An Introvert as Renegade
Imagine being kicked out of your community and then needing to evade even worse sanctions from your government. Introvert Baruch Spinoza managed that in the seventeenth century.
In the Leiter Reports’ 2017 poll ranking the greatest Western philosophers of all time, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) ranks as #14 – not as important as Plato, Aristotle or Marx, among others, but more esteemed than Nietzsche, St. Augustine or Rousseau.
Spinoza created a cerebral philosophy of nature and ethics that Albert Einstein credited as having deeply influenced him. Born into a Portuguese Jewish family in Amsterdam, Spinoza ran afoul of his fellow religionists there and was excommunicated for “abominable heresies” and “wicked ways.” All the same, his overall impact on Europe’s Enlightenment movement was such that, prior to adoption of the Euro, the Netherlands government honored him by placing his image and name on its highest-denomination bank note.
Spinoza’s life story shows many telltale signs of his introvert leanings. Freedom to pursue his studies wherever they led him was essential to him. For the sake of intellectual autonomy, he turned down several academic posts, including a highly prestigious one at the University of Heidelberg. Instead, he earned a modest and solitary living as a lens grinder, rejecting the idea of climbing any kind of ladder to acclaim. “Honor has this great disadvantage,” he once wrote: “to pursue it, we must direct our lives according to other men’s powers of understanding – fleeing what they commonly flee and seeking what they commonly seek.”
In his early twenties, when his freethinking ideas reached the ears of the rabbinical leaders of the Amsterdam Jewish community, they summoned Spinoza to explain himself. Not satisfied by his responses, the rabbis harshly cast him out of the community, declaring:
“Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not forgive him. The fury and zeal of the Lord will burn upon him and bring upon him all the curses that are written in the book of the law. And the Lord shall separate him for evil from all the tribes of Israel.”
No one in the Jewish community – not even his own siblings – were allowed to communicate with him, even in writing. Although such decrees were normally rescinded when the ostracized person repented and paid a fine, Spinoza’s ban remained in force for the rest of his life.
Despite valuing the freedom of his outsider status, Spinoza took a few steps to prevent his punishing isolation from becoming even worse. He published his bold, challenging works in Latin only and refused permission for them to be translated into the languages of the common people. Only after his death did translations into Dutch and other European languages appear. He avoided public debates. The signet ring he wore to mark his letters bore the Latin word Caute, (“caution” or “beware”), along with the image of a thorny rose.
What was so iconoclastic about Spinoza’s work? Religious authorities of his day considered him an atheist because he saw God not as a lofty being but as nature or the universe. In Einstein’s words: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” In place of religious devotion, Spinoza called for rational inquiry and emotional equanimity. He also gave away all his inherited money to his stepsister. Such emphasis on serenity, contentment and a life of the mind perfectly fits the introvert temperament.
Spinoza is sometimes now regarded as the father of scientific thinking because he advocated for the use of intelligence and reason in pursuit of eternal truths. He structured his major work, Ethics, almost as a series of geometric proofs, leading up to the conclusion that free will is an illusion and that we lead our best lives by understanding that even we are part of nature. Peace of mind comes from recognizing that anger, sadness, joy and worry all come about in just the same way as the sun causes shadows or objects fall toward the earth, he advised.