introduction

Beginning in the 1870s Latin American art was gradually transformed by a dual phenomenon. On the one hand, increasing numbers of European (especially French, Italian and Spanish) teachers of drawing, painting and sculpture—some recruited, others simply on a ‘cultural adventure’—arrived in the New World. At the same time increasing numbers of young Latin American artists, with scholarships or prizes if they did not have private resources, departed for Europe to pursue their studies in Paris, Florence, Rome, Madrid or some other centre of Western European art. Most Latin Americans returned to their own countries, either to teach or, commissioned by the government, to depict images of national heroes in bronze or on canvas, immortalizing the principal events of independence in large-scale works of art. Simultaneously, however, monumental change—in part a struggle against the inertia of the academies—was taking place in the art world in a number of different European cities: principally in Paris, but also in Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin and Moscow. It was not for the avant-garde artists of Europe at first simply a question of subject matter, but something more immediate: the treatment of sunlight, the use of colour, as well as the validity of everyday themes which were considered pedestrian by the academies. In other cases, the driving force behind the new painting was the reinterpretation of the artists’ own landscape or the assimilation of non-Occidental forms of art. In a word, the flight from the classical canons, a flight to which photography partly contributed, opened a door to other ways of perceiving and interpreting reality.

In this chapter I shall present two problems which dominate Spinoza's metaphysics (sections 1-2), and then present his solution of one of them through his doctrine that there is only extended substance (sections 3-6). After a brief interlude looking at his views about necessity and time (sections 7-8), I then turn to Spinoza's treatment of the second problem, in his theory about how mentality fits into the universe (sections 9-14). Most of the references are to the Ethics Part 1 and the first few propositions of Part 2.

Spinoza's theology, although original, owes much to the cultural soil that nourished it. His parents were among the many “Marranos”- Portuguese Jews who in their native country had been compelled outwardly to embrace Roman Catholicism - who had emigrated to Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. In the freedom of their new country, the immigrant Marrano community set out to recover its full religious heritage, and to shed beliefs and practices contrary to it. However, some of its members, of whom Spinoza was one, not only remained attached to non-Jewish elements in their Marrano culture, but, having embraced the revolution in the physical sciences associated with Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes, wished to pursue its implications for religion. When he was twenty-three, partly because he would not renounce these non-Jewish interests, the Amsterdam synagogue expelled and cursed him. Yet even among the radical Christians who befriended him, and who repudiated the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines he found absurd, only a small circle of intimates were prepared to follow him when he jettisoned the conception of God as a supernatural creator of the natural universe, and developed a “naturalized” theology, in which the natural universe, as conceived in Baconian-Cartesian natural science, derives its existence from nothing above and beyond it.

sources and interpretation

During the last half-century accounts of indigenous America have pointed to a deeper and wider coherence, and a greater resilience, than was for merly recognized in academic and official discourse, notably in mainstream Anglo-American social anthropology. As early as the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss celebrated not just the coherence of American culture but its prime role in the ‘cumulative history’ of the planet, pointing to its distinctive achievement in such endeavours as plant genetics, medicine (anaesthetics, poisons) and mathematics. Since then scholarship has abundantly vindicated this view while drawing in further areas of common reference, like cosmogony and visual language.

In the matter of script, analysis has revealed characteristics common to the recording systems used in the two principal urban societies of the continent, Tahuantinsuyu or the Inca empire of the Andes, and Mesoamerica. Both the quipu of Tahuantinsuyu, whose logic and codes have been adequately described only in the last few decades, and the books of Mesoamerica are notable for their numeracy and their reliance on such principles as place-value notation. Mesoamerican script conventions have generally become more comprehensible thanks in part to high-quality reproductions of inscribed texts and superb facsimiles of the screenfold books and codices. The hieroglyphic script peculiar to the lowland Maya is now being successfully read according to phonetic principles (advocated by the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorosoz), which effectively link living Maya speech with signs shaped 1700 years ago.

Spinoza's theory of knowledge is a strange and hybrid creature. An organic, inseparable part of his total philosophical system, it blends highly distinctive, original (even bizarre) formulations with both “modern” - especially Cartesian - influences, and ideas and aspirations rooted in much older thought.

Many recent commentators on Spinoza's epistemology have particularly stressed the Cartesian background of Spinoza's position, presenting him as evolving his own views in response to what he perceived as deficiencies in Descartes's. Up to a point this approach is a sensible one. Fundamental features of Spinoza's framework and terminology do clearly derive from the Cartesian philosophy,- and much that Spinoza says about such topics as skepticism, certainty, judgment, and “ideas”is unquestionably directed against Descartes. Further, focusing on those features of Spinoza's epistemology that can plausibly be represented as deliberate alternatives to well-known tenets of the Meditations (and related works of Descartes’s) helps domesticate the epistemological elements of the Ethics, releasing them from their exotic theological/moral/eschatological context, and qualifying Spinoza as a comprehensible disputant in recognizably modern debates about knowledge.

Spinoza is in many ways - and as many have observed - a philosopher in the Cartesian tradition. His first published work was an elucidation of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy, and Descartes is the only philosopher named and discussed in the Ethics. Some of his most fundamental metaphysical and epistemological doctrines are Cartesian, while many others appear to result from reflection on various difficulties in Descartes's position. His physics, too, is largely Cartesian. Despite this unmistakable influence, however, Spinoza's guiding intellectual purpose was quite different from Descartes's. Descartes sought primarily to improve the sciences - for himself and for others - by providing a better foundation for them. He justified this endeavor ultimately on the grounds that it would bring human beings greater mastery over nature. Spinoza, in contrast, sought primarily to improve the character of human beings - both himself and others - by improving their self-understanding. He justified this endeavor ultimately on the grounds that it would bring human beings peace of mind as integral aspects of nature.

introduction: contexts for identity

In the twentieth century the term ‘identity’ has been heavily worked to denote linkage between culture and society. Although the word keeps losing its edge, new generations periodically resharpen it. The term is so loose that one can apply it to anything from mankind at large to a single person seeking self-knowledge via psychotherapy. Artists, poets, historians, anthropologists, philosophers and politicians entertain versions of identity even when not consciously in quest of it or not confident of the term’s utility. This chapter will consider identity primarily with reference to national societies, to aggregations of national societies (Latin America), and to sub-national societies or groups. Two distinctions are important. First, identity, which implies linkage to or manifestation of collective conscience, is not the same as ‘reality’, a word widely used in Latin America to mean historical, socio-geographic factors that might be recognized as creating a circumambient reality. Both terms fluctuate between a descriptive, empirical meaning and a prospective or promissory one. ‘Reality’ may signify what ‘really’ exists or else, in a quasi-Hegelian sense, a ‘higher’ reality to be ascertained as a sine qua non for pursuit of the historic vocation of a people or nation (e.g., essays of interpretation of the ‘Peruvian reality’). Identity is not ‘national character’ as diagnosed by detached socio-psychiatry but collective awareness of historic vocation. Reality starts with environment, identity with tacit self-recognition.

introduction

In general terms, the history of Latin American art-music composition in the twentieth century begins with a period of nationalist assertion, with neo-Romantic and neo-classical countercurrents, followed by a period of openly experimental tendencies. These trends occurred at times concurrently in the various Latin American republics, but musical nationalism appeared above all from the 1920s to the 1950s, neo-classicism and other neo-tonal aesthetic orientations at various times from the 1930s, while experimentalism and the avant-garde in music prevailed from the early 1960s. The output of Latin American composers was considerable, revealing a wide compositional diversity, according to historical period, geographical location and special socio-cultural conditions and circumstances. There was at the same time a significant development of music professionalism, supported by professional associations and by institutions of learning, including the national conservatories inherited from the nineteenth century and, from the 1930s, some state and private universities. A number of opera houses were erected or reconstructed from the beginning of the century, and national symphony orchestras emerged in the major countries of the continent in the 1920s and 1930s.

Historically the art music of twentieth-century Latin America had its antecedents in the colonial period and, above all, in the nineteenth century when numerous elements of the great European classical tradition were implanted in the continent. Following the wars of independence, several of the emerging nations established national music institutions. They were, however, dominated by foreign professionals and visiting virtuosi, especially in the latter part of the century.

In an interview with Oriana Fallaci in 1972, Henry Kissinger, asked about the influence of Machiavelli on his thought, denied that the Florentine adviser of princes had had any influence on him at all:

We may suspect, of course, that if Kissinger had learned anything at all from Machiavelli, the last thing he would want to do, given Machiavelli's reputation as a teacher of evil, would be to admit it. If a leader cannot actually be virtuous, Machiavelli tells us, he must at least try to seem virtuous (unless, in the particular circumstances, seeming vicious will be more helpful in maintaining his position).

introduction

Before the blossoming of narrative in the second half of the twentieth century poetry occupied a pre-eminent position and role in the world of Latin American literature. Before Borges, the short-story writer, interest and attention focused more on Borges as a poet; or on the Peruvian poet, César Vallejo, and the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, whose Canto general burst upon the scene in 1950, dividing the century into equal halves and becoming the prime testimony of Latin American consciousness. The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral in 1945, more than two decades before the Central American novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, in 1967; it was awarded to Neruda himself, in 1971, more than a decade before the Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, in 1982. With the help of these four representative names, it is possible to observe a swing from poetry to narrative prose in the central forces that shape the literary process. The first half of the twentieth century is in fact characterized by the special relevance of poetry; without this antecedent and example, the emergence of narrative would be incomprehensible.

