Ethics summary

Since the time of ancient Greece, philosophers in the western tradition have grappled with the big questions around the meaning of life. Many of the answers came from religion and the worship of one or more gods. Divining the will of the gods occupied much of the philosophy, along with explaining or appeasing them when storms, plagues, or other disasters seemed to indicate their wrath.

But in his small, dark room in Amsterdam in the middle of the 17th century, a young man would begin penning a text that defined God altogether differently. Formulating his definition into a series of mathematical proofs, he aimed to show beyond all reasonable arguments that God and nature were the same thing.

This is how he started. If something simply exists, like the universe, we can only define it as existent. Given Spinoza himself exists to notice the universe existing, it must be that the universe really does exist. Then, looking around, one must say that something like a universe is made up of a variety of finite things, like forces, objects, or beings. These can be perceived as different from one another, but not separate from existence. A mountain will never be an oak tree, but mountains and oak trees surely exist anyway, and an oak can even grow on a mountain so they might even be related in some way.

Now Spinoza considers God. God is something infinite with infinite attributes – something that can be everything that makes up infinity all at once. To be infinite, it must not have a definable beginning or end, or be grasped in comparison to something else. Actually, to be without beginning or end, something infinite must reach beyond time and space itself, to encompass all that was, is, and will ever be.

Spinoza’s philosophy starts from these arguments, stated in simple definitions, axioms, and propositions. The rest follows logically, if somewhat radically. A series of propositions follow that establish several key ideas. The first fifteen propositions define the basic attributes of God as existing, infinite, and indivisible into smaller parts. The next three argue, then, that if the first propositions are true, it must follow that God is the only substance that exists in the universe that is indivisible.

If this is the case, then nothing exists outside of God. And if this is true, then there is no way for us to compare God and the universe, since nothing exists outside of either of them. Ergo, God and the universe are one and the same. God is identical to all of nature, and therefore to existence itself. All things, then, are manifestations of the infinite attributes – meaning nature, or God – and flow from the same, infinite substance: divinity. 

Spinoza’s conception of God is a far cry from the personal, law-giving creator of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, and a far cry from the polytheism of ancient Greece. To Spinoza, the infinite was obvious and all around him: one simply needed eyes to see, and the will to reason.