Reading the works of Spinoza, one can be overwhelmed by a sense of abstract rigor and detachment. They may seem to some readers the product of an almost mechanical mental life. This appearance notwithstanding, I am inclined to ascribe to Spinoza a romantic set of virtues. He is among thinkers extraordinarily creative and novel; his thinking is marked by a marvelous intensity and focus; and yet his deepest commitments are to the most embracing unity and sense of comprehensiveness that one can find in the tradition of Western philosophy. In short, Spinoza’s writings and his thought are marked by a kind of heroism that is rare and beautiful—even breathtaking.
We are tempted to think that the notion of perspective or points of view, so crucial to the world of art, was not of importance to philosophy until Kant and German Idealism made it so. Kant, it is said, taught us what metaphysics could and could not accomplish by confining its investigations to the viewpoint of human experience and then went on to distinguish between the detached point of view of the scientific enquirer and the engaged point of view of the moral agent. From those beginnings, German Idealism and its twentieth-century legacy made the notion of perspective or point of view central to philosophical accounts of human existence and human experience, from Fichte, Schelling, and Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Husserl, Heidegger, and beyond. And with this legacy came a series of struggles, between the natural and the human sciences, between existentialism and scientific philosophy, between relativism and objectivism, and more.
But perspective was at the center of Spinoza’s system. His thinking shows a passion for unity and totality, coupled with a scrupulous fidelity to the integrity of the individual particular. There is no parochialism in Spinoza. His commitment to the progress of scientific enquiry into the natural world belied any such limitation in behalf of his cognitive goals. In every way, in every dimension of our lives, Spinoza saw the common; he saw unity and wholeness. At the same time his allegiance to the universality of the ethical life and its virtues did not annul the personal perspective of human experience. For him life was always a struggle against our finite limitations of perspective and particularity. Life was not life without such limitations, but neither could life be what it could be if we were satisfied with them. The world was of necessity filled with particular objects, but they existed within a single order. We are among those objects, and our goal is to do what we can, in knowledge and conduct, to live with our particularity and yet transcend it. Spinoza was fully aware of the necessity and the complexity of human perspective; he knew what it meant to the hopes for scientific knowledge, for the burdens of religious, moral, and political conflict, and for the possibility of a truly blessed life. In a certain sense, perspective is the fulcrum on which all Spinoza’s thinking turns.
Spinoza lived in a world distant from our own. No amount of historical detail and reconstruction can adequately place us in the complex world of Western Europe in the seventeenth century. So much was new and yet so much was old. Spinoza was immersed in all of it, in a world that was, by virtue of its economic and geographical situation, at a crossroads. Spinoza knew about religious orthodoxies and about religious reform; he knew about traditional culture and novelties; he knew about old texts and new thinking, about the tensions between conservative political practice and liberal hopes and aspirations; and he knew about the risks—persecution and possibly death. To him, reason in us was akin to reason in nature; one order permeated everything and enabled us, as rational beings, to understand ourselves and the whole and to live peacefully and calmly within it. This was the key to science, to ethics, and to religion. It was the key to all of life. It was his goal to show, clarify, explain, and teach it—to the benefit of all humankind.
If the key that unlocked the secrets of possibility for us as human beings was unity and totality, the wholeness and order of all things, then the reality that grounded the aspiration to this unity and order was the fact that each of us, as natural objects and as human beings, was precisely located in that unity and order; each of our places was determined in every way, and we were thereby endowed with a very particular point of view on the whole. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg of November 1665 (Ep32), as he attempts to clarify the nature of parts and wholes, Spinoza provides us with a famous image. Each of us is, he tells us, like a little worm in the blood. Nature is like the entire circulatory system or like the entire organism; each of us lives within that system or organism, interacting with only a small part of it and experiencing only a very limited region. Even if we grasp the fact that there is a total system and understand its principles to some degree, our experience is so circumscribed and narrow that we are bound to make mistakes about our understanding of the system and our place in it. Myopia confines our understanding, no matter how we seek to overcome it. And we do. We aspire to experience every detail, every event, and every item as part of the whole, to see it from the perspective of the whole rather than from our own narrow point of view. Our success is limited; we can free ourselves from prejudices and blindness but only to a degree. We can see ourselves and act in terms of the whole, but only within limits. Our goal is to free ourselves from the distortions and corruptions of our finitude, to become free, active, and rational. These are all the same, and are aspects of becoming like the whole, which is what the tradition dignifies with the title “God” or “divine” or “the Highest Good.”
