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Borges and Spinoza

BDSpinoza
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Posted 05/09/08 - 11:13 PM:	#11
I prefer Einstein's poem about Spinoza: "Zu Spinozas Ethik". Wie lieb ich diesen edlen Mann Mehr als ich mit Worten sagen kann. Doch fÃ¼rcht' ich , dass er bleibt allein Mit seinem strahlenden Heiligenschein. So einen armen kleinen Wicht Den fÃ¼hrst du zu der Freiheit nicht. Der amor dei lÃ¤sst ihn kalt Das Leben zieht ihn mit Gewalt. Die HÃ¶he bringt ihm nichts als Frost Vernunft ist fÃ¼r ihn schale Kost. Besitz und Weib und Ehr' und Haus Das fÃ¼llt ihn von oben bis unten aus. Du Musst schon gÃ¼tig mir verzeih'n Wenn hier mir fÃ¤llt MÃ¼nchhausen ein, Dem als Einzigen das KunststÃ¼ck gedieh'n Sich am eigenen Zopf aus dem Sumpf zu zieh'n. Du denkst sein Beispiel zeiget uns eben Was diese Lehre dem Menschen kann geben. Vertraue nicht dem trÃ¶stlichen Schein: Zum Erhabenen muss man geboren sein. by Albert Einstein, written 1920 Albert Einstein Archive, 31-018 Which says something along the lines of: (not my translation, but I really should do one). How I love this noble man More than I can say with words. Still, I fear he remains alone With his shining halo. Such a poor small lad Whom you'll not lead to freedom The amor dei leaves him cold Mightily does this life attract him Loftiness offers him nothing but frost Reason for him is poor fare Property and wife and honor and house That fills him from top to bottom You'll kindly forgive me If MÃ¼nchhausen here comes to mind Who alone mastered the trick Of pulling himself out of a swamp by his own pigtail You think his example would show us What this doctrine can give humankind Trust not the comforting faÃ§ade One must be born sublime

Dunamis
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Posted 05/10/08 - 08:51 AM:	#12
I would ask, what does that have to do with what Borges thought of Spinoza? Or with the notion that the polishing of lenses is like the polishing of propositions, or of a work? Are you saying that this poem is a better poem than Borges' (it seems like a diddy almost in comparison to my ear), or is it expressing something more important about Spinoza, something Borges' missed? Is comparing Spinoza to Münchhausen and as having a pigtail somehow more revealing than saying that Spinoza was somehow mapping the infinite with his polished text? Is the idea that he he has a shining halo, all alone, somehow better or more convincing than seeing him alone, grinding lenses in the evening? You "prefer" Einstein's poem, why? Because it was writen by Einstein? Edited by Dunamis on 05/10/08 - 11:10 AM
Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

