Imagination, Authority, and Community in Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise

Abstract

The purpose of my dissertation is to explore the relation of Spinoza's epistemology to his account of religion and politics in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP). It has long been recognized that Spinoza considers revealed religion an instance of the first kind of knowledge (or imagination), but this has usually been taken as evidence of a reductive or esoteric critique of religion. Since the imagination, in Spinoza's view, plays an irreducible role in social life, I aim to show that religion can also constitute a potentially constructive force in promoting social solidarity. While Spinoza undoubtedly opposes religious fanaticism and superstition, he does so, not by rationally (or indirectly) undermining revealed religion as a whole, but by nourishing a socially salutary form of religion. This insight is valuable for understanding the unity of the TTP: why Spinoza wrote a theological-political treatise and not a treatise on the externally related topics of theology and politics. In Spinoza's view, I argue, it is only by promoting a religion of justice, charity, and hence genuine community that he can both oppose the despotic abuse of superstition and support democracy in his immediate socio-political milieu and beyond. In the first chapter, I examine Spinoza's assessment of religious images in terms of their ability to support or undermine social cohesion. While Spinoza notoriously decries the dangers of the imagination in the Ethics, he nonetheless reserves a central role for it in his account of religious and political communities. I interpret this in light of two intersecting historical trajectories. In Chapter 2, I provide a detailed account of the political, religious, and intellectual conditions of the Dutch republic during the seventeenth century, showing how Spinoza attempts to use religious images to address a crisis of national identity (a crisis shared, in his view, by all newly instituted states). In Chapter 3, I investigate the role that the imagination plays in certain medieval and reformation accounts of religious knowledge (those of Alfarabi, Maimonides, and Calvin), in order to show the extent to which Spinoza's epistemology of religion consists in a constructive synthesis of these sources. Spinoza concludes that revelation is a product of the imagination, and hence it cannot be a source of metaphysical or scientific knowledge, but that precisely for that reason it can and was always intended to serve as an inspiring moral guide. Chapter 4 provides a close analysis of Spinoza's own account of religious knowledge⎯focusing on revelation and scripture⎯in light of his understanding of the imagination. I argue that Spinoza attempts to reorient the imagination of his readers away from a miraculous understanding of prophecy as a product of transcendent divine intervention in order to embrace a view in which the prophets would act as imitable exemplars within a moral community. In Chapter 5, I maintain that this understanding of revelation forms the basis of Spinoza's approach to both hermeneutics and politics in the TTP. Spinoza uses the moral image of prophecy to oppose superstition and despotism by revitalizing the morally edifying and⎯in his view⎯democratic spirit of revelation and scripture. I conclude by emphasizing some of the ways in which Spinoza's approach might helpfully inform contemporary debates concerning secularization and the role of religion in the public sphere. In sum, I attempt to show that, by denying the metaphysical or scientific status of religious images, Spinoza does not intend to dispute or undermine their constructive potential; instead, he attempts to liberate them for their true purpose as he sees it: the moral edification of religious and political communities.