“In consequence of Kant’s criticism of all speculative theology, almost all the philosophizers in Germany cast themselves back on to Spinoza, so that the whole series of unsuccessful attempts known by the name of post-Kantian philosophy is simply Spinozism tastelessly got up, veiled in all kinds of unintelligible language, and otherwise twisted and distorted.”
“Therefore I wish to indicate the relation which my teaching stands to Spinozism in particular, after I have explained its relation to Pantheism in general. It is related to Spinozism as the New Testament is to the Old; that is to say, what the Old Testament has in common with the New is the same God-creator. Analogously to this, the world exists with me as with Spinoza, by its own inner power and through itself.”
- Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Volume II
"To be a follower of Spinoza is essential. ... You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." - Hegel
“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” - Spinoza, Ethics
Although Spinoza is hardly a household name, he is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in Western philosophical history. While Descartes is rightly identified as the beginning of a distinctly modern philosophy in the West, Spinoza likewise represents the opening of an entire epoch. The term “continental” is a poor one, mostly used to cordon off the analytic traditions of Anglo philosophy from the rest of Europe, with the implicit assumption that the two are truly separate and that continental philosophy is just “that weird stuff the French do”. That said, Spinoza can be seen as the father of continental thought. Leibniz, Kant, the Idealists, Heidegger, the Existentialists, and the post-modernists are all in varying degrees of dialogue with Spinoza. This is for good reason; Spinoza is possibly the most ambitious philosopher to ever live, because he was the one most committed to Reason. Spinoza completely embraced the rationalist ideal that everything is intelligible and ordered. Nothing is left out of his analysis. He tries to reduce everything, from human emotions to mathematics to nature, all to one first principle; God. And fueled by this incredible ambition to answer every question, Spinoza returns with answers that most would like to avoid.
In his attempt to make all reality rationally explicable through God, Spinoza will throw the immortality of the soul, free will, the separation of creator and creation, and even purpose itself out the window; whatever cannot endure the scrutiny of his naturalism is rejected as superfluous and false. Spinoza’s world is one dominated by causality. But, unlike the Aristotelian tradition which dominated his era, for Spinoza there are no final causes, nothing towards which things move; only an infinite series of efficient causes, acting out of blind necessity; one domino tumbles the next, for no other reason than that the previous domino struck it. The world is without beginning, without end, without any goal; it is just the eternal predetermined unfolding of God’s nature. All is one with the clockwork God.
All these views are unacceptable for most people—theologically, morally, and existentially—and Spinoza reaches all of them through his complete adherence to the Principle of Sufficient Reason: the principle that everything has a sufficient reason for why it is. Nothing is to be left unexplained, nothing ‘just happens’. Most of the continental tradition for the rest of Western history is a struggle with Spinoza’s approach and conclusions. Some, like Hegel, will idolize Spinoza as the exemplary philosopher who alone had the right ambition and commitment to Reason necessary to be a true philosopher. Others, like Kant, will see in Spinoza a repulsive abuse of Reason whose conclusions must be avoided. But none were able to fully ignore him, whether they worshipped or despised him, and most continental philosophers had to at some point step into the arena with Spinoza.
