ABSTRACT
According to Spinoza, though, a special social condition is needed to stop worrying about death. ‘Thinking of nothing less than of death’ is not a normal condition of the human being and not just a precept of universal reason, as it was according to Prodicos and Epicurus, the ancient sages, for whom thinking of death was just contrary to nature and logic: ‘How can I fear death? When I am, death is not; when death is, I am not.’ Spinoza limits his rule to ‘a free man’. But who is that free man, who thinks of nothing less than of death? Freedom (as I argued at length in Bauman 1988) is a historically loaded concept, and whenever it is spoken it derives its meaning from the resentment of a particular (and particularly vexing and obtrusive at the time) form of unfreedom, constraint, incapacitation, enslavement. Spinoza’s own peculiar personal freedom was his non-belongingness to any of the churches at the time when membership of a church was not just a norm, but the preliminary condition of being human. Having left the synagogue, Spinoza joined neither Rome nor her sworn Protestant enemies. What he meant, presumably, was that in order to obtain that
kind of freedom-one that entails the capacity not to think of deathone needed to emancipate oneself from the established religion.
