Oddly enough, philosophers, even of the most technical and abstract tenor, can generate personal mythologies. Very early, the aura of legend haloed Pythagoras and Empedocles. Wittgenstein is now the object of a considerable corpus of poetry and fiction in which the strangeness, the sometimes histrionic apartness and reputed violence, of his truth-seeking takes on a romantic, mythical cast. Baruch Spinoza has been a perennial source of imagery or fable. Even those unacquainted with his writings know of a thinker of utmost purity, of utmost abstention from mundanity, who ground optical lenses for a precarious living. They will have some intimation of a pariah of exigent genius wholly committed to meditations of the loftiest, most abstract order, of a man whose brief life (1632-1677) was spent in sombre isolation from his native community and contemporaries. No matter that this picture is, in decisive aspects, false. It adheres with a kind of obstinate radiance to the author of the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Ethics.

LRB 19 April 1990 | PDF Download