Baruch Spinoza
Understanding the passions through their causes rather than judging them: suffering less, acting more, and making of that lucidity a joy.
Dutch · 1632 – 1677
A thinker of the Dutch Golden Age, heir to and to the Jewish tradition of Amsterdam, whose community excommunicated him at twenty-three for his ideas. A lens-grinder who declined academic honours, he set out in , written more geometrico and published after his death, a system that starts from God to rethink freedom, the passions and happiness. Long cursed as an atheist, he was rediscovered in the nineteenth century and remains a major reference for the philosophy of immanence.
There is only one substance, : nothing exists outside it, and no world beyond doubles the real.
is an illusion: everything, our volitions included, follows by from prior causes.
Man's essence is desire itself, the by which each thing strives to persevere in its being.
The passions are not faults to repress but natural phenomena: we free ourselves from them by understanding them, not by fighting them.
is not the reward of virtue: it is virtue itself, the joy of knowing things through their necessity.
Justification
True knowledge proceeds from by deductive chaining, not from sense experience, the source of confused ideas (the first kind of knowledge). Its summit is the third kind of knowledge, intuitive science, which grasps things in their necessity from the essence of God: an unabashed .
This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.Ethics, II, prop. 40, scholium 2
Ethics, II, prop. 40, scholium 2 (the three kinds of knowledge) · Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
Justification
The is demonstrated more geometrico, in the manner of the geometers: definitions, axioms, propositions and proofs. This deductive architecture attests a rationalist , the conviction that true and certain knowledge of the whole of reality is attainable.
Ethics (full title: Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order) · Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on the certainty of the true idea
Justification
Understanding is the sole salvation: each adequate idea increases our power of acting, and beatitude is nothing but the intellectual love born of knowledge of the third kind. Illusion is not first a fault but an impotence, a mutilated idea that makes us passive; the task is neither to mock nor to curse, but to understand, because understanding is already being free.
Ethics, IV-V · Political Treatise, I
Justification
Universal notions such as "man" or "horse" are not realities: they arise from the confusion of too many images the mind cannot distinguish. They are beings of reason, not things; Spinoza is a nominalist.
Ethics, II, prop. 40, scholium 1
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Justification
The Ethics is demonstrated "in the geometrical manner": all knowledge is deduced from first definitions and axioms, and an adequate idea carries its certainty within itself, a true idea being its own standard. This is a rationalist foundationalism.
Ethics, I; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
Justification
If everything follows from God's nature with the same as a triangle's properties follow from its essence, no act of will can be an exception. The argument also explains the illusion of : like a thrown stone that would believe itself free, we are conscious of our desires but ignorant of the causes that determine them.
A stone receives from an external cause that pushes it a certain quantity of motion... Now conceive that this stone, while it continues to move, thinks and knows that it is striving, as far as it can, to move. This stone, surely, since it is conscious only of its striving, will believe itself entirely free.Letter 58 to Schuller
Ethics, I, prop. 29 and appendix · Letter 58 to Schuller (the stone that thinks itself free)
Justification
Each thing, as a finite mode of God's power, tends to persevere in its being: this is its actual essence. Desire is therefore not a lack to be filled, against a whole Platonic tradition, but the very affirmation of our being; wisdom does not extinguish it but uses reason to select what increases the .
Desire is the very essence of man, insofar as it is conceived as determined to do something by a given affection of itself.Ethics, III, definitions of the affects, def. 1
Ethics, III, prop. 9, scholium and definitions of the affects (desire, the essence of man) · Ethics, III, props. 6-7 (conatus)
Justification
The summit of knowledge, the third kind, grasps things in God; this necessarily generates a joy referred to its cause, the . Hence the reversal peculiar to Spinoza: blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, for to know adequately is already to be powerful and free.
Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.Ethics, V, proposition 42, scholium
Ethics, V, props. 32-36 (intellectual love of God, blessedness) · Ethics, V, prop. 42 (blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself)
Justification
Spinoza rejects all in Nature: final causes are a human fiction, a projection of our desires onto a world that acts only by the necessity of its nature. Meaning is not given by a cosmic teleology but constructed through the mind's striving toward knowledge and joy.
