Baruch Spinoza

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) ranks as a major thinker in the rationalist tradition, and his "Ethics" is a classic of Western philosophy. In his writings the crucial issues of metaphysics are exemplified more clearly than in any thinker since Plato.

Baruch, or Benedict, Spinoza was born on Nov. 24, 1632, in Amsterdam, where his family had settled after fleeing religious persecution in Portugal. His grandfather, Abraham, was the acknowledged leader of the Jewish community, and his father was a successful merchant and active in civic affairs. Michael Spinoza had three children, of whom the future philosopher was the only son. Spinoza's mother died when he was 6, and his father and one sister died by the time he was in his early 20s. Little is precisely known about his early education except that biblical and Talmudic texts were studied at the synagogue school and that the young Spinoza showed a facility for languages and eventually mastered Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and German. In 1656 Spinoza was expelled by his congregation on charges of atheism. The edict asked for God to curse him and warned "that none may speak with him by word of mouth, nor by writing, nor show any favor to him, nor be under one roof with him." The philosopher responded with calm detachment and Christianized his name to Benedict.

Teacher and Lens Grinder

For the next 4 years Spinoza worked as a teacher in a private academy in Amsterdam run by Francis van den Ende, a former Jesuit, a doctor, and a political activist. His future interests in mathematics, physics, and politics supposedly stem from this period. From 1660 to 1663 he lived near Leiden among a free religious sect who called themselves Collegiants, and there he wrote Principles of Cartesianism, Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-being, and the first book of Ethics.

Spinoza then moved to a suburb of The Hague, where he worked as a lens grinder. The Ethics was completed between 1670 and 1675. In 1670 he anonymously published his Theological-Political Treatise. In addition to these not very extensive writings, Spinoza conducted a large correspondence with various scientists and philosophers. Two of the most important were Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the British Royal Society, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who visited him in 1676. Three years previously Spinoza had declined a professorship at the University of Heidelberg in order to preserve his "freedom of philosophizing." The same intellectual integrity is seen also in a letter to a former student who accused Spinoza of intellectual presumption. While acknowledging that he had not written the best philosophy, he stated "I do know that I think the true one." Spinoza died in The Hague on Feb. 20, 1677, of consumption aggravated by inhaling dust while polishing lenses.

Origins of Rationalism

Rationalism is the name ascribed to a movement of thought that originated in the 17th century, and it is usually associated with the names of René Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. The point of departure for all rationalists is subjectivity: a discovery of the philosophic implications of the person with a heightened sense of his uniqueness, his inviolability, and, above all, the power of knowledge. Descartes began his career as a highly original mathematical physicist. He generalized from his conception of the method of mathematical reasoning and believed that its proper application might guarantee local certitude in all areas of knowledge. The justification of his theory of reasoning led Descartes to several metaphysical commitments concerning the nature of reality.

In simplest terms, Descartes maintained that God was a supreme rationalist who had created an orderly universe that could be known by following the clear and distinct ideas of reason. In order to avoid the determinist and irreligious implications of such a conception of the universe, Descartes separated the mind as a free spiritual power from the physical world of determined mechanical relations. With this step a set of contradictory dualisms between subject and object, thought and extension, spirit and nature, God and world, and freedom and necessity were bequeathed to philosophy. The only work that Spinoza published under his own name was René Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (1663), and although the book was mainly expository, he could not forbear pointing out that Descartes's errors resulted from his inability to follow out the metaphysical implications of the logic of rationalism, especially with respect to the notion of substance.

Spinoza's Ethics

Spinoza's Ethics consists of five books. Oddly enough, the first is about God and the meaning of substance. The second book deals with the mind and knowledge. The third, fourth, and fifth books seem concerned with topics usually associated with ethical discussions: the passions, human enslavement to the emotions, and finally human freedom by virtue of intellect. Hence the central concern of the treatise is to move from a consideration of God to the realization of human freedom by an analysis of knowledge and passion and their conflict. Thus, for Spinoza, an ethic that studies the purpose of life is simultaneously a metaphysic, a theory of knowledge, and a psychology of human nature.

