Why on earth doesn’t the poor man say the Soul and have done with it? WILLIAM JAMES “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing.” I remember the moment fifty years ago when I read that outrageous and enviable sentence for the first time. The words infuriated me, because they seemed to defy so much of what we know about nature and history, and because they seemed to mock us for regarding the imperfections of the world, which include calamities of enormous magnitude, with the utmost seriousness. The shocking verbal simplicity of its fortune-cookie theodicy, the untroubled and undiversified syntax of its peace of mind, made it easy to imagine it being uttered in a comedy by a fool. But it was not the pronouncement of a fool, and so I confess that I felt also a certain jealousy of the philosopher whose ferocious critical energy did not rule out such a cosmically sanguine conclusion, such an unmitigated declaration of acceptance, such a thorough release from intellectual strain. Either he was wrong or I was flawed. (Or both, of course.) How could the mind think itself to such a state of contentment without compromising itself? Sentences such as this can tar reason’s already tarred reputation. The sentence appears, almost as a methodological throwaway, in the preparatory material, the introductory “definitions,” of the second part of Spinoza’s Ethics. The first part of the work, the strictly metaphysical part, laid the ground for it, so that no elaboration would be necessary. My study of Spinoza had been preceded, fortunately, by some immersion in medieval religious philosophy, and specifically medieval Jewish philosophy, out of which his own thought emerged, so that there were echoes and precedents that qualified my visceral sense of the sentence’s absurdity. There was a whiff of Anselm in Spinoza’s words, of his association, in the renowned proof for the existence of God, of the perfect with the real. Having demonstrated to his satisfaction, in the first part of his book, that God and nature are identical, Spinoza’s sentence follows rather uncontroversially: reality, which is God, and perfection, which is God, are the same thing. This triumphant conflation is re-stated almost immediately: no sooner has he completed his “definitions” and his “axioms” than Spinoza turns to the “propositions” of his second part. The first proposition is that “thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing.” No breakthrough there; it was the conventional wisdom of medieval monotheism. The second proposition is that “extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing.” That was Bento’s bombshell. There also loomed over the sentence, as over the rest of the work, the long, daring, and severe shadow of Maimonides, whose metaphysical faith in natural law and in the omniscience of its creator carried the mind to the very limit that Spinoza momentously transgressed. When, for example, in a startling passage in his own philosophical masterpiece, Maimonides mentions “the divine actions,” he immediately adds “I mean to say the natural actions” — an aside that makes Spinozists swoon, because it seems to suggest that their hero was fearlessly completing the logic of his precursor, who lacked the courage or the imagination to go the whole way. This is nonsense. Spinoza was not the fulfillment of his tradition; he was its destruction. Maimonides did not shrink back, in psychological or political timidity, from the pantheistic temptations of his own naturalism; he believed that they were false and unwarranted, rationally and in his religion. He went where his mind led him; and he regarded the faith in the divinity of creation as the most basic form of idolatry, because his mind — not his synagogue, his mind — established with rigorous conceptual analysis that the identification of the created with the creator cannot be true. These were some of my early thoughts upon encountering Spinoza’s sentence, some of my defenses against it, as I sat in my woolen yarmulke and jeans, a tender Maimonidean in the secular city, and experienced one of the seismic events in the history of Western thought. I had another misgiving about the sentence. Despite its quasi-mystical heat, it seemed so cold. It amoralized the cosmos; or more accurately, it chose to overlook those precincts of the cosmos in which human freedom tears holes in the finished and unruffled fabric of this allegedly immaculate reality. It was clear from the pages in which the sentence appeared that Spinoza was not regarding perfection from a moral standpoint; and indeed it is silly to regard the entirety of the universe from the standpoint of good and evil. In our world we are big, but our world is small. Still, Spinoza’s ontological equation begged an important question. What is the relationship between perfection and goodness? If perfection and reality are the same thing, are goodness and reality the same thing? Quite obviously they are not. In subsequent years, as I studied moral philosophy and the ethical writings of my tradition, the distinction between perfection and goodness became decisive for me. An extended but informal survey of the literature on Spinoza revealed that his sentence was not generally read as an observation on the goodness of what there is. But I note an interesting exception: in one of his greatest essays, Russell claims that Spinoza “uses the word ‘perfection’ when he means to speak of the good that is not merely human.” But what is the good that is not merely human? Russell’s reading remoralizes Spinoza’s cosmos, though he himself never believed that the universe has anything to do with the satisfaction of human desires or ideals. He argues that Spinoza’s sentence should be interpreted as an expression of “mysticism [that] maintains that all evil is illusory, and
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