Spinoza : Benedict de (1632-77), Dutch rationalist who formulated the metaphysical systems of Western philosophy.
... 3. Spinoza (1632-77 C.E.) The great rationalist movement that started off with Descartes was followed by two other famous philosophers who succeeded him: Spinoza and Leibniz. Descartes had already established that apart from the idea of God, and existence of God there is another realm where doubt is not possible and that is the field of mathematics. So by the time that Spinoza came into... Argument. Anselm's argument was criticised by some of his contemporaries, and most of the great modern philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant have also put forward theistic arguments. Spinoza formulated the Ontological Argument within the system of his own metaphysics. After Kant had apparently refuted the ontological argument, Hegel (1770-1831 C. E.) reestablished it within the framework... exists in itself. So since God is substance and since according to his definition substance is that which exists in itself and can be conceived through itself, God exists. To sum up then, "for Spinoza, God or Substance is the all-inclusive Whole within which fall the parallel differentiations of thought and extensions as its corresponding aspect," 5 says Galloway in his book titled, The Philosophy ...
... e de la foi catholique (Vol. 3). Teilhard 8 speaks out his mind to his friend: "1. You are in the wrong in scorning the pantheism of the poets. This pantheism is the mysticism of which Spinoza and Hegel have been the theologians. It represents a psychological force, and it contains a considerable lived truth: it is the living pantheism. You are acting like a man who, in Christianity, 'disdains... different levels? - You contrast Christian morality with the 8. Lettres Intimes..., pp. 89-90: "1° Vous avez tort tie mepriser le pantheisme des poetes. Ce pantheismela est la mystique dont Spinoza et Hegel ont ete les Theologiens. Il represente une force psychologique, et il contient une verite vecue considerable: il est le pantheisme vivant. Vous faites comme un horn me qui, dans le Christianisme... dit, je le repete, sans prejudice du profond interet que m'a cause votre article. Mais, je vous enprie, ne refutez pas seulement! assimilez, construisez!" Page 310 morality of Spinoza by saying that the former tells us only that we must become Tike unto God'. I don't accept the distinction. For the Christian, to be summorphos Christo is to participate, under a similarity of behaviour ...
... And this receives a rather striking confirmation in the case of the thinker who comes after Descartes in the philosophical succession — Spinoza. Spinoza, like Descartes, infers from the idea of God, as the source and sum of all perfection, his existence. But for Spinoza, God, or Substance, is the infinite and all-inclusive Whole, within which fall the parallel differentiations of thought and extension... becomes not only superfluous but absurd. To say the essence of God involves his existence is quite true, if we grant Spinoza's presuppositions; but these in effect prejudge the whole question. So far as Spinoza is concerned the important point is not his proof of the existence of God, for this is purely verbal, but the validity of the philosophical conceptions on which his system is based. The same dependence... Spinoza's proof, I shall briefly refer to it here. Leibniz's argument proceeds on a distinction which he draws in his philosophy between the possible and the actual, the essence and the existence. With Spinoza, on the other hand, all that is possible is actual. Leibniz argues: "If there is a reality in essences or possibilities, or rather in eternal truths, this reality must needs be founded in something ...
... Christian "immanence" which always accompanied the concept of transcendence'. As a Teilhardian you will never be a mere "immanentist" denying God's transcendence as the European pantheist à la Spinoza would, but most certainly you will be a pantheist in the Indian sense, though in a modern evolutionary framework as Sri Aurobindo is. When you write that "Teilhard's basic ideas are now accepted... "of bringing out what one might call the Christian soul of pantheism or the pantheist aspect of Christianity". 36 We shall go to the heart of the matter if we glance at Teilhard's attitude to Spinoza, the arch-pantheist in Catholic eyes, the greatest religio-philosophical danger in European thought to Christianity. Wanting to avoid for the "consummated Christ" of the Pleroma at the world's end... there is room for an Incarnation that culminates in the building up of an organic whole, in which physical union with God is at different levels? You contrast Christian morality with the morality of Spinoza by saying that the former tells us only that we must become 'like unto God'. I don't accept the distinction. For the Christian, to be summorphos Christo is to participate, under a similarity of ...
... constitute the whole of reality. There is nothing beyond the cosmos for Spinoza but the cosmos is God, and Spinoza compares his feeling of it to St, Paul's spiritual sense when he told the Athenians: "In Him we live and move and have our being." Even if no recognisable Transcendent is granted by Spinozism, the pantheist in Spinoza takes at the same time the universe as God and God as the universe without... the fount of all true scientific quest for some all-synthesising, all-harmonising, all-explaining "unified theory". Here he is nearer than Hawking to the philosopher Spinoza. There seems to be something cold-blooded about Hawking. Spinoza is even more suffused than Einstein with the cosmic religious emotion. In fact he has a mystic in him and that is why he was Page 172 called "God- ...
