Spinoza: the quiet revenge of the man Amsterdam expelled

On 27 July 1656 the Portuguese Jewish congregation of Amsterdam read out a herem — a writ of excommunication — against one of its members, a young man of twenty-three.

The language was unusually violent. He was to be cursed by day and cursed by night, cursed when he lay down and cursed when he rose up; no one was to come within four cubits of him, no one was to speak to him, no one was to read a word he had written.

Decrees of this severity were rare. And here is the striking thing: at that date Bento de Espinosa had not published a single line.

It was not his books the congregation feared. It was his conversation.

The masterwork he never published#

After the herem Spinoza latinised his name — Benedictus de Spinoza — and never again joined a congregation. Nor any church.

He earned his living by grinding lenses. That detail is not romantic colour but a philosophical choice: he declined a chair at the University of Heidelberg on the ground that it would constrain his freedom of thought. Grinding lenses obliged him to answer to nobody.

He published only two books in his lifetime: one on Descartes, the other the Theological-Political Treatise, which appeared without his name on it.

His masterwork, the Ethics, was printed after his death, in 1677, by his friends. He had died at forty-four — probably of an illness caused by the glass dust that had gathered in his lungs.

Why the geometrical order?#

Everyone who opens the Ethics for the first time has the same reaction. It does not look like a work of philosophy but like a book of geometry: definitions, axioms, propositions, demonstrations, corollaries. The form of Euclid's Elements.

This is not a display of style.

Spinoza's claim is that we can think about morals and the emotions with exactly the rigour we bring to the properties of triangles. To examine human conduct "as though it were a question of lines, planes and bodies" — the phrase is his own.

Behind it lies a refusal. The human being is not an exception within nature. Envy and hatred are not flaws in nature; they are natural events with causes that can be understood. Spinoza's great objection is to the view that treats man as a dominion within a dominion, a state inside the state of nature.

A single substance#

The first part of the Ethics is the hardest and the most consequential.

Descartes admitted two substances: thinking substance (mind) and extended substance (matter). How the two interacted was the problem he could not solve.

Spinoza cut the problem at the root: there is only one substance. For substance is by definition what exists in itself and is conceived through itself; to speak of two substances is to say that each limits the other — and then neither can be infinite.

So there is one substance, and it is infinite. Its name: Deus sive Natura — God, or Nature.

That "or" is the most heavily freighted conjunction in the history of philosophy. It puts the two names in each other's place.

Where the radicalism lies#

In his own century Spinoza was called an atheist; in later ones, "a God-intoxicated man" (Novalis). Both are wrong — and both are right.

Spinoza did not deny God. He denied that God is a person.

His God does not create, because creating requires beginning at some moment. He pursues no ends, because an end presupposes a lack — a being pursues an end when it does not have what it wants. He hears no prayers, grants no rewards, exacts no punishments. He does not love human beings; Spinoza writes it plainly: "He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return."

He exists necessarily, and everything follows from him necessarily. The world could not have been otherwise than it is.

In the seventeenth century this was the most dangerous thing a man could say. When the Theological-Political Treatise appeared it was banned in the Dutch Republic and in the Catholic world alike; for a hundred years Spinoza's name served as an insult.

The end of final causes#

The appendix Spinoza attached to the first part of the Ethics is the most readable thing in the book, and it is pure polemic.

There he explains why people look for a purpose in everything. Men know that their own actions are done for the sake of ends; from that they go on to load nature with ends as well. The sun exists in order to give light, they suppose, the grasses for the animals, the animals for man.

Then an earthquake comes and good people die. The scheme breaks down. To account for it they say that the ways of God are past finding out.

Spinoza's verdict is sharp. This, he says, is "the sanctuary of ignorance" (asylum ignorantiae).

Much of the philosophical meaning of the scientific revolution sits in that paragraph: to ask of nature not what it is for, but how it works.

Conatus: everything strives to persist#

Spinoza's most fertile concept is conatus.

Everything strives, so far as it can, to persevere in its own being. The stone does, the plant does, the human being does. This striving is not a purpose handed down from outside; it is the thing's actual essence.

In a human being, conatus is called desire. And out of that Spinoza's entire moral philosophy follows.

Good and evil are not qualities to be found in the universe. Good is what increases our conatus, what enlarges our power of acting; evil is what diminishes it. Which is why in Spinoza morality is not a matter of command but of power.

His famous sentence puts it in one line: "We do not want a thing because we judge it to be good; we judge it to be good because we want it."

The geometry of the emotions#

The third part of the Ethics examines the emotions, and does so without preaching.

The basic affects are three: desire, joy (an increase in the power of acting) and sadness (a decrease). Every other emotion is a compound of these; Spinoza defines some forty of them, one by one.

The decisive distinction is between passive and active affects. An emotion makes us passive when we do not know its cause — we are swept along, we collide with things. Once we grasp the cause of that same emotion, its passivity diminishes.

That is the thesis of the fifth part: the moment we form a clear and distinct idea of a passion, it ceases to be a passion.

Freedom, in Spinoza, is not escape from causes; that is impossible. Freedom is understanding one's own causes. The human being is in the position of the stone that believes itself free as it flies through the air: he knows his desires and does not know their causes.

Politics: reducing fear#

The subtitle of the Theological-Political Treatise announces its programme: to show that the freedom to philosophise can be granted without harm to piety or to the peace of the state.

Spinoza is among the founders of biblical criticism. He reads the Torah as a historical document, examines questions of authorship, and ties the miracle narratives to the ways of understanding available at the time. Modern philology largely begins here.

His political thesis, too, comes out of the conatus. The purpose of the state is not to govern men like slaves but to release them from fear: "the purpose of the state is freedom."

He takes democracy to be the most natural of regimes, because it is the order that suppresses men's natural powers least.

Why philosophy has come back to him#

For a hundred and fifty years Spinoza was a thinker whose name went unspoken. The Pantheismusstreit — the pantheism controversy — that erupted in German letters at the end of the eighteenth century brought him back; for Goethe, Herder, Schelling and Hegel he became an unavoidable interlocutor.

The return at the end of the twentieth century came for other reasons.

Deleuze called him the Christ of philosophers and placed the conatus at the centre of a philosophy of desire. Antonio Negri, in The Savage Anomaly, read Spinoza as the source of a democratic theory of the multitude.

On the neuroscientific side, Antonio Damasio argued in Looking for Spinoza that Spinoza's account of the emotions converges with contemporary findings: that body and mind are not two separate things, and that the emotions are not an obstacle to cognition but a component of it.

His name comes up in the ecological debate as well. A metaphysics that places the human being inside nature, as one unprivileged part of it, offers environmental philosophy a serviceable ground.

The quiet revenge#

Accounts of Spinoza's life always reach for the same adjective: calm.

He lived forty-four years. He refused wealth, won a lawsuit over an inheritance and then gave the inheritance away, turned down a chair, took his name off his books. When he died his possessions came to a table, a bed and his lens-grinding tools.

But the calm was not submission. The writ of excommunication had said that no one was to read a word he wrote.

Three hundred and fifty years later, Spinoza is among the most widely read seventeenth-century thinkers in university philosophy departments.

Whether the herem should be lifted comes up from time to time in the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam; to this day it has not been.

In Turkish#

The Ethics, the Theological-Political Treatise, the Short Treatise and the Political Treatise have all been translated into Turkish. The letters are available in Turkish too.