Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) stands as one of the
most radical and consequential thinkers in the history of philosophy. His work
helped detonate the ideological foundations of the seventeenth‑century world
and laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions, and
ultimately the materialist conception of history developed by Marx and Engels.
Steven Nadler’s scholarship — especially his insistence that Spinoza was, in
every meaningful sense, an atheist — has revived interest in this extraordinary
figure. Yet Nadler’s work also reveals the limits of academic philosophy, which
often isolates Spinoza from the historical and social forces that shaped him
and from the revolutionary tradition that later drew upon his ideas.
Spinoza’s thought was dangerous in his own time, and
it remains dangerous today. As the World Socialist Web Site has noted,
his ideas are “dangerous to the financial aristocracy of the twenty‑first
century” because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy,
privilege, and religious authority.¹ To understand why, we must examine
Spinoza’s life, his philosophical system, his political commitments, and his
place in the lineage of materialist thought culminating in Marxism.
A
Life of Intellectual Defiance
Spinoza was born into Amsterdam’s Portuguese‑Jewish
community, a group of former conversos who had fled the Inquisition. Educated
in Jewish tradition, he quickly distinguished himself as a formidable thinker.
But at the age of twenty‑three, he was excommunicated with unprecedented
severity. The cherem condemned him for “abominable heresies” and “monstrous
deeds,” though it did not specify them a sign of the community’s fear of his
ideas.²
After his expulsion, Spinoza lived modestly,
supporting himself by grinding optical lenses. He corresponded with leading
scientists and philosophers across Europe, including Henry Oldenburg, secretary
of the Royal Society. His works circulated clandestinely, often in manuscript,
because they were banned across Catholic and Protestant Europe. His Theological‑Political
Treatise (1670) was published anonymously and immediately condemned as “a
book forged in hell.”
Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life reconstructs
this world with remarkable archival detail.³ It shows Spinoza as a man of
personal integrity, political sympathy for the republican cause of Jan de Witt,
and unwavering commitment to intellectual freedom. When de Witt was murdered by
an Orangist mob in 1672, Spinoza reportedly attempted to post a sign denouncing
the killing as “barbaric,” only to be restrained by his landlord for fear of
reprisals.
Spinoza died in 1677 at the age of forty‑four, likely
from lung disease caused by inhaling glass dust. His friends published his Ethics
posthumously, along with his correspondence and unfinished works. The Ethics
would become one of the most influential — and feared — books in European
intellectual history.
The
Philosophical Break: Monism Against Dualism
Spinoza’s philosophical revolution begins with a
decisive rejection of Cartesian dualism. Descartes had divided reality into two
substances: res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa
(extended substance). This dualism preserved the theological worldview of the
seventeenth century: an immaterial soul, a transcendent God, and a universe
governed by divine will.
Spinoza demolished this architecture. There is only
one substance, infinite and self‑caused, which he calls God or Nature (Deus
sive Natura). Thought and extension are not two substances but two
attributes of the same underlying reality. As he writes in the Ethics, “the
order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of
things.”⁴
This is the foundation of philosophical materialism.
There is no supernatural realm, no divine providence, no miracles, no immortal
soul. Human beings are modes of nature, governed by the same laws as everything
else. Spinoza’s critics were correct to call him an atheist. Nadler argues
persuasively that Spinoza’s “God” is not a being but a conceptual placeholder
for the totality of nature.⁵
Spinoza’s monism dissolves the mind‑body problem
centuries before it became the central obsession of analytic philosophy. If
thought and extension are two aspects of one substance, there is no need to
explain how an immaterial mind interacts with a material body. The problem is a
product of dualist metaphysics, not a feature of reality.
Consciousness
and the Body: Nadler’s Contribution
Nadler’s most significant philosophical contribution
concerns Spinoza’s theory of consciousness. Many commentators have located
consciousness in Spinoza’s doctrine of “ideas of ideas” — the notion that every
idea has a second‑order idea that represents it. But Nadler argues that this
cannot explain degrees of consciousness, since the doctrine applies uniformly
to all ideas.
Instead, Nadler highlights Spinoza’s remarks linking
consciousness to bodily complexity. In the scholium to Ethics IIp13,
Spinoza writes:
“In proportion as a body is more capable than others
of doing many things at once… so its mind is more capable than others of
perceiving many things at once.”⁶
This is the basis of what Nadler calls “explanatory
materialism”: consciousness is not caused by the body but is the mental
expression of the body’s organisation. Degrees of consciousness correspond to
degrees of bodily complexity. This anticipates modern embodied cognition and
dissolves the Cartesian “hard problem” centuries before Chalmers formulated it.
