Baruch Spinoza and What "Radical Philosophy" Might Mean

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) is believed by some philosophers to be the originator of modern thought. Jonathan Israel, a major historian of the Enlightenment, is one of these Spinozists, and he has just come out with a massive biography of hist favorite thinker. "Spinoza is, for him, the master thinker to whom we owe freedom, democracy and modernity itself." Spinoza certainly had the right kind of career for a rebel, expelled from his synagogue with full ceremony (chanting, shofar blowing) when he was 24, cast out by his family, scratching a living around the fringes of Dutch intellectual life.

What got Spinoza in so much trouble was, first, insisting that people should reject all received traditions and think for themsevels, and, second, denying the existence of a personal God. And not from any random reason, but because he had proved logically, to his own satisfaction, that such a being was impossible. Spinoza reasoned in a geometric style. He started from a few postulates about being, substance, and essence and reached the conclusion that the universe was self-caused and moved in inevitable progression through its only possible course toward its only possible conclusion, never deviating. In such a universe the notion of a God who made choices or did things was impossible. Miracles were of course out of the question, as was the notion that God "wanted" to be worshipped, or indeed wanted us to do anything. Everything just is, as it must be.

My go-to resource for understanding any philosopher who comes up is the Stanford Encyclopedia, and it has an excellent article on Spinoza. Here I find this interesting passage in which Spinoza explains why people misunderstand their world:    

[People] find—both in themselves and outside themselves—many means that are very helpful in seeking their own advantage, e.g., eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for supporting fish … Hence, they consider all natural things as means to their own advantage. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. For after they considered things as means, they could not believe that the things had made themselves; but from the means they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there was a ruler, or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their use.

Which, says Spinoza, has to be wrong, because the rules of the universe are never suspended in favor of anybody or anything.

Spinoza said he believed in God, but his contemporaries had trouble understanding what he meant by that. The Stanford Encylopedia:

Spinoza’s fundamental insight in Book One [of the Ethics] is that Nature is an indivisible, eternal or self-caused, substantial whole—in fact, it is the only substantial whole. Outside of Nature, there is nothing, and everything that exists is a part of Nature and is brought into being by Nature with a deterministic necessity. This unified, unique, productive, necessary being just is what is meant by ‘God’.

So, maybe, everyting is God, and God is just everything that is. There is, therefore, no need to ask why anything happens, since all events have the same cause, the working out of Nature's immutable laws. Spinoza:

If a stone has fallen from a room onto someone’s head and killed him, they will show, in the following way, that the stone fell in order to kill the man. For if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance (for often many circumstances do concur at once)? Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? why was the man walking that way at that time? If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on—for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing? why was the man invited at just that time? And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, i.e., the sanctuary of ignorance.

To call the will of God "the sanctuary of ignorance" was, in 1670, asking to be lynched. Which is why Spinoza's books weren't published until he was dead. (Incidentally just the fact that he was dead didn't keep the Roman Inquisition from investigating him with great vigor, and the inquisitors' report is the source for most of what we know about his life.)

Spinoza's God makes no judgments, which makes most of what preachers say nonsense. TSE:

A judging God who has plans and acts purposively is a God to be obeyed and placated. Opportunistic preachers are then able to play on our hopes and fears in the face of such a God. They prescribe ways of acting that are calculated to avoid being punished by that God and earn his rewards. But, Spinoza insists, to see God or Nature as acting for the sake of ends—to find purpose in Nature—is to misconstrue Nature and “turn it upside down” by putting the effect (the end result) before the true cause.

This anti-clerical attitude is part of what made Spinoza controversial, and one of the ways he inspired later Enlightenment thought. The notion that priests make us feel bad so we will give them money and power was hardly original, but with Spinoza this flowed of necessity from his vast metaphysical aparatus, giving it (for some readers) a magisterial force.

When a famous rabbi asked Albert Einstein if he believed in God, he answered, "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings." You may recall that Einstein parted company with modern physics over whether there can be random events, as quantum mechanics seems to require. Einstein wasn't having any of that; he followed Spinoza in believing that the universe had to unfold just as it did, through necessity, and that this unfolding was God.

What is one to make of this philosophy? Spinoza's thought strikes me as somewhat radical in the context of the seventeenth century, because he attacked so much of religion. I remember reading of one seventeenth-century courtier who said, aiming to make peace in that age of religious war, "So long as a man believes in God, Heaven, Hell, and the Mass, we should not care what else he thinks." Well, Spinoza rejected three of the four and some people who tried to read his book thought he was really rejecting God as well. He was also a little radical in rejecting all received tradition and telling people they had to think for themselves. 

But in a different context I am not so sure. If we cast our minds back to the classical world, I don't find anything Spinoza said to be radical at all. I can imagine him wandering into Aristotle's Grove or Seneca's dining hall and being received warmly by ancient philsophers, who might have fiound his ideas interesting but would certainly not have been surprised by them. The Epicureans explained the universe as the inexorable working out of impersonal forces, just as Spinoza did, and some of them might have laughed at his insistence that this reality should be called God. 

