-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Peter Cave, Spinoza and the Case for Philosophy, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 265, October 2016, Pages 846–848, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqv092
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
‘Salus sive Beatitudo sive Libertas’ is part of Elhanan Yakira's heading for his final chapter, and salvation, understood as both blessedness and freedom, is presented throughout as the core of Spinoza's philosophy, a moral philosophy, a search for ‘permanent and lasting joy’ (p. 4). The search is best undertaken, according to Yakira, by concentrating on two sections in Spinoza's Ethics, namely Part Two's first thirteen propositions concerning the nature of mind and Part Five's final twenty propositions dealing with understanding and freedom. Regarding the former, Yakira argues against the usual presentation of Spinoza's position as one of parallelism. Regarding the latter, Yakira believes that sense can be made of those final propositions concerning the intellectual love of God and the eternity of the mind, propositions that strike many (for example, Jonathan Bennett) as incomprehensible or, to put it more kindly, enigmatic, in view of Spinoza's overall metaphysics.
Spinoza's Ethics certainly is no easy read, at least for most of us. For this book under review, there is the added difficulty of Yakira's presentation. As the author disarmingly announces, he writes, to some extent, in the French ‘idiom’ (apparently much reduced in response to a reader's observation), but also in the English idiom, the Hebrew idiom—and with the vantage point of someone well aware of the special religious problems in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Haifa (p. xii). I am unsure which idiom or vantage point is manifested where, but maybe an example of the reduced French is here:
Like understating mathematical truth, and more significantly than it, the hidden understanding of one's own corporeality can become a concrete mode of life. What is understood in this way is that understanding is simply important or, to put it in other words, that philosophy is a serious matter. (p. 264)