The Pious Atheist
“The most monstrous hypothesis that could be imagined,” - Bayle on Spinoza’s pantheism
“That hideous hypothesis,” - Hume on the same topic
“Moreover, pantheism is a self-defeating concept, because the concept of a God presupposes a world different from him as an essential correlate. If, on the other hand, the world is supposed to take over his role, then an absolute world without God remains; hence pantheism is only a euphemism for atheism.” - Schopenhauer, Parerga
“Vile heresy” - Goethe on Spinoza in 1770
“An extremely fair, honest, poor man.” Goethe on Spinoza in 1775
“A God-Intoxicated Man,” - Novalis’ description of Spinoza
“with [Spinoza] there is too much God,” - Hegel
“For atheists usually seek honors and riches immoderately; but all those who know me, know that I have always disdained these things,” - Spinoza, Letter 43
For what should now be obvious reasons, there are few more controversial figures in philosophy than Spinoza. He was not only controversial in the sense that people either loved or reviled him, but that they struggled to even make sense of him. The early reaction to Spinoza was that he was an atheist; by identifying God with Nature and blind causality, Spinoza denied the only acceptable definition of God, and was initially treated as equivalent to a run of the mill God-denying materialist. Spinoza himself took offense with this accusation, and seemed to believe he was doing the work of a committed pious philosopher; he even had his own ontological argument for why it is necessary and hence certain that God exists. Another element which threw early modern thinkers off was Spinoza’s own person; although it was generally agreed he was an irredeemable heretic, there was unanimous agreement that he was a particularly upstanding individual. Both friends and enemies relate Spinoza’s character as exceedingly virtuous. It was common for Spinoza to be mentioned in philosophical debates, not over his actual beliefs, but concerning whether faith in God was necessary to be moral; he became, alongside Socrates and other ancient pagans, a stock example of the ‘noble atheist’.
Following the Pantheism controversy the interpretation of Spinoza would completely reverse, and he would instead be viewed by many as a “God-intoxicated” man, as Novalis labeled him; a dogmatic theist. Hegel and Maimon would argue, convincingly in my opinion, that rather than denying the existence of God, what Spinoza was truly guilty of was denying the existence of the world, of the finite. This is called acosmism, the denial of the cosmos. By beginning with the infinite, and defining determination as negation of the infinite, and failing to explain how the infinite could ever be negated, Spinoza’s system collapses into infinity; the world of finite individuals disappears from sight, and we are left alone with the infinite, with the endless sea of nothing. One of the first significant uses of “Nihilism” was by Jacobi about Fichte’s attempt to replicate Spinoza; if all that truly exists is the infinite, which necessarily lacks any individual limited features, then all that truly exists is nothingness. In the span of a couple centuries Spinoza’s image transformed from heretical God-denier to nihilistic world-dissolver.
Few philosophers can boast of having been criticized for both being the most radical atheist and the most radical theist. But what was he really? I believe that Spinoza is best understood as an accidental pagan, who in his attempt to make the philosophy of Descartes consistent, reintroduced a set of notions common to the ancient world but inconsistent with Christian and Jewish orthodoxy. These three ideas are I. Nothing comes from Nothing (“Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit”), II. All is One (“Hen Kai Pan”), and III. The Divine is Immanent to Nature (“Deus sive Natura”). Together these ideas form the metaphysical basis of the doctrine of phusis which I discussed in my exegesis of BAP; the view of the world as an eternal nature beneath which is one churning vital force. The closest modern corollary to this view are the philosophies of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and the tradition from which they emerge begins in earnest with Spinoza, and his reintroduction of these ideas. This post will first give an overview of Spinoza’s life and thought, before discussing how his philosophy reintroduces these ideas.
An Early Modern Life
“To get rid of all the wordly worries and troubles that commonly hinder the search for truth, and in order to be the less disturbed by all his friends, he left the city where he was born, Amsterdam, and took up residence first in Rijnsburg, then in Voorburg eventually the Hague, the place where he died on 21 February of this year 1677 of a certain illness called consumption.” - Jarig Jelles
Spinoza’s life is distinctly marked by the brush of his times. The 1600s were a period of catastrophic political and religious upheavals. This is the century which saw the Thirty Years War, the British Civil War, the rise of Louis XIVth, and plenty of other turmoil. Europe was caught in the throes of heresy. Early modern thinkers such as Hobbes and Spinoza are distinct in their willingness to stray outside the bounds of accepted thought. Spinoza’s life begins with religious conflict; his family were converso immigrants from Portugal to Amsterdam. The Catholic Iberian kings had instituted laws enforcing conversions to Christianity for Jews, which eventually lead to mass migrations of these Jews, many of whom were granted permission to settle in the Netherlands by the king of Spain. The Netherlands at this point was an isolated bastion of Protestantism, which granted nominal freedom of religion to the Jews on the condition they did not interfere in disputes over Christian theology. It was here that Spinoza’s family settled as merchants.
Spinoza himself grew up with the expectation that he would inherit his father’s business and continue the family trade. But this was not to be. Early in his life, Spinoza came into contact with Franz van den Enden, a former Jesuit with a reputation for heresy who ran a school where Spinoza learned Latin and likely first encountered Descartes, Hobbes, and ancient Roman texts. When his father died he took over the family business with his brother, but his continued engagement with Cartesian philosophy and Christian heretics led to Spinoza’s excommunication by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1619. The excommunication was harsh; it strictly forbade all Jews from maintaining any correspondence or business dealings with Spinoza, and left no room for repentance. He was now an outcast for life from the Jewish community. At this point however Spinoza no longer cared, reportedly responding to the news with “all the better”. He had gathered a community of intelligent, successful, Protestant merchants around him, who admired his philosophical courage and would support him during the trials of his life. He worked as a lens-grater, and spent the rest of his life as the humble, intelligent ascetic for which he would gain his virtuous reputation.
I think it is helpful at this point to give insight into Spinoza’s actual character and motivation, so I will now quote in full from the introduction to his earliest work, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, which was never completed or published in his life.
“After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing good or bad in themselves, except insofar as my mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try and find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself, and which alone would affect the mind, all others being rejected—whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity.
(…)
But since human weakness does not grasp that order by its own thought, and meanwhile man conceives a human nature much stronger and more enduring than his own, and at the same time sees that nothing prevents his acquiring such a nature, he is spurred to seek means that will lead him to such a perfection. Whatever can be a means to his attaining it is called a true good; but the highest good is to arrive—together with other individuals if possible—at the enjoyment of such a nature. What that nature is we shall show in its proper place: that it is the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature.”
— Spinoza, Emendation
It can be somewhat confusing why Spinoza’s major work, the Ethics, is so named when it mostly contains the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological doctrines he became famous for. But for Spinoza these things were all instrumental, means, to the true end of philosophy which was consolation, freedom from the pain and turmoil of ignorance. His stoic and epicurean influences shows pretty clear here.
Spinoza became better known in death, but he still made an impact while living. He was offered a professorship on the condition he refrain from “religious disturbances”, which he refused because of men’s habit for “distorting and condemning everything, even things rightly said.” But possibly the most significant event of Spinoza’s life was his meeting with a young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who would go on to become the most influential rationalist philosopher in Germany. Leibniz was outwardly a critic of Spinoza, but clearly sympathetic to him, and his system would likewise heavily depend on the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The connection between Leibniz and Spinoza will be discussed in further detail in the next post.
Spinoza eventually died in 1677 at the age of 44 from a lung issue, possibly as a result of his work as a lens-grinder, and with the post-humous publication of the Ethics he became the standard punching bag of rationalist philosophers who despised his conclusions. It was a common practice in the academies and schools of the period to have a ‘debunking Spinoza’ lesson, where a strawman of Spinoza’s beliefs (usually that extended matter was cumulatively God) would be refuted with a stock argument. The reaction to Spinoza was dramatic, and generally emphasized the contradiction between his evil philosophy and fine character. Before getting into his actual philosophy, it is best that we briefly discuss his mentor, Descartes. The relationship between Descartes and Spinoza can be compared to that of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; great influence paired with great disagreement, such that one thinker’s views emerge from the alleged failures of the former.
The Dualisms of Descartes
“In spite of all this, Spinoza remains a very great man; but to form a correct estimate of his worth, we must keep in view his relation to Descartes.” - Schopenhauer, World as Will Vol II
“Descartes is justly considered the father of modern philosophy, primarily and generally because he taught reason to stand on its own feet by instructing people to use their own minds, which had rested until then on the Bible on the one hand and Aristotle on the other. He is the father in a particular and narrow sense because he was the first to become aware of the problem around which all philosophizing has mainly revolved since then: the problem of the ideal and the real,” - Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena
Descartes is one of that first generation of European philosophers, including figures such as Galileo and Bacon, who broke from the Scholastic tradition which had been dominant for centuries since the reintroduction of Aristotle to the west. Just as the long 19th century is dated from the defeat of Napoleon and the Hellenistic era has been marked from the final gasps of Alexander, chronologies of modern European philosophy have generally fixed on the publication of Descartes’ Meditations as the beginning of a new era. Descartes, like all intellectuals of his age, had spent his youth imbibing the Aristotelian dogma of Aquinas and other Scholastics. He had however found these answers unsatisfying, and in the end set on a new philosophical path, beginning in doubt.
“I have been nourished on letters since my childhood, and because I was convinced that by means of them one could acquire a clear and assured knowledge of everything that is useful in life, I had a tremendous desire to master them. But as soon as I had completed this entire course of study, at the end of which one is ordinarily received into the ranks of the learned, I completely changed my mind. For I found myself confounded by so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that I had not gained any profit from my attempt to teach myself, except that more and more I had discovered my ignorance.”
- Descartes, Discourse on Method
In the dedication letter of the Meditations, addressed to the Dean and Doctors of the Theology Faculty of Paris, Descartes declares there are two issues that ought to be demonstrated by philosophy; the existence of God and the soul. He was of course anxious to assuage any doubts the Theologians might have concerning the compatibility of his philosophy with Christianity, lest he face the persecution of someone like Galileo, and rightly so considering his works regardless ended up on the list of banned books in 1663. The Meditations is an attempt to begin from absolute skeptical doubt concerning the reality of God, the Soul, and the exterior world, and to establish these things purely through reason. The end result will be a world of dualisms; this failure to reduce his metaphysics to single principles will be Spinoza’s point of departure from Descartes.
Despite turning away from Scholasticism, Descartes continues to use Aristotelian terminology, which Spinoza will adopt and consequently be burdened with himself as well. In Aristotle a substance is a ‘this something’, an individual self-subsisting thing composed of form and matter. Substances are the substrate in which modes inhere. Modes are the properties or states of substances. Now Descartes divides substances in two ways: by their formal reality (their magnitude of being) and their attribute. In Descartes there are three grades of formal reality: Infinite substance, finite substance, and mode. A mode always has less being than a finite substance, and a finite substance less than an infinite one. A substance is a self-subsisting thing, but there is really only one substance which satisfies this definition: God. God is the one infinite substance who created all finite substances that consequently depend on him.
Substances are also divided in terms of their attribute, the essence through which alone all their modes can be conceived. The two attributes are thinking and extension. Human beings are thinking substances, minds, who are causally connected to an extended substance, a body. All the modes of your mind, such as being happy, are only conceivable as thought, and all the modes of your body, such as your weight, are only conceivable through extension. Descartes doesn’t actually say his famous cogito ergo sum in the meditations, but rather simply says “cogito, sum”. I think, I am; these two statements are identical because the essence of the mind as a thinking substance is that it, well, thinks. The third major dualism of Descartes is within the mind itself; it is divided into will and intellect. The intellect is the faculty of perception, it is how you perceive X. Your will is the faculty through which you affirm or deny X.
In summary, Descartes’ path of doubt, which begins from the Aristotelian notions of substance and mode, ends in a world divided: between mind and matter, between God and creation, between intellect and will. Spinoza will reject every single one of these divisions, and instead affirm that mind and matter are one and the same substance, that all finite substances are mere modes of God, and that to have an idea of something and to will it are one and the same thing.
Spinoza’s Philosophy
“Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.” - Spinoza, Proposition 15 of the Ethics
“I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct”. Not only his over-all tendency like mine–making knowledge the most powerful affect–but in the five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest figure is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture and science. In Summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange.” - Nietzsche 1881
Spinoza accepts Descartes framework of substance, mode, and attribute, but rejects his dualisms. He does this for a simple reason: they violate the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Each of the dualisms of God/Cosmos, Mind/Body, and Intellect/Will are given by Descartes without a sufficient explanation for their essential difference and relation. And in each case this leads to large philosophical problems.
