Spinoza’s Ethics

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The scholar of philosophy Clare Carlisle has undertaken the long-belated task of bringing George Eliot’s translation of Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) to publication. Simply the sight of this volume is moving, knowing as we do that the great labor of translation was done between 1854 and 1856, yet until now has been unavailable outside the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and a limited, now out-of-print edition of a transcription of that translation made in 1981. Historically, Eliot’s translation is important because it was likely the first English version of a text that Carlisle defines as among the masterpieces of Western philosophy. But is also meaningful to Eliot scholars since it was the last major work the scholar Marian Evans took on (working meticulously from multiple Latin editions as well as French and German translations, correcting earlier errors as she went) before George Eliot emerged as an artist uniquely capable of integrating into her fiction the fullest range of philosophy, history, theology, and sciences of life and mind. Carlisle suggests that Spinoza was not simply the last of the three major translation projects Eliot took on, but also that “there is something Spinozistic in her sense of becoming empowered to express her nature fully” in her fiction (33). Spinoza’s ideas, Carlisle suggests, contributed to a self-conception that allowed the writer to emerge in the early years of her partnership with George Henry Lewes, he, immersed in his Life of Goethe, she in Spinoza, as together they navigated the radical, creative lives they had chosen.Spinoza was not new to either thinker in 1854, both of them having first encountered his thought in the 1840s. Carlisle offers us an outstanding introductory essay in which she contextualizes the slow travel of Spinoza among English intellectuals in the early to mid-decades of the nineteenth century, from what Lewes called his status as a “theological pariah” (as qtd., 17), denounced and misrepresented, to the central figure for a generation of thinkers “singularly receptive” to Spinoza (29). His philosophy was appealing to those who rejected orthodox doctrine, saw as clearly as possible the evils of sectarian divides, but nonetheless desired to live according to what Spinoza called “true religion” (as qtd., 4). Carlisle helpfully reads Marian Evans’s Westminster Review essay, “Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming,” in the context of Spinoza’s thought, pointing out the overlap in Evans’s critique and her desire to replace orthodoxy “not with secular common sense and benevolence but with a deeper, gentler, more authentic spirituality” (24). At the same time, Carlisle directs us to the fullest assessment of what we might call “the Victorian Spinoza,” in the long 1855 Westminster Review essay written by the thinker and novelist, J. A. Froude, for whom Eliot felt a great affinity. Froude’s essay comes closest to “a true estimate of his life and system,” the full analysis and appreciation that Eliot believed was the only “translation” of Spinoza that could adequately account for the force of his ideas (as qtd., 17).While Carlisle acknowledges that the 1850s was by no means a moment free of religious dogma, still, “God and the human relation to God had finally become an open question” in England, as it had long been in Germany (27). Spinoza’s position that all things are in God—that God is ontologically different from all other modes of being—undercut anthropomorphic theology, as well as atheism, and deism (4). Carlisle distills here a “clear religious significance”: Spinoza’s philosophy meant that “we are at once closer to God, and more different from God, than we may have imagined” (5). This is not the revealed God of individual Protestant scriptural reading but an idea of God that broke down a Cartesian divide between mind and body, and allowed George Eliot to engage in the interplay between the two that characterized her own theorizing in and about fiction.Carlisle, like Isobel Armstrong, the most recent major critic to take on the subject of the relation between Spinoza and Eliot, reads Eliot’s novels insightfully. Yet to my mind, the powerful links Carlisle draws between Spinoza and Eliot tell most biographically, when we consider Eliot’s lifelong struggles with anxiety, her depressive tendencies, and the intensity of her desire for joy, but also for the calm, which can be so artistically enabling. The reigning critical idea of sympathy as the fundamental moral aim for Eliot is complicated by Spinoza (cf. Armstrong) who is equally interested in the conditions of human flourishing without which no sympathy is possible. Carlisle finds “genuine Spinozism” not in any direct representations but in ways less traceable and more generative: “the deep emotional intelligence evident throughout her novels” and her “metaphysics of morals” that came “not so much to replace religious life as to constitute it” (35), two fundamental insights into Eliot’s work. For Spinoza, as for Eliot, ignorance was a kind of captivity whereas knowledge and self-knowledge brought with it powers that could not be found otherwise (41). Carlisle also points to an important divergence between the two thinkers, in Eliot’s deeply Christian insistence that such knowledge could not be attained without suffering. This difference begs more consideration: How do Eliot’s novels manage that strained double commitment to suffering and to flourishing?Carlisle’s edition is useful for Spinoza scholars in that it offers an appendix with a “Table of Emotions” comparing the three major English translations to date. But most notable is Carlisle’s explication of her own deliberations over the problem of gender in a philosophy that speaks of “the human being,” homo, in terms to date always rendered masculine (the gender of God is likewise problematic). She describes considering alternating gendered pronouns or simply consistently using the feminine in order to remind us of the female labor behind the text, to test whether Spinoza’s descriptions of the “human” condition ring as true for women as for men, to note the historical progress in women’s education since Eliot’s own time, and to help undo the masculinist bias still so powerful in the field of philosophy. (Carlisle’s considerations include a useful discussion of Eliot’s own ambivalent feminism and her narratorial voice.) Sadly, Carlisle did not elect the change to feminine, electing to privilege historical accuracy. Yet she offers us an appendix with a single paragraph, the final scholium of the Ethics, rendered in feminine. “The Wise Woman” opens our ears to the massive difference it makes to read a philosophical text directed toward a female audience. Here, we can imagine what it might have meant and what it could mean to make female the confident, universal assertions of a wisdom-genre whose patriarchal ethos has been inseparable from its representation of mind, society, God, nature, and all else. I quote it here almost in its entirety to reproduce its profound effects.“For the ignorant person—besides that she is agitated in many ways by external causes, and possesses no true satisfaction of mind, lives without true consciousness of herself, of God, and of things . . . while the wise person, so far as she is such, has a soul scarcely moved by external things; she has true consciousness of herself, and of God, and of things in virtue of an eternal necessity; she never ceases to exist; and always possesses true repose of mind.”Carlisle worked from the Yale manuscript, and the vision of a twenty-first-century female scholar of philosophy working to bring to light a text that enabled the flourishing of a great nineteenth-century female novelist suggests the sort of “Choir Invisible” that Eliot imagined as the life after death that remained once the promises of a Christian afterlife could no longer be sustained. The edition’s facsimiles of manuscript pages bring us that much closer to the hands of the historical woman. With her philosophical and poetic sensitivity to these two seventeenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, Carlisle reminds us that rather than tracing direct lines of influence, today’s historical criticism might be ready to think in terms of “cosmic affinity[ies],” in this case, “the web of Spinozism that encompasses George Eliot, and the web of George Eliot, which incorporates Spinoza” (56, 55). The notion of a “spiritual friendship” is not what I expected to find in this new edition of a long-translated Spinoza, but Carlisle inspires and challenges us to recognize and value “the subtle power of a certain tie between two human beings, which is somehow sacred, a rich source of meaning” (56).