Baruch Spinoza on How We Are All God

“The eternal and infinite being we call ‘God’ or ‘Nature’ necessarily acts as it does. (Ethics, Part IV, preface, only in the Latin version) ”

Spinoza’s life is one of those that modern philosophers should have a long, hard look at when they feel like complaining about their tenure arrangements. Like Diogenes in his barrel, Socrates in his cell and Mother Teresa in her hospice, Spinoza was one of those almost mythical martyrs of philosophy – someone who was ready to defend what he thought to be true with his life, and who would not compromise just to please others.

Spinoza was born in 1632 in a Jewish family that had moved to the Netherlands from Spain or Portugal. When his thoughts about the nature of God came to be known in his tightly-knit Jewish community, the elders tried first to threaten and then to bribe Spinoza in order to silence him. When none of that worked, they excommunicated him. Spinoza, now 23 years old, had to leave Amsterdam and find work as a lens grinder, while writing his books. He died, probably of a lung disease related to breathing in glass dust, at the age of 44.

But it would be misleading to think of him as a lowly, exploited worker. Lens grinding was, at that time, more like aligning the magnets on one of CERN’s particle accelerators today: a work for the very elite of natural scientists. Other lens grinders at that time included “Descartes, Fermat, Galileo, Hooke, Huygens, Kepler, Newton, Spinoza, Torricelli, and, curiously enough, the British architect Christopher Wren,” 1 although these did not do it full-time.

Spinoza, the Jew who was too ungodly even for the Jews (as his countrymen at that time would have seen him), was universally derided, his works forbidden and destroyed by both Jews and Christians, both by clerics and by the state authorities of Holland. His best-known work, the Ethics, was published only after his death in 1677.

The full title of the book is “Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order,” and it is about as much fun to read as this sounds. Here is a little bit of it:

Proof.—Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else (Ax. i.),—that is (by Deff. iii. and v.), nothing is granted in addition to the understanding, except substance and its modifications. Nothing is, therefore, given besides the understanding, by which several things may be distinguished one from the other, except the substances, or, in other words (see Ax. iv.), their attributes and modifications. Q.E.D.

All the rest is just like that, which is one reason why Spinoza is …

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