Spinozist

Just one word, Spinozist, embroidered in white blackletter script – the gothic type of seventeenth-century Dutch and German print. It claims the label without explaining it, which is fitting for a philosopher whose friends had to publish his main work after his death. Those who know will nod; those who do not will ask.

A Spinozist is someone who follows the philosophy of Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza (1632–1677). Its core is substance monism – there is only one substance, which Spinoza calls God or Nature, and everything else, including minds and bodies, is a mode of it. In the eighteenth century Spinozist was often a charge of atheism; today it describes a naturalistic, rationalist worldview without a personal God.

Deus sive natura is Latin for God, or Nature. Spinoza uses the phrase in his Ethics (Part IV, preface) to signal that God and Nature are one and the same infinite substance, not a creator standing outside the world. God does not act for purposes or reward and punish; everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature, like the properties of a triangle from its definition.

On 27 July 1656 the Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam issued a cherem, a writ of expulsion, against the 23-year-old Spinoza for abominable heresies and monstrous deeds, without naming them. Historians assume he was already denying the immortality of the soul, a personal God and the divine origin of the Torah – views he later set out in the Theological-Political Treatise (1670) and the Ethics. The ban was never lifted.

Yes. Spinoza earned part of his modest income by grinding optical lenses for microscopes and telescopes, a craft that earned the respect of scientists such as Christiaan Huygens. He refused a professorship at Heidelberg in 1673 to keep his intellectual freedom. He died in The Hague in 1677, aged 44, of a lung disease; whether glass dust from his work contributed is still debated.

In 1929 the New York rabbi Herbert Goldstein cabled Albert Einstein to ask whether he believed in God. Einstein answered that he believed in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. It remains the most famous endorsement of Spinoza by a scientist.

Both labels have been applied and both are debated. Spinoza identifies God with Nature, which is why he is often called a pantheist, although the word was coined only after his death. His contemporaries mostly called him an atheist, since his God has no will, no plans and no love for individuals. Some scholars prefer panentheism or simply naturalism; Spinoza himself insisted he was speaking about God.

No. In the Ethics he argues that the will is not free – people believe themselves free because they are conscious of their desires but ignorant of the causes that determine them. In a letter he compares this to a stone that, if it could think, would believe it flies by its own choice. Yet Spinoza is a philosopher of freedom; for him we become free by understanding the causes of our emotions, not by escaping them.

For readers of the Ethics, philosophy students and teachers, rationalists, freethinkers, lovers of Dutch history and anyone who has ever said God or Nature in the same breath. It is available as an embroidered classic T-shirt, embroidered sweatshirt and embroidered premium hoodie, as well as a mug and sticker.