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![]() Commentary by Anne Dalke, August 2006. |
But thinking--and living--outside those bounds was precisely what Spinoza did. In Goldstein's account, Spinoza's anticipation of the scientific objectivity of the view from nowhere offered a clear alternative to the sectarian wars of his era--as well as our own: if we are able to forsake our temporal identities in order "to construct--through the active reflective work of philosophy," a new rational identity, then we "cannot fail to get along; this provides the key to his political theory. Philosophy is good for the polity." (68) This was, of course, the belief of the Enlightenment, and we know better now how the unruly irruptions of the unconscious--not to mention the rational deliberations of the conscious mind--can lead to incessant warfare. I found particularly striking Goldstein's explanation that the very impossibility of establishing "purity of blood" (since the conversation of the Jews to Christianity had been taking place over so long a period of time) fed the racist anxiety of the Inquisition (103). In that context, Spinoza's countermove, to "deny meaning to the very phrase 'one of their own'" (164), seems particularly apt.
According to Goldstein, one of Spinoza's primary contributions to philosophy, and to modernity, was his claim that the "sorts of differences around which groups construct their social identities and distinguish between 'them' and 'us'" are "inconsequential," "confused" (if understandable) "attempts to substantiate"--and aggrandize--the significance we confer on ourselves "by erecting a view of all reality that would do justice to it" (15). As Goldstein layers her account of how and why Spinoza came to construct an ethics that rejects "the priority of that fascinating singularity, that problematic and precious 'I,'" she suggests ways in which our driving force to persist in our own being might better be served when we "cease being only that being" (69), "when in the true light of objectivity, one is overtaken by the sense of near-estrangement from one's own self" (162). This exercise of estranging ourselves from our located, particular (what Spinoza calls "accidental") identities might usefully be practiced in the world today; it is an activity that has, for instance, been repeatedly explored in Bryn Mawr's on-going discussions about Making Sense of Diversity.
There are many other areas in which Spinoza anticipated our contemporary understandings. His recognition of the soul as "an aspect of the body" struck me as particularly modern: it therefore "has as little possibility of surviving the death of the body," he argued, "as has any other corporeal part" (136).
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