Dr. Darren Staloff, Spinoza's Ethics

foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] brook spinoza is far and away one of the most challenging figures in the western intellectual tradition extremely abstruse technical precisionarian in fact if any of you've ever looked at is perhaps greatest metaphysical work the ethics you'll note that the very form of it is profoundly how to say off-putting it's literally takes the form of a geometrical proof with axioms definitions scolium proofs and i should point out that a lot of them are well sort of fanciful not quite accurate and i'm not going to try and go through all the proofs with you in any entirety what i will try to do is again try and make them intuitively clear to you and go over some of the central metaphysical doctrines but that's not the only sense in which descartes is difficult or challenging he's challenging the most obvious sense spinoza perhaps unlike any other philosopher perhaps up to the time of nietzsche challenges the received wisdom of the western view we saw even with descartes who was certainly the father of modern philosophy that he accepted the notion of god and the notion of human freedom free will not so espinoza with spinoza we see one of the first purely rational skeptical minds yet at the same time a rational mind that is attuned to the needs of the human spirit and therefore i want to ask you to try and suspend whatever prejudices you may have towards spinoza's views and follow along and see if there's not something perhaps in it that appeals to you i should point out he's not only challenging to us today he was incredibly challenging to his environment in fact he was excommunicated from both his own faith to jewish religion and from the christian faith and that is no small trick i mean you must really be doing something right if everyone hates you and yet people who knew him and one of which was the famous philosopher leibniz said he was an absolutely charming man sweet kind considerate many ways nurturant and yet he was vilified you'll if you read and say 17th or 18th century philosophy many figures will mention him as a horrible evil man and again from a certain perspective he may seem that way but i think if you take the larger view you can't help but see that that is fundamentally a statement of ignorance and prejudice let me begin with some of the problematic challenging ideas he suggests towards what i call the judeo-christian tradition again that's the idea that there is in the sky somewhere a god who created the world and cares about it knows his reaction in the 17th century writing after descartes was profoundly influenced by descartes they lived in the same city in fact amsterdam was one of bemusement and occasionally perhaps something close to disgust his point was that once upon a time to believe there was a great sky daddy very much like our tribal chieftain who tells us what to do and give him blood libations and sacrifices and love him with all our heart once upon a time that was not such a crazy idea right when nature was a mystery when all we looked at the world with was with awe at that moment it was acceptable to believe in myth to believe in god but he says now that we have modern science now that we're at the very cusp of the newtonian revolution and he was extremely scientifically literate in fact to digress for one moment there is a great myth about spinoza that he was a lens grinder he's got a germ of truth to it he ground lenses but not for glasses he was independently wealthy came from a jewish merchant family set himself up in business in a very young age and made himself independently wealthy he was grinding lenses because he was doing experiments in optics and doing foundational research using microscopes and telescopes so his point is given our modern scientific knowledge of the world how can we believe that somewhere if we could just get beyond say saturn or something like that and open a door we'd find ourselves in heaven where there's this tyrant who pushes us around he says even if you did believe in some kind of a god why would he care about you do you think this is the only planet in the universe right he's post copernican he realizes that the earth's not the center of the universe there are other planets there may be other life forms that was a position that was very challenging he was accused of atheism i'm going to argue in fact he's not an atheist that he only appears to be an atheist if we are traditional judeo-christians he one of the critiques that was thrown at him was that he denied spirituality i don't think so i think he attempts to offer us a scientific spirituality a spirituality as it were for a rational person in the 20th century a sense of the beauty and perhaps sublimity of the world without having to believe things which at least spinoza thought would make a gorilla blush right okay the other thing he rejected and it's from aristotle and it's closely connected to the judeo-christian tradition was the notion of teleology right as i previously mentioned with aristotle teleology is the notion that the earth has purposes things have purposes natural and states now again spinoza says once upon a time i could see how that idea got born how primitive man creates tools and tools are purposeful aren't they right a hammer is very good for the purpose of driving nails a knife is very good for the purpose of cutting from a primitive perspective it was an understandable leap to see that if there were things in nature naturally occurring that served our purposes therefore there must be some sort of tool maker who created them right food just happens to serve our purposes but his point is that once upon a time that was an acceptable view but in a modern scientific age can we really believe nature has a purpose that it's moving towards something it's an incredible sort of hubris to think that well nature's purpose of course is to supply us with things to eat and things to dominate incredibly humorous because it implies that somehow or other the cosmos came about to serve my particular purposes and that he finds palpably absurd there's no intelligence behind the world the world is a physical phenomenon there's no purpose behind it there's no end of it if the world went out of being tomorrow god exploded in a huge series of nuclear accidents that would happen nothing would be lost it's not some cosmic tragedy right there's no purpose to be fulfilled it's simply the physical substance of the universe or however we want to describe that substance we'll see it becomes controversial working itself out through the causal nexus so we must remove animism purpose and notions of divine intent or perhaps anthropomorphic natural intent from the world when we speak of natural law we must not think of it as human law and its moral necessity you must think of it as mathematical law as logical necessity not having any normative value and the implications for instance in terms of ethics are profound if we are as it were simply in nature then we have to see that all human action is part of the natural economy of things war as well as peace hatred as well as love and that they are all completely logically understandable and scientifically explainable phenomena okay so much for spinoza's critiques of what preceded him as i mentioned spinoza is profoundly affected by descartes epistemology that is the epistemology of clear and distinct ideas and the method of carefully rationally reconstructing one's arguments that is in fact the reason why the work takes the form of a geometric proof in five books if he's basically trying to say look renee if you really took your ideas seriously you would not have written expository prose whereas once upon a time expository pros with the malaysians that i argued was a great breakthrough we've reached the point now where that too is antiquated the only forms of disputation which are acceptable are logical mathematical proofs he also accepted something else from descartes at face value and that was his definition of substance and remember we saw two substances mind and body what they both had in common was for descartes a propensity to exist right that's what a substance is that which has a propensity to existence well if that's what substance is is it logically possible that there would be more than one of them right why should then one posit that there are two distinct substances it would make more sense since unity and simplicity is the basic axiom of the scientific method to see what we can do by arguing that in fact there's really only one substance and that is of course the world in the universe that position by the way is called metaphysical monism monism being one there's only one thing and it's generally the famous contrast to descartes metaphysical dualism in this case it's a dualism of mind and body what's interesting about spinoza is that he refers to that substance as god or nature that's the question why would he do that was it an attempt to get into religious good graces i don't think so he'd been excommunicated and incidentally i should point out he didn't exactly and try to avoid excommunication once he realized the fruits of his own researches he thought it was a very good idea to lie down in front of the synagogue on the sabbath so that if these people really felt they had to go in and pray they should do it over his body to realize how much contempt he had for them no i don't think it was to to avoid ecclesiastical censure if it was it was completely unsuccessful rather it's his attempt to offer a rational spirituality if there's no god in heaven then why not take that sense of wonderment of awe of reverence and simply apply its being to that which exists and it is a very not only rational but in many ways humanistic sort of religion isn't it i mean commonly called pantheism but it's rather that simply because we don't believe in the judeo-christian myth there's no reason to give up on human spirituality it's an essential part of the well-lived life once you rationally feel that same take those same feelings and simply apply it to being itself do whatever exists one can reverence life when can reverence the ways of nature or god well if there's only one substance then how do we deal with the apparent fact that i've got a body and i've got a mind that there's something different in me than in chimpanzees right we do seem to all have that intuition the mind is distinct from the body that can't be so if there's monism what spinoza argues is rather than think of them as two different substances think of them as the same thing but described in two different ways he calls them attributes well fair enough but how would you cash that in you might cash it in this way isn't it true that when an event occurs we can describe it in many different ways for instance um for those of you who play chess knows there's a chess notation imagine then i'm going to tell you two moves in a chess game white plays pawn to king four black plays knight to king bishop three that's a description of an event right that notation pk4 and kb3 that's one description but that's not a complete description i can describe it differently i could describe it rather than in terms of the logical notation of chess in physical terms biological terms one human lifts his right hand picks up a piece of matter moves it forward two