration, Worshipful awe,

(29:08):
whatever might be the attitude, because the the pantheists
regards nature as special in that sense.
And I think that all of those attitudes, those psychological
ways of addressing nature, are completely foreign to Spinoza's
philosophy. For Spinoza, you should not look

(29:30):
at nature in any mystical way with any kind of worship or awe
or adoration or reverence. The proper attitude to take
towards nature is scientific understanding.
And so I I think it's it's wrongto think of him as a pantheist
because there is nothing, there's nothing truly divine

(29:51):
about nature. There's no divinity at all.
And so he's also called a monist, which is a thing, I
think that people have trouble grasping what exactly that
means. But that seems to be connected
in with that because this the the pantheistic idea as you
describe it sounds like it's making divinity some other and

(30:15):
for him there is no other is there there?
Well, there's no other. In the grand sense, the biggest.
Yeah. In the most metaphysically grand
sense, everything that I mean there is.
This is something that Spinoza scholars debate.
My take is that for Spinoza, nature really is constituted out

(30:40):
of individuals. You're a real individual.
I'm a real individual. Giraffes are real individuals,
trees, and so on. The division of nature into
individuals is not illusory. It's not a figment of our
imagination. It's not just the way in which
we perceive things. However, the monism comes in in

(31:02):
Spinoza's insistence that everything that is is part of
one thing, one system, nature with a capital N That's the
monism. There's not more than nature.
There's just, if you look at it,if you step back and take the
the eternal perspective, there'sjust one reality.

(31:25):
And so sometimes we call that imminence.
Well, the imminence comes in in the fact that what all these
other things which you, me, the trees, giraffes, and so on, we
are in that system, we are a part of it.
And so when the system of naturebrings about these individuals

(31:48):
and causes them to come into being, causes them to go out of
being, all the changes and developments within nature are
brought about within nature. And so nature is what these
philosophers would call an imminent 'cause that is, nature
is a causal power that brings about effects within itself.

(32:12):
Which is his idea of substance, right?
Something that's literally lyingunderneath everything.
Yes. I.
Was wondering if I could jump inon, on kind of this thread about
how Spinoza perceived nature kind of as a substitute for how,

(32:37):
how God was perceived prior as kind of the source of, of, of
everything, let's say so. So 2 questions come up for me,
Steven. One is you mentioned earlier
that Spinoza was accused of, howdid you put it?
God exists, but only philosophically that heresy.

(32:58):
And I'm curious to hear what he meant by that.
And then in in your last book onSpinoza, I was reading about his
kind of assertion that there's an individual nature that's
emergent in each individual human being that is an

(33:19):
expression of nature. And there seems to be some
duality there between nature writ large and individual
nature. I'd love to hear more about kind
of both of those. Sure, the Well, the accusation
that Spinoza was insisting that God exists only philosophically,
Spinoza himself never says that there.

(33:42):
You know, one way of thinking about that accusation is to
bring in Descartes, for whom hisharsher theological critics felt
that Descartes reduced God to just an eternal infinite cause
and removed any kind of personality from God.

(34:03):
And that Descartes God is not a divinity that you would go to
for comfort or to whom you wouldpray or from whom you would seek
rewards and fear punishments, but just an eternal infinite
substantial cause. That the charge that God exists
only philosophically comes down basically to that.

(34:27):
If Spinoza when he uses the termGod in the ethics is referring
simply to the to the eternal infinite self caused substance
that is the foundation for everything else.
It does seem very much like whatpeople call the merely
philosophical God removing any anthropomorphic dimensions to

(34:50):
God. That's a perfectly legitimate
charge against Spinoza. He certainly does want to
eliminate any way of thinking ofGod in anthropomorphic terms.
Spinoza's God doesn't have any of the psychological
characteristics traditionally attributed to the Abrahamic God.
This God, Spinoza's God, doesn'thave beliefs, expectations,

(35:13):
doesn't make demands, doesn't issue commandments, has no
hopes, doesn't reward and punish, and so on.
Moreover, Spinoza's God doesn't have any of the moral
characteristics traditionally given to the Abrahamic God.
Spinoza's God is not good, just,or wise God, or nature just is.

(35:36):
It's an infinite, eternal, powerful, causal source of
everything that is. And so, so, you know, when I
started getting into Spinoza more, of course, I write them in
college and we all do our best reading in college.
I think I had a girlfriend. So.

(35:58):
But what becomes evident is thatit kind of doesn't just end
there with Spinoza, because he does have this idea that we
through changing ourselves can come into a much higher
understanding of creation. That's almost like a God's like

(36:19):
view. And I'm thinking of his idea of,
of subspecies eternitatus. And you know, when I, when I
look at that, I start to, I start to wonder if this isn't
really a closet Taoist or Buddhist, Is he?
Do you think he's a Mystic in any sense?
Is his idea of intuition, Does it go to things beyond

(36:43):
geometrical truths, do you think?
So I've I'm often asked about Spinoza's relationship to
Buddhism or similarities. I don't know enough about
Buddhism or Taoism to speak intelligently about that.
People find those residences. But let me go this this relates

(37:04):
to the question about individualnatures versus nature.
I, I, I don't think there's anything mysticist in Spinoza at
all. I think he is as rationalist A
philosopher as you can conceive of.
And that's because this relationship.
So yes, individuals in nature have their own natures.

(37:26):
What makes you you What makes meme is you have a nature that is
you have you are a striving a their nature with a capital N
nature writ large is power. Or if maybe say we'd say energy.
Each of us is a finite parcel ofthat infinite eternal power.

(37:53):
And so your nature is to be thatfinite parcel of nature's power.
And what you do as that finite finite parcel is you strive to
maintain yourself as the finite parcel of power that you are.
That this desk resists my pushing on it because it has its

(38:15):
own conatus are striving to maintain itself.
You are striving to maintain yourself.
That's that is what your individual nature is.
But that individual nature is not something separate from
nature. It is within nature and is a
finite and determinate manifestation of that infinite

(38:38):
eternal power of nature. So that's the connection between
big nature and individual natures.
And the best way to secure your persistence, the best way to not
just maintain your power or striving, but to even increase
it, is to avoid both pernicious superstitious beliefs through

(39:03):
the imagination and to come to arational understanding of just
what your individual nature is and how that individual nature
relates to the overall infinite,eternal nature of which to which
we belong. But there's no mysticism here.
There's there's no Kabbalah. For example, Spinos is often

(39:26):
spoken of as somebody who's beenhe was deeply influenced by
Kabbalah. Well, the only time in his
writings that we know of where he mentions Kabbalah, he calls
it foolishness. So.
So when he talks about excellentthings being both rare and
difficult, he's really talking about a kind of intelligence

(39:49):
here, not not anything transcendent.
Correct. Absolutely.
What he's talking about is achieving this superb condition
of human nature where you are asfree as a person can actually
be. In fact, I would say there's a
number of of items here or termsin Spinoza's philosophy which
all amount to the same thing. Freedom, virtue, rationality,

(40:17):
happiness, lessedness, activity all amount.
To different ways of describing this condition of what he calls
the free person, Somebody who does what they do because of
what they know and not because how things happen to affect

(40:38):
them. And and can we plug that into
his argument about free will, which is a little complicated?
Actually, I don't think it's complicated at all.
I think it's perfectly simple. There is no free will.
And then how does that apply to,I mean, it's it's relationship
to freedom is where it gets complicated.
If I have freedom, that is complicated, yes.

(41:01):
So freedom doesn't mean free will.
So by free will, what we mean isthe capacity to choose
independent of any absolutely determining factors.
So I walk into the ice cream shop and I choose vanilla ice
cream according to a libertarianconception of free will.

(41:24):
All things being the same, I could just as well have chosen
chocolate, right? Nothing determines my will.
When did it? That's the the classic
libertarian conception of free will.
And on that view, freedom is incompatible with causal
determination. If the will is causally

(41:44):
determined, it's not free. There's a whole other story,
which philosophers call compatibilism, and this story
goes as follows, that our acts of will, our volitions in our
choices, are causally determined.
Sometimes they're causally determined by factors outside of

(42:05):
us. You know, other people's threats
or physical force being imposed upon me.
But sometimes my choices and volitions are determined not by
external factors, but by internal factors.
My beliefs, my desires, my character.

(42:26):
So if I choose vanilla ice cream, not because somebody has
a gun to my head, but because first of all, I'm craving ice
cream. Secondly, I believe that vanilla
is the best flavor of ice cream,and I strongly desire, at that
moment, vanilla ice cream. And all of this determines me to

(42:49):
choose vanilla ice cream. And given all those factors, I
will not, even cannot choose chocolate.
Nonetheless, I'm free because mychoice, my volition, is an
expression of me, of my beliefs and values.
And I think Spinoza's conceptionof freedom is very similar.

(43:11):
The the more your volitions, themore your your actions and
choices are determined by your adequate knowledge of things,
and especially your adequate understanding of the true values
of things. The more free you are, the less
subject you are to passions and to the effects that other things

(43:34):
have on you. You're not at the mercy of the
external world. You are in charge of yourself.
You have a kind of autonomy. So how would that sit with the
idea of a predetermined mechanistic universe?
And if that is the case and he does believe those things, how
does this guy write a book on ethics, which certainly kind of

(43:58):
presupposes that we actually have a real choice in places as
opposed to just reacting the conditions and.
That is one of the perennial questions that is always asked
about Spinoza. First of all, I I would avoid
the word predetermined because that suggests some kind of fate
or divine Providence who says, OK, this is how it's going to

(44:21):
go. There's there's no such
Providence in Spinoza's system because there's not a God who
has plans. There's no teleology.
But it's, it's a perfectly legitimate question.
You know, ethics on the face of it would seem to presuppose that
we make a decision about how we want our lives to go and how we

(44:42):
should act. And it's a free decision in the
sense that you could choose not to do that.
But I think Spinoza offers us a different way of looking at how
a life evolves from one condition to another, and he
offers that picture in a rare autobiographical set of

(45:05):
paragraphs at the beginning of his very first extant treatise.
So in around 1658 he started writing a book called A Treatise
on the Emendation of the Intellect.
And it's it's really a work in asense of epistemology, but a
very important wall dimension toit.

(45:26):
And at the beginning of this work, he talks about how he was
living the life of a merchant and concerned with wealth and
honor and all of those goods that come with being a
successful businessman. And he describes how
unsatisfying that life was. He didn't feel like he was

(45:48):
pursuing true goods. And that dissatisfaction moved
him to seek out truer goods, goods that would be more
satisfying, goods that were lessephemeral.
But notice that none of that required that.
That change in his life did not require any kind of libertarian

(46:09):
freedom. It all happened because this
kind of life gave rise to these kinds of feelings, and those
feelings moved him to this questfor a better kind of life.
And what Spinoza's doing in his book called Ethics is revealing
to us truths about ourselves, which hopefully will move people

(46:35):
to see what kind of life they are living and how they might
achieve, what steps would could be taken that would lead them
toward a better life. In a way, very much.
It's a very Socratic exercise. Socrates went around
interviewing the citizens of Athens, both to find out what

(46:59):
they valued and what kind of lives they were leading, and to
try to persuade them that there was a better kind of life by
putting in front of them the different values of their
choices. And and that's part of that idea
of whether we're seeing things subspecies duraciones or

(47:21):
subspecy eternatus. Yes, is that is.
That fair? Seeing that vibrates with I was
going to say. That vibrates with the with the
first chapter of the doubt of Ching where he makes pretty much
that distinction. And that's, you know, of course
I always see what I want to see,of course, like like we all do,
but. I think so I.

(47:43):
Almost started to feel. I almost started to feel like
these eternal truths were like the forms of Plato.
Yeah, but without all that metaphysical stuff going on,
they are eternal truths. They are ideas that represent
the essences of things. But what you really grasp is the

(48:08):
way in which my nature, going back to what we were talking
about earlier, what I really grasp is a way in which what I
am truly is to be part of this bigger hole.
To recognize that my freedom does not consist in this lack of

(48:31):
determination, but that I am part of an overarching
necessity. And when I recognize the
necessity of all things, how allthings are a part of nature.
And here's a very stoic side of Spinoza, When I recognize the
necessity of all things, my emotional life will be less full

(48:55):
of turmoil. It won't be these radical ups
and downs. I won't be so overwrought with
joy at the acquisition of thingsand so overcome with sadness at
their loss, because I will recognize that whether I gain or

(49:15):
keep or lose these things is notthoroughly up to me.
It's up to the causal order of nature.
And so I achieve a greater immunity to the vicissitudes of
nature and a greater way of dealing with the slings and

(49:38):
arrows of outrageous fortune. That's the moral.
Side, which now we kind of see as maybe an inevitable process
of maturation, yeah, sort of thematuration of the intellect.
Yeah. And going back to what you were
saying earlier, it's difficult. I mean, when he says all things
excellent, as difficult as they are rare, it's a really hard

(50:01):
process to achieve this condition and not everybody gets
it. You know, if it's, it's
interesting for me that example,because I, I think when we
elevate the rational understanding that all the

(50:21):
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are just part of nature
and, and, and nature is unfolding as it does, and we're
just part of that and experiencing it in order for a
sling or an arrow not to hurt asmuch.
We kind of have, I'm sure there are many models, but I, but I,

(50:46):
but I'm going to offer 21 is we,we examine or interrogate the
emotional reaction that we're having.
And so we have a, a relationshipwith our inner world in order to
work through that. And maybe we're having a strong
reaction to what's happening today because of something that

(51:06):
happened in our childhood etcetera.
The other is, I think, to exert will to suppress the, the
emotional reaction that we're having today and and we use
reason as the suppressing agent where we where we tell ourselves

(51:29):
with enough conviction that everything is unfolding as it as
it should. I'm so so I think for for me.
In either case, there's some comments on the nature of
reality and or or free will inherent in those two models.
I'm sure there are other models or ways of integrating those

(51:50):
that I'm not thinking of. I I think it's a more natural
process than a willful one. It what's willful is your your
work to achieve this condition. But the condition itself is 1
where your, your reason and your, your affect of your, your

(52:12):
knowledge and your effects are in harmony.
There are no states of mind for Spinoza that are not affected,
that don't have an emotional component.
What we are striving for is a joyful life where our power is
increasing. And what I see through this
condition, it's not so much thateverything happens as it should

(52:35):
because there is no should here.Remember again, there's no
teleology. There's no predetermination.
So it's not a kind of Leibniziantheodicy where this is the best
of all possible worlds. And even if I'm suffering now,
that's as it should be. And either I'll be recompensed
down the road or I should have faith that God chose this world.

(52:58):
Remember, there's there's no there are no other possible
worlds for Spinosa. This is the only world.
Nature is necessary, but I do achieve through the acquisition
of knowledge, a kind of control over my passions, but not a
willful control. But both AI can eliminate some

(53:21):
of the more harmful passions, and so the the truly free person
is not given to hate or envy or jealousy.
At the same time, even the free person as a human being will
have does have to live in nature.
Spinoza explicitly says a human being can never not be a part of

(53:43):
nature. So even the most free and
rational person will experience passions, even if it's just a
matter of stubbing their toe andgetting a paper cut.
But they will also experience sadness when a close friend or a
loved one dies. That's what it is to be human
and Spinoza recognizes that. The difference is that for

(54:04):
Spinoza, the free person, while they will feel these passions
and they will feel the appropriate sadness on the
appropriate occasion, they will not let that sadness govern
their activity, their, their lives.
They will, they will deal with it in the appropriate way.
And you know, I, I call this thestoic Spinoza, But bringing up

(54:27):
the term of arrows, there's a, there's a passage in Maimonides
who had a very strong influence on Spinoza.
When Maimonides is discussing how divine Providence works,
it's very similar that the person who has achieved this
higher state of understanding enjoys a kind of protection, a

(54:48):
protection from things that could happen to him through
nature. And at one point, Maimonides
uses the following metaphor. He says the person enjoying
Providence can walk through a field of battle and arrows are
flying everywhere, but he will not be harmed.
Now, one way of reading that is rather incredible, namely that

(55:12):
this virtuous person from Maimonides will never get hit by
an arrow, will never suffer any kind of pain.
I and I think that's wrong. And his commentary on Job
reveals that that's not the way to read this, because Job
suffers a lot of pain. What he really means is that we

(55:34):
will, we will first of all put those suffering passions into
context. But we will also recognize that
the the ordinary pains, the slings and arrows that we do
suffer as we go through life in this material world with our
bodies, these are not true evils.

(55:55):
As Socrates said, true evils areharms that affect the soul.
And Maimonides says that that's the real lesson that Job learns.
And I think it's not unlike whatSpinoza has in mind that if you
want to use, if you want to speak of Providence, that he
does in the theological political truths, we could talk
about Providence. What he means is that virtue has

(56:20):
its rewards, namely the blessedness and happiness that
comes with the knowledge that virtue.
Is right that there's not virtuefor some other reason, but the
virtue is just like a ripe fruitfalls from a tree as a result of
seeing in and understanding. Yeah.

(56:42):
And he says, you know, happinessis not the reward of virtue, it
is virtue itself. To be in this condition of
virtue and freedom is to experience blessedness.
Which is like a positive type ofinstant karma.
Sure. Yes, yeah, see it it again.

(57:02):
It sounds like Buddhism to me. The great way is not difficult
for those who do not pick and choose that we sort of step into
a higher self the an eternal aspect of understanding as a
counterbalance, not a not an erasure of that self that
suffers. But you certainly, you certainly

(57:25):
don't lose your sense of identity.
Although now that you're using the phrases to karma, sounds
more like John Lennon to me. Yeah, that was today's
Rock'n'roll reference. So.
So what do you think? What does Stephen Nadler think
about free will? Now that we've had the
Copenhagen interpretation and the uncertainty principle and

(57:49):
all that kind of stuff? Do you think it still holds?
Is there a little? Crack there for free will.
If we do all this hard work, will there maybe be some sort of
a of a Maybe free will isn't theright way to say it, but I'm I
guess I'm trying to understand the nature of what we win when
we go through this process. So I don't think that anything

(58:10):
that happens on the quantum level has anything to do with
free will. And, you know, Robert Sapolsky,
the the Biologist, published a book recently using all of this
biological and other scientific material to argue that there is
no such thing as free will. That's to say that it's not a
philosophical question. But I think it is a

(58:32):
philosophical question partly because it all depends upon what
you mean by free will. I don't think we'll ever know
whether there's an absolute lackof determination.
I'm not sure how you can establish that.
And you know, brain science has tried to establish gaps between
brain, certain brain States and other brain states, suggesting

(58:55):
that that gap allows for a lack of determination.
You can find all sorts of experiments about people's
decision making being preceded by certain chemical neurological
process in the brain. None of that, to me, is to the
point on the question of free will.
I think free will is both a philosophical and a

(59:16):
phenomenological question. For Spinoza to believe in free
will is a phenomenological phenomenon in the sense that
it's based upon your ignorance of the causal determination.
You think you're free because you feel yourself free.

(59:39):
That's a phenomenological side of it.
And you feel yourself free because you're not attending to
the causes that you're unaware of the causes.
I you know, I'm not a philosopher who has devoted a
good deal of time to the question of free will, but my
own instincts lean towards the compatiblist.
And I think most professional philosophers today do as well.

(01:00:03):
That once we get clearer on whatthe concept of free will is.
We'll have a better understanding of when it is
right to call ourselves free. So it do you think it would be
fair to say? I mean, I know that
Schlayermacher was a great fan of Spinoza and certainly Hegel

(01:00:25):
and a lot of these guys did. Is it fair to say that the real
task here is hermeneutical rather than epistemological?
For. Spinoza, well, and, and, and the
general philosophical question that he's trying to address.

(01:00:45):
No, I, I think for Spinoza, oh, for the, if he's doing
hermeneutics, it's in the theological political truth
where he's trying to teach us how to read the Bible.
But no, I, I think Spinoza is, is out for the truth about
things, the, the metaphysical truth about what's really real
and what, what are we and what'sthe best kind of life for us and

(01:01:09):
what things are truly good for us and what things are truly
bad. I don't think it's a linguistic
question. I don't think it's a hermeneutic
question. I should have qualified that I,
I, I mean more of an ontologicalhermeneutics, like a gottemer
sort of a sense, not so much in a, in a tract, but where our
life is the big text and today is the next page that we're

(01:01:33):
reading. And so that the whole job of
philosophy is basically interpretive is kind kind of
what I'm pointing at. I hesitate, but you know, I, as
you said before, everybody has their own way of, of seeing.
I think Spinoza's like a Rorschach test.
People, people see in Spinoza exactly what they want to see.

(01:01:55):
And I think we should allow a great deal of latitude in how
one reads Spinoza and what 1 takes away from it.
And if seeing him as engaged in a kind of ontological
hermeneutics helps you make sense of what Spinoza is doing,
more, more conatus to you. You know, and the reason I say

(01:02:15):
that is because you know, like, like in some ways, like Spinoza,
I have pursued very pragmatic, practical things.
You know, I, I saw some passage instead of learned men don't
learn a trade, they surely will become scoundrels.
And, and within one, you know, one of my trades was running

(01:02:37):
water systems and we used to do these water audits and you'd
have a bunch of fields and you put a value in each field, but
next to each field is a little pull down menu and you get to
pick from zero to 9. And if you have the most
sophisticated equipment that's measuring that that piece of
data and you have the absolute top amount of confidence in it,

(01:03:01):
you give it a nine. If you got that number by going,
I don't know, it kind of looks like this, then you're down at
the one or zero level. And I feel like the the formula
once you put the values in that formula is like an eternal
formula. It doesn't change from case to
case. But those in that, that pull

(01:03:22):
down stuff is all like the interpretive faculty before we
accept something as at face value.
So it seems like Spinoza is pointing out things like like,
well, wealth or fame, they certainly seem to have an
absolute value. But when we go into it kind of

(01:03:43):
at a deeper interpretive level, we realize that there's some
problems with it compared to relationship with eternal
truths. And that's kind of what I mean
by the hermeneutical part, I guess.
One one thing I resist though. There's a book that came out a
couple years ago by one of my fellow spinosis scholars where
he wanted to say that for Spinoza, it all really comes

(01:04:07):
down to conceptualizing. How do you read things?
How are things? What perspective do you take on
them? And so, for example, causal
relations are really just conceptual relations.
What I, what I would want to resist is saying for Spinoza,
the valuation of things is a matter of how you interpret

(01:04:29):
them. Then.
That's why I was just calling ita hermeneutical project.
Some things there, there are nothing is in and of itself good
or bad. There are no absolute values in
that sense. Whatever is just is, because
whatever exists comes about withnecessity through nature's laws,

(01:04:54):
and there's no value one way or the other with respect to that.
Nothing is good or bad in itselfintrinsically, without relation
to something else. Good and bad are thoroughly
relational terms, but at the same time they are objective
being. Relativism is not subjectivism.

(01:05:18):
It's not good because you think it's good.
It's not bad because you think it's bad.
However, something is good if itdoes in fact objectively
positively contribute to an increase in your well-being.
And something is bad relatively bad but objectively bad if it

(01:05:40):
brings about a decrease or is anobstacle to your well-being.
And so some things that are relatively objectively good for
human beings may be relatively objectively bad for other
individuals. So I know dogs, for example,
can't eat chocolate. Just take a banal example.

(01:06:01):
So chocolate is bad for dogs. It's not bad because we think
it's bad for them. It's not bad because dogs think
it's bad for them. It is objectively, but
relatively bad for dogs. Whereas, you know, an arsenic,
there's nothing objectively goodor bad about arsenic.
It's just what it is. It's a chemical, a compound, but

(01:06:24):
it is bad for us. Knowledge, on the other hand, is
good for us, not because we think it's good.
It's not subjective. It brings us to a better
condition of well-being. So I I wouldn't, I would never
want to say and This is why going back way to the beginning
of our conversation, I would never want to say Spinos is a

(01:06:46):
needless because he does believethat good and bad are objective
but relativistic labels that we need to use to help us navigate
our way through nature. And it seems like Spinoza

(01:07:06):
doesn't just believe this, he seems to actually be a product
of having lived this, and that these realizations that he puts
across came out of a real life experience as opposed to
inferential conclusions. Is that fair to say?

(01:07:27):
Yeah. And I think that, you know, that
early experience he had as a businessman, realizing that it
wasn't the life for him. Yes, absolutely.
Right. And and that he wasn't
hypnotized by by fine clothes orwealth or which we kind of come
to expect from philosophers, don't we?

(01:07:47):
Yeah, I get the sense that Spinoza lived his philosophy
that maybe I don't know whether he did or did not think of
himself as as an example of the free person having achieved that
that state. But I think it was certainly
something he aspired to. We know that he led a rather
sober life. He he wasn't given to austerity.

(01:08:11):
The notion that Spinoza thinks that we should eliminate the
passions from our lives and livein an austere, deprived state,
you know, on survival mode, that's just not right.
In the ethics, he says that the free person will enjoy beautiful
things, enjoy good food, good art, theatre and social company.

(01:08:37):
So it's not as if the ideal condition is a is one of being a
hermit. 'Cause an ascetic.
It's, yeah, an ascetic. Rather, it's one where they
partake of good things in moderation.
And Spinoza, he was not an isolated individual.
He had a circle of friends and he enjoyed good company.

(01:08:58):
At the same time, I think he led, he wasn't pursued pursuing
riches inordinately. What we know about his diet was
that it was a sensible diet. He probably wore sensible shoes,
you know, I I think he strove tolive the the free and virtuous

(01:09:18):
life that he recommends others. And, and so when he gives us
advice about how to go about this, which I think is one of
the things that makes him maybe the most valuable of a lot of
philosophers, is that we don't just walk off thinking cool new
things, but there's actually a reflexive component.

(01:09:40):
It's like for us to understand reality at this higher level, we
have to go through some stuff, self exploration, turning the
light on our own processes. We could almost feel Freud
coming in the future out of thisa little bit.
And, and it's also not just advice he's giving us.
He's demonstrating his truths. You know, the ethics has the

(01:10:03):
geometric format. He never really says you should
do this. Or maybe you're better off doing
that. Rather, it's a series of of
propositions with demonstrationsthat are supposed to convince
you, not through rhetoric but through mathematical certainty,

(01:10:24):
that this life is the life of freedom and virtue and.
And this is where I want to plugyour books.
You must be because, you know, one could easily say, well, if
there's one philosopher to read,it's Spinoza.
And, and I understand that argument.
And yet at the same time, if that's the only book of

(01:10:45):
philosophy you ever read, you'reprobably not going to get real
far with Spinoza, would you? Because Spinoza is not really
easy. And unless one has gone through
certain processes to kind of learn about philosophy, there
really is there's a great utility to having someone bridge
that for you. And I think that's what your

(01:11:06):
books really do. Is that is that a good way to?
I hope so. Yeah, I hope so.
I would never recommend somebodystart their philosophical
reading with Spinoza. And I would never start an
introductory course with Spinoza.
In fact, I wouldn't even, I wouldn't use Spinoza in an
introduction philosophy class. It's just too hard.
Plus, plus, also speaking from experience, once you get hooked

(01:11:29):
on Spinoza, that's it, you're done for.
He will obsess. You'll be obsessed with him for
the rest of your life. And you know, I, I still like to
go back and write and study other philosophers, Cartesians,
medieval Jewish philosophers. I love teaching Plato and
Socrates. But yeah, Spinoza's not the

(01:11:51):
place to begin. But I if you haven't read
Spinoza, I think you're really missing something important.
And this gets, this is shown by the fact that people who do read
Spinoza and not just not just professional philosophers, not
just students, but ordinary people who are interested in
curious about Spinoza, they loveSpinoza.

(01:12:14):
I mean, you can, you walk down the street today and you won't
find many Cartesians or Leibnizians, but you will run to
people who think Spinoza got it right.
And Spinoza has infiltrated highand popular culture in a way in
which maybe no other philosopherhas possibly accepting Socrates

(01:12:36):
or Nietzsche. But you know, you have novels,
operas, works of visual art, plays about Spinoza.
You have musical compositions inspired by Spinoza.
The the the American grocery train, Trader Joe's had Spinoza

(01:12:59):
bagels. So Spinoza really has become, in
a way, has achieved a kind of cultural popularity that's rare
for a philosophy. As well he should.
I would totally sport a Spinoza T-shirt if I had one.
Oh there, just go online. There are dime a dozen.
I bet there are said participatein the eternal totality on the

(01:13:22):
front. So Steven, you mentioned
medieval Jewish philosophy and Iwanted to spend a little time on
that. Maybe this ties back to Spinoza.
We don't have to leave Spinoza, but the just the phrase Jewish
philosophy is interesting to me and and I'd love to hear from

(01:13:44):
you about how Jewish philosophy and Jewish religion might relate
to one another, maybe both in medieval times and and is that
distinction also true today? Yeah.
I mean, there's a great deal of discussion about what is Jewish
philosophy and what is Jewish philosophy.

(01:14:06):
So what is Jewish philosophy andhow would it differ from, let's
say, a Jewish religious text? I think there it's it's a
matter. And especially within Judaism, I
think this becomes a particularly complicated
question given the general, I won't say lack of dogmatism, but

(01:14:27):
the the importance of debate anddisagreement in Jewish
intellectual traditions. It's a very fine line between
theology and philosophy. But generally speaking, there
are certain questions that we recognize as philosophical
questions, and there are other questions that we recognize as

(01:14:47):
theological or halachic Jewish legal questions.
So if you know, if a text is a midrash on halakhah on Jewish
law, it's unlikely that you're going to find a lot of
philosophical discussions, but it's possible.
And you know, and if you read through rabbinical writings, you

(01:15:08):
find great exercises of philosophical reasoning, uses of
modus ponens, modus tolens, reductio out absurdum, and so
on. So philosophical methods often
inform Jewish theological discussions, but there are also
certain questions that really are philosophical questions.
Questions of metaphysics, the nature of creation, the nature

(01:15:31):
of God, can be a philosophical question.
Moral questions, even within theJewish theological milieu, are
philosophical questions which bleed into theological or
religious ones. Epistemological issues likewise
not what should I know or what does God, what does God command

(01:15:54):
me to know, but what is knowledge?
And to the extent that a thinkeris addressing these
philosophical questions both in a Jewish textual milieu and
accessing a certain Jewish intellectual and textual
tradition, that to me is what makes for Jewish philosophy.

