Susan James - Spinoza, the philosopher, and the virtue of fortitude

Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, discusses why Spinoza’s philosophy is relevant to our lives today.

About Susan James  "I’m a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College in London. Most of my work is about early modern philosophy, particularly the social and political aspects of philosophy in that period. My most recent book is called Spinoza on Learning to Live Together."

Key Points

• In Spinoza’s the Ethics, the crucial question is to learn what we are like and how we can adapt ourselves to our environment and one another so as to live well. • Spinoza says that the key virtue that philosophers need is “fortitude” – fortitudo in Latin. • For Spinoza, fortitude is the desire to put your knowledge to work in the way that you live, to turn knowledge which may be theoretical into practical and to bring the two together so that you always act on your knowledge.

A life on both sides of society

It is strange that a philosopher who lived several hundred years ago should be such a source of inspiration for us now, both for ordinary readers and for academics of various kinds, authors and so on. I think part of the reason may lie in Spinoza’s biography, in the fact that he lived both inside and outside Dutch society.

Spinoza was born into a well-established Portuguese Jewish family within the Sephardic Amsterdam community, in which he grew up and was educated. In his early twenties, he entered into a terminal quarrel with the authorities of the synagogue, who eventually excommunicated him. We can tell from the curse, or cherem, that they pronounced over him that they were deeply displeased with him, partly for his financial conduct but also, it seems, for his heterodox views. Spinoza was already beginning to go his own way. When he left the synagogue, as far as we know, he cut ties with the Jewish community – as the cherem required him to do – and set out to remake himself.