A new book asks readers to understand Spinoza through cancel culture
Ian Buruma’s biography of the philosopher paints a vivid picture of the Netherlands of the 17th century, but ruins it with some talk of today
A 1665 portrait of Baruch Spinoza. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By PJ Grisar February 15, 2024
Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah
By Ian Buruma
Yale University Press, 216 pages, $26
40 pages into Ian Buruma’s fascinating biography of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, some very modern language leaps from the page.
“When people are banished from their community,” Buruma writes, “or ‘canceled’ as people might now say, they can react in various ways.”
Buruma is referring to a specific herem, or ban, pronounced by the Jewish community of Amsterdam. Not Spinoza’s — though his excommunication is possibly the most famous ever issued by Jewish authorities — but that of a wealthy Portuguese immigrant and freethinker named Uriel da Costa, who was also banned in Hamburg and Venice. In order to rejoin his coreligionists in 1640, da Costa was flogged and trampled on in the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam as “mobs were baying for his crucifixion”; he later ended his own life. Buruma argues that the death and degradation of this man must have affected then-8-year-old Spinoza, who was born into the same community. His own expulsion at the age of 24 would force Spinoza into the gentile realm, where he would pen the philosophical works that helped defined the Enlightenment.
Though he doesn’t mention it directly, Buruma was also “canceled:” In 2018, he left his job as editor of The New York Review of Books following uproar for a piece he published by Canadian DJ Jian Ghomeshi, in which Ghomeshi mischaracterized numerous allegations of sexual assault made against him.
This book may be one of the “various ways” Buruma has chosen to react to losing that esteemed post. (He said at the time he was “publicly pilloried.”) Mercifully, this notion of Spinoza as the original victim of cancel culture — except for da Costa, Jesus, Edenic man or the various people God hath smote — does not dominate the text.
Yes, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah, does position the popular thinker as a champion of free thought. His ideas about the nature of God (God is nature) were immensely controversial, both in the Jewish fold that expelled him and among the Calvinist majority of his home country. His writings were subject to censorship both in his lifetime and posthumously. Spinoza toed a careful line in his time, cautious not to be too candid — or to risk his work’s publication in Dutch. But what interests Buruma most is the context of a fractious 17th-century Holland.
Buruma first establishes the precarious position and relative liberty of recent Marranos like Spinoza’s family, who had only recently begun rediscovering their Jewishness in the Netherlands after leaving Portugal a generation before. Buruma, who himself grew up in The Hague with a Jewish mother and a father who was the son of a Mennonite minister, peppers the account with his own memories, recalling (re: Sephardic elitism) how he grew up with “people called Van Nunes or Mendes de Leon. They were no less snobbish than gentiles of their class in The Hague.”
From there, he moves on to the world Spinoza, for reasons still murky, was thrust into once he was driven from the Temple: it was a time of shifting modes of government (Spinoza was a proud citizen of the Dutch Republic, in opposition to the royalists of the House of Orange); regional wars (he loathed the French for occupying his country, but appears to have met with some French military officers); Protestant schism (the Calvinists couldn’t abide Spinoza; thinkers from more liberal sects made up much of his friend group) and scientific discovery (he worked as a lens grinder, fascinated by optics and the nascent field of microscopy).
It’s a strangely swashbuckling record of Spinoza’s brief life, including naval battles, invasions and acts of zealous savagery from the masses. Spinoza does not appear to have been a party to any actual violence, though some of it aimed at companions of his who were too free with their iconoclasm. Rather, violence occurred around him, while he carried on an ascetic existence, subsisting on milk gruel and having no worldly luxuries but his parents’ bed, brought with him from one rented room to the next. With all this genuine mutilation, Buruma’s choice to position Spinoza, whose end at the age of 44 came about by way of consumption and inhaled glass dust, as a martyr or Christ figure, after an argument from poet Heinrich Heine, somewhat dubious.
Buruma, a frequent author on Japanese and Chinese subjects, isn’t a philosopher, and his dissection of Spinoza’s treatises can feel a touch cursory. But the narrative, even as it bounces away from Spinoza to detail his admirers and detractors, paints a vivid picture of a nation dry-running a non-monarchical government (a liberal, patrician rule called “True Freedom,” which fell somewhat short of the name) and the implications of these new political currents on the spread of Spinoza’s thought.
The author devotes a chapter to “mob rage,” in which the appalled Spinoza hears of a “lynch party” near his lodgings that butchered Johan and Cornelis de Witt, the political rulers of Holland at the time, under whom Spinoza and his friends were best able to express themselves. Perhaps intentionally, the chapter’s emphasis echoes the grisly fate of the “canceled” da Costa. Though it doesn’t make a direct connection to modern groupthink — yet.
Only the final pages speak critically of a contemporary reality that puts a premium on identity-based “lived experience” as a prerequisite for truth (an idea which, apparently, has “dangerous parallels” with the ideologies of Mao and Hitler). Buruma also reveals a heretofore unvoiced concern that “the biological truth that there are discernable differences between male and female bodies” may become lost to us. (He doesn’t like Trump or “fake news” either, so call it evenhanded.)
“Spinoza should be seen as a model in our difficult times,” Buruma concludes, “when the very idea of reason is regarded with so much suspicion by people who insist on the supremacy of moral beliefs.”
Maybe so. But the biography, which is otherwise enlightening, could do without these asides. As Spinoza wrote, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” For Buruma, avoiding the topic of wokeism is evidently difficult, requiring a rare restraint — and, well, you know what that means for excellence.
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