Quotes About Spinoza

To the mass of mankind, therefore, the philosopher may appear as a spiritual saboteur, a subverter of things lawfully established, and an apologist for the devil. So Spinoza appeared to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death he was regarded as the greatest heretic of the 17th century.

We must inevitably conclude, therefore, that the main influences over Spinoza's thought during his formative years were not those philosophers, such as Descartes, to whom he later devoted his attention, but the Jewish and Muslim writers of earlier centuries, whose thoughts provided the main arguments of contemporary Judaism.

The letters between the two philosophers were cordial, although Spinoza at first distrusted Leibniz, who in turn referred to him privately as 'a Jew expelled from the synagogue for his monstrous opinions'. Since the fundamental assumptions behind their two systems are profoundly similar, it is perhaps not surprising that the two philosophers – whose conclusions are wholly opposed – should have treated each other with a certain caution.

In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, the real meaning of its arguments. Meanwhile, the book was read attentively, and at least one club existed for the express purpose of working through its proofs.

The seclusion of Spinoza's life was necessitated by intense labour and intellectual discipline, and his frugality expressed independence of spirit rather than meanness or self-concern. The strength of Spinoza's social feelings, and his Aristotelian emphasis on friendship as a necessary human good, are abundantly shown in the Ethics.

While Spinoza did not condemn marriage, he rejected it for himself, perhaps fearing the 'ill temper of a woman', and in any case recognizing in matrimony a threat to his scholarly interests.

While he joined eagerly in the contemporary intellectual battles, philosophy was, for Spinoza, not a weapon but a way of life, a sacred order whose servants were transported to a supreme and certain blessedness.

Spinoza was I think a cool, not to say cold, man. His posture toward revealed religion—in particular, Judaism—was simple contempt for the confused ideas underlying revealed religion [which he regarded as] nonsense. His posture I believe is [more] that of the cocksure unbelieving scientist than that of any man of an inner tragedy.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind... to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)

If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza 's Amor Dei Intellectualis , they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.

Spinoza writes, "A free man, that is to say, a man who lives according to the dictates of reason alone, is not led by fear of death, but directly desires the good, that is to say, desires to act, and to preserve his being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own profit. He thinks, therefore, of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life.

The true object of the miraculous stories narrated in the Bible was, Spinoza argued, "to move men, and especially uneducated men, to devotion … not to convince the reason, but to attract and lay hold of the imagination.

The whole point of government, Spinoza maintained, is liberty: "the object of government is … to enable [men] to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice." The state authorities may interfere in religion—indeed, they must do so, since religion is too dangerous to be left in the hands of priests.

When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the "whole man." When people today use the term they almost always imply a splitting of the personality. They ask in one form or another: "Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?

And did not Spinoza's refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?

When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the "whole man." When people today use the term they almost

Now: the first requirement of stability in a human being was that the said human being should really desire to exist. This is what Spinoza says.

And I hold with Spinoza (I hope he won't mind) that to demand what is impossible for any human being, to exercise power where it can't be exercised, is tyranny.

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a product of Amsterdam's vigorous Jewish community. To this day, Amsterdammers' proud slang term for their city is Mokum, the centuries-old Jewish name for it. (For that matter, Amsterdam slang for "see you later" is the Yiddishism de mazzel.)

The concept of substance is the central tenet of Spinoza's metaphysics. All things exist and are conceived through substance, or God, or nature, which exists and is conceived only through itself. Substance represents the singular binding force that connects things, no matter how small or disconnected in space and time they might be, for every thing participates in and is a part of a complex totality.

Nothing of this world is not in God. Substance is not the despised materiality of bodies that must be separated from God; it is God, God under the attribute of extension or materiality. Descartes is thus mistaken, according to Spinoza, in defining matter as extension, for matter must necessarily have a conceptual equivalent, an idea, not in opposition to extension but as one of the attributes of substance.

For Spinoza, an ethics and a politics follow directly from and are immanent in metaphysics; the better one understands the universe in its complexity, in the connections that link each thing to every other, the more adequate is one's ethical relation in and to it. An ethics does not spring directly from our understanding of the world. Rather, it comes from our affective bonds to and connections with other things in the world, relations that enable us to enhance or diminish forms of life.

To the philosopher, infinity, knowledge, movement, empirical laws, etc., are things just as familiar {as family relations}. And as her dead brother and uncle are present to the peasant woman, thus Plato, Spinoza, etc. are present to the philosopher. The one has as much reality as the other, but the latter are immortal.

Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.