God Is Everywhere: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and the Immanent Affirmation of Life

Raphael’s Nietzsche & Spinoza, Fresco. AI art

“I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by ‘instinct.’ Not only is his overall tendency like mine—to make knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness.”¹

Introduction

When Nietzsche discovered his kinship with Spinoza, it was not merely a passing remark or a casual nod to influence. His exclamation signals the recognition of a deeper philosophical convergence — a resonance that transcends their historical distance. Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch rationalist, and Nietzsche, the 19th-century German iconoclast, are often seen as opposites in style and temperament. Yet, beneath the surface, they share a radical reimagining of divinity: not as a transcendent being ruling from above, but as an immanent force pulsing through life itself. While Spinoza finds the divine in the rational order of nature, Nietzsche sees it in the ecstatic flux of becoming. This article explores the parallel yet distinct spiritual visions of these two heretical thinkers, each of whom sought to affirm life without appealing to a world beyond.

A Faceless Divinity: Spinoza and Nature

Spinoza shocked his contemporaries with a seemingly heretical identity: Deus sive Natura — God or Nature. In his Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, God is not a creator external to the world but the single, infinite substance whose essence and existence are identical. Everything that is, exists in God; nothing can be or even be conceived outside Him:

“Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”²

This God does not listen to prayers or issue commandments. He neither judges nor saves. Instead, Spinoza's God is the rational structure of reality itself — an immanent cause expressed through infinite attributes, of which we know only thought and extension. To understand this divine necessity is not simply a theoretical act but an ethical one: it is the path to liberation. As Spinoza writes:

“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”³

Living ethically, then, is not obedience to an external law but the joyful participation in nature’s rational order. Freedom consists in understanding necessity — in aligning one’s life with the totality of causes that determine it.

Dionysus and the Joy of Becoming

Centuries later, Nietzsche too affirms life — but not through rational contemplation. His path runs through art, intoxication, and the dance of becoming. In The Birth of Tragedy, he introduces Dionysus, the god of primordial unity, excess, and ecstasy. Dionysus is not a deity of moral commandments but a metaphor for life’s overflowing force — chaotic, suffering, and beautiful:

“The Dionysian artist is... compelled to look into the inner essence of things and to express the eternal life flowing beneath all appearance.”⁴

For Nietzsche, Christianity is the antithesis of Dionysus: it denies life, divides soul from body, and subordinates the present to an imagined afterlife. In contrast, Dionysus symbolizes a divinity that redeems nothing and demands no sacrifice — a god that affirms life in its fullness, including its pain.

This ethos culminates in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where the prophet proclaims the eternal return: a thought experiment that invites us to embrace existence as if we would live it again and again. Eternity is not in the afterlife, but in the full affirmation of this moment:

“Behold, this moment! From this gateway, a long path stretches back — an eternity lies behind us. Does not this moment want to last forever?”⁵

Joy, for Nietzsche, seeks eternity not by transcending time but by deepening the present — by saying “yes” to life as it is.

Fundamental Convergences

Despite stark contrasts in tone and expression, Spinoza and Nietzsche share core philosophical commitments. Both reject the notion of a transcendent God who stands outside the world. Both deny free will in the traditional sense, conceiving human actions as determined by immanent causes. Both disavow sin, guilt, and moral absolutes imposed from above.

Instead, they describe life as a self-organizing, self-affirming process. Spinoza’s concept of conatus — the striving of each being to persevere in its being — finds an echo in Nietzsche’s will to power, a force not of domination but of self-overcoming, creation, and becoming. Their language differs, but their metaphysical orientation is strikingly aligned:

“Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, strives to persevere in its being.”⁶
“Life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must always overcome itself.’”⁷

In both, we find a vision of life not as a test or preparation for another world, but as an end in itself — perfect in its immanence.

Differences of Style and Feeling

Yet these affinities should not obscure their differences. Spinoza writes like a geometer, carefully deducing propositions in the manner of Euclid. Nietzsche, by contrast, writes like a tragic poet, crafting aphorisms that wound and seduce. For Spinoza, freedom comes through understanding; for Nietzsche, through affirmation — even of what remains irrational and inscrutable.

Spinoza seeks to dissolve fear through knowledge; Nietzsche seeks to transfigure suffering through art. Where Spinoza finds peace in necessity, Nietzsche finds ecstasy in becoming. Spinoza’s God is a faceless order; Nietzsche’s Dionysus is a laughing god of fire and flux.

Conclusion: Two Necessary Heresies

In different idioms, Spinoza and Nietzsche articulate a shared spiritual rebellion — a refusal of transcendence and an affirmation of life. Spinoza constructs a rational system in which God is the name for nature’s infinite productivity. Nietzsche offers a poetic vision in which Dionysus embodies the eternal return of becoming. Both reject a God who judges, separates, and negates; both celebrate a divinity that asks for no worship, only presence.

Spinoza’s God is nature thinking through us. Nietzsche’s Dionysus is life laughing through our bodies. And both invite us, each in their own way, to utter the same radical affirmation: yes.

References

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1954, 91. Postcard to Overbeck.
2. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics, Part I, Proposition 15. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 1, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 417.
3. Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Proposition 42, Curley, 606.
4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, §9. In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 46.
5. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Vision and the Riddle.” In The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1977, 275.
6. Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Proposition 6, Curley, 492.
7. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On Self-Overcoming.” In The Portable Nietzsche, 225.