Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Spinoza's Ethics is not long, but it is very compact. I think most readers will find themselves flipping back to previous definitions and propositions and re-reading on a regular basis. This seems to be part of Spinoza's plan, as each argument builds upon the ones that preceded it, and sometime the preceding stuff makes more sense in light of what comes later. So I'm thinking we want to take this slowly. If the pace is too slow, we can always speed it up a bit.

Reading Schedule

June 12 - Part One, Definitions through Prop. 17
June 19 - Part One, Prop 18 to end of Part One
June 26 - Part Two, Definitions through Prop 19
July 3 - Part Two, Prop 20 to end of Part Two
July 10 - Part Three, Definitions through Prop 40
July 17 - Part Three, Prop 41 to end of Part Three
July 24 - Part Four, Definitions through Prop 36
July 31 - Part Four, Prop 37 to end of Part Four
Aug 7 - Part Five and Book as a whole

There has already been some discussion of translations in the Planning thread, but feel free to let us know your preferences here. We'll become familiar with the main terms pretty quickly, and I suspect those are mostly uniform across translations since they seem to come from the "canon" of his time, Aristotle and Aquinas. (Or so I hope.)

I'll be reading Curley with Eliot as a backup.

Spinoza used the philosophical vocabulary of the Scholastics, Jewish philosophers of the MIddle Ages, and even some contemporaries, but he used it in unusual ways, and in unexpected combinations.

The major study of this is much, much longer than the "Ethics," Harry Austryn Wolfson's originally two-volume Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Process of His Reasoning, currently available as a very thick omnibus.

This is fairly expensive. If you don't mind reading it on screen, there is a free pdf version, labelled volume 2, but containing both, on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/harry-aus...

If you aren't familiar with this, just scroll down the page to the pdf line. Other formats are offered, but the transfer is usually unreliable, if it works at all.

A lot of people complain that Wolfson does not provide a very good explication of Spinoza's philosophy, which is true, but not to the point.

Wolfson, working with a vast literature, pinpointed what Spinoza's original philosphically-educated readers would have brought with them, and shows where and how Spinoza was being different.

The Curley translation is the recent standard, although it has competition. Most free or cheap Kindle versions are of the old Elwes translation, which is public domain, but is the source of quotations in many older secondary works. If you want to use it,and have a little Latin, there is an edition with Elwes' translation that includes the Latin text of the Ethics. This is very difficult Latin, but it sometimes helps to figure out what Latin term different translators interpret differently, Delphi Collected Works of Baruch Spinoza (Illustrated)

Curley translated the rest of Spinoza, too, in a two-volume set, which is also available as a digital ominbus.
The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume I
The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume II

and https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Work...

Another modern translation is Spinoza: Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order, in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, which I may be using in conjunction with Curley. It was translated by Michael Silverthorne and Matthew J. Kisner, and edited by Kisner.

Hackett Classics has another modern translation, in Ethics: with The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, 2nd Edition, translated by Samuel Shirley, and edited by Seymour Feldman.

Ian wrote: "Spinoza used the philosophical vocabulary of the Scholastics, Jewish philosophers of the MIddle Ages, and even some contemporaries, but he used it in unusual ways, and in unexpected combinations.

..."

Since Spinoza did indeed use familiar philosophical terms in unusual ways, it might be best to look to his work first. Some of us have some background in philosophy so terms like "substance" and "essence" have a certain resonance from Aristotle and Aquiinas, but Spinoza doesn't necessarily mean the same thing by those terms. Spinoza writes the Ethics from the ground up, starting with his own definitions, so theoretically we should be able to make sense of it on its own.

In any case, I would definitely encourage everyone to at least read through the first part of Ethics before consulting a commentary.

The suggested Penguin paperback edition of the recent "standard" translation by Edwin Curley is, as noted above, taken from a two-volume "complete works" version, also available as one large Kindle file. However, it is also available in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, which has passages cross-referenced from The Ethics easily available. And the Kindle edition, presently marked down to $16 from $30, is searchable.

The only drawback to the Curley translation is that it appeared about a decade before the discovery of a Vatican Library manuscript, which may be closer to the original than the posthumously published printed version. It has now been edited, with a translation, but is very expensive. However, an advance copy of the critical text was available to the translators of the Cambridge Texts version mentioned above (Spinoza: Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order), so it is not quite inaccessible.

