The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Very Refuse of Thy Deeds

The ethical principles of justice and charity are the enduring legacy of Judaism. Through countless generations of the Jewish community, they have been transmitted to Christianity and Islam, and through them to the world, as the essential foundations of what most of us can agree is civilized society.

Yalom recognizes this Judaic contribution to human existence. He also recognizes that without the cultic and social loyalty of Jews throughout the centuries, such a contribution would not have survived as more than the short-lived refuse of tribal convention. It is the perennial insistence, one might say obstinance, of the community that has been necessary to provide "a light to the Gentiles."

Yalom also recognizes the philosophical problem created by the success of the Jewish community. His tale, in fact, follows two threads of this problem. The first thread is represented by the life of Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century Jewish philosopher. Spinoza accepted the ethical demands of justice and charity but rejected their cultic and social matrix. Consequently he was excommunicated, one might say unjustly and certainly with little indication of charity, from the Jewish community. This is the philosophical problem presented by an ethical community: must it be willing to contradict it own teaching in order to ensure its ability to teach?

The second thread is also connected with the success of the Jewish community. This success has always been achieved in the face of enormous historical forces aimed at destroying Judaism and its contributions - most recently the insanity of European fascism. Yalom uses a fictionalised biography of the leading Nazi theorist, Alfred Rosenberg, as his protagonist to make a point: an important reason for anti-Semitism is the very survival of Judaism, both as a religious community and as a dominant component of European culture. In Yalom's narrative Rosenberg's virulent anti-Semitism is made problematic by the attested devotion of the German poet and national symbol, Johann von Goethe to the Jew, Spinoza. Goethe as well as Rosenberg are themselves the product of Jewish culture.

These two issues are the components of the eponymous Spinoza Problem as presented by Yalom. On the one hand the Jewish community is a necessary condition for achieving what it has accomplished - a relatively civilised society. On the other hand this same community attracts destruction from within and without itself because of what it has achieved. Yalom does an outstanding job of articulating this problem, actually a paradox, as the existential condition of Judaism. He subtly compares this 'Jewish problem' with a parallel problem in the psychiatric community: are there neuroses, for example the fanatical anti-Semitism of an Alfred Rosenberg, which should be 'excommunicated' as beyond hope of correction?

What Yalom is not so good at appreciating is the theological significance of the problem - from psychiatric as well as Jewish perspectives. He makes it clear through comments by his narrator that for him theology is equivalent to superstition, that the scientific attitude of men like Spinoza and his successors in the Enlightenment (especially Kant) make theology not only silly but dangerous. Theology, for Yalom, is the creating of God in the image of man, and should be stopped because it then tries to impose this image as true. Psycho-analysis is the alternative to superstition and as such is a rational substitute for theology.

Yalom obviously has a point. Theology has as often as not been used to justify whatever structure of power happens to be in place - males, believers, monarchists, democrats, fascists, clerics and other assorted bullies from the era of Socrates to the era of Trump. But then the same could be said of much of psychology and sociology, not to mention the hard science directed toward commercial or military superiority. All human inquiry, not just theology, is affected by what is perceived as human interests. There is no disinterested inquiry, nor should there be in a world that has problems to solve.

Yalom misses this point, although it is implicit in his formulation of the novelistic situation. Justice and charity, even supposing we can agree on a single definition of what they might be, are incommensurable on the face of it. This is a fundamental problem. The two criteria (or virtues, or values) are contrary, although not necessarily contradictory, aspects of what philosophers call the Good. As such there is no rational way to make a 'trade-off' between these two criteria of the Good in any real situation. Until the two terns can be somehow reconciled, justice and charity remain abstract and ethically sterile.

The role of theology is precisely to create such a reconciliation between contrary Goods. It does this not by creating an image of God in human form, but by probing for a 'bigger' criterion of the Good which includes both justice and charity, in the manner say that Relativity Physics includes Newtonian Physics as a special case, or the way in which Euler's Theorem unifies radically different universes of numbers in mathematics.

The image that theology creates, therefore, is not of humanity writ cosmically large, but of individual human beings unified with each other in community. The greater the number of people involved, the more difficult the problem of unification, and the closer one comes to that unachievable asymptote, theologically termed 'God'. The problem being addressed in theology is precisely that raised as paradox by Yalom: the status of the individual in a community and the status of a community in a larger community.

Theology, done right, doesn't attempt to be interest-free but interest-inclusive. The image created by theological investigation is also, therefore, not that of any random or arbitrary human being but the specific human being called by Emmanuel Levinas the Other. This Other, whether a person or another community, is the principal locus of divine revelation and, consequently, of the concrete meaning of justice and charity. More theology, more sweeping up of the refuse that is humanity, not less, is the solution to the Spinoza Problem.

View all my reviews