Rhetoric, Theology and Politics: The case of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico Politicus

Eugene Garver

doi:10.4396/2024065G

Eugene Garver

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4396/2024065G

Parole chiave: Rhetoric, hermeneutics, Spinoza, practical reasoning, prophets

Abstract

Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise offers a very unlikely way of solving political conflicts. He purports to show that Bible criticism, a revolutionary hermeneutics that separates meaning from truth, will put an end to linguistic conflict over the. Bible as an object, and to ontological conflicts that come from conflating meaning and truth and making the Bible into an esoteric work of philosophy rather than something available to everyone. Confining ourselves to the meaning of the Bible is equivalent to confining our practical thinking to the imagination rather than reason or, in his terms, adequate ideas. The prophets had vivid imaginations, not exceptional intelligence, and we should follow them and limit our religious thinking to our relation to God and not to God’s actual nature, and then that relation to God, and the meaning of the Bible, are reduced to treating others with justice and charity. Not only will a correct method of hermeneutics remove most of the grounds for conflict, but it will lead to freedom.

Riferimenti bibliografici

Aristotle (1859), Aristotelis rhetorica et poetica, edited by, Immanuele Bekkero, Berolini, G. Reimer, Berlin.

Aristotle (1939), The “Art” of Rhetoric, edited by, John Henry Freese, W. Heinemann, London.

Camus, Albert, (1951), L'Homme révolté, Les Éditions Gallimard, Paris (trad eng., The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, Alfred Knopf, New York 1991).

Cicero, Marcus Tullius (1949), De Inventione De Optimo Genere Oratorum ; Topica / Cicero , with an English Translation by H.M. Hubbell, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Farenga, Vincent, (1979), Periphrasis on the Origin of Rhetoric, MLN, 94.5, 1033–105.

Garver, Eugene, (2004), For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character and the Ethics of Belief, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Garver, Eugene, (1994), Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, (2013), The Essential Writings of Rousseau / Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by, Constantine, Peter, edited by, Damrosch, Leo, Modern Library, New York.

Spinoza, Baruch, (1677) Ethics, edited by Carl Gebhardt, Carl Winters, Heidelberg 1925.

Spinoza, Benedictus (1985), The Collected Works of Spinoza, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Spinoza, Baruch, (1670), Theological-Political Treatise, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.