Episode 14 in which LUNA meets Spinoza, free-thinking lens-grinder and working class hero

Ol and Val try to figure out why Luna chose to travel just up the road from The Hague to Amsterdam to meet Spinoza and read his book The Ethics. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:31

That's right. We finally found out what she's reading.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

A little book to her rucksack. It seems that on this little road trip of hers, that she's taken the enormous journey from The Hague over to Amsterdam.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Not so far.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Not so far. She's been hanging with Descartes, and now she's going to come across a new philosopher, a certain Baruch de Spinoza.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Or is it Benedict?

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Or is it Benedict? We will f we will find that. We will interrogate, I think, a little bit of this uh name change that he does. But why is why is she what's the importance of Spinoza? Why is she reading this?

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Well, um, as Spinoza shows us later on, you know, we always want the things that we love, the people that we love, to be loved by other people that we like. That actually increases our joy as he shows to us. And so I've always been very enthusiastic about teaching Spinoza, um, despite being a rank amateur when it comes to scholarship on Spinoza. And uh, I think there are there are a few reasons for this. I mean, one of them is that uh outside academia, outside the university, one of the philosophers that people know of, that people discuss, that like in the world of art, for example, in in cultural spheres and so on, is Spinoza.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Yeah, so he's not just contained within the world of philosophy. And I mean, in my own intellectual um formation, I was surrounded by spinocists as well. You know, um, had people like, this is particularly down in in Melbourne, you know, had people like John Rubin, Janice Richardson, you and you have a little bit of contact with some Spinozists as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Absolutely. So in Italy, um, back in the late 80s, early 90s, if you wanted to do your PhD, your doctoral thesis on Marx, it was impossible. So, what you would do back then, apparently, was kind of write on Marx under the cover of Spinoza.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

So my mates Filippo De Lucchesi and Vittorio Morfino, uh, despite it being a covert operation at first, they actually became devoted Spinozists and are now very much continuing and actively supporting and maintaining the tradition of Spinoza scholarship.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Yeah, and that's such a fascinating kind of like through, like you read Spinoza to get through to Marx in some respects, but then you find yourself back with Spinoza in some respects interrogating some of the problematics that it gets. And I mean, many of our own, uh, you know, for myself and for all, you know, our intellectual kind of heroes, they all went through Spinoza. Like Spinoza is one of the determining names of French philosophy of the 20th century, right? This operation of reading Marx through Spinoza, you know, that's that's Althusser.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Well, yeah, it's Altusaire, and then it's also Altusir's students, right? So it's Balibar.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Yeah, Balibar, of course, and you know, Pierre Macheray.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Yeah, and then it's also Badu.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Yeah, Badju writes his doctoral dissertation um on the ethics, trying to see if it actually adheres to the Euclidean geometry. Like exactly the Euclidean method of demonstration that we're going to be seeing, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:42

And then when it comes to publishing being an event, because Badou wants to posit himself as the next new great progressive Marxist philosopher, he realizes that the other Marxist philosophers with whom he might have some kind of rivalry are all big readers of Spinoza. So he pinpoints one of the biggest controversies in the analysis of Spinoza's ontology, which is the question of, we'll get into this later, infinite modes. And he does this, this he tries to do this takedown in being an event. Yeah. And if you talk to the Spinozists, they do not like Bagie's reading.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

They're absolutely not happy with meditation 10 of being an event. And of course, the person that he has most firmly in his sights is Gilles Deleuze. Absolutely. One of the other most famous um, you know, Spinoists. And you know, um, only I think it was two years ago, a lot of his uh late lectures on Spinoza at uh Paris Vit um have been published by uh David La Pouliade, if I'm not mistaken. Um a lot of his late um seminars on Spinoza. So there's a tremendous amount of intellectual activity that's going on around Spinoza in 20th century France, but has continued, right? Up up until this moment.

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Yeah, I think that um in our field, which which you can call it like uh contemporary critical theory um and also a particular type of political philosophy, you have to somehow come to grips with Spinoza. And it's not just like a professional obligation or a kind of a calling card. Once you actually start opening the ethics, the first experience is one of stupefaction, no?

SPEAKER_00 5:20

Absolute disorientation, just no, I have no idea what's going on, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Right, yeah. And then afterwards it becomes the stupefaction turns into wonder, and then you start to marvel, and then you just find yourself on this amazing trip.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

And you get get to a sense of beatitude as this is going to promise us in um book or part five. But you know, we should we should go back to Luna, right? Luna is on this road trip, right? And it made me think of, you know, just speaking about the stupefication of first encountering Spinoza. I must confess, all, my very first encounter with Spinoza was indeed on a road trip of sorts. I was I was backpacking across North America. I was up in Toronto, I was in a I was in a bookstore, and I saw a copy of The Ethics. I had heard about it from something somewhere. So I went, yeah, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna grab a copy of that. This will be a nice, easy read to accompany me on all these long train rides and bus rides. I opened it up to the first page, and I could not make heads or tails of it, and I was forced to carry this book on my back because I have a terrible habit of just perfectly accumulating books and having to carry them in my in my backpack, and it's like the tremendous weight, and it's you know, this was 11 years ago, and I've carried that with me.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

Is that weight still on your back?

