Spinozism

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Spinozism is the philosophical system of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677), the Amsterdam lens-grinder expelled from his Sephardic community at twenty-three, and equally the name of that system’s long and quarrelsome afterlife. Its core is a single claim: there exists only one substance — God, or Nature, Deus sive Natura — infinite, necessary, and self-caused, of which every mind and every body is a finite mode. Nothing stands outside it, and nothing within it could have been otherwise. The system is therefore a monism before it is anything else: not many things sharing a world but one thing wearing infinitely many faces, of which the human intellect makes out exactly two.

The one substance

Spinoza begins, as Euclid begins, with definitions. Substance is causa sui, that whose essence involves existence — that which is in itself and conceived through itself, depending on nothing prior. An attribute is what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence; a mode is a modification of substance, what is in another and conceived through another. From these few terms the proofs of Ethics Part I move outward with a stonemason’s deliberateness. Two substances sharing an attribute would be indistinguishable, so each attribute belongs to one substance only. Substance cannot be produced by anything else, so it is its own cause and necessarily exists. A substance with infinite attributes — God — leaves no room beside it for any other. The conclusion is the proposition on which everything else rests: whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.

This single substance possesses infinitely many attributes, each expressing its eternal and infinite essence; of these the human mind grasps two, thought and extension. Here Spinoza performs his sharpest break from his Cartesian inheritance. Where Cartesianism had split the world into thinking substance and extended substance, two created kinds set over against an uncreated God, Spinoza collapses the plurality into one. Mind and body are not two things causally knocking against each other; they are the same thing — a finite mode of the one substance — expressed now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. Within this scheme Spinoza draws his governing distinction: natura naturans, nature naturing, God conceived as the active essence and attributes from which all follows; and natura naturata, nature natured, the whole train of modes that follows. The world is not made; it is entailed.

What the geometry dismantles

The full statement of the system is the Ethics (Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata), completed around 1674 and published in 1677 within months of its author’s death, in the Opera Posthuma that his circle saw through the press under the bare initials B.D.S. It is demonstrated “in geometrical order” — definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs, corollaries, scholia, after the manner of Euclid — so that its most disturbing conclusions arrive not as assertions but as theorems a reader has been made to prove. And what the proofs deliver dismantles most of what the word “God” then carried.

There is no creation, because substance is eternal and was never brought into being. There is no providence and no final cause, because nature acts from the necessity of its own essence and not toward ends; to read purpose into things is to mistake the order of human desire for the order of the world. There is no lawgiver who hears prayers, no deity who feigns a mind like a man’s, subject to passions, swayed by petition. There is no free will in the ordinary sense, because the will is not a faculty floating free of causes but a mode determined to act as it acts by an endless prior chain — the famous figure is of a stone, conscious of its motion, certain it flies of its own accord. The God that Spinoza proves is not the absence of God but the abolition of the personal one: a being identical with the system of nature, infinite, indifferent, and bound by no decree it could revise. Whether one says all things happen by the laws of nature or by the decree of God, Spinoza had already written in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), one says the very same thing.

Yet the book presents all this not as religion’s denial but as its true content. The arc of the later parts is an ascent, not a demolition. Spinoza sorts knowing into three kinds: imaginatio, the disordered knowledge of random experience and hearsay, the sole source of error; ratio, reason working through common notions and adequate ideas; and scientia intuitiva, intuitive knowledge, which proceeds from an adequate idea of the essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of singular things. To know in this third way is to see things sub specie aeternitatis — under the aspect of eternity — not as enduring in time but as following necessarily from the eternal nature of God. From such knowledge arises, of necessity, an intellectual love of God, amor Dei intellectualis, which Spinoza identifies, at the system’s summit, with the very love by which God loves himself. Blessedness, the closing proposition holds, is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself. The driving force throughout is the conatus: each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being, and in a rational being that striving becomes the striving to understand, which carries the mind up the three kinds of knowledge toward its own eternity and its love of the whole. A geometry built to extinguish the miraculous ends in a doctrine that calls understanding salvation.