I do not believe that Spinoza saw this challenge and this sort of life as an escape from the world. History was riddled with strife and conflict, with prejudice and persecution. Life could be better; it could be harmonious with nature rather than a struggle with it. Religious and political institutions could be renovated to serve human purposes, and human life could be refashioned as well. The ancient Stoics had understood that life in harmony with nature was the best human life, and that in order to achieve such harmony, one had to understand nature. Natural philosophy or science was both the highest achievement of human rationality and the key to living the best human life. Spinoza, I believe, fully sympathized with the broad strokes of this program. Like the Stoics, he revered reason and our rational capacities. Like them, he saw our reason and the reason in nature as intimately linked. Like them, he saw natural philosophy as the key to opening the door of the highest good and the way through that door as leading to tranquility of spirit, harmony with nature, and peace. To be sure, Spinoza was a modern. Natural philosophy meant the developments and achievements of the new science, conducted in the spirit of Descartes and others, grounded in mathematics and a priori reasoning about natural events and causal relations. But if the science was modern and mathematical and the metaphysics constructed as a foundation for that science, the overall role for it and its goals were very similar to those of the ancient Stoics: union with the whole of nature through knowledge of the natural order.
Moreover, Spinoza would call the goal of this project—the human project—“blessedness.” He did not shy away from religious terminology, the vocabulary of the Judaism and the Christianity with which he was so familiar. Indeed, it is a remarkable feature of his temperament that his thinking never totally rejected religious themes, beliefs, and vocabulary as much as it sought to refine and refashion them. One might say this about virtually all of the great seventeenth-century philosophers, that they did not decisively reject the religious world out of which they emerged and in which they lived. They sought to retool that world, to come to a new understanding of religious life and to revise religious concepts and terminology. Even those, like Hobbes and Spinoza, who were censored and vilified as atheists, did not reject religion. More correctly, we, from our perspective, can appreciate their philosophical goals as epistemological, ethical, and religious all at once. Spinoza, in these terms, was a religious visionary, a moral innovator, and a philosopher–scientist, not one but all. His passion for unity and wholeness made any fragmentation of this conglomerate undesirable, but the reality was that in his day, given the way that these and other domains of life were lived and experienced, any such fragmentation was quite impossible.
Hence, Spinoza’s scientific philosophy and ethics aimed at tranquility in a conflicted and turbulent world; they did not seek escape from that world but rather a renovation of it. His was a worldview for life, not for escape from life. It recommended changes in one’s behavior and one’s beliefs, practices, and institutions. What it did not recommend was escape from life. It was, as he put it in the Ethics, a meditation on life and not on death.
One could seek the perspective of eternity in order to redeem the unavoidable perspective of finitude, but, as living and natural beings, we could not escape the latter and, as human beings, we should not avoid the former. This is the gist of Spinoza’s philosophy, his ethics, and his religion. The key to grasping this picture of our hopes and our realities is reason, that ability within us that enables us to understand and make sense of our world and ourselves.
Spinoza presents us with the totality of his system in one work: the Ethics. He also left us with a preliminary version of that work, as well as two treatises that constitute introductions to his philosophy, and writings that are examples of applications of that work—to politics and religion. Because these do not completely agree with each other, all of this makes it hard to grasp his philosophical system.
To me Spinoza is remarkable for his creativity. He was an heir of a philosophical terminology that came down to the seventeenth century from antiquity, the recovery of ancient philosophies and texts, and its presence in the medieval philosophical tradition. He did not invent terms like “substance,” “attribute,” “mode,” “affect,” “essence,” “necessity,” and “eternity.” He was taught the terms, how they were used, what they meant, and more. And he was taught how they figured in the thinking of Descartes, who was, for Spinoza, the bridge between the philosophical tradition and the new philosophy and new science. What Spinoza did was to take the tradition, Descartes’ accomplishment, and his own passionate commitments and blend them into a new whole, a new worldview. At one level, it is an extension and modification of Cartesian metaphysics; at another, it has its own character and demands a view of the natural order very different from that of Descartes.
Spinoza has a relentless mind. His commitment to reason involves a commitment to consistency and rigor. This is not to say that he does not allow his reason to leap to conclusions that seem strange and even recalcitrant to us, and it is not to say that he never makes mistakes. What I mean is that he can be understood as starting with certain concepts whose meanings are clear and correct to him and pushing the consequences of accepting those concepts. He can also be understood as observing what Descartes had achieved and yet as believing that Descartes had failed to follow reason to its relentless conclusions because of prejudices, biases to which Descartes had clung and which Spinoza saw as distortions. In the case of the concept of substance, for example, Spinoza thought that he and Descartes largely agreed about what substance means, but he thought too that if so, there was no justification for treating minds and bodies as substances. Moreover, if the principle of sufficient reason was foundational for scientific enquiry and if the natural world and even eternal truths were created by God, then a deep contingency would lie at the heart of nature and human knowledge. And even if one were to treat the physical world as a collection of bodies that causally interact and are capable of being understood by scientific enquiry, why exclude the mind and mental occurrences from similar understanding? Is it not only a prejudice grounded in traditional theological commitments to isolate the mind or the soul, allow it special privileges, and grant it special features? Is it not more consistent with our understanding of nature, science, and the human good to treat the mind and mental phenomena just as one would treat physical ones and yet to do so in a nonreductivist way—that is, without simply treating mental events as identical in some sense with physiological ones?
