Yeah, I want you to imagine something for a second.
It's a feeling almost uncomfortable to think
about. The feeling of this fine, gritty dust.
It's settling on your skin, it's in your hair,
and you can feel it deep in your lungs. You're
in a small, rented room in The Hague. We're talking
late 1670s. And the room is dim, right? Just
this weak Dutch sunlight filtering through a
window that looks out onto some quiet canal.
Yeah, and inside this room, the air itself is,
well, it's shimmering with silica. With glass
dust. And there's this sound, this rhythmic scratching
sound. Scritch, scritch, scritch. And what's
making that sound? It's the sound of glass being
ground against an iron form. So in the center
of this little dust cloud sits a man. He's wearing
a simple robe, probably covered in a layer of
this white powder. He's thin, his face is gaunt,
and he has this hacking cough that just rattles
his whole chest. And to anyone looking, to his
landlord, to the neighbors, he's just the quiet
guy upstairs. The lens grinder. You know, a tradesman
trying to make rent. But if you were to walk
over to his desk, And brush aside all those lens
grinding tools, you'd find a stack of papers
that were, at that exact moment, the most dangerous
object in Europe. Radioactive. Absolutely radioactive.
Yeah. I mean, while his hands were busy grinding
glass, his mind was dismantling the entire medieval
worldview. He was building a philosophy so radical,
so terrifying to the powers that be, that it
would eventually get his books banned. Banned
by everyone. By literally everyone. The Catholic
Church, the Protestant Dutch state. and the Jewish
community he was born into. We're talking about
a man whose work was described by his critics
as, what was the phrase? A book forged in hell.
A book forged in hell. And yet, this agent of
Satan, this total outcast, this quote -unquote
atheist, he ends up becoming the hero of the
Enlightenment. This incredible turnaround. He
becomes the favorite philosopher of Goethe, of
Hegel, of George Eliot. Albert Einstein famously
said he believed in this man's God. It's one
of the most dramatic reversals in intellectual
history. So today we were doing a deep dive into
the life and. The mind of Baruch Spinoza, the
lens grinder who reinvented the universe. It
is a massive topic. It is. And we're going to
take our time with it. We're going to be looking
at the sources, you know, the historical records
from the Dutch Golden Age, the terrifying text
of his excommunication. And, of course, the books
themselves, the ethics and the theological political
treatise. And our mission really is to figure
out how a merchant's son raised in this deeply
religious refugee community became the renegade
Jew who gave us modernity. We want to understand
that clash, you know, between tradition and reason
that defined his whole life. And we have to understand
his most dangerous idea. God or nature. God or
nature. But also, and I think this is really
why we're doing this now. We want to look at
Spinoza as a kind of therapist, because as we're
going to see, his philosophy wasn't just some
abstract logic game. It was a manual for how
to not be miserable. Exactly. A remedy for anxiety.
So let's get into it. To understand the philosophy.
You really have to understand the trauma that
produced it. Spinoza didn't just, you know, appear
out of thin air. No, absolutely not. The context
is everything here. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam
in 1632, but his story, it really begins decades
before that and hundreds of miles to the south.
In Portugal. So we're talking about the Moranos.
The Moranos. Or, you know, the more polite term
is crypto -Jews. And you really, you can't understand
Spinoza's whole psychological landscape without
this. His ancestors were Jews living in Portugal
who, during the Inquisition, were forced to convert
to Catholicism. And this wasn't a gentle suggestion.
Oh, no. This was convert or die. But the conversion
was just on the surface, right? It was a performance.
Totally on the surface, yes. They went to mass.
They baptized their children. They would eat
pork in public. if they had to. But behind closed
doors, you know, in the basement with the curtains
drawn, they were whispering Hebrew prayers. They
were still lighting candles on Friday night.
