The so-called Enlight­en­ment peri­od encom­pass­es a sur­pris­ing­ly diverse col­lec­tion of thinkers, if not always in eth­nic or nation­al ori­gin, at least in intel­lec­tu­al dis­po­si­tion, includ­ing per­haps the age’s most influ­en­tial philoso­pher, the “philosopher’s philoso­pher,” writes Assad Mey­man­di. Baruch Spin­oza did not fit the image of the bewigged philoso­pher-gen­tle­man of means we tend to pop­u­lar­ly asso­ciate with Enlight­en­ment thought.

He was born to a fam­i­ly of Sephardic Por­tuguese Mar­ra­nos, Jews who were forced to con­vert to Catholi­cism but who reclaimed their Judaism when they relo­cat­ed to Calvin­ist Ams­ter­dam. Spin­oza him­self was “excom­mu­ni­cat­ed by Ams­ter­dam Jew­ry in 1656,” writes Harold Bloom in a review of Rebec­ca Goldstein’s Betray­ing Spin­oza: “The not deeply cha­grined 23-year-old Spin­oza did not become a Calvin­ist, and instead con­sort­ed with more lib­er­al Chris­tians, par­tic­u­lar­ly Men­non­ites.”

Spin­oza read “Hebrew, paleo-Hebrew, Aara­ma­ic, Greek, Latin, and to some degree Ara­bic,” writes Mey­man­di. “He was not a Mus­lim, but behaved like a Sufi in that he gave away all his pos­ses­sions to his step sis­ter. He was heav­i­ly influ­enced by Al Ghaz­a­li, Baba Taher Oryan, and Al Fara­bi.” He is also “usu­al­ly count­ed, along with Descartes and Leib­niz, as one of the three major Ratio­nal­ists,” Loy­ola pro­fes­sor Blake D. Dut­ton notes at the Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, a thinker who “made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions in vir­tu­al­ly every area of phi­los­o­phy.”

One might say with­out exag­ger­a­tion that it is impos­si­ble to under­stand Enlight­en­ment think­ing with­out read­ing this most het­ero­dox of thinkers, and in par­tic­u­lar read­ing his Ethics, which is itself no easy task. In this work, as Alain de Bot­ton puts it in his School of Life intro­duc­tion to Spin­oza above, the philoso­pher tried “to rein­vent reli­gion, mov­ing it away from some­thing based on super­sti­tion and direct divine inter­ven­tion to some­thing that is far more imper­son­al, qua­si-sci­en­tif­ic, and yet also, at times, serene­ly con­sol­ing.”

One might draw sev­er­al lines from Spin­oza to Sagan and also to Wittgen­stein and oth­er mod­ern skep­tics. His cri­tiques of such cher­ished con­cepts as prayer and a per­son­al rela­tion­ship with a deity did not qual­i­fy him as a reli­gious thinker in any ortho­dox sense, and he was derid­ed as an “athe­ist Jew” in his time. But he took reli­gion, and reli­gious awe, very seri­ous­ly, even if Spinoza’s God is indis­tin­guish­able from nature. To imag­ine that this great, mys­te­ri­ous enti­ty should bend the rules to suit our indi­vid­ual needs and desires con­sti­tutes a “deeply dis­tort­ed, infan­tile nar­cis­sism” in Spinoza’s esti­ma­tion, says de Bot­ton.

For Spin­oza, a mature ethics instead con­sists in find­ing out how the uni­verse works and accept­ing it, rather in the way of the Sto­ics or Nietzsche’s use of the Sto­ic idea of amor fati. It is with­in such accep­tance, what Bloom calls Spinoza’s “icy sub­lim­i­ty,” that true enlight­en­ment is found, accord­ing to Spin­oza. Or as the de Bot­ton video suc­cinct­ly puts it: “The free per­son is the one who is con­scious of the neces­si­ties that com­pel us all,” and who—instead of rail­ing against them—finds cre­ative ways to live with­in their lim­i­ta­tions peace­ful­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Voltaire: Enlight­en­ment Philoso­pher of Plu­ral­ism & Tol­er­ance

The Diderot Effect: Enlight­en­ment Philoso­pher Denis Diderot Explains the Psy­chol­o­gy of Con­sumerism & Our Waste­ful Spend­ing

How to Teach and Learn Phi­los­o­phy Dur­ing the Pan­dem­ic: A Col­lec­tion of 450+ Phi­los­o­phy Videos Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A giant of 20th cen­tu­ry schol­ar­ship, W.E.B. Du Bois’ career spanned six decades, two World Wars, and sev­er­al waves of civ­il rights and decolo­nial move­ments; he saw the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry with more clar­i­ty than per­haps any­one of his gen­er­a­tion through the lens of “dou­ble con­scious­ness”;  he wrote pre­scient­ly about geopol­i­tics, polit­i­cal econ­o­my, insti­tu­tion­al racism, impe­ri­al­ism, and the cul­ture and his­to­ry of both black and white Amer­i­cans; we find in near­ly all of his work pierc­ing obser­va­tions that seem to look direct­ly at our present con­di­tions, while ana­lyz­ing the con­di­tions of his time with rad­i­cal rig­or.