(01:16:17):
Now let's take Spinoza as an example.
A lot of what Spinoza's talking about in the Ethics is identical
to what Descartes was talking about in his Meditations or his
Principles of Philosophy, and what Leibniz was talking about
in his writings. The reason why I would insist
that Spinoza belongs to the history of Jewish philosophy as

(01:16:41):
well as to the history of Cartesian philosophy and the
history of Stoic philosophy is because when Spinoza answers
certain metaphysical and moral questions, he's accessing a
certain textual intellectual tradition that these other
philosophers, Descartes Leibniz are not because Spinoza has
access to and it really employs his access to Maimonides guided

(01:17:08):
the perplex the more Nebuchim orGirsanadi's Muhammad Hashem wars
of the Lord his I've for example, Spinoza's account of
happiness and the relationship between virtue and happiness I
think is a culmination of a certain rationalist tradition in
medieval Jewish philosophical thinking in a way taking it to

(01:17:32):
its logical conclusion. I think a case can be made that
Spinoza's God is also not reallyMaimonides God, but again the of
the logical conclusion of Imani's God or Maimonides views
and immortality. And So what makes a philosophy a
Jewish philosophy is that it is in dialogue with a certain

(01:17:58):
historical and textual tradition.
You don't have to be Jew like there was a great advertising
campaign in New York in the 1960s.
For Levy's rye bread. You don't have to be Jewish to
enjoy Levy's rye bread and had agreat visual campaign.
I would say you don't have to beJewish to do Jewish philosophy.

(01:18:18):
Is Jean Paul Sarka doing Jewish philosophy when he writes anti
Semite and Jew and is discussingthe philosophical question of
what it is to be Jewish and what's the relationship between
the Jew and the anti Semite. On the other hand, Cynthia, by
virtue of being Jewish does not make you doing Jewish
philosophy. What what matters is who you're

(01:18:41):
in conversation with, what's thedialogue you're engaged in, and
what texts are you addressing and what questions are you
answering? So.
So it's not even that there are particular methods,
philosophical methods or the OR or or particular philosophical

(01:19:03):
ideas that are part of the OR uniquely part of the Jewish
tradition. Rather it's it's bouncing the
ideas and the methods off that lineage to inform them that
makes them that that makes something Jewish philosophy.

(01:19:25):
OK. In a way, in a way it's taking
philosophical methods and philosophical question and
applying them to Judaism. So for example, here, here's a,
here's a philosophic question, which I think is a philosophic
question, but I think it's a specifically Jewish philosophic
question, namely, what is the status of of halakhah of the

(01:19:47):
Jewish law? Where does it get its normative
force from? Should we carry out the
mitzvotes, the commandments, because God commands them, or
did God command them because they're good?
You know the old Euthyphro question?
But now applied to a specific Jewish context.
So Maimonides, for example, has there are long discussions in

(01:20:10):
the Guide of Perplexed about thenormativity of Jewish law, and
it tries to rationalize the Jewish commandments.
That's a philosophical exercise,an exercise about the
normativity of law, but applied to a specific Jewish, to a
specific Jewish religious context.

(01:20:31):
Got it. And and when you mentioned
Sartre, I remembered in our pre meeting the topic came up of
anti-Semitism and you differentiated anti-Semitism
from anti Zionism from anti Judaism if I remember correctly.
And I was really curious to hearmore about that.

(01:20:53):
Is now an OK time to get into that a little?
Sure, why not? Especially because Spinoza has
been accused of being an anti Semite, anti-Semitism.
And I'm just going to use the definition formed by the the
special envoy for anti-Semitism,you know, the appointed by the

(01:21:15):
US government. anti-Semitism is the hatred of Jews, hatred
directed at Jews. I would add hatred directed at
Jews because they're Jews. I For example, a person might
hate these Jews, hate Jews, but not know that they're Jews, Or
he might hate these Jews not because they're Jewish, but

(01:21:37):
because they're wearing the wrong kind of sneakers.
anti-Semitism has to be hatred directed at Jews because of what
they are, because they are Jews.Anti Judaism would be maybe not
hatred, but a strongly critical or perhaps hatred of Judaism as

(01:22:02):
a religion. I would not say and I would in
fact strongly argue against the idea that Spinoza is
anti-Semitic. Mainly first of all because I
don't think Spinoza was given tohatred in the 1st place.
Secondly, I don't think he hatedJews.
What he was opposed to were the major organized sectarian

(01:22:26):
religions. And so I think he, we could say
he was strongly critical of Judaism, but he was no less
strongly critical of Catholicism, although he had to
be a little bit more careful in criticizing Christianity because
he was living in a Christian nation.

(01:22:47):
So he could direct his ire against organized sectarian
religions against Judaism without the risk that he would
incur were he to engage in a full on critique of
Christianity. But the problem with these
organized religions is for him, moral and political.
It's not a hatred. He thinks that sectarian

(01:23:08):
religions introduce divisions into society.
They set citizens against citizens and also raises
questions about their loyalty totheir their own nation state.
So, for example, the Dutch Calvinists were strongly
opposed. Many Dutch Calvinists were
strongly opposed to allowing Catholics to practice openly

(01:23:31):
because one can legitimately askare they more loyal to the Dutch
Republic or to the Pope in Rome.And Spinoza sees that these
organized sectarian religions are a threat to the unity,
stability and security of society.
So his anti Judaism I'm sure hadhis own personal experience

(01:23:53):
within Judaism had something to do with it.
But I, I, I wouldn't call it a hatred.
I would call it a rash, a reason, a reasoned philosophical
and political and moral and religious critique of Judaism as
an organized religion with laws and superstitious ceremonies
equally applicable to other religious traditions.

(01:24:17):
Anti Zionism. I I think the bar for
anti-Semitism has been lowered so much that if you are a critic
of Israeli policies either internal to the state of Israel
or regarding Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people in the
West Bank and Gaza to be critical, that now gets you

(01:24:41):
labeled as an anti Semite. We need to remember that there
are ultra Orthodox Jewish sects that are anti Zionists.
For example the Satnas are against the existence of the
political state of Israel because they believe that only
the Mosiah, the Messiah is authorized to re establish a

(01:25:02):
Jewish state. I think the Jewish voices for
peace as much as I am turned offby their tactics and by a lot of
their rhetoric. Are we going to call these Jews
anti-Semitic because they stand against the the state of Israel?

(01:25:22):
So I think we have to be really careful about conflating
criticism of Israel, even suggesting that the homeland for
the Jews should be a bi nationalstate, not a single Jewish
state. We should be very careful about
calling these views anti-Semitism.