You were living this intense double life. Just
imagine the stress of that for generations. It's
a profound psychological burden. I mean, you
are constantly performing. You are constantly
hiding your true self. Every single neighbor
is a potential informant. Every knock at the
door could be the Inquisitors. So it creates
this culture of... deep secrecy. Secrecy, but
also a kind of skepticism. Think about it. If
you're pretending to be one religion while secretly
believing another, you start to look at religion
itself as something. Well, something distinct
from your own internal reality. It's almost like
there were actors playing a role. And eventually,
the Spinoza family just couldn't keep up the
act anymore. The heat got too high. Spinoza's
grandfather and his father, they fled. They went
from Vidigera to Nantes in France. And then finally,
they made their way to the Dutch Republic. And
we really have to pause on the Dutch Republic
here. Because in the 17th century, this place
was a unicorn. It was a total anomaly. The rest
of Europe was just tearing itself apart in these
horrible religious wars. You had Catholics killing
Protestants, Protestants killing Catholics. the
30 years war was decimating the population but
the dutch republic it was a trading empire it
was incredibly wealthy and crucially it was tolerant
we called it the dutch jerusalem That's what
they called it. Now, we shouldn't romanticize
it too much. It wasn't a modern liberal democracy
where everyone, you know, held hands and sang.
But compared to the fires of the Inquisition,
Amsterdam was a haven. The Dutch authorities
basically said, look, if you help our economy
and you don't cause any trouble, you can worship
how you want. So the Spinoza family arrives,
they can finally drop the Catholic disguise,
and they embrace Judaism again. They're free.
They are free and they are successful. Baruch's
father, Michael Spinoza, becomes a prominent
merchant. He's importing dried fruit, figs, nuts,
olive oil. All from the Mediterranean. He's a
leader in the synagogue. And Baruch Er Spinoza,
he's born right into the center of this whole
establishment. He is the golden boy. He goes
to the Talmud Torah school. He's a star student.
His teachers, the rabbis, they look at him and
they see the future. A great rabbi. A great rabbi.
A pillar of the community. He was being groomed
to lead. Which makes the fall so much harder.
But okay, before we get to the philosophy, we
have to talk about the business. Because Spinoza
wasn't just some bookworm. He was a businessman.
He had to be. In 1654, his father Michael dies,
and Baruch is only 22 years old. Suddenly, he
is the head of the household. He's running the
family import -export firm. But the timing was
just awful. Awful. The first Anglo -Dutch war
had just happened. This was a trade war. And
the English were using privateers, which are
basically, you know... state -sanctioned pirates
to seize Dutch merchant ships. And the Spinoza
family got hit. They lost cargo. They lost ships.
The firm was just bleeding money. So Baruch inherits
a sinking ship. And this is where we see a side
of him that I find really fascinating. He's not
this floaty, ethereal saint. He's practical and
maybe a little ruthless. He pulls this legal
maneuver that just shocked the community. He
was 22. The business was drowning in his father's
debts. Creditors were circling. Now, in Dutch
law, you were considered a minor until you were
25. A loophole. A huge loophole. So Spinoza goes
to the Dutch civil authorities. He completely
circumvents the Jewish court, and he petitions
to be declared an orphan. He plays the I'm just
a kid card. Exactly. He argued that because he
was a minor when the debts were incurred, he
shouldn't be held responsible for them. He effectively
renounced his inheritance to escape all the creditors.
Wow. That is... That's cold. Well, it was survival.
It saved him from debtor's prison. But think
about how that looked to the Jewish elders. Oh,
terrible. Here's the son of a synagogue leader
dragging a family dispute into the Christian
courts and using a legal trick to stiff creditors.
It was seen as deeply dishonorable. It was a
violation of trust. And it wasn't just about
the money, right? He was already starting to
drift away intellectually. The rumors were definitely
swirling. He had stopped attending synagogue
regularly. He was seen hanging out with freethinkers,
Christians who were critical of their own churches.
And in the background of all this, there is a
ghost story. The story of Uriel da Costa. I was
reading about da Costa in the source material.
It is a nightmare. It's a tragic, tragic foreshadowing.
Duriel da Costa was another refugee, a former
crypto -Jew. He came to Amsterdam and he started
asking questions, dangerous questions. Like what?
He questioned the immortality of the soul. He
questioned whether Moses really wrote the Torah.
And the community did not take that well. They
crushed him. He was excommunicated. And to get
back in, he had to submit to this public humiliation
that is almost hard to believe. Tell me. He had
to recant his errors in the synagogue. He was
stripped to the waist and given 39 lashes. And
then, and this is the part that just turns your
stomach, he had to lie down across the threshold
of the synagogue door. Like a doormat, a human
doormat. And the entire congregation, the men,
the women, the children, people he knew, they
had to step over his body to leave the building.
