Baruch Spinoza

Because he questioned traditional dogmas and interpretations of sacred texts at a young age, he was harshly ostracized by his community and pushed into seclusion with a frightening excommunication (herem). He spent his life in a quiet village grinding optical lenses, dedicating himself to observation and abstract logic. In his masterpiece Ethics, published posthumously, he constructs the universe, God, and human nature with mathematical precision, within a geometric order and architecture. His ultimate goal is to prevent the reader from being a slave tossed to and fro by externally imposed passions (affects), and to clearly teach them the formulas for attaining a free mind. Though fed by Descartes, Hobbes, and the philosophical tradition, he rejected every kind of teleology and blazed a rationalist trail that never marvels at anything. In this work, he is a sage who is cool-headed, does not mock, does not pity, but establishes fair equations as part of an infinite effort to understand. Like the flesh-and-blood embodiment of his own theory, he speaks with a clarity isolated from all pain and superstition.