Addendum to Spinoza’s final text.

Addendum to Spinoza’s final text.

I should have finished this one before beginning on the new ones, let me do that now.


Continuation of Text:
This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. In his letter to G. H. Schaller (Letter 62), he wrote: “men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.”[18]

E: true on one level but untrue in the one that embraces this one. Desire is in one realm and freedom from desire in a different one which apparently he wasn’t perceiving in his time.----------


Spinoza’s philosophy has much in common with Stoicism inasmuch as both philosophies sought to fulfill a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness (or eudaimonia, for the Stoics). However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion.

E: The problem is not whether reason can defeat emotion or not, it is not about “defeating” it but about “subverting” it with reason!!! Or if we prefer, seducing it with reason and although it cannot be seduced or controlled with reason alone, reason and will can submit it just like laws and control can submit criminals unable to control their actions just like a rider and the reigns can control a horse.
So the stoics definitely have a partial view of the picture here, surely they are being depicted only too partially but Spinoza’s contention is beautifully legitimate too:


“On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion”

E: This is a lovely understanding and so true but then if we read the next passage carefully, it is actually contradicting his contention with the stoics:


For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held that KNOWLEDGE OF TRUE CAUSES of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key ideas of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.[19]

E: The knowledge of true causes and reason both belong in the sphere of the intellectual. Knowledge of true causes belongs to the realm of laws and we come to the realm of laws through the intellect, through knowledge and reasoning. False, we come to everything through our self but just as our self moves from the ego to itself, in that movement it accesses different scales of knowledge and emotion. The intellectual and emotional realms are part and parcel of each other together with the moving and instinctive realms and they are ALL subject to the self. The difficulty in expressing these things in language is that they belong to the realm of action as much as the realm of being, where action becomes an aspect of being itself rather than an external movement. This is important because in our regular second state we are used to perceive the movement but not the being within the movement and their innate unity. The schizophrenia of our times is precisely about that separation. People’s “self”, their “being”, their “humanity” no longer matters, people only acknowledge their role or position within the context and have lost the “being” inside which is what lends itself to the extreme behavior of over idealizing those in power, be it the male in power, or supra woman with position, in a social or intimate relation or diminishing those without a role within the social, emotional context. Is the idea clear? The average people of today are loosing the capacity to conceive other people as human beings worthy of dignity and respect. It has become “normal” to “label” people and after “labeling” them, granting them an overdose of attention or an overdose of indifference. The DIVA in sports, cults, politics, academics are all aspects of this abnormality and the distribution of excessive amounts of money for these idols is the crystallization of this abnormal consensus. The “machinery” behind the DIVA, exploits the DIVA to support itself while the majority of people out of their circle, remain unacknowledged.

I realize I’ve apparently deviated but there is no deviation in exploration! Where a subject takes me is where it can go and we are trying to understand these principles of knowledge and emotions in our reality. That’s what matters.


Some of Spinoza’s philosophical positions are:
The natural world is infinite.
E: Only three hundred years ago, Spinoza perceived the natural world as infinite and today we are running out of the “natural” world. Mankind is getting old like an individual gets old and they both realize that the abuses committed in their youth are returning the bill. If we cannot put an end to the tremendous pillage of nature, we’ll be no different to an individual with a self-destructive addiction. Consumerism in capitalism is no other than the expression of greed in teenagers whose ego cannot acknowledge the whole. We need full human consciousness to turn the tide of destruction that we are indulging in.


Good and evil are related to human pleasure and pain.
E: False. This belief is another cult pillar to avoid responsibility for actions. There are objectively positive things and objectively negative things and both have the potential to create joy and suffering in the human being. There is nothing wrong with both joy and suffering, these should not be separated from one and the same realm for suffering is not an aspect of evil while crime is.
Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.
E: No, not everything is excellent and divine. Inhumanity is infrahuman and not divine, humaneness is supra-human and divine.


All rights are derived from the State.
E: These is where we started to get into real trouble. One should cry reading this statement because it is at the root of the schizophrenic separation between the being of humanity and the role of individuals within the state. It is at the root of the separation of state and religion when dignity and people’s inherent rights were placed under the jurisdiction of the State and the authority in power. Our history, our lives are so complex that one must necessarily look at the positive side of the role of the state in relation to the massacres of people justified by religion and admit to the necessity of the development of the State and the separation to religion but the massacres and self annihilation that we are living today because of that separation, call for a re-evaluation of the terms on which the separation took place and what it has led us to.

Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational consideration of the benefit as well as the animal’s status in nature.

E: This was also the beginning of madness against nature and this second part about the status of animals in nature was transposed to the status of people in society who could equally be exploited like animals.

If Spinoza was the great philosopher that we’ve been following for centuries, why are we surprised about where we’ve landed ourselves?