PGS Literary Society: 'A Book Forged In Hell . . . By the Devil Himself'

This term, the PGS Literary Society is focusing on Banned Books. This week, James Burkinshaw gave the following talk on the work of Baruch Spinoza.  

 

In 1632, Baruch Spinoza was born into a Jewish family of merchants, in Amsterdam. A gifted student, he was predicted to have a glittering career ahead of him as a rabbi or scholar. However, in 1656, aged 24, he was excommunicated by the shocked synagogues in Amsterdam for denying the divine origin of Hebrew scripture and the immortality of the soul.

To support himself financially, Spinoza became a lens grinder - eventually working with the Huygens brothers in pioneering microscope/telescope lens technology.  However, he continued to study and to write about religious, philosophical and political issues. In 1670, he published Theological-Political Treatise, in support of the secular and democratic reforms of the De Witt brothers.

It was immediately condemned as ‘a book forged in Hell by the Devil himself’ and banned by the regime of Stadtholder William of Orange (who was eventually to become King William III of England). Spinoza was forced to flee from Amsterdam to the Hague. Two years later, his political allies, the de Witt brothers, Johan and Cornelis, were brutally murdered by supporters of William of Orange. Spinoza himself spent the rest of his life under threat of similar treatment, which makes his continued work on his ground-breaking philosophical master-work, Ethics, so extraordinary.

The mutilated corpses of Johan and Cornelis de Witt (painting by Jan de Baen, 1682)

 

In 1674, Baruch Spinoza died, aged only 44, from tuberculosis probably caused by inhalation of glass dust resulting from his work as a lens-grinder. Three years later, Ethics was published posthumously and remained proscribed and condemned in many countries for well over a century.

Today, I want to talk about why so many seventeenth century political and religious leaders were so terrified of Spinoza's work and why they were right to see it as a threat to their authority. I also want to explore the reasons that, in our own era, Spinoza is increasingly seen as a visionary, far ahead of his time, with much to teach us: from ecology to transhumanism, moral philosophy to political freedom.   

1. Biblical Criticism

Spinoza was excommunicated by the Amsterdam synagogue because of his pioneering critical study of Jewish and Christian scripture, in which he analysed the linguistic and structural patterns of the Bible in inventive ways that anticipated modern critical methods. He scandalised Jewish religious leaders by demonstrating that one man (in tradition, Moses) could not have written the Pentateuch; rather, it was demonstrably the product of multiple writers over many eras, reflecting a range of styles, vocabulary patterns and voices. He identified internal inconsistencies and competing purposes and beliefs within these texts. He had a significant influence on the 'Higher Critics' of the nineteenth century, who subjected Biblical texts to critical scrutiny. This included George Eliot, the scholar and novelist, who, in 1856, was the first writer to translate Spinoza's work into English. Furthermore, Spinoza helped shape the ideas of Eliot's contemporary, Karl Marx, notably in his view of religion as a form of political control (what Marx referred to as the 'opium of the people') designed to keep people quiescent and unquestioning.

2. Moral Autonomy

In Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza demonstrates that, contra the Book of Genesis, humanity is not made in God's image but God in man's image. A monist, he argues that everything is one substance. God is identical with the Universe, not external to it; God is immanent, not transcendent. Therefore, there are no transcendent or objective rules or standards by which moral judgements can be made as to an action being good or evil. We must avoid evil in order to live a virtuous life, not in order to go to heaven. Here, he anticipates existentialist writers, from Nietzsche to de Beauvoir. For Spinoza, this is not an abstract argument. He lived under the constant threat of suffering the same brutal fate as the de Witt brothers (which he described as "the ultimate barbarity"); he had seen actions that could only be described as 'evil'. However, he argued that we should not console ourselves with faith in divine justice (or punishment); to believe that there’s an eternal heaven in which you’ll be rewarded, or an eternal hell where you’ll be punished means your life in this world will be governed by irrational hopes and fears for what’s going to happen in the next. For Spinoza, that is a life of bondage and servitude. Morality requires free choice: we need freedom of thought, speech and worship (or non-worship).

3. Political Freedom

This is why Spinoza argues political institutions need to be democratic and pluralist, leading to his treatise memorably being labelled a “book forged in Hell by the Devil himself” by 17th century authoritarians and autocrats such as William of Orange. Furthermore, people can enjoy truer freedom in a society guided by common decisions; the mind is more liable to perceive things adequately the more it shares those ideas with others. Thus, for Spinoza, education is at the heart of freedom.  His ideas have influenced political thinkers, from Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, in the eighteenth century, to Martin Luther King, in the twentieth. Furthermore, Spinoza's monist sense that everyone and everything is part of the same substance opens up potential not only for the rights of women and minority groups, but also a more bio-diverse, ecocentric perspective that anticipates the work of philosophers such as Peter Singer.

4. Ecocentrism

Spinoza's proto-Darwinian view of humans as part of the substance of nature counters the anthropocentric perspective of seventeenth century writers such as Francis Bacon. In Ethics, he wrote "The perfection of things should not be judged by . . . human standards". Although attacked in his own time and afterwards as a ‘pantheist’, Spinoza does not worship nature, but simply counters Bacon’s dictum, ‘knowledge is power’, with the view that ‘understanding is happiness’. Consequently, Spinoza offers a way to treat nature not with domination and exploitation but respect and mutuality. The wisdom of this philosophy is only becoming clearer in our own time, in the face of ecological challenge. For Spinoza, separating ourselves from nature is (in the words of Green philosopher, Freya Mathews) “not an act of transcendence, but a malfunction - leading ultimately to  extinction”. Like Sigmund Freud 200 years later, Spinoza saw religious belief as a bug, not a feature.

5. Transhumanism

As a monist, Spinoza posits no division in substance, only modes of substance. As we are substantively identical with the universe, our ‘identity’ is not stable but a result of a constant exchange of energy with the environment, our self-realisation unable to exist independently of our substantive environment. Spinoza anticipated the insights of neuroscience in his refusal to separate mind and body, but also his belief in the important role  emotion plays in rational behaviour and human understanding, his ideas influencing contemporary neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio. Spinoza's view of the soul as part of shared substance with mind and body, and as essentially characterised by its capacity for thought, is shaping contemporary philosophical understanding of Artificial Intelligence and transhumanism in fascinating ways. As Einstein wrote, "Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosopher because he is the first who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things."

6. Modern Physics and Mysticism

Einstein went on to affirm, "I believe in Spinoza's god, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." Spinoza's intellectual contemplation of nature is a state of heightened awareness that fuses science and religion, the object unified with the mind (or the universe with the soul, if you prefer). The German poet, Novalis, described Spinoza as a "god-intoxicated" philosopher. With his sense of wonder, Spinoza mirrors the mystical proclivities of such modern physicists and mathematicians as Einstein and Wittgenstein. Indeed, in 1921, Wittgenstein titled his philosophical master-work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in explicit homage to Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

When complimented on his revolutionary discoveries in the fields of mathematics and physics, Spinoza's great contemporary, Isaac Newton, replied "I am standing on the shoulders of Giants", acknowledging his intellectual debt to all of those thinkers and scientists who had preceded him. I hope that, today, I have shown just how influential Spinoza has been in the fields of biblical studies, moral philosophy, political science, ecology, transhumanism and physics. In 2023, 350 years after his death, Spinoza's visionary and revolutionary philosophy is perhaps more relevant, than it has ever been, particularly in the crucial fields of neuroscience, ecology and Artificial Intelligence. It is a potent reminder of the power of ideas and the futility of book banning.