SPEAKER_00 6:43

It's still there's still the monkey on my back, you know. But it's still it's just this incredible process of like this unfolding of this, you know, the the absolute disorientation of the first encounter, and then as you you read it and you try and read it again, and you and then you or when you teach it, you know, there's always just this perpetual, continual unfolding towards something that is so captivating and gripping.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

Absolutely. But Luna has not just like met a new philosophy, she's also met a new philosopher, a new person. Yes, and Spinoza himself led a pretty fascinating life. He came from a very singular community.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Yes, absolutely. And so where the the the edition that uh we we have been using is of course the Cambridge edition um that was uh edited by Matthew J. Kissner, and he has presented like this really incredible kind of biography and introduction to the ethics that you know, because it can be quite disorienting the first time. If you just open up the ethics and start trying to read it, you're gonna be totally lost. And so the introduction that Kiss uh Kissner gives, I think, is really quite illuminating, right? So he opens up, he sets a scene, he sets this kind of the drama of the publication of the ethics, right? So he writes In July of 1675, Spinoza traveled from his home in The Hague, well, where the Luna just was, to Amsterdam to oversee the publication of his ethics, right? And the ethics is the culmination of nearly 15 years of philosophical reflection, but this publication is maybe going to run into a couple of snags because this is quite a controversial work.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

Can I just say that it's a bit of a shame that it runs into snags? Because if you put 15 years of your life into something, you pretty much want to see a result.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

I know. You have to think about all those people who, you know, it's it's the endless basically the ethics is like Spinoza's endless PhD that he never kind of he never quite complete thread.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Yeah, but it does. I mean, let's just like reassure, reassure our listeners, there are some incomplete books written by Spinoza that we have. Yes, like his work, his political treatise, yes, um, and his early short treatise. But this one, this one is absolutely complete.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Yeah, it's perfect, it is perfect, no gaps, no, no debates over it at all.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Well, can you imagine? I mean, just seriously, just for our listeners, like has anybody here, anybody listening, have you kept on one project for 15 years? No. I mean, the only thing that that comes to mind for me is like bringing up children. And God knows that's messy and it hits snags, right? Yeah, but and it takes longer sometimes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

So, all right, so Spinoza's gonna be publishing what is well, he's gonna go and try and publish what is an incredibly controversial work. Why is it controversial? It's Cartesian, it's Cartesian, and Cartesianism hasn't yet taken over the the the universities of all of Amsterdam of Amsterdam, of all of Holland. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

Well, universities back then, just just as now, um, don't like controversies, and this was a controversies concerning free speech, like many of the controversies nowadays.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Yeah, right, of course. And so, yeah, and not only, I mean, it's also a continuation not only of the controversy controversy over free speech, but also the the ongoing battle with universities being dominated by Aristotle, right? Aristotle is still the domineering kind of figure in the universities, that's what's taught.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

But and here's Spinoza coming along. Yeah, he's presenting himself as a disciple of Descartes, right? And he's continuing with this new mechanist philosophy, which is very threatening for the Aristotelians and for the church authorities.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

Yeah, and that's what's really interesting because like this is this interesting um fusion between, you know, politics. I mean, it's an argue, it's a very active debate now, the relationship between the state and the freedom of intellectual freedom of universities, because some of the Dutch states actually intervened into this kind of philosophical debate, right? So um Kissner writes that the provincial councils of the states of Holland and uh West Friesland declared that follow uh professors of philosophy must take an oath to cease propounding Cartesianism, even though Descartes would eventually get the last laugh and he would come to dominate all of the universities. But we have the state intervening into what universities are allowed to teach.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Sounds a little bit like Texas and Florida nowadays.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Yeah, what's their big thing? Um the symposium by Plato is far too radical. It's gender bending. It's a j it's yeah, it's part of the uh what is it? Is it called is it just called gender ideology?

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Well, you know, I I just hope that Plato gets the last laugh, because he's certainly had quite a few laughs already at the expense of the Texans.

SPEAKER_00 11:41

Yeah, and the expense of us. Um yeah, so like one of the things that yeah, so uh Spinoza, student of Descartes. So one of the things, once we, I suppose, once we get into this text is a lot of Spinoza's starting points are the same as Descartes, right? We're gonna we're gonna so hopefully that's gonna give some of our listeners a bit of point of orientation because Spinoza's gonna be covering quite a few points that Descartes did, but in his own particular way that actually radically shifts the entire field.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yeah, well, I hope that uh a lot of our listeners will start to see some echoes and some bridges in between, especially Meditation 6, and what Spinoza's actually going to try and do.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Yeah. And I mean the reason we should also mention the reason for this kind of the similarity of these starting points is that the only work that Spinoza published under his name during his lifetime was a commentary on Descartes' principles of philosophy, right? So that was he's really closely aligned with what Descartes is doing. At least that's what people know him for.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

Yeah, he present his public persona at an academic level is that of proselytizing for the new Cartesian philosophy, right? And I should note that back then, if you were known as a Cartesian, that didn't mean that you were like an orthodox disciple of Descartes who believed everything single thing that the master said. It meant that you were basically somebody who was into the new physics, who explored mathematics, who took up problems and contradictions in Descartes' work and tried to solve them in different ways. So being Cartesian was the name for a whole field of like scientific endeavor and of free thinking.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

