Spinoza: The man who dared to be individual

[rug]

Walking with book in hand, Spinoza (1632 - 1677) the great outsider

By Michael Goldfarb, May 26, 2016

Individuality, singularity, our unique personhood is something most people take for granted. It is the psychological underpinning of our ideas of freedom and liberty. It is the basis for our understanding of responsibility and ethical and moral behaviour.

We assume that people always had this definition of "individualism" and filter our understanding of the past through this concept. But the idea of the individual as we mean it is comparatively recent. It goes back no further than the middle of the 17th century and the man "who seeded the Enlightenment" (Professor Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's words, not mine) - Baruch Spinoza.

Spinoza is the first of the many modern Jewish thinkers who fundamentally altered the intellectual lens through which we reflect on and seek to understand our lives. His metaphysics, ethics and politics are focused on human beings as individuals, responsible for their own actions, not overseen or interacting with God.

But to bring out this idea of the individual he had to first demonstrate that the God of the Bible was a figure created by men from an imperfect knowledge of the nature of the universe, and wilful ignorance of how the Torah and Tanakh had been written.

http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/158651/spinoza-the-man-who-dared-be-individual

[Manifestor_of_Light]

1. Interesting guy.

I figured if he pissed off the Christians AND the Jews, he had done something right.

Einstein said his god was the god of Spinoza. Einstein wanted to know the concept of god by observing the laws of the universe and trying to extract god from the laws of physics, whether Newtonian or relativity.

Note: I have a lot more respect for Jews in general than Christians, as they seem to be more sensible. It's OK to rant and rail and shake your fist at god, and ask questions. Not so in Christianity. Also, their tradition of artistic and scientific accomplishment.

[rug]

2. That he was.

When you say that if I deny, that the operations of seeing, hearing, attending, wishing, &c., can be ascribed to God, or that they exist in him in any eminent fashion, you do not know what sort of God mine is ; I suspect that you believe there is no greater perfection than such as can be explained by the aforesaid attributes. I am not astonished ; for I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.

Letter 56 (60), to Hugo Boxel (1674)

I'm not sure if or what he believed, but whatever it was, it was not the product of foolishness.