Over de dood van Spinoza, en Spinoza over de dood

There are various accounts of Spinoza’s death. One well-established fact is that there was a physician with him when he died. If this person, whose identity is uncertain, left a testimony, it has not come down to us. Immediately after the philosopher’s demise rumours began to spread. Until recently little was known about their contents. A report of Spinoza’s final days in an anonymous manuscript – Utrecht UL MS 1284, a notebook kept in 1678–1679 by a young libertine – seems to disclose some of these rumours. But whence this interest in Spinoza’s decease? After all, he was the philosopher who had explicitly stated: ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’ (Ethics part 4, proposition 67). On this point, Spinoza took issue with the prevailing philosophical tradition since antiquity. Precisely for that reason people were curious to see whether he would remain steadfast in the face of death. Especially when a thinker is suspected of atheism, his demeanour at death’s door is considered to constitute the ultimate test of his doctrine. Death thus acquires the status of an argument for or against his philosophy. This paper first surveys the historical details of Spinoza’s demise as we can reconstruct them, and the report of it as given in the Utrecht manuscript. All this is then geared to his own thinking about death, which contrasts not only with the view that has been dominant in philosophy since Plato, but also with the Epicurean indifference towards death as something that does not concern us. According to Spinoza, someone who has a great knowledge of himself and of God, will hardly fear death (Ethics part 5, proposition 39, scholium).