My Friend Spinoza

From Spinoza

In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza and, at the age of 23, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already creating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original.

I highly recommend Betraying Spinoza, the renegade Jew who gave us modernity by Rebecca Goldstein.

This short book provides the cultural and historical background for understanding Spinoza and is readable for the non-philosopher.


Quotes from the book I found intriguing:

On Metaphysics

“What Spinoza has to say about the importance of allowing the discovery of nature to proceed unimpeded by religious dogma could not speak more pertinently to some of the raging controversies of our day, including the recurring public debate in America over Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

“The social frame of reference enclosing every individual of the pre-modern era was inherently religious. Spinoza’s choice was an instance of a principle (secularized spirituality) that had yet to be discerned in even the vaguest outline.”

“Without intelligence there is not rational life, and things are only good in so far as they aid man in his enjoyment of the intellectual life which is defined by intelligence.” {Thus, Spinoza’s ethics will be logic-based and proceed from first principles (axioms) the purest of which is God.}

Because God is identical with nature – that is, God created nature from ‘himself’ – our understanding of nature cannot appeal to dogma or creed but must remain a part of this world itself.

“Soul” or neshama in the Hebrew only means the life of anything that is living and this principle does not commit us to believing that the soul survives the body’s death.

“Metaphysics” is the attempt to use pure reason as opposed to experience to arrive at a description of reality (this is the way Spinoza used logic). In a looser sense, “metaphysics” refers just to our ontological commitments – commitments concerning what sorts of things exist in the world. In the latter sense, even analytic philosophers have a metaphysics but analytic philosophers reject the very possibility of a non-empirical deduction of the nature of reality.

In Spinoza’s view, logic alone is the fabric of reality and into this fabric is woven not only the descriptive facts of what is, but the normative facts of what ought to be. Many believe that this is a metaphysical delusions because science cannot be bypassed to reach a priori certainty about the nature of reality. This is called the naturalistic fallacy or that of ignoring the “is-ought gap.”

Not even reason can produce something out of nothing – It can’t get more out of the premises than what is already implicitly deposited with them. That is, conceptual truths – stating logical possibilities – cannot entail descriptive or ontological truths – describing the way the world really is. The “is-ought gap” might better be explained as the “if-is gap.”



On Ethics

“We can survive our death to the extent that we have already let go of being our singular solitary selves.” I find that this idea lies at the heart of not only ethics, but of servant leadership as well.

“Paradoxically, the only way to flourish in one’s being is to cease being only that being. That singular self, that localized “I,” that “me” which is “me” and no other…that is my substance, my identity, by very being.” But for Spinoza, “that thing is to be cast off into the mists of unreality, outgrown as one stretches outward into reality. The distinctive singular self is not what we ought to think about. It is not even what we ought to be.”

P1 – I am me. No one else can do for me what I am doing in being me. When there will be no one that has this same stake in my persisting, then there won’t be me. This is a fact of my identity. This is a selfish or self-centered commitment to my life’s going well and I make judgments about how various things affect my life for better or for worse.

P2 – Because our emotions intrinsically involve judgments, we can critically evaluate the judgments that they contain and, if they are wrong, correct them.

P3 – Since the process of correcting erroneous judgments is expansive – to understand is to expand ourselves into the world, reproducing (using imagination) the world in our own minds. This requires getting out of oneself and seeing oneself as just another thing in the world, treating one’s own emotions as dispassionately as a problem in mathematics.

P4 – To maneuvering outside oneself and correlate one’s vision of the world with one’s commitment to oneself means that one can never inhabit one’s own self quite the same way again, which is to say that one has changed – one has moved from an inward vision to an outward vision; from selfish and self-centered interest to unselfish and perhaps selfless interest.

P5 – There is an inverse relationship between expanding to become more than what you were and the degree of importance with which you regard yourself. The more expansive one’s self, the less the sense of self-importance. The tendency to over inflate one’s significance in the world, simply because of the forces of inward attention and devotion keeping one oneself, undergoes corrective adjustments in the light of the objective point of view moving us from an “is” (or a “me”) to an “ought.” Virtue follows quite naturally. In Spinoza’s view, as a part of nature, created by God, “We are others.” The point for Spinoza is not to become insiders – always thinking about one’s self importance – but rather outsiders – to identify with others and serve them whenever possible. “Our common human nature reveals why we must treat one another with utmost dignity, and, too, that our common human nature is itself transformed in our knowing of it, so that we become only more like one another as we think our way toward radical objectivity.”

“Conatus, our essence, which dictates that all of our intentions derive from our concerns with our own selves, leads us, if we truly attempt to fulfill ourselves, to see ourselves from the outside, as it were, from the point of view of the infinite system (God) that explains all.” Spinoza says, “A free man, thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.”

“The new men of genius construct explanations out of the certainty of mathematics, not the make-believe of teleological storytelling.”

“The world must somehow offer an explanation for itself; or otherwise we fall back on the explanatory hollowness of divine final causes.”

Pieter Balling, in the same vain as Spinoza blasted organized religion for placing dogma at its center where the soul ought to have been.

“The problem of evil comes down to the stubborn stupidity of mankind.”

Spinoza said that we should “shake off all fears of servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. … The way that we go about the human business of believing leads to the best and the worst in our species.”