Abstract
How can society survive self-destruction and promote sustainable development? The volume under review articulates the belief that both Baruch Spinoza and Johann Gottfried Herder offer insights that can help humanity avoid the exclusive dualisms that can lead to violence. Mack’s wide-ranging work is hard to summarize in a few paragraphs, but hopefully this review will give a flavour of its thought. After an introduction, outlining what is termed Spinoza’s ‘alternative modernity,’ Mack devotes two chapters to Spinoza, four chapters to Herder, and one each to Goethe and George Eliot, before rounding off the volume with a conclusion on Freud. There is a full index of subjects and personal names, but unfortunately no bibliography.
The author is Reader in Medical Humanities and English Literature at Durham University. Like the author’s interdisciplinary job title, this volume reflects a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding modern European culture, drawing especially on philosophy and theology, German literature, and Jewish studies. The ideas of modernity are traced from Spinoza, Herder, Goethe, and George Eliot to Kant, Darwin, and Freud, although Karl Marx is mentioned in just two paragraphs (p. 3.) Some of the thought presented here develops Mack’s earlier work, German Idealism and the Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Many extracts from Herder’s German writings are translated into English by Mack himself.
The book indicates several ways in which western culture has been haunted by the ghost of Spinoza. While his influence has perhaps been strongest in Germany, it has also been felt in other European lands. For example, George Eliot translated Spinoza’s Ethics into English, and her final novel Daniel Deronda describes a Jewish character, Mordecai, as being ‘like Spinoza.’
In Mack’s view, Spinoza has been a ‘major inspiration of visions of modernity that are nonexclusive—or, in other words non-ideological—and non-hierarchical’ (p. 4). At the outset Mack notes how Spinoza’s legacy highlights the self-destructive nature of ‘triumphal declarations of moral, epistemological, military and religious superiority of one societal formation over the one which functions as its “enemy”’ (p. 5). Indeed, he regards Spinoza’s rational inquiry as concerned with the avoidance of violence. It would be interesting for him to bring Spinoza’s thought into further dialogue with recent discussions of violence and victimization, including the works of René Girard (who is mentioned in one paragraph on p. 160).
Mack observes how Spinoza develops rationalist insights from Descartes, but without the sharp Cartesian dualism between mind and body. Spinoza criticizes the self-adulation of humanity as the pinnacle of creation, as well as the human tendency to forget limitations in the pursuit of goals. Drawing on Spinoza’s critique of theological teleology, Herder’s historiography finds no single manifest goal of history. In different ways, both Spinoza and Herder advocate rational study of the Bible as human literature, aside from dogmatic considerations.
Pointing out how Herder’s universalism overcomes narrow rationalism, Mack traces a contrast with Kant, whose 1775 essay (‘Of the Different Human Races’) can be regarded as the first attempt to justify racism on scientific grounds. Mack states that for Herder, ‘a single absolute conception of human nature does violence to human diversity’ (p. 125). In contrast, Kant’s view of a philosophical purpose to human history is basically a theological teleology. Mack argues that Kant’s highlighting of reason leads to a devaluation of races considered (by western standards) as lacking full rational or cultural development.
After claiming that ‘Goethe was the Spinoza of poetry,’ Mack suggests: ‘The whole of Goethe’s poetry is animated by the same spirit that is wafted towards us from the writings of Spinoza’ (p. 139). Drawing on the analysis of Franz Rosenzweig, Mack explores Goethe’s non-dogmatic presentation of evil in his tragedy Faust, as well as his non-dogmatic depiction of the non-civilized in his drama Iphigenia on Tauris. He indicates how Goethe was influenced by Herder’s Spinozist philosophy of universal love, viewed as overcoming the divisiveness of religious convictions. Both Spinoza and Goethe envisage Jesus as an unorthodox thinker without a church or a set of doctrines.
In his conclusion, Mack shows how, following Spinoza’s scientific approach, Herder decentres cultural history by situating it within the life of the natural world and the cosmos. Whereas ‘Kant is the true architect of a modernity that subjugates nature to the autonomous will of human rationality’ (p. 194), ‘Freud undermines the Kantian notion of autonomy as mastering one’s own house and world’ (p. 195). Mack observes that Spinoza and Freud were doubly outsiders—members of the Jewish community yet rejected by their own religious authorities. Mack concludes by noting that ‘Freud’s psychoanalysis radicalizes Spinoza’s demand to be mindful of the mind’ (p. 216).
In this volume, peppered with quotations from primary sources (in English translation), Mack abundantly succeeds in demonstrating Spinoza’s influence on philosophers from Herder to Žižek, on literary figures from Goethe to George Eliot, and on scientists from Darwin to Freud. He also engages with contemporary issues, such as how human beings can overcome self-destructive behaviours and live sustainably as a universal community. This rich and thought-provoking book offers both assertions that will stir discussion and insights that will stimulate reflection.