Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was expelled from his community at twenty-three, lived quietly grinding lenses, published one book under his own name in his lifetime, and died at forty-four. Yet he wrote what many consider the most rigorous and most daring work of metaphysics in the Western tradition, the Ethics — a book that identifies God with Nature, denies free will, dissolves the soul into the mind of the body, and teaches that the highest freedom and happiness come from understanding the necessity of all things. He was condemned in his lifetime as the most dangerous atheist in Europe; a century later the Romantics called him the “God-intoxicated man”. Hegel said that to be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist. Einstein, asked if he believed in God, answered: “I believe in Spinoza’s God.”

Life

Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews

Bento (in Hebrew Baruch, in Latin Benedictus — all meaning “blessed”) de Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632 into the community of Portuguese Jews — descendants of Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in Spain and Portugal, who had fled the Inquisition to the tolerant Dutch Republic and returned openly to Judaism. His father, Michael, was a successful merchant importing dried fruit and olive oil, and a leader of the synagogue. Bento’s mother died when he was six. He studied at the community’s school, learning Hebrew, the Bible and the Talmud, and probably intended to join the family business, which he ran with his brother after his father’s death in 1654.

The cherem

On 27 July 1656, the leaders of the Amsterdam synagogue pronounced against Spinoza a cherem — a writ of excommunication — of unusual severity:

By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza… Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up… No one should communicate with him, neither in writing, nor accord him any favour, nor stay with him under the same roof, nor come within four cubits of him, nor read anything composed or written by him.

The text speaks only of his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”. What they were, we can only infer from his later works and from reports: that God exists only philosophically, that the soul is mortal, that the Torah was not given by God to Moses. Spinoza seems not to have contested it. According to an early biography, he said: “All the better; they do not force me to do anything I would not have done of my own accord.” A story, perhaps legend, tells of an attempt on his life by a fanatic with a knife; he kept the cloak slashed by the blade as a reminder.

The lens-grinder

He took the Latin name Benedictus and joined the circle of freethinking Christians — Collegiants and Mennonites — who met to discuss religion and philosophy without clergy. He learned Latin from the former Jesuit and radical Franciscus van den Enden, and studied René Descartes intensively. He supported himself by grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes — a skilled, scientific trade; Christiaan Huygens admired his lenses.

He lived modestly in Rijnsburg (1661), Voorburg (1663), and from 1670 The Hague, in rented rooms, with few possessions. He corresponded with scientists and philosophers across Europe — Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society; Huygens; and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who visited him secretly in 1676 and read the manuscript of the Ethics, though he later denied the intimacy. In 1673 he declined the offer of a professorship at the University of Heidelberg, fearing for his freedom to philosophize. He also refused an inheritance and a pension that would have compromised his independence.

In 1672, when a mob in The Hague lynched the brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt — Johan, the Grand Pensionary, had led the republican government Spinoza admired — Spinoza wanted to post a placard reading Ultimi barbarorum (“the ultimate barbarians”) at the scene; his landlord locked him in to save his life.

He died on 21 February 1677, aged forty-four, probably of a lung disease worsened by glass dust. His friends published his unpublished works — the Ethics above all — anonymously that same year as the Opera Posthuma, with only his initials, B.D.S. They were banned almost immediately.

Works

Work	Date	Subject
Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being	c. 1660	Early sketch of the Ethics (lost until 1850s)
Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect	c. 1662, unfinished	Method — how to find the true good and true knowledge
Principles of Cartesian Philosophy	1663	Descartes’s Principles in geometrical form — the only book published under his own name
Theological-Political Treatise	1670, anonymous	Bible criticism, freedom of thought, democracy
Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order	completed c. 1675; published 1677	Metaphysics, mind, emotions, freedom, blessedness
Political Treatise	1677, unfinished	Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy

The Ethics: philosophy in geometrical order

The Ethics is written like Euclid’s Elements: each of its five parts begins with definitions and axioms, then proceeds through numbered propositions, each with a demonstration citing earlier propositions, plus corollaries and scholia (explanatory notes, often where Spinoza speaks most freely). The form expresses its content: everything follows from the nature of God as necessarily as the properties of a triangle follow from its definition.

Part	Title
I	Of God
II	Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind
III	Of the Origin and Nature of the Emotions (Affects)
IV	Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions
V	Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom

God, or Nature

Part I begins with definitions — of substance (“what is in itself and is conceived through itself”), attribute (“what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence”), mode (“the affections of a substance”), and God (“a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes”). From them Spinoza proves, step by step:

1. There cannot be two substances with the same attribute.
2. Substance is necessarily infinite.
3. God — a substance with infinite attributes — necessarily exists.
4. Except God, no substance can be or be conceived (I, prop. 14).
5. Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God (I, prop. 15).

