Letters, 29–41

SEPTEMBER 1665–SEPTEMBER 1669

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EDITORIAL PREFACE

People and Themes

Spinoza's principal correspondents in this period are Henry Oldenburg, Johannes Hudde, and Jarig Jelles. He exchanged five letters with Oldenburg (Letters 29–33) and sent three letters each to Hudde (Letters 34–36) and Jelles (Letters 39–41). There are also single letters to Johannes Bouwmeester (Letter 37) and Johannes van der Meer (Letter 38).

Oldenburg

Oldenburg (1619–1677) we know well from Volume I. The letters he and Spinoza exchanged in this period tell us a good deal about Spinoza's interaction with contemporary scientists. Particularly important is Christiaan Huygens, whom he seems to have known well in these years, and whose research he was happy to report on.

We learn also that by the fall of 1665 Spinoza had begun work on the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP). It's clear from what he tells Oldenburg that one reason for writing this work was that he did not find the Dutch Republic to be as free as he would claim it was in his Preface. An illustration of this is that while he was working on the TTP, the arrest, trial, imprisonment, and death in prison of his good friend Adriaan Koerbagh vividly demonstrated the limits of the Dutch Republic's willingness to allow freedom of thought and expression.

Koerbagh's crime was to have published one work (Een Bloemhof van allerley lieflijkheid A Flower Garden of all kinds of loveliness]) and to have attempted to publish another (Een Ligt schijnende in duystere plaatsen A Light shining in dark places]) which criticized organized religion from a point of view closely resembling the one Spinoza was to articulate in the TTP. He represented the Hebrew Bible as a work of human authorship, compiled by Ezra from other Jewish writings which had been handed down to him, and which included many stories no more credible than the legends surrounding Till Eulenspiegel. What is important in the Bible is just its core moral teaching: we must know and obey God, and love our neighbors.

When we first encounter talk of the TTP, in Letters 29–30, it appears that Spinoza may have conceived it more as a theological work than as a political one. "I am now composing," he writes, "a treatise on my opinion regarding scripture." This would be an inadequate description of the work eventually published in 1670, which supplemented the theological argument for freedom of thought and expression with an argument drawn from political theory. It seems possible that Spinoza may have broadened the scope of his argument because he was distressed that the civil authorities had bowed to ecclesiastical pressure in the persecution of Koerbagh, and wanted to defend their right to allow greater freedom than the clergy would be inclined to permit.

Perhaps Spinoza was also influenced by his reading of Hobbes' Leviathan, whose text became available to him, during this period, in languages he could read, first in a Dutch translation by his friend Abraham van Berckel (1667), and then in Hobbes' own Latin translation (1668). Hobbes may have helped him to see how a secular approach to political theory could provide a useful way of defending religious liberty. Unfortunately the surviving correspondence from this period provides little information about the work which was probably occupying most of Spinoza's attention. From this correspondence you would think that he was concentrating mainly on the Ethics and on his scientific work.

In their correspondence from this period Oldenburg is still in his encouraging mode. See particularly Letter 31, whose message is: "Get your philosophy out; everything will be all right; you live in a free country; and anyway, you wouldn't really say anything to harm religion, would you?" His attitude will change once he has read the TTP.

The letter which has attracted the most philosophical discussion is Letter 32, where Spinoza responds to Oldenburg's question concerning our knowledge of how the parts of Nature agree with the whole and with each other. Spinoza does not claim to know how these things agree, which he says would require knowing the whole of Nature and all of its parts. But he thinks it clear that there is such an agreement, and what this seems to mean for him is that the human body and the human mind are parts of nature (IV/173a). What that in turn seems to mean is that the body is part of a law-governed causal network, and that the mind is part of an infinite intellect which reflects everything that happens in nature. Our impression that we and the things around us are independent of one another is an illusion born of our finitude and ignorance.

Oldenburg's final letter to Spinoza in this period, Letter 33, is the last we have between them for ten years. In 1667 Oldenburg was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two months, on suspicions aroused by his extensive foreign correspondence. The time he spent in the Tower may have contributed to the greater caution he showed when their correspondence resumed in 1675. See, for example, Letters 61 and 62.

Hudde

Johannes Hudde (1628–1704) was a student at the University of Leiden in the 1650s. There he became interested in mathematics, and joined a research group led by Frans van Schooten, which translated Descartes' Geometry into Latin, publishing it in an edition which also contained appendices by Van Schooten, Jan de Witt, and Hudde. Though he published relatively little in mathematics, he is said to have been recognized in his own time as "one of the greatest living mathematicians." Leibniz studied his unpublished mathematical manuscripts, reported finding many excellent results in them, and may have been influenced by them in developing the calculus.

Hudde also worked in optics, producing microscopes and grinding lenses for telescopes, and corresponded with Huygens concerning problems of probability, life expectancy, and canal maintenance, a subject in which he took a strong interest after he became burgomaster of Amsterdam in 1672. He held that post for thirty years. In 1657 he directed the flooding of parts of Holland to block the advance of the French army.

The three letters to Hudde are mainly concerned with problems about the nature of God and the consequences of his necessary existence. To some extent this material duplicates arguments we are familiar with from the Ethics, but there are some interesting variations on the presentations there. The final letter in this series discusses a problem in optics and asks Hudde's advice about it.

Jelles

We did not encounter Jarig Jelles (1619/20?–1683) in Volume I. He was a Mennonite, associated with the Collegiant movement, and one of Spinoza's closest friends. As a young man he was a grocery merchant, but by 1653 he had accumulated enough wealth to entrust his business to a manager, and dedicate himself to the pursuit of knowledge. He was one of those who persuaded Spinoza to publish his geometric exposition of Descartes' Principles...