inches and places it down another directly opposite tool picks up a different piece of matter moves the two inches forward and one inch to the left two different things exact same event described differently and we could add more descriptions different sorts of descriptions to get different aspects of it different attributes we could say that that was bori uh bobby fischer playing elections defense against boris baskey and that is in fact the opening we could even make it richer than that and say what was really going on there don't describe in terms of chess notation physicality or the fact of the chess mask match what was really going on there was a psychological thing bobby fischer psyched his shoes off of boris basket he played that opening six months before in buenos aires again bonasares against um sebastian had his head ripped off and here he is in the international championship playing that move clearly on sound and saying yeah i'm not real afraid of you boris and at that moment for him on it sebastian's second best he just loses his nerve so he can describe that event in a lot of different ways and he responds to the card it's not a lot of different events it's the same thing you're just describing it differently so we can describe then human action in two ways we can describe it physically as the motion of organs neural firings or you can describe it in terms of a distinct linguistic protocol a distinct descriptive way or a way of analysis and that is in terms of ideas but there's no reason to assume because we have two different ways of talking about the same thing that they're not the same thing that is hence his monism now i should add another point to that he actually said that we're only aware of these two attributes body and mind in addition to which he said there's undoubtedly an infinite number of those attributes why beats me has something to do with the notion that since god is in fact substance and god is perfect in some sense we reverence it and being is complete it would probably have an infinite number of attributes now that's real abstruse the way i try to make that intuitive is to say spinoza in ways is a sort of proto-hippie you know he's saying wow man you know god's like so many different kinds of things we can't conceptualize it you know you know maybe he's a california hippie i'm sorry on that regard if you're from california but the key for us i think what we should try and take from spinoza because that is a sort of bizarre doctrine is that notion that the mind and body may not in fact be distinct things at all that may in fact be and spinoza argued i think quite cogently are just two different ways of describing the same phenomenon now be really clear about something not all of nature can be described in terms of mind right i wouldn't describe the uh the movement of say a chair in terms of the will of the chair or the concepts that the chair has only part of nature that could be described in terms of mind is of course humans so therefore that leads us to the following question does god have a mind yes he does and where is that mind it's on all of you and in me because there is no god outside of us and nature so the mind of god that goes to a sort of process of development perhaps and we'll see something quite like this in hegel is in fact human rationality the human speculative insight the human mind which is the same thing as the human body and hence his metaphysical monism and resolution of the mind-body problem now another thing i want to point out if it is the case that we accept descartes clear and distinct epistemology and realize that such ideas clear and distinct ones are intuitively true and therefore correspond to objective reality then we can conclude that the causal nexus what exists in the world as the glue between entities is identical to what in in terms of the description of ideas would be called logical necessity it's an abstruse doctrine but has very important implications why because if it's true that every cause and we agree that everything in the universe is caused right there's nothing that's uncaused if every cause is assimilable to logical necessity to logical implication then every cause is necessary there's no accidents therefore the universe knows no spontaneity knows no accidents knows no chance there's no fortune those are all words based on our ignorance we may not be able to explain a phenomena but it's completely logically determined and therefore everything that happens and will happen is unavoidable and that doctrine is called determinism so in spinoza we find the expression of monistic determinism there's one thing in that makes a being and that is substance god or nature and its behavior is completely determined there's no accidents no chances and that raises the other sense in which another way in which spinoza is quite controversial and challenging before he says and you are you a part of nature are you a animal are you a ghost in a machine like descartes thought somehow different than monkeys and chimpanzees well you're different and that you're much more complex and you can speak and reason and we can describe you in terms of ideas but surely man is part of nature and if man is part of nature then his behavior too is determinable is predictable in fact if that's the case then the notion of free will is a pathetic joke we don't have free will we are completely determined by our education our sensory inputs the sort of training we've had in making inferences and again i i realize that that's a very counter-intuitive notion we do feel like we make choices all the time but what spinoza asks us is and those choices i suppose they were random nothing