Spinozism

Spinozism (also spelled Spinoza-ism or Spinozaism) is the monist Part of the series on
philosophical system of Baruch Spinoza which defines "God" as a 17th-century scholasticism
singular self-subsistent substance, with both matter and thought being
attributes of such.

In a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza wrote: "as to the view of certain

people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or
corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken".[1] For Spinoza, our universe
(cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God
has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world.
According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote
Title page of the Calov Bible
"Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") Spinoza meant God was Natura Background
naturans not Natura naturata, that is, "a dynamic nature in action,
Protestant Reformation
growing and changing, not a passive or static thing."
Counter-Reformation
Aristotelianism
Scholasticism
Patristics
Contents
17th-century scholastics
1 Core doctrine
1.1 Substance Second scholasticism of the Jesuits
1.2 Attributes Lutheran scholasticismduring Lutheran Orthodoxy
1.2.1 Thought Ramism among the Reformed scholastics
1.2.2 Extension
Metaphysical poets in the Church of England
1.3 Modes
1.4 Substance monism Reactions within Christianity
1.5 Causality and modality
Labadists against the Jesuits
1.5.1
The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) Pietism against orthodox Lutherans
1.6 Parallelism Nadere Reformatie within Dutch Calvinism
2 Pantheism controversy Richard Hooker against the Ramists

3 Modern interpretations Reactions within philosophy

4 Comparison to Eastern philosophies
Modernists against Roman Catholics
5 See also
Neologists against Lutherans
6 Notes Spinozists against Dutch Calvinists
7 References Deists against English Christianity
John Locke against Bishop Stillingfleet

Core doctrine
In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent
"organism". Spinoza argued that everything is a derivative of God, interconnected with all of existence. Although humans only
experience thought and extension, what happens to one aspect of existence will still affect others. Thus, Spinozism teaches a form of
determinism and ecology and supports this as a basis for morality.
Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not
have unfolded in any other way. Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is the highest kind attainable. More
specifically, he defined this as the ability for the human intellect to intuit knowledge based upon its accumulated understanding of the
world around them.

Spinoza's metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there
is only one substance, which is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. From this substance, however, follow an infinite number
of attributes (the intellect perceiving an abstract concept or essence) and modes (things actually existing which follow from attributes
and modes). He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase
he uses is "Deus sive Natura"), but readers often disregard his neutral monism. During his time, this statement was seen as literally
equating the existing world with God which is why he was accused of atheism. For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is
made of one substance, God, or, what's the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).

It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza's philosophy his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his
psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion flows more or less directly
from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of theEthics.[2]

However, one should keep in mind the neutral monist position. While the natural universe humans experience in both the realm of the
mind and the realm of physical reality is part of God, it is only two modes thought and extension that are part of infinite modes
emanating from God.

Spinoza's doctrine was considered radical at the time he published and he was widely seen as the most infamous atheist-heretic of
Europe. His philosophy was part of the philosophic debate in Europe during the Enlightenment, along with Cartesianism.
Specifically, Spinoza disagreed with Descartes on substance duality, Descartes' views on the will and the intellect, and the subject of
free will.[3]

Substance
Spinoza defines "substance" as follows:

By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the
[4]
concept of another thing, from which it must be formed. (E1D3)

This means, essentially, that substance is just whatever can be thought of without relating it to any other idea or thing. For example, if
one thinks of a particular object, one thinks of it as a kind of thing, e.g., x is a cat. Substance, on the other hand, is to be conceived of
by itself, without understanding it as a particular kind of thing (because it isn't a particular thing at all).

Attributes
Spinoza defines "attribute" as follows:

[4]
By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence. (E1D4)

From this it can be seen that attributes are related to substance in some way. It is not clear, however, even from Spinoza's direct
definition, whether, a) attributes are really the way(s) substance is, or b) attributes are simply ways to understand substance, but not
necessarily the ways it really is. Spinoza thinks that there are an infinite number of attributes, but there are two attributes for which
, thought and extension.[5]
Spinoza thinks we can have knowledge. Namely

Thought
The attribute of thought is how substance can be understood to be composed of thoughts, i.e., thinking things. When we understand a
particular thing in the universe through the attribute of thought, we are understanding the mode as an idea of something (either
another idea, or an object).

Extension
The attribute of extension is how substance can be understood to be physically extended in space. Particular things which have
breadth and depth (that is, occupy space) are what is meant by extended. It follows from this that if substance and God are identical,
in Spinoza's view, and contrary to the traditional conception,God has extension as one of his attributes.

Modes
Modes are particular modifications of substance,i.e., particular things in the world. Spinoza gives the following definition:

By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.
(E1D5)[4]

Substance monism
The argument for there only being one substance (or, more colloquially, one kind of stuff) in the universe occurs in the first fourteen
propositions of The Ethics. The following proposition expresses Spinoza's commitment to substance monism:

[4]
Except God, no substance can be or be conceived. (E1P14)

Spinoza takes this proposition to follow directly from everything he says prior to it. Spinoza's monism is contrasted with Descartes'
dualism and Leibniz's pluralism. It allows Spinoza to avoid the problem of interaction between mind and body, which troubled
Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

Causality and modality

The issue of causality and modality (possibility and necessity) in Spinoza's philosophy is contentious.[6] Spinoza's philosophy is, in
one sense, thoroughlydeterministic (or necessitarian). This can be seen directly from Axiom 3 ofThe Ethics:

From a given determinate cause the effect follows necessarily; and conversely, if there is no determinate cause, it is
impossible for an effect to follow. (E1A3)[4]

Yet Spinoza seems to make room for a kind of freedom, especially in the fifth and final section of The Ethics, "On the Power of the
Intellect, or on Human Freedom":

I pass, finally, to the remaining Part of the Ethics, which concerns the means or way, leading to Freedom. Here, then, I
shall treat of the power of reason, showing what it can do against the affects, and what Freedom of Mind, or blessedness,
is. (E5, Preface)[4]

So Spinoza certainly has a use for the word 'freedom', but he equates "Freedom of Mind" with "blessedness", a notion which is not
traditionally associated withfreedom of the will at all.

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR)

Though the PSR is most commonly associated with Gottfried Leibniz, it is arguably found in its strongest form in Spinoza's
philosophy.[7] Within the context of Spinoza's philosophical system, the PSR can be understood to unify causation and explanation.[8]
What this means is that for Spinoza, questions regarding the reason why a given phenomenon is the way it is (or exists) are always
answerable, and are always answerable in terms of the relevant cause(s). This constitutes a rejection of teleological, or final
causation, except possibly in a more restricted sense for human beings.[4][8] Given this, Spinoza's views regarding causality and
modality begin to make much more sense.

Parallelism
Spinoza's philosophy contains as a key proposition the notion that mental and physical (thought and extension) phenomena occur in
parallel, but without causal interaction between them. He expresses this proposition as follows:

[4]
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. (E2P7)

His proof of this proposition is that:

The knowledge of an effect depends on, and involves, the knowledge of its cause. (E1A4)[4]

The reason Spinoza thinks the parallelism follows from this axiom is that since the idea we have of each thing requires knowledge of
its cause, and this cause must be understood under the same attribute. Further, there is only one substance, so whenever we
understand some chain of ideas of things, we understand that the way the ideas are causally related must be the same as the way the
things themselves are related, since the ideas and the things are the same modes understood under dif
ferent attributes.

Pantheism controversy
In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobipublished a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was thought to
have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time of being called a heretic. Jacobi claimed
that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for
Jacobi, was the result of Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed with
Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The entire issue became a major intellectual and
religious concern for European civilization at the time, which Immanuel Kant rejected, as he thought that attempts to conceive of
transcendent reality would lead toantinomies (statements that could be proven both right and wrong) in thought.

The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late eighteenth-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative to materialism,
atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:

the unity of all that exists;

the regularity of all that happens; and
the identity of spirit and nature.
Spinoza's "God or Nature" [Deus sive Natura] provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the Newtonian mechanical "First Cause"
or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Coleridge and Shelley saw in Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature[9] and
called him the "God-intoxicated Man."[10][11] Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism."
[10]

Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that was different from that of
traditional JudeoChristian monotheism. "Spinoza expressly denies personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence,
feeling, nor will; he does not act according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...."[12]
Thus, Spinoza's cool, indifferent God [13] differs from the concept of an anthropomorphic,fatherly God who cares about humanity.

Modern interpretations
German philosopher Karl Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are
interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes
known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.[14] Even God under the attributes of thought and
extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no
attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one
cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is
indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13).[15] Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two
attributes of thought and extension. Therefore, the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One"
[14]
preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.

French philosopher Martial Guroult suggested the term "panentheism", rather than "pantheism" to describe Spinoza's view of the
relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, "in" God. Not only do finite things have God
[15] In other words, the world is asubset of God. American philosopher Charles
as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.
Hartshorne, on the other hand, suggested the term "Classical Pantheism" to describe Spinoza's philosophy.[16]

Comparison to Eastern philosophies

Similarities between Spinoza's philosophy and Eastern philosophical traditions have been discussed by many authorities. The 19th-
century German Sanskritist Theodore Goldstcker was one of the early figures to notice the similarities between Spinoza's religious
conceptions and the Vedanta tradition of India, writing that Spinoza's thought was "... a western system of philosophy which occupies
a foremost rank amongst the philosophies of all nations and ages, and which is so exact a representation of the ideas of the Vedanta,
that we might have suspected its founder to have borrowed the fundamental principles of his system from the Hindus, did his
biography not satisfy us that he was wholly unacquainted with their doctrines... We mean the philosophy of Spinoza, a man whose
very life is a picture of that moral purity and intellectual indifference to the transitory charms of this world, which is the constant
longing of the true Vedanta philosopher... comparing the fundamental ideas of both we should have no difficulty in proving that, had
Spinoza been a Hindu, his system would in all probability mark a last phase of theedanta
V philosophy."[17][18]

