The Blessed One

Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza is a name that will be popping up here more and more. I've almost finished one book about him and I eagerly await arrival of his seminal work, The Ethics. While many of you may be familiar with his life and philosophy, I realize that there's probably a good number of you who know little, if anything, about the man. So, this post is dedicated to remedying that.

Unlike many of my classmates, I always enjoyed book reports and research papers. That said, in this day and age of information at our fingertips via the internet, I'm simply going to cut-and-paste some info I've found. Enjoy.

Baruch Spinoza was born to Portuguese Jews living in exile in Holland, but his life among the Marranos there was often unsettled. Despite an early rabbinical education, he was expelled from the synagogue at Amsterdam for defending heretical opinions in 1656. While engaging privately in serious study of medieval Jewish thought, Cartesian philosophy, and the new science at Rijnburg and the Hague, Spinoza supported himself by grinding optical lenses, an occupation that probably contributed to the consumption that killed him.
~ Philosophy Pages ~

Benedict de Spinoza was among the most important of the post-Cartesian philosophers who flourished in the second half of the 17th century. He made significant contributions in virtually every area of philosophy, and his writings reveal the influence of such divergent sources as Stoicism, Jewish Rationalism, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, and a variety of heterodox religious thinkers of his day. For this reason he is difficult to categorize, though he is usually counted, along with Descartes and Leibniz, as one of the three major Rationalists. Given Spinoza’s devaluation of sense perception as a means of acquiring knowledge, his description of a purely intellectual form of cognition, and his idealization of geometry as a model for philosophy, this categorization is fair. But it should not blind us to the eclecticism of his pursuits, nor to the striking originality of his thought.
~ The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ~

As a pantheistic monist, Spinoza was of the belief that there is no dualism between God and the world; we need not go beyond the immediate present experience to seek for a being outside of it. God moves and lives in nature; the whole of it, the entire universe is God. Nature, or God is Its own cause and is self-sufficient. (Because of his view of God, Spinoza, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, was known as a man of appalling wickedness.) Man, in his egotistical way has imagined God to be like him; to be anthropomorphic in character; and, further, man imagines that this God (created in the imagine of man) has a special interest in, and concern for man. The Spinozistic God does not love nor hate. The totality of existence, Nature, God, is far above us, and is indifferent to our desires and aspirations, - gone is the notion of a personal God. As for the notions of good and evil, they exist, but only to the extent that they fit our own personal inclinations. "Such things as please us, we denominate good, those which displease us, evil."
~ Biographies ~

The Ethics is an ambitious and multifaceted work. It is also bold to the point of audacity, as one would expect of a systematic and unforgiving critique of the traditional philosophical conceptions of God, the human being and the universe, and, above all, of the religions and the theological and moral beliefs grounded thereupon. What Spinoza intends to demonstrate (in the strongest sense of that word) is the truth about God, nature and especially ourselves; and the highest principles of society, religion and the good life. Despite the great deal of metaphysics, physics, anthropology and psychology that take up Parts One through Three, Spinoza took the crucial message of the work to be ethical in nature. It consists in showing that our happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue; nor in the related unreflective attachment to the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason. To clarify and support these broadly ethical conclusions, however, Spinoza must first demystify the universe and show it for what it really is.
~ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ~