Baruch (1632–77), Dutch metaphysician, epistemologist, psychologist, moral philosopher, political theorist, and philosopher of religion, generally regarded as one of the most important figures of seventeenth-century rationalism.
Life and works. Born and educated in the Jewish community of Amsterdam, he forsook his given name ‘Baruch’ in favor of the Latin ‘Benedict’ at the age of twenty-two. Between 1652 and 1656 he studied the philosophy of Descartes in the school of Francis van den Enden. Having developed unorthodox views of the divine nature (and having ceased to be fully observant of Jewish practice), he was excommunicated by the Jewish community in 1656. He spent his entire life in Holland; after leaving Amsterdam in 1660, he resided successively in Rijnsburg, Voorburg, and the Hague. He supported himself at least partly through grinding lenses, and his knowledge of optics involved him in an area of inquiry of great importance to seventeenth-century science. Acquainted with such leading intellectual figures as Leibniz, Huygens, and Henry Oldenberg, he declined a professorship at the University of Heidelberg partly on the grounds that it might interfere with his intellectual freedom. His premature death at the age of fortyfour was due to consumption. The only work published under Spinoza’s name during his lifetime was his Principles of Descartes’s Philosophy (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Pars I et II, 1663), an attempt to recast and present Parts I and II of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the manner that Spinoza called geometrical order or geometrical method. Modeled on the Elements of Euclid and on what Descartes called the method of synthesis, Spinoza’s ‘geometrical order’ involves an initial set of definitions and axioms, from which various propositions are demonstrated, with notes or scholia attached where necessary. This work, which established his credentials as an expositor of Cartesian philosophy, had its origins in his endeavor to teach Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy to a private student. Spinoza’s Theological- Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) was published anonymously in 1670. After his death, his close circle of friends published his Posthumous Works (Opera Postuma, 1677), which included his masterpieces, Ethic, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata). The Posthumous Works also included his early unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione), his later unfinished Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus), a Hebrew Grammar, and Correspondence. An unpublished early work entitled Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Vorhandelung van God, de Mensch en deszelvs Welstand), in many ways a forerunner of the Ethics, was rediscovered (in copied manuscript) and published in the nineteenth century. Spinoza’s authorship of two brief scientific treatises, On the Rainbow and On the Calculation of Chances, is still disputed. Metaphysics. Spinoza often uses the term ‘God, or Nature’ (‘Deus, sive Natura’), and this identification of God with Nature is at the heart of his metaphysics. Because of this identification, his philosophy is often regarded as a version of pantheism and/or naturalism. But although philosophy begins with metaphysics for Spinoza, his metaphysics is ultimately in the service of his ethics. Because his naturalized God has no desires or purposes, human ethics cannot properly be derived from divine command. Rather, Spinozistic ethics seeks to demonstrate, from an adequate understanding of the divine nature and its expression in human nature, the way in which human beings can maximize their advantage. Central to the successful pursuit of this advantage is adequate knowledge, which leads to increasing control of the passions and to cooperative action.
Spinoza’s ontology, like that of Descartes, consists of substances, their attributes (which Descartes called principal attributes), and their modes. In the Ethics, Spinoza defines ‘substance’ as what is ‘in itself, and is conceived through itself’; ‘attribute’ as that which ‘the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence’; and ‘mode’ as ‘the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which also it is conceived.’ While Descartes had recognized a strict sense in which only God is a substance, he also recognized a second sense in which there are two kinds of created substances, each with its own principal attribute: extended substances, whose only principal attribute is extension; and minds, whose only principal attribute is thought. Spinoza, in contrast, consistently maintains that there is only one substance. His metaphysics is thus a form of substantial monism. This one substance is God, which Spinoza defines as ‘a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each expresses an eternal and infinite essence.’ Thus, whereas Descartes limited each created substance to one principal attribute, Spinoza claims that the one substance has infinite attributes, each expressing the divine nature without limitation in its own way. Of these infinite attributes, however, humans can comprehend only two: extension and thought. Within each attribute, the modes of God are of two kinds: infinite modes, which are pervasive features of each attribute, such as the laws of nature; and finite modes, which are local and limited modifications of substance. There is an infinite sequence of finite modes.
