The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I edited and translated by Edwin M. Curley – by Stella Crouch

As an atheist, I often feel starved of non-theistic philosophies and philosophers. I realize there are many diverse atheist philosophers, however they are certainly not the majority. I would argue most people can think of more religious than atheist philosophers - which makes sense as there are many more religious people in the world than atheists. There are, however, a large group of philosophers ‘in the middle’ that I find intriguing as they still hold some religious or spiritual beliefs but deviate from the, and question them, in ways that can be off-putting to traditional religious organizations. Spinoza is one of those philosophers. He was a Pantheist, though often confused as an atheist.

After reading The Collected Works of Spinoza,  I think that his religious/spiritual beliefs are integral to his philosophy and that they simply do not align with the traditional Western sense of ‘God’. Spinoza's God is not personal and not transcendent. He rejects personifying God and rather suggests that God is identical to the world and nature. Spinoza also echoes future philosophers in many works such as ‘God, Man, And His Well Being’, which I would argue is a proto-phenomenological text. His work is deeply analytical in search of some truth.

Spinoza also did not believe in an afterlife, something that also greatly deviated from his Jewish education in Amsterdam. I couldn’t help but wonder, throughout reading his works, how I feel about my own death. This is something I think about too much for my own good, but, this time, I thought about it differently through the lens of a man from hundreds of years ago who dared to question and was ultimately excommunicated for it. Why do I think so much of my own death? Is it because I deeply fear, dread, or am perplexed by it? Perhaps all of those reasons and more. Even broader, however, I pose the question that many before me have. Why do we fear death? It is a question I don’t believe humans will ever stop asking, at least until we figure out some cyborg way for no one to die, and in that case, I will have many more questions to add. The ancient Epicureans felt that fearing death was a mistake, that you should fear only those things that can harm you, and if you are dead then nothing can harm you. When one is dead no pain can befall them. As Epicurus so famously put it, ‘Death, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not’.