Among Spinoza’s many notorious views is his necessitarianism: the view that everything that happens happens necessarily. Clearly, the view flies in the face of how we usually think. The coin comes up heads, we’re late for that appointment, we brake just in time to avoid the speeding car, and we think things might have gone some other way: it might have come up heads, we might have made the bus, we could easily have been t-boned and killed. Not so, though, Spinoza argues: nothing whatsoever could have been otherwise than it is.

Of course, most will reject this idea out of hand. And, the reasons for doing so are likely to run deeper than any commitment to abstract metaphysical doctrines, or even to simple common sense. The notion that all things that are are necessarily so doesn’t merely contradict many of our common beliefs. More than this, it can seem downright horrific. That is, a world in which all things are necessary can easily seem like one in which we’re utterly helpless, unable to make a difference: simply buffeted around by forces that are utterly indifferent to our efforts.

At this point, though, Spinoza will object. To put his point in anachronistic terms, such reflexive horror presupposes a libertarian view of freedom. As this term is used in contemporary philosophical parlance, it has nothing to do with its more common political meaning. Rather, it refers to the notion that in order for me to have done something freely, it must have been possible for me to do otherwise. And, Spinoza thinks this view of freedom is wrong. So to speak, our agency consists, not in doing what might have been otherwise, but rather in the necessities of Nature bringing something about through us—in his terms, in such a way as to be explained more through our own essence than through the essences of other things. Thus, a necessitarian world isn’t one in which we’re helpless at all.

However, all of this can easily strike one as mere intellectual parlor games. Very few philosophers —let alone laypersons—these days are likely to take necessitarianism seriously. Thus, while Spinoza’s criticisms of libertarian views of freedom might be of interest to some philosophers—since, that is, whether freedom is libertarian is a live issue in contemporary philosophy—the view in defense of which Spinoza raises them might seem like a mere historical curiosity.

I would like to shift focus, though, to a different element of Spinoza’s views on these matters—one that can to some extent be prised apart both from his views about freedom, and from his necessitarianism itself. That is, Spinoza doesn’t merely argue that horror at a necessitarian world is grounded in mistaken presuppositions about freedom. More than this, as he so often does, he considers what many of us would find to be nightmarish, and argues that, when properly understood, it is, quite the contrary, the source of the profoundest joys.

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