Yesterday, I read this startling Scholium in Spinoza's Ethics, Part II (about the origin and nature of the mind):
Schol.: Here, no doubt, my readers will come to a halt, and think of many things which will give them pause. For this reason I ask them to continue on with me slowly, step by step, and to make no judgment on these matters until they have read through them all.
I wasn't particularly shocked by that particular proposition, but that's because I find the whole of Spinoza's philosophy weird—weird in a wondrous, alluring way.
Spinoza's remark follows a consequence of Proposition 11 in Part II, where he states, “From this it follows that the human Mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God.”
I had encountered a similar idea in al-Kindi's philosophy of mind (written in the 9th century). Al-Kindi distinguishes between different kinds of intellects, one of which is a universal intellect that holds all thoughts, and that our thoughts are part of and derive of. So it was interesting to see something similar pop up in this very different intellectual context.
But the Scholium made me think of two further things. First, that there is a quiet, contemplative mode of reading that Spinoza seems to presuppose for the Ethics where you do not, like a grad student with a heap of readings for the next seminar, push on with dozens or even hundreds of pages, but move in a slower pace.
Early modern authors such as Descartes (in the Meditations) and Spinoza did not invent this practice of contemplative reading.
You can see it in Medieval and Renaissance authors, particularly in religious texts as Christina Van Dyke's Hidden Wisdom demonstrates. As this paper by Christia Mercer shows, Descartes’s Meditations were not only indebted to this older medieval tradition of meditative readings, he also is indebted to innovations in that genre by Teresa of Ávila. So when you read early modern texts, you need to digest them slowly, allowing your epistemic emotions to range freely and to help you consider what you have just read.
This brings me to the second idea: the idea of reading something alluring with a sense of firstness. This idea of firstness comes from Descartes's Passions of the Soul (1649) where he describes Wonder (in French, Admiration, which at the time had a slightly different range of meanings than it does today) as the first passion:
Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual and extraordinary. (Descartes, Passions, 70, CSM I, 353.)
In my forthcoming book on wonder (that should appear with Princeton University Press some time this fall or next spring), I expand Descartes's definition of firstness to include not only things we see for the first time but also things we see as if for the first time. My view is similar to Sara Ahmed's conception of wonder. She sees the ability to recover that sense of firstness as a crucial emotion for liberatory feminist politics. By considering something with a sense of firstness you can challenge it, by wondering at it you can examine it without the ballast of history. You can wonder at why gender roles are the way they are by not taking them for granted.
However, it's important to note that for Descartes, wonder really is the sense of seeing something for the first time, simpliciter. He does not think that you should continue wondering at things once you have been able to evaluate them. Reading Spinoza's works for the first time, with very little secondary reading, I do have a sense of firstness, in the original Cartesian sense.
For Descartes, wonder “has as its object not good or evil, but only knowledge of the thing that we wonder at.” (Descartes, Passions, 71, CSM I, 353.) To put it differently, wonder does not lead us to appraise negatively or positively the object or event we wonder at, unlike the other passions. It just allows us to consider the object or idea before us and meet it on its own terms.
Descartes thinks that we tend to see things that makes us happy in a positive light, and things that make us sad in a negative light. When we wonder at something, we have not yet examined how it can be used (or misused). Wonder is thus a provisional passion. Descartes’s Meditations invite us to meet the weird ideas, of the evil demon, of radical mind-body dualism, with that sense of firstness.
What Spinoza is asking is for us to hold off making judgments until we reach the end. I'll try to hold off any evaluative thoughts (if possible) until I've read the entire Ethics.
People sometimes express envy when you read or watch something for the first time. For example, experienced chess players will sometimes express envy at someone who watches the famous Game six between Botvinnik and Tal (1960). To be able to see this dazzling, complex game, for the very first time!
Obviously, you can re-read and rewatch. And you can prepare your mind to get that contemplative, slow mood that is receptive to wonder so maybe you can read and see something you missed the first time. But Descartes is right that your first reading experience (or more broadly your new experience of anything) is unique, and that sense of firstness is not something I think you can wholly recapture again.
Fortunately, we are recovering the passion for slow reading, of the joy of reading slowly, as expressed in this nice video by Booktuber Robin Waldun. It is also a nice skill to impart to your students, and because I don't entirely trust my students will do it at home, I will take time during class to slowly read passages aloud to them of classic philosophical texts where we take time to quietly digest the readings. That is, without a doubt, one of the greatest joys of doing philosophy.