_010 Spinoza & Pantheism

Spinoza was a 17^th Century Jewish Dutch philosopher. In his book “Ethics”, he attempted to redefine God towards that which is comparable to pantheism. This led to his excommunication from the Jewish community. So why were his views so controversial?

For Spinoza, God was the only substance, which he defined as that whose existence does not rely on other things. This is known as logical monism, which is the belief that the world is one essence, whose individual parts cannot exist independently. Spinoza thought that God must be infinite, since anything which is finite must be contained within something else, since it must have a boundary. Therefore, it cannot exist without other things (definition of substance).

In other words, God is the entire universe, specifically nature (but also transcends it). God is everything and nothing is separate from him. He is abstract and impersonal, not like the traditional view of God, who was outside the universe and had characteristics.

For this reason, Spinoza was a determinist. Determinism is the rejection of free will and the belief that all actions are caused by other events and forces. This means that the future is as fixed as the past. There is only one possible chain of events; people do not have the ability to choose their actions.

Spinoza said that the reason we are under the illusion of choice is because we have desires; things we want to do, but don’t understand why we have them. You may think that you chose to eat a slice of pizza, but really your hunger caused you to want it.

This implies a few things, specifically that we cannot be held morally accountable for our actions, since we never could have done something different. But Spinoza said that everything necessarily happens as it does and we shouldn’t try to do otherwise. We should accept reality because it is perfect. Many would argue that it isn’t perfect since there is evil in the world. Spinoza claimed that evil only arises from a limited conception of the world. Good and bad is merely an illusion since our perspective of the world is so tiny, we cannot see the full picture.

Therefore, instead of trying to change the way the world works, we should accept it. Happiness is aligning our will with that of the universe, instead of trying to battle against it. Only this way can we see how God views the world, under the aspect of eternity.We shouldn’t fear the future or death, nor should we blame, praise or criticise anyone for their actions. We should embrace that God is the universal cause.

But there is a way we can become freer, by becoming more aware of our causes. Reason can never triumph emotion, but through reason we can understand our emotions and causes, and thus change them from passive emotion to active emotion, thus becoming more like God. Happiness is having an intellectual love of God and accepting one’s place in nature.

Word Count: 498

Spinoza, Ethics, in Edwin Curley, translator, The Collected Writings of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), volume 1.