Pantheist, atheist, acosmist

What Spinoza had actually built was disputed from the first page of its reception and is disputed still. Three readings have contended for three centuries, and each is defensible from the text. On the pantheist reading — the popular and traditional one — God simply is the totality of nature, immanence without remainder, the divine wholly inside the world it constitutes. On a panentheist reading, the world is in God, who exceeds it, since the infinitely many attributes beyond thought and extension lie wholly outside human reach, so that Deus sive Natura holds reaches no mind can enter. And on the acosmist reading, only substance is fully real and the world of finite particulars is derivative, almost a vanishing — the reading Hegel made famous when he charged, or credited, Spinoza with a system in which the finite is swallowed by the infinite and the cosmos is deposed before the sole reality of the One. The choice among the three is not cosmetic. It decides whether Spinozism is a naturalism that has sanctified nature, a hidden transcendence, or an acosmism whose nearest kin are the apophatic and non-dual mysticisms that lose the world to keep the absolute.

For a century after the book appeared, none of these subtleties governed its public life; “Spinozist” worked as an accusation, roughly interchangeable with atheist. The image was fixed by Bayle, whose great Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) gave Spinoza a long, hostile, and unforgettable article. Bayle painted the man as the exemplar of the virtuous atheist — sober, austere, kind, utterly upright — holding a doctrine he judged monstrous and systematically godless. The double portrait was incendiary precisely because it would not resolve: a saint’s life proving a devil’s metaphysics, or the reverse. It kept Spinoza famous and kept him unread except as a warning, the name a freethinker whispered and an orthodox divine cursed.

The reversal in Germany

The turn came late, and it came in Germany. In 1780 the dramatist Lessing, the reigning conscience of the German Enlightenment, told Jacobi in conversation that the orthodox conceptions of the divine were no longer for him, and that if he were to name himself after anyone it would be Spinoza — hen kai pan, one and all. When Lessing died, Jacobi disclosed the confession in correspondence with Mendelssohn and then, in 1785, published the exchange as Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. Jacobi’s purpose was to bury, not to praise: he held that consistent reason runs inexorably to Spinozism, and Spinozism to fatalism and atheism, so that the only escape was a leap, a salto mortale, into faith. Mendelssohn rushed to defend his dead friend’s good name and his own rational theism, and died, his circle believed, of the strain — early in 1786, the dispute still raging.

The effect was the opposite of Jacobi’s intent. The pantheism controversy, the Pantheismusstreit, made Spinoza intellectually irresistible to the generation it reached. Within a few years he had become the secret hero of German letters: the favorite philosopher of Goethe, who carried the Ethics like a breviary; of Herder, whose dialogues recast him as a vitalist of living force; of Novalis, who gave him the epithet that outran every argument, the God-intoxicated man. The Romantics found in Deus sive Natura exactly what the orthodox had recoiled from — a divinity diffused through the whole, available to wonder rather than to worship — and they read the geometry as devotion in disguise. Hegel, sealing the verdict that organized the idealist reception, declared that to be a philosopher one must first have been a Spinozist, even as he filed his charge of acosmism. The system built to end enthusiasm had become enthusiasm’s text.

The Kabbalah question

The esoteric reading arrived earliest of all. In 1699 the controversialist Johann Georg Wachter published Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb, arguing that Spinozism was Kabbalah in philosophical disguise — that the En Sof, the boundless God of the kabbalists, and its emanations had been recast as substance and modes, the sephirot rationalized into attributes, the whole unfolding of the divine into the world translated from the idiom of vision into the idiom of proof. Wachter, who would later soften from prosecutor to admirer, was the first to call Spinoza a mystic, and the line he drew runs straight into the idealist reception: his kabbalist Spinoza is among the sources of the acosmist Spinoza the next century would inherit. The thesis has an obvious leverage. Both systems begin from an infinite, undifferentiated ground; both derive a graded world by emanation or entailment from that ground; both locate the divine within nature rather than above it; and the Sephardic Amsterdam in which Spinoza was raised had Kabbalah, including the Lurianic strain, woven through its devotional life.

