A brief guide to Spinoza's concept of freedom, and a review of Ian Buruma's Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah
The Jew of Voorburg
Of the several very short introductions to Spinoza, Ian Buruma’s Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah, part of Yale’s Jewish Lives series, is the most useful for those entirely new to the philosopher. Buruma, a journalist and historian, acknowledges in the book’s introduction “I’m not an expert in philosophy and I cannot propose to offer any fresh insights into Spinoza’s thinking”. Buruma’s book is a biography, though he graciously acknowledges Stephen Nadler as ‘Spinoza’s biographer’ (Nadler’s biography is only for serious students of Spinoza). Where Buruma does explicate Spinoza’s philosophy he does so with clarity and concision, with no assumption of any familiarity with the discipline.
There is no getting around the difficulty of Spinoza and clear, short introductions like this are invaluable. His austere style, with its at-first-bewildering ‘definitions’, ‘axioms’ and ‘scholia’, his fundamental notions of ‘substance’, ‘attributes, ‘the infinite’, ‘mode’ and so on, has had all imaginative and figurative language expunged from it, everything that derives from images, from sense experience, or that can have subjective associations, so that words become like logical counters or numbers. He is only partially successful in this, as discursive language can never be fully divested of subjective associations.
The clarity and finality of Euclidean geometry was his model, and his style cannot be separated from his philosophy which, in very crude short, is that we can access freedom only through rational thought and adequate ideas (an adequate idea is one that is so logically unassailable that it is safe to proceed to the next without error), by freeing ourselves from illusion, and from the tyranny of emotions. Each proposition in his complex edifice the Ethics follows precisely on from the one that precedes it, and all are intended to mutually support one another. Spinoza created a model of what constitutes “clear and consecutive” thought in the Ethics, and the book's style is linked conceptually to his notion of ‘God’ (in his metaphysical system God is indistinguishable from Nature, is Nature), who cannot be thought of in terms of any image, analogy or figurative language, and all of whose actions proceed with absolute Necessity, like stages in the unfolding of a geometrical proposition - or of the Ethics.
Yet the purpose of the Ethics is to aid the reader in living the ‘Good Life’, to be a practical guide to the “right conduct of life”. One becomes acclimatised to his style, and the final three chapters - Concerning the Origin and Nature of the Emotions, Of Human Bondage, or the Nature of the Emotions, and Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom - have, and were intended to have, a ‘self-help’ feel to them. The relative ease of reading of these chapters is due to their vocabulary being familiar to us, that of the emotions, whereas the opening two chapters, introducing his metaphysics, are couched in his taxing philosophical idiolect. It’s recommended, then, if you want to tackle the Ethics, to begin with the final three chapters.
Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew born in 1632 in Amsterdam, the son of a successful dealer in Mediterranean foods, but was cast out of the Portuguese synagogue in 1656 after falling out with Jewish biblical scholars and disputing core elements of Judaism, such that he was considered an atheist. However, as Buruma points out, he was both during and after his life “identified by his Jewishness”, and he discusses the reception of Spinoza by Jewish intellectuals across the centuries: “... to Heine, Hess, Marx, Freud, and no doubt many others, Spinoza exemplified how to be Jewish without Judaism”. Spinoza was completely detached from the Jewish faith, laws and community following his expulsion, yet his regular relocations (moving between Amsterdam, the countryside just ouside the capital, Rijnsburg, The Hague, and Voorburg), his autonomy, and his indigence, make him the archetypal rootless, cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual, precursor of figures such Eric Auerbach and Walter Benjamin.
In Voorburg, to where he moved in 1644, he was known as ‘the Israelite’, and ‘the Jew of Voorburg'. “His dedication to reason and freedom of thought” Buruma writes, “and his idea that there were universal goods, owed something, perhaps a great deal, to his being born a Jew in a Gentile society”. Spinoza, still looked at askance by Orthodox Jews, but nevertheless had a basalt tombstone erected to him by Jewish admirers in Amsterdam in 1956, with the Hebrew word ‘amcha, ‘your people’, carved beneath his face.
Short history books covering a long span of time are often soporifically list-like, but Buruma keeps the book lively throughout. He gives an account of the persecution and ghettoisation of Jews in seventeenth century Europe and Jewish life in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age, describes the tangled skein of seventeenth century Dutch politics, gives us a sketch of Descartes’s thought and its reception, of the Dutch Reformed Church, and portraits of various characters from the period, such as Spinoza’s friend the Republican Grand Pensioner Johan de Witt, who once offered Spinoza an annual stipend of 200 guilders, which he declined.
Expulsion and Exile
There is a long account of the suicide of Uriel da Costa who, when Spinoza was ten, was given 31 lashes publicly, and afterwards had his body trampled upon by the synagogue congregation for saying that Mosaic law was a human invention, and that Judaism and Christianity were both made up of useful fictions. It was for making the same claims that Spinoza was expelled, but in addition Spinoza claimed that God and Nature were indivisible, which was tantamount to atheism. He also said that angels are imaginary, that the immortality of the soul is false, and that there was no transcendental cause of things, everything being part of a single and all-inclusive Nature.