quickly
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Posted 05/19/08 - 10:47 PM:	#13
I started reading the Ethics, partly due to the interest all these Spinoza posts have piqued. Perhaps this is tangential, however. Almost do not exist for the man so quiet Who is dreaming a clear labyrinth. He's not perturbed by fame, that reflection Of dreams in the dream of another mirror, Nor by the timorous love of maidens. This is such a clear picture of how I envision Spinoza's God: a labyrinth. I’m reminded of the medieval labyrinths, like the one at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. An image, an imprint, a sign of God fused with the material, which extends off to infinity, made of mirrors. Wandering through planar space which reflects back from below, and seeing the dark spaces deepen until they are given an extension, a three-dimensional space; and then snapping back, seeing the imprint again. The pure sign becoming the world and back. Like looking at something, and seeing its reflection from an ulterior angle in a mirror; and God the infinite series of mirrors, comprehending and stretching into infinity each subdivision of the thing – like infinitesimal spaces on a sphere expanding and expanding, each one an Attribute, and further reflected until each one becomes an infinity more attributes. It would seem that Spinoza would ultimately agree with the notion that his Ethics was a vast diamond(s), a tremendous lens which he worked on for over decade. He would enjoy the idea that the work itself is a materiality, (his ontology demands it), a materiality which we too use, in combination with our own materiality. The brilliance of the Ethics, I think, is how it seems so dry, so devoid of life, and suddenly some word or thought will catch your attention, and the attention narrows and narrows – a bit like pulling glasses away from a face until everything around you is distorted except for this small, narrow space which is intensely clear – until it explodes out from its form. And suddenly your body or your mind, or the things around you – even the most mundane of objects – takes on this extraordinary alterity and life, a kind of hyper-extension. When I read the comment on man’s body in the Appendix to Pt. I, suddenly the notion of modal existence flashed into this utmost clarity, but a clarity which is an intense confusion, too. I just caught myself playing with my hands, rolling one over onto its palm, waving it through the air, rapping it against a table, conceiving of this intense kind of power I’d received. Anyways, for what it’s worth. I'll have to read that essay now. Edited by quickly on 05/19/08 - 10:55 PM
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Posted 05/20/08 - 10:30 PM:	#14
On another note, I noticed that Borges makes a point, twice, of emphasizing Spinoza's Jewish heritage. On the one hand, he refers specifically to him as the Jew; and on the other, as residing in a Jewish ghetto. Every biographical comment I've read on Spinoza emphasizes his Jewishness, if "Jewish" is some qualitative essence which they believe without which no-one can concieve of Spinoza's writings. Similarly, actually, with Marx and Freud. It's as if these people - but especially Spinoza - are considered a kind of anomalous discrepancy in the history of philosophy. Why is this?
Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura quae legis hic; aliter non fit philosophyforums.com (cf., Martial, Epigrammata I.XVI)

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Posted 05/24/08 - 07:08 PM:	#15
I recall that Borges always felt that he was chasing after his own Jewish heritage (he had come up with the thought that he had a Jewish ancestor), so he admits that his fascination with Spinoza is was wrapped up in his fascination with Jewishness. I think that Spinoza's Jewishness is most definitely involved in the form of his thought (but perhaps no more than Kant's Christianity, by Culture, or Plato's Greecianism). For one, he experienced being an outsider, doubly so. He was a Jew, who was also an excommunicated Jew. This can be said to have privileged him outside, so to see "inside". Spinoza in his own time was regularly referred to as "the Jew" as if it were a means of explaining him, positioning him. As for the "discrepancy" I don't really see one. Spinoza seems to be at one in the same time the most historical, and the most ahistorical of philosophers, just as his philosophy asserts.
Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

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Posted 05/24/08 - 07:36 PM:	#16
I get that sense from some paragraphs of the Ethics as I read it. There is a kind of, shall I say, bitterness to it? Or if not bitterness, a kind of forlorne, alienated sense of self confronting a world, as if his work were his refuge. Like the work is his excommunication, or the record of it, and he is witnessing it to himself. I'm a third of the way through, and I feel myself immersed - like being in a labyrinth, or being between two walls, I suppose. There's an article in the Atlantic where Christopher Hitchens, talking about something (in a book review), remarks on a religious regime in an oppressive, South American country. He makes the point of noting that the thematics which were disparaged and condemned as immoral were those same ones advanced by Freud, Marx, and the like. And that "Jewishness" itself was linked to this kind of outsider status, a philosophy which isn't coherent within the religious system (if I recall correctly). Spinoza reminds me of this, and the way I've seen him treated - "The Great Jew," "One of the greatest of Jews," to name two epithets I recently saw - are a way of positioning him in this "incoherence" in regards the Christian tradition. It's interesting how he doesn't (or hasn't yet) named any specific person by name, even if he wrote to and for himself. He uses the pronoun "They" - as if he alone was within his construction. I agree that it's a tacit method of positioning him.
Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura quae legis hic; aliter non fit philosophyforums.com (cf., Martial, Epigrammata I.XVI)