This is made clearer if one is familiar with an earlier and unpublished work, which he called On the Improvement of the Understanding. In a highly personal manner Spinoza began by saying that he resolved to seek true happiness and joy "after experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile." Men everywhere esteem "riches, fame, and the pleasures of sense," but their pursuit seems to diminish rather than to enhance men's lives through frustration or overindulgence. The only remedy for the wretchedness of life is to improve or literally "cure" the mind. Man's attitude toward reality is equal to his sense of what is true and important. In a striking passage Spinoza wrote: "All these evils seem to have arisen from the fact that happiness or unhappiness is made wholly to depend on the quality of the object which we love. When a thing is not loved, no quarrels will arise concerning it - no sadness will be felt if it perishes - no envy if it is possessed by another - no fear, no hatred, in short no disturbances of the mind."

Nature of Reality

Because of man's "mixed perceptions" and confused knowledge, he desires perishable objects. To see reality clearly, man would need an exact knowledge of himself and of general nature in order to understand the extent to which they can be modified in the search for lasting happiness. This can be accomplished only by a more and more inclusive understanding of reality. Imagine, Spinoza wrote to a correspondent, a parasite living in the bloodstream being asked to describe its environment. From its perspective each drop of blood would seem to be separate. But, in truth, the action of each independent drop can be understood only as a determined part of a larger system. And this system, in turn, is a small part of a larger whole. The ultimate aim of philosophic knowledge is what Spinoza called a "synoptic intuition" of all reality as a deductive system. And this is why the Ethics begins with a consideration of God as substance. In Spinoza's view the task is not so much to explain God as to understand what it means to be a man.

The Ethics is subtitled More Geometrics, and its geometrical method, using axioms, postulates, and definitions to prove its propositions, relates to the content as well as to the technique of exposition. As a rationalist, Spinoza aimed at nothing less than total certitude, and the clearest way was to utilize deductive reasoning. But the content of the system is such that the truth of each proposition depends, in part, on its necessary connection with the others.

The first book of the Ethics draws out the implications of one of the central assumptions of the Western metaphysical tradition: that the intrinsic order of nature is an effect of an ordering mind, God. The startling conclusion that Spinoza draws is that the words nature, substance, and God are interchangeable. There can be only one such being, who is self-caused and of which everything else is an effect. An effect manifests only what it has received from its cause, and the causal principle can only communicate what it is. With these axioms Spinoza argued monism, or the oneness of reality, in proposition after proposition; and the effect that, if God is causa sui and first cause (and if there is no such cause, then there is no reality), such an entity must be understood as an "absolutely infinite being." In logic, at least, there cannot be an infinite being and something else. Thus all finite existence must be rooted in a necessary existent, and there is one system of nature in which all limited things begin or cease inevitably according to causal sequences and interdependencies. Spinoza adopted a scholastic distinction to express the only conceivable differences that can be predicated of infinite being: Natura Naturans is nature as active or is God as the free cause that brings all things to pass according to necessary principles, and Natura Naturata is nature as passive or existent at any one moment.

Nature and Origin of the Mind

Spinoza's argument is conducted a priori, or without appeal to experience, and its truth or falsity rests on what the concept of substance entails logically. Accordingly, God exists by definition, or negatively one must posit a reason for the nonexistence of such a being and again only God would suffice. For him, reason is identical with cause, and the only legitimate distinctions that one can impute to the reason of the universe is to logically separate that which causes and that which is caused.

The second book of Ethics examines the nature and origin of the mind. An infinite substance possesses infinite attributes, but the mind perceives only two: thought and extension. Yet the relation between mind and matter is not dualistic but one of identity, for "thinking substance and extended substance is one and the same substance comprehended now under this and now under that attribute." To understand this doctrine, sometimes referred to as "psychophysical parallelism," the mind must overcome its reliance on sense knowledge ("opinion") and even advance beyond scientific understanding ("adequate ideas") of cause-and-effect relations to a synoptic vision ("intuition") of the complete system of reality. In this perspective the mind of man is an individually existing modification of infinite intelligence, the body is the object of that idea, and the two are like different sides of a coin.

With this understanding of man's place in nature, Spinoza took up the questions of moral life. Action occurs when an individual is the cause of his own conduct, and a passion when he is the partial cause. Virtue is the power of knowing how to act in accord with nature, whereas men suffer in proportion to the number of inadequate ideas that they have.

