Spinoza Flashcards
17th century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher.
His philosophy is founded on a rejection of the Gods that inform Abrahamic religions.
For Spinoza, God is Nature and whatever happens is necessitated by the laws of Nature (the only miracle is that there are no miracles). There is nothing beyond Nature and no departures from Nature - miracles and the supernatural are an impossibility.
Spinoza does not divinise Nature. He does not make it the object of worshipful awe or religious reverence.
Spinoza regards the following as the most pernicious doctrines promoted by organised religion: the immortality of the soul and the divine judgement it will undergo in some world-to-come. If one believes that God will reward the virtuous and punish the vicious, one’s life will be governed by the emotions of hope and fear: hope that one is among the elect and fear that one is destined for eternal damnation. A life dominated by such irrational passions is a ‘life of bondage’ rather than a life of rational freedom.
Spinoza is a model of intellectual courage. He took on the powers-that-be with an unflinching honesty that revealed ugly truths about his fellow citizens and society.
In Spinoza we can find inspiration for resistance to oppressive authority and a role model for intellectual opposition to those who, through the encouragement of irrational beliefs and the maintenance of ignorance, try to get citizens to act contrary to their own best interests.
People who are led by passion rather than reason are easily manipulated by the ecclesiastics. It remains no less a threat to an enlightened, secular democracy today as religious sectarians exercise a dangerous influence on public life.
His fully fleshed out views were to be expressed in his great work, the Ethics, written entirely in Latin and published in 1677.
In the Ethics, Spinoza directly challenged the main tenets of Judaism in particular and organised religion in general:
- God is not a person who stands outside of nature
- There is no one to hear our prayers
- Or to create miracles
- Or to punish us for misdeeds
- There is no afterlife
- Man is not God’s chosen creature
- The Bible was only written by ordinary people
- God is not a craftsman or an architect. Nor is he a king or a military strategist who calls for believers to take up the Holy Sword. God does not see anything, nor does he expect anything. He does not judge. He does not even reward the virtuous person with a life after death. Every representation of God as a person is a projection of the imagination.
- Everything in the traditional liturgical calendar is pure superstition and mumbo-jumbo
However, despite all this, remarkably, Spinoza did not declare himself an atheist. He insisted that he remained a staunch defender of God.
God plays an absolutely central role in Spinoza’s Ethics, but it isn’t anything like the God who haunts the pages of the Old Testament.
Spinoza was keen to undermine the idea of prayer. In prayer, an individual appeals to God to change the way the universe works.
But Spinoza argues that this is entirely the wrong way around. The task of human beings is to try to understand how and why things are the way they are – and then accept it, rather than protest at the workings of existence by sending little messages up into the sky.
In other words, only naive (but perhaps rather touching) narcissism would lead someone at once to believe in a God who made the eternal laws of physics and then to imagine that this same God would take an interest in bending the rules of existence to improve his or her life in some way.
Spinoza’s work was largely ignored. In the 19th century, Hegel took an interest, as did Wittgenstein – and some 20th-century scholars. But on the whole Spinoza offers us a warning about the failures of philosophy.
The Ethics is one of the world’s most beautiful books. It contains a calming, perspective-restoring take on life. It replaces the God of superstition with a wise and consoling pantheism.
And yet Spinoza’s work failed utterly to convince any but a few to abandon traditional religion and to move towards a rationalist, wise system of belief.
The reasons are in a way simple and banal. Spinoza failed to understand – like so many philosophers before and since – that what leads people to religion isn’t just reason, but far more importantly, emotion, belief, fear and tradition.
People stick with their beliefs because they like the rituals, the communal meals, the yearly traditions, the beautiful architecture, the music and the sonorous language read out in synagogue or church.
Spinoza’s Ethics arguably contains a whole lot more wisdom than the Bible – but because it comes without any of the Bible’s supporting structure, it remains a marginal work, studied here and there at universities in the west – while the traditional religion that he thought outmoded in the 1670s continues to thrive and convince people.
If we’re ever to replace traditional beliefs, we must remember just how much religion is helped along by ritual, tradition, art and a desire to belong: all things that Spinoza, despite his great wisdom, ignored at his peril in his bold attempt to replace the Bible.