I'll probably be anathema to this learned collection of explorers of Spinoza, but I am old enough and uncaring enough to share a bit of my backhanded touching of the ideas of the formidable Spinoza. Several years ago, my f2f book club read Rachel Kadish's "The Weight of Ink," the fictional creation of a daughter for Shakespeare, who corresponds with Spinoza. While reading it, I came across any number of fascinating, perplexing videos on dear Spinoza from about every perspective imaginable -- usually not obvious how to identify the time-waster versus the insightful. Hoopla (available in my library system) also offered (still does) an audio version of Paul Strathern's "Spinoza in 90 Minutes." It may not provide much insight into Spinoza's philosophy, but I just re-listened to it and it does share a bit about the time and circumstances in which Spinoza lived and worked.

Ah, why am I reminded of Genesis 11:1-9 and John 1:1? And perhaps "Wittgenstein's Poker"?

This turned out to be longer than I expected, but I decided to include bibliographic details instead of just mentioning names.

I was also drawn to Spinoza by fiction. Back in the late 1960s Ballantine Books, following on the great success of the the paperback "Lord of the Rings," reprinted the fantasy novels of E.R. Eddison. The most famous of them, The Worm Ouroboros is irrelevant for our purposes.

What is relevant is the lesser known Zimiamvia Cycle (often labelled a trilogy, although the author planned for a fourth book), consisting of, in publication order, Mistress of Mistresses, A Fish Dinner in Memison, and The Mezentian Gate. (For an omnibus see Zimiamvia: A Trilogy, or, with "Worm," and in Kindle The Complete Zimiamvia).

A recurring figure in these novels is the philosopher/royal councilor/magician Dr. Vandermast, who produces Latin sayings supposed to fit the underlying philosophy. (The name is that of a European rival magician in the Elizabethan chapbook and play "Roger Bacon." Eddison was nothing if not eclectic.)

Eddison admitted (proclaimed) that these came from Spinoza, but were being used in ways that are entirely different from what the philosopher meant.

This got me curious, especially since my Junior High and High School Latin didn't produce meaningful translations of the decontextualized quotations. Although I did recognize that "sub specie aeternitas" probably meant "from the view of Eternity" whatever that implied.

Of course, this was all before the internet, and checking up on things like that required real library time. Later, in larger libraries, sometimes going to different floors depending on the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress number of a wanted book.

I tried to read Spinoza, in the Elwes translation, and found that, even when I located the needed passages, I didn't understand what Spinoza was talking about.

I took a college-level course in Philosophy, which helped a little. But, just before my first year of college, I discovered Wolfson's The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning., and diligently read through both volumes, with the Spinoza translation at hand. (Doing this exposed several shortcomings in the Elwes translation.)

I eventually figured out some of what I needed to know to make sense of individual definitions, axioms, and propositions: along with a whole philosophical language (or jargon) that is now obsolete.

I still didn't understand Spinoza as a whole, but I at least made some sense of the quotations I started with, and saw how they worked in their original context, and how Eddison how adapted them.

I also read a number of the writers Wolfson mentioned, like Aristotle (although it was years before I tackled his Physics and Metaphysics, which turned out to be useful), and Maimonides' The Guide for the Perplexed, which illustrates what happens when you mix Aristotle with monotheistic revealed religion. But I probably would have read them, and others.anyway.

I have returned to Spinoza at long intervals over the decades since, including reading a fraction of the critical literature, especially compendia like The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza and The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's Ethics.

Dagobert Runes's Spinoza Dictionary is a sort of topical index with quoted passages, and was of remarkably little help once I had searchable Kindle editions with better translations, at least of the Ethics.

I'm still a bit hesitant, as I tend to avoid reading single works and prefer to spend more time on single authors instead: reading several of their works, the works of their close friends, the books mentioned in their private letters and diaries, related essays... However, today I'm picking up:

• S. Nadler: Spinoza's 'Ethics': An Introduction; 2006;
• B. Spinoza: Complete works (original language+Italian); 2010;
• B. Spinoza: Ethics (Latin+Italian); 2006, preface by Giorgio Agamben.

I might not be able to follow the group's schedule, as I'm currently reading something else, but I'll eventually catch up. In the meantime, I follow and enjoy the discussion. For the record, Spinoza's compete works (letters excluded) in their original languages – Latin, Dutch, Hebrew – fit in 1300 pages.

Ian wrote: "This is very difficult Latin, but it sometimes helps to figure out what Latin term different translators interpret differently."

