Recommendation: U.K. Spinoza Circle

This series on Philosophy and Technology has construed technology broadly, often focusing on the relationship among faith, science, and philosophy. Several pieces have discussed Spinoza, and one of the original posts with Michael Della Rocca, on his book The Parmenidean Ascent, drew parallels between a strict form of Rationalism and modern physics. At the same time, the series leverages public philosophy, which has been my connection to the discipline and the inspiration for my affiliation with the APA and work with the Public Philosophy Digest, a series within the APA’s Substack platform. 

This month’s piece ties these two elements together, as I would like to share a vibrant online program: the U.K. Spinoza Circle. The upcoming sessions are highlighted below, and the recent seminar was built on one of my favorite APA Blog posts—a discussion with Clare Carlisle on her last book, Spinoza’s Religion. It makes a powerful case that Spinoza’s philosophy is vital for our restless world—accommodating the alternatives of faith and philosophy. I also recommend Clare’s recent biography of Kierkegaard, Philosopher of the Heart.

In the most recent U.K. Circle, Clare revisited scientia intuitiva and I would like to re-explore her important case in Spinoza’s Religion and share her notes from this Circle session. 

In sum, I highly recommend joining the U.K. Spinoza Circle and, before including her notes on a wholesale basis below, revisit our Q&A and highlight how Clare’s account reinforces how Spinoza is misunderstood—to the point of interpreting him as an atheist.  

Clare begins by placing Spinoza in a rich historical and theological context:

“Spinoza was an heir to both Jewish and Christian culture—in Amsterdam he grew up in a Jewish community within a Protestant society—yet he distanced himself from both these religions. He did not want to be a member of a religious institution with strict, prescriptive codes of belonging and belief. He feared—quite rightly—that a religious affiliation would inhibit his philosophical work. At the same time, he was deeply influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas, and he was also pragmatic in adapting his own philosophy to a broadly Christian culture.  

When we think about Spinoza’s intellectual inheritance, it’s important not to reify a tradition like “Christianity.” What we call Christianity has always, right from the start, been multicultural and diverse, an eclectic mixture of Jewish and Greek and Roman philosophies, and often full of the tensions that come with this eclecticism; it subsequently absorbed Islamic influences too, and of course as Christian teachings spread to different regions they blended with local folk traditions. So by situating Spinoza in a broadly Christian context, we’re not cutting him off from all those diverse religious and philosophical currents. On the contrary, he was very resistant to the Christian churches’ efforts to seal themselves off from cultural forms perceived as ‘other,’ which in fact meant denying or suppressing their own heritage.

In my book, I argue that for Spinoza, being religious does not mean belonging to a sect or faction, defined in terms of orthodoxy or orthopraxy. Instead, he retains a conception of religion that was common in the medieval period: religion is a virtue, which involves living in the right relation to God. This virtue can be practiced inside or outside a recognized religious institution. Spinoza is far from being an individualist, both metaphysically and ethically, so even if a person pursues their religion in a non-conventional context, this pursuit will still be collective, supported by perhaps a small group of like-minded people.”

Clare then goes on to review Spinoza’s central notion of being-in God—“whatever is, is in God”—and suggests it is the highest ideal of human life:

“’Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God’—is right at the heart of my reading of the text. I show that this proposition underpins Spinoza’s entire system: this is factually true insofar as he keeps referring back to it throughout the Ethics. I see the principle of “being-in-God,” as I call it, as Spinoza’s fundamental thought. Of course, this is a theological idea as well as a philosophical idea. I think that E1p15 shows that philosophy and theology are inseparable, for Spinoza.”  

The question, then, is what does it mean to be in God? E1p15 indicates that this is a relation of causal and conceptual dependence. God makes us exist, and makes us intelligible; God makes everything exist, and makes everything intelligible. We could describe being-in-God as a panentheist principle. One difficulty there, though, is that panentheism is sometimes seen as a marginal theological position, perhaps bordering on heresy, and certainly not an orthodox view. For a Spinozist, of course, there’s nothing wrong with unorthodoxy per se, but in fact this idea of being-in-God is absolutely central to the mainstream Christian tradition that Spinoza inherited. It is articulated by theologians such as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas—the architects of western Christianity. This is not to say that these thinkers are Spinoza’s sources; my point is simply that being-in-God—and the question of what this means—is central, not peripheral, to theological tradition. Last year Yitzhak Melamed and I ran a symposium on Panentheism and Religious Life with experts on Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, and the Kabbalah, and it was clear that being-in-God is fundamental to these different theistic traditions. I had suspected this, but it was nice to have it confirmed by experts in those fields.

