Spinoza: One Substance, God or Nature, and Freedom Through Knowledge

Spinoza’s Ethics uses words that look familiar — substance, attribute, God, freedom — in senses that throw a first-time reader off balance. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, substance is what exists in itself and is conceived through itself, borrowing no other concept to be understood. The bar is a demanding one: anything that has to lean on something else in order to be thought falls outside. That vocabulary comes down a long road, from Aristotle’s Metaphysics onwards, and before that from the differences between Plato and Aristotle over how reality should be explained. Spinoza picks it up and tightens it until only one result is left: there is a single substance, which the IEP entry describes as an absolutely infinite being made up of infinite attributes.

One substance that goes by two names, God or Nature

Spinoza calls that infinite being by two names at once, Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. It is an eternal and infinite being that acts by necessity, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry reports. Where the identification leads is not where a devout reader would expect: religious fear and devotional worship are not, the SEP entry warns, the right attitude to take up towards God or Nature.

The encyclopedia entries cite the Ethics by proposition number, with labels like Ip29 and Ip33.

Practical example: imagine asking Spinoza why a stone falls. No will decides the matter case by case; the fall follows from the nature of things the way a result follows from its premises, and the same goes for every other event, your own thoughts included.

If everything is necessary: Spinoza on free will

Proposition Ip29 of the Ethics, reported by the SEP entry, says that there is nothing contingent in nature and that everything is determined by the necessity of the divine nature. Proposition Ip33 adds that things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than the one in which they were produced. That leaves our experience of choosing. The IEP entry explains it through partial awareness: people take themselves to be free because they are aware of their own actions and do not know the causes that determine them. Our sense of free will grows out of what we do not know.

Spinoza draws no resignation from that determinism. For him, the IEP entry reports, reason asks for nothing against nature and pushes each person to seek their own real advantage. The ethical question changes shape and turns on what makes a person active.

The Ethics, a programme for restraining the passions

Spinoza’s ethical goal, as the SEP entry presents it, is learning to moderate and restrain the passions, so as to become an active and self-governing being. The IEP entry gives the measure of that work: the power of the mind is gauged by knowledge alone, and passion, being a want of power, amounts to a privation of knowledge. Aristotle too had written an Ethics, his treatise on virtue; Spinoza hands the same job to the intellect and to a knowledge of causes.

Knowledge in the Ethics comes in three grades, and moving from one to the next is the route towards inner freedom.

The last step concerns death. On the SEP entry’s account, the free person Spinoza describes does not fear it, having understood that the soul is not immortal as a person and shares only in a certain form of eternity.

The Theological-Political Treatise: Spinoza on religion and free thought

The Theological-Political Treatise came out anonymously in 1670. The book caused great alarm, to the point that one critic, the SEP entry recounts, called it a work forged in hell by the devil himself. Far more than metaphysics was at stake: in the Treatise Spinoza denies the Mosaic authorship of the Torah and argues that the biblical texts were not written by the authors to whom tradition assigns them.

Keeping faith and philosophy apart is the move that holds the book together. For Spinoza, the SEP entry reports, Scripture is no source of truth about nature and counts as the carrier of a simple moral message, “love your neighbour”, while the job of knowing how things stand belongs to philosophy. On the political side the IEP entry sums up the aim of the work: to show that freedom of thought, and above all the freedom to philosophise, strengthens the stability of a society instead of threatening it.

Underneath lies a principle the SEP entry states flatly: by absolute natural right, everyone is master of their own thoughts. The defence of freedom of thought starts there.

The clergy, the charge of atheism and the herem of 1656

The conflict had begun long before 1670. Spinoza’s family had arrived in Amsterdam from Portugal, and the IEP entry describes his parents as Marranos, Jews converted under duress, who emigrated to escape the Iberian Inquisition and to live in the relative tolerance of Holland. On 27 July 1656 the synagogue elders pronounced the herem, the excommunication, against their son. The SEP entry describes it as the harshest decree the Sephardic community of Amsterdam ever issued, and one never lifted; the IEP entry reports the charges, “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds”, with no detail provided.

Even after the break with the synagogue, the pressure kept coming from the religious side. Spinoza saw the clergy as the main threat to freedom of thought, the IEP entry reports, and accused them of trading on popular fears and superstitions to hold on to power. Religious controversies drew him in personally, and the reputation for atheism attached to his name weighed on him.

What happened after 1677

Spinoza died in 1677 in The Hague, in the room he rented, while still at work on the Political Treatise, a separate book from the Theological-Political Treatise. The following year his works were banned across Holland. His figure has been read in two opposite ways ever since, the IEP entry recounts: for some a forerunner of a modernity led by reason, for others a threat to tradition.