So there is only one substance in the universe: God. Everything else — stones, trees, you and me, thoughts and bodies — are modes, modifications or ways of being of that one substance. Spinoza’s famous phrase Deus sive Natura — “God, or Nature” (IV, preface) — expresses the identity: God is not a person outside the world who created it, but the infinite, self-causing whole of reality itself.

Spinoza distinguishes Natura naturans (“nature naturing” — God as the active, self-causing power) from Natura naturata (“nature natured” — the totality of modes that follow from it).

Not the God of the Bible

Spinoza’s God has no will or intellect in the human sense, no purposes, no emotions; it does not love or hate, reward or punish, answer prayers or perform miracles. “He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return” (V, prop. 19). The Appendix to Part I attacks the prejudice of final causes — the belief that nature acts for ends, that everything was made for human beings, and that God sends earthquakes and diseases to punish the wicked. This, he says, is “the asylum of ignorance”: when we cannot find a cause, we say it was the will of God.

Was Spinoza an atheist, a pantheist, or a deeply religious thinker? His contemporaries called him an atheist; the Romantic poet Novalis called him “the God-intoxicated man”; scholars still argue whether “God” in Spinoza means anything more than “Nature”.

Attributes: thought and extension

God has infinitely many attributes, but we know only two: thought and extension (physical space-occupying reality). These are not two substances, as René Descartes held, but two ways of expressing the one substance. Every thing exists both as a body (a mode of extension) and as an idea (a mode of thought).

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. (II, prop. 7)

This is parallelism, or dual-aspect monism: mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived under two attributes. The human mind is the idea of the human body (II, prop. 13). There is no interaction problem, because there are not two things to interact — the mind does not move the body or the body the mind; they are the same event, described in two vocabularies. This solution to Descartes’s problem anticipates modern views in philosophy of mind and neuroscience (Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza, 2003, champions it).

Necessity: no free will

Everything follows necessarily from God’s nature: “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way” (I, prop. 29). Even God does not act from free will in the sense of choosing among alternatives; God acts from the necessity of his own nature — and that is what Spinoza calls freedom.

Human beings believe they are free only because “they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined” (II, prop. 35, scholium). In a famous letter (Letter 58), Spinoza imagines a stone flung through the air, which, if it were conscious, would believe it was moving freely, by its own choice.

Three kinds of knowledge

1. Imagination (opinion) — knowledge from the senses and hearsay, confused and inadequate.
2. Reason — adequate ideas of the common properties of things, as in science and mathematics.
3. Intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva) — seeing each particular thing as it follows from the essence of God; the highest knowledge, which gives the greatest satisfaction of mind.

The emotions as natural phenomena

Part III treats human emotions “as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies”. He refuses to mock or condemn passions as vices; they follow nature’s laws as surely as storms. “I have laboured carefully not to mock, lament or execrate human actions, but to understand them” (Political Treatise I.4).

Everything has a conatus: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (III, prop. 6). This striving is its very essence. In humans, conatus conscious of itself is desire (cupiditas). From desire and two other primary affects — joy (laetitia, the passage to a greater power of acting) and sadness (tristitia, the passage to a lesser power) — Spinoza derives all the others: love is joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause; hatred is sadness accompanied by the idea of an external cause; hope, fear, pity, envy, pride, shame, and dozens more are defined in a catalogue at the end of Part III.

We do not desire things because they are good; “we judge a thing to be good because we desire it” (III, prop. 9, scholium).

Bondage

Part IV, “Of Human Bondage”, describes our servitude to the passions: “Man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects I call bondage. For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune” (IV, preface). Our passions are passive affects — caused mostly by external things we do not understand — and they pull us in contrary directions. “An affect cannot be restrained or removed except by an opposite and stronger affect” (IV, prop. 7).

Spinoza’s ethics is naturalistic: virtue is power, the power to persevere in one’s being guided by reason; “the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life” (IV, prop. 67). Pity, humility and repentance are not virtues, because they are forms of sadness. And because human beings are most useful to each other, reason teaches cooperation: “To man there is nothing more useful than man.”

Freedom and blessedness

Part V shows how reason can free us. A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it (V, prop. 3): understanding the causes of our emotions transforms them from passive to active affects. Seeing things as necessary lessens their power over us: the grief at losing something diminishes when we see that it could not have been kept.

The highest point is the intellectual love of God (amor intellectualis Dei): the joy that comes from understanding all things through God, sub specie aeternitatis — “under the aspect of eternity”. This is blessedness (beatitudo), and it is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself. Something of the mind — its knowledge of eternal truths — is eternal (V, prop. 23); “we feel and know by experience that we are eternal”. The book ends:

If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found… But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. (V, prop. 42, scholium)

The Theological-Political Treatise

Published anonymously in 1670 — “with a false imprint” (Hamburg) — the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was called “a book forged in hell by the devil himself”. Its aims: to defend the freedom to philosophize, and to show that this freedom is compatible with piety and public peace.

Bible criticism

Spinoza argued that the Bible must be interpreted like nature — from itself, by historical and philological method, not by philosophy or reason imposed on it. Applying this method, he concluded that Moses did not write the Pentateuch (it mentions his death); that the books of the Bible were compiled by later editors (probably Ezra); that the prophets were people of vivid imagination, not superior intellect; that miracles, as violations of natural law, are impossible — what were called miracles were natural events not understood; and that the Bible’s core message is simple moral teaching — justice and charity — not metaphysics. This made him a founder of modern biblical criticism.

Freedom and democracy

The purpose of the state is not to rule by fear but to free people from fear, so that they may live securely and use their reason: “the purpose of the state is really freedom”. The most natural and best form of government is democracy. And the state should not try to control thought or belief: “In a free state everyone may think what he likes and say what he thinks” (chapter 20). It was among the first great defences of freedom of thought and speech, and of the separation of philosophy from theology.

Critics and reception

Scandal

For a century after his death, “Spinozist” meant atheist. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) called his system “the most monstrous hypothesis imaginable” — while admiring his virtuous life. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz borrowed from him and publicly distanced himself.

The Pantheism Controversy

In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi revealed that the revered Lessing had confessed to him: “There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.” The resulting Pantheismusstreit (“pantheism controversy”) convulsed German intellectual life: Mendelssohn, Herder, Kant, Goethe, and the young Idealists all took sides. Jacobi argued that consistent rational philosophy leads to Spinozist fatalism and atheism; only a leap of faith could escape it. The result, paradoxically, was a Spinoza revival: Goethe found peace in the Ethics; Herder, Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel built on him. Hegel wrote: “Spinoza is the crucial point in modern philosophy: either Spinozism or no philosophy at all.”

Nietzsche, Marx, Einstein, Freud

Friedrich Nietzsche, discovering him in 1881, wrote: “I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor!” — denying free will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Marx and Engels claimed him as a materialist. Einstein, telegraphed in 1929 by a rabbi asking whether he believed in God, answered: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” Freud saw his own deterministic psychology anticipated.

The modern Spinoza

In the twentieth century, Spinoza’s monism attracted philosophers of mind; his politics inspired Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar and Gilles Deleuze (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1970), who saw in the Ethics a philosophy of joy and power against the “sad passions” used by priests and tyrants. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion campaigned (unsuccessfully) for the cherem to be lifted; in 2015, the Amsterdam rabbinate considered and declined it.

Spinoza in comparison

• René Descartes: Spinoza’s starting point; he kept the geometric method and clear and distinct ideas, rejected two substances and free will.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: one substance versus infinitely many monads; necessity versus “the best of all possible worlds”.
• Stoicism: a rational, necessary cosmos; freedom as understanding necessity; overcoming passions by reason — Spinoza is often called the modern Stoic.
• Ādi Śaṅkara: one reality; individuals as its modifications. But Spinoza’s world is fully real — modes of God — not illusion; and the path is understanding, not renunciation.
• David Hume: both naturalists, both determinists, both denied miracles; but Hume was an empiricist who doubted reason’s reach, Spinoza a rationalist who thought reason could understand everything.

Key terms

Substance

That which is in itself and conceived through itself — for Spinoza, only God.

Attribute

What the intellect perceives as the essence of substance — we know thought and extension.

Mode

A modification of substance — every particular thing.

Deus sive Natura

"God, or Nature" — their identity.

Natura naturans / naturata

Nature as active cause / nature as the totality of effects.

Using Spinoza in conversation

• On understanding others: “Not to mock, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.”
• On free will: the stone that thinks it flies freely.
• On God: Einstein’s “I believe in Spinoza’s God.”
• On emotions: we do not desire things because they are good; we call them good because we desire them.