Douglas J. Den Uyl: Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1985. Republished with permission.

 

“Spinoza’s approach to political issues is decidedly modern,” by which Den Uyl means “scientific or positivistic.” That is, Spinoza’s “fundamental concepts” are “devoid of normative content” although some of his other, non-fundamental “principles” do have “normative content.” This foundation presents a difficulty. Modern science at least appears to begin with the “normative”: an invitation to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate. At the same time, its proponents insist on ‘realism,’ by which they mean, among other things, the rejection of teleology. What is the relation of the modern ‘norm’ to the modern ‘freedom’ from ‘values’?

In five chapters and two appendices Den Uyl explores the dual character of Spinozist modernity. In the first chapter he discusses Spinoza’s version of natural right. Spinoza regards human law as ‘normative’ and nature as non-‘normative.’ He regards right and power as “co-extensive terms.” “[O]ne has the right to do whatever one can do. Den Uyl claims that according to Spinoza “it cannot be said that the man who acts according to reason is acting more in accord with natural right than the man who acts exclusively from passion or appetite,” but he also sees that Spinoza considers rational men more powerful than impassioned men. Den Uyl does not explicitly draw the conclusion: if right and power are co-extensive terms and rational men are finally the most powerful, then he who acts according to reason does act more in accord with right. Den Uyl claims that Spinoza differs from Hobbes in that Hobbes does not equate right with power but with “right reason”; thus Hobbes was “clearly tied to the older normative traditions.” But if right reason does yield power, then those ties do not bind. “Spinoza’s equation of right and power is perhaps the most novel feature of his political theory. Perhaps—but one might consider not only Hobbes but Bacon, Descartes, and Machiavelli.

Making right and power co-extensive gives “normative” human law a tenuous moral status. In subsequent chapters Den Uyl considers Spinoza’s version of the state, the nature and foundations of political authority, and the relation of power to liberty. Den Uyl somewhat incautiously assumes that any teaching not found in the Political Treatise cannot be Spinoza’s final teaching, even if it is found in the Theologico-Political Treatise. He makes this assumption because Spinoza tells readers that “he will discuss what is relevant to his task in the [Political Treatise] without requiring the reader to consult his other works.” Fortunately, Den Uyl sees that the two books share “a remarkable similarity in their theoretical foundations.” Nonetheless, some readers may wish for a more careful consideration of Spinoza’s literary devices. Although Den Uyl reads Spinoza with intelligence, it is difficult for him to prove his usually stimulating interpretations. Den Uyl may be even more right than he realizes when he suggests that “casting off prejudices is perhaps the most difficult task facing the reader of Spinoza; for it is not uncommon for Spinoza to attach unfamiliar meanings to familiar terms.” To understand those meanings, their context must be considered; to understand a book by Spinoza, its context, namely, Spinoza’s works as a group, must be considered.

Den Uyl’s interpretations include the suggestion that “fear and love are the two basic passions by which one may fall under the authority of government.” Thus “the government has no authority over the reasonable man,” who is “his own master, his own authority.” Thus, the distinction between citizen and slave is rendered problematic by the political philosopher sometimes regarded as the founder of modern liberalism. Spinozist “political authority” is “norm-giving” but “determined by power.” Spinoza’s “is a philosophy of liberty only to the extent that liberty can be equated or shown to be consistent with a theory of power.”

Spinoza reconciles power and liberty by contending that reason liberated from passion and superstition is the source of power. The state is most powerful when acting rationally. Perhaps because reason requires the elimination of contradictions (Den Uyl does not say), peace “is the political expression of reason or rational action.” Because true power aims at, even yields, peace, the Spinozist state allows fairly substantial individual liberty. True power does not concern itself with regulating private vices. Tyranny depends too much on fear instead of “willing obedience to the law”; it is inefficient largely because of its irrational deployment of power.

In Spinoza one sees many of the elements of modern liberalism. Difficulties now well known to us, most particularly those concerning the character of reason, come to light in the writings of this conspicuously daring philosopher. If reason is a means of action instead of the best means of contemplating truth, it seems to be reconciled with politics in a way rejected by the ancients. But if reason is essentially ‘active,’ what can it serve but the body? And does not service to the body eventually corrupt reason and empower the passions? Will such corruption eventually yield the destruction of the liberal order, then despotism?

Ernest L. Fortin: Dissidence et Philosophie au Moyen Âge: Dante et ses antécédents. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1981.

