Benedictus de Spinoza or Baruch de Spinoza (Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה) (lived November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin, considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy and, by virtue of his magnum opus the posthumous Ethics, one of the definitive ethicists. His writings, like those of his fellow rationalists, reveal considerable mathematical training and facility. Spinoza was a lens crafter by trade, an exciting engineering field at the time because of great discoveries being made by telescopes. The full effect of his work was realized only some time after his death, following the publication of his Opera Posthuma. He is now recognized as having laid the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment, and as a founder of modern biblical criticism. 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze referred to Spinoza as "The absolute philosopher, whose Ethics is the foremost book on concepts" (Deleuze, 1990). Variations to his surname are abundant: Despinoza, d'Espinoza, de Spinoza, Spinoza, et cetera. Life: Following their expulsion from Spain around 1492, many Jews sought refuge in Portugal, only to be instructed to accept Christianity or be expelled. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, to parents of Sephardic Jewish descent, among the Portuguese Jews of that city - Miguel de Espinosa and Ana Débora, Miguel's second wife who died when Spinoza was a little boy of six. They were Marranos who had fled from Portugal in order to escape the Portuguese Inquisition and return to Judaism. Some say that the Spinoza family had, in fact, its remote origins in Spain, others claim that they were Portuguese Jews who had moved to Spain and then returned in 1492 to their country of origin - Portugal. There, they were forcibly converted to Catholicism in 1498. Spinoza's father, Miguel de Spinoza, would be born about a century after this forced conversion in the small Portuguese city of Vidigueira, near Beja in Alentejo. When Spinoza's father was still a child, Spinoza's grandfather, Isaac de Spinoza (who was from Lisbon), went with all his family to Nantes in France. They were expelled in 1615 and moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1627. Spinoza's father and his uncle, Miguel and Manuel respectively, then moved to Amsterdam, where they assumed their Judaism (Manuel even changed his name to Abraão de Spinoza, though his "commercial" name was still the same). His father was a successful importer/merchant and Baruch had an orthodox Jewish upbringing; however, his critical, curious nature would soon come into conflict with the Jewish community. After wars with England and France decimated his family's fortune and after the death of his father, he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his brother, Gabriel, and devote himself to philosophy and optics.
He initially gained infamy for positions that defied the Jewish law, with highly critical positions towards the Talmud and other sacred texts. In general, Judaism is quite tolerant with atypical representations of God; nonetheless, Spinoza believed that God was Nature/Universe, a thought that definitely outgrows any traditional semblance of what God is. In the summer of 1656, he was issued the writ of cherem (Hebrew:חרם) , (similar to excommunication)[1] from the Jewish community, for the apostasy of how he conceived God. The terms of his cherem were quite severe (see Kasher and Biderman): it was never revoked. Following his excommunication, he adopted the first name Benedictus, the Latin equivalent of his given name, Baruch; they both mean "blessed". In his native Amsterdam he was also known as Bento de Spinoza, which was the informal form of his name.
After his excommunication, it is purported that Spinoza lived and worked in the school of Franciscus van den Enden, who taught him Latin in his youth and may have introduced him to modern philosophy, although Spinoza never mentions Van den Enden anywhere in his books or letters. Van den Enden was a Cartesian and atheist who was forbidden by the city government to propagate his doctrines publicly. Spinoza, having dedicated himself completely to philosophy after 1656, fervently desired to change the world through establishing a clandestine philosophical sect. Because of public censure this was only eventually realized after his death through the dedicated intercession of his friends.
During this period Spinoza also became acquainted with several Collegiants, members of a non-dogmatic and interdenominational sect with tendencies towards rationalism and Arianism. Spinoza also corresponded with Peter Serrarius, a radical Protestant merchant. Serrarius is believed to have been a patron of Spinoza at some point. By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza's name became more widely known, and eventually Gottfried Leibniz and Henry Oldenburg paid him visits. He corresponded with the latter for the rest of his life. Spinoza's first publication was his Tractatus de intellectus emendatione. From December 1664 to June 1665, Spinoza engaged in correspondence with Blyenbergh, an amateur Calvinist theologian, who questioned Spinoza on the definition of evil. Later in 1665, he notified Oldenburg that he had started to work on a new book, the Theologico-Political Treatise, published in 1670. It should be noted that Leibniz disagreed harshly with Spinoza in Leibniz's own published Refutation of Spinoza.
