Aristides Baltas' Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses seeks to link Spinoza's Ethics with Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, arguing that both works pursue the same philosophical agenda.

When deciding how to review this book, I realised the job had already been done for me, by Baltas himself, towards the beginning of the book. ‘Unclear claims proliferate’, the book complains of itself,

Rather than explaining that this is not so – that is, why the book meets the minimal standards a reader of a published scholarly work has the right to expect – Baltas instead claims that ‘…this should be expected’. Spinoza's and Wittgenstein's works are ‘difficult texts’. Is this really meant to justify the scholarly failings Baltas is at no pains to hide?

He claims that his work should be viewed in the French tradition of explication de texte. One may have thought that this should impose on it particularly rigorous standards of transparency. But no, again Baltas excuses himself: explication de texte is a ‘complex affair’ when it involves two texts instead of one. He painfully labours the obvious point that any reading of a text will inevitably be subjective and biased. After three gruelling pages of semi-intelligible self-exculpation, he concludes: ‘The evocation of explication seems not to have safeguarded my account but rather kicked the bucket empty’ (21). As a coda to this, he deprecates himself by way of a joke and his own translation of a poem from the Palatine Anthology – in case the pomposity was so far lost on you.

It may seem inappropriate to begin a review with an attack on the author's style. In this case, however, style is the overwhelming feature of the book. The whole work sounds a triumph of intellectual over-elaboration over the desire for communication. Wherever you expect a cryptic expression to be unpacked or the relevance of a gnomic example to be revealed, you are hit instead with a barrage of unhelpful name-dropping. One chapter opens using the terms ‘present at hand’ and ‘ready to hand’ (40). This is not because such terms help to clarify anything at all, rather: ‘I use Heideggerian turns of phrase to suggest that Heidegger is not foreign to the perspective [ascribed here to Spinoza and Wittgenstein].’ (257 fn.1) There follows a reference to the work of Stephen Mulhall, whose only relevance here is that he ‘discusses Heidegger in connection to Wittgenstein.’ This is emblematic of the way in which sources are used throughout the book.

The book's central thesis is that Spinoza and Wittgenstein ultimately defend the same philosophical claim. The claim is that:

I am sorry to say that this is the clearest form in which this thesis is ever expressed. It is meant to describe the philosophical ‘perspective of radical immanence’. Baltas claims that this borrows ‘Spinoza's terminology’, though where does Spinoza ever use the term ‘radical immanence’?

The most sense I can make out of the perspective of radical immanence is to suppose that it amounts to the claim that nothing true, or perhaps nothing meaningful, can be said about the world, thought, or language as wholes, although things can presumably be said about parts of them. I have my doubts that this is the right reading. I wish Baltas had evoked more explication to safeguard this account. But if the above is something like what he means, it is a version of the Liar Paradox. If nothing can be said about the world, thought, and language, as wholes, then it can't be said of the world, thought, and language as wholes that nothing can be said of them. It's just as well that Spinoza and Wittgenstein never made such a claim, nor implied it.

Baltas admits that his central claim has an air of paradox: ‘if the proposition is true, if there can be no position outside the world (and thought and language), then there can be no position from which to issue this proposition – talking, as it does, of the world (and thought and language) from the outside.’ But, he then points out, in order to state the negation of the proposition – i.e., that there can be a position outside the world – one has to take the same position. Thus one ‘assumes the possibility of a position outside the world’. This is ‘begging the question’ (4). Here the attentive reader will be inclined to respond with bafflement, and perhaps irritation. Compare: To refute the claim ‘you cannot speak’ by saying ‘yes I can; I am speaking!’ is to beg the question. After all, saying that assumes your ability to speak.

Baltas then proposes that Wittgenstein and Spinoza have another trick up their sleeves. True, the claim that one cannot take up a position outside the world seems to perform what it denies as possible. You can't make such a claim without taking up a position outside the world. But if you can take up a position outside the world, note that you can now, from that position, make the claim that you can't take up a position outside the world. Thus from a position of transcendence you can argue both for transcendence and for immanence. This entails, apparently, that arguments for transcendence ‘can ultimately have no more validity than the views against which they were originally set [i.e. the perspective of radical immanence]’ (6). Again, compare: In order to assert ‘I am speaking’ you must be in a position from which you can speak. But from the same position you could also assert ‘I cannot speak’. Therefore the first assertion has no more validity than the second.

