Spinoza

The Routledge Philosophers

by Michael Della Rocca

Renowned for his metaphysics, Spinoza made significant contributions to understanding the human mind, the emotions, moral philosophy, and political philosophy.
Beginning with an overview of Spinoza's life, Michael Della Rocca carefully unpacks and explains Spinoza's his metaphysics of substance and argument at the center of his whole system that God is the sole independent substance; his account of the human mind and its relation to the body; his theory that human beings tend towards self-preservation and his most famous work, the Ethics, including the problem of free will; and his writings on the state, religion and scripture. Della Rocca concludes with a chapter on Spinoza's legacy and how modern philosophers, Hume, Hegel, and Nietzsche, responded to Spinoza's challenge. Ideal for those coming to Spinoza for the first time as well as those already acquainted with his thought, Spinoza is essential reading for anyone studying philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, Textbooks

360 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

Reviews

[Stefan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two months ago, following the recommendation of my best friend, I started reading about Spinoza. First about his life (Stephen Nadler's brilliant biography, "Spinoza: a Life") and then about his philosophy (Stephen Nadler's equally brilliant "Introduction to Spinoza's Ethics", Jan Knol's "Spinoza uit zijn gelijkenissen en voorbeelden" and Herman De Dijn's "Spinoza: de Doornen en de Roos"). The strange thing is that Spinoza really "got to me": his philosophy feels like a magnificent cathedral abundantly illuminated by the light of reason. Although I am not sure I understand all of it (actually, I am sure I do NOT understand all of it), it is beautiful, brilliant and impressive. Hence my hunger to learn more about this philosophy.

And that's why I started reading Michael Della Rocca's "Spinoza", a book I very much enjoyed.

First, and foremost, I guess it is his American style (if there is such a thing). I always have the impression that American writers respect their readers. They try to use understandable language and explain things as clearly as possible. I am not a philosopher and my capacity to understand Heideggerish language is pretty limited, but I really managed (and very much enjoyed) to follow Della Rocca. Each chapter ends with a very useful summary. And at the end there is a practical glossary.

The book basically follows the structure of the Ethics (with an additional chapter on Spinoza's thoughts on the state and the role of religion).

Throughout the whole book, Della Rocca very much insists on the importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason according to which everything must have a reason, cause or ground. It is a principle that permeates Spinoza's philosophy through and through. Understanding this principle helped clarifying some of Spinoza's more mysterious propositions.

Della Rocca's chapter about the eternity of the mind (corresponding to the fifth chapter of the Ethics) was highly intriguing for me. Very, very, very simply put, Della Rocca explains that only "adequate ideas" (i.e. ideas that directly stem from our essence) exist. And so by trying to have more and more adequate ideas ourselves, we increase our own degree of existence. I do not know whether this is a widely accepted interpretation in spinozistic circles, but it definitely is exciting.

Della Rocca also analyses Spinoza in a very "philosophical", non-spiritual way (just like Nadler). What I mean is that with some of the few other writers I read (e.g. Jan Knol and Herman De Dijn, both religious) I felt a more spiritual approach. They insist that the correct ethical life of increasing our power by adequate ideas is also a religious life, bringing us closer to (or should I say "in"?) God. They try to convey the religious feeling one might experience following Spinoza's way. This is not so much the case in Della Rocca's book. But that is not a criticism.

By the way, I have just started reading the Master himself, plunging myself into his Ethics. Had I done so before reading Nadler or Della Roca, my brain would have exploded after 2 minutes. As so many people have already said, Spinoza has a particularly challenging way of presenting his ideas (in a Euclidean style with definitions, axioms, propositions and demonstrations) which looks outright scary for a non-philosopher like me. But Nadler's and Della Rocca's books make me feel more comfortable and are helping me to see more clearly the beauty of Spinoza's ideas.

To conclude, if you are new to the Universe of Spinoza, I warmly recommend this excellent book!

[امیر لطیفی · Rating 4 out of 5]

چرا این کتاب؟
ناشر کتاب اتشارات راتلج هست. راتلج کتب‌ و مجموعه‌های متنوعی دارد درباره‌ی فلسفه‌، به عنوان راهنمای فلسفه‌های مختلف و ... در حقیقت گفته می‌شود انتشارات راتلج بزرگ‌ترین و پرکارترین ناشر در رشته‌های علوم انسانی و علوم اجتماعی است(مبنع). اعتبار این انتشارات و تجربه‌ی خوب من با کتاب راهنمای فلسفی دیگری از همین نشر (در مورد ارسطو)، باعث شد که برای آشنایی با اسپینوزا این کتاب را انتخاب کنم.

