Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die

 

Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die: Steven Nadler in conversation with Alex Douglas.

 

“The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.” Spinoza
 
The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza has long been known for his “heretical” view of God and for the radical determinism he sees governing the cosmos and human freedom. Only recently, however, has he begun to be considered in a serious way as a moral philosopher. In his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, after establishing some metaphysical and epistemological foundations, he turns to the “big questions” that so often move one to reflect on, and even change, the values that inform one’s life: What is truly good? What is happiness? What is the relationship between being a good or virtuous person and enjoying happiness and human flourishing? In this conversation with fellow Spinoza scholar Alexander Douglas, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Steven Nadler connects Spinoza’s ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one’s best life (and death).
 
Steven Nadler is the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One of the world’s leading Spinoza scholars, his new book Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die is published in September.
 
Alexander Douglas is a lecturer in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He studies early modern rationalism, particularly various forms of Cartesianism and especially that of Spinoza. He is also interested in critiques of political economy and is the author of The Philosophy of Debt.
 
Recording of live webinar hosted by The Philosopher, on 21 September 2020.

 Princeton University Press

We often think of cancel culture as a contemporary phenomenon, driven by social media and rife in our hyper-connected world. But really, punishing people for their ideas and opinions has been going on for as long as people have been thinking. Take the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In the mid-17th century, Spinoza was charged with heresy and cast out from his Amsterdam Jewish community.

Since then, he's gone on to be canonised as one of the great Enlightenment thinkers — and even embraced as a hero of Judaism. But un-cancelling a cancelled philosopher is harder than you might expect, and three centuries later, there are still plenty of people who would prefer to see Spinoza hang onto his outcast status.

 Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and raised in the city's Talmud Torah congregation. He had a traditional Jewish upbringing and education, attending the local yeshiva until the age of 17, when he went to work in his father's importing business. But Spinoza remained a scholar, and over the next few years, he began to lay the intellectual foundations for what would become one of the most celebrated bodies of work in European philosophy. At the time, however, Spinoza's ideas weren't being celebrated within his own community. While Spinoza's exact heresies weren't documented, rumours began to swirl of his unorthodox views, and he started clashing with the local religious authorities. It's said that at one point, a fanatic shouting "Heretic!" attacked Spinoza with a knife on the steps of the local synagogue. Things finally came to a head on July 27, 1656, when the congregation issued a writ of cherem or excommunication against the 23-year-old philosopher.

 Spinoza is vaguely accused of "evil opinions", "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", but what religious wrongs did he actually commit? His later philosophical work — particularly the Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 — could offer some answers.  In it, Spinoza articulates a conception of God that would have been highly offensive to any observant Jew at the time. Spinoza's God lacks all the attributes of the God of the Torah, having no will or emotions, no psychological traits or moral character. His God makes no plans or judgments, issues no commandments, and possesses no wisdom or goodness. Spinoza's God is neither transcendent nor supernatural, being more or less reducible to Nature. Indeed, Spinoza's preferred term for this entity is "God or Nature". It's all a far cry from the God of Abraham and Moses, who led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt — and hardly surprising that Spinoza's ideas landed him in such hot water with the religious authorities of his day.

 What's more surprising is that Spinoza has, over the centuries, gone on to become a highly regarded figure in contemporary Judaism, if still a controversial one.  But not all modern Jews have adopted his ideas or extracted a definitive theology from them.  Certainly, from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, Spinoza remains as problematic today as he did in the 17th century. But even anti-Spinozans will admit that many of the big questions that lie at the foundations of modern Judaism — What does it mean to be a Jew? What must Jews believe? Is it possible to have a secular Jewish identity? — are either direct responses to Spinoza, or spring from the history of his interpretation.

