Spinoza's Ethics - the Context
Benedicto Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 of Portuguese Jewish parents who had fled to the religious freedom of the
Dutch Republic of Jan de Witt. In July 1656, young Bento was the leader of a philosophical discussion group which included
members of the more liberal-minded Protestant sects, and was expelled from the local Jewish community for his heretical views.
Descartes' works were widely discussed in the Netherlands at that time, though Cartesian views were proscribed by the Church,
and the young Spinoza was clearly influenced by Descartes. Spinoza probably attended lectures in Cartesian philosophy in Leiden
between 1656 and 1659. In 1663 he published a "geometrical" version of Descartes Principles of Philosophy (i.e., a version
rendering Descartes' work into the form of axioms and theorems). However, Spinoza had already sharply departed from
Descartes' view.
Spnoza denied the immortality of the soul, and believed in a God who manifests himself only in the laws of Nature, rather than
in a anthropomorphic entity which creates nature. In reading Spinoza, one should substitute the word "Nature" wherever the word
"God" is written. This view is, in fact, a world-view which would be shared by large numbers of scientifically-minded people
today.
Spinoza was intensely interested in natural science, corresponding with Robert Boyle (the founder of the physics of fluids), Henry
Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society in respect of Descartes' theory of comets and planets, Huygens on the wave
properties of light including his own experiments with lenses and was widely read in physics, astronomy, chemistry and anatomy.
In 1665, Spinoza laid aside his work on the Ethics, to write a book defending freedom of speech and religion against the 'strict'
Calvinists. The Treatise on Theology and Politics asserted that the Bible should not be regarded as containing scientific or
philosophical truth, but was the work of human beings and should be regarded as an historical document, which teaches obedience
to a certain moral code.
The Calvinists were furious, to say the least. The Synod of South Holland referred to the Treatise as an 'evil and blasphemous
book' and it was anonymously described as 'spawned in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil'.
When the French invaded the Republic, and Jan de Witt was beaten to death by a Calvinist mob in The Hague, Spinoza had to
keep a low profile. The Ethics was completed in 1675, but it was not published until after Spinoza's death in 1677.
Spinoza's principal amendment to Descartes' theory was that he eliminates the problem of the "coordination" of extension-less
thought and unconscious matter (Descartes' "dualism") by proposing a world made up of "Substance" which has attributes of both
extension and thought. Thus "Nature thinks itself", and the problem of "coordination" does not arise. Spinoza was thus the first to
offer a solution to the "subject-object" problem, the first "Monist".
Further, Spinoza is a Rationalist, in the sense that he appeals to the "clear light of Reason" rather than to the evidence of the
senses, and a Logicist in that he proposes that any theory should be developed by formal-logical proof from axioms, modelled on
the only science to have by then achieved the status of genuine science - geometry, and mathematics in general.
Spinoza must be regarded as a materialist, as for him thought is but an attribute of objectively existing Substance; Substance may
or may exhibit the attribute of thought. In line with the development of positive science at that time, his view of the material world
is exclusively mechanical, and the world unfolds with determined necessity. Human freedom is expressed by the fact that through
knowledge of God (i.e. Nature and its laws) - people are conscious agents, participants in events, not subject to "outside" events.
Spinoza was a contemporary of the British Empiricists, Hobbes and Locke; his predecessors were Descartes and Galileo; Isaac
Newton was a young man when Spinoza died of consumption in 1677. Although he is in many ways 250 years ahead of his time,
Spinoza's work remained more or less obscure until the great German poet, Goethe, promoted and extended Spinoza's naturalistic,
"pantheistic" views in the late eighteenth century, and Haeckel and Einstein were among his admirers.
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