The First Modern Jew

by Schwartz, Daniel B. ;

  Spinoza would once again mention the “ancient Hebrews” in the second book of the Ethics. This allusion comes in the scholium to what is arguably the most well-known proposition in the entire work—proposition 2:7, which condenses Spinoza’s philosophy of identity into a statement of splendid concision: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” On this idea, that “a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, though expressed in two ways,” Spinoza commented: “Some of the Hebrews seem to have seen this, as if through a cloud, when they maintained that God, God’s intellect, and the things understood by him are one and the same.”63 Wachter framed his attempt to expose and refute Spinoza’s “deification of the world” in the third and final chapter of his book with references to these two excerpts, which, he claimed, drove home “the consensus between the Jewish synagoga and her faithful child Spinoza.”64

  Whether this image of Spinoza has any merit is a question that has engaged thinkers throughout the reception of the Amsterdam philosopher. Generally free of Wachter’s malign intent and slapdash approach, scholars continue to debate the possibility of a kabbalistic root to certain of Spinoza’s ideas.65 The truthfulness of the “Neoplatonic Kabbalist” Spinoza, however, lies beyond the scope of this study. The concern here is with the afterlife of Wachter’s thesis. In 1707, eight years after the publication of Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, the French Huguenot Jacques Basnage echoed the earlier interpretation in his multivolume Histoire des Juifs, the first history of the Jews written after Josephus.66 Without mentioning Wachter’s book, which he may not have read, Basnage asserted that Spinoza’s monism derived from kabbalistic principles, explaining that the philosopher had suppressed this influence because he “was so extremely jealous of the Immortality of his Name, that he designed to pass for an Original, and an Inventer of his Opinions.”67 Like Wachter, Basnage went on to argue that Spinoza had “undermined the Foundation of the Jewish Religion” largely by pursuing the logic of kabbalistic teachings beyond where the kabbalists themselves were willing to venture. Leibniz, in never-edited notes for a refutation of Spinoza, proved receptive to Wachter’s conflation of the Kabbalah with the system of his chief philosophical adversary.68 Right through the “pantheism controversy” between Mendelssohn and F. H. Jacobi in the 1780s, the Spinoza-Kabbalah nexus remained a topic of discussion. In the opinion of the leading expert on Wachter, “Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb became one of the most influential books to be written about Spinoza in the first hundred years after the appearance of the Opera posthuma.”69

  Why did the image of Spinoza as a cryptokabbalist prove so contagious in the eighteenth century? Undoubtedly, its appeal had much to do with making Judaism responsible for Spinoza. For a freethinking critic of the Bible like Wachter, or a rationalist metaphysician like Leibniz, putting the blame for Spinoza on a “foreign” element like the Kabbalah may have unconsciously served as a means of bleaching their own intellectual resumes. Still, this explanation is only partly valid. The Kabbalah, after all, called forth diverse responses from medieval and early modern Christians. Some, like the editors of the Kabbalah denudata, were convinced that it contained a pristine theosophy whose discovery could purify Christianity, persuade the Jews to convert, and accelerate the coming of the millennium; others denounced the Kabbalah as “a completely irrational and contradictory curd.”70 Ambivalence was characteristic not only of the collective reaction but even of individual impressions over the span of a lifetime, Wachter being a striking if somewhat extreme illustration of this pattern. Seven years after publishing Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, he issued a much shorter book entitled Elucidarius cabalisticus (1706).71 Written in Latin instead of German, the new tract maintained the basic thesis of the original work—that the dominant impulse in Spinozism came from the Kabbalah—while retracting his earlier condemnation of both. Instead, he now came to the defense of Spinoza’s pantheistic theology and the kabbalistic En-Sof, insisting that both were in accord with natural religion and pure philosophy.