Things become a little clearer, though not more coherent, when Baltas fleshes out his argument with a digression on the history of science (his original area of expertise). He argues that grammatical restrictions on theoretical terms often make certain possibilities inconceivable, until some scientific discovery renders them conceivable. For example, prior to Einstein's work, it was impossible to conceive of an electromagnetic field. For ‘a wave [was] classically defined as the propagation of a medium's disturbances’ (73), while electromagnetic waves can travel without a medium. Thus what seemed, at one point, as inconceivable as a married bachelor – a wave without a medium – was shown to be in fact conceivable by Einstein's discoveries (or discoveries made in light of Einstein's theories).

This discussion of the shifting reference of theoretical terms leaves much to be desired. Baltas does no justice to this topic, nor to the rich literature on it.Footnote ¹ But what he means his discussion to show is that we can't specify the rules of conceivability independently of scientific discovery. This gives us a slightly better understanding of what his central thesis means. When he says that, according to Spinoza and Wittgenstein, we can't make any pronouncements about thought as a whole, he means, perhaps, that we can never have final knowledge on what is and isn't thinkable. Things can appear unthinkable right up to the moment somebody manages to think them. Likewise we can't have any final knowledge about what the world, as a whole, does and doesn't contain, not even when things seem totally impossible (as a wave without a medium supposedly once did). And again likewise, we can't make general statements about the limits of language: we may set limits on what can be said, but one day some speaker might get beyond those limits in some hitherto undreamt-of way.

Again, I doubt that this is all Baltas means by ‘radical immanence’. But it is enough to focus on, because it is deeply problematic, both as an interpretation of Spinoza and Wittgenstein and in itself. First, both Wittgenstein and Spinoza seem happy to make general, final pronouncements about what the world can contain, what can be thought, and what can be said. Spinoza claims that everything in the world, insofar as it can, strives to persevere in being (Ethics III.P6) – things which don't do this cannot be in the world. He also makes pronouncements about what can't be thought, for example that nothing can be conceived without God (I.P15). Wittgenstein makes similar such general statements, for example he makes the final claim about language that ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly’ (obviously a statement of no interest to Baltas).

Moreover, the position itself is untenable. Baltas' claim that judgments of conceivability (indeed, he thinks, the very facts of conceivability) can be revised in the face of new discoveries is reminiscent of Quine's claim that even logical truths can be revised in light of new observations.Footnote ² Perhaps this is why Baltas associates the perspective of radical immanence with ‘naturalism’ of what appears to be a Quinean variety (33, 138). But the major problem for Quine is that the very activity of revising one's beliefs in light of new observations presupposes certain logical truths – the Law of Non-contradiction, for instance.Footnote ³

And it is still true that the statement that nothing can be said of the world, thought, and language as wholes is a statement of the very kind it proposes to rule out. The central thesis Baltas projects onto Wittgenstein and Spinoza is blatantly refuted each time he states it. To deal with this problem, he repeatedly invokes Wittgenstein's image – the statement is like a ladder that must be kicked aside once one has climbed up to apprehend its truth (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.54). But if you can't say something then you can't say it. You can't tell us what it is that you're saying, for now, but only so that we can come to see that you didn't really say it (because you couldn't) and thereby kick it away like a ladder. Wittgenstein courts paradox when he proposes that the statements in the TLP ultimately reveal themselves to be senseless. But this perhaps falls short of genuine paradox; it depends on whether one can believe that the senseless statements in question might be somehow capable of showing a truth even without stating anything meaningful. Baltas, by contrast, goes past paradox and into open sophistry when he asks us to entertain a proposition that entails that it could not have been thought, said, or written at all.

There is probably an interesting point to be made about the difference between assertions made of things in the world, thought, or language, and assertions made of them as wholes. R.G. Collingwood has an interesting take on this distinction in his essay ‘Faith and Reason’. I recommend that essay.Footnote ⁴ I don't recommend Baltas' book. You won't find in it any interesting new perspective on the logical issues it raises, besides a few new variations on old fallacies. You won't learn much about Spinoza's or Wittgenstein's philosophy (on my own moderate authority I'm inclined to assert that Spinoza's philosophy has nothing to do with Baltas' ‘perspective of radical immanence’). Your time would be better spent reading the sources it discusses. It might even be better spent actually peeling potatoes or grinding lenses. Just don't kick the bucket empty. Whatever that means. Whatever any of it means.