A life on both sides of society

The Temple of the Jews in Amsterdam (1675) by Romeyn de Hooghe. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

It is strange that a philosopher who lived several hundred years ago should be such a source of inspiration for us now, both for ordinary readers and for academics of various kinds, authors and so on. I think part of the reason may lie in Spinoza’s biography, in the fact that he lived both inside and outside Dutch society.

Spinoza was born into a well-established Portuguese Jewish family within the Sephardic Amsterdam community, in which he grew up and was educated. In his early twenties, he entered into a terminal quarrel with the authorities of the synagogue, who eventually excommunicated him. We can tell from the curse, or cherem, that they pronounced over him that they were deeply displeased with him, partly for his financial conduct but also, it seems, for his heterodox views. Spinoza was already beginning to go his own way. When he left the synagogue, as far as we know, he cut ties with the Jewish community – as the cherem required him to do – and set out to remake himself.

A humble celebrity

Spinoza studied Latin. He met many Dutch intellectuals. He went to lectures at Leiden University. He earned demand as a grinder of lenses for telescopes and microscopes. At the same time, he kept himself apart and maintained his independence. He remained single. He lived all his life in simple rented rooms and he refused all employment. None of this, however, stopped him from becoming an internationally celebrated philosopher, one who was regarded as absolutely outrageous in many quarters. It was partly because of his reputation that he refrained from publishing very much.

The Ethics and how well we have learned to live

One of the books Spinoza didn’t publish was his magnum opus, the Ethics, which has, as its overarching theme, the project of philosophy as the art of learning to live well; in his case, particularly, the art of learning to live well by learning to live together. Spinoza sees philosophy not just as a theoretical undertaking – a matter of coming to understand questions about what the world is like, what we are like, what we can know and so on. It is all that, but at the same time, it’s a practical enterprise, a matter of learning how to put all that knowledge to work in the way we live and in what we do.

That’s the difficult bit for Spinoza. We can tell how well we’re doing, as it were, how much philosophical progress we have made, by asking how well we have learned to live and how empowering and satisfying our lives are. In the Ethics, Spinoza talks about all sorts of things that are important to this project of learning to live well together. I think that some of the most important are about ourselves. The crucial question, as he sees it, is to learn what we are like and how we can adapt ourselves to our environment and one another so as to live well.

Understanding how philosophy can help us learn to live together

It might seem that these are not particularly philosophical projects, rather the kind that are undertaken in psychology, in psychoanalysis and in politics. This would be true. They belong to a philosophical tradition that we have largely lost, but Spinoza was an advocate of this tradition, which had flourished in the ancient world. It’s one that’s being somewhat revived nowadays. So, perhaps Spinoza is one of the philosophers who can help us to understand what’s attractive about this image of philosophy as learning to live together.

The virtue of fortitude

So far, you might think that this project of learning to live together is a bit non-specific. Imagine that you’re a philosopher and you’re trying to learn this art of living. Where do you start? Spinoza says the key virtue that philosophers need is “fortitude” – fortitudo in Latin. We have to be careful here because, to us, fortitude often has military or Christian connotations of learning to suffer, and that is not what Spinoza understands it to be. For him, fortitude is the desire to put your knowledge to work in the way that you live, to turn knowledge which may be merely theoretical into practical and to bring the two together so that you always act on your knowledge.

That, in turn, he says, has two strands. One is that to exercise fortitude is to use your knowledge to look after yourself, for example to look after your health in all the standard ways – learning to take enough exercise, eating properly and so on. The other is to take account of the conditions in which it’s possible for you to do that and to make sure that they’re in place.

Animositas and generositas

Excommunicated Spinoza (1907) by Samuel Hirszenberg. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Suppose, for example, that it’s harder to look after ourselves in conditions of poverty. Part of this quality, which Spinoza calls animositas, would be concentrating on finding out how to eradicate poverty so that your capacity to look after yourself is not depleted. You might think about generating a vaccine or getting vaccinated as instances of animositas. You can see that one of the things you have to learn is to look after yourself.

The other part of it, Spinoza says, is more outward-looking. He calls this generositas: the desire to bind yourself together with other people in ways that are mutually supportive and help you to exercise fortitude to make the most of your knowledge.

The second strand of fortitude

The second strand of fortitude is learning how to bind yourself with other people in relationships which will help you and everybody else to exercise fortitude to cultivate your desire to put your knowledge to work. Spinoza calls these sorts of relationships “friendships”. He says you have to bind yourself to other people in friendship. So, here again, we might think about the practicalities of this: what sorts of relationships is he talking about? Not just personal friendships or love relationships but a much broader set of political and social relationships through which we are able to concentrate on this philosophical project of learning to live together and to propagate it.

Applying the notion of fortitude to our lives

This is what Spinoza’s idea of what philosophical virtue fundamentally consists of, but we might want to know why that is relevant to us. There are lots of ways in which this notion of exercising fortitude applies to our lives. Thinking about fake news, propagators of fake news are, as Spinoza would analyse them, people who lack fortitude – their desire to control the narrative and have the world the way they want it to be overcomes their desire to understand and to live in the light of their full understanding.

What Spinoza might say to fake news propagators

Spinoza’s general message is that the philosopher approaches such people as people whose fortitude needs to be strengthened. The philosopher does this by trying to give them the support that they need to be able to understand that the situation is more complicated than they pretend and to be able to put that knowledge to work. That might feel vague, and I think that Spinoza would say it is, because there is no recipe for cultivating fortitude. It always depends on who you are, what powers you have, what circumstances you are in and so forth.

Applying Spinoza’s philosophy today

Benedictus de Spinoza (1664) by Franz Wulfhagen. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Spinoza’s analysis of the ways that we might set about cultivating fortitude is shaped by his own experience and culture, which sometimes feels to be on the wrong track.

Spinoza often talks about fortitude as the preserve of a male elite who are going to show other people how to exercise it. We might say, well, wouldn’t it be good to look more broadly at the kinds of fortitude that may be exercised by less-privileged groups in society and try to learn from that? Spinoza often speaks of the State as a force for fortitude, but sometimes it’s quite the opposite – that States function in ways that suppress the growth and the exercise of fortitude.

Spinoza also seems to assume that friendship can usually be built between people in the way that I’ve theoretically, schematically described. This is not always possible. Sometimes the relations between dominated and suppressed groups are so bad and there’s so little trust between them that this project of building friendship is not accessible. The question then is, what does Spinoza, the philosopher, do in these circumstances? I think that all in all, Spinoza offers us a project of cultivating fortitude and thinking of philosophy in those terms, but it’s up to us to realise it.

Discover more about

Spinoza and the Ethics

James, S. (2020). Spinoza on Learning to Live Together. Oxford University Press.

James, S. (2012). Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise. Oxford University Press.

Nadler, S. (2006). Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.

Spinoza and the relationship between the body and the mind