Spinoza

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza

Spinoza was expelled from his own community at twenty-three, cursed and cast out, for a vision of God so radical that to his judges it looked like atheism and to a later age would look like the deepest piety. There is, he had come to believe, only one thing. Not many separate substances, not a world of distinct objects made by a God standing outside it, but a single, infinite, eternal reality, of which everything that exists, you, me, this thought, that star, is a passing expression, a wave on one boundless sea. He had two names for this one reality, and he used them interchangeably, in a phrase that scandalized Europe: God, or Nature, Deus sive Natura. God is not a person in the sky who made the world and watches it; God is the world, the infinite living whole, the single substance whose unfolding is everything there is. This was not, as his enemies charged, a denial of God. It was the reverse, an intoxication with God so total that Spinoza could no longer find anything that was not divine. A later poet called him "the God-intoxicated man," and the phrase is exact: he saw the infinite and the eternal not somewhere beyond the world but in every blade of grass and every passing mood, and he spent his life trying to teach others to see it too.

The man who lived it. What is most striking about Spinoza is that he lived his philosophy, with an integrity that awed even his enemies. Cast out by his own people, who pronounced over him one of the harshest curses in their records, he did not rage and did not grovel; he simply changed his name to its Latin form, Benedict, and went on thinking. He earned his bread grinding lenses for telescopes and microscopes, a quiet, exacting craft, and when the University of Heidelberg offered him a prestigious chair, he turned it down, explaining gently that a salaried professorship would cost him the one thing he would not sell: the freedom to think and say exactly what he found to be true. He lived plainly, owed nothing to anyone, kept a few devoted friends, and worked out, in rented rooms, the most rigorous philosophy of his century, asking of the world only that it leave him alone to understand it. The serenity his philosophy holds up as the highest human good was not a theory for him; it was visibly how he lived, and it is part of why, of all the great philosophers, Spinoza is the one his readers tend not merely to admire but to love.

Your mind is your body. One of the first knots this vision unties is the one Descartes had tied so tightly: the gap between mind and body. Descartes had split the world into two utterly different substances, thinking mind and unthinking matter, and could then never explain how they touch, how a thought moves an arm or a wound becomes a pain. Spinoza dissolves the problem at a stroke. Mind and body are not two things that have to interact; they are one thing, the same reality expressed in two different ways. Thought and extension, the mental and the physical, are simply two of the infinite "attributes," the two we happen to know, under which the one substance can be viewed. Your mind is not a ghost piloting your body; your mind is your body, the very same event seen from the inside rather than the outside. "The order and connection of ideas," he writes in his most famous proposition, "is the same as the order and connection of things." There is no mysterious bridge between the mental and the physical, because there was never a gap, only one reality wearing two faces. It is a startlingly modern thought, and every contemporary attempt to understand the mind as one aspect of the physical brain is, knowingly or not, walking a path Spinoza cleared.

The chains are made of confusion. The whole point of the system, behind its forbidding geometry, is intensely practical: it is a path out of suffering. Spinoza looked at human misery and diagnosed it as bondage, not to sin or to fate, but to our own passions. We are pushed around, he saw, by emotions, fear, anger, jealousy, longing, that seize us from outside, that we did not choose and do not understand, and that toss us about like driftwood. He called these the passive affects, "passions," because in them we are passive, acted upon. And here is his liberating insight: the way out is not to crush the emotions, which cannot be done, but to understand them. An emotion, Spinoza argues, is bound up with a confused idea of its own cause; the moment you trace it back, see clearly why you feel it and what chain of causes produced it, it changes its character. "An emotion which is a passion," runs one of his propositions, "ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it." The feeling need not vanish, but it stops owning you, because you have gone from being its victim to being its knower. This is, three centuries early, the founding insight of every therapy that works by understanding: that we are enslaved by what we do not understand and freed, in exact proportion, by what we do. Freedom, for Spinoza, is not some magical power to have done otherwise; it is simply the difference between being driven by forces you cannot see and acting from a nature you have come to comprehend.

Under the aspect of eternity. Where does this path of understanding finally lead? To something Spinoza calls, in the strange and luminous last pages of the Ethics, the intellectual love of God. As you understand more, you come to see yourself and everything around you not as isolated accidents but as necessary expressions of the one infinite substance, threads in a single seamless whole; you begin to view things, in his haunting phrase, "under the aspect of eternity," sub specie aeternitatis, past the temporary and the local toward what is timeless and necessary in them. And to understand the world this deeply, Spinoza says, is to love it, to feel a calm, clear-eyed joy at being a conscious part of something infinite and eternal, a love that asks for nothing back because it is already complete in itself. This intellectual love of God is the nearest thing in his philosophy to salvation, and he is careful to say what it is not: it is not a reward you collect later for having been good. "Blessedness is not the reward of virtue," reads the very last proposition of the Ethics, "but virtue itself." The peace he is describing is not somewhere else and not someday; it is simply what the understanding mind feels, right now, when it sees clearly. The reward for understanding the universe is the joy of understanding the universe.

The lens-grinder's universe. The room reads Spinoza in an old translation, cited in his own austere shorthand, by part and proposition; the Ethics is hard going, built like a geometry textbook out of definitions and axioms and proofs, and it is worth knowing why. Spinoza refused to let anyone take ethics on authority, and set out to demonstrate the good life the way Euclid demonstrates a theorem, step by inescapable step. He also wrote, anonymously and at real risk, one of the first great defenses of freedom of thought, and founded the modern critical study of scripture in the doing. For his pains he was, for a century, the most reviled name in Europe, a byword for atheism, his books banned and burned. And then the tide turned completely. The Romantics rediscovered him and fell in love; Goethe carried the Ethics with him; the German philosophers decided that to be a philosopher at all you had first to pass through Spinoza; Nietzsche, finding him late, wrote joyfully to a friend, "I have a precursor, and what a precursor!" And in our own century Einstein, asked whether he believed in God, answered: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists." The excommunicated lens-grinder, who wanted nothing but the freedom to think and to grind his glass in peace, turned out to have glimpsed, more clearly than almost anyone, the universe that science itself would come to recognize: one seamless, law-governed, intelligible whole, of which we are a small conscious part, and which it is our highest joy to understand.