Spinoza, Baruch / Benedict

(1632-77)

   Together with Descartes and Leibniz, Spinoza was one of the great rationalists of the early-modern period. A grinder of lenses by profession, he was ethnically Jewish, but was expelled from his synagogue in Amsterdam for heresy (he was a pantheist: he believed that there was only one substance, which he said could equally be called 'God' or 'nature'; all other things were only modifications of this). One of his main works was the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, the stated aim of which was to discover 'the life of blessedness for man', which necessitated a search for that 'by whose discovery and acquisition I might be put in possession of a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity'. Spinoza called this 'the intellectual love of God', saying that it consisted in a clear understanding of human nature, the universe and the joy essential to humans, which came through realising that we were all just cogs in a deterministic machine. Spinoza's magnum opus, Ethics demonstrated in a geometrical manner, was published immediately after his premature death aged forty-five, and is a system of definitions, axioms and theorems proved in the manner of Euclid. Spinoza agreed with Descartes that there were only two attributes of which we had any knowledge: extension and thought. Whereas Descartes thought that these two attributes were incompatible, Spinoza thought that both of these were possessed by the one substance (God/nature); in other words, God/nature was both an infinite thinking thing and an infinite extended thing (and an infinite number of other things beyond our ken). This implies not only that things we normally think of as unextended, such as God, are actually physical, but also that things we usually think of as unthinking, such as rocks, are actually conscious, since they are but modes of the one substance. Spinoza also translated the Old Testament into Dutch, and his writings on the Old Testament in his Tractatus Theologico-politicus contributed to the rise of the critical-historical approach. Spinoza also thought that religions such as Judaism and Christianity were not primarily repositories of theological truths, but rather disguised commands about how one should live.

   See Descartes, René; Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm; pantheism; rationalism

   Further reading: Hampshire 1988 and 2005; Spinoza 1925-87, 1985- and 1994