Baruch Spinoza

Wilber's View

Spinoza does double duty in SES. In the book's early chapters he's cited, alongside Whitehead, Leibniz, and Aurobindo, among the philosophers who recognized that every holon has an interior — that "consciousness" (Spinoza's own word is "cognition," paired with "extension" for the exterior view of the same event) isn't something added to matter from outside but present, in some degree, all the way down. That's Spinoza the epistemologist of the within of things.

The larger and more structurally important role comes in the book's history-of-Western- philosophy chapters (13–14), where Spinoza becomes the paradigm case of the pure Eco or Descended path — the philosophical pole opposite Fichte's "infinite Subject." Where Fichte's Ego chases pure Ascent, transcendence, and subjective freedom, Spinoza's system of Nature as one infinite and eternal Substance (Deus sive Natura) embodies the opposite pull: pure immanence, pure objective union, the ego dissolved into the Greater Order. Wilber presents late-eighteenth-century German Idealism as one long, serious, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to "unite Fichte and Spinoza" — to hold subjective autonomy and objective wholeness together rather than collapsing into either. Spinoza isn't treated as wrong so much as half of an antinomy the culture never resolved; Wilber notes his continuing pull on "ecomasculinist" and deep-ecology thought as evidence the Eco pole is still very much alive. Wilber is careful, though, to distinguish his own reading of Spinoza from the "God = Nature" version popular with those ecophilosophers: in an endnote he insists Spinoza never equated finite nature with the whole of Spirit, and that Spinoza himself separates transcendental Nature (natura naturans) from merely immanent nature (natura naturata) — a more careful, transcendence-and-immanence position than the simple "pantheist" label usually implies.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Whitehead, Aurobindo, Schelling, and Radhakrishnan are just a few of the major theorists who have explicitly recognized that the within of things, the interiority of individual holons, is in essence the same as consciousness… Spinoza uses "cognition" for knowing an event "from the inside" and "extension" (or matter) for knowing the same event "from the outside."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4

…the pantheism of Spinoza (who regarded himself as a good Cartesian), seeing mind and matter as two parallel attributes of God that never interacted (which he assumed took care of that problem).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1

And by the end of the eighteenth century, this tension—between the Ego and the Eco, and in its extreme forms, between pure Ascent and pure Descent—this tension had become extremely and even unbearably acute, and the watchwords of the age became "unite Fichte and Spinoza!"—unite Ego and Eco, unite Ascent and Descent, and thus heal the two-thousand-year-old schizoid God that had dominated Western culture virtually from its inception.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13

The Eco camps, on the other hand, all had recourse to Spinoza, suitably interpreted for their purposes (this recourse to Spinoza is still quite common in ecomasculinist circles)… To the same age, Spinoza stood for Spirit as eternal and total objective Substance (or infinite and Absolute Object, as Fichte stood for infinite and Absolute Subject).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13

Spinoza maintained that Spirit is radically other to this world, and yet totally and completely embraces this world as a logical premise embraces all its consequents… At no point whatsoever did Spinoza equate the sum total of finite nature with the whole of Spirit or God; this is utterly contrary to what he was trying to say. This is why he himself differentiates carefully between Nature (as God or Spirit, natura naturans), which is infinitely transcendental, and nature (as this world, natura naturata), which is merely immanent.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 8, endnote

See Also

• whitehead — the other major "interiority of holons" source Wilber pairs Spinoza with
• ascent-and-descent — the concept page for the Ego/Eco, Ascent/Descent polarity Spinoza anchors on the Descent side
• holons — the "within of things" claim Spinoza's epistemology supports