Considered one of the most consequential thinkers of the early modern period, Baruch
Spinoza proposed new, revolutionary ideas about reason, knowledge, freewill, the nature of God,
and humanity’s relationship with everything. As one of the early pioneers of the intellectual
movements of rationalism and The Enlightenment, Spinoza merged and advanced aspects of philosophy,
religion, psychology, and science, seeking new ways of understanding, through reason,
how one could live a more joyous and contented life, in greater harmony with the cosmos.
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1632. He was born into a modest Jewish
family and raised in a Spanish-Portuguese-Jewish community in the city. He received a traditional
Jewish upbringing and education and is understood to have been a very intelligent and scholarly
child. As Spinoza grew older, however, he also grew increasingly skeptical of his Jewish faith,
and organized religion in general. In his twenties, Spinoza would be exposed to
modern philosophy, and this would ultimately lead to the final break that separated him completely
from of his religious upbringing, and set him out on his journey toward new, revolutionary thinking.
Around the same time, when Spinoza was twenty-three, he was banned and shunned
by the Jewish community, including his own family. Although the precise reason for his
excommunication is unknown, Spinoza’s masterwork, the Ethics, which would be
published years later in 1677, reveals aspects of what Spinoza likely asserted and what likely
lead to his excommunication: staunch, radical challenges to the fundamental tenets of religion.
Throughout his work, Spinoza would reject the validity of things like traditional
concepts of an immortal soul, the legitimacy of the bible, divine law, and the very nature
of God. Understandably, this did not go over very well for many at the time. Spinoza wrote,
however, “I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”
In place of traditional religion, Spinoza wanted to invent new religious concepts
that moved away from superstition, blind faith, and dogma, and instead,
moved toward objective understandings of the universe arrived at through reason.
In terms of understanding Spinoza’s attempt to do so, it is important to understand
his conception of nature. Spinoza divided the universe, or being, into three parts:
substance, attributes, and modes. Substance here referring to the material that things are made
out of (something in it itself that needs nothing else in order for it to exist or be conceived),
attributes being the qualities that comprise the essence of a thing in order for it to be
conceived and described, and modes being the individual form a thing takes. For Spinoza,
in order for things to come into existence, and for anything to exist at all,
there must be an underlying substance of nature that is unaffected by anything else
and does not need anything else in order for it to exist; it must be universal, infinite,
and independent. A single underlying infinite substance with infinite expressions, or modes—or,
put differently, one infinite being, and everything that exists is just a different
way of being. Spinoza would refer to this infinite, independent substance as nature or God.
“Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God,” Spinoza wrote.
For Spinoza, God is not a man, a woman, or a human of any sort. It does not have any personal
interest, special consideration of humankind, or any conscious will at all. Any conceptions
that liken God to this, for Spinoza, are merely an anthropomorphized projection
of the human imagination. Although the term God, of course, has religious implications,
Spinoza’s God arguably requires no religious faith—or at least very little comparatively
speaking. And more importantly, one does not necessarily need to throw out scientific and
rational thinking in order to discuss, agree with, or benefit from the philosophy Spinoza builds from
here. Albert Einstein famously said, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly
harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."
This different conception of God is fundamentally important to the rest of Spinoza’s philosophy,
because if God is simply the natural order of the way things are, according to the laws of nature,
we can learn what God wants so-to-speak, and how to live well in the universe,
by simply studying and understanding, through reason, the nature of the universe.
For Spinoza, this is the task of humanity and the way to a joyous life.
Specifically, this would come from attempting to understand the causal relationship amongst
things in nature. Nature operates through a process of causality—a continuous webbing of
cause-and-effect, everything affected by something else, and everything affecting something else.
And since, for Spinoza, nothing is outside of nature, and nothing is separate from nature,
this process of causality also includes us (including the human mind). And so,
with this, Spinoza would argue that our sense of freewill is an illusion. Everything we are,
everything we do, is the product of being affected by other modes of nature—every feeling, emotion,
thought, choice, and action. Although this might appear to be dismaying and fatalistic,
Spinoza would go on to attempt to argue that through this knowledge, we can obtain a new level
of understanding ourselves and a different kind of freedom. “The highest activity a human being can
attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free,” wrote Spinoza.
Since we are a part of nature, bound to the laws of nature, which operate consistently and
verifiably through causality, we can understand and gain perspective about how things affect us,
and we can make better decisions and evaluations for what we do, how we interact with the world,
how we respond, and how we treat and perceive things. We can thus become
active participants in the unfolding structure of the universe. In this, according to Spinoza,
we become free—at least in the sense that what we do and experience will no longer purely
be the result of our external world, but our internal world: the intuitions of nature guided
by our higher faculties of reason. We will thus know when and how to better moderate, relegate,
silence, or embrace our automatic responses to the world—our emotions and passions and
desires—so to best ensure the preservation and quality of our lives. Spinoza wrote,
“Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey
to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that
he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.”
Understanding how things are liberates one from the chains of how things are. A prisoner is
only a prisoner if they are restricted from where they want to go. In knowing
how things inexorably are and why things are inevitably that way, one becomes wise
and content with where they are, mitigating the desire to be elsewhere. The free person
is perhaps merely conscious of the necessity of all things, including their own lack of freedom.
Though we are finite and temporal beings bound to an individual, myopic view of everything,
through reason and intellect, we can understand things that are bigger than ourselves; we can
gain perspective from the things that are bigger than ourselves; we can see existence through what
Spinoza referred to as sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity). When we see
the whole of nature, of which we are somehow an infinitesimal part, inexorably and forever locked
in to, we recognize that all things that happen are inevitable and necessary; that what is good
or bad is relative to us but is an impersonal unfolding of time and space to everything else;
that we are no more but no less important; that everyone and everything is an unchosen part of the
whole—a single particle amidst a sea of an eternal substance of continual motion and reconfiguration.
This perspective arguably lessens the power that everything has over us. By realizing our
meagerness and inexorable interconnectedness with everything, affected by an unending and continuing
line of causality, which we did not and can never really choose, we become less rigidly attached to
what has and will come; we become less anxious about doing exactly the right or wrong things;
we become less regretful; we become less scornful; we become more indifferent to
that which we cannot control nor change; we understand the storms, the lions, the snakes,
the people we fear and despise; and finally, we gain a sense of poise, liberation, and peace.
Of course, Spinoza’s ideas are not without reasonable critiques. If everything is
cause-and-effect, including the mind, how can the sort of freedom Spinoza defines
actually be considered freedom? If every event is a reaction to some prior event,
would not one’s own nature, and the ability to reason and understand,
also be a product of causality? Would not one’s own understanding of causality be a product of it?
How can one be free because they follow a certain intellectual line of causality, but not another,
though they never really fundamentally choose or controlled either? Moreover,
can one ever truly have enough knowledge to have a sufficient understanding of what is happening—of
what is good or best or true? How can one, even at the collective scale of humanity,
understand enough to know how everything is working and will work in the future to properly
determine what is truly and enduringly optimal? Though many questions like these are still left
open in Spinoza’s work, his ability amalgamate the various methods of human thinking,
break free from indoctrination and antiquated conceptions of being, and innovatively advance the
possibility and methods of human understanding, he opened the doors for new ways of considering
questions like these, and ultimately changed the course of everything forever.