That is just brutal psychological warfare. It
broke him. DaCosta committed suicide shortly
after that. And Spinoza was just a child when
this happened, maybe eight years old. He grew
up with this story. He knew exactly what happened
to people who stepped out of line. The message
was clear. Conform or be destroyed. And yet,
Spinoza, he doesn't conform. He keeps pushing.
Which brings us to July 27, 1656, the day of
the cherim, the ban. This is one of the most
famous documents in Jewish history. We still
have the text. And it is unlike any other ban
issued by that community. Usually a ban was a
kind of slap on the wrist, you know, a temporary
punishment to get you to apologize. This was
not that. This was something else entirely. I
have some of the text here. It reads like a dark
magic curse. Cursed be he by day and cursed be
he by night. Cursed be he when he lies down and
cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when
he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in.
They invoked the curses written in the book of
the law. And the practical restrictions were
just total. No one could communicate with him
orally or in writing. No one could do him any
kindness. No one could stay under the same roof
with him. And crucially, no one could read anything
he wrote. Anything composed or written by him.
They were trying to erase him. To cut him out
of reality. They were cutting him off from the
root. But here's the mystery that the sources
point out. The ban mentions abominable heresies
and monstrous deeds. But it never actually says
what he did. Why the vague language? That is
the million -dollar question. Why not list the
crimes? The prevailing theory among historians
is that it was political. We have to remember
the position of the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
They were guests. They were on probation. Exactly.
They were allowed to be there as long as they
didn't cause a scandal. The Dutch authorities
were tolerant, but they were still Christian.
They were Calvinists. They believed in God, in
the Bible. in the soul and if word got out that
the jews were harboring a man who said god is
just nature or that the soul dies with the body
that could blow back on the entire community
the dutch might say see these people are atheists
kick them all out so it was a preemptive strike
it was self -preservation the rabbis were in
a terrible bind to protect the group they had
to police their own heretics even more strictly
than the christians did they had to prove to
the dutch authorities we are handling this we
are not with him So Spinoza gets this ban. He's
23 years old. Most people would crumble. DaCosta
crumbled. Did Spinoza fight it? No. And that
is the crucial difference. Spinoza didn't beg.
He didn't try to lie on the threshold. He reportedly
said, this does not force me to do anything that
I would not have done of my own accord. You can't
fire me. I quit. Precisely. He packed his bags
and he left. But notice what he didn't do. He
didn't convert to Christianity. Which was the
normal path. In 1656, if you were kicked out
of the synagogue, the only normal path was to
become a Christian. That's how you got a new
community. Spinoza refused. He went solo. He
became arguably the first modern secular individual.
He lived without a religious affiliation. He
even changed his name from the Hebrew Baruch
to the Latin Benedictus. Both mean blessed. He
kept the meaning, but he translated it into a
universal language. So he leaves Amsterdam. He
moves out to the suburbs, Rheinsberg, Vorburg,
and he starts this new life. The life of the
lens grinder. And I want to dig into this because
I think people gloss over it as just, you know,
a job. But it was so much more than that. Oh,
it was a highly technical scientific profession.
He wasn't just making reading glasses. He was
grinding lenses for telescopes and microscopes.
This was the absolute cutting edge of the scientific
revolution. So he's literally working with the
tools of clarity. That's the metaphor, isn't
it? I mean, he was obsessed with helping people
see reality more clearly, literally, through
his lenses, and metaphorically through his philosophy.
He was corresponding with top scientists like
Christian Huygens about optics. But this work,
I mean, you mentioned the dust. It was deadly.
It was. Grinding glass in the 17th century meant
you were inhaling fine silica dust. all day every
day there was no osha no masks so he was just
slowly filling his lungs with glass he died at
44 from a lung condition most likely silicosis
that was aggravated by tuberculosis he literally
sacrificed his breath for clarity but he wasn't
just a hermit in a dusty room I think we have
this image of the Lonely Genius. That is a complete
myth. He had a very loyal, very active circle
of friends. They were a band of brothers, mostly
dissidents, Mennonites, collegians, you know,
people who are also on the fringes of established
religion. They formed a kind of philosophical
study group. A book club for heretics, basically.
