Defending Spinoza, Part 3

Spinoza lived in an era nearly as barbaric as our own. In 1672, Louis XIV of France invaded the Low Lands and declared war on the Dutch Republic. Some 170,000 French troops, armed with the latest muskets, spread across the country. The Dutch blamed the disaster on Jan de Witt, leader of the republicans and, since 1653, head of state. The most orthodox and intolerant of the Calvinists looked for salvation to the House of Orange, which did nothing to staunch rumors of de Witt's treachery with the French. On Aug. 20, 1672, a mob dragged de Witt and his brother Cornelius from a prison in the Hague. In Rebecca Goldstein’s words, in Betraying Spinoza:

“Jan de Witt, a friend of philosophy and thus of freedom, was, together with Cornelius, torn to pieces by the mob. The atrocities the crowd inflicted on their bodies is beyond the imagination to comprehend. They fed their organs to dogs and hung their severed limb from lampposts.”

The gentle, retiring Spinoza, learning of the savagery, made a placard reading “ULTIMI BARBARORUM” (“YOU ARE THE GREATEST OF BARBARIANS”) and planned to erect it at the site of the murders. His prudent landlord, van der Spyck, double-locked the doors and probably saved the philosopher’s life. After recounting these events, Goldstein turns immediately to Spinoza’s understanding of human suffering:

“The mystery of human suffering, its inevitability and extravagance – he had contemplated it often enough in his boyhood….But the mystery is no mystery. The world was not created with a view toward human well-being. Logic entails what it does, despite our parochial wishes. It’s not surprising that out of the vastness of logical implications there are a profusion that threaten our endeavor to persist in our being and to thrive. So nature will produce such illnesses and disasters as make men’s lives a misery. And so, too, men will through their blind bondage to their emotions compound the misery of their own lives and those of others. It is only reason that can save us. Why then, we might ask, did not God make men more reasonable? Why then did he not make them more intelligent? That is what the problem of evil comes down to: the stubborn stupidity of mankind. Why did God make men so stubbornly stupid?”

Goldstein’s account of Spinoza’s understanding of human suffering and barbarism is reconfirmed daily, in our hearts, in the house across the street, and continents away. Consider Miklos Radnoti, one of Hungary’s greatest poets. He was born in 1909, in Budapest, and, like Spinoza, he was a Jew. In May of 1944, two months after the Nazis occupied Hungary, Radnoti was pressed into a Jewish labor gang to build roads in Yugoslavia. That fall, as the Germans fled the Balkans, the work crews, weak from hunger and exhaustion, were ordered to march back to Hungary and into Austria. Of the 3,600 men who left the work camp in Yugoslavia, only 800 reached the Hungarian border. When Radnoti collapsed, in November, possibly on the 8th, he was shot in the neck by his Hungarian guards and buried with 21 others. Twenty months later, the mass grave near Abda in western Hungary was uncovered and Radnoti’s body exhumed. In the pocket of the raincoat he wore, officials found an address book, blood-stained and dirty, containing 10 poems Radnoti had written in the Yugoslav labor camp and on the death march. Their worth is both documentary and poetic. They are great poems as well as emblems of the fierceness of art in the face of unimaginable inhumanity. They are nearly impossible to read without weeping.

The last poems Radnoti wrote are fragments titled “Razglednicas” – Serbian, by way of Hungarian, for “picture postcards.” The final one, dated Oct. 31, about a week before his murder, has been translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsvath and Frederick Turner:

“I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,
tight already as a snapping string.
Shot in the neck. `And that’s how you’ll end too,’
I whispered to myself; `lie still; no moving.
Now patience flowers in death.’ Then I could hear
`Der springt noch auf,’ above, and very near.
Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.”

The translators gloss the German phrase this way: “these lines refer to Mikos Lorsi, a violinist comrade of Radnoti who was murdered at Cservenka by an SS man on a horse. Having been shot once, Lorsi collapsed; but soon after, he stood up again, staggering. `He is still moving,’ called the SS man, taking aim a second time, this time successfully.”

After the last passage from Goldstein quoted above, without a paragraph break, she quotes a excerpt from The Ethics:

“Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind. To those who ask why God did not so create all men, that they should be governed only by reason, I give no answer but this: because matter was not lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature are so vast, as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence, as I have shown.”