Verschenen in: Filip Buekens (ed.), Wisdom and Academic Education.

Tilburg, Univ van

Tilburg, 2006, 76-82.

Spinoza, wisdom and academic education

Herman De Dijn
K.U.Leuven
1.

Spinozas conception of wisdom

Spinoza holds a very peculiar, radically Western conception of wisdom since he argues
that a prerequisite of wisdom is active participation in the new, Copernican or Galileian
way of scientific thinking and in the modern way of philosophizing intrinsically related to
it.

The title of Spinozas major work, Ethica more geometrico demonstrata, perfectly
describes his aim. This is a radical reconsideration of the central question in human life
what is the good life? in the light of the Copernican revolution in science and
philosophy, and of the new scientific way of thinking (mos geometricus).1
This
reconsideration required a revolution in the semantics of age-old concepts (God, man,
freedom, immortality) and in the understanding of certain practices like theology, ethics
and wisdom.

But first, what did the Copernican and Galileian revolution in scientific thinking mean to
Spinoza? As Hans Blumenberg has put it,2 to engage in scientific thinking means
surrendering to a radical curiosity in the service of a pure desire to know. It is a desire
to know purified of all anthropomorphism, i.e. guided by the paradigm of geometry. It
involves suspending the ordinary desire that things be the way we would like them to be
(wishful thinking), discarding taboos and going beyond fear and hope. In short, it entails
radical free thinking.
According to Spinoza3, the results of this Copernican revolution are the following:
(1) Nature is totally unlike our spontaneous anthropomorphic vision of it;
(2) God is Nature, not a Superman, king or lawlord;
(3) Man is not the centre of things, but rather just part of nature;
(4) Notions like free will or purpose in nature (teleology) are illusory.
Spinozas interpretation of the Copernican revolution was much more radical than that of
Descartes and even Hobbes. Hence, there are compelling reasons to speak here of
radical enlightenment. In contrast, Descartes attempts to vindicate the traditional views
on God, man and immortality, while Hobbes still sees man as having special natural
rights and obligations vis--vis God, even in the state of nature.

The anti-anthropomorphism in thinking resulted in a radically anti-anthropocentric vision

of things.4 Man is not the centre of creation, man is not wanted, either collectively or
individually: we are just one of the endlessly diverse forms of Nature. Pascal was right:
this vision is frightening, so frightening and disenchanting that he saw only one solution,
faith (in the Pascalian and Kierkegaardian sense). Yet, paradoxically, for Spinoza (as for
Hume) this disenchanting vision was accompanied by the delight of knowing what we

really are. Furthermore, this free thinking was incompatible with belonging to a church
and with occupying an academic position; for this reason, Spinoza refused the post in
Heidelberg offered to him by Fabritius5.

Notwithstanding this radically enlightened position, Spinozas thought does not involve a
rejection of ordinary, institutionalised religion. (Here one might note the resemblance to
Durkheim for whom religion was also, socially speaking, inevitable.) Rather, he sees
religion as a social force that has to be properly channelled for political purposes.

The scientific and theoretical spirit is compatible with a kind of non-theistic religiosity, a
kind of wisdom. This wisdom is obtained in a process in which an anti-anthropocentric,
disenchanting vision of things leads to a strange kind of enchantment via the delight
experienced in scientific and theoretical knowing. This is a new version of consolatio
philosophiae. To be brief, we will attempt clarification of this paradox not through
quotations from Spinoza or scientific philosophers, but through the words of the scientist
and poet Leo Vroman. His poem, Begrip (Understanding) 6 shows how scientific insight
can be combined with an experience of wonder and love of Nature, a kind of religious
experience in the Spinozistic sense.

BEGRIP

Als ik de grens aanraak van mijn vermogen

worden mijn zolen even grondig plat
kriebelt er iets boven mijn ellebogen
en begrijp ik: nu begrijp ik wat.

Dan krijg ik wel eens tranen in mijn ogen

niet van het begrepene maar doordat
ik merk hoe kinderachtig opgetogen
ik weer ben met wat ik nooit bezat.

Lieve natuur door de natuur bedrogen

omhels ik de natuur en blijf ik pogen
in haar te baden die ik al aanbad

UNDERSTANDING

When I touch upon the limits of my powers

Suddenly my soles are flattened drastically
I feel an itch above my elbows

And I understand: now I understand something.

At times tears then spring into my eyes,

Not because of what I understand but because
I realise how childishly excited
I am again by what I never possessed.

Beloved nature deceived by nature

I embrace nature and continue my attempts
To lose myself in her whom I have worshipped all along.7

The scientist here sees his own activity and his own emotions as a part of nature, a part
in which nature attains a paradoxical self-reflection. This self-reflection indulges in the
joy of understanding but at the same time recognises itself as inevitably somewhat
illusory: are not even his knowledge and his joy after all but a product of natures
mechanisms operating behind his back? Yet, through this recognition the scientist comes
to a tender acceptance of himself (beloved nature) and a love for that of which he is a
part (I embrace nature). Insight into an initially harsh truth (I am only this) combines
with the joyful experience of ones own activity of understanding and leads to tender
feelings for oneself and a love for that which makes everything possible, including these
paradoxical experiences.

