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Spinoza: une lecture d'Aristote

Mogens Lærkea
a
University of Aberdeen,

Online publication date: 25 May 2011

To cite this Article Lærke, Mogens(2011) 'Spinoza: une lecture d'Aristote', British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 19:
3, 570 — 573
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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2011.563535

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 570 BOOK REVIEWS

Fréderic Manzini, Spinoza: une lecture d’Aristote. Paris: Presses Universi-

taires de France, 2009, pp. 334, e25.00. ISBN 978-2-13057093-6

I begin this review by explaining the importance of Frédéric Manzini’s book

in the context of the history of commentary which has made it not only a
welcome, but a necessary addition to the existing literature. I do not intend
by this to imply that Manzini’s work lacks value outside this context. On the
contrary, Spinoza: une lecture d’Aristote is a thorough, well-crafted and
erudite work, and should be read by anyone with a serious interest in
Spinoza’s philosophy and its sources. Indeed, this is a book which in reality
does not need the sort of justification that this history provides. However,
the historical context adds value to this philosophical study which largely
justifies itself.
Let me now address the question of the importance of the book in the
context of previous commentary on the relations between Spinoza and
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Aristotle. Undertaking a comparative and contextually informed study of

Spinoza’s reading of Aristotle is courageous and a bit like entering an old
combat zone still full of unexploded landmines. The old combat in question
is the methodological one between H. A. Wolfson and M. Gueroult. In The
Philosophy of Spinoza (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934),
Wolfson undertook the task of ‘reconstructing the Ethics out of scattered
slips of paper figuratively cut out of the philosophic literature available to
Spinoza’ (ibid., 3). He envisaged Spinoza’s philosophy as a compilation of
thoughts and doctrines conceived by Greek, Jewish, Arabic, and scholastic
thinkers, including Maimonides, Averroes, Crescas, Saint Thomas and, of
course, Aristotle. In his book, Wolfson thus attempted to provide an
account of the Ethics ‘going behind the geometrical method’, showing that it
in reality contains a philosophy ‘demonstrated in rabbinical and scholastic
order’ (ibid., 59). The result was spectacularly erudite, but methodologically
disastrous. Martial Gueroult’s devastating attack on Wolfson’s rampant
and somewhat arbitrary contextualism is contained in the third appendix of
the monumental Spinoza I – Dieu (Paris: Aubier, 1968). It is worth quoting
at length:

It is a damaging gamble wanting to reduce the original doctrine of a powerful

thinker to a ‘puzzle’ made up of disparate bits cut out from previous
philosophers and to confuse an original mind with the countless mass of text-
compilers and rabbinic commentators . . . it is an insult to the author, lowering
his philosophy to knowledge of the lowest kind (namely the first kind),
substituting the mere indexing of references for philosophical reflection, the
association of ideas for intelligence, and making verbal analogies prevail over
the meaning dictated by the analysis of the works, to the point of forcing the
texts to make them fit at all costs to what one has decided a priori they ought
to fit.
(442; my translation)
 BOOK REVIEWS 571

Wolfson’s ambitious contextual interpretation was left dying in a pool of

Aristotelian and rabbinical references.
After this battle of the giants, only few serious historians of philosophy
have had the courage to return to the comparative study of Spinoza and
Aristotle. Instead, this area in Spinoza research quickly became inhabited
by a peculiar breed of Spinoza commentator, for the most part not
particularly committed to historical analysis, justifying their interpretations
by invoking some unspecified relation to a variety of broad philosophical
contexts, the importance of which for Spinoza’s thinking is at best
unverified, often unclear, and in many cases historically dubious.
Comparisons with early modern Aristotelianism of the Suarezian kind are
here particularly popular, despite the fact that most of the authors
concerned are absent from Spinoza’s library, that his works contain only
very few explicit references to them, and that there is little evidence that
Spinoza felt particularly concerned with the catholic Scholasticism of
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Spanish monks (unsurprisingly, Spinoza being an apostate Jew living in a

dominantly Calvinist country). Hence, one finds a host of commentators
recasting Spinoza as a seventeenth-century Aristotelian – simply because,
for example, he has occasional recourse to the notion of causa formalis – or
labelling him, explicitly or implicitly, a late Scholastic thinker because he
speaks of God as the causa essendi of all things. This is not to say that these
interpretations are necessarily erroneous or that there are no exceptions to
the rule. Nonetheless, many such readings are historically unmotivated and
I suspect mainly grounded in a rising interest in late Scholasticism among
contemporary historians of philosophy, and not at all in reflections on what
was arguably of any serious interest to Spinoza. Unfortunately, commenta-
tors frequently neglect to verify whether Spinoza had read the authors in
question, which texts exactly or in what conditions he read them if he did,
and whether it is even historically and/or biographically plausible to think
that these authors should constitute the immediate context for Spinoza’s
philosophy. Instead, they content themselves with appealing to vague
analogies or terminological coincidences. However, any contextual study in
the history of philosophy claiming to be governed by principles amounting
to more than random association must not eliminate analogical reasoning,
which indeed often provides the material to investigate and verify, but add a
historical method of verification which relies on at least some kind of causal
principle. Thus, for example, certain analogies between Spinoza and
Aristotle’s arguments and concepts do not in themselves demonstrate an
Aristotelian inspiration, but only indicate that there might be one, if indeed
it can be made historically plausible that this was where Spinoza picked up
these terms by investigating, for example, where exactly he could have read
them, who might have provided him with the information, reflecting on
what motivations he may have had to engage with them philosophically,
and excluding the option that one is mistaking invocations of seventeenth-
century commonplace for specific inspirations.
 572 BOOK REVIEWS