درباره‌ی کتاب
من متن اصلی را خواندم. تا جایی که می‌دانم این کتاب ترجمه نشده است. نویسنده ساده نوشته است. توضیحات و مثال‌ها برای فهم مطالب کافی بودند. به نظر نمی‌آید چیزی از اسپینوزا ناگفته باقی گذاشته باشد. فصل‌ها و بخش‌ها و موضوعات به خوبی تفکیک شده‌اند. بارها و هر جا لازم بود از فلاسفه‌ی دیگر صحبت می‌شود. در بحث‌های معرفت‌شناسی و فلسفه‌ی اولی، مقایسه‌های با دکارت انجام می‌شود. ضمن شرح نظریات اخلاقی اسپینوزا، از اخلاق کانتی صحبت می‌شود. و در بحث در مورد حکومت و دولت، از شباهت و تفاوت‌ها با هابز گفته می‌شود.

آشنایی با دکارت از پیش‌نیاز‌های مطالعه‌ی این کتاب است.

[Ian Gillies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baruch Spinoza is a puzzle and a wonder. Living mostly in Amsterdam in the mid 17th century (1632 - 1677), excommunicated from his Jewish community for his "evil opinions, abominable heresies and monstrous deeds", shunned by most of the era's intellectual elite, he supported himself modestly by fashioning lenses for telescopes and eyeglasses while on a solitary deep dive into human nature, God and religion, psychology, political theory and ethics. During his all too brief lifetime, he lived by the motto Caute! (caution), anonymously publishing only two books, Descartes Principles of Philosophy and the Theological-Political Treatise, which was immediately denounced by religious leaders as "a book forged in hell". The quality of his insights, developed from rigorous and fearless examination of things as they are and informed by careful study of the works of classical philosophers, religious thinkers and recent predecessors (Descartes) and contemporaries like Hobbes and Leibniz, make him seem more than an outlier. He is a unicorn, in fact, a thinker as bold as Plato, Newton, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein or Bohr. Michael Della Rocca pays tribute to Spinoza with a detailed and sympathetic presentation of his ideas. Spinoza is far from an easy read but, for me, Della Rocca's book made the the main lines of his inquiry accessible. This is important; I have usually found philosophy difficult to read in the original. I have taken a run at a translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason but took no pleasure in the structure of his writing. And I also admit that reading Spinoza in translation (he wrote his works in Latin, probably to make them less accessible to a lay audience) was difficult and frustrating. So I am grateful to Della Rocco for finding a middle ground that respects the intricacy of Spinoza's work and contains a fine sense of debate about the usefulness of some of Spinoza's claims. The unifying concept of Spinoza's philosophy is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), the idea that nothing is uncaused and everything can be intelligible, though humans, as limited beings, may not have sufficient knowledge of sensory power to understand all things. "It would be impossible for human weakness to grasp the series of singular, changeable things, not only because there are innumerably many of them but also because of the infinite circumstances in one and the same thing." Spinoza's unreserved embrace of reason led to his commitment to naturalism, the idea that in nature there is only one set of rules, at all times and in all places. There are no miracles, no events that are by their nature inexplicable, though we may not be able to explain them in our time and place. He refuted all philosophers and all religious thinkers who conceived of "man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows the order of Nature." Spinoza lived at a time of great religious unrest. Vicious European wars were fought over religious dogmas of the Catholic and Protestant churches. People were executed in unspeakably cruel ways for the sin of heresy. Spinoza's concept of God was utterly heretical for its times. In Spinoza's system, there was no transcendent God with any interest in individual beings. That would be an inexplicable brute fact, akin to the rejected idea of of a dominion within a dominion. "There is only one substance and it is God" seems to be the fundamental starting point for his inquiry. Spinoza's way of expressing this concept was Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. Everything that exists, substance and thought, laws and forces of nature, is an attribute of God or Nature. He viewed the bible as a collection of fables and historical stories with power to inspire but with no divine status. The old testament could be seen as wisdom literature containing rules and laws for individual and societal governance. The new testament, in his view, brought into prominence "true piety" which consisted of "loving your neighbour as yourself". Spinoza's naturalism enabled him to interpret ancient philosophical questions in new ways. Descartes, motivated by the theological need to create a basis for the immortality of the soul, which he equated with the mind, saw duality between mind and body (thought and extension). Spinoza saw things in more systemic terms. The mind could be viewed as the brain's idea of the body, a view much closer to the modern concept favoured by neurobiologists. Spinoza's psychology is based on his notion of the essence of being which he identified as a "striving to persist" or "conatus". This essence is a feature of all living things, not privileged to humans alone. Desire is the expression of striving. Spinoza saw all behavior as essentially egotistic or self preserving. Humans strive not only to persist but