Free Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldstein Page A

Spinoza? I have insisted on speaking in personal terms of the philosopher who insisted most on impersonality. To bring in the personal and the temporal—references to one’s self and one’s times— is to place oneself outside of Spinoza’s reason-sanctioned scheme of things, the view, as one contemporary philosopher has wonderfully put it, “from nowhere.” 1 Spinoza himself puts it this way in The Ethics: “It is in the nature of reason to perceive things sub quâdam aeternitatis specie,” that is, under the guise of a certain form of eternity. 2
    Still, the personal and the temporal is where we all begin. Even Spinoza began by being only himself. The question is whether that is where one ought to end. Spinoza tells us no. He urges one to forsake, in a sense, one’s own temporal identity as it has passively come down to one through the contingencies of what he calls “external causality,” contingencies that have nothing to do with one’s own true essence. He asks one to construct—through the active reflective work of philosophy, seeking the true explanations of all things— a new identity.
    To become rational, believing only what we have good grounds for believing, is to transform the self so substantially as to change its very identity. His astounding conclusion: to the extent that we are rational, we, all of us, partake in the same identity. (The rationally reconstructed cannot fail to get along: this provides the key to his political theory. Philosophy is good for the polity.)
    To arrive at an identity that is not uniquely one’s own? Isn’t that, in a certain sense, to simply forsake personal identity altogether? Yes, it is, in a certain sense, and in that sense it is what he asks of us. To disinhabit our selves, and thereby save ourselves. It is in that sense that he will even offer us, at the end of The Ethics , a certain form of immortality, the immortality that comes from abandoning one’s own personal identity, giving it up for the infinite web of necessary connections that he identifies as the causa sui , the self-explained, the thing that can be conceived alternatively as God or nature and which he dubs Deus sive natura . It is that vast and infinite scheme of things that pure reason can get us to precisely because it is constituted of the very stuff of reason: logic. It consists of all logical implications spun out in their entirety.
    We can survive our death to the extent that we have already let go of being our singular solitary selves. (But do we particularly care about that universalized self surviving? An aperçu of Woody Allen’s seems peculiarly pertinent at this point: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”)
    Immortality, for Spinoza, is impersonal; I survive my necessary death to the extent that I have ceased identifying with that mere thing that I am, and identify with the whole intricate web I have assimilated in the knowing. The first-person point of view that I am is relinquished for the View from Nowhere, which is the same for all of us.
    All of this is to say that we, whose distinctive literary voice is the memoir, are perhaps peculiarly ill placed to grasp the vision of Spinoza. Where we are endlessly captivated by the drama of the self in all its distinctive singularity, Spinoza sought only to escape it. The priority of that fascinating singularity, that problematic and precious “I,” is, for Spinoza, a symptom of a passivity, the acceptance of the contingently given, that weakens our capacities, drains and stunts us, impedes our driving force to persist in our own being, to flourish in the world. Paradoxically, the only way to flourish in one’s being is to cease being only that being. That singular self, that localized “I,” that “me” which is “me” and no other, that tantalizingly elusive but inescapably ubiquitous reality that is my substance, my identity, my very being, yes, that thing is, for