Two takeaways on language and Spinoza's Latin from Giorgio Agamben's preface:

• Without access to the original language text, it's impossible to read philosophy. Philosophy and poetry share the same relationship with language: terminology, essential in philosophy, is like the poetic moment of thought; moreover, philosophy operates on language, is a journey through language and towards language.

• Spinoza's low-key, low-register, scholastic Latin – full of syntagmas taken from Terence and his "comic register" – is different from the instrumental language used by European scholars of Spinoza's time. Spinoza's operation on language and operation on thought are one and the same: a turning off, a quieting down towards inactivity, «acquiescentia». This linguistic quiescence is «the contemplation of potency» (Spinoza), the highest happiness available to the mind, contemplation of the glory (heb.: kabod) that accompanies the manifestations of YHWH («re vera... acquiescentia a gloria non distinguitur»).

I eventually found a commentary or article that reported that Spinoza was using late-medieval Scholastic Latin, probably because of its large technical vocabulary, which he sometimes used with new or original meanings.

This was very different from the Latin of the Humanists, who regarded Medieval Latin as debased, and scholasticism as nonsense. They tried to restore Latin to the pristine clarity of Cicero, one going so far as to not only avoid any word not used by Cicero, but, he claimed, even forms of words not attested in Cicero’s surviving works.

C.S. Lewis noted that the Humanists very successful re-classicalizing Latin, which he thought helped kill it as a language of advanced scholarship. There were too many things that couldn’t be said in it without being accused of “barbarisms.”

Ian wrote: "This was very different from the Latin of the Humanists, who regarded Medieval Latin as debased, and scholasticism as nonsense."

Ch.S. Calenza: The lost Italian Renaissance. Humanists, Historians, and Latin's Legacy; 2004. New perspectives on the humanists' Latin, on their understanding of philosophy, wisdom, imitation, orthodoxy and status, on their relationship with the past and continuity with the Middle Ages; and on our understanding forged by 19th c. historiography.

Laura Cereta: Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist; transcribed, translated and edited by Diana Robin; 1997. Female humanists and the point of view of women. Includes an informative Introduction to the Series and a long list of names of female humanists for further reading. Cereta herself (1469-1499) studied Latin between the age of 7 and 14 – something then unusual even for women of a prominent family – and for the rest of her short life cultivated the habit of devoting the whole night to the study of the classics and to exchanging Latin letters with other scholars and prominent figures. She often had to defend herself from the attacks of male scholars, who scanned her letters word-by-word looking for slips in her Latin.

Ian wrote: "I eventually found a commentary or article that reported that Spinoza was using late-medieval Scholastic Latin, probably because of its large technical vocabulary, which he sometimes used with new ..."

That is very interesting, Ian. I have studied a little bit of Latin a few years ago and every study book, site, tool, etc. directed me to classical Latin. At the time, it sounded very natural. But now I compare it with Spinoza's text and I was just wondering if it was a very narrow point of view to concentrate in just one period of time when studying a language that has survived for centuries, generated so many important works in different periods of time and is actually being used up to our days in Vatican documents, for instance.

These days there are a couple of websites that include dictionaries of Medieval Latin (which I will look up when I have a little time).

Part of the difference is in spelling, which makes it hard to look up a word in a classical Latin dictionary, unless you that, for example, c and t sometimes interchange. There are other variations. However, while the scholastics blamed the spelling issues on semi-literate monks, epigraphic evidence indicates that the monks were accurately copying late-antiquity manuscripts which had updated the spelling.

One place to check is the Medieval Academy of America’s digital edition of Du Cange’s late nineteenth century Medieval Latin Glossarium, at https://mdr-maa.org/resource/du-cange...

Unfortunately, full use of it requires some French. I usually keep a device with a French dictionary app close at hand (like pairing a tablet with a smart phone, side by side).

Thank you very much, Ian. I will take a look on it. I also started looking at the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS) which also seems to be a nice source. But the more the better... I certainly need all the help I can get.

This might be marginal for the understanding of Spinoza, but the question of style kept been debated among humanists and no final agreement was ever met, although, following the lively debate between Angelo Poliziano and Paolo Cortesi which took place between 1485-1491 (Cortesi submitted his Latin epistles to Poliziano for endorsement; Poliziano sent them back, commenting he was «ashamed of having wasted [his own] precious time» reading them, the excessive imitation of Cicero making them a dull read), on the long run the position of Cortesi de facto prevailed and «a moderate Ciceronianism became the style taught in schools, universities and academies. This style was moderate in the sense that its practitioners allowed room for the required neologisms and therefore did not consider the Ciceronian vocabulary the only possible among the ancient authors they used as models. However, the basic structure of the sentence and the order of words typical of Cicero remained the scholastic model and became the standard for the Latin of the elites until relatively recently» (Calenza, "The lost Italian Renaissance", 2004, my own retroversion).

