SPINOZA

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Spinoza was born in Amsterdam on 24th November, 1632. His name was Baruch, which he later Latinised to Benedictus (both mean ‘blessed by God’). The surname was variously spelled ‘Espinoza’, ‘Despinoza’, or ‘d’Espinoza’, and Spinoza himself used the form ‘de Spinoza’. His parents were Portuguese Jews, who fled to the relatively liberal Netherlands, in order to escape religious and racial persecution.

His mother tongue was Portuguese, but he rapidly became fluent in Dutch and Hebrew. He learned Latin only relatively late in life. His education was Jewish, and he became an expert in Talmudic scholarship and theology. One of his claims to fame (or infamy) was as one of the first people to apply modern methods of textual criticism to sacred texts. He also wrote a Hebrew grammar. It seems likely that his early education exposed him to some quite radical and heterodox opinions from within the Jewish tradition.

Instead of continuing his studies in preparation for the rabbinate, he left school (probably at the age of about 14), and entered his father’s merchant business, and continued to run it with his brother after his father’s death in 1654, when he was 22.

It was probably around this time that he decided to learn Latin, and entered a school run by a medical doctor called Franciscus Van den Enden. Van den Enden was not merely interested in modern scientific developments, but was also notorious as an ‘atheist’ (probably meaning that he had highly unorthodox religious views, rather than that he flatly denied the existence of God). At any rate, Spinoza became a member of a circle of intellectuals, who combined a deep respect for Descartes and modern science, with a reputation for heresy and atheism. They shared many of the ideas which were later given expression in Spinoza’s philosophy. In 1656, he was formally expelled from the Jewish community.

Soon after his father’s death, the family business collapsed, and Spinoza took up the profession of lens grinder and maker of optical instruments, for which he acquired a high international reputation. One of his unpublished works was a treatise on optics.

It was during the last years of the decade that he wrote his earliest works, the Treatise on the Correction of the Understanding (uncompleted), which is mainly about philosophical method; and the unpublished Short Treatise on God, on Man, and his Wellbeing, which seems to have been a parting gift for his friends in Amsterdam. In 1661 he moved to Rhijnsburg, and then in 1663 he settled down in a village near the Hague.

He put a lot of effort into the close study of Descartes’ philosophy, and re-wrote the first two books of the Principles of Philosophy using the geometrical method. These were published under his own name, together with a commentary (still from a largely Cartesian standpoint) called Metaphysical Thoughts, in 1663. He was perhaps simultaneously working on his own Ethics, which was probably finished by 1665. He decided not to publish it, because it would be difficult to keep its authorship secret. Instead he set to work on the Theologico-Political Treatise, which was (among other things) a plea for freedom of thought and expression. This work was published anonymously and with a false imprint in 1670. It caused an uproar throughout Europe, and was almost immediately condemned (along with Hobbes’s Leviathan).

In 1672, The Netherlands were invaded by the French and the Germans, and Spinoza’s friend and political protector, Jan de Witt was assassinated. The political regime became much more oppressive, and Spinoza felt in great danger for the rest of his life. In 1674, his mentor Van den Enden was sentenced to death and executed in Paris (ostensibly on political grounds, but probably as much for his theology).

Spinoza suffered from failing health, probably from glass dust in his lungs, and he died on 23rd February 1677, at the age of 44. The same year, his friends had most of his unpublished works (including the Ethics) printed, but they were officially banned in 1678.

The following are easily available:

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition (s.v. Spinoza)
Edwin Curley, A Spinoza Reader (University of Princeton Press, 1994), ix–xxxiv. This includes a useful bibliography on the biography of Spinoza.
W.N.A. Klever, ‘Spinoza’s Life and Works’, in D. Garrett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza (Cambridge, 1996), 1–60.

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