#spinoza

(after Spinoza's God)

Spinoza was the "God-drunk man"

I have read the Ethics. I have read the Theological-Political Treatise. Spinoza wasn't subtle about this. "Deus sive Natura" is not a cryptic clue requiring a decoder ring.

For the uninitiated, here's a meme crash course in Spinoza:

...if that's your philosophy then you are pantheist or panentheist and not an atheist.

First: Admiration ≠ Adoption

Admiring a thinker, Anon, does not mean filing the paperwork to join their metaphysical framework.

I also admire Maimonides, but I'm not a theistic medieval Aristotelian.

I think CS Lewis' prose and rhetoric are exceptional, but am not myself a British Christian apologist.

I admire Bishop John Shelby Spong, but I have no plans to become an Episcopalian hero of Christian heterodoxy.

I can appreciate the historical analysis of Marx without (like Marx) being a Marxist.

I can admire Newton’s Principia without believing that alchemy is the key to the universe.

Appreciation for a rigorous mind is not a contractual obligation to adopt all their conclusions.

But imagine the model of intellectual engagement would produce this comment.

Does Anon believe that admiring someone means endorsing their system wholesale? If you say Plato was brilliant, you must secretly believe in the Forms? If you quote Aquinas favorably, you owe the Church a tithe?

It's a feature of the moment in which we live that people want to assume beliefs come in sealed packages - you're either all-in or you're the opposition.

Engaging seriously with a thinker whose views you don't share is not a contradiction.

I have serious problems with Judith Butler and Edward Said. I still urge people to read them.

You can't engage with what you haven't read. You can't understand (let alone criticize) what you haven't read!

So: I've read Spinoza, I admire Spinoza, and it does not logically follow that I share all of Spinoza's views.

Second: There's less difference between my Atheism and Spinoza's Pantheism than you think

Rejection of Traditional Theism

Spinoza rejects a personal, sapient God - a being with a will, a beard, or an interest in your Friday night plans.

Naturalism

Spinoza leans heavily into the laws of physics and the assertion that there is no supernatural realm - everything is contained within the natural universe.

Functional Equivalence

Spinoza was famously accused of being an atheist in disguise - and from my atheist perspective, there's no functional difference between my atheism and Spinoza's pantheism.

In traditional theism, God is a Ruler who makes decrees. God intervenes, God judges, and God breaks the laws of physics to answer a prayer. God does things.

Spinoza's God is a Geometry enthusiast who can't make a triangle's angles sum to anything but 180°. Spinoza's God doesn't choose, doesn't intervene, and doesn't perform miracles. Spinoza's God is the necessary unfolding of natural law.

For the atheist, a God who lacks the freedom to do anything anything outside of mathematical law is just...physics and math. It's the universe, called by a more poetic name.

You can, if you like, take the word "God" out of the Ethics and replace it with "The Universe" without changing a single logical conclusion.

[Look at the memes up top again. That's Spinoza's point: God = Universe.]

Spinoza's God is immanent, not transcendent.

Spinoza's worldview has no throne and no heaven. Spinoza's God has no will and does not perform miracles. If it's a theism at all, it's a theism which has removed all supernatural elements, leaving behind the natural world.

Spinoza describes a God that an atheist can actually believe in because it's a God that doesn't require faith, only observation.

"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind"

"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem-the most important of all human problems." -Albert Einstein

About the "God-Drunk Man" thing:

Spinoza was the "God-drunk man"

I would argue that he wasn't.

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) famously described Spinoza as "der Gottvertrunkene Mann" (the God-intoxicated man) more than a century after Spinoza's death, and many have chosen since then to see Spinoza as a mystic, imagining him being intoxicated by a personal God as he davened.

But Novalis' description is Romantic-era branding by a poet - and it says a great deal more about the German Romantics than it says about Spinoza. The Romantics were looking for a philosophy that found divinity in nature to counter the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment, and they embraced Spinoza as their patron saint by reinterpreting his rigorous logic as a form of mystical passion.

Maybe Novalis might have argued that Spinoza was so focused on the infinite reality of God that he saw nothing else as truly real. In Spinoza's philosophy, everything that exists, from a tree to a thought, is merely an expression or a "mode" of God. In that sense, Spinoza's God certainly permeated every part of his philosophy.

But Spinoza was known for being calm, rational, and intellectually disciplined. His primary work, Ethics, is written in a dry, geometric style that prioritizes logical deduction over emotional or mystical fervor - and "intoxicated" implies a loss of reason or a mystical haze...which is the exact opposite of what Spinoza practiced.

Spinoza's God was entirely impersonal, lacking will, emotions, or the ability to love humans. Calling someone "intoxicated" by a God like that that is essentially synonymous with saying he was intoxicated with the natural world.

Spinoza wasn't drunk on the Who, but on the How. He was intoxicated by the necessity of the universe and the way every effect follows its cause with the relentless precision of a geometric proof.

Awe Without Messy Supernatural Baggage

To love God, in Spinoza's view, is to study science, mathematics, and logic. The more you understand how a star works, the more you know God. This reframes "religion" as curiosity.

An atheist can find this reframe enormously appealing because it allows for a sense of awe and spirituality without having to abandon reason or embrace superstition - without the intellectual baggage and poor metaphors of a sapient creator deity.

Atheism: The universe is all there is, and it is an indifferent fact.

Spinoza: The universe is all there is, and it is a sublime poem!

Atheism: The universe is a cold, dark room.

Spinoza: The universe is a cold, dark room, but look at how perfectly the floorboards are joined!

The facts remain the same, but the perspective changes.

If calling the sum total of natural laws "God" makes the vast indifference of the cosmos feel like sublimity, that's a framing upgrade, not a theological surrender.

Spinoza's pantheism and my atheism are indistinguishable...except in terms of vocabulary.