Talks I've Given: 1: abstract and handout for: A Day with Spinoza: Bodies, Cognition and Society: 20th April 2016
It has come to my attention recently that people have had some visibility and access IT technical issues with some of my research work on my academia.edu, especially my presented research papers. So for ease of reference and access, I'm posting all about my academic talks here on my Professional Researcher blog.
This post is dedicated to my first accepted abstract and the first academic talk I gave back on the 20th April 2016.
After it was suggested to me by Dr Emily Thomas, I submitted this abstract below by email 30th November 2015 23:42pm (stating that I am an Independent Researcher with a BA degree in Philosophy (2:1) from London University) to Dr. Andrea Sangiacomo for the Dutch Seminar Conference in Early Modern Philosophy (March 2016) but I was redirected to give this abstract/paper as a presentation at the workshop: 'A Day with Spinoza: Bodies, Cognition and Society' 20th April 2016 at the University of Groningen, where I was accepted as a speaker so I presented it there instead.
© Liba (Libuse) Kaucky 20/04/2016 All Rights Reserved The Moral Rights of this author have been asserted.
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1598-0833
Web of Science Researcher ID: P-2484-2016
URL:
https://publons.com/researcher/2202509/liba-kaucky/
The document version of my abstract below is available on my academia.edu at:
https://www.academia.edu/49045438/Abstract_On_the_Role_of_True_Worship_for_True_Religion_and_Political_Stability_Liba_Kaucky_November_2015_All_Rights_Reserved_Moral_Rights_asserted_ORCID_ID_http_orcid_org_0000_0003_1598_0833_Web_of_Science_Researcher_ID_P_2484_2016URL_https_publons_com_researcher_2202509_liba_kaucky_
Abstract:
On the Role of True Worship for True Religion and Political Stability
In this paper, I wish to explore Spinoza’s arguments about true worship in his Theologico-Political Treatise (TTP). The topic of how to engender true worship is important because it has ramifications for Spinoza’s overall concept of true religion as well as showing the role religion has in relation to a state, particularly a Republic. Spinoza emphasises the value of underpinning religious practices with reason and understanding by illustrating how critical analysis of scripture supports piety, public peace and freedom which, in turn, strengthens religion and state alike. This is because, by strengthening reason over emotion and superstition, Spinoza is attempting to reduce potential causes of conflicts between religions and the authority of the state.
Thus, I would like to examine Spinoza’s view in his TTP that gaining a rational understanding of how and why people worship in the way they do creates a more secure basis for religion which, in turn, impacts on how people behave as citizens. In other words, rational worshippers are more likely to be rational citizens because they are more emotionally stable so more likely to be law abiding and behave in a beneficial way rather than being volatile and prone to causing civil disturbances. In this way, the state benefits from true worship because the latter helps to promote a stable, rationally based political society, especially because worship is by and large a collective activity. Therefore, I would like to focus on Spinoza’s arguments about worship and scripture and his view that how scripture is analysed and understood affects how people approach the ritual of worship (TTP 12). I would also like to show that Spinoza’s views are still relevant today. For instance, irrational religious fanaticism can, in some cases, still lead to political turmoil and war both within and between states. Therefore, in this paper, I wish to put forward the suggestion that scripture and true worship are pivotal aspects of Spinoza’s argument for true religion and the political stability of a state.
Here's my speaker acceptance email:
Here's the email correspondence I received as a confirmed speaker, alongside the other speakers, apart from one, Karolina Hubner who didn't enter the speaker list until a later date, after the submission and confirmation dates had passed. Hence, as you will see, she isn't included in the 4th February 2016 email or the original conference schedule emailed to the speakers:
Below is the following email which was sent to all speakers now, including Karolina Hubner who, as you can see from the conference workshop schedule on the University of Groningen website, presented her paper that day, alongside myself and the other speakers.
