Netherlands, 1632–1677
Baruch Spinoza
Dutch rationalist excommunicated from his community. His Ethics offers a geometry of substance, freedom, and joy as the increase of being.
Baruch Spinoza in 7 lines
Every Baruch Spinoza passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“The free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.”
“Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence.”
“He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.”
“Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.”
“I have resolved to demonstrate by a certain and undoubted course of argument, or to deduce from the very condition of human nature, not what is new and unheard of, but only such things as agree best with practice.”
“All laws which can be broken without any injury to another, are counted but a laughing-stock, and are so far from bridling the desires and lusts of men, that on the contrary they stimulate them.”
“I pass, at length, to the third and perfectly absolute dominion, which we call democracy.”
Where Baruch Spinoza lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Something happened that you did not choose and cannot undo.
You are treating the event as part of a chain rather than an insult aimed at you. The risk is an acceptance that arrives before the grief has finished.
Reading Baruch Spinoza today
Baruch Spinoza wrote in 1632–1677, from Netherlands — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Baruch Spinoza is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 7 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Immanuel Kant — Prussia, 1724–1804
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Switzerland/France, 1712–1778
- Jeremy Bentham — UK, 1748–1832
- John Locke — England, 1632–1704
- Mary Wollstonecraft — England, 1759–1797
Argues the same cases
Zeno of Citium, Marcus Aurelius, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir take positions on the same dilemmas as Baruch Spinoza, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.