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Put in Spinozism or Spinoza

From Harry A. Wolfson's The Philosophy of Spinoza; ISBN: 0674665953 1934; Vol. 2 pp. 350-352—What is New in Spinoza?

Spinoza is represented by those who knew him as having lived a life of retirement, though one not devoid of friendship. We should like to agree with his biographers that he was guided into this mode of life by his philosophy, but unfortunately recluses are not made by philosophies, not even by philosophies which, unlike the philosophy of Spinoza, preach retirement from life as an ideal virtue; they are made, rather, by the inhospitableness of the social environment and by the ineptitude of their own individual selves. But for the circumstances, environmental and personal, which had cut his normal contacts with society, Spinoza, who defined man, after Aristotle, as a social animal' {4P35n}, would undoubtedly have guided himself by the same dictate of reason that he had prescribed for others—by his maxim that man is freer when he participates in the life of society than when he lives in solitude {4P73}. In conformity with this maxim of his, then, he would undoubtedly have joined in the active life of the communities in which he lived after his departure from his native Amsterdam—Rijnsburg, Voorburg, and The Hague; he would have become a substantial, respectable, and public-spirited burgher and a pillar of society. Perhaps, also, despite differences in theology, he would have joined the Lutheran church of his friend Doctor Cordes in The Hague. And I can picture him, once of a Sunday, at the invitation of the good old Doctor, taking the services in the church. He preaches a sermon which is an invective against what he styles "the prejudices {world view} of the theologians of our time." In it he inveighs against prevailing credulous beliefs in the spirituality of G-D, His personal relation to men, His direct guidance of human affairs, the divine origin of the Scriptures, human freedom of the will, the separability of soul from body, and the survival of the soul after death as an individual entity. The sermon over, he pauses and says, "Now let us pray." And in his prayer he thanks G-D, "the creator of the universe," for His bountiful goodness; he begs for the forgiveness of "our sins," asks for divine enlightenment in the true understanding of, "Thy revealed Word," and petitions for divine grace in "guiding us" in the paths of righteousness, to the end that "we may inherit" life everlasting and enjoy eternal bliss in the presence of "Thy glory." As he is about to close his prayer, he catches a glimpse of the congregation and suddenly realizes that he is in a Christian church. Immediately he adds: "In the name of Christ, the mouth of G-D, whose spirit is the idea of G-D which alone leads us unto liberty, salvation, blessedness, and regeneration. Amen."

Continued with addition made in the 1983 reprint of Harry A. Wolfson's The Philosophy of Spinoza; ISBN: 0674665953 1934; Vol.2 p. 352-355.

These observations on what is new in Spinoza may be finally clinched by a formal summary, complete though brief, of the philosophy of Spinoza as it unfolds itself in the pages of this work. Beginning with the traditional definition of "substance," Spinoza applies that term only to G-D, designating all the other so-called substances as well as all the so-called accidents by the term "mode," under which he includes the physical world as a whole and the variety of individual things of which it consists. This in itself would seem to be merely a verbal difference. But a real difference appears when he afterwards contends that G-D must be material, or extended, as he calls it, on the ground that the theory of an immaterial God would inevitably lead to all the insurmountable difficulties to which any conceivable attempt at the explanation of the origin of the material world would necessarily give rise. This material G-D, however, continues to be described by Spinoza by all the terms by which the traditional immaterial God has been described: He is necessary existence or causa sui in whom there is no distinction of essence and existence; He is infinite in the sense that He is unknowable in His essence; He is known only through His attributes, that is to say, by the manner in which He manifests himself to our mind in the physical universe as it is perceived by us. But while His essence is unknown, the fact of imagination, is known to us—and it is known to us by a direct and immediate kind of knowledge which of all the kinds of knowledge is the most valid.

Of the infinite number of attributes which G-D in thetraditional conception of Him is supposed to possess there are only two through which He manifests himself to us in the world, and these two are the two conventional constituent elements of the world, matter and form, or, as Spinoza prefers to call them, extension and thought. The attribution of extension to G-D, to which Spinoza has been driven by the difficulties of the old problem of creation, becomes all the easier for him because, in departure from the older tradition of philosophy, though not altogether without a precedent, he considered extension to be infinite. Since Spinoza's G-D, unlike the conventional saying that all things are in G-D ceases to be a mere pious expression of praise and glorification and assumes a meaning which corresponds exactly to the literal meaning of its words.

{'in G-D' says that ALL things are organically interdependent. Popkin:80}

Again, following tradition, Spinoza continues to speak of G-D as attribution of extension to G-D he is enabled to use with greater accuracy and with more logical consistency all the conventional terms by which the causality of God has always been described, such as "universal," "efficient," "first," "principal," and "free"; and, moreover he is led to reject the description of G-D as transient cause which term in the restricted sense of separate or immaterial cause has been explicitly stated to be applicable to God, and to make Him exclusively an immanent cause in the special sense in which he uses the term "immanent". Similarly, in the manner of tradition, He describes G-D also by the term "eternal" in all the three senses in which the term "eternal" has been generally used in its application to God, though "eternal" in the sense of immutable is not according to him, an exclusive property of G-D. Admitting with tradition that G-D is a conscious cause, he contends, without precedent since Aristotle, that G-D has no will and acts without design, so that the modes, which -to him are not outside of G-D but within G-D, are produced by the necessity of G-D's Nature and without any purpose.

Man, of course, is a part of nature, a mode like any other mode, consisting of what is commonly known as body and mind; and, body can be equally spoken of as being of divine origin, he declares, in opposition to tradition, that mind is inseparable from body. He continues to follow tradition in his description of the various functions of the mind: sensation, imagination, memory, consciousness, and reason all of which constitute the sources of the greater part of our knowledge—knowledge as a whole being divided, as it has common with others, may be false and two kinds are true, using as his criteria of truth two definitions of the term which have come down from Aristotle. No less traditional is his description of the human will, but he opposes tradition by eliminating from it any kind of freedom. With this denial of the freedom of the will in man, the old traditional distinction between emotions and virtues disappears; but still Spinoza's treatment of emotions and virtues is only a variation of the traditional manner of treatment; what is commonly considered as good and evil continue to be with him good and evil, though their definitions are somewhat modified; man, though unable to choose, will still by the guidance of reason continue to act in pursuit of what is good and in avoidance of what is evil; and instruction in the ways of good and evil will still continue to be profitable to man. G-D, though no longer endowed with will and design, can still continue to play His old traditional part of the supreme object of satisfaction to the human mind and the supreme power for goodness in human conduct; the soul, though no longer separable from the body, can still be immortal after the manner in which immortality was conceived by religious philosophers; and, finally, though the revelation of a law by G-D is no longer thinkable, still a religion of reason can be built up which in all essential respects would be like the rational religion of theologians.