We are living on the edge, more precarious each day it seems. The global health crisis has ripped away many illusions of solidity and reliability we had of this world and left us teetering. This uncertainty is a terrible discomfort but for philosophy, it is as familiar as the morning sun. When Spinoza wrote, it was the dawn of modernity, a hopeful enlightened mercantilism was lighting out of the abyss of perpetual war. But the project of a world rued by reason was and is still fraught with failures and desperate conflicts and unlikely to succeed.

In our final circle of this momentous year we will teeter together on the limns between modernity and tradition, between the finitude of life and the infinity of substance, between the human and the non.human, between the personal and the political. All the liminal distinctions are fine filigree, elusive and ephemeral, but there they are, always provisionally, but always, inevitably operationally, making a difference — liminality is critical information, as Gregory Bateson called it ‘the difference which makes a difference’. Reading from selections of the Ethics together, we will open out the surprising dimensionalities hidden in the finest distinctions — which inform how we act and understand our prospects.

(image: Albert Eckhout, Studie van twee Braziliaanse schildpadden, c. 1640, Collection Mauritshuis The Hague)

Baruch Spinoza was a radical and a rebel. His philosophic writing was boldly secular and rational, scintillatingly irreverent and irrepressibly critical, committed to friendship, and emancipated embodied experience. Spinoza and his contemporaries traced out the principles of civil freedom still operative today and the acceptance of diversity with a commitment to good faith political discussion and the rule of law.

But Spinoza’s utopia was one of a merchant class grown rich on colonial exploits. Today, with globalised capitalism in crisis, these principles are suddenly in question. The hope of a future of prosperous ease, powered by reason and science seems to be faltering, revealing the vast majority desperate and angry, prey to reactionary nationalism and all manner of intolerance. Can Spinoza’s thinking help us gain agency to face our challenges today?

Through the readings and discussions in the monthly Spinoza circles we hope to re-evaluate the status and prospects of European civil democracies in the light of the contemporary challenges which are laying bare its weaknesses and its strengths.

In 2019 and 2020, West Den Haag in coordination with the Vereniging Het Spinozahuis will host monthly reading and discussion series connecting Spinoza’s thought with our contemporary conditions and applying his ideas to explore the exhibitions on display at West Den Haag.

The sessions are convened by Baruch Gottlieb and will be held on the last Sunday of each month. The Spinoza reading circle is open to anyone who would like to read Spinoza regardless of previous experience. Main language of discussion will be English.