In response to Descartes’s dualism, the Dutch Jewish philoso-pher Benedict de Spinoza discovered a new way of viewing the mind-body problem and God. Considered one of the greatest Continental rationalists, Benedict de Spinoza’s scientifi c and philosophical accomplishments helped lay the foundation for modern biblical criticism. Comparisons of Spinoza to the great Greek philosopher Socrates have been made for centuries.
Except for Socrates himself it would be hard to fi nd a philosopher who was a more highly regarded person than Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza. Like Socrates, he was not interested in power or wealth. Like Socrates, he was accused of atheism and was hounded for his unorthodox beliefs. And, like Socrates, he was inter-ested in philosophy as a way of life, not as a profes-sional discipline. 14
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Spinoza’s Life
Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–1677) was born in Am-sterdam, the Netherlands, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant who had fl ed religious persecution in Portugal. His parents educated him in the traditional Hebrew literature, hoping he
Th e Birth of Modern Philosophy
Benedict de Spinoza’s contention that God is the world and the world is in God summarized his belief that there is no separation between God and the world. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community for his beliefs.
would become a rabbi. Because of his original ideas on God and nature, however, the Jewish community accused him of heresy.
Th e synagogue of Amsterdam insisted that Spinoza renounce his personal philosophy. When he refused, they offi cially ex-communicated him with a curse:
With the judgment of the angels and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch Spinoza. . . . Let him be accursed by day, and ac-cursed by night; let him be acac-cursed in his lying down, and accursed in his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed in coming in. May the Lord never more par-don or acknowledge him; may the wrath and displea-sure of the Lord burn henceforth against this man, load him with all the curses written in the Book of the Law, and blot out his name from under the sky.15
Even Spinoza’s own family disowned him. When someone tried to kill him, he changed his name from Baruch to Benedict and left Amsterdam for the Hague, another large Netherlands city. Th ere, he lived a secluded life devoted to philosophy, earn-ing a meager livearn-ing by grindearn-ing lenses. His kindness and simplic-ity was an example to others as was his reputation as a brilliant philosopher. Spinoza was off ered a professorship of philosophy by the University of Heidelberg in Germany, but he refused the off er so that he could maintain the freedom he needed to write his own philosophy. Spinoza died at age 44 of tuberculosis, probably as a result of breathing the glass dust from the lenses he ground.
God
Like Descartes, Spinoza wanted to develop what he called a “ge-ometry of philosophy” to explain the nature of reality. In his masterwork, Ethics, Spinoza said if we are to understand the
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universe and human nature, we must fi rst formulate ideas about God. He agreed with Descartes that God is an “infi nite sub-stance,” but he disagreed that mind and matter are two separate substances. God did not create the world to stand outside it, he insisted. God is the world, and the world is in God. Th ere is no separation between God and the world. Th us, Spinoza rejected Descartes’s dualistic view that God is separate from the world.
For Spinoza, God is “one substance with infi nite attributes,” or expressions, meaning that mind and matter are two attributes of God’s one substance and not two diff erent substances. Being infi nite, God contains everything.
Spinoza’s statement that God contains everything makes Spinoza a pantheist, a view unacceptable to Jewish and Chris-tian theologians. According to Judaism and ChrisChris-tianity, God created nature and fi nite beings, and his creations are separate and dependent on him. Spinoza had no quarrel that God is ul-timate reality, but he denied that God is a person, a creator, or a loving father. For Spinoza, God, as “infi nite substance,” goes beyond these human qualities, yet contains everything.
Th e World
As a pantheist, Spinoza viewed the world as modes, or shapes and appearances, of God’s existence. Th is idea also opposed
Th e Birth of Modern Philosophy
Figure 2. Spinoza’s geometry of philosophy.
God (Infi nite Substance)
Infi nite Attributes
Mind Matter
(Modes of thought) (Modes of matter)
© Infobase Publishing
Jewish and Christian belief that the world is separate from God. According to Spinoza, the world is God expressed in various modes of mind and matter. Modes diff er from attri-butes only in degree, not in kind. Your body, for example, is a mode of matter, and your mind is a mode of thought. A rose is a mode of the attribute of matter, and a poem about the rose is a mode of the attribute of thought. Both, however, are expressions of God.
Freedom
Because everything, including our thoughts and actions, is an expression of God and follows God’s laws, we can only act ac-cording to our nature. For Spinoza, the belief that we are free comes from our ignorance of the causes and desires that moti-vate us. For instance, when we judge people to be good or bad, we are essentially saying they could have acted diff erently. Spi-noza argued, however, that good and bad are relative to human standards, not to those of God. Only when we realize that the cause of what happens to us comes from the nature of God will we understand.
Free will is only in God. Th e free individual, led by reason and intuition, wills to understand God’s law. Th us, the high-est human happiness springs from our knowledge of God. Th e more we understand God, the freer we are.
It is therefore most profi table to us in life to make per-fect the intellect or reason as far as possible, and in this one thing consists the highest happiness or blessedness of man; for blessedness is nothing but the peace of mind which springs from the intuitive knowledge of God, and to perfect the intellect is nothing but to understand God, together with the attributes and actions of God, which fl ow from the necessity of His nature.16
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If the way . . . I have shown . . . seems very diffi cult, it can nevertheless be found. It must indeed be diffi cult since it is so seldom discovered; for if salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labour, how could it be possible that it should be neglected al-most by everybody? But all noble things are as diffi cult as they are rare. 17