Baruch Spinoza (AKA
Benedict Spinoza) (1623 - 1677) was a
Dutch philosopher of
Portuguese Jewish origin who lived and worked during the
Age of Reason.
Along with
René Descartes and
Gottfried Leibniz, he is considered one of the great
Rationalists of the
17th Century, although the
breadth and
importance of his work was not fully realized until years
after his death.
An enormously
controversial figure (both in his own day and after) for the highly
original and
provocative positions he advocated, Spinoza is nowadays respected as one of the
definitive ethicists (he took a largely
Moral Relativist position), and as a harbinger of
enlightened modernity. His
metaphysical views were essentially
monistic and pantheistic, holding that
God and
Nature were just two names for the same
single underlying reality.
Spinoza was born on 24 November 1632 in Amsterdam, Holland, to a family of Sephardic Jews descended from displaced Maranos from Portugal. His father was Abraão (Miguel) de Spinoza, a successful importer and merchant; his mother was Ana Débora, Miguel's second of three wives, who died when Baruch was only six years old.
He had a traditional Jewish upbringing, and his early education consisted mainly of religious study, including instruction in Hebrew, liturgy, Torah, prophetic writings and rabbinical commentaries. However, his critical, curious nature would soon come into conflict with the Jewish community.
At the age of 17, when his father died in the wars against England and France and the family fortune was decimated, Spinoza was forced to cut short his formal studies to help run the family business, although he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his brother, Gabriel, and devote himself to his real love, philosophy. He gave away his share of his father's inheritance to his sister, and lived the rest of his life in genteel poverty as a grinder of optical lenses.
In 1656, Spinoza was issued a writ of "cherem" (the Jewish equivalent of excommunication) for the apostasy of how he conceived God, and for various positions contrary to normative Jewish belief and his criticisms of the Talmud and other religious texts. He had reportedly been offered 1000 florins to keep quiet about his views, but had refused on principle. Following his excommunication, he adopted the first name Benedictus or Benedict (the Latin equivalent of Baruch, meaning "blessed") or, more informally, the Portuguese equivalent Bento.
After his excommunication, Spinoza lived and worked at times at the school of his old Latin teacher,
Franciscus van den Enden, an
atheist and devotee of the
Rationalism of
Descartes, who was
forbidden by the city government to propagate his doctrines publicly. He dedicated himself completely to philosophy, and his fervent desire was to
change the world through establishing a
clandestine philosophical sect, although this was only eventually realized
after his death, through the dedicated intercession of his friends.
He became acquainted with several
Collegiants, members of an eclectic sect with tendencies towards
Rationalism, as well as corresponding with
Petrus Serrarius (1600 -1669), a
radical Protestant and millennarian merchant, who acted as a
patron of Spinoza for a time. By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza's name had become more
widely known, and he met and corresponded with
Gottfried Leibniz and
Henry Oldenburg (1619 - 1677). Around 1661, he relocated from Amsterdam to
Rijnsburg (near
Leiden) and later lived in
Voorburg (1663) and then
The Hague, earning a comfortable living from his work as an
optician and
lens-grinding, although he was also supported by small, but regular,
donations from close friends. He
never married, nor did he father any
children.
Spinoza's first publication was a geometric exposition of the work of
Descartes, the two part
"Principia philosophiae cartesianae" (
"Principles of Cartesian Philosophy"), published in 1663. In the early 1660s, he worked on what was to become his magnum opus, the
"Ethics", but he
suspended the work in 1665 in favour of his
"Tractatus Theologico-Politicus"(
"Theologico-Political Treatise"), which was eventually published anonymously in 1670. The
public reaction to this work, though, was
extremely unfavourable and Spinoza was wary enough to
abstain from publishing more of his works for the rest of his life (the
"Ethics" and several other works were all published
posthumously by his friends, in secrecy). Even his colleague Leibniz
disagreed harshly with it (and published his own detailed
refutation), although some of
Leibniz's own work bears some
striking resemblances to certain key parts of Spinoza's philosophy. In 1676, Spinoza met with
Leibniz at The Hague to privately discuss his
"Ethics", which he had just
completed but
dared not publish.
Spinoza died at the young age of 44 on 21 February 1677 in The Hague, due to a lung illness (perhaps tuberculosis or silicosis, possibly due to breathing in fine glass dust from the lenses he ground). Even after his death, Spinoza did not escape controversy, and in 1678 his works were banned throughout Holland.
Although he is usually counted, along with
Descartes and
Leibniz, as one of the three major
Rationalists of the 17th Century, his writings reveal the
influence of such divergent sources as
Stoicism,
Jewish Rationalism,
Machiavelli,
Hobbes,
Descartes and a variety of
heterodox religious thinkers of his day, and he made significant contributions in virtually
every area of philosophy. His pursuits were
eclectic and his thought was strikingly
original, which makes him somewhat
difficult to categorize.
