Benedict Spinoza

Benedict Spinoza
Benedict Spinoza is one of the most respected philosophers of all time.

Welcome to our topic entitled Benedict Spinoza. Benedict Spinoza is a very colorful yet enigmatic figure in the history of philosophy. A follower of rationalism, he shares philosophical beliefs with Rene Descartes and Wilhelm Leibniz. However, his unique approach and belief in God is one of the few things which sets him apart from his fellow rationalists. So, hang on and together, let us take a closer look at the man and philosopher who rejected an offer to become a university professorial chair and continue to live his life as a “professional” lens grinder. Enjoy!

“God is all and all is one,  and the one is divine.” ~ Benedict Spinoza

Intended learning outcome

By the completion of this topic, you should be able to:

  1. Explain the influence of the pantheistic ideas of Spinoza and his contributions to modern philosophy of metaphysics and epistemology.

Who is Benedict Spinoza?

Benedict Spinoza was a Jewish, the only Jew before Karl Marx to occupy a position in the very front rank of original thinkers among Western philosophers. (There were several great Jewish scholars.) He was born in Amsterdam in 1632. He had an orthodox Jewish upbringing and education; but because of his heterodox opinions he was expelled from the Jewish community at the age of 24. At this time he changed his first name from the Hebrew form Baruch to its Latin form Benedictus. He proceeded to live a solitary life, earning his living by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles, microscopes, and telescopes – at that time a new profession. His writings made him famous even so; but when he was offered a Professorship of Philosophy at Heidelberg University in 1673 he turned it down because he wanted to be left alone to do his philosophizing “in accordance with his own mind,” as he put it.

Benedict Spinoza was, according to Bertrand Russell, “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers,” because Spinoza, more than any other philosopher, lived his philosophy, even though he realized that doing so would result in his alienation from both the Jewish and the Christian communities (he was excommunicated by the Jewish synagogue).

Apart from his philosophy he was the first scholar of note to examine the scriptures as historical documents that were of problematic authorship and embodied the intellectual limitations of their time. In doing this he inaugurated the so-called higher criticism that was to come to full flower in the 19th and 20th centuries. He was engaged in translating the Old Testament into Dutch at the time of his death in 1677, of a lung complaint which, it was believed, had been brought on by the daily inhalation over many years of powdered glass from his lens-grinding. After his death, but in the same year, 1677, the book by which he is now best known was published. It is called simply “Ethics,” but in fact it covers a whole range of basic philosophical problems in addition to ethical ones.

Benedict Spinoza, like so many of the most famous philosophers, was a genuine polymath. For family reasons he was brought up to speak Spanish and Portuguese as well as Dutch and Hebrew; and he wrote in Latin. In addition to this and to being a distinguished biblical scholar he was learned in mathematics and what people called “the new science,” studying in particular the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes. His professional understanding of microscopes and telescopes gave him a grasp, ahead of his time, of the possibilities of new technology that were being opened up by this new science. His philosophy, it might be said, attempted to bring all these things and their implications together into an integrated and orderly whole.

He was mightily impressed by science, and he accepted from Descartes the view that the right way to build up the edifice of our scientific knowledge was to start from indubitable premises and deduce the consequences of these by logical reasoning. But at the same time he saw that Descartes’ philosophy of dualism left certain fundamental problems unsolved. If total reality consists of two different sorts of substance that are ultimately distinct, namely material substance and mental substance, or matter and mind, how is it possible for mind to move matter around in space?

Substance as God or Nature

Like Descartes’, Spinoza’s philosophy is centered on a definition of substance, but Spinoza had detected a contradiction in Descartes’ account. Descartes had said, “By substance, we can understand nothing else than a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist.” Then Descartes had gone on to say, “And in fact only one single substance can be understood which clearly needs nothing else, namely, God,” which he called “infinite substance.” Despite this admission that by definition there could exist only one kind of being that was absolutely independent, Descartes (in a contradictory manner, according to Spinoza) proceeded to distinguish between “infinite substance” and “finite substances” — the latter were called corporeal substance (body) and mental substance (mind).

