Steven Nadler

On his book A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Modern Age

Cover Interview of October 20, 2011

The wide angle

Spinoza’s Treatise is very much a product of its time—especially the immediate context of the Dutch Golden Age, with its heady mix of economic wealth, political liberalism, religious dissent, scientific and technological progress, cosmopolitan culture, and artistic riches. By the same token, Spinoza’s ideas were well ahead of their time; the world of early modern Europe was not ready to dismiss organized religion as nothing but organized superstition and the belief in miracles as grounded in ignorance. In so far as Spinoza’s scandalous treatise provides the foundations for a modern, secular, and tolerant state, it remains, today, one of the most vitally relevant works in the history of philosophy.

A Book Forged in Hell is an addition to my earlier studies of Spinoza and his philosophy: the biography I published in 1999, Spinoza: A Life; a book devoted to his excommunication from Judaism, Spinoza’s Heresy (2002); and a study of the Ethics (2006).

With this new book, I have completed what has turned out to be a long-term project on Spinoza, one devoted to making his life and the various dimensions of his thought accessible beyond academia to a broader reading public. It is a life and thought well worth studying today.

philosophy / polemics / religion / europe / christianity / modernity / netherlands / spinoza baruch /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009