The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought by Goetschel Willi;

Author:Goetschel, Willi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Smart Worms

A passage in a letter from Spinoza captures the issue of the interplay between interpretation, ethics, and politics succinctly and, as it were, in a nutshell. In a letter to Henry Oldenbourg, the secretary of the Royal Society in London, a key operator at the switchboard of the seventeenth-century republic of letters, Spinoza responds concerning the question Oldenbourg had raised: how do we recognize in nature the agreement of every part with its whole and the rest of nature, i.e., how do we think the relationship between the particular and the universal? Spinoza offers his response by way of a description that couches the hermeneutic situation in suggestively illuminating terms:

Now let us imagine, if you please, a tiny worm living in the blood, capable of distinguishing by sight the particles of the blood—lymph, etc.—and of intelligently observing how each particle, on colliding with another, either rebounds or communicates some degree of its motion, and so forth. That worm would be living in the blood as we are living in our part of the universe, and it would regard each individual particle of the blood as a whole, not a part, and could have no idea as to how all the parts are controlled by the overall nature of the blood and compelled to mutual adaptation as the overall nature of the blood requires, so as to agree with one another in a definitive way. For if we imagine that there are no causes external to the blood which would communicate new motions to the blood, nor any space external to the blood, nor any other bodies to which the parts of the blood could transfer their motions, it is beyond doubt that the blood would remain indefinitely in its present state and that its particles would undergo no changes other than those which can be conceived as resulting from the existing relation between the motion of the blood and of the lymph, chyle, etc. Thus the blood would always have to be regarded as a whole, not a part. But since there are many other causes which do in a definite way modify the laws of the nature of the blood and are reciprocally modified by the blood, it follows that there occur in the blood other motions and other changes, resulting not solely from the reciprocal relation of its particles but from the relation between the motion of the blood on the one hand and external causes on the other. From this perspective the blood is accounted as a part, not as a whole. So much, then, for the question of whole and part.5

The passage has an allegorical thrust hard to ignore.6 But it expresses more than an eloquent visualization of Spinoza’s ontological scheme. Notice the passage’s critical and resolute move to the question of interpretation and the way it frames this question. Interpretation is a question of perspective, and as part of a whole the epistemological subject can literally not think itself out of the box, i.e., detached from the environment in which it lives.

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