The Potentiality of the Archaic: Spinoza and the Chinese

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Notes

¹“It is astonishing that among the different religions in the world, there is only one that, without any resort to revelation, rejecting equally supernatural systems and the ghosts of superstition and terror, which are supposed to be of such a great use for the behaviour of men, was established just through natural duty” says Boulainvilliers about Confucianism (“Réfutation des erreurs de Benoit de Spinosa”, Oeuvres Philosophiques [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973], p. 206).

²Bayle, P., The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, vol. 3 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997), p. 550.

³Uzgalis, W. L. (ed.), The Correspondence of Samuel Clarke and Anthony Collins, 1707–08 (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2011) (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~scmitche/clarkecollins2.html).

⁴Quoted in Wolf, A., “An Addition to the Correspondence of Spinoza”, Philosophy 10, p. 203. Mundus subterraneus (written in 1660 and published in Amsterdam in 1665) is Kircher's masterpiece. In it are described all kinds of realities hidden underground, liquids, rocks, caves …  and the neologism “Geocosmos” is coined to designate the set of natural phenomena of the planet, conceived as a vast organism traversed with channels in its interior. The conversation between Spinoza and Huygens dwells on the theory of pendulums – useless, according to Kircher and against Huygens' position, to measure lengths.

⁵Spinoza, B., A Theological-Political Treatise (hereafter: TPT), Section 1, chap. 3 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/phi/spinoza/treat/tpt05.htm).

⁶Carrington, G. L., A Short History of the Chinese People (Mineola: Dover, 2002).

⁷The occupation of Peking by the Manchu tartars, which put an end to the Ming dynasty, was an influential historical fact, mentioned as an example of factual truth by Albert Burgh, one of the most hostiles correspondents Spinoza ever had. In this letter – which would trigger a famous answer full of explicit anticlericalism and anti-christianism – Burgh accuses Spinoza of denying Christ's divinity (taken as a de facto truth), in which so many myriads of holy men have believed, and he writes “[a]gain, might I not in like manner deny that the kingdom of China was occupied by the Tartars, that Constantinople is the seat of the Turkish Empire, and any number of such things?” (Spinoza, B., The Letters, trans. S. Shirley [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995], p. 308).

⁸TPT, Section 1, chap. 5 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/phi/spinoza/treat/tpt07.htm).

⁹TPT, Part 4, chap. 16 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/phi/spinoza/treat/tpt24.htm).

¹⁰TPT, Section 1, Preface (http://www.sacred-texts.com/phi/spinoza/treat/tpt02.htm).

¹¹Spinoza, B., A Treatise on Politics, trans. William Maccall (London: Holyoake, 1854), p. 41. (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018713347;view=1up;seq=47)

¹²Spinoza, B., “Letter LXXIV. Spinoza to Albert Burgh,” The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891) (http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1711&chapter=199575&layout=html&Itemid=27). Nevertheless, stripped from their superstitious content, all religions that teach the minimal creed of love for the neighbour and for God – Mohamed's included – are equivalent and true: “As regards the Turks and other non-Christian nations; if they worship God by the practice of justice and charity towards their neighbour, I believe that they have the spirit of Christ, and are in a state of salvation, whatever they may ignorantly hold with regard to Mahomet and oracles”. “Letter XLIC. Spinoza to Isaac Orobio” (http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1711&chapter=199521&layout=html#a_3163242).

¹³Spinoza, B., Political Treatise, chap. 7 (http://www.constitution.org/bs/poltr_07.htm#027).

¹⁴De la Bruyère, J., The ‘Characters,’ trans. Henri Van Laun (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), p.461 (http://archive.org/stream/charactersofjean00labriala/charactersofjean00labriala_djvu.txt).

¹⁵See Mungello, D. E., “European philosophical responses to non-european culture: China,” in Gerber, D. and Ayers, M. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 89–91.

¹⁶Founded by the Jesuits at Trévoux in 1701, its main task would end up being the defence of religion and the struggle against its declared enemies, in particular the materialists of L'Encyclopédie. [See. Journal de Trévoux ou Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des sciences et des arts (1701), Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1969]. The same year in which the Entretien d'un philosophe chrétien et d'un philosophe chinois sur l'existence et la nature de Dieu – 1708 – was printed, the Mémoires de Trévoux published a critical article, answered by Malebranche in an Avis touchant l’ Entretien d'un philosophe chrétien et d'un philosophe chinois.

¹⁷Some of Leibniz’ texts dealing with China are the Prologue to the two editions of the Novissima Sinica (1697/1699); a letter to A. Verjus from 1700 known as De cultu Confucii civili; the correspondence with Father J. Buvet, which lasts for ten years, and the Discours sur la théologie naturelle des chinois (1716), which would have been interrupted by the death of its author on 14 November 1716.

¹⁸“But who would have believed that there is on earth a people who, though we are in our view so very advanced in every branch of behavior, still surpass us in comprehending the precepts of civil life? Yet now we find this to be so among the Chinese, as we learn to know them better. And so if we are their equals in the trial arts, and ahead of them in contemplative sciences, certainly they surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adopted to the present life and use of mortals" [sect. 3, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Writings on China, trans. D. J. Cook and H. Rosemont Jr., Chicago: Open court, 1994] (http://candleforlove.com/forums/topic/22449-chinese-history-and-philosophy).

¹⁹A copy of the Entretien …  (preserved with notes from the author of La Monadologie) was sent in April 1712 by Lelong to Leibniz, who started reading it in November 1715.

²⁰Mungello, D. E., op. cit., pp. 97–8.

²¹See Lai, Y. T., ‘‘The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche”, Journal of the History of Philosophy 23–32 (1985), p. 178.

²²Malebranche, N., Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God, trans. D. A. Lorio (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980), p. 22.

²³This reference to authors who deny punishment and reward after death, even without explicitly naming him, alludes obviously to Spinoza, and in particular to his TPT.

²⁴Leibniz, G. W., op. cit., p. 66.

²⁵Ibid., pp. 88, 84.

²⁶Ibid., pp. 85–6.

²⁷It is wisdom and justice but – he puts himself in the mouth of the Chinese philosopher – it is neither wise nor fair, that is to say, it is not a subject: “it knows neither what it is nor what it does”, it does not have a will nor freedom, “acts only by the necessity of its nature” and, against the creatio ex nihilo idea, extension is considered “eternal, necessary, infinite” (Malebranche, N., op. cit., pp. 84, 46, 100).

²⁸For example, the Confucian dictum of “all things are one”, or the interpretation of Li as something close to the doctrine of the Soul of the World “of which the individual souls would only be modifications. This would follow the opinion of several ancients, the opinions of the Averroists, and in a certain sense, even the opinions of Spinoza” (Ibid., p. 90).

²⁹ The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, vol. 5 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1997), p. 198.

³⁰These are the Chán Buddhists, called Foe Kiao (No-man) by the Jesuit missionaries – whose reports are Bayle's source here (see P. Wienpahl, The Radical Spinoza, New York: New York University Press, 1979).

³¹Bayle, P., The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, vol. 3, p. 550.

³²Ibid., vol. 5, p. 199.

³³Ibid., pp. 199–202.

³⁴Bayle, P., Oeuvres diverses de Mr. Pierre Bayle, vol. 4 (La Haye: Par la Compagnie de libraires, 1737), p. 728 (https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=6cjcwpwpac4C&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA728).

³⁵Ibid., p. 983 (https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=6cjcwpwpac4C&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA983).

³⁶Weststeijn, T., “Spinoza sinicus: An Asian Paragraph in the History of the Radical Enlightenment”, Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (2007), p. 538.

³⁷In effect, in Radical Enlightenment Jonathan Israel attributes to Bayle the purpose of transmitting radical ideas – stealthy covered behind the insult of “systemic Atheist” – but without mentioning the coincidence between Spinoza's ideas and ancient Chinese thought that figures on the long note on the Amsterdammer philosopher in the Dictionnaire. Instead, Israel highlights the Greek and Renaissance's premises that Bayle cites as proof that Spinozism would be a kind of constant of human thought (Israel, J., Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 136–7).

³⁸Old friend of Menasseah Ben Israel and Huygens, Isaac Vossius (1618–89) had dealings with Spinoza because of a shared interest in problems of optics and chemistry.

³⁹The entries “Spinosa” and “Spinosiste” were written by Diderot in 1759 and are listed in volume XV of the Encyclopédie, published in 1765. Even though this is the most relevant explicit reference to him, the presence of the Amsterdammer philosopher is disseminated through various entries, starting with volume I where his name is mentioned in entries “Soul”, “Atheist” or “Atheism”.

⁴⁰Diderot, D., Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, The ARTFL Project, University of Chicago, (http://artflsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgibin/philologic/getobject.pl?p.2:362.encyclopedie0513).

⁴¹M. Albrecht edited a bilingual edition of this work: Christian Wolff, Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica/ Rede über die praktische Philosophie der Chinesen (Meiner, Hamburg, 1985).

⁴²Fleming, W. F. (trans.), The Project Gutenberg Ebook of A Philosophical Dictionary, vol. 3 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35623/35623-h/35623-h.html).

⁴³Ibid.

⁴⁴Ibid.