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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Both leading American realists, both dedicated and militant socialists, Jack London and Upton Sinclair were nevertheless completely different in temperament and philosophy of life. Although they appreciated each other's works, they only met twice, in circumstances not entirely favorable for the development of a friendship. Whereas London hailed the publication of Sinclair's The Jungle with generous praise, thus propelling the book and its author toward international fame, Sinclair was less generous in his appraisal of London, basing his criticism not on the work but on the man. Voicing his own deep-set puritanical nature, he damned London for such sins as smoking, drinking, enjoying sex, resigning from the Socialist party, and making too much money? As Charmian London commented, Sinclair's misapprehensions were partly due to his lack of personal acquaintance with London and to his never having seen him sober, both their meetings having taken place in New York where London was seldom on his best behavior. It is unfortunate that Sinclair did not accept London's invitation to visit him at his Glen Ellen ranch in California, since it would have been his only opportunity to see him at work, sober and in his own surroundings.

To most people who recognize the name, Thoreau conjures up his famed Walden, but those who appreciate his acute powers of observation and his ability to translate the wonder of what he sees into memorable prose quickly find their way to other of his works. Some become dedicated readers of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as meandering a book as the streams it describes, as they seek hints in this early work of how better to understand what came next.' But at least as many find their way to The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, posthumously published “travel ” books in whose essays they find the same authority and eloquence as in Walden, if not at quite so sustained a level.

Both The Maine Woods and Cape Cod have at their center Thoreau’s encounters with the wilderness he so movingly describes in the penultimate chapter of Walden, where he speaks of man’s "need to witness [his[ own limits transgressed." "Man can never have enough of nature," he observes, and "must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets" (W 318). Thoreau did not like to leave to the imagination what he might experience firsthand: The Maine Woods treats one of these wilderness landscapes, Cape Cod another.

A recent magazine article evokes the perennial mystery of human desire by asking why a movie star who “has it all” - “a perfect body, happy marriage, wealth,” and “success” - is “not yet satisfied.” Beginning with a play of words, “Why Demi Moore Wants More,” the article ends by finding the word more “elusive.” This elusive more is the subject of my essay, which links a desire for more to determinism as a doctrine of causation common to literary naturalism, behavioral psychology, modern advertising, and consumerism. Once consumption figures in a discussion of literary naturalism, at issue in this essay, the lines of argument move centrifugally in various directions to include such seemingly far-flung and unrelated matters as the Vietnam War, kleptomania, the “packaging” of American politics, women's fashion, material culture studies, fitness diets, images of burning bodies, the commodification of books, Jane Fonda's self-transformations, and indecent proposals to Demi Moore. All these matters converge at a single point of origin where a woman character, an American literary heroine, stands and looks.

Every reader has noticed how often Walt Whitman says I. There are few pages of Leaves of Grass without at least some form of the first-person pronoun - I, me, mine, my, myself. Nor is there any hint of an apology in his acknowledgment of this fact: “I know perfectly well my own egotism . . . and cannot say any less.” Yet I is not the pronoun that most markedly distinguishes Whitman's poetry (as C. Carroll Hollis has calculated, for example, “on a percentage basis Dickinson uses even more”). You is. Whitman doesn't say you as often as he says I, but he does use the second-person pronoun more pervasively than any other major poet. Even the assertion of his own egotism that I've just quoted is embedded in a larger thought that reveals the interdependence of his authorial I and the you of his reader:

To describe this awareness of and address to the reader, Hollis borrows a term from modern linguistics and calls it Whitman's “illocutionary” stance. Ezra Greenspan borrows a term from classical grammar and calls it Whitman's “vocative technique.” A more colloquial way to indicate the crucial place you occupies in many of Whitman's poems is to say that they are performances. Whitman put it still more colloquially when he wrote in a notebook: “All my poems do. All I write I write to arouse in you a great personality.” Of course, as performances they were enacted imaginatively rather than literally. Despite Whitman's fantasies about being a national orator, speaking from real stages to packed houses, he seldom performed in front of live audiences.

Thoreau’s reputation is unique. It has a pattern all its own, filled with paradoxes and contradictions, and widely vacillating from decade to decade. In his own day he was generally dismissed as a minor writer who would soon be forgotten; yet in our day he is universally recognized as one of the few American writers of the nineteenth century who deserve the appellation “great. ” But the progress of his reputation has not been steady.

