Baruch Spinoza is experiencing something of a Renaissance, not his first. He goes in and out of fashion. I attribute the recent rebirth to Gilles Deleuze’s book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988), but so much has been written about Spinoza in the last several decades, and from such different perspectives, including neuroscience and feminism, that Deleuze could just be a part of a periodic eruption of interest. /1/ I return to Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza as a theorist of joy later. A lot depends on how one translates the Latin word for “joy.”
My argument doesn’t always fit together neatly. One might attribute this to my deficient rhetoric. Or, one might attribute it to the different interpretations of Spinoza that are offered, for example, by Carlisle contra Nadler. I attribute it to Spinoza himself; he is simply unable to hold to the assumptions about God that his argument requires.
A few facts about Spinoza’s life
Spinoza was born in 1632 into a Portuguese Jewish family that fled the Inquisition. Holland was about the most tolerant of European nations at the time, but not nearly tolerant enough to contain Spinoza. He was excommunicated (herem in Hebrew) by Amsterdam’s Jewish community at the age of 23. His sin, among other things, was holding that the Bible was a literary work written by ordinary men, and not particularly well written or organized at that. Unlike most who were excommunicated, he never recanted, and was never accepted back into the synagogue. He changed his name from Baruch (“blessed” in Hebrew) to Benedictus (“blessed”) in Latin.
From that point he lived as an independent philosopher, supporting himself as a lens grinder, at which he was apparently quite good. He lived simply in rooms rented from Mennonites and Collegiants, dissident groups within the Dutch Reformed Church. He had correspondents. I can’t tell if he had friends, but intellectuals and students visited him frequently. /2/
Around 1670 he moved to The Hague, a more cosmopolitan city than Amsterdam, where he might melt into the crowd. It was there that he published his Theological Political Treatise (TPT, original 1670), a bold book that hardly made him popular among the devout masses (vulgus), whom he deplored. He died in 1677 at 44 years. After his death, followers published Ethics, his most important book, as well as his incomplete Political Treatise. They also published some of his correspondence.
Spinoza was the most radical of his Enlightenment precursors, indeed of Enlightenment authors overall. Today he no longer sounds so radical, but neither is he dated like Descartes, who struggles to make room for certainty about God in a world in which everything else is to be doubted except oneself. /3/
If God is nature, then Spinoza is an atheist
Steven Nadler puts Spinoza’s view well, though he stops short.
There was no creation; there will be no final judgment. There is only Nature and what belongs to Nature. The word ‘God’ is still available, even useful, particularly as it captures certain essential features of Nature that constitute (at least among philosophers in Spinoza’s time) the definition of God: Nature is an eternal, infinite, necessarily existing substance, the most real and self-caused cause of whatever else is real. (2020, p 2)
For Nadler, the term “God” is appropriate for nature, but only because by nature Spinoza refers to something he calls a substance. By substance, Spinoza means independent of anything else. A substance is uncaused and unmoved. God is the only substance.
God does not make choices. God is nature and nature just is and could not be otherwise. It has no telos, no purpose. Said another way, nature is the only substance, not only the most real thing that exists, but one that has always existed, neither coming into nor going out of being. Nature does not struggle to be, a struggle for which Spinoza employs the Latin term “conatus.” (Ethics III, proposition 6). As Spinoza uses the term, it also means endeavouring to increase one’s power. The reader can see why Deleuze seizes on the apparent similarity between conatus and Nietzsche’s “will to power.”
Spinoza employs the phrase Deus sive Natura, often translated as “God or nature.” But one might equally well translate it as “God, that is to say, nature.” (Ethics, IV, Preface). Or as Spinoza states in his Theological Political Treatise, the book that got him into so much trouble, God’s decrees and commandments are nothing but nature’s order (2023, p 197).
While Nadler’s is the least ambiguous way to see Spinoza’s view of God (God = nature), it’s not quite so simple. By nature Spinoza doesn’t mean a collection of animals, vegetables, and minerals. Spinoza means a natural order that is a reflection of God’s mind. Spinoza’s goal is to completely spike any view of God as an anthropomorphic being. What remains are the laws of nature. Trying to understand the way the world works is the same thing as trying to understand God’s mind, an act of worship (James, pp 92-93). Here it pays to be careful. Unless one understands this identity (nature = God’s mind) as metaphor, then understanding nature is an act of presumption–that is, an overstepping of human bounds into a realm properly belonging to God. /4/
Nature’s order is experienced by humans in terms of modes. A mode is something that is dependent on substance for its existence, from rocks to men and women, to everything else that is. In fact, it’s more complicated than this, with attributes mediating how we experience modes (Ethics 1, definitions 3-5). The key point is that substance is everlasting and never changing. Everything else is neither, depending on substance, that is nature’s order.
