Giving Spinoza his due

 While I was eating Thanksgiving dinner, my friend Christopher Cook was marking the 390^th birthday of Spinoza.

Spinoza was seriously out of style when I was in school. We went from Descartes on to Leibnitz, Berkeley, Locke and Hume, skipping the chapter on Spinoza.

Part of it was about style. Most ancient philosophers thought the great questions were all connected. They thought that finding the best way to live was included in questions about what kinds of things make up the universe and how the universe is organized. Spinoza had such a conception of philosophy. But about a century ago, the focus shifted to analytic philosophy. As the name of that school suggests, most contemporary philosophers analyze the details of specific problems.

There was a more serious objection to Spinoza. Since the dawn of the scientific revolution, scientists and philosophers have rolled their eyes at teleology, the notion that nature is up to something, that it’s moving toward an end or purpose. Note in that language the troubling presumption of design. To move toward an end or purpose is to move by design.

That kind of thinking opens the door to a lot of nonsense. (Perhaps you’ve tried to unravel this analogy: The existence of a clock implies a clockmaker. Does that in turn imply the existence of a cosmos-maker, since a cosmos obviously exists? If you haven’t grappled with that question, the essays of David Hume are a good place to start.)

Teleological arguments have produced a lot of nonsense. But even our best conceptual systems haven’t eliminated the possibility that nature is up to something.

The world, conceptually, would be a cleaner, neater place if that possibility were eliminated. But while the vast majority of rational thinkers behave as if that question had been resolved, it has not. 

Spinoza’s thought acknowledges that possibility. He suggested that scientific thought, as it was conceived in Europe at the dawn of the scientific revolution, couldn’t close that door. Hundreds of years later, it still hasn’t.

It’s why Einstein muttered, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.”

• Sources: Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life; Cambridge University Press, 2001; Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza; Pelican Books, Inc., 1975.