António Damásio on Baruch Spinoza

“Now that I have sketched my main purpose, it is time to ex­plain why a book dedicated to new ideas on the nature and signif­icance of human feeling should invoke Spinoza in the title. Since I am not a philosopher and this book is not about Spinoza's phi­losophy, it is sensible to ask: why Spinoza? The short explanation is that Spinoza is thoroughly relevant to any discussion of human emotion and feeling. Spinoza saw drives, motivations, emotions, and feelings—an ensemble Spinoza called affects—as a central aspect of humanity. Joy and sorrow were two prominent concepts in his attempt to comprehend human beings and suggest ways in which their lives could be lived better.”

“Some of Spinoza's ideas are part and parcel of our culture, but to the best of my knowledge Spinoza is absent as a reference from the modern efforts to understand the biology of the mind. This ab­sence is interesting in itself. Spinoza is a thinker far more famous than known. Sometimes Spinoza appears to rise out of nothing, in solitary and unexplained splendor, although the impression is false—in spite of his originality he is very much a part of his intellectual times. And he appears to dissolve as abruptly, without succession—another false impression given that the essence of some of his forbidden proposals can be found behind the Enlight­enment and well beyond in the century that followed his death.”

“One explanation for Spinoza's status as unknown celebrity is the scandal he caused in his own time. As we shall see (in Chapter Six), his words were deemed heretical and banned for decades and with rare exceptions were quoted only as part of the assault on his work. The attacks paralyzed most attempts by Spinoza admirers to discuss his ideas publicly. The natural continuity of intellectual acknowledgment that follows a thinker's work was thus interrupted, even as some of his ideas were used uncredited. This state of affairs, however, hardly explains why Spinoza con­tinued to gain fame but remained unknown once the likes of Goethe and Wordsworth began to champion him. Perhaps a bet­ter explanation is that Spinoza is not easy to know.”

“As I leave the churchyard, my thoughts turn to the bizarre significance of this burial site. Why is Spinoza, who was born a Jew, buried next to this powerful Protestant church? The answer is as complicated as anything else having to do with Spinoza. He is buried here, perhaps, because having been expelled by his fellow Jews he could be seen as Christian by default; he certainly could not have been buried in the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk. But he is not really here, perhaps because he never became a proper Christian, Protestant or Catholic, and in the eyes of many he was an atheist. And how fitting it all is. Spinoza's God was neither Jewish nor Christian. Spinoza's God was everywhere, could not be spoken to, did not respond if prayed to, was very much in every particle of the universe, without beginning and without end. Buried and unburied, Jewish and not. Portugese but not really, Dutch but not quite, Spinoza belonged nowhere and everywhere.”

“The difficulty begins with the problem that there are several Spinozas with which to reckon, at least four by my count. The first is the accessible Spinoza, the radical religious scholar who dis­agrees with the churches of his time, presents a new conception of God, and proposes a new road to human salvation. Next comes Spinoza as political architect, the thinker who describes the traits of an ideal democratic state populated by responsible, happy citi­zens. The third Spinoza is the least accessible of the set: the philosopher who uses scientific facts, a method of geometric demonstration and intuition to formulate a conception of the universe and the human beings in it. Recognizing these three Spinozas and their web of depen­dencies is enough to suggest how convoluted Spinoza can be. But there is a fourth Spinoza: the protobiologist. This is the biological thinker concealed behind countless propositions, axioms, proofs, lemmas, and scholia. Given that many of the advances on the sci­ence of emotions and feeling are consonant with proposals that Spinoza began to articulate, my second purpose in this book is to connect this least-known Spinoza to some of the corresponding neurobiology of today. But I note, again, that this book is not about Spinoza's philosophy. I do not address Spinoza's thinking outside of the aspects I regard as pertinent to biology. The goal is more modest. One of the values of philosophy is that throughout its history it has prefigured science. In turn, I believe, science is well served by recognizing that historical effort.”