Tobias
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Posted 05/25/08 - 01:21 AM:	#17
It was and a common in those times and still is in many ways to use classifications and epithets dirived from cultural background or heritage. Hegel, Schelling and Holderlin for instance are referred to as the Swabian threesome. Heidegger is named the "Magician from Messkirch", Avicenna is referred to as the great Arab scholar. Nowadays this is frowned upon especially in the case of Jews because of European genocide against people with a Jewish background. May it be that we read too much into these classifications because Western culture itslef is formed by WW2? That said, I do see that for centuries the Jewish were considered the 'other', but so too have gypsies, Turkish, Arabs and homosexuals to name a few. Perhaps the continuous mentioning of Foucault being gay can be interpreted in a similar vein? Just a thought, By the way, I think you read way to much materiality in the poem Dunamis. It looks to me very idealist. Look: The translucent hands of the Jew Work in the penumbra, crystals & the evening, dying, is dread & chill. (Evenings to evenings are equal.) The hands & space of hyacinth Waning in the confines of the Ghetto Almost do not exist for the man so quiet Who is dreaming a clear labyrinth. He's not perturbed by fame, that reflection Of dreams in the dream of another mirror, Nor by the timorous love of maidens. Free from metaphor & myth He works a hard crystal: the Infinite Map of That which totals His stars. Matter in this poem is diminished rather than emphasised. The hands (body) are translucent. The chilliness of the evening is annulled by the reflection ëvenings to evenings are equal". The hands and space are waning and do not exist for the man so still. In fact what does exist is his "dreaming a labyrinth". Idea over body. He in fact disregards the body in his rejection of the "timorous love of maidens". He works a hard crystal yes, but a crystal is a see through stone and in fact the crystal is not a crystal but a map which totals the stars. The poem reflects idea not body. Intellectual love of god. No matter what his ontology in your view demands. Great thread and posts, nonetheless. regards Tobias Edited by Tobias on 05/25/08 - 01:31 AM
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Dunamis
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Posted 05/25/08 - 01:38 PM:	#18
Tobias wrote: Matter in this poem is diminished rather than emphasised. The hands (body) are translucent. The chilliness of the evening is annulled by the reflection ëvenings to evenings are equal". The hands and space are waning and do not exist for the man so still. In fact what does exist is his "dreaming a labyrinth". Idea over body. He in fact disregards the body in his rejection of the "timorous love of maidens". He works a hard crystal yes, but a crystal is a see through stone and in fact the crystal is not a crystal but a map which totals the stars. The poem reflects idea not body. Intellectual love of god. No matter what his ontology in your view demands. Ah, I miss your Hegelian ways! Yes, the matter is thinning, but the process is a material one. The hands are translucent/luminous, but it is not an Idea which is luminous. The sense is both material and illuminating. The chill indeed is annulled, but it is still a material chill. And the hands and space NEARLY do not exist, but still do exist. His dreaming is accomplished through the physical act of grinding glass (the very act whose material dust killed Spinoza). Spinoza's Labyrinth is a material thing, it is his Ethics, written in bodily form, as his metaphysics demands us to see. And the map is made out of the hard glass, a most resistant material. It reflects the Idea IN and THROUGH body, not just "Idea". Of course you can pretend that Borges did not really like Spinoza, and wanted to write him as a Hegelian, (other than your need for this, I can't see why one would read the poem this way). Spinoza makes Body and Mind to be equivalent, and parallel expressions of Substance, much unlike Descartes (who actually spent much of his life trying to have a lense-grinding machine made, a machine that was so unrealistic, it remained in diagrams). It was Spinoza's attention to the material, to the body, which distinguished him from Descartes, no doubt brought about in part due to his vocation as a lens-grinder. If there were a proper Hegelian Spinoza poem written, it would be something like: Ah, the glowing Idea in the Mind of the Jew, how Like the Sun it sifts through the shadows of material, to Die a Christ, only to be redeemed by that Great German Who knew, that Geist required dross and mediation, too.
Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

Tobias
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Posted 05/26/08 - 12:19 AM:	#19
Of course you can pretend that Borges did not really like Spinoza, and wanted to write him as a Hegelian, (other than your need for this, I can't see why one would read the poem this way). Spinoza makes Body and Mind to be equivalent, and parallel expressions of Substance, much unlike Descartes (who actually spent much of his life trying to have a lense-grinding machine made, a machine that was so unrealistic, it remained in diagrams). It was Spinoza's attention to the material, to the body, which distinguished him from Descartes, no doubt brought about in part due to his vocation as a lens-grinder. God, if my mouth would really contain all the words you put in it, it would soon be overflowing with drivel. Luckily it does not. I think Borges loved Spinoza. He doesn't write him as a Hegelian either. I only pointed out he makes the bodily parts disappear in favour of something ideal. What in the poem fades Dunamis? The hands fade, the nights' chill fades into all other nights, space wanes and almost does not exist, physical love is rejected outright. The hard chrystal is worked to be something else, from mere hard chrystal it becomes a labyrinth and an infinite map which totals His stars. A labyrith he is dreaming, no less. A more disembodied act is hardly imaginable, since as you know bodies in dreams are not real. I didn't write Borges' poem, Borges did. I love it, it is brilliant, but to make it bodily is to read your interpretation in that of Borges. Perhaps Borges doesn't read Spinoza like you do. Perhaps you are right to emphasise the bodily Spinoza, I don't know. Borges at least in his poem doesn't. that is what I claim from a reading of his poem. If there were a proper Hegelian Spinoza poem written, it would be something like: Ah, the glowing Idea in the Mind of the Jew, how Like the Sun it sifts through the shadows of material, to Die a Christ, only to be redeemed by that Great German Who knew, that Geist required dross and mediation, too. This has to be your wildest ad hominem to date, but at least it is done with flair.
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Posted 05/26/08 - 03:43 PM:	#20
Tobias wrote: Perhaps Borges doesn't read Spinoza like you do. Perhaps you are right to emphasise the bodily Spinoza, I don't know. Borges at least in his poem doesn't. that is what I claim from a reading of his poem. Then we disagree. I will take up the concluding lines of the poem: He works a hard crystal: the Infinite Map of That which totals His stars. Is a "map" to you immaterial, or material? I think both. Are stars immaterial or material? I think by Borges' reading, both. Read Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" to get a sense of the physicality of a map which totalizes, and hence the question of materiality: In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 "On Exactude in Science" What "faded" in the poem of Borges' is not the materiality of the hands, but the conception of the hands as "bordered". For this very reason he uses the line "Waning in the confines of the Ghetto" (trans.). It is not for Spinoza, that the materiality fades, but the borders themselves that seem to make things limited. Only if you define "materiality" by this limitation, which Spinoza does not, would you say that materiality is fading. The "hard crystal" is not suddenly made "immaterial" but rather expansively material. Just as the map of Empire does not cease to be a material thing, but it becomes a material thing which becomes what it maps. When the "hard crystal" becomes the map which totals his stars, materiality takes on a new dimension. Much as in keeping with Spinozist philosophy, material is no longer a shadow thing, or a dump, mute thing, which one works on in its passivity, but rather it becomes something one lives with and through. The map becomes the very thing, in the closeness of its proximity. And the Ethics is to be understood as just such a materiality, a border-crossing materiality. Spinoza's study of materiality made infinite, does not make materiality any less material. It makes it distinct in its connection to vastness. Now Borges was not a Spinozist. He was lauding a person who could work to do something he could never do. It is a kind of elegy. He is much like the following generations of the Empire, those who are not so fond of Cartography, who do not really understand it. In writing his poem he opens up the question, I think, to the question whether we should expose such a remarkable map to the "Inclemencies of Sun and Winters" so that it falls into ruins. Whether we should have something more than relics of the discipline of Geography. Edited by Dunamis on 05/26/08 - 04:58 PM
Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

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