Elena - Spinoza

One of the great pleasures and horrors of looking at these men and their philosophies is understanding how so many aspects of my own life and times were conditioned by their beliefs. It is almost a terrible thing that we believe each other so easily. Please, never believe anything I say. Believe only in your self, not your ego. We must not look at each other as light posts that we are aiming at but as points of reference for our own lives, just like planes don't aim to land on the lights that guide them but on the landing strip.

Each life has a history of its own and is meant to process the world through that particular experience. We do not need to steal each other’s experience to live our own. We each have everything that is necessary for our life and work. Each life has the capacity to transform the whole of reality and give it new life just like couples give birth to life in different children. There is only one life no matter how many different children and yet there are as many lives as people and still life is only one.

Having said this it would be easy to see where my understanding is different to Spinoza’s, as different as the understanding of anyone who lives three hundred years from us today, will be in relation to what I am saying. And yet Spinoza is within us as we’ll be within them. The beauty of time is that it lives in eternity and vice-versa.

I would have liked to look at Spinoza more closely today as we read along this little passage so that we could have gone back to Deleuze but my eyes feel as if they were bleeding with pain from the pleasure and pain of looking at the life of this people. Seeing double as I do is not an easy matter for anyone as greedy as myself in the consumption of knowledge. Were I wise enough I would not indulge myself so lavishly in such richness, especially when it’s my aim to rest at least on Sundays!



The opening page of Spinoza's magnum opus, Ethics
Main article: Philosophy of Spinoza
“ These are the fundamental concepts with which Spinoza sets forth a vision of Being, illuminated by his awareness of God. They may seem strange at first sight. To the question "What is?" he replies: "Substance, its attributes, and modes". ”
— Karl Jaspers[17]

Spinoza believed God exists only philosophically and that God was abstract and impersonal.[1] Spinoza's system imparted order and unity to the tradition of radical thought, offering powerful weapons for prevailing against "received authority." As a youth he first subscribed to Descartes's dualistic belief that body and mind are two separate substances, but later changed his view and asserted that they were not separate, being a single identity. He contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e., everything in the Universe) is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality,[11] namely the single substance (meaning "that which stands beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is only understood in part. His identification of God with nature was more fully explained in his posthumously published Ethics.[1] That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do. Spinoza has been described by one writer as an "Epicurean materialist."[11]
Spinoza contends that "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") is a being of infinitely many attributes, of which thought and extension are two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat the physical and mental worlds as one and the same. The universal substance consists of both body and mind, there being no difference between these aspects. This formulation is a historically significant solution to the mind-body problem known as neutral monism. The consequences of Spinoza's system also envisages a God that does not rule over the universe by providence, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Thus, according to this understanding of Spinoza's system, God would be the natural world and have no personality.
In addition to substance, the other two fundamental concepts Spinoza presents, and develops in the Ethics are attribute – that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance, and mode – the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). 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]
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. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion. 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]
Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are:
The natural world is infinite.
Good and evil are related to human pleasure and pain.
Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.
All rights are derived from the State.
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.[20][21]
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