Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah
Ian Buruma, Yale University Press, £16.99

IT has been observed that Baruch Spinoza does not rate very highly in the popular pantheon of world philosophers and yet, as much as many of his better-known analytical sages, along with Descartes his contemporary, he can be seen to fulfil Marx’s necessary demand that more than interpreting the world, philosophers should strive to change it. 

Both were born in the 17th century “Dutch Golden Age,” when Amsterdam became the city at the centre of world trade, science and culture, unlike the rest of Europe where the straightjacket of religious control was imposed by Catholic and various Protestant sects. Indeed, this “city of refuge for Jews, Huguenots, Quakers and other victims of persecution was known as Vrijstad, meaning Freetown.”

These two revolutionary thinkers introduced the necessary intellectual context for the scientific Enlightenment breakthroughs of Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others, freeing nature — the universe — from its prime-mover, God. 

Where Descartes, despite his renowned “cogito, ergo sum,” I think therefore I am, remained a devout and orthodox Catholic, Spinoza, an excommunicated Jew, overthrew the anthropocentric view of humanity as some kind of special, privileged creature, instead locating humanity firmly as a part of nature. 

Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy called Spinoza “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers” and although Buruma’s subtitle to this short biography, “Freedom’s Messiah,” may appear too adulatory, there is no doubt that the influence of this remarkable, unassuming man spread widely throughout his short 44-year life, despite having chosen to have only one work, Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, published under his own name. 

This caution was due to his recognition that his books covering metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, and science would dangerously incense the religious Establishment, and he arranged for his major work, Ethics, to be published posthumously.

Having established the social context in which Spinoza worked (he was a skilled lens grinder) and wrote, Buruma turns to an examination of the nature of his philosophic understanding of humanity. 

At the centre was his belief that the God he believed in was Nature. His particular form of Pantheism resulted in his being seen, not only by the Jewish community that had disowned him but also by the Christians of various types, as an atheist, the most dangerous anathema.

Buruma explains that Spinoza saw Nature/God as a “self-creating, infinite, self-perpetuating force.” Therefore, there could be no transcendent God existing outside Nature. This deeply subversive view meant that the concepts good and evil were simply human notions. Unsurprisingly Spinoza warns: “I would ask you urgently to be very careful about communicating these things to others.”

It may be that the Western world today is much less concerned about the nature of God or even whether there is a benevolent deity. Notably however, Marx and Engels recognised Spinoza very much as one of the forerunners of historical materialism. 

Buruma’s examination of Spinoza’s ideas on politics and human psychology demonstrates that his philosophy was always designed not simply to explain but to help people, through the power of reasoning, to lead better and happier lives.

In his final work, the Political Treatise, Spinoza assesses the pros and cons of monarchy (the worst of all systems), aristocracy and democracy, as far as this last could be understood in the 17th century. He was clearly no idealist or believer in utopias, maintaining that governments not based on the common interest will collapse.

Spinoza’s views that land and properties should be publicly owned and countries should be defended by unpaid citizen militias, Buruma notes, “would still be considered extremely radical in liberal democracies today.”

There can be few better short introductions to the life of a philosopher who saw philosophy as being anything but the devising of abstract schemes for the ideal society but, like Marx, worked to help society to reject illusion and understand the realities of the human condition.