Abstract

In the late seventeenth century, Benedict de Spinoza developed an idiosyncratic world view that both bridged and transformed late medieval and early modern thought, conceiving reason to connect human beings to the divine law of God, while arguing that this law is always subject to interpretation by the human polities within which it is expressed. What most readings of this Dutch Jewish thinker of Portuguese heritage haven't adequately captured are the ethical values that structure his major works, values that are expressed not simply in what he says about ethics directly but in his conception of biblical hermeneutics, his theory of law , and his understanding of reason and power. Spinoza was convinced that the creation of a truly just and democratic polity depended not only on ensuring political representation but on formulating laws which allowed for the maximum diversity of ideas and opinions. Such diversity, he felt, was more than politically expedient; it served to stimulate the refinement of the ideas themselves, challenging the notion that intellectual insight is reserved solely for elites while also directing this insight towards the improvement of the social order. Spinoza thus departs from many of his medieval precursors in insisting that individual enlightenment is also a communal and political task; and he departs from many of his modern contemporaries in stressing that a society cannot be politically free without securing popular access to the texts it considers sacred, and more specifically, without contesting the notion that the Bible is an esoteric text. I show that, on the cusp of the Enlightenment and its eventual dispersion of the human sciences into discrete disciplines, Spinoza is one early modern thinker for whom the metaphysical, the theological, the hermeneutical, and the political are intimately related dimensions of the project of enlightenment. This perspective not only sheds new light on the conceptions of reason, interpretation, and politics that were alive in Spinoza's day. Illuminating the nature of his particular synthesis of these concepts also provides a way of thinking about the origins of the Enlightenment that significantly complicates our understanding of its dominant motifs