I love that. Yeah, Spinoza would write a section
of his ethics, he'd send the draft to his friends
in Amsterdam, and they would meet to discuss
it. They'd write back with questions, what do
you mean by attribute? This proof seems weak.
And Spinoza would revise. So his philosophy was
beta tested. It was, and he was very, very careful.
He wore a signet ring with a specific image engraved
on it, a rose with thorns, and underneath one
word. Caution. Caution. He knew his ideas were
dynamite. He knew that if he published them openly,
he could be imprisoned or much worse. Okay, so
let's talk about the dynamite. Let's open the
ethics. Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata.
Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order. And
I've got to say, I remember trying to read this
in college, and it is. It's intimidating. It
doesn't look like a normal book. It looks like
Euclid. Definition one, axiom three, proposition
14, QED. Mm -hmm. Why on earth would he write
a philosophy book, like a geometry textbook?
It definitely pushes people away. But for Spinoza,
the form was the message. He wanted to strip
away all the rhetoric, all the poetry, all the
emotion. He wanted to show that truths about
God, the human mind, and happiness are just as
objective and... as the truths of mathematics.
He wanted to prove it. He wanted to build a fortress
of logic. The idea was if you accept his definitions,
just like you accept the definition of a triangle,
then the conclusions have to follow by absolute
necessity. You can't argue with them. Okay, so
let's walk into the fortress. The foundation
of everything is his definition of substance.
Right. This is where he just flips the table
on all of traditional religion. Think about the
standard view. You have God, the creator. And
then you have the world, the creation. There
are two separate things. God makes the world
like a potter makes a pot. The pot is not the
potter. Exactly. But Spinoza defines substance
as that which exists in itself and is conceived
through itself. It's the ultimate reality. And
he argues if God is infinite, which, you know,
everyone agrees he is, then there cannot be anything
outside of God. Because if there was something
outside of God, like the universe, then God would
be limited by it. He wouldn't be infinite anymore.
Precisely. If God is God plus the universe, then
God alone isn't everything. So Spinoza concludes
there is only one substance, and that substance
is God. But that substance is also the universe.
Deus if natura. God or nature. They are synonyms.
So he's saying God is the physical universe,
the rocks, the trees, everything. Yes, but also
more than that. This is where it gets a little
nuanced. Spinoza is often called a pantheist
God is all, but some scholars would call him
a panentheist all is in God. Help me visualize
this. The notes mention an ocean analogy. The
ocean is the best way to get it. Imagine an infinite
ocean. The ocean is one single continuous substance,
water. Now look at the surface. You see waves.
A wave rises up. It travels for a bit. It crashes.
And the wave looks like a separate thing. It
has a shape. It has a lifespan. But is the wave
separate from the ocean? No. It is the ocean,
just acting in a certain way for a moment. We
are the waves. We are the waves. You, me, this
table, that star, my cat. We are modes. That's
Spinoza's term. We are temporary modifications
of the one infinite substance. We rise up, we
exist for a little while, and then we dissolve
back into the whole. That is incredibly humbling.
It dissolves the ego. You aren't a special separate
soul that's been dropped into a body. You are
a ripple in God. But this creates a huge problem
for traditional religion. Because if God is the
ocean, The ocean doesn't care about the individual
waves. Bingo. This was the heresy. Spinoza's
god has no personality. He or doesn't have a
white beard. He doesn't sit on a throne. He doesn't
judge you. He doesn't love you in some sentimental
human way. The ocean doesn't mourn when a wave
crashes. The ocean just is. So prayer is? Yeah.
Useless. Useless. At least, petitionary prayer
is. If you're praying for God to change the weather
or cure your aunt or help your favorite sports
team win, Spinoza would say you are being absurd.
