Everybody loves Spinoza

Atheist Jew, champion of modernism, and kind and sociable man, the 17th century lens grinder who was "drunk on God" continues to win hearts and minds with his breathtaking philosophical vision.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, metaphysics, Laura Miller, Philosophy, Reviews, Book reviews

Illustration by Bob Watts/Salon.com

May 17, 2006 | Bertrand Russell declared the 17th century lens grinder Baruch Spinoza to be "the noblest and most loveable of the great philosophers." To judge from several recent books, he's not alone in that opinion. The neurologist Antonio Damasio made the philosopher's thought a keystone of his 2003 book on emerging theories of emotion and consciousness, "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain." In "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity," philosophy professor and novelist Rebecca Goldstein declares herself to have loved Spinoza since the first time she heard him decried in the Orthodox yeshiva high school she attended as a girl. Matthew Stewart, a management consultant turned freelance historian of philosophy, makes Spinoza the supreme champion of modernism in his tale of intellectual rivalry, "The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World." Even Einstein, when asked if he believed in God, replied, "I believe in Spinoza's God."

All this is strange, when you observe, as Goldstein does, that Spinoza's ideas, from the perspective of contemporary analytic philosophy ("the philosophic tradition toward which I gravitate"), are considered "not just unsubstantiated speculations, but highfalutin nonsense." Surveying Spinoza's view of existence, Russell declared "the whole of this metaphysic is impossible to accept; it is incompatible with modern logic and with scientific method." Stewart characterizes Spinoza's thought as exhibiting a forbiddingly "eerie self-sufficiency." And in his own time and for decades afterward, Spinoza was widely denounced as (according to one church leader) "that insane and evil man, who deserves to be covered with chains and whipped with a rod." Yet however obsolete, ridiculous or even blasphemous, Spinoza still speaks to modern thinkers with an immediacy no philosopher of his time can match.

Of the two most recent books on this once-infamous "atheist Jew," Stewart's is the more wide-ranging and entertaining and Goldstein's is the more elegant; both are splendid. Goldstein (whose book belongs to a series of short volumes on Jewish thought) wants to reclaim Spinoza's famously dismissive attitude toward notions like ethnic identity as a paradoxically Jewish position. Stewart wants to vaunt him as a prophet of liberal secularism.

Many are those who can be accused of betraying Spinoza, including the Jewish community of his native Amsterdam, who excommunicated him in his early 20s. Then there's Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the brilliant German polymath who, as Stewart tells it, spent his whole life being influenced by and reviling Spinoza. You might, then, suspect Goldstein to be referring to these or other contemporaneous betrayals in her title. But what Goldstein gracefully acknowledges is that her own project to characterize Spinoza's philosophy as distinctly Jewish, though inspired by "love," amounts to another betrayal. The aspects of Spinoza's life that we consider fascinatingly personal -- his religious and ethnic background, his habits and relationships, his family history and quirks -- were qualities Spinoza himself dismissed as mere ephemera and illusion. To write about Spinoza's own life as if it matters is, in a way, to betray him.

Still, there's something about Spinoza the man that led people to love him, then and now -- even though his own work mostly avoids autobiographical intrusions and even though he would have frowned on such considerations. Although he was regarded as a dangerous heretic in his own time and refrained from publishing his final works for fear of provoking serious problems, Spinoza's funeral, as described by Stewart, was "an impressive event. Six state carriages led the procession, and many persons of high social rank attended along with the philosopher's numerous admirers. Notwithstanding his solitary ways and international notoriety, it seems, the sage of The Hague had developed quite a following among his fellow citizens."

Despite what Goldstein deems his "reptilian detachment" from the personal, little details of Spinoza's life manage to convey why he might have been so popular even when his ideas were often so detested. Goldstein herself decided that Spinoza was "loveable" when she learned that, as a young man, the philosopher kept his religious skepticism to himself until after his father's death, in order to prevent his own apostasy from troubling his parent. Whatever his beliefs about the irrelevance of individual identity, Spinoza was a kind and sociable man. His landlord's Christian family, for example, was devoted to him, supplying him with his simple meals and even locking him inside the house on one rare occasion when Spinoza intemperately tried to confront his fellow citizens about a recent act of mob violence.

"When he needed to take a break from his philosophical labors," Stewart writes, "the apostate Jew would descend to the parlor and chat with his house companions about current affairs and other trivia. The conversation often revolved around the local minister's most recent sermon. On occasion the notorious iconoclast even attended church service in order to better participate in the discussion." Spinoza did not believe in God as any church of his time would have defined the deity, and he considered most organized religions to be vehicles of deceit and oppression. But when his landlord's wife told him she was worried she'd picked the wrong church, he reassured her it was fine: "You needn't look for another one in order to be saved," he said, "if you give yourself to a quiet and pious life."

By the standards of his day, Spinoza was an atheist. (He insisted he was not, but his notion of "God" is one that even today many people would find overly abstract.) As Stewart notes, his contemporaries were much confused by the philosopher's character, since atheists were assumed to be depraved, amoral hedonists whose impulses were completely unrestrained by any threat of punishment in the afterlife. (This is still a common idea, especially among those raised in authoritarian religions. The comedian Julia Sweeney, in her one-woman show about losing her Catholic faith, describes fearing that without a belief in God she and others would run around stealing things and killing people.)

Spinoza, however, was no reprobate, although he was made to suffer for his beliefs. He never married, and after being excommunicated, he was forced to give up his position in his family's business, since all members of the Jewish community were forbidden to speak with him, including his own relatives. He lived an exemplary, modest life, supporting himself grinding lenses (a highly skilled trade) and turning down various commissions and allowances that he deemed either too extravagant or likely to impinge on his intellectual freedom. "Unlike some other philosophers," Russell writes, "he not only believed his own doctrines, but practiced them; I do not know of any occasion, in spite of great provocation, in which he was betrayed into the kind of heat or anger that his ethic condemned. In controversy he was courteous and reasonable, never denouncing, but doing his utmost to persuade." Many who knew him considered him a kind of saint.

Next page: Love itself was not something Spinoza endorsed, with the sole exception of what he called "the intellectual love of God"