... instance, upon this same principle that such a composite 'picture' as Spinoza's Ethics is built up? If so, we could talk, in an exact sense, about 'metaphysical picture'." 15 But why single out Spinoza alone? A perceptive investigation of the process of philosophical inquiry is bound to reveal to us the interesting fact that even in this austere domain of abstract thought and in spite of the apparently... in setting out upon his quest after knowledge, is confronted at each step with the searching query: "How to be sure that the knowledge that I have so far gained is in fact true knowledge?" And, as Spinoza recommended in his De Intellectus Emendatione, before all things means must be devised for the improvement and clarification of the faculty of intellectus. For one must be careful about the distinction... kind of knowledge is hearsay knowledge, the second sort comes from vague experience; the third type is that gained through the faculty of ratio, by a process of ratiocination; but, according to Spinoza, the fourth and the highest form of knowledge is that received in intellectus or direct perception and the great philosopher admits ruefully: "The things which I have been able to know by this, ...
... and the world-intelligence, a pre-established harmony without which neither the search for truth nor the divining of truth can have sufficient explanation. Einstein is a Spinozist, affirming with Spinoza that the ultimate reality is a universal Substance with the dual aspect of mind and matter. He also calls himself a pantheist, with - in his own words - "the firm belief, which is bound up with deep... mystical insight would lay bare may not be Page 75 mathematical structure; but that does not invalidate it as knowledge, as discovery of truth, as the formulation of what is. Spinoza himself does not seem to have depreciated mystical insight as a gateway to knowledge. Einstein's Spinozism is therefore somewhat faulty and narrow. Nor is Spinozism an entirely satisfying philosophy... impersonal divinity and does not account for the individual human soul and its supporting truth in a Super- person who is more than the universal existence He has emanated. Yes, the metaphysics of Spinoza, for all its sweep and grandeur, does not go far or high enough. But the general theoretical method of Einstein's physics unequivocally suggests that if Spinozism is to be criticised the criticism ...
... experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics. Shaw is... things of the surface; even his Life-Force is only a thing of the surface or, at the most, just under the surface. The right of Plato [to be considered a mystic] is regarded as beyond question; Spinoza with his "amor intellectualis Dei" is, outside the Catholic Church, also hailed as such; and even Kant I have found looked upon in the same light. In our own day it is common, I believe, to refer to... Regarded, looked upon by whom? It was not so in my time at least in Europe. Plato was never called a mystic then; Hegel was regarded as a transcendentalist but no mystic; if you had called Kant or Spinoza mystics people would have stared. To believe in the Absolute or something metaphysical or supraphysical does not make one a mystic philosopher, nor does belief in the élan vital or a dry and geometric ...
... arbitrary in the extreme. Even to label the pantheist philosopher Spinoza a metaphysical dreamer would be an error: what he termed "amor intellectualis Dei" was for him a powerful intuitive act and a part of living experience which have earned for him the reputation of having been "God-intoxi- Page 16 cated". Actually, Spinoza 4 claimed his system to be a logical working out of St. Paul's ...
... Medieval Indian Philosophy reached its climax in him…It is a pity that nobody came forward to develop his philosophy, else he too would have been established as a founder of modern philosophy like Spinoza and Berkeley.” We should ponder whether such a western approach is at all proper to look into the work. It is well known that Jnaneshwar in Jnaneshwari had never set himself to deal with any philosophy... details and nowhere an attempt was made to bring out any doctrinal principle for its own sake, as was done by Shankara. In fact one wonders whether Jnaneshwar himself would have relished being a Spinoza or a Berkeley, nor even a Plato. Therefore such a discussion in the context of his phenomenological-experiential attainments will be our misplaced enthusiasm to call him a philosopher. It is through ...
... himself a Spinozist, 63 one to whom the pantheos of Spinoza — the rational Intelligence immanent in the world — is the God science must recognize. Does Mr. Alvares get the hang of such a statement? Einstein was not a practising philosopher, but Spinoza was, and the foundational implication of Spinozism is a single infinite ...