You are asking the laws of nature to violate
themselves for your personal benefit. You're
asking gravity to stop working because you dropped
your phone. Exactly. Spinoza says miracles are
impossible. Because God is nature, a miracle
would mean God contradicting his own nature,
which is a logical impossibility. This grips
away all the comfort, though. No listening ear,
no divine plan for me specifically. But Spinoza
argues that the traditional view is actually
an insult to God. We project our own petty human
emotions onto God. We get angry, so we imagine
a God who gets angry. We want things, so we imagine
a God who wants things. Spinoza calls the traditional
God an asylum of ignorance. He wants us to worship
the truth, not a fantasy. Okay, so we have this
one substance. But Spinoza solves another massive
philosophical problem with this idea. The mind
-body problem. Ah, Descartes' ghost. Right. Descartes
said the mind is a spiritual thing and the body
is a physical thing. But nobody could ever figure
out how they talk to each other. How does a ghost
pull a lever to move an arm? Spinoza's solution
is so elegant, he says. Mind and body aren't
two separate things. They are one thing seen
from two different perspectives. The source notes
mention a coin analogy. Yes. Take a coin. One
side is heads, one side is tails. It's the same
coin. Spinoza says the one substance has infinite
attributes or ways of being perceived. We humans
happen to know two of them. Extension, which
is matter, and thought, which is mind. So when
I stub my toe. It's not that the physical toe
sends a message to the mental brain. It's that
the event, the stubbing, happens in the substance.
That single event is a physical bruise if you
look at it through the attribute of extension,
and it is a feeling of pain if you look at it
through the attribute of thought. They happen
simultaneously. Because they're the same thing.
He has that line, the order and connection of
ideas is the same as the order and connection
of things. Exactly, and this implies something
else wild, a kind of panpsychism. If mind and
matter are just two sides of the same coin, then
everything has a mind side. Even a rock. A rock
has a mind. A very, very simple mind. The mind
of a rock is just its tendency to persist, to
hold together. The complex mind of a human corresponds
to the complex biology of the human body. Complexity
in matter equals complexity in thought. That
is way ahead of its time. That sounds like modern
neuroscience. Yeah. The mind is what the brain
does. It is remarkably modern. Okay, we have
to go to the scariest room in the fortress now.
We have to talk about determinism. Because if
everything follows from God's nature with mathematical
necessity, then there is no free will. None at
all. Spinoza is a hard determinist. He says in
nature, there is nothing contingent. Nothing
could have happened differently than it did.
So the fact that I chose to wear this shirt today.
You didn't choose it, not freely. You were determined
to wear it by a chain of causes stretching all
the way back to the Big Bang. Your mood, the
weather, what was clean in your closet, your
cultural conditioning, your biology. But I feel
free. I feel like I could have picked the other
shirt. And Spinoza has an answer for that. He
calls it the illusion of free will. He has this
famous analogy about a stone, he says. Imagine
a stone is thrown through the air. Now imagine
that stone suddenly wakes up and becomes conscious.
It looks around, sees it's moving, and it thinks,
I am flying. I am cheesing to fly over to that
window. But it's just obeying the laws of physics,
the arm that threw it. He gives some great examples
of this delusion. The baby thinking it freely
craves milk. The angry boy thinking he freely
wants revenge. The coward thinking he freely
wants to run away. The drunkard. That's the most
relatable one, isn't it? The drunkard chatters
away, saying things he thinks are his own free
thoughts. Then he sobers up and realizes he was
just a puppet of the wine, Spinoza says. We are
always the drunkard. We are always under the
influence of something. Hormones, fatigue, trauma.
The weather. This sounds incredibly depressing.
I mean, if I'm just a meat puppet of cause and
effect and God is a cold ocean who doesn't care,
why is Spinoza known as the joyful philosopher?
How is this not a recipe for nihilism? This is
the twist. This is the aha moment. This is Spinoza's
therapy. He argues that while we cannot change
the script of the universe, understanding the
script is the key to happiness. Explain that.
Spinoza distinguishes between bondage and freedom.
Bondage is when we are driven by passions, what
he calls passive emotions, fear, anger. Jealousy.
Hope. These are things that happen to us. We
are just reacting to the world. Like getting
cut off in traffic. Perfect example. You get
cut off. Your immediate passive reaction is anger.
You think, that guy's a jerk. He chose to disrespect
me. I hope he crashes. Your blood pressure spikes.
You're miserable. You are in bondage. Okay, so
what's the alternative? How do I get free? The
alternative is action, which comes from reason.
You use your mind to understand the causes. You
stop and you ask, why did he cut me off? Well,
maybe he didn't see me. Maybe his kid is sick
and he's rushing to the hospital. Maybe he was
just raised in a chaotic environment and never
learned patience. Right. You realize that his
bad driving was determined. It was necessary.
