Spinoza's 'Ethics': What do you mean by 'God'?

the funny thing about the ethics is that although it looks like a an old-fashioned terribly boring maths textbook with definitions proofs propositions demonstrations when you read it at least when I read it it comes across as telling a story as well in a sense that it's it's an idealized intellectual autobiography he begins on page one with a set of dry as dust definitions and then he sets off on this extraordinary journey through well as five chapters thrives stages of his life he goes through emotions emotional servitude and then he ends up this extraordinary sort of last act of the of the drama which is called freedom and it's there that he discovers that freedom is not what you might think it is it's not a matter of getting what you like freedom is learning to like what it's rational to like it's learning to love the world to love the world as he says with an intellectual love and you learn to love the world with an intellectual love when you can see it this phrases sub specky a attorney Tartus under the aspect of eternity you abstract yourself from the particular history of your own life from your own body from your own emotional attachments to things Spinoza saw himself as building on the work of Rene Descartes as with the most celebrated philosopher of the preceding generation and they can't life work at least as I see it was about breaking down the traditional dichotomy between knowledge of particulars based on bodily sensation and knowledge of universals based on ideas of reasoned mathematic of ideas and his idea was that you should get rid of that dichotomy and replace it with a continuum for him even sensation in those ideas but ideas that he describes as confused and obscure and his idea was the progress of science was that you work with your confused and obscure and gradually refine them until they become clearer they become quantitative and they can become capable of being handled by mathematics so they become scientific so science wasn't about a world of reason whereas sensation was a separate world of experience he brought two together in a in a single world Spinoza picked up on that suggestion about continuity rather than dichotomy and he applied not only to the field of Sciences but to the field of how to lead a human life because there's an old image that goes back to Plato the leading human life is like being a charioteer in a chariot pulled in two directions by two different horses one of which is Noble and rational and the other of which is base and emotional and the charioteer is trying to bring them in and Spinoza completely scraps that ideas for him the personality is unified and it's unified not so much by what it is by what but by what it wants to be it strives to be more rational it strives to leave behind the stupidity of a life based entirely on sensation and emotion and transform itself into something more stable more intelligent and perhaps even happier as well but now there's a problem about God the Spinoza was brought up in the Jewish community in Amsterdam but sometime when he was a teenager he converted to Christianity or to a form of Christianity my call the rational Christianity he wasn't interested in the scriptures he didn't believe in revelation or anything like that but he thought that there was something about Christianity that every rational person should agree with it was said that he had a copy of the Quran on the same shelf in his library as his Bible and that was thought to be very unorthodox but on the other hand the book the ethics begins with a chapter on God in which he argues that nothing can exist without God and you can see why it hundred years later the German romantic novelist describes Spinoza as a God intoxicated man someone who is drunk on God ask yourself the question is Spinoza an atheist or not and I think well the obvious answer is it depends what you mean by God and he's actually very interesting about this he says well by God I mean the same as nature God and nature are two words for the same thing so when he asked you to worship God he's not asking you to worship a severe jealous lawgiver he's jaska you to look with an attitude of love and reverence on the natural world as a whole and perhaps even on yourself as a part of it this is obviously a story of growth of rational enlightenment as a story of the growth of science but it's also a story of personal transformation that as Spinoza becomes more rational as he becomes freer he's freed from his particular identity it's this historical person with this particular body and his mind becomes well first of all his mind becomes part of a communal mind yes the idea is that as you become more rational insofar as you're more rational your mind coincides with the minds of other members of your community and sufferers they're rational you might say insofar as we're irrational we're divided insofar as were rational we are united and eventually you're not just United with your community you're united with thee with the entire universe eventually and you become completely absorbed in the universe there is no distinction between your own personality and the rest of the world you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 71,864

Keywords: Spinoza, ethics, philosophy, rationalism, enlightenment, atheism

Id: F617UbSAaU4

Length: 6min 22sec (382 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018