The essence of man is the struggle "to preserve in being." Adequate ideas replace passions, rational self-control supplants the impotence of desires. The issue is life itself: whether one is ensnared in "human bondage" as a prey to the whims of desire or external persons or objects, or one achieves the freedom that Spinoza calls "blessedness" and that is virtue's own reward. He was enough of a psychologist to see that ultimately passions can be overcome only by stronger passions. Thus in cultivating a knowledge and intellectual love of God man comes to know himself and to experience a freedom from external restraint.

Further Reading

For studies of Spinoza consult the following works: F. Pollock, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (1880); E. Caird, Spinoza (1902); H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza (1934); and S. Hampshire, Spinoza (1956).

(1632-77) Dutch philosopher and theologian. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, of Spanish-Portuguese-Jewish origin. His family had taken refuge there to escape persecution in Spain. His thirst for knowledge led him to study under Francis van den Enden, a freethinker. By 1656 his views were so unorthodox that he was accused of atheism and banned from the synagogue. He earned his living by grinding lenses, which put him in touch with developments in optics, and hence with the advances in mathematics of the time. Meanwhile he continued his reflections and wrote many philosophical works, especially on ethics.

In the Tractatus Theologico-Philosophicus of 1670, and the unfinished Tractatus Politicus, he advocated freedom of thought, religious thought in particular. Like Hobbes, he believed that the state came into being to prevent anarchy. But unlike Hobbes he did not believe autocracy was the solution. He passionately believed in democracy, in the right to disagree and hold contrary opinions short of anarchy. The ultimate objective was wisdom, which, for Spinoza was reasoned judgement or rational behaviour. It was this that the state was established to promote.

— Cyril Barrett

For more information on Benedict de Spinoza, visit Britannica.com.

Philosopher (1632-1677). Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a Marrano family from Portugal that had fled to Holland and returned to Judaism. As a child, he received a formal Jewish education in the Ets Ḥayyim Talmud Torah. Upon completion of his studies, he began to delve deeply into the works of the medieval Jewish philosophers, such as Gersonides (Levi Ben Gershom) and Maimonides, both of whom profoundly influenced his views and philosophic system.

From the age of 22, Spinoza began to draw closer to the Christian circles in the city and to express an interest in the general sciences. His "atheistical" and heretical views aroused concern both in the Jewish community and in Amsterdam's Calvinist circles, leading to his Excommunication by the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656. Following this, he left Amsterdam and spent most of the rest of his life in The Hague, earning his livelihood by polishing lenses for reading glasses.

Spinoza's philosophic thought is complex and difficult, combining metaphysics, ethics, psychology, anthropology, political thought, and the philosophy of religion. The religious base is one of its major hubs, as Spinoza offers man an alternative to the established religions.

His first great work was the Theologico-PoliticaI Treatise (1670), in which he criticized the major tenets of religion, protested against the subjugation of the state to religion, and preached freedom of the spirit and thought. He also expounded his views on the Bible, which paved the way for subsequent Bible criticism. The book shook the foundations of traditional theology and caused a major storm, after which, Spinoza no longer dared to put his ideas into print and only lectured on them before his faithful disciples.

His most important work, the Ethics, was published after his death. In it he developed his pantheistic theory, in which he identifies nature with God, as expressed in his famous saying, "Deus sive natura" ("God or nature"). Its major thesis is the idea of the unity and necessity of all reality, disavowing the exercise of Divine will to order the universe and arguing instead that all things follow naturally and changelessly, as things given, from the very existence of God as such.. When Spinoza used the term "nature," he was not only referring to the world or to all of physical nature, but to everything that exists. Biblical monotheism appears in Spinoza as if in the highest degree of purity, having been purified of all the historic additions of worship and commandment. In this sense, there is a clear link between his thought and the history of Jewish thought.

Spinoza also identified, clearly and profoundly, the new political reality in Europe, and discussed its significance for the fate of the Jewish people. As a result, he was critical of the Jewish heritage, both from a philosophical and a modernizing viewpoint. His major conclusion was that the laws of the Halakhah were not in keeping with the new culture, which meant that a change in the status of religion in the life of the individual and the state was required. Because of his views, he was considered a heretic even after his death and his teachings were proscribed by both Christians and Jews. Only at the end of the 18th century did philosophers begin to study his ideas. Since then his writings have become an inseparable part of modern philosophy.