 Spinoza has even been hailed as a proto-Zionist. The documentary evidence for this is slim — largely based on his assertion in his text Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that the Jewish people would "one day ... establish once more their independent state", provided they could summon the requisite "manliness" to do so. The passage is more of a loose speculation than a prescient endorsement of a Jewish state, but 19th-century European Zionists took it to mean that Spinoza had envisaged a Judaism based on nationalism. Elsewhere in his work they found a champion of the kind of Jewish identity that they saw in themselves and their project: reason-based, democratic, and at pains to separate rabbinic authority from political governance. And this notion of Spinoza as a secular saint of Zionism carried through to the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called Spinoza "the first Zionist of the last 300 years", embracing him as not just a philosopher who happened to be born a Jew, but a profoundly and definitively Jewish philosopher. So taken was Ben-Gurion with Spinoza that in 1953, he published a laudatory article about the philosopher that kicked off a raging debate about the justice of his excommunication three centuries earlier. Calls rang out within the Israeli parliament and the international Jewish press to have the original cherem rescinded, and opinions were sought from chief rabbis worldwide. The debate remained inconclusive, largely because neither David Ben-Gurion nor most of the world's Jewish leaders had the authority to reverse the original decision. According to Steven Nadler, a long-standing Spinoza scholar and philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the only people authorised to lift the cherem against Spinoza is the community that issued it in the first place — the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam.

 As it happens, the Amsterdam congregation still exists. In December 2015, they held a symposium to debate the proposition that the ban should be lifted. Scholars from four continents were invited to the symposium, to act as an advisory committee. One of the scholars was Professor Nadler. "They didn't want us to express an opinion as to whether the cherem was good or bad," he recalls. "They wanted to know: what were Spinoza's philosophical views, what were the historical circumstances of the ban, what might be the advantages of lifting the cherem, and what might be the disadvantages?"

The debate was held before an audience of over 500 people and, at its conclusion, the current rabbi of the congregation handed down his opinion: that Spinoza should remain where he was, officially cancelled, and (to quote the 1656 decision) "expelled from the people of Israel".

 Despite the ruling, Professor Nadler says most members of the community would have liked to see the cherem lifted. "It would have been a great PR move," he says. "[To annnounce,] 'Look, we're not the intolerant community of the 17th century, Spinoza is one of us and we're proud to own him.'"

But the rabbi thought differently. Professor Nadler says the religious leader asked: "Who am I to overrule my 17th-century predecessors? Am I that much wiser than them?" The rabbi also held that Spinoza's religious views, considered beyond the pale in 1656, had not really been made any less problematic by the passage of time. Once a renegade, always a renegade — particularly when the renegade in question remained proud and unrepentant in his heresy. "Spinoza knew the rules of the game," says Professor Nadler. "The rabbis warned him, and his response was 'Hey, you know what? I'm leaving anyway.'  "So you can't call the cherem a terrible miscarriage of justice." So Baruch Spinoza, rebel philosopher and abominable heretic, remains officially cancelled for the foreseeable future. Fortunately — for philosophers and secular Jews, but also for Orthodox Jews who welcome a provocative challenge to their theology — his works remain.

 The Jewish philosopher Spinoza was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers. So why was he 'cancelled'? By David Rutledge.  ABC Radio National , October 3, 2020

The abominable heretic

 In July 1656, the young philosopher Baruch Spinoza was cast out of his Jewish community for "abominable heresies". We don't know what those crimes were, but we do know that Spinoza has remained a polarising figure within Judaism ever since. On one hand, his philosophy is atheistic, based on the complete rejection of any notion of a sovereign or even conscious God. On the other hand, he's often hailed as one of the founding figures of progressive Judaism - even as a hero of Zionism. Spinoza is a puzzle, and this week we're putting some of the pieces together.

 David Rutledge interviews Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler. 

The Philosopher's Zone.   ABC Radio National , September 9, 2020. 

On July 27, 1656, the governors of Amsterdam’s Jewish synagogue read out a proclamation of excommunication. With unprecedented ferocity, it excoriated Baruch Spinoza for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds” and banished him from the community. “The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn against this man,” the judgment thundered, “and may the Lord erase his name from under the heavens.” With this the most famous Jewish philosopher in history was exiled by his people.

 
Spinoza, age 23, left Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter and Latinized his first name to Benedict. The causes of his banishment have been much debated. His father, a Portuguese merchant who had joined the flight of Sephardic Jews out of Iberia, had died two years before, leaving his sons a failing trading firm. Baruch Spinoza had scandalized his fellow Jews by having himself declared an orphan in order to escape his father’s debts.
 
But there can be little doubt that it was primarily Spinoza’s ideas, rather than his deeds, that condemned him. By 1656 he had likely begun to express his beliefs, later enshrined in his writings, that the Hebrew Scriptures were not the unerring word of God; that the Jews were not a chosen people; that there existed no immortal afterlife or divine providence. These views would have scandalized orthodox Jews but also the Christian governors of Amsterdam, at whose sufferance the Jews of the city lived in relative peace. Spinoza was a renegade whom the community could neither abide nor afford.
 