Handout
Below is the handout I provided to the organiser on request a couple of hours before my presentation that I delivered as an Independent Researcher at the workshop: 'A Day with Spinoza: Bodies, Cognition and Society' 20th April 2016 at the University of Groningen. This handout is heavily based on my paper they saw me present so it would be easier for them to follow my argument during my talk and ask me questions/ comment at the end, which they did.
© Liba (Libuse) Kaucky 20/04/2016 All Rights Reserved The Moral Rights of this author have been asserted. ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1598-0833 Web of Science Researcher ID: P-2484-2016
The document version of this handout is available on my academia.edu at:
Liba Kaucky: On the Role of True Worship for True Religion and Political Stability: handout 20/04/16
Aims: I hope to show in this paper, by analytically delving into the role of true worship for true religion and political stability, that Spinoza does outline some key definitions, concepts, principles and conditions during his discussion of true worship that should be applicable to almost any religious and or political scenario. I have also argued for the centrality and important role true worship plays in Spinoza’s TTP, with a particular focus on its impact on true religion and political stability and that his arguments in the TTP also raise and explore questions that are still relevant today.
Section one: A possible definition of true worship and what the notion contains
In chapter IV of the TTP, Spinoza uses the phrase “to worship Him truly” while examining Solomon’s proverbs (TTP IV p67). Spinoza equates this phrase with the notion that “wisdom or intellect alone teaches us to fear God wisely” (TTP IV p67). So, I think that one can conclude from this that true worship could be defined as wise worship, that is, worship which is informed by wisdom attained through the faculty of the intellect. Further textual support for this definition is that Spinoza advocates in his preface that people “learn to worship God more wisely” which, once again, combines the best way to worship with employing wisdom (TTP preface p7).
I would like to put forward the following attempt of how to deductively set out Spinoza’s definition of and argument for true worship:
Premise 1 Wisdom and knowledge come from God
Premise 2 from premise 1 it follows that knowledge of God alone gives rise to and determines wisdom and knowledge (because God is the source of wisdom and knowledge)
Premise 3 wisdom is at the pinnacle of knowledge and involves true, adequate ideas
Premise 4 true worship should be based on true, adequate ideas (that is gained either from philosophical reasoning or core scriptural teachings or both)
Hence, conclusion 1: true worship is achieved by applying God-given wisdom (and knowledge), including knowledge of God and other true adequate ideas (gained from philosophy and or scripture) to worship
Hence, conclusion 2: worshipping truly is identical to worshipping wisely
So, I read Spinoza as arguing that, just as true worship is derived from God-given wisdom and knowledge of God, similarly, true principles of ethics and politics are also derived from wisdom from God and knowledge of God. Therefore, I suggest the deductive argument structure could run the same way as I attempted previously:
Premise 1 Wisdom and knowledge come from God
Premise 2 from premise 1 it follows that knowledge of God alone gives rise to and determines wisdom and knowledge (because God is the source of wisdom and knowledge)
Premise 3 wisdom is at the pinnacle of knowledge and involves true, adequate ideas
Premise 4 true principles of ethics and politics should be based on true, adequate ideas
Hence, conclusion 1: true principles of politics and ethics, including true virtue, are achieved by applying God-given wisdom (and knowledge), including knowledge of God
This also ensures that ethics and politics contain true, adequate ideas, because they were attained through wisdom.
Section two: Ways in which wisdom and knowledge of God contribute to ethical and political principles and in turn, enhance and maintain political stability in a state.
“there exists a God, that is, a Supreme Being, Who loves justice and charity, and who must be obeyed by whosoever would be saved; that the worship of this Being consists in the practice of justice and love towards one’s neighbour, and that they contain nothing beyond the following” seven “doctrines” (TTP XIV p186).
In other words, these vital concepts within knowledge of God motivates one to obey God and includes knowing that God loves justice and charity. In this way, Spinoza provides strong Biblical textual support for his argument that true worship entails acting with justice and love towards the other.
