Al vaker heb ik laten weten dat ik 'gek' ben op lemma’s in encyclopedieën over Spinoza.
In de loop der tijd heb ik er heel wat verzameld of erop gewezen. Dat laatste
deed ik ook in het blog van 28 april 2018, waarin ik erop wees dat Richard
H. Popkin in de Encyclopaedia
Britannica het lemma schreef over "Benedict de Spinoza,
Dutch-Jewish Philosopher" dat op 20 juli 1998 door de redactie op internet
werd geplaatst. De Duitse Spinoza Bibliografie, die veel werk van hem noemt, vermeldt dit niet.
In aansluiting op het blog van gisteren, “Richard H. Popkin (1923 – 2005) deed als een detective onderzoek naar Spinoza,” breng ik hier dat lemma. Opvallend is dat hij Spinoza's verblijf in Voorburg overslaat; en verder dat hij Spinoza in 1673 in Utrecht de Prins de Condé laat ontmoeten.
In aansluiting op het blog van gisteren, “Richard H. Popkin (1923 – 2005) deed als een detective onderzoek naar Spinoza,” breng ik hier dat lemma. Opvallend is dat hij Spinoza's verblijf in Voorburg overslaat; en verder dat hij Spinoza in 1673 in Utrecht de Prins de Condé laat ontmoeten.
Nieuw
voor mij was de bewering die Popkin hier doet, dat Spinoza’s model voor de
geometrische opzet van de Ethica,
niet zozeer de Elementen van Euclydes
was, maar Proclus’s Institutio theologica (Elements of Theology). Hij maakt niet duidelijk waarop hij dat baseert.
Benedict de Spinoza
Dutch-Jewish
philosopher
Written
By: Richard H. Popkin
Benedict
de Spinoza, Hebrew forename Baruch, Latin forename Benedictus, Portuguese Bento
de Espinosa, (born November 24, 1632, Amsterdam—died February 21, 1677, The
Hague), Dutch Jewish philosopher, one of the foremost exponents of 17th-century
Rationalism and one of the early and seminal figures of the Enlightenment. His
masterwork is the treatise Ethics (1677).
Early life and career
Spinoza’s
Portuguese parents were among many Jews who were forcibly converted to
Christianity but continued to practice Judaism in secret (see Marranos). After
being arrested, tortured, and condemned by the inquisition in Portugal, they
escaped to Amsterdam, where Spinoza’s father, Michael, became an important
merchant and eventually served as one of the directors of the city’s synagogue.
Spinoza’s mother, Hannah, died in 1638, shortly before his sixth birthday.
The
Jewish community in Amsterdam was unique in its time. It originally comprised
people who had been raised in Spain, Portugal, France, or Italy as Christians
and who had fled to Amsterdam to escape persecution and to practice their
ancestral religion freely. The community was granted toleration by the Dutch
authorities on the condition that it not cause scandal or allow any of its
members to become public charges.
The
community developed many social and educational institutions, including an
all-male Talmud-Torah school founded in 1638. The students there were taught by
adult males, many of whom had been trained at Roman Catholic schools before
their arrival in Amsterdam. They taught the younger men more or less what they
themselves had learned but also added instruction in various Jewish subjects,
though it is not clear how much traditional Judaism was included in the
curriculum. As a student in this school, the young Baruch Spinoza probably
learned Hebrew and studied some Jewish philosophy, including that of Moses
Maimonides.
When
he was 18 or 19 years old, Spinoza and his brother went into business selling
tropical fruit. At his stall on the main canal in Amsterdam, Spinoza met other
young businessmen from different religious backgrounds, some of whom became his
lifelong friends.
There
is some evidence that Spinoza began to attract attention as a potential heretic
when he was in his early 20s. After he and two other young men began teaching
classes in Sabbath school, all three were charged with improprieties, though in
Spinoza’s case the record of the investigation does not survive. The two other
men were accused of raising doubts in their students’ minds about the
historical accuracy of the Bible and about whether there might be other
accounts of human history with an equal or even better claim to the truth.
