Baruch de Spinoza - Portuguese: Bento de Espinosa ; Latin: Benedictus of Spinoza - (November 24th 1632, Amsterdam, Netherlands - February 21st 1677, $the Hague) is a Philosophe which had a considerable influence on its contemporaries and many posterior thinkers. Resulting from a family marrane, he was a critical heir to the Cartésianisme and moved away from any religious practice, but not from any theological reflection thanks to his many interreligieux contacts. After its death, the Spinozisme, condemned as atheistic doctrines , had a durable influence. Deleuze called it the “  Prince of the philosophes  ”, while Nietzsche was inspired explicitly by its refusal of the Téléologie. The psychoanalysts hold it for the philosopher having opened the way more with Freud. It was, for Lacan, undoubtedly largest.

Biography

Origins

Baruch Spinoza is born with Amsterdam, on November 24th, 1632, in an Jewish family of Portuguese origin. At that time, the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam is primarily made up of marranes (Jewish Spanish and converted Portuguese gladly badly liking with Christianity) having fled the Inquisition and the climate of intolerance towards the converts. Far from the Spain, the majority of them return to their first worship and are perfectly tolerated and inserted in the Dutch company. It also should be noted that if Portuguese constitutes for this community the language of the everyday life, Spanish dominates what milked with the culture. Dutch is the language of exchange with the nonJewish fellow-citizens. Lastly, for Spinoza, it is Latin who will be the language of the written expression.

Spinoza attends the school of its community, Talmud Torah, acquiring a perfect control of the Hebrew and rabbinical culture. Under the control of Rabbi Mortera, it looks further into his knowledge of the written Law and reaches the medieval comments of the Torah (Rachi, Ibn Ezra) like to Jewish philosophy (Maïmonide). With died of his father, in 1654, it takes again the family company with his Gabriel brother. After its exclusion of the Jewish community, it earns its living by cutting optical lenses for glasses and microscopes, field in which it acquires a certain fame.

Exclusion

The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam - impregnated tolerant environment of the Plain Provinces - do not constitute a particularly closed community. However, the herem (decision of exclusion) which, on July 27th, 1656, cursed Spinoza, due to heresy, is particularly violent and, thing rare, final. Little time before, a man would have even tried to stab Spinoza, which wounded, would have preserved the coat perforated by the blade. If the fact is not completely certain, it belongs to the legend of the philosopher.

The exclusion of Spinoza is not the first crisis passed through by the community. A few years earlier, Uriel da Costa had already defied its authorities of them. Juan de Prado, friend of Spinoza, is in its turn excluded from the community in 1657.

It is difficult to know with exactitude which remarks sanction the herem, because no document gives a report on the thought of Spinoza at this time precise. It is known however that at that time he attends the school of the libertine Franciscus Van den Enden (perhaps as of its opening in 1652), where he learns Latin, discovers Antiquity (in particular Terence) and the large thinkers of XVIe and XVIIe centuries, like Hobbes, Bacon, Grotius, Machiavel. It côtoie of the hétérodoxes of all confessions (in particular of the Collégiants, of the scholars readers of Descartes, whose philosophy exerts on him a major influence. It is probable that it professes as of this time that there is of God only philosophical, that the Jewish law is not divine origin, and that it is necessary to seek the best - reported remarks with the Inquisition in 1659 by two Spanish having met Spinoza and Juan de Prado at the time of a stay with Amsterdam. At all events, Spinoza seems to accommodate without displeasure this occasion to be freed from a community of which it does not share any more the beliefs. One has no trace of any indeed act of repentance intended to join again with it.

