Avi A. Katz, Israëlische illustrator en cartoonist, maakte deze
illustratie voor The Jerusalem Report
van 16 oktober 2006 bij een artikel van Benjamin Lazier, “The Philosopher, the
Heretic, the Jew and His Lovers. Subtitel: How did Spinoza, one of the wildest
and most unmanageable thinkers of all time, become domesticated?” [PDF]
Ik ontdekte dit daar ik bezig ben met een blog over een bijzonder boek van hem. In dat artikel besprak Lazier twee boeken:
• Rebecca
Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity,
• Goce Smilevski, Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel
Maar hij opende met de Spinoza-Bear [cf over deze Spinoza
beer dit blog]. Lazier schreef:
“Spinoza-Bear is but the latest stage in the domestication
of perhaps the most wild and unmanageable thinker in history. Wild, because
Spinoza rebuffed all social entrapment: Expelled from the Jewish community of
Amsterdam in 1656, he declined to return, refused Christianity, and so lived a secular
life before it was (institutionally) possible to do so.
Unmanageable, because Spinoza has been appropriated by just
about everyone, but in incompatible ways and never for long: To judge by his reception, he is
both rationalist and mystic, materialist and pantheist, ascetic and hedonist, philosopher
and Jew. He is the father of both liberal democracy and the totalitarian state.
He is Hegel and Marx, devil and Christ, atheist and intoxicated with God. David
Ben-Gurion hoped to rescind his ban, Leo Strauss to reinstate it. Even the German
dental association once felt obliged to put in a few good words for the
venerable Jewish heretic.”
Daarbij was het bovenstaande, Spinoza als knuffelbeer, een passend plaatje.
[cf. Katz’s website,
waar deze illustratie overigens niet te vinden is]
