The Philosophy Of Baruch Spinoza

Throughout your philosophic studies you  may consider passing by the philosophy of Baruch De Espinoza, but I beg you,  read on, and you will find yourself a little greater than you were before. Let  this video serve only as your introduction and pass on eagerly to one of the supreme  achievements of modern thought “The Ethics. ” Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on November 24th,  1632.

The community in which he was brought up was unique in that it was comprised of Jewish  immigrants that had fled from several European countries to avoid persecution from the Roman  Catholic Church. The Jewish people, including our philosophers Portuguese ancestors, traveled  from place to place until Dutch authorities granted them asylum, this as long as they didn’t  cause any scandal or allow any of its members to cause ripples throughout society. It seems here  that it was destined that Spinoza would belong to the world.

And in 1656, at the age of just 24,  Spinoza would be excommunicated from the Synagogue and the world would be better for it. He would join no other creed and live out the rest of his life alone in the  outskirts of Amsterdam. It was here, under the name Benedict that he would reach out  to every corner of the earth and through every generation.

Our philosopher published only two  books during his lifetime and due to the threat from the Roman Catholic Church these publications  would be anonymous less he would suffer the same fate as the tenacious Giordano Bruno. His  greatest work “The Ethics” would only appear after his premature death in 1677, approbation  for his achievements would take even longer. In an attempt to maintain clarity we will cover  his work in the order in which he produced them.

He begins by asserting that the language  of the bible is deliberately metaphorical and allegorical. This was in order to  capture the imagination of the masses, since “Scripture was written primarily for an  entire people, and secondarily for the whole human race; consequently its contents must  necessarily be adapted, as far as possible, to the understanding of the masses. ” For this very same reason the apostles resorted to miracle stories.

After all The people  will always require “a religion phrased in imagery and haloed with superstition,” and no matter how  many are destroyed innumerable others will spring up anxious to occupy the throne. Spinoza would  also pause in perplexity at the utter lack of compassion toward other creeds displayed by the  Roman Catholic Church. “I have often wondered” he said “that persons who make boast of professing  the Christian religion – namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men – should  quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily toward one another such bitter hatred, that  this, rather than the virtues which they profess, is the readiest criteria of their faith.

” We  see here why, in an age dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, Spinoza would publish under an  alias. Lastly this work reveals to us, for the first time, Spinoza’s pantheistic view of god. Allow me to pass by his second book, (Principles of the Cartesian Philosophy) in order that we  may focus on his more original third and fourth.

After the many ills of life that he had  experienced, Spinoza set out on a quest to discover how he may go about attaining  “the faculty of enjoying throughout eternity continual supreme happiness. ” And in his  third book, the improvement of the intellect, he reveals to us what he has found. To strive for the utmost development of our intellect while abstaining from all  things superfluous, this, Spinoza thought, would allow for the better understanding  of its forces as they pertain to the order of nature.

True happiness can only come  to us through the pursuit of knowledge, and this pursuit would eventually  lead us to the joy of understanding. Throughout this pursuit he thought the  philosopher must also remain a citizen; he lays out these rules of conduct to  follow as we seek this elusive end: I. To speak in a manner comprehensible to  the people, and to do for them all things that do not prevent us from attaining our ends.

II. To enjoy such pleasures as are necessary for the preservation of health. III.

To seek only enough money as is necessary for the maintenance of our  life and health, and to comply with such customs as are not opposed to what we seek. Before delving into Spinoza’s masterpiece “The Ethics,” a question that must be explored is “how  do we know that our knowledge is knowledge? ” How, with our senses so often deceptive do we  determine truth?

Spinoza suggests that first we must distinguish between the various forms of  knowledge. In Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” he assists us in understanding each of them. I.

First there is here say knowledge, such as when I know the date of my birth. II. Second there is knowledge that comes about by experience, such as when a physician  knows a cure not by any specific formulation of experimental tests, but by a “general  impression” that it has “usually” worked.

III. Third, immediate deduction,  or knowledge reached by reasoning, as when I conclude to the immensity of the  sun from seeing that in the case of other objects distance decreases the apparent size. IV.

Forth, the highest form of knowledge, comes by immediate deduction and direct  perception, as when we see at once that 6 is the missing number in : 2x4 = 2+X, or as when we  perceive that the whole is greater than the part. If you’re familiar with the works of Immanuel  Kant then you should be familiar with “a priori” knowledge; this and that are one in the same. Now that we have, as Spinoza suggested, “Devised a means for improving and clarifying the intellect,”  we are prepared at last to explore “The Ethics.

” When reading the Ethics do not think that  by running through it quickly you will understand it fully, “every part depends on  preceding parts, you will not understand any important section thoroughly till you have  read and pondered the whole. ” I will not be able to capture the whole of its grandeur in this  video, what I hope is that I am able to expatiate on its most essential lessons and principles. In an attempt to make the Ethics comprehensible, Spinoza constructs it in geometrical form, but  the result is a work of philosophy that is neither clear nor comprehensible.

He acknowledges the  apparent complexity of the ethics, but consoles and reassures us saying, “Doubtless, the reader  will become confused, and will recollect many things which will bring him to a standstill;  therefore I pray him to proceed gently with me and form no judgement concerning these things  until he shall have read all. ” Have patience with this video as well, I assure you we will come  to its core principles soon enough, but first we should clarify bits of Spinoza’s terminology,  less we should misunderstand his message. For the sake of this video we will only define  two important terms “substance and Mode.