Descartes regarded a human being as a substantial union of two different substances, the thinking soul and the extended body, in causal interaction with each other. Spinoza, in contrast, regards a human being as a finite mode of God, existing simultaneously in God as a mode of thought and as a mode of extension. He holds that every mode of extension is literally identical with the mode of thought that is the ‘idea of’ that mode of extension. Since the human mind is the idea of the human body, it follows that the human mind and the human body are literally the same thing, conceived under two different attributes. Because they are actually identical, there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body; but there is a complete parallelism between what occurs in the mind and what occurs in the body. Since every mode of extension has a corresponding and identical mode of thought (however rudimentary that might be), Spinoza allows that every mode of extension is ‘animated to some degree’; his view is thus a form of panpsychism. Another central feature of Spinoza’s metaphysics is his necessitarianism, expressed in his claim that ‘things could have been produce. . . in no other way, and in no other order’ than that in which they have been produced. He derives this necessitarianism from his doctrine that God exists necessarily (for which he offers several arguments, including a version of the ontological argument) and his doctrine that everything that can follow from the divine nature must necessarily do so. Thus, although he does not use the term, he accepts a very strong version of the principle of sufficient reason. At the outset of the Ethics, he defines a thing as free when its actions are determined by its own nature alone. Only God – whose actions are determined entirely by the necessity of his own nature, and for whom nothing is external – is completely free in this sense. Nevertheless, human beings can achieve a relative freedom to the extent that they live the kind of life described in the later parts of the Ethics. Hence, Spinoza is a compatibilist concerning the relation between freedom and determinism. ‘Freedom of the will’ in any sense that implies a lack of causal determination, however, is simply an illusion based on ignorance of the true causes of a being’s actions. The recognition that all occurrences are causally determined, Spinoza holds, has a positive consolatory power that aids one in controlling the passions. Epistemology and psychology. Like other rationalists, Spinoza distinguishes two representational faculties: the imagination and the intellect. The imagination is a faculty of forming imagistic representations of things, derived ultimately from the mechanisms of the senses; the intellect is a faculty of forming adequate, nonimagistic conceptions of things. He also distinguishes three ‘kinds of knowledge.’ The first or lowest kind he calls opinion or imagination (opinio, imaginatio). It includes ‘random or indeterminate experience’ (experientia vaga) and also ‘hearsay, or knowledge from mere signs’; it thus depends on the confused and mutilated deliverances of the senses, and is inadequate. The second kind of knowledge he calls reason (ratio); it depends on common notions (i.e., features of things that are ‘common to all, and equally in the part and in the whole’) or on adequate knowledge of the properties (as opposed to the essences) of things. The third kind of knowledge he calls intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva); it proceeds from adequate knowledge of the essence or attributes of God to knowledge of the essence of things, and hence proceeds in the proper order, from causes to effects. Both the second and third kinds of knowledge are adequate. The third kind is preferable, however, as involving not only certain knowledge that something is so, but also knowledge of how and why it is so.
Because there is only one substance – God – the individual things of the world are not distinguished from one another by any difference of substance. Rather, among the internal qualitative modifications and differentiations of each divine attribute, there are patterns that have a tendency to endure; these constitute individual things. (As they occur within the attribute of extension, Spinoza calls these patterns fixed proportions of motion and rest.) Although these individual things are thus modes of the one substance, rather than substances in their own right, each has a nature or essence describable in terms of the thing’s particular pattern and its mechanisms for the preservation of its own being. This tendency toward self-preservation Spinoza calls conatus (sometimes translated as ‘endeavor’). Every individual thing has some conatus.