  For our purposes, what is most important is the narrative frame that Wachter’s thesis helped establish. Spinoza was not only a Jew by origin; he was an exponent of a distinctive if esoteric Jewish teaching, his excommunication and geometrical idiom notwithstanding.72 Though initially meant as a stigma, this view of Spinoza would later be appropriated by East European maskilim eager to reclaim Spinoza for Jewish thought and identity. Their efforts at rehabilitating the Amsterdam heretic would be preceded by the more cautious advances of a German Jewish enlightener, who regarded Spinoza, and the attempt to “Judaize” him, with a mix of sympathy and suspicion. Let us turn to Mendelssohn.

  *FIGURE. 2.1. Johann Christoph Frisch, Portrait of Moses Mendelssohn, 1786. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

  CHAPTER 2

  Refining Spinoza

  Moses Mendelssohn’s Response to the Amsterdam Heretic

  I.

  Moses Mendelssohn is a watershed figure in both the German and the Jewish reception of Spinoza; he is also a deeply elusive one. In the history of the image of Spinoza, he looms large for several reasons. The first is his pioneering role in softening Spinoza’s heretical reputation in German thought and thus aiding his integration into the canon of modern Western philosophy. He opted for this role at the beginning of his career; toward the closing stages, he played it more by compulsion. Whatever the impetus, his two major engagements with Spinoza—in the anonymously published Philosophische Gespräche [Philosophical Dialogues] of 1755 and the “pantheism controversy” of thirty years later—broached the possibility of a reconciliation between Spinozism and theism. Yet this was only one aspect of Mendelssohn’s legacy vis-à-vis the Amsterdam heretic. Near the end of his life, in Jerusalem (1783), Mendelssohn defended Judaism by effectively rebutting Spinoza. Soon thereafter, in his feud with the German antirationalist thinker Friedrich H. Jacobi (1743-1819), he endangered his health and, it is thought, hastened his death, all in order to keep the stain of Spinozism from clinging to the name of his late friend Lessing. Indeed, Mendelssohn furnished ammunition for friends and foes of Spinoza alike. His legacy was one of both reclamation and resistance.

  Arguably, Mendelssohn was the first Jewish thinker to regard Spinoza as a Virgil-like mentor in his intellectual development. This claim is ventured cautiously, because Mendelssohn left no record of how he became acquainted with the life and work of Spinoza. In the narrative of Mendelssohn’s philosophical origins eventually propounded by his maskilic admirers, it was not Spinoza but another Sephardic thinker who emerged as his guide. In 1742, when the adolescent Moses, the son of Mendel the scribe, turned thirteen, a new edition of Maimonides’ Moreh nevukhim [Guide for the Perplexed] was printed for the first time in nearly two hundred years, by a Jewish publisher in the Prussian town of Jessnitz, not far from Mendelssohn’s hometown of Dessau.1 Mendelssohn’s perusal of this classic of medieval Jewish philosophy became a pivotal moment in his later legend. In a story first told by Mendelssohn’s maskilic biographer and repeated in print many times thereafter, the philosopher was said to have attributed his well-known humpback to all the time spent hunched over the Guide in his youth, engrossed in study.2 Without placing as much weight on rumors of this kind, Alexander Altmann, the doyen of twentieth-century Mendelssohn studies, continued to ascribe seminal significance to the German Jew’s engagement with Maimonides, claiming that “[t]he vistas opened to Mendelssohn through his study of the Guide were of incalculable value in his early intellectual development.”3

