Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom
TLS, April 27, 2018
The most original, radical and controversial of all early modern philosophers was born in Amsterdam in 1632. Bento de Spinoza was the middle son of one of the many families of Portuguese origin who, as Judaizing “conversos” fleeing the Inquisition, had settled in that tolerant Dutch city in the early decades of the century. He was raised and educated in an open (and non-ghettoized) Jewish community – quite rare in the seventeenth century – and entered the family’s importing business (dealing in dried fruit and nuts) after his father’s death in 1654. Bento (he would have been called “Baruch” in the synagogue – both names mean “blessed”) was, at this time and to all appearances, an upstanding member of the Sephardic congregation.
And yet, by the summer of 1656, something had changed. on July 27 that year, the following proclamation was issued by the parnassim (directors) sitting on the ma’amad (governing board) of Amsterdam’s Talmud Torah Congregation:
The Senhores of the ma‘amad make it known to you that they have been aware for some time of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, and that they have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways. But being unable to effect any remedy, and, on the contrary, each day receiving more information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about the monstrous deeds which he performed, and having many trustworthy witnesses who have reported and testified on all of this in the presence of the said Espinoza, who has been found guilty; after all of this has been examined in the presence of the rabbis, they [the members of the ma’amad] have decided, with their [the rabbis’] consent, that the said Espinoza should be banned and separated from the Nation of Israel, as they now put him under herem with the following herem:
With the judgment of the angels and with that of the saints, we put under herem, ostracize, and curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of Blessed God and with the consent of this entire holy congregation, before these holy scrolls, with the 613 precepts which are written in them; with the herem that Joshua put upon Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the youth, and with all the curses that are written in the law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not forgive him. The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn against this man and bring upon him all the curses that are written in this book of the law. And may the Lord erase his name from under the heavens. And may the Lord separate him for evil from all of the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law. And you that cleave unto the Lord your God, all of you are alive today.
The document concludes with the warning that “no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, nor provide him any favor, nor be with him under the same roof, nor be within four cubits of him, nor read any paper composed or written by him”.
It was the harshest writ of herem (ban or ostracism) ever pronounced on a member of the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam, and it was never rescinded. There is no evidence that Spinoza sought any kind of pardon, and good reason to believe that he had finished with congregational Judaism anyway.
Over three and a half centuries later, with very meagre documentary evidence at hand, it is all a bit of a mystery. We do not know for certain why Spinoza, only twenty-three years old at the time, was punished with such extreme prejudice. He had not written any philosophical treatises, and his fame (or infamy) was still many years away. That the punishment came from within the community that had nurtured and educated him, and that held his family in high esteem, only adds to the enigma. Neither the herem itself nor any document from the period tells us exactly what his “evil opinions and acts” were supposed to have been, nor what “abominable heresies” or “monstrous deeds” he is alleged to have practiced and taught. Spinoza never refers to this period of his life in his extant letters, and thus does not offer his correspondents (or us) any clues as to why he was expelled. All we know for certain is that Spinoza received, from the Amsterdam Jewish community’s leadership in 1656, a herem like no other in the period.
And yet, in light of Spinoza’s mature philosophical writings, which he began working on less than a decade after the herem, the mystery of the ban begins to dissipate. No one who reads his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, or his scandalous Theological-Political Treatise, published (anonymously) to great alarm in 1670 – one overwrought critic called it “a book forged in hell by the devil himself” – can have any doubts about how radical and unorthodox a thinker Spinoza was. Moreover, the evidence suggests that Spinoza was already, in the mid-1650s, expressing something like the views that appear in these works.
Among the boldest elements of Spinoza’s philosophy is his conception of God. The God of the Ethics is a far cry from the traditional, transcendent God of the Abrahamic religions. What Spinoza calls “God or Nature” lacks all of the psychological and ethical attributes of a providential deity. His God is not a personal agent endowed with will, understanding and emotions, capable of having preferences and making informed choices. Spinoza’s God does not formulate plans, issue commands, have expectations, or make judgments. Neither does God possess anything like moral character. God is not good or wise or just. What God is, for Spinoza, is Nature itself – the phrase he uses is Deus sive Natura – that is, the infinite, eternal and necessarily existing substance of the universe. God or Nature just is; and whatever else is, is “in” or a part of God or Nature. Put another way, there is only Nature and its power; and everything that happens, happens in and by Nature. There is nothing supernatural; there is nothing outside of or distinct from Nature and independent of its laws and operations.
