Core doctrine
Spinoza's doctrine was considered radical at the time he publishedand he was widely seen as the most infamous atheist-heretic of Europe.
His philosophy was part of the philosophic debate in Europe during the Enlightenment, along with Cartesianism.
Specifically, Spinoza disagreed with Descartes on substance duality,
Descartes' views on the will and the intellect, and the subject of free
will.[14]
In Spinozism, the concept of a personal relationship with God comes
from the position that one is a part of an infinite interdependent
"organism." Spinoza argued that everything is a derivative of God,
interconnected with all of existence. Although humans only experience
thought and extension, what happens to one aspect of existence will
still affect others. Thus, Spinozism teaches a form of determinism and ecology and supports this as a basis for morality.[citation needed]
Additionally, a core doctrine of Spinozism is that the universe is essentially deterministic. All that happens or will happen could not have unfolded in any other way. It has been said that Spinozism is similar to the Hindu doctrines of Samkhya and Yoga. [15] Spinoza claimed that the third kind of knowledge, intuition,
is the highest kind attainable. More specifically, he defined this as
the ability for the human intellect to intuit knowledge based upon their
accumulated understanding of the world around them.
Spinoza's metaphysics consists of one thing, substance, and its modifications (modes). Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there is only one substance, which is absolutely infinite,
self-caused, and eternal. From this substance, however, follow an
infinite number of attributes (the intellect perceiving an abstract
concept or essence) and modes (things actually existing which follow
from attributes and modes). He calls this substance "God", or "Nature". In fact, he takes these two terms to be synonymous (in the Latin the phrase he uses is "Deus sive Natura"),
but readers often disregard his neutral monism. During his time, this
statement was seen as literally equating the existing world with God -
which is why he was accused of atheism. For Spinoza the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or, what's the same, Nature, and its modifications (modes).
| “ | It cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza's philosophy—his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, and his philosophy of religion—flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in Part I of the Ethics.[16] |
” |
the natural universe humans experience in both the realm of the mind and
the realm of physical reality is part of God, it is only two modes -
thought and extension - that are part of infinite modes emanating from
God.
