Dutch philosopher. Baruch Spinoza, or Baruch d' Espinoza. Informed of sciences of its time and strongly influenced by Hobbes and Descartes, Spinoza is one of the most influential rationalist philosophers of the XVIIe century.
Its thought, of a demanding difficulty, preached a radical immanentism: nothing exists that all, and this whole - Nature - is only God. For him, there is thus neither supernatural, neither Providence, nor last Judgment: the eternity of all is not another world but the truth of this one.
Spinoza, was born in Amsterdam, in 1632, in a Jewish family of Portuguese origin. He died in 1677, in $the Hague, without to have left Holland, which was then at the top of his economic power and its intellectual and artistic radiation. Having received a double formation, Hebraic (Talmud) and Latin (philosophy and Cartesian science), Spinoza attended there the liberal mediums most enlightened. He was the friend of Simon de Vries and the brothers of Witt. Excluded from the Jewish community since 1656 (major excommunication by the synagog of Amsterdam), without institutional fastener nor religious, it consequently carried out the existence of a free man, interfering work optical craft industry, by which it earned his living, and the intellectual speculation, by which it wanted to save it.
Spinoza passes for pantheist“God, i.e. Nature” Spinoza passes for pantheist, and this name, although it is anachronistic (the word appears only to the XVIII E century), summarizes well a characteristic of its thought. Spinoza, which is defended to be atheistic, however does not recognize any transcendent divinity. Nature is the whole of reality, and it is this whole which it calls God. It is little to say that there exists: he is the existence even, in his eternal need and his infinite productivity. All that east is as a God, who is cause of oneself (caused sui), and which is also, and consequently, the cause - immanent and nontransitive - of all that it contains; it is thus not other thing only Nature (“Deus sive Natura”, written Spinoza: “God, i.e. the Nature”), which is at the same time the cause of all (it is what Spinoza calls “Nature naturante”) and the totality of his effects (“naturée Nature”).
Reality and perfection
Its contemporaries saw for the majority a masked atheism there: if Nature is God, any belief in supernatural or transcendent God is indeed excluded, and such is well the direction of the spinozism. Nature is God, certainly, but this impersonal God is neither creator nor judge. He takes effect, not by a free choice of his will, but by the free one (since it is submitted only to itself) required his nature. Also it does not continue any end: “This Being eternal and infinite that we call God or Nature acts with the same need that there exists. Existing for no end, it thus does not act also for any; and like its existence, its action has neither principle nor end.” It is thus God without morals and benevolence: there is neither well nor badly in Nature, and it is in what, paradoxically, it is perfect, being always exactly all that it can be, without any fault and any negativity. The whole of reality is necessarily what it is, and it is only God. “By reality and perfection, Spinoza writing, I understand the same thing.”
Substance, attributes, modes
In its Ethics, shown “according to the geometrical order”, Spinoza calls substance “what is in oneself and is conceived by oneself”. Any substance, it shows, is cause of oneself and absolutely infinite, i.e. consisted “an infinity of attributes of which each one expresses a certain eternal and infinite gasoline”. It is in what it is God: “God, i.e. a substance consisted an infinity of attributes of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite gasoline, necessarily exists.” This substance is single, and all the singular things are only its modifications, or affections (its “modes”), which can exist only in it and by it. It is thus of a stone, a tree, a man.
The thought and extent
The spinozism is a radical monism: any being takes part to be it, and of the same being, which is Nature. As for the attributes, they are not substances (because the substance is single) nor however another thing (since there is anything else only the substance): they are “what the understanding perceives of a substance like component of a gasoline”. There is necessarily an infinity (since God is absolutely infinite), when well even we know only two of them, who are the thought and the extent.
Of this theory of the attributes - perhaps the most difficult point of the system - one will avoid any idealistic or, a fortiori, dualistic interpretation. The attribute is not the point of view of a subject on the substance (Spinoza is not Kant: its ethics is not a transcendental esthetics) but its reality even (its gasoline: what it is), as it is expressed of such or such manner. The attributes, if they are logically distinct from/to each other (each one can be conceived by oneself), less structurally parallel (“the order and the connection of the things”) and are not really confused of it (they are all the attributes of only one and even substance and contain “the same things for this reason”).
Spinoza, which defends Démocrite, Epicure and Lucrèce against Plato and Aristote, is closest to the materialists: “Thinking Substance and extended substance, it is only one and even substance understood sometimes under an attribute, sometimes under the other. In the same way also a mode of the extent and the idea of this mode, it is only one and even thing, but expressed in two manners.” The theory, applied to the man, will make feel all his subversive load: “The heart and the body are only one and even thing”, and “the decrees of the heart are anything else only the appetites themselves and vary consequently according to the variable provision of the body.”
“The desire is the gasoline even of the man”
The man thinks, and he knows: sometimes empirically or confusedly (knowledge of the first kind), sometimes rationally (knowledge of the second kind), sometimes intuitively (knowledge of the third kind). But this thought, if it is its fact, is not its singular gasoline. An false idea is nothing; and a true idea, as it is adequate, is the same one in the man and a God: a truth which would not be that human would cease by there being true.
What is this thus that a man? A reasonable animal, a political animal, a thinking thing? The man is not “an empire in an empire”: he belongs to the Nature, of which he follows the order. Like any being, it tends to persevere in the being, and this effort (conatus), as it refers at the same time to the heart and with the body, appetite is called. “The appetite, specifies Spinoza, is by there anything else only the gasoline even of the man, of the nature of which follows necessarily what is used for its conservation; and the man is thus determined to do it.”