His first published work, the
"Principia philosophiae cartesianae" (
"Principles of Cartesian Philosophy") of 1663, was a
systematic presentation of the philosophy of
Descartes, to which he added his own suggestions for its
improvement, and it already contained many of the
characteristic elements of his later work. The
"Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" (
"Theologico-Political Treatise") of 1670 was an examination of
superficial popular religion in general and a vigorous critique of the
militant Protestantism practised in Holland at the time. He argued that Christians and Jews could live
peaceably together if they would only rise above the
petty theological and cultural controversies that divided them. The core of Spinoza's
ethicalviews was encapsulated in his early
"Tractatus de intellectus emendatione" (
"Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding").
But his
major work was the monumental
"Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata" (
"Ethics"), an abstract and difficult work, finished in 1676 but only published posthumously in 1677. Each of its five consituent books comprises a long sequence of numbered
propositions, each of which is
deduced through a method consciously modelled on the
deductive logic used by the Greek mathematician
Euclid in his seminal work on
geometry. Like Euclid, Spinoza started with a small set of
self-evident definitions and
axioms, meticulously built up his deductive argument, and concluded each section with a triumphant
"QED"(
"quod erat demonstrandum", or "that which was to be demonstrated"). It is sometimes held up as a supreme example of a
self-contained metaphysical system, whose object is nothing less than to explain
everything, the total scheme of reality.
As a young man, Spinoza had subscribed to
Descartes' belief in
Dualism, that body and mind are
two separate substances. However, he later changed his view (as demonstrated in the
"Ethics") and asserted that they were not separate, but a
single identity, and that
body and
mind were just two names for the same
reality. Starting from
Descartes' definition of
substance as "that which requires nothing other than itself in order to exist", Spinoza's conclusion was quite different from that of
Descartes: where
Descartes saw the one underlying substance as being God, Spinoza saw it as the totality of everything (in other words,
Nature). All of reality, then, was really just
one substance, and all apparently different objects were merely facets or aspects (what he called
"modes") of that underlying substance. In this way, Spinoza refined
Descartes' rather unsatisfactory treatment of the
mind-body problem in
Philosophy of Mind by positing that the physical and mental worlds (
extension and
consciousness) were essentially one and the same thing. This was therefore a kind of
Monism, as opposed to
Descartes'
Dualism, (more specifically, it was a historically significant solution known as
Neutral Monism).
Following on from this analysis, then, Spinoza saw
God and
Nature as just two names for the same
reality of the universe, essentially a kind of
Pantheism. Thus, he believed that there was just
one set of rules governing the whole of reality, and that the basis of the universe was a
single substance, of which all lesser entities are actually
"modes" or modifications. Spinoza's "God" (or "Nature") was therefore a being of
infinitely many attributes, of which
extension and
thought were but the two that we can understand. He envisaged a God that was not a
transcendent creator of the universe who rules over the universe by
providence, but a God that itself is the
deterministic system of which
everything in nature is a part. Thus, for Spinoza, God effectively
is the infinite natural world and He has no separate
"personality", nor is he in some way
outside of Nature (
supernatural).
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing
determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of
necessity, leaving absolutely no room for
free will and spontaneity. For him, even
human behaviour is fully determined, and
freedom (or what we presume to be free will) is limited to merely our capacity to
know that we are determined and to understand
why we act as we do. Nothing happens
by chance in Spinoza's world, and
reason does not work in terms of
contingency.
Spinoza's
Ethics have much in common with
Stoicism in as much as both philosophies sought to fulfill a
therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain
happiness (
Eudaimonism). He asserted that the
"highest good" was
knowledge of God, which was capable of bringing freedom from
fear and the tyranny of the
passions, and ultimately
true blessedness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the
Stoics in his rejection of their contention that
reason could overcome
emotion. He contended that an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a
stronger emotion, and that knowledge of the true causes of
passive emotions (those not rationally understood) could
transform them into
active emotions (ones that can be rationally understood), thus anticipating by over 200 years one of the key ideas of the
psychoanalysis of
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939).
Spinoza took the
Moral Relativist position that nothing is
intrinsically good or bad, except to the extent that it is
subjectively perceived to be by the individual. In a completely
ordered world where "necessity" reigns, the concepts of
Good and
Evil can have
no absolute meaning. Everything that happens comes from the
essential nature of objects or of God/Nature, and so, according to Spinoza, reality is
perfection, and everything done by
humans and other animals is also
excellent and
divine. If circumstances sometimes appear unfortunate or
less than perfect to us, it is only because of our
inadequate conception of reality. He asserted that
sense perception, though practical and useful for rhetoric, is
inadequate for discovering
universal truth.
While it is easy to see why both the
Jewish and
Christian authorities of Spinoza's day felt both
appalled and
threatened by his ideas, his philosophy did hold an
attraction for late 18th Century Europeans in that it provided an
alternative to
Materialism,
Atheism and
Deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas in particular strongly appealed to them: the
unity of all that exists; the
regularityand
order of all that happens; and the
identity of spirit and nature.
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