2.

Wisdom and academic education

If this is Spinozistic wisdom, what can we learn from it for academic education, assuming
that academic education is the kind of context in which young people become acquainted
with and learn to participate in science?

First, of course, there is the importance of acquiring a certain spirit, one could even say
a spirituality, of scientific activity: one experiences a sort of forgetting of oneself in the
desire to know and this brings with it, as a by-product, a special kind of delight. Doing
research in this spirit is diametrically opposed to desiring knowledge in function of
something else, such as wealth or power. It is diametrically opposed to the merely
functional and utilitarian use of scientific knowledge.

Bertrand Russell talks at some point of a radical shift in modern mans attitude towards
nature from the gentlemanlike pursuit of knowledge for its own sake to a
predominantly pragmatic attitude. The victory of pragmatism, he said, is greatest in
those countries where science is most advanced. The question is if, in the end, this is
not to the detriment of science and of the scientific spirit as scientists become slaves of
research projects geared towards technical mastery.8

Universities are more and more being turned into markets where young people can make
their consumer choices and obtain certain competences, skills and diplomas, and where

highly specialised jobs and positions are distributed in a competition in which research,
projects and publications are calculated in order to decide who wins or moves up the
hierarchy. This means that research is done pragmatically, in function of obtaining the
job, rather than the job giving space for research as an end in itself.

Second, it is vitally important to transcend received and preconceived ideas, and to

overcome wishful thinking. In this respect, we are confronted today with a real paradox.
Disenchanted insights based on Spinozistic or Darwinian naturalistic ideas are now so
widely accepted they have become like a new creed. Phrases such as its all in the
genes have become almost commonplace, repeated everywhere from laboratories to
supermarket queues. Surely something is amiss here? Have people come to accept the
unacceptable and disenchanting visions that so frightened the contemporaries of Spinoza
and Darwin? Can all of us now really face the truth that God is dead and that we are just
complicated machines or organisms sooner or later destined to disappear without a
trace? Or are these ideas giving us precisely what we want to hear: we can really do
what we like, we are no longer responsible for anything. To paraphrase Spinoza: the
idea of free will and responsibility may be scientifically or even philosophically misguided,
but advocating irresponsibility or acting irresponsibly is inhuman or subhuman.

Third, for Spinoza there is a possible link between science and wisdom, or - as some
would call it - religiosity or mysticism. Is this peculiar form of wisdom still attainable
today?
However, the link Spinoza made should not be confused with a certain
contemporary position, a form of holistic thinking: that science itself will discover and
reinvigorate religious meanings. Again, this would be to subordinate the scientific
endeavour to the quest for meaning.

What Spinoza meant by the link is that scientific activity and insight can, in the right
context, produce side-effects of a religious nature: this is the love of Nature felt by the
scientist as expressed by Spinoza and Vroman. Of course, for this to happen a total
engagement in science for its own sake is required. There seems to be hardly any room
for this today due to the prevailing pragmatic attitude towards science in present-day
academia, but that does not mean that it is totally unattainable. Indeed, Russell and
Einstein, both university professors, not only agreed with Spinozas general antianthropocentric philosophical outlook, but also accepted the possibility of a kind of
Spinozistic mysticism or religiosity that presupposed a whole-hearted engagement in
scientific activity for its own sake.9

Notes
1

For further information on this notion, and on Spinozas philosophy in general, see: Herman De Dijn, Spinoza.
The Way to Wisdom, West-Lafayette (Ill.), Purdue University Press, 1996.
2
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (transl. R.M. Wallace), Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press,
1983.
3
See the appendix of Spinoza, Ethica, Book I.
4
See also: Herman De Dijn, Knowledge, Anthropocentrism and Salvation, in Gideon Segal & Yirmiyahu
Yovel (eds.), Spinoza (The International Library of Critical Essays in the History of Philosophy), Darmouth,
Ashgate, 2002, p. 341-355.

See Spinozas letter to Fabritius in Spinoza, Briefwisseling (vertaald & uitgegeven door F. Akkerman, H.G.
Hubbeling, A.G. Westerbrink), Amsterdam, Wereldbibliotheek, 1977 (Brief 48, p. 301-2).
6
Leo Vroman, Dierbare Ondeelbaarheid. Gedichten, Amsterdam, Querido, 1989, p. 24.
7
Translation by Chris Emery; see: Herman De Dijn, Comfort without Hope. The Topicality and Relevance of
Spinoza in The Low Countries (Stichting Ons Erfdeel) 13 (2005), p. 287.
8
Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, London, Unwin Paperbacks, 1976 (reprint 1952), p. 91.
9
See Herman De Dijn, Einstein and Spinoza in D.A. Boileau & J.A. Dick (eds.), Tradition and Renewal.
Philosophical Essays Commemorating the Centennial of Louvains Institute of Philosophy, Leuven, Leuven
University Press, 1992, p. 1-13.