Season 5 Episode 6: Steven Nadler

Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and philosopher Professor Steven Nadler for a thought-provoking discussion of Baruch Spinoza and Nadler’s book, Spinoza: Atheist.

Together, they explore Spinoza’s extraordinary life, his excommunication from Amsterdam’s Jewish community, and his groundbreaking ideas about religion, science, politics, and human freedom. At the heart of the conversation is Spinoza’s controversial conception of God: was he an atheist, a pantheist, or something else entirely?

Sachs and Nadler examine Spinoza’s rejection of a personal and providential God, his belief in understanding nature through reason and science, and his vision of morality grounded not in divine reward or punishment, but in virtue, freedom, and human flourishing.

The conversation also explores Spinoza’s connections to Aristotle and Epicurus, his lasting influence on modern thought, and Albert Einstein’s famous admiration for “Spinoza’s God.”

The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs. Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world. Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs. I'm really excited to have with us today Professor Stephen Madler, who is uh professor of uh philosophy at University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the uh Milas research professor and William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and he has served as director of the University's Institute for Research in the Humanities. He's a wonderful philosopher, and he has devoted a lot of his career to the philosopher Spinoza, whom we're going to discuss today because we're going to be talking about Professor Nadler's uh new book, Spinoza, Atheist. It's a question of Spinoza's religion and whether it is uh theology and atheism, uh, or exactly what kind of philosophy it is. But just to say, Spinoza's philosophy has had a huge, huge, huge impact on the world, and that's why I'm so excited to discuss this uh with you, Stephen, if I may call you Stephen. Absolutely. And uh we're we're very excited. You're also a graduate of uh Columbia University, so that's wonderful. I am, yes. Uh, you have your PhD from Columbia University, and that's very exciting. So welcome to Book Club. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on. You have uh indeed spent a lot of your professional life uh as a uh leading philosopher with Bruce Spinoza. So I know that many people listening in will maybe have heard the name. Many will never have heard the name. I think few will know of kind of the radicalism of Bruce Spinoza's philosophy in the 17th century and its lasting impact until today, because he was an absolutely amazing, profound thinker. So if uh I might, could I ask you a little bit to tell us who he is, who he was uh in his age, and why you've spent decades uh lecturing about him, thinking about him, writing about him, including the book that we're going to discuss today.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, thanks. The reason why I've spent so much time working on Spinoza, and I think a lot of people who read and study Spinoza would agree with me on this, it's just easy to become obsessed with him because every time you read him, he becomes more difficult. Um new questions arise that you hadn't thought of, things you thought you understood, you realized were more complicated. Um people ask you questions and you realize you don't really have clear answers to them. And so every time you and I've read Spinoza's two major treatises along with the other works many times, uh it's more and more difficult each time. And so you become obsessed with really getting it right. Um and one of the reasons why we all like Spinoza is because we thought he did get it right, or a lot of it right. Um, and so, unlike, say, other 17th-century philosophers like Descartes or Leibniz, Spinoza seems to be a much more relevant philosopher to us today. You could walk down the street and you wouldn't meet many Cartesians or Leibnizans. Maybe you'd run into an Aristotelian like you. But you know, you could easily throw a stone and hit one or two Spinozists because even outside of academia, yes, people are fascinated by Spinoza. They write novels about him, they write operas, uh, they make films that produce works of visual art about Spinoza. So somehow Spinoza has permeated not just academic culture, but popular culture in a way that other philosophers have not. He was born in 1632 in Amsterdam to a family of former conversos. And what that means is that these were people who generations earlier had been forced, they were Jews, but uh in the late 15th century had been forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal. And the Inquisition made life very intolerable for these conversos. Uh, the Inquisition didn't care if you were Jewish, what it did care is if you were an insincere Christian. And they doubted the sincerity of these conversos, thinking that they were practicing Judaism in secret, and many of them, in fact, were. So eventually, over the course of the 16th and early 17th centuries, um, these conversos fled Spain and Portugal, and many of them ended up in Amsterdam, where they were allowed to return to Judaism openly. And uh the tolerant Dutch Republic allowed Jewish communities to establish themselves with some restrictions, but with a relatively uh relative degree of freedom. They weren't confined to a ghetto, they didn't have to wear any uh special marking on their clothing. So Spinoza was born into uh in 1632 into a family of Portuguese Jews who were part of a of a larger Sephardic, that is, Iberian or Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. Um we know he attended school for a while, but when his father died, he had to take over the family business. Um, however, the we don't know very much about his youth aside from some mercantile um exchanges, but in 1656 we have this remarkable document where Spinoza is put under cherim, that is, he's banned or excommunicated. At age 24. At age 23 or 24, yeah. Um and the harem document is extraordinary. It's long so the community used the harem rather frequently just to keep things in order because a lot of these uh former conversos were reintegrating into Judaism. And so they had to be taught how to be good Jews, essentially. Uh, and so this community used the harem rather frequently, more frequently than other communities in the time. Um, but the harem issued against Spinoza is longer and more vitriolic uh than any other harem issued by the community. It's a long document full of curses and damnations against Spinoza. And it speaks of his horrifying heresies and abominable deeds, but doesn't tell us what those were. By the way, that's extraordinary. It really is, yeah. I mean, so there's a bit of a mystery here at this truly momentous event in Spinoza's life. On the other hand, for anybody who reads his mature philosophical treatises, there's not really a mystery here.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Does he ever write about the excommunication, the the harem?