And this kind of scientific endeavor that comes into sharp confrontations with the reigning theological teachings of this era, right? You know, so like one of the things that uh one of the stories that is kind of told in this introduction is you know, we're not gonna go into exactly every single point just at the minute uh that uh aligns Spinoza with Descartes, but there's one point that Spinoza does, and he goes, There's an identity between this this is a point of differentiation, sorry. Spinoza says that God and nature are self-identical, they're one and the same thing. So it's not like with Descartes, where Descartes has a split where there's something of a creator God, if we recall God is the author of my existence, etc. etc. Spinoza's going to say this is one and the same thing, right? And here is one of the first kind of points of controversy, right? Because this view that God and nature are one and the same thing was put forward by one of Spinoza's friends, right? Um, and a close intellectual, I suppose, associate, a uh Adrian Koebach. I'm always I've been I'm always terrible with Dutch names, right? So Koerbach publishes some works saying some things of the same nature, and what does he get for all of his troubles?

SPEAKER_01 14:36

What does he get?

SPEAKER_00 14:37

He gets sentenced to 10 years hard labor in a prison in Amsterdam.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Oh my god, what was he doing? Building the dikes?

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Where he dies. He die he dies. Oh no! Yeah, in this basically labor camp for publishing this view that God and nature are the same thing, not separate, not creation ex nilo, one and the same.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Yeah, well you can imagine this is still a hugely controversial claim. So if you want to get into an argument uh with somebody who's religious, just try and tell them that God and nature are exactly the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

It does, it unsettles a lot of the the kind of the received uh uh theological uh ideas around you know what God is. You know, God creates the heavens and the earth, etc. etc. There seems to be a separation. We can see very clearly why it's so controversial to say that God is the same thing as creation.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

Yeah, and let's just point out that like he was in the most liberal, the most tolerant, and the most exciting city, if you're an intellectual, of Europe in the 1600s, and that was Amsterdam.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Yeah, absolutely. And this is, I mean, this is one of the reasons why, you know, Spinoza is here in the first place, because like his parents, you know, so uh we should do a little bit more, I suppose, by biographical details, right? So he's born Baruch de Espinoza on November the 24th, 1632, to Hannah and Michael de Espinoza, right? So they're Portuguese Jewish migrants, right? They're fleeing the persecution of the Jewish community in Portugal to go to this more liberal, you know, tolerant um city of Amsterdam, or at least the Netherlands, right? So there's this kind of sense of persecution that his parents feel they're forced to flee Portugal and they find themselves in Amsterdam with the Jewish community there.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

But the the history is actually um quite complicated and fascinating because this is a community that were originally in Spain, right? And Spain was like a haven of religious toleration during the Middle Ages, but as of the 1490s, it becomes more and more dominated by the Catholic Church that becomes less and less tolerant, right? And the Jewish uh community in Spain are compelled to convert, right, to convert to Christianity, okay? And they do that in try trying to ward off and defend themselves against persecution, yeah, but it doesn't work because what happens is that although they are officially Christians, especially the lower and the lower middle classes, see them as upstarts and see them as not belonging and name them maculo, which means stained, like you know, that cafe macchiato is stained, right? Yeah. Macculo. And so they're seen as not being of pure blood. And so they then flee to Portugal, right? And in Portugal they survive for a while, it's quite a successful community, like economically speaking, but then again, they get persecuted in Portugal, and so this is a double escape. And I think what's absolutely fascinating is that this community, this Murano uh community, has learned that it's not enough to escape persecution by converting to the religion of the persecutor, of the dominant caste, right? That's not going to work. You'll still be persecuted. So, what you actually need to do is you need to pack your bags up and actually leave, lose all of your ties. These people are basically political refugees, they're seeking asylum.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

Yeah, well, I mean, it's part of the, I suppose the on like one of the great signifiers of you know Jewish history is of course the Exodus, right? Being forced to flee from persecution, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

Find a kind of asylum in in you know somewhere else. It's always this this constant deferral of being forced to go somewhere else and seek and s and be allowed to practice, right? And this is exactly what they find um in Amsterdam or in in the Netherlands, right? But for all of its you know, liberal pretensions and things like that, you know, there are still certain conditions.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

As always with liberalism.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Yeah, as always with liberalism, right? So it's like they were allowed to observe their faith on the condition that they do not get involved with the religious disputes that were going on in the Netherlands at the time, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:00

So don't there's basically told don't stir up any more trouble.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Yeah, stick to yourselves, be in your compute communities, and and that's it. You'll you'll be fine, but that's what don't I don't want to hear any kind of like theological disputes with the Calvinists and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Or the Arminians or the Socinians. Yes, it's stick to yourselves, or the Anabaptists, yeah, or the Baptists. There was also a family of love back then. Oh, okay. The 1960s had nothing on the family of love.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Oh, yeah, no. I was gonna I was gonna say that's um there's there's there's a lot, it seems like there's a lot more uh intellectual things going on.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

It's a hot house, Val. It's an absolute hothouse.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