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Spinoza, Baruch (1632-77). In France the great Judaeo-Cartesian philosopher was known largely from the article in Bayle's Dictionnaire and an essay by Boulainviller. For Cartesian rationalists like himself (e.g. Fénelon), Spinoza's logic was irreligious and dangerous. Refuted both by less radical free-thinkers and Christian apologists, he was commonly seen by 18th-c. readers as a subversive critic of the Bible (in the Tractatus theologico-philosophicus) and a materialistic atheist denying free will (in the Ethics). Condillac criticized him as a system-builder. Voltaire in later works was comparatively impartial, but until the 19th c. few were sympathetic and knowledgeable except Diderot.

[Christopher Betts]

Spinoza, Benedictus de (Baruch Despinoza), (Amsterdam, 1632-77, The Hague), a philosopher of Jewish descent, was expelled from the Synagogue in 1656. In 1676 he rejected an invitation to teach philosophy at Heidelberg University, preferring to remain in obscurity. He made his living by grinding and polishing lenses. Spinoza's writings are in Latin, and the anonymously published Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) was the only one of his works to appear in his lifetime. Like his posthumous works, it was placed on the Roman Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum. His Ethics, for which he is most esteemed (Ethica ordine geometrica demonstrata), appeared in five parts in 1677 shortly after his death. In spite of the dryness of the Euclidean method, they express an attitude of love, kindness, and tolerance for his fellow-men. The ethical views, however, have not been specially influential in German literature, which has been attracted more by Spinoza's monistic view of God and Nature as one substance, existing in various modes.

The impact of Spinoza outside philosophical circles was first felt in Germany in the second half of the 18th c. In the time of the Sturm und Drang he came to be regarded as a kind of godfather to vague pantheistic ideas and sentiments. Largely at second hand he exercised considerable influence on the young Goethe and later on the writers of the Romantic movement (see Romantik), who saw God in Nature and felt that Spinoza offered them a philosophical justification for doing so. Lessing showed a genuine interest in the philosophy of Spinoza and in a conversation with F. H. Jacobi in 1780 declared, ‘Es gibt keine Philosophie als die Philosophie des Spinoza’. Spinoza is the subject of novels by B. Auerbach and by E. G. Kolbenheyer.

Spinoza, Benedictus de (1632-77) Dutch Jewish rationalist. Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza was born in Amsterdam into a distinguished Jewish family, exiled from Spain and living in the relative religious freedom of the Netherlands. He attended the Jewish school, and became learned in the work of Jewish and Arabic theologians; one of his teachers was the Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, a distinguished liberal figure of the time. However, contact with dissident Christian movements, and with the scientific and philosophical thought of Descartes, led Spinoza to distance himself from orthodox life, and in 1656 he was deemed a heretic, cast out of the synagogue, and cursed with the comprehensive ‘anathema where with Joshua anathematized Jericho’, of which one clause alone calls for him to be cursed with all the curses of the firmament.

For a short time Spinoza was exiled from Amsterdam, but he returned and began a life supporting himself by grinding lenses and teaching. During this period he wrote the Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well Being (written in Latin but surviving in Dutch, trs. 1883). In 1660 he moved to the country, and began composing the Renati Descartes Principiorum Philosophiae (1663, trs. as The Principles of Descartes' Philosophy, 1905), a geometrically structured exposition of the philosophical system of Descartes. This was published in 1663. Now living at Voorburg, Spinoza became acquainted with Jan de Witt, the principal focus of opposition to the House of Orange. This led in 1670 to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (trs. as Political Treatise, 1883), a work whose advocacy of tolerance and peace caused it to be condemned by the Reformed Church in 1673, and banned the following year. At this time Spinoza moved to the Hague, where he lived with great frugality on a small pension, working on the Ethics and a grammar of Hebrew. In 1672 Spinoza undertook a small diplomatic mission to the invading French army, but on his return was under some suspicion as a spy, and narrowly escaped being killed by the mob, as de Witt had been before him. By now a recognized figure, he refused offers of various posts, and lived out his remaining years in the same frugal state, writing and corresponding. He abandoned his original intention of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would simply generate controversy and rancour. Spinoza's final publication was the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, published in the year of his death (trs. as Treatise on the Improvement of the Intellect, 1883). He died of phthisis, possibly brought on by his trade as a lens-grinder. There remain numerous testimonies to his simplicity, virtue, charm, and courage.