SPEAKER_00 6:54

I wish he did. Uh, he may have, but when his friends put his posthumous writings together, including all of his correspondence, they burned a lot of the letters that were not of philosophical interest. And maybe other letters that might have cast uh some shadow on Spinoza or people he was associated with. So I I'm certain that in at least one of those lost letters, he must have said something about this.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

But he didn't express uh from what is still extant, he didn't express anger or address this issue, which is uh to be kicked out of your community as a young man in this uh absolutely damning way.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah. No, he didn't, although I should say he never did it directly. But when you read the theological political treatise, you can see there's no love lost between Spinoza and the Jewish community at large, or between Spinoza and sectarian organized religions generally.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Yeah, although I would regard him as uh the greatest Jewish philosopher of the last thousand years, but in this unique way. Yeah, I would agree, although we might have to make an exception for Maimonides there. Well, I was thinking uh from Maimonides onward, and with Maimonides, that's a close race, but I like Maimonides too.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Well, so did Spinoza, uh, but he also was critical of Maimonides. I so I I entirely agree with you. I think to exclude Spinoza from the canon of Jewish philosophy is to make a serious mistake, both because he represents the culmination of centuries of Jewish philosophy before him, and he lays down a legacy for later Jewish philosophy.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Yeah, as an American Jew myself, I regard him absolutely as a Jewish philosopher, but in this absolutely extraordinary way that we're going to going to come to. So he is expelled from his community with great prejudice, yes, with uh rather in nasty damning terms that are uh really over the top, in fact, uh as a young man. So you have to do a lot to get uh that kind of uh damnation, and then just tell us about uh the rest of his life, which was also extraordinarily brief uh in in light of the impact that he had on Western thought and world civilization.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Yeah, he died a mere two decades after the excommunication. Um we suspect he had respiratory issues to begin with, and they were exacerbated by the fact that his he made his living by grinding lenses, and so the inhaling glass dust probably uh sealed his fate. He left Amsterdam by the early 1660s and moved around to various small villages, but ended up in The Hague uh toward the end of his life, and um really began writing his philosophical works very soon after the cherem. Um, the earliest extant piece we have from him, a treatise on the emendation of the intellect, we suspect was probably begun in 1658. So that's just two years after the chem, and already we see themes of his mature philosophy. So I think there's very good reason to think that even in 1656, when he was still a part of that community, he already had at least in embryonic form a lot of the ideas about religion, about God, about Judaism, especially, about the Bible and miracles already in his head and may have begun saying them sotovoche to others, and then wind got round that this man, this young man, was not uh the great Jewish hope of the rabbis.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Yeah, yeah. Well, certainly something got around at the moment of his being expelled. Yeah. Uh and so, like you say, it's just two years later that things are starting to be put down on paper and circulating that are rather astounding.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

I I do have a little pet theory, which there's no evidence for this whatsoever. I will have to lay that out at front. But I suspect that the philosophical views may account for the horrifying heresies, but what were the abominable deeds? I mean, it can't be that he was simply buying meat from a non-kosher butcher. So, but here's here's my little pet theory, which I'll throw out now for the first time publicly. Um, the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam had enslaved people in their homes and in their businesses, and this was uh against, explicitly against Dutch law. The Dutch were deeply involved in the Atlantic slave trade, probably more than any other nation until the English took over that. But the Dutch outlawed slavery in the Dutch Republic itself, and yet these immigrant Jews, these Jews from S uh Spain and Portugal, brought with them to Holland enslaved people. Wow, I didn't know that. Africans, in fact? Uh, yes, mostly Africans, yeah. Also from the Caribbean, because the uh Spanish and Portuguese Jews were deeply invested in plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. And Spinoza's philosophy is about anything, is about freedom. And so here's my pet theory. If Spinoza, and I think he was really concerned about human freedom as early as the mid-1650s, perhaps he turned whistleblower and told the Dutch, you know, look what's going on in this community. And the Dutch no doubt knew, but like so many other things, they turned a blind eye to it. But I wonder if Spinoza, and I repeat, I have no evidence for this whatsoever.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

What a fascinating idea, though. It is really, yeah. And and uh just to say Spinoza's idea about freedom is also a sign of his uniqueness in thinking in a what we would regard as a forward modern way, because it would be two centuries uh even later, uh and and even the Americas uh having to have a uh the US Civil War before uh this practice was uh legally banned.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Um and boy, I like that that interpretation. I uh if you can develop that and find some evidence uh on it, it would be uh phenomenally interesting. But like you say, uh some deeds must have been turning against the community in some way. That's very interesting. So he went off, left the community, lived in Holland in The Hague eventually, was a lens grinder, but started writing philosophical tracks basically on his own. What happened then?

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Well, uh he composed what I think is his most interesting philosophical work, which is called The Ethics, a five-part treatise, in which he lays out his views on God, human nature, knowledge, virtue, happiness, reason, um, and also moral duties to other human beings and our proper understanding of who we are. He wanted to publish it, but he wasn't quite ready. And then in the late 1660s, he became greatly alarmed over the turn that Dutch politics was taking. And maybe we can talk about this later in terms of his continued relevance today. And so he put the ethics aside and wrote the theological political treatise.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Was the ethics completed at that point, but not published, or was he working on it?

SPEAKER_00 14:22

He was still working on it. We believe that by 16 uh 65, when you put it aside, it was just a three-part work, although maybe most of the ideas that were it that were going to appear in it. Although what happened, I think, in the late 1660s while he was doing other things, is that he was able to read Thomas Hobbes' political writings. Um they were originally composed in uh the Leviathan, at least, Hobbes' most famous political work was written in English, and Spinoza, as far as we know, didn't read English. But in the late 1660s, Dutch and Latin translations appeared, and now Hobbes became accessible to Spinoza. And so um one plausible scenario is that what he did between 1665 when he put the work aside and the early 1670s when he picked it up again, is that he read Hobbes, and uh maybe a lot of the political propositions of the ethics uh came later. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

I want to come back on that because I loved I didn't realize that, and I didn't like to understand Spinoza's reading of Hobbes because uh that's an another part of uh early modern philosophy that we grapple with until absolutely today. Yeah, it's a great question. And incidentally, I was reading what I regarded as a not very persuasive uh article in uh foreign affairs magazine just a couple of days ago, but it of course leads with the Hobbesian world. So if anyone doubts that these philosophers have a long shadow uh to them, they are every moment present in our current debates and our current thinking, even if we're not aware of it. So Hobbes is a big part of the story. So he turns uh aside from the ethics, which is the kind of philosophical track, and then he turns to his other great work, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:12

