by Will Durant
But to use the imaginary rewards and punishments of a life after death as stimulants to morality is an encouragement to superstition and quite unworthy of a mature society. Virtue should be—and is—its own reward, if we define it, like men, as ability, intelligence, and strength, and not, like cowards, as obedience, humility, and fear. Spinoza resented the Christian view of life as a vale of tears, and of death as a door to heaven or hell; this, he felt, casts a pall over human affairs, clouding with the notion of sin the legitimate aspirations and enjoyments of men. To be daily thinking of death is an insult to life. “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.” 140
Nevertheless Spinoza seems at times to flutter around the idea of immortality. His theory of mind and body as two aspects of the same reality committed him in logic to view their death as simultaneous. He affirms this quite clearly: “The present existence of the mind, and its power of imagining, are taken away as soon as the mind ceases to affirm the present existence of the body”; 141 and again: “The mind can imagine nothing, nor can it recollect anything that is past, except while the body exists.” 142 In Book V some hazy distinctions appear. “If we look at the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their minds, but they confound this with duration, and attribute it to imagination and memory, which they believe remain after death.” 143 Insofar as the mind is a series of temporal ideas, memories, and imaginations connected with a particular body, it ceases to exist when that body dies; this is the mortal duration of the mind. But insofar as the human mind conceives things in their eternal relationships as part of the universal and unchanging system of natural law, it sees things as in God; it becomes to that extent part of the divine eternal mind, and is eternal.
Things are conceived as actual in two ways by us, either insofar as we conceive them to exist with relation to certain time and space, or insofar as we conceive them to be contained in God [the eternal order and laws], and to follow from the necessity of the divine nature [those laws]. But those things which are conceived in this second manner as true or real we conceive under a certain species of eternity [sub quadam specie eternitatis—in their eternal aspect], and their ideas involve the eternal and infinite essence of God. 144
When we see things in that timeless way we see them as God sees them; our minds to that extent become part of the divine mind, and share eternity.
We attribute to the human mind no duration which can be defined by time. But as there is nevertheless something else which is conceived under a certain eternal necessity through the essence of God, this something will be necessarily the eternal part which appertains to the mind 145 . . . We are certain that the mind is eternal insofar as it conceives things under the species of eternity. 146
Let us suppose that in contemplating the majestic sequence of apparent cause and effect according to apparently everlasting laws, Spinoza felt that through “divine philosophy” he had escaped, like some sinless Buddha, from the chain of time, and had shared in the viewpoint and tranquillity of an eternal mind.
Despite this seeming reach for the moon, Spinoza devoted most of his concluding Book V, “Of Human Liberty,” to formulating a natural ethic, a fount and system of morals independent of survival after death, though fondly using religious terms. One sentence reveals his starting point: “An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it” 147—that is, an emotion aroused in us by external events can be reduced from passion to controlled feeling by letting our knowledge play upon it until its cause and nature become clear, and its result in action can, through remembered experience, be foreseen. One method of clearing up an emotional state is to see the events that begot it as part of a chain of natural causes and necessary effects. “Insofar as the mind understands all things as necessary, it has more power over the emotions, and is less passive to them” 148—less given to passions. No one becomes passionate at what he considers natural and necessary. Anger at an insult can be cooled by viewing the offender as the product of circumstances outreaching his control; grief over the passing of aged parents can be moderated by realizing the naturalness of death. “The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue,” 149 in Spinoza’s sense of this word, for it reduces our subjection to external factors, and increases our power to control and preserve ourselves. Knowledge is power; but the best and most useful form of that power is power over ourselves.
So Spinoza works his Euclidean way to the life of reason. Recalling his three kinds of knowledge, he describes merely sensory knowledge as leaving us too open to domination by external influences; rational knowledge (reached by reasoning) as gradually freeing us from bondage to the passions by letting us see the impersonal and determined causes of events; and intuitive knowledge—direct awareness of the cosmic order—as making us feel ourselves part of that order and “one with God.” “We should expect and bear both faces of fortune with an equal mind; for all things follow by the eternal decree of God in the same way as it follows from the essence of a triangle that its three angles will make two right angles.” 150 This escape from thoughtless passion is the only true freedom; 151 and he who achieves it, as the Stoics used to say, can be free in almost any condition in any state. The greatest gift that knowledge can give us is to see ourselves as reason sees us.