” Think of substance not as anything material, as we would  speak of marble as the substance of a statue, but instead substance as Spinoza understands it  is “that which eternally and unchangeably is, and of which everything else must be a transient  form. ” These forms are what Spinoza refers to as modes; this is “any individual thing or event  including you, your body, and even your thoughts. ” He identifies substance with god and  nature, “I hold that god is the immanent, and not the extraneous, cause of all things.

I  say, all is in god; all lives and moves in god. ” He does not mean to convey to his readers that  god and nature are one in the same, but that like substance god is the underlying reality in which  the processes of nature occur. Natural law is but the eternal commandments of god.

This means, to  the Roman Catholic Churches abhorrence, that god was not some omnipresent man ordering countless  persecutions, but was instead only nature and its laws. He would also go on to address our  timeless problem of evil. Spinoza asserted that philosophers often make the mistake of  attempting to reconcile evil with an all-powerful and completely good god, take Leibnitz’s  best of all possible worlds as an example.

Good and evil are but anthropocentric delusions,  subjective assertions. For the spider to live the fly has to die; for the fly to live  the spider must starve. “Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd,  or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant  of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged  according to the dictates of our own reason; although in fact, what our reason pronounces  is bad is not bad as regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards  the laws of our own nature taken separately.

” What of Spinoza’s position on free will?  I will let him tell you in his own words. “There is in the mind no absolute or free will;  but the mind is determined in willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its  turn by another cause, and this by another, and so on to infinity,” we only think that we  are free because we are conscious of our desires, but Spinoza informs us that most are ignorant  of the causes that lead us to these desires.

Of all the profound moral philosophies that  populate history there are but three that stand predominant; that of Buddha and Jesus, that of  Machiavelli and Nietzsche, and that of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. As Durant so accurately  said “it is the distinction of Spinoza that his ethic unconsciously reconciles  these apparently hostile philosophies, weaves them into a harmonious unity, and gives  us in consequence a system of morals which is the supreme achievement of modern thought. ” In his ethic happiness is the ultimate goal, the apogee of all human conduct.

He would  define happiness very simply as the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain. To him  pleasure and pain are merely transitions; pain being ones transition from a greater state  of perfection to a lesser, and pleasure being the antithesis of pain. He would equate power with  virtue and thought joy only comes when our power is increased, “the more a man can preserve  his being and seek what is useful to him, the greater is his virtue.

” In the same sense  emotions are only good or bad in so far as they positively or negatively impact our power. So he  stands behind a justifiable egoism and lays it down as his foundation on which virtue is built. He has no use for humility or remorse, but admires modesty.

Unjustifiable pride is also something  Spinoza rejects, and for society to overcome its shortcomings the individuals that populate  it must conquer these undesirable emotions. To do this we must endeavor to understand; passion  should come secondary to reason, “instincts are magnificent as a driving force, but dangerous as  guides” – Will Durant. When we decide to adopt a deterministic philosophic model we also adopt the  fortitude to bear up under any circumstance, to recognize the necessity of all things, and to see  them as not harmful nor beneficial.

As Nietzsche would go on to say “that which is necessary does  not offend me. Amor Fati is the core of my nature” Spinoza’s view on religion and immortality  are best summarized here with this epilogue. “Our mind, in so far as it understands, is an  external mode of thinking, which is determined by another mode of thinking, and this one  again by another, and so on to infinity; so that they all constitute at the same time the  eternal and infinite intellect of god.

” And with that we should continue on to his fourth and final  work Tractatus Politicus “The Political Treatise. ” While this work would remain unfinished due to  his untimely death, it would, none the less, bring clarity to his political views. “Men are not born for citizenship, but must be made for it,” this is to say that before  civilizations were formed individuals lived apart without conceptions of right and wrong, “Might was  Right.

” It is only through accepted organization that the might of the individual becomes the might  of the state. The individual, seeing that survival is much more of a guarantee with mutual aid,  concedes his own individual power to the power of the whole. From here arises the development of  morality and conscience, since these things are necessary for the survival of the whole.

Let Spinoza explain, in his own words, the necessity of social organization; “the  last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to  free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself  or his neighbor. The end of the state, I repeat, is not to make rational beings into brute beasts  and machines. It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely.

It is to lead men  to live by, and exercise, a free reason; that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger and  guile, nor act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty. ” Freedom of thought and freedom of speech are essential to maintaining the stability of  the state; it is for this reason that Spinoza expresses a preference for Democracy.

In this  form of Governance “everyone submits to the control of authority over his actions,  but not over his judgement and reason; i. e. seeing that all cannot think alike, the  voice of the majority has the force of law.

” Democracy does however have its troubles, for  instance its propensity for electing demagogues into office. The only remedy, Spinoza thought, was  to limit office to those trained for the cause. For some time after his death the world  would sadly hold him in ill repute, this was until the German writer Lessing  restored his name to its rightful place among the geniuses of history.

All those who endeavor  to follow the philosophic path should know him, it was Hegel who declared that “to be a  philosopher one must first be a Spinozist. ” I can only say that Hegel was right,  and that I too implore whoever hears this to discover our gentle philosopher. It would be near impossible to fit so much matter into this video, less I kept you here  another hour.

I hope, however, that I was able to adequately capture the essence of his work. If you enjoyed the video or found it helpful in any way consider subscribing and turning  on the notification bell for more on eastern and western philosophy, and as always thank you  for talking philosophy with me, until next time.