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Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza (Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה, Portuguese: Bento de Espinosa, Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza) (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Jewish origin. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza’s work was not fully realized until years after his death. Today, he is considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism. By virtue of his magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes’ mind–body dualism, Spinoza is considered to be one of Western philosophy’s most important philosophers. Philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all modern philosophers, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”All of Spinoza’s works were listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibi Books) by the Roman Catholic Church.
Spinoza lived quietly as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions, and gave his family inheritance to his sister. Spinoza’s moral character and philosophical accomplishments prompted 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him “the ‘prince’ of philosophers.” Spinoza died at the age of 44 of a lung illness, perhaps tuberculosis or silicosis exacerbated by fine glass dust inhaled while tending to his trade. Spinoza is buried in the churchyard of the Nieuwe Kerk on Spui in The Hague.
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Biography
Family origins
Spinoza’s ancestors were of Sephardic Jewish descent, and were a part of the community of Portuguese Jews that grew in the city of Amsterdam after the Alhambra Decree in Spain (1492) and the Portuguese Inquisition (1536) had led to forced conversions and expulsions from the Iberian peninsula.
Some historians argue the Spinoza family (“Espinosa” in Portuguese) had its origins in Espinosa de los Monteros, near Burgos, Spain.Others claim they were Portuguese Jews who had moved to Spain and then returned to their home country in 1492, only to be forcibly converted to Catholicism in 1498. Spinoza’s father was born roughly 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), took his family to Nantes in France. They were expelled in 1615 and moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1627. Spinoza’s father, Miguel, and his uncle, Manuel, then moved to Amsterdam where they reassumed their Judaism. Manuel changed his name to Abraão de Spinoza, though his “commercial” name was still the same.
Early life and career
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. His mother Ana Débora, Miguel’s second wife, died when Baruch was only six years old. Miguel was a successful importer/merchant and Baruch had a traditional Jewish upbringing; however, his critical, curious nature would soon come into conflict with the Jewish community. Wars with England and France took the life of his father and decimated his family’s fortune but he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his brother, Gabriel, and devote himself to philosophy and optics.
Controversial ideas and Jewish reaction
Spinoza became known in the Jewish community for positions contrary to normative Jewish belief, with critical positions towards the Talmud and other religious texts. In the summer of 1656, the Jewish community issued to him the writ of cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of excommunication), perhaps for the apostasy of how he conceived God. Righteous indignation on the part of the synagogue elders at Spinoza’s heresies was probably not the sole cause for the excommunication; there was also the practical concern that his ideas, which disagree equally well with the orthodoxies of other religions as with Judaism, would not sit well with the Christian leaders of Amsterdam and would reflect badly on the whole Jewish community, endangering the limited freedoms that the Jews had achieved in that city. The terms of his cherem were severe. He was, in Bertrand Russell‘s words, “cursed with all the curses in Deuteronomy and with the curse that Elisha pronounced on the children who, in consequence, were torn to pieces by the she-bears.”The cherem was, atypically, 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 (Portuguese for Benedict or blessed) de Spinoza, which was the informal form of his name.
After his cherem, it is reported 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.
During this period Spinoza also became acquainted with several Collegiants, members of an eclectic sect with tendencies towards rationalism. Spinoza also corresponded with Peter Serrarius, a radical Protestant and millennarian 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 andHenry Oldenburg paid him visits, as stated in Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic.Spinoza corresponded with Oldenburg for the rest of his short life. Spinoza’s first publication was his geometric exposition of Descartes, Parts I and II of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (1663). 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, Spinoza notified Oldenburg that he had started to work on a new book, the Theologico-Political Treatise, published in 1670. Leibniz disagreed harshly with Spinoza in Leibniz’s own published Refutation of Spinoza, but he is also known to have met with Spinoza on at least one occasion, and his own work bears certain striking resemblances to certain key parts of Spinoza’s philosophy.
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 “cautiously”). The Ethics and all other works, apart from the Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy and the Theologico-Political Treatise, were published after his death, in the Opera Posthuma edited by his friends in secrecy to avoid confiscation and destruction of manuscripts.
Later life and career
Spinoza relocated from 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 hesis. His premature death was due to lung illness, possibly the result of breathing in glass dust from the lenses he ground. Or also possibly due to a syndrome, known as Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) which is a hereditary inflammatory disorder that affects groups of people originating from around the Mediterranean Sea (hence its name). It is prominently present in the Armenian people, Sephardi Jews (and, to a much lesser extent, Ashkenazi Jews), people from Turkey, and the Arab countries.
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. This meeting was described in Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and the Heretic.Spinoza never married, nor did he father any children. When he died, he was considered a heathen anti-religionist by the general population, and when Boerhaave wrote his dissertation in 1688 he attacked the doctrines of Spinoza. He claimed later that defense of Spinoza’s lifestyle cost him his reputation in Leiden and a post asminister.