determined that choice right well then if there was something that determined that choice then then they're caused and hence determined and predictable there was nothing that determined it and it was random then it was well irrational now again abstract let me try and cash it in in a common sense example we all believe we have free will yet somehow or other we do feel we can predict other people's behavior and the two things don't mesh how do we predict other people's behavior how many i presume not knowing how many of you most of you have seen marx brothers movies right i really love them and there's a wonderful demonstration of determinism there because there's a counter example to it you ever notice whenever you try to shake whenever someone tries to shake harpo marx's hand what he does sticks his knee in it right what's the point when you meet someone for the first time and you stick your hand out if they have completely free will and their action is unpredictable it shouldn't shock you at all that they stick their knee in it you should be surprised if they don't stick their elbow in it perhaps rub the nose in your hand why not but somehow rather you really do seem to have the sense that they're going to stick their hand out and grasp yours hence you believe their behavior is predictable hence you believe is determined by your own action if we've had if we've watched children watch them grow up don't you feel you can predict their responses to things right if you've got a kid that say loves the redskins you know he's a big football fan and you you know how the super bowl is going to end up you know you watch the super bowl can't you predict he's going to be real happy at the end well how can you predict that if his behavior is not determined if it's not a stimulus response game with respect to his desires that's the intuition that spinosa tries to to give you tries to tell you look we may not understand all of the causes of our action that's no reason to assume they're uncaused we once didn't understand the cause of gravitational attraction or what it was uh how we could predict it that didn't mean that things fell to the earth as aristotle said because they love them because they kind of feel natural on the earth right that's an argument from ignorance and he argues that the more you come to understand a person the more dating you have the more you can predict them and i think we all see that in our common life right i mean people you know very well you know how they're going to respond to a question you know what they're going to do in a certain situation and when they don't is it because well they have free will or because there was probably some mitigating circumstances which you didn't know if you had all of the complete biography you would be able to predict everything and all the complete neurology of course that's exactly what spinoza tries to give us a modern deterministic psychology i'm not going to run through the whole thing but i'll tell you he he posits two principles and from them is able to produce in a logical deduction all of the emotional states we have so what is the first positive something he calls the conatus he says within every organic entity is a desire for survival a will to power if you will and a long vital or as we darwinians might say a survival instinct right everything attempts to have as much potency as it possibly can in its environment that's what it means to be alive to be animate matter so we start with that the konatus will to life desire and we add one more principle which spinoza invented and which is the basis of all modern psychology the principle of association all right if [ __ ] victories are associated in the young child's mind with or experience with uh pleasure with going out to mcdonald's afterwards if it likes mcdonald's or getting a slurpee afterwards if it likes slurpees after that every time the redskins win it will be experienced as pleasant those two things will be associated together we know that with dogs from pavlov ring a bell if before you feed it and after a while if you ring a bell you don't even have to bring the food it starts drooling and we know that with humans too right we have associations and unraveling them as the business of modern psychologists when they become traumatic with that he's able to argue that every emotional response we have every emotional state is simply principle of association with a desire for pleasure pain or devoid pain and can be reconstructed from that so love is an association we have with something which is positive which is pleasant to us and the idea of the thing which causes it and it goes on and on and on with all the universes i'm not going to go through the whole proof with you but my point is he's reducing all of human psychology to stimulus and response which is exactly what you would do with animal psychology too isn't it and his point is well that's just what you'd expect what are you after after all you're an animal too why shouldn't you obey all the rest of the laws of biology right in fact think about stimulus response how do you train a dog how do you housebreak a dog stimulus and response how do you train a child stimulus and response when a child goes to stick his hand in the fire do you reason with them if you do that you're gonna you know get nerve damage there and it's going to cause very unpleasant neural states or do you say no that's bad and he feels shame and he associates sticking his hand in the fire with a state of shame and he avoids it and then later on when he gets old you'll say well i the reason i did that i didn't mean to really you know traumatize you or anything but i didn't want you to burn