Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677 CE) was born in the Portuguese Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam, and was thus Jewish, Portuguese and Dutch. Jews had fled from Spain and Portugal to nearby lands during the Spanish Inquisition of 1492 and the Portuguese Inquisition of 1536, forty years later. If 1492 is a familiar date, that is because it is the year that Christians retook Spain from Muslims, and also the year Columbus chose to leave Spain and sail as far across the world as he could. While Jews thrived in Spain and Portugal under Islamic rule, often occupying high places in the government, education, science and medicine, the Catholic Portuguese Inquisition that caused Spinoza’s own Jewish community to flee to Amsterdam happened only a hundred years before his birth. Some scholars argue that the Portuguese Spinoza family was originally of the Spanish Espinosa family, some of whom fled to Portugal to avoid the Spanish Inquisition while others remained in Spain and converted to Catholicism. If this is true, Spinoza’s branch of the family successfully fled both inquisitions.
Spinoza was not only a philosopher, but also a scientist, mathematician, and biblical scholar, studying the bible critically to understand and interpret its authorship, meaning, and historical context. Spinoza’s views of the bible and its authorship, radical for the time, got him kicked out of the Jewish community of Amsterdam at the age of 23, as well as ostracized by the surrounding Christian community. Like Descartes, his work was put on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books. He was once attacked as he left the synagogue by a man with a knife who yelled out, “Heretic!”, and Spinoza wore his cloak, torn by the knife, for years afterwards as a badge of honor. Spinoza was one of the first European biblical scholars to question the traditional understanding that the first five books of the Old Testament (for Jews the Torah, the only testament) were not written by Moses. At the time, they were still known as the five Books of Moses, until Spinoza and others pointed out that not only did the book of Exodus speak about Moses in the third person, but Moses dies near the end, making his authorship of the book quite questionable. Islamic scholars had noted this problem of authorship centuries earlier.
After being banished from Amsterdam for a brief period and then returning, Spinoza lived as a lens grinder, making lenses for telescopes and microscopes, turning down several teaching positions for a quiet and private life. Because Spinoza died at the relatively young age of forty four from an unknown lung condition, it is suspected that his death was in part caused by glass dust inhaled while grinding. He was known as an outstanding producer of lenses, and these were used by scientists in the fields of optics, astronomy and medicine during the European enlightenment as they had been used in earlier forms by Muslims.
After writing several short works on science, theology, and philosophy, particularly criticism of Descartes, Spinoza wrote his masterpiece, the Ethics, which was only published after his death and written in Latin, as was most European scholarship for centuries. Leibniz, who we will examine next, visited Spinoza and discussed his as yet unpublished Ethics with him. Then, after returning to Germany, Leibniz plagiarized parts of the work and published them interspersed with his own without giving Spinoza credit. There are many instances in philosophy, both ancient and modern, of duplicated work that dances on the boundary between illegitimate plagiarism and legitimate influence. Philosophers often fail to mention names when using ideas in the sequence of an argument.
Although Spinoza was interested in investigation and observation of the sciences, he was drawn to Rationalism via philosophy and mathematics. His Ethics is an attempt to do philosophy as a formal Euclidean geometric proof. Euclid, the ancient Greek mathematician, proceeded from axioms, basic principles assumed to be true, to deduce conclusions that necessarily follow. The definitions can be confusing before reading the Axioms, the points Spinoza hopes to prove by deduction as a Rationalist. Experts pour over the particular twists and turns Spinoza’s thinking takes, and it is often hard to follow, but there are particular conclusions he reaches that are certainly worth examining. While Euclid did not use equations, he worked systematically much in the way that mathematical and logical proofs work, and Spinoza attempted to follow Euclid’s method to make his thinking rigorous and sound. This is why he is known as a Rationalist, falling under the same heading as Descartes. Unlike Descartes, in trying to work out a mathematical proof of everything Spinoza argues that our reality and world is indivisibly one and the same as God.
Central to the work, Spinoza attacked Cartesian dualism and argued that mind and body are inclusively one, not exclusively two, an anti-dualist position known as monism. In ancient Indian, Greek and Chinese philosophy, the idea that all things are one beneath and beyond human judgement is known as philosophical monism. For Spinoza, there is only one unified reality, which he identified with God as Being, and any complete difference or exclusive separation is human ignorance and misunderstanding. Each individual thing, including minds, are like a wave on the sea, a part of the whole and not entirely removed or exclusive.
According to Spinoza, nature, the world and all of Being is God, a pantheistposition that infuriated the traditionally religious and got Spinoza barred as a heretic by both Jews and Christians who believed God to be separate from and superior to the physical world. Just as the Gnostic notion of a world ruled by Satan, removing God from the world entirely, was deemed heretical to the orthodox, the opposite pantheist view, that the world is identical to God, was deemed likewise heretical. According to the Jewish and Christian orthodox position, God rules the world as its separate superior. In the same vein, right wing evangelical Christians in America today have taken to attacking the environmental movement as satanically inspired pantheism, a heretical worship of nature rather than of a god that created nature but is separate and distinct from it.
