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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

A religious fanatic slashes Spinoza’s cloak outside Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. Spinoza kept the torn cloak for the remainder of his life.

Baruch Spinoza transformed Western philosophy with his radical ideas on God, freedom, and the nature of reality, inspiring thinkers from Goethe and Hegel to Einstein. Yet the man who identified God with nature was denounced as a heretic, excommunicated by his own community, and earned his living grinding lenses in rented rooms. Few philosophers have lived so quietly while thinking so dangerously.

Steeped in Descartes

When Descartes died, Baruch Spinoza (also known, after his excommunication, as Benedict, or Benedictus, de Spinoza) was seventeen years old.

Growing up in Amsterdam, he became familiar with the philosophy of Descartes—to the extent that, until 1660, he supported himself by giving private lessons in Cartesianism.

In fact, he became, as far as method is concerned, more thoroughly Cartesian even than Descartes. His Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, published in 1663, is a reconstruction of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the formal deductive format of Euclid’s geometry, complete with definitions, axioms, and theorems. It succeeded not only in recasting Descartes’s system, but also in clarifying, refining, and, finally, undermining it.

Given its merits, Spinoza held on to the geometric method for his magnum opus, the Ethics [Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata]. Its geometric method provided Spinozism with added curiosity and credibility, and, to an extent, still does.

Freedom in the Dutch Republic

Like Descartes before him, Spinoza enjoyed relative freedom in what has retrospectively been called the Dutch Republic (formally, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands; informally, the United Provinces), then in its golden age and the most liberal, and richest, place in Europe.

In the preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP, 1670), Spinoza eulogises his country and its constitution:

Now since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where freedom of judgement is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.

In the TTP, Spinoza critically analyses the Bible and argues for the establishment of a secular state founded on toleration. His purpose in critiquing the Bible is to undermine the repressive theological and political order of the era. ‘The purpose of the state’ he concludes, ‘is freedom’—a maxim far ahead of its time, and inscribed on the pedestal of his monument in Amsterdam.

Merchant or Philosopher?

For all its freedoms, life in Amsterdam had not been a bed of tulips. Spinoza’s paternal grandfather Isaac, a Portuguese Jew, had fled the Iberian Inquisition. In the early 1630s, his father Miguel and uncle Abraham moved the family business from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, where Baruch was born. Had the firm not been bankrupted, essentially, by the First Anglo-Dutch War, Spinoza might have continued as an importer of fruits, nuts, and wine.

Attempted Assassination and Excommunication

In April 1655, on the steps of Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, a knife-wielding fanatic attempted to assassinate Baruch, shouting, ‘Heretic!’ Fortunately, the assassin succeeded only in slashing his cloak, which he kept as a memento of the dangers of fanaticism. 

A year later, on 27 July 1656, in his twenty-fourth year, his Jewish community expelled him for his freedom of mind. His excommunication order decried his ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’: ‘By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza…’

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law.

The sting, however, came in the tail, banning all members of his community, including close family, from engaging with him: ‘We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells [around four metres] of him, or read anything composed or written by him.’

In a tradition going back to Socrates and Plato, he wrote (but did not publish) an ‘apology’, or defence. Although the work has been lost, he incorporated its contents into later works, especially the TTP—which a viral pamphlet described as, ‘forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil…’ 

Some time after his excommunication, he adopted the motto Caute [Take care] and had it engraved on his signet ring along with a thorny rose (‘Spinoza’ derives from the Latin spinosus, ‘thorny’).

Life as a Castaway

After his excommunication, Spinoza boarded in rented rooms in other people’s houses, in Amsterdam, in Rijnsburg near Leiden, in Voorburg, and finally in The Hague.

Those who knew him were struck by his simplicity, courtesy, and quiet contentment. He lived so frugally that his daily meals often consisted of little more than bread, milk, raisins, and a little butter. In his spare moments, he watched spiders weave their webs and observed flies under his microscope.

In Rijnsburg, under the influence of Descartes, he wrote the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on knowledge and method and the purification (or ‘emendation’) of the intellect.

This work on ‘thinking skills’ opens with a sentence that could have been written by Seneca or some other Stoic:

After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else—whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.

For fear of compromising his freedom, Spinoza rejected a stipend from a patron and a professorship at Heidelberg, to eke out a living by grinding lenses—including for Huygens, who, in 1667, wrote to his brother, ‘The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish.’

He should have taken the stipend: the inhalation of glass dust led to his death in 1677, at the age of forty-four, from silicosis.

In the months preceding his death, the thirty-year-old Leibniz, as if acting on a premonition, travelled to The Hague and spent several days in conversation with him—in arguably the greatest meeting of minds since Plato and Aristotle.

The God of the Ethics

Spinoza’s masterpiece, The Ethics, completed in 1675 and published posthumously in 1677, consists of five parts.

The first part, Concerning God, contains an ontological proof, founded on his necessary perfection, for the existence of God, not dissimilar to the one deployed by Descartes. 

Departing from Descartes, Spinoza argues that God is not beyond the world but at one with it. Propositions 14 and 15 state, ‘No substance apart from God can exist or be conceived,’ and, ‘Whatever exists, exists in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.’ This lack of a distinction between the Creator and his creation is encapsulated in the slogan, Deus sive natura, ‘God, or nature.’

