Philosophy
1632 to 1677, Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
One infinite substance - God, or Nature - and the path from bondage to blessedness through understanding.
Start learning Benedict →Spinoza argues that there is only one substance - infinite, self-caused, and necessary - and that this single substance is what we may call either God or Nature. Everything that exists is a mode of this one reality.
God has infinitely many attributes, but the human mind knows only two: thought and extension. Spinoza explains how one substance can be expressed as both mind and matter, and how all finite things follow from God by nec…
Every thing strives to persist in its own being - this striving (conatus) is its very essence. From it Spinoza derives desire, joy, and sadness, and builds a geometry of the emotions that treats love and hate as effects…
Spinoza calls our enslavement to the passions ‘human bondage’: when we are driven by emotions we do not understand, we are passive, tossed about by fortune. Freedom is not free will but understanding - repla…
The Ethics ends in joy: the highest knowledge sees each thing under the aspect of eternity, as following from God’s nature, and this knowledge is itself a love of God. In this intellectual love of God Spinoza find…
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