David Egan Philosophy

In my previous newsletter, I wrote on a topic that I was teaching (or, as it happened, wasn’t teaching) in my course on aesthetics. So this month I thought I’d write about my other course, which is on early modern philosophy. Right now, we’re working through one of the strangest and most dazzling works of modern philosophy: Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics.

“Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers,” Bertrand Russell said of him. “As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.” Spinoza’s ideas earned him tremendous hatred and abuse. This seems neither to have cowed him nor embittered him. He was known as a gentle and retiring character with a generous spirit. When a wealthy friend offered to support him with a stipend, he politely refused, and when that friend, on his deathbed, tried to leave his estate to Spinoza, Spinoza insisted that his friend’s sister and her husband should be the beneficiaries instead.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a Portuguese Marrano family. Since the late fifteenth century, Jews in Spain and then Portugal had been required to convert to Christianity or face expulsion. The Marranos, or crypto-Jews, ostensibly converted but continued to observe Jewish practice in secret. By the late sixteenth century, Portugal had become increasingly inhospitable to Jews of any kind and many of them fled to the relative political freedom of the Dutch Republic, which had recently declared its independence from Spain. And so the young Spinoza grew up in Amsterdam speaking halting Dutch and fluent Portuguese.

Already an outsider in Amsterdam as a “Hebrew of the Portuguese Nation,” Spinoza’s situation was made even worse by excommunication from the Jewish community in 1656. The writ of herem that expelled him from his community was the strictest that had ever been issued. “By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza. . . . Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in.” The writ of excommunication went on to explain “[t]hat no one should communicate with him neither in writing nor accord him any favour nor stay with him under the same roof nor within four cubits in his vicinity; nor shall he read any treatise composed or written by him.” Spinoza’s entire family and community was required to turn their back on him in the severest possible manner.

We don’t know exactly what happened for the young Spinoza to earn this herem. The writ alludes to “the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and . . . his monstrous deeds,” but we can only guess at what he did. The philosophical ideas he would later put into writing presented a sharp challenge to religious tradition and his honest and forthright character must have prevented him from keeping his developing thoughts to himself. But that gives us no hint about his “monstrous deeds,” nor why he was subjected to such an absolute expulsion.

What we do know is that Spinoza subsequently left Amsterdam and spent the remainder of his life mingling with gentiles in other towns and cities in the Netherlands. He lived modestly and supported himself principally by grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. His lenses were reported to be of a very high quality, attracting the admiration of the great Dutch scientist and astronomer, Christiaan Huygens.

But Spinoza’s principal occupation was philosophy and the Ethics is his foremost contribution to the subject. Knowing how incendiary it would be, he refused to allow it to be published in his lifetime. At a certain point, Spinoza broke off writing the Ethics to compose the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), in which he argued for democracy, freedom of speech, and a strict separation between religion and the state. It was described by one critic as having been “forged in hell by the apostate Jew working together with the devil,” but today it’s seen as a cornerstone of the “Radical Enlightenment” that pushed strongly against traditional systems of power and faith.

Despite its title, the Ethics offers a comprehensive philosophical system with a heavy metaphysical bent. The book is divided into five parts and its structure is modeled on the system of mathematical proof devised by the Greek geometer Euclid. Each part begins with a set of definitions and axioms and then proceeds with a series of numbered propositions, each of which Spinoza derives from some combination of the definitions, axioms, and previous propositions. It makes for a perplexing reading experience: the Ethics is a passionate and radical revisioning of the nature of God, human existence, and the world that comes packaged as if it were a coldly rational geometric proof.

Part One begins with a series of definitions and axioms that would seem innocuous to someone familiar with the metaphysics of substance that was current at the time, most famously expressed in René Descartes’s Meditations of 1641. A substance is anything that has independent existence. Substances, in turn, have attributes as their essential features and modes as their accidental features. According to Descartes, there is one infinite substance, God, and two kinds of finite substance: minds and bodies. Minds have thought as their primary attribute—which is to say that it is essential to minds that they have thought and anything that doesn’t have thought isn’t a mind—while bodies have as their primary attribute extension in space. Minds can then have modes like desires and hopes and beliefs and bodies can have modes like colour and shape and texture.

