A Few Short Reasons Why Spinoza is a Must

Not only a great philosopher that shook the foundation of modern philosophy and challenged the most basic thoughts and beliefs, Spinoza had the courage to stand up for what he believed was true, which eventually resulted in his excommunication from his community. His philosophy is radical, brave and ground breaking.

His masterpiece the Ethica is a milestone in modern philosophy and culture. I will humbly try to mention a few ideas that continue to inspire me deeply. In the Ethica, Spinoza challenges the traditional theological understanding of God while presenting a conceptual revolution on the concept of God. Not only does he rule out any sort of a human-like God, but he also denies any understanding of a transcendental God whether different or separated from the world. Spinoza determines that God can not be different from the world – DEUS SIVA NATURA. There is no difference between Nature, Substance or God; they are the infinite chain of necessity.

The substance consists of an infinite number of attributes, of which each one expresses the eternal and infinite essence. Two attributes which humans cognize are extension and thought. Both have ontological equality and express the same world in a different way. With this holistic understanding, the division between body and mind, for example, (that is central to Jewish and Christian theological beliefs as well as Cartesian ideas) is denied. Body and mind are two different expressions of the same essence; hence they are one with no division or separation.

Another inspiring idea of the Ethica was the concept of freedom in relation to a life of reason. Our happiness and well being lie not in the enslaved life of transitory goods and passions; nor does it lie in the ineffective attachment to a superstitious religion. Our well being lies in a life of reason that can lead us to our freedom. Spinoza’s understanding of freedom is different from the popular view, which mostly conceives freedom as freedom of choice. For Spinoza freedom means the recognition of us as a part of an infinite necessity, while understanding our one time mortal and unique link in the eternal chain of necessity.

Although every action is the outcome of the eternal necessity, freedom does not contrast necessity. Freedom means that our action was the outcome of understanding the self essence within the substance. Freedom is a self cause that emerges from the necessity of the active substance; we have the option of understanding the necessity of actions we take part in, and within this capacity we are free. The free man understands his necessity within the eternal essence and understands that he is a unique flash of existence of the substance. The love for the transitory things transforms to the mind’s intellectual love of God (the understanding of the universe, and our specific virtue in the substance.) The free person does not hope for eternal rewards, nor does he fear any eternal punishments. He fully recognizes that his soul is not immortal, but he does have a share in immortality by being an essential link in the eternal chain of necessity.

Tal Shamir

Snow Day Lectures (III): Spinoza, God and Immanence

In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as “prince of philosophers.” Spinoza, they write, “is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere […] He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence” (1994, 48). Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is the consequence of his rejection of the Judeo-Christian conception of God as a transcendent creator; a supernatural being who is cause of a world distinct from himself, created out of nothing and through an act of free will. Spinoza argues that God is not prior to or outside the world – transcendent to creation – but wholly immanent within it. God is “an extended substance composed of an infinity of attributes that is purely immanent throughout nature” (Daniel Smith 2003, 18). Divinity is fully expressed in the world and without reserve. This leads Spinoza to his scandalous formulation “God, or Nature” (Deus sive natura), which both divinizes nature and naturalizes divinity (and explains descriptions of Spinoza as both pantheist and atheist).

By rejecting the notion of God as transcendent cause, Spinoza also undermines the link between God and moral absolutes or laws. Moral judgments have no corollary in the natural world and therefore cannot be attributed to God, since what cannot be said to belong to nature cannot be said to belong to God. Moral judgments must be understood as “human creations made for our convenience and utility.” Morality as “the product of social agreement” can only be deemed legitimate or illegitimate in terms of its beneficial or harmful effects on the society that agrees to live under its rules and regulations (Smith 2003, 52 and 126). For Spinoza, there is no “imaginary supernatural realm” and no external authority to which we can refer or reference in order to determine morality, and if there is no God who pre-exists the world, then there can be no source that can be said to stand outside or beyond the world to approve or condemn it. Life cannot be explained by what transcends life.

Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence thus requires a new kind of ethics, addressed to the here and now, immersed in the sensible world, without recourse to absolute or divine authority. Spinoza goes further. He rejects the anthropomorphic fallacy that conceives God in the image of man, albeit raised to the power of infinity. “People attribute to God features borrowed from human consciousness […] and, in order, to provide for God’s essence, they merely raise those features to infinity, or say that God possess them in an infinitely perfect form” (Deleuze 1988, 63). What Spinoza makes clear is the extent to which this notion of God functions as a mirror image of the attributes man perceives or idealizes in himself: man as an intending agent, who supposedly creates, like God, through a spontaneous act of free will; man as outside, or transcendent to, nature.

Here, Spinoza’s critique can be directed not only against the philosophy of transcendence found in Plato and in Christian theology, but the modern variant found in Descartes. Thus, in opposition to the latter’s dualist ontology, Spinoza asserts the conjugation of mind and body. Both mind and body are modes of substance (i.e., God or nature). Spinoza: “Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension” (qt. in Montag 1999, 42). Spinoza renders problematic the notion that that body is controlled by “the will of the mind and the exercise of thought” (Spinoza qt. in Montag 1999, 38). Spinoza doesn’t simply reject Descartes’s dualist thought, but challenges the hierarchy that subordinates the body to the mind, which subordinates the power to be affected to the power to think, which separates the power to be affected from the power to think. Spinoza’s immanent philosophy does not allow us to set apart “mind from body, thought from action,” or man from nature: each coincides with the other (Montag 1999, xvii). Just as God is expressed in world (as world) so too is the artist, for example, expressed in their work. There is not an individual who acts but an act that individuates. And this individuation is ongoing.

S I-G

References
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988.
––––– and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. London: Verso, 1999.
Smith, Daniel W. “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought.” In Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds.), Between Deleuze and Derrida. London and New York: Continuum, 2003.