The first way in which Spinoza breaks with Descartes is in his method and presentation. The Meditations begins in doubt; we are supposed to suspend our judgement on all the things we take for granted, as we cannot yet eliminate skepticism towards the world and God, and from the secure foothold of our own existence we reconstruct the Christian worldview of a cosmos of ontologically dependent beings created by a benevolent God. Spinoza thinks this is pointless and unnecessary; instead he adopts the style of the ancient Greek geometrician Euclid. The entire Ethics is written as a set of definitions, axioms, propositions, and demonstrations. If you accept the definitions and axioms, which Spinoza believes are indubitable, then the rest is supposed to follow logically just as the fact that a circle only touches a tangent at one point follows from its definition. So rather than beginning in doubt with our own existence, the first part of the Ethics begins with substance, with God.
Definition 3: By substance I understand what is in itself and conceived through itself
Definition 4: By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence
Definition 5: By Mode I understand the affectations of a substance
Proposition 5: In Nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute
Proposition 7: It pertains to the nature of substance to exist
Proposition 11: God, or a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists
This is just a short sample without the demonstrations, but the gist is essentially this: if the definition of substance is that it is self-subsisting, then there can only be one infinite substance, which Spinoza following Descartes identifies with God. Descartes’ division between God and the world violated the Principle of Sufficient Reason because there is no explanation for why substance would have an ambiguous meaning. Descartes himself recognizes this when he distinguishes between God as the one true substance, and all other beings as merely finite substances. Spinoza’s answer is that all those finite substances, such as human beings, are really just modes if we are being consistent with our definitions. And thus he declares that God is nature (“Deus, sive Natura”; God, or Nature). The cosmos is within God; it is just various states of his being in cascading dependence relations.
The next dualism which Spinoza dissolves is that of thought and extension. If thinking and extended substances are both substances, they shouldn’t be completely distinct. The problem with Descartes’ division clearly emerges in the mind-body problem. If thought and extension are totally distinct, then how is it possible for them to causally interact such that my mind can lift my arm, or a wound can cause me pain? It took little time following the publication of the Meditations for the intellectual public of Europe to recognize this essential issue in Descartes, who for his part struggled to come up with an answer beyond positing a mysterious interaction in the Pineal gland. This is hardly a satisfying answer, since it fails to address the fundamental problem. Spinoza would scathingly rebuke his great mentor for this error:
“Indeed, I cannot wonder enough that a philosopher of his caliber—one who had decided to deduce nothing except from principles known through themselves, and to affirm nothing, which he did not perceive clearly and distinctly, one who had so often censured the Scholastics for wishing to explain obscure things by occult qualities—that such a philosopher should assume a hypothesis more occult than any occult quality.”
Spinoza, Ethics
In place of this unsatisfying answer Spinoza offered one of his one, which would have a profound influence upon German philosophy; what if mind and body were two aspects of the same thing. Rather than reducing mind to body (eliminative materialism) or body to mind (empirical idealism), Spinoza reduced both to substance. Attributes were simply ways in which the mind could perceive substance. What this exactly means has been long disputed, but what it entailed is fairly clear: your body is your mind, just as your mind is your body. This is called parallelism and is true of all of God’s modes; everything can be perceived under thought, i.e. my idea of a chair, and under extension, i.e. the chair itself. The human being is a mode of a God, perceived as a body under the attribute of extension, and a mind (the idea of that body) under the attribute of thought. All of the German Idealists, including Schopenhauer, would adopt this explanatory structure for the mind-body problem in some form. Hence in Schopenhauer, your body is simply the objective appearance of what you are as subjective thing-in-itself. In Schelling, there is the absolute identity of Spirit and Nature. In Hegel, there is a speculative identity of Being and Thought. Consciousness is not some illusive epiphenomenon, but an entire dimension of the cosmos.
What made Spinoza particularly difficult for even the more open-minded early moderns to accept was his immoralism. While he was known for his unquestionable character, Spinoza’s consistent adherence to naturalism and rationalism also lead him to completely undermine the traditional foundations of morality. If all is one in God/Nature, then there is nothing special about humans; they are just particular states of God, another part of Nature. The only laws which could apply to human beings would be laws of Nature which equally applied to wolves or gravel. Even worse, Spinoza in denying that human beings are substances, also denied that they possess free will. Human actions, like the rest of Nature, are entirely pre-determined products of God’s essence. Therefore there can be no real moral responsibility, we are simply cogs within the clockwork God. It will be this point, Spinoza’s fatalism, which will be central to the Pantheism controversy; does Reason commit us to the view that we have no freedom, and hence no responsibility or real influence in life?
There are two final points of Spinoza’s philosophy I would like to elucidate before I turn to my overall interpretation of what Spinoza represents; they are his conatus doctrine, and his ethics, as both heavily preempt the philosophy of Nietzsche, who explicitly pointed towards Spinoza as a great influence and kindred spirit. I took my handle, Conatus, from the part of Spinoza’s philosophy which spoke the most to me, although it is a relatively small part of his overall system.
Part III Proposition 6: Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.
Part III Proposition 7: The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.
Conatus is latin for “striving”, and the doctrine states that all things, all modes of God, are in a constant state of striving to preserve their being. For Spinoza, the sole means by which we can objectively judge a thing is according to this doctrine; to what extent is the thing powerful, that is, to what extent does it determine itself, and hence preserve itself, rather than be determined by other modes acting on it. Although all things are determined by God, there are varying degrees according to which a mode can or can not be determined by its essence. Spinoza’s account of the human psyche is that the passions are quite literally passive; when you are angry, sad, or lovesick, you are being acted on by something foreign in a way which is limiting your power, the ability of your essence to determine yourself. The kernel of this doctrine which permanently impressed itself on me was not this psychological theory, but the idea of the conatus itself; the view of the world as an endless scene of dynamism, of striving. I believe the conatus is a precursor to Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s Will-to-power; striving is latent to being itself.
Since a individual thing’s striving is the only objective means by which we can evaluate it, Spinoza foreshadows Nietzsche with an ethical doctrine which defines Good and Evil relative to individual beings attainment of power. What is good for you is what will increase the degree to which you determine yourself, what is evil is what will literally overpower your being through affecting you, make you weaker, and even potentially extinguish you.
“As far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another”
“We call good, or evil, (…) what increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, our power of acting”
Spinoza, Ethics
“What is good?-Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.”
Nietzsche, The Antichrist
Of course, Spinoza did not take these ideas to their logical conclusion, but attempted to attach on top of them a virtue ethics resembling Aristotle through the most pitiable sophisms. This is at least the verdict of Schopenhauer and one I completely agree with. Spinoza argues that what is useful to our essence is what resembles it, and therefore other rational beings are always good to us, and from this tries to create a doctrine of communitarian compassion founded on self-interest. This is a recurring pattern with much of early modern thought; philosophers break with Scholasticism and begin to go in interesting directions, but always at the last minute turn tail back home like nothing has changed.
Summary
“Spinoza’s Ethics is through a mixture of the false and the true, the admirable and the bad.” - Schopenhauer, Parerga
Spinoza’s philosophy is a strange combination of monism and Cartesian philosophy. All is in God, who Spinoza interchangeably refers to as Nature. This God/Nature can be divided into natura naturans (Creative Nature) and nature naturata (Created Nature). God’s essence is natura naturans and the cosmos is natura naturata; the world is just the expression of God’s eternal essence. All individual things are just states in God. This one substance possesses infinitely many attributes, which are just different ‘lenses’ through which the same content, the same substance, can appear. Only two of these attributes are known to us, and they are thought and extension; mind and matter. Your body and mind are the same mode of God, just considered under two different attributes. The world is a blindly shifting unity, and humans are just particular states of it, devoid of free will or ultimate ends. This vision springs from a fanatical adherence to Reason, to the ideal that everything has a complete rational explanation. The end of Spinoza’s philosophy is to purge oneself of ignorance and contemplate God’s infinite perfection, no longer fearing death or evil; “knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature.”
Deus sive Natura
“Hence, he chose an indirect phrase and said: ‘The world itself is God’—which it would never have occurred to him to assert if, instead of from Judaism, he could have impartially started out from nature itself.”
“How much clearer, and thus better, would his so-called Ethics have turned out if he had spoken candidly, according to his intention, and called things by their proper name, and if in general he had presented his ideas, together with their reasons, honestly and naturally, instead of letting them appear laced up in the Spanish boots of propositions, demonstrations, scholia, and corollaries, in this garb borrowed from geometry,”
Schopenhauer, Parerga
Deus sive Natura: God, or Nature. Now that we are somewhat familiar with Spinoza, it falls to us, as it has for every prior generation of Western men since his death, to try and make sense of him; to place him on the scales of thought, and judge his worth. Beneath the Cartesian terminology and Euclidean garb I see lingering a truly ancient kernel, something I believe even Spinoza himself failed to comprehend. By collapsing the vacuum between the world and its source, Spinoza, similarly to Giordano Bruno, reintroduced the idea of the cosmos as a living whole to the Western consciousness. The world was once more Nature, whose source of power and existence was immanent to itself. Impersonal, eternal, inexhaustible; a world that had no need of ends or beginnings, but was ceaselessly dynamic of its own volition.
There is a modern tradition of viewing Spinoza as a forerunner of the atheistic liberal-scientific view of the world as an inert material system governed by arbitrary natural laws indifferent to man. But in my opinion this outlook is merely a different descendant of Descartes, one that simply removed God from the picture without ceasing to view the cosmos as a creation; and so it became a dead dependent world whose root has been severed, and can only now be judged on its own terms as some leftover toy of a suicide. Judaism required that the cosmos depend on God for its being, as its eternal and ever-present creator, but he could not be of the world; and so matter became a mere miraculous material, ripped from the void and without its own being, upon which the absently present creator worked. For me, Spinoza is distinct in making the world alive once more, returning the origin of the energy and activity beneath all being to the cosmos itself. This was the seed from which the Romantic German spirit would spring, weaned on Spinoza in the Pantheism controversy, opening itself with welcoming arms to the all-devouring Absolute.
Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit
“Thus Spinoza was a mere reviver of the Eliatics, as Gassendi was of Epicurus.” - Schopenhauer, Parerga
“It is certainly nothing other than the ancient a nihilo nihil fit that Spinoza made an issue of, (…) in place of an emanating En-Soph he only posited an immanent one, an indwelling cause of the universe eternally unalterable within itself, One and the same with all its consequences…” - Jacobi to Lessing, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza
The driving engine of Spinoza’s philosophy is the Principle of Sufficient Reason. But this name for it was actually coined by Leibniz; Spinoza never uses the term. Rather the idea itself is lurking behind his fundamental presuppositions. Everything has an explanation, which is a knowledge of its causes, and for each thing there must be a reason for its being or non-being. This is identical with what Parmenides, founder of the Eleatics, simply expressed as Ex nihilo nihil fit; Nothing is from nothing generated. This idea was accepted by practically all subsequent Greek philosophers. The Eleatics on the basis of this view denied all becoming, and asserted there only existed the One: unchanging Being. For what is change, if is not the dissolution into nothing of one state and the coming from nothing of another? This ancient doctrine, expressed in Parmenides paradoxical language, is the earliest hint of the division between the ephemeral apparent world of becoming and the eternal hidden world of being which figures in the later philosophies of Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer among others.
This ancient doctrine posed a fundamental issue for Christian theology, which the Platonism influenced Scholastics struggled with. Something metaphysically distinct about Judaism and consequently Christianity compared to most Pagan and Oriental metaphysics is that the world is neither eternal nor self-subsisting. If in the beginning was only God and nothing else, and God then created the world, either he created the world from nothing, violating Parmenides’ wisdom, or he created it from himself, and now we return to Spinoza. Traditionally Christians and Jews have opted for the miraculous explanation: God created the universe, and our individual souls, from nothing. Philosophically, this leads to the problem Descartes runs into; how do we exist as real self-subsisting beings if we are dependent on God and once were nothing? But more broadly, it eventually leads to the Atheistic worldview I briefly mentioned earlier: God disappears from the picture, and yet we are left with an image of the world as something dead and empty, which inexplicably erupted from nothingness, and consequently has no real being in the full sense of the word. What Spinoza did, which makes him so distinct and of such great influence on later German philosophy, is that he returned the principle of existence and activity to the world itself. Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit.
Hen Kai Pan
“Accordingly, that which exhibits itself in a million forms of endless variety and diversity, and thus performs the most variegated and grotesque play without beginning and end, is this one essence. It is so closely concealed behind all these masks that it does not recognize itself again, and thus often treats itself harshly. Therefore the great doctrine of the Hen kai pan (One and All) appeared early in the East as well as in the West; and in spite of every contradiction it has asserted itself, or has been constantly renewed.”
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation Volume II
Hen Kai Pan. All is One! This is the ancient monistic creed which Lessing joyfully declared to Jacobi when he confessed his Spinozism. Monism is the view that the apparent plurality of the world, the diversity of its being, can be reduced to a single principle. This was widely accepted by most philosophical schools by the end of the Classical era, and it is related to ex nihilo nihil fit. A consistent application of that principle will naturally lead to positing something which is the cause of all causes, the unity beneath all unity. What is needed is a first principle; the Eleatics and Plato called it One, Heraclitus called it Fire, Aristotle identified it as Intellect, and the Stoics like Spinoza named it God. But this emphasis on an absolute first principle also fell out of favor with the arrival of Christianity. The thing about a first principle is that it isn’t very personal; when one reads Plotinus speaking of a mystical union with the Platonic One, it’s much less clear how you should feel about it compared to the Christian reconciliation with a Paternal creator God of whom man is an image. The problem is that a first principle has to be absolutely simple, for if it contained difference, and hence plurality, within itself, there would need to be a further principle which explained how that plurality came to be One. I believe it was the Scholastic Duns Scotus who, in reference to this problem, brought up how God is supposed to be both merciful and just. Spinoza returned explicit monism to the awareness of Western philosophy, and this idea that all is one, that everything is just the schizophrenic expression of one infinite essence, reappears constantly in German idealism.
Conclusion
“An explosion.” - Goethe on Spinoza’s introduction to Germany by Jacobi
“A thunderbolt out of the blue.” - Hegel on the same
I appreciate your patience or your passion, dear reader, whichever has carried you this far. What I have hoped to have convinced you of is that Spinoza still merits our attention and thought; it is here that a distinct set of ideas return to the fore of European thought. The foundations of the doctrine of phusis, which I believe to be the purest expression of the tragic Greek spirit present in Homer and channeled by Nietzsche, were reintroduced by Spinoza, whom both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer rightly recognize as their important progenitor, autistic Jewish sperg that he was. Our story will continue with the introduction of Spinoza to Germany, culminating in the Pantheism controversy as Friedrich Jacobi becomes the first great interpreter of Spinoza, and recognizes in his philosophy a tremendous challenge to Enlightenment German Christendom; Nihilism.
Further Reading
For those who would like to dig deeper into Spinoza, I would first of all recommend reading the Ethics itself. It’s geometric format makes it surprisingly approachable, and there is a reason why figures as diverse as Nietzsche, Hegel, and Goethe speak admirably of the benefit of reading Spinoza in his own words. However, for those who would prefer secondary sources, I would recommend Michael Della Rocca’s Spinoza.