The central themes of the Ethics are developed in the four parts of the book. These concern first God, then the nature and origin of the mind, the origin and nature of the emotions, and human servitude and the strength of the emotions. The stage is set by acceptance of a basic rationalist presumption, that the nature of the world is transparent to the intellect, so that relations of dependence amongst ideas reflect (or are perhaps identical with) relations of dependence amongst events and states in nature. Substance being conceived as that which is self-dependent, there follows the ontological argument for the existence of God as the one necessary being, but not distinct from the world (for there is only one substance: any other substance would owe its existence to God, and therefore not be self-dependent). Rather God is immanent in the world, and individual things are themselves modes or modifications of God: the one reality is ‘God or nature’, deus sive natura. This God is naturally rather removed from the God of simple religious faith, and while Spinoza's crystalline remark that ‘whoever loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return’ has subsequently spoken to many thinkers, in his own time the accusation of atheism constantly hung over him.

Spinoza's monism extends to mind and matter: each is a different characteristic, or way of rationally appreciating the essence of the same one eternal reality. Like Descartes, Spinoza believed that it is the intellect rather than the senses that discloses the essential nature of things. A complete and adequate idea of God shows that he has two attributes: he can be conceived under the heading of extension, or under that of thought. In other words God, or reality, can be conceived in these two incommensurable ways, and each discloses an attribute or part of his essence (a problem in interpreting Spinoza is that God is supposed to have infinitely many attributes, although only these two are found). Understanding aims to increase our knowledge of God (or the universe) by discovering the way in which it makes up a closed system, self-sufficient and completely unified, in which everything that happens is necessary, and nothing could be otherwise than it is.

Against this metaphysical background Spinoza clearly faces trouble making sense of the nature of the single self, and human activity, and these form the subject of the latter two books of the Ethics. For Spinoza, thinking is a consciousness of the body. The same mode is conceived under the attribute of extension and under that of thought, so that body and mind are not related causally, but as parallel expressions of the one reality. In this God-intoxicated system (as it was called by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hardenberg), error and evil need explanation, and in each case Spinoza identifies them with privation. Error is the lack of adequate ideas, and evils are merely absences or privations, that ‘express no essence’. (This approach to the problem of evil later received especial critical attention from Hume.) The senses provide only modifications of our body but no knowledge, and most of our notions are only confused and lacking the marks of final adequacy. These are found in Spinoza's version of Descartes's clear and distinct ideas: conceptions of the formal essence of God that are inextricably joined to their own proof. Like the theorems of mathematics, they cannot be understood without being seen to be true.

In such a rigid and deterministic world there may seem to be no room for human free will. But Spinoza finds its place by abstracting from the dimension of time. Freedom becomes the capacity to see the world under the heading of eternity, and without bondage to emotions and desires. These themselves are the result of ignorance of the causes whereby we are determined. Activity and agency are the result of adequate cognition. In other words, it stops being true that I am controlled by things, and starts being true that I control them, in so far as in my thoughts the course of events is displayed as it then turns out. (The equation of freedom with this unity of reason and reality played a major role in the subsequent philosophy of Kant.) To advance towards this adequacy, emotions must be understood, and the aim of Spinoza's subtle attempt to provide a ‘geometry of the emotions’ is to show that most of what drives us is unknown to us, but that when we understand our motivations we gain control over them and emend or improve them (this idea has been hailed as the fundamental truth on which psychoanalysis depends). In the end, true religion, true science, and true philosophy are identical, and each consists in the intellectual love of God.

In his political writings Spinoza draws out the implications of his system for the theory of government. It is the business of the state not to attempt to put limits on the exercise of reason, but to provide the conditions in which it may flourish: what is necessary is a constitutional democracy providing a forum for reason and freedom of opinion within a framework of law.