(01:25:42):
I think there's, there's a, there's a, a connection that
that's worth mentioning there though, that Israel's policies,
internal and external and, and the existence of a Jewish state,

(01:26:05):
you know, in general might be criticized by these groups or in
general to a standard that othergroups are not criticized.
And so it, I, I think it's not only whether Israel is being
criticized politically or not that that is the standard, it's

(01:26:29):
whether it's held to a differentstandard than other political
entities. I totally agree and I would also
say that a lot of the a lot of the anti Zionism is rooted in
anti-Semitism. I just think they have to be
distinguished. If you're an anti Zionist
because you are in general against any nation state founded

(01:26:53):
on strict ethnic or religious principles and you carry that
across the board, then you're consistent.
No, I I totally agree with you and to single Israel out does at
least reek of anti-Semitism and probably is in many cases deeply
grounded in anti-Semitism. Even if the protest is voiced by

(01:27:20):
a group like Jewish Voices for Peace.
Yes, although I still have trouble with, you know, the
notion of a self hating Jew. I've always found that a really
empty label. Noam Chomsky the sort of the
paradigm of of this people what think of him as the paradigmatic
self hating Jew. I don't find that a useful label

(01:27:42):
in any circumstances. That's interesting.
I do relate to it and I think that there's that there's a way
that. I'm not even sure how to put

(01:28:04):
this because my experience of itcomes from kind of not not a
strictly verbal place, and I don't know if I've done a good
job putting words to this before, but that that there's a
little voice in my head that pops up sometimes.
And I suspect it does for other Jews as well.

(01:28:26):
Maybe not all, but I think some admitted to there and some
don't. That says what if Hitler or fill
in the blank was right and that that that we're inferior.
And and I think that that's the outcome.

(01:28:48):
And, and this is, this is maybe going to reveal maybe some of my
philosophy, half baked as it is,that's the result of a drum beat
of, you know, thousands of yearsof persecution that that that we

(01:29:10):
carry around with us, kind of a fear that it could happen again.
And maybe even it, it, it'll work.
And and what is the mark of superiority if not the ability
to eradicate? So I agree with much of some of

(01:29:30):
what you say. I think we all as Jews have that
voice saying what if it happens again?
You know, look at Charlottesville a couple of
years ago. Look at look at the exclusionary
policies of the Trump administration apps.
You know, I think it would be naive for us to think it could
never happen again. However, my my take away from

(01:29:54):
that is not that the ability to oppress and murder is a sign of
superiority, and that therefore there must be something my my
voice doesn't say. Maybe they're right.
Maybe there's something inferiorabout Jews.
My voice takes something different away.
Namely, yes, what if it can happen again?

(01:30:17):
There's a fear there. But my voice also says that
we're living in a different world than the 1930s because it
did happen. And, you know, I do.
We need Israel just in case. I, I, I don't think it's a

(01:30:41):
reasonable thing to believe. Yes, we do need Israel just in
case. I don't happen to believe that.
But, you know, I live, I grew upin New York and it's, you know,
I don't think New York Jews growup with the idea that we are
inferior and that we need Israeljust in case.

(01:31:03):
But that's very particular to mycase.
But what I, what I do find, here's the other voice in me.
And this is partly because of how I was raised and having gone
to Hebrew school and having children myself now and soon to
have grandchildren are on the way.

(01:31:24):
What I, what I find in the back of my mind speaking, you know,
there's the rational side of me that thinks, well, do we really
need Israel or do we really needa state exclusively for the
Jews? A, a, a nation state that
defines itself as exclusively for the Jews people?

(01:31:50):
Or would we be better off as Jews with a homeland that is
itself a bi national state? That's that's a debate I have.
But the other voice in the back of my mind is, and I think so
many Jews have this and either they admit it or they ignore it,

(01:32:11):
is a deep emotional attachment to Israel, especially if you've
been there and if you have relatives there.
It it may be a perfectly irrational attachment.
It's it's very emotional, I think.
All attachment is irrational, isn't?
It. Passionate.
Yeah. OK.
I'll go with that. I was born in Israel and, and,

(01:32:35):
and, and lost my parents in a terrorist attack.
So, so I'll completely acknowledge that that I have an,
an attachment and the, and I guess from a Darwinian sense,
you know, the ability to eradicate another people is, is

(01:32:56):
a kind of tacit superiority. I'm not saying it's a moral
superiority or. Or it's a stronger connotus.
Yeah, yeah, right. So, So I'm curious, you know,
you mentioned that that New YorkJews don't necessarily think of
themselves as persecuted, but I but I don't know if that's true

(01:33:20):
on the campus of Columbia University these days.
And, and I think anti-Semitic attacks are, are up.
I think I saw some 300 plus percent since October 7th.
And and and you said we live in a different world than the
1930s. Are you sure?

(01:33:41):
Help help me. Help me believe that because I
want to. No, I'm not sure.
I, I guess it's a, it's a hope that in light of what happens in
the 20th century, we have more political moral safeguards
against that kind of thing happen.
But I, I think my confidence in that is probably weakening over

(01:34:02):
the last couple of years, let's say the last nine years.
So no, I'm not confident. And you know, I do.
As a Columbia PhD, I'm troubled by what's happening on that
campus, but I'm also troubled bythe way in which anti

(01:34:25):
anti-Semitism is being so cynically manipulated by
political powers. And I'm not on the Columbia
campus now, so I can't speak with any authority about how
Jews on that campus feel, but I,I do believe that they would,

(01:34:47):
they are justified in having, you know, seeing what's
happening, just videos from seeing what's happening on
campus and in the Morningside Heights neighborhood.
I think it's, it's a very frightening situation.
So I, I would temper what I saidabout New York Joe's and that I
guess I, what I meant was growing up as a Jew in New York

(01:35:12):
when I did and you know, and living there in the, in the
1980s. It may be that the last nine
years refute my confidence. I think about it more is the
last two, but but yeah, I'm not sure that that.
Matters about 9 years. I mean, going back to the

(01:35:34):
beginning of the Trumpet, the first Trump administration.
See, I grew up, I grew up in NewYork in that during those very
same years. And, you know, I'm an orphan.
So I, I was told I could be partJewish, but I have no way to
know. And I, I guess I was around a

(01:35:55):
lot of Jewish people, but I never got a general message that
that they were somehow inferior.In fact, if anything, if I was
to try to, to, to understand some of the reactions, I might
make the argument that there is a certain superiority that I

(01:36:17):
mean, I think anybody who is intelligent knows that there
will be people that will hate you just for your intelligence.
And if you're successful, there will be people that just hate
you for your success. But but you know, and I haven't
been back for years, so I can't speak to the change in that.
Well, the New York I grew up in was a very, so I was born in the

(01:36:39):
city. I grew up on Long Island, and
then I went to Graduate School in the city.
And the New York, in my experience in those days, it was
a very Jewish city. The, you know, the, the holidays
came around and you saw menorahs, you saw Mizzou's on
doorways, you saw Jews walking around everywhere.