Pantheist, panentheist, or atheist?
Wikipedia (8/15/2025) says that “Pantheism was popularized in Western culture as a theology and philosophy based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza—in particular, his book Ethics.”
In Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics, a recent and well regarded book, Clare Carlisle (pp 58-59) argues that Spinoza is a panentheist. Put too simply, this means that while nature is the residence of gods, as the pantheist argues, God also remains outside of nature, greater than the universe. God is “ontologically different” from creation. God transcends the world while containing it. God is more than the things of this world.
While it is not always crystal clear exactly what Spinoza meant, he is neither a pantheist nor a panentheist. To grasp nature as an assembly of objects, knowledge of which is tantamount to the love of God, leaves nothing outside of nature, contra panentheism. Finding God in the order of nature, but not in natural things themselves is contra pantheism. Finding God is not atheism.
Spinoza does not make it easy for us, but why should he? Why should his categories fit ours? We can shrink Spinoza to fit by claiming, for example, that equating the order of nature with the mind of God has nothing to do with God but that’s little more than saying that Spinoza doesn’t think about God within the frameworks with which we are familiar, such as a God who makes choices, either at the time of creation (deism), or now. But wouldn’t such a God be at least a pale reflection of an anthropomorphic God?
Spinoza as a theorist of freedom?
It is popular to hold that Spinoza is a theorist of freedom, both inner and outer. But this requires a rethinking of freedom. Above all, it means not wanting what we can’t have.
Inner freedom
Steven Nadler treats Spinoza as a Stoic in Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (2011), a book that attempts, with remarkable success, to see Spinoza as a guide to living well as a Stoic would.
Above all, the life of his free person resembles, to a remarkable degree, in both its general contours and in its details, the life of the Stoic sage. (p 63)
We live in a world that cares nothing for our happiness, and whatever happiness we do find in life never lasts. How should one live in such a world? Spinoza argues that our task is to learn to accept as part of nature’s plan all that is not within our power–that is, virtually everything.
Concerning things that do not follow from our nature . . . we must expect and bear calmly both good fortune and bad. For all things follow from God’s eternal decree with the same necessity as from the essence of a triangle it follows that its three angles are equal to two right angles. (Ethics II, proposition 49) /5/
The solution, which is pure Stoicism, is not to become too attached to people or things, for they are not under our control. If we keep our wishes in accord with nature, then we shall want only what we have. Spinoza calls this keeping reason in accord with nature.
Sickness of the mind and misfortunes have their origin in too much love toward a thing which is liable to many variations and which we can never fully possess. (Ethics V, proposition 20)
In the end, all we can control is our own desires, making sure that we do not become too attached. Over all else nature rules. /6/ To see things from the perspective of nature is to see things from the perspective of eternity, the perspective of a God.
So how is it that Jesus and God appear in the Theological Political Treatise?
Written at the same time, but published earlier (Ethics was not published until after Spinoza’s death), Spinoza argues that Jesus Christ’s “love thy neighbor” is the highest ethical teaching. Almost everything else in the Bible is fable. Love thy neighbor, however, comes from God.
I acknowledge that God revealed himself to Christ, or that Christ was God’s mouthpiece, and in this sense the wisdom of God (i.e. wisdom beyond human) took on human nature in Christ and communicated with men. (TPT, p 29 [chapter 4])
The most obvious problem with this view is that Spinoza regards God as collective fiction in Ethics, substituting nature for the usual ontological attributes of God, such as necessary, self-caused, and self-moved. In Theological Political Treatise, God serves as a moral premise, not a metaphor for nature.
Upon a little reflection, an even bigger problem emerges. Spinoza was salvaging from Christianity those teachings that he believed were most in accord with living according to nature, which includes getting along with others. The teachings of Christ, sent from God, were their expression most likely to appeal to the masses. (TPT, p 4 [Preface]; p. 35 [Chapter 5]).
