School of thought

Spinozism

Intellectual current

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Classification

Period
c. 1663-1800 CE
Regions
europe
Domains
Metaphysics , Philosophy of Religion

Overview

Spinoza's philosophy identifies God with Nature itself (Deus sive Natura) — there is only one substance, infinite and self-caused, of which all particular things are modes or modifications. Free will is an illusion; everything follows necessarily from God's nature. Yet this determinism is liberating: through rational understanding, we achieve the 'intellectual love of God' and blessedness.

Spinozism outlived Spinoza as an underground current and then as a public controversy. Clandestine readers carried it through the radical Enlightenment, and Jacobi's disclosure in 1785 that Lessing had avowed himself a Spinozist set off the Pantheismusstreit, which put the doctrine at the centre of German philosophy and drew in Goethe, Herder and the young idealists.

Key ideas

  • Substance Monism: There is only one substance — God or Nature — with infinite attributes, of which we know two: thought and extension. Everything that exists is a mode of this single substance.
  • Conatus: Every being strives to persist in its own being (conatus). This striving is the essence of each thing and the foundation of Spinoza's psychology and ethics.
  • Freedom Through Understanding: We are 'free' not by escaping determinism but by understanding our place in nature. The more we understand, the less we are enslaved by passive emotions.

Key figures

Baruch Spinoza · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Influenced by

  • Medieval Jewish Philosophy

    Spinoza studied Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed closely, absorbing its rationalist theology even as he pushed past it to identify God with Nature.

  • Continental Rationalism

    Spinoza worked inside Descartes' programme before turning it against him, keeping the geometrical order of demonstration and the appeal to clear and distinct ideas while rejecting the plurality of substances they had been used to defend.

Later connections

References