Truth Is Its Own Standard: the Bible as the Cause of Itself

Abstract

When Spinoza announced in the first of his two great works, the Theologico-Political Tractatus, published anonymously in 1670, that his aim was to separate philosophy from theology, he was supremely conscious of not merely reflecting but, indeed, advancing the revolution in thought which, becoming critically self-aware of its liberating power, would radically challenge established ideas and institutions and determine the structure of values which continue to shape our lives today. Spinoza both participates in and makes a unique contribution to that critical self-consciousness which constitutes modernism, our recognition that we must be thrown into a crisis of self-doubt if we are to recover the roots of our solidarity. Thought, Descartes had discovered, is the revolution whereby I, at least once, in the middle of my life, must break the closed circle of existence and begin again, in truth. Thought is not the blind circle of thought thinking itself in which there is no existential beginning, in the tradition of Platonism (including Plato’s greatest pupil and expositor, Aristotle). Thought is revolutionary, Descartes recognizes, only insofar as its subject realizes itself as the circle of existence. I think, therefore I am.