(01:37:02):
When I moved to Wisconsin, all of a sudden the holiday season,
there are these green and red lights.
I thought, oh, that's what's what's with this?
And you know, Madison is kind ofspecial for the upper Midwest.
But even here, you know, the, the schools didn't close for the

(01:37:23):
Jewish holidays the way they didon Long Island.
But boys, let me let me ask you,do you So as a, as a born
Israeli, what's your take on whither Israel?
Do we still need a exclusively aa a nation state exclusively for

(01:37:43):
Jews? Well, I think the word
exclusively there is doing a lotof work.
I'm not. That's how it was enshrined
recently, right? The what?
That's how it was enshrined recently by by Knesset.
Yeah, I'm, I'm not an expert on on Israel, So, so this is just

(01:38:07):
me here. I think that given the extent of
persecution that Jews have experienced, Jews need a place
to call home that they that theycan feel safe in.

(01:38:28):
I think the the way Israel workstoday, Arabs are citizens in
Israel and it it might already not be exclusive in, in the way
that exclusivity might be envisioned.
And, and I think that's a good thing, I think.

(01:38:52):
They are second class citizens though, aren't they?
I mean, they serve on the Supreme Court, they vote.
They, I, I'm, again, I'm not an expert on Israel, but, but, but
I think there are some tropes there that, that get mixed in on
both sides and, and I might be victim to some of them.
But my, you know, having spent time in Israel, I, I was, I went

(01:39:17):
to school there in elementary school for, for a little while
and there were Arab kids in my class and it there, there
wasn't, I didn't experience it as second class citizens there.
There absolutely are dynamics where Arabs living in the West

(01:39:38):
Bank or Gaza who are travelling into Israel to work and things
like that are going through checkpoints.
They're being checked for, for whether they're carrying
explosives, whether they, they, they have a right to work and,
and certainly there's security everywhere and, and stop and

(01:39:59):
frisk. Kinds of policies are include
racial profiling, There's no question.
And you know, there there could be argument that that's
justified because Jews aren't typically the ones carrying out
suicide bombings in Jerusalem. So, but, but, but I, I think

(01:40:23):
that anti-Semitism has a way of coming back again and again in,
in, sometimes in seemingly new ways or in, in, in subtle ways
before it explodes. And I don't think we're out of
the woods. And, and, and I had an, an

(01:40:43):
interesting experience when, when October 7th happened, I had
the sense that I should have been there with, with my people
that, that, that if we don't look out for each other for
real, then those kinds of thingswill continue to happen.

(01:41:08):
And, and could be worse. And, and I don't know what that
looks like, but, but I don't think that anti-Semitism is no
longer a very visceral threat. No, I would agree with that.
In fact, I would say it's not even very subtle.
You know, just putting aside things like Charlottesville, I,

(01:41:29):
I was watching, I have friends still around the Columbia campus
and was watching videos. And when Jewish students are
told no Zionist will be allowed here, there's nothing subtle
about that. Psychologists Association not
referring patients to Zionist practitioners.

(01:41:54):
Therapists. Yeah, I totally agree.
So to bring it back briefly to Spinoza, one of the things that
always bothers me is what we we're talking about Spinoza as a
Rorschach test. Sometimes he's referred to as a
proto Zionist because there's a statement in the theological
political treatise where he says, and maybe if they can get

(01:42:17):
over the their emasculation fromtheir religion, God will restore
them again in the homeland or, you know, God will give them the
nation again. And this is taken to be a kind
of wishful thinking of Spinoza'spart.
I think what he's really doing is making fun of Zionism there.
Well, you know, Zionism of all of that stuff.

(01:42:38):
There is no Zionism yet in the 17th century.
But yeah, it's there's nothing Zionist in Spinoza's philosophy.
Yeah, I do have to be somewhere shortly after noon.
Can we wrap this up soon, you think?
You bet, Brian. Any last questions, comments.
No, I guess I just would encourage people once again to

(01:43:02):
check out Stevens books because there's, there's some real gems
within the work of Spinoza, but they're kind of, you know,
they're buried in some thick stuff.
And, and this is definitely a way to bridge across that, to be
able to get those out of there. I think I personally think that

(01:43:24):
we're in a time where philosophymakes more difference maybe than
it ever has, and that we need tobe smarter and we need to be
thinking clearer and we need to be communicating better.
And everything about Spinoza, I think is all about that.
And so I see it as a real as a real remedy in parts to the

(01:43:46):
chapter that we're in. Do you have any thoughts about
that, Steven? I totally agree and I, you know,
I appreciate the endorsement of my books, which are for sale at
find stores everywhere. We'll put it in the notes.
OK, No, I think you're absolutely right.
You know, we've kind of come full circle now in our
conversation to what, you know, we need more philosophy in the

(01:44:10):
world today. And one of my great
disappointments after 911 is howthe media went to politicians
and journalists and even poets for their thoughts.
But you didn't see philosophers coming out, they weren't at the
forefront. But I think that's exactly we

(01:44:33):
need a greater public role for philosophers.
And I'm not saying that it's themedia that we blame, because I
think philosophers themselves have become so over specialised
and have isolated themselves from the general public, maybe
less so than other humanities disciplines.
Because I'd like to think that philosophers haven't fallen for

(01:44:55):
a lot of the jargony kind of scholarship that passes for a
lot of humanities work. There's still a kind of clarity
and appreciation for truth amongphilosophers, and I think they
should take advantage of that. And the carefulness about
language. Yes, and and and.

(01:45:17):
A realization of the pernicious influence of rhetoricians.
Yep, it's just really. Rampant today, I think.
Steven, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the the
conversation with you today. And yeah, your time was was
really valuable to us. Well, thank you.
It's been a pleasure. I appreciate the opportunity and

(01:45:39):
Boaz Sunday let's I'd like to continue the conversation about
your experience growing up in Israel.
I would too. And, and maybe even on, on the
podcast. I, I feel like there's more
there and we have some other guests potentially coming up
that will also inform that. So yeah, we'll, we'll definitely
come back to it. Thank you.
Thank you.

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