Spinoza

In July 1656, the leaders of Amsterdam's Portuguese synagogue gathered by candlelight to pronounce a curse. Its object was a young man of twenty-three, a merchant's son named Baruch Spinoza. He was cursed by day and by night, cursed lying down and rising up, and the ban was never lifted. To this day, it never has been.

Curiously, the writ of excommunication never names his offense. We have only the reaction, the way you might infer the size of a stone from the violence of the splash. This book is about the stone.

The idea that made Spinoza the most dangerous man in Europe can be stated in three words of Latin: Deus sive Natura. God, or Nature. The two names refer to one thing. There is no supernatural realm, no divine person issuing commandments, no exemption from the laws that govern everything. And yet the philosophy built on this demolition ends not in despair but in something Spinoza did not hesitate to call blessedness: a freedom, a peace of mind, and even a kind of eternity available to anyone who follows the argument to its end. His enemies called him an atheist. The poet Novalis called him a God-intoxicated man. Both were right, and this book explains how.

Spinoza: A Primer is a complete guided tour of the most audacious system in Western philosophy, written for readers with no background in the subject. It follows the lens grinder of Amsterdam from excommunication to his rented room in The Hague, then walks patiently through the ideas that detonated under European thought for three centuries: the single infinite substance of which all things are expressions; the mind and body as one thing grasped in two ways, a doctrine now enjoying a remarkable revival in neuroscience; the striving that constitutes our essence; the machinery of the emotions, mapped with a rigor that anticipates modern psychology; the honest bad news about free will; and the reconstruction of freedom as necessity understood. The ascent culminates in Spinoza's famous injunction to see life under the aspect of eternity, and in the intellectual love of God, the only attachment in human life that cannot be lost.

Along the way the book traces his revolutionary case for freedom of thought, the chapters from which the modern liberal settlement descends, and tells the strange three-act story of his afterlife, from a century of anathema through the adoration of Goethe and the Romantics to Einstein's telegram and the laboratories of contemporary consciousness research.

The final chapter makes the measurement that sets this Primer apart. A solitary European rationalist, reasoning from definitions in a Calvinist republic, arrived within sight of conclusions the contemplative traditions of Asia had reached by entirely different roads: the separate self as illusion, freedom as alignment with the way things are, liberation through understanding, available now, in this life. Proof and zazen emerge as two paths up the same mountain, and the convergence is examined with the care it deserves, four genuine agreements, four genuine differences, and a verdict.

Written in clear, flowing prose and requiring no prior philosophy, this is a book for anyone who has ever suspected that the deepest questions might have answers, and that the answers might change how you live. As Spinoza wrote in the last line of his masterwork: all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.