On this naturalistic basis Spinoza arrives at some ethical conclusions surprisingly like Christ’s:
He who rightly knows that all things follow from the necessity of divine nature, and come to pass according to eternal, natural, and regular laws, will find nothing at all that is worthy of hatred, laughter, or contempt, nor will he deplore anyone; but as far as human virtue can go, he will endeavor to act well. . . and rejoice. 152 . . . Those who cavil at men, and prefer rather to reprobate vices than to inculcate virtues . . . , are a nuisance both to themselves and to others. 153 . . . A strong man hates no one, is enraged with no one, envies no one, is indignant with no one, and is in no wise proud. 154 . . . He who lives under the guidance of reason endeavors as much as possible to repay hatred, rage, contempt, etc., with love and nobleness. . . . He who wishes to avenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. Hatred is increased by reciprocated hatred, and, on the contrary, can be demolished by love. 155 . . . Men under the guidance of reason . . . desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind. 156
Does this control of emotion by reason contradict, as some 157 have thought, Spinoza’s admission that only an emotion can overcome an emotion? It would unless the following of reason could itself be raised to an emotional level and warmth. “A true knowledge of good and evil cannot restrain any emotion insofar as the knowledge is true, but only insofar as it is considered as an emotion.” 158 This need, and perhaps a desire to kindle reason with phrases hallowed by piety and time, led Spinoza to the final and culminating thought of his work—that the life of reason must be inspired and ennobled by the “intellectual love of God.” Since God, in Spinoza, is the basic reality and invariable law of the cosmos itself, this amor intellectualis dei is not the abject propitiation of some nebular sultan, but the wise and willing adjustment of our ideas and conduct to the nature of things and the order of the world. Reverence for the will of God and an understanding acceptance of the laws of nature are one and the same thing. Just as the mathematician finds a certain awe and ecstasy in viewing the world as subject to mathematical regularities, so the philosopher may take the deepest pleasure in contemplating the grandeur of a universe moving imperturbably in the rhythm of universal law. Since “love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause,” 159 the pleasure we derive from viewing—and adapting ourselves to—the cosmic order rises to the emotion of love toward the God who is the order and life of the whole. Then “love toward a being eternal and infinite fills the mind completely with joy.” 160 This contemplation of the world as a necessary result of
its own nature—of the nature of God—is the ultimate source of content in the mind of the sage; it brings him the peace of understanding, of limitations recognized, of truth accepted and loved. “The highest good (summum bonum) of the mind is the knowledge of God, and the highest virtue of the mind is to know God.” 161
Thus Spinoza mated the mathematician and the mystic in his soul. He still refused to see in his God a spirit capable of returning man’s love, or of rewarding litanies with miracles; but he applied to his deity the tender terms that for thousands of years had inspired and comforted the simplest devotees and the profoundest mystics of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Cold in the solitude of his philosophic empyrean, longing to find something in the universe to receive his adoration and his confidence, the gentle heretic who had viewed the cosmos as a geometrical diagram ended by seeing and losing all things in God, by becoming, to the confusion of posterity, the God-intoxicated “atheist.” The compulsion to find meaning in the universe made the exile from every faith conclude his seeking with the vision of an omnipresent divinity, and an exalting sense that, if only for a moment, he had touched eternity.
VIII. THE STATE
Perhaps, when Spinoza had finished the Ethics, he felt that, like most Christian saints, he had formulated a philosophy for the use and salvation of the individual rather than for the guidance of citizens in a state. So, toward 1675, he set himself to consider man as a “political animal,” and to apply reason to the problems of society. He began his fragmentary Tractatus politicus with the same resolve that he had made in analyzing the passions—to be as objective as a geometer or a physicist:
That I might investigate the subject matter of this science with the same freedom of spirit as we generally use in mathematics, I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them; and to this end I have looked upon passions, such as love, hatred, anger, envy, ambition, pity, and the other perturbations of the mind, not in the light of vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere. 162
Since human nature is the material of politics, Spinoza felt that a study of the state should begin by considering the basic character of man. We might understand this better if we could imagine man before social organization modified his conduct by force, morality, and law; and if we would remember that underneath his general and reluctant submission to these socializing influences he is still agitated by the lawless impulses that in the “state of nature” were restrained only by fear of hostile power. Spinoza follows Hobbes and many others in supposing that man once existed in such a condition, and his picture of this hypothetical savage is almost as dark as in The Leviathan. In that Garden of Evil the might of the individual was the only right; nothing was a crime, because there was no law; and nothing was just or unjust, right or wrong, because there was no moral code. Consequently “the law and ordinance of nature . . . forbids nothing . . . and is not opposed to strife, hatred, anger, treachery, or in general anything that appetite suggests.” 163 By “natural right,” then—i.e., by the operations of “nature” as distinct from the rules and laws of society—every man is entitled to whatever he is strong enough to get and to hold; and this is still assumed between species and between states; 164 hence man has a “natural right” to use animals for his service or his food. 165
Spinoza moderates this savage picture by suggesting that man, even in his first appearance on the earth, may have been already living in social groups. “Since fear of solitude exists in all men—because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself and procure the necessaries of life—it follows that men by nature tend towards social organization.” 166 Men, then, have social as well as individualistic instincts, and society and the state have some roots in the nature of man. However and whenever it came about, men and families united in groups, and the “natural right” or might of the individual was now limited by the right or might of the community. Doubtless men accepted these restrictions reluctantly, but they accepted them when they learned that social organization was their most powerful tool for individual survival and development. So the definition of virtue as any quality that makes for survival—as “the endeavor to preserve oneself” 167—has to be enlarged to include any quality that makes for the survival of the group. Social organization, the state despite its restraints, civilization despite its artifices—these are the greatest inventions that man has made for his preservation and development.
