Rebecca Goldstein on Reason and its Limitations

Your first book is Middlemarch, by George Eliot.

Many people will be familiar with this book. The main story concerns a young woman named Dorothea, who is very hungry for an intellectually and spiritually expansive life, though she’s not quite sure how to secure it. Given the time that she lives in, her first thought is to marry the man who can teach her the most, and this leads her to make an unfortunate marriage with the dry pedant Mr Casaubon. Casaubon turns out to be not only an impoverished thinker but a rigid and small-souled person. So it really is a book about her bucking convention and living with the consequences, and slowly finding her way toward moral clarity.

George Eliot was not only a great novelist, but a fine philosopher. You feel, underneath the workings of the plot, a very good philosophical mind thinking things out in a very original way. Only very recently, when I was writing something on Spinoza’s literary influences, did I discover that George Eliot had translated Spinoza’s work from the Latin into English. She only decided to turn to literature after she finished translating The Ethics. So here are these two great writers whom I love, Eliot and Spinoza, and Eliot had loved him. Still, Spinoza didn’t think much of the imagination. He didn’t think that it could be a cognitive instrument, whereas Eliot did, and you can sense her arguing with him through her fiction.

Your next choice is The Ethics, by the man himself, Baruch Spinoza.

He is, of course, one of the great 17th-century rationalists, someone who made all the claims for reason that have ever been made. Reason can not only discover the nature of the world but can make us better people and more spiritually transcendent people! So every claim you can imagine. There is great ambiguity in him. He was called a God-intoxicated man by the poet Novalis. But he was also perhaps one of the most effective atheists of all time. And he was seen that way. He was excommunicated by his own community – the Jewish community of Amsterdam, and he was denounced by all of Europe in his day and well into the Age of Enlightenment.

His conception of reality is so profoundly radical, even today, that the usual concepts of atheist, theist, and agnostic just don’t really fit neatly.

He completely rejects the idea of a transcendent God. He identifies God with existence itself, with the laws of nature and all that those laws yield. It is a very abstract idea of existence and that is what he identifies with God. He doesn’t think that the normal conceptions of God make any sense at all, and he tries to do justice to his intuition, still a viable intuition, that the laws of nature will prove self-explanatory.

And do you agree with him after all your research?

To me the only God that really makes sense, if any of them make sense, would be Spinoza’s God. Identifying God with the laws of nature themselves, the final theory of everything, and the sense of awe this can invoke, which Spinoza called the Intellectual Love of God: that is a conception of God that appeals to me tremendously, as it did to George Eliot, my favourite novelist, which was a surprise.

But you also side with imagination and don’t just go for reason?

Yes, I align myself very much with the argument that George Eliot is making. Imaginatively inhabiting other lives, which is what we do in literature, can induce a great moral growth. She says we have to struggle to know what it is like to be other people, that these acts of the imagination are morally relevant.

Another novel you have chosen is Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince.

Iris Murdoch had been an Oxford don in philosophy and then became a very well respected novelist. A preoccupation with philosophical questions runs beneath her wonderfully inventive plots. With Eliot it’s Spinoza who is looming behind the fiction, and with Murdoch it’s often Plato. And Plato also had no use for the life of the imagination. Like Spinoza, Plato is another chauvinist on behalf of reason. He banished the poets from his Utopia. He is very suspicious of enchantment of all sorts, and art is a profound form of enchantment, as is romance. So he’s wary of both of them, but also he is torn, sometimes allowing himself to entertain the thought that there are truths that one can only get at through both aesthetic and erotic enchantment, and he argues with himself. (I love a philosopher who can argue with himself.) In The Black Prince, Murdoch is carrying forth this Platonic argument.

The Black Prince is about a very ambiguous character, an aging tax collector, who feels himself to have always been a great novelist, even though he’s never written the great novel. He retires, he’s about to write the great novel, but he falls in love with an inappropriately young woman. It is not clear if he is a dirty old man or if he is showing us the path to redemption. Murdoch maintains this ambiguity, which is a very Platonic ambiguity, throughout the whole book.