The melting pot.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

All the scum floats the top. No, it's not about scum. It's actually, it's as we said, like to get a picture of Amsterdam, you have to imagine like the most exciting uh scientific and religious controversy that you can possibly live in, all the time boiling over into quarrels. And basically, it's a city in which everybody is searching for God in a different way. Yeah, and at the same time, optics is taking off, so uh telescopes have just been invented, microscopes have just been invented, mathematics is is taking off, the study of mechanics, the understanding of the artillery projectiles, trajectories, all of this is happening, right? Yeah, it's an absolute hothouse.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Okay, so move over May 68 in Paris. You should have been in Amsterdam back in the 1600s.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Oh, if you gave me a time machine, I'm telling you, either I go back to the 1920s Berlin and trying to stop that happening, or I'm going back to Amsterdam in the 1650s.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Okay, yeah, all right. And so we have this incredible melting pot, but basically the Jewish community has says as has been told, okay, you can come here, but you must observe your um your your your faith and don't get too embroiled in all of these in all of this in this melting pot.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Um so they were instigated to maintain orthodoxy in a strange way. It's it's quite ironic in a way.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Yeah, so they effectively have to become the the own their own police of their community to avoid persecution by the state police, they have to become their own their their own yeah, their own cops, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 21:12

Well, this is amazing because it takes us back to one of those terms that our friends at the Barren Field experience actually investigated, which is um apostasy, right?

SPEAKER_02 21:21

Yes, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Because basically that particular community they gave up on, they went back on their own faith to try and get protect themselves from religious persecution. And then that didn't work, so they f they fled, and now they're actually they convert back in a certain way to Judaism. Yes, but if you convert back to a religion, you're not going to go back to a radical version of that religion, you're gonna try and practice an orthodox, stable version of it.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah, so it's like a yeah, it's a quelling of the radicalism that originally made you got you persecuted. But I mean, obviously that stands to reason. You know, if you were persecuted in one place for being too radical and you go so Somewhere else, it's like, yeah, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to stir things up yet again and then invite further persecution, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:07

It's kind of and Spinoza starts off in that orthodoxy, yeah, because he attends the local Talmud Torah school, uh, where he studies he studies Hebrew, right? And not only did he study Hebrew, he studied it so well, Val, that he actually wrote his own grammar of Hebrew.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Oh, I have heard about this, but this is this is something that I I feel is like um I need to know a bit more about this. Like, so he writes his own book of Hebrew grammar.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah, I think it's always been like one of the obstacles for me to becoming a spinoist was I kind of understood that if you really want to become a spinocist, you have to learn Dutch, you have to learn Hebrew, and you need to understand Hebrew grammar.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Yes, and you have to learn Latin, of course, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Well, a Latin's not so much of a challenge because then you you can use that for all kinds of other philosophers, but learning the grammar rules of ancient Hebrew. Well, yeah, for me, I just thought, wow, that's a little bit enough. Py on my pay grades.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

I like Spinoza, but I don't like him that much. Oh, um, but okay, so he goes to the local, um, the local school, he's he's studying the Talmud, he's studying Hebrew, but then after the death of his father, right, he takes over the family business.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

So I mean he's following in the kind of family footsteps, you know, he um he he takes over the family business with his brother as well. Yeah, right. Um, but Kishna kind of notes that it's already at this moment that we see uh maybe Spinoza's thought drifting away from the orthodoxy of his community, right?

SPEAKER_01 23:41

Yeah, we don't have many details, but it does appear from a few letters and a few documents here and there that he was already frequenting some of these radical Protestant free thinking circles in which all kinds of concepts were debated. The uh what was the actual foundation for the so-called law, the sacred law, as it was passed down in scripture, that kind of thing. Um and he also actually went to a particularly kind of radical or libertarian kind of school run by this chap called Van den Eenden.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Yes, and yeah, so he this this is this is a quite an interesting, again, like political political history, right? Because this van den, that's a bit of a mouth, Van Den van den Eenden. Um he tries to found basically this utopian settlement in New Netherlands, which is now present-day Delaware, um, and also gets embraced with this conspiracy against everyone's favourite French king, Louis XIV.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

The Sun King.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

The Sun King. He goes this Van Dem van Dem Emden, he tries to establish like this republic in Normandy.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Like this in the absolute monarchies like the most absolute monarchy there is is that of Louis XIV, right? The Sun King. And this guy's trying to say, I'm gonna take over some of your territory and turn it into a republic.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

I'm gonna turn into this little utopian settlement, and you know, there's nothing you can do about it.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

Well, hey, Val, I don't know what the headmaster of your school was like, but the headmasters of my schools were not up to this kind of like these kinds of hijinks.

SPEAKER_00 25:23

No, no, and neither was Louis XIV because what's the fate of this Van denden? He gets hanged outside of the Basti for his political crimes, for his political activism.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

Yeah, but Val, he also gets high admiration from people like you and me.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yeah, I mean, he goes down in history, he has a lot we're talking about him today, you know, but I mean, but people are still talking about Louis XIV, you know. I went and saw his rug collection just across the Seine.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

His rug collection?

SPEAKER_00 25:50

I this blew my mind because I my friends wanted to go in the Comp Palais, they were having an exposition of Louis Catos's rugs, and I went, why would on God's Earth would anyone want to go and see a bunch of rugs? Like this is what this is totally.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

I said, Do you mean his wigs? Is rug like Australian?