Expulsions from the synagogue (known as cherem) were quite common but were typically temporary and couched in mild language, whereas Spinoza’s read: “By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematise, cut off, curse and execrate Baruch Spinoza … with all the curses written in the book of law, cursed be he by day as cursed he be by the night, cursed when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up … the Lord shall not pardon him, the wrath and fury of the lord shall henceforth be kindled against this man, and shall lay upon him all the curses written in the book of Law”.
Buruma suggests that the viciousness of Spinoza’s anathema (afterwards, he was not allowed to do business, or even to meet his own siblings) was because Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, Spinoza’s former tutor, was trying to negotiate a return of Jews to England with Cromwell, or because he had been doing too much business with Gentiles. Spinoza was offered a huge sum of money to recant but he refused it, choosing instead to earn a living by lens grinding and the generosity of rich admirers, preferring “a life of quiet contemplation to the rough and tumble of commerce”. Spinoza didn’t publish his views on the Bible in his lifetime and his Ethics was passed around between friends from 1665, but not published until 1677, and even then only in Latin.
It is in part this life of “quiet contemplation” that has made Spinoza the philosopher’s philosopher, such an exemplum. He ate with consistently spectacular frugality throughout his life and seems to have been asexual. Buruma puts Spinoza’s lifelong celibacy down to his “total commitment to individual autonomy and freedom”; he was as far from being the 'average sensual man' as it’s possible to be, dismissing sex as without significance, ‘mere titillation', and romantic love as illusory.
Spinoza led a life of reading, writing, study, discussion, and corresponding. He corresponded with many acolytes and some of the leading minds of the age. He had numerous friends, mostly Mennonites and Collegiants, as well as some of Holland’s leading political figures. He enjoyed chess and sketching, and made a little extra money from drawing portraits. At his final lodging, with the painter Van der Spyck in Voorburg, he would often not emerge from his room for days, but when he did, would often sit with the family and chat over a pipe. He aimed for a life of moderation and complete equanimity and clarity of thought, untroubled by emotional upheaval or the suffocating foetor of intimacy.
Spinoza hated conflict, violence and mobs, and was an enemy of conformity, superstition, pseudoscience, belief, and dogma, as opposed to reasoned argument and adequate fact. In an age in which social contagions spread like wildfires, in which large swathes of the middle class, in a hapless state of propaganda induced irreality, profess belief in an ideology that makes a belief the flatness of the earth look sophisticated, in which pseudoscience and crudely racialised ideologies reign, and in which the enlightenment is in retreat, Spinoza is surely the philosopher for our age.
“Even scientific thinking today is condemned”, Buruma writes, “if it fails to affirm particular beliefs in social justice”, adding, “this poses a similar threat to intellectual life that the church did in Spinoza’s time, because it leads to timidity and conformity”. Buruma refrains from any further discussion of contemporary issues but does explain that it was these that led him to take on the subject: “… my curiosity was piqued because intellectual freedom has once again become an important issue ... if one thing can unequivocally be said about Spinoza, it is that freedom of thought was his main preoccupation, “Not only did he think the best political order was one that protected the right to think and write in peace, but also that this very freedom would help maintain such an order”.
Essential for freedom, according to Spinoza, is freedom of speech, “If a state extends to man’s minds and speech it is a tyranny”, he wrote, insisting that “in a free state everyone is allowed to think what he will and say what he thinks” (though he distinguished between of freedom of thought and freedom of action, exempting from free speech incitements to violence and anything intended to deceive.) “What greater evil can be imagined for the Republic" he wrote, "than that honest me should be exiled or considered wicked because they hold different opinions and don’t know how to pretend that they don’t.”
Spinoza's Theory of Partial Freedom
The title Freedom’s Messiah has a ring to it, but Buruma does not actually go very deeply into Spinoza’s theory of freedom, and Autonomy’s Messiah would have been more accurate. Firstly, Spinoza thought that rationality could only liberate certain self-willed and courageous individuals, not all of humanity, because, in his view, most of humanity is too feeble-minded for autonomous, rational thought. This may seem intellectually arrogant, yet Stanley Milgram’s experiments in the 60s showed that only 20 per cent of people are capable of critical thinking, whilst nearly 2 billion people still believe in miracles and an anthropomorphic God; even belief in witchcraft is still widespread globally today, with around 200 witches being murdered annually in the Congo alone.
Spinoza approved of organised religion if it didn’t oppress with its dogmas, despite thinking all of its stories and the idea of an anthropomorphic god preposterous. He wrote that “the Wisdom of the Prophets is a great comfort for those whose powers of reason are not strong” and that many needed “religion’s moral guidance and system of rewards and punishments to keep them virtuous and peaceable”. It would be wrong to see this as social elitism, however. It was the elites and the texts they generated that were subject to his criticism, not ‘the masses’, for want of a better phrase, and he recognised the harm and violence to which toxic texts and inadequate, “mutilated and confused ideas” could lead, the horrors of the Thirty years War being withing living memory.