“An activist and a jour­nal­ist, a his­to­ri­an and a soci­ol­o­gist, a nov­el­ist, a crit­ic, and a philoso­pher,” notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, Du Bois “exam­ined the race prob­lem in its many aspects more pro­found­ly, exten­sive­ly, and sub­tly” than “any­one, at any time.” And there is no one more flu­ent in the ver­nac­u­lars, lit­er­a­tures, and philoso­phies Du Bois mas­tered than Cor­nel West, who lays out for us what this means:

Du Bois, like Pla­to, like Shake­speare, like Toni Mor­ri­son, like Thomas Pyn­chon, like Vir­ginia Woolf…. What do they do? They push you against a wall: heart, mind, soul. Struc­tures and insti­tu­tions, vicious forms of sub­or­di­na­tion, but also joy­ful and hero­ic forms of cri­tique and resis­tance.

West begins his course on Du Bois—delivered in the sum­mer of 2017 at Dart­mouth—with this descrip­tion (things get going in the first lec­ture at 3:15 after the course intro), which ges­tures toward the com­par­a­tive, “call and response,” dis­cus­sion to come. All nine lec­tures from “The His­tor­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy of W.E.B. Du Bois” (plus an addi­tion­al pub­lic talk West deliv­ered at the uni­ver­si­ty) are avail­able at Dart­mouth’s Depart­ment of Eng­lish and Cre­ative Writ­ing site, as well as this YouTube playlist.

The course fol­lows the move­ment of Du Bois’ com­plex his­tor­i­cal phi­los­o­phy and pio­neer­ing use of schol­ar­ly autobiography—(what West calls the “cul­ti­va­tion” of a “crit­i­cal self”)—through a num­ber of themes, from “Du Bois and the Cat­a­stroph­ic 20th Cen­tu­ry” to, in the final lec­ture, “Rev­o­lu­tion, Race, and Amer­i­can Empire.” It begins with 1903’s The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois first wrote of dou­ble con­scious­ness and penned the famous line, “The prob­lem of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry is the prob­lem of the col­or-line.”

West puts close read­ings of that sem­i­nal work next to “sub­se­quent essays in [Du Bois’] mag­is­te­r­i­al cor­pus, espe­cial­ly his clas­sic auto­bi­og­ra­phy Dusk of Dawn (1940),” the course descrip­tion reads. The lat­ter text is not only a Bil­dung, a “spir­i­tu­al auto­bi­og­ra­phy,” Du Bois called it, but also a crit­i­cal analy­sis of sci­ence and empire, white­ness, pro­pa­gan­da, world war, rev­o­lu­tion, and a con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of race that sees the idea’s arbi­trary illog­ic, in the “con­tin­u­ous change in the proofs and argu­ments advanced.” These ideas became for­ma­tive for anti-colo­nial, anti-impe­r­i­al, and Pan-African move­ments.

Du Bois first formed his “rad­i­cal cos­mopoli­tanism,” as Gunter Lenz writes in The Jour­nal of Transna­tion­al Amer­i­can Stud­ies, dur­ing his stud­ies in Ger­many, where he arrived in 1892 and found him­self, he wrote, “on the out­side of the Amer­i­can world, look­ing in.” He returned to Ger­many over the decades and, in a 1936 vis­it, was one of the few pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als who pre­dict­ed a “world war on Jews” and “all non-Nordic races.” But Du Bois not only con­front­ed the geno­ci­dal wars and helped lead the lib­er­a­to­ry move­ments of the 20th cen­tu­ry; he also, with uncan­ny per­spi­cac­i­ty, both antic­i­pat­ed and shaped the strug­gles of the 21st. Access West­’s full lec­ture course here.

West­’s course, “The His­tor­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy of W.E.B. Du Bois,” will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

Take Free Online Cours­es on African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry from Yale and Stan­ford: From Eman­ci­pa­tion, to the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, and Beyond

W.E.B. Du Bois Cre­ates Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, Artis­tic Data Visu­al­iza­tions Show­ing the Eco­nom­ic Plight of African-Amer­i­cans (1900)

W.E.B. Du Bois Dev­as­tates Apol­o­gists for Con­fed­er­ate Mon­u­ments and Robert E. Lee (1931)

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness