Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza (in Portuguese Bento, in Latin Benedictus: all three names mean “blessed”) was one of the great philosophers of the seventeenth century, alongside René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He is often grouped with them as a “rationalist”, because he believed that reason can grasp the true structure of reality.

Spinoza is remembered for several bold claims. There is only one substance, which can be called God or Nature. Everything that happens follows necessarily from the nature of this substance; nothing is truly random, and there is no free will in the sense of an uncaused choice. The mind and the body are not two different things but one thing seen in two ways. And the highest human good is to understand this, which brings a calm joy he called the “intellectual love of God”.

He was also a political thinker who argued, in the Theological-Political Treatise of 1670, that the state should allow its citizens to think what they like and say what they think. Because his views on God and the Bible were considered deeply dangerous, he was denounced as an atheist for more than a century after his death. Later generations came to admire him as a pioneer of modern secular thought, biblical scholarship and democratic theory.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632. His father, Michael, was a merchant who imported goods such as dried fruit from Portugal and Spain. The family belonged to the city’s Portuguese-Jewish community, made up of people whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal (so-called conversos) and who had returned to Judaism in the more tolerant Dutch Republic. His mother, Hanna Deborah, died when he was six.

Spinoza studied at the community’s Talmud Torah school, where he learned Hebrew, the Bible and Jewish commentary. He did not, however, complete the higher rabbinical studies; after his older brother died he worked in the family business, which he ran with his brother Gabriel after their father’s death in 1654.

In the early 1650s he began to study Latin with Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit with radical political opinions who ran a school in Amsterdam. Through Latin, Spinoza gained access to the philosophy of Descartes, to classical literature and to the new science. He also came into contact with Mennonites and Collegiants, groups of Christians who rejected church hierarchy and met to discuss religion freely.

On 27 July 1656 the leaders of Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community pronounced a herem, a writ of expulsion, against Spinoza, then 23 years old. The text, which survives, is unusually harsh. It speaks of his “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” without saying exactly what they were, curses him, and forbids members of the community to communicate with him, stay under the same roof, come close to him or read anything he wrote.

Historians think the heresies probably included ideas later found in his books: that the soul is not immortal in the traditional sense, that God is not a lawgiver who reveals commandments, and that the Law of Moses is no longer binding. The community also had practical reasons to act. Its members depended on the tolerance of the Dutch authorities, and open religious radicalism among them could threaten that tolerance.

Spinoza apparently did not seek reconciliation. He left the Jewish community and never joined any Christian church. He adopted the Latin form of his name, Benedictus, and began a quiet life devoted to philosophy. The herem was never lifted; in the twenty-first century, proposals to reconsider it have been discussed but not adopted.

Around 1661 Spinoza moved to Rijnsburg, a village near Leiden that was a centre of the Collegiants. There he wrote the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being and worked on the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and began the Ethics. In 1663 he moved to Voorburg, near The Hague, and published the only book to appear under his own name in his lifetime: an exposition of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, with an appendix of Metaphysical Thoughts.

Spinoza earned money by grinding lenses, a skilled craft connected with the new science of optics; he was respected for it by scientists such as Christiaan Huygens. He was also supported by friends, including Simon Joosten de Vries and Jarig Jelles. His circle of admirers discussed drafts of the Ethics, and he corresponded with Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society in London, about science, religion and philosophy.

In 1670 he moved to The Hague, where he lived as a lodger for the rest of his life. In 1672, the “Disaster Year”, France invaded the Republic and a mob in The Hague murdered the statesman Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis. According to a story later told by Leibniz, Spinoza wanted to put up a placard reading “ultimi barbarorum” (“the lowest of barbarians”) near the scene and was restrained by his landlord. In 1673 he declined an offer of a professorship of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, fearing it would limit his freedom to philosophise.

In 1676 Leibniz visited him in The Hague and they talked for several days. Spinoza died on 21 February 1677, aged 44, probably of a lung disease such as tuberculosis, possibly worsened by the glass dust from lens grinding. His friends quickly published his unpublished writings in Latin (Opera Posthuma) and in Dutch translation (De Nagelate Schriften) later that year, with only his initials, B.D.S., on the title page.

Spinoza lived during the Dutch Golden Age. The Dutch Republic, having won independence from Spain, had become Europe’s leading commercial power, with a global trading empire, thriving printing presses and relative religious tolerance. Amsterdam welcomed Sephardic Jews, Protestant dissidents and refugees of many kinds. This was the world of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Huygens.

Tolerance had limits, however. The official Reformed Church was powerful, and many of its preachers wanted strict control over religious opinion. Politics was divided between the republican regime of Johan de Witt, which favoured toleration and the dominance of the merchant elite, and supporters of the House of Orange, who were allied with orthodox Calvinist clergy. Spinoza’s friend Adriaan Koerbagh, who published radical religious views in Dutch, was imprisoned in 1668 and died in prison in 1669, a warning of what could happen to open freethinkers.

Intellectually, Spinoza’s generation was shaped by the new science and by Descartes, who had lived in the Netherlands for many years. Cartesian philosophy promised to rebuild knowledge on clear and distinct ideas, and it provoked fierce controversy in Dutch universities. Spinoza took up Descartes’ method and vocabulary but drew radically different conclusions.

The Ethics is written “in the geometrical order” (ordine geometrico demonstrata). Like Euclid’s Elements, each of its five parts begins with definitions and axioms, from which propositions are demonstrated, with corollaries and explanatory notes (scholia). Spinoza hoped this form would force readers to follow reasons rather than rhetoric. The five parts treat God; the nature and origin of the mind; the origin and nature of the emotions (affects); human bondage, or the power of the emotions; and the power of the intellect, or human freedom.

Part One argues that there can be only one substance, something that exists in itself and is conceived through itself, and that this substance is God, an absolutely infinite being. Everything else is a “mode”, a way in which this substance exists. Stars, rocks, people and thoughts are not separate things standing outside God, but modifications of the one God. Spinoza sometimes writes “God, or Nature” (Deus, sive Natura), which is why his view is often called pantheism, though scholars debate whether that label fits.

God, for Spinoza, has infinitely many attributes, of which humans know two: extension (being physical) and thought. God does not act for purposes, does not choose among possibilities and does not reward or punish; everything follows from God’s nature as necessarily as the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. In the appendix to Part One, Spinoza argues that the belief that nature serves human purposes, and that God sends storms and diseases as punishments, comes from human ignorance and self-centred imagination.

Mind and body. Because thought and extension are two attributes of one substance, the human mind and the human body are “one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension”. The mind is the idea of the body. This is often called parallelism: for every physical event there is a corresponding mental one, but neither causes the other. Spinoza thereby avoided Descartes’ problem of how an immaterial soul could move a material body.

Emotions. Every thing strives to persevere in its being; Spinoza calls this striving conatus, and in humans it is the essence of desire. Joy is the passage to greater power of acting, sadness the passage to lesser power, and all other emotions, such as love, hatred, hope, fear, envy and pity, are built from desire, joy and sadness together with ideas of their causes. Spinoza promises to treat human actions and appetites “as if it were a question of lines, planes and bodies”.

Bondage and freedom. When we are driven by external causes we do not understand, our emotions are “passions” and we are in bondage. We become freer as we form adequate ideas, true understanding of the causes of things. Spinoza distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: imagination (opinion, hearsay, vague experience), reason (knowledge of common properties and laws) and intuitive knowledge (seeing how particular things follow from God’s nature). The more we understand, the less we are dominated by passions.

Blessedness. The last part of the Ethics describes the “intellectual love of God”, the joy that accompanies understanding everything as following from God, and a sense in which the mind is eternal. Blessedness is not a reward for virtue but virtue itself. The book ends: “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”.

The Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) was published anonymously in 1670 with a false place of publication. Its aim, as its subtitle announces, is to show that freedom to philosophise can be granted without harm to piety or public peace, and indeed that it cannot be abolished without destroying both.

Spinoza argues that Scripture must be interpreted from Scripture itself, by studying its language, history and authors, like any other ancient text. On this basis he concluded that Moses did not write the whole Pentateuch, that the prophets were people of vivid imagination rather than superior intellect, and that miracles, understood as violations of natural law, are impossible. The core message of Scripture, he held, is simply to love God and one’s neighbour through justice and charity; it does not teach philosophical truths.

In politics he followed Thomas Hobbes in basing the state on natural right and power, but drew more liberal conclusions. Since no one can surrender their judgement, a government that tries to control thought only breeds hypocrisy and rebellion; “the purpose of the state is really freedom”. He regarded democracy as the most natural form of government. His unfinished Political Treatise analyses monarchy, aristocracy and democracy; it breaks off in the chapter on democracy.

The book caused an uproar. It was condemned by Reformed synods and banned by the authorities of Holland in 1674, and it was attacked across Europe as an atheist manifesto. Yet it circulated widely and laid foundations for modern historical criticism of the Bible and for arguments for freedom of expression.

