Raffaele spinoza biography

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Or, as he puts it, from God’s infinite power or nature “all things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles” (Ip17s1).

His father born in Vidigueira, a small town in the south of Portugal, and his family had fled from the Inquisition, seeking refuge in the tolerant Netherlands. The natural result of this “internal” and “external” aid is that their society was well-ordered and their autonomous government persisted for a long time.

Such an examination of the true nature of political society is particularly important to his argument for intellectual and religious freedom, since he must show that such freedom is not only compatible with political well-being, but essential to it.

The individual egoism of the Ethics plays itself out in a pre-political context—the so-called “state of nature”, a universal condition where there is no law or religion or justice and injustice—as the right of every individual to do whatever he can to preserve himself.

If the Bible is an historical (i.e., natural) document, then it should be treated like any other work of nature. Since we cannot control the objects that we tend to value and that we allow to influence our well-being, we ought instead to try to control our evaluations themselves and thereby minimize the sway that external objects and the passions have over us.

It follows that prophecy, while it has its origins in the power of God—and in this respect it is, in Spinoza’s metaphysical scheme, no different from any other natural event—does not provide privileged knowledge of natural or spiritual phenomena. This is the real word of God and the foundation of true piety, and it lies uncorrupted in a faulty, tampered and corrupt text.

Spinoza believes that this is something that has not been sufficiently understood by previous thinkers, who seem to have wanted to place the human being on a pedestal outside of (or above) nature.

Most of those who have written about the Affects, and men’s way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature.

Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. He knows that the soul is not immortal in any personal sense, but is endowed only with a certain kind of eternity. God, in Spinoza’s system, is the rational order of the cosmos, manifest in the laws of nature.

This radical view had profound implications for how people understood both divinity and human existence.

“If Scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred …” Strictly speaking, however, miracles—understood as divinely caused departures from the ordinary course of nature—are impossible. Thus, it has been argued that Spinoza is not a pantheist, because God is to be identified only with substance and its attributes, the most universal, active causal principles of Nature, and not with any modes of substance.

Spinoza, in effect, denies that the human being is a union of two substances. There is also the irregularly published series Studia Spinozana, each volume of which contains essays by scholars devoted to a particular theme. But, Spinoza insists, to see God or Nature as acting for the sake of ends—to find purpose in Nature—is to misconstrue Nature and “turn it upside down” by putting the effect (the end result) before the true cause.

Nor does God perform miracles, since there are no, and cannot be, departures whatsoever from the necessary course of nature.

To clarify and support these broadly ethical conclusions, however, Spinoza must first demystify the universe and show it for what it really is. These ideas were radical for their time and placed Spinoza at odds with both religious authorities and monarchies.

Spinoza was deeply concerned with the relationship between religion and politics.

For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.