OCCAM’S RAZOR IS THE WORST RAZOR! Some thoughts on revisiting The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, which has been revived at the DCJCC’s Theater J and will play through April 1. My review of the original production is here, so these are just some scattered additional notes. (Oh, and here’s a post about a Philadelphia production, over at The Groom’s Family!)

First, the play is still fantastic, Alexander Strain is still ridiculously compelling despite playing a guy who is kind of a jackass (albeit a jackass under unbearable pressure), and they’ve toned down the cartoonishness of Rebecca a bit, which I doubt will pacify the people who didn’t like her character the first time around.

I still don’t understand why Spinoza is so in love with simplicity. Why is a belief, a God, a proposition, or an argument better because it is simpler than other possibilities? Why force a cube-shaped faith on a mountain-shaped world?

The focus on simplicity or unity, along with the strange, unsettling paeans to philosophy as a love with no beloved (or in which the beloved is totally unable to love you back), made me feel like this was all just backsliding into Platonism. Didn’t we try this already?

Last time I’m not sure I noticed that both Spinoza and his Gentile Juliet, Clara, do the adolescent thing where they think they’re in love with you because you deserve it so much. Everything about Spinoza’s pedestal love of Clara is done so well–it’s painfully endearing, it’s totally wrongheaded, it’s relatable, and it captures at least half of the problems with his philosophy. Plus Strain uses his voice really well, shifting perfectly from the ringing tones of the confident genius to a rougher, lower, more intimate register with Clara.

One benefit to the philosopher of having a definite, obligatory community is that he has to deal with everyone’s questions, even the ones he doesn’t like or see the point of. The Jewish community, because it includes so many people who are totally unlike Spinoza, can provoke and challenge him in a way that a community made up solely of his friends or equally-intelligent philosophers could not. (This, by the way, was one major failing of the “talk back” panel afterward, in which Leah Libresco very ably moderated two academic philosophy-types. We didn’t get to talk back! It was insufficiently Jewish–specifically Jewish questions weren’t raised at all, actually–and since the audience, full of feisty old Jews, didn’t get to ask questions, the panelists were able to stick to their own preferred topics and approaches.)

Spinoza at one point comes very close to echoing this gnomic utterance of the squid!

I was weirdly reminded of this article about David Foster Wallace’s use of popular self-help books and his fight against what in AA circles is called “terminal uniqueness” and which I think is called by Catholics spiritual pride. Spinoza by the end of this play has been through many shattering experiences: his father’s death, his realization that he will die young of tuberculosis, and then the awful events of the play itself. But the thing is, none of the suffering or humiliation he undergoes happens because he’s wrong, or in the wrong. That at least he’s spared. And so in the end, when he thanks the congregation (aka us the audience) for what he’s gained from what he’s been put through, even this is not a gesture of full humility.

So. That’s what the play made me think about. What about you?