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Baruch Spinoza: Life
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During this period Spinoza ... became acquainted with several Collegiants, members of a non-dogmatic and interdenominational sect with tendencies towards rationalism and Arianism. Spinoza also corresponded with Peter Serrarius, a radical Protestant merchant. Serrarius is believed to have been a patron of Spinoza at some point. By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza's name became more widely known, and eventually Gottfried Leibniz and Henry Oldenburg paid him visits. He corresponded with the latter for the rest of his life. Spinoza's first publication was his Tractatus de intellectus emendatione.
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In 1673 Spinoza received an invitation from the elector palatine to quit his retirement and become professor of philosophy in the university of Heidelberg. The offer was couched in flattering terms, and conveyed an express assurance of "the largest freedom of speech in philosophy, which the prince is confident that you will not misuse to disturb the established religion." But Spinoza's experience of theological sensitiveness led him to doubt the possibility of keeping on friendly terms with the established religion, if he were placed in a public capacity. Moreover, he was not strong; he had had no experience of public teaching; and he foresaw that the duties of a chair would put an end to private research. For all these reasons he courteously declined the offer made to him. There is little more to tell of his life of solitary meditation.
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The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition.
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Spinoza may initially have taken up the production of lenses and instruments to support himself. When he was forced to break completely all relations with the Jewish community, and therefore could not carry on with the family's importing business, he had to seek his living by other means. But the firm Bento y Gabriel Despinoza was not bringing in very much income from 1655 onward anyway, certainly not enough to cover the debts he inherited from his late father, and Spinoza could not have felt his forced exit from the business to be much of a pressing loss. Moreover, from the opening paragraphs of his early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, it is clear that Spinoza had independent, philosophical reasons for leaving the world of business, to turn from the pursuit of money and other mutable goods to the search for the "true good": "I found that, if I devoted myself to this new plan of life, and gave up the old . . . I would be giving up certain evils for a certain good."3(pp8,9) He made an effort all his life to keep his material needs to a minimum, and his friends provided a good deal of financial help.
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This opposition of Leibnitz practically ruined any chance of influence by Spinoza on the Germany of the early part of the eighteenth century, where the philosophy of the former and his follower Wolff was all-powerful. A revival of interest... was brought about by Jacobi's declaration that Lessing was a professed Spinozist and had declared that "there is but one philosophy, the philosophy of Spinoza." Mendelssohn, who in philosophy was a Wolffian, devoted some of his "Morgenstunden" to defending the memory of his friend Lessing from what he considered to be an aspersion, and this again tended to discourage any active adherence to Spinoza in Germany. Kant, by making the problem of metaphysics how man knows instead of what he knows, changed the course of metaphysical thought for a time; but renewed attention was drawn to Spinoza by his followers, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the last-named of whom declared that to be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist. Schleiermacher expressed himself in the highest terms of Spinoza, and Novalis called the so-called "atheist" a "God-intoxicated Jew." This revival of interest in Spinoza was due possibly to the influence of Herder and Goethe, who had both given utterance to great admiration for Spinoza's life and thought.
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Spinoza is an important figure in early modern Jewish history because he used modern critical methods to question Jewish tradition and authority. His rebellion earned him excommunication from the Jewish community; he lived the remainder of his life apart from the Jewish community, but never renounced his Judaism. In this way, he was a sort of proto-secularist. Reprinted with permission from The Jewish Religion: A Companion, published by Oxford University Press.
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