Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities. Nadler has written many books on Spinoza, early modern European philosophy, and Jewish philosophy. His book Rembrandt’s Jews was nominated as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His most recent book, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die, brings new insight to Spinoza’s philosophical project by examining him as a moral philosopher. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Nadler discusses his ongoing relationship to Spinoza’s works, Spinoza as a moral realist, and the few foods named after philosophers.
What is your work about?
Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die is a study of Spinoza as a moral philosopher. For a long time, especially in the Anglo-American philosophical world, interest in Spinoza focused primarily on his metaphysics and epistemology, to the relative neglect of his moral and political thought. Numerous books and articles examined his views on substance (and, of course, his account of “God or Nature”); his necessitarianism; his understanding of the human being (especially what has been called, somewhat misleadingly, the “mind-body parallelism”); and his theory of ideas. In teaching, he was often conveniently placed among the so-called “rationalists”, mediating between Descartes and Leibniz, on the way to the “empiricists” Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
We are now far from such a neat and simplistic picture of early modern philosophy, and from such a narrow view of Spinoza’s philosophical project. In the past two decades or so, much more attention has been paid to Spinoza’s moral, religious and political philosophy—so much so that students are finally being allowed to see why his most important work is called Ethics. With my new book, I hoped to continue the work of other scholars and offer a systematic and detailed picture of Spinoza’s views on such topics as freedom, virtue, rationality and happiness. Along the way, I address metaethical questions on the status of “good” and “bad” and the nature of moral judgments, and normative ethical questions about what things really are good and what makes a right action right. I especially wanted to look closely at the particular virtues in Spinoza’s ethics (for example, what he calls “tenacity”, “nobility”, and “piety”, as well as more familiar virtues like honesty, generosity, and benevolence) and the ways in which the “free person” (the rationally virtuous individual) typically thinks and behaves. This required analyzing Spinoza’s moral psychology and the ways in which the free person, despite essentially being egoistically motivated, will treat other human beings with justice and charity. I also consider how the virtuous person will confront his/her own mortality, including the possibility of rationally motivated suicide.
How does your work fit in with your larger research project?
Ever since I wrote a biography of Spinoza—Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999; 2nd edition 2018)—I have not been able to get away from him. This is probably something that most Spinoza scholars have experienced; once he gets into your head, he’s there for good. I, at least, find that every time I read Spinoza’s Ethics or his Theological-Political Treatise it is a more difficult challenge. Things I thought I understood now seem a little more puzzling; questions arise that I hadn’t thought to ask before. It doesn’t hurt that I think that Spinoza got it all mostly right, so at least I can convince myself that, in obsessively studying Spinoza, I’m not neglecting important philosophical questions. I also believe that much of Spinoza cannot be understood except in relation to medieval Jewish rationalism, and so I continue to study Maimonides, Gersonides and other figures with whom I believe Spinoza was in a kind of dialogue; I regard this as no less important a context for understanding his philosophy than the contemporary context of Descartes, Hobbes, and others.
My work on Spinoza, though, is really just one corner of my ongoing interest in early modern philosophy generally, especially Cartesianism; my PhD dissertation, in 1988, was on the Cartesian/Jansenist theologian/philosopher Antoine Arnauld. I thus still spend a good deal of research time on Descartes and thinkers in the Cartesian tradition, as Louis de la Forge and Géraud de Cordemoy, along with Nicolas Malebranche, and their contributions to making Cartesian philosophy the dominant philosophical paradigm of the seventeenth century.
I should add that my work on Spinoza has also led me into other areas of early modern Dutch intellectual and cultural history. I recently published a biography of Menasseh ben Israel, one of the rabbis of the Portuguese-Jewish community in which Spinoza was raised and from which he received a herem or ban. And I’ve dabbled a bit in seventeenth-century Dutch art history, with studies of Rembrandt and Frans Hals.
Why did you feel the need to write this book?