SPEAKER_00 26:09

The rugs that you put on the ground.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

The mats. Yeah, mats. The carpets.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Yeah, carpets, his rug collection, his carpet squares. All right, his carpet squares. And I went, why on God's earth would anyone want to go see that? I'm not sure if you've been to the Grand Palais since it's reopened after its renovations, but you know, you've seen the dome. You see how huge it is.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

Have you been in the it's in some of our videos in the background of some of our videos? Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

Yeah. In that main hall, so the massive one with the glass dome, these rugs were just laid out across like they're so big, and they look like paintings.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Ah.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

Like the level of detail and craftsmanship. I mean, this is there's a whole geopolitics that goes into this as well, because you know, Louis Catorz had brought back rug manufacturing as a kind of s as a snub or a slight to the Ottoman Empire, because the Ottomans were the ones, you know, famous for rugs and things like that. Louis Cators says, I want to bring manufacturing back into France. So he starts um uh what's the word? Uh yeah, buying up. Oh, what's the word when you you you pay somebody for somebody? No, not contract. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But yeah, he starts producing all of these just incredible rugs, right? And they're just they look like paintings. Like I just I couldn't, and they're so astronomically like anyway. So that was a bit of a weird digression.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

That's visual culture for you. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

But moral of the story is don't mess with Louis Catorz, right? He's not happy, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:36

So that's for all of you who want to become headmasters of schools, right? Yes. And and want to set up your own little republic inside somebody else's country.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Not a good idea, at least, yeah. As we as so we've kind of seen this like so Spinoza is being influenced by this, you know, political radical a little bit. So we see his his you know, he's straying away from the orthodoxy of his Jewish community, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:00

But that's dangerous, Val. You don't go straying away from orthodoxy with without paying for it sooner or later.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

Why? What what could possibly happen to you if you stray away from orthodoxy at all?

SPEAKER_01 28:10

You could be told to walk the plank, Val.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Walk the plank.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

Absolutely. He gets excommunicated.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Yes, he gets he gets a particularly severe uh so the word for um the word for this is uh her hen harem. Right. Sounds like harem, I suppose. Like it's a harem. So Spinoza ends up at the at the tender young age of 24 years old, he gets excommunicated from his from his community, right?

SPEAKER_01 28:36

But what does that mean, Val? What is it to be excommunicated? Do our listeners, I think our listeners need to understand how heavy that is this is.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Yeah, and I think uh Kishna gives a really good explanation of how intense this experience was for Spinoza because he writes, you know, harems was kind of just like a tool that was used to bring kind of unruly people back in line, right? You know, it was kind of like a warning. Like a look at like a warning, yeah, like, you know, stop doing this, you know. Like normally they contain like provisions for, you know, if you repent, you can, you know, you can come back into the community if you ask for forgiveness, etc. etc. Not Spinoza's.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

No.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Spinoza's one was particularly punitive, right? This is what was written on his the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

That is absolutely horrific.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Yeah. Can you imagine your own community, the Lord shall blot out his name from heaven? Right?

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Well, I'm so happy that we're saying his name right now.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

Yeah. So basically, yeah, kind of it clearly didn't work, um, this harem, because we're still speaking about him now. But basically, what this meant, part of the conditions of Spinoza's harem, was that not a single member of the Jewish community could communicate with him in any way, admit him into his homes, or even be within four qubits from him.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

How long is a cubit, Val?

SPEAKER_00 30:13

I actually have no I assume it's a meter by meters cube.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Okay, so for our listeners, Val was holding his hands about one meter forty apart just then.

SPEAKER_00 30:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

Four of those.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Four of those. Okay. So basically a restraining order from your entire community, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Can you imagine that happening to you when you're 24?

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Yeah, well, it's like he's just now can he's cut he's lost his father, he's cut off from his brother, his family. He's lost his business, isn't it? He's lost his business. He can't even stay inside of the community where where where he is growing up, all of his friends, all his family, nothing. At 24.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Well, I actually have like a reading of this because basically I was thinking about this, and in the end, Spinoza is a little bit like Antigone, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:59

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

Because he has been cast out, like he's undergone a kind of symbolic death. Yeah, right? You no longer belong to this community that is organized according to this religion with these rights and these orthodox beliefs. You no longer belong, right? So, with regard to that community, he has got nothing to lose, right? Yes, and where is he being cast out? He's been cast out to this radical free-thinking city where he no longer needs to worry about offending people in his own community because he's offended them so much now, yeah, nothing he could do could ever be worse. He's gone beyond the worst. So I actually see this as emancipating for him. It's horrific, but on the other hand, it completely liberates him to think what he wants.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Well, yeah, there's a certain, like, and and we'll we'll see this in a second, because you know, there is a certain liberty that he feels after having been excommunicated, and there's certain kind of readings that you could say, you know, maybe he invited it, he kind of welcomed it with open arms. There's a kind of ethics um that we'll see with Spinoza in his attitude towards his approach to philosophy, but I kind of like the you know that the comparison to Antigone is is is quite an apt one because, of course, you know, another um big figure of uh French intellectual scene of the 20th century who made a big deal about the ethics of Antigone was Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, who was apparently in his teenage years, he would tear out pages of the ethics and plaster them up all around his his bedroom wall. And really, apparently it was really heavily annotated, right? And when you read, you know, for any of us who have been so unfortunate to engage with Lacan and try and read him, you'll see these moments where you you you just see the influence that Spinoza, the subterranean influence of Spinoza on Lacan. But yeah, that's the ethics of what Antigone does. She refuses the system of laws of her community in order to, uh my memory serves, give her brother the correct burial.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And uh, you know, Lacan in his reading, he makes this point that she speaks just like Socrates. Socrates is also liberated after a death sentence. He says that she's between the two deaths, she's between the symbolic death and the real death of the body, right? And once there's nothing worse than you can do towards your community, once there's no longer any kind of question of debt or responsibility towards your community, your speech is liberated. And that's what happens to Spinoza.