This appetite can be conscious (in which case Spinoza speaks rather about desire) or not, but that does not change its nature: “That the man, indeed, has or is not aware of its appetite, this appetite does not remain about it less the same one”, and it is in what the philosopher actually does not recognize “any difference between the appetite of the man and the desire”. Spinoza can thus understand under the word of desire “all the efforts of the human nature, which we indicate by the words of appetite, will, desire or impulse”, and it is in the sense that he writes that “the desire is the gasoline even of the man”.
However any value is worth only by and for the desire: “We do not make an effort with nothing, want, do not appétons nor do not wish any thing because we consider it good; but, on the contrary, we judge that a thing is good because we make an effort towards it, wants it, appétons and wishes.” This inversion founds a radical relativism, which returns any morals which would be liked absolute with its statute of illusion. God or Nature does not have morals: it is of morals only human.
“All that gives joy is good”
Still is necessary it to avoid being mistaken on the statute in this morals. Not only it is only human but, even confined with this register, it remains illusory as long as it supposes the free will. “The men appear being free”, written Spinoza, because they are conscious of their actions and volitions, but they are ignoramuses of the causes which make them act and want. Also they are full with hatred and rancour for themselves or, more often, others. Such are the moralists, who “can fade the defects rather than to teach the virtues” and which “tend to anything else only to return the others as miserable as themselves”. Against this spirit, Spinoza teaches that “all that gives joy is good”, and that the joy, as it agrees with the reason, is the beginning of the virtue. It is there the heart of its ethics: “Which knows righteously that all follows need for divine nature and arrives according to the laws and eternal rules of Nature, will not certainly find anything which is worthy of hatred, mocking remark or contempt (...); but, as far as the human virtue allows it, he will endeavor to make well, like one says, and to be held in joy.”
An ethics of the love
One insists often, and rightly, on the aspect intellectual, if not intellectualist, of this ethics. The principle is given by it in a famous formula of the political Treaty, where Spinoza thus summarizes its attitude with regard to the human actions: “Not to laugh, not to cry, not to hate, but understand.” But knowledge could not with it only found an ethics, which is made possible only by the immanent normalcy of the desire, and effective that by positivity joy magnetizes. The ethics of Spinoza is thus neither intellectualist neither voluntarist (neither truth nor will are not enough): it is an ethics, indissolubly, knowledge and joy, and it is in what it is an ethics of the love.
Love and bliss
What joy? It is the “passage of the man of least to greater perfection”, Spinoza answers: the heart is delighted when it feels to increase its power to exist and to act. This joy, like any real modification, has a cause, and such is the truth of the love: “The love is a joy which the idea accompanies by an external cause” or interior (what Spinoza calls “love or self-satisfaction”). A joy which would not be loving would be a joy, not certainly without cause (that may not be), but ignorant of what makes it be and thus, at least partially, of oneself: the love is the truth of the joy and for this reason includes the love of the truth, which is philosophy even.
In the Treaty of the reform of the understanding, left unfinished, Spinoza noted already that “all our happiness and our misery reside only in one point: with which kind of object are us attached by the love?”. And he added that only “the love going to an eternal and infinite thing feeds the heart of a pure joy, of a joy free from any sadness”. Such is wisdom: it is a question all not in detail of liking, fugitive events, but in the eternal need for this whole which is God. It is what Spinoza calls “intellectual love of God”, who is not other thing only the joy of knowing (by the third kind of knowledge) and, since any truth is eternal, the eternity of this joy. Such is the bliss, which “is not the price of the virtue but the virtue itself” and single safety.
“The end of the State is actually freedom”
Such an adventure could not be lived alone: wisdom, like individual release, is not possible that in the community of the men and supposes that this one satisfies certain conditions. The man belongs to Nature, but is human only by the culture. Also can it be regarded as a sociable or political animal: any man needs the other men for human being, and their freedom to be free.
This is why Spinoza is declared in favor of the democracy, which corresponds at the same time, and better than any other mode, with the reality of the policy (the conflict confrontation of the desires) and with its function (introduction of peace in freedom). “Is not to hold the man by fear and to make that it belongs to another that the State is instituted; on the contrary is to release the individual of fear, so that he lives as much as possible in safety, i.e. preserves, as well as he could be, without damage for others, his right natural to exist and act… The end of the State is thus actually freedom.”
Small glossary of the concepts
Substance: what is in oneself and is conceived by oneself. The substance necessarily exists; it is single and absolutely infinite; it is expressed in the infinity of its various attributes.
Attributes: what the understanding perceives of a substance like component its gasoline. There exist an infinity of attributes, but we let us know only two of them: the thought and extent.
Modes: modifications, or affections, of the substance. The modes are the singular things; they always exist in another thing, by the means of which they are also conceived.
Conatus: the effort by which each thing tends to persevere in its being.
Affect: the affect (affectus, which one sometimes translates by “feeling”) is a confused idea by which the heart affirms a force to exist of its body, or of one of its parts, more or less large that before. It is to be brought closer and distinguish from the affection (affectio), which is only one modification of the substance, or from such from its modes. In practice, the affection says body rather; and the affect, of the heart. The three fundamental affects are the desire, the joy and sadness.
Bibliography
- 1663 principles of the philosophy of Descartes, follow-ups of the thoughts metaphysics
- 1670 Treaty théologico-policy
- 1677 posthumous works: Ethics
- Treaty of the reform of the understanding
- Political treaty.