The Hebrew Scholia in Spinoza's Ethics

A few weeks ago, I was at St. Andrews to celebrate Alexander Douglas’ fascinating The Philosophy of Hope (recall this post, this post, and this one). There I realized the following is not common knowledge: that in at least three, perhaps, four Scholia of the Ethics, Spinoza explicitly engages with what we may call the Hebrew Bible: E4p54s, E4P68s, E5p36s,and (slightly more controversially) E2p7S. In what follows I call these ‘the Hebrew Scholia.’ This is, in fact, a theme I starting blogging about more than a decade ago (!) at NewAPPS here; then at D&I (recall; and here; and here).

I tend to view the scholia of the Ethics as places where Spinoza engages with likely objections or confusions about the propositions and demonstrations he present in geometric fashion. Sometimes, perhaps, he says in ‘confused’ language what he intended to have demonstrated adequately. They are popular among commentators because they allow one to latch on to topics and themes familiar to philosophers. The trickiness is that in the Scholia Spinoza also introduces vocabulary and concepts that he may use as immanent criticism of would-be-opponents and not his own position. (This is sometimes forgotten.)

What makes the Hebrew scholia especially distinctive is two-fold: first, in some of the Hebrew scholia Spinoza clearly seems to presuppose knowledge of the Hebrew Bible (and its commentator tradition(s)); second, sometimes Spinoza seems to presuppose his own other work, including work that appeared anonymously (especially the TTP). These two points suggest that in certain respects the Ethics is not completely self-standing, not even completely ‘timeless’ as some modern commentators suggest.

Why does this matter? Today I want to proceed a bit dogmatically without detailed textual analysis of the Hebrew Scholia. If you are interested in the arguments please check out the links above.

First, the Hebrew Scholia matter at least in so far that they help us understand some of the debates Spinoza explicitly seems to have anticipated; thus it helps to know something about how Spinoza understood the wider intellectual context.

So, for example at at E2P7S, Spinoza writes, that “Some of the Hebrews seems to have seen this, as if through a cloud, when they maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same.” (translation by Curley) I think this is an allusion to Exodus 34:5 and the surrounding material. But it also seems to presuppose Maimonides’ discussion of this Exodus episode in The Guide of the Perplexed (chapter 54, on the Attributes of God). Today, my point is not to argue for this, just to note that Spinoza anticipates some of his readers to find this helpful.

Second, sometimes Spinoza explicitly presupposes the TTP not just to understand what he is saying, but also how to interpret the rhetorical strategy of what he is saying. My favorite example of this is E4P68s. In this scholium he introduces the ‘spirit of Christ.’ Now what he means by that is explained in the TTP (Chapter 5: 46; as well as some of the letters included in his posthumous works see some of the letters to Ostens, Oldenburgh, Burgh, and I think Jelles).

That Spinoza presupposes, thus, the TTP (and his wider corpus) for understanding a scholium in the Ethics, also allows us to draw on the TTP to doubt that Spinoza really assumes that Moses is the author of Genesis as he seems to allow in E4P68s. Here Spinoza is being far more pious and concessive to his religious audience than he had been in TTP!

This last point matters, third, because in some of the Hebrew Scholia (not the least E4P68s) Spinoza is both rationalizing the Hebrew Bible in a way that he castigates Maimonides for in the TTP. And along the way, Spinoza rationalizes the Hebrew Bible in a fashion that anticipates the practice of deism of a subsequent age. (This is somewhat ironic because the deism we find in, say, the Boyle lectures is often rather polemical against Spinoza and Spinozism—such that Spinoza seems to have invented the main argument of his own critics.)

None of this is to deny the possibility to read the Ethics as a self-standing book without, say, the Scholia and the appendices. But that much smaller work would be bordering on the unintelligible for most of us.

The point about the piety of the Hebrew scholia matters more generally. There is a tendency to treat the Ethics as real speculative and pure (timeless) philosophy and the TTP as a work in hermeneutics and situated political philosophy. In so far as there has been interest in figuring out how much of Spinoza’s ‘philosophy’ is presupposed in the TTP, the tendency has been to privilege the Ethics as Spinoza’s presentation of his real or fundamental philosophy. I don’t want to deny that this is a sensible interpretive strategy. But as I have argued for some parts of the Ethics, knowing the TTP is genuinely clarifying. (This is also true if we look at Spinoza’s version of the social contract theory.)

In my engagement with Alex Douglas’ work I hinted at the significance of some of this already. If one relies on the Hebrew scholia, one can’t simply draw on passages from them in isolation from Spinoza’s wider corpus. (I am not claiming Douglas did that by the way.) For, one may well be drawing on material that Spinoza only introduces to engage with hypothetical or imagined/expected critics and that may not involve his own all-things-considered position.

Let me wrap up. In TTP at chapter VII:65 Spinoza wrote the following:

Euclid wrote only about things quite simple and most intelligible. Anyone can easily explain his work in any language. To grasp his intention and be certain of his true meaning we don’t need a complete knowledge of the language he wrote in, but only a quite ordinary—almost childish!—knowledge. Nor do we need to know about his life, concerns and customs, or in what language, to whom and when he wrote, or the fate of his book, or its various readings, or how and by whose deliberation it was accepted.

If I am correct about the Hebrew Scholia, one shouldn’t treat these as involving things ‘quite simple and most intelligible.’ (In fact, they may well be simple, but they are not intelligible by an isolated intellect without knowledge of Spinoza’s other witings and/or Scriptures.) Rather one must know something of the “life, concerns and customs, or in what language, to whom and when” Spinoza “wrote, or the fate of his books.” I think this fact helps explain why Spinoza’s writings were so carefully curated at his death. The Ethics was supposed to appear alongside works that could help the reader interpret it (that’s of course compatible with attempts to manage Spinoza’s legacy for all kinds of other reasons).

To say that we need to interpret the material and can’t merely rely on the official arguments of the Ethics, always generates some unease. One tends to get worried about a slippery slope toward Straussianism. As regular readers know, I am less polemically against Straussianism than most analytic philosophers. But there are plenty of places to get off the slippery slope before one ends up doing numerology.

This is all I wanted to digress on today. But there is a further passage salient here here. Not far from the passage just quoted, in TTP, at Chapter VII:66 Spinoza added an adnotation that is worth quoting in conclusion:

By things one can perceive I understand not only those legitimately demonstrated, but also those we’re accustomed to embrace with moral certainty and hear without wonder, even if they can’t be demonstrated in any way. Everyone grasps Euclid’s propositions before they’re demonstrated. Thus I also call perceptible and clear those stories of things, both future and past, which don’t surpass human belief, as well as laws, institutions and customs (even if they can’t be demonstrated mathematically). Those obscure symbols and stories which seem to surpass all belief, I call impossible to perceive. Still, many of these can be investigated according to our method, so that we can perceive the author’s thought.

This tells us that Spinoza’s TTP offers us a hermeneutics by which one can interpret the kind of material (‘stories’) that appear in the Hebrew scholia, and so, thereby, understand his intentions. So, as I have argued elsewhere, the TTP can help us interpret the practice of the Ethics.