Many contemporaries understood Spinoza to be an atheist, although later Romantics interpreted him rather as a pantheist. The Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801) famously referred to him as ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, ‘a God-intoxicated man.’

The Mind-Body Problem

Whereas, starting from an ontological argument, Descartes had argued that at least one thing exists, and that that one thing would not deceive us, Spinoza had argued that at most one thing exists, and that that one thing is everything, including us.

For Spinoza, you and I have no independent existence outside of God; we are not substances, but modes of God, who is the one and only substance.

God has infinitely many attributes, but we can only know two of them, namely, thought and extension. Spinoza’s answer to the mind-body problem is thus to deny that there is a problem: thought and extension, that is, mind and body, are two ways of apprehending the same reality.

Mind and body do not interact, or even correlate, but simply correspond, like the two sides of a same coin.

Freedom

God being eternally and necessarily as he is, things could not be otherwise. Everything follows from God’s essence and prior causes. This being so, nothing is intrinsically good or evil; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are simply subjective judgements as to what may be helpful or harmful to our survival.

Freedom, too, is a construct of the human mind. People think that they have free will because they cannot grasp the complex concatenation of infinite causes that determines their every thought and action. Freedom is not the ability to do otherwise, but the capacity to comprehend reality as if outside of time and subjectivity, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, in the manner of a geometrical proof.

Freedom, in other words, is knowledge, which leads to tranquillity and virtue, is blessedness, and can only be achieved in the secular state.

Immortality

There is no afterlife or personal immortality, because there is no person. But the human mind is capable of grasping eternal truths and, in so doing, participates in something that transcends the individual. If we can bring ourselves to see the world sub specie aeternitatis and share in the eternal mind of God, we achieve a kind of immortality.

Appraisal

As I said, Spinoza has been read by some as an atheist and by others as a pantheist. I see in his Ethics many parallels with Stoicism, Paganism, and, above all, Hindu Vedanta. As per the Chandogya Upanishad, ‘When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest.’

Both ancient and remarkably modern, Spinoza stood completely outside, or beyond, his time. While we may debate the nature of his God, we cannot doubt what he, or it, is not, namely, the God of the Bible—and wonder whether Spinoza’s metaphysics derives, in fact, from his politics.

When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’

Whereas Descartes, with his vain attempts at resolving the mind-body problem, had struggled to salvage received religion from the trainwreck of the Scientific Revolution, Spinoza did his utmost to overturn it.

The metaphysics of Leibniz, who almost literally picked up the torch from the dying Spinoza, may be read as an attempt to solve the mind-body problem while preserving, rather than overturning, the status quo ante.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my book The German Greeks, an accessible overview of the German philosophers who responded to Descartes and Spinoza and the challenges posed by the Scientific Revolution.

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And why ours may be the best of all possible worlds.

Gottfried Leibniz

For Aristotle (384-322 BCE), all living things had a vegetative or nutritive soul; animals also had a sensitive soul; and humans, on Why does the world exist? Or to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing? This ultimate mystery in philosophy and physics has been called the “Fundamental Question of Metaphysics.”

First, it might be that the question itself is misguided. “Nothing” is a human abstraction used to describe the absence of specific entities. The concept cannot be extended to all reality. If there truly was “nothing,” then nothing could ever exist, which contradicts the brute fact that we are here to pose the question.

Already in the fifth century BCE, the pre-Socratic Parmenides of Elea argued that one cannot speak or think of “nothing.” To think of anything at all, it must in some sense exist or pre-exist. Logically, something cannot come out of nothing, or nothing out of something. If there is something, there cannot have been nothing, and vice versa.

Quantum Physics and the Multiverse

When we try to imagine nothingness, we find that we cannot. In our mind’s eye, there is still, for example, light and space. “Nothing” could be a non-descript state, lacking the laws and properties enabling it to maintain itself. Thus, “nothing” would be an unstable state, and bound to collapse into “something.” Existence, perhaps, is more stable than non-existence—with complex existence being most stable of all.

Many physicists tell us that an absolute vacuum is likely impossible. Quantum fields constantly fluctuate, creating energy and particles out of what we perceive as empty space. What we perceive as empty space is really a bubbling “foam” in which virtual particles and fields constantly flicker in and out of existence. The hypothesis that “nature abhors a vacuum” [horror vacui] is attributed already to Aristotle.

Some theories go so far as to suggest a multiverse in which every possible world naturally exists, making our universe just one of many. It so happens that our universe is one that, at least in our localised area, is full of interesting things, like moons, roses, starfish, wine, and talking monkeys like me.

Still, a quantum field is something. Quantum physics merely explains how to get “something from something,” rather than “something from absolute nothing.” Also, quantum physics presupposes the laws of quantum physics, without being able to account for their origin. Maybe that’s all that existence, or minimal existence, entails: simply a set of laws, or mathematics.

Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) built his entire metaphysical system of monads on just two fundamental principles of reasoning: namely, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.

  • The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa.
  • The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts.

