Les quatre grands disciples de Spinoza
(Nietzsche - Lawrence - Kafka - Artaud)
I.
Spinoza is one of those philosophers I have never read and about whom my knowledge is extremely limited: I know, for example, that he was a 17th-century Dutch thinker of Portuguese-Jewish origin and a founding figure of the Enlightenment who preferred to earn his living as a lens grinder, rather than accept an academic post that might compromise his intellectual independence.
I also know that he rejected the idea of free will and divine judgement and argued for a kind of pantheistic monism (i.e., the belief that God and Nature are one and the same identical and infinite substance). Such thinking made him a controversial figure at the time and and a thorn in the side of the religious authorities.
Finally, I know that Deleuze was a great admirer; that Spinoza was the thinker who provided him with the basis for his own work on immanence and encouraged a joyful affirmation of life free from belief in a world beyond, or tedious moral concepts that always terminate in judgement and punishment.
For Deleuze, Spinoza was le prince de philosophes and he had four great heirs or disciples: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kakfa, and Artaud [1]. The question that interests me here, however, is not how or why Deleuze arrives at this conclusion, but what did each of these four think of the renegade Jew who gave us modernity ...? [2]
II.
Let's
work backwards and begin with Artaud, who, as far as I'm aware, never
mentioned Spinoza in his writings, suggesting that the link between the two is
something formed almost exclusively in Deleuze's philosophical
imagination.
Deleuze (and Guattari) may like to think of Spinoza's Ethics (1667) as anticipating Artaud's notion of the body without organs, but that's not something that ever occured to the French dramatist who introduced the world to the theatre of cruelty.
Indeed, according to one scholar, Artaud's work is ultimately incompatible with Spinoza's rationalism [3]. For whereas Artaud aims to liberate libidinal energy and resist the body's rational organ-isation, Spinoza, in contrast, wished to perfect man via reason and an active form of knowledge. Both spoke about joy and passion, but each conceived such terms in radically different ways.
III.
Unlike Artaud, Franz Kafka apparently did acknowledge his indebtedness to Spinoza - even if he didn't do so in his published writings - considering him a spiritual mentor during his younger years when part of an intellectual circle in Prague which often discussed the Dutchman's work [4].
Kafka was particularly interested in Spinoza's notion of an indifferent deity; i.e., one who was blind to the suffering of humanity. This idea shaped Kafka's construction of an amoral fictional universe in which there is ultimately no justice, despite all the mechanisms of law and order put in place by mankind.
IV.
Amusingly, one commentator has described Lawrence as a "sort of sexy Spinozist" [5], which I think is pushing things a bit too far, even if it's fair to say that Lawrence's own thinking does align in certain key aspects with Spinoza's philosophy.
For example, Lawrence's model of pantheism which insists that God exists only in bodies; or his concept of blood-knowledge, which has echoes of Spinoza's intuitive science (a third way of knowing beyond imagination and reason which allows one to grasp the essence of things and experience a sense of blessedness or oneness with the universe).
But again, as with Kafka and Artaud, there is hardly a mention of Spinoza in any of Lawrence's writings; the only one I can recall from memory is in the short prose piece 'Books' in which he dismisses him as another of those philosophers who, like Kant, only thought "with his head and his spirit" (and never with his blood) [6].
V.
Finally, we arrive at Nietzsche ...
And finally we find actual written references to Spinoza that we are able to cite, such as the postcard sent to his friend Franz Overbeck in the summer of 1881, in which Nietzsche expresses his astonishment and delight at having found a precursor - i.e., someone in whose work he recognises himself, even if, due to differences in time and culture, there remained certain important points of divergence [7].
In the Genealogy (II.15), meanwhile, Nietzsche acknowledges Spinoza's insight into (and the
need to overcome) traditional moral concepts. Material found in his notebooks from this period also show Nietzsche turning to Spinoza for ideas, particularly concerning the
transformation of knowledge into a passion.
Ultimately, Nietzsche saw in Spinoza someone who was able to think beyond good and evil - someone who scorned the teleological fantasy that the universe had
some ultimate goal, or that man possessed free will.
Having said that, however, it's also true that Nietzsche viewed his own concept of will to power as superior and more radical
than Spinoza's insistence that life strove above all for its own
preservation. And in his mature (some might say mad) Dionysian phase, it's hard to believe that Nietzsche would have had much time for Spinoza's defence of reason as the essential human faculty leading to freedom.
VI.
In sum: whilst Deleuze isn't simply joking or trying to be provocative by grouping together Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud as disciples of Spinoza, we need to take this idea with a pinch of salt and remember that none of the above saw themselves as such.
Essentially, Deleuze was highlighting a number of conceptual connnections between them which might otherwise go unnoticed. He was probably also attempting to make Spinoza more relevant to a contemporary readership and, perhaps, inseminate Spinoza with his own ideas.
Thus, it might be best to think of Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud, and Deleuze himself as a line of thinkers who share common ground with Spinoza, but are not followers per se (more like fellow travellers); artist-philosophers who above all else want to have done with judgement.
Notes
[1] See the essay 'To Have Done with Judgement', in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Sith and Michael E. Greco (Verso, 1998), pp. 126-135.
According to Deleuze, it was not Kant but Spinoza who, in breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, carried out a true critique of judgement and had "four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud" (126).
[2] This description was coined by the American philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein and formed the subtitle of her biographical study Betraying Spinoza (Random House, 2006).
[3] See Jon K. Shaw, 'Athleticism Is Not Joy: Extricating Artaud
from Deleuze's Spinoza', in Deleuze Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Edinburgh University Press, May 2016), pp. 162-185.
As Shaw writes in the Abstract to this essay, "much of Artaud's metaphysics is
incompatible with Deleuze's Spinozism, not least the relation between
a body and its constitutive outside, and the questions of affect and
expression": click here.
[4] In the absence of direct references to Spinoza in Kafka's writings, we have to rely on biographical studies and scholarly analysis to confirm the latter's interest in (and sense of kinship with) the former. I'm not sure I'd speak of parallel destinies between the two, however, although that's the argument put forward by Carlos García Durazo in his essay on Medium (24 Oct 2024): click here.
[5] See Mattie Colquhoun, 'Rainbows: From D. H. Lawrence to the NHS', on Xenogothic (23 Dec 2020): click here.
[6] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Books', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 198.
[7] Nietzsche, postcard to Franz Overbeck (30 July, 1881). It can be read (in English translation) on The Nietzsche Channel: click here.
It is interesting to note that Nietzsche doesn't simply identify with Spinoza because of certain shared ideas, but also because the latter was, due to his radicalism, very much a maligned and marginalised figure in his own day (much as Nietzsche felt himself to be in modern Germany).
It is also important to remember that Nietzsche's understanding of Spinoza was mostly based on his reading of secondary sources, such as Kuno Fischer's highly influential six-volume study Geschichte der neuern Philosophie ['History of Modern Philosophy'] (1854-1877).
See Andreas Urs Sommer, 'Nietzsche's Readings on Spinoza: A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer', in the Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Autumn, 2012), pp. 156-184. This essay is available on JSTOR: click here.