The construction of work

About 1660-1661, Spinoza settles in Rijnsburg, centers intellectual collégiants (hétérodoxes Protestant). It is there that it receives the visit of Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, with which it exchanges long and rich correspondence. In 1663, it leaves Rijnsburg for Voorburg and starts to teach in a pupil, Casearius, the doctrines of Descartes. From these courses, it draws the principles from the philosophy of Descartes , whose publication gives place to a correspondence centered on the problem of the evil, with Willem van Blijenberg, a merchant calvinist who will produce then refutations of the Éthique and Traité théologico-policy . It is probable that the drafting of two works preceded the publication by the Principes : the Treated reform of the understanding (unfinished and published with posthumous works) and the Short treaty (published only at the XIXe century).

In the years 1660, Spinoza is more and more frequently attacked like atheist. If no lawsuit is made an attempt to him, contrary to others of its contemporaries, it is probably because he writes in Latin and not in Dutch. In this context of tensions, it stops the writing of the Éthique to write the Traité théologico-policy , in which it defends freedom to philosophize and disputes the charge of atheism. The work appears in 1670, under cover of anonymity, and with a false place of edition. It causes polemical sharp, including at open mind, like Leibniz, or at men that Spinoza meets occasionally into private, like the entourage calvinist of Louis II of Bourbon-Cop. For those, it is advisable to distinguish new philosophy (Descartes, Hobbes) from the more radical reflection of Spinoza. As for the religious authorities, they condemn the work unanimously. In April 1671, on request of the provincial synods, the Court of Holland judges that an ordinance must be taken to prohibit the diffusion of the Treaty and other judged works blasphématoires, like the Léviathan (Hobbes) of Hobbes. She also asks that continuations be committed against the authors and other persons in charge of the publication of the works. The States of Holland balk nevertheless to follow the decision of the court and to prohibit the works written in Latin. It is only in 1674, after the fall of Witt, that the books concerned will be actually prohibited by the secular authorities.

The political context, with the French invasion, still becomes less favorable for Spinoza. The seizure of William of Orange on the Plain Provinces puts an end to one period quasi republican liberalism. After the assassination of the brothers of Witt (1672), the indignation of Spinoza is such as it wishes to post in the street a wall cupboard against the assassins (" Ultimi Barbarorum" , the last of the barbarians), that from which would have dissuaded it its landlord. However, the philosopher, who gave up Voorburg for $the Hague about 1670, does not leave the country. Thus he in 1673 refuses, by preoccupation with an independence, the invitation of the Elector Palatine who proposed to accommodate it at the University of Heidelberg.

In 1675, Spinoza tries to publish the Éthique - moving back in front of the incurred risks - and starts to write the political Traité . Its daring thought is worth to him the visit of admirors or personalities like Leibniz. He dies two years later, on February 21st, 1677. In spite of its image of isolated ascetic, it forever ceased being within a network of friends and correspondents, who contradict at least partially his reputation of recluse. It is them, in particular the doctor Ludovic Meyer, which publish its posthumous works: the Ethical , most important, and three unfinished treaties ( Treated reform of the understanding , the political Treated and the Shortened Hebraic grammaise ).

Philosophy

Theory of knowledge

The speculative Philosophie of Spinoza tries to be entirely deductive. She is written more geometrico i.e. while following the “geometrical” order: axioms and postulates, then definitions, and finally demonstrations. She is developed according to logical sequences rigorously deduced starting from Définition S, on the model of the Mathématiques. However, this choice is not arbitrary: it is the result of a true reflection on the gasoline of knowledge. It is thus necessary to start by presenting in general the idea of the Connaissance in its Philosophie, idea of which we find elements above all in the Tractatus of intellectus amendatione (often translated by Traité reform of the understanding ; retranslated by Bernard Pautrat under the more literal title of Treated amendment of intellect ).

Degrees in knowledge

With three recoveries in its work, Spinoza works out a Typologie modes of knowledge:

  • in the Treated reform of the understanding , §10-16;
  • in the Short Treaty , delivers II, chapter 1;
  • in the Ethical , left II, proposal 40, scholium 2.

The three presentations are different: they always do not contain the same modes of knowledge, and not always in the same order. But behind these differences, it presents certain constants.