Review published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 12, No. 1. 1984.

[Two decades after its publication, this book was translated into English and republished under the title Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Dante and His Precursors. Marc A. LePain translation. Lanham: Lexington Press, 2002.]

 

Artful self-contradiction and even syllogisms left incomplete enable philosophic writers to suggest unpopular thoughts to some readers. but poetic writing poses a dilemma for careful readers. Is the self-contradicting poet rational? Does he aspire to reason? Or does he believe something “because” it is absurd? (Walt Whitman put it with equanimity: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself….”)

Dante appears to bring fewer problems in this respect than, for example, Shakespeare. Dante celebrates reason. But he also celebrates Christianity, founded in part on the teaching that philosophic wisdom is folly. Does the poet who celebrates reason and Christianity subvert Christianity or baptize reason? How can anyone find out?

Fortin opposes the majority of today’s medievalists, who regard Dante as a poetical Aquinas. More than one-third of the pages here consist of firm scholarly assurances that such a thing as “the politic mode of philosophy” exists. (Although contemporary scholars readily accept the existence of mystical esotericism, rational esotericism seems much more improbable to many of them). Fortin discusses al-Farabi, Averroës, and Maimonides, tracing their kind of writing to Plato. He recounts the condemnation of Aristotle’s works in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier. He prudently observes that Siger and Boethius, Aristotle’s ill-fated medieval apologists, “had not sufficiently reflected upon the human and social conditions of philosophy”; their excessive candor almost invited the Bishop’s revenge. If Dante was indeed an Aristotelian, he had every reason to proceed with caution.

In Paradiso, Dante represents Siger’s sole wrong as the teaching of “truths susceptible to stirring up the malevolence or envy of his contemporaries.” This is one of several Dantean teachings that might stir malevolence or envy against Dante, were they not seemingly overwhelmed by far more numerous pieties. Fortin refuses to be overwhelmed—even to the extent of writing that Dante regarded political philosophy as “this master discipline” less than twenty pages after quoting Dante’s slightly different assertion that political philosophy is the “master of public things.” Such well-shaded imprecision, coupled with the necessarily selective approach to evidence that the brevity of his interpretation requires, will surely not force “apologists for the orthodox Christianity of the poem [to]…. admit their impotence before this opaque residue that ceaselessly comes to trouble our [!] repose and puts all in question.” Those apologists have their own reservoirs of ingenuity. That notwithstanding, one may say with some certainty that Fortin instructively follows an observation by one of his teachers, Leo Strauss, who noticed that when most readers come across a passage in a long and complex book which contradicts the overall argument the author seems to be making, they tend to overlook, ignore, or explain away the anomaly. Fortin is not such a reader.

Fortin’s strength will force some readers to look at the Commedia with more care, and more skepticism. At the very beginning of his commentary he observes that he does not intend to offer a comprehensive interpretation of the poem, only to spur the curiosity of others. He recognizes that a conclusive interpretation would have to show how the whole poem works.

Charles E. Butterworth, ed.: Averroës’ Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle’s “Topics,” “Rhetoric,” and “Poetics.” Albany: University of New York Press, 1977. Charles E. Butterworth translation.

 

Averroës’ name, synonymous with skepticism, might better be associated with coherent skepticism’s only basis: a rigorous standard for the establishment of certainty. These commentaries form part of a series of commentaries on Aristotelian treatises, the majority of which concern logic. In them, Averroës measures not only the Koran’s teachings in accordance to a logical hierarchy; he measures Aristotle’s teachings, as well.

Butterworth recalls that Averroës was considered “the commentator on Aristotle” by medieval scholars, not only by Muslims but by Jews and Christians (vii). These scholars esteemed commentary as a philosophic genre far more than most do today; “with the spread of the assumption that all things evolve through time, inventiveness has come to be acclaimed the mark of excellent thought and commentary condemned as imitative or servile” (vii). But on the contrary, “the art of the commentary was completely transformed” by Averroës, as he presented “a unique interpretation of Aristotle’s ideas under the guise of a commentary” (viii). With a succession of deft omissions and additions to Aristotle’s actual arguments, Averroës makes a “consideration of the logical arts” into “little more than a veil behind which [he] evoked the problematic relation between philosophic thought, religious belief, and political conviction” (ix). “Starting with the particular perspective of Islam, Averroës was able to raise the universal question of the relation between philosophy, politics, and religion” (ix). We are likely intended to notice that in his second formulation of these three topics, Butterworth has shifted politics to the central position. And indeed all three commentaries are concerned with assent, a problem at or near the core of politics. Each treatise presents “ways of imitating or abridging correct reason in order to influence other human beings,” especially as regards their “political decisions and religious beliefs” (19). “His thought about this problem was based on specific ideas about the logical character of different kinds of speech, their proximity to certain knowledge, and the investigative or practical purposes to which each might be put” (21). “These treatises contain the fullest statement of the grounds for Averroës’ abiding disagreement with those who considered themselves the defenders of the faith” (21).

