- Person
- Baruch Spinoza
- Lived
- 1632–1677
- Field
- Philosophy
- From
- Dutch
The story
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a Portuguese-Jewish family whose ancestors had suffered under the Inquisition. Expelled from the Jewish community in 1656, he earned his living grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes while writing some of the most original philosophy of the early modern period, and he turned down a professorship at Heidelberg, perhaps to protect his freedom of thought.
His masterpiece, the Ethics, was written between 1661 and 1675, and he considered it his chief work. He set it aside in the mid-1660s to write his Theological-Political Treatise, then returned to rework it in The Hague, but did not publish it in his lifetime. His friends brought it out in 1677, shortly after his death. It is perhaps the most ambitious attempt ever made to apply Euclid's geometric method to philosophy, deriving hundreds of propositions from a few definitions and axioms.
Its central idea, summed up in the phrase 'God or Nature', is that God is not a ruler outside the universe who creates it for a purpose, but the one infinite substance of which everything is a part, and that everything follows from nature's necessity. Mind and body, he argued, are not two separate substances but one thing understood in two ways. Scholars still debate whether this view is best called pantheism, panentheism or a form of atheism.
From that foundation the Ethics explores how people can understand their emotions and live freely and well. Spinoza argued that happiness lies not in being ruled by passions or chasing passing goods, but in a life guided by reason, and that understanding the true causes of an emotion can turn a passive feeling into an active one, an idea later compared to psychoanalysis. Free people guided by reason, he held, are useful to one another and tolerant of others' opinions. Rejecting a focus on the afterlife, he emphasised valuing life for oneself and others.
Spinoza is regarded as a forerunner of the Enlightenment, and his works influenced philosophers for the next two centuries, from Lessing and Goethe to Hegel and Nietzsche. Poets such as Coleridge and Shelley saw in his philosophy a religion of nature. Albert Einstein named him as the philosopher with the most influence on his world view, replying to a rabbi in 1929 that he believed in 'Spinoza's God', revealed in the orderly harmony of what exists. The only known surviving manuscript of the Ethics was found in the Vatican archive and published in 2011.
Why it matters
Spinoza's Ethics opened the way to a scientific, naturalistic view of the world and remains a guide for readers seeking freedom through understanding.
About Baruch Spinoza
Amsterdam-born philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, excommunicated at twenty-three, whose Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise helped lay the foundations of the Enlightenment.
More about Baruch Spinoza
Sources
- Baruch Spinoza Wikipedia
- Spinoza's Ethics Wikipedia
- Baruch Spinoza Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.