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Review Essay Defending Spinoza?

In 1755, the young Moses Mendelssohn presented his friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing with a short essay. The essay was the culmination of numerous conversations between the two that centered on the meaning and value of Spinoza’s philosophy. At the time, Lessing had been writing defenses (Rettungen) of maligned Christian figures. Mendelssohn imitated this practice and wrote a defense of Spinoza at the time one of the most detested thinkers in Germany. Unknowingly, Mendelssohn inaugurated a literary genre—the Spinoza defense. Thinkers, philosophers, and scholars as diverse as Johann Gottfried Herder, Heinrich Heine, and Nachum Sokolow have all sought to rescue Spinoza, and, judging from two recent works, this desire has not ebbed. Nancy Levene’s Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason is a synoptic interpretation of Spinoza’s opus treating his metaphysics, theology, politics, and biblical interpretation. Levene seeks to take the heterodox edge off Spinoza. Though there is a long tradition of reading Spinoza as a duplicitous atheist, in recent times Leo Strauss has given this line of interpretation great currency. For Strauss, Spinoza represents the paradigmatic example of an esoteric writer. Although Spinoza often writes as if he believes in revelation, theism, and natural morality, careful inspection of Spinoza’s writings shows that these are red herrings meant to divert attention from Spinoza’s unstinting naturalism, atheism, and amoralism.