The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Steven Nadler - The Life of Philosopher Baruch Spinoza (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_912)

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00:01:05.840 Hi, everybody. This is Gad Saad. Today, I have another fantastic guest, a philosopher. I'm going

00:01:11.720 to read his bio shortly, but first, let me say hello. Professor Stephen Nadler, how are you

00:01:16.480 doing, sir?

00:01:17.420 Hello. Thanks for having me on.

00:01:18.980 Oh, I'm delighted to have you on. Actually, well, I'll say in a second how you came up,

00:01:23.660 but before I do that, it's, you said Vilas, yes?

00:01:27.780 Yes.

00:01:28.300 Okay. So you are the Vilas research professor and the William H. Hay, the second professor

00:01:34.600 of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. You're also the director of the Institute for

00:01:39.360 Research in the Humanities at Setz University. You specialize in 17th century philosophy with a focus

00:01:47.120 on Spinoza, Descartes, and Leibniz. Some of your books include, and this is a sample of all of your

00:01:54.560 books, Spinoza, A Life. That's what drew me to you. Look at this baby. Here we go.

00:02:01.240 Good looking book.

00:02:01.800 What? Gorgeous book. Now we go to Rembrandt's Jews, 2003, The Best of All Possible Worlds,

00:02:09.160 A Story of Philosophers, God and Evil, The Philosopher, The Priest, and The Painter,

00:02:15.000 A Portrait of Descartes. Now, I don't have your book on Descartes, but you're ready, Stephen?

00:02:19.780 Check this beauty out. Do you know this one?

00:02:22.160 I do. Yeah, that's a very early, well, relatively early biography.

00:02:27.160 There you go. I've got this one. Are you getting impressed by my personal library yet?

00:02:31.220 Yes, it's remarkable.

00:02:32.900 All right, wait up. And then, Why Bad Thinking Happens to Good People. Now, that's very close

00:02:40.200 to my wheelhouse because I study human decision-making. I wrote a book called The Parasitic

00:02:44.960 Mind, How Human Minds Can Be Parasitized. So, it'll be interesting to talk about that.

00:02:48.660 And then you've got two forthcoming books, one on Maimonides. Read Maimonides today. Boom,

00:02:54.700 here is one that I read. Do you know this one?

00:03:00.120 It's Ilil Arbel. It's a short little...

00:03:03.320 No, I don't know.

00:03:04.300 Okay, so that one I read. And then finally, oh, and your other forthcoming books,

00:03:09.720 Penielsa, Atheist. Now, I don't have a Leibniz biography, but I do have his nemesis, 0.97

00:03:16.260 Isaac Newton, 1968. Now, I knew of those two guys because I studied mathematics, and so I knew

00:03:24.940 about their attention. Maybe we'll get into that. But first, maybe we could start with

00:03:28.960 Spinoza, apparently the original version of Christopher Hitchens. Tell us all about him.

00:03:34.440 You mean Spinoza was the original version of Christopher Hitchens?

00:03:38.400 Well, that's what I heard, that he was sort of the, you know, the combative, the, I mean,

00:03:43.760 sort of... Yeah. No, actually, I don't think he, I think that's not really correct, because

00:03:49.440 Spinoza was not a combative person. In fact, he says explicitly in one of his correspondence

00:03:54.960 that he hates, he does not like scandal, he does not like confrontation, whereas Hitchens,

00:04:04.600 I think, thrived on scandalizing us in confrontations. So, but, you know, Spinoza was a radical,

00:04:12.480 especially for his time. He was born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a Portuguese Jewish family within

00:04:20.360 the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community there, which was essentially a community of refugees,

00:04:26.020 Iberian refugees from the Inquisition. And we know very little about his early life, but

00:04:32.500 what we do know is the shocking ban or harem that he received in 1656 for what is called

00:04:41.500 in the ban document his horrible heresies and abominable deeds. And so what we know is that

00:04:49.200 at the age of 23, Spinoza was kicked out, ostracized by the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community.

00:04:57.740 At the time, as far as we know, he hadn't written anything. And there was a lot of speculation

00:05:02.640 about what were the reasons for the ban. But I think we should take the harem document at face value.

00:05:08.340 It's for heretical ideas. And we know that around the time of the ban, Spinoza was saying

00:05:15.680 some of the bold claims that appear in his mature philosophical treatises. For example, his view

00:05:24.120 on God, his view about Judaism as religion, his claims about the Bible being merely a work

00:05:30.700 of human literature, and especially his rejection of personal immortality. I think these are things

00:05:37.280 that ordinarily would not get one a ban or a harem. But Amsterdam in the 1650s was just the wrong place

00:05:45.380 in time to be holding such strong contrarian views on those matters. Then he would go on in the 1660s

00:05:54.140 and 1670s to compose his mature philosophical treatises. He only published two in his lifetime.

00:05:59.720 In 1663, he published a summary of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy. And that brought him

00:06:05.800 a reputation in the philosophical world. And then in 1670, he published his theological political

00:06:12.520 treatises in Latin and kept his name off the cover. But this was such a bold book regarding issues of

00:06:21.720 religion and faith and the Bible and prophecy and miracles and the proper relationship between the church

00:06:28.360 and the state. It caused an enormous scandal. And Spinoza was attacked by ecclesiastic authorities,

00:06:35.720 civil authorities, academic authorities. One overwrought critic called it a book forged in hell

00:06:41.800 by the devil himself. And then, you know, sadly, Spinoza died at a relatively young age,

00:06:48.440 probably from respiratory problems. He was only 43 at the time in 1677.

