Skip to main content

Kant About Spinoza


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. 


Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryMay 12, 2022 at 7:57 AM

    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.

    Philosophically, 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.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. HenryMay 12, 2022 at 8:18 AM

      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.

      Delete
  2. Mary belindaMay 24, 2022 at 9:52 PM

    My husband was diagnosed of Parkinsons disease 2 years ago, when he was 59. He had a stooped posture, tremors, right arm does not move and also a pulsating feeling in his body. He was placed on Senemet for 8 months and then Siferol was introduced and replaced the Senemet, during this time span he was also diagnosed with dementia. He started having hallucinations, lost touch with. Suspecting it was the medication I took him off the Siferol (with the doctor’s knowledge) him on PD natural herbal formula we ordered from TREE OF LIFE HEALTH CLINIC, his symptoms totally declined over a 3 weeks use of the TREE OF LIFE HEALTH Parkinson's disease natural herbal formula. He is now almost 61 and doing very well, the disease is totally reversed! (w w w. treeoflifeherbalclinic .com)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more