In any of these traditions, different theologians will find different answers to the question of the meaning of being in God—different doctrinal formulations that make sense of this principle. Aquinas’s formulation involves a doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which Spinoza opposes. Aquinas also develops the meaning of being-in-God through his concept of participation, which has both biblical and Platonic roots. I was intrigued to see that Spinoza also uses the verb “participate” to describe the way we share in the divine nature. Again, I’m not arguing that Aquinas was his source here. But it is important to recognize that when Spinoza used the verb “participate,” this concept was saturated with a theological meaning that he must have been aware of. I think we have to take Spinoza’s concept of participation together with his concept of expression. To say that we participate in the divine nature perhaps means the same thing as saying that we are expressions of the divine nature. God expresses, we participate: are these two ways of describing the same activity?

It’s also important to note that participation and expression are categories for understanding being-in-God not only as a doctrine, but also as a practice. For example, devotional rituals can be ways of performing—and thereby expressing—a sharing or communion in divine nature. Contemplative practices like meditation, yoga, and prayer can also be understood in these fundamentally Spinozist terms.

The fundamental misunderstanding of Spinoza relates to the “catch phrase” of Deus sive Natura (equating God with nature)—which has led to claims of atheism. Clare clarifies how Spinoza should not be viewed as a pantheist, but rather as a panentheist, where God and nature are not equivalent, with an asymmetrical relationship between God and the universe. That is, both immanent, in grounding everything, yet transcendent, as ontologically different and not fully accessible. The distinction, for me, is captured by her statement that human beings are constituted by their participation in only two of an infinite number of attributes—thought and extension. As Clare explains,

“In my book, I undertake a close reading of the passages where Spinoza uses the phrase ‘God or Nature’ and show why, in the context of the overall architecture of the Ethics, these passages do not amount to a robust metaphysical claim that would make Spinoza a pantheist. At the very least, ‘God or Nature’ must be interpreted in light of Spinoza’s more fundamental principle of being-in-God. This is not to say that we should simply dismiss the phrase ‘God or Nature.’ We should neither dismiss it, nor take it as the key tenet of Spinozism. I see ‘God or Nature’ as proposing alternative names for the reality traditionally named as God. In fact, Spinoza is offering us three alternative names for this reality: ‘God,’ ‘Nature,’ and ‘God or Nature.’ I see this as a very inclusive gesture that invites a broad diversity of religious, atheist, and agnostic beliefs into Spinoza’s philosophical vision. I also suggest that ‘God or Nature’ names a question and an ambiguity, and living with this question is just part of what it means to read Spinoza.”

These clarifications lead us to the recent U.K. Spinoza Circle discussion on scientia intuivia and Spinoza’s framing of three forms of knowledge, with different degrees of virtue reflecting forms of cognition and human experience, culminating in the intellectual love of God:

“Spinoza identified three kinds of knowing, each of which has a particular affective quality. The first kind of knowing is imagination; the second kind is reason; the third kind is intuition. In my book, I suggest that imagination is characterized by instability and fluctuation, which has an affective quality of restlessness, agitation, anxiety. Reason, by contrast, brings emotional stability. Intuition has an immediacy that makes it kind of timeless: it gives us an experience of eternity, which brings deep peace or rest.

To illustrate the distinction between reason and intuition, imagine solving a mathematical problem. Reason takes you through a series of steps required to find the solution. As you solve it, you have a joyful awareness of your own understanding. This awareness is intuitive knowing. You’ve not done any extra work or followed any additional steps to reach this awareness; it arrives effortlessly, accompanying the rational process. Of course, this is just an illustration; we can experience intuitive knowing in many different contexts. For example, in a therapeutic setting, you might work with your therapist to understand your own psychological patterns: this is a process of rational understanding, but it can also be accompanied by a feeling of “ah yes, now I understand!” That feeling of one’s own insight into a truth is another example of intuition…Spinoza’s religion is a combination of metaphysics and ethics. The way these combine looks different depending on whether we’re reading the Ethics or the Theologico-Political Treatise. My book gives priority to the Ethics, where the intellectual love of God is an intuitive understanding of being-in-God. Spinoza thinks that ethical-justice and loving-kindness flow naturally and necessarily from this insight. One reason for this is that understanding one’s own being-in-God is really inseparable from understanding that everything is in God, so that being-in-God is known as a common nature that we share with all things.”

The nature of intuitive knowledge reflects Spinoza’s conception of immortality, especially the immediacy of intellectual knowledge and the notion of the mind’s eternity. In Spinoza’s Religion, Clare frames how scientia intuitiva is a virtue that is cultivated under “a species of eternity,” with a joyful awareness of being-in-God: 

“The idea of participation is helpful here. Spinoza suggests that we can participate more or less in the divine nature, and this suggestion that participation is a matter of degree contrasts with his absolute claim that everything is in God. Participating in divine nature means participating in eternity, and the more we participate, the more we are eternal. In my book, I link this to a kind of immanent eschatology, sometimes called ‘realized eschatology,’ that we find in the First Letter of John, which was one of Spinoza’s favorite New Testament texts. The author of this ancient text wrote that eternal life is not merely some kind of heavenly reward, but a condition of existence that we can access here and now. (This is not in itself to deny that there might also be some sort of port-mortem immortality, though Spinoza does not go in this direction.)  

We can compare the experience of eternity that comes with intuition, which as I said has an immediate, timeless quality, and a doctrine of personal immortality based on imaginative thinking. We might imagine ourselves, with all our personal attributes, being resurrected and living forever. Spinoza rejected this doctrine, and replaced it with a less personal account of eternity which, I think, rests on a fundamental nonduality between human and divine consciousness. This nondualism is quite subtle and hard to grasp, and again I’d refer readers to my book to find the full argument. I should mention that I’ve been influenced by the Indian school of Advaita Vedanta, which opened my mind to this way of interpreting Spinoza. The account of human eternity put forward at the end of the Ethics seems to promise an experience of deep peace or rest, and perhaps it was even rooted in this kind of experience. Experiences like these can indeed be transformative, as religious practitioners in different traditions will attest.”          

Finally, to share Clare’s notes from the most recent Circle session, she expands on this passage, revisiting scientia intuitiva as a form of understanding beyond the limits of reason, eclipsing the interaction of affects—as a basis for happiness and salvation. I encourage the philosophical community to join Clare and a host of other Spinoza scholars in the Circle!

Revisting Scientiva Intuitiva

“[I]t is clear that we perceive many things and form universal notions:

I. from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way that is mutilated, confused, and without order for the intellect; for that reason I have been accustomed to call such perceptions knowledge from random experience;

II. from signs, e.g., from the fact that, having heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them, which are like them, and through which we imagine the things (P18S). These two ways of regarding things I shall henceforth call knowledge of the first kind, opinion or imagination.

III. Finally, from the fact that we have common notions65 and adequate ideas of the properties of things. This I shall call reason and the second kind of knowledge.

In addition to these two kinds of knowledge, there is (as I shall show in what follows) another, third kind, which we shall call intuitive knowledge. And this kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the [NS: formal] essence of things. (E2p40s2)

Reason’s epistemic limits?

• reason cannot access particular things (e.g. Lloyd, Viljanen, Soyarslan)
• reason is limited to knowledge that something is the case (e.g. Garrett, Melamed)
• reason cannot engage directly with the existence of things (e.g. Lloyd, Primus)
• reason cannot know God, since God is unique and thus no common notions pertain to God (Laerke) 
• reason is not limited (Renz, Nadler)

1. Reason’s practical limits

[W]e cannot conquer by Reason those [opinions or passions] which are in us [in ons] through experience; for these are nothing else in us but an enjoyment of, or immediate union with, something we judge to be good, and though Reason shows us something that is better, it does not make us enjoy [genieten] it. Now what we enjoy in ourselves [genieten in ons] cannot be conquered by what we do not enjoy and what is outside us [buyten ons], as what is known by Reason is. But if it is to be conquered, there must be something more powerful, like an enjoyment [genietinge] of and immediate union [onmiddelyke vereeniginge] with something that is known to be better than [opinions or passions] and enjoyed more…We noted this difference when we spoke of reasoning and clear understanding [klaar verstand]. 