00:06:54.120 Now, so in the history of certainly Jewish thought, but more generally a religious thought,

00:07:00.200 but let's stick to Jewish thought. There wouldn't have been anyone else that would have raised some of

00:07:07.080 the, you know, similar issues prior to him? Is there something unique about how he constructed his

00:07:12.920 arguments that allowed him to have the position that he has today in sort of the history of philosophical

00:07:18.280 thought? Well, there were people before him and along with him who argued for toleration,

00:07:25.160 for example, John Locke or Pierre Bale. And there were people who argued that the Hebrew Bible or

00:07:32.520 especially the Torah was not all authored by Moses and not literally by God. But Spinoza took these views

00:07:38.920 and especially his denial that miracles are possible and his identification of God with nature. He presents

00:07:45.320 them in such a bold and philosophically compelling way that there's just no ignoring him, that he,

00:07:53.320 despite the ban and despite the widespread critique of him personally and the banning of his books by

00:08:02.520 authorities, especially the Dutch Republic, there was no ignoring him. And he became infamous

00:08:08.040 for these ideas which were offensive not only to the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam and perhaps to,

00:08:15.320 you know, Jews across Europe, but to Catholic and Protestant authorities in Europe as well.

00:08:20.200 Would his position be one that would also be referred to as natural theology? Are those two

00:08:28.120 synonymous with each other? What do you mean by natural theology? Natural theology would be,

00:08:32.440 so for example, so I'm an evolutionist. Specifically, I'm an evolutionary behavioral scientist. So I study

00:08:38.520 how you apply evolutionary biology to study the human mind and human behavior. And so whenever I get,

00:08:43.880 let's say, a student who's totally into all the evolutionary stuff, but they come from a religious

00:08:49.960 background and somehow they have to find a way to reconcile the two, I then will invoke an argument that

00:08:56.200 comes from natural theology, which basically says, well, evolution itself is such an exquisite mechanism

00:09:03.480 that it could be considered the work of the divine. So with one little swoop, you've managed to,

00:09:10.200 you know, reconcile both of these worldviews together. Does that make sense?

00:09:15.400 It does, but that's not going to be Spinoza's view, because there is no divine for Spinoza.

00:09:21.080 And this is something that I'm arguing in my forthcoming books. I think Spinoza was an atheist.

00:09:25.240 He was not a pantheist. He was not a pantheist. He's certainly not a theist in the traditional

00:09:29.080 sense because Spinoza's God is not some transcendent creator who then at some point through an act of

00:09:37.960 free will creates a world. That can't be Spinoza's God. He identifies God with nature. And by nature,

00:09:44.920 he doesn't mean just the visible empirical world around us, but also the eternal infinite dimensions of

00:09:52.840 of this world, namely the laws of nature, the essences of things and so on.

00:09:59.560 But the pantheist and the atheist can agree that all there is, is nature. There is no supernatural for Spinoza.

00:10:06.920 There's no transcendent God. But the pantheist would still say, to the extent that the pantheist

00:10:14.040 sees that God is nature and nature is God and all things are in God, the pantheist, in order to really

00:10:21.080 be a pantheism and not an atheism, would have to say that there's something divine about nature. That

00:10:26.040 nature is therefore deserving of worshipful awe or reverence or adoration, some kind of religious

00:10:33.720 attitude. There's none of that in Spinoza. Nature is not divine for him. It's not appropriate to

00:10:41.480 approach nature with worship or adoration or prayer or awe. The only proper attitude to take towards

00:10:48.680 nature is to investigate it scientifically, to try to understand its laws and its processes

00:10:55.640 and the causal determinism that governs all things. So to me, no, it's not a natural theology. It's an

00:11:02.760 atheism. However, no, no, please go ahead, finish your point. So there is theology for Spinoza because

00:11:09.160 not everybody is going to be a philosopher and not everybody can come to a life of virtue and reason

00:11:15.240 through the geometric method and through studying difficult philosophical works like the ethics. A lot

00:11:20.680 of people are going to be inspired towards lives of virtue by reading inspirational stories and perhaps

00:11:28.600 the best texts for inspiring people to lives of virtue are the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Gospels.

00:11:37.240 Because their authors as prophets were both morally superb individuals and gifted storytellers with

00:11:45.160 very vivid imaginations. And what theology consists in for Spinoza is determining from the Bible what

00:11:53.400 things we should believe in order to be led, not through reason, but through our imaginations to be

00:12:00.680 led towards a virtuous behavior. Would Spinoza have stated that notwithstanding all of the positions I'm taking,

00:12:11.640 I still am leaning into my Jewish heritage. I can both be Jewish and Spinoza, the guy who is espousing 0.77

00:12:20.600 these positions, or by espousing those positions, I reject my Jewish identity. And let me give you sort

00:12:27.160 of the reason behind, I mean, the personal reason. I often will get people writing to me saying, well,

00:12:34.520 you're someone who's very proud of your Jewish heritage, you defend all sorts of Jewish causes,

00:12:40.360 but yet we also have seen you at various positions talk about the irrationality of some

00:12:46.120 religious beliefs. Certainly as an evolutionist, it's hard to reconcile some of the, you know,

00:12:50.280 the young earth creation and stuff. How could you be a non-believer and a Jew? So what would 1.00

00:12:56.440 Spinoza answer to that, you know, challenge?

00:13:01.240 So one of the myths, and there are many about Spinoza, is that he envisioned and perhaps lived

00:13:06.360 a kind of secular Judaism, a Judaism without really a divinity. I don't think that's right. 0.97

00:13:12.520 I think for Spinoza, Judaism was the law. And to live a life outside the law, outside of normative 1.00

00:13:21.080 Jewish observance and ritual and ceremony, is not to be Jewish. And here I disagree with him. I think

00:13:28.760 there's more to Judaism than the law. There's more to Judaism than having certain beliefs. But in his

00:13:35.560 mind, once the law disappears, so does Judaism. 0.63

00:13:41.160 But those, the Jewish, you know, legal code, is he arguing that it's an earthly code or

00:13:51.560 is it coming from some divinity? Because based on what you said, it can't have been, you know,

00:13:56.280 given to us from some divine. So there's just some earthly mechanism that results in these

00:14:02.120 laws being passed on to Jews and we shall all abide by them without invoking a divine origin to them? 0.91

00:14:09.320 Well, within Judaism, a divine origin is invoked. And this was Moses's genius, because he had these

00:14:16.120 tribes wandering, recently liberated from enslavement in Egypt. And he had to unite these tribes. He had

00:14:23.640 to give them a kind of polity or state. And Moses realized the best way to do that was to make it a

00:14:29.960 theocracy. And so being a wise lawgiver, Moses created these mitzvot, these laws that would allow the 0.78

00:14:38.920 Jewish, the Israelites to govern themselves and be unified. So yeah, it's a very mundane origin. It's the,

00:14:47.480 in Spinoza's view, Jewish halakha, and both in its strictly legal components and also in its moral

00:14:56.040 components, was instituted at a particular historical juncture for a certain historical and political

00:15:04.360 purpose. So very earthly reasons, basically. Yes. You know, it's funny because, so if I can link back to

00:15:11.960 my evolutionary work, this is not my work, but certainly stuff that I, that I've written about,

00:15:17.000 there are competing evolutionary explanations for why religion is so compelling for human minds.

00:15:26.420 One argument is one that is based on an adaptive argument. The one who espoused it most famously is

00:15:34.540 David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary biologist. He wrote a book called Darwin's Cathedral.

00:15:38.420 And then what he's arguing is that if you, if you take religious groups versus a religious group or

00:15:45.300 non-religious groups, the ones who are religious will have greater communality, greater cooperation,

00:15:52.960 greater cohesion, greater delineation between us versus them, that will result in a survival advantage.

00:15:59.980 And so without caring whether God exists or not, merely being religious confers an adaptive 0.96

00:16:08.360 advantage in being religious, then there is another argument that says, well, religion does have

00:16:14.320 an evolutionary origin, but it's not because it's adaptive. It's actually an exaptation, meaning that

00:16:20.000 it is a byproduct of other evolutionary mechanisms that have evolved. So for example, the fact that we have

00:16:27.160 coalitional thinking as part of the architecture of the human mind, us versus them, well, it's easy to show how

00:16:33.640 all Abrahamic faiths piggyback on that, right? There is the Goys and the Jews, the non-believers, 1.00

00:16:39.020 the Kuffar, and so on. So can we incorporate either of those two evolutionary explanations within a Spinoza

00:16:49.860 framework? Well, Spinoza actually does do that, not in the precise terms that you've described, but he does

00:16:56.140 at the beginning of the theological political treatise, give us what we would now call a natural history of

00:17:01.620 religion. Why do people become religious? Why do they believe that there is a providential God

00:17:09.300 who's running things? In his case, it's not so much a story of evolution towards adaptation in a social

00:17:18.660 context, but rather the development of certain beliefs in the face of the vagaries of nature, the ups and downs

00:17:26.840 of fortune, that life is a risky and chancy thing. Things don't always go our way. And so in order to try

00:17:34.280 through, in a sort of magical way, to control nature, we adapt these superstitious beliefs and then engage

00:17:43.500 in ceremonies to try, superstitious beliefs about gods or a god, and then we engage in these superstitious

00:17:51.120 rituals and ceremonies to try to get the gods on our side and make things go our way. But then when

00:17:58.320 things are going well, we kind of drop, we kind of forget about those ceremonies and rituals. However,

00:18:03.120 there are certain people who realize that they can achieve a good deal of power and respect and honor

00:18:10.960 if they somehow institutionalize these superstitious practices, and that's where organized religion comes

00:18:18.000 from. Very interesting. Do you think that the fact that he was wedded to an actual, you know, profession,

00:18:26.720 he was a lens maker, allowed him to have a different philosophy than if he were the prototypical

00:18:36.160 ivory tower completely decoupled from reality academic? And if so, how?

00:18:41.600 No, I don't think so. I think a lot of the ideas that we find in his mature treatises were things he had

00:18:47.520 been thinking about for a long time, well before he became a lens grinder. You know, there are some

00:18:53.200 aspects of his philosophy that do, that clearly derive to some extent from his scientific work in optics and

00:19:00.640 he had a really good understanding of the nature of light, refraction, reflection, and so on. And

00:19:07.200 apparently he made very good lenses. So even a scientist like Christian Huygens praises Spinoza's

00:19:13.840 telescopes and microscopes. But no, no, I really, I think Spinoza was on his way to where he was going,

00:19:21.600 regardless of what profession he took up. Because once he was banned from the Amsterdam Jewish community,

00:19:27.440 he, at the time he was running his parents, his family's importing business. But he couldn't do

00:19:33.520 that anymore because to do that you had to be a part of the Jewish community. So he had to find a 0.89

00:19:38.080 new way of making some money. But I think he had already formulated at least an embryonic shape,

00:19:45.040 his radical thoughts on religion and God.

00:19:48.000 To be banned, as you mentioned at the start of our conversation, the haram. And in Arabic, you say,

00:19:54.880 actually, Arabic is my mother tongue, you say haram, which is almost the same thing.

