Benedictus de Spinoza (Amsterdam, 1632 – The Hague, 1677) is one of the most consistently rational philosophers we know. In fact, he was so rational that his work sometimes took on mystical features, an unusual phenomenon in philosophy and science. For that reason he never became really popular and influential, like for example his contemporaries Descartes and Leibniz. Yet Spinoza’s work has become a secretly cherished treasure for many, namely as a form of art philosophy. He influenced romantics around 1800 and, around 1900 , avant-gardists and theosophists. However, to this day he has his followers, the so-called Spinozists. They are all equally fascinated by his art of living, which links rigorous rationality to individualism and a mystical sense of the unity of everything.
A special person
Spinoza is special not only as a philosopher, but also as a human being. As a child of Portuguese Jews, he lived in the Netherlands. That already made him a stranger. By choosing a rationalist philosophy in which he also assumed the absolute unity of God and Nature, he also alienated himself from the Jewish community, which in no uncertain terms excommunicated him when he was twenty-four years old. However, he was able to earn a living as a lens grinder and wrote his philosophical works in his spare time. For security reasons, he only had them published after his death.
Living in accordance with your being
Freedom, voluntariness and personal expression, as much as possible in accordance with your being (adequately, as he himself put it), were of the utmost importance to Spinoza. You could call him an individualist in the name of Unity. It can safely be said that Spinoza found his freest and adequate expression in a life according to the laws of Reason. That is, a form of action that was as consistent as possible with his own being, no matter how much this alienated him from his family, culture and hometown.
Art of living philosophy for independent minds
Spinoza’s work confronts us with important questions about ourselves, especially when we have voluntarily or involuntarily distanced ourselves from our cultural roots. Do you know who you are, who you really are?, he seems to ask. Do you have a sense of your most perfect expression? And: do you give yourself the freedom and power to express your own being in your actions? Spinoza was not a cultural philosopher (there were none yet). For him, nothing about preserving culture, cultural identity, culture clashes, multiculturalism and what not. He was concerned with the bare essence of experiencing, acting and understanding – the bare essence of being. He designed an art philosophy for independent minds, separated from the context of culture, family and place of residence. But of course Spinoza’s philosophy inevitably contains many cultural elements that he took for granted. There are clearly Aristotelian, Hermetic, Scholastic and Cartesian elements in his Ethics that, among other things, make him use a mathematical style that is somewhat difficult to follow.
Each individual one aspect of the divine
It is precisely the radical individuality of Spinozism, rooted in unity with God and Nature, that has stimulated and inspired many artists, esotericists and philosophers over the centuries. In a crystal clear and almost irrefutable argument, Spinoza calmly explains that each individual represents one aspect of the divine. It is precisely that aspect that makes you individually and at the same time intimately connected to everything. It is the art of living to express this individuality (= aspect of Unity) as optimally as possible. That is your contribution to the community (Spinoza’s ethics) and it makes you Free and Happy at the same time (Spinoza’s art of living).
Emotions as a play of forces
Spinoza describes the dynamics of the Conditions, what we would call emotions, as a play of forces, in which the increasing passivity or activity of the person involved, under the influence of these forces, makes him Sadder or Happier. Spinoza, between the lines, in his Ethics keeps asking questions along the lines of: where lies the cause of a force that acts on you? What is its reason for existence? The ultimate cause is of course God (or Nature) and for each individual human being the ultimate cause, Reason, lies in his own Mind and in his own Body, insofar as these can be themselves.
Sad or Happy
It is perception and imagination that can throw a spanner in the works. Namely, when a person, based on incorrect images, starts to place the causes, the reasons, of the forces acting on him outside himself. This is what Spinoza calls Suffering and it causes Sadness, the term he uses to describe all Afflictions that arise from thoughts in which a person sees himself as a powerless victim of forces greater than himself. On the other hand, every time a person views himself as an active and causal force he becomes Joyful, the collective term that Spinoza uses for all Afflictions that arise from thoughts in which he experiences his Mind and Body as active and free. Even when a man finds himself confronted with forces greater than himself, he can Rejoice himself. Namely, by imagining and understanding that everything in the universe is connected by chains of (mathematical) cause and effect, ultimately leading back to the first and, in essence, only cause: God – Nature.
Understanding the bigger picture
Understanding, the crucial faculty in Ethics, for Spinoza is actually having an awareness of necessary interrelationships (logical dependence) within the totality of Being. This connection is structural (mathematically causal) and not historically or coincidentally developed (causality as a sequence in time). Connectedness is an expression of the One Ultimate Being (God-Nature). This God-Nature has no purpose, but is. The reason or cause from which God-Nature acts is at the same time the reason for God-Nature’s existence, namely its own nature or essence. For Spinoza, acting divinely is essentially equal to being divine. Reality and Perfection are the same for him. To experience imperfection is not to understand the greater coherence, therefore, not to see Reality.