In
1655 a book titled Prae-Adamitae (Latin: “Men Before Adam”), by the French
courtier Isaac La Peyrère, appeared in Amsterdam. It challenged the accuracy of
the Bible and insisted that the spread of human beings to all parts of the
globe implies that there must have been humans before Adam and Eve. La Peyrère
concluded that the Bible is the history of the Jews, not the history of
humanity. Although it is not known whether Spinoza met La Peyrère at this time,
one of Spinoza’s teachers, Menasseh ben Israel, was acquainted with La Peyrère
and even challenged him to a debate in 1655. (Menasseh also wrote a refutation
of the work, which was never printed.) Prae-Adamitae was soon condemned in the
Netherlands and elsewhere, and it came to be regarded as one of the most
dangerous pieces of heresy in print. Spinoza owned a copy of the work, and many
of La Peyrère’s ideas about the Bible later appeared in Spinoza’s writings.
Excommunication
La
Peyrère’s heresies may well have been the starting point of Spinoza’s falling
out with the synagogue in Amsterdam. In the summer of 1656 he was formally
excommunicated. A series of horrendous curses were cast upon him, and members
of the synagogue were forbidden to have any relationship with him, to read
anything he had written, or to listen to anything he had to say. The statement
of excommunication, or herem (Hebrew: “anathema”), reads like a wild attack,
suggesting that Spinoza was very much hated and despised. In the late 20th
century it was discovered that the herem pronounced against Spinoza used a
formulation that was given to the Amsterdam Jewish community by the Venetian
Jewish community in 1617 and was specifically intended for heretics.
Despite
the severity of the excommunication, it was apparently undertaken with some
reluctance. According to Spinoza’s later account, the community offered to
rescind it and even to pay him a pension if he would agree to appear at High
Holiday services and to keep quiet while he was there. Spinoza apparently
declined. Some time after his excommunication, he changed his given name from
the Hebrew Baruch to the Latin Benedictus, both of which mean “blessed.”
Despite being formally excluded from the Jewish community, he seems to have
remained in contact with some members, even taking part in a Jewish theological
discussion group in the late 1650s.
There
is still much debate about why Spinoza was excommunicated. Many scholars have
naturally tried to find an explanation in Spinoza’s religious views. Yet they
have rarely taken into account the fact that the Jewish community in Amsterdam
was very broad-minded and that its social and political leaders (the parnassim)
were businessmen rather than rabbis. Although the Amsterdam synagogue
excommunicated more than 280 people in its first century of existence, most of
the cases concerned the enforcement of rules and regulations (e.g., the payment
of dues and the fulfillment of marriage contracts), and only a handful involved
heresy. Furthermore, although rabbis could recommend excommunication, only the
parnassim could carry it out. In Spinoza’s case it is plausible to assume that
the parnassim would have been most reluctant to excommunicate the son of a
recently deceased parnas (Michael Spinoza died in 1654) for ideological
reasons.
The
American scholar Steven Nadler has contended that Spinoza’s excommunication
resulted from his denial of the immortality of the soul. But Spinoza had
written nothing on this subject and did not directly discuss the issue in his
later philosophy. It is only by implication that it is clear that he did not
believe in individual immortality. Other scholars have tried to make Spinoza’s
adherence to the philosophy of René Descartes the central problem, but it is
unclear that Spinoza had even studied Descartes by this time; in any event, it
is unlikely that the parnassim would have been greatly exercised by the views a
young man might hold about Cartesianism. Another possibility is that Spinoza
was excommunicated because of his views about the interpretation of the Bible
and the truth of biblical claims.
Ultimately,
however, his excommunication may have had more to do with the presentation
rather than the content of his beliefs. As suggested by some strongly worded
sections of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (published anonymously in 1670),
Spinoza may have been aggressively obnoxious in his criticism of established religion
and insensitive to the suffering that older Marranos in the community had
undergone (see below Tractatus Theologico-Politicus).
Although
the herem forbade Jews to read Spinoza’s writings, there is no evidence that he
had written anything other than commercial documents up to that time.
Accordingly, many scholars have postulated the existence of lost heretical
books. It is more likely, however, that Spinoza was still developing his own
doctrines during this time. An indication of this is given in an account by an
Augustinian friar of a theological discussion group attended by Spinoza in
Amsterdam. He reported that Spinoza and a fellow excommunicant, Juan de Prado,
held that God exists, but only “philosophically.” This statement contains the
germs of the theory that Spinoza was soon to develop.
