Baruch Spinoza

Key ideas

1. One substance: God or Nature. Spinoza argues that there is exactly one substance, infinite and self-caused, which he calls God or Nature. Everything else, bodies and minds included, exists in it as modes, the ways it is expressed.
2. Attributes and parallelism. We know God under two attributes, thought and extension, and neither acts on the other. A mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing expressed in two ways, so the order of ideas is the order of things.
3. Necessity without purposes. Nothing in nature is contingent: everything follows from the nature of God as the properties of a triangle follow from its definition. There are no miracles and no final causes, and the idea of a God who acts for ends is a human projection.
4. Conatus and the emotions. Each thing strives to persevere in its being. The emotions are natural events with causes, to be understood rather than condemned, and some of them diminish our power while others increase it.
5. Freedom as understanding. Freedom is not an uncaused will but being determined by our own nature, through adequate ideas rather than outside causes. Knowledge runs from opinion through reason to intuition, and its highest fruit is the intellectual love of God.
6. The Bible and the state. Scripture should be read as we read nature, historically and without appeal to supernatural authority. The best state, Spinoza argues, protects freedom of thought, and he held democracy to be the most natural form of government.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent who argued that there is only one substance, God or Nature, and that everything else, minds and bodies included, is a mode of it and follows by necessity. In the Ethics he drew from this a moral philosophy in which freedom is understanding, not an uncaused will. He is counted with Descartes and Leibniz as one of the three great rationalists, and the Stanford Encyclopedia ranks him the most radical philosopher of the early modern period.

On 27 July 1656 the Portuguese-Jewish congregation of Amsterdam pronounced a writ of herem, or excommunication, against its twenty-three-year-old member. His family had fled the Inquisition in Portugal, and his father was a merchant. The writ accused him of “abominable heresies” without saying what they were. Spinoza took up lens grinding, lived at Rijnsburg and Voorburg and then in The Hague, and published under his own name only a geometrical presentation of Descartes’s Principles (1663). The Theological-Political Treatise (1670) appeared anonymously, and he is said to have worn a signet ring engraved Caute, “caution”. He refused a chair at Heidelberg and died in The Hague on 21 February 1677, aged forty-four, of a lung illness. Friends published the Ethics and his other manuscripts within the year; in 1678 they were banned throughout Holland.

What is the Ethics?

It is written like Euclid’s Elements, with definitions, axioms, propositions and proofs. Its five parts treat God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage and human freedom. In Part III he says that he will treat even human vice and folly “geometrically”, as a part of nature with causes of its own.

What is Spinoza’s God?

He defines substance as “that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself” (Elwes’s translation), argues that there can be only one, and concludes: “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.” Later he speaks of “the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature”. This is the doctrine that is variously called pantheism, panentheism or atheism: his God has no purposes, and the world is not made for human ends. Spinoza’s monism departs from Descartes’s dualism: thought and extension are two attributes of one substance, and “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”

Does everything happen by necessity?

“Nothing in the universe is contingent,” he writes, “but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.” There are no miracles, and no free will in the sense of an uncaused will. Men think themselves free, he says, “inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire.” This is a strict determinism.

What is freedom, then?

Spinoza accuses earlier moralists of conceiving man as “a kingdom within a kingdom”, as if outside the order of nature. Each thing “endeavours to persist in its own being”, and the emotions are natural events. We are in bondage when outside causes govern us and free to the extent that our own understanding does. Knowledge runs from opinion to reason to a third kind, intuition, whose fruit is the intellectual love of God.

The result is a worldly ethic. “A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.” And: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”

How did he read the Bible and the state?

In the Treatise he argues that “the method of interpreting Scripture does not widely differ from the method of interpreting nature”. Wikipedia says it significantly influenced modern biblical criticism. Its last chapter is headed “That in a Free State every man may Think what he Likes, and Say what he Thinks.” He argued, the Stanford Encyclopedia reports, that democracy is the “most natural” form of government and the one most likely to respect its citizens’ autonomy.

What did he leave behind?

Leibniz visited him in November 1676 and later criticised his necessitarianism. In the 1780s the German pantheism controversy, in which Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi reported that Lessing had called Spinozism the only true philosophy, made him a central figure in German thought. Hegel wrote that “to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy” (Haldane and Simson’s translation).

How should you start reading Spinoza?

Begin with the definitions, the proof of God’s existence and the Appendix of Part I in the Ethics, then the Preface to Part III and the end of Part IV. The UGC NET syllabus lists substance, attribute and mode, “God or Nature”, the intellectual love of God, parallelism, pantheism and the three orders of knowing; see the UGC NET guide and the UPSC guide. The Elwes translations are old; the guide to reading philosophy explains how to use them.