The Metaphysics of Spinoza | A World of Substance (and Attributes and Modes)

hey what's up seekers welcome back bar spinoza we've all heard his name before but how many of us actually know what he believed and taught one of the greatest minds that the western philosophical tradition has ever produced a self-taught jew who went on to redefine pantheism and monism whose thought changed the landscape of religious political and philosophical thought forever join us to find out who he was and what he believed in this episode on spinoza's metaphysics [Applause] i've been obsessed with the character and philosophy of spinoza ever since i read stephen adler's the book forged in hell as a teenager and now i have the opportunity to share with you a mini series on spinoza which is part of a larger ongoing series on the history of pantheism links to all of that in the description just to give you a sense of where we're heading we're going to begin with a short biography of spinoza before we get into his primary work the ethics explain his methodology and explore his metaphysics his fundamental conception of reality in the second video we'll explore spinoza's conception of god and the debate about his pantheism and conclude with a video on what i think is spinoza's most beautiful and useful idea but that will be a surprise this video is also part of an epic collab with dr justin sledge from the youtube channel esoterica where justin explores the arcane side of history philosophy and religion one of the best things which have happened to me personally since beginning this crazy project of seekers of unity have been the friends that i've made it through it along the way both within the seekers community and in the world of academic mysticism at large but some of the most beautiful friendships and relationships that have emerged have been with fellow creators and hosts of channels and podcasts with overlapping topics of interest with ours and among them one which i particularly cherish and whom i consider a friend and mentor is dr justin sledge in whose presence i begin to get a sense of how little i know but is always happy to share to teach to encourage and to challenge so thank you justin and i'm looking forward to grabbing a beer with you together in the near future in justin's video he'll be looking at the hermetic spinoza the way he was seen amongst the romanticists the pantheism controversy that followed in his wake and the more mystical reading of spinoza that continues till this day in thinkers like deleuze contrasting spinoza as he was received before the controversy as basically an atheist with the more mystical spinoza post the controversy justin is making content of unparalleled academic rigor and bringing his dryers eyes tumor to topics that have been solely missing them from alchemy to magic to mysticism hermaticism philosophy theosophy and the occult justin and i put out a two hour video recently where we had a great time butting heads over the topics of logic and mysticism looking at the relationship between those two worlds and questioning the rationality of mysticism itself available to watch here on the channel of course please do go check out and subscribe to justin's channel it'll probably be one of the best things you did all day link to that in the description and back to spinoza i'd like to just briefly mention for the sake of thoroughness a few things that we won't be covering in the video after having said what we will be the first is relationship to general western and jewish philosophy and his indebtedness to jewish mysticism all fascinating stuff because we have already covered those in previous videos on the channel that we made i think about a year ago check them out here and as well in the description neither are we going to get into his philosophy of religion his political theory his moral philosophy his psychology his epistemology that we'll have to wait all for another time or for people with more expertise to cover on to the biography then shall we begin bob spinoza was born in amsterdam on november 24 1632 his family immigrating there following the expulsion of the jews from portugal in 1536 his mother died when he was just six years old followed by the death of his father when he was just 21. as a child spanish received a traditional jewish education at his local hater but at the age of 17 after the death of his older brother spinoza left his schooling to begin working in the family business spinoza went on to study latin with a tutor by the name of francis vanden enden who instructed him in cartesian philosophy and there he befriended a group of ex-protestant free thinkers who were big into rejecting church dogma and authority at the same time spinoza began a serious rigorous study of jewish philosophy particularly that of maimonides spinoza began to drift away from his traditional upbringing changing his name from the hebrew barak to the latin benedictus and began to question the mosaic authorship of the bible or rather he started to see it as more of a mosaic than the work of a single author spinoza started getting a reputation in his jewish community as something of a heretic which proved to be quite dangerous when one jewish fanatic tried attacking spinoza with a knife on the steps of the synagogue no less piercing his cloak but luckily missing his body and infamously in 1656 spinoza at the very young age of 23 was excommunicated by the jewish community under a harsh writ of prohibiting anyone within the community from having any dealings with him or any contact with him or reading anything that he wrote spinoza it seems was more or less unperturbed by his ex communication remarking that he was now made contractually free to continue pursuing what he had been pursuing already just without the permission until this day the kheram the excommunication has not been rescinded and lifted