Spinoza argued against the immortality of the soul, which helped to label him a heretic. Like Jains and Buddhists of India, Spinoza believed that the self ceases to be a separate individual thing at death, but, insofar as one has come to identify with and know the whole as oneself in life, one lives on as the whole itself. Unlike Jains and Buddhists, Spinoza did not argue for stages of reincarnation. In an episode of the Simpsons, Bart sells his soul but then regrets the decision and spends a day and night tracking it down. His sister Lisa tells him that some philosophers believe one is not born with a soul, but earns one, as he did. The writers are likely thinking of Spinoza. Because all things are God, all things are also eternal, but not as individual things that remain unchanging. Spinoza seems to say that insofar as our minds contemplate the true ways of things, our minds become the ways of things, and are thus as eternal as the ways we contemplate. This is much like saying that by studying the gravitational constant, you become the gravitational constant, and thus are as enduring as the constancy of gravity, enduring as long as it endures. Perhaps if someone wants an eternal afterlife, reminding them that energy can’t be created or destroyed would not make them very happy.
Spinoza believed that reality is one substance with all particular beings linked together by chains of causation. Spinoza was a determinist, and believed that there was no real freedom or chance in the universe. The will and mind of God was not the personal care of an emotional being with a personality, but the causal workings and design of nature. Reason reveals the necessary causal connections between things. Spinoza argued that human beings, like Descartes, believe in free will because they are aware of desires but do not understand the reasons behind these desires, and so they perceive the gap as freedom when in fact there is none. Spinoza noted that people who are driven by passions, such as the baby seeking the breast, the cruel boy who lashes out at others, and the drunk who seeks more to drink, all feel that they are free because they do not understand the forces that determine their actions.
Just because there is no free will does not mean that human beings have no degree of control over their actions. Understanding the causes of one’s behavior and situation with reason gives one greater ability to act in various ways. If one has a greater exercise of reason, one will naturally be determined to take a better path that one may not have been aware of before. An individual who knows they are hungry is free to eat a sandwich rather than punch random people or burst into tears, but the past entirely determines whether the individual will choose to make a sandwich or not. In this sense, one gains freedom by reasoning, but much as immortality is not immortality for the individual but the individual conforming to nature, so too is freedom not freedom for the individual but the individual conforming to nature, becoming more capable.
Scholars have noted that this is similar to Daoism of ancient China and Stoicism of ancient Greece and Rome. As we become more active, we become the universe, the sum of all activity. Like the Mutazilites of Islam, who believed that God is reason and the necessary logic of all being, Spinoza was committed to the position that God is not free to be illogical or be contradictory, but as the sum of all activity this absolutely determined being is the sum of all freedom. Einstein said that Spinoza had more influence on his views than any other philosopher. When asked if he believed in God, Einstein said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God”. A determinist like Spinoza, Einstein argued against the chaos theorists who would surpass his work on relativity saying, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. According to chaos theory, Einstein was right that time and space are relative, but he did not see that necessity and chance are also relative, and thus the absolute determinism of Spinoza and Einstein is impossible.
Spinoza’s first axiom is: Things exist either in themselves or through something else. These are much like the two skeptical modes of Sextus the ancient Greek skeptic that Descartes hoped to solve by grounding his thinking in the self-evident existence of consciousness and the dependence of consciousness on God. He then presents this causally: Effects cannot be known in themselves, as they are the effects of causes. The question arises: Are there causes that are not themselves effects in a chain, caused by earlier causes? Spinoza has already set up God in his definitions as infinite in essence, who will be the singular cause of all causes, the only truly independent self-evident thing, Being itself, the cause of all particular beings, which themselves can cause other particular beings, but are not the cause of themselves.
Spinoza argues that all things have to be similar to each other in some way, and thus things cannot be completely distinct or many, and thus there is, in fact, only one substance, which is God, infinite and indivisible. Parmenides argued that all differences between things must be illusion, as difference is non-being, and non-being can’t be. Spinoza says that for things to be completely distinct is impossible, and so they must be one and the same substance. Being itself is infinite and without limits because anything that limited it would have to be part of it to exist. Thus, Spinoza states with full confidence, “Besides God no substance can be granted or conceived.” Because substances are created only by similar substances, there must be a super-substance that is the substance of all substances. Because like begets like, there must be a super-like that includes all difference within itself. From Being, there necessarily “must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways”.
Hegel wrote in his History of Philosophy that one could not be a legitimate philosopher without being a Spinozist. Hegel geared his system to overcome and synthesize all dueling points of view, and thought that Spinoza’s monism had overcome Descartes’ dualism. One of the final stages in Hegel’s conception of the history of philosophy is the recognition that freedom and necessity are one and the same thing. Deleuze, a French postmodernist we will study at the very end of the course, called Spinoza the prince of philosophers. Indeed, for many thinkers skeptical of exclusive dualist distinctions, Spinoza’s opposition to the dualism of Descartes became one of the first glorious moments of European thought. I was myself quite inspired by Spinoza as an undergraduate philosophy major.
Thought Itself 