Judaism, panentheism and Spinoza's intellectual love of God

How does Spinoza’s passing statement in a letter that “determination is negation” become central to Hegel’s Spinoza interpretation? The background is a tradition that negotiates Spinoza’s Jewishness by means of another epistolary statement: that “nothing comes from nothing.” More made this Kabbalah’s first principle, while Bayle associated it with Spinoza and the Orient. Wachter and Basnage then interpreted Spinoza as philosophical Kabbalah’s main exponent. Jacobi construed the principle as a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, identifying Spinozistic rationalism with philosophical Kabbalah. The consequence was a negative view of determinacy and, indeed, nihilism. Hegel drew on this tradition but argued that Spinoza’s Jewishness consisted in a static nihilism lacking the dialectical self-negating found only in Trinitarian thinkers such as Boehme and himself. Yet, in an irony typical of German idealist discussions of Judaism, self-negating negativity is central to the Lurianic Kabbalah discussed in the tradition on which Hegel draws

"Spinoza is the rationalist philosopher par excellence, making every conceivable emancipatory claim for reason in delineating the connection of reason to freedom and power. Spinoza develops a philosophy which affirms the emancipatory function of reason. This kind of philosophy has been challenged in recent times by postmodernist modes of thought. Whereas Spinoza affirms knowledge as power in a positive sense, the likes of Michel Foucault argue a knowledge/power nexus that savours more of an Hobbesian ceaseless conflict. Foucault’s equation of all forms of knowledge with the endless exercise of a power, the effects of which may be discursively placed but whose authority cannot be subject to rational criticism, explicitly denies the emancipatory function that Spinoza assigned to reason. Free of such rational critique, discourse inspired by Foucault lacks political and ethical import. Not surprisingly, Foucault’s work has proved itself to be compatible with a wide range of political platforms, spanning the spectrum from New Left to New Right. This political ambivalence directly follows from the loss of an ethical position owing to the denial of rational critique. The distinguishing characteristic of ‘the Left’ in both politics and ethics has been the commitment not just to challenge existing power structures in favour of the poor, the marginalized and the suppressed but to associate this challenge with a commitment to distinguish truth from ideological mystification and obfuscation. In connecting his rational philosophy with democratic politics, Spinoza is a ‘Left’ thinker in this grand tradition. This thesis highlights the ‘radical’ aspects of Spinoza’s rationalist philosophy, finding inspiration in his God-Nature relation, his democratic politics and his commitment to free rational thinking as subversive of all forms of coercive or state-sanctioned religious doctrine. The book argues that Spinoza makes it possible to resist the postmodernist drift by affirming the possibility of separating truth from illusion, reason from rhetoric. In this manner, philosophy can retain its emancipatory function and engage the political, social and economic issues of the day in a critical and emancipatory sense. In delineating the terms of freedom, knowledge and power and in showing their connection to each other, Spinoza offers a means of resisting the relativising tendencies of contemporary theory and, indeed, the way that this relativism in ethics serves existing power and entrenches the forces of political conservatism. The truth, for Spinoza, is the product not of consensus-belief but of rational critique which subjects existing norms and values to question. Not the least of Spinoza’s achievements is to have shown how such rational critique – the very stuff of philosophy – is no longer an elitist concern leading to the philosopher-ruler but has the potential to emancipate all humankind, since knowledge is key to an active relation to the world." This book has now been published and is available for purchase.

In recent years, the concept of panentheism has become one of the most influential methodological frameworks among authors contributing to the science/theology debate in the Anglo-American context. However, a deep and well-weighed study of its philosophical foundations is still lacking. Moreover, a more critical evaluation of its legitimacy within theological reflection in the context of natural science is needed. The aim of this article is twofold. First, I present an analysis of a critical shift in metaphysics and the philosophy of God: I trace the origin of modern panentheism, the trajectory from Spinoza to Hegel, from substance to subject, from ontologically independent to an evolving God. Secondly, I refer to Barbour, Peacocke and Clayton and try to reveal crucial problems that challenge their versions of panentheism, as well as the one presented by Hegel. I claim that they all fail to express properly God’s transcendence. I argue from the position of classical theism.