despite many attempts to have it revoked some by quite some famous people but that's a history for itself if you believe that religious authorities should have the power to curtail the intellectual freedom of an individual i advise that you consider stopping to watch this video at this point but continue at your own theological risk it's not entirely clear on what ground spinoza was excommunicated although the scholarly consensus seems to be that he was excommunicated more for political reasons in relation to the community standing as guests in a religious christian holland than more for spinoza's theological pronounces per se because he had not yet actually published any of his challenging works back to the story so not a whole lot is known about the years following the excommunication but within a short period spinoza had left amsterdam and had taken up life of a independent scholar writing a series of philosophical works the most important of which the ethics we shall talk about shortly and supported himself financially as a lens grinder refining the optical tools of telescopes and microscopes of his day trying to help others see clearer even at his own peril with historians suggesting that spinoza eventually died from a respiratory illness caused by the inhalation of fine dust particles that he had ground for his lenses a metaphor perhaps for his life at large spinoza lived out a humble life of physical silence but abundant mental activity maintaining rigorous correspondence with scientists mathematicians philosophers and theologians throughout europe at one point even despite having no university degree himself spinoza was extended the prestigious invitation to teach philosophy at the university of heidelberg on condition however that he would quote not insult the precepts of the established religion in his classes indicative of his liv philosophy in general spinoza said no thank you and turned down the offer preferring his integrity and freedom of thought than the salary and prestige that the position would have brought him on the 21st of february 1677 spinoza passed away at the young age of 44 leaving behind a collection of manuscripts and unpublished works which his closest friends immediately published most of which right after being published were banned throughout holland by the church but which nevertheless continued to exert quite the influence of that beautiful mind that genius and saint the kind gentle and careful bar spinoza spinoza is remembered as one of the great rationalists of the early modern period and one of western philosophy's most important thinkers whose philosophy encompassed nearly every area of philosophical discourse of his day metaphysics epistemology political philosophy ethics philosophy of mind and philosophy of science however what strikes one more than anything about spinoza's legacy is the way that he is remembered not just as one of the greatest philosophical minds of the west but as one who practiced what he preached and lived a life that perfectly mirrored the beauty that he espoused in his magnificent writings in the estimation of the notorious literary critic harold bloom as a teacher of reality spinoza practiced his own wisdom and was surely one of the most exemplary human beings to have ever lived maybe a slight exaggeration but we'll take it the french philosopher gil de luz gave him the memorable title the prince of philosophers and butchered russell in his magisterial history of western philosophy called spinoza one of the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers saying that intellectually some others have surpassed him but ethically he is supreme spinoza's influence continues through the great minds of hegel shelling fifthe herder goethe rousseau scherpenhauer nietzsche russell wittgenstein and freud the first of whom said that postspinoza one is either a spinozist or no philosopher at all let us explore then the philosophy of barack spinoza spinoza's philosophy is laid out in these magnum opus the ethics or as known by its full title ethics as demonstrated in geometrical order talk about clickbait titles am i right the ethics is a highly abstract work in the words of the philosopher roger scrutin spinoza wrote the last indisputable latin masterpiece and one in which the refined concepts of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed a word on spinoza's methodology unlike rene descartes spinoza did not start from first-hand experience which for descartes was his experience of being able to doubt his own existence which led him to his famous conclusion of kogito ergo sum that there must be some subject which was capable of doubting itself thereby proving its own existence spinoza chose rather to start from a purely metaphysical hypothesis a theoretical postulation which he calls substance that which does not depend upon anything else for its existence after wasting little time proving the necessity of the existence of his postulated substance he proceeds to work his way slowly and rigorously with a method of reasoning based on that of euclidean geometry through definitions axioms propositions and corollaries to their indisputable conclusions spinoza's metaphysics is his anchor point from which the rest of his philosophy follows as de la rocca writes it cannot be over emphasized how the rest of spinoza's philosophy his philosophy of mind his epistemology his psychology his moral philosophy his political philosophy and his philosophy of religion flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings in part one of his ethics which is why we're going to pay our attention to those metaphysical underpinnings that sit at the base of spinoza's philosophy spinoza's intention no doubt was to ground his philosophy on a solid bedrock of mathematics and geometry laying it out as one elaborate unassailable equation so that if you accepted his