“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”

Baruch Spinoza

Today we visited the statue of Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher  whom I have been learning about and been inspired by over the last few months.

I purchased ‘The History of Western Philosophy’ by Bertrand Russell earlier this year. Whilst I haven’t read the entire book yet, it is a very comprehensive and erudite book on philosophy. The first chapter I read was the one about Spinoza. Russell (1945; 569) described him as “the noblest and most loveable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme.”

Spinoza lived from 1632 to 1677 and has had a major influence on western philosophy and is often regarded as one of the greatest rationalists. He tried to reinvent religion by moving it away from something based on superstition and ideas of direct divine intervention to being a discipline that was more ‘impersonal, quasi-scientific and also serenely consoling.’  According to Shorto 2013: 183) Spinoza was the first true philosopher of modernity, the first to argue systematically that religion and politics should be separated and an early advocate of democracy but he did concede later from insisting that democracy was the only acceptable form of government. He was the first and maybe the greatest philosopher of liberalism who made his life’s work to comprehend what freedom means and how individuals can be free.

His views were expressed in his great work, the Ethics published in 1677 after his death. I read some of this book during our flights and its taking me some time to get my head around it but it has been described as containing a calming, perspective restoring take on life. It replaces the God of superstition with a wise and consoling pantheism. I look forward to reading some more during this trip.

I am drawn to Spinoza and his philosophy. He believed that the task of human beings is to try to understand how and why things are the way they are – and then accept it.  He was influenced by the Stoics who argue that wisdom lies not in protest against how things are, but in continuous attempts to understand the ways of the world.

Spinoza introduced the idea that the best way to know god is to understand how life and the universe work and it is through a knowledge of psychology, philosophy and the natural sciences that we can come to understand god.

Spinoza made a famous distinction between two ways of looking at life, we can either see it egotistically, from our limited point of view, as he put it; sub specie durationis – under the aspect of time, or we can look at things globally and eternally; sub specie aeternitatis – under the aspect of eternity. I believe now more than ever we need to look at things under the aspect of eternity.

Spinoza envisaged his philosophy as a route to a life based on freedom from guilt, sorrow, pity or shame. Happiness involves aligning our will with that of the universe. The universe, or god, has its own projects and it’s our task to understand rather than rail against these. To Spinoza, god is the universe and its laws, god is reason and truth, god is the cause of everything, but is the eternal cause. God doesn’t participate in change, god is not in time.

According to Spinoza, “The minds highest good is the knowledge of god, and the highest virtue is to know god.”

Spinoza was a Sephardic Jew whose family fled Portugal to escape the inquisition. He received a traditional Jewish education but as evident from his views outlined earlier they were different to the faith of his ancestors. In fact his ideas led to him being excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656 and there was also an attempt to assassinate him forcing him to flee Amsterdam for The Hague.

It could be argued that Spinoza’s ideas and philosophy was very much influenced because he was born in Amsterdam where at the time the forces of liberalism and individual freedom in its various forms were establishing themselves. He took the events of the time, the history and deeds of the city where he was born and distilled that experience into a philosophy (Shorto, 2013; 184). This is one of the reasons I am drawn to this city and its influence on liberalism. As Shorto (2013: 20) eloquently puts it, “you can’t just think of Amsterdam as a city but also as an idea as its history belongs to all of us who live in Western democratic societies who depend on liberalism as a foundation of our lives.” 

I think I will end this blog with the words Spinoza used to end his work the Ethics….

”The wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but being conscious of himself, and of God, and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit. If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Need must be hard, since it is seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand and could without great labour be found, that is should be by almost all men neglected? But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”