Students of philosophy are perennially captivated by Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century thinker whose ideas about rational thought and biblical criticism were radical enough to get him excommunicated from his Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. In Spinoza, Atheist (Princeton Univ. Apr.), University of Wisconsin professor of philosophy Steven Nadler argues that Spinoza ultimately eschewed belief in any divinity, whether in the natural world or in a celestial realm. Nadler, author of the 2003 Pulitzer finalist Rembrandt’s Jews, calls the book a culmination of years of research and writing. (He is also contracted to publish another book on the man, Spinozaland, with Norton in the future.)
Spinoza, Atheist addresses “questions that the many lay readers interested in Spinoza and his philosophy wanted to have answered,” says Rob Tempio, publisher at Princeton University Press. And chief among these questions, Tempio notes, is: “How could this thinker whose major work, The Ethics, is suffused with talk of God be called an atheist?”
What made Spinoza the most radical thinker of his century, as you put it in the book?
For him, religion only consists in treating other human beings with justice and loving kindness. He rejects any kind of divinity and the possibility of miracles. In the political realm, he is a staunch defender of democracy as the best political system. And he goes farther than anybody else in defending freedom of expression. In the 17th century, these were very extreme positions to take.
Why call the book Spinoza, Atheist?
By the 18th century, a notion of pantheism emerged that became a standard way of thinking of Spinoza—Spinoza identifies God with nature, and everything is in God or nature. The problem with that reading is that that it turns nature into something divine, something deserving of reverence or worshipful awe or fear. But for Spinoza, the only appropriate attitude to take towards nature is trying to understand it scientifically and come to a deep knowledge of what nature is and how we are a part of nature.
Do you still consider Spinoza to be a Jewish thinker?
I think it would be wrong not to think of him as a Jewish thinker. But I don't think he envisioned anything like secular Judaism because for him, Judaism is the law. He argued that Jewish law only had its foundation as long as there was a Jewish commonwealth and worship in the Temple, but once the Temple was destroyed in the first century CE, all of those laws lost their raison d'etre, so they're just empty, superstitious ceremonies.
Do you anticipate pushback on your book from Spinoza scholars?
Spinoza is kind of a Rorschach test—people see in him exactly what they want to see. He was an atheist, or he was a pantheist. Marxists see Marxism in Spinoza, mystics see mysticism, and even religious Jews find in Spinoza legacies of rabbinic thought. So, people who really are committed to seeing Spinoza as somebody who sees God everywhere are going to be a bit taken aback by this book. But this is the first opportunity I've had to lay out the whole case for Spinoza’s atheism. I've written this book hoping that people will be motivated to go back to Spinoza and read him for themselves.
What is Spinoza’s relevance to our times?
Spinoza offers us a way of living our lives under the guidance of reason and not under the guidance of irrational emotions. In a way, it’s part of a grand rationalist project to get us to redirect our lives away from not just superstitious beliefs, but conspiracy theories and pernicious prejudices that have no basis in evidence.
