A D V E R T I S E M E N T

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

[Continued from page 2 of 3]

I was approached by Jonathan Rosen [the general editor of the Jewish Encounters series]. The conversations we had were superb. We don't really agree on things, but it was fun. He's a wonderful antagonist to have. He's somewhat horrified by Spinoza, and I love him.

Why is he horrified by Spinoza?

Spinoza, in asking us to be consistently, rigorously, ruthlessly rational, asks us to give up a lot of what it means to be human - our passionate ties to other people. He doesn't ask us to give up passion, but it should be passion for the truth and for objectivity. And he also asks us to give up a passionate attachment to one's own personal history, the history of one's people. He's the first really secular Jew, and I would argue that he really prefigures the Enlightenment.

You've written that philosophy attempts to take an objective view of the world, while fiction lets us into subjective views. Do you take the side of fiction?

Yes. I believe that the imagination - and the kind of infiltrating into another worldview that we do in fiction - has a truth of its own. It can't be gotten at through the purely objective point of view. Of course, you could say that whatever can't be captured in the purely objective point of view is illusion and doesn't exist. That is Spinoza's way. At the end of the book, I try to inhabit him as a fiction writer - warning that this is the trick of a fiction writer. I know that it will make some philosophers very,very angry. But, yes, I believe that there is great value in the imaginative grasp of others' subjectivity.

Martha Nussbaum has made some similar arguments about the moral value of literature.

I like her discussion of Plato. I've heard her work denigrated by philosophers, because it's very imaginative. She's trying to imagine what Plato might have been like when he was writing the Phaedrus, and why he would depart so dramatically from his views on love in the middle dialogues. He was in love, she said, and she tried speculating about whom it might be and trying to find a story behind it. She's showing something that I respect and that I tried to do with Spinoza: Philosophy isn't just this academic game.You do it with your whole soul.

Continued
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