What is most traditional about Spinoza's ideas is what he thought a person who understood them ought to do. TSE:

What we should strive for is to learn how to moderate and restrain the passions and become active, autonomous beings. If we can achieve this, then we will be “free” to the extent that whatever happens to us will result not from our relations with things outside us, but from our own nature. We will, consequently, be truly liberated from the troublesome emotional ups and downs of this life. The way to bring this about is to increase our knowledge, our store of adequate ideas, and reduce as far as possible the power or strength of our inadequate ideas, which follow not from the nature of the mind alone but from its being an expression of how our body is affected by other bodies. In other words, we need to free ourselves from a reliance on the senses and the imagination, since a life guided by the senses and the imagination is a life being affected and led by the objects around us, and rely as much as we can only on our rational faculties.

Which is probably the single most traditional idea in all of human philosophy. Everywhere you look around the world you find people arguing that since the wise man can't do much to change fate, he should concentrate his mind on receiving whatever happens with equanimity. (What was the first watchword Marcus Aurelius set for his guards when he became emperor? "Equanimity.") We may not be able to control events but we might be able to control how we respond to them; there is our freedom, and there is our happiness. And this is how one can see that philosophy is rooted in aristocratic culture, in the detached attitude of men who knew that they were and ought to be above all the petty concerns of little people.

So when I read all this about Spinoza, I got to wondering what was radical about him, and how he and other philosophers might have influenced the Enlightenment. If these ideas are not really all that new, and would have seemed unexceptionable in 300 BC, how did they inspire revolution in the 1700s? 

I suppose the place to start is with science. Modern science depends absolutely on the idea that the universe runs by rules which grind forward impersonally, without God having to do anything about it. So you could say that Spinoza's kind of thinking helped spread that sort of "scientific" attitude. But then Spinoza's books were not published until 65 years after the inquisition condemned Galileo for his machine physics, so I don't think you can show any real causality. It seems that the idea of an inexorable universal progress, drawn from Aristotle and other ancient thinkers, were already in the air in the 1600s.

Was there much influence on politics? One has to be careful, because besides the philosophical thinking that might have been influential, there was also the practical experience of a century of miserable religious warfare. And when the sectarian wars wound down after 1648 Europe got, not peace, but another century of wars fought between ambitious kings. So if some Enlightenment thinker trashes priests and kings, he might be drawing on Spinoza or some other philosopher, but he might just have been reading history.

How about this for a model: there was nothing particularly new about hating priests and their rigamarole, or thinking that doomster preachers were frauds out to take your money, or wanting the common people to have more say in how they were governed. The advice that you ought to think for yourself rather than accepting received wisdom goes back at least to Socrates. So maybe how philosophy influenced the Enlightenment was by making a contrarian attitude toward church, king, country, and tradtition respectable. 

The political and economic world of the 1700s was being thoroughly shaken up by the transformational engine of global trade: new families were now routinely becoming richer in a generation than ancient ducal houses, and as a collective group the merchants and manufacturers controlled more wealth than all the landowning nobles. Through Spinoza and other philosophers the members of this new elite found a justification, written in the ancient language of geometric logic and Aristotelian metaphysics, for overturning the old order. In these philosophers they read that there was nothing special about kings or nobles, which is what they had begun to suspect already. They read that what they did for a living, learning about the world and capitalizing on the opportunities they found in it, was inherently more virtuous than living off your peasants' rents. They read that the true nobility was not those who inherited status, but those who earned it by personal virtue and a detached attitude toward petty things.

The new thinking gave intellectual and moral dignity to the desire of the new class – the bourgeoisie, let's call it – to take over running the show, and provided a new impetus for the ancient but mostly suppressed notion that what touches all must be approved by all. In the old mechanisms of elected assemblies they found a mechanism that, if brought up to date by a bit of modern rigor, could be used to put this philosophy into motion. Soon the revolutions were under way.

I guess I see a thinker like Spinoza as reflecting his time more than shaping it. I can believe that ideas like his provided another small push in the rush toward the modern world, by, so to speak, protecting modernity on the flank of philosophy. Some people did care about philosophy and theology, so it might have been true that if they had not had Spinoza (and then David Hume and Diderot) to defend them against medieval philsophical ideas, that might have mattered. But I suspect that if the philsophers we know by name did not perform that service, somebody else would have. The social and economic pressure toward revolution was so great, and the ideas of ancient philosophers so ready to hand, that philosophical attacks on monarchy and the church would have emerged from somewhere.

I do not believe that Spinoza or anyone else is the master thinker of modernity; I think the world changes in ways, and by mechanisms, that far overpower any one person's ideas.

Come to think of it, Spinoza believed the same thing.