Baruch Spinoza's "Ethics" (Part 2/5)

In this episode, I cover Part 2: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind from Spinoza's "Ethics."
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9:55 it’s also a metaphysical base for arguing ethically to endorse cooperation, but more importantly to the metaphysical side- it’s a justification for being able to speak of anything without referring to the totality of nature as it’s parts. Individuation for Spinoza isn’t a reduction until you reach some infinitesimal unit, but a way of perceiving according to common aim. Multiple human are a single group when working towards a common goal, but also your body is your body in as much as it’s parts are cohesive in the goal of maintaining the life form that is you. It’s an answer to Theseus’s ship. When is a part an actual part of the whole? When it works together with other parts to maintain the whole. When it works towards a single goal with others, then they are justified to be considered as parts of the same thing. Any particular has to exist in nature so it can be what it is, but you don’t need to know the full causal chain of the entire universe to understand the chemical compounds which make your food, with its atoms and quarks splitting and combining in a subatomic level. What works for the sake of the same goal, as one unit, is what it is to be a unit. What does not, is not one thing but several things. And all things in nature work as a function in nature, and are thus the same thing- god/nature on the greater scope of things. The units might struggle between themselves but they don’t act against being of nature, as that is conceptually impossible. It’s how Spinoza the monist justifies talking about different things without giving up his monism of everything being god.

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24:38 you’re phrasing it in transcendental terms. For Spinoza humans, like all other particular things, are immanently parts of god. It is self interest that leads individuals to better themselves, and recognition of ourselves as humans and our immanent capacity to aid ourselves in crafting a society which would benefit us all is what Spinoza claims is in our self interest as particulars of god which are capable enough of thought to reach such true conclusions.

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26:53 Spinoza, as well as Newton, build their notion of physics around Descartes contemplations on space and extension (not to say that they’re identical. In his Princpia Newton gives his theory in contrast to Descartes). Spinoza’s physics aren’t a physics with a start, nature is endless to him. Spinoza scholar Noa Shein extrapolated that when Spinoza says every mode of matter is determined by each other mode of matter he means it both spatially, as every object is entirely surrounded from all its sides by other objects, and causally, as every object is brought into being by its necessitating cause and it is also necessarily in its own being brings other effects into being. Spinoza’s cosmology is also an eternal one. We might say “well, contemporary physics shows us he’s wrong about that, the universe had a beginning, thus it’s not a true infinite without both a beginning and an end”, though I think Spinoza might retort with the most intuitive answer; what was before the Big Bang? Was there a slightly different universe which collapsed and re-expanded in the Big Bang? I dunno. Hmu if you got a good theory that explains how time can even have a starting point.

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16:26 you’re splitting the attributes. Spinoza insists that to be necessary and to be found from itself without the aid of another idea is what it is to be god. What it is to be body, what it is to be mind, are different ways of perceiving the same thing. Like Descartes’ substance, substance for Spinoza isn’t a mere component but a unified totality who’s particulars are only affected by other particulars of the same kind. But unlike Descartes- mind and matter are not creations of god, distinct from it, but actual ways of perceiving god themselves.not different organs of the same being but different perspectives on that same being.

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50:59 Spinoza isn’t Cartesian and doesn’t fully reject the senses. He is close to Descartes in claiming that false beliefs come to being through partial perception of true ideas instead of whole perceptions of them. The senses are not flat out rejected by Spinoza, they are considered as merely having the potential to mislead even during their proper function, unlike reason and intuitive knowledge. Spinoza doesn’t do the whole skeptical thought experimenting that Descartes does, and doesn’t conclude the senses are only a lead to pure Doxa. False ideas for Spinoza come from partial knowledge, not from lack of knowledge. That’s an important distinction since Spinoza considers knowledge to be existing absolutely irregardless of perception of it without relying on god’s consciousness perceiving it like Berkley does, but on god’s mind containing it.

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17:12 Spinoza explains the incapability to hold a complete idea of god through a perspectivist argument. You can only see from your vantage point, you can’t see the whole of god, as you can’t see infinity in a limited lifetime and perspective. you’re going to conceive, recognize and imagine according to your perceptions. Differing vantage points provide differing perspectives provide differing conclusions. No one can see the whole of nature, the scientific striving can attempt to asymptotically close the gap, but it’s an infinite thing and particulars are not infinite. We can’t hold the infinite in a finite box, we can strive to to the best of our abilities, and Spinoza does speak in favour for that striving for the betterment of humanity

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4:39 Spinoza would phrase it less as particulars needing a purpose to exist, and more as necessitating a reason to exist. Anything that does exist exists towards something, but Spinoza doesn’t consider God’s will as a goal considered and granted to an agent. Gods will in Spinoza is the form and function of the rules of nature. An individual is born, becomes hungry, strives to perform this or that action, because there is in nature a cause that necessitates that individual to act in that way. Not because it was individually designed and crafted for the purpose of doing all that they do.

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57:44 having potential to be false=/=doesn’t count. Spinoza wouldn’t work on lenses most of his life if he thought observation was pointless.

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15:26

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It's my birthday today lol

[@benzur3503]

@@TheoryPhilosophy happy birthday 🎉

[@msski9905]

so, in summary 'if you define god, as the laws which govern the natural order of the universe, then god is what governs the natural order of the universe"

[@benzur3503]

49:21 again- “everything that god decides” that’s not what Spinoza says! Deus sive natura! Everything that is is in nature, it is not a personal god with a personality and human-like deliberation between options, it is the true nature. Everything is in nature not because it is assumed, but because nature is defined as substantiating everything. Leibniz critiqued (indirectly, as to not address the atheist heathen directly) Spinoza’s god as lacking free will. Spinoza’s god doesn’t decide anything they could’ve decided otherwise