For some reason, today, I found my mind continuously returning to the epigraph of Deleuze’s charming little book Spinoza: A Practical Philosophy. There Deleuze draws a passage from Malamud’s text, The Fixer.
“Let me ask you what brought you to Spinoza? Is it that he was a Jew?”
“No, your honor. I didn’t know who or what he was when I first came across the book– they don’t exactly love hi9m in the synagogue, if you’ve read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn’t understand every word but when you’re dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch’es ride. After that I wasn’t the same man…”
“Would you mind explaining what you think Spinoza’s work means? IN other words if it’s a philosophy what does it state?”
“That’s not so easy to say… The book means different things according to the subject of the chapters, though it’s all united underneath. But what I think it means is that he was out to make a free man of himself– as much as one can according to his philosophy, if you understand my meaning –by thinking things through and connecting everything up, if you’ll go along with that, your honor.”
“That isn’t a bad approach, through the man rather than the work. But…”
I’m feeling rather despondant today, a bit dim. Perhaps I’m suffering from post-traumatic interview syndrome, or maybe it’s everything going on with the book. Occasionally I feel as if I go through these periods where I become all but autistic; where I lose my will to speak with anyone or think at all. Yet nonetheless I found that I couldn’t shake this passage from my mind, even though it’s been so long since I read the book. Similarly, when I returned home from the office I found myself delving back into Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, a book that I’ve kept beside my bed for many years and that I read when I wake up in the middle of the night.
Perhaps this passage and the desire to read Lucretius emerges from the fact that we’re beginning Descartes’ Meditations in my intro classes, that shining point of light emerging from darkness. Somewhere Lacan remarks that the style makes the man, and I’m always struck by the manner in which the Meditations read like a personal journal or stream of consciousness, like a novel. Just as the style of Plato’s works themselves make a substantial philosophical point– that questions of philosophy are questions of intersubjectivity –it seems to me that Descartes’ writing style is a declaration of his freedom, his independence, that he will no longer submit himself to the authority of the church fathers and Aristotle, where arguments are won through citation, and where kings and priests rule on the basis of unconditional authority. Once again, one can be hostile to Descartes’ Meditations seeing him responsible for all manner of things, but in the method of radical doubt itself, there’s something of tremendous value as a break from citation, authority, priests.
As I mentioned in a previous post, Plato’s question is always “who is the good shepard, who is fit to rule?” and his answer is always the same– those who have wisdom. In this connection he staunchly opposes, like Lucretius, ungrounded superstition and religious thought (today we would refer to it as ideology… we have our own cave walls), and holds that we must submit those who claim to be good shepards to the test or gauntlent of their wisdom. They should be able to demonstrate their knowledge in order to demonstrate that they are fit to lead in religious, ethical, and political matters. Just read The Statesman or The Republic. It’s easy to disagree with Plato’s politics and metaphysic, but not his sentiment. The paradox, of course, is that once the would-be statesman demonstrates to me that he has the knowledge or wisdom that would make him fit to rule, we no longer need him as he has now given us this knowledge and we are now capable of self-direction and self-governance. Plato and Socrates are sly this way. It is a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation: If you cannot demonstrate that you have knowledge then you are unfit to rule and we should shut our ears to your words. If you can demonstrate that you have knowledge or wisdom, then you are fit to rule, but we no longer need you because in demonstrating your wisdom you give us your wisdom.
Socrates and Plato, perhaps without realizing it, will free men and women… Men and women that would direct themselves. Their clarion call is the call to an end to all authority– To all parents, teachers, priests, kings, pundits, and obfuscatory sacred texts, so that men and women might direct themselves through the light of their own faculties. This, it seems to me, is the essence of the philosophical endeavor: The creation of free men and women. Men and women free from the bonds of charismatic and manipulative authorities. Men and women free of the fears and anxieties borne of superstition, obfuscating religion, and deceptive ideology. Men and women that direct themselves, that are their own legislators after the fashion described by Kant in his magnificent “What Is Enlightenment?”. Men and women who have become active, and are not the passive agents of their desires (hence the interest and importance of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, biology, anthropology, and sociology). Men and women who are able to overcome their material conditions and the forces of capital that perpetually place them at a disadvantage (I live in a “right to work” state, which means a “right to be arrested if you go on strike because you’re being taken advantage of by those who have the money”). It seems to me that this project must be perpetually renewed. That we must forever resist falling into defeatest skepticism. That we must forever resist the temptations of crypto-theology. What does it mean to both become free and to create free men and women today? How is it possible to renew such a project today and escape the sad forces that trouble our souls?
Larval Subjects . 
February 22, 2007 at 9:24 am
I am struck by your equation of freedom to mastery implicit throughout this. It fills me with sad passions. Also your allegiance to the Enlightenment is, to my mind, a bit misplaced. The Enlightenment was not an event, it was the stratification (and now a historical fetish object) of a myriad of rebellions, the spirit of which was crushed qua Enlightenment. We all want God dead, which is fine, but it seems we were willing to let nature go with God as collateral damage. Sorry, I’ve been reading Schelling of late.
We’ll never agree on this though and it really does come down to a decision in the end. I do hope you feel better soon, I often feel the same way. The University here in Nottingham is situated on the top of a hill overlooking the surrounding city and countryside. In the room I do most of my work I can look out at night (which used to begin at 3:00pm) and the sight had the ability to make me nostalgic for all my past (Paris, Chicago, that dinky corn town I grew up in) but also for the present. A strange feeling, not quite autistic, but very unsettling in that it really is a separation from my immediate life.
February 22, 2007 at 10:10 am
heads up dr. sinthome! how can anyone refuse a sexy kitten like you? And if they do, it’s THEIR LOSS. I believe in spinoza’s message of freedom.And you, with your work, help people to be free.
February 22, 2007 at 10:40 am
It strange, the different things that strike people about a post: you were struck by the equation of freedom with mastery; I was struck by the equation of freedom with the fundamental repudiation of the authority of others – which, as I see it expressed here, is understood as a self-reflexive process that would necessarily also involve a repudiation of one’s own authority over others… ;-P
Let’s say you’re right about the historical Enlightenment, APS (although there’s a certain tension in asserting in one paragraph such a confident historical verdict, and then saying in the next “it really does come down to a decision in the end” ;-P): what does this mean for Sinthome’s call for a renewal of a project of Enlightenment, in the way in which that project seems to be defined here? Sinthome cites an ideal:
The creation of free men and women. Men and women free from the bonds of charismatic and manipulative authorities. Men and women free of the fears and anxieties borne of superstition, obfuscating religion, and deceptive ideology. Men and women that direct themselves, that are their own legislators after the fashion described by Kant in his magnificent “What Is Enlightenment?”. Men and women who have become active, and are not the passive agents of their desires
It’s clear from Sinthome’s references above to a much longer history – from the notion that the critical ideals or even the style of thought of one generation can point, even unwittingly and unwillingly, to ideals that are potent and meaningful to us – that Sinthome isn’t calling in any simple way for some kind of romantic revivification of the past. What’s at stake here is more a Benjaminian heliotrophism – a critical reinterpretation of history to sensitise us to the potential of a project in the present, which can meaningfully understand itself as action that seizes on potentials that have already been constituted in historical time…
It seems to me that a critique of this kind of position, if one were to make it, would need to be formulated with reference to an analysis of present potentials, rather than by pointing to past failures… But I’m conscious that I’m replying to a comment in which you explicitly flagged that you were not trying to make a complete argument, and I’m not trying to draw you into doing so… I was just struck by our different reactions to the post.
February 22, 2007 at 11:56 pm
N.P.,
Rather quickly – the bit about decision comes down to the fact that the Enlightenment is a plural event. I don’t consider myself an Enlightenment thinker or in the spirit or whatever, but obviously there are reall positive things that came from the Enlightenment and so I would never want to simply be a reactionary against it. So we decide which tendency we are going to call the Enlightenment and that is a kind of salto mortale.
Well of course the Enlightenment is not one thing (nothing ever is). Indeed, this is why the Enlightenment ideal gives us both freedom and control. Freedom comes through control. Taking the paragraph you cite as Sinthome’s ideal, though, we see control all over the place.
“The creation of free men and women.” No control here, but certianly universal inclusion.
“Men and women free from the bonds of charismatic and manipulative authorities.” A somewhat banal point but this would mean that the charismatic and manipulative authorities have to be controlled, for aren’t the unfree men and women bonded? And will the charismatic and manipulative authorities be put in bondage?
I could continue but what I’m saying is nothing new, I’m sure you’ve heard it before.
February 23, 2007 at 5:06 am
I’ll have to apologise for being a bit tired at the moment – just wanted to post a quick gesture, which I probably wouldn’t be able to develop well, even if I were more awake :-) You use the vocabulary of bondage – a vision of a specific kind of power, which may be wielded by one group or another in a sort of zero-sum game, but without the potential for the nature of power itself to be transformed. Sinthome’s post, to me, suggested something potentially more closely related to a normative ideal for the legitimacy of power: that the person who would claim it, should be able to demonstrate the wisdom that justifies the claim. In Sinthome’s account, this is a self-undermining proposition: the act of the assertion of power inherently undermines the legitimacy of its assertion in that exclusive form…
Hegel comes at something similar, I think (since you invokve the vocabulary of bondage) in suggesting ideals for mutual recognition as the transcendence of the lord-bondsman relationship – but I’m too tired to develop this point, which I’ve discussed at rough theory recently in any event…
I don’t want to push the discussion in too utopian a direction – but I do think it flattens our sense of potentials a bit to conceptualise power as something that must be held by a group – and must therefore be exercised in the form of domination over others. Other metaphors are possible. I took Sinthome to be asking, in part, what some of those metaphors might be…
But I must apologise for the lack of clarity and development on my end here, and I don’t want to distort Sinthome’s post with my awkward associations from it – it’s the wrong time of the academic term for me to be doing any serious thinking :-) Thanks for taking the time to elaborate on your original comment.
February 23, 2007 at 8:30 am
Yeah, I hear you.
I am struck by how different sithome and myself are. Obviously I respect him, so pointing out this difference shouldn’t be misunderstood as a sign of aggression. Actually, because when I post on these kinds of issues it usually doesn’t go well, I had banned myself from doing so. I think I was really tired when I read this and had a weak moment. I personally don’t want to argue about this.