Spinoza’s Secret for a Good Life

was undoubtedly one of the greatest minds that the western philosophical tradition has ever produced but do his ideas have relevance beyond the halls of academia and the journals of continental philosophy does he in all his wisdom have something important to say to us humans in our regular everyday lives i'd like to share with you what i think might be spinoza's most powerful idea one who's inside if fully digested and internalized has the power to literally change our lives [Applause] hey what's up seekers this video is part of a small mini series in the first video we covered spinoza's metaphysics his understanding of substance attributes and modes in the second video we covered spinoza's view on god and tried figuring out whether he is a blasphemous atheist a god intoxicated pantheist or a sophisticated pananthist check out those videos if you haven't already links to them down in the description this video is also part of an ongoing series of collaborations that i'm making with other creators here on youtube that are covering topics in religion and philosophy this one is with casper at his channel the danish philosopher go check out his accompanying video to this one which will be looking at spinoza in relation to alfred north whitehead's process philosophy it stands to be an enjoyable one all right shall we begin then philosophy at least in the western tradition beginning with the ancient greeks can be seen as the attempt to ask and answer certain specific questions such as what is truth what is the nature of consciousness how does it relate to the physical world what is the nature of reality why is there something rather than nothing what is time what is beauty what is justice how can we best organize our societies and so on and so forth and despite all of its abstraction philosophy from its very inception has also been concerned with very real world practical questions one of the most pressing of such practical questions for the greeks was what is the good life and how does one go about living it also known in philosophy simply as the question of the good life when most people think of spinoza they don't necessarily think of him as being particularly concerned with addressing practical questions such as the question of the good life what i'd like to show today is that spanish was in fact very conscious of this question and spent a lot of his time and his considerable brain power in attempting to answer this question and quite beautifully at that but he doesn't answer this question the way that some self-help guru making up whatever sounds good in the moment would spinoza instead may be suggested painstakingly builds his entire highly sophisticated highly rigorous and elaborate metaphysical and epistemological structure of reality of which we partially covered in the first two videos for the sole purpose of answering this one question to answer it for once and for all on what he believed to be the most solid and incontrovertible logical foundations that philosophy could provide his magnum opus the ethics is accordingly divided into five books or chapters in his first chapter on god he gives us his metaphysics in his second chapter on the nature and origin of the mind he gives us his epistemology his theory of knowledge in his third and fourth on the origin and nature and power of the affects the emotions he lays out his psychology which all finally come to its goal and summit in the fifth chapter where sprinosa brings the whole edifice to bear on the real-life question on human freedom and the escape from suffering how one can attain what he calls beautifully blessedness the ethics of the ethics and philosophy's final answer to this age-old question before i give you the answer i'm going to have to lay out some of the metaphysics the theory of reality and the epistemology the theory of knowledge that spinoza lays his answer upon i'm assuming for purposes of this presentation by the way that you've already watched the first video in the series on spinoza's metaphysics because we're going to be building up from what we already laid out there so if you haven't watched that video and you feel like you're getting a bit lost please pause this video at any point go back and watch that first video and come back here and pick up from where you left okay the first thing i'd like to draw your attention to as we build this case is the very title of spinoza's magnum opus ethics as demonstrated in geometrical order it's a rather odd title i'm not sure publishers today would go for it but more pressingly why did spinoza call his main work the ethics if one reads it they get the impression that spinoza is far more concerned with questions of metaphysics than with those of ethics i'd like you to entertain in the ironically counter-intuitive thought that the ethics is in fact primarily a work of ethical philosophy with its aim being to harness metaphysics in the pursuit of ethics but not ethics perhaps as we can see them today the rules and mores governing the interactions between humans and the world around them questions of morality good and evil right and wrong justice crime and punishment but more of what may be called an individual ethic a personal ethic how on ought to interact with and within themselves ben adam latsumo as we might say in hebrew i'd like to present the case that spinoza's ultimate goal with these ethics is to demonstrate how one may attain happiness eudaimonia how to flourish and blossom as a human and spanish's answer in short which we will endeavor to explain with the rest of this presentation is that happiness is achieved through retaining now brace yourself because this is not what you're going to expect to hear but i'll explain happiness is achieved through attaining an intellectual love of god what he calls in latin amore d.a intellectualism this love according to spinoza arises from the contemplation of how each particular thing in existence what spinoza calls the modes or modifications of nature partake in the divine substance or nature and through the contemplation of the particulars and the relationship to the hall of substance we can come to know something of the hull and that knowledge gives rise to intellectual love for the whole a intellectual love for god the all nature and this knowledge of god of the totality of existence releases us from being enslaved to our passions which have us chasing passing pleasures it frees us from our fears grounds us in a life of reason and places us on the path to true blessedness now don't for a second think that the ethics of spinoza's ethics is divorced from its metaphysics physics anthropology philosophy psychology and politics in general his ethic is deduced logically directly from his opening axioms in the very beginning of his book to the extent that spinoza sees his ethic as a necessary consequence of his very opening definitions of god or nature as all of existence and i'd like to show you just how he does that spinoza begins by making a distinction between the way that he understands nature and the way that nature had been understood before him particularly the relationship between nature and human nature prior to spinoza most philosophers who wrote about the human condition and human nature wrote about them like they were something separate from the natural order of things around them as if they functioned as independent and autonomous entities within the natural world above and beyond their environments that envelop them fundamentally interrupting rather than following the natural order of things and by perceiving the human as a sovereign walled off island within nature a dominion within a dominion they saw it possible for the human to be in complete control of themselves and entirely self-determined if they could only exert the sufficient willpower to do so spinoza says naenae the human is not outside of nature an exception to nature the human says spinoza is part and parcel of nature subject to the same laws and the inescapable chain of cause and effects that govern the rest of the natural world and he goes to work in part three and four of his ethics two as he writes restore the human being with their volitional and emotional life to their proper place in nature for nothing for spinoza stands outside of nature not even the human mind and not even the human soul this seemingly technical metaphysical tweak gives rise to some very serious psychological implications what emerges for spinoza is a theory of human emotions that are entirely natural deterministic and mechanistic spinoza being the meticulous thinker that he is follows the logic of this tweak all the way down and we're going to follow it alongside with him if the human is entirely a part of nature a cog in an infinitely large machine it follows that the single largest mistake that a human might be able to make is to think that they are autonomous and possessing free will spinoza believes that this delusion of free will is one which gives rise to much havoc and confusion he writes in the mind there is no free will the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another again by another and so to infinity for this reason right spinoza people believe themselves to be free because they are only conscious of their own actions but ignorant of the causes by which they are determined if we only knew and understood that infinite chain of causes we would see how our every action and thought merely followed logically and necessarily from the chain reaction trailing behind it if we only had an adequate conception of our actions as spinoza calls it the delusion that we somehow have a choice in the process would fall away automatically as ludicrous for spinoza the human mind could only possess an autonomous will of its own if it were an independent entity residing outside of the sphere of nature which he reminds us is not the case because in his opinion the mind is fully part of nature and must therefore be governed by the same laws and subject to the same causal chain that governs the rest of it but here is where things get a little tricky because on the one hand spinoza's philosophy is thoroughly deterministic as we're seeing through and through and even perhaps necessitarianistic a position which few in the history of western philosophy have explicitly embraced they believe that this world that we inhabit is the only possible world that could have existed and it could not have been any other way down to the tiniest tiniest detail of reality and not just the structural details of reality the number of substances or attributes or their relationship to one another as in the case of spinoza but even the very details of the modes the particular modulations and modifications of reality all the way from the number of freckles on your face to the leaf that falls off a tree at the exact moment that it does all of that is necessarily determined from the very first moments of existence and could not have been any other way this position which spinoza takes to be painfully obvious to any thinking person is the third axiom of his ethics from a given determinant cause an effect follows necessarily and conversely if there is no determinant cause it is impossible for an effect to follow so anything that happens has a determined cause that we could find out and if there is no determined cause there simply is no effect hence everything at all that happens is absolutely determined and necessary and yet within spinoza's system there is room left one very specific type of freedom there is one thing that we humans have the power to change and spinoza opens the fifth and final chapter of these ethics tellingly entitled on the power of the intellect or on human freedom by writing i pass now to the remaining part of the ethics which concerns the means or way to freedom here i shall treat of the power of reason showing what it can do against the effects and what freedom of mind or blessedness is spinoza with these words begins his philosophy of freedom freedom which spinoz believes can only be attained through the power of reason and that freedom is none other than freedom of the mind but because there is no possibility of altering the course of nature around us the only thing we can change is our mind now while this is surely sage wisdom and advice even if it has been cheapened into a cliche by copious repetitions by a thousand and one self-help gurus there's something odd in spinoza's formulation of it because if spinoza is truly a determinist even a necessitarianist how according to him can one do anything to affect and change anything at all even their own state of mind to make sense of this conundrum we'll need to get clear on spinoza's theory of mind although i can't promise that either we or spinoza will be able to fully remove ourselves from this sticky situation spinoza believes that there are three ways that humans can go about thinking about things which he conveniently calls the three kinds of knowledge the first kind of knowledge is what is gathered by what he calls inadequate perception either from random experience or ex-cygnus from signs at which he means from things that one has heard come across or read on facebook both of which spinoza sees as fundamentally lacking reason and rationality the second kind of knowledge are those things that are procured by reason which he believes gets the very essence of things and we can see here spinoza taking sides in one of the hottest philosophical debates of his day between the rationalists who like spinoza preferred to put their faith in what they could deduce rationally and logically a priori from the comfort of their own armchairs alongside great thinkers like descartes and leibniz against the empiricists thinkers like luck berkeley and hume who prefer to get their knowledge from direct experience and experimentation spinoza being a good rationalist presents his second kind of knowledge that derived by reason in the category of adequate perception of things away from the inadequate perception gleaned by the first kind of knowledge this second kind of knowledge knowledge by reason isn't merely knowledge about a thing by itself in this very moment it includes an understanding of the full chain of causality that brought this particular thing into existence how it follows from god slash substance nature through the natural laws that necessitate the being of this thing as it is the knowledge not just that it is or even what it is but how it is and why it is the way it is and knowing something this way according to spinoza necessarily includes an understanding of the thing as existing necessarily why it had to be just the way it was and could not have been any other way the thought that something is contingent namely that it came to be or is the way it is by mere happenstance and could have been some other way is a conscious spinoza a thought that can only be entertained by a mind possessing inadequate ideas no shade intended it is of the nature of reason to regard things as necessary not as contingent right spinoza unequivocally to perceive things adequately tells espinoza is to perceive its necessity and its embeddedness in nature and god the crowning achievement of the mind however lies in neither of these two but in a third and final kind of knowledge which spinoza calls intuitive knowledge siencia intuitivi which he describes somewhat mysteriously as that which proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of god to the adequate knowledge of the formal essence of things now while it may not be entirely clear what he's saying here he seems to be saying that in this third wave of knowledge the individual in a moment of insight and intuition understands or gets a glimpse into the essence of a given particular thing and in that glimpse sees how the essence of the thing derives and follows necessarily from the essence of god and this apprehension of the deep affinity and unity shared between the essence of all particular things with the essence of god substance or nature is seemingly gleaned not via a discursive deductive or analytical process that would all belong to the second kind of knowledge reason but this third kind intuition seems rather to be reached in a foul swoop in a single moment of insight where the essence and nature of reality the nature of god opens itself up to the individual in an instantaneous intuition of the hull now i know that may sound very mystical but it's the word that spinoza himself uses to describe this third kind of knowledge whether you like it or not and spinoza may just in fact be both a rationalist and a mystic it certainly is a possibility and we shouldn't discount it a priori because we're not used to thinking about these thinkers in these categories in this way let us allow these thoughts and spinoza's own words to stretch our categories just a little and it is with this third kind of knowledge that spinoza may find a way out of his deterministic pickle and give us some helpful advice for living our lives spinoza believes that while one is governed by their passions love anger hatred envy pride jealousy etc they're living a life of bondage no not that kind he means a life of suppression and subjugation to our every passing whim and emotion a sickness of the mind as he calls it being knocked around constantly by every passing feeling pursuing