On the Improvement of the Understanding" (even in English, what a lovely, clear and crisp phrase) I was hooked from the title which made serious promises the text kept. .d.
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I was thinking back when I was a high school kid checking out the abridged version of Aquinas. It covered several topics but the one I remember was his argument on first causes. Since Aquinas mentioned Aristotle a lot, I went back to the library and looked around on the same shelf, the `A's. I picked the smallest volume I could find, and unfortunately it was on `Physics'. I got nothing out of it.
For some reason I wondered over a few more titles and tried Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious. It sounded `deep'. When I took it to the borrowing counter, the library clerk told me I needed adult permission to check it out. I interpreted this to mean there was sex in it. So I called my mother and she came down and signed off on it, asking what the hell I was doing trying to read Jung. She seemed to know who he was. When I got home I tried for several days to get through the first paragraph and discovered I didn't understand half the words. Well, I understood the words themselves, but the totality of them all together alluded me. I had to look up some of them, like libido and archetype. So I was right. It had sex in it. Dirty thoughts. I certainly understood those. But I couldn't find any in Jung. I got a few other ideas out of it like collective unconscious, which seemed strange.
How could everybody not know the same thing all at the same time? I decided I didn't believe in the unconscious in just about the same way I didn't believe in God. I `looked' really `deep' inside to try to figure out if there was some hidden place I was missing, or some thought I had, that I didn't know I had. All the lies and secrets seemed to be just where I thought they were. Nothing missing.
The one thing I think I understood in very general terms was archetype. I couldn't come up with one on my own, but the general idea made sense to me. I thought of them as something like stone age sculpture.
Well, at any rate, the key issue at that moment was God. What to do about God. I had a big fight with my father (divorced when I was two, and had another family) over refusing to be baptized. But it got me re-thinking God. The existence of God. Like the unconscious, I kept an eye out for him or it or whatever. I asked my mother if she believed in God and she waffled. I couldn't get a straight answer out of her. She had been raised in a family divided between Mormons and Catholics, and she had followed the Catholic side. I asked a couple of friends and after some prodding, most of them did. My girlfriend believed in God and we had an argument about it. That made me suspicious of her for some reason. I decided I didn't trust people who believed in God. They sounded like they were lying or pretending.
I finally figured out that it made most people extremely uncomfortable and it was an obnoxious question anyway, so I stopped. I had tried to read some of the bible and decided it was complete mumbo-jumbo. How could anyone take any of that stuff seriously? But there was the art. I had already fallen in love with the art. Everything but the crucifix. The only one of those I liked was Grunewald's, because it looked like a horror show.
So to the point about Spinoza. Following Strauss in his Zionist essays and then opening the Theological-Political Treatise brought all this back. Strauss was an atheist, but I am not sure when he decided that. It isn't at all clear from his writing, but I suspect that he was making up his mind about God during the time he was writing on Zionism which was in his mid-twenties. I suspect he was trying to figure out how he could be a `real' Jew and not believe in God. But this must have given him a serious headache, because the most godless of the Zionists were all Communists!
The central idea Strauss keeps probing is revelation as opposed to reason. That is the main theme in Spinoza's Critique of Religion (SCR) and what he is doing is unearthing, doing what Foucault called `archaeology', unearthing the point in medieval Jewish thought when reason had taken center stage to replace revelation as a source of religious thought. But I stopped reading SCR at the beginning of the Maimonides chapter and decided I really needed to read Spinoza first.
So I have some intellectual sympathy for Strauss on this particular point, but I can see he is taking a wrong or bad turn. I get the feeling he wants to find some form of intellectual security. The deep sense of intellectual chaos bothers him (not to mention the real chaos of Weimar). I know he has been reading Nietzsche in this period, but he never mentions him, or alludes to N at all. Why not? In the deep background are Kant and Hegel brooding like mountains in the fog, and he studiously avoids them. Why? I can't help but think he is afraid of them. They are vast and he doesn't know how to tackle them directly, so he has decided to pick away at Spinoza instead.
Besides, just about every sentence in T-PT beats up on the `Hebrews' as Spinoza so quaintly calls them. If it were not for the fact that Spinoza was Jewish, T-PT would be considered an anti-Semitic classic. In any event, many passages are funny and arrogantly witty. There is a kind of flippant quality of complete disrepect. I am a little surprized he wasn't burned at the stake instantly. There is not wonder at all why his synagogue threw him out. Spinoza was what my father would have called a real smart aleck pain in the ass.
CG