(1632-1677)

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on November 24, 1632. His parents were Portuguese Jews who had escaped from the persecution they suffered in their homeland. Sadly, his mother died when Baruch was only six.

He received a religious education, but his father instructed him in various secular subjects in the hopes that Baruch would take on a business career. Baruch became fluent in many languages, and had a particular love for math, especially geometry. His father died in 1654, when Baruch was 22.

Discussing his beliefs with his friends, he admitted to doubting many of their religious traditional beliefs, such as life after death. They reported him to the synagogue soon after. After trying to persuade him to keep his opinions to himself, the rabbis excommunicated him in 1656. At that time, excommunication (Jewish or Christian) including the practice of shunning -- i.e. no one in the community was to speak or correspond with him in any fashion.

But Baruch -- now called Benedictus (“blessed,” the Latin for the Hebrew baruch) -- had many friends outside the Jewish community, and they would protect him all his life. Nevertheless, he was forced to move to Rijnsburg, a small town, in 1660 after a death threat, and again in 1663 to Voorburg near the Hague, and finally to the Hague itself.

He supported himself throughout as a lens-maker. At this time, that occupation included not only the making of glasses, but of lenses for telescopes and microscopes -- the latest thing in technology! He conducted a variety of experiments as well. Unfortunately, the constant exposure to glass dust was to take a toll on Benedictus’ lungs.

He published, anonymously, the Treatise on Theology and Politics in 1670. This was a devastating critique of Biblical literalism, and was immediately condemned by the religious community of Holland.

His most important work, Ethics, was begun all the way back in 1662. He tried to publish it in 1675, but was frightened off by rumors that his life would be in jeopardy if he did so. He died of tuberculosis two years later, February 20, 1677, at the age of 45. His friends published Ethics and other unpublished works in his honor in that same year.

The full title of the book was Ethics, Demonstrated in the Fashion of Geometry, because he laid out his arguments in the same way that a mathematician might lay out a geometric proof. This is certainly a rigorous way of writing philosophy, but it does make it hard to read. (Dagobert Runes edited The Ethics of Spinoza in 1957 so that it would be more readable for modern students.)

According to Spinoza, Substance (that which underlies all reality, also known as Existence or Being) has two attributes (sides or aspects). If we look at reality from one angle, through the senses, we see it as matter. But if we look at it within ourselves, we see it as thought. He suggested that there were an infinite number of aspects, but those two are the only ones evident to human beings.

So, the body (or brain) and the mind (or soul) are one and the same thing seen from two different perspectives. Where there is material activity, there is thought. Where there is thought, there is material activity. Not all thought is available to what I perceive as myself: Much of it remains unconscious. But it goes on nonetheless.

This “double-aspectism” sounds great, but it does bring us to panpsychism. Panpsychism is the idea that every material thing has a mental side to it (and vice versa). People have minds, animals have minds, plants have minds, even rocks and houses have minds. The earth itself has a mind. Of course, as we move away from people, those minds are increasingly unconscious and lacking in a sense of self, but still....

It also leads to Spinoza’s most famous concept, the one he actually based the rest of his theory upon: God and Nature are one and the same, and identical with all of Existence, mental and physical. God is the mind of the universe; the universe is the body of God. This is often called pantheism -- God is everywhere and in everything -- but in his day, it was called atheism.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza is a mechanist. He believes only in determinism, not free will. For us as humans, this determinism comes in the form of desires, which derive from our need to survive. All things, he says, have the motive of self-preservation, all things are “selfish.”

He says that we strive to increase our power, that is, our capacity to preserve ourselves. Then he identifies this power with virtue! So the good is defined as what is useful to us, and the bad as what is damaging to us. Good advances our well-being, bad decreases our well-being. Good we perceive as pleasure, bad is perceived as pain.

But, we have many desires. Usually, one outweighs the others and we do what we desire most. But often they conflict. This conflict itself decreases our well-being and so is painful. What do we do to make our lives less painful then?

Society helps to some extent. By providing rewards and punishments, praise and blame, it adds new items to our list of desires that may outweigh certain desires and support others. Ultimately, society instills a conscience in most of us. Spinoza saw conscience as learned, not innate.

Ultimately, we must rely on ourselves: First, Spinoza says, we have to gain some control over our desires. When they are out of our control, when they instead control us, he calls them passions. They are out of our control because they operate unconsciously and so are not available to reason. By getting a “clear idea” of them, we turn them into simple emotions, which are amenable to reason. Freud would say, three centuries later, that we must “make the unconscious conscious!”

One way to turn a passion into an emotion, incidentally, is to trace its roots. If you can see where it came from, its operations become clear -- conscious -- and you can better deal with it.

Another way to deal with passions is to see the necessity of things. Nature is what it is, God wills what he wills, and no one can change that. Surrender to the inevitable, and you will be much more peaceful, at least. A wise person, for example, sees that getting angry at unpleasant people isn’t going to change them. In fact, it only hurts you. Being kind to others, on the other hand, is usually rewarded, and it takes much less out of you. Along with Buddha and Jesus, Spinoza said that love can conquer hate.

He also said that wise people “desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind” (Ethics, iv, 48). This presages Kant’s categorical imperative by a century.

But only an emotion can overcome another emotion. Therefore, reason must itself become an emotion -- a powerful one -- in order that it may outweigh others. He calls this powerful emotion “the intellectual love of God,” which of course means love of nature as well. It also includes the acceptance of God’s will -- or natural law. Knowledge of God/Nature is the ultimate virtue, and the ultimate pleasure!

Dismissed by the English as an atheist and by the French as too religious, Spinoza would have great influence on upcoming German philosophers, including Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. And it is in Germany where psychology was to flourish.