Aside from a bit piece that he published anonymously in a local Concord newspaper in 1837, just after graduating from Harvard, he broke into print in the pages of the Transcendentalist Dial in 1840, where his neighbor and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson pressured the editor, Margaret Fuller, to print some of his early essays and poems. Later, after Emerson himself took over the editorship of the Dial, he included more of Thoreau’s short works. Other than an occasional bit of praise in some newspaper reviews, they achieved little notice and were generally dismissed as just another effusion of another of Emerson’s many minor disciples. One of the earliest published evaluations of Thoreau’s writing, James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics (1848), dismissed him as one who had "stolen all his apples from Emerson’s orchard" and urged him to strike out on his own. This was a charge that would haunt Thoreau’s literary career not only throughout his lifetime, but well into the twentieth century, even though it would be difficult to think of an author more ruggedly independent, or one who more fiercely prided himself on his distinct individualism than Henry Thoreau. Ironically, although Emerson’s intentions were of the best, it has been suggested that in the long run he probably hindered the development of Thoreau’s literary career rather than enhanced it, for he encouraged Thoreau in his early works to follow the styles and philosophy of the Transcendentalists, and it was only when Thoreau began to break out of that mold that he began to attract attention on his own.

The company they kept, very often, was each other. Henry James and William Dean Howells first met in 1866, at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howells was the newly hired assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the organ of New England's literary dominance. James was a promising young writer, six years Howells's junior, whose stories had begun to appear in the magazine, thanks in large part to the advocacy of the assistant editor. From 1866 until James departed for Europe in 1869, the two men were nearly inseparable companions. In a public letter on the occasion of Howells's seventy-fifth birthday, James paid tribute to the “frankness and sweetness” of Howells's hospitality and the inspiration of his sympathy during their Cambridge years. “You showed me the way and opened me the door,” he recalled; “you wrote to me, and confessed yourself struck with me - I have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of that.” As Howells remembered, in an essay left unfinished at his death in 1920, “We seem to have been presently always together, and always talking of methods of fiction, whether we walked the streets by day or night, or we sat together reading our stuff to each other.”

No one knows where he comes from, but suddenly there he is in Apex, Kansas - first behind the counter at Luckabuck's Dollar Shoe Store, then at the office of the coal merchants, then at the Apex Water Works. Quickly he becomes “a leading figure in the youthful world of Apex,” and, despite some scandals, he is clearly a man of destiny. “Great men,” as he notes, “always gravitate to the metropolis,” (696), so, though he is red and glossy and balding and swaggering, he makes it to New York. His rise goes beyond the meteoric stage to a kind of stability:

As he becomes ever more successful, indeed a billionaire, he develops “a growing passion for pictures and furniture” and a burning “desire to form a collection which should be a great representative assemblage of unmatched specimens” (976). His goal is “to have the best . . . not just to get ahead of the other fellows, but because I know it when I see it” (976).

The narrative portion of The Maine Woods consists of separate essays based on Thoreau’s three trips (1846, I 853, 1857) to the forested mountain and lake country of north-central Maine. This region, physically the most primitive and uninhabited that Thoreau ever visited, was relatively accessible from Concord, and offered the advantages to Thoreau of available companionship, persons knowledgeable about local conditions, and hospitality before and after the wilderness adventure. The Thatchers, relatives by marriage of Thoreau’s father, resided in Bangor, the jumping-off point for lumbering operations and for sporting excursions to Moosehead Lake, Chesuncook Lake, the East and West Branches of the Penobscot River, and Mount Ktaadn (Katahdin). Near Bangor, and connected with it by a railroad, was the principal settlement of the Penobscot tribe, on Indian Island at Old Town. Thoreau’s cousin George A. Thatcher, a competent merchant, had timber interests on the West Branch, enjoyed the outdoors, and knew many of the Penobscot tribal aristocracy, the pioneer farmers along the rivers, and the lumbering speculators and sawmill owners of Bangor and Orono. He was also an antislavery activist and a pillar of his church. The Thoreaus were welcome in the Thatcher home; Sophia, the last of the family, moved to Bangor in 1873 after her mother’s death and died there three years later.

In the Transcendentalist view, especially as articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Poet ” and in Nature, the poet’s responsibility is essentially religious - by a finer organization, a greater sensitivity to truth and beauty, the poet perceives and interprets the eternal realm that stands behind the apparent reality of the material world. Thoreau aspired to this sacred and powerful vocation at least from the time he began keeping his Journal in October 1837. Emerson indicates that poetry is defined by the strength of its internal source rather than by the regularity of its external form,' but as a young man just beginning to explore the shape of his literary vocation, Thoreau, with Emerson’s encouragement, was a dedicated writer of verse.

Thoreau’s poetry is for the most part unremarkable in its subject and its form, and it suffers in comparison with even the quotidian prose of the Journal. In the poems, Thoreau often uses images provided by natural phenomena in and around Concord, and he applies the high standards of his idealism to aspects of the human condition - love, friendship, memory, the transitory nature of life. Nature is acknowledged as the source of inspiration, and provides analogies and tropes for Thoreau’s perceptions and concepts. More than three quarters of the poems are written in the first person or foreground the speaker in some way. Despite this, in general they are quite bland. In many cases, the persona provokes only mild interest, and the situations lack drama.