Leibniz thought that the ontological argument for the existence of God, according to which the very concept of God as a supremely perfect being entails his existence, is incomplete, since it proves only that the perfect being exists if he is possible.

In 1697, he wrote a short treatise, On the Ultimate Origin of Things, in which he supplements the ontological argument with a “cosmological argument” founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which the cause of the cosmos, which consists in a contingent series of dependent causes, can only be a first, necessary, or uncaused cause.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

But that there is a God, or First Cause, does not explain why this entity created the world. Thus, in On the Ultimate Origin of Things, Leibniz also asks why there is something rather than nothing—and replies, rather poetically: because good and beautiful things demand to exist.

…since something rather than nothing exists, there is a certain urge for existence or (so to speak) a straining toward existence in possible things or in possibility or essence itself; in a word, essence in and of itself strives for existence. Furthermore, it follows from this that all possibles, that is, everything that expresses essence or possible reality, strive with equal right for existence in proportion to the amount of essence or reality or the degree of perfection they contain, for perfection is nothing but the amount of essence. From this it is obvious that of the infinite combinations of possibilities and possible series, the one that exists is the one through which the most essence or possibility is brought into existence…

Leibniz used this line of thought to bolster his argument that ours is the best of all possible worlds, with moons, roses, starfish, wine, and talking monkeys like you.

Whenever we are able to imagine something good and beautiful, we, too, conspire to bring that thing into existence.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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Theodicy: Leibniz’s Answer to the Problem of Evil.

Many people who have heard of Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, “the greatest philosopher of the Holy Empire”—a parody that is a hard to get past. In so far as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.

Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship. However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the best place for an original thinker.

Still, Leibniz now had a licence to practise law. Later, in the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God’s own attorney—to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. “Theodicy”, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for “vindication of God”.

The Problem of Evil

In 1755, nearly forty years after Leibniz’s death, Lisbon suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, sparking fires that led to greater devastation than the earthquake itself. Voltaire has Candide crawling through charred ruins, saying to himself, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?”

This so-called problem, or paradox, of evil has the pedigree of antiquity, having been attributed by Lactantius (d. 325 CE) to Epicurus (d. 270 BCE): God either wishes to take away evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not wish to. In the first instance, he is less than omnipotent; in the second, less than benevolent.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume eloquently restated the problem:

Epicurus’ old questions remain unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Leibniz’s Response

In the Theodicy, Leibniz’s response to the Problem of Evil is that God, having created the best of all possible worlds, that is, the one that is simplest in theories while being richest in phenomena, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good. Evil results indirectly or accidentally from the absence of good. Because God did not create evil, evil is not a substance and has no proper existence. What from our limited perspective appears to be evil in fact contributes to the greater goodness of Creation, like shadows in a painting which bring out its colours, or discordant notes in a piece of music which contribute to its richness.

Leibniz distinguishes between three forms of evil:

  • Metaphysical evil, which is the necessary imperfection or limitation in creation—since created things are not God, and if they could be perfect, would collapse back into God.
  • Natural evil, which is pain and suffering, and a consequence of metaphysical evil.
  • Moral evil, which arises from the poorly exercised free will of rational minds, and leads to natural evil.

God could have created a world without minds. But though such a world would have been free from moral and natural evil, it would not have been the best of possible worlds.

Man’s Role

What’s more, the world, in man, carries within itself the potential for its own optimization. We can work, first, to improve ourselves, and, then, to improve the world and reduce suffering. If asked, what is the meaning of life, Leibniz would reply, “To perfect God’s creation!”

Schopenhauer, that paradigm of a pessimist, riffing on Leibniz, would remark that ours is the worst of all possible worlds.

And if it were any worse, it wouldn’t exist at all—a hypothesis that humanity seems keen to test.

Neel Burton is the author of the newly published The German Greeks: German Philosophy and the German Philosophers.

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The German Greeks was announced for end of June, because I didn’t want to rush it. But it was so inspiring to write that I finished earlier.

So I’m releasing the ebook early, on the quiet, at the special price of 2.99. When the paperback comes out at the end of June, the ebook will go up to the regular 9.99.

The work has already received a couple of editorial reviews, including from Prof Robert Wicks, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, who called it: ‘A fine, enjoyably readable and historically accurate book that informatively and excitingly portrays the lives of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.’

The lightning book cover (which I designed myself) is inspired by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who preaches:

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness by which you might be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

For Schopenhauer, our character is inborn and immutable, and apparent, at every stage of life, in the face and, especially, the eyes, which are the ‘mirror of the mind’. For this reason, when someone surprises or disappoints us, we never say, ‘Oh, his character has changed’ but, ‘Oh, I must have been wrong about him.’

Under the changeable shell of his years, his relationships, even his store of knowledge and opinions, there hides, like a crab under its shell, the identical and real man, quite unchangeable and always the same.

Schopenhauer took this idea very seriously, and when sitting for painters, obsessed over the depiction of his eyes.

That’s why, now, his eyes are still so full of lightning.

You can order the ebook here in the US and here in the UK.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be very receptive to any comments and feedback.

PS. I appreciate that many will prefer to await the paperback or hardback.