In the Treated reform of the understanding

In the Treated reform of the understanding , Spinoza distinguishes several species from Perception:

“to look there closely, all our modes of perception can be brought back to four:
I. There is a Perception which we by hearsay, or by means of some sign that each one calls as it acquires likes it.
II. There is a Perception which we acquire using a certain vague experiment, i.e. of an experiment which is not determined by the understanding, and that one calls of this name that because one tested that such fact usually occurs thus, that we do not have to oppose any contradictory fact to him, and that it remains, for this reason, firmly established in our spirit.
III. There is a Perception in which we conclude a thing from another thing, but not in an adequate way. It is what arrives when we collect a cause in a certain effect, or when we draw a conclusion from some general fact constantly accompanied by a certain property.
IV. Enfin there is a Perception which makes us seize the thing by the only virtue of its gasoline, or by the knowledge which we have of his immediate cause. ”

By comparing certain forms of perceptions, one can have a more precise idea of than is the fourth mode of perception.

Perception by hearsay (I) is the most dubious form of perception: for example, we daily consider that we know our birth date, even if we were not there to check.

Simple the Experiment (II), such as it is presented to us, is presented in a hazardous and involuntary way. This experiment does not make known true to us: it gives us particular elements in the Temps and the space, elements which are printed in the Conscience and maintain there only when they were not contradicted by other experiments. If not, we are in the doubt. These experiments cannot offer any Certitude to us. It is named by Spinoza experientia vaga . It is a simple enumeration of case, enumeration which does not have anything rational, because it is neither a principle (IV), nor deductible from a principle (III); it cannot consequently be held seriously for true.

These the first two modes of Perception have jointly to be irrational, though useful for the control of the daily businesses of the life. The mark of their irrationality is uncertainty where they plunge us, if they are followed. Is thus needed, as much as possible, that they does not play a determining role in the construction of knowledge. This is why also, the Éthique will gather these the first two modes of perception in only one “kind of knowledge” which it will name “opinion” or “imagination”.

Rational knowledge (III) has of all other procedures: far from insulating the Phenomenon S, it connects them in a coherent sequence, according to the deductive order. It is what Descartes called of the “  chains of raisons  ” (Cf Discourse on Method , II) or Deduction. But so to speak, with what to hang the first chain link of the reasons? If it is left floating, it is the open door with the regression ad infinitum, that Spinoza refuses, as Aristote in Metaphysics (“It is necessary well to stop some share! ”). If one attaches it to another chain link already built, one forms a logical loop ( Petitio principii ), in other words, a Contradiction. Consequently, so that the knowledge formed by the chain of the reasons is true (and more only coherent), it is necessary to make it depend on a idea true data , which will form of it the Principe .

The third mode of perception is a way of preserving and of transmitting the truth of the starting point (Principe), but not to produce it. Here are which brings us to the need for the fourth mode.

It is about an intuitive knowledge (IV). Like says it Spinoza itself: “ habemus ideam veram ” (“we have a true idea”, Traité reform of the understanding , §33). This true idea is that of God, which is In oneself and can be conceived By oneself (definition of the Substance in Éthique, I, 3). It is there the starting point Absolu necessary to any adequate knowledge, the originating truth, which is “  Standard of itself and the faux  ” ( Ethical , II, 43).

After the Treated reform of the understanding , the degrees of knowledge, become “  kinds of connaissance  ” will pass from the number of 4 to that of 3.

Gilles Deleuze, in his courses on Spinoza, uses three examples which illustrate the three kinds of knowledge present in the Éthique , each one corresponding to a way of life to whole share:

  • the knowledge of the first kind is empirical: I splash in water, my body undergoes the waves and water.
  • the knowledge of the second kind is empirical and rational: I can swim, with the direction where I can compose my relationship with the reports/ratios of vagueness, with the element water.
  • the third kind is purely rational: I know the gasolines on which the reports/ratios depend, I know what are water, the wave, the wave, the Archimedes' principle, their causes, etc

Gilles Deleuze specifies in addition that mathematics is the formalization of the second kind.

