Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Iris Murdoch was 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; with Murdoch it’s often Plato. She maintains a Platonic ambiguity throughout the whole book.
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.
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein graduated from Columbia University, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her PhD in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship. As well as her teaching work she is also a writer whose novels and short stories dramatise the concerns of philosophy. Goldstein’s writings emerge as arguments for the belief that in our time fiction may be the best vehicle for involving readers in questions of morality and existence. She says imaginatively inhabiting other lives, which is what we do in literature, can induce a great moral growth.
