Parens, Joshua. Maimonides and Spinoza: Their Conflicting Views of Human Nature, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2012, 240 pp.
Joshua Parens begins his Maimonides and Spinoza by indicating that “[s]ince the 1960s, it
has become commonplace to argue that Maimonides, not Spinoza, fired one of the
first salvos in modernity or our modern secular world,” a view popularized by Harry
A. Wolfson, Shlomo Pines, and Warren Zev Harvey. However, this was not always the
case, as Maimonides had long been treated as “a great defender of Judaism,” and
Spinoza as “one of its great opponents.” Parens suggests that not only is this
latter characterization more accurate, but that returning to this long held position
reveals a great deal more. Indeed, it shows the “distance [of Maimonides] from
our own world and viewpoint, which has been so deeply shaped by the thought of
Spinoza” (1).
As the subtitle—Their Conflicting Views on Human Nature—indicates, the focal point
of the text centers on the conceptions of human nature in Maimonides and
Spinoza, and how those concepts open onto entirely different worlds. Parens
brings this to light throughout six chapters that highlight different sets of
tensions between the two thinkers: “Desire (Shahwa)
and Spiritedness (Ghadab) vs. Conatus,” “Veneration vs. Equality,”
“Forms vs. Laws of Nature,” ”Freedom vs. Determinism,” “Teleology vs. Imagined Ideal,”
and “Prudence vs. Imagination.” Each chapter advances its own argument, but
incorporates insights from the previous, giving the text a sense of
ever-expanding scope. Maimonides and Spinoza, for Parens, are two figures that
foreground his wider preoccupation with the relationship between premodern and
modern thought. Although he does not use the term, he seems to show that the divide
between Maimonides and Spinoza is illustrative of a key ‘epistemic break’
between premodern and modern worldviews.
That break can be understood by focusing on a
major methodological difference between premodern and modern philosophy. While
premodern thinkers generally emphasize a distinction between theoretical and
practical sciences, modern thinkers blur the distinction in favor of “universal
method” (20n6, 100). For instance, argues Parens, “Aristotle often warns his
readers not to expect the sciences to be undertaken in the same manner or
according to the same method, or to be capable of achieving the same position”
(20). Contrastly, modern philosophers—especially the early moderns—display a
strong tendency toward building philosophical systems. René Descartes’s The World, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, etc., are good examples of this attempt to
develop a so-called ‘theory of everything.’ In this respect, Maimonides shares
far more in common with premodern than modern thinkers: “Like Aristotle, Maimonides
places a premium on the differences between the sciences, as dictated by the
difference in character of their various objects of inquiry” (20). Spinoza’s
philosophy, however, epitomizes universal method; the Ethics, Parens claims, is the first text to place physics,
metaphysics, and ethics “under one roof” (100, 20). The worldviews implied by
these methods are, respectively, a premodern sense of the “ineliminable
multiplicity of being” as opposed to the modern sense of being as a “system”
(100).
In this review, I would like to focus on
Parens’ characterization of this epistemic break according to his reliance on a
lesser-known article by Richard Kennington from 1980, “Analytic and Synthetic Method
in Spinoza’s Ethics.” Parens
admittedly relies upon the text a great deal, and he dedicates the Appendix of Maimonides and Spinoza—entitled “Richard
Kennington’s Spinoza and Esotericism in Spinoza’s Thought” (193–212)—to
Kennington’s interpretation. It is an interpretation that vastly re-conceives
Spinoza’s methodology and, consequently, his relationship to modern thought.
For this reason, this review will focus predominantly on Parens’ treatment of Spinoza
[1].
