Ikigai Daily
Menu
StillnessFact

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote 'God, or Nature' in his Ethics, published in 1677, soon after his death. He argued for one infinite reality that contains everything that exists. On this view, God is not a separate being outside nature, choosing how to direct it. The word 'God' stays, but its meaning changes.

Baruch Spinoza

PhilosophyHistoryReligion & Belief

The story behind the card

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 into a Portuguese Jewish family and was expelled from the city's Jewish community in 1656 for views its leaders judged heretical. He earned part of his living grinding lenses. He held back the Ethics for fear of the reaction, and friends published it after his death. It is set out like a geometry book, with definitions, axioms and proofs, and argues that everything follows from the nature of God, or Nature, as necessarily as a theorem follows from its axioms. Many contemporaries read this as atheism in disguise, since it leaves no room for a God who chooses or intervenes; Spinoza saw it as the most consistent way to think about the divine.

Türkçe oku
Hollandalı filozof Baruch Spinoza, 1677'de, ölümünden kısa süre sonra yayımlanan Etika'da “Tanrı ya da Doğa” der. Ona göre var olan her şeyi içine alan tek bir sonsuz gerçeklik vardır. Bu görüşte Tanrı, doğanın dışında durup onu nasıl yöneteceğine karar veren ayrı bir varlık değildir. “Tanrı” sözcüğü yerinde kalır, ama anlamı değişir.

Spinoza 1632'de Amsterdam'da, Portekiz kökenli Yahudi bir ailede doğdu. 1656'da, cemaatin önderlerinin sapkınlık saydığı görüşleri yüzünden kentin Yahudi cemaatinden aforoz edildi. Geçimini kısmen mercek taşlayarak sağladı. Etika'yı tepkilerden çekindiği için yayımlamadı; kitabı ölümünden sonra dostları bastırdı. Eser bir geometri kitabı gibi tanımlar, aksiyomlar ve kanıtlarla ilerler ve her şeyin, bir teoremin aksiyomlarından çıkması gibi zorunlu olarak Tanrı'nın, yani Doğa'nın özünden çıktığını savunur. Çağdaşlarının çoğu bunu kılık değiştirmiş bir ateizm olarak gördü, çünkü seçen ya da olaylara müdahale eden bir Tanrı'ya yer bırakmıyordu. Spinoza ise bunu tanrısallık üzerine düşünmenin en tutarlı yolu sayıyordu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Spinoza's Ethics
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Ise Grand Shrine, the holiest site of Shinto, Japan's native religion, takes down its main sanctuaries every 20 years and rebuilds them exactly on the plot next door. The custom began in 690 and, despite some long interruptions, continues today; the next rebuilding is due in 2033.

The rebuilding is called Shikinen Sengū. Along with the buildings, the shrine's furnishings and sacred objects are made anew, and the wooden Uji Bridge at the entrance is rebuilt too. The timber is hinoki, a Japanese cypress. Power tools are not allowed within the shrine grounds, so the work falls to miyadaiku, carpenters trained in traditional shrine building; less experienced carpenters usually learn on the bridge before they work on the sanctuaries. Shinto calls the idea tokowaka, 'ever young': renewing a sacred building keeps it fresh and passes the skills from one generation to the next. The present buildings, from 2013, are the 62nd set. Wars have delayed the cycle more than once, most notably for over a century during Japan's civil wars of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Ise Shikinen SenguRead card
WonderPhilosophy

The Muslim scholar al-Ghazali (c. 1058–1111) described in Deliverance from Error how he lost trust in both his senses and his reasoning. A shadow looks still, yet it moves; might reason, too, have limits it cannot see? Certainty returned, he wrote, only through a light that God cast into his heart.

Al-Ghazali was a theologian, jurist and Sufi mystic from Tus, in Persia. In 1095, while a celebrated professor at the Nizamiyya college in Baghdad, he went through the crisis he later described: he could barely speak, could not teach, and left his post to spend years travelling as a Sufi, a follower of Islam's mystical path. Deliverance from Error, written in his last years, tells that story. He is also known for The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which argued that thinkers such as Ibn Sina could not prove some of their key claims, including that the world has always existed. About seventy years after his death, Ibn Rushd answered it in The Incoherence of the Incoherence.

Al-GhazaliRead card
WonderPhilosophy

Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century philosopher and judge in Muslim Spain, argued in The Decisive Treatise that Islamic law did not merely allow philosophy: for those able to reason rigorously, it could make it a duty. Truth cannot contradict truth, he held, so where proof and the literal words of scripture clash, the passage must be interpreted.

Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in medieval Europe as Averroes, served as a judge in Seville and Córdoba and later as court physician to the Almohad rulers of Muslim Spain and North Africa. His detailed commentaries on Aristotle were translated into Latin and Hebrew, and Christian and Jewish scholars called him simply 'the Commentator'; Thomas Aquinas argued with his views directly. In The Incoherence of the Incoherence he replied point by point to al-Ghazali, who had attacked the philosophers nearly a century earlier. The Decisive Treatise makes the case in a shorter form, as a legal opinion: it asks, as a judge would, whether the law forbids, allows or requires the study of philosophy.

Ibn Rushd (Averroes)Read card
WonderReligion & Belief

Cārvāka, also called Lokāyata, was an ancient Indian school of materialism: it trusted only what the senses show and rejected the authority of the Vedas, the oldest Hindu scriptures, along with rebirth and life after death. Almost none of its own writings survive, so we know it mainly from rivals who wrote to refute it.

Materialism here means the view that only the physical world exists: a person is the body, and death is the end. Tradition names a legendary teacher, Brihaspati, as the school's founder, but the sayings attributed to him survive only as fragments quoted by others. Cārvāka thinkers held that perception is the only reliable source of knowledge, so neither reasoning nor scripture could prove gods or karma, the idea that deeds bring reward or punishment in later lives. Critics summed the school up as advice to enjoy this life rather than give up pleasures for a promised next one. The fullest account is the first chapter of the Sarva-darshana-samgraha, a 14th-century survey of Indian philosophies by the Vedanta scholar Madhava, written to rank rival schools below his own, so how fair the picture is remains hard to judge.

Charvaka (Lokayata) schoolRead card
StillnessLiterature

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

This sentence has not been found in Rumi's writings, but it echoes a story in his Masnavi, the long Persian poem he dictated in Konya. Moses hears a shepherd offering, in homely words, to mend God's shoes, comb his hair and bring him milk. Moses scolds him, and God rebukes Moses: he was sent to bring people closer, not to drive them away. God's answer includes the line “The religion of love is apart from all religions.” When Rumi died in 1273, Christians and Jews joined his mourners.

Rumi (popular attribution)Read card
Next card in the archiveThe philosopher Gottfried Leibniz argued that a perfectly good God must have made the best of all possible worlds, suffering included. Voltaire's Candide (1759) tests this optimism against war, an earthquake and ruin, as the tutor Pangloss keeps insisting all is for the best. The satire asks what such comfort is worth to those who suffer.Read next →