It has been said that Spinozism is similar to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga. Though within the various existing Indian
traditions there exist many traditions which astonishingly had such similar doctrines from ages, out of which most similar and well
oga.[19]
known are the Kashmiri Shaivism and Nath tradition, apart from already existing Samkhya and Y

Max Muller, in his lectures, noted the striking similarities between Vedanta and the system of Spinoza, saying "the Brahman, as
conceived in the Upanishads and defined by Sankara, is clearly the same as Spinoza's 'Substantia'."[20] Helena Blavatsky, a founder
of the Theosophical Society also compared Spinoza's religious thought to Vedanta, writing in an unfinished essay "As to Spinoza's
Deity natura naturans conceived in his attributes simply and alone; and the same Deity as natura naturata or as conceived in the
endless series of modifications or correlations, the direct outflowing results from the properties of these attributes, it is the Vedantic
Deity pure and simple."[21]

See also
Philosophy of Spinoza

Notes
1. Correspondence of Benedict de Spinoza, Wilder Publications (March 26, 2009),
ISBN 1-60459-156-0, letter 73
2. Della Rocca, Michael. (2008).Spinoza. Routledge., pg. 33.
3. Michael L. Morgan, ed.,Spinoza: Complete Works, translated by Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
2002), 119n6.
4. Curley, Edwin M. (1985). The Collected Works of Spinoza. Princeton University Press.
5. Stanford.edu (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza-attributes/)
6. Stanford.edu (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza-modal/)
 7. Della Rocca, Michael. (2008).Spinoza, Routledge.
8. Della Rocca, Spinoza, 2008.
9. Anthony Gottlieb. "God Exists, Philosophically (review of "Spinoza: A Life" by Steven Nadler)"
(https://www.nytimes.c
om/books/99/07/18/reviews/990718.18gottlit.html) . The New York Times -- Books. Retrieved 2009-09-07.
10. Harold Bloom (book reviewer) (June 16, 2006)."Deciphering Spinoza, the Great Original -- Book review of
"Betraying Spinoza. The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity ." By Rebecca Goldstein"(https://www.nytimes.co
m/2006/06/16/arts/16iht-idside17.1986759.html)
. The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-09-08.
11. Hutchison, Percy (November 20, 1932)."Spinoza, "God-Intoxicated Man"; Three Books Which Mark the Three
Hundredth Anniversary of the Philosopher's Birth BLESSED SPINOZA. A Biography . By Lewis Browne. 319 pp. New
York: The Macmillan Company. $4. SPINOZA. Liberator of God and Man. By Benjamin DeCasseres, 145pp. New
York: E.Wickham Sweetland. $2. SPINOZA THE BIOSOPHER. By Frederick Kettner. Introduc- tion by Nicholas
Roerich, New Era Library. 255 pp. New York: Roerich Museum Press. $2.50. Spinoza"(http://select.nytimes.com/gst/
abstract.html?res=F40A14F83A5513738DDDA90A94D9415B828FF1D3) . The New York Times. Retrieved
2009-09-08.
12. Frank Thilly, A History of Philosophy, 47, Holt & Co., New York, 1914
13. "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns
himself with fates and actions of human beings. These words were spoken by Albert Einstein, upon being asked if
he believed in God by Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue, Nework,Y April 24, 1921, published in
the New York Times, April 25, 1929; fromEinstein: The Life and Times Ronald W. Clark, New York: World Publishing
Co., 1971, p. 413; also cited as a telegram to a Jewish newspaper, 1929, Einstein Archive 33272, from Alice
Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
14. Karl Jaspers, Spinoza (Great Philosophers), Harvest Books (October 23, 1974),
ISBN 0-15-684730-2, Pages: 14
and 95
15. Genevieve Lloyd, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Spinoza and The Ethics (Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks),
Routledge; 1 edition (October 2, 1996),ISBN 0-415-10782-2, Page: 40
16. Charles Hartshorne and William Reese, "Philosophers Speak of God," Humanity Books, 1953, ch 4.
17. Literary Remains of the Late Professor Theodore Goldstucker
, W. H. Allen, 1879. p32.
18. The Westminster Review, Volumes 7879, Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1862. p1862
19. Disguised and overt Spinozism around 1700 Page 133(https://books.google.com/books?id=eKF4A
vtQnXEC&pg=
PA133)
20. Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy. F. Max Muller. Kessinger Publishing, 2003. p123
21. H.P Blavatsky's Collected Writings, Volume 13, pages 308310. Quest Books

References
Jonathan I. Israel. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity , 16501750. 2001.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Wood, James, ed. (1907). "article name
needed". The Nuttall Encyclopdia. London and New York: Frederick Warne.

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