Baruch Spinoza

• 1. Introduction

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  Baruch Spinoza was born on the 24th of November 1632 into an Amsterdam family that had survived the Portuguese Inquisition by hiding their faith for generations. By the time he was twenty-three, he had been expelled from his own community in a censure so severe it was never rescinded. By the time he died at forty-four, he had written works that would preoccupy Lessing, Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Einstein. He did all of this while grinding lenses for a living, publishing almost nothing under his own name, and wearing a signet ring engraved with a single Latin word: Caute. Caution.

  Who was this man who argued that God and Nature were the same thing, that human freedom was mostly an illusion, and that church authority had no place in a democratic state? How did a young merchant's son from the canals of Amsterdam become, as Rebecca Goldstein put it, "the renegade Jew who gave us modernity"? And why, more than three and a half centuries after his death, does the congregation that expelled him still refuse to take it back?

• 2. A Family Forged by Flight

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  In 1597, the family of Spinoza's paternal grandfather left Vidigueira, in Portugal, and made their way to Nantes, living outwardly as New Christians to survive. For reasons that are now unknown, they eventually transferred to Holland, where the Portuguese Jewish community offered something rare: relative tolerance, so long as one practiced discreetly.

  Spinoza's maternal grandfather was a foremost merchant in Porto who drifted between Judaism and Christianity. His maternal grandmother raised him from age six to nine, and scholars believe he learned much of his family's hidden history from her. The double inheritance of secrecy and commerce shaped the world he was born into.

  His father, Michael, became a prominent and wealthy merchant in Amsterdam with a business of wide geographical reach. In 1649, Michael was elected to serve as an administrative officer of the congregation Talmud Torah, the recently united community that anchored the Portuguese Jewish world in the city. Michael married his cousin Rachael d'Espinosa, a practice common in the community that consolidated family capital and commercial networks. Rachael's children died in infancy, and she herself died in 1627.

  Michael's second wife, Hannah Deborah, became Baruch's mother, and they lived on the Vlooienburg, an artificial island on the south side of the River Amstel, at the fifth house along the Houtgracht canal. The artist Rembrandt lived nearby. Baruch was the third child, named by tradition for his maternal grandfather. His mother died when he was six, and his stepmother Esther, who had grown up as a New Christian and knew little formal Judaism, raised him from age nine onward. The household spoke Portuguese at home.

• 3. The Expulsion

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  On the 27th of July 1656, the leaders of the Talmud Torah community, which included Aboab de Fonseca, issued a writ of herem against the twenty-three-year-old Spinoza. The censure was the harshest ever pronounced in the community. The document itself cited his "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds" but named no specific charge, referring only to the testimony of witnesses "in the presence of the said Espinoza".

  The road to expulsion had been building for years. The First Anglo-Dutch War had devastated the Spinoza firm, with English ships capturing much of their cargo and merchant voyages. By 1654, when his father died, the family's wealth had effectively evaporated, and the business was finished. In March 1656, Spinoza had gone to the city authorities to be declared an orphan, a legal maneuver that would free him from his father's debts. This violated a synagogue regulation requiring business disputes to be resolved within the community, and it was a public act of defiance.

  The expulsion was never revoked because it produced no repentance. After the herem, Spinoza did not convert to Christianity or join any religious sect. He may have written a Spanish-language defense of his views, an Apologia, but it is now lost. Instead, he found lodgings elsewhere in Amsterdam and later in Leiden, supported himself by teaching and lens grinding, and began the work that would define him. He did not maintain a Jewish identity; he argued that without adherence to Jewish law, the Jewish people lacked a sustaining source of difference, rendering the notion of a secular Jew incoherent.

• 4. Lenses and Letters

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  From around 1654 to 1657, Spinoza began studying Latin with Franciscus van den Enden, a former Jesuit and avowed atheist. Van den Enden ran a school where students learned arts and sciences, participated in theatrical performances used as pedagogical tools, and encountered scholastic and modern philosophy. It was almost certainly through Van den Enden that Spinoza first engaged seriously with Descartes, who would become the decisive early influence on his thinking.

  Around 1658, Spinoza audited classes in Cartesian philosophy at Leiden University. The circle that formed around him in these years included Jarig Jelles, Lodewijk Meyer, Johannes Bouwmeester, and Adriaan Koerbagh. In Amsterdam, this group was publicly disparaged as atheists by the Danish polymath Ole Borch. Their private reputation was different: they subjected the drafts of Spinoza's Ethics to rigorous scrutiny, serving as his philosophical testing ground.

  By grinding lenses, Spinoza earned the respect of the scientist Christiaan Huygens, the mathematician Johannes Hudde, and Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the British Royal Society, all of whom praised the quality of his optical work. He corresponded with Oldenburg about natural philosophy, and Oldenburg became one of the relay points through which Spinoza's ideas moved across Europe. The correspondence also brought Willem van Blijenbergh, an amateur Calvinist theologian, who pressed Spinoza on the nature of evil and sin. Spinoza told him plainly that their views were incommensurable and that scripture alone was not a reliable guide to truth.

