Other Writing
Before I met Rebecca Goldstein, I worried she might be snooty. She looks glamorous and brainy in author photos, with long blond hair and an austere expression. She’s an adept in physics and mathematics with a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton. She has won acclaim for her highbrow fiction and quasi-fiction, including The Mind-Body Problem: A Novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Plato at the Googleplex and biographies of Spinoza and Gödel, two of history’s knottiest thinkers. She’s spoken at Davos, given a TED talk, won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. In 2015, Barack Obama gave her the National Humanities Medal in a ceremony at the White House. Come on, the woman is entitled to be snooty.
Then I met Goldstein in the fall of 2015 at “The Weirdness of Consciousness,” an event at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Robert Wright, a journalist and friend, organized “Weirdness.” He loves to dwell on how “weird” consciousness is, hence the title. The announcement stated: “Science can explain the body, but can it explain the mind? The failure of scientists and philosophers to reach a consensus explanation of consciousness has led to a revival of interest in theories once widely dismissed, such as panpsychism.”
Wright chatted with David “the hard problem” Chalmers and Goldstein. She didn’t try to dazzle us with eloquence and erudition, although she was in fact eloquent and erudite. She seemed—no, she was—fascinated by the hard problem, panpsychism and the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. She was eager to hear what Chalmers and Wright had to say and to share her thoughts with them and the audience. The ideas mattered.
The tradition of Jewish nonbelief is as rich, powerful, and distinctive as that of faith.
I don’t think I have to name the tune humming beneath my title. Even if you are, like me, a Jewish atheist, you’ve probably attended a seder recently.
That the ghost of the seder’s Four Questions haunts my title encapsulates the paradox I’d like to explore. It’s the paradox embodied in those I’d call — and, more important, in those who would call themselves — Jewish atheists. The paradox begins with giving both words equal importance, making it more an exclusive term than an inclusive one: Not all non-believing Jews qualify as Jewish atheists in my sense.
To narrow the class down even further, here are Four Questions, sung accordingly:
- While other atheists don’t identify themselves with their birth religion, why does a Jewish atheist continue to actively identify as Jewish?
- While other atheists don’t necessarily highlight ethics, why are ethics of such central concern to a Jewish atheist?
- While other atheists don’t necessarily emphasize the primacy of reason in human endeavor, why does a Jewish atheist see reason as redemptive?
- While other atheists may be indifferent to the flourishing of those who share their birth religion, why does the well-being of Jews remain of paramount concern to the Jewish atheist?
These questions indicate a type of atheist with a pronounced ethical sensibility, committed to a reasoned moral universalism that would eliminate all boundaries between peoples, and yet who is acutely responsive to the particularism that goes by the name of “Jewish identity.” Jewishness matters to such atheists, in a way not logically entailed by — perhaps not even entirely reconcilable with — robust universalism, despite their abiding faith in the redemptive value of reason. The tension of quasi-paradox lives within the Jewish atheist, and tensions are known to inspire creative resolutions.
Though all fields of inquiry have to struggle with their own unwelcome truths regarding unknowability, philosophy’s relationship with unknowability is special. But philosophy’s woes regarding unknowability are all of our woes, since what philosophy reveals as unknowable are pivotal presumptions that are implicated in the general conceptual framework we all presume in pursuing our lives with some minimum degree of coherence. When philosophical reflection reveals that we are not entitled to these presumptions, then our entire grip on coherence seems to loosen. Unknowability then seems not to be localized within some highly specialized field but rather to engulf us globally.
How does a citizen respond when a democracy that prides itself on being exceptional betrays its highest principles? Plato despaired, but he also pointed the way to renewal.
What happens when a society, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to backslide into intolerance and irrationality—with the complicity of many of its own citizens? How should that society’s stunned and disoriented members respond? Do they engage in kind, resist, withdraw, even depart? It’s a dilemma as old as democracy itself.
Twenty-four centuries ago, Athens was upended by the outcome of a vote that is worth revisiting today. A war-weary citizenry, raised on democratic exceptionalism but disillusioned by its leaders, wanted to feel great again—a recipe for unease and raw vindictiveness, then as now. The populace had no strongman to turn to, ready with promises that the polis would soon be winning, winning like never before. But hanging around the agora, volubly engaging residents of every rank, was someone to turn on: Socrates, whose provocative questioning of the city-state’s sense of moral superiority no longer seemed as entertaining as it had in more secure times. Athenians were in no mood to have their views shaken up. They had lost patience with the lively, discomfiting debates sparked by the old man. In 399 b.c., accused of impiety and corrupting the young, Socrates stood trial before a jury of his peers—one of the great pillars of Athenian democracy. That spring day, the 501 citizen-jurors did not do the institution proud. More of them voted that Socrates should die than voted him guilty in the first place.
This chapter focuses on literary artists—that is, novelists, poets, and playwrights—who have shown fascination with Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy. The fictionalization of Spinoza’s life begins during the Enlightenment period and continues until today.
The multifaceted literary attraction to Spinoza becomes only more remarkable when one considers how little it was reciprocated. For all the attention that literary artists have paid to Spinoza, he appears to have accorded little thought to the arts. This chapter first examines why Spinoza has paid little attention to the arts before turning to literary figures who have made Spinoza the central character of their work, including Gotthold Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Heinrich Heine, Matthew Arnold, Herman Melville, George Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, Zbigniew Herbert, Eugene Ostashevsky, Goce Smilevski, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It concludes by discussing how compatible literary Spinoza is with philosophical Spinoza.
Spinoza believed that there was only one substance in reality, which he called “God or nature.” A number of leading contemporary philosophers have defended monism, this strange and beautiful idea that the cosmos is the source of all being. This book explores both the historical roots of the monism in Spinoza, and its flowering in the 21st century.
Goff, Philip (ed.) (2011). Spinoza on Monism. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan.