Free Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein

explanations, the assumption that I am calling the Presumption of Reason, and which Leibniz formalized as “The Principle of Sufficient Reason.”
    The personal sense of the philosopher that had come upon me in the moment of hearing the phrase shalom bayis inserted into his tale had long ago disappeared. That phrase had carried all the heavy intimacy of the life that was then closest to me. In the moment of hearing it I had thought that I grasped something immediate and essential about a great philosopher, something that brought him home to me, making him a figure of piercing sympathy. Now, too, strangely enough, given my antimetaphysical tendencies and training, I believed I had come to have an intuitive understanding of him, could study each of the proofs of The Ethics and shadow his thought processes. But the two understandings of him— the first in terms that were both personal and Jewish, the second in terms that were strictly philosophical—didn’t intersect with each other. If anything, they were at odds.
    The philosophical understanding of Spinoza seems to forbid understanding him in terms that are personal and Jewish. To have indulged in a sense of a special bond with Spinoza, forged by reason of our shared Jewish experience, would have been to forsake the rational project as Spinoza understood it, and as he deeply influenced me to understand it as well. To have intimated an extraphilosophical intimacy with Spinoza, come to me by way of the sheer accidents of my and his precedents, would have amounted to a betrayal of his vision.
    I spoke of his vision to my students as “radical objectivity,” and from its vantage point all the accidents of one’s existence, the circumstances into which one was born— including one’s own family and history, one’s racial, religious, cultural, sexual, or national identity—appear as naught, and the lingering emotional attachments to such accidents are only evidence of impartial rationality and obstacles in the way of achieving a life worth living.
    To the extent that we are rational, merely personal matters matter not at all. To the extent that we are rational, personal identity itself shrivels away into insignificance. The fact of who I happen to be in the infinite scheme of things disappears altogether in the apprehension of the scheme itself.
    I was being true to Spinoza in leaving behind the personal sense of him that had opened up to me within the space of one small Hebrew phrase; and yet it is back to that personal sense of him that I am trying now to return, even knowing what I know about his philosophy. I would like to recapture the sense of the man behind the formidable system, locate the pounding pulse of subjectivity within the crystalline structure of radical objectivity.
    There was a moment long ago when I knew next to nothing about the magnificent reconfiguration of reality laid out in the system of Spinoza, and yet when I felt I knew something about what it was like to have been him, the former yeshiva student, Baruch Spinoza.
    I would like to know that feeling again, even though I know that the desire amounts to betraying Spinoza.

III

    The Project of Escape
    T he most characteristic literary genre of our day is the memoir. Unlike an autobiography, the author of a memoir needn’t have distinguished herself in her life in order to have earned the right to tell her life’s story. Many contemporary memoirs are written by people who are famous for having done nothing but write a memoir, often to much acclaim.
    The appeal of the memoir says something about the temperament of our times. What , precisely, it says, I’m not prepared to say, though I suspect it’s nothing good. I suspect that what it says is mixed up with the nondecorous celebration of celebrity that is also such a salient feature of our days.
    And who, after all, am I to condemn the memoirist turn in contemporary letters when I myself have seized upon it in approaching this very discussion of