Post #3 - Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. He was the son of a successful Portuguese Jewish merchant and was educated in his congregation’s academy, the Talmud Torah School. When his father died during the wars with England and France he took over his father’s business but then quickly passed the responsibility to his brother and focused on philosophy. Spinoza then lived and worked in the school of Franciscus van den Enden, the Cartesian atheist who was forbidden to propagate his doctrines publicly. Spinoza became known in the Jewish community for his controversial positions towards the Talmud and other religious texts. He was excommunicated from the Jewish community in 1656 and changed his name to Benedictus, the Latin equivalent to his given name meaning “blessed.” Spinoza made a comfortable living as a lens-grinder and wrote controversial books like Theological-Political Treatise, which was published anonymously in 1670. This book argued that the stability and security of society is determined by its freedom to philosophies. It also explains how the clergy use fear and superstition to maintain power over the common people. This book received lots of criticism, so Spinoza decided not to publish his Ethics book which he completed in 1675 until after his death.

Reading over Spinoza’s Ethics reminded me of my Freshman Geometry class where we had to work on proofs to specific formulas the whole time. Spinoza wrote his Ethics based on a deductive method derived from Euclidean geometry. He claimed that the validity of ethical ideas could be demonstrated by mathematical arguments and proofs. Spinoza first makes several propositions, which he then follows with definitions of all the important terms and then a logical proof of each proposition. He believes that ethics is a rational system which then corresponds with the rational nature of our universe.

Spinoza is a pantheistic philosopher who believes that “God is All” and God and Nature are one and the same. He did not believe that God was the transcendent creator of the universe who determines our fate or destiny. Spinoza explained that God is Nature itself, which is an infinite, necessary, and fully deterministic system of which we are a part of. Thus, God is the natural world and He does not have a personality. He believed that humans can find happiness only through a rational understanding of this system and their place within it. According to Spinoza, the highest virtue that people strive for is the intellectual love or the knowledge of God, Nature, and the Universe. He explained that the human mind has both adequate and inadequate ideas. An active mind is full of adequate ideas, which are the subject of reason. A passive mind is full of inadequate ideas that are guided by emotions and not reason. The more active the mind is, the more adequately it knows God, and the more it is able to avoid emotions which are evil. Spinoza further explains that not all emotions conflict with reason. Emotions which agree with reason may cause pleasure but inability to control emotions may cause pain. Spinoza argues that if we live according to reason then we are guided by love and good-will not by fear or hatred.

These days, Spinoza is considered to be one of the great rationalists of the 17^th century philosophy and given credit for setting the groundwork for the 18^th century Enlightenment movement and modern biblical criticism. His account of the nature of reality treats the physical and mental worlds as one and the same. The universal substance consists of both of our mind and our bodies, without any difference between these aspects. This formulation explains the famous mind-body problem in Neuropsychology. Albert Einstein named Spinoza as the philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view. Einstein believed in an impersonal deity, which fit very well with Spinoza’s idea of God being the same as Nature. When Einstein was asked if he believed in God, his response was: “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.”