to increase our power of acting. Thus, human activity is based on the dynamics of power, a notion closely allied with later philosophical thinking such as "the will to power" central to Nietzsche's system. Della Rocca writes "there can be no desire that is totally divorced from our self interest - in particular there can be no desire to do something particularly because it is the right thing to do." From this central principle of striving to exist, emotions can be understood. Joy is a being's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection (or power of acting) while sadness is a being's passage from a greater to a lesser perfection. Spinoza was an arch rationalist in the sense that he believed that everything could be explicable with enough knowledge. However, in Spinoza's system, reason alone cannot control emotion or desire. That may seem to contradict the rules of rationalism. Desire can be controlled only, in Spinoza's view, by a stronger desire. My strong desire to eat the apple pie sitting on the kitchen counter may be countered by my stronger desire to be fit and disciplined, consistent with the story I tell myself about my nature. In the parallel realm of substance, Spinoza believed "there is no singular thing in nature than which there is not another more powerful and stronger. Whatever one is given, there is another more powerful by which it can be destroyed." (He would except his notion of God or Nature from this assertion since the hierarchy of singular things are simply modes or inadequate expressions of the one substance of God or Nature.) Spinoza's approach to ethics has the virtue of simplifying some ancient philosophical questions. Della Rocca notes that any ethical theory must provide not only an account of the good but also an account of the right, of what we are morally obligated to do. Spinoza, he says, holds that an action is good to the extent that it increases the agent's power and bad to the extent that it decreases the agent's power. Further, what is right to do is what is good to do. But, one might object, in Spinoza's system of desire, self interest and power, how would humans ever live together in peace? In the condition where each individual attempts to exercise her rights against all others (to increase her power of acting), human life, in Spinoza's words "must necessarily be most wretched.", an echo of Hobbes' "nasty, brutish and short" dictum. To that objection, Spinoza would offer two ideas. First, at the level of an individual, is very often in our self interest to help others; in fact, he would probably say that to live within the single dominion of nature, the desires for respect, belonging and community, desires that lean toward increasing an individual's power of acting, lead people to do the right thing with others. Second, at the level of human groups, the right to increase one's power of acting must necessarily be viewed in the long run. For Spinoza what is good for us to do and what we ought to do is acquire knowledge. That leads us toward morality. While individual rights stem from our nature as individuals striving for self-preservation, we soon gain the knowledge that we can't achieve much of value on our own, especially in the long run, and thus we agree to pool our rights and work harmoniously from our common interests and refrain from harming one another. Spinoza uses the term "sovereign" for this pooling of individual rights leading to his political philosophy described in The Theological-Political Treatise and his posthumous works, the Ethics and the unfinished Tractatus Politicus. Spinoza argued that the "sovereign", or government, must always be superior to religion. Though logically derived from the premises of his system, Spinoza no doubt drew practical conclusions from the first hand evidence he witnessed in his era where the contest of religious dogmas resulted in warfare and cruelty. This is the early enlightenment expression of separation of church and state but goes much further by explicitly favouring supremacy of the state. The wise sovereign will protect the freedom of citizens to philosophize and debate but will not tolerate actions inimical to its authority. Later thinkers found problems with this formulation as it seemed not to extend enough individual freedom to influence the rule of the sovereign. If he could, Spinoza would probably respond to these criticisms with arguments around degrees of freedom - the sovereign should be influenced by dissent that favours it's continuation in the long run. And it is important to note that Spinoza saw an important role for religion because of the power of its stories to motivate "true piety" in the mass of citizens- loving your neighbour as yourself. In intellectual realms as different as human nature, government, psychology, scriptural interpretation and ethical theory, Spinoza offers us much. He seems to have been a truly kind and gentle person; those who met him and called him friend, praised his character. One of my bucket list items is to visit his modest house in Amsterdam, preserved as a kind of shrine to this most humanistic of philosophers. His insights were subtle, audacious and often difficult to grasp. He was a wonderful fountain of wisdom of the early enlightenment and well worth careful study. As he wrote, "All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."

[aa · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a helpful book! I read this side-by-side with The Ethics.

