174. - Stoicism

Summary

Ever since Spinoza was alive, commentators have been struck by the prevalence of Stoic themes in his writings. Leibniz named him a leader of “a sect of new Stoics” which maintained that “things act because of [the universe’s] power and not due to a rational choice” (Leibniz 1989b, 281). In the nineteenth century Hegel placed both Stoics and Spinoza in the same philosophical school, which tried to advance an idealistic metaphysics and dogmatically avowed what he called the metaphysics of the “understanding.” In more recent times, major scholars such as Susan James and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty have published important articles asserting that at bottom Spinoza was a Stoic. Some have even linked Spinoza to the Stoics because of his temperament. In the earliest known biography of Spinoza, Johannes Colerus tells his readers that even as he suffered greatly from illness at the very end of his life, Spinoza “always exprest … a truly Stoical constancy” (Colerus 1706, 87).