... it has not come up to the level of genuine integral spirituality. Many philosophers must have had easily and naturally some realisation of this kind. The intuition of infinity in. the philosopher Spinoza and in the scientist Einstein is of the same quality and status – impersonal, abstract, a mathematical infinitude, an x as it were. The scientist has reached the acme of his specific faculty as a result... surpass the boundary of the brain and the intellect. The true spirituality lies in exceeding this limit – in piercing through the six centres, as the Tantras would say. The amor intellectualis Dei of Spinoza may signify the theism of the scientist, but it has not reached the status of spirituality. We do not know how many have given due regard to this remarkable fact that the rational mind of modern ...
... sadness always does bring. It is the reason why I object to the gospel of sorrow and to any sadhana which makes sorrow one of its main planks ( abhimāna , revolt, viraha ). For sorrow is not, as Spinoza pointed out, a passage to a greater perfection, a way to Siddhi; it cannot be, for it confuses and weakens and distracts the mind, depresses the vital force, darkens the spirit. A relapse from joy ...
... its own types of perfection and its own absolutes. What intrusion of Overmind or Supermind could produce philosophies more perfect in themselves than the systems of Shankara or Plato or Plotinus or Spinoza or Hegel, poetry superior to Homer's, Shakespeare's, Dante's or Valmiki's, music more superb than the music of Beethoven or Bach, sculpture greater than the statues of Phidias and Michael Angelo, ...
... result sadness always does bring. It is the reason why I object to the gospel of sorrow and to any sadhana which makes sorrow one of its main planks ( abhimān , revolt, viraha ). For sorrow is not, as Spinoza pointed out, a passage to a greater perfection, a way to siddhi; it cannot be, for it confuses and weakens and distracts the mind, depresses the vital force, darkens the spirit. A relapse from joy ...
... experience. Merely to have metaphysical notions about the Infinite and Godhead and underlying or overshadowing forces does not make a man a mystic. One would never think of applying such a term to Spinoza, Kant or Hegel: even Plato does not fit into the term, though Pythagoras has a good claim to it. Hegel and other transcendental or idealistic philosophers were great intellects, not mystics."! Yes ...
... inclined to make his God completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God's purpose. Lloyd Morgan is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of 'emergence' in the evolutionary process, one suspects that changes occur according to rule, and there is no spontaneity. According to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ...
... apostate Jews who had converted to Protestantism or Catholicism, and who were baptized; and there were the atheist Jews, who no longer believed in a God of any kind, or maybe in the abstract God of Spinoza or of the Enlightenment’s deism. Another dividing line among the Jews ran between the “assimilationists” and the separatists, the latter being mostly orthodox, and was caused by differences in attitude ...
... additive activity but by an inwardly perceptive comprehension of the universal in things. It is such a comprehension, an intimate light of knowledge, that in connection with the highest religious turn Spinoza designates "amor intellectualis Dei" - "the intellectual love of God" - the mind's ardent seizure of the underlying unifying Reality by a direct intuition which is at bottom the One knowing the One ...
... no linguistic analysis can annul our experience of self. We need ideas which depart more radically from those of the physical sciences; something perhaps akin to the thought of philosophers such as Spinoza and Whitehead, who have suggested that even non-living entities should not be denied qualities related to the self-awareness and will which we know, in much more highly evolved forms, in ourselves ...
... lustre perhaps ultimately led to this state for himself. In the cosmic working the executive aspect is that of the dynamic Nature or Prakriti rather than of the quiescent Being, Purusha. Spinoza defined the ultimate reality God as substance and also as Nature-begetting, natura naturans, and looked upon the universe as Nature-begotten, natura naturata, which has a certain validity not ...
... inclined to make his God completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God's purpose. Lloyd Morgan is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of 'emergence' in the evolutionary process, one suspects that changes occur according to rule, and there is no spontaneity. C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936) ...
... to be looking for something else. The contemporary man may resolve to explore. He may turn to the dialogues of Plato, learn and endure the Cartesian doubt, and marvel at the magnificence of Spinoza and Leibnitz. He may witness the conflict between Galileo and God, sharpen his intellect on the whetstone of materialism, pursue zealously the dispassionate inquiries of science, probe the 'fourth' ...
... conceive of his God as completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God's purpose. Lloyd Morgan, is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of 'emergence' in the evolutionary process, it appears that changes occur according to rule, and Page 11 there is no spontaneity. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ...
... In the Medieval history of Europe, we find St. Thomas Aquinas proving existence of God by means of what is called the Ontological Argument. Three greatest philosophers of modern Europe, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz formulated their own Ontological Arguments in the context of their own systems of philosophy. Along with the Ontological Argument, the Cosmological Argument and Teleological Argument have ...
... been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very Occidental and up-to-date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but as our typical heroes ...