Association with Collegiants and
Quakers
By
1656 Spinoza had already made acquaintances among members of the Collegiants, a
religious group in Amsterdam that resisted any formal creed or practice. Some
scholars believe that Spinoza actually lived with the Collegiants after he left
the Jewish community. Others think it more likely that he stayed with
Franciscus van den Enden, a political radical and former Jesuit, and taught
classes at the school that van den Enden had established in Amsterdam.
A
few months after his excommunication, Spinoza was introduced to the leader of a
Quaker proselytizing mission to Amsterdam. The Quakers, though not as radical
as the Collegiants, also rejected traditional religious practices and
ceremonies. There is some reason to believe that Spinoza became involved for a
while in a project to translate one or more Quaker pamphlets into Hebrew. In
this he would have been aided by Samuel Fisher, a member of the Quaker mission
who had studied Hebrew at the University of Oxford. Fisher, it seems, shared
Spinoza’s skepticism of the historical accuracy of the Bible. In 1660 he
published a book in English of more than 700 pages, Rusticus ad Academicos; or,
The Country Correcting the University and Clergy, in which he raised almost
every point of biblical criticism that Spinoza was later to make in the
Tractatus.
In
1661 Spinoza was visited by a former Collegiant, Pieter Balling, who belonged
to a philosophical group in Amsterdam that was very interested in Spinoza’s
ideas. Shortly after his visit, Balling published a pamphlet, Het licht op den
kandelar (Dutch: “Light on the Candlestick”), that attempted to justify the
tenets of Quakerism. The work, which eventually became a standard piece of
Quaker theology, contains a fair amount of terminology that Spinoza later
employed, which suggests that Spinoza helped to formulate this basic statement
of Quaker doctrine.
Rijnsburg and The Hague
In
1661 Spinoza moved from Amsterdam to the coastal town of Rijnsburg. Most
traditional accounts assume that he had tired of his isolation from the Jewish
community in Amsterdam or that he desired a quiet place in which to pursue his
philosophical work. Spinoza himself, however, reported that he left Amsterdam
because someone had tried to kill him with a knife as he emerged from a
theatre. (He kept the coat he had been wearing, torn by the knife, for the rest
of his life.) In Rijnsburg Spinoza lived alone in a modest but comfortable
cottage, where he worked on his philosophy and supported himself by grinding
lenses.
Shortly
after Spinoza’s arrival in Rijnsburg, he was visited by Henry Oldenburg, who
later became secretary of the Royal Society. Oldenburg had probably heard of
Spinoza through Peter Serrarius, a millenarian merchant in Amsterdam who
handled Spinoza’s dealings with the outside world. Oldenburg subsequently put
Spinoza into contact with the eminent British scientist and theologian Robert
Boyle. Oldenburg, who seems to have regarded Spinoza as a kindred spirit, was
keen to promote Spinoza’s ideas among the radical Protestants with whom he
associated in England. Oldenburg and Spinoza corresponded until the very end of
Spinoza’s life.
In
1661 Spinoza began writing the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (Treatise
on the Emendation of the Intellect), a presentation of his theory of knowledge,
which he left unfinished. In about 1662 he completed his only work in Dutch,
Korte verhandeling van God, de mensch en deszelfs welstand (Short Treatise on
God, Man and His Well-Being), a brief survey of his overall philosophy. During
this period he was also working on the Ethics, as his correspondence shows.
In
1663 Spinoza published Renati des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae (1663; René Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy),
the only one of his works to be published under his own name in his lifetime.
An exposition of Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae (1644; Principles of
Philosophy), it showed a profound understanding of Descartes’s system. Although
Spinoza generally accepted Descartes’s physics, he rejected Cartesian
metaphysics, objecting to three features: the transcendence of God, the conception
of mind as a “mental substance” radically distinct from matter (see mind-body
dualism), and the ascription of free will both to God and to human beings. In
Spinoza’s eyes the combination of these doctrines made the world
unintelligible. It was impossible to explain the relation between God and the
world or the causal interaction of mind and body or to account for events
occasioned by free will. Spinoza also showed that Descartes’s definition of
substance, which Spinoza accepted, implied that there cannot be more than one
substance in the world. Spinoza’s monism is therefore the logical outcome of
Cartesianism (see below The period of the Ethics).