From a Marxist standpoint, this is crucial. Spinoza
provides the monistic foundation; Marx adds the historical and social
dimension. Human consciousness is not only the correlate of a complex body — it
is the correlate of a body transformed by labour, tool‑use, and social
practice. Marx’s dictum in The German Ideology — “consciousness can
never be anything else than conscious being” — completes what Spinoza began.⁷
Politics:
Equality, Democracy, and the Attack on Ideology
Spinoza’s philosophical radicalism was inseparable
from his political radicalism. Jonathan Israel has shown that Spinoza was the
first major modern thinker to embrace democratic republicanism as the most
rational form of political organisation.⁸ If all humans are modes of the same
substance, governed by the same natural laws, then no divine hierarchy can
justify monarchy, aristocracy, or clerical authority.
Freedom, for Spinoza, is not free will but the
understanding of necessity — the rational comprehension of the causes that
determine us. This is why superstition, religious authority, and political
tyranny are intertwined: they depend on ignorance of causes. Spinoza’s Theological‑Political
Treatise is one of the earliest and most powerful arguments for secularism,
freedom of thought, and the separation of philosophy from theology.
It is no accident that Spinoza’s revival in the 1780s
preceded the French Revolution. As Ann Talbot notes, Spinoza was “as
responsible as any one person could be for the revolution in consciousness”
that made the Enlightenment possible.⁹
Spinoza
and Marxism: A Line of Descent
The connection between Spinoza and Marx is not a
retrospective imposition. It runs through the French materialists — La Mettrie,
Diderot, d’Holbach — and into the dialectical transformation of materialism
achieved by Marx and Engels.
Plekhanov put it plainly: “present‑day materialism is
a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself.”¹⁰ When he asked
Engels in 1889 whether Spinoza was right that thought and extension are
attributes of one substance, Engels replied: “Of course. Old Spinoza was quite
right.”¹¹
Spinoza provided the monistic ontology; Marx provided
the historical, social, and dialectical method. Spinoza dissolved dualism; Marx
dissolved idealism. Spinoza grounded human equality in nature; Marx grounded it
in social relations and class struggle.
Spinoza
vs. Roger Scruton: Materialism Against Conservative Idealism
The contrast between Spinoza and Roger Scruton
reveals the political stakes of philosophy. Scruton admired Spinoza’s logical
rigour but sought to neutralise him — to turn Spinoza into a source of
aesthetic consolation rather than a revolutionary materialist. Scruton’s
conservatism, rooted in tradition, hierarchy, and the “sacred,” is the
ideological antithesis of Spinoza’s rationalism.¹²
Where Spinoza insists that social reality can be
understood and transformed, Scruton insists it must be accepted. Where Spinoza
undermines religious authority, Scruton defends it as a source of social
cohesion. Where Spinoza’s monism points toward equality, Scruton’s idealism
defends hierarchy. This is not a difference of temperament; it is a difference
of class position.
Why
Spinoza Matters Now
The renewed interest in Spinoza — from Nadler’s
scholarship to the embodied‑mind movement to the revival of radical
Enlightenment studies — reflects a deeper crisis. Postmodernism, with its
rejection of reason and truth, has exhausted itself. Bourgeois philosophy,
trapped between scientistic reductionism and irrationalist relativism, finds
itself returning to the materialist tradition it once abandoned.
Spinoza offers a way out: a rational, naturalistic,
egalitarian worldview that rejects superstition and hierarchy. But only Marxism
can complete what Spinoza began — by grounding consciousness, politics, and
freedom in the material conditions of social life. Spinoza was a revolutionary
in the age of the Dutch Republic. His ideas remain revolutionary in the age of
global capitalism.
Notes
- Ann
Talbot, “Spinoza Reconsidered,” World Socialist Web Site, 2001.
- Steven
Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), 73–75.
- Ibid.
- Baruch
Spinoza, Ethics, IIp7.
- Steven
Nadler, “Was Spinoza an Atheist?”, Journal of the History of Philosophy
45, no. 2 (2007).
- Spinoza,
Ethics, IIp13s.
- Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846).
- Jonathan
Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001).
- Ann
Talbot, “Spinoza Revisited,” World Socialist Web Site.
- G.
V. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908).
- Ibid.,
correspondence with Engels.
- Roger
Scruton, Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Bibliography
Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment:
Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German
Ideology. 1846.
Nadler, Steven. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999.
“Was Spinoza
an Atheist?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 45, no. 2 (2007).
Plekhanov, G. V. Fundamental Problems of Marxism.
1908.
Scruton, Roger. Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986.
Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics.
1677.
Talbot, Ann. “Spinoza
Reconsidered.” World Socialist Web Site, 2001.