opening axioms and definitions which spinoza believes you'd have to be complete full not to and so that the deductions he made from starting axioms as valid and sound and felt that his use of language was consistent you'd have no choice but to accept his conclusions which he teases out throughout the chapters of the ethics as following necessarily from his axioms from the beginning to the end there is a pure running straight line of logic which one is obliged to follow if you're a logical person says spinoza with spinoza there is no choice if you understand his terms admit the possibility of his science and sees his meaning you could no more doubt his conclusions than you can doubt euclid in the words of george henry luz in the ethics there is no rhetoric passion or poetry in his formulation he hoped to persuade simply by the sheer force of logic itself now many people have hated on his method and continue to do so seeing it as more fit for consumption by machines than by humans who are known on occasion to be moved less by logic than by some other things like rhetoric and poetry but most people in their criticism espinoza's methodology may be missing two points firstly we have to understand the place of pride that mathematical language held in spinoza's day in the realm of physics at the capable hands of kepler and galileo and afterwards in those of newton and leibniz mathematical analysis had won over from nature her previously undisclosed secrets the secrets of the cosmos it was not unreasonable then to assume that the miraculous success mathematical language had demonstrated in physics and the natural sciences might be readily replicated in the realm of metaphysics and theology if god after all was the great mathematician in coding nature with the secrets of geometry might reality not osan unravel itself to the philosopher with the same tools and a second point that most people miss i think in their criticism of hypnosis methodology is something truly stunning which is that spinoza in building his philosophy as a deductive system in which every proposition follows from a set of initial axioms postulates and definitions he was merely mirroring his conception of reality in which all that exists flows by necessity from the definition of substance itself and the divine nature as spinoza saw it just as nature flows necessarily from its own first principles so does spinoza's words flow necessarily from his starting definitions one could picture in the mind of spinoza he himself a necessary manifestation of nature sitting at his quiet desk with the words flowing from his pen a force of nature itself at work unstoppable neither by attempted assassinations ex communications or expulsions the waterfall of cold pure latin prose flows on working one's way through spinoza's ethics is a demanding task and at times an extremely difficult book to comprehend but not an obscure one the difference between difficulty and obscurity is that the more time one invests in a difficult work the clearer it becomes where the more time one spends on an obscure work it proves to be only more obscure a good example of such a work might be hegel's phenomenology of the spirit no shade intended we're actually quite big fans of hegel ii here but he is extremely obscure spinoza though proves to be difficult but if we spend our time trying to make sense of him the book will open up for us let's talk then about spinoza's metaphysics as laid out in the first part of his great book the ethics i'd like to walk you through what is perhaps the most difficult part of the ethics part one where in the first 15 propositions spinoza presents the basic elements of his picture of reality and although his language and categories are somewhat obtruse and challenging fear not we'll walk through them together and hopefully we'll see in the end that these conclusions are actually in fact rather straightforward and elegant much of this exposition will be relying upon stephen nadler's interpretation of spinoza thank you steven for your great work a good place to start with any exposition of spinosa metaphysics is with the acronym sam sam which stands in this case for substance attributes and modes as carl jaspers writes these are the fundamental concepts which with 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 spinoza replies substance its attributes and modes let us begin then by allowing spinoza himself to give us his own definition of these key terms his definitions are deceptively simple and may not help the listener but it's worth repeating them because this is what spinoza defined these words as by substance i understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself i.e that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing from which it must be formed by attribute i understand what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence by mode i understand the affections of a substance or that which is in another through which it is also conceived if you found those definitions to be adequate and self-explanatory my work here then is done and you can move on and have your morning coffee but in the rare case that those definitions do not help you let us continue and try and explain them substance let us begin with substance firstly it's important not to be scared off by the language of spinoza but to take these terms one at a time and unpack them these terms although somewhat obscure and antiquated by now would have been familiar and readily understood by any 17th century philosopher so we need to mentally go back in time a little to make sense of what is going on here and once we can get back into that time frame this will make a lot more sense the notion of substance had already been vogue in philosophy all the way back from aristotle to rene descartes for descartes knows his primary immediate philosophical predecessor substance