Although from Vasconcelos to Paz and from Mariátegui to Salazar Bondy the essay also contributed to the development of Latin American cultural identity, it was poetry that first crossed national frontiers, formulating a global reality which reached the Spanish world as a whole. This situation had existed since Rubén Darío (Nicaragua, 1867–1916), whose most mature poetry—the poems in Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905)—was in one way a search for a cultural definition of the Spanish-speaking peoples.

introduction

By the 1950s Latin American poets were writing within the context of their own continental traditions. From Rubén Darío’s break with the post-colonial Hispanic tradition in the 1890s, to the following generational break embodied in Vicente Huidobro’s avant-garde poems in the 1920s and César Vallejo’s experimental Trilce (1922), the desire to be as modern as possible by absorbing the latest modes from Europe continued to dominate Latin American poetry. A typical avant-garde poem from the 1920s refused to conform to metre as a definition of what was poetic (i.e. free verse), and sought a new kind of subjective sensibility through playing with syntax, punctuation, common sense, and obvious metaphorical associations, in order to express the novelty and originality of the ‘romance’ of technology ushered in by the cosmopolitan twentieth century. This typical avant-garde poem serves, at a formal level, as a mould that includes the Brazilian modernistas as much as the Mexican estridentistas. One of the most representative collections of this period was Carlos Oquendo de Amat’s 5 metros de poemas (1927). A third wave of Latin American poets who wanted to ‘make it new’ were less Europeanized. Here the emblematic collection was Pablo Neruda’s Residencia en la tierra I y II (1935), whose title was a proclamation of an earthy or materialistic position. Neruda idiosyncratically created a new generational style exploring telluric, or sensual, relations with the empirical world that did not apparently feed off culture. In 1930 Carlos Drummond de Andrade claimed that stupidity made poets sigh for Europe where in fact only making money counted.

Spinoza is usually considered one of the creators of modern Biblical scholarship and Biblical criticism because of the views about the Bible that he expressed in the Theological-Political Treatise and in some of his letters. In this chapter I shall briefly indicate a way in which Spinoza's views might have developed, then present what his views are, and compare and contrast them with those of some of his contemporaries. Finally I will try to evaluate the extent of his originality.

The usual picture of Spinoza’s development is taken from what appears in “the oldest biography,” attributed to one Jean-Maximillien Lucas; in the Life of Spinozaby Johann Colerus,- and from occasional remarks by Spinoza. Spinoza is seen as being born into, and growing up in, a rigid orthodox Jewish community in Amsterdam. He studied in the school of the Portuguese Jewish Synagogue. As a youth he began questioning some of what he was being taught, and by 1655 was rejecting the theological assumptions of the Jewish community, and the views of his teachers, the rabbis of Amsterdam. In July 1656 he was excommunicated, charged with holding outrageous beliefs and execrable practices.

introduction: the silent era

With the advent of the centenary of cinema, each country has a story to tell about the arrival of moving pictures in the last decade of the nineteenth century. On 6 August 1896, in Mexico, C. F. Bon Bernard and Gabriel Veyre, agents of the Lumiere brothers, showed the President of Mexico, General Porfirio Diaz and his family the new moving images. Three weeks later they gave public screenings. And they began to film the sights of Mexico, in particular those in power in the land: Diaz on his horse in Chapultepec Park, Diaz with his family, scenes from the Military College. At the end of the year Veyre left Mexico and arrived in Cuba on 15 January 1897. He set up in Havana, at 126 Prado Street, and a few days later the local press announced screenings in the Parque Central alongside the Tacón theatre. Particular favourites were the ‘Arrival of the Train’, ‘The Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid’ and ‘The Arrival of the Czar in Paris’. Veyre went down to the fire-station in Havana to film the activities there. He took along with him Maria Tubau, a Spanish actress who was the star of the theatre season. It is said that she wanted to see the fireman at work. What is more likely is her early fascination with a medium, still in its infancy—the shots of the firemen last one minute— which would incorporate theatre and its forms into a new language.

introduction

There are many ways in which one can try to encapsulate the process of Latin American fiction, but no point of departure is ultimately more persuasive, given the material conditions of Latin America’s historical experience, than the distinction between an Americanist and a ‘universalist’, or ‘cosmopolitan’, orientation. The Americanist impulse can be traced from the earliest days of Latin American independence, when it took on both a nationalist and an anti-colonial ideology and rhetoric. The cosmopolitan impulse, equally strong, corresponds to a permanent desire to know and understand the global culture within which and against which the Latin American nations have had to define themselves. At the present time, in an era of ‘pluralism’, when even the existence of a recognizable and reasonably homogeneous ‘Latin American’ entity is questioned, such generalizations are not infrequently challenged, but this distinction remains profoundly persuasive as a conceptual tool. It applies within and between periods, and it applies within and between the forms and contents of literary works. To explain why one tendency or the other predominates at any particular time is not easy, but the phenomena themselves are not difficult to identify.