00:19:59.280 The cognate word, yeah.

00:20:00.160 Yeah, exactly. And I had sent you the fact, you know, when I sent you sort of the possible

00:20:06.720 questions that we might discuss, I said, he might be one of the earlier instantiations of,

00:20:11.200 you know, cancel culture. Now, when I spoke-

00:20:15.760 After Galileo.

00:20:17.360 That's true. Well, and Socrates, I guess, was also canceled.

00:20:20.560 And Socrates, yeah.

00:20:21.360 I mean, literally.

00:20:22.160 There's a long history of intolerance.

00:20:24.080 Fair enough. But, okay, so, but let's, so, what I once asked, actually, a Hasidic rabbi,

00:20:33.600 who were very good friends, I said, well, you know, rabbi, I'm not into every single one of the,

00:20:38.000 you know, the, the Jewish beliefs, but of course, I'm very much wedded to my Jewish identity.

00:20:42.560 Judaism is a multi-factor construct, blah, blah, blah. Could I ever say anything 1.00

00:20:49.920 that would somehow make me lose my Jewish card? And he said, no. So then, so now, if, if this,

00:20:57.600 if Spinoza is being excommunicated, is that in an earthly sense that you could no longer be

00:21:04.000 accepted in the community? Or are we revoking your Jewish card?

00:21:08.800 It's mostly the former. You know, it, it depends who you ask and what they think about

00:21:15.520 Jewish essentialism. You know, can you, if you're Jewish, you're Jewish. And one of the questions

00:21:20.800 you sent me was, you know, can you be a Jewish atheist? Well, yeah. If you think of Judaism as

00:21:27.600 both an ethnicity and also a way of finding your identity in a certain history related to certain

00:21:35.760 events and certain texts. I do think that after the harem, Spinoza no longer saw himself as Jewish.

00:21:43.200 That is, he being Jewish no longer played a role in his self-identity. But he's a part of Jewish

00:21:50.560 history because he was Jewish. And the events of his life were events in Jewish history, even if he

00:21:57.600 continued to refer to the Jews as a third person and had very unkind things to say about Jews,

00:22:03.360 about, not about Jewish individuals, but about Judaism. So, you know, I, I do think

00:22:12.480 why, I suppose one could renounce one's Judaism. Spinoza didn't officially do so,

00:22:19.280 even though Judaism renounced him. And the harem document says you are expelled from the people

00:22:23.440 of Israel. And that sounds like we're taking away your decoder ring and your membership card and all

00:22:28.160 that. But in fact, you know, who has the authority to tell someone that they are not Jewish?

00:22:33.600 Right, right. Well, I mean, if I remember, I'm going back now, maybe 30 years, if I remember what

00:22:39.200 this particular rabbi told me, he sort of couched it in the language of a Jewish soul. So that makes

00:22:44.640 it a bit more difficult to revoke the card, right? I mean, you are born, you have a Jewish soul,

00:22:50.160 nothing could ever change that. So you could literally renounce your Judaism and that still 0.87

00:22:55.120 wouldn't matter. You'd always be Jewish. In a sense, that's comforting because, you know, you feel like 0.99

00:23:01.520 it is what it is. And nothing that I could ever do or say could take me out of the tribe. What made

00:23:07.360 you... Well, you know, here's the real test is when the Nazis come knocking, are they going to come

00:23:11.520 after you? As I was saying that, that's exactly what I thought, given my own personal history of

00:23:18.080 putting on really good running shoes and escaping from the Muslim extremists who wanted to kill us.

00:23:24.240 So you're right. It doesn't matter to those who want to kill me whether, you know, my card has been 0.86

00:23:28.880 revoked or not. You're exactly right. So one of the things that I study is psychology of decision

00:23:36.240 making. That was actually the topic of my doctoral dissertation. So I'm always fascinated by the sort

00:23:42.560 of really important decisions that people make in their lives. So then in your case, you know, okay,

00:23:48.320 fine, you want to be a philosopher, you want to be a professor of philosophy, there's a million things you

00:23:52.080 could study. What leads you to decide, well, I'm particularly interested in 17th century philosophy

00:24:00.000 and I'm interested in these three gentlemen. Now, obviously there's a link between them,

00:24:03.680 but why these three? Why wasn't it somebody else? What's the mechanism that says these guys resonate

00:24:09.200 with me? That's a good question. And I think the story goes way back to my very first undergraduate

00:24:15.760 class in 1976. I went to Washington University in St. Louis. And for some reason, I had no idea what I

00:24:23.360 was going to major in. And for some reason, I took a philosophy class my very first semester.

00:24:28.080 And it was the first class that I attended, the first meeting. And the professor was so exciting,

00:24:34.960 so enthusiastic, and he made it come alive. I immediately said, that's what I want to do.

00:24:39.360 Wow. Did you ever tell that professor that exact story? He knows, or he knew, because we eventually

00:24:47.520 became good friends after I graduated. I took a number of classes with him. I probably annoyed

00:24:52.560 the hell out of him. And he became a lifelong mentor. He died a few years ago. He became a lifelong

00:24:59.040 mentor. And he inspired me to go into philosophy. Why 17th century? Well, because I read a lot of his

00:25:07.440 stuff. And I thought, this really resonates with me. I loved doing the historical work.

00:25:12.400 I loved doing the philosophical work. I think there's a big difference between

00:25:15.760 somebody who's an intellectual historian and someone who does history of philosophy.

00:25:19.760 Because when you do history of philosophy, you're still doing philosophy. You're examining theses and

00:25:25.520 arguments, questioning their validity and soundness, asking what this person could have said,

00:25:30.560 should have said, given their premises, and so on. So you're doing philosophy. You're engaged in a

00:25:35.120 philosophical dialogue with somebody. It just so happens that they're over 300 years dead.

