BARUCH SPINOZA (1632–77) IS THE first of our modern philosophers. He led the way in having the courage to question, too. For not many in Spinoza’s day dared to doubt the existence of a personal God as he did. Spinoza also doubted the notion of free will and, with it, the reality of guilt. In fact, Spinoza put the entire edifice of moral law in question. Excommunicated from a community founded on religious law and living a precarious existence in a wider society that was no less legalistic, Spinoza’s philosophy challenges the operation by which moral law assigns blame. As we shall see, this involves a radically new conception of ethics in which the question of responsibility (what should I do or not do?) is replaced with the question of capacity (what can I do or not do?).

Spinoza was only a generation younger than Descartes, who is traditionally considered the father of modern philosophy. Like Descartes, Spinoza had great faith in the power of reason. The question of how it is with the world is not something for the sages but has a set of precise, almost mathematical-like, answers. With reason liberated from the shackles of superstition, our fundamental questions lead us to answers. And being in possession of this understanding we can be free – not in the sense that we have any choice concerning how things are, but rather in our awareness of the order of things. As for the Stoics before and Nietzsche after him, the important thing for Spinoza is that our way of living affirms the way of the world rather than seeking solace in otherworldliness (worlds where things match up to the way we want them to be).

Though he lived in a time and place – Amsterdam in the seventeenth century – when the unfathomable providence of God was the answer to all difficult questions, explanations of things that seek refuge in the will of God were, for Spinoza (Ethics Part I, Appendix II), Asylum Ignorantiae – a sanctuary of ignorance. This was a very dangerous thought to harbour since God’s freedom was central both to the Reformed Protestant faith that shaped the Dutch Republic and, in a different way, also to the Rabbinical Judaism of his upbringing (the community from which he was excommunicated).