Against this stands Spinoza’s own record. He read the kabbalists he could reach and dismissed them with contempt, calling their lore the triflings of men whose madness, more than their wisdom, astonished him. The derivation thesis, modern scholarship concludes, cannot be proved: there is no demonstrable line of transmission from any kabbalistic text to the propositions of the Ethics, and Spinoza’s geometry is built from Cartesian and scholastic materials that need no esoteric source. Yet the resemblances do not dissolve under examination, and they are not confined to Kabbalah. Scholars keep returning to the same family of likenesses — to the Stoics’ divine cosmos pervaded by one immanent reason (Stoicism supplies the conatus and much of the affect-theory); to Maimonides’ God known only by negation, beyond every positive attribute; to the immanentist cosmos of Giordano Bruno and the coincidence of opposites in Nicholas of Cusa; behind them all to the Neoplatonic One from which the many flow. The careful judgment is therefore double-edged: the parallels are genuine and the descent unproven, and Wachter’s claim survives not as fact but as the founding text of a reading the system keeps inviting. Where the broader strand of esotericism inside medieval Jewish philosophy is concerned, the family quarrel over how much of the kabbalists’ God survives in Spinoza’s substance belongs to its own longer history.

Texts and scholarship

The foundation is the Opera Posthuma of 1677, the editio princeps that the philosopher’s friends — Jarig Jelles, Jan Rieuwertsz, Lodewijk Meyer and the rest — printed without place or publisher, carrying the Ethics, the political treatise, the treatise on the intellect, the letters, and the Hebrew grammar; the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus had appeared anonymously in 1670 under a false Hamburg imprint. The standard English of the public-domain era is the Chief Works translated by R. H. M. Elwes (1883–84), whose Ethics is freely readable in full at Wikisource; the scholarly standard is now Edwin Curley’s Collected Works (1985, 2016). The modern critical biography is Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life (1999; revised 2018), with his Spinoza’s Heresy (2001) the key study of the eternity-of-the-mind doctrine and the strongest case that there is no mysticism in the system at all; Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment (2001) makes Spinozism the engine of the European Enlightenment’s most daring wing. On the esoteric question, Mogens Lærke’s study, “Spinozism, Kabbalism, and Idealism from Johann Georg Wachter to Moses Mendelssohn” (Journal of Modern Philosophy, 2021), traces the line from Wachter’s kabbalist Spinoza through Mendelssohn to Hegel’s acosmism and is the clearest recent account of how the Kabbalah thesis became the idealist reading. The reception documents themselves are now in print: the Jacobi–Mendelssohn correspondence that ignited the Pantheismusstreit, and Bayle’s article, whose 1697 first edition can be read in the original. The current reference works — the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza and the Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon — gather the contemporary debate over substance, the attributes, and the German afterlife.

The deepest tension in Spinozism is the one its own architecture produces. The Ethics proves, line by demonstrated line, that everything is necessary, that nothing could have been otherwise, that the personal God is a confusion and prayer an error — and then ends by calling the understanding of that necessity blessedness, and the love of the whole the love by which the whole loves itself. A system that demonstrates there is nothing to worship arrives at an act its author was willing to name love of God. Three centuries of readers have stood at that join: the geometer’s Spinoza, for whom the love is only the joy of adequate knowledge under another name, and the God-intoxicated Spinoza of the Romantics, for whom the geometry was always a ladder to ecstasy. The proofs do not adjudicate between them. They were never meant to; the same propositions hold whichever way the reader’s wonder falls, and the system goes on producing both kinds of reader from one set of axioms.

→ Related: Benedictus De Spinoza · Pantheism · Monism · Stoicism · Kabbalah · Substance · Necessity · Free Will · Immanence · Acosmism · Atheism · Emanation · The One · Neoplatonism · Giordano Bruno · Nicholas Of Cusa · Philosophical Jewish Esotericism · Lurianic Kabbalah · Cartesianism