Spinoza’s God is not a God to whom one would pray or give worship or to whom one would turn for comfort.
What follows from Spinoza’s philosophical theology is that there is no divine creation of the cosmos. Nature is eternal: as it always was and always will be. This means, too, that Nature does not have any teleological framework – it was not made to serve any purpose and does not exist for the sake of any end. “All the prejudices I here undertake to expose”, Spinoza says in the Ethics, “depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God.”
Nor are miracles, understood as supernaturally caused violations of the natural order, possible. As Spinoza explains in the Theological-Political Treatise, there may be events whose natural causes are unknown by witnesses, and so they call such events “miraculous” and attribute them to a supernatural providential agent; this was certainly the case in the Biblical period. But this is all superstition, Spinoza argues, and is grounded in ignorance of the true knowledge of God (or Nature). All phenomena – including human choices and actions, for we are no less a part of Nature than a tree or a rock – come about in Nature (through its laws and causes) with an absolute necessity. There is no contingency in Nature, no free will, nothing that could have been otherwise.
What Spinoza is particularly concerned with are the superstitious beliefs and behaviours that the notion of an anthropomorphic and providential God nourishes. If we think that God is like us, an agent who acts for the sake of ends and who, by issuing commands, makes known his expectations and punishes those who do not obey, we will be dominated by the passions of hope and fear: hope for eternal reward and fear of eternal punishment. This will, in turn, lead us towards submission to ecclesiastic authorities who claim to know what God wants. The resulting life is one of “bondage” – psychological, moral, religious, social and political enslavement – rather than the liberating life of reason.
Because the passions are foundational for the other types of bondage into which people invariably fall, Spinoza goes to great lengths in the Ethics to explain them and show how their power can be countered. Much of this depends on his particular, highly unorthodox (for its time) conception of the human being.
Ever since Plato, the human soul was conceived as essentially different from the human body. Descartes took this “dualism” to an extreme, arguing that mind and body are ontologically distinct and independent substances with nothing in common; and yet, somehow, they are united and causally interact in a human being. Spinoza, on the other hand, believes that there is only one substance: the infinite, eternal and necessarily existing God or Nature. An individual human being, as a “mode” of God or Nature (as all things are), is neither a substance nor a union of substances, but simply a finite and determinate parcel or ｅxpression of God or Nature’s infinite power. Moreover, this finite power that is the individual manifests itself in two ways: as a mind (or mode of God or Nature’s attribute of Thought) and as a body (or mode of God or Nature’s attribute of Extension). The human mind and the human body are thus, at a deep level, one and the same thing. This intimate unity, even metaphysical identity, of mind and body means that nothing happens in the body that does not have a corresponding “idea” or affect in the mind.
Now the power (or, to use Spinoza’s term, conatus) that constitutes an individual is subject to fluctuations, mainly due to the way the individual is affected by external things. These fluctuations in power are the human passions, all of which are forms of joy (an increase in power) or sadness (a decrease in power). Human beings are egoistically motivated agents constantly striving for joy and to avoid sadness. They therefore pursue those things that they believe will bring about the desired affect and improvement in their condition. Yet this pursuit is all too often guided by “inadequate ideas”, by sensory or imaginative beliefs about how a thing may or may not improve one’s power. We thus spend our lives blindly chasing after what we believe, on a deficient basis, to be good. Thus the title of Part Four of the Ethics: “On Human Bondage”.
While it is impossible for a human being not to be a part of Nature and subject to passions, there is still a kind of freedom available. Given the exceptionless determinism of Spinoza’s universe, freedom of the will is not possible. But we can liberate ourselves from enslavement to the passions and a life governed by the transitory “goods” of the world around us. What freedom consists in, for Spinoza, is autonomy, rational self-governance. Individuals are free to the extent that what they do follows not from how external things happen to make them feel, but from their own intellectual resources – especially what they know, through “adequate ideas”, truly to be good, that is, what will certainly bring about an improvement in their overall condition and bring them closer to maximal power and flourishing.
The one thing that best contributes to this authentic improvement is understanding, and in particular a knowledge of God or Nature and of the ways in which all things are a part of Nature, governed by its deterministic necessity. This deep intellectual insight is our highest good, and it will be followed by a weakening of the passions and happiness understood as equanimity and peace of mind. It is a rather Stoic morality that Spinoza adopts.
