Spinoza: God, or Nature

In What is existence? A short tour of ontology I ended by pointing at one philosopher who made the strangest move of all: he claimed that exactly one thing has an essence that involves its existence, and that this thing is everything. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) wrote that idea as a chain of proofs, did not dare to publish it, and was read for the next three centuries as either a devil or a saint. Probably he was neither.

Spinoza grew up in a Sephardic family, descendants of refugees from the Iberian Inquisition, and worked in the family's import business. On 27 July 1656 the congregation pronounced a cherem against him, a ban that cut him off from the community. The text accuses him of heresies and monstrous deeds in general terms. We do not know the details, and he never recanted.

He moved among freethinking Dutch friends and then to small towns, living partly by grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. The scientific world wrote to him, among them Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society and Christiaan Huygens. His Theological-Political Treatise (1670), a defence of free thought and a critical reading of the Bible as a human, historical book, was banned in 1674. It argued that a state is safest when it lets people think and speak freely, and historians of ideas count it among the roots of modern Bible scholarship and liberal politics. In 1673 he turned down a chair at Heidelberg to keep his independence. He died at 44 of a lung illness, often tied to glass dust, though nobody knows.

His masterpiece, the Ethics, is subtitled demonstrated in geometrical order. It imitates Euclid: definitions and axioms first, then propositions with proofs, corollaries and the longer notes called scholia. It has five parts: God; the mind; the affects (emotions); human bondage; human freedom. The last three belong to Spinoza on emotions and freedom.

Descartes had sketched how metaphysical arguments could be laid out this way; Spinoza did it at full scale. The point is not decoration. Every claim shows which earlier claims it rests on, so a critic knows exactly where to attack. And critics do: the definitions are far from self-evident, and many readers feel the real thinking lives in the scholia. Here is a simplified map of Part I, with my own paraphrases.

Recall the Avicenna problem: for ordinary things, what they are differs from whether they are. Spinoza's very first definition makes one exception, a thing that is the cause of itself, whose essence involves its existence. Everything else depends on that exception, because it will turn out that there is only one such thing.

Four more definitions carry the weight. A substance is what is in itself and is understood through itself, needing nothing else to be conceived. An attribute is what the intellect perceives as making up a substance's essence. A mode is a state of a substance: something that is in another and understood through it. God is a being absolutely infinite, a substance with infinitely many attributes.

From these he argues that two substances cannot share an attribute (P5), that a substance with all attributes necessarily exists (P11), and so there is only one (P14). Descartes' two created substances, mind and matter, become two attributes of one reality. Of the infinitely many attributes we know only two, thought and extension. Spinoza explains in a letter that this is because we are minds and bodies. Whether attributes are real aspects of the world or only the way an intellect grasps it is still disputed.

Everything in daily life, a stone, a thought, you, is a mode. A body and its idea are not two things that interact. They are one thing under two attributes, because the order and connection of ideas is the same as that of things (Part II, P7). Scholars argue whether to call this "parallelism" or "identity", but it explains why neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio read him with interest.

The phrase "God, or Nature" appears in the preface to Part IV. Spinoza keeps the word God but removes nearly everything that made God a person. This God has no purposes, hears no prayers, works no miracles and judges no one. It is the one self-caused being and the source of all else, natura naturans (nature as producing) and natura naturata (nature as produced).

Determinism follows. Everything flows from God's nature the way the angle sum of a triangle flows from its definition (Part I, P17, scholium). Nothing is contingent (P29) and things could not have been otherwise (P33). The Appendix to Part I attacks explaining nature by purposes, "rain falls so crops will grow", as a projection of human wants onto the world. On free will, he says people feel free because they know their desires but not the causes. In a letter of 1674 he imagines a thrown stone that believes it flies by its own choice.

None of this makes him a fatalist who shrugs. How a determinist can still speak of freedom is the story of Spinoza on emotions and freedom.

Authorities did not hesitate: the Dutch banned his books in 1674 and 1678. Pierre Bayle's influential Dictionary (1697) painted him as an atheist of blameless life. The word pantheist came a few years later, coined by the English writer John Toland in 1705. Spinoza never used it, and many scholars find it too simple. His God does not pervade the world as a spirit; it simply is the world's own self-explaining structure. Whether that counts as atheism depends on what you mean by God. He wrote about God on almost every page.

In 1785 the philosopher Friedrich Jacobi claimed that Lessing, the dramatist and critic, had confessed to being a Spinozist, and Moses Mendelssohn rose to defend his dead friend. The quarrel put Spinoza at the centre of German thought. Novalis called him "God-intoxicated", and Hegel said that to be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist. In 1929 Einstein answered a rabbi's telegram by saying he believed in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who bothers with human fates. Whether Einstein shared Spinoza's whole system is another matter; he took the impersonal God and the lawfulness. Among historians, Jonathan Israel argued that Spinoza stood at the core of a "Radical Enlightenment", a claim others think overstates his role.

I paraphrase throughout rather than quote translations. Elwes' English version of 1883 is in the public domain if you want the words themselves, and the Latin is surprisingly plain.

Treat the Ethics like a large binary with no symbols. Start from the definitions, which are its entry points. Follow the dependencies. Don't trust the labels, because words like God and freedom mean something different here than in everyday speech. And when you disagree, find the exact proposition where you get off. Spinoza would have approved of that, since he built the book to make it possible.