Averroës ranks the “logical arts” in a hierarchy, with demonstration at the apex, followed by dialectic, sophistry, rhetoric, and poetics. He does so in order to study other arts, which turn out to include dialectical theology, traditional theology, and traditional jurisprudence.

Aristotle’s Topics concerns dialectic. Whereas Aristotle regards dialectic as a means of bringing the man partial opinions up to the standard of truth, and even as a means of examining “the ultimate bases or grounds of each science” [Topics 101a25-101b2], Averroës regards dialectic’s materials (opinions) too weak to support philosophic certainty. As Butterworth explains, “the crucial difference” between demonstrative and dialectical argumentation “is that dialectical premises may be false”—chosen for their “renown”—”whereas demonstrative premises are always certain and true” (25). In particular, induction cannot yield such certainty because the necessity of the universal cannot be proven by collecting some or even all the particulars; induction cannot demonstrate because it cannot set forth what Averroës calls the essentially necessary predicate of the argument. His example of this is a critique of an argument by Muslim dialectical theologians as a proof that the world was created, although Averroës carefully avoids mentioning those theologians in the course of his discussion. Tellingly, Averroës relegates his explicit discussion of dialectical theologians to his commentary on the Rhetoric. Dialectical training, he writes, “seems unnecessary for the perfection of the demonstrative arts” (55). He is silent on Aristotle’s contention that dialectic is useful in conversation, in the philosophic sciences, and even in demonstration itself because it examines “the ultimate bases or grounds of each science” (Topics 101a25-101b2).

Rhetoric ranks still lower than dialectic in the hierarchy, as it does for Aristotle. Averroës considers rhetoric, not dialectic, to be (in Butterworth’s words) “the proper art for instructing the general public or addressing it about any matter” because it “permits the speaker to pass over difficult matters or even to be deceptive regarding them, whereas such practices cannot be admitted in dialectic argument” (29). But Aristotle regards rhetoric based on enthymeme as at least partly reasonable, not merely useful; this may coincide with his well-known advice that one should seek “as much clearness as the subject matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts” (Nicomachean Ethics 1094b3). Averroës tolerates imprecision less, perhaps because in his day the dialectical theologians defended Islam with enthymemes, which he calls “unexamined opinion previously existing among all or most people” (63-64). Averroës also goes so far as to cast doubt on rhetoric’s “most powerful” non-syllogistic technique, testimony (74)–the basis of most theologies, dialectic or otherwise. As Averroës wryly puts it, “As for imagining that something is impossible when it is possible, there are many things whose existence is not difficult when the beliefs of the multitude about them are considered” (70). He singles out Aristotle’s short treatise On Prophecy in Sleep, which casts doubt on prophecy as delivered in dreams, which happens to be the means by which Mohammad perceived prophecies. He ranks religious testimony, tradition or community consensus, and the performance of miracles below enthymemes (77), just before he makes his first mention of the social and political nature of man.

Poetry ranks below rhetoric. “[S]peeches [that] cause something to be imagined are not speeches [that] make its essence understood” (83). What poetic imagery really does is to “move the soul to flee from the thing [imagined], or to long for it, or simply to wonder because of the delightfulness” of the imagery itself (83). Poetic metaphor can be deceptive if taken literally, especially if the thing or person described is difficult to conceive (like God, Butterworth observes, in a note). He goes on to note that Muslims often regard the Koran as “the best example of poetic excellence in Arabic” (38-39).

Averroës’ emphasis on demonstrative certainty in establishing the truth might be thought to be a response to the very high stakes the Koran puts on its own presentation of the truth, and on fidelity to that truth. Butterworth’s candid, astute introduction, along with his notes, serve to illuminate these texts in their entirety, or very close to their entirety. In addition, he provides careful English translations, the Arabic texts themselves, and three indices (of names, of titles, and of technical words): all the assistance contemporary readers will need to renew Averroës thought in their own minds.