Spinoza and the Radical Enlightenment

[Music] what is enlightenment how do you define that era of rational thinking that gave birth to the so-called modern world in 1784 in the essay answering the question what is enlightenment the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance for another this immaturity is self incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another the motto of enlightenment is therefore sapa auld have courage to use your own understanding since then the idea of the Enlightenment has gone through many incarnations in the 1960s the historian Peter Gay interpreted the Enlightenment as a unified coherent movement but it's also been defined nationally the British enlightenment the French enlightenment etc to give it coherence and more recently postmodern and post-colonial thinkers have attacked the idea of an Enlightenment altogether citing it as a Eurocentric concept that didn't really contribute to ideas like anti-imperialism democracy or feminism at all it is this recent postmodern attack on the idea of an Enlightenment that Jonathan Israel in his book radical enlightenment attempts to defend the Enlightenment against instead of a single coherent movement Israel thinks the Enlightenment is better seen through the categories of moderate and radical thinkers while the moderates thinkers like human Locke attempted to reconcile the idea of reason and emancipation with the old pillars of Scripture and hierarchy including colonialism and slow Avery the radical enlightenment thinkers rejected all compromised with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely while scorning all forms of ecclesiastical authority and refusing to accept that there is any God ordained social hierarchy concentration of privilege or land ownership in noble hands or religious sanction for monarchy the radicals thinkers like Spinoza Bale and Diderot had a reverence for mathematical logic with some form of non providential deism if not outright materialism and atheism along with unmistakeably Republican even Democratic tendencies Israel's central claim is that despite not being widely known or highly regarded it's Spinoza that should be the central figure of the Enlightenment if radicalism was to spring from anywhere in the 17th century Amsterdam was the most likely source a Danish visitor to the city wrote in his diary that here are some atheists in Amsterdam several of whom are Cartesians among them a Jew who is an impudent atheist that ate yeast later described as a pantheist was Baruch Spinoza born in 1632 to a Jewish family of Portuguese immigrant ancestry expelled from the synagogue in 1655 and taught in his early development at least by the prominent Amsterdam radical Van Daan Endon from whom he would learn mathematics and Greek and most importantly Cartesian philosophy but what does Israel mean when he calls Spinoza a radical and what was Spinoza's contribution to the legacy of the Enlightenment if radical is defined as a break from the past Spinoza's radicalism can be assessed through two tenets first he read Descartes the thinker who kick-started the modern era of philosophy by describing the certainty of individual thought but Descartes still argued that the mind was a separate entity from the body in order that mind or soul would have the possibility of leaving the body after death Spinoza was one of the first philosophers to deny this Cartesian dualism and so was am honest and the second tenet interconnected Lee he was the first to critique the Bible in such a rigorous and methodological manner Pierre bales later description of Spinoza as the greatest atheist there ever was highlights the opposition his work would come up against that's time when atheists could never be considered as virtuous Spinoza was of course aware of the challenge his ideas would present to the theologians and to his view oppressed minds of the period and the trajectory of his work from the softened approach of the theological political treatise to the more austere materialism of ethics is illustrative of the nuance Spinoza was capable of a rejection of a literal reading of Scripture and strict religious orthodoxy was first to be found in the theological political treatise and Spinoza's ideas of freedom and conscience were criticized for their potential for leading to anarchy but if moral relativity is what is critics feared if dome writes immorality it is exactly what they found seven years later when ethics was published posthumously in ethics vanozza makes his moral relativity explicit when he defines good as that's which we certainly know to be useful to us and bad as that which we certainly know to be an obstacle to our attainment of some good but while this may have given his contemporaries calls for concern his central point in contrast to the social contract Aryans of the time was a hopeful one nothing is more advantageous to man than man and it's from these fundamental observations that monism means that we are all connected and that man is the sole measure of morality that we see some of the most liberal and democratic writings of the period because while Cartesian dualism the distinction between mind and body have the purpose of bestowing on the mind the potential for immortality Spinoza's monism inevitably led to a rejection of any supernatural belief and from this from Israel at least materialism meant the undesirability of hierarchical systems preordained by an immaterial God it was this the Dutch preacher Johanns al steais wrote in 1705 that unforgivably overturned the entire structure of divinely ordained morality in fact Israel defines the late 17th and early 18th centuries as a period when almost all great thinkers aim to accommodate their thoughts with the Cartesian split allowing them to line scientific and enlightenment advances up with Cartesian beliefs and therefore uphold theology Spinoza refused to do this and because of this reading his work work written in the 17th century is like reading something that could have been published yesterday it's his focus on definitions and semantics that highlights the importance of language and philosophy and inevitably leads to the linguistic turn of the 20th century Spinoza's novelty and subsequent powerful influence is not just obvious it's explicit Hegel declared that it was either spinosum or no philosophy at all Nietzsche took up Spinoza's mantle of moral relativism and marx and engels both read Spinoza for his determinism and materialism a precondition of their own writings and in the Bible of philosophy Bertrand Russell's history of Western philosophy Russell writes that Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of all the great philosophers intellectually some others have surpassed it but ethically is supreme I'm going to put a recommended reading list for Spinoza and Jonathan Israel in the description below and if you buy through those links I'll get a small Commission which would really help this channel right you can subscribe to that and now by clicking here and please like and share this video below and if you're feeling really generous you can pledge as little as $1 towards each new video on patreon by clicking here [Music] [Music]

Channel: Then & Now

Views: 42,659

Rating: 4.901618 out of 5

Keywords: Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Theological Political Treatise, Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, The Enlightenment, Pierre Bayle, Philosophy, History, Descartes

Id: CrTwcsVaIks

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/lewlewwaller]

This video's about the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and the Historian Jonathan Israel's new interpretation of the Radical Enlightenment. Israel hopes to save the enlightenment from recent postmodern criticism by articulating the existence of a 'radical' movement, with Spinoza front and center, in which can be found the seeds of today's liberal-democracies...