Spinoza’s definitions deliberately leave it open how many and what kinds of substance there are. In effect he says, let’s take the basic definition of substance as a self-standing entity and see what follows from this definition. First of all, substances exist necessarily: since they’re self-standing, they can’t be caused or brought into being by another substance, so their existence must be part of their own essence. Furthermore, no two substances can have the same attribute since then they’d be indistinguishable. He then argues that an infinite substance must have infinitely many attributes. And since a necessarily existing infinite substance has all the attributes, and no two substances can have the same attribute, there must be only one substance. That substance is God.

Spinoza’s God isn’t a transcendent entity that exists apart from and above the world, as an artist exists apart from her creations. Spinoza’s God is the world: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.” The sky, the trees, you and me, in both our bodies and our minds—all of us are just modes of the infinite substance that is God. Among other things, this means that God neither wills that things be one way or another, nor does God judge or bless or condemn us. In fact, some have seen in Spinoza’s pantheism the shadow of atheism. If God simply is nature, then do we lose anything by dropping the word “God” altogether and just talking about the unity of nature? If he was already rehearsing these thoughts out loud as a young man, you can see why his elders in Amsterdam’s Jewish community were perturbed.

Where does ethics fit into the Ethics? Spinoza accompanies his vision of an immanent and all-encompassing God with an account of human virtue and happiness that sounds more Greek than Jewish or Christian. The highest element within us is our intellectual capacity, and this is working in its most exalted mode when it apprehends the world sub specie aeternitatus—under the aspect of eternity. We should strive to understand the world as a complete whole. In short, we should strive to understand God. To the extent that we succeed, we can restrain and moderate the individualistic passions that discompose a human life. Because he practiced what he preached, Spinoza managed to retain his gentle nature despite the turbulence of his external circumstances.

The Ethics was published shortly after Spinoza died, in 1677. In addition to Spinoza’s strict banishment from the Jewish community, the Ethics was promptly placed on the Roman Catholic Church’s index of forbidden books and all of Spinoza’s writings were banned in the States of Holland. For about a century, the book circulated mostly in secret. You get hints of Spinoza’s influence in the work of Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and others who wouldn’t have been able to cite him openly. The hints are less covert in a range of later thinkers, including Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze. And he inspired readers and thinkers well beyond the domain of academic philosophy. The first known English translation of the Ethics was written by the novelist George Eliot.

I’ve found myself using the word “weird” a lot while talking to my students about Spinoza. Some of his ideas are wild and his reasoning is exceptionally ambitious and adventurous. In addition to building the case for secular democracy, he develops ideas in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind that are centuries ahead of their time. But more than any of his specific results, Spinoza inspires admiration for his courage—both his courage in thinking so boldly and so freely and his courage in following out the consequences of his reasoning even in the face of tremendous pressure not to. It’s in this courage above all that Spinoza offers a model of a philosophical life. 

1. The military tank got its name through an act of official deceit. During the First World War, the British were developing what they privately called a “landship.” To conceal the purpose of the project, they described it publicly as a water tank that was being built to deliver water to the front lines. (source)
2. Abstinence movements in early twentieth-century Britain and America emphasized teetotaling—the total abstinence from alcohol of any kind. In France, by contrast, an exception was made for wine. Wine was perceived as good for the health and could even protect one from alcoholism provided one drank it in moderation. “Moderation” was understood as drinking no more than four litres of wine per day. (source)
3. In the early 11th century, the Central Asian polymath Al-Biruni made a strikingly accurate estimate of the Earth’s circumference. Recognizing that the known world of Eurasia spanned only about two-fifths of that circumference, he hypothesized that there must be another major continent to the west of Europe and to the east of Asia. (source)
4. Extracted from Caspian Sea sturgeon, caviar was traditionally a major export for just two countries: Russia and Iran. But, as farmed caviar has taken over from wild caviar, the world’s largest exporter of caviar is now China. (source)
5. A commonly held expectation among speakers of Indo-European languages is that “mama” will be a child’s first words. But this expectation is far from universal. In Samoa, the expected first word is “tae,” meaning “eat shit.” (source)
6. Pre-fab construction is generally not cheaper than conventional construction. (This is just one fact from a fun list of fifty.) (source)
7. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Austrian nobleman and writer whose name is the source of the word “masochism,” was the great uncle of the English pop singer Marianne Faithfull. (source)
8. Recent research suggests that humans heal from wounds at less than half the speed of other mammals. This anomaly seems to be connected to the fact that we have far fewer body hairs and far more sweat glands than other mammals. (source)