While it may be a bit of a caricature, it is helpful to see Spinoza as seeking a middle ground regarding the treatment of mind, soul, and mental phenomena in a world where the physical sciences are beginning to take shape in new and exciting ways. On the one hand, the Cartesian strategy could be seen as having isolated the mind in order to save the integrity of certain theological commitments, such as the belief in free will and in the immortality of the soul. Science could not study the mind and mental phenomena in the same way it could study the physical world, using mathematical reasoning and applying it to causality, motion, and so forth. The strategy of materialists like Hobbes, on the other hand, could be seen as reducing mental phenomena to physical ones—that is, basically to motions of various kinds—and defining mental processes and experiences in terms of motions of physical bodies. What Spinoza achieves, its problems notwithstanding, is a middle road. He constructs a view of nature as a whole in which physical events and mental events are both understandable, in which they are related but separate, and in which the sciences of the physical world and of the mental world are related but distinct. It may be that Kant, Dilthey, and Neo-Kantian developments and later debates about the distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences look like they are built on Cartesian foundations; there is also a sense in which they build on Spinozist ones as well. To the degree that the social sciences and psychology are conceived as requiring a scientific treatment of mental phenomena, they are Spinoza’s heirs, whether or not that scientific treatment is conceived of as similar to or different from the methodology of the natural sciences. Indeed, there are post-Kantian attempts by Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and others to distinguish the domain of the mental and the “space of reasons” from the physical or the “space of causes.” These can even be treated as a development of Spinoza and his commitment to demystifying the mind and the body and to making both accessible to rational understanding and thereby, in a sense, to human control.
There are two keys to this Spinozist achievement. The first is to conceive of the totality of the natural world as both the sum of all facts—that is, all things in all of their determinations—and the ordering force that determines all those facts to be just the ways they are. To conceive of nature as God and as substance gives the natural world the unity and orderliness that Spinoza believes science aspires to understand and makes it the case that everything we do and are finds its rational place within the totality of nature. The second key to Spinoza’s system concerns the “channels” whereby the single ordering force or principle (“God”) is the single active causal determining force of all there is, and actually determines things and their states in the world. At the highest level, where these “channels” are virtually identical to God or the one and only substance but are nonetheless wholly distinct from each other, Spinoza calls these “attributes” of substance, and while he thinks that in principle the one and only one substance has all the attributes that there are, there are but two that determine the world in which we live: thought and extension. In short, all the modes—things and their states—that make up the natural world are modes of thought and extension, and while scholars have debated exactly how the distinction between these attributes should be understood, I believe that what Spinoza means is that we understand the single array of facts in the world by using both the physical sciences and the psychological sciences. In the famous Proposition 7 of Part II of the Ethics and in the scholium to that proposition, Spinoza indicates just this: that the order and connection of ideas or mental phenomena is one and the same as the order and connection of physical ones. This is a proposition with countless important implications throughout the remainder of the Ethics and Spinoza’s system.
As far as our attempts to understand the world go, then, for Spinoza these attempts are self-contained and comprehensive. All worldly facts should be examined and studied in the same way; there is a uniformity to all of nature. Mental modes interact causally with mental modes, and physical modes interact causally with physical modes. But since, strictly speaking, there is just one set of facts in nature, what this means is that these two types of scientific understanding are self-contained. We do not use physical causes to help us understand mental phenomena, nor do we use mental causes to help us understand physical phenomena. Moreover, in a sense the sciences of both physical and mental phenomena apply to all things in the world, and this means that Spinoza must show in what sense even inanimate things have mental or ideational correlates and what distinguishes animals and most preeminently human beings among worldly things—that is, what we mean when we say they have minds or souls.
I do not mean to suggest that on all these matters Spinoza was clear and lucid throughout his career and never changed his mind. A careful study of the early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, for example, shows how his thinking developed into the shape we find in the Ethics, and we are helped to some degree in understanding how Spinoza’s ideas developed by some of the letters in his correspondence. But the basic character of his thinking, I believe, did not change from the time around his excommunication in 1656 until his death in 1677. Throughout his life Spinoza was always committed to finding a way to unite science, ethics, and religion and to articulating a metaphysical system that would make the whole of nature, human life, and religious themes comprehensible. His system was an attempt to work out what made nature unified and an ordered whole and then to see what that picture implied.
