What can I say, I'm always thinking about Spinoza and philosophy in general. 🤷
I was watching the wonderful TV drama Gentleman Jack 🎩🏳️🌈 last Sunday (BBC 1, Series 2 episode 7, still available to watch on demand here) and was fascinated by the way Anne Lister (1791-1840, a highly educated woman and 'out' lesbian living in Jane Austen's era) explained Euclid to a class of children. It made me think - do some Spinozists assume Spinoza shares Euclid's approach to God and mathematics, simply because he made use of Euclid's geometric explanation in his Ethics? 🤔
A few times I've heard philosophers (Spinozists and non-Spinozists) maintain that everything in the world is not, and should not, be reducible to maths. I've never been sure why this was of such great concern to them. So what if it was reducible to maths? Once, over a philosophy society dinner back in 2016, in answer to a question thrown out to everyone around the table: what would the description of everything in the world look like? one said it would be an impossibly long written description, I interjected that the explanation of everything could perhaps be all reduced to an equation. I wasn't thinking of Spinoza or Euclid at the time because it was in the context of contemporary philosophy, it just came to mind. 🙂 💭
However, while watching Anne Lister, it struck me: Do some Spinozists, or even philosophers in general, think that, through his use of Euclid's geometry, Spinoza is suggesting that the world / creation has been created through God's mathematical thoughts, via the laws of nature? Does this trigger some religious reaction in some philosophers? Although I haven't quite figured out yet why this should religiously bother them.
Here's Anne Lister's summary of Euclid's approach and a brief example of his mathematics:
If the two interior angles are less than right angles then these two straight lines will meet at a point if you go far enough.
Then a child asks her why this is important and why this relevant to the Sunday school they were attending. Lister's answer was:
Euclid deduced everything ie. his propositions and theorems from just 5 axioms / postulates. The Laws of Nature are the mathematical thoughts of God and God created the world as well as everything in it, such as leaves, trees, birds and so on. Hence, maths is the basis of everything in creation.
Anne Lister agrees with Euclid about this. So she doesn't have any religious/Christian objections to Euclid. So why should anyone else?
I've briefly researched who would object to the possibility (whether it is true of Spinoza's intentions or not) that maths could explain the universe. Of course, Spinoza was Jewish so his assessment of Euclid's maths and whether there is any pagan religion in it would not be the same as for Christians. So I'm not sure why this would even be an interpretive concern for philosophers. 🤔🤯
Anyway. In fleshing out the issue of how people have interpreted and misinterpreted Euclid, here's what I discovered:
People in the medieval era did not see any religious concerns about relating maths to understanding the world because they saw it as two sides of the same coin when wrapping their head around God's creation:
"if God applied geometric principles to the creation of the world, then an understanding of those principles should aid in interpreting that divine act. What we may think of as two ways of looking at the world - the religious and the scientific - were, to the medieval mind, one." (Perry)
Nevertheless, apparently, many Christians have been Christianising Euclid's pagan text and rewriting it (and with it the history of mathematics):
"Adelard’s translation of Euclid’s Elements enjoyed no such flexibility: it was a purely pagan text. But while there may have been little room for manoeuvre in terms of content, there was nothing to prevent the makers of individual copies of the Elements, such as the manuscript housed at the Fisher, from including extra-textual details that cast the work in a Christian context. And so we find our Christ-like Euclid placed prominently on the first page, a reminder to the reader to approach this text from a Christian point of view." (Perry)
The last sentence refers to a book with a medieval illustration of Euclid but depicted with Christian symbolism, based on an image of Christ as the Geometer creating the world and skies above while using a mathematical compass.
So this made me wonder whether there is some Christian twist to Euclid that had passed me by. I, probably very much like Spinoza, just took Euclid to be a pagan mathematician and that maths, like logic, can simplify complex ideas into a succinct, brief, clear format. If I remember rightly, Spinoza had originally written the Ethics in prose and only re-wrote it as a geometric explanation later at the suggestion of some Cartesian philosopher who claimed it would make his Ethics more understandable, accessible and make it easier to follow his arguments simply through rational deduction. Thus, I merely thought of it as being a result of peer review, not part of Spinoza's authorial intention as such, therefore not entirely an essential property of the text or overly representative of Spinoza's fundamental system of philosophy. After all, Spinoza wrote all of his other treatises in prose not in the style of Euclidean geometry, so it can't be that big a deal. If he was that fixated on Euclid's mathematical system or the Christianised version of Euclid, Spinoza would have used it across all of his texts. But he didn't!
I still haven't quite got to the bottom of what aspects of Euclid's maths Christians have adjusted for their own purposes; whether this results in a completely different reading of Euclid; or any religious objections to Euclid's mathematical explanation of the universe or not. However, reading around, I did discover that religious references to Euclid can appear almost randomly in not just traditional Christian thought but even in Christian cults.
For instance, apparently, the American Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910, the founder of the sect Christian Science) referred to Euclid a few times in her writings, although I'm not entirely sure exactly where she was going with it.
Especially since her version of Christianity involved drawing inspiration for her arguments from Hindu philosophy, or more specifically, Indian Vendanta Philosophy, which is based on a type of monism whereby everything in the world is one, and this is the non-personal god Brahman, who is a world-soul which permeates everything. Indeed, apparently Christian Science is also monist but, instead, believing only in a spiritual reality (the material world is all unreal). So what seems to have a physical cause, is only really caused by mental states. However, for them, Spirit with a capital S refers to God, whereas spirit with a small s refers to quality, although I'm not sure what that means. I am not at all familiar with Vedanta or Christian Science, I'm only just beginning to investigate to what extent they have any bearings on philosophers' opinions within the fields of philosophy I research, so I'm exploring the issue here in my Spinoza Research Diary.