  It is unlikely that Mendelssohn’s first exposure to Spinoza was as shaping a factor in his maturation as his discovery of Maimonides. Nor is it surprising that the eighteenth-century Jew would have been reticent about his degree of indebtedness to a notorious atheist and heretic. Yet it is hard to imagine the opening chapters of his Philosophical Dialogues without some formative encounter with Spinoza. Through Neophil, who, in the first two dialogues, steadily wins over h
is initially skeptical interlocutor Philopon, Mendelssohn made his literary debut in German by going further than any moderate enlightener before him in applauding Spinoza. Not only did he praise the moral standing of Spinoza—a step that even staunch foes like Bayle and Colerus had taken, albeit without the zeal that Mendelssohn would demonstrate. He also sought to credit Spinoza as a metaphysician, specifically by casting the Amsterdam philosopher’s monistic concept of being—which Bayle had derided as “the most monstrous hypothesis that could be imagined”—as a necessary, if erroneous precursor to the philosophy of Leibniz. This was not an altogether new thesis. German Pietist theologians like Joachim Lange and Johann Franz Budde, faith-philosophers who deplored the attempt to constrain God via the rules of logic, had already blasted the rationalism of Leibniz and Christian Wolff as Spinozist to the core.4 What was audacious in Mendelssohn’s Dialogues was the inflection of this claim. Here a nexus of the two thinkers was proposed not to smear Leibniz, but to redeem Spinoza. That another major aim of the work was to defend Leibnizian metaphysics against its increasingly ascendant detractors in the German philosophical establishment made this appropriation even more striking.5

  The crux of Mendelssohn’s argument was that Spinoza, not Leibniz, had originated the concept of “preestablished harmony.” As articulated by Leibniz, preestablished harmony was a solution to the mind-body problem, which had gained new urgency in the seventeenth century as a result of Cartesian dualism. Descartes’ identification of mind and matter as distinct “substances”—the first defined by the “attribute” (or essential trait) of “thought,” the latter by that of “extension”—raised the problem of their interaction. How could a physical sensation provide “sufficient reason” for a change in mental state, and vice versa, if body and soul were metaphysically independent of each other, each expressing itself via its own immanent chain of causes? In a nutshell, Leibniz came up with the preestablished harmony as a way out of this dilemma. He eliminated the problem of interaction by positing a world of noninteracting monads, whose coordination had been “preestablished” by God prior to creation. In other words, if I stubbed my toe, it was not this physical event itself that directly caused me to feel pain; rather, the collision triggered some bodily change that was the necessary corollary to the mental state of pain. The coincidence of these independent sensations was determined in advance, without the need for any continuous intervention to keep mind and body in sync, as occasionalist thinkers like Malebranche argued. The preestablished harmony was thus Leibniz’s way of maintaining a metaphysical pluralism while remaining loyal to the logical definition of substance.

  Before Leibniz, however, Spinoza had ventured his own resolution of the difficulties that Descartes had left dangling. For Spinoza, only a being subject to no limits, conceptual or ontological, could be considered a substance. Given this strict definition, only one such being could and did exist: God-or-Nature. Mind and body were two of the infinite attributes of this ultimate reality, expressions of its essence in thought and spatial extension respectively. As attributes, each was fully self-contained and autonomous in its own sphere; thoughts were caused solely by other thoughts, things by other things. The only limit of thought was that it was not extension, and vice versa. By rejecting the Cartesian premise of the metaphysical discontinuity between God, mind, and body—a premise that Leibniz would seek to save with his preestablished harmony—Spinoza eliminated the need to appeal to some external cause to explain their interaction. A physical entity and its mental representation were united by virtue of being “one and the same thing, explicated through different attributes.” This identity was famously conveyed in Spinoza’s proposition that “[t]he order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” The reality articulated under the attribute of Thought as a chain of mental causes was necessarily the same as that conveyed under the attribute of Extension as a series of physical causes.