We shall bear calmly those things which happen to us contrary to what the principle of our advantage demands, if we are conscious that we have done our duty, that the power we have could not have extended itself to the point where we could have avoided those things and that we are a part of the whole of nature, whose order we follow . . . For insofar as we understand, we can want nothing except what is necessary, nor absolutely be satisfied with anything except what is true.
Spinoza defines “virtue” as success in this rational pursuit of self-interest. This does not mean, though, that one may ignore or even run roughshod over the interests of others. on the contrary, the rationally virtuous person will understand that it is in her own best interest to improve the lives of others and lead them to a condition of rational virtue. This is because there is nothing more useful to a virtuous person pursuing self-interest under the guidance of reason than other virtuous people doing just the same thing. The “free” person will thus treat others with justice, charity, benevolence and honesty, and will be free of envy, prejudice and especially hate. The free person understands what true piety is, experiences the intellectual love of God, and enjoys “blessedness” and even “salvation”, understood in naturalistic terms as the satisfaction that true knowledge of oneself and of God or Nature brings.
Spinoza is less sanguine about more traditional and organized forms of religion. In the Theological-Political Treatise, he has some especially deflationary things to say about the Jewish people and Judaism. He insists that there is no theological or metaphysical or even moral sense in which the Jews are God’s “chosen people”, in part because Spinoza’s God does not (and cannot) choose anything. All human beings are a part of Nature in exactly the same way, and thus there is nothing special or distinctive about the Jewish people other than the particular set of laws they once followed in the Israelite kingdom. Moreover, with the end of that kingdom, the ceremonial laws of Judaism have become irrelevant. The commandments of the Torah were tailored for life and worship around the Temple. But with the final destruction of that edifice, along with the commonwealth of which it was the center, the Mosaic Law has lost its raison d’être. The ceremonies of Judaism – indeed, the ceremonies of all organized religions, including Christianity – are empty and meaningless practices. The acts prescribed by the Torah have no validity for latter-day Jews. They have nothing to do with what Spinoza calls “true piety”, which he reduces to a single moral maxim: Love your fellow human beings and treat them with justice and charity. This is all that is essential to the “true religion”; everything else is just superstition.
Perhaps the most deleterious superstition of all is the belief in the immortality of the soul. Like the notion of a providential God, the idea that a person will experience a post-mortem existence in some world-to-come is a part of all three Abrahamic religions. A robust doctrine of personal immortality, like the eschatology that accompanies it, only strengthens those harmful passions that undermine the life of reason. Spinoza devotes a good deal of the final part of his Ethics to showing that while there is, in a sense, an eternal part of the human mind that remains after a person’s death – namely, the knowledge and ideas that she has acquired in this lifetime – there is nothing personal about it. When you are dead, Spinoza is saying, you are dead.
Finally, as part of his effort to undermine the usurpation of political power by contemporary ecclesiastics, Spinoza undercuts the stature and alleged authority of Scripture. He denies that the Torah is literally of divine origin. Neither the Pentateuch nor the prophetic writings or histories were written by God or by anyone serving as God’s amanuensis; in fact, they were not even written by the individuals who by tradition are alleged to be their authors or whose names they bear as titles (Moses, Joshua, etc). The Torah is, in fact, a haphazard collection of very human writings, composed over a long period of time by various authors. These texts were handed down, in copy after copy, through the centuries and finally collected and edited into a single (but not seamless) work by someone in the Second Temple period (most likely Ezra, Spinoza suggests). Thus, what we now have is a “corrupt and mutilated” document, one whose relationship to any original set of writings (by Moses or other prophets) must remain indeterminate. If it is at all a “pious” and “divine” document, it is not because of its origin or the words on the page, but only because its narrative is especially morally edifying and effective in inspiring readers to acts of justice and charity – to practising the “true religion”.
Spinoza’s project is a philosophy of freedom: personal freedom, as the life of reason that he describes in the Ethics is supposed to liberate us from bondage to our irrational passions and the superstitions that they nourish; and political freedom, in so far as the Theological-Political Treatise offers an extended case for a secular and tolerant polity where religious authorities are kept from interfering in civic affairs, and for the freedom of thought and ｅxpression. As Spinoza says, in a truly free society “everyone may think what he likes and say what he thinks”. It is a lesson no less relevant now than it was in the seventeenth century.
Steven Nadler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison