Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677) was expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam because he thought something the community could not think: that God is not a being standing opposite the world, but the world itself. The excommunication of 1656 was so radical that no one was permitted to speak with him, stand near him, or read his writings. Spinoza continued to grind lenses and wrote a book he did not publish in his lifetime. The Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677) appeared only after his death. In it lies a thought that has not been silenced since: Deus sive Natura — God or Nature.
#One Substance, Infinitely Many Expressions
What Spinoza unfolds in the Ethics begins with a single claim: there is only one substance. This substance is infinite, exists necessarily out of itself, and expresses itself in infinitely many attributes, of which we recognise two: extension and thought. Everything particular — every body, every thought, every thing — is not an independent being but a mode, a determinate way in which the one substance expresses itself.
This position, substance monism, is directed against Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who had split reality into two separate substances: res cogitans (thinking thing) and res extensa (extended thing). If you take Descartes seriously, you face an insoluble problem: how can two substances interact that have nothing in common? The mind would have to act on the body and vice versa, yet two essentially different substances have no point of contact. Descartes’ makeshift solution — the pineal gland — was consistently named by Jochen Kirchhoff (1944-2025) in his lectures for what it is: a fantasy born from the embarrassment of a false starting point (cf. Kirchhoff, 2007). Spinoza sidesteps the problem by dissolving the dualism. Mind and body are not two things but two perspectives on the same thing.
#Conatus: The Striving in Being
In Part Three of the Ethics, Spinoza articulates a proposition that works like a bridge between rationalist metaphysics and living experience: every thing, insofar as it lies within it, strives to persist in its being. This striving he calls conatus. It is not a conscious intention but the basic principle of all existence. A stone does not fall because it wants to. But it behaves according to its nature. A person does not think because they decide to think. But the mind strives to increase its power of acting, just as the body strives to preserve itself.
What Spinoza describes here bears a kinship with what appears in Jochen Kirchhoff’s natural philosophy as Bewusstwerdungsdrang — an urge toward awareness: a striving that inheres in reality itself, not one first imported by the subject. The difference is that Spinoza’s conatus remains a principle within a closed system, while Kirchhoff’s drive toward awareness points toward an open, living whole that unfolds and intensifies out of itself (cf. Kirchhoff, 1998). Spinoza describes the striving; Kirchhoff describes the growth. These are not the same.
#What are joy and sadness in Spinoza?
Joy and sadness are, for Spinoza, the two basic affects of transition: joy (laetitia) is a person’s passage to a greater perfection, sadness (tristitia) the passage to a lesser one, and that passage is an increase or a decrease in their power of acting (Ethics III, Definitions of the Affects II–III). In R. H. M. Elwes’s English translation they are pleasure and pain:
“Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection.” “Pain is the transition of a man from a greater to a less perfection.”
— Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics III, Definitions of the Emotions II–III (transl. R. H. M. Elwes, 1883)
The decisive word is transition. Spinoza explains it himself: pain is “an activity whereby a man’s power of action is lessened or constrained” (ibid.). Joy, then, is not something one possesses but the experience of an increase. This is where the affects connect to the conatus: because every thing strives to persist in its being, whatever furthers that striving is felt as joy and whatever hinders it as sadness (cf. Ethics III, Propositions 6–7 and 11 with its note).
Gwendolin Kirchhoff reads this definition as a teaching about agency. “I take Spinoza for this, the Spinoza I hold in high esteem,” she says in a MANOVA conversation with Elisa Gratias (2026, 48:55, transl.), and then: “And we always feel joy when we find our power to act, our agency, our capacity to act, our power to have an effect increased” (ibid., 49:14, transl.). For her the highest joy therefore lies where there is no opposite: in knowledge of the whole context, which Spinoza calls the knowledge of God (cf. ibid., 49:30–49:49). “This knowledge cannot disappoint you, because it has no opposite” (ibid., 49:55, transl.). Here the path leads from the affects to the amor dei intellectualis of the fifth part.
She applies the same definition to despair about the state of the world. A viewer asks how the world is supposed to change for the better if stupidity rules (cf. ibid., 46:34). Her answer starts with the person asking: “And first of all, the question of changing the world is a question asked by someone who feels powerless” (ibid., 47:01, transl.). In Spinoza’s terms that powerlessness can be read as an experienced decrease in the power of acting — as sadness. Kirchhoff leads the question back “to our sphere of action, where we really are, where we spend our time, and to start there” (ibid., 51:25, transl.).
How something spreads from there she describes the same way in two independent conversations: not by one individual rebuilding the world as a whole, but by a person embodying something that others then imitate. Whoever acts differently out of insight is sensed by others, and they resonate with it (cf. ibid., 50:29–50:53). On the podcast Durch den Nebel with Laurens Dillmann she puts it like this: “By embodying something in ourselves, we make it accessible to others” (Kirchhoff in conversation with Dillmann, 2026, 30:41, transl.).
