Substance, attributes, and modesEdit
Main article:
Philosophy of Baruch Spinoza
These are the fundamental concepts with which 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?" he replies: "Substance, its attributes, and modes".
—
Karl Jaspers[83]
Spinoza argued that God exists and is abstract and impersonal.
[5] Spinoza's view of God is what
Charles Hartshornedescribes as
Classical Pantheism.
[84]Spinoza has also been described as an "Epicurean materialist,"
[77] specifically in reference to his opposition to Cartesian mind-body dualism. This view was held by Epicureans before him, as they believed that atoms with their probabilistic paths were the only substance that existed fundamentally.
[85][86] Spinoza, however, deviated significantly from Epicureans by adhering to strict determinism, much like the Stoics before him, in contrast to the Epicurean belief in the probabilistic path of atoms, which is more in line with contemporary thought on
quantum mechanics.
[87][88] Spinoza's system imparted order and unity to the tradition of radical
thought, offering powerful weapons for prevailing against "received authority." He contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e., everything in the Universe) is one Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality,
[77] namely a single, fundamental
substance (meaning "that which stands beneath" rather than "matter") that is the basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is understood only in part. His identification of God with nature was more fully explained in his posthumously published
Ethics.[5]Spinoza's main contention with Cartesian mind–body dualism was that, if mind and body were truly distinct, then it is not clear how they can coordinate in any manner. Humans presume themselves to have
free will, he argues, which is a result of their awareness of appetites that affect their minds, while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and act as they do.
Spinoza contends that "
Deus sive Natura" is a being of infinitely many attributes, of which thought and extension are two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat the physical and mental worlds as intertwined, causally related, and deriving from the same substance. It is important to note here that, in Parts 3 through 4 of the
Ethics, Spinoza describes how the human mind is affected by both mental and physical factors. He directly contests dualism. The universal substance emanates both body and mind; while they are different attributes, there is no fundamental difference between these aspects. This formulation is a historically significant solution to the
mind–body problemknown as
neutral monism. Spinoza's system also envisages a God that does not rule over the universe by Providence in which God can make changes, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of which everything in nature is a part. Spinoza argues that "things could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case,";
[89] he directly challenges a transcendental God which actively responds to events in the universe. Everything that has and will happen is a part of a long chain of cause and effect which, at a metaphysical level, humans are unable to change. No amount of prayer or ritual will sway God. Only knowledge of God, or the existence which humans inhabit, allows them to best respond to the world around them. Not only is it impossible for two infinite substances to exist (two infinities being absurd),
[90]God—being the ultimate substance—cannot be affected by anything else, or else it would be affected by something else, and not be the fundamental substance.
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing
determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of
necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand
why we act as we do. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do and our emotions or
affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will. They believe, however, that their will is free. This illusionary perception of freedom stems from our human consciousness, experience, and indifference to prior natural causes. Humans think they are free but they ″dream with their eyes open″. For Spinoza, our actions are guided entirely by natural impulses. In his letter to G. H. Schuller (Letter 58), he wrote: "men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are determined."
[91]
This picture of Spinoza's determinism is ever more illuminated through reading this famous quote in
Ethics: ″the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid. … All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak.″
[92] Thus for Spinoza morality and ethical judgement like choice is predicated on an illusion. For Spinoza, ″Blame″ and ″Praise″ are non existent human ideals only fathomable in the mind because we are so acclimatized to human consciousness interlinking with our experience that we have a false ideal of choice predicated upon this.
Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with
Stoicism inasmuch as both philosophies sought to fulfil a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that
reasoncould defeat emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held that knowledge of true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key ideas of
Sigmund Freud's
psychoanalysis.
[93]
Ethical philosophyEdit
Spinoza shared ethical beliefs with ancient Epicureans, in renouncing ethics beyond the material world, although Epicureans focused more on physical pleasure and Spinoza more on emotional wellbeing.
[94] Encapsulated at the start in his
Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding(
Tractatus de intellectus emendatione) is the core of Spinoza's ethical philosophy, what he held to be the true and final good. Spinoza held good and evil to be
relative concepts, claiming that nothing is intrinsically good or bad except relative to a particularity. Things that had classically been seen as good or evil, Spinoza argued, were simply good or bad for humans. Spinoza believes in a deterministic universe in which "All things in nature proceed from certain [definite] necessity and with the utmost perfection." Nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and nothing is
contingent.
Spinoza's EthicsEdit
Main article:
Ethics (Spinoza)
In the universe anything that happens comes from the essential nature of objects, or of God or Nature. According to Spinoza, reality is perfection. If circumstances are seen as unfortunate it is only because of our inadequate conception of reality. While components of the chain of cause and effect are not beyond the understanding of human reason, human grasp of the infinitely complex whole is limited because of the limits of science to empirically take account of the whole sequence. Spinoza also asserted that sense perception, though practical and useful, is inadequate for discovering truth. His concept of "
conatus" states that human beings' natural inclination is to strive toward preserving an essential being, and asserts that virtue/human power is defined by success in this preservation of being by the guidance of reason as one's central ethical doctrine. According to Spinoza, the highest virtue is the intellectual love or knowledge of God/Nature/Universe.
Also in the "Ethics",
[95] Spinoza discusses his beliefs about what he considers to be the three kinds of knowledge that come with perceptions. The first kind of knowledge he writes about is the knowledge of experiences. More precisely, this first type of knowledge can be known as the knowledge of things that could be “mutilated, confused, and without order.” Spinoza, Benedict (1677). "Books 1–5".
The Ethics. Another explanation of what the first knowledge can be is that it is the knowledge of dangerous reasoning. Dangerous reason lacks any type of rationality, and causes the mind to be in a “passive” state. This type of “passive mind” that Spinoza writes about in the earlier books of The Ethics is a state of the mind in which adequate causes become passions. Spinoza’s second knowledge involves reasoning plus emotions. He explains that this knowledge is had by the rationality of any adequate causes that have to do with anything common to the human mind. An example of this could be anything that is classified as being of imperfect virtue. Imperfect virtues are seen as those which are incomplete. Many philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, would compare imperfect virtue to pagan virtue. Spinoza defines the third and final knowledge as the knowledge of God, which requires rationality and reason of the mind. In more detail, Spinoza uses this type of knowledge to join together the essence of God with the individual essence. This knowledge is also formed from any adequate causes that include perfect virtue. Spinoza, Benedict (1677). "Books 1–5".
The Ethics.
In the final part of the "
Ethics", his concern with the meaning of "true blessedness", and his explanation of how emotions must be detached from external causes in order to master them, foreshadow psychological techniques developed in the 1900s. His concept of three types of knowledge—opinion, reason, intuition—and his assertion that intuitive knowledge provides the greatest satisfaction of mind, lead to his proposition that the more we are conscious of ourselves and Nature/Universe, the more perfect and blessed we are (in reality) and that only intuitive knowledge is eternal.
Given Spinoza's insistence on a completely ordered world where "necessity" reigns,
Good and Evil have no absolute meaning. The world as it exists looks imperfect only because of our limited perception.
Thoughts???
The Bible teaches God can harden anyone, lift up anyone, make a stumbling block out of anyone.
Does the clay have a real say or is it just chosen and molded.
Is our narrative real or determined?
You will say you have free will but you are Gods. Doesn't the servant only follow commands? And if you can be hardened what free will do you have? And we only see what is chosen for us. We did not choose our birth or location. We do not have gifts of reading minds or have the power to change time.
We generally receive what we ask, find what we seek and doors open if we have the courage to knock. To all of which is only our daily bread.