The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Spinoza is the only Jewish member of Durant’s pantheon (except for a brief treatment of Henri Bergson), and so the chapter begins with a brief overview of the Jewish experience, one of dispersion and persecution across many centuries. Jewish philosophy flowered in Muslim-dominated Spain, and then went into decline falling the expulsion of Spanish Jews in 1492. Some of the exiled fled to Holland and built a flourishing community which produced Baruch (also known as Benedictus) Spinoza.

Spinoza followed his synagogue education with training in Latin and European philosophy, admiring Descartes’s “desire to explain all of the world except God and the soul by mechanical and mathematical law” (167). His philosophizing led to his excommunication, with the Jews of Holland eager to assure the Christian masters in the middle of their own religious wars that they would not have one more front of heresy to confront.

After surviving an assassination attempt, he adopted the name Benedict, lived with several Christian patrons, and produced most of his writings, only a few of which he published during his lifetime. Despite his relative seclusion and modest means, he gained enough fame to win a pension from King Louis XIV after French forces defeated the Dutch in 1672. He rejected the pension because of his refusal to uphold the Catholic pieties of the French state. He died shortly afterward at the age of 44.

Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise offers the then-extremely controversial argument that the Bible is not a literally factual account, instead reflecting a specific cultural origin rather than universal truth for all humanity. The Bible also separates the workings of nature from the intervention of God—which Spinoza believes are one and the same (180)—because people wanted to believe that God was acting specially for them, and not simply according to fixed laws that operate the same way for everyone.

Spinoza argues that the Bible still has great moral value, but he wants to isolate its moral teaching from the doctrinal strife common in his day. For example, seeing Jesus as a great teacher, rather than the Son of God, would allow Christians and Jews to unite over him rather than fight over who earns his divine inheritance. This striking departure from Christian doctrine is part of Spinoza’s project of achieving happiness through complete intellectual freedom. To achieve intellectual freedom, one must have a proper sense of which elements constitute knowledge and the value of each, with intuition at the lower end and reason informed by perception at the higher, especially when reason identifies eternal rather than transient truths.

Spinoza’s greatest contribution is his Ethics, a subject he approaches with mathematical rigor, making the book as dense as a book of mathematical equations. It begins with metaphysics, defining the terms “substance, attribute and mode” (187). A mode “is any individual thing or event” that finds itself within reality at a given place and time, while substance is “that which eternally and unchangeably is, and of which everything else must be a transient form or mode” (188). Substance relates to nature and God (which, again, Spinoza considers jointly), and so every action indicates the operation of natural laws. Humans criticize nature with terms like “evil” only because they lack full knowledge of nature and its underlying mechanics.

Nature encapsulates all of mind and matter, and all of existence thereby exhibits the duality between these two processes, which are intricately connected but incapable of seeing the fullness of the other’s reality. Spinoza settles on the admittedly artificial distinction of intellect, “an abstract and short-hand term for a series of ideas,” and will, “an abstract term for a series of actions or volitions” (194-95). Intellect can conceive of anything, but will is required to render it into action, and so will, or desire, becomes central to all human action. Humans are gratified when they achieve what they will, and feel pain when they fail to acquire it, or receive what they do not will. In this regard, humans are no less mechanical than any other aspect of nature.

What is ethical is therefore what brings pleasure, and what is pleasurable tends to involve the preservation or other benefit of the self. In contradiction to Christian ethics, Spinoza regards nothing wrong with “an inevitable and justifiable egoism” (199). This is healthiest when the desires of the mind learn to restrain the desires that merely belong to the body. A refined reason will show a person what will truly make them happy, rather than place them at the mercy of successive, fleeting passions.

Humans may not be free in a metaphysical sense, but determinism also points the way toward a fulfilling life. Notably, this does not require God in a Christian sense, as “[b]lessedness [divine favor] is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself” (207). The goal of the state is to promote such virtue, which in turn depends on a measure of individual freedom. From Spinoza, we therefore see the earliest signs of what would later be called political liberalism.