Sacred Filth

Phillip Roth is one of the most important American novelists. As for covered a wide range of subject matters and creative techniques, he has won all kinds of honor except for Nobel Prize. Like his literary predecessors Issac Singer, Bernard Malarmud, and Saul Bellow, Roth is also particularly concerned with the subject of Eros. And even the ethnic, politics, culture, ethics etc. themes are related with this subject, so he is the same famous as Pornographer with Henry Miller, Milan Kundera and Georges Bataille,Comparing with D.H Laurence’s Idyllic sexual love. Roth would depict the sexual perversion in the sense of Freud rather than erotic love. His erotic film is not only in the form of perversion, but also the core is emptied. Just as Kapthy said in The Dying Anima l:" No pleasure of sex, but just the agony of sex." And this painful poison is caused by various negative sentiments:jealousy, fear, shame, disgrace, angry, hatred, desire etc. Therefore, Roth is perplexed not only by the erotic love, but also all kinds of the desires. These negative emotions are defined by Spinoza as passive emotions, and they make human’s heart in a state of slavery. Three hundred years ago, Spinoza had targeted restraining passive emotion as his philosophy object. Restraining means achieving dynamic balance rather than eliminating. As the limited form of God, human’s nature is to make an effort to self-preserve. This effort is the instinct of human, blind and irrational. The emotions show out both in the body and heart equally, and sometimes make innocent humans wavering. They must resist passive emotion with rational love led by rationality. While rationality couldn’t resist emotions, the human must resist passive emotion with rational love led by rationality.Spinoza used geometry to prove all of this, but Phillip Roth demonstrated them in the form of funny image in his comics. Erotic love instinctively response to life, but it is not the only way. Disease and physical exercises are of the same function. Disease symbols the arrested life, while physical exercises mean release of strength. In Spinoza’s eyes, the process of life and excrement is the style of God. There’s no holy and evil, just the distinction of good and bad. If must define it as filthy, just only call it as the filthy of Holy.The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part is Chapter one, it introduces Spinoza and his passive emotion theory. The second part is Chapter two, it discusses Spinoza’s influence on Phillip Roth. The third part is Chapter three, four, and five, they analyze Roth how to show and surpass passive emotion in his works.The first part, the main chapter, the system introduces Spinoza and passive emotion theory. Section analysis of the "ethics" of the structure and narrative sequence, the emotion that actually passive restraint philosophy of Spinoza’s starting point; the second part mainly in the overall philosophy of Spinoza in the study of people and the status and role of passive emotion; the third section analyzes the specific causes of passive emotion and structure of production; the fourth part focuses on human interpretation of passive emotional slavery, the power and effect that human beings get rid of slavery and move towards freedom.The second part, the main body of the thesis, discusses the practical and spiritual relationship from Ross Philip to Spinoza:the first chapter finds out the three origins of passive feelings respectively from the "Bible", the Stoics and Descartes Spinoza; the second chapter focuses on the actual impact and potential impact on the later generations and on modern philosophy, as well as the possible impact on Ross; the third chapter discusses Spinoza’s impact as a scientist on the modem, and contemporary science, especially direct impact of William James and Freud on Ross; the fourth chapter points out the multiple roles of Spinoza’s image in the modernization process Jewish ethinics from Moses Mendelssohn’s "improved Spinoza doctrine" to "first modern Jewish generation" described byAuerbach, to the "secret" revealer in Hebrew Enlightenment Movement, to the Zionist movement in which Spinoza said that "You Are our brothers". Spinoza, excommunicated out of the Jews, never left the sight of progressive Jewish intellectuals; the fifth chapter trys to find Spinoza’s influence in the field of literature and its possible impact on Ross: the first is Goethe’s esteem, and then to the contradictory attitude of American Jewish writers, especially Singh. All of these exercised unneglectible impect on Roth’s literary road. The third part, including the third, fourth and fifth chapters, mainly analyses Ross’s representation and excess of passive feelings. The third chapter analyzes the unusual "erotic":the first scrtion of this chapter poits out that Philip Roth is a conscious "erotic writers "; the second section finds that sex described in the pen of Ross is actually abnormal sex; Section 3 identifies that fact that the progtaonists in Ross works get more pains than pleasures; Section 4 analyses Rose-style comic and Spinoza similar relationship between the geometry argument:first, it points out that the relationship between power and sex is the core of life; then, discusses the actual sex Ross and passion of life comedy; and next, the relationship between the comic Ross and rational and intuitiv Spinoza. Chapter Five poits out the double function of resistance and excess caused by passion:the first section poits out the coincidence between the physical relationship described by Ross and Spinoza’a theory of parallellism; SectionⅡdiscusses the function of resistance that fear, hatred, shame, and other passive emotions shoulder in the field of Jewish religious culture; SectionⅢanalyzes the relationship between the passion, sex and disease, between aging and death; Section IV points out that sports has a function of the emotional release; Section V analysis the possibility of the accessibility to God by way of passive emtions to the intuitive feelings.The last part is conclusion. From Spinoza to Philip Roth, the physical time span as much as three centuries. But Spinoza concern today is far from outdated. The face of emotional distress and passive slavery, Spinoza hoped to achieve a healthy mental state to achieve happiness. Ross’s theme is still emotions and desires, but he dealt with the same theme by cartoon-style imaginations and pain-causing comics. Spinoza as a philosopher, more values the power of the mind; and Ross, with the writer’s eyes finds that reflectively-thinking practice is the way to freedom. Ross’s reflectively-thinking practice has many forms, such as sex, sports, illness, death, but the most basic is his sexy writing.