Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Dutch-Jewish philosopher. His given name, in Portuguese, was Bento; its Latin form was Benedictus. He was perhaps the most original and radical thinker of his time. He was also, for this reason, among the most vilified figures in the early modern period, and political and religious authorities issued numerous condemnations of his ideas. Despite this formidable opposition, Spinoza had a strong influence upon the Enlightenment and upon the development of modern philosophical, political, and religious thought.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a prominent merchant family in the city’s Portuguese-Jewish community. As an intellectually gifted boy, he was undoubtedly one of the star pupils in the congregation’s Talmud Torah school, but he never made it into the upper levels of the curriculum. At the age of 17 he was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family’s import business. And then, on July 27, 1656, the 23-year-old Spinoza was issued the harshest writ of cherem, or excommunication, ever pronounced by the Sephardic community of Amsterdam; the ban was never rescinded. We do not know for certain what Spinoza’s “monstrous deeds” and “abominable heresies” were alleged to have been. But there is good reason to believe that he was, even as a young man, already giving utterance to just those radical ideas that would later appear in his mature philosophical treatises. In those works, Spinoza denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a providential God; and claims that the Mosaic Law neither was literally given by God (to Moses) nor is any longer binding on Jews. Such opinions would have been troubling both to the rabbis and governors of the Portuguese community and to the Calvinist authorities of Holland within whose domain the Jews, many of whom were refugees from the Inquisition, resided.

To all appearances, Spinoza was content finally to have an excuse for departing from the community and leaving Judaism behind; his faith and religious commitment were, at this point, gone. Within a few years, he left Amsterdam altogether. By the time his extant correspondence begins, in 1661, he was living in Rijnsburg, not far from Leiden, and supporting himself by grinding lenses. While in Rijnsburg, he worked on the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect), an essay on philosophical method, and the Korte Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en deszelvs welstand (Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being), an initial but aborted effort to lay out his metaphysical, epistemological, and moral views. His critical exposition of Principia Philosophiae by René Descartes—Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae—the only work he published under his own name in his lifetime, was completed in 1663, after he had moved to Voorburg, outside The Hague. By this time he was also working on what would eventually be called the Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata/Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner), his philosophical masterpiece. However, when he saw the principles of toleration in the Dutch Republic being threatened by reactionary forces, he put this work aside to complete his “scandalous” Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Theological-Political Treatise), which was published anonymously and to great alarm in 1670. When Spinoza died in 1677, in The Hague, he was still at work on his Tractatus Politicus (Political Treatise); this was soon published by his friends along with other writings, including, finally, the Ethics and Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebreae—a compendium to Hebrew grammar.

The Ethics is one of the most difficult books in the history of philosophy, not least because of its Euclidean format, with its architecture of definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations, postulates, scholia, and corollaries. Spinoza was seeking to provide a maximally rigorous and persuasive presentation of his philosophical ideas about God, the human being, and happiness. He decided that the best way to do this was to adopt the method of the geometers, with its deductive procedure and absolutely certain conclusions.

In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that God is not some transcendent, providential being endowed with the psychological and moral characteristics attributed to it by the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Rather, God just is the unique, infinite, necessary, and eternal substance of the universe. For Spinoza, God is Nature, both its most universal elements (its ultimate essences and laws) and all the particular finite things that causally follow from them. Everything—including the human being—is thus within and determined by “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura) with an absolute necessity. There is no contingency in the universe, and nothing could possibly have been otherwise. Spinoza thereby hopes to preclude any anthropomorphizing of God and any false conceptions of human freedom, and thus to forestall the kind of superstitious beliefs and behaviours from which sectarian religions draw their authority over us and, through appealing to our passions, keep us in a life of “bondage”. Like the ancient Stoics before him, Spinoza believed that happiness is achieved through virtue, which consists in rational understanding. Through insight into Nature’s necessity, the “free person” who lives according to reason is able to diminish the power of irrational emotions and achieve some degree of tranquillity and well-being. There is no such thing as personal immortality, however, and the only “rewards” of virtue lie in the benefits it brings to a person in this life.

In addition to his bold metaphysics and rationalist ethics, Spinoza makes an important contribution to the history of political thought. In fact, the philosophy of the Ethics bears an intimate relationship to the political and religious project that Spinoza pursues in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In this work, Spinoza argues for a tolerant, secular, and democratic polity. He insists that “the freedom to philosophize can not only be granted without injury to piety and the peace of the Commonwealth, but that the peace of the Commonwealth and Piety are endangered by the suppression of this freedom”. By offering a profoundly reductive and naturalistic conception of God—a God who does not perform miracles, establish covenants with select groups of people, issue laws, or stand in judgement over us—and showing how Scripture is simply a work of human literature whose “divinity” lies only in a simple moral message (“love your neighbour”), Spinoza hoped to preserve basic liberties and undercut the political power exercised in modern states by intolerant religious authorities.