Given his genes, his day, his car, his state
of mind, he could not have done otherwise. He
is just a stone flying through the air. And you
can't be angry at a stone for falling. Exactly.
When you truly understand the necessity of an
event, the anger just... It evaporates. You don't
hate the rain for making you wet. You just open
an umbrella. When you view people as part of
nature, you stop hating them. You stop taking
it all so personally. So understanding converts
the suffering into peace. Into peace. Into what
Spinoza calls blessedness or the intellectual
love of God. It's the joy you get from understanding
how the machine works. It's the ultimate let
go. It is. It's very stoic, but it's also the
ancestor of cognitive behavioral therapy. Catch
the thought, analyze the cause, change the feeling.
Freud loves Spinoza for exactly this reason.
It's weirdly empowering. It's like, I can't control
the world, but I can control my understanding
of it. And that is the only real freedom we have,
the freedom of the mind. So Spinoza has this
massive system all worked out, but he keeps it
in his desk drawer. He knows the ethics is way
too hot to publish, but he does publish one book
in his lifetime. The Tractatus Theologico -Politicus.
The TTP. This was the grenade he threw into the
public square. 1670. Published anonymously. The
title page even listed a fake city of publication,
Hamburg, to throw off the Dutch censors. Why
was this book so dangerous? Because it attacked
the root of all religious authority. The Bible
itself. How so? Before Spinoza, the Bible was
viewed as the direct... perfect dictation of
God. Spinoza puts on his lens grinder glasses
and looks at the text as a human artifact, as
a historical document. He read it like a historian,
not a believer. Exactly. And he started pointing
at the cracks. He noted that the Torah refers
to Moses as the humblest man on earth. Would
a humble man really write that about himself?
Probably not, no. He noted that the text mentions
the death of Moses. How could Moses write about
his own death and burial? Spinoza argued that
the Bible was a compilation written by many different
authors over many centuries, edited and redacted.
He was basically one of the fathers of biblical
criticism. He was, and he went further. He argued
that the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, they weren't
super philosophers with a direct line to the
truth. He said they were just people with very
vivid imaginations. Stripping all the magic away.
He's saying the word of God isn't the ink on
the page. The real word of God is the universal
moral truth. Love your neighbor. and act with
justice, everything else, the dietary laws, the
temple rituals, the miracles, that was just political
packaging designed to keep the ancient Hebrews
in line. Speaking of politics, the TTP has a
huge political agenda. Oh, it does. It is a passionate
defense of democracy and free speech. Spinoza
argues that the whole purpose of the state is
not to control people's minds, but to secure
their freedom. He says the church should have
absolutely no power over the government. Separation
of church and state. In 1670, this was treasonous.
He was arguing for a secular state where you
could say what you thought and worship or not
worship however you pleased. No wonder they called
it a book forged in hell. The backlash was immediate
and severe. The book was banned. Ministers preached
against it from the pulpit. Spinoza realized
he could never publish the ethics while he was
alive. And he didn't have much time left. 1677.
He's 44 years old. The dust catches up with him.
He died on a Sunday afternoon in February. He
was in his rented room. There were no family
members there, just his landlord and his physician
friend, a man named Meyer. Did he panic at the
end? Did he recant? I know there were rumors
that he did. Those rumors were lies spread by
his enemies, stories that he screamed in agony
or called out for a priest. The eyewitness accounts
say the complete opposite. He was calm. He was
chatting about philosophy. He took some chicken
soup. And then he just stopped breathing. He
dissolved back into the substance. He died as
he lived. Rational. accepting of nature but then
there's this frantic mission to save his work
it's like a thriller scene Spinoza knew the authorities
would come for his papers the second he was dead,
so he had left instructions. His landlord put
his desk, the one containing the manuscript of
the ethics, onto a barge and shipped it to Amsterdam
to his friends. The rescue of the ethics. And
his friends worked fast. They stripped his name
off the title page. They published the book as
Posthumous Works by BDS, no full name. They smuggled
the ideas out into the world before the censors
could find them and burn them. And thank God
they did, because let's talk about the life.
For a hundred years, Spinoza was the boogeyman.
