Editors’ preface to special issue of Intellectual History Review on Spinoza and Art

Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) is often characterised in the history of philosophy as the rationalist philosopher par excellence. However, much contemporary critical interpretation of his thought has stressed the complex interplay of his account of imagination and affect with reason, and the importance of acknowledging the roles that each play in his epistemology, politics, and morality.¹ Despite this affective turn in Spinoza studies, until recently little has been said about the relevance of his philosophy to art and aesthetics. J. C. Morrison captures the common view when he states that Spinoza's philosophy “is fundamentally alien to, even hostile towards, art and beauty”.² Our research strongly contests this simplistic stance. The last decade, or so, has witnessed a steady erosion of caricatures of Spinoza in favour of more subtle and constructive approaches.

This special issue emerges out of research undertaken by the editors with the support of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, “Spinoza and Literature for Life: A Practical Theory of Art” [DP170102206]. Some of the essays collected here began life as conference presentations at events and symposia, funded by this grant, that took place at the University of Sydney and at Western Sydney University during 2017 and 2018. The articles by Amy Cimini, Sara Hornäk, and Susan Ruddick are exceptions and they appear here by invitation. These three essays reflect our desire to enrich the scope of the issue by including work on Spinoza and music, Spinoza and painting, and the relevance of Spinoza's philosophy to the desire to sustain life itself.

The project as a whole involves interrogating the ways in which Spinoza's system and the insights it brings might shed light on the ars vivendi (the art of life), or the endeavour to live well. In particular, our focus is on the role played by the arts and artistic practice in the achievement of joyful living. This focus involves two key elements. On the one hand, we read Spinoza's works in order to rigorously apply some key ideas to an understanding of the arts. This is the aim of our co-authored essay here, which explores how the paired concepts of ingenium and dispositio (both of which are involved in understanding Spinoza's notion of disposition) allow us to more fully grasp the empowering capacities of art. On the other hand, we develop case studies related to writers who have been drawn to Spinoza's work, so as to examine how his ideas have influenced the mode of expression of the values embodied in those works.³ One of the immense joys involved in work on this project has been the opportunities it has afforded us to work with scholars from around the world who are also exploring the relations between Spinoza and the arts.⁴

The present collection includes essays by scholars who take up this exploratory task in a variety of ways. The first two essays, by Joe Hughes and Jonathan Israel, are historical in focus. Hughes works into the history of ideas by considering how Spinoza's idea of the truth might be related to his own reading of works by writers of fiction, theatre, and poetry, as well as philosophy. It looks to the contents of Spinoza's library to consider possible influences on how he developed and reformed ideas of truth and falsity. In doing this, Hughes looks, among other things, at Spanish writers that Spinoza is known to have read. Hughes’ essay offers ground-breaking readings that, in part, illustrate how Spinoza himself made use not only of works of philosophy and theology but also works of fiction to formulate his ideas. Israel develops the first detailed overview in English of the importance of a “Spinozist” society dedicated to literature and the arts: the Nil Volentibus Arduum. While a good deal of work has appeared in Dutch related to this group, which included key members of Spinoza's inner circle such as Lodewijk Meyer and Johannes Bouwmeester, and which continued to work as a society and influence artistic practice in the Netherlands into the eighteenth century, Israel offers the first detailed reading in English of how the ideas of the group relate to Spinoza's project and its reception, and so adds to our knowledge of how Spinozist ideas might be applied to the arts. Warren Montag's essay complements that of Hughes, by focusing on writers of fiction and poetry that Spinoza is known to have read, Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián, and demonstrating how these writers offered Spinoza an alternative understanding of literary practice; one that emphasised incompleteness and openness of form rather than formal closure. These models, in turn, speak to a world built upon complex and ever-evolving formal relations between things, rather than an idea of fixed static things.

The next essay in the collection is our own, which, as touched upon above, concerns the importance of disposition to the ars vivendi and artistic practice. In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that, while we cannot avoid being affected by passions, we do possess the power to organise these affects, both by choosing to engage with things, including the arts, that dispose us towards feeling and understanding, and by altering our perspective on things that happen to us through understanding them. We argue that concepts of disposition allow us to see how this is possible: we can dispose ourselves either to understand better and so become more active, or to wallow in ignorance and suffering. We further contend that works of art, which are themselves bodies that act on other bodies, are capable of disposing their audiences in particular ways. This essay, in turn, is complemented by the one that follows. Sara Hornäk takes us from readings of literature to a focus on the visual arts. She offers a juxtaposition of ideas apparent in the work of Spinoza's contemporary, the great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. Rather than claiming direct affinity or influence moving either from Spinoza to Vermeer or vice versa, Hornäk takes seriously Hans Blumenberg's claim that immanence was “a general hypothesis of the epoch” in which both Spinoza and Vermeer thrived. She then traces the manner in which signs of immanence emerge from Vermeer's works to engage his viewers. This engagement offers an example of how works of art possess the power to alter the dispositions of their audiences.

The essays that follow seek to apply readings of Spinoza to contemporary practice, in music (Cimini on Spinoza and modern and contemporary music), architecture (Lord on architectural thinking in Spinoza), and the ars vivendi (Ruddick on our relation to the planet and the crisis of climate change). Cimini takes us on a tour of modern and contemporary sonic theory and practice in considering how the famous assertion from Spinoza that “we don't know what a body can do” allows us to think of the nature of sound and music in new ways. Lord, who recently completed a major project on Spinoza and architecture, looks at the brief mentions Spinoza makes of architecture, and draws them into relation with a rigorous reading of his system to consider what it means to think like an architect. We end with a powerful essay by Susan Ruddick, which engages with the overwhelming problem of our age, climate change, and engages with the work of Vittorio Morfino to demonstrate how ideas from Spinoza can help us to better conceptualise the nature of the threats that confront us, and the world whose relations are being altered by our passions and compulsions, and to consider how we might try and work towards a fuller understanding of what we can do; an ars vivendi that would involve really acting in order to preserve the being of the world on which our own being is utterly dependent.

Acknowledgments

The guest editors of this special issue would like to warmly thank Julie Weston for her excellent work, her professionalism, and her patience. We are grateful to Jason Tuckwell and Inja Stracenski for their help in preparing this volume for publication. We would also like to thank Stephen Gaukroger for his encouragement and support of the project.

Notes on contributors

Moira Gatens is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin in 2007–2008. In 2010, she held the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam. In 2011, she was President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. She has research interests in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, early modern philosophy, and philosophy and literature. She is presently co-investigator on an ARC grant on Spinoza and Art with Anthony Uhlmann.

Anthony Uhlmann is Professor of Literature in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. He is the author of four monographs concerned with literary history and the interaction between literature and philosophy: Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge UP, 1999); Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge UP, 2006); Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov (Continuum, 2011); and J. M. Coetzee, Truth, Meaning, Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is the author of a novel, Saint Antony in His Desert (UWAP, 2018).

Notes

1 See, for example, Armstrong, Green, and Sangicomo, Spinoza and Relational Autonomy; Lord, Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio; Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization; Jaquet, Affects, Actions and Passions in Spinoza. For an overview of contemporary work on Spinoza, see Duffy, “Spinoza Today”.

2 Morrison, “Why Spinoza Had No Aesthetics”, 359.

3 Examples of this aspect of our project include: Uhlmann, “Spinoza, Aesthetics and Percy Shelley” and Gatens, “Frankenstein, Spinoza, and Exemplarity”.

4 In addition to the work presented here, our co-edited special issue of Textual Practice, Spinoza's Artes, contains essays by several authors on Spinoza and art, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2019.