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A review by kevin_shepherd
The Spinoza Problem by Irvin D. Yalom
4.0
“I long for a community that is not enthralled with false beliefs.”
Full disclosure: I picked this up thinking it was a non-fiction account of Baruch de Spinoza and the appropriation of his ideologies by the nazi theorist Alfred Ernst Rosenberg. I was taken in by the cover art and a snippet of a back cover synopsis that I didn’t read in its entirety. Now that I’ve read Yalom’s The Spinoza Problem, I have no regrets.
So little is known about the specific reasons for Spinoza’s seventeenth century excommunication and Rosenberg’s twentieth century Spinoza obsession that perhaps imagination (call it speculative fiction) is the best way to hypothesize and rationalize it all—kinda like how religion soothed our curiosity about the universe before the invention of the telescope and the microscope.
Full disclosure: I picked this up thinking it was a non-fiction account of Baruch de Spinoza and the appropriation of his ideologies by the nazi theorist Alfred Ernst Rosenberg. I was taken in by the cover art and a snippet of a back cover synopsis that I didn’t read in its entirety. Now that I’ve read Yalom’s The Spinoza Problem, I have no regrets.
So little is known about the specific reasons for Spinoza’s seventeenth century excommunication and Rosenberg’s twentieth century Spinoza obsession that perhaps imagination (call it speculative fiction) is the best way to hypothesize and rationalize it all—kinda like how religion soothed our curiosity about the universe before the invention of the telescope and the microscope.