Let Dissonance Ring

Dissonance is the most beautiful freedom.

Freedom is a frighteningly elusive idea, isn’t it? We all agree that freedom is good and the opposite is bad. We may even agree that, as humans, we have a right to it; that it’s something worth cherishing and defending. But can we agree on what it means?

Modern Western lore offers exhaustive, competing definitions for Liberty, famously catalogued by political philosopher Isaiah Berlin into two camps: the negativists, who defined freedom as the absence of obstacles, and the positivists, who took freedom to mean an affirmation of one’s autonomy. On Team 1 you’ll find, Hobbs, Locke and practically all our Founding Fathers; on the other (less Anglo-Saxon) side, Kant and Rousseau.

But the one concept of Freedom distinguished by having annoyed and unnerved virtually all its contemporaries is that of Baruch Spinoza.

Spinoza grew up in 17th-century Amsterdam, the glistening, bustling nerve-center of European trade. Around him, the world was in rapid flux and growing dense with contradictions. His were the days of big new ideas, between Galileo and Newton, between Descartes and Leibniz, when a new appetite for inquiry was seizing European scholars, along with an almost gleeful willingness to doubt the hitherto unchallenged.

By contrast, Spinoza was raised in a traditional, close-knit community of Sephardic Jews, where he trained, in what must be one of history’s most generous metaphors, as a lens grinder. The Jews of Amsterdam lived under the strained protection of the Calvinist authorities; they were allowed to thrive, so long as they never forgot their subordinate place. For neither the first nor last time in history, a status-quo of mutual convenience, founded on economic confluence and religious orthodoxy, kept the Jews safe. Dissidence, therefore, terrified the Jewish community, who watched, unsettled, as a fervor of new ideas, along with exotic goods and exquisite art, flooded Amsterdam’s ports.

To the community’s dread, the young Baruch breathed in deep the revolutionary air. He observed how new methods of thinking allowed nations to develop new technologies, and scholars to make successful, real-world predictions. He saw a world of shrinking mysteries, in which the new sciences were filling gaps of ignorance nobody had even realized existed.

Getting at the truth, Spinoza thought, was a matter of using the right methodology — and sticking to it, no matter where it leads. All that’s radical in Spinoza’s work stems from this simple, scientific commitment: Let inquiry form my idea of reality, not the other way around.

Spinoza’s masterwork, Ethica, reads like Euclid’s Elements, building up a tower of grand principles from a humble foundation of a few, easily granted, axioms. Euclid used the method to explicate geometrical shapes and relations. Spinoza used it to explain God.

He must have been aware, even before completing Ethica, of what awaited him at the end of the road. The picture that started emerging from his metaphysics was of a world locked by rigid and sparse laws; a mechanical world with room for nothing but the inevitable. Surely it must have dawned on Spinoza early on that many ideas widely held sacred, like a Creator God or humanity’s freedom of choice, would have no place in his description of reality. Other radical thinkers in Spinoza’s position, realizing their work could undermine the public’s stubbornest beliefs (not to mention their own), have found ways (wittingly or not) to bend their ideas just enough to make them compatible with, well, common sense. Descartes fudged his method of radical doubt (which heavily inspired Spinoza) by cramming in an overseeing, omnific Deity - a total deus ex machina. Later thinkers, more ready to accept the notion of a mechanistic reality, struggled to accept the possibility of purposelessness and so imagined a Watchmaker God, who, if not concerned with the fate of His creation, was at least responsible for winding it up, setting a direction to history. Even God-skeptics exalted Man’s volition, holding freedom of choice as an undeniable fact of physics, and an end in itself.

But not Spinoza. He was prepared to face the full implications of his work.

Everything, according to Ethica, is part of one substance, to which belong all attributes and possibilities. Spinoza calls this whole, almost provocatively, “God.” God is whole in the fullest sense of the word. He is “infinite,” containing all that is and all that could be. This may sound like a capricious universe, where anything can happen and the sun just might vanish at any moment. But it’s exactly the opposite. According to Spinoza, only a world tightly governed by regularity — a world with order its sovereign, where outcomes are as inescapable as the results of a mathematical equation — can be coherently considered infinite. If you think about it, a truly chaotic world, wherein events occur and terminate randomly, actually contradicts the idea of “infinite possibility.” For Spinoza, this meant three things: that only a world logically ordered can be considered “infinite,” that only one such world can exist, and, alas, that it does and we all live in it.

