The influences on Spinoza's writings have been the subject of much philosophical scrutiny and debate, commentators variously citing the Stoics, Hebraic scholarship, Islamic philosophy and Early Modern precursors such as Descartes and Hobbes as sources or inspirations for Spinoza's own thought. What seems incontestable is that Spinoza was a participant in the philosophical scene of his time, engaged in dialogues and disputes over speculative questions from metaphysics to political theory. In this concise book, Alexander Douglas elucidates Spinoza's treatment of a debate of fundamental significance to the Dutch academy of the seventeenth century: the relative scope of philosophy and theology, and the relation between them.
Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology offers a rich and erudite account of Spinoza's work in its intellectual context: that is, in vigorous and often combative debate with his contemporaries. At a time when philosophy and theology tended to be regarded as contiguous disciplines, offering alternate approaches to a common set of concerns, the work of Descartes had disrupted such established intellectual demarcations by proposing a single method of intellectual inquiry. Although the interface of philosophy and theology was by no means Descartes’ primary concern, the organisation of Dutch academic institutions was such as to make Cartesian philosophy unavoidably controversial, and the common response of those who sponsored Cartesian teaching in the universities was to follow a strategy of arguing that philosophy and theology belonged to entirely distinct domains. This strategy, which Douglas characterises as the Cartesians’ separation thesis, was undermined by Spinoza's conceptions of God, free will and the human mind. Spinoza's thinking therefore threatened both the philosophical strategies and, in at least some cases, the professional standing of the Dutch Cartesians.
Douglas's book provides a thorough and compelling exploration of this tension in Spinoza's relations with his contemporaries. It aims at showing that Spinoza's project of replying to the Dutch Cartesians provides an illuminating perspective on pivotal arguments in his mature works. On the way, it brings to life the thinking of a range of Dutch philosophers from the seventeenth century whose work may be less familiar to non-specialists, demonstrating very clearly that many were Spinoza's direct interlocutors, and indeed that his own philosophy was crafted in response to at least some of the individuals concerned, even as he developed and expounded his criticisms of their separation thesis.
Douglas's first chapter sets the scene for an appreciation of how attempts to make space for Cartesianism in the Dutch universities unfolded as they did. It gives a detailed and fascinating account of the conflict between established Scholastic views of the natural world as exhibiting purposiveness and the Cartesian science that took natural causes, rather than meaning, as the proper focus of exploration and inquiry. He avoids caricaturing the defenders of Aristotelianism as blinkered reactionaries, while at the same time making clear that their concern was as much with piety and religion as with philosophy. The conclusion of this chapter – that the dispute between the Dutch Cartesians and their university opponents was one between natural theologians and natural philosophers – elegantly summarises the intellectual context for the emergence of the position that Spinoza was to challenge.
Chapter 2 discusses the development of the separation thesis that was used to challenge the proponents of Aristotelianism and promote Cartesian natural philosophy in the universities and in Dutch culture more widely. Douglas makes it clear that this was no arcane debate, but one which shook the foundations of the university curriculum, shifting philosophy from being a preparation for more practical disciplines to a self-standing methodology for inferring abstract or speculative theories of the natural world. He describes how a diverse network of thinkers formed a united front to break down the conflation of physics and piety that characterised the established teaching of Aristotelian philosophy, and gives an intriguing account of their evolving strategies. From arguments about the differing purposes of Scripture and scientific inquiry, to the separation thesis and its consequential demolition of the very concept of natural theology, Douglas makes clear just how high the stakes were for all the participants, and thus brings a sense of animation to what might otherwise read as merely a reprise of an arcane Early Modern philosophical debate.
In chapter 3, clouds gather on the horizon for the Dutch Cartesians. Despite their best – and reasonably successful – endeavours to clear the ground for Cartesian natural philosophy by repudiating any theological interest or impact, metaphysics remained an Achilles heel. Douglas shows how Spinoza's brand of Cartesianism posed difficulties for advocates of the separation thesis, not only by giving centre stage to metaphysics but, worse, by drawing metaphysical conclusions that were at best unorthodox and at worst heretical relative to Dutch Reformed theology. As such, the challenge to the Dutch Cartesians was both an intellectual one and one of reputation or respectability; and one to which, Douglas argues, they were reluctant to respond philosophically lest they compromise their goal of marginalising metaphysical questions in order to promote Cartesian method.
Douglas really warms to his theme in the second half of the book. Chapter 4 focuses on Spinoza's extraordinary Tractatus Theologico-Philosophicus (TTP), which directly confronts the Dutch Cartesians’ concessions to the Aristotelians. Douglas shows how, using the principles of Cartesian method, of investigation, certainty and natural light, Spinoza effectively demolished the Dutch Cartesians’ attempts to reassure the traditionalists that their philosophy was outside the domain of theology, arguing that understanding scripture required the same kind of intellectual capacity as understanding nature and that the scriptural content purportedly discoverable only by theology is either accessible to philosophy or else no content at all. Douglas draws out Spinoza's case succinctly from a text whose argumentation is often elliptical or masked by rhetorical diversions and illustrates how the Dutch Cartesians responded to the publication of the TTP, not by defending their separation thesis with philosophical argument but rather by attacking Spinoza as impiously breaching the proper limits of philosophy.
If the TTP had been received as confrontational and impious, Douglas suggests in chapter 5, the Ethics was downright inflammatory: opening with a treatment of God, in clear violation of the separation of philosophy from theology, and moving on to equate God with nature, not on the basis of scriptural or theological sources but on philosophical grounds alone. Especially troubling for the Dutch Cartesians was the risk that, if readers of the Ethics understood Spinoza as building on Descartes’ insights and using his methods, then the separation thesis they had used to defend Cartesianism against charges of impiety was nullified. The conflict with the the Dutch Cartesians thus outlived Spinoza himself, culminating in the publication of Anti-Spinoza by Christoph Wittich who, as a Dutch Cartesian theologian, had an interest in both dimensions of the Spinoza problem. The Anti-Spinoza fittingly sought to refute the content of the Ethics and to demonstrate that, in fact, Spinoza was no Cartesian. Douglas offers a considered and charitable treatment of Wittich's arguments, but demonstrates that, especially in the key themes of methodology and the will/intellect distinction, they miss their mark. He also argues that, like other Dutch Cartesians, Wittich was blocked from a critique of Spinoza's innate idea of God, the most obvious route to discounting the Ethics as a form of Cartesianism, by the very separation thesis that he was determined to defend. And his final coda suggests that this was not merely a speculative problem, or indeed a seventeenth century problem: the Dutch Newtonian empiricists were in no better position than their Cartesian contemporaries to dismiss Spinoza's contention that natural philosophy could not be separated from metaphysics, and those of today's philosophers who seek to step aside from metaphysics face similar problems of inconsistency and limitation.
Douglas therefore presents the reader with Spinoza the philosopher par excellence, the indefatigable and uncompromised searcher after truth. It is a popular picture and, as Douglas has ably demonstrated, it truly reflects Spinoza's philosophical achievement and the rigour of his argumentation. It does not focus on the more multifaceted Spinoza: the Spinoza who wore a ring etched ‘Caute’ on its inner surface, the Spinoza whose Ethics devotes an entire book to the irreducible complexity and provisionality of all human thought. Such considerations would have given us a more nuanced perspective on Spinoza's defence of philosophy; as would an exploration of the stylistic contrast between the painstaking, if not always transparent, logic of the Ethics and the waspishness and humour of the TTP. But in fairness, this is not Douglas's project. Rather, Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism provides the reader with a valuable insight into the specific theological-philosophical debate that divided Spinoza from the Dutch Cartesians, and the philosophical consequences of that debate. In doing so, it illustrates the richness and engagement of Spinoza's philosophy and his commitment to challenging elisions and accommodations, regardless of their convenience or usefulness. As so often with Spinoza, this picture raises further questions: about his own appeals to convenience and usefulness in the face of the limits of his methodology; and about the extent to which his arguments meet their own standards of clarity and consistency. Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism offers a scholarly and compelling account that draws out the significance of a dispute that played an important part in shaping Spinoza's own philosophy, leaving the reader keen to discover more.
