Spinoza

From Philosopedia.org

Spinoza, Baruch (or Benedict de) (24 November 1632 - 21 February 1677)

A Dutch philosopher, Spinoza was the son of one of the Sephardic Jewish fugitives from Spain who had settled in the Netherlands to escape the Inquisition.

Developing an independent mind at an early age, he broke from the teachings of his family and teachers and, after many vain admonitions, was excommunicated. George William Foote described the experience:

• His anathema was pronounced in the Synagogue on July 27, 1656. It was a frightful formula, cursing him by day and night, waking and sleeping, sitting and standing, and prohibiting every Jew from holding any communication with him, or approaching him within a distance of four cubits. Of course it involved his exile from home, and soon afterwards he narrowly escaped a fanatic’s dagger.

Spinoza, wrote James Martineau after reading a Dutch pastor’s description,

• was of middle height and slenderly built; with regular features, a broad and high forehead, large dark, lustrous eyes, full dark eyebrows, and long curling hair of the same hue. His character was worthy of his intellect. He made no enemies except by his opinions. Even bitter opponents could not but own that he was singularly blameless and exacting, kindly and disinterested. Children, young men, servants, all who stood to him in any relation of dependence, seem to have felt the charm of his affability and sweetness of temper.

Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are:

• The natural world is infinite.
• There is no real difference between good and evil.
• 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 animals' status in nature.

According to Joseph McCabe, Spinoza

• is the best-known of Pantheists, holding that God and Nature, mind and matter, are one reality. His system differs from Monism in the fact that he insisted that this reality is God and the object of religious feeling.

H. James Birx finds that Spinoza’s pantheism represented a daring transitional stage in philosophy between earlier theism and modern atheism.

During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Spinoza as being only a “possible” atheist. It was, at any rate, not politically expedient to be identified as his friend, such was his notoriety as an atheist.

The Israeli philosopher, Ryarmiyahu Yovel, in his Spinoza and Other Heretics (1989), considers Spinoza to have been “the first secular Jew,” for he was the one who took the initial steps necessary to lead to the eventual secularization of Jewish life. For him, secularism was an alternative to theism. In his Theological-Political Treatise (1677), he wrote, “Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety. Yovel describes what has been called the "Marrano" experience, that which people like Spinoza's parents had in pretending to be Christians in Spain at a time when they were secretly practicing Judaism.

J. M. Robertson points out that Spinoza’s teacher, Van den Ende, was a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion, and it was while under his influence that Spinoza was excommunicated by his father’s synagogue. . . . Still more profound, probably, was the effect of the posthumous Ethica (1677), which he had been prevented from publishing in his lifetime. In it, he not only propounded in parts an absolute pantheism but also definitely grounded ethics in human nature.

Indirectly, Ludwig Wittgenstein recognized Spinoza's importance by naming his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, much as Spinoza named his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Both started their works with basic logical assertions and principles.

When Albert Einstein was asked if he believed in God, he responded in a 1929 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 [[1]].

Prof. E. E. Powell in his Spinoza and Religion (1906) equates that “absolute pantheism” with atheism, agreeing with Martineau that Spinoza has no valid ground for retaining the word “God.” Powell states that “the right name for Spinoza’s philosophy is Atheistic Monism.”

Spinoza's philosophy was considered to be a religion by the Germans of the late eighteenth century. It seemingly provided an alternative to Materialism, Atheism, and Deism. They did not, however, value Spinoza's geometric form with its logical proofs. 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 the Newtonian mechanical First Cause or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." [[2]].

In 2006, Rebecca Goldstein wrote Betraying Spinoza: The Reneade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, in which she writes about Spinoza's advocacy of complete freedom of thought in religious matters, including ridding anthropomorpism and thinking of God as a "person" in any sense. His idea of a philosophical religion was inviting to some, but the Amsterdam Jewish community expelled him for heresy. As explained by Goldstein, his "determination to think through his community's tragedy in the most universal terms possible compelled him to devise a unique life for himself, insisting on secularism when the concept of it had not yet been conceived."

At the time of his death, Spinoza lodged with a poor Dutch family at the Hague. They regarded him with veneration and gave him every attention. But he had a delicate constitution and became emaciated. On 20 February 1677, he sent for a medical friend, Dr. Meyer, from Amsterdam. Martineau hints that inasmuch as the hosts were at church and Spinoza died alone with his physician that the two may have arranged to carry out a method of euthanasia. However, he wrote, “There is no tittle of evidence” for such a thing. Neither, as Colerus found, is there evidence that Spinoza had cried out several times in dying, “Oh God, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner!” Dr. Meyer was the only person with Spinoza when he died, so it would have been impossible for any scandalmongers to have heard Spinoza’s last words.

(See the article by Alasdair MacIntyre on Spinoza in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.)

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