Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life

by John Gray

There may be several reasons for Spinoza’s equivocation. Like Montaigne he belonged to a Jewish family that fled the Iberian Peninsula to escape persecution and forcible conversion by the Inquisition. Bolder than Montaigne, he was expelled in 1656 from the central synagogue in Amsterdam for expressing some of the ideas which would be published posthumously in the Ethics to his co-religionists, who regarded them as heretical. Following his excommunication he was offered an academic position, which – fearing his freedom to think and write might be compromised – he refused. Instead he made a modest living as a lens-grinder, an occupation that may have shortened his life. Spinoza’s critics were right in regarding his views as heretical. For him, God is not the power that created the universe. God is an infinite substance, Deus sive Natura, God or Nature, self-subsisting and everlasting. Human values cannot be derived from a God that created the universe, since God is the universe itself. Spinoza’s ambiguous language may have been an attempt to make this philosophy more palatable to those who had excommunicated him. But it may also be true that he underestimated the extent to which his philosophy undermined traditional beliefs. At times he seems to back away from what is most original in his thinking.