Since reason, then, has no power to bring us to our well-being, it remains for us to investigate whether we can attain it by the fourth and last kind of knowledge [i.e. clear understanding] (Short Treatise II. 21-22).

[T]hough I perceived these things so clearly in my mind, I still could not, on that account, put aside all greed, desire for sensual pleasure, and love of esteem.

I saw this, however: that for so long as [quamdiu] the mind was turned toward thoughts [of the true good], it was for so long [tamdiu] turned away from those things, and was thinking seriously about the new goal. That was a great comfort to me. For I saw that those evils would not refuse to yield to remedies. And although in the beginning these intervals were rare, and lasted a very short time, nevertheless, after the true good became more and more known to me [mihi innotuit], the intervals became more frequent and longer—especially after I saw that the acquisition of money, sensual pleasure, and esteem are only obstacles so long as they are sought for their own sakes, and not as means to other things. But if they are sought as means, then they will have a limit, and will not be obstacles at all. On the contrary, they will be of great use in attaining the end on account of which they are sought, as we shall show in its place. (TIE §10-11)

Though we see that a thing is good or bad, we nevertheless find no power in ourselves to do the good, or omit the bad. (Short Treatise II. 21)

“I see and approve the better, but follow the worse.” (E4p17s).

2. Philosophical practice 

[By this practice] our mental capacity is enormously increased [maxime augetur ingenii capacitas].

Run through [the logical sequence] in a continuous and repeated movement of thought… 

[the sequence is thus] refreshed and strengthened [in memory] until I can pass from the first to the last [proposition] so quickly that memory has practically no role to play and I seem to be intuiting [videar intueri] the whole thing at once…

We [thus] acquire the habit of distinguishing at a glance [usum acquiramus subito distinguendi] what is more, and what is less, relative, and by what steps the relative may be reduced to the absolute… 

[Now we can] immediately recognise [statim agnoscit] the nature of [any analogous] problem and the simplest method for dealing with it. (Rules for the Direction of the Mind §11).  

[power over the affects is] conferred by clear and distinct cognition, above all [praecipue] by the third kind of cognition…[By the power of this cognition, passive affects are reduced to] constitute a smaller [minimam] part of the mind…[love of God] becomes stronger and stronger [semper major, ac major esse potest]…and occupies a greater part of the mind [mentis maximam partem occupare]. (E5p20s).  

For so long as [Quamdiu] we are not torn [conflictamur] by affects contrary to our nature, we for so long [tamdiu] have the power of ordering and connecting the affections of the body according to the order of the intellect. (E5p10).  

[By] meditating often [on] rational precepts [and] applying them constantly [to] the particular cases frequently encountered in life … [our rational precepts] will always be ready in us. 

…He who diligently observes and practices [diligenter observabit…et exercibit] these rules (and they are not difficult), will in a short time [brevi temporis] be able to direct most of his actions according to the guidance of reason. (E5p10s)

3. Literary pedagogy

We now clearly understand [that] our salvation, or blessedness, or freedom consists…in a constant and eternal love of God, or in God’s love for men.

[B]ecause the essence of our mind [nostrae mentis essentia] consists only in knowledge [cognitione], of which God is the beginning and foundation (by E1p15 and E2p47s), it is clear to us how our mind [mens nostra], with respect both to essence and existence, follows from divine nature, and continually depends on God.

I thought this worth the trouble of noting here, in order to show by this example how much the knowledge [cognitio] of singular things I have called intuitive, or knowledge of the third kind, can accomplish, and how much more powerful it is than the universal knowledge I have called knowledge of the second kind. For although I have shown generally [generaliter] in Part I that all things (and consequently the human mind also [mentem etiam humanam]) depend on God both for their essence and their existence, nevertheless, that demonstration, though legitimate and put beyond all chance of doubt, still does not affect our mind [mentem nostram] as much as when this is inferred [concluditur] from the very essence of any singular thing which we say depends on God. (E5p36s).