Why is this this important? Spinoza is famously known as a substance monist and there is a great deal of secondary literature arguing for and against Spinoza's monism. However the term monism wasn't invented until after Spinoza's lifetime, when the philosopher Christian von Wolff (who adapted Leibniz) used it in the 18th century, in his book Logic (1728). This makes me wonder🤔:
Is monism the best description of Spinoza's metaphysics? Is it the exact, complex concept he had in mind, given that he wouldn't have known the term or anything particularly similar to it?
Both Vedanta and Christian Science are idealist but in different ways. Vedanta sees ideas and ideals as rooted in Spirit/Self. For them, god is the highest ideal, not the mind. Whereas Christian Scientists are radical philosophical idealists, who think all ideas and ideals are rooted in the Christian God's mind, and so people form their ideals from God's ideas. This is relevant to Spinoza because I've often found myself baffled by idealist interpretations of Spinoza and his monism. 🤔 I don't see any idealism in his philosophy. 🤷
It is worth bearing in mind that Eddy's version of Vendanta Philosophy has a twist to it, so it's not identical. She claimed that matter is not real (as well as related things such as illness and suffering which she also thought were not real). Indeed, after reading around, I've now discovered that it's common knowledge in philosophy that Eddy's Christian Scientist argument (in her book 'Science and Health') claiming that evil is merely an illusory false belief, is based on Vedanta Philosophy which considers the phenomenal world and evil within it to be what they term maya ie an illusion/magic. For Vedanta Philosophy (a philosophy based on ancient Hindu religious scripture) this means that a god creates illusions through magic powers thereby causing false beliefs in people (at least in the Advaita school of non-dualist Vedanta anyway). Nevertheless, unlike in Western Philosophy, Indian Philosophy is not preoccupied with relating its monist and non-dualist arguments to mind-body problems. It's not clear to me yet which of the schools of Vedanta Philosophy Eddy was drawing on, or whether she combined several, and exactly how she adjusted it to put her own Christian spin on it.
Now that's cultural appropriation! Because it's not about appreciating Indian Philosophy and respecting its cultural, religious Hindu context in its own right, but rather distorting it for Western, Christian purposes.
It never crossed my mind before that there were any Christian Scientist beliefs hidden in the middle of Philosophy! 😲
Eddy was keen on Spirituality, although she sometimes denied it. But one has to be careful about what someone means by spirituality because it signifies different things to different people. In Eddy's case, it involved doing séances, being a medium and going into trances, claiming she could channel the spirits of the (twelve) Apostles. Nevertheless, she seemed to reject Spiritualism in her writings despite trying to convert people to Christian Science during some of her séances. This spirituality strangely combined in some of her more metaphysical thought about matter. For example, apparently, she argued that only spirit exists, whereas matter is not real. So spirit is not within matter, although it may appear to be so. This is a problem for anyone researching Spinoza or Margaret Cavendish's vitalism. Not to mention Cavendish's references to spiritual substance, or spirits, or arguments in favour of everything comprising of matter, with the only exception being God. Such early modern concepts must be very prone to misinterpretation for anyone who superimposes any such later arguments onto it, such as Eddy's rejection of matter and her focus on a very narrow, specific version of spirits and spirituality. Such conflations between Eddy's Christian Sect metaphysics and early modern metaphysics could be an issue for some, given that her favourite subjects as a child were, amongst other complex subjects, natural philosophy, logic and ethics, so there may be appear to be some topic overlap.
So what's my overall point here? It's simply this: it's unwise to make gross assumptions, superimpose views or conflate people, arguments or concepts. For instance:
- conflate Euclid's (pagan) aims and world views with Spinoza's;
- conflate a Christianised Euclidean geometry with Spinoza's use of Euclid's geometry in his Ethics
- jump to the conclusion (or hope!) that Spinoza must be secretly hoping to convey some medieval Christian theology via a Christianised Euclidean approach;
- conflate Christian thought which has nothing to do with the early modern text you're reading, with the early modern philosopher who wrote it, eg conflating Mary Baker Eddy's concept of spirit and matter with arguments for or against Spinoza's or Margaret Cavendish's concept of spirit and/or matter;
- assume that other philosophers (whether speakers; attendees asking questions; philosophical discussion at socials etc) are on the same page as you eg making the same assumptions, working with the same background knowledge and concepts as you just because you are all trained in (usually analytic) philosophy. If you come from different religious and/or non-religious perspectives then you end up talking at cross purposes! Because someone's personal critical stance may draw on sources that you are completely unfamiliar with and they probably won't explain any background to their views, so you'll find yourself trying to wrap your head around some unknown, alien concepts in order to answer their questions or understand where they are really going with it;
- you can also misspeak in the sense of assuming your philosophical audience shares the same definitions and concepts as you so there's no need to explain everything ad nauseam. So when I happily work with non-religious, secular, agnostic and Jewish concepts, perhaps I need to explain it in a variety of ways so philosophers of all backgrounds can follow my argument and not slip into relating it to irrelevant (Christian or otherwise) concepts and world views.
Having said that, it would be rather unwieldly to try to account for every possible worldview, especially if a philosopher doesn't explicitly state what their personal views, stances and perspectives are and where they have come from. And, surely, we are meant to be analysing philosophical texts in terms of 1) the content; objective properties in the text 2) the philosopher, not superimposing/projecting our worldviews onto the texts or constantly accounting for others superimposing/projecting their religion and/or worldviews onto the texts and your papers/books.
And the reason for this is simple:
we researchers have to stay on task: in the history of philosophy, the historical philosopher; their political/societal context; and their texts are everything - it dictates the whole interpretation. If one wants to set out one's own system of philosophy/ own philosophical thought, then one mostly does that within the field of contemporary philosophy.