... reality was the central theme of his poetic creation: only and naturally he viewed it in a special way and endowed it with a special grace. We know of another God-intoxicated man, the Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who saw things sub specie aeternitatis, under the figure or mode of eternity. Well, Tagore can be said to see things, in their essential spiritual reality, under the figure or mode of beauty. Keats ...
... and Perse's Amers, 78; symbolism of the sea, 78 Songs to Myrtilla, 38ff, 68,71, 72 Sophocles, 21 Sorokin, Pitrim A., 751 Spiegelberg, Frederic, 17,20,751 Spinoza, 418 Srinivasachariar, Mandayam, 375ff, 391, 405,525 Standard-Bearer, The, 527 St. Paul, 445 Statesman, The, 222-23, 237, 247 Strachey, Lytton, 177,241 ...
... contribution of the Jews towards the world's progress in every branch is remarkable." Indeed the Jewish race has produced Page 94 not only prophets like Elijah or philosophers like Spinoza (1632-77), but also the greatest of our modern scientists, Albert Einstein (1879-1955), born one year after Mirra. Besides, my acquaintances of that race are all people of refinement. Like the ...
... been the supreme endeavour of her greatest spirits, are not sane, not virile. This, one may be allowed to say, is a very occidental and up to date idea of spirituality. Homer, Shakespeare, Raphael, Spinoza, Kant, Charlemagne, Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mussolini, these, shall we suggest, are to figure henceforth not only as great poets and artists or heroes of thought and action, but as our typical heroes ...
... pages. But he denies that this familiarity and this subtlety are any proof of great mental capacity—"necessarily", he adds, I suppose in order to escape the charge of having suggested that Plato, Spinoza or Berkeley did not show a great mental capacity. Perhaps it is not "necessarily" such a proof; but it does show in one great order of questions, in one large and especially difficult range of the ...
... professions which in some regions they almost monopolized; but one found them also as goldsmiths, glass blowers, and as producers of bronze and iron.” Paul of Tarsus was a tent maker, and Baruch Spinoza polished lenses for a living. “Some were simple labourers, others lived from commerce or the liberal arts. Still, as the historian J. Juster rightly underlines, ‘no pagan author has typified them as ...
... People to whom all “the nations” were to bow, and whose reign over the Earth would be the sign for the Last Judgment. Nor should it be forgotten that Judaism had its own Galileo in the person of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), one of the great philosophers. “On 27 July 1656, the elders of the Amsterdam synagogue made the following cherem , or damnation, or fatwa, concerning his work: ‘With the judgment of the ...
... object to the gospel of sorrow and to any sadhana which makes sorrow one of its main planks (abhim ā na [hurt love], revolt, viraha [separation]) Page 194 For sorrow is not, as Spinoza pointed out, a passage to a greater perfection, a way to siddhi; it cannot be, for it confuses and weakens and distracts the mind, depresses the vital force, darkens the spirit. A relapse from joy ...
... suggest the wisdom of God if some philosophers of the Middle Ages are to be believed. For surely in anticipation of the need of specs God created the bridge of the human nose! The pantheist thinker Spinoza may have been particularly struck with this wisdom, for he was by profession a grinder of lenses for spectacles and even had a name whose last half (...noza) may serve to suggest to us what a "Nosey ...
... marshalled thought one will be aware of the inner restructuring with greater clarity, but even otherwise invisible hands will go on raising up in your depths a more Aurobindonian You. For here is not a Spinoza or Hegel challenging you to trace the edifice of his speculative system: here is God's grace seeking to impress on the deepest part of your mind the shape of the Page 191 cosmic vision ...
... formula is tabooed by him: Einstein has no proper philosophical grasp of tran- scendence and is evidently repelled by the too anthropomorphic conceptions current in the popular creeds. But a God a la Spinoza, a Pantheos, is in his view a prerequisite of science. For science is to him the discovery of the order, the system, the logic, the reason embodied in phenomena: it is the finding of the mathematical ...
... not ... a supracosmic, arbitrary, personal Deity himself altogether uninvolved in the fall who has imposed evil and suffering on creatures made capriciously by his fiat" [pp. 65-66]. I wonder why Spinoza did not arrive at a convincing explanation of the problem of evil and misery. The European type of monism is usually pantheistic and weaves the universe and the Divine so intimately together that ...
... Notes and References 1. "From my reading of Plotinus, it would seem that Monchanin errs (Mother India, December 1974, p. 924) when drawing a distinction between the systems of Plotinus and Spinoza as to the coincidence of the points of departure and arrival in the Eternal, the One. In Plotinus, the original emanation of Nous from the One is not a temporal distinction (Enneads, V. I, 6th section) ...
... inspired by the intellect alone. If the philosopher's realisation is poor and fragmentary, the philosophy will seem narrow in spite of the intellect being gigantic. In some respects Plato, Spinoza and Hegel seem very narrow, they do not cover our full sense of things: the cause is that each of them elaborated in terms of the intellect a one-sided intuition of a limited set of intuitions ...
... be irrefutable has a powerful appeal to the contemporary mind. Subsequently, Western philosophy passed through various forms of rationalism enriched by contributions made by great philosophers like Spinoza (1632-1677), Leibnitz (1646-1716), Kant (1728-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831). In the meantime, an opposition against rationalism arose with the empiricism 1 of John Locke (1632- 1704). Locke attacked ...
... syphilis (Henry VIII, Benvenuto Cellini, Baudelaire), and sufferers from tuberculosis can be listed with out end — Voltaire, Kant, Keats, Dostoevsky, Moliere, Schiller, Descartes, Cardinal Manning, Spinoza, Cicero, St. Francis. But in the realm of physical deformity names are not so numerous. Several celebrated writers were eunuches or eunuchoid. Peter Stuyvesant lost a leg and buried it in the West ...
... Page 168 Sri Chaitanya and his unity with the supreme love and ecstasy; intellectual struggle to prove the existence of God and attainment of intellectual love of God such as what we find in Spinoza; quests of reformers of society and politics, their dreams and battles for establishment of life of equity and justice, all these and many more accounts can be presented to the students. There is also ...
... 31, 278 Socrates, 12, 58, 73, 98, 239, 281 Soma, 23, 28-9, 44-5, 165, 167, 184 Song if Solomon, 66-7 Sophocles, 73, 86, 187, 189 Spain, 205 Spengler, 297 Spenser, 68 Spinoza, 98 Sri Aurobindo, 49, 52, 54, 55n., 58-62, 64-5n., 67n., 75-6n., 81n., 1O2n., 126, 132, 135, 162n., 176, 179, 183-4, 224, 226-9, 233, 235, 248, 286 -Collecwd Poems & Plqys, 59n., 1O2n., ...
... are poets of all ages and countries. We were dealing with the natural and the genuine in literature. That alone is real literature which sees a thing whatever it may be – in the great words of Spinoza, sub specie aeternitatis, under the figure of Eternity. This is the fundamental principle, the bedrock of real literature or of world-literature. Sub specie aeiernitatis – even a little of this ...
... Seneca, Emerson, Socrates, Plato, Heraclitus, Voltaire, Tseu-Tse, Confucius, Minamoto Sanetomo, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Epictetus, Lao-Tse, Leibnitz, Hermes, Schopenhauer, Sadi, Asvaghosha, Rumi, Spinoza, Bahaaullah, Omar Khayyam, Pythagoras, Kant, Firdausi, Ramakrishna, Vivek ananda , Pasteur, Giordano Bruno and Antoine the Healer. It is a fascinating mosaic of the choicest quotations meant to inform ...
... sorrow, good fortune and ill-fortune are not my main concern whether in this birth or in future lives, but my perfection and the higher good of mankind purchased by whatever suffering and tribulation. Spinoza's dictum that joy is a passage to a greater perfection and sorrow a passage to a lesser perfection is a much too summary epigram. Delight will be indeed the atmosphere of perfection and attends too ...
... space-time." The need, in Teilhardism, to accord Christian theology "literally", non-metaphorically, with what the latter has most feared in philosophies of the World-Soul like Bruno's and Spinoza's and Hegel's, is borne in upon us even by the fact that not only in Teilhard's stories but also in his direct utterances we have time and again the use of the terms "pantheistic", "pantheist" and ...
... knew the subtle earth-soul, even more the sea-soul; but Shelley had a transcendental vein in him besides the pantheistic, an aching eye towards Plato's Archetype as well as a dissolving gaze into Spinoza's Substance. It is to Francis Thompson that we must turn for a recurrence of Shelley's transcendental touch — with important discontinuities in form, Thompson being a somewhat fanatical adherent ...
... s it holds and what the results of its full descent into our earth-existence will be.... There is a mighty intellect in The Life Divine which we at once feel to be no whit less than Plato's or Spinoza's or Hegel's, but none of these giants was a full-fledged Yogi. Page 418 Sri Aurobindo's intellect is an instrument used by a spiritual realisation: not one sentence anywhere is inspired ...
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