Transcendence And Internalization, Freedom And Necessary Tension - A Study Of Spinoza 's Pantheism

Spinoza, as a summit of modern philosophy, certainly should be taken highly of. However, just as "One thousand viewers have one thousand Hamlet", different researchers might also view Spinoza differently. For a long time, there are endless discussions about his ethics, political science, epistemology, especially about his philosophy of religion and viewpoint of theology. Most of the previous studies on his viewpoint of theology were about his atheism, with no deep interpretation. This kind of research situation is the right beginning of this paper.Beginning with the breakup to religious theology, Spinoza can still not be classified as an atheist. In this paper, we mainly discussed the relationship between Spinoza and religion as well as his general positions on theology. Originally influenced by Jewish monotheism、Medieval mysticism、Cartesianism, Spinoza finally became a Pantheist and developed Pantheism into a much more detailed and rigorous study with wide and strong influence. Pantheism can be found in philosophy during its long history, including Neo-platonism and Medieval theology. However, Spinoza is quite different from the previous pantheists, for he set up the interior relationship between God and nature as well as the Necessity principle, which is easily ignored by researchers. Therefore, in the paper, the writer presented the tension between transcendence and immanence, freedom and necessity, and explained the meaning of Pantheism.Instead of regarding God as the material world, Spinoza concluded the basic propositions——"God is Nature" and "God is Entity"——through the dichotomy of Nature. He also abandoned the tradition method of definition adhered to scholastic philosopher, but began with ontology way to define, verify and cognize God. About the relationship between God and Nature, he objected to the theory that God was beyond Nature which was held by theologians, but believed God was internalized into Nature. On this basis, Spinoza denied the mysteriousness in the definition of God, equaled God with entity, and advanced the Cartesian Dualism into Entity Monism, which lay the meta-philosophy foundation of Pantheism.On freedom and necessity, Spinoza was a firm determinist. In his pantheism, both model and entity’s existence and exercise were dominated. Therefore, Spinoza believed that the Free Will theory held by theologians couldn’t hold water, for the freedom of human-being shall not be the freedom of making choices but the rational control of emotion. In this way, he set up the coherent and systematic philosophy.As Pantheism failed to get many interest from researchers, what are the real reasons of doing studies from this aspect? On one hand, we can get full understanding about Spinoza in this way; on the other hand, with distinct philosophical points, Spinoza pantheism showed us a brand new theory. First, Spinoza, obviously, developed his political and religious stance from pantheism. In other words, he finished the deconstruction of traditional theism by the means of pantheism. Second, pantheism indirectly resulted to the fading of the Enlightenment. In the opinions of philosophies like Jacobi, it is inevitable that Spinoza finally developed fatalism and atheism, for his adherence to necessity theory will be damage to both religion and rationalism. Lastly, pantheism created a kind of buffer space for both reason and faith to make hesitant ideologists take a breath temporarily.It is no doubt that Spinoza Pantheism is a rebellion to traditional theism, but how to judge their relationship deeply? This is an important issue about the understanding of Spinoza’ view of philosophy. First of all, Spinoza declared clearly that he was not an atheist and gave detailed explanation. In the second place, Spinoza essentially differentiated from atheist in moral practice, ontology thought, and the adherence to necessity theory. Therefore, Spinoza pantheism was neither the heritage of the traditional ones nor the variety of atheism, but a kind of theory with great Spinoza’ characteristics.