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Baruch Spinoza: Ethics Demonstrated
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In the Ethics Spinoza rejects the traditional providential God of the Jewish and Christian religions. The notion of a benevolent, wise, purposive, judging God is, he insists, an anthropomorphic fiction, one that gives rise only to superstition and irrational passions. God, according to Spinoza, is nothing but the active, generative aspects of nature. In an infamous phrase, Spinoza refers to Deus sive Natura (God, or Nature), and identifies it with the substance, essential attributes, and causal principles of the universe. All beings are "in" God, but only in the sense that Nature is all-encompassing, and nothing stands outside Nature's laws. Everything happens in Nature with a deterministic necessity.
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In 1663 Spinoza left Rijnsburg and moved near The Hague. Hoping to publish The Ethics, and anticipating controversy, he wrote and published anonymously his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) in which he defends the liberty to philosophize in the face of religious or political interference, arguing for political toleration of alternative religious practices. He maintained that Christians and Jews could live peaceably together provided that they rose above the petty theological and cultural controversies that divided them. After a self-initiated and failed diplomatic mission to France, Spinoza was forced to give up hopes of publishing the Ethics. However, his manuscripts were circulated among Spinoza's trusted friends. He was often in correspondence with other intellectuals, and discussion groups were formed by students of his ideas.
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When the public reactions to the anonymously published Theologico-Political Treatise were extremely unfavourable to his brand of Cartesianism, Spinoza was compelled to abstain from publishing more of his works. Wary and independent, he wore a signet ring engraved with his initials, a rose and the word "caute" (Latin for caution). The Ethics and all other works, apart from the Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and the Theologico-Political Treatise, were published after his death in the Opera Postuma edited by his friends in secrecy to avoid confiscation and destruction of manuscripts.
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In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that God is not some transcendent, providential being endowed with the psychological and moral characteristics attributed to it by the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Rather, God just is the unique, infinite, necessary, and eternal substance of the universe. For Spinoza, God is Nature, both its most universal elements (its ultimate essences and laws) and all the particular finite things that causally follow from them. Everything—including the human being—is ... within and determined by “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura) with an absolute necessity. There is no contingency in the universe, and nothing could possibly have been otherwise. Spinoza thereby hopes to preclude any anthropomorphizing of God and any false conceptions of human freedom, and thus to forestall the kind of superstitious beliefs and behaviours from which sectarian religions draw their authority over us and, through appealing to our passions, keep us in a life of “bondage”.
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As soon as this preliminary conclusion has been established, Spinoza immediately reveals the objective of his attack. His definition of God — condemned since his excommunication from the Jewish community as a "God existing in only a philosophical sense" — is meant to preclude any anthropomorphizing of the divine being. In the scholium to proposition fifteen, he writes against "those who feign a God, like man, consisting of a body and a mind, and subject to passions. But how far they wander from the true knowledge of God, is sufficiently established by what has already been demonstrated." Besides being false, such an anthropomorphic conception of God can have only deleterious effects on human freedom and activity.
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Spinoza therefore recommends a three-step process for the achievement of human knowledge: First, disregard the misleading testimony of the senses and conventional learning. Second, starting from the adequate idea of any one existing thing, reason back to the eternal attribute of god from which it derives. Finally, use this knowledge of the divine essence to intuit everything else that ever was, is, and will be. Indeed, he supposed that the Ethics itself is an exercise in this ultimate pursuit of indubitable knowledge.
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Ethics Demonstrated