Benedict Spinoza defined substance as that which is absolutely independent and taking deadly seriously the inference that there could be only one such substance. (If there were two, they would limit each other’s independence.)  Furthermore, because finiteness would constitute a limitation on God’s absolute independence, Spinoza defined God as having infinite attributes. So once again, the conclusion is that there can be but one substance because any substance other than God would have to possess attributes that have already been defined as belonging to God.

Substance as defined by Descartes and Spinoza
The nature of substance as defined by Descartes and Spinoza.

Like Descartes, Spinoza equated “infinite substance” with God, but he also equated it with nature. The equation “Nature equals God” (Deus sive natura) makes him a pantheist. (It is also this equation that got him into trouble with both the Jewish and Christian theologians.) There are two human perspectives on reality (i.e., on God): one viewed through the attribute of mind (resulting in idealism, the claim that only mind exists) and one viewed through the attribute of body (resulting in materialism, the view that only matter exists). In theory, there are an indefinite number of other perspectives on reality, but only these two are open to the human intellect. A completely consistent idealistic or materialistic account of reality can be given, but for Benedict Spinoza, no consistent dualism is possible.

Against dualism Spinoza’s solutions to these problems started with the bold stroke of denying the basic premise, denying the fundamental distinction between mind and matter we know, he said, for the reasons given by Descartes, that God exists, and is an infinite and perfect being. But if God is infinite, then he cannot have boundaries; cannot have limits, for if he had, he would be finite. So there cannot be anything that God is not. So it cannot, for instance, be the case that God is one entity and the world quite another, for this would be to place limits on God’s being. So God must be co-extensive with everything there is. Therefore, God is everything.

The World is God

Spinoza’s theory, which he explains fully in his book Ethics, is often referred to as a form of pantheism – the belief that God is the world, and that the world is God. Pantheism is often criticized by theists (people who believe in God), who argue that it is little more than atheism by another name. However, Spinoza’s theory is in fact much closer to panentheism – the view that the world is God, but that God is more than the world. For in Spinoza’s system, the world is not a mass of material and mental stuff—rather, the world of material things is a form of God as conceived under the attribute of extension, and the world of mental things is that same form of God as conceived under the attribute of thought.

God as the Cause

What can Spinoza mean, then, when he says that “God is the cause of everything?” The one substance is “God or nature”—so even if there is more to God than those modifications of substance that make up our world, how can the relationship between God and nature be causal?

First, we should note that Spinoza, in common with most philosophers before him, uses the word “cause” in a much richer sense than we do now—a sense that originates in Aristotle’s definition of four types of causes. These are (using a statue as an example): a formal cause, or the relationship between a thing’s parts (its shape or form); a material cause, or the matter a thing is made of (the bronze, marble, and so on); an efficient cause, or that which brings a thing into being (the sculpting process); and a final cause, or the purpose for which a thing exists (the creation of a work of art, the desire for money, and so on).

For Aristotle and Spinoza, these together define “cause”, and provide a complete explanation of a thing—unlike today’s usage, which tends to relate to the “efficient” or “final” causes only. Therefore, when Spinoza speaks of God or substance being “self-caused” he means that it is self-explanatory, rather than that it is simply self-generating. When he talks of God being the cause of all things, he means that all things find their explanation in God.

Spinoza’s legacy

God, therefore, is not what Spinoza calls a “transitive” cause of the world—something external that brings the world into being. Rather, God is the “immanent” cause of the world. This means that God is in the world, that the world is in God, and that the existence and essence of the world are explained by God’s existence and essence. For Spinoza, to fully appreciate this fact is to attain the highest state of freedom and salvation possible—a state he calls “blessedness.”

References

  • Dorling Kindersley. (2011). The Philosophy Book. New York: DK Publishing.
  • Stumpf, Samuel Enoch. (2008). From Socrates to Sartre and Beyond. New York: McGraw Hill Publishing.
  • Palmer, Donald.(2006). Looking at philosophy:The unbearable heaviness of philosophy made lighter 4th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill Companies.
  • Ramos, Christine Camela. (2004). Introduction to Philosophy. Manila: Rex Bookstore.Gaarder, Jostein. (2004). Sophie’s World. Great Britain: Phoenix House.
  • http://www.plato.standford.edu

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