Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice. - Benedictus de Spinoza

Many people who are engaged in the ecological crisis claim to have been inspired by Spinoza. They read some of Spinoza's texts or his comments on those texts. Some even read about Spinoza himself, but this does not mean that they try to find out exactly what Spinoza meant. Why should they? They make use of his image and his texts in their lives. What more could or should Spinoza expect of them? Spinoza does not write about the beauty of wild nature. Perhaps he never talked about it. Not about the coastline of the Netherlands, the storms, the variety of light and darkness, the seabirds. There were people around him, Dutch landscape painters, who appreciated all this. Maybe he did also, but it scarcely influenced what he says in the Ethics.

It was not until the Twelfth Century of our era that the Pentateuch as a whole was subjected to rational scrutiny. The man who undertook the ungrateful task was a learned Spanish rabbi, Abraham ben Meir ibn Esra. He unearthed many absurdities, but... it was not until five hundred years later that anything properly describable as scientific criticism... came into being. Its earliest shining lights were the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes [with his Leviathan], and the Amsterdam Jew, Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-politicus", published in 1670, made the first really formidable onslaught upon the inspired inerrancy of the Pentateuch. It called attention to scores of transparent imbecilities … including a dozen or more palpable geographical and historical impossibilities … The answer of constituted authorities was to suppress the "Tractatus", but enough copies got out to reach the proper persons, and ever since then the Old Testament has been under searching and devastating examination.

...But when it comes to the subject of the arts, Spinoza is oddly reticent. His failure to consider the aesthetic response—surely a profound facet of human experience—is all the stranger when one compares him, again, to Plato who directs as much conflicted pondering to the arts, particularly to poetry, as to erotic love.