Monism

There is a philosopher who, writing in Latin in a small house in The Hague in the seventeenth century, formulated one of the most radical worldviews Western philosophy has ever produced — and did so in the unlikely form of a treatise of geometry. That philosopher is Baruch (Bento) Spinoza (1632–1677), and the treatise is the Ethics demonstrated in geometrical order, published posthumously in the year of his death. In a little over two hundred pages, organized into definitions, axioms, propositions, and demonstrations, Spinoza proposes simultaneously a metaphysics of the absolute, a theory of human affects, a psychology of knowledge, and an ethics of freedom. His influence runs across three centuries — Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Antonio Damasio — and his name still functions, in the history of philosophy, as a cipher for an intellectual decision: thinking God, nature, and the human being as expressions of a single reality. ...

Anaximander A fellow citizen and disciple of Thales of Miletus, Anaximander (c. 610–546 BCE) was one of the boldest minds of the Milesian school and perhaps the first thinker to write a prose treatise on nature. Tradition credits him with the pioneering use of the term arché (“principle”), as well as remarkable achievements: drawing the first map of the inhabited world and introducing the gnomon (sundial) into Greece. Dissatisfied with Thales’s water, Anaximander proposed as the principle the apeiron — the boundless, indeterminate, and imperishable. No particular element could give rise to all the others without being consumed by them; only something indefinite and inexhaustible could be the eternal source of everything. From the apeiron, eternal and divine, the opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry) separate out, and from this separation worlds are born — which, in due time, return to it. The only surviving verbatim fragment, transmitted by Simplicius, speaks of this cosmology in moral terms: things “pay one another penalty and retribution for their injustice, according to the order of time.” ...

Baruch Spinoza (Benedict of Spinoza) Born in Amsterdam in 1632, into a family of Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin who had fled the Inquisition, Baruch Spinoza received a rabbinic education, but his ideas soon put him on a collision course with the community: in 1656 he was subjected to a herem (excommunication) of rare severity. He declined chairs and honors to preserve his independence of thought and supported himself humbly by grinding optical lenses. He died young, in 1677, and his principal works — among them the Ethics — were published only after his death. He is regarded as the most radical of the seventeenth-century rationalists. ...