One would think (a priori) that Immanuel Kant would have had a lot to say about Baruch Spinoza. After all, Spinoza was a great exhibit A for the sort of dogmatic rationalism whence Kant thought he had been saved, awakened, by his reading of Hume. Spinoza was why rationalism had to go "critical" in order to be worth the attention of people who likewise have awakened from such slumber.
But one finds that Spinoza is barely ever mentioned in Kantian texts at all. When Spinoza IS mentioned, it is in the philosophy-of-religion context. And therein lies a tale.
Kant despised Spinoza's God concept. To identify God as nature is to make of God (Kant said) a non-being, a no-thing. In German, an Unding. Further, Kant seems to have believed that Spinoza was clear on this point: he was an atheist who obscured the subject and denied his atheism by his tricky redefinition of terms.
This matters to Kant in part because Kant doesn't believe atheists as such can be morally good, yet it seems to him as a historical judgment that Spinoza was a morally good man.
How resolve that? Well, focus on my use of the phrase "as such" in my paraphrase of Kant's view above and you can probably figure it out.
Kant seems to believe that Spinoza was suffering from something akin to a split identity, being a theist in his ordinary lens-grinding life, and an atheist whenever he sat down to write philosophy. The plausibility of that diagnosis I leave to you.
Kant should keep separate Spinoza's biography and his philosophy. Biographically, from what you write, Kant believed him to be a theist in his personal outlook and a good person. But did Kant have any evidence that he was a theist in his ordinary lens-grinding life, other than that he was a good person? Was Kant begging the question in the sense of assuming the truth of what he set out to prove? He assumed that only a theist can be a good person and reasoned that, since Spinoza was a good person, he must have been a theist. That's also called circular reasoning.
ReplyDeletePhilosophically, Kant believed Spinoza to be an atheist. Because we remember and we study Spinoza as a philosopher, that's what counts. If, in his heart of hearts, he didn't believe his philosophy, that's only of biographical significance. I'm no authority on Spinoza, but I am skeptical that he didn't believe his philosophy. I believe, rather, that Kant had no basis for assuming that only a theist can be a good person.
On further thought, if Kant were right that Spinoza was a theist in his ordinary lens-grinding life, it would not necessarily mean that Spinoza didn't believe his philosophy. It could mean that, logically, Spinoza was an atheist, but, emotionally, he was a theist. He could have believed his logical conclusion, but, out of an emotional need, nevertheless had faith that God exists. Many theists today acknowledge that they have no basis other than faith for their belief in God.
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