Spinoza, arguably more than any other philosopher in the early modern period, enjoys a good deal of interest among readers who not only are not professional philosophers, but not even academics. He really has had an impact on literary and artistic culture – there are novels, plays, poems, even operas and works of visual art devoted to Spinoza. Then there is his presence in popular culture: rock bands, comics, even “Spinoza bagels” (sold by Trader Joe’s). Other than Leibniz Keks, Spinoza may be the only philosopher to have a food item named after him. Thus, when writing about Spinoza, I think there is a great opportunity to reach a broad audience and bring his philosophical insights beyond the realm of academic journals and monographs. There is a strong curiosity about Spinoza out there¾everyone loves a radical, especially one who has been “excommunicated” and whose philosophy is enticingly complex and subject to a great variety of interpretations¾and there is no reason why Spinoza scholars should not write for these lay readers.
Also, as I mentioned, I continue to have unfinished business with Spinoza, coming up with new questions and new ways of making sense of his ideas. Thus, I needed to write this book to try to come to some resolution of those problems and deepen my understanding of the various dimensions of his ethical project. Some of the propositions from the Ethics that I address in the book continue to be a source of puzzlement and debate among specialists.
What topics do you discuss in the book, and why do you discuss them?
There are a number of perennial debates around Spinoza’s metaethical and normative ethical views. One of the claims I defend in the book is that, contrary to a very common anti-realist reading of Spinoza’s axiology (theory of value), whereby “good” and “bad” are subjective or mind-dependent values, in fact, Spinoza is a moral realist. While he consistently denies, throughout all of his writings, that anything is good or bad absolutely or “in itself”, regardless of its relation to anything else, nonetheless, good and bad represent a real and objective, mind-independent status of a thing, action or state of affairs. Things that are good are good because they truly do contribute to an individual’s flourishing, and other things are bad because they truly are detrimental to that flourishing. Thus, while good and bad are relational features of things, nonetheless, whether or not something is good or bad is not dependent upon someone having a belief or some other approbative attitude toward it.
I also address the question as to the relationship between the moral status of an action and the agent’s motivation in performing that action, and argue that an action is good or bad/right or wrong depending on what moves the agent to perform the action. (And just to be clear: I am talking here about the morality of the action, not the morality of the agent.) So, for example, an act of benevolence arising from a feeling of pity is bad, since pity is a sympathetic sadness that we feel and thus a diminution in one’s condition. By contrast, an act of benevolence arising from rational knowledge of how that benevolent act is in one’s own best interest is good, since its motivational source is joy, an increase in one’s power. I also defend a view of Spinoza’s “free person” according to which that “model of human nature” is not an incoherent or impossible ideal because such an individual would be inhuman and outside of Nature, as some scholars have argued. The free person is still a “part of Nature” and subject to passions (passive affects), but being a free person is a superb, concrete (albeit difficult and rare) human condition that we strive to attain, a condition in which an individual is guided consistently and unfailingly by reason. The free person still feels passions but never let those passions determine their actions.
Among the most important parts of the book, in my view, is the chapter in which I examine Spinoza’s views on death. In a famous proposition of the Ethics—from which my book takes its title—he says that “a free person thinks least of all about death.” The free person is aware of his/her mortality but does not obsess over death and dying. A free person’s life is not dominated by irrational hopes and fears about death because s/he knows that there is no afterlife, no immortal soul and thus no eternal reward and punishment; a free person is thus immune to the superstitious beliefs and behaviors that form the core of most organized religions. This individual’s life is consumed with the joys to be experienced in living the life of reason in this world. If there is a practical lesson to be learned from reading Spinoza, this is where it lies.
How has your work influenced your teaching?
I love teaching Spinoza because the Ethics basically teaches itself. All you really have to do is take the students through the propositions and ask them to try to make sense of them. What do you think Spinoza means by “God or Nature”? How can he say that a free person always acts honestly? Is he saying that a virtuous person will never tell a lie, even if it means putting him/herself or a loved one in danger?
More generally, I find the more familiar I am with these historical works—whether it is Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, or Plato, or Aristotle—or a particular philosophical problem, the more comfortable I am in the classroom with letting the students take the lead; the effort I put into my research allows me to be a more relaxed and ecumenical guide for students reading these texts or discussing these problems for the first, or the tenth, time.
How have readers responded?
The response from readers has been absolutely wonderful. I receive emails from colleagues who want to discuss the book, but also from non-academic readers who really appreciate having Spinoza made accessible. This is very rewarding and, beyond the sheer pleasure I get from studying philosophy, makes it all seem even more worthwhile.
*
The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
Steven Nadler
Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