Ethics, I, appendix (the critique of final causes) · Ethics, IV, preface (good and evil as notions relative to us)
Justification
The mind is the idea of the body: there is neither a soul housed in a machine nor a mere body, but a single reality expressed under two attributes. Spinoza embodies psychophysical unity, equidistant from the body-as-instrument and the lived body.
Ethics, II, prop. 13
Justification
For Spinoza, the actual essence of a thing is nothing but its conatus, the striving by which it perseveres in its being: everything, the human being included, acts and exists by following the necessity of its nature. Far from indeterminate, each being involves an eternal essence deduced from substance; what it can do, what it becomes, follows from what it is.
Ethics, III, props. 6-7 · Ethics, II, def. 2
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Justification
Understanding that everything happens by lessens the power of sad passions over the mind: we grieve less over what we know to be inevitable. This serene acceptance of necessity prefigures , without revolt against what must be.
I have taken great care not to deride human actions, nor to bewail them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.Political Treatise, I, 4
Ethics, V, prop. 6 (the mind suffers less from affects it refers to necessity)
Justification
is good in itself, for it marks the passage to a greater perfection and increases the power to act; to make moderate use of pleasures befits the wise. Spinoza mocks the savage and sad superstition that forbids pleasure: nothing warrants thinking a god delights in our privation. The moderation comes only from reason's task of regulating these pleasures.
Ethics, IV, prop. 45, scholium (against the sad superstition that forbids pleasure) · Ethics, III, definitions of the affects (joy, the passage to a greater perfection)
Justification
Sadness is always the passage to a lesser perfection, a diminution of the power to act: in itself it has no redemptive value. Wisdom consists in reducing it by understanding its causes, never in seeking or sacralizing it, hence a clear abolitionist leaning.
Ethics, III, prop. 11, scholium and definitions of the affects (sadness, the passage to a lesser perfection) · Ethics, IV, prop. 41 (joy is never directly bad, sadness never directly good)
Justification
For the free man, the fear of dying is a passion born of , to be dissolved through knowledge: a free man thinks of nothing less than of death. The eternity of the mind he speaks of is no personal survival in duration, hence a residual share of immortalism. And though every being strives to persevere in its being (conatus), this metaphysical refusal of its own destruction stays secondary to the sage's serenity.
Ethics, IV, prop. 67 · Ethics, V, props. 38-39
Justification
Hope and fear are correlated affects, inconstant joys and sorrows born of about an uncertain future: whoever hopes also dreads. One may infer that the man led by reason would live less by hope than by lucidity, acting from the knowledge of necessity rather than awaiting a better lot, though Spinoza never thematizes this lucidity as an ideal.
Ethics, III, definitions of the affects 12-13 (hope and fear) · Ethics, IV, prop. 47 (the affects of hope and fear cannot be good in themselves)
Justification
The opens by refusing to deride, bewail or curse human actions: they must be understood as one studies natural phenomena, taking men as they are. Spinoza accordingly devises institutions fitted to the real nature of the passions, not to a chimerical ideal, an avowed political realism.
Political Treatise, ch. 1, §1 and §4 (understanding human actions, not deploring them)
Justification
Seeking one's own advantage is the very foundation of virtue, but advantage rightly understood, guided by reason, leads man to seek what he has in common with others: nothing is more useful to man than man. Enlightened thus converges on concord, without becoming disinterested altruism.
Ethics, IV, prop. 18, scholium (seeking one's advantage, the foundation of virtue) · Ethics, IV, prop. 35, corollary (nothing more useful to man than man)
Justification
In the , Spinoza argues that the end of the state is freedom and defends freedom of thought and expression as a condition of civil peace and the growth of knowledge. Without being an anarchist, he sharply limits authority, religious authority above all, in the name of that freedom.
Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 20 (the freedom to philosophize)
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Justification
At the heart of love Spinoza sees neither lack nor gift but a joy: to love is to pass to a greater perfection, a joy referred to the idea of its cause (, III). Love is therefore not the surge of a void toward what would fill it, but the striving (conatus) of power toward what increases it, which keeps a kinship with without its pathos of lack. Among human beings this striving culminates in the friendship of those guided by reason, who agree in nature, are mutually useful and want nothing for themselves that they do not also want for others: a rational , reciprocal and chosen. At the summit, the exceeds every interpersonal bond: a love without return, in which the sage does not require to be loved back, closer to disinterested gift than to possession.
He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.Ethics, V, prop. 19
Ethics, III (definition of love); IV, props. 35-37 and 70-71 (the friendship of reasonable people); V, props. 19 and 32-37 (the intellectual love of God)
Justification
In the , the state arises from a transfer of natural right: to live in safety, individuals agree to hand the community their power to act as they please. This derivation of the polity from a pact is contractualism, even if Spinoza grounds it in power rather than in a moral obligation.
Theological-Political Treatise, ch. 16 (the foundation of the state, transfer of right)
Justification
Virtue coincides with power, the capacity to act under the guidance of reason and according to the laws of one's own nature: to act from virtue is to persevere in being by seeking what increases it. This naturalistic , centered on the and the flourishing of the power to act, is governed neither by duty nor by the mere reckoning of consequences.
Ethics, IV, def. 8 and prop. 20 (virtue, the power to act according to one's nature) · Ethics, IV, prop. 24 (to act from virtue is to act under the guidance of reason)
Justification
Spinoza derives immanence from his definition of substance: being cause of itself and infinite, there can be only one, outside which nothing can be conceived. God therefore cannot be a transcendent creator set apart from the world, as in or in theology: he is its , and the whole of reality is but the deduction of his nature.
Ethics, I, prop. 18 (God, immanent cause) · Ethics, IV, preface (Deus sive Natura)
Justification
God exists necessarily, but is not the personal, transcendent God of classical theism: it is the single, infinite substance, identical with Nature (pantheism). Lacking providence or anthropomorphic will, this God is so remote from ordinary theism that Spinoza was charged with atheism; hence an intermediate value on the theist side, affirming a God while flagging its impersonal nature.
Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.Ethics, I, prop. 15
Ethics, I, prop. 11 (God necessarily exists) · Ethics, I, props. 14-15 (single substance)
Justification
Since the affects follow from natural necessity like everything else, blaming them is futile: Spinoza proposes to treat them as if it were a question of lines and planes. His therapeutic argument is precise: a passion is a confused idea, hence a passivity; forming a of it turns it into an action, so that to understand an affect is already to free oneself from it, not to repress it.
I shall treat human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.Ethics, III, preface
Ethics, III, preface (studying the affects geometrically) · Ethics, V, prop. 3 (an affect of which we form a clear idea ceases to be a passion)
Justification
Spinoza explicitly rejects as a human illusion: Nature acts toward no end, everything following from it by the sole necessity of efficient causes. This is a thoroughgoing mechanism, where the idea of a providential design is mere prejudice.
Ethics, I, appendix (the critique of final causes) · Ethics, I, props. 16 and 29 (all follows necessarily from the divine nature)
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Justification
Spinoza is a monist: a single substance, God or Nature, of which thought and extension are two attributes expressing the same reality under two aspects (the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things). His position therefore fits none of the three slots: it stands at the centre, neither materialist (extension is not primary) nor idealist (nor is thought), and its dualism of attributes is not a dualism of two substances. Hence near-equal weights.
Ethics, II, prop. 7 (parallelism of ideas and things) · Ethics, I, def. 4 and prop. 14 (the attributes of the single substance)
Justification
Thought and extension are two attributes of one substance: the mind is the idea of the body, neither reducible to it nor separable from it. "All individuals are animate in varying degrees": a position close to dual-aspect monism and panpsychism.
Ethics, II, props. 7 and 13 (scholium)
Understanding rather than blamingStanceFreedom of the will
Not to mock, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.
held that nothing happens without a cause, and that understanding the causes of an act loosens the grip of the anger or resentment it stirs. To hold this stance is, before a wrong, to replace « whose fault is it? » with « what made this possible? »: indignation and guilt, which assume one could have done otherwise, lose their force, and you decide what comes next with a calm mind.
⚠ To understand is neither to excuse nor to resign: one can grasp the cause of a wrong and still firmly oppose it. Beware too of fatalism, « everything is determined, so I do nothing »: your reflection and your efforts are themselves among the causes of what follows.