Debra Nails - Spinoza and the Sciences

As this volume approaches readiness, it is simultaneously heartening and staggering to realize how many people (and some of them anonymous) were essential to its reaching its readers. I want to express my appreciation to a few who were not only essential but encouraging: I am grateful to Katie Platt who administered a cumbersome transworld collaboration; to Amlie Rorty who provided excellent advice in the planning of the original Spinoza Sesquitercentenary Symposium; to Reidels redoubtable Annie Kuipers for unfailing good humor; and to Berend Kolk for helping in innumerable invisible ways. To Joe VanZandt, I am grateful not only for advice about the present volume, but for a decade of stimulating conversations about Spinozas philosophy of science. Thanks also to the Unmoved Mover, Bob Cohen; and especially to the First Cause, Marjorie Grene.

Most of the work on this volume took place while I was Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, but was completed after I became University Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of both institutions.

DEBRA NAILS

Permissions : J. Thomas Cook quotes from George Santayanas unpublished notes by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Hans Jonass article was originally published as Parallelism and Complementarity: the Psycho-Physical Problem in the Succession of Niels Bohr in Richard Kennington (ed.), The Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza , Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 7, Catholic University of America Press, Washington D.C., 1980. It is reprinted here by permission of the author and publisher.

Michel Patys quotations from unpublished manuscripts in the Einstein Archives (Spinoza folder, reel 33, no. 7) are reproduced here with permission of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

MARJORIE GRENE

DEBRA NAILS

Prefatory Explanation

It must be remarked at once that I am editor of this volume only in that I had the honor of presiding at the symposium on Spinoza and the Sciences at which a number of these papers were presented (exceptions are those by Hans Jonas, Richard Popkin, Joe VanZandt and our four European contributors), in that I have given some editorial advice on details of some of the papers, including translations, and finally, in that my name appears on the cover. The choice of speakers, and of additional contributors, is entirely due to Robert Cohen and Debra Nails; and nearly all the burden of readying the manuscript for the press has been borne by the latter.

In the introduction to another anthology on Spinoza I opened my remarks by quoting a statement of Sir Stuart Hampshire about interpretations of Spinozas chief work: The double theme of moving tensions and unresolved conflicts seems even more appropriate to the present volume. What is Spinozas relation to the sciences? The answers are many, and they criss-cross one another in a number of complicated ways. I shall not attempt here to enumerate all these interconnections; the arguments that follow speak for themselves. But a glance at a few of the tensions and conflicts may serve as introduction to a rich and, I hope, fruitful group of studies of this transcendent and enigmatic thinker. I started to say transcendent yet enigmatic, but caught myself: the transcendence is the reason for the enigma(s): if the living face behind the mask, the living person behind the printed texts, evades our questions and our answers, that is not because Spinoza was confused or self-contradictory. The texts, indeed, are often confused or self-contradictory for our understanding. If their writer escapes us, however, it is not by reason of those superficial contradictions; it is, if we glimpse it at all, the grandeur of the vision behind them that dazzles, and dazes, would-be interpreters. Or so it seems to me; that is why I have the habit (if twice makes a habit) of introducing anthologies on Spinoza, but dare not attempt, myself, to put on paper any would-be explication of his thought. Others, however, fortunately, are more courageous than I, and the present collection adds, I believe, important aids toward our reading of Spinozistic texts, and hence of Spinoza, both in general and in the special context of the sciences, past and present.

Again, our authors are asking, in one context or another, the basic question: what is Spinozas relation to the sciences? In the spectrum of possible answers to our general question, Maull at the start and VanZandt and Paty at the close provide the alpha and omega. For Maull, Spinoza is a stranger in the age of science: we find in him no kinship with, indeed, hostility to the groping, experimental, cumulative and critical approach from which modern science springs. To put Maulls thesis perhaps too crudely, Spinoza is a rationalist, and modern science is empiricist. For VanZandt and Paty, on the contrary, Spinoza exhibits a deep and moving kinship with the very archetype of The Scientist, Albert Einstein. Nor is this just because Einstein, like Spinoza, was given to metaphysics, as distinct from science. His very science was metaphysically rooted, as Spinozas was. And more than that, as VanZandt argues, some particular and important doctrines of relativistic science in this century have shown analogies with Spinozistic tenets. So, it seems, in the history of science, rather than being an outsider, Spinoza assumes, three centuries in advance, something like a culminating place.

This startling contrast needs to be further complicated; but meantime, and parenthetically, I must comment on one paradox that arises in connection with Maulls paper. As an author who denies Spinozas rationalism she cites E. M. Curley, who in his book, Spinozas Metaphysics (1969), had given a superb exposition precisely of Spinozas rationalism, at least as he then understood it. Yet it is true that in his Experience in Spinozas Theory of Knowledge (Curley, 1973), Curley declared: The view that Spinoza was a rationalist, in the sense we are concerned with [that is the sense in which knowlege is viewed as purely a priori ] is not only mildly inaccurate, it is wildly inaccurate (Curley, 1973, p. 26). On the other hand, in his book, referring to Meyers statement of Spinozas denial of the Cartesian view that this or that exceeds human grasp, Curley declares: If rationalism consists in having this optimistic view of mans ability to comprehend the world around him, then Spinoza was plainly and unequivocally a rationalist (Curley, 1969, p. 157). Rationalism is a weasel word; yet it is clear what Curley means in each case. Spinoza is a rationalist in that he sees the basic structure of science as being ideally that of a deductive system (Curley, 1973, p. 58). That is what he argued in his book, and one could find elsewhere, in David Lachtermans essay on Spinozas physics (1978) for example, a powerful metaphysical grounding of that argument a grounding I believe it needs. Yet in itself, too, the argument is a careful and convincing one. And the idea of science as a deductive system is not so far, either, from one conspicuous strand in scientific thought. Curleys point in the Experience paper is that Spinozas deductive system, which culminates, in the third kind of knowledge, in the understanding of an individual thing, needs, at that juncture, explicit grounding in experience. And this thesis is expanded and substantiated in David Savans contribution to this volume. Yes, Spinoza is a rationalist in his emphasis on science as a system of necessary truths in which the consequences follow necessarily from necessary first principles; but yes, he emphatically recognizes a role for experience and experiment in science, and perhaps, one might even want to suggest, less naively than his correspondent Oldenburg or Oldenburgs friend Boyle. Thats another question still open for debate.