SPEAKER_00 33:27

You are free, and I mean that also follows the movement of the entire book of the ethics, right? Once you get to book five, it's on freedom, right? It's this movement from absolute constraint of a fully determinate universe to thinking the conditions of freedom in freedom as being blessed, yeah, blessedness. And so, I mean, like to go back to not that we've ever left Spinoza, but to go back to him, you know, he was again no stranger to what a harem or an excommunication meant, right? During his own childhood, another person, um, a certain Uriel Da Costa, had also been issued one of these harems to the at the same level, right? Um De Costa was allowed to rejoin the community, however, but on the condition that he undergo a public whipping in the synagogue, after which the members of the congregation exited by stepping upon his prostate body.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

I can't think which one would be worse, the whipping or having people tread on you?

SPEAKER_00 34:27

I think it's the treading. I think the treading is the bit because they've already beaten you, they've already totally destroyed your body.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

Did they wear high heels back then?

SPEAKER_00 34:36

Weren't they in clogs, aren't we, in the Netherlands?

SPEAKER_01 34:39

Can you imagine people in clogs treading on you?

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Getting getting getting flogged and then clogged.

SPEAKER_01 34:47

What then flogged and clogged? What a fate. What did the cost to do after? I mean, he was allowed to rejoin the community though, isn't that good?

SPEAKER_00 34:54

No, what I yeah, he was, but he felt so humiliated by the vlogging and clogging that he ended up taking his own life a few days later.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

The shame.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

The shame. No, again, but Spinoza, with full knowledge of what had happened to Van den Eden, what happened to De Costa, he still is going to be pursuing his intellectual trajectory, right?

SPEAKER_01 35:18

I can see it, Val. I can see a pattern emerging, a pattern in the collective memory of this Murano community. Yeah. Because they knew, right, that giving up on their own religion in order to appease the persecutor had not worked in Spain or Portugal. So they fled to come all the way to Amsterdam. And then Spinoza, as a youth, he sees that trying to appease the priests of your own community when they accure you of heresy, trying to appease them by agreeing on their conditions to rejoin the community, that doesn't work either. So as Lacan says, the great ethics of psychoanalysis that Lacan comes up with is do not give up on your desire.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

Exactly. And Lacan himself follows his own ethics when he himself is excommunicated from the International Psychoanalytic Commun uh Association.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Oh my god, the persecution and the excommunications, they don't ever stop, do they, Val?

SPEAKER_00 36:14

I don't think they have. I don't think they've it's just a repeating maybe maybe history is cyclical. I'm sorry, Fukuyama, we're not at the end. We need to repeat a few more excommunications.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

The wheel is rolling.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Well, you know, I'm I'm glad that the stakes are a bit lower for Luna, though.

SPEAKER_01 36:29

I hope that Luna's gonna be safe.

SPEAKER_00 36:31

Yeah, I'm not sure what community Luna might be getting excommunicated from, but you know, hopefully, hopefully that won't that won't occur.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

So, what did Spinoza do with his life then? He's been excommunicated. How does he how does he make a buck? How does he put bread on the table?

SPEAKER_00 36:45

He turns he turns to a very curious pro uh profession because there's one thing that we haven't uh mentioned. Um, throughout his entire life, he's but he's he's beset with this kind of respiratory condition, right? And what does this mug go and do? He goes and gets a job as a lens grinder. What's wrong with that? Well, he's grinding glass to make to make the lenses for science various scientific instruments. You were talking before about, you know, this we're in this hot hot this melting pot of you know scientific inquiry. People need telescopes to look at the star, the stars. People need lenses to look, you know, to make microscopes and things like that, right?

SPEAKER_01 37:21

So this was like a new art. This was like the cutting edge kind of applied science.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Yeah. So he's there with his respiratory condition grinding lenses. And what are lenses made out of?

SPEAKER_01 37:32

Oh glass. And do you think they had But he must have worn a mask. Do you think didn't he have his SB95 mask on?

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Yeah, I don't think they had many OHMS uh safety regulations back then.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

What about the ventilation valve? Did he have proper ventilation?

SPEAKER_00 37:45

I don't believe he I don't believe he did.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

Ah, this is tragic. But you know, like you said, he needs to why couldn't why couldn't he have chosen just like a safe, nice, middle-class job like being a professor of philosophy?

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Well, this oh man, this is this is I think one of the most fascinating moments in in Spinoza's kind of career. He does get offered a job, a cushy job. What? As a philosophy professor. Who does that happen to? In one of the most prestigious universities in Europe, the University of Heidelberg, very prestigious, very flattering offer. They've gone, come take the the philosoph the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. And what's he say?

SPEAKER_01 38:29

No.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

He says, get stuffed.

SPEAKER_01 38:32

You're kidding.