is simply that whose existence is self-explanatory and he proposed two such fundamental substances as existing mind and matter the building blocks of descartes world this metaphysical position that there are multiple substances fundamental substances which constitute reality is called substance dualism or substance pluralism if you count other things such as god as another distinct category of substance this position dominates western philosophy all the way back to plato variously formulated throughout history as a duality of form and matter matter and spirit mind and body body and soul but these are the basic dualities of substance that dominate western philosophy spinoza continues in this tradition of the substance in western philosophy by defining it as that which is in itself and is conceived through itself and that which needs no other concept to ground it namely the most basic and fundamental constituent of reality but spinoza breaks hard with the western philosophical tradition and his direct predecessor descartes by adamantly affirming that there aren't multiple or a diad of substances but there is only one such substance which is infinite eternal and indivisible which is the fabric of all reality a position which is called substance monism monos being one now for the next term espinoza attributes the best way to understand what spinoza means by attributes that which the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence in spinoza's words is to think of attributes as the primary expressions of substance the most basic ways that substance can be perceived so for example in modern physics at a very basic level of analysis all that is anything of substance can be expressed as either matter or energy the very first categories into which reality can be divided up into this example actually works quite well because we know that according to modern physics at a deeper level of analysis matter and energy are not two fundamentally separate distinct things but rather two forms or potential expressions the same thing where matter could be expressed and turn into energy and energy conversely express and turn into matter the yet undivided and unperceived thing would correspond to spinoza's substance which is then expressed and perceptually broken into two primary attributes thought and extension the binary in which all of subsequent reality partakes now we can't take this comparison too seriously because spinoza is formulating his philosophy in relation to and in correspondence with 17th century thought descartes newton and others and not in relation to 21st century physics and for various nuanced philosophical reasons which i fear maybe be on the level of nuance that we're aiming for here in this exposition spinoza intentionally rejects the aristelian ontological duo which already existed for him as a model of form and matter replacing them carefully with thought and extension for very good philosophical reason with serious implications but we're going to leave that for the moment spinoza's insightful way of conceptualizing reality as fundamentally substantially won before being broken into a dualized reality or dual aspect moonism as it's known by people with tweed jackets and tortoised shelled spectacles has some fascinating implications as a conceptual framework for our own lives and our own way that we perceive reality now this point regarding the relationship between the attributes is still somewhat contentious and debated amongst spinoza scholars so i recommend you go check out the scholarship for more nuance on this point and in fact every other point we're making here but for purposes of exposition we're just going to stick with a specific interpretation here on spinoza and run with it so for spinoza thought and extension are not really two different things but rather are two ways which we carve up the same reality i.e substance much like energy matter in that regard as we said that everything can be understood both in its bodily form in its extension as it finds itself in time and space and it can be understood from its conceptual place as the idea of the thing the thought of that thing what's it called thought let us try out an example of this dual aspect monism this way of thinking about reality from these two perspectives of thought and extension in an example that comes from antonio dimasio a neuroscientist who's implying spinoza's ideas to our understanding of what happens in the brain that complex relationship between our neural synapses and our conscious experience of reality so let us take love as our example spinoz would say that under the aspect or attribute of extension what is happening in your brain when we feel love is an initial chemical flood of endorphins some field goal dopamine followed by a plummeting of serotonin making you a little obsessive a pumping of adrenaline and nepernephrine from your adrenal gland and a rise in cortisol making your heartbeat and giving you those nervous butterflies a deactivation of the amygdala making you feel safe a reduction of activity in your frontal cortex responsible for judgment and decision-making um and then cooked up in your hypothalamus and secreted by your pituitary gland comes the chemical that seals the deal good old oxytocin along with vasopressin in men which is responsible for attachment and bonding in all mammals so that is the phenomena of love as perceived and expressed under the attribute of extension and everything there is true and that is what happens but directly parallel to that extended ie material experience of understanding expressing the event is the experience subjective sensation of love expressed under the attribute of thought which i've read is a very beautiful experience and much poetry and songs have been written about that side of the experience now the point for spinoza is that those expressions are not two different