We often think of ourselves as isolated individuals, struggling against the world or trying to rise above it. But another possibility is to see each person as a unique expression of Nature itself—a kind of ongoing evolutionary experiment, situated precisely where genes, environment, and experience intersect in the great unfolding of time.
This is not just a poetic metaphor. It’s a deeply grounded philosophical view—one that finds powerful support in the work of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who offered a radical vision of human nature, freedom, and ethics.
The Cutting Edge of Evolution
From an evolutionary perspective, no two lives are alike. Every person is shaped by a distinct configuration of genes, epigenetic markers, early experiences, and cultural forces. We are not blank slates. Nor are we mere products of fate. We are Nature experimenting with itself—each consciousness a node in a long, ancient process of adaptation, persistence, and emergence.
And remarkably, Spinoza’s metaphysics gives this view philosophical depth. For Spinoza, everything that exists is part of a single, infinite substance: God or Nature (Deus sive Natura). Human beings are not separate from this reality—we are modes of it, shaped by necessity and governed by the same rational laws that move the stars and shape the tides.
To live ethically, in Spinoza’s sense, is not to obey commandments or strive for divine reward. It is to come into understanding of the causes that shape us. To move from being passively ruled by our emotions to actively participating in the clarity of thought and emotional coherence. In a sense, it is to co-evolve with Nature consciously.
Catastrophe Without Malice
This perspective is especially powerful when facing the difficult problem of evil or natural catastrophe.
Take the Permian-Triassic (PT) boundary—a mass extinction so severe that over 90% of marine life was wiped out. If one imagines God as omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and personal, this kind of planetary-scale devastation is hard to reconcile. Why would a good God allow such suffering?
But in Spinoza’s vision, this problem dissolves—not because suffering vanishes, but because God is not a person. God is not watching over us with benevolence or wrath. God is the structure of the universe itself—an infinite causal order in which birth, extinction, pain, and joy are not moral categories, but necessary expressions of the whole.
“Nothing happens in Nature which can be attributed to a defect in it.”
—Spinoza, Ethics III, Preface
This view may seem cold at first glance, but it carries a quiet dignity. There is no betrayal by a loving deity, because there was no such expectation. There is only the unfolding of Nature—terrible, beautiful, impersonal—and our ability to see it clearly, and perhaps even to love it.
Evolution Becoming Aware of Itself
To live ethically, in light of this view, is not to escape Nature but to fully inhabit it. To realize that we are not strangers in the cosmos but extensions of its logic, endowed with the strange gift of self-reflection.
In this sense, Spinoza’s ethics is the flowering of evolutionary intelligence. We are evolution becoming aware of itself—not through power or domination, but through clarity, coherence, and serenity.
And perhaps that is enough.