In the Short Treaty

Short Treaty , delivers II, chapter 1.

In the Ethical

Ethical , left II, proposal 40, scholium 2.

The truth

The Vérité of this knowledge is not for Spinoza an external element, or an agreement with the things, according to a traditional Définition; the truth is the mark of itself, it is by itself clear and obvious: the truth lights itself and clarifies the error.

“from where it follows still obviously that it is enough to recognize the certainty of the truth, to have the true idea of the object, and that it is not need for any other sign. ”

It will be then by a rigorous logic that we will be led to the certainty of the truth.

“But since the man does not require for any sign to recognize the truth, and that it is enough for him to have the objective gasolines of the things, or, which returns to same, the ideas, to banish the doubt far from him, it follows that the true method does not consist in seeking the sign of the truth, the once acquired ideas, but that the true method teaches in which order we must seek the truth itself, or the objective gasolines of the things, or the ideas, all synonymous expressions. ”

It is on the basis of a criterion such that we can discover the eternal Raison things, because, for Spinoza, the standards of our Pensée are identical to those of the things: the subjective order of our thoughts the objective order of nature answers. Between the real objects that we think and our thoughts, there is thus an identity of reports/ratios.

Metaphysics

Substance

In the Ethical , Spinoza begins its deductive talk by the definition from the Substance. The substance is conceived as causes itself ( caused sui ) according to the law of causality:

“I understand by cause of oneself that whose gasoline wraps the existence, or that whose nature can be conceived only like existing. ”

This must make it possible to make knowledge possible. Indeed, on the one hand, without the Law of causality, knowledge would be impossible, and, on the other hand, without main cause knowledge would be never complete. Thus, upon the departure, Spinoza, by affirming the existence necessary of a substance causes itself, poses that not only knowledge is possible, but moreover that this knowledge of the nature of the things can be absolutely complete.

The existence of this substance is a reality objective and necessary. This substance single, is incréée, incorruptible, absolutely simple and without limitation. All the phenomena are Attribut S or properties of this substance, and they have only one conditional existence which depends on the only true reality, being per which is this substance. By there the Cartesian Dualisme is congédié.

The substance is for Spinoza as well God as the Nature whose Spinoza makes synonyms: all that is, is as a God and cannot remain without him; there exists nothing apart from him. God is the immanente cause of all that exists: he contains what he creates and is in all. As it creates, God is the will natura naturans , the will natura naturata being consisted of the whole of the individual phenomena. God contains any difference, neither temporal nor space. All that rises from its nature is necessary, and this need is its Liberté.

The conatus

The Conatus is the effort which each being makes to persevere in its existence and to affirm its power, in resistance to the other individuals who compose the life. The ethical life is that which has as a concern of exploiting in an optimal way the resources of its own being, i.e. the complexity of its body and its intellect. This life must thus affirm a desire paramount to live, while knowing that this desire which defines it intrinsically finds modified by the relation with the other beings, with the other men. The conatus modified by the social relations loses its power insofar as he seeks to achieve himself according to models which do not correspond to its nature, it is what Spinoza calls imagination in proposal 17 of the second part.

Ethics

The fundamental goal of philosophy at Spinoza is the constitution of authentic a ethical of the Bonheur and Liberté. The metaphysics and the theory of knowledge are only elements propaedeutics and subordinated to this company.

Philosophy of the religion

It is among the first to harness with a rationalist Exégèse of the Bible which leads it to formulate the distinction between the to believe and the to know . Identifier God with Nature, Spinoza will be pantheist, or rather, atheistic, according to the readings using the sive formula Deus Natura to justify this reading. As Althusser exposes it, like Negri and Deleuze, Spinoza opposes to the transcendent design divine philosophy materialist of the Immanence: God is not external with the world, but immanent with Nature, it is Nature. In the same way, the man and the company are not external with nature: one should not design the man like a " worsen in a empire".