meaningless fleeting mind-numbing distractions to keep us from the void widening within the emptiness consuming us running nights into days spinning us in endless circles after our own tale with no pride responsibility or purpose to wake up to in the morning in his words driven around like waves in the sea by contrary winds tossing about not knowing your outcome and fate the person who is subject to the affects the emotions right spinoza is under the control not of themselves but of fortune in whose power they so greatly are though often they see the better for themselves are still forced to follow the worse how true unfortunately these words are and doubly unfortunate however is that the extent to which one has the ability to extricate themselves according to spinoza from the sway of the passions is rather severely limited there seems to be only two ways out of this conundrum the first which we shall call the path of necessity and the second the path of internalization let's start with the first the first piece of advice that spanish gives for dealing with adverse emotions or the sad passions as he calls them and the things that cause them is to stop seeing them as contingent as something that may or may not have happened but to see them instead of something necessary and determined as we've already said it is only when we examine life through the lenses of the first kind of knowledge the inadequate evaluation based on anecdotal evidence and ill-conceived opinion that we think that the things that happened to us might have happened differently or been avoided entirely had we or someone else done something different about it the reason we think this is because we're prone to perceive things in isolation in partial and limited ways without the critical thinking and oversight necessary to perceive things in their full context specifically the context of the chain of causes that determine the thing to be exactly as it is and for this reason things can appear to us to be as contingent as something that could have panned out differently but armed with the third and highest kind of knowledge the ciancia intuitivity the correct intuition into the nature and essence of things we understand things to be absolutely necessary exactly as they are to quote spinoza the mind has greater power over the emotions insofar as it understands all things as necessary and determined to exist in an infinite chain of causes this vision and intuition allows us to see all of reality including all the particulars the modes of existence in their true full context in their relation to the totality of existence to god essentially we're no longer seeing things with a myopic vision independently temporally as they are at this given moment subspecies temporalis but we see things truly fully unraveled and wound back through their cause of causality back into the cosmos subspecies eternitatis under the aspect of eternity with a timeless vision and this applies not only to extended things i.e to bodies objects and items all following necessarily from the essence of matter through the universal laws of physics and mathematics but also to the modes of thought to all of our emotions feelings and states of mind they can be properly understood as deriving necessarily from the essence of thought through the eternal laws of logic and psychology and this understanding of all things as absolutely necessary really takes the sting out of whatever is affecting us adversely as spinoza succinctly puts it in so far as we understand the cause of pain to that extent it ceases to be a passion that is it ceases to be pain to give just two examples the first rather unpleasant thing for most death either our own or someone else's becomes a whole lot easier to accept once we've accepted it as something necessary and unavoidable to fight against it or to deny it would only be to create more inner turmoil towards it and a second example say someone gets upset at you the contingent reaction would to get upset back but adequate thinking would lead us to examine the causal chain behind the person's anger maybe they're hangry because they haven't had a banana in a while maybe it's that tiny seam inside their inside out sock that's irritating their toes or the mosquito that bit them at 3am last night or the stranger they just saw who subconsciously reminded them of their mummy or daddy issues there's no volitional ghost in the machine that willfully chose to express anger towards us they're simply determined to do so by a thousand one factors stretching causally all the way back to the very beginning of time there is therefore no valid reason according to spinoza to respond with anger in return but instead with understanding and compassion and the result of this account espinoza is a state of equanimity reasonableness calmness and inner peace because we're no longer tormented by fear about the future no longer anxious about concerns in the present or stricken by guilt about the past because we understand all that is was and shall be as simply the way things must be with no other way they could have been ordained as such in the words of spinoza by the very necessity of god's eternal nature and it is this understanding of one's true place in the eternal natural scheme of things that brings true peace of mind true blessedness the wise person writes spinoza is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit but being conscious of themselves and of god and of things by sudden eternal necessity never ceases to be but always possesses true acquiescence of their spirit so while we can never eliminate our passions and adverse emotions entirely we can recognize that we and they are entirely a part of nature tied to its causal chain linking us all the way back to things eternally and that perspective