For the remainder of his short life Spinoza lived outside of Amsterdam, modestly and without family. To our knowledge he never left the Dutch Republic. He worked as an optical lens grinder, an occupation that probably killed him by filling his lungs with glass dust. Already versed in Hebrew language and Scripture, Spinoza secured an informal but rigorous education in the new philosophies of the era, particularly those of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes.
 
In the 1660s and ’70s, Spinoza produced one of the most significant intellectual systems in the history of Western philosophy. It encompassed natural science, religion, politics and ethics. Of his two masterworks, the “Ethics” was written first but remained unpublished when Spinoza began to fear the intolerant vigilance of the Dutch ministers. His “Theological-Political Treatise” was anonymously printed in 1670, to torrential public outrage. By his death in 1677, Spinoza’s infamy had spread well beyond Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter.
 
The standard biography of the man is the fascinating “Spinoza: A Life,” by Steven Nadler, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin. A revised edition of this much-admired book has recently appeared. It is highly recommended for the general reader. Spinoza’s philosophy is intricate and obscure, but Mr. Nadler writes with beautiful lucidity. There are large gaps in our knowledge of Spinoza’s life (his friends burned his papers), but Mr. Nadler fills out his narrative with absorbing accounts of Amsterdam’s Jews and Christians during the Dutch Golden Age.
 
Readers more interested in Spinoza’s philosophy, and particularly his ethical thinking, might instead turn to Mr. Nadler’s latest book, “Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die.” Spinoza inspires a rare devotion in many who study him. Descartes, Hobbes and Locke are all granted historical importance, but Spinoza is often read as a kind of timeless sage. There exists an entire genre recommending him to modern readers as a philosophical and ethical guide. “Think Least of Death” is just such a book. As an accessible introduction to the complex thought of Spinoza, it is a success. As an effort at advocacy, it is less of one.
 
The first sentence pulls no punches: “Every day billions of people devote a significant amount of time to worshiping an imaginary being.” Spinoza, Mr. Nadler continues, exposed this anthropomorphized God—who commands, judges and governs—as a “superstitious fiction.” Mr. Nadler is here speaking for or paraphrasing Spinoza—but there is no doubt that he endorses these teachings. His book is marked by a profound identification with its subject.
 
 
Spinoza’s ethics emerged from his ontology, his theory of all being. With Descartes and Hobbes, he swept aside the Aristotelianism that had, once adapted by Christian philosophers, dominated European intellectual life for centuries. This older and still powerful tradition held that every individual thing had a particular essence and end, with the whole animated by the purposes of a providential God. The new thinkers of the 17th century instead taught that, beneath the deceptive appearance of discrete “things,” the visible universe was a swirl of atomistic matter. Creation might have been launched by a God of some kind, but it was not sustained by constant divine intervention. The mechanistic laws of nature drove the universe forward, toward incomprehensible and perhaps random ends.
 
Descartes’s dualism preserved a realm of non-bodily spirit, where individual souls and God might exist alongside the material universe. Hobbes bit the bullet and reduced all things to matter. Descartes preserved human free will. Hobbes was a determinist: Human will, for him, was merely appetite produced by the clash of atoms.
 
For his part, Spinoza produced something like a fusion of these views. He preserved a figment of Descartes’s dualism by arguing that “ideas” existed in parallel with material extension (or visible things). But whereas, for Descartes, spirit and matter were two different substances, for Spinoza they were not. “There is and can only be,” explains Mr. Nadler, “one substance or ultimate reality—God or Nature—and so the human mind and the human body must be modes of or items in God or Nature.” Mr. Nadler makes a heroic effort at explaining this inscrutable doctrine. For practical purposes, Spinoza’s account of existence most resembled that of Hobbes: The mind is buffeted matter, lacking free will; God, if we must preserve the concept, is nothing more than the sum total of natural causes in an eternal physical universe.
 
Spinoza’s account of nature informed his ethics, which is the primary subject of Mr. Nadler’s book. “The inviolable necessity of Nature,” he writes of Spinoza’s philosophy, “governs not only the world of physical bodies—where apples fall from trees and rocks roll down hills—but also the domain of human activity, including whatever happens in the human mind.” According to Spinoza, some traditional notions with a powerful mental sway—our own free will, our ability to objectively measure good and evil or to recognize true beauty and ugliness—were nothing more than subjective fictions.
 