Dutch Port cities as sites of free thought
Amsterdam and Rotterdam were important cosmopolitan centers where merchant ships from many parts of the world brought people of various customs and beliefs. It is this hustle and bustle which ensured, as in the mediterranean region during the Renaissance, some possibility of free thought and shelter from the crushing hand of ecclesiastical authority. Thus, Spinoza no doubt had access to a circle of friends who were basically heretics in the eyes of tradition. One of the people he must have known was Niels Stensen, a brilliant Danish student in Leiden; others were Coenraad van Beuningen and his cousin Albert Burgh, with whom Spinoza is known to have corresponded..
Philosophy
Substance, Attributes and Modes
| “ | These are the fundamental concepts with which Spinoza sets forth a vision of Being, illuminated by his awareness of God. They may seem strange at first sight. To the question “What is?” he replies: “Substance, its attributes, and modes”. | ” |
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— Karl Jaspers
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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 (i.e., everything in the 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 viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality, namely the single substance (meaning “that which stands beneath” rather than “matter”) that is the basis of 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 is 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.
Spinoza contends that “Deus sive Natura” (“God or
Nature”) is a being of infinitely many attributes, of which thought and
extension are two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat
the physical and mental worlds as one and the same. The universal substance
consists of both body and mind, there being no difference between these aspects.
This formulation is a historically significant 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 the deterministic system of
which everything in nature is a part. Thus, according to this understanding of
Spinoza’s system, God would be the natural world and have no personality.
In addition to substance, the other two fundamental concepts Spinoza
presents, and develops in the Ethics are attribute – that which the
intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance, and mode – the
modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through,
something other than itself.
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, humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their
will is free. In his letter to G. H. Schaller (Letter 62), he wrote: “men are
conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that
desire has been determined.”
Spinoza’s philosophy has much in common with Stoicism in as much as both
philosophies sought to fulfill 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 only be displaced or overcome 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 related to human pleasure and pain.
- 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
animal’s 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 good and evil to be relative concepts, claiming
that nothing is intrinsically good or bad except relative to a particular
individual. Things that had classically been seen as good or evil, Spinoza
argued, were simply good or bad for humans. Spinoza believes in a deterministic
universe in which “All things in nature proceed from certain necessity and with
the utmost perfection.” Nothing happens by chance in Spinoza’s world, and
nothing is contingent.
In the universe anything that happens comes from the essential nature of
objects, or of God/Nature. According to Spinoza, reality is perfection. 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, human 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, though
practical and useful for rhetoric, is inadequate for discovering universal
truth; Spinoza’s mathematical and logical approach to metaphysics, and therefore
ethics, concluded that emotion is formed from inadequate understanding. His
concept of “conatus” states that human
beings’ natural inclination is to strive toward preserving an essential being
and an assertion that virtue/human power is defined by success in this
preservation of being by the guidance of reason as one’s central ethical
doctrine. According to Spinoza, the highest virtue is 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 to and explanation of
how emotions must be detached from external cause in order to master them
presages 20th-century psychological techniques. His concept of three types of
knowledge – opinion, reason, intuition – 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.
Given Spinoza’s insistence on a completely ordered world where “necessity”
reigns, Good and Evil have no
absolute meaning. Human catastrophes, social injustices, etc. are merely
apparent. The world as it exists looks imperfect only because of our limited
perception.
Pantheism controversy
In 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
(statements that could be proven both right and wrong) 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 theNewtonian mechanical
“First Cause” or the dead
mechanism of the French “Man Machine.”
Modern relevance
Late 20th century Europe demonstrated a greater
philosophical interest in Spinoza, often from a left-wing or Marxist perspective. Notable
philosophers Louis Althusser, Gilles
Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar and Marilena Chauí have
each written books which draw upon Spinoza’s philosophy. Deleuze’s doctoral
thesis, published in 1968, refers to him as “the prince of philosophers.”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.
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
upon 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)
Furthermore, 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 novelist, George Eliot, produced her
own translation of the Ethics, the first known English translation
thereof. The twentieth century novelist, 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.”Spinoza’s pantheism has also influenced environmental theory. Arne
Næss, the father of the deep ecology movement,
acknowledged Spinoza as an important inspiration.
Moreover, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was
greatly influenced by Spinoza’s world view. In many of his poems and short
stories, Borges makes allusions to the philosopher’s work. So of course does Isaac Bashevis
Singer in his short story The Spinoza of Market Street
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 Spinoza
prijs (Spinoza prize).
Spinoza’s work is also mentioned as the favourite reading material for Bertie
Wooster’s valet Jeeves in the P.
G. Wodehouse novels.
Spinoza and Deep Ecology
Arne Næss first wrote
about the idea of Deep Ecology, and from
the early days of his developing this outlook, he looked to Spinoza as an
important philosophical source.
Others have followed Naess’ inquiry, including Eccy de Jonge, in Spinoza and Deep
Ecology: Challenging Traditional Approaches to Environmentalism, and
Brenden MacDonald, in Spinoza, Deep Ecology, and Human Diversity—Realization of
Eco-Literacies
One of the topical centres of inquiry connecting Spinoza to Deep Ecology is
“self-realization.” See Arne Naess in The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology movement
and Spinoza and the Deep Ecology Movement for discussion on
the role of Spinoza’s conception of self-realization and its link to Deep Ecology.
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