Baruch Spinoza Philosophy

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Baruch Spinoza – The Pantheist (1632 – 1677)
"Love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with pleasure, and it is free from all pain; so that it is much to be desired and to be sought with all our might." ("Ethics" 229)
Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam of Jewish parents. He spent all his life searching for personal truth and he developed a philosophy which included metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. His writings include: the Short Treatise on God, man and his well being, the principals of Cartesian Philosophy, which is the only work publish under his own name, the Theologico-Political Treatise, which he published unanimously, and the Ethics, which was published after his death. Some other writings we have from Spinoza are incomplete. His philosophy was so unique that it made Spinoza one of the most important and original thinkers of the seventeenth century. Samuel Shirley, who translated Spinoza's complete works into English, describes the significance of Spinoza's philosophy as follows: “To my mind, although Spinoza lived and thought long before Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and the startling implications of quantum theory, he had a vision of truth beyond what is normally granted to human beings.”

Spinoza grew up with the rabbinical Jewish philosophical traditions. Later, he studied Cartesian philosophy, and his eyes opened to a whole new world. Gradually, he became dissatisfied with the traditional teachings and the dogmatism of the Jewish community, had new ideas, and he changed his name to Benedict (a Christianized version of his Hebrew name). The Jewish community was upset by his teachings, and in 1656 at the age of 24, Spinoza was accused of heresy, cursed and expelled from the synagogue. He was also briefly expelled from Amsterdam, but returned and until 1660 made a living by teaching Cartesian philosophy. During this period he wrote the Short Treatise on God, Man and his well being.

Although he was rejected by the Jewish and Christian communities, he tried to reconcile the new scientific and philosophic understanding of the universe with his rabbinical education. He considered the scriptures and the biblical commentators trying to understand the relation between God and man. He was the first to develop a method for textual analysis of the scriptures which considered the language and stylish features of each book of the Bible and revealed the history of the texts. After his study, he concluded that all the books of the Bible contain history and not divine revelation.

In the following years, Spinoza developed his philosophy further. He was always righting in Latin and he followed the pattern of Euclidean geometry. He did not write for a general audience, but for the new generation of scientists and philosophers. His Arguments were always built systematically on the basis of self-evident axioms. By following mathematical principles, he hoped that his conclusions would be valid and irrefutable. Some of the other philosophers did not like his method, and did not agree with his conclusions. Nietszche called Spinoza’s method "hocus-pocus in mathematical form" because the result was often obscurity rather than increased certainly.

In the mid-1650's, Spinoza studied Cartesian philosophy with Franciscus Van den Enden, who was an ex-Jesuit radical with revolutionary tendencies. Van dan Enden appears to have profoundly influenced Spinoza. One commentator has gone so far as to call Van den Enden “the genius behind Spinoza,” claiming that Spinoza formed his philosophy from Van den Enden's writings which “contain a political theory which is in fact the same as the one worked out by Spinoza”. Whether or not this assessment is fair, it is clear that Spinoza's thinking improved through his association with Van den Enden and the larger radical Cartesian circle in Amsterdam.
In the next years, Spinoza developed a number of close
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