SPINOZA'S FREEDOM

Spinoza is a God-loving man, and what makes his philosophy so attractive is that it is filled with optimism. His boundless optimism, in my view, consists in the repudiation of free will, in conjunction with the belief in God’s Absolute Goodness. Free will is, in fact, the one and only source of evil, as it is logically impossible to have a choice between different courses of action, including the opposites, that would be all “good,” so that there would be no ethical preference whatsoever of the right choice over the wrong choice, depending on the course which we may choose to take. In fact, free choice is the choice between good and evil. It is therefore extremely depressing to realize ex post facto that we have made a mistake while exercising our free will, and then yet another mistake and another, eventually screwing up our life beyond redemption. It is for this reason that Christianity has come up with the concept of repentance, and Evangelical Christianity with its source of unconditional optimism, albeit restricted to professing born-again Christians only, which is the notion that any sin, even of the very worst kind, will be washed away by the blood of Jesus in the hereafter.

But philosophically, free will can only be a source of our frustration, and ultimately of indecision, where the circumstances require a prompt, energetic and ethically complex action. Such indecision has no place in the deterministic view of life, where anything which happens has been preordained, and, therefore, hesitation is nothing but procrastination.

Spinoza sees everything in the world as ruled by absolute logical necessity. All events are manifestations of a higher power, over which we have no control. By the same token, as he denies free will in human conduct, he rejects the notion of chance in nature. As Russell summarizes Spinoza’s doctrine, “It is logically impossible that events should be other than they are. This leads to difficulties with regard to sin, which the critics were not slow to point out. One of them observing that, according to Spinoza, everything is decreed by God, and therefore must be good, asks indignantly: “Was it good that Nero should kill his mother? Was it good that Adam ate the apple?” Spinoza answers that what was positive in these acts was good,--- and only what was negative was bad; but negation exists only from the point of view of finite creatures. In God, who alone is real, there is no negation, and therefore the evil in what to us seem sins, does not exist whenever they are viewed as parts of the whole.”

This dismissive view of sin, and the resultant denial of damnation, are completely consistent with Spinoza’s metaphysics. In the previous entry we have referred to the latter as a modification of Dèscartes’, but this is in no way indicative of Spinoza’s acceptance of Dèscartes. Quite the contrary. Using Cartesian metaphysic only as the starting point, Spinoza parts ways with Dèscartes right away, moving instead toward Parmenides and The One. In Dèscartes there are three substances altogether: God, mind, and matter. Mind is defined by the attribute of thought, matter by the attribute of extension. But in Spinoza’s metaphysic there is room for one substance only, which is God. Both thought and extension are attributes of God. ("God is a thing that thinks. He is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes expressing His eternal and infinite essence." [Ethica]). Human souls or particles of matter are not things to Spinoza, but aspects of God. This is where Spinoza’s theology is seen as a quintessential representation of pantheism, if ever there was such a thing at all.

It should come as no surprise now that, to Spinoza, the concept of freedom is nothing but an illusion. When he talks of freedom, which he often does, he uses this term in a patently restrictive sense (for example, “He alone is free who lives with free consent under the guidance of reason,” etc.). On the other hand, talking of freedom in the sense that we might expect, or want to hear, he says that “those men who think that they are free, do not understand the sources of their actions.”

 

In other words, Spinoza’s freedom is man’s capacity to understand that freedom as such does not exist, and to be able to say “yes” rather than “no,” to the events which take place, with the full comprehension of their metaphysical and logical inevitability.

With this apotheosis of Spinoza’s ethical determinism, we are about to end this terribly abbreviated series on Spinoza. It must be remembered that there are considerably developed entries on him scattered throughout this book, so that my decision to make this series short has been made merely in order to avoid unnecessary repetition. Yet, there is one more thing left before we part with him in this section, which happen to be, predictably, his dicta. This is going to be the subject of my last Spinoza entry, to be posted tomorrow.