The théologico-policy: religion and policy

In the Treated Théologico-Policy , major work published of alive sound, it shows how much many theological assertions the church S and Religion S, are in fact of the standpoint Politique S which has nothing to do with the biblical text. It supports on writings of Abraham ibn Ezra and begins again completely reading of Bible, for which it proposes new method of reading, literal, which requires to follow this principle that the text is explained only by the text itself, without him of substituting interpretations more or less " libres" . I.e., in the event of incomprehension of the reader, or of darkness of the text, or contradiction of this one, it is necessary to go to seek in the remainder of the text, other passages likely to light that which one seeks to include/understand. In other words: the answer is in the text, and does not have to be sought in the imagination of the reader. Any interpretation is prohibited. It is a question of learning how to read the text, by respecting it, that is to say the entirety of the text, which inevitably contains the sought answer.

Indeed, this rests on the principle of the prevalence of the text on imagination, but as, on the assertion clarifies as God and the word of God cannot be against the reason. It would be to make insult with God to suppose it differently. As for Maïmonide, before him, and Averroès (Ibn Rushd), the agreement of the reason and the divine message cannot not be: it is by nature, in accordance with the perfection of God, whom they can only necessarily agree.

If the text of the Bible can only agree with the reason, its darknesses and contradictions must be dissipated by a meticulous study and an attentive reading of the text which will avoid transforming it by interpreting it, which will thus avoid reinventing it according to the needs for the moment.

Spinoza, like Hobbes before him, devotes to a critical demonstration misdeeds of the use of the religion, i.e. of the belief of the men by the political powers, which thus carry out their subjects to follow their decisions submissively and to achieve their projects, even worst. The religion - religious belief - is thus the means surest and easiest to make make the men what is appropriate for the capacity, when well even they are most harmful for themselves and most ashamed. But they do not realize of it, and believer to make the good and to contribute to the hello of their heart they make the opposite exactly, misled that they are by political discourses which take the form of religious injunctions and promises.

After this theory of the religious illusion and interest which has all to be able to maintain it, Spinoza supplements the analysis of theological by an analysis of the policy, explaining the principles of the good political organization and the reports/ratios which the religion and the policy in order to allow must maintain peace. As had already theorized it before him Hobbes, in Léviathan, the religion must be subjected to the common laws, which apply to it as with all, subjected to the State and the political power, and must deal only with the government of the hearts and to teach the good and morals.

Then, it can develop, which is the goal of the work, a political theory of freedom, showing in what this one is tallied by the laws; then in what freedom of thought and of opinion is entirely good and must be entirely recognized by the State. Initially, the recognition of freedom to believe and think freely granted to each one is the condition of the end of the religious conflicts. Then, this freedom is entirely good and nonlikely to harm the State - if the right task sharing is carried out between the religious authorities and policies -, freedom which can be granted without restriction no, except for what concerns the incentive to hatred and would be thus likely to harm the State. Freedom of thought must be protected by the State, like condition of civil peace. Granted freedom cannot harm the State in these conditions.

That constitutes a theory of the democracy and an invalidation of the dictatorship, this capacity which claims to go beyond its power. Indeed “no one does not have the capacity to order with the languages” since the men themselves do not manage to control what they say, therefore it goes from there in the same way for the capacity. If the capacity cannot control the languages (which speak out of control of the speaking subject), a fortiori cannot it control the thoughts. The State, indeed, does not govern all the fields of the human life, the laws not being able to be wide with all the activities: “the human nature cannot support to be forced absolutely” (chap V), and “to want all régenter by laws is to make the men bad” (chap XX).

This is why “nobody can give up freedom to judge and think; each one is Master of its thoughts”. It is a right which each one holds of its nature.

Random links:Pontvallain | The Queen of snows (novel) | Rhizome | Gumball 3000 | Aliette of With a grid