God’s decrees and commandments, and consequently God’s providence, are in truth nothing but Nature’s order
Spinoza laid the foundations not only for the modern self, but also for the modern conception of the
universe as well.
The philosophical identification of God and nature—the thesis of pure immanence—laid down a pattern of naturalistic explanation that would inspire many of the greatest thinkers of modernity
the universe, he claims, is a single substance, unique, infinite, and absolutely necessary. It is an order without alternative, without contingency or division, and its existence is nothing less than eternal
the birth of the secular age.
The highest ideal of the Treatise is libertas philosophandi, the freedom to philosophize.
Although civil religion is designed to fashion better citizens, a government “that attempts to control men’s minds is regarded as tyrannical,
A perfect divinity does not perform miracles but is identical with the perfection of its creation. To insist on miracles merely betrays one’s failure to grasp the structure of reality: “miracles and ignorance are the same.”
In his cosmos, there is no personal redeemer to whom we might appeal in our distress, and there is no room for a higher creator who dwells outside of nature. Indeed, such a monistic vision allows little room for the traditional conception of God at all. For nature is all that there is; thought and extension are merely its attributes.
Nature is infinite and acts with thoroughgoing necessity, but it is utterly indifferent to our individual cares and aspirations. Spinozism, in other words, does not divinize nature, it naturalizes the divine.
Kant recoiled from naturalistic monism, and cleaved instead to the idea of freedom as a “miracle in the phenomenal world.”
this metaphysical principle amounts to a kind of “secular theology.” The assumption that the natural order is perfect and its laws necessarily inviolable across all possible variations of space and time does not actually surrender but instead secularizes the idea of divine perfection
The Bible, Spinoza argued, is “faulty, mutilated, adulterated, and inconsistent.” Much of the Treatise consists of a deliberate and merciless dismantling of its miraculous reports and, most of all, its moral codes
For the entirety of this “mutilated” text, in Spinoza’s view, contains little more than one lesson that is truly of value: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus, 19:18) and “He who loves his neighbor has satisfied every claim of the law.” (Romans 13:8). But the final blow to the authority of the text is that even this lesson can be learned in other ways.
the best form of government, according to Spinoza, is one that permits the individual to exercise his own rational will. Obedience to laws simply because they are imposed is analogous to the irrational condition that Spinoza described in the Ethics as enslavement to the passions. In both cases one is merely responsive to external commands
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