Spinoza (1632-1677) was a bit of an eccentric. A Dutch philosopher of Jewish origin, he cultivated a very original take on the nature of God and the universe. Half rationalist, half mystic, he shocked the Jewish community enough to be excommunicated, the Christian community accused him of atheism and his books were burnt. So what were Spinoza’s main ideas?
Ethics can be built up rationally
He was a rationalist, like Descartes, and turned his logical approach to the question of ethics. In his “Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata”, published posthumously, he derived his ethical views logically from a series of axioms, just as Euclid had proved his geometical results from a set of fundamental statements.
God and the oneness of the universe
Everything in the universe is an aspect of God (or Nature). Everything is divine – from rocks to humans. Some commentators choose to describe this as “pantheism”, while others reject the term. In any case, God is everywhere – not a separate entity which had created the universe.
Rejection of Descartes’ dualism
Cartesian dualism held that body and mind were two distinct substances which somehow interacted. Spinoza denied this. He believed in “monism” – everthing was part of the whole – and the mind and the body were therefore just two aspects (or modes of being) of God’s world. Thus he could dodge the age-old question of how the mind and the body could interact and influence each other!
No free will
As human beings are just one part of this divine nature, then they cannot have independent free will. Spinoza was therefore firmly a ‘determinist’. Whether we have the impression of free will is another matter!
No good or evil
Similarly, since every man is part of the universal whole, there can be no “evil” as such. There might be the appearance of evil if we don’t have the full picture of the universe.
The path to happiness
Spinoza believed that we needed to throw out our irrational superstitions, including the precepts of the Bible, control our passions and embrace rationalism. Sounds a rather dull recipe for achieving the fulfilled life!