One can begin to see why Spinoza has earned a coterie of modern advocates. He elevated the material methodology of natural science into a metaphysics. His system appeals to the reductive “naturalism” of the modern outlook and to the militant atheism that is particularly strong among evolutionary biologists. Mr. Nadler—with Spinoza—wishes to convince us that a universe of matter, necessity and appetite can be ethical.
 
This is a heavy lift. Spinoza’s humans have no free will. Like all substance, they only strive—without conscious intention—to “preserve” and maintain themselves. For this purpose they seek power. Our emotions (happiness and sorrow) and our conventional moral valuations (good and evil) merely reflect the random waxing and waning of our power. The dominant notes here are egoism and a fatalistic determinism. “Whatever is, just is,” writes Mr. Nadler; “whatever happens, just happens (and had to happen).” This seems, he concedes, “a rather bleak picture, one worthy of the most radical form of nihilism.”
 
For Spinoza, however, the path through this thicket of blind wanting and striving is a kind of quietude. Contentment, or “blessedness,” is achieved by those who minimize the emotional turmoil triggered in them by exterior causes. The wise man (Spinoza was rather less confident about the capacities of women) would come to see his modest place in the whole of nature.
 
It has never been entirely clear that all of this holds together as a coherent ethics. Is Spinoza merely describing what is rather than what should be? Buffeting the mind from external agitation in a world of chaotic matter seems an impossible task. What is more, minds governed by irresistible nature can’t really intend or purposefully will themselves to learn, and so Spinoza’s blessed humans presumably can only “recognize” the truth of the universe, like some sort of elect elite granted a revelation. Spinoza surrendered the vulgar—those incapable of true “intuition”—to what he considered the noble lies of religion. But if happiness is all that we seek, what is wrong per se about living with such comforting illusions? Why should the minds of the wise track the truth of the universe at all? And if they do, why is Spinoza’s intuition that we humans lack free will superior to the much more common intuition that we enjoy it?
 
Mr. Nadler explores all of these questions, shoring up Spinoza’s system with a series of thoughtful, but often rather charitable, interpretations. He tries to soften Spinoza’s elitism and misogyny and to massage away the paradoxes of Spinoza’s deterministic account of freedom.
 
In the end, what is most striking is how traditional Spinoza’s ethical system remains. Much of it is lifted from Stoicism and the Abrahamic religions, counseling inner peace, a resistance to ambition and to unchecked appetite, freedom from the fear of death, control of the passions. It turns out that control of the passions requires honesty, fortitude, altruism and charity. These traditional virtues can, perhaps, be recoded as strategies for avoiding conflict with the exterior world, but such an effort is tendentious. There is no particular reason to think that virtuous living will fortuitously maximize individual power and happiness. Like most accounts of “enlightened” egoism, the notes of enlightenment here often seem smuggled in from older ethical systems that have better claims on them.
 
There is, in short, a question-begging quality to Spinoza’s philosophy. His cryptic and even bizarre account of nature doesn’t produce a particularly unique ethical outcome, and so the ethics lend no added plausibility to the science. Spinoza’s system reconciles an unorthodox theory of being with a conventional ethics, but there is nothing incontrovertible about the result. In many ways the sacrificial, modest and pacific life that he commended—and that he led—is profoundly appealing. But it is an ethic better supported by belief in foundational good and evil and human free will.
 
Like all materialists, Spinoza can’t demonstrate that free will and objective good and evil do not exist; nor can he disprove a God distinct from nature or a soul that lives beyond the body. Such things are not subject to physical measurement or experimentation. His own belief in the mechanistic world of blind matter, and the similar belief of his modern devotees, is at bottom a mere opinion, a faith—if you will—in disenchantment. It is perhaps telling that these faithful so delight in Spinoza’s conclusion that disillusioned laws of nature will not upend our traditional moral inheritance. With these assurances, the old heretic has become a consoling prophet.

Spinoza: A Heretical and Modern Mind. By Jeffrey Collins. The Wall Street Journal, October. 9, 2020 

Socrates says in Plato’s Gorgias that there’s nothing more serious than “the question [of] how we ought to live.” We may aspire to live a good and happy life—but what does such a life consist in? Good in what way? And happy how?
  