Hence, I suggest that this is an example of how Spinoza perhaps sees true worship directly impacting positively on society and the political state since it engenders patterns of behaviour, actions and attitudes that avoid insecurity and instability by bringing people together peacefully.
True worship includes acting in a just and charitable way towards everyone in a political society and “true method of interpreting Scripture” (TTP VII p99) which involves working through scripture in an almost Cartesian style error avoiding manner, mixed with the historical, linguistic, argumentative and contextual considerations inspired by Jewish tradition.
Section three: categories of worship and sovereignty
Spinoza also argues for another, more controversial necessary condition for having and maintaining a kingdom of God as can be seen by the following quote:
“God has no special kingdom among men except in so far as He reigns through temporal rulers” (TTP XIX p245)
To see the necessary condition within this statement, I shall re-state this quote as:
If God can rule through Sovereigns of a state or states, then that state can be a kingdom of God.
This has the consequence that some categories of worship fall under the jurisdiction of the sovereign. Spinoza outlines two distinct categories of true worship, that of inward worship and outward worship. The latter can fall under the bounds of public right and so sovereign jurisdiction while the former falls within the bounds of a person’s private, inalienable right of freedom of thought (TTP VII p118, XVIII p241). These categories of worship, therefore, also refine my analysis of how Spinoza might be defining and arguing for the beneficial role of true worship in his TTP. Spinoza outlines the outward and inward worship thus:
“the rights of religion and the outward observances of piety should be in accordance with the public peace and well-being, and should therefore be determined by the sovereign power alone. I speak here only of the outward observances of piety and the external rites of religion, not of piety itself, nor the inward worship of God, nor the means by which the mind is inwardly led to do homage to God in singleness of heart.” (TTP XIX p245)
“all the decrees of God involve eternal truth and necessity, so that we cannot conceive God as a prince or legislator giving laws to mankind. For this reason the Divine precepts…do not receive immediately from God the force of a command, but only from those, or through the mediation of those, who possess the right of ruling and legislating. It is only through these latter means that God rules among men, and directs human affairs with justice and equity” (TTP XIX p248).
This seems to me to be a vital connecting step in Spinoza’s argument because it links his prior arguments about the concept of and the definition of outward and inward worship with piety and with public peace, by making them achievable via a sovereign. By making the role of the sovereign include being a proper interpreter of religion, or at least, the true outward worship of it, then Spinoza simultaneously accounts for and attempts to preserve religion and the state. However, I’m not sure how Spinoza would account for some rare occurrences whereby a legal decree of a state is left so open to interpretation and unclear that what is legally enforced does not match the decree. A contemporary example of this is the organisation 'Women of the Wall' who fight for attaining gender equality in terms of having the same religious rights as men to legally and peacefully conduct outward worship in the public space of the Western Wall. Their actions, such as wearing a tallit, bringing and reading the Torah in the women’s section and singing prayers such as the Shema aloud, were treated as illegal by authorities despite Women of the Wall citing that neither divine nor human law, in Spinoza’s terms, prohibits or renders what they do illegal. The clause that was cited in 2012 by authorities for the prohibition, categorized their actions as the conduct of a religious ceremony that was not in accordance with “local custom” (Maltz and Ettinger 2013). However, a year later in 2013, the Israeli courts ruled against the authorities stating that Women of the Wall were “not violating law” or “local custom” and that their outward worship, as Spinoza would term it, did not constitute “provocation” (Maltz and Ettinger 2013). Since then, these events have led to a change in “the Law of the Holy Sites” with the aim of increasing religious pluralism and toleration within Judaism by creating a non-orthodox, egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall and including Women of the Wall as representatives in the governing committee for that section (JPost staff 2016).
In terms of the outcome of the Western Wall issue, I think one can see Spinoza’s views at work here in that the sovereign, rather than a religious faction, should have the last word on resolving tensions concerning outward worship and that a democratic sovereign’s solution should aim at creating public peace, toleration and pluralism. Spinoza does not see this system of attuning outward pious worship with political welfare and peace, as new-fangled, even for the seventeenth century. He sees it as a fact that came to light from his empirical observation that “religion has always been made to conform to the public welfare” (TTP XIX p250). This leads Spinoza to claim that this attuning of the two constitutes a true, necessary condition for the preservation of both religion and the state alike (TTP XIX p252). Moreover, Spinoza anticipates an “increase in piety”, public welfare and the “security of states” in which this system is followed (TTP XIX p254).
On Spinoza’s account, piety seems to lie at an interesting cross-roads because he notes the categorical difference between piety in an intrinsic sense and pious observances. Intrinsic piety falls under the category of inward worship that a sovereign doesn’t attempt to control or determine, whilst pious observances categorize under outward worship that a sovereign does determine in order to preserve the state. Spinoza claims to have successfully demonstrated by the end of chapter VII that inward worship of God and intrinsic piety, including “the means by which the mind is inwardly led to do homage to God in singleness of heart”, all categorizes as private inalienable rights that a sovereign must not infringe (TTP VII p119). This is mostly because Spinoza sees this as being part of a broader category containing general inalienable rights such as freedom of judgement and thought which encompasses Spinoza’s view that “every man’s understanding is his own” (TTP XX p257). Much as this independence of understanding has often been seen as a threat to religion, Spinoza disagrees, claiming instead that this freedom of thought and judgement actually benefits true religion. This is because if one feels free to think about religion in a manner that best suits that person, then Spinoza maintains that this brings about the right conditions for true worship of God and a dedicated approach to religion. In this way, contrary to general opinion, both religion and the state benefit from freedom of thought and judgement and from worshipping wisely/truly or in other words, worshipping in accordance with one’s “conscience” (TTP preface p6).
Spinoza approves of one aspect of Rabbi Jehuda Alpakhar’s approach to the Hebrew Bible ie that of interpreting “Scripture by Scripture” and argues vehemently against any approach that twists the text for a particular end goal, whether it be well-meaning or not (TTP XV p191). This, I think, is another way in which Spinoza discusses how to preserve and maintain true worship since the methods of scriptural interpretation again, as I discussed earlier in this paper, seem to fall under Spinoza’s broader definition of true worship. In other words, that part of worshipping truly is to take care not to “twist” what scripture teaches by, for instance, over-rationalizing scripture until its meaning is incorrectly changed as he criticises Maimonides for doing (TTP VII p115). By arguing against Biblical commentators having too much creative license with scripture, Spinoza hopes to preserve and understand the true doctrines of faith therein (TTP VII, XV).
Section four: Internal guidance from God and emotional stability as aspect of true worship that promote true religion and political stability
Spinoza also highlights a tension between the authority of the sovereign and the obedience of the subject. I agree with Susan James (2014 p285) that Spinoza is portraying this tension as a delicate equilibrium between the two because either side can tip the scales and adversely affect the stability of the state. This is because, much as the power seems to be stacked in the sovereign’s favour, Spinoza shows the complexities of how there needs to be a healthy balance of freedom and power between the sovereign and the subject in order that the political and societal structure promotes the welfare of both. Spinoza sets out the following dilemma which arises as a semi-conclusion from his premise that’s based on his observation that “all actions spring from a man’s deliberation with himself” and so (TTP XVII p215):
“either dominion does not exist, and has no rights over its subjects, or else it extends over every instance in which it can prevail on men who decide to obey it.” (TTP XVII p215)
To analyse this quote I shall first reformulate it in a minimalistic way as essentially claiming the following disjunctive of the form ~A & ~B v if B then A (either not A and not B are true or A and B are true where A stands for the property of having a dominion and B stands for having rights over subjects):
Either a sovereign has no dominion over its subjects and no rights over its subjects or if a sovereign can have rights over its subjects then a sovereign’s dominion is all encompassing.