When the public reactions to the anonymously published Theologico-Political Treatise were extremely unfavourable to his brand of Cartesianism, Spinoza was compelled to abstain from publishing more of his works. Wary and independent, he wore a signet ring engraved with his initials, a rose and the word "caute" (Latin for caution). The Ethics and all other works, apart from the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and the Theologico-Political Treatise, were published after his death in the Opera Postuma edited by his friends in secrecy to avoid confiscation and destruction of manuscripts.
Spinoza relocated form Amsterdam to Rijnsburg (near Leiden) around 1661 and later lived in Voorburg and The Hague respectively. He earned a comfortable living from lens-grinding. While the lens-grinding aspect of Spinoza's work is uncontested, the type of lenses he made is in question. Many have said he produced excellent magnifying glasses, and some historians credit him with being an optician (in the sense of making lenses for eyeglasses). He was also supported by small, but regular, donations from close friends. He died in 1677 while still working on a political thesis. His premature death was due to a lung illness, possibly silicosis, the result of breathing in glass dust from the lenses he ground. Only a year earlier, Spinoza had met with Leibniz at The Hague for a discussion of his principal philosophical work, Ethics, which had been completed in 1676 (Lucas, 1960). Spinoza never married, nor did he father any children. Overview of his philosophy: Spinoza's system imparted order and unity to the tradition of radical thought, offering powerful weapons for prevailing against "received authority." As a youth he first subscribed to Descartes's dualistic belief that body and mind are two separate substances, but later changed his view and asserted that they were not separate, being a single identity. He contended that everything that exists in Nature/Universe is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza argued that God and Nature were two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning "to stand beneath" rather than "matter") that underlies the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect are only understood in part. That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do. The argument for the single substance runs as follows:
Substance exists and cannot be dependent on anything else for its existence. No two substances can share the same nature or attribute. Proof: Two distinct substances can be differentiated either by some difference in their natures or by the some difference in one of their alterable states of being. If they have different natures, then the original proposition is granted and the proof is complete. If, however, they are distinguished only by their states of being, then, considering the substances in themselves, there is no difference between the substances and they are identical. "That is, there cannot be several such substances but only one." [2] A substance can only be caused by something similar to itself (something that shares its attribute). Substance cannot be caused. Proof: Something can only be caused by something which is similar to itself, in other words something that shares its attribute. But according to premise 2, no two substances can share an attribute. Therefore substance cannot be caused. Substance is infinite. Proof: If substance were not infinite, it would be finite and limited by something. But to be limited by something is to be dependent on it. However, substance cannot be dependent on anything else (premise 1), therefore substance is infinite. Conclusion: There can only be one substance. Proof: If there were two infinite substances, they would limit each other. But this would act as a restraint, and they would be dependent on each other. But they cannot be dependent on each other (premise 1), therefore there cannot be two substances. Spinoza contended that "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") was a being of infinitely many attributes, of which extension and thought were two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat the physical and mental worlds as two different, parallel "subworlds" that neither overlap nor interact. This formulation is a historically significant panpsychist solution to the mind-body problem known as neutral monism. The consequences of Spinoza's system also envisage a God that does not rule over the universe by providence, but a God which itself is part of the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Thus, God is the natural world and has no personality.
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, there is no free will.
Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism in as much as both philosophies sought to fulfil a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness (or eudaimonia, for the Stoics). However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can be displaced or overcome only by a stronger emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held that knowledge of true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key ideas of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.
Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are:
The natural world is infinite. Good and evil are definitions of Humans not nature. Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine. All rights are derived from the State. Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational consideration of the benefit as well as the animals' status in nature. Ethical philosophy: Encapsulated at the start in his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding (Tractatus de intellectus emendatione) is the core of Spinoza's ethical philosophy, what he held to be the true and final good. Spinoza held a relativist's position, that nothing is intrinsically good or bad, except to the extent that it is subjectively perceived to be by the individual. Things are only good or evil in respect that humanity sees it desirable to apply these conceptions to matters. Instead, Spinoza believes in his deterministic universe that, "All things in nature proceed from certain necessity and with the utmost perfection". Therefore, no things happen by chance in Spinoza's world, and reason does not work in terms of contingency. In the universe anything that happens comes from the essential nature of objects, or of God/Nature. Perfection therefore abounds according to Spinoza. If circumstances are seen as unfortunate it is only because of our inadequate conception of reality. While elements of the chain of cause and effect are not beyond the understanding of human reason, our grasp of the infinitely complex whole is limited because of the limits of science to empirically take account of the whole sequence. Spinoza also asserted that sense perception - while the basis of all ideas - leads only to what is false, because we are ignorant of the causes that determine our desires and actions. His concept of "conatus" - man's natural inclination to strive toward preserving essential being, and assertion that virtue/human power is defined by our success in this preservation of being by the guidance of reason is his central ethical doctrine; the highest virtue being the intellectual love or knowledge of God/Nature/Universe. In the final part of the "Ethics" his concern with the meaning of "true blessedness" and his unique approach and explanation of how emotions must be detached from external cause in order to master them is distinctive and presages 20th c. psychological techniques. His concept of three types of knowledge - opinion, reason, intuitive - and assertion that intuitive knowledge provides the greatest satisfaction of mind, leads to his proposition that the more we are conscious of ourselves and Nature/Universe, the more perfect and blessed we are (in reality) and that only intuitive knowledge is eternal. His unique contribution to understanding the workings of mind is extraordinary, even during this time of radical philosophical developments, in that his views provide a bridge between religions' mystical past and psychology of the present day. The pantheism controversy (Pantheismusstreit): 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Lessing was thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called an atheist. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of transcendent reality would lead to antinomies in thought.
The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to Materialism, Atheism, and Deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:
the unity of all that exists; the regularity of all that happens; and the identity of spirit and nature. Spinoza's "God or Nature" provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical First Cause or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Modern relevance: Late twentieth century Europe has demonstrated a greater philosophical interest in Spinoza, often from a left-wing or Marxist perspective. Notable philosophers Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar and the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí have each written books on Spinoza. Deleuze's doctoral thesis, published in 1968, refers to him as "the prince of philosophers". (Deleuze, 1968). Other philosophers heavily influenced by Spinoza include Constantin Brunner and John David Garcia. Stuart Hampshire wrote a major English language study of Spinoza, though H. H. Joachim's work is equally valuable. Unlike most philosophers, Spinoza and his work were highly regarded by Nietzsche.
Prominent Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein evoked Spinoza with the title (suggested to him by G. E. Moore) of the English translation of his first definitive philosophical work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an allusion to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein deliberately borrowed the expression sub specie aeternitatis from Spinoza (Notebooks, 1914-16, p. 83). The structure of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus does have certain structural affinities with Spinoza's Ethics (though, admittedly, not with the latter's own Tractatus), in erecting complex philosophical arguments starting from basic logical assertions and principles. Furthermore, in propositions 6.4311 and 6.45 he alludes to a Spinozian understanding of eternity and interpretation of the religious concept of eternal life: stating that "If by eternity is understood not eternal temporal duration, but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present." (6.4311) "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole." (6.45) Wittgenstein's interpretation of religious language, in both his early and later career, may be said to bear a family resemblance to Spinoza's pantheism.
Spinoza has had influence beyond the confines of philosophy. The nineteenth century novellist, George Eliot, produced her own translation of the Ethics, the first known English translation thereof. The twentieth century novellist, W. Somerset Maugham, alluded to one of Spinoza's central concepts with the title of his novel, Of Human Bondage. Albert Einstein named Spinoza as the philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view (Weltanschauung). Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. In 1929, Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."[1] Spinoza's pantheism has also influenced the environmental theory. Arne Næss, the father of the deep ecology movement, acknowledged Spinoza as an important inspiration. Moreover, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, was greatly influenced by Spinoza's world view. In many poems and short stories, he makes constant allusion to the philosopher's work, not as a partisan of his doctrines, but merely in order to use these for aesthetical purposes. He has done it many times with all the philosophers whose work he admired.
Spinoza is an important historical figure in the Netherlands, where his portrait was featured prominently on the Dutch 1000-guilder banknote, legal tender until the euro was introduced in 2002. The highest and most prestigious scientific award of the Netherlands is named the Spinozapremie (Spinoza grant).
Spinoza's works and personality are currently featured in the book The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World, by Matthew Stewart.