your hand and that he says is the nature in a very complex way of human emotionality now we turn now to his doctrine his way of salvation and it's a difficult way he says as much but i think it's important he argues that what is human happiness what is the well-being of the human and not in some abstract and metaphysical way but palpably it's the well-being of the animal what makes an animal or gives it more well-being more power right quite simply the more power the more potency it has the better off it is in physical terms that means strength stature to have all of the the best physical development possible and emotionally there's an analog to it so happiness is creating as much power for yourself as possible now here's where he says something interesting if you are determined in your cognitive states by external phenomena and they overwhelm you does that make you more powerful or less powerful in other words if say the amount of taxes you have to pay is going to make you depressed for three weeks then visit your environment is that a state of empowerment or disempowerment it's disempowerment your cognitive states your emotional life is being determined by something outside of you that's a lack of power he describes that as a passive emotion passive in the sense that you are held passive to external phenomena that manipulate the way you're going to feel about your life and that's the only thing of what you're immediately aware are your feelings so your life is in fact out of your hands insofar as you succumb to passive emotions insofar as you are simply a response to stimulus in fact he goes farther and i think quite eloquently i want to read you a small passage describes that as human bondage i assign the term the term bondage to man's lack of power to control and check the emotions for a man at the mercy of his emotions is not his own master but his subject of fortune in whose power he lies so that he is often compelled although he sees the better course to pursue the worst insofar as emotion caused by external phenomena grip our cognitive states our our consciousness we are on the grasp about of things outside of us we are determined by that which is outside of us this is the origin of a notion called heteronomy which will become one of the fundamental principles of khan's metaphysics of morals and he points out something we're all in human bondage no one can avoid all of emotional bondage and that's where he differs from the stoics so the stoic should have had a good idea but no one can actually achieve what the stoics achieve but he says there is a way out a way of salvation it's not absolute it's not complete but nonetheless it at least gives us a chance to reach the path of salvation and that is how do you break the power of the emotions over you it's by understanding the cause or learning scientifically how human psychology is a stimulus and response game when you do that when you see the necessity of all of your emotional states of all your judgments they as it were lose their power on you now it may not seem obvious to any of us how that should be the case but in fact think about what modern psychologists do how they do break people from traumas and emotional bondages they simply explain how they occurred and that's the form of therapy it's a sort of speech therapy once you understand the nature of the things which are causing your responses you're sort of therapeutically liberated you can then look at that emotional state as i get my taxes fill out my tax bill and realize i have to pay a lot of money and immediately start to feel rage and anger i can say to myself but darren that's a completely understandable and predictable response to the fact that you know you want to keep as much money in your pocket as you possibly can and once i realize that the power of that powerful emotion is checked and i can sort of say yeah it was funny that i would have been upset about that but now i can achieve a certain degree of equanimity of serenity of equipoise towards the world so when you come to understand the necessity of each of your human emotions why you must have stimulus response patterns then you are strangely enough able to liberate yourself from that power that also means however you have to understand the necessity of events in the world and this bears on spinoza's life in a very i think important way here is a man who's been excommunicated from the jewish and christian faith in addition to which you've been vilified by all speculators he comes from a uh tradition sephardic judaism which has recently gone through about a century of brutal persecution in the iberian peninsula in fact originally from portugal pushed out from the spanish inquisition wouldn't it be natural to be bitter and angry in that sort of a situation so look around at your perhaps the christian environment that surrounds you and say when i hate these people they're hateful they're sick all they do is persecute they supposedly teach a doctrine of love but spinoza's point is yeah you could do that that would be an understandable emotional response and you'd live a life of misery a life of bitterness what you have to do is understand they're acting just the way people would if they'd had the upbringing they've had the training they've had the moral indoctrination they've had that's been completely understandable that they'd act that way they're not to be blamed for it it doesn't hurt the universe so they persecute me in portugal and send me you know from lisbon to amsterdam and persecute me there too i'm not the end of the world that's what people do sometimes sometimes they do nice things sometimes they do one nice thing there's no point in railing against it's not going to change it the only thing you can you can control to some extent and again very much like marcus aurelius all your own emotional states is your own state of of mind and if that's what you can control then even in the midst of persecution of excommunication you can remain espinoza did a charming kind friendly person even as you're being vilified and told that you're a pig and an atheist you can smile and say i understand why you think that i disagree but i'm not angry with you if i'd been brought up like you were brought up if i'd thought the thoughts that you think i'd undoubtedly agree with you i'd like you to try and see it my way but if you don't if you in fact decide to kill me as a result there's nothing i can do and i'm not going to be upset about it i have as much time as i have and i'm going to enjoy it in equipose equinamity and in peace goes a step farther however once you realize the necessity of everything in the universe then hatred disappears and you can return to that reverence for being even in the midst of the most awkward and unhappy circumstances and that then takes the form of a sort of universal rational love you realize that the universe is just the way it is and it's the way it has to be given the laws of nature and you get old and die and that's the way it should be why some people get diseased but lay someone's got to feed micro parasites that's the way of the world and if you can do that then with each thing that happens you can look at it and say it's necessary it may not seem pleasant but there's no reason to let it upset me that's the way the universe is there's no reason to let it just disturb the tranquility of a rational intellect and in fact we realize that the ultimate sort of power you have or no longer can anything outside of you control your emotional stakes the ultimate expression of that power is the ability to love everyone and everything even your enemies to say i have so much power over you that even when you tell me that i'm a horrible lecturer i still like you because you can't get me upset because i understand that i just do the best i can and if that's not particularly good it's still the best i can and that's the only judge standard i can judge myself by and so if you think that's horrifically bad i respect that and that's fine that's the standard that spinoza offers us it's a particularly modern i would say sort of spirituality particularly beautiful spirituality it's not to say that it's been invented in modernity i think the stoics launched something very close and clearly it's not very far from what the buddha teaches but it's modern in another sense if we are to have a spirituality today and we are not to do violence to our spiritual needs to our scientific uh understanding of the world if we're not to come up with some contradiction i wonder if spinoza's is not the last sort of religion that a scientific and rational person could have and it's an important point spinoza makes in in arguing that this is a way of salvation because what he's stating is spirituality was was is a real part of human life we always thought it referred to something transcendental but simply because we don't believe in the transcendental anymore there's no reason to give up the spirituality that's the baby in the bathwater problem all we have to do is take that sense of awe that sense of reverence and apply it to the world and perhaps to each other that he sees is the way of liberation so then in conclusion i wanna uh as it were append something to a previous lecture professor sugru mentioned that stoicism or the sort of ethos which is very similar to what spinoza argues for um is particularly apt for military men for what he called silver men men of spirit and i think that that's a very good point i think he's right but it's also very apt for another sort of person it's apt for another sort of time unfortunately one of the dark sides of modernity has been persecution has been intolerance has been destruction in such moments when the world seems most bleak what are one's options to rail to scream to cry you've only got a short time to live you might as well not waste it is for people in such a position with their quote backs against the wall that spinoza's philosophy is indeed a way of salvation since you're only going to be as live alive as long as you're going to be alive and if you're going to be hated and vilified why not find a spirituality which allows you to keep your your sense of equipose your sense of of happiness impact to live a full and rich life in the worst of circumstances and i would enjoy that perhaps not for americans we've been fortunate but for peoples around the world peoples who lived through the nightmares of the second world war the hideous repression that existed in the soviet union existed in communist china exist it still exists in communist china existed in pots cambodia if you are to emerge from that without being permanently scarred without being completely and even contemplated without being completely distraught and made ill at ease in the world feeling like you want to commit suicide that's the moment to think of spinoza and to think of how this man in very similar circumstances could live a life of dignity of compassion of love and even towards those who persecuted him how he could emerge from such trials intact so in short i do think that spinoza offers us a legitimate path towards salvation

Channel: Michael Sugrue

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Comte, Origins, Sociology

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Length: 39min 14sec (2354 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2022