Between the covers of this collection you will find the totality of Spinoza’s writings, all that we now have come to think that he left us. If this is a big book, it is also a small one, particularly when compared to the total written corpus of other philosophers, such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Given Spinoza’s impact on subsequent Western philosophy and Western intellectual culture in general, so brilliantly surveyed for example in the recent work of Jonathan Israel (Radical Enlightenment [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001]), his written legacy is surprisingly spare. Nonetheless, its richness is evident everywhere.
Furthermore, the corpus of Spinoza’s works contains a fascinating diversity. There is at its center, of course, the presentation of his system, the Ethics. Begun in the early 1660s, this work was probably completed about 1674. It is his lifework, the centerpiece of what came to be known as Spinozism, and one of the great accomplishments of world philosophy and Western intellectual culture.
In addition to the Ethics and his philosophical system, Spinoza left us what we might call four different introductions to that work and that system. The first is his handbook on Cartesian philosophy, first composed as a guide to tutoring a student in Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy and useful for what it shows us about Spinoza’s early appreciation of Descartes. The second is his youthful, unfinished work, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. Largely a work on method and definition, this short essay places Spinoza’s project within an ethical context. The third introduction is the unfinished Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, which is a preliminary attempt to begin the system and which Spinoza set aide when he decided to turn to the early parts of the Ethics. And finally we can treat the anonymous treatise on biblical interpretation and politics, the Theological-Political Treatise, as an introductory work, insofar as it seeks to persuade those with an affinity for philosophy and science how to read Scripture and understand its central ethical teaching; revise traditional interpretations of notions such as prophecy, law, and miracles; and appreciate the relation between church and state. What we have, then, is a mansion with four entrances, any one of which enables us to enter the vast complex of Spinoza’s world.
Furthermore, Spinoza has given us, in the Theological-Political Treatise and in the unfinished Political Treatise, two examples of how his system might be applied more fully to areas dealt with in only a cursory way in the Ethics, religion and politics. To be sure, in both cases, there are already indications in the Ethics of how Spinoza thinks we should understand religious concepts and institutions and also political life. Especially in various scholia and in the appendix to Part I, he notes how traditional ideas such as creation, miracles, teleology, and free will must be either revised or jettisoned altogether. In Part IV of the Ethics, Spinoza sets out the rudiments of his contract theory and of his views on the foundations and purposes of the state. Finally, in Part V, in the famous final propositions of the work, Spinoza defends and reinterprets what he takes to be the eternity of the mind and the goal of the ethical life, an “intellectual love of God” that is blessedness itself, a goal, he says, that is as difficult as it is rare. These indications notwithstanding, the treatises on politics and religion add significantly to our understanding of how Spinoza’s naturalism applies to these domains of human experience.
In Chapter 7 of the Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza describes his “historical” method for interpreting Scripture. The first requirement for any responsible reader is a study of the Hebrew language. Among Spinoza’s writings we have an unfinished treatise on Hebrew Grammar, a work that he probably began to write shortly after finishing the Theological-Political Treatise at the request of friends. The Hebrew Grammar gives us a valuable insight into what he thought that study of Hebrew should involve, Spinoza’s understanding of Latin grammar and biblical Hebrew, and his general approach to intellectual activity—in this case a philological and linguistic inquiry.
Lastly, among the writings of Spinoza we are grateful to possess are a sampling of his correspondence—letters to him and many by him. Here we are helped to understand better his philosophical and religious views, but we are also given valuable information about the chronology of his works, about his friends and associates, and about his life. Without these letters, we would know less about Spinoza the person than we currently do and less too about his thinking.
I would like to thank Deborah Wilkes, Jay Hullett, and Frances Hackett for the invitation to edit the first English collection of Spinoza’s works, for their friendship over many years, and for the wonderful contribution to the study of philosophy that Hackett Publishing Company has made. Needless to say, we are all in the debt of Samuel Shirley, whose commitment to Spinoza and his writings has provided us with splendid translations and made this volume possible. At Hackett, Meera Dash orchestrated the production of the collection with patience and skill. I would also like to thank Abigail Coyle for helping with the design of the volume. Rondo Keele, Inge Van Der Cruysse, Bieneke Heitjama, and Michal Levy assisted with matters Latin, Dutch, and Hebrew. Lee Rice generously provided an extensive chronology, which we modified for this volume. Joshua Shaw assisted with the proofs; he and Lilian Yahng compiled the bulk of the Index.
There is something inspiring and noble about Spinoza’s philosophical thinking and his moral vision. An important feature of his Ethics is its emphasis on rationality and self-control; we all face the challenges of coping with the worries and the fears that fill our lives, and yet we go on. We can learn this lesson from Spinoza’s works; we can also learn it from life. As this project comes to completion, I am thankful for those special people who have helped me to learn it—my wife, Audrey, and my daughters, Debbie and Sara.
Michael L. Morgan