Hopefully, Manzini’s book will presage the end of such vague

contextualism in relation to the particular problematic of the relations
between Spinoza and Aristotle by setting a much higher standard of
precision for the comparative study of the two philosophers. Primarily, as
the title of the book indicates, his interpretation wisely brackets speculation
concerning Spinoza’s engagement with Scholastic literature and focuses
mainly on Spinoza’s unmediated relation to Aristotle’s own works. Thus,
Spinoza: une lecture d’Aristote is not a book about Spinoza and the nebulous
entity called Aristotelianism, but has a much clearer aim. This does not
mean that the consideration of Scholastic philosophy (as some of it arguably
was transmitted to Spinoza through contemporary Dutch Scholastics such
as Adriaan Heereboord and Franco Burgersdijk) is excluded, but that such
sources are used exclusively for the purpose of clarifying Spinoza’s reading
of the Greek philosopher himself. Moreover, Manzini’s reading is motivated
and constantly supported by an extraordinary textual discovery, namely of
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the exact edition of Aristotle’s collected works that Spinoza had in his
possession (Opera Omnia, Basilea, ex officina Joan. Oporini 1548). In itself,
this discovery, and Manzini’s meticulous use of it, allows him to reach some
interesting conclusions that otherwise would not have been available. For
example, the systematic correlation of Spinoza’s remarks on Aristotle with
the Basel edition enables him to explain certain incoherencies in Spinoza’s
references to Aristotle, simply because the pagination of the edition is flawed
(this concerns in particular the faulty reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics
XI, 7, in Spinoza’s Cogitata Metaphysica, II, 7.) More importantly, the
exploration of this exact edition also allows for a rich and concise lexical
analysis, systematically comparing Spinoza’s Latin terminology with the
Latin of the edition of Aristotle to which he referred. Finally, it permits
bringing to light a wealth of hidden quotations and allusions to Aristotle in
Spinoza’s text. Surely, with an author as widely read in the early modern
period as Aristotle, it is at times difficult to distinguish a direct allusion to
Aristotle from an appeal to an Aristotelian locus communis. Manzini,
however, is very sensitive to the problem and always indicates in footnotes a
wealth of other possible sources, while most often in his own interpretations
opting for the possibility that the inspiration comes directly from Aristotle.
The result is a systematic exposition of Spinoza’s engagement with central
Aristotelian themes and notions, on a wide range of topics, spanning from
physics to metaphysics, politics and, obviously, ethics.
In his analysis, Manzini shows greater veneration for H. A. Wolfson’s old
study than my presentation above suggests it deserves. He does, however,
avoid the pitfalls of his predecessor. Hence, contrary to Wolfson, Manzini’s
objective is not to reduce Spinoza’s philosophy to the Aristotelian passages
to which Spinoza refers, but to show how the Dutch Jew engages with them,
discusses them, and evaluates them. All the same, on Manzini’s reading
Spinoza does indeed agree with Aristotle more often than one would
expect given Spinoza’s own explicit statements about the Greek philosopher.
 BOOK REVIEWS 573

In a letter to Hugo Boxel, written in 1674, Spinoza boldly claimed that

‘the authority of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates carries little weight with
me’ (Letter 56). Such a statement, and the fact that it is one of less than
ten explicit references to Aristotle in Spinoza’s entire oeuvre, could suffice
to discourage some commentators from even engaging in the project of
looking for any serious engagement with Aristotle in Spinoza. Manzini,
however, is unimpressed by such evidence, asking whether there ‘is not a
bit of strategy vis-à-vis his reader when Spinoza takes a stance, not to
say a posture, which is radically and unilaterally anti-Aristotelian?’ (14).
Proposing an interpretation of a philosopher going counter to this
philosopher’s explicit position is always a bit of a gamble, and can
expose the commentator to the serious criticism of indulging in arbitrary
Leo Strauss style reading strategies. Manzini, however, convincingly calls
Spinoza’s bluff. His study amply demonstrates that, at least with regard
to Aristotle, Spinoza’s declaration to Boxel should be taken in the
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same way as Descartes’ claim, in the first Meditation, to have ‘razed

everything to the ground’ before recommencing philosophy: with a grain
of salt.

Mogens Lærke
University of Aberdeen
ª 2011, Mogens Lærke

Richard Bett (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. xii þ 380, £20.00, $33.00
(pb.). ISBN 978-0-521-69754-5

The remarkable progress that the scholarly study of ancient scepticism has
undergone in the past thirty years required that a Cambridge companion
be devoted to this topic. Although some fine general presentations of
Greco-Roman scepticism have recently appeared in print, the advantage of
this book lies in its variety of approaches and interpretations. This will
allow the reader to better appreciate the historical, exegetical, and
philosophical complexity faced by anyone exploring the ancient sceptical
traditions. Richard Bett has assembled a prestigious line-up of contribu-
tors, most of whom are renowned specialists. I will here limit myself to
providing an overview of the present volume and making a few critical
remarks.
Besides a short introduction, an extensive thematic bibliography, and
detailed indexes, the volume contains fifteen essays divided into three parts.
The first (chapters 1–6) offers a historical survey from the pre-Hellenistic
thinkers in whom one finds sceptical arguments and tendencies to the main
representatives of the ancient sceptical traditions in the Hellenistic and
Imperial periods. The second part (chapters 7–13) explores certain key