The theological political treatise. Um, and the goal of the theological political treatise is inscribed in its subtitle is to show that the freedom of philosophizing is consistent with the stability, security, and peace of the state. In other words, we should the the state is it's in the state's own best interest, as well as in the best interest of its citizens, to allow freedom of expression, freedom of association, a lot of the freedoms that we recognize today in the First Amendment. Um, and he begins a treatise with mostly religious and theological matters, who were the prophets, what is the Bible, what's its origins, how should we read the Bible? But eventually he turns to political matters and argues that democracy is the best form of government, and that a truly secure and stable polity, one that best serves the ends of freedom, is a polity that allows for great freedoms, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, um, and doesn't try to control people's minds. Although, you know, it's easy to mistake Spinoza as well for somebody who foreshadows everything we find in the First Amendment. And so he's often called a forerunner of the separation of church and state. I think that's wrong. Um, he certainly does not want ecclesiastic interference in civil matters. And this is what inspired him to put aside the ethics and start writing the theological political treatise. He was concerned that in the Dutch Republic, the more intolerant and orthodox leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church were exercising greater and greater influence over public policy, as well as trying to influence the daily lives of citizens. And he thought that this would be a betrayal of the founding principles of the Dutch Republic. And so the theological political treatise uh in some ways is a very angry work. Um, he is seeking to undermine the authority of these ecclesiastics seeking to usurp political power. So they can't get involved in civil affairs. However, it is the responsibility of the civil sovereign, the government, whether it's a monarchy, an aristocracy, or democracy, to control the public exercise of religion. People should be free to believe whatever they want or not believe whatever they want about God, and they can worship God or not worship God however they want in their homes. But once you talk about organized sectarian religions, it becomes a public matter because these are public activities, and anything that's a public activity falls under the bailiwick of the civil sovereign. And so that's the point of the theological political treatise. When it was published in 1670, it caused enormous scandal, not just in Holland, but across Europe. And it was called an atheistic book, a soul-destroying book, and one overwrought critic says it's a book forged in hell by the devil himself. And Spinoza becomes um perhaps the most vilified but radical philosopher of the 17th and 18th centuries.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Could we step back for just a moment to bring people into kind of the chronology of thought? Because Spinoza's writing just at the time, of course, it's the time of tremendous religious ferment. It's uh the Thirty Years' War, it's the the still uh century later, but the aftermath of Luther's uh Reformation and turmoil, but it's also exactly the age of the early scientific revolution, uh, and uh overlaps with uh Newton and with the the breakthroughs in in natural science. And Spinoza is in in a way together with uh uh some of his contemporaries that you mentioned, and uh Descartes and Leibniz and Newton, the philosophers exactly of the of the emerging modern world. Can you uh help uh people uh to understand the broader context that he was uh engaged in? Because it's this mix at the one hand of religious ferment, tension, orthodoxy, crackdowns, war, and at the same time the revolution of secular modernity, if I could put it that way.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Yeah, I think you know, with all due respect to fourth century Athens, I think the 17th century Europe is probably philosophy's greatest era, um at least in terms of a of a break with the past. I mean, there's great continuity with the past as well. But when thinkers like uh Galileo and Descartes and Boyle and Huygens and Newton and Leibniz really changed the way that we look at the natural world. Um, the natural world is now a world of matter and motion. Uh, human beings are the only um beings who have minds or souls, as opposed to the old Aristotelian system, where nature was governed by teleology. That is, things uh were created for and exist for a purpose, and they pursue almost intentionally the natural resting places. That's the old Aristotelian model. Um, among thinkers like Galileo and Descartes and Hobbes and Boyle working in chemistry, um nature, material nature is inanimate, and all of the natural phenomena that we seek to understand is the result of particles of matter in motion. There are no mental intentions moving bodies around. Um, and divine providence may exist in the laws of nature, uh, and perhaps. For some of these thinkers, God is causally involved in nature. But the natural scientist's role is to understand why things happen as they do without appealing to either theological or metaphysical principles. Spinoza is in some ways a part of that picture because he saw nature and like Descartes as something that can be understood solely in terms of laws of motion and the impact and causal interactions of bodies. But at the same time, he stood outside of that tradition because he also thought that the human being, and this is where he departs from Descartes, Descartes thought that the human being was special because we human beings have souls, and our souls are not governed by the laws of nature. We have free will. So it's a sort of classic religious way of looking at the human being. Spinoza rejected that. He thought the human being was a unity. And this unity that is either Jeffrey Sachs or Stephen Nadher or anybody, this unity expresses itself as in a bodily expression and in mental ways. And so our bodies move and our minds have thoughts. But the thoughts are not some soul-like substance distinct from the body. They are just different ways in which Jeff Sachs expresses itself. But Spinoza's real um odd contribution is that he thought this was true of everything in nature. Giraffes, trees, they too have both physical or bodily expressions and mental or thought expressions. It's just that because those bodies are relatively simple, the minds associated with those bodies are also very simple. They don't have full consciousness.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

Before we turn to your book, Spinoza Atheist, we dwell just a moment on a theological political uh treatise. I was almost giddy when I read it the first time, because it was so much fun, first of all. I mean, it wasn't the book from hell, it was my god, what a brilliant I found, straightforward account of demysticizing a lot of things. That was a big part of the point. Spinoza said these aren't miracles, this is how nature works. Maybe it's not understood at the time. Is it right to say he almost single-handedly creates the modern way of thinking about the Bible as a book written by people over time that recounts religious experience, of course. But Spinoza treats the Bible, to my knowledge, in the first time in the Christian world as it's a book, it's quite remarkable. It's got a history. You can actually read it as a history, uh, and it's it's written by different people. Uh, and uh they have great moral qualities and insights, and not to be denied, but it's a book written by people. Was he the first to put that proposition forward? Because when you read the book, it's so uh amazingly fresh uh 350 years later, but it did absolutely spawn a complete revolution in how the Bible is viewed because it left centuries of scholarship of looking at the text and the grammar and the chronology and the authorship and the underlying editors and so forth. So if you could expound a little bit about that, I'd be grateful.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Yeah, I totally share your fascination with the treatise. And it's a great shame that for so long the treatise was ignored by philosophers. It's rarely taught in a philosophy class, and a lot of the scholarship by philosophers about Spinoza either ignores a treatise or minimizes it, which I think is a great shame because the treatise and the ethics are part of the same overall moral political project. Um, there's one well-known Spinoza scholar who was writing a study of the ethics, and he says, I'm not going to talk about the theological political treatise because it's of no use in understanding the ethics. I just think that's totally wrong. Wow. It's it's you can't you can't understand the one without the other. So I totally agree with you. You know, Spinoza was not the first to suggest that Moses did not write everything in Torah in the Pentateuch. Um, Abraham Ibn Ezzarus said, well, Moses couldn't have written these passages about his own death. Yes, exactly. And and even Thomas Hobbes says that Moses could not have uh written these parts where names of places are used that they didn't have those names during Moses' own time. So there were thinkers before Spinozas who suggested that not everything we find in uh the Hebrew Bible was written either by Moses or by the prophets whose names these books bear. But he did so in such an extended uh systematic way, where he goes part by part through the Hebrew Bible, and he'll do the same thing for the Christian Gospels, part by part showing that there are many texts, many layers of texts, that the Hebrew Bible, first of all, is an anthology of human writings, which may reflect some original texts way back pre-antiquity, and then these texts were passed down copy after copy after copy, finally put together and edited by a committee led by Ezra the Scribe in the Second Temple period. And so the decision to include these texts and not others, was in many ways a political, religious, and historical choice. And yes, Spinoza was the first to really give us this critical approach to the Bible, and it suggests that you you can't read this as a source of truth, because the authors of these books, while they were highly imaginative people and great storytellers, and also people of great moral character, they were not philosophers, they were not scientists, and they were not even theologians.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

I love in Spinoza, it's always true, but the respect that he shows for it, but also the very straightforward nature say, come on, this is not science. This is but he doesn't, he doesn't disdain it, he doesn't uh denigrate it. Right. He says it's it's quite wonderful. But it's not, you don't look to a prophet for natural science, you look to a prophet for moral inspiration.

SPEAKER_00 28:53

Yeah, a lot of it's Bubamysis, and you know, even Galileo said, you know, we don't read the Bible to tell us how the heavens go, we read the Bible on how to get to heaven. And I think Spinoza, Spinoza essentially agrees that you don't turn to this book even for truths about God, because these ancient prophets had very imaginative and false beliefs about God. But he still says that the book is divine in a very interesting sense. That um what makes any book divine is that it inspires us to true religion. But what true religion consists in for Spinoza is living with justice and loving kindness. That's religion.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

I want to turn to that now, but just before we do, uh, just to say uh one of the one of the pieces of evidence uh that Spinoza gives in the theological political treatise is a uh a line in the Bible where it's in King Solomon's temple. And I don't remember exactly what's being built, but where he describes, he says Solomon said the radius is one cubit, and so the circumference is three cubits. Uh and uh Spinoza said, hmm, that's not quite right. Uh the circumference uh is uh two pi, uh not and or its diameter, sorry, diameter is one uh cubit and uh and the circumference is three cubits. And he says, no, it's not three, it's pi, which is close to three. So is the Bible wrong? Was it three then? Or maybe they just didn't know what pi was at the time that this was written. And it's so straightforward. And I just remembered looking at that sentence and saying, oh my God, this is so so nice, so clever, so straightforward, so decent. And I called my wife over and said, You gotta read this. This is incredible. So that's for me the spirit of that book, which is it's extraordinarily radical and straightforward, but also in a kind of goodwill. Uh, it's you said it's an angry book, but it's not putting down religion. No, absolutely not. It it's just straightforwardly saying let's get our categories right. Yeah. Uh don't look to Amos or Hosea to uh explain pi or to explain physics. Or even or even God. Or God. Look to them exactly for what they were for pious, moral people who can teach us about proper ways of living.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Right. Which is why it's it's a mistake to think that Spinoza, and even if even I who think that Spinoza is an atheist, is an atheist, I would not call him an irreligious thinker. And I think it's a mistake to think that Spinoza's goal here is to do away with the Bible. No, he thinks that the Bible plays a very essential role in moral edification of ordinary people. I mean, there's two routes to virtue and happiness. One route is philosophy, but not everybody's going to be a philosopher. And so most of the people out there are going to be inspired to justice and loving kindness, not through reason, but by being motivated by inspired inspirational stories. And the Bible, for Spinoza, is a great source of inspirational stories.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

And by the way, in that sense, he is in line with the great Jewish philosophers from Philo on to Maimonides, who also said in a different way. They didn't say the Bible is a historical work of people, but they said that it is an allegory. It's not to be read literally, and it is to be read, it's written in a way that it can be understood by everybody. But for philosophers, for that you need something higher. And Maimonides' guide for the perplexed is about the underlying philosophy and read the text as stories, as allegories, as inspirations, but not as literal.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Yeah. And this is, well, this is one spot where Spinoza is both inspired by Maimonides and departs from him. Because for Maimonides, the authors of the Hebrew Bible were philosophers, but they were philosophers who also, unlike most philosophers, have gifted imaginations. Right. And so they could take the philosophy and spin it into inspiring stories. And Spinoza says, no, that's nonsense. They weren't philosophers. We should read the Bible not to get truth, but simply to determine the meanings that these people of great moral character were trying to convey to us.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

So now you have uh taken on the question, what is Spinoza's theology? Because Spinoza most famously, please explain it to us, uh, said Deus Cive Natura, if I have that pronounced correctly, and I want you to explain that. And he was interpreted as having a uh philosophy of God or a theology in a particular way, and it came to be called uh pantheist philosophy or pantheist uh religion or theology in the book Spinoza Atheist. You have uh written uh at length about how to interpret the claim of Spinoza from a theological point of view. Was he in fact an atheist? Or was he in fact a pantheist? Uh was he a theist of some other form? So could you explain the motivation and what the argument is and what your position is on this?

SPEAKER_00 34:30

Yeah, um, and I should say that I'm pretty certain I I'm a minority view on this. But let's go back to the 17th century because in his period, Spinoza was often called an atheist. But in the 17th century, the term atheist was very ambiguous. It just meant your God is not my God. So if you were a deist, you might be called an atheist, or if you were a Quaker, you might be called an atheist, which really is not very informative about what really their beliefs about the existence of God are, but rather, you know, what kind of God do they believe in. And then in the 18th century, Spinoza becomes a pantheist because the term is um coined. And the pantheist is somebody who, and I think it's easy to read Spinoza in this way, the pantheist is somebody who identifies God with nature. The pantheist says, God is everything and everything is God. So there's no transcendent supernatural deity for the pantheist. And for centuries, that's the standard way of reading Spinoza. If you pick up any book on Spinoza, you'll find him described as a pantheist. And if you pick up any book on pantheism, Spinoza will be highlighted as one of its leading lights. Here's why I think that that's the wrong way to read Spinoza. He does use that phrase God or nature, Deus Siwe Natora. Um, and so I do think he wants to argue that all there is is nature. There's nothing beyond nature, and nature, moreover, doesn't have any of the psychological or moral characteristics that the Abrahamic God traditionally has. Nature is not endowed with intentions or beliefs, or nature does not issue commands, nature does not exercise any kind of providence, it doesn't judge us, it doesn't intentionally reward us or punish us.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

And just to say also for the listeners, you know, one of Spinoza's main themes was we think of God as a person, because uh humans would say, well, God is a like a human, but a superhuman. And he has this wonderful line if you're a triangle, you'll think of God as the perfect triangle. If you're a circle, you'll think of God as the perfect circle. So anthropomorphizing God, making God human, uh, he says, this is totally expected, but rather limiting for what God really means. Right. Yeah. One of those rare moments of humor is uh hilarious, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

But you know, that's but that's a good way to put it. Don't you know, even if we think of God as unequivocally unlike human beings in any sense whatsoever, it's still the case that traditional Abrahamic deities, however, visions of the Abrahamic deity treat God as uh a personal and moral agent. And Spinoza says that's absolutely wrong because that engenders superstitious behavior.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Or even seeing the face of God or humans in God's image and Michelangelo giving us the immortal characterization of that with God and and uh Adam.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

Yeah, to think of God in that way not only engenders superstition, because now you're gonna live your life in hope and fear of divine punishment or divine reward. Um, and that means that in addition to being governed by these irrational passions in the face of this providential agent, you're gonna throw yourself at the mercy of ecclesiastics who promise you that they know how to get to heaven and avoid hell. Uh so it's not just a matter of emotional and psychological bondage, but in fact, your life becomes one of enslavement to religious authorities. So we can say that for Spinoza, for the pantheist and the atheist, they agree that all there is is nature. There's nothing beyond nature. So what's the difference? Isn't Spinoza then a pantheist? Because he says there's just one substance and everything is in that substance, and that substance is God or nature. But the difference, as I see it, is that the pantheist divinizes nature, turns nature into something worthy of worshipful awe, devotion, adoration, maybe even fear and trembling. And for Spinoza, those are absolutely the wrong, irrational attitudes to take towards nature. The only proper and beneficial attitude to take towards nature is to try to understand it with the intellect through science. And then maybe there's a kind of awe that's proper to science, but it's an awe that leads one to further investigation. It's not an awe that leaves one to fall back in wondering stupor. And so I think he's an atheist because that's his view of what there is and how we should regard it.

SPEAKER_01 39:11

Before we get to that, I think it's uh really worthwhile explaining Spinoza's view that if I had that belief that there's not a God that punishes, there's not a god with moral claim, there's not uh the afterlife which is the carrot for good behavior, it doesn't mean you shouldn't behave well. There is a natural goodness and a natural law, so he was himself, from all accounts, an extremely moral person in his own behavior. He behaved decently. I mean, this man led a decent life. But also, it seems he is emphasizing that thinking about ethics as divine punishment or reward for good behavior gets everything wrong in ethics in this sense. I mean, in terms of uh what way to live your life, that the reason you follow ethical behavior is it's good for you. It creates the kind of life you want to live. Could you say something about that? Because I think it's a beautiful part of Spinoza. It is, yeah. This is not denying the anthropomorphic God as he does, doesn't mean, well, we're on our own. We can do whatever we want, let's go party. Uh, it's actually quite a different idea.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

Yeah, even his most vociferous critics admitted that Spinoza himself led a moral life. And Pierre Bale, who was another 17th-century uh intellectual, conceded that, at least with Spinoza, I abhor his philosophy. But here we have an instance of someone who is a moral atheist, that the atheist can be an ethical person. Yeah, he says at one point that to think that the only reason to be virtuous, to be good, if you think that the only reason to do so is for the eternal reward in heaven. And then when you discover there is no eternal reward in heaven, it's okay to be evil. That's like thinking that since you're not going to live forever, you might as well eat junk food now and enjoy that. Now you put not in those terms. Yeah, the virtue, happiness, he says, is not a reward for virtue, it is virtue itself because the person who leads the life of virtue is enjoying a peak human flourishing. And I think for spin, it's important to understand Spinoza when he uses terms like freedom, rationality, virtue, happiness, blessedness, activity, these are all the same thing. They all refer to this condition that he calls freedom. And what freedom is a free person is somebody who does what they do and thinks what they think, not because of the way other things happen to affect them. That's a life of passivity, that's a life of being merely reactive to external circumstances. The free person is somebody who does what they do because they know through reason and the intellect that it's in their very own best interest to do so. And so there's a kind of egoism at the heart of Spinoza's moral philosophy. But it doesn't follow from that that you should do whatever you believe to be in your own best interest, because maybe those beliefs are grounded in the imagination and the passions. Moreover, it doesn't mean you have total license to treat other people however you want to treat them, because the rational person knows that it's in their own best interest to treat other people well and improve their lives so that they will be surrounded by other rational and virtuous people. It's a lot like what Socrates says in his trial during the Apology. He's accused of corrupting the youth of Athens. And Socrates' response essentially is, do you think I'm an idiot? Why would I corrupt these people? I have to live with them. Nobody wants to live with corrupt and vicious people.

SPEAKER_01 43:03

I'm glad you went back to the Greeks, because uh I I wanted to uh touch on them before we conclude. On the one hand, to my mind as an Aristotelian, though, I'm not teleological in uh Aristotle's sense of uh thinking that the world has been ordered to an end purpose that way. But he is a eudaimonist, meaning that the purpose of ethics and life and virtue is a good life. And the content of Aristotle's eudaimonia of living a good life seems to me to be very coherent with Spinoza's concept. Uh, if the two were together, I think they'd be good friends. They might disagree on some of the metaphysics, but they would agree on what is good behavior and so on. And I wanted to ask you about one more Greek, or actually a Greek and a Latin, but um, the one that seems to me to become to be close. Closest to Spinoza that we I think we don't read enough or contemplate enough is uh Epicurus. Yeah. Because uh Epicurus metaphysically is completely Spinoza, uh nature's nature, and yet he's a eudaimonist also. We need to be good, decent people. We use the word Epicurean to mean you love pleasure, but it's almost the opposite of Epicurus himself, who was very much like Socrates or Aristotle or Plato in saying you need virtue for your own happiness. Actually, did Spinoza even mention or ever have uh any thought about that? Because of all of the philosophers in the ancient past, he seems somehow closest in my view. And when you read uh Lucretius De Natura, which is an Epicurean account of the universe, it seems a lot Spinoza to me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:54

Um he doesn't, as far as I know, he doesn't explicitly cite Epicurus, although what's interesting is that, as you probably know, the the Hebrew term for heretic is apicoros, which is a Hebraication of the of the Greek. Oh, I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_01 45:09

How fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 45:10

And Spinoza was called an apicoros uh throughout the phone. I will I would add, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. Spinoza does represent a continuation. If there's a continuity between Spinoza and the ancients, it's in this notion of eudaimonia of human flourishing or happiness. I would add Epictetus as well to an important influence here. However, uh here's one difference I would suggest between Spinoza and Epicurus. Epicurus defines our goal as pleasure, but what he sees as pleasure is the absence of pain. A kind of state of ataraxia, um absence of feeling almost. I think for Spinoza, the happiness is not an absence of feeling, it's truly a joy. The ethics closes with this notion of aquiscantia anime, satisfaction of soul, which is I think it's a positive joy and a pleasure when one appreciates one's own power as a rational, self-actualizing individual.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Stephen, your book is wonderful and uh it uh really for me deepened uh my understanding of Spinoza and his place. But I had one doubt uh which I want to raise, uh, which is uh on this question about awe, because one of the most poignant statements for me in modern times is Einstein's statement that I believe in Spinoza's God. And um Einstein was not jocular, he was profound, and he stood in awe, he said, of the universe in a way that maybe Spinoza did as well. But I wonder uh how you regard Einstein's statement that he believes in Spinoza's god in terms of this discussion.

SPEAKER_00 46:58

Yeah, I I think it's incumbent upon me to have some understanding of that, but you know, I think an Einstein scholar, here's how I would read that. The awe that Einstein I think allows and appreciates, I think we can find room in that in Spinoza, as I suggested earlier. Let's say there's two kinds of awe. There's the awe that sees an ineffable mystery in nature and makes you fall back with your mouth wide open, and a wonder that will never be satisfied. The other kind of awe is the awe that I imagine scientists experience when they find something that is worthy of investigation. An awe that motivates you to seek further understanding and not fall back in wonder and worship.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

Although I would add, Stephen, one more kind of awe, which is E equals MC squared. Oh my god. Yeah. Oh my god. The universe can be written uh in tensor equations. Yeah, that's a kind of awe too.

SPEAKER_00 47:57

Yes, but also an awe directed at human ingenuity, I think.

SPEAKER_01 48:00

Yes, that's true too. Well, this is a wonderful point to end our brief discussion, and I I hope you and I can continue. You've opened the world for us for Spinoza. I find every time I dip into uh Spinoza a joy, which maybe is the joy that Spinoza uh himself talked about uh of life, the idea of what virtue can mean, the wit and brilliance of the theological political treatise, and someone who, my God, thought at the scale of the universe and helped to illuminate it, and you helped to illuminate him. I hope that people will read your book and use it also as an entry into your other works about Spinoza and use it as an entry to read the theological political treatise. The ethics, I have to say, is hardgoing unless you're a specialist. It's not a simple read. I've only dabbled in it. Uh, I don't understand uh how to read it cover to cover. The other uh is uh blindingly fresh, bestseller uh of the year 1670, but I think uh is a completely fresh book, totally accessible for us today. But all of it is uh a work of great genius, and thank you, Stephen Nadler, for illuminating all of this uh for us as you've done throughout your career, and thank you for being on a book club with Jeff Saxon. Most grateful. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for joining in the conversation. Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.