Baruch (Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677)

Famous Dutch philosopher; chief representative of modern Western materialism; atheist thinker.

Spinoza was born on November 24, 1632, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, into a Jewish merchant’s family. His parents had lived in Portugal and were persecuted by the local Catholic Church and moved to the Netherlands. Spinoza spent his early years studying theology and philosophy at a school that trained rabbis, as well as Latin at a secular school, and it was through Latin that Spinoza was able to access the writings of Descartes and others. The accumulation of knowledge in the early years made Spinoza doubt the classics and doctrines of Judaism, and in the Judaism, Spinoza put forth a series of “heretical” ideas, such as God is nature, negating the immortality of the soul, which were regarded as deviant by the Jewish religious authorities and he was expelled from the Jewish community. Since then, Spinoza began to live in seclusion in the countryside, relying on polishing optical lenses to support his livelihood, and continuing his philosophical research in a difficult living environment. He once directed a group of philosophers by means of communication and had direct dealings with Leibniz, Boyle, Huygens and other famous philosophers, scientists and mathematicians. In 1673, In 1673, Spinoza was offered the chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, but he declined because he was unwilling to give up his freedom to criticize religion. Spinoza’s main works include: A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being (1659), On the Improvement of the Understanding (1661–1662), The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663), A Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), The Ethics (1675), etc.

Spinoza philosophically opposed Descartes’ dualism of distinguishing between material and spiritual substances, holding that there is only one substance, God, and that God, the only substance, exists in nature, that nature is the outward manifestation of God, and that substance, nature, and God are simply three different names for the same thing. Although there is only one God as substance, when it is concretized into forms, it presents two mutually parallel series, i.e., the series of notions and the series of things. In this way, Spinoza replaces Descartes’ “interactionism of body and soul” with the “parallelism of body and soul”.

In epistemology, Spinoza followed the line of rationalism. In On the Improvement of the Understanding, he divided knowledge into four kinds: Knowledge gained by hearsay or arbitrary designations, knowledge gained by common experience, knowledge gained by reasoning, and knowledge gained by knowledge of the essence of a thing. In Ethics, Spinoza again merged the first two kinds of knowledge into one category and called them imagination or opinion, the knowledge derived from reasoning is called rational knowledge, and the knowledge derived from the realization of the essence of things is called intuitive knowledge. And of these three kinds of knowledge, Spinoza held that imagination or opinion was unreliable, that it was a source of fictions and misconceptions, and that only rational knowledge was reliable, but that the reliability of rational knowledge ultimately comes from intuition. Therefore, only the third kind of knowledge, i.e., intuitive knowledge, is the most reliable, i.e., real notion. Spinoza held that the criterion of truth is the truth itself, and the true idea (i.e., the truth) has two marks, intrinsic and extrinsic; the true idea must conform to its object, which is only its “extrinsic mark”, and the clarity, understanding, and adequacy of the idea itself is the more important “intrinsic mark” of the true idea.

In social and political thought, Spinoza, like Hobbes, Locke and other political philosophers, advocated the doctrines of “natural rights”, “state of nature” and “social contract”. In Spinoza’s view, in the state of nature, all men were free and equal, and had the right to preserve their own natural rights. However, in the state of nature, not everyone can guide their lives with reason, so conflict inevitably occurs. Therefore, it is necessary to make a contract to transfer a part of one’s natural rights to a society to perform and thus form the state, whose function is to protect the security and welfare of each individual. In terms of ethics, Spinoza held that ethics is based on the affections of self-preservation and self-improvement of man, here morality is based on self-improvement of human nature and it guides its own behavior according to rational orders in order to better realize personal interests. In addition, Spinoza explored the question of human freedom, arguing that man is the process of seeking freedom in a state of slavery, that man is not free, but can strive to obtain freedom, and that freedom is the knowledge of necessity, which lies in the full knowledge of the necessity of one’s own nature, and then acting based on one’s own intrinsic determinations. All these thoughts have exerted a profound influence on later generations. In 1677, at the age of 45, Spinoza died in poverty and illness.