Spinoza

Starred review from December 15, 2023
A fresh biography of one of the leading lights of the Enlightenment, whose views on rational thinking and secularization still resonate. In this illuminating exploration of the life and work of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Dutch writer and historian Buruma fashions a well-articulated argument for revisiting the seminal philosopher's works on ethics, politics, and religion. Spinoza was born into a devout Sephardic family in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age, when many religions were tolerated but the dominant views were Calvinist. Early on, he enthusiastically imbibed the freethinking ideas in the city, learned Latin, communed with Mennonite friends who were reading Descartes, and espoused radical ideas about the nature of God. In 1656, the synagogue issued a herem, or ban, against him, essentially ostracizing him from the Jewish faith. Reliant upon his wealthy friends, he worked as a teacher and lens grinder in Rijnsburg, a village outside Leiden. Buruma looks closely at Spinoza's central radical notion of God. "What he had done was something very few of his contemporaries could follow, for he had severed God from any transcendence," writes the author. "Since God is self-causing, infinite, and eternal, God cannot by definition stand outside the world, any more than nature can. The entire universe is God." Spinoza was a strong supporter of democracy, an "enemy of dogma," and a believer in universal rationalism, above all else, serving as the inspiration for Enlightened philosophers in the next centuries. Cautious at a time of political and religious instability, he barred publication of his significant text Ethics and other works until after his death. Buruma also examines how, despite their divergent views, people from the English Romantics to Marx and Einstein later claimed to be Spinozists, and why his views on freedom of thought are still important. An elegant, relevant biography of a vital thinker.

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March 25, 2024
The life and thought of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) can prove instructive for “our own censorious time of dangerous political polarization,” according to this admiring biography from bestseller Buruma (The Collaborators). Born into a Portuguese Jewish merchant family in Amsterdam, Spinoza developed a sense of “personal caution”; he was “cagey” about sharing ideas with those he didn’t trust and halted translations of some of his potentially inflammatory works from Latin into Dutch. His provocative notions, including his belief that god and nature were inseparable and his dismissal of “religious superstitions that worked on people’s hopes and fears,” threatened the religious and secular authorities of his time, and contributed to his formal expulsion from the city’s Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community in 1656. Though Spinoza “was no revolutionary,” Buruma contends that he was committed to a revolutionary mode of “reason and freedom of thought” to which all, regardless of religion or culture, were entitled. Overviewing the political and religious landscape of Spinoza’s lifetime, Buruma convincingly frames the philosopher’s dedication to reason as an exemplar for an America constricted by a “disregard for... discernible reality” and by “secular ideologies which insist... on ideological conformity” in the same way as the church did in Spinoza’s. It’s an inspiring reassessment of the enduring relevance of a trailblazing thinker.