Graham – The third chapter of your book targets what you call “neo-Spinozism.” Where can we find this philosophy today, and why is it not the path we ought to pursue?
As I describe it therein, neo-Spinozism is a big tent today, especially in Continental philosophical circles. Amongst Continentalists, much of this is to be attributed to the lasting influences of Althusser and Deleuze.
The third chapter you ask about is set up by the second chapter of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (“For a Thoughtful Ontology: Hegel’s Immanent Critique of Spinoza”). I revisit Hegel’s various interrelated criticisms of Spinoza (and of those, such as Schelling at certain moments, who fail to maintain sufficient distance from Spinozism) with an eye to their enduring relevance.
One of the major fault lines of tension amongst those in today’s theoretical humanities self-identifying as “materialists” could be described as the division between neo-Spinozists (such as Jane Bennett and William Connolly, about whom you ask below, as well as various Althusserians and, especially, the multitude of Deleuzians still around and working) and neo-Hegelians (such as Žižek, Malabou, and myself).
Hence, I believe that revisiting the Spinoza-Hegel rapport is particularly important considering this specific contemporary philosophical situation of intra-materialist antagonism.
To cut a long story short, I consider Spinozisms both old and new to be flat, monochromatic monisms of little explanatory value indefensibly sidelining subjectivity and everything associated with it (here, my arguments against reductive, eliminative, and/or epiphenomenalist analyses of subjects come into play, ones laid out in Part One of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism as well as elsewhere).
As with Hegel’s dismissal of “the night in which all cows are black,” I see nothing philosophically or intellectually interesting or productive in repetitively chanting ad nauseum the mantra “hen kai pan,” endlessly invoking nothing more than the vacuity of a hypothesized Infinite, Natura naturans, or whatever else along these lines as the alpha-and-omega of a fundamental ontology.
Moreover, these monisms seem to me to be arrived at via some sort of epistemologically under/un-justified magical, mystical power of intellectual intuition (à la Hegel’s disqualification of those who put forward supposed knowledge as if it could be formulated “as though shot from a pistol”) based on arbitrary inclinations and tastes.
Related to this, neo-Spinozists strike me as too pre-Kantian, behaving as though Kant had never existed and they easily can ignore the deadly serious epistemological issues and problems raised by the Critique of Pure Reason and similar works.
By contrast with contemporary neo-Spinozists, the post-Fichtean German idealists who wished to reconsider and appropriate select aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy did so in tandem with meticulous, sustained considerations of Kant’s critical-transcendental framework.
These objective/absolute idealists’ “Spinozism of freedom” (as a synthesis of the split betweeen, on the one side, Spinoza’s monism and, on the other side, Kant’s and Fichte’s transcendental idealisms), which I see as the primary historical precursor of transcendental materialism, is very different from the Spinozisms of those I describe as “neo-Spinozists.”
Apart from these objections to neo-Spinozism at the level of theoretical philosophy (qua ontology and epistemology), I never have been convinced by either Spinoza himself nor any of his advocates that a precise group of implications at the level of practical philosophy (as ethics, politics, etc.) strikes me as being ethically and politically neutral in and of itself.
Admittedly, it can be read as progressive or radical, as do many who follow in the footsteps of Althusser, Deleuze, et al. But, it does not have to be read in these ways. In fact, I readily can imagine far-right readings of it as underpinning organicist-totalitarian models of society and state.
To return yet again to the German-speaking world of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries —as I hope has become evident by this point, I operate with the conviction that making headway with respect to current philosophical/theoretical questions and problems requires parallel ongoing engagements with the history of philosophy behind these very questions and problems — the Pantheismusstreit triggered in the 1780s by Jacobi’s invocations of Spinoza help bring to light the inherent ambiguities of Spinozism in relation to the areas of concern to practical philosophy.
One of the challenges Jacobi poses for Spinoza’s proponents then and now is the possibility of interpreting the system of 1677’s Ethics as ultimately fatalistic, quietistic, and nihilistic. Jacobi’s interpretations, whatever their inaccuracies, are much more sophisticated and harder to dismiss than Spinozists past and present might like to admit.
Graham – Your book discusses the political philosopher William Connolly, who is perhaps less well known in continental philosophy than his collaborator, Jane Bennett. What important lessons could we learn from Connolly?
In terms of what Connolly has to teach Continental philosophers and their allies in other disciplines, I would pinpoint two contributions made by him. First, he sometimes is careful to acknowledge that there are no straight lines of automatic entailment between ontologies and political theories.
Instead, as he depicts it, certain pictures of being nudge our reflections on politics in a general range of directions without, for all that, compelling the affirmation of one specific political position.
As my remarks about the practical-philosophical dimensions of Spinoza’s metaphysics at the end of my answer to your previous question already hint, I tend to agree with Connolly about this.
The second thing to be appreciated in Connolly’s work is its admirable exemplification of a genuine spirit of all-too-rare real interdisciplinarity, one spanning the full range of disciplines from the humanities to the naturalsciences.
A lot of lip service is paid to interdisciplinarity in academia. But, not only is much scholarly output still narrowly restricted by (hyper-) specialization — academics continue literally not to put their money where their purportedly interdisciplinary mouths are, with academic hires very rarely involving a crossing of traditional disciplinary boundary-lines.
In this vein, Connolly, like Malabou, strives to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, the humanities and social sciences (especially as informed by the Continental philosophical tradition) and, on the other hand, the life sciences (particularly neurobiology).
I believe this precise variety of interdisciplinarity pursued by Connolly is the future not only for philosophy in general, but for the theoretical humanities as a whole.