`The Rock-Bottomness of One's Self-Concern'

Just in time for the accelerating tedium of yet another presidential election comes this observation from Rebecca Goldstein:

“The fundamental political fact Spinoza insisted on was that the state has no business mixing into the pursuit of truth. Beware those politicians who go where philosophers fear to tread.”

The passage is from a lengthy interview Goldstein gives to Contemplate: The International Journal of Cultural Jewish Thought. Dave Lull passed it along on Tuesday, Rosh Hashanah, as he knows my enthusiasm for Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, which I wrote about here, here and here. The interview is no substitute for reading Goldstein’s book, but the following passage about Spinoza’s understanding of responsibility to one’s self seems central:

“Spinoza never asks one to relinquish one’s wholehearted devotion to one’s self. One cares about one’s self in a unique way, without requiring any premises or philosophical argument whatsoever.

“The rock-bottomness of one’s self-concern isn’t a matter of selfishness; it’s a matter of basic metaphysics. That investment that each thing has in itself constitutes, for Spinoza, the very fact of its identity. What does it mean to be me, this very thing and not another? I am this thing, Spinoza says, because I am essentially and primitively committed to the persistence and flourishing of this thing. Spinoza doesn’t just make of each thing’s devotion to itself an empirical
fact, but a metaphysical fact. So there’s just no question of asking a person to give up on her self-investment. That would be asking a person not to be the person she is.”

Self-concern versus selfishness seems to pose a fundamental moral dilemma. We’re not good at distinguishing them, but we’re gifted at rationalizing one into the other. When does caution become paralysis of will; tact, dishonesty; assertiveness, arrogance; self-nurturing, greed? If the concerned self is in charge of monitoring “self-concern,” how reliable can the readings be? Often in his poems and prose, Zbigniew Herbert contrasts Spinoza’s rigorously logical approach to philosophy with his illness-plagued, abbreviated, ascetic life. Sometimes the contrast is comic, as in “Mr. Cogito Tells About the Temptation of Spinoza.” Here is the translation by John and Bogdana Carpenter:

“Baruch Spinoza of Amsterdam
was seized by a desire to reach God

“in the attic
cutting lenses
he suddenly pierced a curtain
and stood face to face

“he spoke for a long time
(and as he so spoke
his mind enlarged
and his soul)
he posed questions
about the nature of man

“--distracted God stroked his beard

“--he asked about the first cause

“--God looked into infinity

“—he asked about the final cause

“—God cracked his knuckles
cleared his throat

“when Spinoza became silent
God spake

“—you talk nicely Baruch
I like your geometric Latin
and the clear syntax
the symmetry of your arguments

“let’s speak however
about Things Truly
Great

“—look at your hands
cut and trembling

“—you destroy your eyes
in the darkness

“—you are badly nourished
you dress shabbily

"buy a new house
forgive the Venetian mirrors
that they repeat surfaces

“—forgive flowers in the hair
the drunken song

“—look after your income
like your colleague Descartes

“—be cunning
like Erasmus

“—dedicate a treatise
to Louis XIV
he won’t read it anyway

“—calm the rational fury
thrones will fall because of it
and stars turn black

“—think
about the woman
who will give you a child

“—you see Baruch
we are speaking about Great Things

“—I want to be loved
by the uneducated and the violent
they are the only ones
who really hunger for me

“now the curtain falls
Spinoza remains alone
“he does not see the golden cloud
the light on the heights

“he sees darkness

“he hears the creaking of the stairs
footsteps going down”

This is God as Jewish Mother. Herbert confronts the philosopher who renounces wealth, family, the esteem of his community and most worldly pleasures with the middle-class blandishments paraded by God the Tempter, the ones we all face – “Things Truly Great.” The anthropomorphic God whose existence Spinoza denied lures him with a 16th-century Dutch version of Gemütlichkeit.

In a brief prose piece, “Spinoza’s Bed,” published in Still Life with a Bridle, Herbert recounts a puzzling episode in Spinoza’s life after the death of his father in 1656. His stepsister and her husband tricked Spinoza out of his inheritance. Instead of acquiescing, he turned litigious. He sued his family in an effort to recover the contents of his father’s house. “Then he requested objects without any value,” Herbert writes, “explaining that he had an emotional attachment to them.” Spinoza, one of philosophy’s saints, seemed uncharacteristically driven by greed. But once he wins the lawsuit, he keeps only his mother’s bed and returns the rest to his family. Here’s Herbert’s explanation of Spinoza’s behavior:

“No one understood why he acted this way. It seemed an obvious extravagance, but in fact had a deeper meaning. It was as if Baruch wanted to say that virtue is not at all an asylum for the weak. The art of renunciation is an act of courage – it requires the sacrifice of things universally desired (not without hesitation and regret) for matters that are great and incomprehensible.”

We have something in common, in other words, with Spinoza.