Benedictus de Spinoza

Benedictus de Spinoza: The Ban That Made a Philosopher

On 27 July 1656 the elders of Amsterdam's Talmud Torah congregation issued a writ of *herem* against a 23-year-old merchant's son, citing his "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds." They did not specify what he had said. They did not need to: the ban was among the harshest the community ever issued, and it has never been rescinded. The young man did not convert, did not protest, and did not leave the country. He took up lens-grinding, adopted the Latin form of his name, and spent the next two decades quietly writing the book that would make him, in Hegel's judgment, the point at which philosophy either begins or fails.

The Merchant's Son of Amsterdam

Baruch Espinosa was born in Amsterdam on 24 November 1632, into a Portuguese-Jewish family that had fled the Inquisition and lived for generations as Marranos — outwardly Christian, secretly Jewish — before reaching the relative tolerance of the Dutch Republic. His father Michael was a prosperous merchant and a prominent figure in the Talmud Torah congregation; his mother Hannah Deborah died when he was young, and his father remarried. The boy went through the community's school, learning Hebrew, Torah and the commentaries of Rashi. He also learned Latin, from around 1654 to 1657, under Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit with a reputation for radicalism, and later sat in on Cartesian philosophy lectures at Leiden. It was the Latin, and what it opened onto, that did the damage.

The Ban

The *herem* fell in 1656 and the reasons were never officially stated, but they are legible in what he went on to write: he denied that God is a person with purposes, denied the immortality of the individual soul in any conventional sense, and denied that Jewish law was divinely legislated for all time. Excommunication cut him off from family, trade and community in a single stroke. He responded by reorganising his life around the minimum required to think. From 1656 he supported himself grinding optical lenses — work good enough that Christiaan Huygens, the best instrument-maker in Europe, praised it — and moved successively to Rijnsburg (1660–61), Voorburg (1663–70) and finally The Hague, where he lived until his death.

A Life Arranged Around Freedom

He was not a hermit. He corresponded with Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, and with the merchant-theologians Pieter Balling and Jarig Jelles, the physician Lodewijk Meyer, and hostile interlocutors like Willem van Blijenbergh; Leibniz, who was privately desperate for a copy of the *Ethics* while criticising Spinoza in public, came to see him in 1676. In 1670 the University of Heidelberg offered him a chair of philosophy. He turned it down, apparently reckoning that a salary would come with limits on what he could say. That was the constant of his life: every arrangement he made was calculated to protect his freedom to argue.

God, or Nature

The *Ethics*, completed in 1674 and published only after his death, is written in the form of Euclid's geometry — definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations — and argues to conclusions that horrified its century. There is only one substance: infinite, self-caused, necessarily existing. Call it God or call it Nature, *Deus sive Natura*; the two words name the same thing. Everything else that exists — stars, states, human beings — is a finite mode of that single substance, expressed through its attributes, of which we know two, thought and extension. "Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God."

The consequences run all the way down. Nothing is contingent: "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order." There is no divine purpose, no plan, no miracle understood as a suspension of natural law. Mind and body do not interact, because they are not two things: the human mind is the idea of the human body, the same reality read under a different attribute. Each thing strives to persevere in its own being — *conatus* — and the passions, which are what happens when external things act on us and we do not understand how, are a form of bondage. Freedom is not the absence of causation but the possession of adequate ideas. The highest state available to a human being is *scientia intuitiva*, and with it the intellectual love of God, *amor Dei intellectualis*: seeing one's own existence *sub specie aeternitatis* and finding in that a peace no fortune can disturb.

The Most Dangerous Book in Europe

Before the *Ethics* he published, anonymously, the *Tractatus Theologico-Politicus* (1670). It argued that Scripture is a historical document to be read like any other, that Moses did not write the Torah, that prophecy is imagination rather than superior knowledge, that miracles as violations of nature do not occur, and that the entire message of the Bible reduces to loving God and one's neighbour. From this it drew a political conclusion: the state should be secular, tolerant, and should protect freedom of thought, because a commonwealth that suppresses philosophy destroys its own peace. The book was denounced across confessional lines and eventually banned. So was almost everything else he wrote.

Death and the Posthumous Books

Spinoza died on 21 February 1677 at The Hague, aged 44, of a lung disease, probably tuberculosis and possibly aggravated by years of inhaling glass dust. He was buried at the Nieuwe Kerk four days later. His friends immediately gathered his manuscripts and issued the *Opera Posthuma* in Latin and Dutch — the *Ethics*, the unfinished *Political Treatise*, the incomplete Hebrew grammar. Secular authorities and the Roman Catholic Church banned the volume. Copies circulated anyway.

Why Benedictus Is Called a Genius

The word has been spent on him lavishly and by serious people. Hegel: "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Novalis called him the "God-intoxicated man." Deleuze, in 1968, named him the "prince of philosophers." Goethe credited the *Ethics* with reordering his inner life; Heine praised him at length; Borges wrote two sonnets about him; Einstein said his own religious position was belief in "Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists."

The specific quality is architectural: the capacity to take a small number of definitions and press them, without flinching, to every conclusion they entail — including the conclusions that cost him his community, his safety and his readership. Most philosophers stop when a premise leads somewhere unbearable. Spinoza did not stop.

The honest counter-case is that the method he trusted does not work as advertised. The geometric demonstrations frequently fail to follow; the axioms are not self-evident to anyone who does not already accept the system; and readers have argued for three centuries about what the attributes even are. His physics was Cartesian and is obsolete. His necessitarianism sits awkwardly with an ethics that asks us to strive. He founded no school in his lifetime, and his reputation lay largely dormant until the German pantheism controversy of the 1780s revived it — meaning the towering figure is partly a construction of later readers who needed him.

Legacy

Biblical criticism, secular liberalism, and every subsequent attempt to describe God without anthropomorphism run through him. Rebecca Goldstein called him "the renegade Jew who gave us modernity," which is an overstatement of a real point. The Netherlands put him on its thousand-guilder note and named its highest research prize after him — public honours for a man his own century tried to erase.

Achievements

• Notable work: Ethics
• Notable work: conatus
• Fields: philosophy, ethics and epistemology