  In 1676, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz traveled to The Hague to spend three days with Spinoza, discussing current events and philosophy. Leibniz was privately enthusiastic about the manuscript of the Ethics but publicly dismissive of Spinoza's work. Later, when his name appeared unredacted in the printed Opera Posthuma, Leibniz was visibly alarmed.

• 5. God or Nature

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  Early in the Ethics, Spinoza argues that there is only one substance in the universe, which he calls God, or Nature, treating the two terms as synonymous. In Latin: Deus sive Natura. Everything that exists is a modification, a "mode", of this single infinite substance. Individual things, including human minds and bodies, are not separate entities but modifications of the one underlying reality.

  Spinoza defined God as "a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence", and argued that such a being, by its very nature, must exist. He then stated that "Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God." He was explicit that he did not mean God was simply corporeal matter. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg, he wrote that those who thought he identified God with "a kind of mass or corporeal matter" were "quite mistaken".

  For humans, God is knowable through two of the infinitely many attributes: Thought and Extension. Spinoza's position is that the mind and the body are not two different things but one thing conceived under two different descriptions. This directly challenged Descartes's dualism, which treated mind and matter as fundamentally distinct.

  His determinism was thoroughgoing. He wrote in the Ethics that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case". His illustration was blunt: the infant reaching for the breast, the angry boy seeking revenge, the drunk speaking words he will regret all believe they act freely. None of them do. In Letter 58, he wrote that "men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which their desires are determined."

  Debate about what to call this position has never settled. In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi called it pure materialism. Moses Mendelssohn argued there was no real difference between pantheism and theism. Martial Gueroult proposed the term panentheism. Steven Nadler concluded it was atheism, not because Spinoza rejected this or that conception of God, but because "there is no divinity whatsoever" in his system.

• 6. The Books He Dared to Publish

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  Spinoza's first publication, in 1663, was a geometric exposition of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy, the only work he published in his lifetime under his own name. It was an exercise in Euclidean method, walking through Descartes's arguments with definitions and axioms, and it established his philosophical reputation among those able to read it.

  The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670 with a false publisher and a fictitious place of publication, was something altogether different. Written while the Second Anglo-Dutch War raged and addressed to theologians and religious leaders rather than technical philosophers, it questioned the divine origin of the Hebrew Bible, argued that miracles were impossible, and asserted that ecclesiastical authority had no place in a secular, democratic state. It caused, as his colleague Adriaan Koerbagh had learned at terrible cost, an uproar. Koerbagh had published similar ideas under his own name and died in prison after his arrest by the authorities. Spinoza's book was safer because it was written in Latin, a language the general public did not read, and Spinoza explicitly forbade its translation.

  Samuel Maresius attacked Spinoza personally. Thomas Hobbes and Johannes Bredenburg criticized his conception of God. The Reformed Church in Amsterdam ordered the book's distribution banned. Secular authorities enforced this order with varying degrees of conviction. Spinoza told his supporters not to translate his works and abstained from publishing further.

  The Ethics, the work he considered his chief philosophical legacy, was finished by 1674 but published only after his death. Its structure was modeled on Euclid's geometry, built from definitions and axioms toward propositions covering metaphysics, epistemology, the emotions, and freedom. Steven Nadler described it as "a superbly cryptic masterwork" containing many unresolved obscurities. His friends edited the Opera Posthuma in secrecy to prevent the confiscation and destruction of the manuscripts. Secular authorities, and later the Roman Catholic Church, banned the published works.

• 7. Death and Enduring Argument

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  Spinoza's health began to fail in 1676. He died in The Hague on the 21st of February 1677, at age forty-four, attended by his physician friend Georg Herman Schuller. He had suffered from a lung affliction, probably tuberculosis, possibly complicated by silicosis from years of grinding glass lenses. He died without a will, and his death was sudden despite weeks of increasing illness.

  His friends rescued his papers and unpublished manuscripts, removing them from his belongings before any inventory was taken, so they do not appear in the official record of his possessions. They had the Latin manuscripts translated into Dutch within a year of his death. He was buried inside the Nieuwe Kerk four days after he died, sharing a vault with six others. There was no memorial plaque. In the following century the vault was emptied, and its remains scattered across the churchyard. A plaque now stands outside the church, where some of his remains are part of the soil.

  The Lutheran preacher Johannes Colerus wrote the first biography of Spinoza specifically to research his final days, in order to refute rumors that he had repented on his deathbed. Those rumors circulated for decades and eventually faded in the eighteenth century.

  Hegel asserted that "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Albert Einstein, when asked by telegram in 1929 whether he believed in God, responded: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." In the Netherlands, Spinoza's portrait appeared on the thousand-guilder banknote until the euro replaced it in 2002, and the country's highest scientific award still bears his name: the Spinoza Prize.

  In December 2015, the Amsterdam Jewish community organized a symposium to consider lifting the herem issued in 1656. Scholars from around the world attended. The rabbi of the congregation ruled that the censure should hold. He said he had no greater wisdom than his predecessors, and that Spinoza's views had not become less problematic over time.