Spinoza's method and system went largely unappreciated during the subsequent ascendancy of empiricist and Enlightenment ideals, and the decline of the ontological argument at the hands of Hume and Kant. He was rediscovered by the German idealists, and indeed absolute idealism is well seen as simply adding an element of time, or a capacity for dynamic self-realization, to the attributes of Spinoza's one God, whose essence is equally that of the spatially extended world, and that of reason itself.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedictus de Spinoza; 1632–1677), Dutch philosopher. Baruch Spinoza's radical metaphysical, theological, moral and political ideas made him one of the most vilified thinkers of his day. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam to a Portuguese-Jewish family. He was raised and educated within the city's community of Sephardic Jews, many of whom had once been forced converts (conversos) to Christianity in Spain and Portugal. At the age of twenty-three, however, Spinoza, now a young businessman, was expelled from the congregation. The writ of cherem, or ban, the most vitriolic ever issued by the community's leaders, speaks only of his "abominable heresies and monstrous deeds," and the specific reasons for his expulsion remain vague. It is fairly certain, however, that among the offenses for which Spinoza was punished were his ideas on God, Jewish law, and immortality.

Spinoza's earliest philosophical writings, dating from the late 1650s and early 1660s, include the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and the aborted Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. He first came to public attention with the publication of a critical exposition of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy (1663). It was the anonymously published Theological-Political Treatise of 1670, however, that brought him great notoriety. The reaction to this stunningly bold work of Bible criticism and political thought was immediate and harsh; it was banned by numerous political and religious authorities, and its author was excoriated as a blaspheming atheist. As a result of the outcry, Spinoza decided not to publish his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics; it did not appear in print until after his death, together with other unpublished writings, including A Compendium of Hebrew Grammar, some correspondence, and the never-completed Political Treatise.

In the Ethics Spinoza rejects the traditional providential God of the Jewish and Christian religions. The notion of a benevolent, wise, purposive, judging God is, he insists, an anthropomorphic fiction, one that gives rise only to superstition and irrational passions. God, according to Spinoza, is nothing but the active, generative aspects of nature. In an infamous phrase, Spinoza refers to Deus sive Natura (God, or Nature), and identifies it with the substance, essential attributes, and causal principles of the universe. All beings are "in" God, but only in the sense that Nature is all-encompassing, and nothing stands outside Nature's laws. Everything happens in Nature with a deterministic necessity. Even human beings, often (he alleges) regarded as autonomous creatures whose freedom puts them outside Nature's dominion, are a part of Nature and thus subject to its rigorous determinism. Some measure of freedom or "activity" is obtainable for human beings but only insofar as they can achieve an intellectual understanding of Nature and themselves and thereby exercise control over their passions. Spinoza adopts a Stoic conception of human well-being. Happiness is the result of virtue and consists in success in the pursuit of knowledge and self-mastery. Moreover, the rewards of virtue are to be found in this life. While human beings do "participate" in eternity, particularly through the knowledge they acquire, there is no personal immortality. Spinoza's metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy reveal a variety of influences, especially Descartes, medieval Jewish philosophy, and ancient sources. However, there can be no denying the originality of his thought.

In the Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza turns to a critique of organized religion and an investigation into the status, history, and interpretation of the Bible. He begins with a deflationary account of prophecy (the prophets, he insists, were simply people with highly active imaginations) and a denial of the possibility of miracles (since Nature's laws admit of no exceptions). He insists, moreover, that Jewish ceremonial law was only of temporary validity (that is, during the Temple period) and is no longer binding on contemporary Jews. His most stunning theses, however, concern Scripture. Spinoza argues that the Bible is not literally of divine origin and that its first five books (the Pentateuch) are not the writings of Moses. Rather, Scripture as we now have it is simply a work of literature, a compilation of human writings passed down through generations and edited in the Second Temple period. Others before Spinoza had suggested that Moses was not the author of the entire Pentateuch, but no one had taken that claim to the extreme limit that Spinoza did, arguing for it with such boldness and learning and at such length. Nor had anyone before Spinoza been willing to draw from it the conclusions about the interpretation of Scripture that Spinoza drew. The meaning of Scripture is to be sought not by appeal to theological dogma or to demonstrated truth—after all, the authors of Scripture were neither theologians nor philosophers—but by a close examination of the texts themselves and by a historical investigation into the backgrounds and intentions of its authors. If there is a universal truth conveyed by Scripture, it is a simple moral principle: love God and your neighbor.

