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Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die
Steven Nadler
Socrates says in Plato’s
Gorgias that there’s nothing more serious than “the question [of] how we ought to live.” We may aspire to live a good and happy life but what does such a life consist in? Good in what way? And happy how?
We may aspire to live a good and happy life, but does Spinoza’s love of God remain a viable path to it?
For a pious Jew or Christian, perhaps, the answer seems simple: a life in line with God’s will as expressed in the Bible. But what about the rest of us who have turned our backs on revelation? One of the first to do so was the Dutch Portuguese Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza in the seventeenth century. The prophets had no wisdom, he claimed, and the Bible’s picture of God was utterly wrong: there is no creator God who performs miracles and reveals his will to Moses, let alone records it on tablets. (It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Spinoza was excommun