In
the mid-1660s Spinoza moved again, to the outskirts of The Hague, where he
spent the rest of his life. He began to acquire a wide circle of intellectual
acquaintances, beginning with a philosophical-spiritual group in Amsterdam that
conducted discussions with him by mail and occasionally in person. Recognized
as a significant intellectual figure, especially after the publication of the
Tractatus in 1670, Spinoza found himself in the company of professors,
diplomats, and writers of great renown.
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
The
publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in 1670 made Spinoza notorious.
Although his name did not appear on the work, he was quickly known as its
author. The Tractatus was one of the few books to be officially banned in the
Netherlands during this period, though it could be bought easily. It was soon
the topic of heated discussion throughout Europe.
The
Tractatus combines biblical criticism, political philosophy, and philosophy of
religion with germs of Spinoza’s developing metaphysics. The early chapters can
be seen as the culmination of Spinoza’s long-standing skepticism regarding the
Bible. The themes that the Bible is not historically accurate, that it is full
of inconsistencies, and that some of its content can be explained through
scientific study of the language, history, and beliefs of past times probably
date from the period before Spinoza’s excommunication. The first seven chapters
in particular contain many borrowings from La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae and from
Book III of Leviathan (1651), by the English philosopher (and atheist) Thomas
Hobbes.
Spinoza
denies that the Jewish prophets possessed any knowledge beyond that of ordinary
mortals, and he denies that the history of the Jews is any more extraordinary
than that of other peoples. He contended that much of the content of the Bible
was determined by the peculiarities of Hebrew history from the time of the
Exodus onward. The particular rituals it describes were relevant to the
circumstances in which the ancient Hebrews found themselves but no longer made
sense in a modern age; hence, the ceremonial law of the ancient Hebrews could
be disregarded. Although most of the discussion concerns Judaism and the Hebrew
Bible (Old Testament), Spinoza also briefly indicates that Christian ceremonial
law is also historically determined and therefore not binding on the modern
believer. He cites in support of his conclusion the fact that Dutch Christians
in Japan were willing to set aside all of their religious paraphernalia and
practice during their trading visits in the country.
A
more radical side of Spinoza’s view emerges in his discussion of divine law and
scripture. According to Spinoza, divine law is necessary and eternal; it cannot
be changed by any human or divine action. Hence, miracles, which by definition
are violations of divinely created laws of nature, are impossible. Alleged
miracles must have a rational, scientific explanation, and anyone who believes
in the reality of miracles is thus simply ignorant. Scientific developments
will explain all alleged miracles once all of the laws of nature have been
discovered.
Spinoza
then turns his attention to the study of the Bible, arguing that it should be
studied in almost the same way in which nature should be studied. Scripture
should be examined in terms of linguistic development and historical context.
Using his naturalistic approach to language, he argued that the scriptures were
simply a collection of Hebrew writings by different persons from different
times and places. Indeed, the examination of conflicting passages reveals that
there must have been many authors, not just Moses and the prophets.
Deuteronomy, for example, must have had more than one author, since the alleged
author, Moses, describes his own death. While the scriptures may provide an
interesting picture of ancient Hebrew life and times, they contain no superhuman
dimension.
Spinoza
derides those who reinterpret scripture in order to see a rational message in
it—as Moses Maimonides did—as well as those who accept its unreasonableness on
faith. Instead, one should dispense with the view that the scriptures are a divine
document and simply accept them as a historical one.
This
line of thought leads Spinoza to assert that the message of the scriptures is
to be found not in any collection of ancient parchments but rather in the
spirit that pervades them. He reduces this message to a simple set of
propositions that any rational person could determine for himself: that God
exists, that God causes everything, and that a person should treat others as he
would wish others to treat him.
Spinoza’s
scientific approach to the scriptures has implications for his view of the
origins of political societies in human history. According to Spinoza, they
develop not from supernatural forces but in response to human needs and human
values. Spinoza accepted Hobbes’s view of the justification of political
authority: people cede their own power to a sovereign in order to preserve
themselves from the violence and chaos that must attend a state of nature. In a
society so constituted, religion can play a significant role in promoting
people’s obedience to the sovereign. Spinoza proposes wide toleration of
different religions as long as they help to make the people obedient and as
long as they are subordinate to the state.