things but rather two articulations of one and the same phenomena under two fundamental categories of reality expressing itself extension and thought the flood of neurotransmitters which we described is what that warm and fuzzy feeling is from perspective of matter and conversely that warm fuzzy feeling is what that flood of endorphins feels like in thought they are the mirror images of one process the collective happenings of substance i hope that made a bit of sense it's somewhat different than how we generally think about the interaction between matter and mind but getting into spinoza's thinking on this actually may prove to be a very helpful and holistic way about thinking about this issue it's for this reason that one of the greatest scientific minds of the century albert einstein said that spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers because he's the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one not two separate things now because the attributes are a bit of a difficult category to understand i'd like to share with you one additional category for understanding what perhaps it means by attributes which hopefully won't complicate things more but i'm sure for some of you this will be helpful the first example we bought was from the world of physics the second i like to bring from the world of mysticism specifically that of jewish mysticism kabbalah now just like a spinoza there are two attributes through which we conceptualize all of reality and through which all of reality ie's substance expresses itself so do the capitalists conceptualize the way that the infinite the ainsoft god expressed and chows itself through the system of the tense virat and just as the sphere are one with and virtually identical with god and yet entirely distinct from god so do the spinosa describe the attributes as virtually identical with and yet entirely distinct from substance that same play and duality of the expression of the essence of the thing itself being essentially that thing and yet being entirely other than it applies in both of these examples and to take this analogy one step further just as for the kabbalist the spherot the ten channels through which the infinite expresses itself would set the basic paradigms and conditions of reality engendered within their permutations and interplay all of reality as we know it the surat teach the kabbalists are only 10 out of an infinite amount of potential spherot the sphere out insof as they call them and the kaleidoscope of the potential interplay of any other spherotic arrangement would create an infinite variety of other worlds which we as belonging to the specific decade of spheroid version of reality would have no capacity of understanding and comprehending likewise for spinoza his two attributes thought and extension are only two out of the potential infinite possible attributes which could have determined our reality for spinoza this is a very important point with potentially infinite possible basic reality configurations out there in these infinite attributes a point which again is hard to wrap our heads around constrained as we are by the version of reality which we know in the same way perhaps that we find it impossible to perceive reality to conceptualize reality without the basic fundamentals of space time and say causality a wink to immanuel kant and check out our video on spinoza and kabbalah if you'd like to see why this parallel may be more than just a coincidence where we look at the historical case that's been made in the textual case talking about the influence of kabbalah on spinoza onto the next important term for spinoza modes the term modes also called affections by spinoza is best read as an abbreviation of the word modifications meaning that for spinoza a mode or the modes in the plural are the particular modifications of substance i.e the particular finite things we encounter in reality since for spinoza there is one substance which is infinite i.e everything everything that we perceive must simply be a modification of said substance or a mode of substance in spinoza's language we can think of the relationship between modes and substance with the imperfect analogy of the relationship between the waves of the ocean and the ocean itself where just as the wave is a part of the ocean and yet appears to be unique and separate from it so are the modes merely the ripples of reality fully constituted by and perpetually re-emerging back into substance now thankfully almost all spinoza scholars are past their physical prime and not that violent by nature or else i might get myself into some trouble for employing all of this seriously inadequate and incommissarate imagery metaphor and analogy and poetry to try and explain spinosa metaphysics to you trying to give you a intuitive sense of what spinoza perhaps was trying to get out in his thick latin prose with the caveat given that this is all merely my intuition of what's going on here with my own inescapable interpretive lenses brought to bear on the subject i do recommend that you don't rely on me as your one definitive and authoritative source of spinoza's philosophy not that i think that anyone here in their right mind would but i hope simply to serve as a adequate albeit flawed springboard to awaken or reawaken your interest in spinoza so you can go off and study him from richer and more qualified sources for yourself i hope that these copious caveats both disabuse you of any notion of authority here on the subject and simultaneously alleviate my encroaching imposter syndrome two modes with one stone talking about two modes to get a little more accurate spinoza actually has two types of modes for us in the system infinite modes and finite modes isn't this fun the infinite modes are those things that follow necessarily and directly from the absolute nature of one of the two