However, Spinoza’s claim is more complex than this. It is not just a matter of a sovereign being able to exercise rights, power, dominion over subjects merely in virtue of being a sovereign. The subjects themselves hold a certain power as to whether they choose to conform to the sovereign’s authority. Nevertheless, this applies in limited ways, sometimes in admirable ways and sometimes not. For instance, Spinoza warns that if subjects are only controlled by negative emotions rather than their reason then this emotional instability endangers the stability of the state (TTP XVII p216). This is because the sovereign then becomes somewhat at the mercy of the “fickle disposition of the multitude” whose cooperation and attitude towards the sovereign will blow with the wind and make them unreliable (TTP XVII p216). This creates instability for both sovereign and subjects and makes for very difficult conditions for ruling a state. Spinoza additionally points out that, during Biblical times, sovereigns would try to avoid the inconsistent emotions of their subjects by portraying themselves as demi-gods to be worshipped thereby creating a sacred kingship (TTP XVII p217-8).
Nowadays it has been used as a domination technique employed by dictators such as the North Korean sovereign Kim Jong II despite technological and cultural advancements.
If subjects are led by their negative emotions instead of reason, and are prone to superstition, then this fluctuating state of mind will make them inconsistent citizens that unhinge political stability, which is self-defeating and counterproductive for the sovereign. Nowadays with globalisation, political instability in one country often causes political instability including arms races and wars across the world in any other given country and takes on an even more complex pattern of political friction than could be imagined in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, I suspect Spinoza’s basic principles would still apply, albeit perhaps be replicated more times over since globalization means there can be a bigger ripple effect from each individual political instability.
Nevertheless, what about when a sovereign audaciously flouts or disobeys Divine law? Spinoza briefly alludes to the example of disobedience against King Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel (TTP XVI p212).
An interesting contrast to the King Nebuchadnezzar example, is Spinoza’s analysis of the worshipping of the golden calf in chapter seventeen of his TTP (TTP XVII p232-5). In chapter XII, Spinoza argues that the worshipping of the golden calf, which constitutes false worship, broke the covenant with God and reduced the tablets from being sacred to just mere stone. This illustrates how political instability, and instances of false religion, have their roots on false worship.
Spinoza has given two contrasting Biblical situations, ie King Nebuchadnezzar and the golden calf, which illustrate the pivotal role of true and false worship for true religion, political stability and subject-sovereign interaction.
Conclusion:
I think a broader definition and concept of true worship makes it easier to see how Spinoza’s arguments can be applied not only to other Biblical examples and seventeenth century Netherlands, but also twenty-first century contemporary societies. In this paper, I maintain that Spinoza’s arguments in his TTP do go a long way towards helping one to evaluate political and religious clashes in society in every era, especially those involving some type of worship. I think worship is perhaps an underrated but vital factor that underlies and shapes many of the political conflicts analysed in political philosophy and world politics. However, there can never be any neat answers as to how a sovereign should keep control of and prevent religious extremism without suppressing its subjects.
References in this handout:
James, S., (2014) 'Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics The Theologico-Political Treatise' Oxford University Press (first published 2012)
JPost.com staff (2016) 'Reform Movement holds first official prayer service at Western Wall' The Jerusalem Post (02/25/2016 10:40)
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Reform-Movement-holds-first-official-prayer-service-at-western-wall-446050 last accessed 12/04/2016
Maltz, J., and Ettinger, Y., (2013) 'Major Victory for Women of the Wall Jerusalem Court: Women Not Violating Law by Wearing Prayer Shawls at Western Wall' (04/25/2013 8:30pm)
Spinoza Benedict de., 'A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise' translated by Elwes, R. H. M, Dover Philosophical Classics, Dover Publications Inc. Mineola New York (2014)
For the presented paper which I delivered as a talk and emailed to lecturers after my talk for additional peer review, see my next blog post. It's also available on my academia.edu page, at:
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