For a pious Jew or Christian, perhaps, the answer seems simple: a life in line with God’s will as expressed in the Bible. But what about the rest of us who have turned our backs on revelation? One of the first to do so was the Dutch Portuguese Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza in the seventeenth century. The prophets had no wisdom, he claimed, and the Bible’s picture of God was utterly wrong: there is no creator God who performs miracles and reveals his will to Moses, let alone records it on tablets. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Spinoza was excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Jewish community in 1656 for “horrible heresies.” He was twenty-three.) Spinoza had to find a new answer to that most serious question. Forget revelation, he argued, and follow reason, which will lead you to peace of mind and lasting joy. If you want to be “blessed” and “saved,” let the philosopher guide you, not the prophet.
 
This may strike some as hubris, but Spinoza was in good company: from Socrates to the skeptics, all ancient philosophers advertised their teachings as gateways to eudaimonia—a happy and flourishing life. They didn’t just ponder philosophical questions but also campaigned for philosophy. If you want to succeed in life, they argued, don’t seek advice from priests, poets, politicians, businessmen, or celebrities. It’s the philosopher’s job to investigate the true nature of things, including that of happiness. Plato dismissed Homer and Hesiod long before Spinoza dismissed the Bible.
 
In a new book on Spinoza’s ethics, Steven Nadler argues that Spinoza “fits well in this broad eudaimonistic tradition.” Over the centuries Spinoza has been many things to many readers: an atheist, a God-intoxicated man, a master metaphysician, a revolutionary, the founder of the radical enlightenment. But his “overriding goal,” according to Nadler, is to show us “the path to true wellbeing.” Nadler’s account of this path is clear, engaging, historically informed, and philosophically nuanced. But his ambition goes further. He suggests that the path Spinoza traces is one we can still walk on, as it provides “valuable insights about how to live today.”
 
It would be wonderful if Spinoza could show us a philosophical path to “blessedness” and “salvation.” It is “very hard,” Spinoza concedes in the Ethics, his philosophical masterwork, but “it can yet be discovered.” Nadler agrees; I don’t. Spinoza’s path is inseparable from his concept of God. As laid out in the Ethics, it starts with demonstrating God’s existence and nature, and ends with demonstrating that the best life consists in the intellectual love of God. That’s the God of the philosophers, to be sure, established by rational argument, not revelation. But it is still a God I doubt we can embrace.
 
There’s now a cottage industry of books that peddle philosophers, from Socrates to William James, as life coaches and therapists. The target audience is a secular, urban, often highly educated crowd eager for some form of “spiritual” guidance. Recent titles in this genre include John Kaag’s Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2020), Edith Hall’s Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (2018), and Massimo Pigliucci’s How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (2017).
 
Spinoza may well be the best bet for moderns seeking a philosophical guide. He suggests that we can have our cake and eat it too: attain blessedness and salvation in a disenchanted world.
 

Nadler doesn’t explain why we should prefer Spinoza over others, but what he describes as Spinoza’s “bleak picture” of the world and of human nature offers a powerful argument for it. For Spinoza, no transcendent God designed the world, watches over it, and gives our lives purpose and meaning. Everything, moreover, is strictly determined, including our will. (If you believe that you freely chose the merlot over the cabernet sauvignon, that’s because you ignore the causal chain that determined your choice from all eternity.) Human beings are selfish, seek their advantage, and strive to increase their power. No wonder Friedrich Nietzsche applauded Spinoza as a precursor!

 
And yet, Spinoza thinks he can carve out a space for a free and joyful life in which we rise above the rollercoaster of fortune and emotions to attain peace of mind. If we pursue our advantage rationally, moreover, we’ll care for the well-being of others as much as for our own. Given Spinoza’s ostensibly “bleak” outlook, this sounds pretty cheerful.
 
Nadler duly lists echoes of ancient philosophers in Spinoza’s work, especially of Aristotle and the Stoics. But what makes Spinoza so intriguing isn’t that he picks up the “eudaimonistic tradition.” It is that he reinvents it. Spinoza not only breaks with the God of the Bible; he also breaks with untenable versions of the God of the philosophers that underpin the ancient concepts of the good life—Aristotle’s unmoved mover, for example, or the Stoic divine mind that providentially orders the universe. That’s why Spinoza may well be the best bet for moderns seeking a philosophical guide. He suggests that we can have our cake and eat it too: attain blessedness and salvation in a disenchanted world.

But how disenchanted is Spinoza’s world, really? On Nadler’s view, it is “worthy of the most radical form of nihilism.” That’s exaggerated. Spinoza isn’t Nietzsche, for whom God is dead. For Spinoza, God is everything. True, he identifies God with Nature (“Deus sive Natura,” as he famously puts it). But Spinoza’s “Nature” isn’t the universe of modern physics: an expanding, mostly empty space that burst into existence 14 billion years ago. It is an eternal, infinite substance whose infinite power produces every possible thing. Nadler denies that for Spinoza this amounts to the best possible world—but it does. Spinoza’s world isn’t best in the sense that God has optimized it for human beings. But it is best in the sense that it includes every level of perfection from the highest to the lowest. Even the withering flowers you forgot to water on the balcony add to it. Their existence admittedly expresses God’s being and power in a very limited way, yet without them, the world would lack something. Spinoza, in short, equates being, power, and goodness. God is the best thing because his being and power are infinite. All other things have as big a share in God’s goodness as they have being and power. At work here is a version of the “principle of plenitude” that can be traced back to Plato.
 
If God is the best thing, he is as foundational for Spinoza’s ethics as he is for his metaphysics. Spinoza couldn’t be clearer on this in a letter to Jacob Ostens, his most forceful rejection of the charge of atheism:
 
    “Does that man, pray, renounce all religion, who declares that God must be acknowledged as the highest good, and that he must be loved as such in a free spirit? And that in this alone does our supreme happiness and our highest freedom consist?”
 
Plainly, we can’t detach Spinoza’s concept of the best life from his concept of God. What does such a life look like, why does he think we should choose it, and why does Nadler concur?
 
The shape of our lives depends to a large extent on the good we aim at. Consider how starkly the lives of Giacomo Casanova, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Immanuel Kant differed: the first pursued sensual pleasure, the second power, and the third wisdom as the highest good. Spinoza, like his ancient forebears, wants us to center our life on the true good.
 
One of his early works, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, opens with a stylized autobiographical text that also serves as the starting point for Nadler’s book. Spinoza tells us how he “resolved” to turn away from what “men regard as the highest good”—things like “riches, honor, and sensual pleasure”—to pursue “the true good” which affords “continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.” The conventional goods have in common that they’re transient and unstable: beauty fades, children leave the house, power and honor can be lost (Napoleon died in exile on St. Helena), health decays, crystal shatters, a villa burns down, the stock market crashes.
 
 If the love of God could reliably offer us superior joy (which, on top of it, doesn’t cease with our physical demise), we would be fools to neglect it for the sake of “riches, honor, and sensual pleasure.” That’s a big “if,” of course, but Spinoza is confident he can prove it. His portrait of the homo liber, the “free man” who pursues his advantage guided by reason, is meant to illustrate this choice. He is, Nadler contends, Spinoza’s “model of human nature,” the ideal we all should aim at.
 
But on closer inspection, it is not clear that “freedom” in Spinoza’s sense is better than “bondage.” Consider children: I love mine; they’re a source of great delight. But they’re also a source of anxiety: Will they succeed in life? Fall sick or be harmed in other ways? What will I do when the nest is empty? How can I prepare for the final goodbye? If my happiness depends on my children, I’m in bondage: how well my life goes depends on “fortune”—factors I can’t fully control. The anxiety this induces disrupts my peace of mind. The “free man” is free because he is able to detach from such transient goods and connect to the true good whose attainment is entirely in his power. Unlike me, he won’t lose sleep over a child’s fever or college entrance exam.
 
The “true good,” Spinoza argues, consists in intellectual activity: in particular, what he calls amor dei intellectualis, the intellectual love of God. Just as all things necessarily follow from God’s nature, we can deduce all things from the idea of God. Since the idea of God is innate, not acquired, we depend on nothing outside of us. We do for nature’s rational order what a geometrician does for the properties of space: deduce them from self-evident axioms. In Spinoza’s view, the mind knows God as it knows the axioms of geometry (we know, rather than learn, that things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another). All we have to do, then, if we want to be happy, is to start deducing. And since God—in the form of his innate idea in our mind—is the cause of our happiness, we will love him in return.

But even if we buy into Spinoza’s rationalist account of knowledge, why should deducing truths from God be a source of supreme joy? Spinoza, as we saw, equates being and goodness. Since existing is good, all things hold on to their existence as much as they can (even the withering flowers on your balcony try to hang in there for as long as possible). This “strive to persevere” is Spinoza’s fundamental law of nature. Success here depends on power—the power to keep oneself going and ward off external threats. The more power the better. That’s why an increase in power is experienced as joy, a decrease as sadness. Power for Spinoza isn’t measured in the number of people you can boss around, but in the number of effects you cause. God’s power is infinite; he is the cause of infinite effects, Spinoza’s universe containing all possible things.
 
The more effects we cause, in short, the more powerful we become, and the more our life is filled with joy. We produce the largest number of effects by deducing true insights from the idea of God in us. Intellectual activity, therefore, is our greatest source of power and joy. (On Spinoza’s scale, Albert Einstein was much more powerful than Adolf Hitler.) It also makes us successful in more conventional ways. Expertise in nutrition and anatomy, for example, helps us to efficiently preserve our health. The “free man” navigates the world wisely, but this is but a side benefit. The main value of knowledge lies in the joy derived from understanding.
 
All of this will be a tough sell to secular readers looking for guidance in confusing, fitful times. Even if we acknowledge that a “strive to persevere” defines us, are we also ready to attribute this to our being finite expressions of an infinite God who hold on to the portion of goodness that constitutes our existence? Do we persevere most successfully by deducing true insights from the innate idea of God? And are our fellow human beings valuable only as a means to our persevering? This doesn’t mean that Spinoza was wrong, of course (Charles Darwin’s theory also was a tough sell, and still is in some circles). But Spinoza’s view is surely not obvious, and certainly not immune to challenge. If Nadler wants us to embrace it, he needs to do a lot of convincing. There is a great deal of strange metaphysics we must take on board if we want to view the world through Spinoza’s eyes.
 
Though Nadler sketches the metaphysical foundations of Spinoza’s free man, he doesn’t defend them. Instead he argues that the ideal is inclusive (he translates “homo liber” as “free person” to signal that women can be free, too, despite some unflattering things Spinoza says about their intellectual abilities). And he shows that it is attainable on Spinoza’s terms. That’s persuasive enough. But what we want to know is not if the ideal is attainable on Spinoza’s terms, but on ours. Does Spinoza’s love of God remain a viable path to a good and free life?

Nadler’s book is strongest when he explains what the free man’s life actually looks like. Detaching from transient goods (“riches, honor, and sensual pleasure”) allows him to be moderate, courageous, and generous, as well as to avoid hatred, envy, and vanity. He’ll also do everything in his power to promote the well-being of others—not because he is an altruist, but because he knows that a life in the company of wise people like himself gives him the best shot at focusing on the love of God. Here Spinoza builds on one of the greatest draws of the eudaimonistic tradition: making morality, including caring for others, part of seeking one’s own advantage. Spinoza even manages to rationalize Christ’s command to love our enemies: if I love my enemy, I do good things for him, which increases his power and joy. Since we necessarily love the cause of our joy, my enemy’s hostility toward me will turn into love, which, in turn, increases my power and joy. Everybody wins!
 
Nadler insists, correctly, that the free man remains part of, and interacts with, the natural and social world. Nobody can live from the love of God alone. As Spinoza writes in the Ethics:
 
   “It is part of the wise man . . . to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater and other things of this kind, which anyone can use.”

But Spinoza stresses that he does so “in moderation . . . without injury to another.” To the extent that these things are empowering, they add joy to the free man’s life. Detaching from transient goods, then, doesn’t mean rejecting them altogether like an ascetic, but desiring them in the appropriate way—as means to the true good, not as ends in themselves. What allows the free man to maintain the right measure of detachment—neither succumbing to the lure of transient goods nor despairing over their loss—is that the joy derived from the love of God overpowers whatever joy transient goods offer and whatever pain their loss inflicts. This, Nadler contends, is the key to freedom for Spinoza. Like everyone, the free man is affected positively and negatively by the things around him. But these things can’t move him to act. He won’t eat the apple because it looks tasty but rather because it sustains his intellectual activity. Love of God, not love of the apple, draws him to the fruit basket. From deducing to eating, he is always in charge of his acts.
 