Spinoza
insists that the obligation to obey the sovereign is absolute; the people have
no right of rebellion in any circumstances, no matter how badly the sovereign
may rule. In this respect his view is more authoritarian than that of Hobbes,
who believed that the people would be justified in rebelling against the
sovereign if they were in fear of their lives or if they felt that their
condition had become no better than it would be in a state of nature.
At
the end of the Tractatus, Spinoza argues for complete freedom of thought and of
speech, claiming that no one can be forced to have one thought rather than
another and that people should be allowed to develop their thoughts by
themselves. People should be allowed to say and publish whatever they wish, so
long as it does not interfere with the state. Spinoza ended the work with a
declaration that this is what he thinks and, if the state thinks otherwise, he
would be glad to change his text—which of course he never did.
The period of the Ethics
In
1673 Spinoza was invited to Utrecht to meet Louis II, prince de Condé, whose
armies had occupied much of the Netherlands since 1672. There he also met the
French poet Saint Évremonde. When he returned to The Hague with presents from
the prince, he was immediately accused of being in league with the country’s
enemy. One year earlier the political leaders of the Netherlands, Johan De Witt
and his brother Cornelius, who had been accused of conspiring against the young
prince of Orange, William III, had been torn apart by an angry mob. At this
point Spinoza, concerned for his safety, seems to have wanted to leave the
Netherlands, and he considered an invitation from Louis II to move to Paris, as
well as an offer of a professorship from the University of Heidelburg. He
ultimately decided against going to Paris, because he feared that Louis did not
have enough power to protect him from bigots in France, and he declined the
offer from Heidelburg because he did not think he would have complete freedom
to teach as he wished. His famous letter to the Heidelburg authorities, which
contains an impressive defense of academic freedom, may in fact have been
composed after the offer was withdrawn. At any rate, Spinoza seems to have
reconciled himself to staying in the Netherlands for the rest of his life.
Spinoza
resumed work on his masterpiece, the Ethica (Ethics), finishing a five-part
version by 1675. He delayed its publication, however, after being advised that
it would cause even greater controversy than the Tractatus. It was finally
published, together with the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and an
unfinished work on politics, the Tractatus Politicus, at the instigation of
some of his Collegiant friends a few months after his death in 1677.
The
bulk of the Ethics is written as a geometric proof in the style of Euclid’s
Elements, though its more direct inspiration was probably Proclus’s Institutio
theologica (Elements of Theology), an axiomatic presentation of Neoplatonic
metaphysics composed in the 5th century ce. Spinoza apparently believed that a
geometric presentation of his ideas would be clearer than the conventional
narrative style of his earlier works. Accordingly, he begins with a set of
definitions of key terms and a series of self-evident “axioms” and proceeds to
derive from these a number of “theorems,” or propositions. The early portion of
the work contains no introductory or explanatory material to aid the reader,
apparently because Spinoza initially thought it unnecessary. By the middle of
Part I, however, he had added various notes and observations to ensure that the
reader would understand the significance of the conclusions being developed. By
the end of Part I he had also added polemical essays and introductions to
various topics. The form of the work as a whole is therefore a mixture of
axiomatic proof and philosophical narrative.
The
Ethics relies on three Jewish sources, which were probably familiar to Spinoza
from his early intellectual life. The first is the Dialogues on Love by Leone
Ebreo (also known as Judah Abravanel), written in the early 16th century.
Spinoza had a copy in Spanish in his library. This text is the source of the
key phrases that Spinoza uses at the end of Part V to describe the culmination
of human intellectual activity—namely, seeing the world “from the aspect of
eternity” and having as an ultimate aim the “intellectual love of God.” Spinoza
also used at least one argument from the 15th-century Spanish Jewish
philosopher Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas, whose critique of Aristotle had been
printed in the mid-16th century in Hebrew. Last, Spinoza seems to have had
access to the Gate of Heaven by Abraham Cohen de Herrera, the most
philosophically sophisticated Kabbalist of the 17th century. A disciple of
Isaac ben Solomon Luria and an early member of the Amsterdam congregation,
Herrera knew a vast amount of ancient, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian
philosophy, as well as Kabbalistic thought. The Gate of Heaven, his major work,
circulated in Amsterdam in Spanish and appeared in a Hebrew abridgement in
1655.
