Jul 24, 2026 · 1 hr 23 min · 14 segments
In this unlocked patreon episode Breht traces and explains a subterranean philosophical lineage running from Spinoza through Hegel to Marx and Louis Althusser. Beginning with Spinoza's conception of…
Baruch de Spinoza was a 17th century philosopher who was born to a Jewish family who had fled Portugal for the much more tolerant Dutch Republic.
Spinoza grew up in the robust Jewish community which had formed there, a community that would excommunicate him in 1656 when he was only 23 years old in the harshest possible terms short of outright imprisonment or execution.
The surviving harem document doesn't even spell out exactly what he was accused of.
It curses him for unnamed quote-unquote abominable heresies and monstrous deeds, and historians still argue about precisely what triggered it.
Spinoza developed the ethics over many years and circulated substantial drafts privately among trusted readers by the mid-1660s.
So it's more accurate to say that the community expelled him for heterodox ideas whose mature systematic form he hadn't yet completed, rather than for the finished philosophy later readers would associate with his name, which, if anything, makes the story more remarkable.
A 23-year-old already considered dangerous enough to cast out entirely years before he'd fully built the system that would make his name infamous across Europe.
A figure of the early Enlightenment, Spinoza's philosophy was defined by a rejection of Cartesian dualism, the philosophy of René Descartes, who believed, among other things, that mind and matter were two fundamentally separate substances.
So to repeat myself, the philosophy of René Descartes, who believed, among other things, that mind and matter were two fundamentally separate substances that merely interacted with one another.
In The Ethics, Spinoza articulated and defended with geometrical proofs a unified metaphysics which argued that mind and matter are not two separate substances at all, but rather attributes of one single infinite substance.
Your individual mind is a finite mode, a particular limited expression of the bigger attribute of thought.
Same underlying reality expressing itself two different ways at the level of one particular person.
So simply put, Spinoza argued that this underlying unified reality was God or nature, which for him amounted to the same exact thing.
The picture of the cosmos that emerges from the pages of The Ethics is one in which the structure of nature itself simply is God.
Baruch de Spinoza was a 17th century philosopher who was born to a Jewish family who had fled Portugal for the much more tolerant Dutch Republic.
Spinoza grew up in the robust Jewish community which had formed there, a community that would excommunicate him in 1656 when he was only 23 years old in the harshest possible terms short of outright imprisonment or execution.
The surviving harem document doesn't even spell out exactly what he was accused of.
It curses him for unnamed quote-unquote abominable heresies and monstrous deeds, and historians still argue about precisely what triggered it.
Spinoza developed the ethics over many years and circulated substantial drafts privately among trusted readers by the mid-1660s.
So it's more accurate to say that the community expelled him for heterodox ideas whose mature systematic form he hadn't yet completed, rather than for the finished philosophy later readers would associate with his name, which, if anything, makes the story more remarkable.
A 23-year-old already considered dangerous enough to cast out entirely years before he'd fully built the system that would make his name infamous across Europe.
A figure of the early Enlightenment, Spinoza's philosophy was defined by a rejection of Cartesian dualism, the philosophy of René Descartes, who believed, among other things, that mind and matter were two fundamentally separate substances.
So to repeat myself, the philosophy of René Descartes, who believed, among other things, that mind and matter were two fundamentally separate substances that merely interacted with one another.
In The Ethics, Spinoza articulated and defended with geometrical proofs a unified metaphysics which argued that mind and matter are not two separate substances at all, but rather attributes of one single infinite substance.
Your individual mind is a finite mode, a particular limited expression of the bigger attribute of thought.
Same underlying reality expressing itself two different ways at the level of one particular person.
So simply put, Spinoza argued that this underlying unified reality was God or nature, which for him amounted to the same exact thing.
The picture of the cosmos that emerges from the pages of The Ethics is one in which the structure of nature itself simply is God.
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