11 - The Eyes of the Mind: Proportion in Spinoza, Swift, and Ibn Tufayl

Summary

This chapter will examine the interconnected ideas of proportion and relation in Spinoza by reading Spinoza alongside two novels that have been drawn into proximity with his works. The first is a ‘Spinozistic novel’ avant la lettre, written by the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Tufayl, which was translated by a friend of Spinoza's because of its resonance with his philosophy. This novel, I will argue, sheds light on the importance of relation and the absence of relation to Spinoza's three kinds of knowledge. By contrast, the second novel, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, seeks to criticise Spinozism, and at times Spinoza (see Gardiner 2000), in part by considering the idea of proportion and its connection to reason. To begin, however, I will sketch a background to some of the claims concerning Spinoza's effect on English literature in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The Radical Enlightenment and English Literature

In Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested, Jonathan Israel offers a major rethinking of the importance of Spinoza's ideas and the effect of his works on the European Enlightenment from 1650 to 1752. Israel recovers the central role of Spinoza in the processes that produced the Enlightenment, a role that he argues had been obscured because it had to take place underground. During the period of study, it was more or less forbidden to mention Spinoza's works, or ideas that were seen to align with them (called ‘Deism’ in England, or, following Israel, Spinozism), directly, unless one was repudiating them out of hand. The ideas that characterised Spinozism included the denial of a providential God, the identification of God with nature, and the insistence on seeking truth through reason rather than through reference to authorities such as the Church or the Bible. Even those who sought a more nuanced critical engagement with Spinozism had to be very careful. In effect, the only possibility was to engage with it indirectly. Israel states:

By the early eighteenth century the widening perception of Spinozism as the prime and most absolute antithesis and adversary of received authority, tradition, privilege, and Christianity had generated a psychological tension evident throughout the academic world and ‘Republic of Letters’, not unlike the intellectual and ideological paranoia regarding Marxism pervading western societies in the early and mid-twentieth century.