For awhile I was hesitant to read books like these because I wanted to come to my own analysis of philosophy texts. But since I never studied philosophy in school, I realize its unrealistic to expect that I would understand the 17th century meanings to words and various references to Greek or scholastic philosophy.

Della Rocca goes over the ideas almost chapter-by-chapter alongside The Ethics, and includes a nice summary at the end of each. I read each chapter twice: first just to familiarize myself with what's being argued, and second to take notes and make sure I really get it. I finished this feeling like I really have a handle on Spinoza's philosophy.

[Zo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid exposition and exploration of Spinoza's thought, but subject to many of the sins of dull academic writing (repetitive and uninspiring). I enjoyed Della Rocca's commitment to defending Spinoza, and think he does a great job of presenting charitable readings of Spinoza I can largely get behind, but I wish he was a little more willing to confront flaws in Spinoza's views, especially vis-a-vis modern scientific understandings of the world. His writings about Spinoza's ethics and psychology also convey none of what I find beautiful/powerful in Spinoza's own writings, and could do a better job exploring tensions between Spinoza's psychology and modern psychological frameworks. The emphasis on the PSR is an intriguing departure point, and I would like to read other accounts of its status in a modern physics view of the world. The best part of this for me might have been the elucidation of Spinoza's philosophy of mind, and how it seems plausible and important in some contemporary phil of mind debates.

[Harris Bolus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explains a wide range of Spinoza’s ideas and explores their historical context as well as arguments for and against them. The first half, on historical context, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, deserved five out of five stars for great writing and engaging arguments. The second half was less interesting to me, because it felt like both the author and Spinoza were overreaching in attempting to come up with positions on politics, ethics, psychology from the basis of the first half. Overall, I enjoyed this book a lot and I’m glad to have read it.

[Ian Mathers · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a long time since I've taken notes while reading a book, but Della Rocca's mostly excellent unpacking of Spinoza's work deserves it. We differ in how we approach his thinking; where Della Rocca approaches Spinoza through the Principle of Sufficient Reason, I would do so through either the concept of sub specie aeternitatis or conatus. But that doesn't mean I think he's wrong to do so (and Spinoza would certainly understand looking at his work under one aspect or another) and I wound up really appreciating how thoroughly Della Rocca was able to work through the Ethics and other works using that one principle as a spine.

I do think that Della Rocca makes some mistakes here, and if anything they're severe enough (from the perspective of my understanding of Spinoza) that it's kind of amazing he gets so much so right throughout. Most of the areas we differ on are ones where Della Rocca doesn't take Spinoza's metaphysics seriously enough as metaphysics, to the point of discussing conatus almost as if it was a psychological rather than metaphysical term. This means both that Della Rocca misses some important distinctions (he appears to repeatedly conflate mental existence with ‘having a mind,' which is both wrong and misleading) and that he can't seem to take seriously some things that Spinoza says very plainly (no, Spinoza does not think there is no such thing as free will; no, he does not think there's any kind of afterlife that would be recognizable as such). Heck, as late as (checks notes) page 152 Della Rocca is writing as if modes are somehow something separate from substance (and while I think this is more an error in his terminology than a flaw in his actual argument, it's still not a good sign).

But I criticize to the extent that I do largely because this is one of the best books I've read on Spinoza, a lucid explication and defence of my favourite philosopher. I found myself taking notes about the things Della Rocca writes that I don't agree with partly because when someone asks me about Spinoza (this is a thing that does happen) I'd like to be able to point them in this direction, but I also feel like I need to include some caveats. I'm borrowing the copy I read from a friend, but I would certainly like my own.

[Thanos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writer seems to approach many aspects of Spinoza's thought more literally than i think is needed. Though this book was my first foray into Spinoza, i came to believe that a more "spiritual"/"mystical" way of interpreting him leads closer to his work's beauty. Nevertheless an accessible and clearly-written introduction.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

good for explaining spinoza to dumb people like myself.

[Plato · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains info on a dutch man who inhaled to much glass who really loved the principle of the identity of indiscernibles and the principle of sufficient reason. The boy thinks there is no contingency and all things are absolutely necessary (necessitarianism). Also each mind is just God’s idea of a particular body as were all modes of God, the One Substance. Panpsychist metaphysics with a Stoic-Nietzschean style moral psychology.

‘It [the ethics] picks up ancient debates, where questions about the nature of knowledge and of the ultimate nature of things were integrated with reflection on the mental attitudes required for a well-lived life.’ (Lloyd, 1996: 141).


"Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in
no other order than they have been produced."
(1p33)

Since God as the substance of infinite attributes has the most reality, the most properties possible follow from his nature. Spinoza concludes from this that God determines all things. Because each detail in extension is paralleled by and represented by an idea, it follows that my mind represents all the states of my body and that, likewise, each extended thing is represented by an idea in God’s mind, an idea that is the mind of that thing. Spinoza is a panpsychist, the idea that all things are mental.

Spinoza's main predecessor is Descartes, who Spinoza took very seriously and studied with intense rigour. But Spinoza diverges from Descartes on many significant points, such as his skepticism and dualist philosophy of mind. Spinoza’s account of mental power constitutes a sharp critique of Descartes’s theory of belief or judgment. For Spinoza, as for Descartes, judgment is simply a function of mental power or assent brought to bear on a certain idea. But whereas for Descartes, this mental power comes from a separate non-representational mental state (a volition), for Spinoza, assent is internal to an idea: each idea is, by its nature, powerful to some degree and so commands a degree of assent. This refusal to bifurcate mental states, as Descartes does, into passive, representational ideas and active, non-representational volitions reflects Spinoza’s naturalism and his rejection of inexplicable disparities. Here the PSR (the principle of sufficient reason) is at work. The PSR similarly guides his response to radical skepticism. The radical skeptic draws a sharp line between the representational character of ideas (their clarity and distinctness, in Descartes’s terms) and their epistemic status, i.e. their amounting to genuine certainty or knowledge. Thus the skeptic sees himself as showing that our clear and distinct ideas, our ideas that are representationally most in order, do not amount to knowledge. Spinoza rejects this sharp separation implicit in skepticism between the representational character of ideas and their epistemic status. This separation is, for Spinoza, an inexplicable bifurcation every bit as objectionable as the sharp Cartesian separations between mind and body, between will and intellect, and between consciousness and representation.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, Spinoza is some pretty heady stuff and not what I would consider an ‘easy read’. Michael Della Rocca did a good job of making Spinoza a little more accessible while retaining many of the technical aspects of Spinoza’s use of the PSR. There are still many nuts and bolts that fit together in enigmatic configurations, but things should be a little more clear after reading. I don’t know that I’d recommend it to someone as their first exposure to Spinoza, but it would make for a good challenging start for those who wanted to delve into the deeper waters of Lake Spinoza.

[A. B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book, a good guide to Spinoza's system, it's possible shortcomings and their resolutions. Della Rocca examines the system with the Principle of Sufficient Reason and naturalism as the basis of the whole. The last chapter on Spinoza's legacy and defense of the PSR was very interesting and his doctrines of immanence, rejection of bifurcations, the intelligibility of reality, and the representational mind were especially inspiring!

Would not however recommend it to absolute beginners. Steven Nadler's 'Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction' was a more holistic guide there for me.

[Ravi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike other reviewers, I did not find that book all that accessible, perhaps because I have not read the Ethics. I also thought there was too much emphasis on the Principle of Substantive Reason. It did not convince me that Spinoza was an important philosopher even though I am very open to that perspective. I was also surprised it never mentions Deleuze at all.

[Paolo De Ruggiero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really an enjoyable book. I was not too sure at the onset, as the author engaged in much “vs Descartes” before diving in the core Spinoza.
But gradually I got accustomed to his method and style, and by the end it all came together nicely.
A very strong close.

[Anmol · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brilliant introduction to the philosopher-saint Spinoza. I will reserve my thoughts on Spinoza himself until I read his primary works. However, I am astounded by the similarities of Spinozism with Vedanta.

[Michel · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The order of things is of the same nature with the order of ideas." (2+2=2x2)

[Dominique · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely clear and informative.

[Brandon Peele · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a mostly digestible overview of Spinoza's life and work. Della Rocca did a good job of illuminating key concepts, controversies/reactions and derivations of Spinoza's work. I especially liked the summaries of each section. Spinoza's "Ethics", while his most famous work and significant contribution to the field of philosophy, were not as interesting to me as his monist metaphysics. I thought Spinoza could have done more in establishing God's existence, as he seemed so close a couple of times, but his theory did seem to contain one or two brute facts, e.g. the abstract view of essence, God, ethics, etc. seem at least one degree from the definition of God that Spinoza posited. Like many philosophers he failed to justify how his work, especially re Ethics, relates to his own will to power. Overall, I think the book could have used slightly more mainstream intros to each section that answers why this section should be read by the average person, as it was not totally evident except in hindsight..

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Metaphysics