For about a century after his death, “Spinozist” was a term of abuse meaning atheist or materialist. Pierre Bayle’s influential Historical and Critical Dictionary praised Spinoza’s personal virtue but attacked his system as absurd. At the same time, his ideas circulated underground among freethinkers, and the historian Jonathan Israel has argued that Spinoza stood at the centre of a “Radical Enlightenment” that championed democracy, equality and secular reason.

In 1785 a public dispute known as the Pantheism Controversy broke out in Germany after Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi reported that the admired writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had confessed himself a Spinozist. The debate made Spinoza central to German philosophy and literature. Goethe, Herder, Schelling and Hegel all engaged deeply with him; Hegel declared that one must first be a Spinozist to philosophise at all, and the poet Novalis called him a “God-intoxicated man”.

Later thinkers found very different Spinozas. Nineteenth-century scientists admired his naturalism; Albert Einstein said that he believed in “Spinoza’s God”, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, rather than a God concerned with human fate and actions. Nietzsche saw a precursor; Marxist philosophers read him as a materialist; Gilles Deleuze made him a philosopher of joy and power. In modern philosophy of mind, his view of mind and body is compared with dual-aspect and neutral monist theories, and neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio have drawn on his account of emotion.

Jewish responses have also changed. Some Jewish thinkers regarded him as a traitor, while others, especially from the nineteenth century onward, reclaimed him as a secular Jewish hero and a founder of modern Jewish thought. Debates about his relation to Judaism continue.

Substance and modes. How do finite things “inhere” in God? Pierre Bayle took Spinoza to mean that things are properties of God, which led to absurdities (God would be both happy and sad, both Turk and German). Edwin Curley proposed instead that modes depend on God causally rather than as properties of a subject, which removes Bayle’s objection but has been criticised as too far from Spinoza’s own language. Other scholars, such as Yitzhak Melamed, defend a reading in which modes do inhere in substance and argue that the resulting view is coherent.

Attributes. Are the attributes objectively real features of substance, or only ways in which the intellect perceives it? The “subjectivist” reading, associated with Harry Austryn Wolfson, stresses Spinoza’s definition of attribute as what the intellect perceives of substance; most recent interpreters favour an “objectivist” reading. The question matters for how the one substance can have many really distinct attributes.

Pantheism, acosmism or naturalism? Some read Spinoza as divinising nature (pantheism), others as dissolving God into nature (atheism or naturalism). Hegel accused him of “acosmism”, of making the finite world vanish into God. Whether “God” in Spinoza is a religious term used strategically or a sincere metaphysical claim remains disputed, as does how far he wrote cautiously to avoid persecution, a question raised by Leo Strauss’s thesis about “writing between the lines”.

Eternity of the mind. The closing propositions of the Ethics, claiming that “something of the mind remains which is eternal”, have puzzled readers. Some see a doctrine of personal immortality; most see an impersonal eternity of the mind’s true ideas; others find the passage in tension with the rest of the system. Similar debates surround his determinism and the possibility of moral responsibility, and whether his politics is fundamentally democratic or a realist theory of power.

Our knowledge of Spinoza’s life depends on a limited set of sources: the herem and other records of the Amsterdam community and the city; his correspondence (some 88 letters to and from him survive, mostly on philosophical questions, many edited for publication by his friends); the preface to the Opera Posthuma by Jarig Jelles and others; an early French biography attributed to Jean-Maximilien Lucas, written by an admirer; and the 1705 biography by the Lutheran minister Johannes Colerus, who lodged in the same house in The Hague and interviewed people who had known Spinoza. Anecdotes such as the “ultimi barbarorum” story and the attempted stabbing outside the synagogue come from later reports and should be treated with caution.

The texts also raise problems. The chronology of the Ethics is only partly known; letters show that a version existed in the early 1660s and that Spinoza abandoned plans to publish it in 1675. The Short Treatise survives only in Dutch manuscripts discovered in the nineteenth century. In 2010 the scholars Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro identified in the Vatican Library a manuscript copy of the Ethics, the only known manuscript of the work, which had been passed to the Catholic authorities in the 1670s; it differs in details from the printed text and helps show how the work was revised.

Modern scholarship relies on critical editions (Carl Gebhardt’s edition of 1925 and the newer Presses Universitaires de France edition) and translations such as Edwin Curley’s Collected Works. Steven Nadler’s biography, Spinoza: A Life (1999), synthesised archival research on the Amsterdam community. Historians now stress reading Spinoza in his Dutch, Jewish and Cartesian contexts rather than as a lonely genius outside history.