Spinoza

Richard H. Popkin

Introduction

Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most intriguing figures in the history of modern philosophy. His originality, audacity, and consistent rationality made him both hated and applauded by thinkers of all kinds. He was also just about the only person in modern philosophy whose personality had as much importance as his philosophy. Whereas other philosophers have been cited for their arguments, ideas, or theories, Spinoza has been offered as the epitome of what a true philosopher should be like as a person. Hence, Spinoza has been a unique figure among modern thinkers for the last three centuries, inspiring many different currents of thought and many different interpretations.

Harry Austryn Wolfson, the renowned Spinoza scholar of the first half of the twentieth century, said that Spinoza was the last of the medievals and the first of the moderns. On the one hand, Spinoza was still using some of the categories and conceptions of Arabic, Jewish, and Christian medieval thought. On the other hand, his great contribution lay in making a clean break with religious and theological philosophy. According to Wolfson, Spinoza was the first philosopher of modern times who required no axiom or premise based on revealed religious information. Descartes was still clinging to, or giving lip service to, a theological base for his new philosophy. Spinoza eliminated this and proceeded directly from a set of principles or axioms that had no theological content or import.

Spinoza dispensed with any appeal to the supernatural to account for the world and how it operates. His brilliant system developed a complete picture of the world based solely on definitions and axioms and sought to explain everything in terms of the attributes of a non-supernatural God. The attributes that human beings could know were those of thought and extension and, through these, men can discover how the world operates, what it consists of, and the role of human beings in it. This conception enabled Spinoza to present a way in which people could find their goals in non-theological terms. This remarkable break with tradition was one of the most radical innovations in seventeenth- century thought and one that has continued to spawn interesting new understandings and insights in philosophy, ethics, and science.

His two major works, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the Ethics, published posthumously in 1677, advanced his radical new conceptions. Subsequent philosophers have found much to contemplate and cogitate in these works, which are still very much in the main stream of philosophical discussion.

The picture that has been formed of Spinoza the thinker and Spinoza the moral agent was developed in the first biographical accounts of Spinoza: those by Pierre Bayle, Jean-Maximilien Lucas, and Johann Colerus, as well as those of the early German Enlightenment. Bayle, at the end of the seventeenth century, was compiling his massive Dictionnaire historique et critique. He intended to include important figures that had been misrepresented or left out of previous dictionaries. In the finished product, which first appeared in 1697, by far the longest article is that of Spinoza, being ten times the size of any other article. In fact, when taken out of its folio size and when the footnotes are incorporated it turns out to be a book of over 300 pages. Entitled Het Leven de Spinoza, it was published as such in Dutch in 1697 by the publisher and bookseller Francis Halma.

Bayle’s article contains what is probably the first known biography of Spinoza but it is the Lucas biography that is generally called the earliest biography of Spinoza although there is no evidence that it existed before 1711–12. The Lucas biography, La Vie de Spinosa, first appeared in French along with a work called L’esprit de M. Spinosa or Traité des trois Imposteurs. Lucas is reported to have been a French Protestant refugee in Holland at the end of the seventeenth century who was part of a circle of spinozists. Nothing much is known of him even if he is the author of the early life of Spinoza.

Johann Colerus was a Lutheran minister in The Hague who rented the very rooms that Spinoza lived in at the end of his life at the home of the painter Henrik van der Spyck. Colerus heard much about the philosopher from the landlord and decided to put together this material with whatever else he could find out about Spinoza from people in the Netherlands.His biography of Spinoza first appeared in 1705–6 and was quickly translated into many languages.

Unfortunately, there is scant biographical material in the three original sources and not much more has come to light since. Thus, a lot of rumors, speculations, and fantasies have become mixed into the discussion of the life of the philosopher.We will try to unravel the various strands of Spinoza’s short life in the pages that follow.

First, we will try to situate Spinoza in his historical context in the seventeenth century – a Jew born of Portuguese parents and raised in the Jewish community in Amsterdam,who was excommunicated from that group and then made his way in a quite different world, that of secular and Protestant society in the Netherlands.We will look at the ideas that appear in his earliest writings and in his fully developed ones, the Tractatus and the Ethics.We will then discuss his interaction with intellectuals of the time in the Netherlands and elsewhere and how his ideas came to be known to a wider audience. Finally, we will examine what sort of influence he has had over the last three centuries and more.