00:25:41.200 So it's actually hard then, because you have to keep up both sides of the conversation.

00:25:46.880 Whereas I think intellectual history is a very different kind of enterprise.

00:25:50.880 So anyway, I always admired the kind of work he did. And the more I got engaged in it,

00:25:55.040 the more I decided that that's where I wanted to do my own scholarship. When I was a graduate student

00:26:00.560 at Columbia in New York, Columbia University, I was working mainly on Descartes and Cartesianism.

00:26:08.800 And my dissertation was on problems in the Cartesian philosophy, problems about knowledge and mental

00:26:15.840 states. But then one evening, I was having dinner. I was living on 107th Street between Broadway and

00:26:22.400 Riverside. I have an Orthodox sister who was living at 89th Street on West End Avenue. So just,

00:26:30.160 you know, 15, 16 blocks away, 17 blocks away. And she invited me over for Shabbat dinner. And her

00:26:37.040 rabbi was there. And he said, what are you working on? And I explained the topic of my dissertation.

00:26:43.520 And he said, why are you working on those Goyesh philosophers? Somehow that stuck with me. I, you know,

00:26:50.880 I went on, I continued to do my very technical work in 17th century philosophy on Cartesianism.

00:26:56.960 I got the job I got at Wisconsin, been very happy here. And then when I got tenure, I realized,

00:27:03.600 wouldn't it be, and we had kids, small children at the time. And I thought, well, if I'm going to

00:27:09.040 squirrel myself away from playing with my children, it better be for something that more than 10 other

00:27:14.720 people are going to read. And so I thought, okay, I want to continue working on 17th century philosophy,

00:27:20.000 but I want to write something that will reach a broader audience. And then I also, that little,

00:27:26.000 that little kernel that that rabbi had planted started to grow into a full grown thought. I 0.93

00:27:32.560 thought, okay, so I want to work on 17th century. I want to write something for a broader audience.

00:27:36.800 And I want it to be on something of related to Judaism and my Jewish heritage. And then I realized

00:27:42.960 that Spinoza gives me all three. It's still 17th century philosophy. A biography of Spinoza had

00:27:49.600 never been written. And I thought Spinoza is quite a popular figure and a biography of Spinoza could

00:27:55.840 really reach a broad audience. And in a manner of speaking, it was a Jewish theme because I had to

00:28:02.000 investigate the Jewish world of 17th century Amsterdam. Now, when I was visiting that same sister,

00:28:09.280 who at the time was now ultra-Orthodox and living in Jerusalem, I went with her husband,

00:28:15.840 my brother-in-law to his yeshiva, and we were talking about my work. And there was an old rabbinic

00:28:22.080 figure in the corner. And he said, did I hear somebody mentioned Spinoza? And I said, yes,

00:28:27.280 I'm writing a biography of Spinoza. And he just went like this.

00:28:30.560 What a fantastic answer. You know, because oftentimes, if I were to ask other academics,

00:28:41.360 I mean, I don't want to say it's haphazard or accidental, but, you know, they'll say, oh, I

00:28:45.280 can't really identify the genesis of how I landed on this. Whereas, you know, you traced literally down

00:28:51.920 to, you know, the street corner of where you had the Shabbat dinner. So that's fantastic. How did that

00:28:59.840 book go? Let me put it up again so that people can see it. Well, I said, find stores everywhere.

00:29:04.480 It's actually, so that's the first edition. There's actually a second edition that I published

00:29:10.400 20 years later, because there was more material that we've discovered about his family background,

00:29:16.240 details about this or that aspect of his life. So the second edition is a little bit expanded from

00:29:22.640 the first. So for example, if you take, say, Stoicism, there's been a complete renaissance of

00:29:30.880 Stoic philosophy because all sorts of, you know, modern writers, many of whom may not be academics,

00:29:36.480 have taken an interest in it. And suddenly now you, you know, you hear Epictetus or Seneca or Marcus

00:29:42.560 Aurelius as if it's contemporary, you know, pop stars. Do you envision or hope that Baruch Spinoza

00:29:51.360 would ever become as popular as some of these guys, or is it a bit more difficult to make links

00:29:58.480 to the modern world? I think we're way past that point. Spinoza, unlike Descartes or Leibniz,

00:30:05.120 for example, Spinoza has really entered the public realm. There are, if you look, if you really did a

00:30:12.000 survey of novels, poems, theater pieces, operas, works of visual art, music, Spinoza is all over

00:30:24.960 there. They're dedicated works, films. Spinoza is all over the place in popular culture. Even,

00:30:31.520 so there's a grocery chain here in the United States called Trader Joe's. Have you heard of it?

00:30:35.440 Of course. Yeah. Well, they have these bagels that are called Spinoza bagels. 1.00

00:30:40.160 I didn't know that. There's a picture of Spinoza on the package. They're very bad bagels. I wouldn't

00:30:44.560 buy them. I like Trader Joe's, but I wouldn't buy them. You're speaking to somebody who's living in 1.00

00:30:48.560 Montreal, and Montreal bagels are known as the number one bagels in the world. So come on.

00:30:52.480 My family is from Montreal, and I totally agree. The best bagels, however, it depends. Are you a

00:30:58.880 Fairmount or a St. Vila person? Oh, look at you. I'm liking you more by the minute, although I'm a bit

00:31:03.840 insulted that you would ask such a question. Of course, it's St. Vila bagels. No, no, no, no, no.

00:31:08.880 That's not true. Well, so I think a good bagel has to have a crust that breaks, that crunches when

00:31:16.000 you bite into it. And I've always found the St. Vila bagels to be a little too soft. However,

00:31:22.000 they're the only Montreal bagels you can get delivered in the United States. And so I get my

00:31:26.800 monthly St. Vila bagels. So can I tell you a personal story? I don't think I've ever said this publicly.

00:31:33.680 Some of my earliest emails to my eventual wife, with whom I've been now almost 26 years,

00:31:43.040 were from the bagel shop on St. Vila. I had become friends with the gentleman who would

00:31:51.360 tend the place late at night. I used to live on Bernard Street in Outremont. And so I would go

00:31:57.200 after, say, a soccer match or something, or I taught a late class. I would go there and we'd hang out.

00:32:02.000 He'd give me some free bagels. And so I had just met my eventual wife. And it wasn't at a time when

00:32:09.120 we had cell phones and so on. This is in the 90s. And so he said, oh, why don't you go to the back of

00:32:15.520 the St. Vila bagel shop in my office? And you could send some emails there. Well, last year we

00:32:22.080 celebrated our 25th anniversary and she put together a montage of every single year that

00:32:27.360 we've had together. And she took a screenshot of two of the emails from our first year together.

00:32:34.320 And they come from St. Vila bagel. What do you think of that story, Steve?

00:32:37.280 That's lovely. And actually, most people I've talked to from Montreal, they all seem to prefer

00:32:43.360 St. Vila. I'm happy to stand by Fairmount. So my father is from Montreal. He grew up on St.

00:32:50.160 Urban Street in, I guess, the neighborhood that's now called the Plateau or the Mile End.

00:32:54.400 Yeah. And there are a number of things he instilled in me. First of all, he taught me,

00:33:01.600 the lesson he always told me was always be a mensch. Secondly, he taught me how to ice skate

00:33:06.800 and how to play hockey. Third, he took me to Schwartz's as a young boy for his smoked meat.

00:33:16.080 Although I think he preferred Ben's delicatessen, which is no longer in existence.

00:33:19.600 No, I'm going to go with Schwartz. Yeah. I'm going to go with Schwartz.

00:33:24.400 Yeah. And also a love for the Montreal Canadiens. Ah, yes. Wow. I didn't know you had the Montreal

00:33:30.560 roots. All right. So let's move. Although I love doing all this personal stuff, I think it adds a

00:33:35.680 human element. Let me bring you, let's go back to geeking out. What are your thoughts on other

00:33:42.400 philosophical strands? So for example, one of the guys that I love is Karl Popper because of,

00:33:47.840 you know, philosophy of science and so on, epistemology, so on. But I despise postmodernism.

00:33:54.640 As a matter of fact, in this book right here, in the yellow book, in the parasitic mind,

00:33:58.960 where I talk about certain idea pathogens and parasitic ideas, I argue that the granddaddy of

00:34:04.800 all parasitic ideas is postmodernism. Am I off? Am I too nasty to postmodernism? Or am I being too

00:34:13.680 charitable in saying that it is a form of intellectual terrorism? It's even worse than that.

00:34:18.800 So to me, postmodernism, so we're just talking about postmodernism in intellectual and literary

00:34:24.480 matters. Because I think in terms of visual art and architecture, it's a very interesting

00:34:29.360 Yes, got it.

00:34:30.320 set of developments. But in terms of philosophical thinking, I have no truck with it whatsoever.

00:34:36.640 And I think you would find very rare anybody in an Anglo-American philosophy department who's

00:34:44.640 interested in Derrida, Lacan, and all of the poststructuralist and postmodernist. To me,

00:34:53.040 life is too short to try to make sense of the opacity of their writings. And the whole project to me

00:35:00.800 seems impenetrable. And at my age, I'm not going to spend any time on it.

00:35:06.240 Well, I'm relieved to hear you say that. So here's a theory I have. And I'm asking you here

00:35:12.960 to speculate because I don't think you have any direct evidence, but hear me out in terms of my

00:35:18.000 theory. So I actually think that the way these guys began, it's a form of sexual signaling from,

00:35:25.280 I mean, literally from evolutionary theory. So I can get up, I'm speaking now as one of the

00:35:29.760 French postmodernists could be Jacques Lacan, it could be Jacques Derrida, it could be Foucault, 1.00

00:35:34.480 it could be all these idiots. Okay, and I get up in front of a crowd, I engage in some full 0.99

00:35:40.400 profundity that exactly sounds profound, because it is impenetrable. So I'm pulling here a nice,

00:35:46.880 you know, illusion magic trick, whereby the audience has one of two things they can do, 0.86

00:35:52.480 they can either say, I don't think what he's saying makes any sense, because I'm dumb, 0.99

00:35:57.600 or because he's a charlatan. Most people end up going for the former, it must be that this 0.92

00:36:03.040 professor who's standing up in front of the Princeton University crowd is so smart that it's

00:36:07.680 way above my head. And then those postmodernists realize that they can actually become super

00:36:13.920 prestigious and get all sorts of hot women, or in Michel Foucault's case, maybe hot guys. And off we

00:36:21.200 go with the train of bullshit. What do you think of this theory? 1.00

00:36:24.000 I think you've given it a lot more thought than I ever have. And you've subjected it to a much

00:36:28.720 deeper analysis. I might actually make an exception for Foucault, at least some of the things of some

00:36:34.480 of the early writings of his that I've read, like The Order of Things, which I think is a serious piece

00:36:40.000 of scholarship on language and categorization and ontology. But, you know, a lot of, I do think a lot

00:36:48.480 of what, to use the word charlatanism, I think is probably correct. But again, I haven't paid much

00:36:54.240 attention at all, just because I'm busy. I'm busy enough trying to make sense of people like Leibniz

00:37:00.000 and Spinoza and Maimonides and others, who I find deeply interesting and a constant source of wisdom.

00:37:08.000 Do you feel that at any point, you will have known all that there is to know about these three

00:37:15.120 individuals? I'm talking about Decaf, Leibniz, and Spinoza? Or is it, I mean, it's not an infinite

00:37:21.040 well, but you're only scratching the surface of what you could potentially know?

00:37:26.080 Yeah, it's going to be endless. The thing about Spinoza is that, and I think this is true of Maimonides as

00:37:31.120 well. Once they get their talons in you, that's it. You're done. You're captured. And I'm teaching

00:37:37.920 a course this semester, History of Modern Philosophy. We're doing Spinoza right now. And I tell the

00:37:43.120 students, I've read The Ethics so many times. And every time I read it, it's more difficult,

00:37:49.520 because things you thought you understood, you realize you don't really understand.

00:37:54.080 You come at it with new questions that hadn't been answered yet. And so I think reading and rereading

00:37:59.760 and studying Spinoza and Leibniz, whose output was enormous, and such a difficult text as Maimonides'

00:38:07.360 Guide to the Perplexed, I think it's a lifelong project. And if you think you've answered all the

00:38:12.880 questions and you understand it all, then you haven't been reading it closely enough.

00:38:17.200 It almost sounds like Richard Feynman's famous quote, if you think you understand quantum physics,

00:38:22.720 you don't understand quantum physics. So it's almost like that. All right, let me ask.

00:38:27.120 I do think I understand Spinoza. But I don't think I've fully understood it.

00:38:32.640 Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. I did include this as one of the list of things I want to ask

00:38:38.800 you. It's kind of a bit more fun. Hopefully, you'll enjoy playing along. So you've been tasked

00:38:45.360 to invite the top 10 historical people to that party of yours. Who are they going to be? You don't

00:38:50.880 have to go through all 10, but you give me the people that absolutely have to be there. I'm

00:38:55.200 guessing those three will be there. Who else are we bringing to the party?

00:38:59.120 Well, yeah, Leibniz is a little kooky. So yeah, definitely Spinoza, definitely Maimonides,

00:39:05.040 and Socrates, without doubt.

00:39:09.360 More so than Aristotle or Plato.

00:39:12.000 Yeah, I don't think Aristotle would be much fun. Plato would be interesting,

00:39:15.280 but I'd rather hear from Socrates. And I'm afraid Plato would just take up the conversation

00:39:19.120 away from Socrates. Do they have to be philosophers?

00:39:22.480 They don't. I mean, you could tell me if you want whatever, some singer, but I was thinking

00:39:28.960 since I've got an esteemed intellectual, maybe we could restrict them to the cerebral life.

00:39:33.600 So Abraham Lincoln.

00:39:35.520 Oh, okay.

00:39:37.040 For obvious reasons, sort of.

00:39:38.880 Yes. Because, well, you know, he's a prophet of freedom and emancipation, despite, you know,

00:39:47.280 there's not a single American president that doesn't have blood on his hands. And I'm not

00:39:50.720 just talking about the Civil War. I'm talking about Lincoln's policies towards indigenous people. But

00:39:55.680 say what you will, Lincoln was Lincoln. And I would be, there are so many questions. I mean,

00:40:01.360 the reason why I want these people there is just because I have so many questions for them,

00:40:05.760 as well as what would be wonderful to see them interact with each other. So we have Socrates,

00:40:10.800 we have Maimonides, we have Lincoln, we have Spinoza, maybe Leibniz if we're feeling generous.

00:40:19.120 David Hume, I think would be a good person to have. A nice, I think he's a very sociable guy,

00:40:24.480 which means I wouldn't invite Kant because Kant would just deaden all the fun. Lincoln,

00:40:30.080 possibly Thomas Jefferson, because I want to ask him about his slave holding. Pete Seeger,

00:40:37.760 one of my personal heroes. I'm not very familiar with him. Oh, Pete Seeger is one of the great

00:40:45.200 songwriters and civil rights activists of the 20th century. Okay. I'm sure you know his songs.

00:40:52.000 You know, I came close to inviting Burt Bacharach on my show. Is that, does that count as adjacent to

00:40:59.760 Pete? No, not at all. Okay.

00:41:02.720 Burt Bacharach would put us to sleep. Pete Seeger would have us all singing. Okay. Wow.

00:41:08.240 I'm a huge fan of Simon de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Oh, okay.

00:41:12.960 I wouldn't mind having them there. Um, no, no King Solomon, no Jesus, no, none of these kinds of guys.

00:41:22.160 Um, no, maybe, I don't know. Uh, not, not really. You know who I'd like to have, and this is,

00:41:28.160 this is an additional thing my father instilled in me. Um, I'd like to have Mordecai Richler there

00:41:32.800 because I think it would be really entertaining. From Montreal. From Montreal, a novelist with such a

00:41:38.880 keen eye for human fallibility and our peccadilloes. Uh, no Charles Darwin?

00:41:47.360 No. I mean, I admire Darwin, but, but he's not, he's not your guy. Okay. Well, he certainly,

00:41:51.520 we're talking about an entertaining dinner party. I think, uh, Jane Austen would be very interesting

00:41:56.080 here given her sensitivities to, uh, social relationships. I would love, I would love to

00:42:01.520 have her there. I think we, you know, we certainly need to include some women. Um, it's funny that you

00:42:07.520 mentioned Jane Austen because my previous guest guest, I haven't, I haven't posted the chat yet.

00:42:13.200 He's an evolutionary anthropologist from Oxford. His name is Robin Dunbar. And as we were talking

00:42:19.440 about creating consilience between the social sciences, the natural sciences and the humanities,

00:42:25.200 and how you could, you know, study literature from a Darwinian perspective, he, he specifically

00:42:30.160 referred to Jane Austen as sort of the, one of the original evolutionary psychologists, right? Because

00:42:35.760 in your ability to write such, uh, you know, works of fiction, you have to understand human

00:42:42.400 nature to do so. So you may not be called an evolutionary psychologist, but you are an

00:42:46.320 evolutionary psychologist. So that's, that's interesting. You know what I would do with her

00:42:50.000 is after everybody else has left, I'll have her stay behind and ask her to give me her assessment of

00:42:55.840 all the people that were at the party. I love that. But wait a minute, you're breaking one of those

00:43:00.080 edicts in Judaism about not gossiping. Well, it says you should never repeat Lashon Hara,

00:43:05.600 which means you could say it once. Fair enough. Very good. All right. What are some things? So I

00:43:12.080 know that you've got a couple of, I'm just, I want to be mindful of the time. Uh, I know that you've got

00:43:16.560 these two forthcoming books that, uh, we mentioned earlier, another one on Spinoza and one on Maimonides.

00:43:23.520 What are some other things that are making you wake up in the morning and rubbing your hands with

00:43:28.000 anticipation? Well, I'm about to become a grandfather twice. So for the first time,

00:43:33.120 twins, uh, no, our daughter is due in two weeks and our daughter-in-law is due in January.

00:43:38.560 Oh, amazing. Congratulations. That's what's keeping me distracted from all things philosophical,

00:43:43.680 although I'm trying to be very philosophical about it. But if you meant, um, other, other things,

00:43:49.520 um, I, you know, I still, I maintain, I wrote a book some years ago called Rembrandt's Jews,

00:43:54.000 which is about, I've always been fascinated with 17th century Dutch art. Um, and then a couple of

00:43:59.440 years ago, I published a biography of Frans Hals, the great Dutch portraitist from the 17th century.

00:44:04.480 I see a painting behind you that speaks to this. Um, that's, isn't that, isn't he?

00:44:10.160 Oh, that, yeah. That's the Vermeer. Yeah. That's from the, uh, Maury's house exhibit. Yeah. That's

00:44:15.120 the Vermeer girl with the pearl earring. Yeah. Um, yeah. And so I'm all, I also have a thought of

00:44:20.880 slowly working on a book about, uh, another Dutch painting. Um, also in the Maury's house,

00:44:26.720 where the girl with the pearl earring is, uh, the painting is it's the goldfinch. And there was

00:44:30.480 a novel some years ago by, Oh, I, I, I saw the movie based on it by, yeah, by Donna Tartt.

00:44:35.840 Amazing. But the, the history of that painting and the painter who painted it in Delft, uh,

00:44:41.120 is just a fascinating story. So I think, um, slowly I'm working on a book about that as well.

00:44:47.200 Should we expect Hollywood to call you as the executive, uh, consultant for a biography on,

00:44:55.440 uh, Baruch Spinoza. And then when they're looking for an extremely good looking version of Baruch

00:44:59.760 Spinoza, I will be the lead actor. Can we expect that? I don't think either of us should hold our

00:45:04.640 breath. Fair enough. Well, you know, there was, there is a Dutch director, Rudolf Vandenberg,

00:45:10.560 um, who was, who had scripted and has a production, uh, maybe even finished filming,

00:45:16.960 um, uh, a, um, uh, a film about Spinoza, a scripted film about Spinoza, not a documentary.

00:45:25.520 Uh, really sadly, he died, uh, suddenly two months ago, but I understand that the production company is

00:45:32.160 still, uh, wrapped, trying to get things, uh, in completed form. Would this be the, I mean,

00:45:37.840 I'm, I'm unaware. I can't think of another English speaking. I don't know if that, this is an English

00:45:42.000 one, but have there been many other biographies or any sort of, uh, works of art, visual art that

00:45:48.640 have had Spinoza as a central figure? Oh, lots. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, not films, but you know,

00:45:55.440 I, I have a list somewhere of sculptures, um, works of performance art, paintings, um, all to some,

00:46:04.800 in some way or other, uh, devoted to or inspired by Spinoza. Oh, very, yeah, but I was thinking,

00:46:10.880 go ahead. This goes back to what I was saying before, that he really has entered, you can walk

00:46:14.560 down the street and you won't find any Cartesians or Leibnizians, but you might run to somebody who

00:46:19.520 thinks of themselves as a Spinozist. Yeah. Very interesting. So there was a film, there was an 1.00

00:46:24.560 Israeli film, I think from the early nineties, maybe late eighties. It's a terrible film, but it's called,

00:46:31.680 um, in Hebrew, in Hebrew, uh, the film is called infinite joy, the life of B Spinoza as told by his

00:46:39.600 neighbors, very weird movie, but it's a movie about Spinoza. So should I even track it down or is it a

00:46:46.800 useless endeavor? Yeah, no, I think you should judge for yourself. Okay. Fair enough. Steven, what a

00:46:51.600 pleasure to have you stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline. I hope you've enjoyed yourself

00:46:55.680 and, uh, I'll let you know once it is posted. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks so much for

00:47:00.240 having me. It was enjoyable. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 05, 2025

Dr. Steven Nadler - The Life of Philosopher Baruch Spinoza (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_912)

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