Thanks.

Standardising Latin seems to be an ongoing issue. When I was taking second-year Latin in High School back in the 1960s, our teacher had us memorise the opening of Caesar’s Commentaries in a Grammar and Reader. I can still remember a good chunk of it. Unfortunately, it turned out that the textbook editors had tampered with spelling and grammar, and even syntax. This made it uniform with their paradigms in a “normalized” form. So what I remember is not necessarily accurate, even if my memory is good.

And it created a problem for me when I took introductory Latin, Cicero, and Vergil in Graduate school. I thought the first would be a refresher course. Instead I had to relearn some declensions and conjugations.

Fed wrote: "This might be marginal for the understanding of Spinoza, but the question of style kept been debated among humanists and no final agreement was ever met, although, following the lively debate betwe..."

Fed, thank you very much for these insights on the Latin side. This "marginal" items are what make group discussions so captivating as we have the oportunity to explore different aspects of the reading.

Monica wrote: "Fed, thank you very much for these insights on the Latin side."

My pleasure, Monica!

I was re-reading Celenza's preface to the completely rewritten Italian edition (2014) of his book "The lost Italian Renaissance" (2004). It mentions the canon in the context of American academia (the wobbly translation is mine):

«This book was written ten years ago by an American in an American academic context, as the critical realisation of the fact that the study of Italian Renaissance intellectual life had almost entirely disappeared from U.S. university curricula. While there had been a relative flowering of such studies between the 1950s and 1960s (especially in History departments), by the 1980s and 1990s their strand was now decidedly in decline. Thus, the study of the Italian Renaissance, except for its artistic production, in many respects no longer finds an institutional "home" in the United States today.

«There is little interest in European history in American History departments, less still in pre-modern European history (which in the U.S. academic context means pre-nineteenth century) and almost none in the history of the Italian Renaissance. Philosophy in American departments is mostly practiced along largely ahistorical lines, following the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition initiated by Wittgenstein.

«This means that in those few institutions where History of Philosophy teaching still exists, the discipline is not taught as "history" precisely, but as the history of philosophical argumentation. It goes without saying then that there is no room for philosophers who do not belong to the canon, which creates a clear separation between the age of Ockham and that of Descartes.»

I continue to struggle with what is worthwhile for myself to try to understand from/about Spinoza and his writings (esp. at this point in a long life?). Fed, you encourage me by mentioning related books/authors. Spinoza has been another of the examples where, while I respect it, the St. John's approach of concentration (solely) on original texts, such alone isn't going to cut it for me.

I have been browsing among these (besides the aforementioned "90 minutes"?!): Spinoza: A Life by Steven Nadler and The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza & the Fate of God in the Modern World by Matthew Stewart, as well as listening to/watching Great Courses: "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida" with Lawrence E. Cahoone, Professor, College of the Holy Cross.

I was struck by the vigor of the words of the "curse" placed on Spinoza, which Nadler quotes in a reproduction of one of his learned lectures. Stewart reminds one of endemic "academic competition" with the stories of Leibnez and Spinoza. Cahoone gives a very real sense of some of the difficulties (rigorous impossibilities?) of comparing world views across the centuries and across civilizations.

Lily wrote: "Spinoza: A Life, by Steven Nadler"

By Steven Nadler, I'm about to start "Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction" (2006). I suppose I'll end up reading his other works on Spinoza as well, later on. He also wrote on Descartes.

Lily wrote: "Cahoone gives a very real sense of some of the difficulties (rigorous impossibilities?) of comparing world views across the centuries and across civilizations."

This is very intriguing! In case you will read it, please consider sharing the odd little quote or your own takeaways.

Here's eminent scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-1999) on the gaps in the canon and our persistently biased approach:

«The history of philosophy, as indeed the history of other aspects of culture, is usually written from the standpoint of a specific philosophy, insisting that certain thinkers of the past were precursors of that philosophy, and giving little attention to those thinkers or problems that have no such connection to current philosophy. Instead, we should aim for a history of philosophy that encompasses all that has been considered part of philosophy in the past. Such a procedure could broaden our perspective, and also confront us with problems and ideas that would deserve our attention.» — Renaissance in the History of Philosophical Thought, 1979