aforementioned attributes of substance thought and extension they're called infinite modes because they're part of the eternal and universal furniture of our reality the most basic principles of our universe the infinite modes that followed from the attribute of extension are the principles which govern all extended objects spinoza's fancy way of saying things that take up physical space so the infinite modes of extension would be things like the truths of geometry and laws of physics and the infinite modes of thought would be either the laws of logic or those of psychology depending on how one reads spinoza but the point being the same namely that which necessarily governs the mental psychical or immaterial realm so those are the two forms of infinite modes what we have next naturally is the finite modes which is the modes as we've actually been speaking of them up until now the particular and individual things that make up reality again broken up into extension and thought so the finite modes of extension are things like your nose a doughnut and the philosopher's favorite example among things a chair and the finite mode of thought would be things like the idea of your nose or the thought of excavating your nose the recipe for a doughnut and the philosopher's favorite thought the concept of the chair just to reiterate the importance of these primary terms substance attributes and modes for spinoza's philosophy cannot be understated it is with them and their definitions that spinoza opens his book operating as his clear and distinct concepts in the cartesian sense i.e the self-evident concepts that cannot be logically doubted which spinoza lays as the solid foundation for the rest of his philosophical structure building upon them with what he assumes are a series of obvious axioms and from these axioms following necessarily spinoza's first propositions and every subsequent proposition continue to follow on only insofar as they can be demonstrated to rest upon what has already preceded it i'd like to leave you with one final point one of the most important positions that emerges from cephenosa's aforementioned metaphysics is what's known as his substance monism the belief that everything that exists is in some meaningful way fundamentally a single reality and substance now while spinoza is neither the first nor the last monist in the history of western philosophy spinoza's demonstration of this position is in all likelihood the best known and the most respected of the lot no reckoning of western philosophy and certainly modern western philosophy is complete without spinoza's name effectively securing a place of the highest intellectual legitimacy and respect for the position of monism itself which may have up until the posthumous publication of spinoza's ethics being dismissed as mere sentimentality romanticism or mysticism was now given the firmest of grounds to stand upon on the giant euclidean shoulders of spinoza if this alone would have been spinoza's legacy it would have certainly sufficed dayenu as we say in hebrew it happens to be that he was also one of the leading thinkers of the enlightenment one of the founders of the modern school of biblical criticism and an important political philosopher arguably one of the first advocates for a separation of church and state directly influencing america's founding fathers but it is spinoza's metaphysical monism that we are most interested here in the moment in this series i hope you enjoyed that overview of spinoza's philosophy in case you'd like a recap we presented a brief biography of the man spoke a little about his legacy and his reputation we introduced his main work the ethics and spoke about the odd methodology that he employs in the book and speculated as to why he did so we then dove right into the heart of synonymous metaphysics with spinoza's definitions of substance attributes and modes and endeavor to explain them and make sense of them and demystify his metaphysics we got to talk about infinite attributes his dual aspect theory and his monism stay tuned for the next video where we will be explaining spinoza's view on god and dissecting what precisely is implied by his pantheism and whether it is just atheism masquerading as something else and we'll have a look at the historical debate that shook european intelligencia in the wake of spinoza's writings spinoza a practically self-taught kid who grew up as a foreigner in a religiously repressive community who had no formal philosophical or secular education who relentlessly saw the truth and dared question everything in the process who risked his life excommunication and expulsion shunned fame wealth and reputation to sit quietly and solemnly in his room night after night polishing the lenses and sentences that would allow generations to come to see clearer and brighter shining knowledge to dispel the darkness of superstition and illuminate the shadows of thought eliminating the odious cobwebs of ignorance intolerance and delusion with knowledge a knowledge that didn't lead to arrogance and superiority but a true knowledge that led only to humility compassion and love for all by understanding how we're all part of one unified substance infinite and indivisible it is to this great man that we owe a great debt a debt that can only be repaid in emulating his ways following his noble example of a life guided by careful thinking and examine life one perhaps worth living until next time thank you for watching and keep seeking you

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Published: Fri Apr 02 2021

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In this vid we’ll be exploring Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, beginning with a brief biographical sketch, a word on his legacy and methodology, followed by an introductory overview of the heart of his philosophy, his metaphysics.