and recognition itself takes the edge of our passions and brings us some relief from the tumultuous grief they wreck on our poor souls the second way that spinoza proposes for dealing with adversity is a touch more esoteric than the first but let's have a go at making sense of it because what we've set up until now could easily have been proposed by any older determinist with some minor changes to the words this next one though really sets spinoza apart spinoza tells us that through the third kind of knowledge we can take whatever it is that's perturbing us identify their causes and then we can bring the causes inside of us we can make them internal to pivot from passivity to activity from being ridden to riding our own reality let's unpack what he means by all that there are two ways which we can interact with our emotions tells espinoza the first is that they can act upon us wherein we are enslaved to them in our passivity and the second way by attaining an adequate intuitive conception of reality understanding its full cultural chain and the knowledge of the essence of nature that that knowledge becomes a part of us it becomes us and therefore we become the active cause of our own emotions we realize that because we are nature the cause of our emotions lies entirely within us and in doing so the mind becomes active in this process it's no longer a mere slave a passive slave to the passions because the source now is within and we can never take an active role in living out those effects that we are a part of and if we can achieve this then we're free to the extent that we're no longer being controlled by things that we perceive to be outside of us but rather living in sync with what is indeed our own nature recognized properly as such once we've accepted it and embraced that identity we can then partake in it without being suppressed and acted upon passively by those causes which seem to be outside of us because they're not in reality nothing here has changed because nothing can change the only difference is that we now learn to recognize all of the happenings of nature as internal to us which in fact they always were because we are nothing about nature only now the difference is that we know it whether this solution is admissible in a strictly deterministic universe i'm going to leave that for you the viewer to decide if you can you get it because you can't really make decisions in a deterministic universe whether you think this solution is consistent with the rest of spinoza's thought what is clear is that his philosophy is one which is geared for liberation for liberation of the human one which is achieved through the cultivation of reason and the subjugation or internalization of the passions and it is to this end where the proverbial rubber of spinoza's entire metaphysical apparatus hits the tarmac this preoccupation with human liberation by raising the rational over the emotional with the help of a robust orderly metaphysics shows spinoza's indebtedness and puts him in line as the direct successor to the stoics of ancient greece who also sought to guide people in the life of reason over passions with the ability to live in line with the reason and the order of the cosmos itself the logos in their case god in spinozas if we have to sum up everything that spinoza said here on one foot it might go something like this everything that happens happens according to the divine natural order of things and our freedom consists entirely in our capacity to identify ourself with said natural order of things and in doing so we can get out of our narrow temporary view of reality and begin to see and accept the big picture to quote another philosopher william blake to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower to hold infinity in the palm of your hand an eternity in an hour subspecies eternitatis the view of reality under the aspect of eternity a proper true view to see that our problem is not the end of the world but only a tiny part of its immense dazzling tapestry and to fall in love with the whole thing with nature with god in intellectual love amor die intellectualis this is spinoza's secret to living a blessed life and for leading us on the path to a life of blessedness spinoza lives up to his own name barach in hebrew benedictus in latin both meaning a blessing to bless and be a blessing to others as the jewish saying goes all that bless others they themselves are blessed by god and certainly barak was blessed as such above all to end with baruch's own words it is useful for people to establish relationships to bind themselves by those bonds which are most apt to unite them with each other as one and without exception to do those things which serve to strengthen friendship hearts therefore are one not by arms but by love and greatness of soul and what a great soul he was indeed stay tuned for the next video where we'll try to explain in some greater depth what spinoza means perhaps by amar d intellectualis his third kind of knowledge which at this point is still probably a bit obscure and mysterious we're going to devote the next video to exploring and unpacking it and asking the question was spnos in fact a mystic at least epistemologically considered and if you haven't already make sure to subscribe to the channel and press the bell button so you can get notified when that next video comes out so that you don't miss it you don't want to and thank you to all of the kind brothers and sisters who are supporting this project over at patreon it really means the world to us stay blessed keep seeking and catch you next time you

Channel: Seekers of Unity

Views: 13,714

Keywords: Spinoza, eudemonia, happiness, philosophy

Id: MC1JVerhHjY

Length: 28min 22sec (1702 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021