Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

"This is a work which is perhaps of all Spinoza’s works the most accessible, because he’s quite a difficult and technical writer, and yet he is a tremendously significant figure for our modern age. Some people have identified him, I think rightly, as being the chief wellspring of the Enlightenment, although people didn’t quote him overtly or reference him too much because he was regarded with a certain horror as an atheist. Somebody once described him as the most God-besotted of all philosophers. But in this work, he commits himself to the view that people have used in order to interpret him as an atheist. One of the key things that comes out of it – the perspective that people took from it, and which made him an important figure in the Enlightenment – is this idea of the responsibility of the individual. He put it slightly differently in the Ethics – which is his major work and a much more substantial work even than the Tractatus – where the final two books are called “Of Human Bondage” (which is where Somerset Maugham got his book title from) and “Of Human Freedom”. In the latter he talks of human freedom [as] resulting from the realisation that we are not at all free, that we’re determined, that everything we do is the outcome of necessity, that we’re all part of this great single thing – this one great reality which operates in an entirely necessary way out of its own laws. When we recognise this, we cease to strive in a futile way against the impossibilities – we recognise that our desire is the source of our suffering. It’s a rather Buddhist view in a way, and similar to a view that Schopenhauer much later took. And the realisation that this is so, and the acceptance that we have to act in conformity to necessity, is what makes us free. I take it that the root of humanistic ethics is the idea that we are each of us ultimately responsible for our moral choices, for our ethics – that is, the answer we give to the question “what sort of person are you going to be?”. Whereas the root of the theological moralities is that there is a demand imposed on us from outside, a transcendent sort of demand, and that our morality is the act of response or indeed of obedience to that demand. These are two very opposed ways of thinking about the moral life. As a humanist myself, I’m committed to the idea that we should encourage people to accept the challenge of the first way of thinking about things. One way you could dramatise this a bit is to appeal to something that I find more attractive than many of my contemporary philosophers, which is some of the insights of existentialism in the last three quarters of a century. Namely, the idea that our existence precedes our essence, in the sense that we find ourselves existing and we have to answer the challenge of what kind of person we’re going to make ourselves, what sorts of constructions we are going to erect in our best endeavours. Famously, the existentialists said that dignity and creativity and indeed love – affection for our fellow human beings – are things worth pursuing in their own right, and by pursuing them we make ourselves, according to our individual capacities. This I think is where the deep autonomy of the human position has its greatest value. This is re-asserted – rediscovered, perhaps – in the 18th century Enlightenment. I see Western history as being one with a very long intermission between the great conversation of classical antiquity [to the 18th century] – from Plato and Aristotle, right on to late stoicism, which came to an end with the triumph of Christianity over the European mind, and through the process of reformation and scientific revolution in the 17th century, we arrive at this great insight of the 18th century, which is that it’s wrong to think there’s a one-size-fits-all story. We must recognise diversity, and in particular we must allow the autonomy and individuality of the person, with his or her rights, entitlements and responsibilities, to be the determiner of how they are to live."

"One is that it is way ahead of its time in its understanding of the human nature of traditional religion, and on the place of religion in society. Another reason, which has nothing particularly to do with religion, is that it’s intelligible, unlike Spinoza’s Ethics, which you really need to have studied quite a lot of philosophy to understand. The Ethics is the work of Spinoza’s that people try to read, but most of them get very little out of it. His Tractatus, by contrast, is intelligible to everybody. It doesn’t require any philosophical background, and gives you many of the main themes of Spinoza’s thought. I suppose the most famous ideas expounded in the Ethics is that God is equivalent to nature, in some sense, and so should not be thought of as a personal being. God is certainly not like us: he doesn’t have emotions and wishes in the normal sense. So that’s one thing. But the first task Spinoza set himself in the Tractatus is to undermine the traditional notion of the Bible as the inerrant word of God. (In fact, the Tractatus is arguably the first serious work of biblical criticism.) “The first task Spinoza set himself in the Tractatus is to undermine the traditional notion of the Bible as the inerrant word of God.” He takes the five so-called books of Moses and shows why they probably aren’t by a single person, and certainly not by Moses. As he goes through the various books of the Old Testament, what he’s out to establish is that these writings reflect human ideas, and that they are the ideas of particular people expressed at a particular place and a particular time. Most educated people accept that now, but it was a horrifying idea to the religious establishment in Spinoza’s time. No, and certainly not the Jews. Spinoza was Jewish by birth, though he was famously excommunicated by his synagogue, and one of the things he sets out to do in the book—and does, I think, very well—is attack the idea that the Jews were the chosen people, or more beloved by God than anybody else. Yes. He was generally thought of as an atheist, although he certainly wouldn’t have described himself as one. He thought he was just trying to show what God was really like, and in fact the German poet Novalis called him a “God-intoxicated man,” with some justice, because Spinoza never stops talking about God. Well, you can’t be both God-intoxicated and an atheist. “Whether or not you think he was an atheist or a theist, he was certainly a secularist.” But you can, of course, be both God-intoxicated and yet unimpressed by traditional Judaism. Spinoza thought that the rules by which Jews lived, as derived from the bible, merely reflected the circumstances of the early state of Israel, and because Israel no longer existed, and times had moved on, he thought these rules had become irrelevant. The dietary laws and so forth that bound the religious community of his time, and which continue to bind the orthodox, were all based, he felt, on a misunderstanding. It was a mistake to suppose that God wanted you to go on living like that even today. Yes. Interestingly, he thought that circumcision was actually key to the survival of the Jews. It was a way in which they marked themselves out and bound themselves together. This was shocking at the time. Another thing that people found shocking was Spinoza’s notion of religious toleration and of the separation (for the most part) between church and state. Whether or not you think he was an atheist or a theist, he was certainly a secularist. He thought that religion had no part to play in politics. He was, by the way, writing in one of the most secular states at the time, where there was most religious freedom: Holland. He thinks of God as identical with nature. This is a slight simplification of what he said, but it will do for now. This is a radical reinterpretation of the idea of God, but on the other hand Spinoza thinks that there is a supreme being who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent—which are the traditional attributes of God. Because he does not think of God as a personal being, however, morality ends up being secularised. If God is not like a person, then we should not think of him as having desires in the ordinary sense, or as issuing commands, so we have to think of the relation between God and morality in a new way. Spinoza’s way is to say that God’s law is justice, charity and the love of one’s neighbour. If you let those things govern your life, then you are in fact following God’s law. That’s all it takes to be godly. “If God is not like a person, then we should not think of him as having desires in the ordinary sense, or as issuing commands” One thing that follows from that, of course, is that you can live a godly life while being an atheist. You might just want to do those things anyway, even if you think there is no God. Just so long as you are living a just and loving life, that’s the important thing about being godly. And I think it’s pretty plain that educated, moral, people today who are not religious would say, yes, that’s roughly what I think: if you want to talk about “God’s will”, you can say that living a moral life and doing God’s will come to the same thing. So Spinoza was a very modern thinker, a long, way ahead of his time. Spinoza certainly had an unusual conception of freedom. To be free, for him, is to understand the ways in which you are determined. That is one of the hardest things to understand in Spinoza."