Oh, yeah. If you wanted to insult a philosopher,
you called him a Spinozist. It meant atheist,
immoral, fatalist, the worst thing you could
be. But then the tide turns. The romantics. Late
18th century, Germany, Goethe, Novalis, Hegel,
all the poets. And you'd think they would hate
Spinoza. They were all about emotion and storms
and passion. And he's Mr. Geometry. Right. Why
do they love him so much? They loved the one.
They kind of ignored him. the cold determinism
and they embraced the pantheism. They saw Spinoza's
universe as this living, breathing, divine organism.
They saw the divinity in the trees, the mountains,
the storms. Novalis famously called Spinoza the
God -intoxicated man. They saw the mystic in
him? Exactly. They saw a man who found holiness
in everything. And that reverence, it traveled
all the way to the 20th century. To Albert Einstein.
The famous telegram. Yes. A New York rabbi sent
Einstein a telegram. It just said, do you believe
in God? Stop. Answer 50 words. No pressure. And
Einstein replied, I believe in Spinoza's God
who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of
what exists, not in a God who concerns himself
with the fates and actions of human beings. That
is the perfect summary. God is the harmony. God
is the math. It allowed Einstein and a lot of
other scientists to be religious without being
superstitious, to stand in awe of the universe
without believing in a personal judge. There's
one final twist in the legacy that I find fascinating.
Zionism. You wouldn't think the guy who was excommunicated
from the Jewish community would be a hero to
the Jewish state. It is complicated. But David
Ben -Gurion, the founding father of Israel, was
obsessed with Spinoza. He called him the first
secular Zionist. Why? Because in the TTP, Spinoza
makes this one stray comment. He says that the
Jews have survived because of their hatred of
other nations and their rituals. But he says
if the foundations of their religion didn't emasculate
their minds, meaning... make them passive, and
just wait for a messiah, they might one day,
given the changing political landscape, reestablish
their state. He predicted Israel. He analyzed
it as a political possibility, not a religious
prophecy. Ben -Gurion loved that realism. He
wanted to claim Spinoza back. He actually tried
to get the Cherim ban lifted. Did they lift it?
They've tried multiple times. As recently as
2012 and 2015, the Jewish community in Amsterdam
debated whether to rescind the ban. They said
no. The chief rabbi said the ban stands. He argued
that Spinoza's ideas are still preposterous and
fundamentally incompatible with Judaism. He denies
a personal God. He denies the divinity of the
Torah. You can't be a member of the synagogue
and believe that. You know, I actually kind of
respect that. They're saying, look, words mean
things. If you don't believe in our God, you
aren't part of our congregation, even if you're
famous. It proves that Spinoza is still dangerous.
He hasn't been tamed by history. His ideas are
still a live challenge to faith. So here we are.
Why should the listener, who is maybe dealing
with a breakup or a bad boss or just the general
chaos of the 21st century, why should they care
about a 17th century lens grinder? I think Spinoza
offers the ultimate remedy for the control freak
in all of us. We live in this age of anxiety
because we feel we should be able to control
everything. Our image, our career, our politics.
And we panic when we can't. The illusion of control.
Spinoza teaches us to let go. Not to give up.
But to accept. To understand that we are not
the directors of the movie. We are characters
in the movie. And the movie is written by the
laws of nature. There is relief in that. It's
not all on me. And there is forgiveness in that.
This is the thought I really want people to sit
with. If Spinoza is right, then the person who
hurt you, the parent who neglected you, the partner
who left you, they were acting out of necessity.
Their trauma, their biology, their circumstances
caused them to act that way. It doesn't mean
you have to invite them over for dinner. No,
absolutely not. You can still protect yourself.
You avoid the falling stone, but you don't have
to hate the stone. You can let go of the resentment.
You can look at them and say, I understand why
you are this way. And that understanding sets
you free. He lives eternally who lives in the
present. Yes. Spinoza believed that when we use
reason, when we understand a truth, we participate
in something eternal. The truth of a triangle
doesn't die. And when your mind grasps that truth,
that part of your mind touches eternity. Under
the aspect of eternity, that's the view from
Spinoza's window. A view from high above the
dust. Thank you everyone for diving deep with
us today. It was a pleasure. Keep grinding those
lenses and try to see the signal and the noise.
Until next time.