Benedictus de Spinoza - Spinozas Ethics

Our philosophical landscape is populated by growing numbers of Spinozists, and by quite a few Spinozas. Some uncontested facts provide common ground: he was born Baruch Spinoza in 1632, the son of Jewish Portuguese immigrants, and he was raised in Amsterdams Jewish community, from which he was expelled in 1656, never to return; from then on he took the name Benedict (the Latin version of Baruch, meaning blessed), associated with Christians of various kinds, but refused to join any Church. From here, characterizations of Spinoza diversify. There is the brave critic of superstitious religion, a clear-eyed prophet of the secular age: this Spinoza heralded a radical Enlightenment more than a century before Kant. There is the daring anti-theological thinker of pure immanence, popularized in recent years by Gilles Deleuzes influential interpretation of Spinozas philosophy. There is a Spinoza whose invocation of God or Nature represents a more familiar naturalism: his readers equate God to a modern, materialist conception of nature and tend to dismiss as rhetoricalor as mere nonsensethose passages in his works that suggest a more religious view. There are also left-wing and liberal Spinozas, early champions of equality, individual freedom, and democracy. Hovering among these modern Spinozas is the ghost of Spinoza the atheist, which haunted generations of readers and critics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While this old Spinoza was castigated for his monstrous atheism, his descendants are now celebrated for it.

Marian Evans in Berlin, 1854; photograph provided by The George Eliot Fellowship.

Benedict de Spinoza; lithograph by Karl Bauer, originally published in Spinoza im Portrt by Ernst Altkirch (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1913).

The present text is, as far as we know, the first English translation of the Ethics. It was completed in 1856 by Marian Evans, then a successful woman of letters, who in the following year began to publish stories under the pseudonym George Eliot. She encountered a different Spinoza, more angel than monster: he wore a bright new halo, conferred by the admiration of successive German geniuses, including the poets Goethe and Novalis, the theologian Schleiermacher, and the philosophers Schelling and Hegel. Like Spinoza himself, these thinkers were neither atheists nor conventionally religious. Though they did not grasp Spinozas philosophy perfectly, they appreciated its spiritual depth at a time when Protestant orthodoxy was being challenged in unprecedented ways, in Germany as in England. Through the first decades of the nineteenth century, this Spinozism emanated from the German university towns, its strange glow illuminating the avant garde of English intellectual life.

The Ethics is indeed a radiant book, though a tough one. It is Spinozas greatest work, sitting easily among the true masterpieces of Western philosophy, and perhaps rivaled only by Platos Republic in its completeness and power as a work of both ethics and metaphysics. It was written in Latin, like most of Spinozas works, and published shortly after his death in 1677. It crowned a brilliant philosophical career, which included a critical exposition of Descartess philosophy (1663), the controversial Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), various unpublished writings, including a book on Hebrew grammar, and a large correspondence in which Spinoza elaborated his philosophical system as well as his views on religious and scientific questions.

Part I of the Ethics sets out Spinozas theologyhis account of God, and of Gods relationship to everything elseand at the core of this theology is the claim that Whatever is, is in God (E1, P15). This expresses in propositional form St. Pauls insistence that God is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our beingan insight Paul offered in Athens, a city full of idols, as a corrective to the pagan idea that the deity is an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. In the seventeenth century, Spinoza was responding to a similar error: he saw that the mainstream Christian churches were propagating an idolatrous image of God formed after the pattern of human power, as if God were a great king or an omnipotent father, eager to reward or punish people for their obedience or disobedience. Spinozas claim that all things are