In certain theological circles today, panentheism is all the rage. One of the most notorious difficulties with panentheism lies in figuring out what panentheism actually is. There have been several attempts in recent literature to demarcate panentheism from classical theism, neo-classical theism, open theism, and pantheism. I shall argue that these attempts to demarcate panentheism from these other positions fail. Then I shall offer my own demarcation.

2021

‘Substance’ (substantia, zelfstandigheid) is a key term of Spinoza’s philosophy. Like almost all of Spinoza’s philosophical vocabulary, Spinoza did not invent this term, which has a long history that can be traced back at least to Aristotle. Yet, Spinoza radicalized the traditional notion of substance and made a very powerful use of it by demonstrating – or at least attempting to demonstrate -- that there is only one, unique substance -- God (or Nature) -- and that all other things are merely modes or states of God. Some of Spinoza’s readers understood these claims as committing him to the view that only God truly exists, and while this interpretation is not groundless, we will later see that this enticing and bold reading of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’ comes at the expense of another audacious claim Spinoza advances, i.e., that God/Nature is absolutely and actually infinite. But before we reach this last conclusion, we have a long way to go. So, let me first provide an overview of our plan. In the first section of this paper we will examine Spinoza’s definitions of ‘substance’ and ‘God’ at the opening of his magnum opus, the Ethics. Following a preliminary clarification of these two terms and their relations to the other key terms defined at the beginning of the Ethics, we will briefly address the Aristotelian and Cartesian background of Spinoza’s discussion of substance. In the second section, we will study the properties of the fundamental binary relations pertaining to Spinoza’s substance: inherence, conception, and causation. The third section will be dedicated to a clarification of Spinoza’s claim that God, the unique substance, is absolutely infinite. This essential feature of Spinoza’s substance has been largely neglected in recent Anglo-American scholarship, a neglect which has brought about an unfortunate tendency to domesticate Spinoza’s metaphysics to more contemporary views. The fourth section will study the nature of Spinoza’s monism. It will discuss and criticize the interesting yet controversial views of the eminent Spinoza scholar, Martial Gueroult, about the plurality of substances in the beginning of the Ethics; address Spinoza’s claim in Letter 50 that, strictly speaking, it is improper to describe God as “one”; and, finally, evaluate Spinoza’s kind of monism against the distinction between existence and priority monism recently introduced into the contemporary philosophical literature. The fifth and final section will explain the nature, reality, and manner of existence of modes. We therefore have an ambitious plan; let’s get down to business.

Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, 2017

Elijah Benamozegh (Livorno, 1823-1900) was a highly-respected Italian rabbi of Moroccan heritage. He was well-versed in Kabbalah, the study of Jewish mysticism and, in his works, connected Kabbalistic and philosophic sources to delineate his conception of God. He argued, inter alia, that Torah and science are in complete harmony, and his religiously tolerant model called for the legitimacy of diversity of faiths and worships. In this paper, I aim to show that Benamozegh's conception of the Divine – and thus his philosophy and theology – was based on a reading of Kabbalistic sources about God that was heavily influenced by Baruch Spinoza's philosophy on the nature of the Divine, and in particular, by the Spinozist-inspired concept of " God's attributes. " This comparison between Benamozegh and Spinoza will enable us to better understand Benamozegh's bold argument in favor of religious tolerance, but also how and why he succeeded in challenging the traditional concept of heresy, all while using terminology provided by traditional Jewish sources and from within the rabbinic paradigm.

There have been several major challenges to Hegel’s criticisms of Spinoza’s philosophy. Thus far, no effective response has been made to those challenges. This article defends Hegel’s criticisms of Spinoza’s philosophy, and it argues that the challenges to his criticisms fail.

Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, 2017

This chapter provides an outline of the main philosophical and interpretative problems involved in Spinoza's key concepts: Substance, Attribute, and Modes. Spinoza's God has infinitely many qualities that constitute, or are adequately conceived as constituting, his essence, while the other qualities of Spinoza's God, though not constituting God's essence, follow necessarily from God's essence. Spinoza calls the former "Attributes [attributa]" and the latter "Modes [modi]." Following a clarification of Spinoza's understanding of Substance [substantia] in the first part of this essay, we will study in the second and third parts Spinoza's conception of attributes and modes, respectively.