PERSON

Baruch Spinoza

The 17th-century Dutch philosopher whose metaphysics of the single substance — Deus sive Natura — provided the foundation for Næss's Self-realization and his deep ecology's refusal of the nature/human boundary.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch-Jewish philosopher whose Ethics constructed a metaphysical system in which all particular beings are modes of a single infinite substance — what Spinoza called God or Nature, Deus sive Natura. The identification was not rhetorical but structural: Nature is not a creation placed here for human use; Nature is the totality of what exists, and every being within it participates in the same fundamental reality. The apparent separateness of things is a feature of limited perception, not of reality itself. Every finite being expresses a conatus, a striving to persist in its own being. Ethics, in Spinoza's system, is the cultivation of adequate ideas about one's participation in the whole — a cultivation that dissolves the boundary between self-interest and the interest of the wider reality in which the self participates.

In The You On AI Field Guide

Næss described himself as a Spinozist, not in the sense of subscribing to every proposition in the Ethics but

In The You On AI Field Guide

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