Combining threads from recent posts on Spinoza and on Walter Kaufmann, here are a few further thoughts on intellectual honesty and philosophical methodology.
One of the most challenging aspects of reading Spinoza's Ethics is that he used the geometrical method, à la Euclid's Elements; the book is replete with axioms, definitions, propositions, proofs, corollaries, and scholia. Yet Spinoza scholar Edwin Curley once observed that the geometrical method is an exercise in intellectual honesty, because it helps prevent a thinker from hiding the assumptions and connections they make. Unfortunately, the result is an extemely dense text that is both eternally fascinating and eternally difficult!
On this point (albeit speaking about Hegel, not Spinoza), Kaufmann noted:
When a philosopher is exceptionally difficult, most readers leave him alone or soon give up. The few who persevere and spend years figuring him out naturally do not like to be experts on something that is not worth while. So one is tempted to suspend criticism and concentrate on exegesis.
Yet exegesis is not the be-all and end-all of philosophical study, because the point is to figure out what's true - and no one has a monopoly on that (as Tocqueville said: "men grasp fragments of truth, but never truth itself"). Kaufmann argues that we need to combine fair-minded comprehension with critical evaluation:
External criticism that simply condemns without any prior effort to comprehend is relatively easy and trivial. To really grasp a position and the arguments involved in it is more difficult. But a philosopher must combine grasp and critical evaluation; for until we rethink every step critically we cannot fully comprehend what led a writer to go on as he did; what problems led him to develop his views; and what prompted later writers to differ with him.
Ideally, the step-by-step reasoning process set forth in a serious treatise like Spinoza's Ethics should enable us to form solid conclusions about the author's arguments - if only we can muster the patience to "rethink every step critically"...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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