Spinoza's discussion of Scripture takes place in the broader political context of his argument for a liberal, tolerant secular state, one in which the freedom to philosophize is defended against attempts to make it conform to so-called religious truth. For it is the "excessive authority and egotism of preachers," he tells one of his correspondents, that most threatens the freedom "to say what we think." The key to diminishing the undue influence of the clergy, who justify their abuses by appealing to the holiness of a certain book as the Word of God, is to demonstrate the true nature of Scripture and its message and eliminate the "superstitious adornments" of popular religion. By naturalizing Scripture, Spinoza hopes to redirect the authority invested in it from the words on the page to its moral message; and by formulating what he takes to be the proper method of interpreting Scripture, he seeks to encourage his readers to examine it anew and find therein the doctrines of the true religion. Only then will people be able to delimit exactly what needs to be done to show proper respect for God and obtain blessedness.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Spinoza, Benedictus de. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton, 1984.

Secondary Sources

Allison, Henry. Benedict de Spinoza: An Introduction. Rev. ed. New Haven, 1987.

Garrett, Don, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge, U.K., and New York. 1999.

—STEVEN NADLER

(Baruch Spinoza)
(1632–77). Dutch philosopher, one of the last great metaphysical thinkers of the 'rationalist' period in philosophy. In his major work, The Ethics, he starts from supposedly self-evident truths and rigorously develops them through the use of reason and deductive argument. His commitment to the power of reason and to the view that man can gain knowledge of reality through the powers of the mind alone culminates in a profound vision of the world and of man's place within it.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam of Portuguese Jewish stock. He was educated initially in the Jewish school, but later received Latin lessons from a private tutor, Van Den Ende, who introduced him to the scientific and philosophical developments of the day. Spinoza's growing commitment to secular thought and philosophy brought him into conflict with the Jewish authorities, and in 1656 he was expelled from the synagogue for his 'heretical' views. His Hebrew name, Baruch, he abandoned for its Latin form, Benedictus. The remainder of his life was spent developing his philosophical system while earning a living from polishing and grinding lenses. His reputation as a heretic and atheist did not prevent him carrying on an extensive correspondence with other major thinkers, but only one of his works, the Theological–Political Treatise, was published (anonymously) during his lifetime. His other works — A Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-Being, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, The Ethics, and the unfinished Political Treatise — were collected and published by his friends shortly after his death from consumption.

Spinoza developed his theory of the mind partly in an attempt to solve the problems raised by Descartes' account of the mind and body as two fundamentally different substances. For Descartes the mind and body are independent and mutually exclusive systems, and it is well known that this strict dualistic theory made it extremely difficult to explain the apparent causal interaction between mental and physical items (see dualism).

Spinoza rejected Descartes' dualistic account and replaced it with a theory of 'substance monism'. This may be explained as follows. Substance is that which is self-dependent — needing nothing other than itself in order to exist. So far, both Descartes and Spinoza are in agreement. But where Descartes asserts that there are many such substances (including each finite mind and body), Spinoza argues that there can be only one being which has the character of substance, and this being is God or nature itself. All finite things, ourselves included, are dependent upon other things for existence. Only God — the being beside whom there is nothing else, for he is infinite — has the nature of substance. This being so, all finite things, in particular minds and bodies, are not substances but 'modifications' or 'modes', that is, beings that are manifestations or fragmented expressions of the one reality. Mental and physical items alike have no reality save that which they have as parts of substance.

God or nature (these are synonymous terms for Spinoza) may, however, be viewed in two ways. We may think of the one substance either as a thinking being, or as extended in space. For Descartes, thought and extension constitute the essence of mental and physical substances respectively. In contrast, Spinoza regards thought and extension as two ways of conceiving one and the same reality. He is committed not to mental and physical things but to things that may be conceived in two different ways. He claims that, whether we conceive of God in mental terms or in physical terms, we are thinking of just one being in either case. He then applies this 'conceptual dualism' to all items in the world. Every finite thing or 'mode' can be viewed in two ways, either as mental or as physical. Whatever there is, is fully explicable in either way. But, as in the case of God, there is only one thing that is being described.

When Spinoza came to speak of the human mind and body he said: 'Mind and body are one and the same individual conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.' This seems to amount to an identity claim — there is just one thing, which may be viewed and described either as a mind or as a body. This approach to the mind–body problem has some adherents today. Many accept that a human being can be described in two fundamental ways, attributing to him both psychological and physical properties, while also accepting that there is only one being — the human person — which is being so characterized.

