Introduction to Spinozist Modernism

Mens nostra, quatenus intelligit, aeternus cogitandi modus sit, qui alio aeterno cogitandi modo determinatur, et hic iterum ab alio, et sic in infinitum; ita ut omnes simul Dei aeternum et infinitum intellectum constituant.(Ethics V, 40 Schol.)'Insofar as our Mind understands', Spinoza tells us in the above scholium, 'it is an eternal mode of thinking, which is determined by another eternal mode of thinking, and so on to infinity; and all together these constitute the eternal and infinite intellect of God'.Two of Spinoza's most remarkable speculative claims are contained here: first, that there even is such a thing as the infinite intellect, against the scepticism of a Hume or a Kant; and second, that we constitute this mind, that we in our finitude are not separate from it.This is, of course, the great thesis of immanence: God, the absolutely infinite substance, is nothing other than or outside of the absolute infinity of modes through which its essence is expressed.But what is shocking here is not just that we finite modes participate in constituting the infinite intellect: it is rather that, when we do so, we do so as eternal, and this simply because this is our mode of existence insofar as we understand.Thus, finitude is not incompatible with eternity, and eternity even appears to be the point of articulation between the finite and the infinite, by way of the intellect that grasps things in their necessity.Everything turns on how we understand this coexistence of finitude and eternity, for we remain nevertheless finite: we will die, this is a matter of necessity; our bodies and minds will pass out of existence, comprehensively, as our characteristic relations of motion and rest are destroyed under the weight of external pressures, as our mind is transformed into new ideas incompatible with our continued individuation; nothing of 'us' will remain, and yet we feel and know by experience that we are eternal.introduction to spinozist modernism xix The Spinozism that François Zourabichvili lays out in the present study is intense: brutal in its rigor, ambitious in the extreme, unflinching.It is philosophy in the grand modernist style, developing concepts and following them all the way to their logical conclusions with genuinely reckless abandon.We are tempted to say that it is the first philosophical attempt since the great efforts of German idealism to construct or reconstruct the pure logic of the infinite intellect after Kant's critical prohibition against speculative metaphysics.But the animating concerns of Spinozism are quite different than those of Hegel, for instance, who claimed in the Logic to carry out 'the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit'. 1 Although Hegel famously claimed that true philosophy begins with Spinozism, the idea of such an exposition would be meaningless for Spinoza, for whom the notion that God's essence existed prior to a first moment of Creation is a theological absurdity, a chimera.More importantly, it would not help Spinoza solve his true problems, which are above all practical: misunderstanding the infinite nature of God and our own natures as finite modes of the divine substance can only prevent our salvation.Spinoza's philosophy is animated by a desperate urgency: as Zourabichvili puts it, 'beatitude is now or never'. 2 Such an assertion positions Zourabichvili's Spinoza in strong opposition to several leading interpretations in both the Francophone and Anglophone worlds 3 -even and especially that of his one-time teacher and inspiration, Gilles Deleuze. 4 Coming to terms with this desperate urgency, accepting and affirming the now-or-never quality of our beatitude is, perhaps paradoxically, the first step in attaining it.Refusing to allow any theological nostalgia for a prelapsarian state to which one might return, Zourabichvili reckons that from a Spinozist perspective, 'our whole task -our whole education, even -is to learn to re-grasp ourselves as a part of nature'.5 To see ourselves as a part of nature is to see clearly, but, strangely enough, we cannot see without first learning to speak a new language -a language that 1 Hegel 2010: 29. 2 See below, 163. 3 Harry Wolfson, Alan Donagan, and Tamar Rudavsky are three figures that come to mind, as evidenced by Steven Nadler's helpful categorisation in Nadler 2002.4 Deleuze, as Zourabichvili says in a footnote, 'goes the farthest in the reification of essence', a reification that will constitute one of the fundamental errors in the interpretation of Spinozism.See below, 102, note 22. 5 See below, 51.