Spinoza on Truth, Religion, and Salvation

I WHILE HE WAS IN PRISON, Antonio Negri, the well-known Italian philosopher, coauthor of the bestseller Empire, and the supposed brain behind the Italian terrorist group The Red Brigade, wrote a book about Spinoza entitled: La anomalia salvaje. Spinoza's thinking is characterized here as an untamable, savage anomaly. The anomaly was not that Spinoza was the only one of the great thinkers of the early modern age who was not a Christian. Whatever Negri's reasons for calling him an anomaly, I would argue the most likely reason is that Spinoza was the only great philosopher who took the new, scientific way of thinking completely seriously, even down to its most unacceptable consequences. He considered the new science of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and others to really reveal the truth. In his eyes, this implied a devastating criticism of the whole traditional, Judeo-Christian worldview. Of course, later enlightenment thinkers would, partly under his influence, engage in similar criticism, but, as I will show, also with respect to them, Spinoza constitutes a new sort of anomaly. In his eyes, the rejection of the age-old beliefs did not and could not mean the dissolution of religion, since religion is such a powerful social phenomenon. Like all social phenomena, it appears in forms that can be more or less detrimental or advantageous to human well-being. This feature of religion has to be taken into account in any realistic form of political thinking. One of the central implications of the new, scientific way of thinking was the rejection of teleology or final causation in nature. Once this cornerstone of the traditional view is eliminated, all the other central doctrines come tumbling down as well, as Spinoza demonstrates with great clarity in the Appendix to Ethics I: All the prejudices that I undertake to point out here depend on one fact: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act on account of an end, as they themselves do. Indeed they think it certain that God himself directs all things towards a certain end, for they say that God has made everything on account of man, and man in order that be might worship God. This, therefore, I shall consider first. I shall seek first of all the cause of the fact that many people acquiesce in this prejudice, and that all people are inclined by nature to embrace it. Then I shall show that it is false, and finally how prejudices about good and bad, merit and wrongdoing, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and deformity, and other matters of this sort, have arisen from it. However, this is not the place to deduce these from the nature of the human mind. It will be sufficient if I take as a basis here something which everyone must admit: namely, that all human beings are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all have an appetite for seeking what is useful to them, and that they are conscious of this. For from this it follows, first, that human beings think themselves to be free in so far as they are conscious of their volitions and of their appetite, and do not even dream of the causes by which they are led to appetition and to will, since they are ignorant of them. It follows, secondly, that human beings do everything on account of an end; namely, on account of something that is useful, which they seek. From this it comes about that they always seek to know only the final causes of things that have been done, and when they have heard these they are satisfied, because they have no cause for future doubt. But if they cannot learn these final causes from another, nothing remains for them but to turn to themselves and to reflect on the ends by which they themselves are usually determined to similar things, and so they necessarily judge the mind of another from their own mind. Further, since they find, both inside and outside themselves, many means which contribute greatly to the procurement of what is useful to them--for example, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, vegetables and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for breeding fish--it has come about that they consider all natural things as if they were means to what is useful for them. …