Stoicism was a doctrine aimed at the more philosophically minded. It not only lacks a Christian expression; it runs counter to Christianity. Stoicism is all about making oneself happy (eudaimon). It is a virtue ethic: my virtue or superiority as a human being, not yours. Since virtue is a somewhat misleading translation of arete, it is often called an aretaic ethic, an ethic of human excellence. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the most familiar example to many. It is all about how I may become a more excellent human being in every important aspect of my life, most of which are social. Am I friendly, brave, generous, a good conversationalist, pleasant to look at, and so forth (book 2)?
But while the virtues are social, their goal or telos, is my eudaimonia, my happiness. To achieve happiness I must be a good companion, but not for my companions’ sake but my own. Stoicism has nothing to do with loving one’s neighbor. Stoicism is a virtue ethic, and like all virtue ethics (Aristotle’s is the supreme example), it is about the happiness of the one who practices it, what Aristotle called eudaimonia, not so much happiness, but about living well one’s whole life long.
Deleuze, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Joy
Deleuze sees Spinoza as a practical philosopher, concerned with how to live well. If this were all there were to it, Deleuze too would be in line with Nadler and others who see Spinoza as giving advice to the careworn. The difference is that Deleuze views Spinoza through Deleuze’s own work on Nietzsche (1983). Conatus, which for Spinoza is an attempt to express one’s power, becomes a version of Nietzsche’s “will to power,” which in turn seeks joy: the overcoming of external obstacles, including other people, but above all of overcoming one’s own limits. It is the joy of creativity, the joy of the healthy animal. Nietzsche’s prime example is not the warrior, but Goethe, the most creative man alive.
Trouble is, the Stoic seeks not joy, but to adapt his desires to the possibilities of his circumstances. In one important respect the Stoic is like Nietzsche: overcoming external nature is not as important as overcoming one’s own internal nature. Only in the case of the Stoic, the internal desire he seeks to overcome is his desire that the world be other than it is. This too is a type of conatus, but it sure isn’t Goethe. The ideal of non-attachment–to people, to things, and perhaps even to inconvenient ideas, such as the pain of others far away–is the Stoic ideal, and it has nothing to do with joy. It has to do with my adaptation (surrender?) to external circumstances.
“Joy” is the common but misleading translation of laetitia, the Latin term employed by Spinoza, which is better translated as a flourishing emotional state. In De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life), Seneca uses laetitia to refer to a rational happiness in accordance with virtue or reason.
Laetitia is about the betterment of the self. Laetitia est hominis transitio ad majorem perfectionem. Joy is the transition of a person to a greater perfection. (Ethics III, Def. 2) This is conatus, and it is related to what Deleuze is talking about. Related but not the same, coming closer to what Aristotle calls eudaimonia, which is not just happiness, but living well one’s whole life long. Eudaimonia, in turn, needs other people, but it needs them as an actor needs an audience. As someone before whom to display courage, or with whom to be generous. But about others as others it cares little.
Outer freedom
Spinoza’s political theory is confusing, primarily because he died before he could complete his Political Treatise. Having finished the section on monarchy (c’s 3-4), and begun the section on aristocracy, he never wrote the projected section on democracy. Claims that he preferred democracy rest on shaky ground. Spinoza preferred order, and if a monarch can bring order, then the monarch is acting in accord with nature. The monarch must be powerful enough to contain and control the passions, the enemy of order. For this he must have force of arms in order to secure the goal of maximizing individual freedom.
Nevertheless, Spinoza is not Hobbes, for he understands something that Hobbes, who wrote just a few years before him, never did: where the monarch’s power comes from. /7/ It comes from his imaginative mobilization of the people. For if order is necessary, freedom is desirable. Both are achieved by an imaginative alliance between the people and the monarch.
When Spinoza writes that the sovereign must talk like a prophet, he doesn’t mean like a Biblical prophet, who tells the people that if they don’t straighten up God will obliterate them (for example, Isaiah 1; Ezekiel 33:11). He means that the sovereign must speak in images and stories designed to capture the imagination of the people. He must transform abstract moral truth into the language of the masses. Here is Spinoza’s great, and underappreciated contribution to political theory, the alliance of reason and imagination under the prophetic leadership of the monarch.
What Spinoza does not do is address the way in which civil association teaches men the art of self-governance. To be sure, Spinoza emphasizes that citizens are free to talk about religion and politics (TPT, c. 20). But he does so for freedom’s sake, not for its contribution to democracy. Had he lived to expound upon this theme, he would never have become a democratic theorist, not even a sceptical one such as Tocqueville who saw the educational value of participation. Spinoza was too much an individualist for that. In other words, he remains a Stoic who appreciates more than most the contribution of friendly relations to an orderly society and a peaceful life. But the happiness (eudaimonia) of the self comes first.
Conclusion
The one who truly practices the politics of joy is the raconteur Jesus Christ, and both Spinoza and Deleuze reject the transcendence he requires. Indeed, it is Spinoza’s pure immanence (the universe simply is, with no telos and no purpose) that attracts Deleuze to him.
However Spinoza is always finding cracks in the immanence of the universe. The biggest opening to transcendence is the way the mind participates in eternity through knowledge. “Halfway through part 5 of the Ethics, Spinoza pauses . . . . [to] consider the eternity of our minds.” (Carlisle, p 148). Not the soul, but a remnant of the mind, is eternal, because it shares in the collective knowledge of the world.
The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but there remains of it something which is eternal. . . . Thus, although we do not remember that we existed before the body, yet we feel that our mind, in so far as it involves the essence of the body, under the form of eternity, is eternal, and that thus its existence cannot be defined in terms of time, or explained through duration (Spinoza, Ethics 5, proposition 23).
Eternity is not time without end. Eternity stands outside of time. Only God dwells there. Spinoza never strays as far from home as he thinks he does. Or perhaps not as far as we are led to think he does.
Notes
1. Spinoza has been embraced (sometimes for the wrong reasons) and adapted by everyone from environmentalists to feminists in recent years. Following are just a few of the varied responses. Deleuze’s is not the only one.
Despite his contempt for women, some feminists find Spinoza of value. See Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, by Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd (1999). Environmentalists and ecologists have found value in Spinoza. See Spinoza and the Ethics of Nature, by Patrick Hayden (2001). Some recent authors have found in his monism a useful way to think about neuroscience. See Spinoza: The Ethics of an Outlaw, by Antonio Damasio (2011). Freud found both Spinoza’s monism and his Stoicism congenial. See Letter to Martin Buber, April 9, 1927 (Jerusalem Quarterly, 1988). Kimberly DeFazio sees him as a Marxist, or at least a class-theorist, in Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary (2025).
And so it goes for hundreds of books, many of them recent. Perhaps Spinoza has become too many things to too many people, but he is no longer an obscure thinker.
2. In his otherwise admirable biography, Nadler (1999) uses the term “friend” (and its cognates) so loosely it’s hard to differentiate between, for example, a friend and someone who helped Spinoza out of a jam, such as his “Mennonite merchant friends.” (p 132) It is my inclination that a close friend might have softened Spinoza’s Stoicism, but perhaps I am naive.
3. Descartes argues that only a perfect being could have produced another being (that is, humans), who can imagine a perfect being. Since humans imagine a perfect being, God must exist. Of course, it’s a lousy argument, but it saves God from doubt.
4. Presumption is a theological term, and it means something like hubris, almost as if one could claim divine authority as one’s own. It has other religious meanings as well.
5. A full citation of Ethics, which is constructed as a long geometrical proof, may include part (roman numeral), proposition (p), demonstration (dem), definition (def), scholium (s), and corollary (c). For simplicity, I cite the part and proposition or definition, depending on which is called for.
6. Nature, according to Spinoza, also rules over our minds. He is a mind-body monist, not a Cartesian dualist, but I won’t take that up here (see Ethics II, especially propositions 7 and 11).
7. Spinoza never explicitly states that he read Hobbes (Leviathan was published in Latin four years before Spinoza’s death), though it seems likely that he at least read De Cive, published in Latin in 1647. De Cive (“On the Citizen”) anticipates most of the themes of Leviathan. The well-known phrase, bellum omnium contra omnes (“war of all against all”) is first found in De Cive, as Hobbes is describing the state of nature, and consequently the need for a mighty central government.
References
Clare Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics. Princeton UP, 2021.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. Columbia UP, 1983.
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights, 1988. (original 1970).
Susan James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together. Oxford UP, 2020.
Stephen Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age. Princeton UP, 2011.
Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge UP, 2018 (second edition).
Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die. Princeton UP, 2020.
Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes. Grapevine India Publishers, 2023. (original 1670). Kindle.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans R.H.M. Elwes. Grapevine India Publishers, 2023. Kindle. [Elwes’ translation was originally published in 1883. Dated, and in the public domain, it reads well and is sufficiently precise.]