Spinoza
begins by stating a set of definitions of eight terms: self-caused, finite of
its own kind, substance, attribute, mode, God, freedom, and eternity. These
definitions are followed by a series of axioms, one of which supposedly
guarantees that the results of Spinoza’s logical demonstrations will be true about
reality. Spinoza quickly establishes that substance must be existent,
self-caused, and unlimited. From this he proves that there cannot be two
substances with the same attribute, since each would limit the other. This
leads to the monumental conclusion of Proposition 11: “God, or substance
consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite
essence, necessarily exists.” From the definition of God as a substance with
infinite attributes and other propositions about substance, it follows that
“there can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God” (Proposition 14)
and that “whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without
God” (Proposition 15). This constitutes the core of Spinoza’s pantheism: God is
everywhere, and everything that exists is a modification of God. God is known
by human beings through only two of his attributes—thought and extension (the
quality of having spatial dimensions)—though the number of God’s attributes is
infinite. Later in Part I, Spinoza established that everything that occurs
necessarily follows from the nature of God and that there can be no
contingencies in nature. Part I concludes with an appended polemic about the
misreading of the world by religious and superstitious people who think that
God can change the course of events and that the course of events sometimes
reflects a divine judgment of human behaviour.
Part
II explores the two attributes through which human beings understand the world,
thought and extension. The latter form of understanding is developed in natural
science, the former in logic and psychology. For Spinoza, there is no problem,
as there is for Descartes, of explaining the interaction between mind and body.
The two are not distinct entities causally interacting with each other but
merely different aspects of the same events. Spinoza accepted the mechanistic
physics of Descartes as the right way of understanding the world in terms of
extension. Individual physical or mental entities are “modes” of substance: physical
entities are modes of substance understood in terms of the attribute of
extension; mental entities are modes of substance understood in terms of the
attribute of thought. Because God is the only substance, all physical and
mental entities are modes of God. Whereas the modes are natura naturata
(“nature-created”) and transitory, God, or substance, is natura naturans
(“nature-creating”) and eternal.
Physical
modes that are biological have a feature beyond simple extension, namely,
conatus (Latin: “exertion” or “effort”), a desire and drive for
self-preservation. Unconsciously, biological modes are also driven by emotions
of fear and pleasure to act in certain ways. Human beings, as biological modes,
are in a state of bondage as long as they act solely from emotions. In Part V
of the Ethics, “Of Human Freedom,” Spinoza explains that freedom is achieved by
understanding the power of the emotions over human actions, by rationally
accepting things and events over which one has no control, and by increasing one’s
knowledge and cultivating one’s intellect. The highest form of knowledge
consists of an intellectual intuition of things in their existence as modes and
attributes of eternal substance, or God; this is what it means to see the world
from the aspect of eternity. This kind of knowledge leads to a deeper
understanding of God, who is all things, and ultimately to an intellectual love
of God (amor Dei intellectualis), a form of blessedness amounting to a kind of
rational-mystical experience.
Last years and posthumous influence
Soon
after he completed the Ethics, Spinoza was visited by several important people,
including Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus (in 1675), a scientist and
philosopher, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in 1676), who was, like Spinoza,
one of the leading rationalists of the time. Leibniz, having heard of Spinoza
as an authority on optics, had sent him an optical tract and had then received
from Spinoza a copy of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, which deeply
interested him. According to Leibniz’s own account, he “conversed with him
often and at great length.” Spinoza, however, was now in an advanced stage of
consumption that was aggravated by the inhaling of glass dust from grinding
lenses. He died in 1677, leaving no heir, and his few possessions were sold at
auction. They included about 160 books, the catalog of which has been
preserved.
Spinoza
has an assured place in the intellectual history of the Western world. Because
his philosophical system was completely severed from any specific religious or
historical perspective, and because he was strongly opposed to any form of
supernaturalism, he was almost universally misunderstood (and denounced) as an
atheist for nearly a century after his death. The tone was set by the French
philosopher Pierre Bayle, whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697;
“Historical and Critical Dictionary”) asserted that Spinoza was the first
philosopher to make atheism into a philosophical system. A much more discerning
assessment, however, was given in the late 18th century by the German poet
Novalis, who said that Spinoza was a “God-intoxicated man.” The intensely
religious—yet entirely rational and undogmatic—character of Spinoza’s thought
has been appreciated and admired by philosophers as well as poets ever since.
Richard
H. Popkin
Van: www.britannica.com/biography/Benedict-de-Spinoza
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