ABSTRACT
Baruch Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin. The "free man" is the central conception of Spinoza's Ethics. Classical philosophers had tried to define the "wise man" or "the philosopher", and philosophic wisdom was presumed to be the especial province of the pure philosopher. Spinoza's ethics of the free man is a point-by-point criticism of the ethics of the Calvinist party. The ethics of Spinoza is straightforwardly hedonistic. Spinoza's hedonism differs from his contemporaries' in so far as it is a therapeutic hedonism. Spinoza, the ethically-minded psychiatrist, merged into Spinoza, the mystic lover of God. Mystic and scientist struggled within Spinoza as he labored to achieve a coherent system which would be pantheist and religious, in which God's infinite necessity would coexist with the life of free men. The free man might hope to understand the causes of his human frustration; he might then apply the remedies of social science, of medical science, of psychology.