The question of Spinoza's involvement with science depends initially on the kinds of scientific pursuit in which he is thought to have been involved. To judge by the prestigious Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Spinoza was not importantly involved in any kind of science, since he does not merit an entry in its ostensibly comprehensive sixteen volumes (Gillispie 1970-80). This judgment is shared by the authors of most histories of science that cover the seventeenth century, where Spinoza's name appears, if at all, only in passing as part of the historical furnishing. A minority of historians of science takes a more constructive view. In Wolf's History of Science, Technology and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries, where one enjoys the wider vision of an older historiography of science, Spinoza joins Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz in the chapter on psychology, and he is accorded a chapter or section in most histories of psychology, including collections of source material. Furthermore, many articles and book-length studies deal in one way or another with Spinoza's psychology (however understood); biology, medicine and psychoanalysis also figure topically in Spinoza bibliographies.

In many ways, Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza appears to be a contradictory figure in the history of philosophy. From the beginning, he has been notorious as an “atheist” who seeks to substitute Nature for a personal deity; yet he was also, in Novalis's famous description of him, “the God-intoxicated man.” He was an uncompromising necessitarian and causal determinist, whose ethical ideal was to become a “free man.” He maintained that the human mind and the human body are identical; yet he also insisted that the human mind can achieve a kind of eternality that transcends the death of the body. He has been adopted by Marxists as a precursor of historical materialism, and by Hegelians as a precursor of absolute idealism. He was a psychological egoist, proclaiming that all individuals necessarily seek their own advantage above all else and implying that other individuals were of value to himself only insofar as they were useful to him; yet his writings aimed to promote human community based on love and friendship, he had many devoted friends, and even his critics were obliged to acknowledge that his personal conduct was above reproach. He held that the state has the right to do whatever it has the power to do, while at the same time he defended democracy and freedom of speech.

introduction

On 27 August 1920 four Argentine medical students broadcast Wagner’s Parsifal from the roof of the Coliseo theatre in Buenos Aires. The next day a newspaper observed that the twenty families who received the opera on their radio sets probably thought Wagner’s divine music came directly from heaven. The transmission was one of the most important events in the cultural history of Latin America in the twentieth century. It marked the advent of broadcasting and the modern mass media in the region.

During the 1920s visionary pioneers introduced radio into almost every country in Latin America. Experimental broadcasts began in Mexico in 1921. N. H. Slaughter, a Westinghouse engineer, and two assistants installed the first radio transmitter in Brazil in 1922 on top of the Corcovado mountain overlooking Rio de Janeiro. At the exhibition grounds where the city was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Brazilian independence, trumpet-shaped loudspeakers blasted out O Aventureiro from the performance of Carlos Gomes’ opera O Guarani at the Teatro Municipal (as well as popular hits like Yes, We have no Bananas). Newspapers reported the reception was so good you could hear the audience applaud. A year later the first Brazilian radio station, equipped by Western Electric, went on the air with the motto: ‘To work for the culture of those who live in our country and for the progress of Brazil’. Cuba also set up its first radio station in 1922 under the auspices of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (IT&T).

Investigating “Spinozism” teaches at least as much about interpretations of Spinoza by other movements - both those approving him and (more often) opposing him - as it does about Spinoza's thought itself. More than other philosophies, Spinoza's has been held up like a mirror to the great currents of thought, a mirror in which their distorted images can be seen. Its first reception was accomplished in the midst of polemics; the modalities of its influence have always suffered from this, so that, at every period, the recovery of the exact situation of Spinozism from under the accumulation of abuses and misunderstandings is an effective intellectual instrument for analyzing the disposition of forces within the domain of ideas, its dominant and dominated ideas, and the battle they wage against one another. In this way one can see Calvinism, Cartesianism, the Enlightenment, and other movements, look upon their reflections, and see their own contradictions revealed in it.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

For a century and a half after his life, the first figure Spinoza assumed was that of the atheist or impious person. Leo Back (1895), P. Verniere (1954), and W. Schroder (1987) have studied the formation of this image. For many years, Spinoza was discussed primarily for refutation; it was even asserted that he must be read only with that intention. Alternatively, if he awakened some positive interest, it was with thinkers who already looked upon official religion with a critical eye. Both the orthodox and the libertine, however, concurred in conceiving him as atheistic or impious.