Benedict de Spinoza

Benedict de Spinoza a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent (1632-1677), one of the most rigorous and radical thinkers of the early modern period, who identified God with nature and set out a complete system of metaphysics, ethics and politics in a geometrical style. His rejection of a personal deity and of religious authority made him notorious in his lifetime.

Life and Excommunication

Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a community of Sephardic Jews who had fled the Iberian peninsula. He received a traditional Jewish education and became a careful reader of the medieval Jewish philosophers, especially Maimonides. He also learned Latin and came under the influence of Descartes and of heterodox Christian thinkers such as Uriel da Costa.

In 1656 the synagogue of Amsterdam pronounced against him a writ of excommunication of unusual severity, apparently because of his views on God, the law and the authority of Scripture. He was expelled from the Jewish community, and he never joined another. He earned his living grinding lenses for optical instruments, a trade that kept him independent and that may have contributed to the lung disease from which he died.

He lived quietly at The Hague and elsewhere, refusing academic posts and prizes in order to preserve his freedom of thought. He corresponded with the leading thinkers of Europe, including Henry Oldenburg, and he allowed his ideas to circulate among a small circle while withholding most of his works from the press.

God or Nature

The Ethics, published posthumously in 1677, is arranged in the manner of Euclid, with definitions, axioms, propositions and demonstrations. It begins by arguing that there can be only one substance, infinite and self-caused, which is God. Whatever exists exists in God and cannot be conceived without him, so that God and nature are two names for the same reality, a doctrine summarised in the phrase God or Nature.

This pantheism denied the transcendent creator of traditional religion. God does not act for purposes and has no will analogous to the human will; events follow from the divine nature with logical necessity, and there is nothing contingent in the universe. Freedom, in this scheme, does not mean choosing among alternatives but acting from one's own nature rather than under external compulsion.

Spinoza rejected the idea of a providential will and of miracles, which he regarded as violations of the order of nature and therefore as unintelligible. Whatever happens happens by necessity, and to understand this necessity is to see things from the perspective of eternity, a vision that reason can attain in part and that constitutes for him the highest form of knowledge.

Mind, Body and the Affects

Spinoza held that thought and extension are two attributes of the one substance, known to us through two parallel descriptions. Mind and body are not two things but one thing conceived under two aspects, so that every mode of extension corresponds to a mode of thought. This parallelism avoids the problem of how an immaterial mind could act on a material body.

His account of the emotions, which he called the affects, is naturalistic. Joy and sadness, desire, love and hate are states of the mind bound up with bodily change, and they are to be understood rather than simply condemned. The passions become destructive when they are passive and confused; they become rational when they are adequately understood and thus brought within our power.

The famous final propositions of the Ethics argue that the greatest good is the knowledge of God or nature, that this knowledge is accompanied by a love of God which is eternal, and that blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself. Through understanding necessity the mind is released from bondage to the passions, and this release is Spinoza's conception of human freedom.

Scripture, Politics and Freedom of Thought

In the Theological-Political Treatise, published anonymously in 1670, Spinoza subjected the Bible to historical criticism. He argued that Scripture must be interpreted from within, in the light of the language and circumstances of its authors, and that its purpose is not to convey philosophical truth but to promote obedience and piety. Prophecy depends on the imagination of the prophets, not on superior wisdom.

He drew from this a plea for toleration and for the separation of philosophy from theology. The state should regulate outward conduct for the sake of peace, while thought and speech should remain free, since no government can control what people believe and the attempt to do so is both futile and destructive of the commonwealth. This argument is among the most powerful early defences of free expression.

In the Political Treatise, left unfinished at his death, he analysed monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, arguing that the best form of government is one in which reason and the common good prevail and in which the natural rights of individuals are preserved as far as possible. His political thought rests on the same naturalistic assumptions as his ethics.

Reputation and Influence

Spinoza's works were condemned by churchmen and philosophers alike, and for a century his name stood for atheism and impiety. He was attacked by theologians and misunderstood by many of the Enlightenment writers who borrowed his ideas. Yet careful readers recognised a thinker of extraordinary coherence, and the Ethics came to be regarded as one of the monuments of rationalist philosophy.

His influence grew in the romantic and idealist era. Lessing, Goethe and Herder admired him, and the German idealists built their systems in dialogue with his monism. In the twentieth century his naturalism, his critique of teleology and his account of the emotions attracted the attention of philosophers and of scientists, and his biblical criticism prepared the way for modern scholarship.

He is remembered as the most daring metaphysician of the seventeenth century and as a moralist of severe integrity. Excommunicated, poor and solitary, he lived the freedom he described, holding that the mind's salvation lies in the intellectual love of the whole of nature. His vision of unity beneath the multiplicity of things remains one of the great alternatives in Western thought.

See also

• Rationalism
• Pantheism
• Ethics
• Freedom of thought