c ha p t e r 1 3

The Lens Grinder

Baruch Spinoza

Most religions teach that God exists somewhere outside

the world, perhaps in heaven. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77)
was unusual in thinking that God is the world. He wrote
about ‘God or Nature’, to make this point – meaning that the
two words refer to the same thing. God and nature are two
ways of describing a single thing. God is nature and nature is
God. This is a form of pantheism – the belief that God is every-
thing. It was a radical idea that got him into quite a lot of
trouble.
Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, the son of Portuguese Jews.
Amsterdam was then popular with people fleeing persecution.
But even here there were limits to the views you could express.
Although brought up in the Jewish religion, Spinoza was excom-
municated and cursed by the rabbis in his synagogue in 1656
when he was 24 years old, probably because his views about
God were so unorthodox. He left Amsterdam, later settling in
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The Hague. From this point he was known as Benedict de

Spinoza rather than Baruch, his Jewish name.
Many philosophers have been impressed by geometry. The
Ancient Greek Euclid’s famous proofs of various geometrical
hypotheses moved from a few simple axioms or starting assump-
tions to conclusions such as that the sum of the interior angles
of a triangle are equal to two right angles. What philosophers
usually admire in geometry is the way it moves by careful
logical steps from agreed starting points to surprising conclu-
sions. If the axioms are true, then the conclusions must be true.
This sort of geometrical reasoning inspired both René Descartes
and Thomas Hobbes.
Spinoza did not just admire geometry; he wrote philosophy
as if it were geometry. The ‘proofs’ in his book Ethics look like
geometrical proofs and include axioms and definitions. They
are supposed to have the same relentless logic as geometry. But
instead of dealing with topics like the angles of triangles and the
circumferences of circles, they are about God, nature, freedom
and emotion. He felt that these subjects could be analysed and
reasoned about in just the same way that we can reason about
triangles, circles and squares. He even ends sections with ‘QED’
which is short for quod erat demonstrandum, a Latin phrase
meaning ‘which was to be proved’ that appears in geometry
textbooks. There is, he believed, an underlying structural logic
to the world and our place in it that reason can reveal. Nothing
is as it is by chance, there is a purpose and principle to it all.
Everything fits together in one huge system and the best way to
understand this is by the power of thought. This approach to
philosophy, emphasizing reason rather than experiment and
observation, is often labelled Rationalism.
Spinoza enjoyed being on his own. It was in solitude that he
had the time and peace of mind to follow his studies. It was
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probably also safer not to be part of a more public institution,

given his views about God. For this reason too his most famous
book, Ethics, was only published after his death. Although his
reputation as a highly original thinker spread during his life-
time, he turned down an offer to take up a teaching post at
Heidelberg University. He was, though, happy to discuss his
ideas with some of the thinkers who came to visit him.
The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz was one
of these.
Spinoza lived very simply, staying in lodgings rather than
buying his own house. He didn’t need much money and was
able to get by on what he earned as a lens grinder together with
some small payments from people who admired his philosoph-
ical work. The lenses he made were used in scientific instru-
ments such as telescopes and microscopes. This allowed him to
remain independent and work from his lodgings. Unfortunately
it also probably contributed to his early death from a chest
infection at only 44. He would have breathed in the fine glass
dust from grinding the lenses and this almost certainly damaged
his lungs.
If God is infinite, Spinoza reasoned, it must follow that there
cannot be anything that is not God. If you discover something
in the universe that is not God, then God can’t be infinite,
because God could have in principle been that thing as well as
everything else. We are all parts of God, but so are stones, ants,
blades of grass, and windows. All of it. It all fits together into an
incredibly complex whole, but ultimately everything that exists
is part of this one thing: God.
Traditional religious believers preached that God loved
humanity and responded to personal prayers. This is a form of
anthropomorphism – projecting human qualities, such as
compassion, on to a non-human being, God. The most extreme
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form of this is to imagine God as a kindly man with a big beard

and a gentle smile. Spinoza’s God was nothing like this. He – or
perhaps more accurately ‘it’ – was completely impersonal and
did not care about anything or anyone. According to Spinoza,
you can and should love God, but don’t expect any love back in
return. That would be like a nature lover expecting nature to
love him back. In fact, the God he describes is so completely
indifferent to human beings and what they do that many
thought Spinoza didn’t believe in God at all and that his
pantheism was a cover. They took him to be an atheist and
against religion altogether. How could someone who believed
that God didn’t care about humanity be anything else? From
Spinoza’s perspective, though, he had an intellectual love of
God, a love based on deep understanding achieved by reason.
But this was hardly conventional religion. The synagogue had
probably been right to excommunicate him.
Spinoza’s views on free will were controversial too. He was a
determinist. This meant he believed that every human action
was the result of earlier causes. A stone thrown into the air, if it
could become conscious like a human being, would imagine
that it was moving by its own willpower even though it wasn’t.
What was really moving it along was the force of the throw and
the effects of gravity. The stone just felt that it rather than
gravity, was controlling where it went. Human beings are the
same: we imagine that we are choosing freely what we do and
have control over our lives. But that’s because we don’t usually
understand the ways in which our choices and actions have
been brought about. In fact free will is an illusion. There is no
spontaneous free action at all.
But although he was a determinist, Spinoza did believe that
some kind of very limited human freedom was possible and
desirable. The worst way to exist was to be in what he called
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bondage: at the complete mercy of your emotions. When some-

thing bad happens, someone is rude to you, for example, and
you lose your temper and are filled with hatred, this is a very
passive way to exist. You simply react to events. External
happenings cause your anger. You are not in control at all. The
way to escape this is to gain a better understanding of the causes
that shape behaviour – the things that lead you to be angry. For
Spinoza, the best that we can achieve is for our emotions to
emerge from our own choices rather than external events. Even
though these choices can never be fully free, it is better to be
active than passive.
Spinoza is typical of a philosopher. He was prepared to be
controversial, to put forward ideas that not everyone was ready
to hear, and to defend his views with argument. Through his
writing he continues to influence those who read his work, even
when they disagree strongly with what he wrote. His belief that
God is nature didn’t catch on at the time, but since his death he
has had some very eminent admirers, including the Victorian
novelist George Eliot, who made a translation of his Ethics, and
the twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein who, though he
couldn’t bring himself to believe in a personal God, revealed in
a letter that he did believe in Spinoza’s God.
Spinoza’s God, as we have seen, was impersonal and had no
human characteristics, so would not punish anyone for their
sins. John Locke, born in the same year as Spinoza, took a very
different line. His discussion of the nature of the self was partly
inspired by his concern about what might happen on the Day of
Judgment.