SPEAKER_00 38:33

Yeah. He says, jog on.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

But thou, thou, if the University of Heidelberg rang you up and said, uh, Mr. Cartier, uh, Dr. Cartier, uh, we'd like to offer you a job as chair of philosophy, what would you say?

SPEAKER_00 38:47

Oh, in this job market, absolutely, immediately. There'll be no qu I wouldn't think twice about it. I'd say goodbye to all my friends and family here, say in Ara, I'll never see you again. I'll gladly accept that excommunication. But not Spinoza, right? He says, No, because if I accept this position, it will compromise my freedom to philosophize.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Well, freedom, freedom to die poor.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Oh, yeah. Well, no, he's got his job, I'm sure. He's making he's making all the best lenses for all the best greatest scientists.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

Okay, so it is an exciting okay. So let's give him this. It is an exciting profession because he's on the cutting edge, right? These are new instruments, it's new technology. It's like it's like people working in AI, but it's nowhere near as corrupt as AI, right? You know, because it's absolutely cutting edge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

But he's but he's he makes this point where he says, no, if I accept this position in this university, I will have to submit my philosophy, uh my philosophical uh investigations to your rules and your regulations, and I am not accepting that, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:50

Absolutely, he's beyond rules.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

He's beyond rules, right? You know who wasn't beyond rules?

SPEAKER_01 39:55

Who?

SPEAKER_00 39:56

This is a very significant university, right, in the history of philosophy, because you know who comes along not too much a little bit later and accepts this very position?

SPEAKER_01 40:06

Georgi Porgi.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

Georgie Porgi, a certain Georges Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

So Hegel, right? Hegel, before he goes off to be the chair of the University of Berlin, he starts in Heidelberg, right? In this very position that Spinoza turned down, right? And I love this moment because um we mentioned before, um, there's a uh a French philosopher, Pierre Macheray, who's written, I'm gonna be referring to Macheray's books quite a bit to help me orient myself through the ethics, because Masheray writes this book called Hegel or Spinoza.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

You have to choose.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

You have to choose. What? It's one or the other. They're two totally different philosophical systems that are fundamentally incompatible, right? You have to make a choice. Oh, okay. Yeah. But I particularly like Mashere um because what he like you you want to talk about Spinoza's scholarship, right? He writes an entire book on each book in ethics, right?

SPEAKER_01 41:15

Sure. He's systematic.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

He's systematic. The level of detail that this I don't think I've ever seen anyone go into such systematic detail over one philosophical, you know. Then again, Spinoza's team seemed to be quite uh systematic. There seems to be something about his philosophy where where it invites going into tremendous amounts of detail. The big, like, massive tomes on Spinoza. You see, that like I can see that all you've got uh uh Moreau, uh Pierre-Francois Moreau, uh, his like his books on Spinoza are enormous.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

That's right, that's right. And I'd just like to quickly shout out um again my mate Philippo Delucese, who is editing this amazing adventure called the Spinoza series at Edinburgh University Press, um in which all of the greatest works of Spinoza commentary in Italian or French or are being translated into English.

SPEAKER_00 42:11

Yeah, for the Edinburgh University Press. That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:15

Carol MacDonald uh is spearheading this whole initiative, she's helping it, one of my editors, and uh I'm actually gonna shout out a translation that I've just completed, which is part of this series, which is one of the great uh Italian Spinozas in the 70s and 80s, um, was Emilia Giancotti. And uh along with Negri and a few others, she basically built the entire Spinoza community and and and uh pushed the whole tradition, like basically supported the tradition, in you know, made sure that Spinoza's legend lived on. Um, and so I translated 15 of our essays uh recently for for this Spinoza series at Edinburgh University Press.

SPEAKER_00 42:56

Oh, that's a that's a tremendous undertaking. Um so I mean, congratulations to you all. I think you you just you just submitted it, right?

SPEAKER_01 43:03

Yeah, that's right. I haven't seen the proofs yet, but for the time for the time being.

SPEAKER_00 43:07

Okay, so I realised that I just went off on this massive tangent from the book that I was even trying to talk about. So Masheray, Hegel or Spinoza. Right. Right? So in this book, Mashere makes a big deal out of this moment where Hegel takes up the seat at Heidelberg University. That Spinoza refused. That Spinoza refuses. And so Spinoza.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

So Hegel's gonna feel like a bit of a fake, a bit of a sellout, right? Compared to Spinoza.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

Yeah, he's gonna he's he's he's he's cognizant of this moment, right? Right. Because what Spinoza Spinoza says, what stops me is not at all the desire for a better fortune, but the but the love of my tranquility, which I believe I must preserve in some way by absenting myself from public lessons, he writes. Well, basically what he's saying is I don't want to waste my time teaching. I want to philosophize.

SPEAKER_01 44:03

Right. He says I don't want to get involved and embroiled in Bruhaha and public controversy. Had enough of that. Already been excommunicated. Thanks very much.

SPEAKER_00 44:10

Leave me alone. I don't want to deal with students. I don't want to have to deal with marking. It's going to take up too much of my time.

SPEAKER_01 44:15

It's the same thing as Descartes. This is what Descartes does. But Descartes is lucky, right? Because he inherits this money. Yes. So he can just swan off and go around Europe and like retire into a cozy cottage. Yeah, meditate. Meditate in peace. Exactly. And the rent is paid for, right? But he does retire from active, busy life. He actually Descartes actually says, I am fleeing all these people who are calling upon him because he became quite famous early on. So everybody wanted to talk to him about the latest like mathematical controversy. Spinoza does the same thing, but he can't travel all over the place. Most of the time he's in a workshop.

SPEAKER_02 44:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

I mean, when did he write the ethics, Val? Was it like in the morning or at night? Like before work or after work?

SPEAKER_00 44:52

I reckon it was probably after work. It reminds me, I think it was like, was it Kafka who had the job in the post office or whatever it was? Or I know Bukowski did, you know, that Bukowski had the job in the post office, that would be his nine to five, and then he would go do, you know, write his poetry or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

But I think that's no, the best job is Faulkner. So Faulkner was a night watchman over a factory, and because nothing was happening in the factory at night, he basically wrote his novels.

SPEAKER_00 45:14

Yeah. So I I mean, I really like it. I can see why all the Marxists prefer reading Spinoza, right? Because Spinoza's the working class kid who has to continue working to fund his philosophical interests. Descartes is the rich the trust funded rich kid.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

But Val, that's a song, isn't it? Working class hero.

SPEAKER_00 45:32

It is.

SPEAKER_01 45:33

Isn't that cold chisel?

SPEAKER_00 45:35

Working class that is.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

I think it should be cold chisel, even if it isn't.

SPEAKER_00 45:39

Yeah. I got I always I was thinking of working class hero by uh what was that? No, I was getting confused. What's the John Lennon? Oh whatever. I can't remember. So anyway, Spinoza said that, you know, I don't want this job. It's gonna take up too much of my time. I don't I want to invest myself in philosophy, right? Mastery continues, so Hegel was very aware of this in this incident, and in his own lectures, so Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, he writes Spinoza very wisely declined this offer, however, because he did not know within what limits his philosophical liberty would have been constrained in order that it would not appear to disturb officially established religion. Right? Hegel's I I find this really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

So Hegel kind of envies him his liberty in a certain in a certain manner.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

He does. I mean, there's a tremendous, I mean, we've we could we could spend forever talking about Hegel in in this in this kind of discussion, but one of the things that Mashere, and I'll just I'm gonna summarize very, very briefly, that one of the points that Mascheray makes in the book is that Hegel compromises his philosophy to bring it more in line with the state ideology. And this is the big critique of his elements of the philosophy of right, you know. Hegel's a sellout, basically. The moment, and when you compare it to the kind of enthusiasm for Napoleon, the revolutionary writings of Hegel's youth, once you get into the older Hegel, the Hegel that's taken up the position at Heidelberg, the and more explicitly the Hegel that then becomes the chair of philosophy of Berlin, you get the old reactionary who begun who makes his philosophy conform with the state ideology. And we can already see a kind of I mean, this is Mastery's point, you don't have to agree with it. I personally do. But there's a sense in which uh Hegel is recognizing that there is a compromise that one has to make when you accept these teaching positions on your philosophical interests.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

But I think this is one of the interesting points. So Hegel's philosophy very famously has given rise to both left-wing interpretations and right-wing interpretations. You know, very early on in Germany there were the left Hegelians and there were the right Hegelians. Marx, of course, was one of the left Hegelians, right? And it is the case that Spinoza's political philosophy has also given rise to different interpretations, but it is quite obvious that Hegel's political philosophy is far closer to the center than Spinoza's, right? Because Spinoza basically says the absolute political regime is democracy. He's like a democrat when nobody was a democrat back in the 1600s. And so that's why you know Spinoza is, in a way, the darling of the radical left.

SPEAKER_00 48:34

Yes. Whereas, you know, Hegel is the is in the center, neither left nor right, and that's dialectics, baby.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

So what happens, what happens then? What happens to Spinoza after he refuses this job?

SPEAKER_00 48:48

He continues, he just continues living his life as a lens grinder, doing philosophy, but then he suddenly dies.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

How much?

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Uh uh I think he was 44. And obviously the likely cause is as I mentioned before, he had a rest respiratory condition, and you know, like I said, probably doesn't help grinding lenses for your entire life when you've got a respiratory condition. So he suddenly dies in uh on February the 21st, 1st, 1677.

SPEAKER_01 49:19

My god, we thought that Descartes died early when he went off to Sweden and caught pneumonia at the Swedish court. But he was he was easily in his fifties. Yeah, and here, poor Spinoza, he's only 44.

SPEAKER_00 49:29

Yeah, so so yeah, but you know, af so after his death, so the ethics is not published in his lifetime, right? After his death, his friends go through his drawers, look at all of his writings, put it together, and then that very year, most of it gets published in both Dutch and in Latin. Right?

SPEAKER_01 49:52

And if I understand correctly, Val, it becomes pretty immediately quite controversial. It's not the kind of book you want to be you want to get caught in the street actually having in your pockets.

SPEAKER_00 50:02

No, not no, but yeah, I mean there's so many there's so many controversies that are gonna unfold from the the scandalous claims that Spinoza is going to be going to be making in this book, right? And I think we're gonna have to leave it at this point, because the controversy needs. I suppose uh a kind of a slow consideration of what these companies are going to be.

SPEAKER_01 50:34

Absolutely. So we look forward to having you on board for the next session in which the winner is actually going to dive into Pokemon the epics.