There was enough heresy in Spinoza’s uncompromising model to vex Jews and Christians, but also to upset the fashionable humanists of his day. Just when Liberty was finally beginning to get taken as a natural, human right, Spinoza was irksomely balking at the very possibility of free choice.

As by now you must have guessed, Spinoza viewed a world of free choices as anything but free. Such a world, he argued, would be tyrannized by arbitrariness or, at best, probability. Quite comfortably then, Spinoza’s strictly-causal philosophy does away with both corporal and divine “freedom of will.” It eliminates the vagaries of personal choice, and, unlike Calvinist predestination, offers nothing in exchange — no path charted by supreme authority, no end goal, no purpose. But Spinoza went even further. He argued that getting rid of this “confused idea” of free will is itself the key to achieving real freedom. To Spinoza, true freedom is freedom from misconceptions and muddled ideas, imagined by the prejudices of mind and society. By disabusing yourself of them, you can at last understand and accept life for what it really is: one inexorable and indifferent whole, and nothing more. Only once you can intuit your own incompleteness as part of this whole — are you really free.

There’s another counterintuitive perk in Spinoza’s freedom: Quite the opposite of eliminating individuality, it, in its own way, reaffirms it. We each are nothing but the story that composes us.

We are the totality of our actions, those we did and those we will do. It’s precisely because what we consider to be our choices are in fact part of a deterministic sequence of events, precisely because we will have always followed the same story, that we can consider ourselves discrete individuals. We aren’t aimless bodies thrown around by arbitrary choices, nor are we subject to the whim (or, for that matter, design) of a celestial despot. We are instead each a distinct, unchanging story; if we were anything else, we wouldn’t have been ourselves. As a favorite Hebrew nursery rhyme goes: My hat has three corners; if it didn’t have three corners, it would not have been my hat.

***

The Jewish community ostracized Spinoza in 1656, when he was only 23. In addition to being deeply affronted by his ideas, the congregation feared that Dutch authorities might seize on Spinoza’s heterodoxy as an excuse to terrorize the Jews. Before the writ of excommunication — the cherem — was issued, Spinoza had several opportunities to recant his heresy. He refused, fully aware this meant he would forever be banished from both his community and city.

For the remainder of his short life, Spinoza would unironically insist that his ideas weren’t only patently true (“I don’t think that I found the best philosophy, I know that I found the true philosophy”), but also entirely orthodox (after all, all Spinoza did was to follow more traditional methods to their logical conclusion). This could easily be dismissed as provocative recalcitrance against the community that disowned him, but I see in it something much deeper.

Rather than lead its readers to nihilistic despair, Spinoza intended his work to serve as a guide for the ethical life. Despite all the fatalism in his philosophy, Spinoza was a man of action, of world correction, of justice. He lived his life a staunch defender of civic freedoms and strident advocate of democracy. His theory posited that good and evil are utterly meaningless concepts (for there’s no authority to judge nor a freedom to choose), yet it did absolutely nothing in the way of moderating his political activism.

And there it is — the taste of cognitive dissonance. Holding on to two contradictory ideas at the same time is a beautifully human feat, and one, in my opinion, too often maligned (indeed, social psychologist Leon Festinger originally coined the term to explain the roots of anxiety). For all its bad rep, cognitive dissonance is a marvelous capacity. It gets us through life’s incomprehensibilities, allowing us to accept, even embrace, the absurd. It’s what makes it possible to bear a happy moment while being fully aware of its fugacity. It also serves us an humbling by showing that contradictions may, after all, coexist; it doesn’t even matter whether the flaw is in the ideas themselves, in our own facility for Reason, or even in our very understanding of what a contradiction really is: All the same, the very fact of dissonance exposes our fallibility in truth-telling.

Dissonance is the toughest — and most beautiful — freedom Spinoza, perhaps unintentionally, invokes. To be free is to accept a deterministic world, to concede to life its cruel, cold inevitability and yet to call out its injustices with unadulterated rage. It’s all we can do, to swallow the hopelessness of the fight, and fight it with undimmed defiance.

And what can be more liberating than that?