Secondly, Spinoza thought that freedom is impossible, that we can only attain varying degrees of partial freedom, and that part of attaining this freedom is becoming aware of our unfreedom. Spinoza thought of freedom in terms of autonomy, and that one is free only to the extent that one is self-determining, with only god being fully self-determining and therefore fully free: “That thing is said to be free”, he wrote, “which exists by mere necessity of its own nature and is determined its actions by itself alone”. Everything less than God is affected by causes other than itself, but only humans can recognise and limit these causes, thus, via such insights, becoming more or less free.
One is unfree,according to Spinoza, “to the extent to which one thinks on the basis of inadequate ideas”. ‘Inadequate ideas’ are those due imagination, unreliable testimony, ‘common notions’, propaganda, musings, dreams, superstition, “confused or mutilated ideas”, or insufficient information, rather than those that are the result of a sequence of previous ideas that could not have been otherwise, ideas unaffected by outside influences. Freedom is inseparable from understanding and rational thought; freedom is insight, and the highest form of thought, beyond insight, is ‘intuition’, immediate perception of the truth (it’s a moot point whether Spinoza thought that only God was capable of true intuition). We can come close to experiencing God’s autonomy by maximising our own autonomy, and by rejecting anything that reduces our autonomy or anonymises us. God, in Spinoza’s metaphysic, is Nature, and Nature God, so that when we experience a partial freedom whilst engaged in rational thought, we become one with Nature.
Freedom also consists in acting and not being acted upon. The less one is acted upon, the less passive one is, and the more one goes from a lesser towards a greater degree of perfection, of fullness of being, and substantiality of existence. This striving to increase our power of thinking and acting Spinoza termed ‘conatus’. For Spinoza, the aim of any human life is to live one of “cheerfulness and joy” and to avoid pain and melancholy, emotions Spinoza categorised as the ‘sad affects’, along with ajelousy, anger, hate, envy, depression, fanaticism, sadness and grief. These 'affects' reduce our power to act and think, put us in their bondage. Pity, for instance, he regarded as a ‘weakening affect’, though he wasn’t prescribing callous indifference: “…pity no one, but do good and perform helpful actions”, he advised. Like Nietzsche, he regarded pity not only as useless, but recognised it as often performative, with surreptitiously selfish motives, an emotion only ostensibly other-directed.
Fortune's Slaves
To be governed by emotions is to have one’s being weakened, to have a low level of existence, and to move farther from Nature, ordinary loves and hates, desires and aversions being illogical, often illusory, succeeding each other without any logical connection. “I assign the term ‘bondage’”, he wrote, “to men’s lack of power to control and check the emotions. For a man at the mercy of his emotions is not his own master but is subject to fortune”.
To achieve equanimity, one must think rationally about one’s emotions, free yourself from your bondage to them, ascertain their true cause and source, and not be passive in relation to them, smothering them with the pillow of rational thought. Even just by reflecting on them one has already become more ‘active’ and ‘powerful’. One must avoid anything, and anyone, according to Spinoza, that saps one’s power or disturbs one’s equilibrium: what discombobulates, banish.
Spinoza made a distinction between the force of outside compulsions and inner necessity, obedience to one’s true nature. This ‘becoming oneself’ is one of several ways in which his thought overlaps with Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche called Spinoza a ‘sick hermit’ and a ‘poison brewer’ but added that “what is poison for the inferior type” is “for the higher type … nourishment and delectation”. Both had a similarly dim view of pity, of petty calculation, and for the desire to dominate others, and valued recognising the cold truth of a situation and accepting it with equanimity, if not joy. Nietzsche saw Spinoza as a kindred spirit and precursor, and Spinoza’s passive, affect-enslaved, ill-informed conformist is a cousin to Nietzsche’s Untermensch, and his unmediated, intuitive action cognate with Nietzsche’s ‘noble action’. For both, the nadir of being human, the most abject mode of being, is servility.
For enabling freedom of thought, unlike Nietzsche, Spinoza regarded democracy as the least tyrannical option, “since sovereignty belongs to everyone”. “An assembly of reasonable men”, he wrote, “elected by reasonable people, acts reasonably”. However, he thought that to enjoy the benefits of democracy entailed the quid pro quo of submitting to legitimate authority and largely giving up our individual powers. The key word here is ‘legitimate’, as he believed that unreasonable laws should be flouted and that unreasonable or tyrannical states, and leaders without a mandate, should be overthrown.
On the social, ethical, and political plane, not to think and act according to Spinoza’s dicta regarding rationality, the banishing of affect from decision making, and using only adequate ideas as much as one is able to is pure folly. Freedom on Spinoza's terms is not easy; attempting the maximum of self-determination and minimising the degree to which we are affected by anything outside of us necessarily involves a certain level of isolation, rejecting not just inadequate ideas, but also those who hold them; but as Spinoza wrote at the close of the Ethics, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare”.
Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Jewish Lives) is published by Yale University Press, £16.99
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