Even marriage and children, Spinoza says, can be beneficial in this instrumental way. And if the free man’s child were in hospital with a severe illness, he’d behave like a good parent—do all he can to save the child, cheer the child up, and delight in the child’s love. But if the child dies, the free man wouldn’t shed a tear. The pain of the loss is eclipsed by the joy derived from the love of God.
 
My objection is not that I find this behavior heartless; I just don’t think that we can make it work. For a Spinozist, it makes perfect sense to choose freedom over bondage. Detaching from transient goods—including loved ones—liberates the Spinozist to wholeheartedly embrace the good he deems most worth desiring. It’s an excellent trade-off. But if Spinoza’s true good doesn’t exist, then detaching from transient goods leaves us with no good at all.

 
 Grasping the order of things caused by God, Spinoza contends, provides supreme joy. But how delightful is understanding the structure of the universe, really? Can it comfort us over life’s losses? Frankly, I don’t find reflecting on the age, size, and composition of the universe and my place in it especially uplifting. I can’t see how it would help me come to terms with the death of a loved one. Nadler thinks that determinism does much of the comforting. But will parents not be devastated over their child’s death from leukemia if they recognize that it was inevitable given the system of causes and effects? I think detachment is Spinoza’s key to consolation, which, in turn, requires loving God. So unless we can make a compelling case for Spinoza’s God, or some other God who can do his job, the fleeting joy of transient goods is all we have (nights wrecked by anxiety over children notwithstanding). In the disenchanted world, we can manage our bondage more or less well, but not break the chains and attain blessedness and salvation.
 
Nadler’s book is an excellent introduction to Spinoza’s ideal of the free man. He shows how appealing this ideal is—but I doubt that he’ll convince many readers to adopt it.
 
Are we doomed, then, if we can’t find a way to God through either faith or reason? I don’t think so. For one thing, transient goods are goods, and there’s plenty we can do to make them less vulnerable to fortune: from finding cures for diseases to distributing health care, wealth, and recognition fairly.
 
We should, moreover, seek rational guidance to manage our attachments to transient goods, though less from metaphysics than from empirical sciences such as biology and psychology. In often surprising ways, these correct our assumptions about what makes lives better or worse. Psychologists, for example, have shown that winning the lottery or becoming paraplegic affects a person’s well-being much less than we would expect.

Attaching to a higher good that gives our life purpose adds a great deal of value as well. But we’ll have to take it down a notch: not Deus sive Natura, but contributing to an artistic or literary tradition, joining a scientific endeavor, finding meaningful work, championing a noble political or social cause. Such attachments, besides being valuable in themselves, surely also help to mitigate losses we suffer among more fragile goods.
 
Finally, not looking at the universe as perfect by default (even in Spinoza’s sense of perfection which doesn’t mean perfection for humans) makes it much easier to embrace one of the most distinctive ideals of our time: to make the world better (and, with increasing urgency, preserve it from destruction).
 
Note, also, that I’m not saying that Spinoza’s God doesn’t exist. Einstein famously equated Spinoza’s God with what he considered the universe’s intelligibility. When a cardinal charged his theories as “cloaking . . . ghastly atheism,” an upset rabbi from New York cabled Einstein: “Do you believe in God?” Einstein cabled back: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the lawful order of existence, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and doings of mankind.”
 
What I am saying is that we can’t have the one without the other—Spinoza’s path to well-being and freedom without amor dei intellectualis. If we want to convert modern readers to Spinozism, we need to convince them that Spinoza’s God exists and that loving him is the highest good.
 
But if Spinoza can’t sway us, is this a reason not to study him? That surely doesn’t follow. On the contrary: What better opportunity to break out of our echo chamber than a philosopher of the past who has put together—with exceeding care and powerful arguments—a view of the world and of the good life that we disagree with? At the very least, it’s a chance to critically reflect on and give reasons for our own convictions. If we engage in conversations across religious, cultural, and ideological divides to consider alternative views and entertain the possibility that the other is right and we are wrong, why would we make a pass on as astute an interlocutor as Spinoza? We may not agree with Spinoza’s answer to Socrates’s question in the Gorgias—“the question of how we ought to live.” But he can certainly help us to avoid the “unexamined life” which, as Socrates says in Plato’s Apology, “is not worth living.”
 
 
 
Can We Deduce Our Way to Salvation? By Carlos Fraenkel. Boston Review , December 14, 2020