  Thus, both Spinoza and Leibniz arrived at a metaphysics wherein body and soul are conjoined yet noninteractive. Mendelssohn saw this as proof that Leibniz had borrowed heavily in developing arguably the most important element of his system—and without proper acknowledgment. To Philopon’s complaint—“Do you know that you have now put me in a rather embarrassing situation regarding the uprightness of our Leibniz?”—Neophil responds, “As inappropriate as this behavior would have been for a philosopher like Leibniz, I nevertheless believe that he is to be excused in this case,” especially in light of the all too common human tendency to “pass judgments on truths according to a certain genealogy.”6 Mendelssohn in this exchange pardoned Leibniz for plagiarism while raising eyebrows just enough to convey a certain measure of pique with “the greatest, but also the most careful philosopher.” For the twenty-five-year-old German Jew, the time had come to show courage and integrity where Leibniz, however prudently, did not. The first step was to disown the practice of slandering or suppressing a point of view “according to a certain genealogy,” an artfully ambiguous phrase on Mendelssohn’s part that manages to evoke not only Spinoza’s heresy, but also his Jewish extraction. Removing this barrier would make it possible to engage with Spinoza’s thought sympathetically, and to realize that embedded in its dense undergrowth of error and confusion there stood a constructive contribution to philosophy. This contribution could be isolated from the absurdity of the whole, as Leibniz already did stealthily in the case of the preestablished harmony, and as Mendelssohn himself would proceed to do with his notion of a “refined pantheism” (geläutertes Pantheismus), to which we will come shortly. In short, this is a plea for a hermeneutic of charity and criticism combined, of appropriating what is true or proximate to truth and discarding the rest. Most historians of philosophy agree that Mendelssohn exaggerated the resemblance between Spinoza and Leibniz in making the former the inventor of the preestablished harmony, but the accuracy of this argument need not concern us here.7 If anything, the fact that Mendelssohn may have minimized the gap between the two philosophers speaks to how far he was willing to go in redeeming Spinoza.

  This eulogy reaches its rhetorical crescendo toward the beginning of the second of the four dialogues. The conversation between Neophil and Philopon turns from the originality of Leibniz’s preestablished harmony to the reputation of metaphysics in a more general sense. Philopon opens by expressing his astonishment and dismay that “this former queen of the sciences,” which was “so much exalted by the Germans in the past . . . has sunk so low in the present day.” Neophil replies that the “source” of this “evil” is plain enough: “our [i.e., the German] slavish imitation of a people”—namely, the French—who prefer “stylishness of manners” and superficial wit to serious exploration of the “rigorous and fundamental matters” of metaphysics. Such contempt, Neophil laments, has even taken root among “[h]onorable Germans.”8 The background to this scathing critique of French cultural hegemony, which sounds like something that might come from the pen of the later Herder or Fichte, was the waning influence of the rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff in Berlin intellectual circles. In the middle of the century, a faction emerged in the Berlin Royal Academy that strongly opposed the Leibniz-Wolff school. Led by the French head of the Academy, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, this group expressed a disdain for metaphysics that was reminiscent of Voltaire, the French philosophe whose hostility to the Leibnizian idea of “the best of all possible worlds” would soon be immortalized in Candide (1759). Their bias had support in high places. In 1750 the Prussian monarch Frederick II (“the Great”), an ardent admirer of French high culture and an amateur philosophe himself, brought Voltaire to Berlin. While the relationship between these two would ultimately go sour, forcing Voltaire to quit Berlin for good three years after his arrival, Frederick’s contempt for speculative rationalism and preference for all things French would endure, posing a stern challenge to the once-commanding position of Leibniz and Wolff in German philosophy. No doubt Frederick was one of those “[h]onorable
Germans” who derided metaphysics and whom Mendelssohn had in mind.

  In the Dialogues, for the first time but not the last, Mendelssohn came to the rescue of the German tradition of metaphysics. Yet after stumping for the authentic German character of metaphysics, he shifts his ground in what immediately follows. To Philopon’s question—“Will the Germans, then, never recognize their own worth?”—Neophil responds:

  Certainly! Leibniz, Wolff, and their various successors, to what a level of perfection and completeness they have brought philosophy! How proud Germany can be of them! Yet what does it help to claim more for oneself than is right? Let us always acknowledge that someone other than a German, I add further, someone other than a Christian, namely, Spinoza, has participated immensely in the work of bettering philosophy. Before the transition from the Cartesian to the Leibnizian philosophy could occur, it was necessary for someone to take the plunge into the monstrous abyss lying between them. This unhappy lot fell to Spinoza. How his fate is to be pitied! He was a sacrifice for the human intellect, but one that deserves to be decorated with flowers. Without him, philosophy would never have been able to extend its borders so far.9