Therefore Spinoza anticipates Voltaire’s answer to Rousseau:
Let satirists laugh to their hearts’ content at human affairs, let theologians revile them, let the melancholy praise as much as they can the rude and barbarous isolated life, let them despise men and admire the brutes; despite all this, men will find that they can prepare with mutual aid far more easily what they need. . . . A man who is guided by reason is freer in a state where he lives according to common law than in solitude where he is subject to no law. 168
And Spinoza rejects also the other end of the law-less dream—the utopia of the philosophical anarchist:
Reason, can, indeed, do much to restrain and moderate the passions, but we saw . . . that the road which reason herself points out is very steep; so that such as persuade themselves that the multitude . . . can ever be induced to live according to the bare dictates of reason must be dreaming of the poetic golden age, or of some stage play. 169
The purpose and function of the state should be to enable its members to live the life of reason.
The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is to set free each man from fear, that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor. The end of the state . . . is not to make rational beings into brute beasts and machines [as in war]; it is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a true reason. . . . The end of the state is really liberty. 170
Consequently Spinoza renews his plea for freedom of speech, or at least of thought. But yielding, like Hobbes, to fear of theological fanaticism and strife, he proposes not merely to subject the church to state control, but to have the state determine what religious doctrines shall be taught to the people. Quandoque dormitat Homerus.
He proceeds to discuss the traditional forms of government. As became a Dutch patriot resenting the invasion of Holland by Louis XIV, he had no admiration for monarchy, and he sharply counters Hobbes’s absolutism:
Experience is supposed to teach that it makes for peace and concord when all authority is conferred upon one man. For no political order has stood so long without notable change as that of the Turks, while none have been so short-lived, nay, so vexed by seditions, as popular or democratic states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, then peace is the worst misfortune that can befall a state. . . . Slavery, not peace, comes from the giving of all power to one man. For peace consists not in the absence of war, but in a union and harmony of men’s souls. 171
Aristocracy, as “government by the best,” would be fine if the best were not subject to class spirit, violent faction, and individual or family greed. “If patricians . . . were free from all passion, and guided by mere zeal for the public welfare . . . , no dominion could be compared with aristocracy. But experience itself teaches us only too well that things pass in quite a contrary manner.” 172
And so Spinoza, in his dying days, began to outline his hopes for democracy. He who had loved the mob-murdered de Witt had no delusions about the multitude. “Those who have had experience of how changeful the temper of the people is, are almost in despair. For the populace is governed not by reason but by emotion; it is headlong in everything, and easily corrupted by avarice and luxury.” 173 Yet “I believe democracy to be of all forms of government the most natural, and the most consonant with individual liberty. In it no one transfers his natural right
so absolutely that he has no further voice in affairs; he only hands it over to the majority.” 174 Spinoza proposed to admit to the suffrage all males except minors, criminals, and slaves. He excluded women because he judged them by their nature and their burdens to be less fit than men for deliberation and government. 175 He thought that ruling officials would be encouraged to good behavior and peaceful policies if “the militia should be composed of the citizens only, and none of them be exempted; for an armed man is more independent than a man unarmed.” 176 The care of the poor, he felt, was an obligation incumbent on the society as a whole. 177 And there should be but a single tax:
The fields, and the whole soil, and, if it can be managed, the houses, should be public property, that is, the property of him who holds the right of the commonwealth; and let him lease them at a yearly rent to the citizens. . . . With this exception, let them all be free and exempt from every kind of taxation in time of peace. 178
Then, just as he was entering upon the most precious part of his treatise, death took the pen from his hand.
IX. THE CHAIN OF INFLUENCE
In the great chain of ideas that binds the history of philosophy into one noble groping of baffled human thought, we can see Spinoza’s system forming in twenty centuries behind him, and sharing in shaping the modern world. First, of course, he was a Jew. Excommunicated though he was, he could not shed that intensive heritage, nor forget his years of poring over the Old Testament and the Talmud and the Jewish philosophers. Recall again the heresies that must have startled his attention in Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Hasdai Crescas, Levi ben Gerson, and Uriel Acosta. His training in the Talmud must have helped to sharpen that logical sense which made the Ethics a classic temple of reason. “Some begin” their philosophy “from created things,” he said, “and some from the human mind. I begin from God.” 179 That was the Jewish way.