Baruch Spinoza | Biography

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza ranks as a major thinker in the rationalist tradition, and his Ethics is a classic of Western philosophy. His writings express the crucial issues of metaphysics more clearly than in any thinker since Plato.

Baruch, or Benedict, Spinoza was born on November 24, 1632, in Amsterdam, where his Jewish family settled after fleeing Portugal. Little is known about his early education except that the young Spinoza showed a facility for languages and eventually mastered Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and German. In 1656 Spinoza was expelled by his congregation on charges of atheism.

For the next four years Spinoza worked as a teacher in a private academy in Amsterdam and his interests in mathematics, physics, and politics developed. From 1660 to 1663 he lived near Leiden wrote Principles of Cartesianism, Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, and the first book of Ethics.

Spinoza then moved to a suburb of The Hague, where he worked as a lens grinder. The Ethics was completed between 1670 and 1675. In 1670 he anonymously published some these writings and corresponded with various scientists and philosophers, particularly Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the British Royal Society, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. Spinoza died in The Hague on February 20, 1677, of consumption aggravated by inhaling dust while polishing lenses.

Rationalism, the name ascribed to a movement of thought that originated in the seventeenth century, is usually associated with the names of René Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. The point of departure for all rationalists is subjectivity. Descartes, initially a highly original mathematical physicist, generalized from his conception of the method of mathematical reasoning and believed that its proper application might guarantee local certitude in all areas of knowledge. The justification of his theory of reasoning led Descartes to several metaphysical commitments concerning the nature of reality.

Descartes maintained that God was a supreme rationalist who had created an orderly universe that could be known by following the clear and distinct ideas of reason. Descartes separated the mind as a free spiritual power from the physical world of determined mechanical relations. With this step a set of contradictory dualisms between subject and object, thought and extension, spirit and nature, God and world, and freedom and necessity were bequeathed to philosophy. In René Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (1663), Spinoza pointed out that Descartes's errors resulted from his inability to follow the metaphysical implications of the logic of rationalism, especially with respect to the notion of substance. Spinoza's Ethics consists of five books. The central concern of the treatise is to move from a consideration of God to the realization of human freedom by an analysis of knowledge and passion and their conflict.

Spinoza resolved to seek true happiness and joy "after experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile." Men everywhere esteem "riches, fame, and the pleasures of sense," but their pursuit seems to diminish rather than to enhance men's lives through frustration or overindulgence. The only remedy for the wretchedness of life is to improve or literally "cure" the mind. In a striking passage Spinoza wrote: "All these evils seem to have arisen from the fact that happiness or unhappiness is made wholly to depend on the quality of the object which we love. When a thing is not loved, no quarrels will arise concerning it--no sadness will be felt if it perishes--no envy if it is possessed by another--no fear, no hatred, in short no disturbances of the mind." The ultimate aim of philosophic knowledge is what Spinoza called a "synoptic intuition" of all reality as a deductive system. And this is why the Ethics begins with a consideration of God as substance. In Spinoza's view the task is not so much to explain God as to understand what it means to be a man. As a rationalist, Spinoza aimed at nothing less than total certitude, and the clearest way was to utilize deductive reasoning. But the content of the system is such that the truth of each proposition depends, in part, on its necessary connection with the others.

The first book of the Ethics draws out the implications of one of the central assumptions of the Western metaphysical tradition: that the intrinsic order of nature is an effect of an ordering mind, God. The startling conclusion that Spinoza draws is that the words nature, substance, and God are interchangeable. Spinoza's argument is conducted a priori, or without appeal to experience, and its truth or falsity rests on what the concept of substance entails logically. Accordingly, God exists by definition, or negatively one must posit a reason for the nonexistence of such a being and again only God would suffice.

The second book of Ethics examines the nature and origin of the mind. An infinite substance possesses infinite attributes, but the mind perceives only two: thought and extension. Yet the relation between mind and matter is not dualistic but one of identity, for "thinking substance and extended substance is one and the same substance comprehended now under this and now under that attribute." To understand this doctrine, sometimes referred to as "psychophysical parallelism," the mind must overcome its reliance on sense knowledge ("opinion") and even advance beyond scientific understanding ("adequate ideas") of cause-and-effect relations to a synoptic vision ("intuition") of the complete system of reality. In this perspective the mind of man is an individually existing modification of infinite intelligence, the body is the object of that idea, and the two are like different sides of a coin. With this understanding of man's place in nature, Spinoza took up the questions of moral life. The issue is life itself: one is either ensnared in "human bondage," prey to the whims of desire or external persons or objects, or one achieves the freedom that Spinoza calls "blessedness" and that is virtue's own reward.