Week 5a Spinoza Flashcards
Pantheism is the belief that all reality (the universe as the totality of all nature) is identical with divinity, or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent god.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) thought that God WAS the world.
To him, ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ meant the same thing. It was a radical idea that got him into a lot of trouble.
If God is infinite, Spinoza reasoned, it must follow that there cannot be anything that is not God. If you discover something in the Universe that is not God, then God cannot be infinite, because God could have in principle been that thing as well as everything else.
Spinoza wrote philosophy as if it were geometry (with the same relentless logic): the ‘proofs’ in his book ‘Ethics’ look like geometrical proofs and include axioms and definitions.
There is, he believed, an underlying structural logic to the world and our place in it that reason can reveal. This is why Spinoza is a rationalist, since reason is emphasised rather than experiment and observation.
Pantheists, like Spinoza, thus do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god.
Spinoza’s God was impersonal and did not care about anything or anyone. It would be like expecting nature to love you back.
Spinoza’s views on free will were controversial too. He was a determinist and therefore thought that free will was an illusion.
Although he was a determinist, he did believe that some kind of very limited human freedom was possible and desirable.
He thought that the worst way to exist was in bondage: at the complete mercy of your emotions. You simply react to events and lose your temper for example. This is a passive way to exist.
Even though these choices can never be fully free, it is better to be active than passive.
Spinoza is typical of a philosopher. He was prepared to be controversial, to put forward ideas that not everyone was ready to hear, and to defend his views with argument.
Since his death he had some very eminent admirers, including the Victorian novelist George Eliot and Albert Einstein.
‘Ethics’ dealt with the whole range of philosophy.
It is often held up as the supreme example of a self-contained metaphysical system whose object is to explain everything.
What is important is a VISION, a vision of the world as an absolutely unitary entity, any division of which - either into parts, such as souls or physical objects, is a mutilation, embodying some kind of misunderstanding.
The only God Spinoza was prepared to countenance is a God who is identical with the whole array of natural things.
There can be no supernatural or supernatural realm.
God and nature cannot be conceived as distinct things.
Spinoza would unite the ‘cartesian dualism’ of mind and body. It’s also important to note, that according to Spinoza, mind and body are only 2 attributes…
God or nature, the single substance, the totality of reality has an infinity of attributes. It’s only mind and body which are intelligible to humans.
He goes on to say that local and temporary formations crop up in the one substance, like wrinkles in a cloth. He calls these wrinkle modes.
They are, in his view, the real nature of what we ordinarily think of as self-subsisting things such as tables, chairs, friends etc.
In everyday life we take such things to be identifiable items with clear, definite outlines. For Spinoza they are just temporary contours taken on here and there by the fabric of everything there is.
For Spinoza, the mind and the body are inseparable, indeed he describes the human mind as the idea of the human body. That leaves no place for the immortality of the soul.
One could see Spinoza’a attitude to man’s position in the world as a stoic one. It is the idea that the world around us is not particularly interested in us, so we must diminish its power to make us suffer by controlling the emotions it excites in us.
Spinoza was genuinely religious.
There is a good deal of correspondence between Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes was a man of indestructible cheerfulness even though he took a gloomy view of the Universe and human nature in particular. In contrast to Spinoza, Hobbes was clearly an atheist and his attitude was unswervingly secular, perfect devoid of anything like piety or reverence.
Spinoza’s attitude towards the world, however, was a religious one of awe and respect, of dignified humility and withdrawal into contemplation.
We fail to recognise the genuineness of Spinoza’s religious attitude because of Christian parochialism.
