No Lie, Just Fact

[The following is a slightly revised reprint of a piece that appeared several years ago as the lead article on the "Spinoza Net." I offer it on this Memorial Day as a much belated thank you to my father, a WW I soldier, who taught me to think for myself. The errors in my thinking are, of course, mine, not his. He had his own and on one or two occasions, tearfully confessed them to his favorite son.]

So far as I know my father never read a word out of a book, but he had about him an air that I would later come to call an aura of certainty. It wasn’t that he spouted off like a know-it-all. He just said things that sounded true. Take for example what he told me about higher education: “It’s learning what’s already been discovered, what’s already been written, already invented, so you can start where other people left off and not waste your time doing something that’s already been done.” See what I mean? My father’s pronouncement not only sounded true, but had a gracious little hook in it, one that maybe he put there for his oldest son to grab onto.

I never grabbed the hook, never got the higher education. Instead I went to work as a clerk at the L&N railroad where Dad was an engineer. But remembering his words—his hook—and liking the sound of doing something that hadn’t been done before, I decided to spend a part of my earnings on books, intending (by actually reading them) to educate myself about the state of all human knowing. Dad had forgotten to mention the part about specializing.

I had a plan. I was going to buy every one of the Random House Modern Library editions, read them all, master them all, and then set out to re-invent the world while “standing on the shoulders of [the] giants” Random House had selected for me to read.

My plan almost came to a halt before my first purchase. You see, there was this charming young lady standing in the Mobile [Alabama] Book Store, holding in her delicate little hands a copy of a book that purported to be about The Philosophy of Spinoza. I had never heard of Spinoza, but the name had a romantic sound to it, almost as alluring as the young lady’s ocean-blue eyes.

In violation of my bringing up I said something to the girl that was only superficially true: “I’ve never been able to understand Spinoza.”

The girl looked me over, appeared to be thinking about what I had said, and then, apparently having sized me up, sarcastically observed, “Figures.” She handed me the book and walked out of my life forever.

The book remained. It wasn’t at first Spinoza’s philosophy that drew me to him; I really was having a hard time understanding what he was talking about. What hooked me was the way the man himself lived his life. In the beautifully written introduction to the book, Joseph Ratner described how Spinoza had been sued over an inheritance, won the case, but then, in a gallant gesture, presented the inheritance to the plaintiff. This same man had earlier been offered a sizeable bribe by his religious community if he would recant his “heresy;” when he turned it down they excommunicated him. Later, after his fame had spread, Spinoza refused a prestigious position at the University of Heidelberg for fear that serving under an autocratic regime would inhibit his freedom to express his ideas. After being booted out of the religion he was born into, Spinoza lived the rest of his life in humble circumstances, earning his living as a lens grinder. He died owning the bed he slept in, a table, three chairs, the tools of his trade, and a small library.

But I would not want my admiration for Spinoza the man to mislead you. His ideas had an appeal of their own. (The irony was not lost upon me of the connection between lens grinding and writing philosophy, between seeing and seeing.) The excerpts from Spinoza’s Treatise on Theology and Politics in the book the young lady handed me blew like a freshening wind through my Southern Baptist mind, nurturing its doubts and misgivings. “[I]n interpreting Scripture...accept nothing as authoritative...which we do not perceive very clearly when we examine it in the light of its history.” [The Philosophy of Spinoza, Page 15] To my mother and all my aunts and uncles (but not my father) the words of Scripture were to be regarded as the truth simply because they appeared between the covers of the King James Bible. Spinoza gave my doubts a comfortable place to work themselves out.

In the decades following my encounter in the book store with the beautiful young lady, I struggled to understand Spinoza’s words. His proofs, stripped of their redundancies in Ratner’s abridgement, sometimes left me wondering what I was reading, but like the true believer I had become, I reasoned that all in due time I would see what I was then only seeing, that among the vast accumulation of Spinoza’s knowing of the first and second kinds building in my mind, knowing of the third kind—sub specie aeternitatis—would eventually emerge. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. Like a “little worm in the bloodstream” (and perhaps like the apostle Paul) I know in part only those things I, as a part, can know; and feeling my “partness,” yet seeing the double-edged meaning of being a part of God, I grew in awe of that greater something which I imagine all people, even professing atheists, must acknowledge as the infinitude of Being. Spinoza claimed that, “the more we know of things, the more we know of God.” If that’s true, then to have learned those things I have been privileged to learn has been to worship at the only altar that makes sense to me as a place illumined by the light of God.

[All effects have causes, but some causes are more causative than others, and some effects more lasting.]