#Why did Spinoza give up honour, wealth and pleasure?
Spinoza gave up honour, wealth and sensual pleasure as aims in life because he found that they pass, stir up unrest and bind the mind to things that can perish; this is how he describes it at the opening of his early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (cf. Spinoza, 1677). These three, he writes there, are what people usually take to be the highest good.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff read this passage aloud in her symposium “Spinoza & Bruno” (2024, in German) from the Meiner edition and translated it into present-day experience (cf. 05:36–09:01). Sensual pleasure passes and often leaves regret behind. Wealth demands an enormous amount of effort and great risks, and whether one attains it remains uncertain. Whoever wants to become famous has to approve of what their surroundings approve of and condemn what they condemn, and is therefore not really free. All three drives, she says, are unstable, and none of them feels free (cf. 07:24–08:39).
At first it seemed unwise to Spinoza to give up something certain for something uncertain. He decided to do it anyway, because in the supposedly certain he recognised a certain evil: the things people usually chase do not preserve our being, they often stand in its way (cf. 08:49–09:54). Happiness and unhappiness, for Spinoza, depend on the quality of what we love. Love for an eternal and infinite thing feeds the mind with joy alone, free of all sadness (cf. 10:22–11:07). Spinoza distinguishes a true good, as a means towards the higher human nature, from the highest good, which consists in attaining that nature together with others wherever possible (cf. Kirchhoff, G., 2024, 13:04–13:34).
The higher human nature he strives for, Spinoza defines as the knowledge of the union the mind has with the whole of nature (cf. 13:22–13:34). Kirchhoff interprets it like this: there is a human dimension that is one with the divine mind — in Christian myth the Christ nature, in Buddhism the Buddha nature — and that is wisdom, the living knowledge of the order and connection of everything (cf. 14:13–14:41).
On Kirchhoff’s reading this is not a flight from the world. Spinoza relies on measure; a person still needs society and family, they are just not placed above the inner orientation towards the highest aim (cf. 14:48–15:22). And he describes how the states of this orientation were rare and brief at first and grew more lasting the more deeply he came to know the true good (cf. 15:22–15:39).
#Amor Dei Intellectualis — and the Question of Knowledge
In Part Five of the Ethics, Spinoza’s thought reaches its summit. He describes three kinds of knowledge: unreliable sense experience, ordering reason, and finally scientia intuitiva, which grasps the particular immediately within the whole. From this third kind springs what Spinoza calls amor dei intellectualis: the intellectual love of God, which is simultaneously the love with which God loves himself.
Here Spinoza touches an experience that reaches far beyond rationalism. If you take in the Ethics with your whole body and not only with your understanding, something can happen: the rhythm of your breathing changes, a deep concentration arises, the mind becomes still and wide at once. There are experiences that ignite at Spinoza’s thinking and that connect with something real in what he calls scientia intuitiva: a knowing that is no longer a standing-opposite but a participating.
And yet a contradiction remains. Spinoza describes this highest knowledge in the language of geometric demonstration: definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs. Jochen Kirchhoff named this contradiction in conversation: Spinoza, although a great mind and also a spiritual one, expresses himself in a language that does not do justice to what he wants to say (cf. Kirchhoff, 2023). The geometric method is a vessel that freezes its content. What is meant as living knowledge becomes a theorem. What is meant as love becomes a proposition.
#Goethe, Einstein, and the Spinoza Effect
Spinoza’s influence on German intellectual history can hardly be overstated. Goethe was a Spinozist before he encountered Schelling’s natural philosophy. What fascinated him about Spinoza was the unity of God and nature, the rejection of any creator-god standing opposite the world. Einstein admired Spinoza throughout his life and repeatedly declared that his concept of God was Spinoza’s: a cosmic order that is neither personal nor arbitrary but manifests itself in the lawfulness of nature.
But precisely the question of what Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura actually means is where the traditions diverge. When you think Deus sive Natura, the question immediately arises: is nature then God? Or is God then nature? For the materialist, God dissolves into nature, and what remains is a world without interiority. For natural philosophy, nature dissolves into something more encompassing that includes mind, consciousness, and aliveness. Spinoza stands at the fork. He dissolved the dualism, but he did not decide in which direction the dissolution leads.
Schelling, in his Naturphilosophie (1797), makes this decision. Nature is not merely a substance with attributes. It is a living process in which mind and matter mutually bring forth one another. “Nature should be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature” (cf. Schelling, 1797). What remains a logical identity in Spinoza — God is nature — becomes in Schelling a dynamic unity: nature becomes spirit, spirit becomes nature.
