School of thought
Spinozism
Intellectual current
Classification
- Period
- c. 1677-1800 CE
- Regions
- Europe (origin)
- 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 and Herder.
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
Methods used
Positions held
- Spinozistic Substance Monism
Question scope: How Many Fundamental Substances?
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
- German Idealism Influenced by this tradition
The young idealists took up Spinoza's monism once the Pantheism Controversy of the 1780s had made it a central question of German philosophy. Schelling above all took from it the demand for a single unconditioned ground of everything, while trying to escape the fatalism Jacobi had found in it.
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza
- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677, posthumous), the publication that put the system into circulation and from which this movement dates, and the start date used here. It is not Spinoza's first attempt at his own doctrine: the earlier Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being was, in the words of the entry's Stanford source, 'an initial but aborted effort to lay out his metaphysical, epistemological and moral views'
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, §1 — Formation: Spinoza wrote the Ethics in the Netherlands, and his Dutch circle published his works after his death in 1677.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spinoza: Metaphysics, §3–4 (substance monism is the distinctive claim that one infinite substance, God or Nature, alone exists)
- Spinoza, Ethics, title and Part I, definitions, axioms, and propositions 1–15 (Spinoza presents his central doctrine in geometrical order)
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, §2.1 'God or Nature' (describes the ordered demonstrations of the Ethics)
- Ethics — Baruch Spinoza
- Theological-Political Treatise — Baruch Spinoza