Spinoza

Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam's Jewish community at twenty-three for reasons the *cherem* doesn't specify — but his subsequent philosophy makes the likely offence obvious. The *Ethics* (published posthumously in 1677, geometrically ordered like Euclid) argues that God and Nature are the same thing: one substance, infinite, of which mind and matter are two attributes among infinitely many. There is no transcendent creator standing apart from creation. This is pantheism — or, depending on who's reading, naturalism with the word "God" used unconventionally.

The metaphysics has uncomfortable consequences. Free will, in Spinoza's view, is an illusion of perspective. Everything that happens follows necessarily from the nature of the one substance. Human beings are modes, finite expressions of infinite substance, and we are *not* the special exceptions we like to think we are. Acting morally, in this framework, isn't about deserving — it's about understanding. The more clearly we see why we feel and act as we do, the more we move from passive bondage to the active power of reason. The closing book of the *Ethics* — "Of Human Freedom" — is some of the strangest, most luminous philosophy ever written, ending with the intellectual love of God that he carefully redefines along the way.

The political philosophy is just as bold. The *Theological-Political Treatise* (1670) was anonymous and banned almost everywhere; it argues for freedom of thought, against scriptural authority over civic life, and for democracy on broadly naturalistic grounds. Hobbes was a clear influence; the conclusions diverge sharply.

He earned his living grinding optical lenses. He died at forty-four, probably of silicosis from glass dust. Hegel later said: "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all." Twentieth-century readers — Deleuze, Negri, the new naturalists — have made him fashionable again.