#What Spinoza Opens and What He Closes
Spinoza’s thinking stands closer to the truth than any materialism and closer than any dualism. Deus sive Natura is a more honest formula than the claim that dead matter somehow produced consciousness. If you read Spinoza, you understand why the split between mind and body is a mistake: not a problem to be solved, but a question wrongly posed. In this respect, Spinoza belongs to the line running from Giordano Bruno through Schelling to Kirchhoff.
Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s answer to the last part of a viewer’s question, how the idea of a higher consciousness can give orientation in thinking and acting, begins with a qualification: “Well, to begin with, only as a possibility.” (Kirchhoff, G., 2026, Das Schicksal ist größer als wir, 1:01:24–1:01:34) Elisa Gratias reads the question out in their conversation on TransitionTV; Kirchhoff has already answered its first part, on the so-called scientific-rational view of the world and of the human being, when Gratias, at her request, reads the last part a second time (cf. ibid., 58:06–58:32, 58:35–1:01:14, 1:01:14–1:01:30). Even when she simply lets all her feelings and thoughts about a situation be there, she says, there are still aspects she does not see or cannot perceive directly (cf. ibid., 1:01:34–1:01:48). But if she holds the idea that there is a higher consciousness – let’s just say, in Spinoza’s sense, a mind that is united with the divine and through that sees clearly what is really the case – and simply posits as a possibility that it could be so, then she knows: there may still be information she does not have, which may nonetheless be potentially accessible to her and would have to be added to the situation (cf. ibid., 1:01:48–1:02:16). This literally maintains a certain openness in her, and this openness allows life and being to tell her something that goes beyond the conclusion already drawn and the supposedly finished insight (cf. ibid., 1:02:15–1:02:38). “And it makes sense to preserve this openness to there always being something beyond that.” (ibid., 1:02:38–1:02:44) Preserving this openness, she says, makes her “strangely enough, peaceful, more open” (ibid., 1:02:44–1:02:48) and keeps something like joy in life and hope alive, which she calls very important forces that always sustain every living being (cf. ibid., 1:02:48–1:02:56). Who knows what will develop from it, she says, and then: “I don’t know.” (ibid., 1:02:58–1:03:04) She does not have to make things so final and finished; she can leave something open (cf. ibid., 1:03:03–1:03:11). It may also be that she does not see things in a situation, and that can motivate her to ask a few new questions again or to learn something more elsewhere (cf. ibid., 1:03:10–1:03:18). It is quite all right, though, to see at this point only as far as she sees, and perfectly all right to be wrong; our perception is limited, will always be so and has to be so (cf. ibid., 1:03:18–1:03:30).
What Spinoza closes off shows in his substance: it is silent. It does not work from within like Bruno’s inner artist. It does not shape, unfold, or grow. It is everything there is, yet it has no voice. The geometric method Spinoza chooses expresses this silence: reality is deduced, not heard. The living cosmos, as natural philosophy conceives it, cannot be proved. It can be experienced.
If you are interested in the philosophical background of the mind-body problem that Spinoza tried to solve, or in the epistemology that follows from his third kind of knowledge, you will find the continuation in those entries.
#Sources
- Spinoza, B. de (1677). Ethics. English quotations from the translation by R. H. M. Elwes (1883), London: George Bell and Sons; German edition used on the German page: Leipzig 1975.
- Spinoza, B. de (1677). Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect [Abhandlung über die Verbesserung des Verstandes, Latin–German, ed. and transl. W. Bartuschat]. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1798). Von der Weltseele. Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes.
- Kirchhoff, J. (1998). Was die Erde will. Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2007). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Klein Jasedow: Drachen Verlag.
- Kirchhoff, J. (2024). “Leben mit der Weltseele — Jochen Kirchhoff bei Pantheismus TV” [Video, in German]. YouTube.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2024). “Spinoza & Bruno – Von den heroischen Leidenschaften – SYMPOSIUM” [Video, in German]. YouTube, 05:36–15:39.
- Kirchhoff, G., in conversation with E. Gratias (2026). “Die gefährlichste Form von Intelligenz” [Video, in German]. MANOVA, YouTube, 46:34–53:47.
- Kirchhoff, G., in conversation with L. Dillmann (2026). “Folge der Schönheit” [Video, in German]. Podcast Durch den Nebel, YouTube, 30:41.
- Kirchhoff, G., in conversation with E. Gratias (2026). “«Das Schicksal ist größer als wir» Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff über Christopher Nolan und das Leben” (“Fate is greater than we are”) [Video, in German]. TransitionTV, YouTube, 18 September 2026, 58:06–58:32 and 1:01:14–1:03:30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smlQFizE8Lg (the Manova version Die Odyssee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjtervR5tR4, has different timestamps).
