Lev Shestov - Potestas Clavium - Part III

     Spinoza goes even further than Hegel. In his asceticism, in any case, he is more daring, more resolute, more free. We know the puzzling and provocative statement of the father of Cynicism, Antisthenes: "I would rather lose my reason than experience pleasure." It is related that Diogenes called Antisthenes a powerful trumpet which did not hear itself. But it is not known just why the disciple spoke thus about his master. It is probable that it is precisely this statement that furnished Diogenes the occasion for his "psychologistic" criticism. The philosopher, according to Diogenes, must not speak but act. And I believe that among modern philosophers it is Spinoza who would have best satisfied Diogenes' demands. He truly "acted" according to his philosophy, lived it, and carefully pruned away from his "being" all "sensible" elements, so that he succeeded better than anyone else in transforming his soul into a general idea. He ceased to be Spinoza hic et nunc; he became philosophus, that is, a being not only bodiless but "without senses," like the God whom he worshiped. I think that it is precisely because of this that he provoked in his contemporaries so superstitious a repugnance, and that it is because of this also that he later captivated the hearts of his distant followers who discovered him anew, or, rather, disinterred him after long years of oblivion.

     The biography of Spinoza tells us that among the living beings of the seventeenth century there wandered for a long time a phantom, i.e., a being knowing how to think like men and even interesting itself in its way in earthly life, but deprived of all the sensible qualities that permit us to distinguish living beings from apparitions. A phantom is intermediate between the living and the dead. It is not dead, for it enters into relationships with men; but it is not living either, for what exists does not exist for it. And men have different attitudes toward phantoms: some fear them, some worship them.

     But how was so strange a metamorphosis produced in Spinoza? Why from man did he become a phantom? A question all the more interesting in that, though according to Spinoza's teaching res nullo alio modo vel ordine a Deo produci potuerunt quam productae sunt, we have every reason to believe that this res which in its time existed under the name of Benedict Spinoza became what is was - that is, an object of fear and astonishment - not by virtue of "necessity" and not even by virtue of the necessity of its inner nature. God Himself had nothing to do here. To this res a truly extraordinary thing happened: it escaped outside the bounds which attached it to other objects, outside the milieu where its destiny had placed it, and became not what it had to be by virtue of necessity but what it wished to be according to its own individual caprice. And if it be true that God creates things, we must believe that in this case He stopped midway. He began to create Spinoza according to His ordinary fashion, but when He perceived that the matter that had fallen into His hand was extremely special, He abandoned it to itself and permitted it to complete itself as it wished. And certainly the Spinoza we know was not created by God by virtue of necessity but created himself by an arbitrary act, in the realization of that freedom, perhaps, of which Dostoevsky speaks to us through the mouth of his Kirilov. I would say more. According to Spinoza, if the stone were endowed with consciousness, it would imagine not that it falls to the ground in obedience to the law of gravity but that it flies freely in space at its own whim. Ah well, a conscious stone would perhaps not guess that it does not fly but only falls, but even an unconscious stone must understand that Spinoza became Spinoza not by virtue of necessity but by a free decision of his will.

     Now we would see how he was transformed into a phantom or into what men took for a phantom. The answer to this question is not to be found in any of his chief writings, neither in the Ethics nor in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, nor even in his letters. He appears to us there already as an accomplished philosophus, a man who has overcome all doubts, who has rooted out everything of the human in himself, in short, man as a concept, a pure intellect, with this fundamental principle: de natura rationis non est res ut contingentes, sed ut necessarias contemplari [the nature of reason is not to contemplate things as contingent but as necessary]. But in the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione we are able at least in part to follow the process by which "this man," that is, the living man, transforms himself into man in general. It is true that Spinoza shows himself here also very reserved and niggardly as far as confessions that one expects of him are concerned - as if these teachings should be given only to initiates by allusion, an allusion from which it may be concluded that behind the exoteric philosophy there is hidden an esoteric one. It is known that the admission of such a duality profoundly revolted Hegel. But it seems to me in this case Hegel was not sufficiently clear-sighted, perhaps ex officio. It is indubitable that every man has two philosophies: the one open, expressed, accessible to all; the other secret, not only inaccessible to all, but even at moments inconceivable to himself who has created it and carried it in his soul. It almost never succeeds in finding a form capable of expressing itself. Fragmentary phrases that the author lets escape, one might say, involuntarily, some words, an intonation, an exclamation - it is only through these that this invisible, secret, but perhaps most important part of the human soul's life manifests itself. Even Hegel to whom, by the nature of his aspirations, such confessions were so alien could not fail to note, at least in passing, with disdain or scorn, the fact of the existence of a "musical" consciousness. But, as we know, Hegel tried to materialize even general ideas, sought die Festigkeit der Allgemeinheit, and feared above all the "animated," in which he discovered quite rightly that contingency and arbitrariness to which he was so deeply hostile. And that is why one feels such a difference between Hegel and Spinoza, despite the resemblance of their pantheistic ideas.

     Hegel is more heedless, more self-confident than Spinoza, like a man for whom his predecessors have prepared the ground, accomplishing the hardest part of the work. He received as a heritage his power to bind and to unbind, his potestas clavium; this power was handed over to him through a long series of generations, and he believed that it came from God. Spinoza had acquired it himself and well knows, like every man who has himself conquered power, what it cost him. It is for this reason that we find in Hegel answers to all questions, while Spinoza has only his Ethics, in other words, the science that shows us that the man who is prepared to undertake the supreme renunciation and to accomplish exercitia spiritualia of the most difficult kind can become a metaphysical being. Such a man can transform himself into pure thought, which is as independent of the hazards of earthly existence as of the changeability of individual fate.

     Spinoza was certainly not the first to set himself such a task, and he was not the first to fulfill it. But the question of priority in this case is of no importance. In such cases the experience of predecessors is of no help. One must himself accomplish from beginning to end everything that the metamorphosis of a living man into an idea or concept demands. In ancient times men often set themselves such tasks. Indeed they were not alien even to the pre-Socratic philosophy. But our information concerning the ancients is too meagre for us to be able to risk seeking among them an ultra-esoteric philosophy. We do not know very much even of the Cynics and the Stoics. In modern times, in any case, the most striking example of such a philosophy is offered us by Spinoza.

     In his Tractatus de intellectus emendatione, he reports to us briefly what happened to him. In his youth it seemed to him, as to all men, that the best things in life were divitiae, honores, et libidines. But he soon became convinced that all these are acquired only at the price of great difficulties, that those who attain these goods are very rare, and furthermore that they are vain. Moreover, by their very nature they are incapable of procuring for us true satisfaction. The rich man wishes to be still richer, honors provoke the desire for still greater honors, and pleasures leave after them only a feeling of emptiness. What to do then? Like a man attacked by a mortal sickness, Spinoza felt himself condemned to a desperate remedy: renunciation. The medicine itself could kill him. But there was no other solution. He renounced the world and found that amor erga rem aeternam which alone could heal the human soul and grant to it the supreme good, obviously an intellectual good, of which the miserable descendants of Adam have been dreaming ever since the day their ancestors were driven out of paradise.