With Spinoza's monistic theory, Descartes' problem — that of explaining causal interaction between disparate items — vanishes, for there are not two things at all; the mind and body do not interact, for one thing cannot interact with itself. Anything that occurs in the body can be explained in mental terms and anything that occurs in the mind may be explained and described physically. Spinoza would therefore be sympathetic to those materialist or physicalist philosophers who claim that mental states just are physical happenings in the brain. But they would be less happy with Spinoza's reverse claim — that any physical occurrence may be fully explained in mental terms.

Spinoza speaks of the mind as the 'idea' of the body. As such it is aware of the body and of the things that happen to it. When light rays hit the retina of the eye, for example, the physical process may be described in mental terms as an image or sensory idea. But Spinoza thought that such sense perceptions are invariably confused or 'inadequate', because we take them to be the true representations of external objects whereas in reality they are merely reflections of our own bodily processes. (See illusions; perceptions as unconscious influences; sensations.)

Spinoza claims that all finite things endeavour or strive to maintain themselves in being and to perfect their existence. Thus the body will try to avoid those things that are harmful to it and will pursue those things that it needs in order to survive. The mind too, in Spinoza's view, exhibits this endeavour (or conatus, as he calls it) in its attempt to resist ideas that are inadequate and confused and to grasp those that help it to understand itself, the body, and the external world. Spinoza thinks the mind will be aware that its sense perceptions are inadequate, for they will lack the clarity, distinctness, and self-evident character of all true ideas. This being so, the mind will naturally try to replace sense perceptions with more adequate ideas, through a process of reasoned reflection and the application of self-evident principles. Once this stage is reached the mind is active rather than passive: it pursues and grasps the truth through its innate power of understanding, rather than remaining at the mercy of arbitrary and confused images and sense impressions.

This process of replacing sense impressions with adequate conceptions can also be applied to the emotions. For Spinoza, emotions are merely confused and inadequate ideas which befuddle the mind and which, for the most part, make us extremely unhappy. He thinks that to the extent that we allow our emotions to rule us we are in a state of slavery or bondage: 'When a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.' Our emotions can be overcome by replacing the inadequate ideas on which they are grounded with a clear and distinct understanding of their causes. If emotions are confused ideas and if they arise from inadequate understanding, it seems to follow that increased knowledge will change them, and enable us to become free of their power over us. As Spinoza says: 'An emotion therefore becomes more under our control, and the mind is less passive in respect to it, in proportion as it is more known to us.' This account of active self-improvement through the analysis and clarification of ideas has led some commentators to greet Spinoza as an early precursor of Freudian psychoanalysis.

For Spinoza, the mastery of emotions, and the state of improved understanding achieved through the mind's reasoning powers, enables us to become more active and free. But the freedom which Spinoza grants us has seemed to some to be no freedom at all. When the mind understands things adequately it perceives them as necessary, and sees that they could not have been otherwise. Reason, Spinoza tells us, perceives things 'under a certain form of eternity', and we then see that nothing could have been different, because everything results from God, who himself is a necessary and eternal being.

Our freedom consists in recognizing the necessity of our nature, understanding ourselves as expressions and manifestations of God's power and laws, and as having no existence save that which he grants us. Viewed rightly, we see ourselves and all things as in a sense eternal, for we no longer judge things as contingent happenings in time, but as determined by immutable laws. This understanding, which Spinoza calls 'intuition', constitutes the mind's highest achievement and its complete fulfilment. Knowing itself and other things in this manner, the mind achieves a certain immortality, and with true contentment realizes that death, which is a mere temporal event, cannot destroy it.

Spinoza thus ends his Ethics on a note of almost religious fervour which has encouraged some in the view that he was a mystic. Although his philosophy has influenced many, and has been hailed by idealists, materialists, atheists, and theists alike, his vision is perhaps most pertinent today to all those who wish to find a place for spiritual fulfilment in a world governed by natural laws.

A translation by

R. H. M. Elwes, Basic Works, was published in two volumes in New York in 1955, and The Correspondence of Spinoza, trans. A. Wolf, appeared also in New York in 1966

.

(Published 1987)

— Joanna North

Bibliography
• Hampshire, S. (1951). Spinoza.
• Scruton, R. (1986). Spinoza.

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