REISSUE-Ep. 24: Spinoza on God and Metaphysics

0:24 Unknown speaker: Hey, this is Mark from the Partially Examined Life.

0:26 Dylan: This is Dylan from the Partially Examined Life.

0:28 Unknown speaker: We're here to introduce in 2017 an episode from 2010, our episode 24 on Spinoza and God in Metaphysics, covering the ethics books one and two.

0:38 Mark: Yeah, I listened to it as we have.

0:40 Unknown speaker: You do, since you were not part of the podcast formally at this point.

0:44 Dylan: Exactly. I'd been on an episode, but not a full fledged PEL member.

0:49 Unknown speaker: We thought we'd reissue this to everyone because it's been behind the firewall for a while and it seems like it would help folks understand the Spinoza episodes we're about to release after this on Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico Politicus. So this is actually going to be the first of five weeks that we have some Spinoza related thing coming out because for episode 165 we're talking about Spinoza on biblical criticism, which sounds weird, but we'll explain what the context is of that and then for 166 it'll be his views on politics.

1:22 Dylan: Yeah, it's a Spinoza fest.

1:24 Unknown speaker: So this book, the Ethics, was released after his death, but he was working on it for a long time and it's definitely right there in the background. It's kind of assumed in the earlier work, this Tractatus, that we're going to be talking about, which that is more talking to the everyday people. Whereas this is more hardcore philosophy. And is this one of our more difficult episodes in terms of the subject matter at least there's a couple different

1:48 Dylan: ways I get to listen to it. Right. It's six years ago and so there's a certain amount of just thinking back about doing PEL episodes that happens when I'm listening to it. That book, which I don't know very well, but it's definitely sort of hardcore metaphysics, especially those first two sections that you guys worked on. But I thought it seemed very true to the Spinoza that I'm familiar with in the Theological Politicus, both in the kind of eruditeness in the Ethics. You guys quote a lot of the propositions there. And it's noted that the Ethics is presented as a kind of geometrical proof.

So it's proposition after proposition with proofs involved in it, and that kind of exhaustiveness While it's not done in terms of propositions, in the Tractatus, there is a kind of intellectual exhaustiveness that goes on where when he's working through the individual books of the Bible and he picks a word or a theme and he just marches through and quotes the Hebrew and then translates it and then summarizes it, that aspect of his intellect shines through both in the Tractatus and then in what I heard on the Ethics. It just seems like a guy who could exhaustively hold things in his head, which I think predisposed him to this unified nature of God.

It is challenging, but I thought it was great and a great preparation for what we're doing with theological politicus. I think it makes a lot of sense to be re releasing it.

3:28 Unknown speaker: Right. So ultimately, the Tractatus is a political document, but the political issue of his time was people fighting over religion. So it's all about the ultimate conclusion of that, is that we should be tolerant of other people's interpretation of religious texts. And so you might ask yourself, how does that tolerance line up with an actual theological view, which you'll get in this episode that you're about to hear. And to some extent, I want to leave that a question that's open to you folks. We're going to discuss that a little bit in the Tractatus episode.

One of the great things about Spinoza's take on theology, as opposed to, frankly, many of the other ones we've considered in terms of Augustine or Maimonides, is for someone who's not married to a particular religious tradition, Spinoza's thoughts about God, about the fundamental concept of everything, I think are really relevant to everybody. It's not a matter of, do you believe in original sin? Or something peculiar like that. It's a matter of what do we make of talking of the universe as a whole. And that's kind of the first question of metaphysics itself.

4:34 Dylan: Yeah. And it's really interesting that those conclusions lead to political conclusions on his point, as you'll see in the. In the episode that we were recording right now and listening to this episode on the ontology of Spinoza, his rationalism comes through so strongly. And what's resonating with me, having listened to it, with the Spinoza that I'm reading now, is that the universe exists out there as a manifestation of God, that imminently the laws of the universe and the way we are in the world are just captured in the activity of God himself.

So that phrase that God is nature, which is a little bit of a Simplification drives him to natural science and wanting to understand the ways of the world, but also understand it as something to be discovered. It's a prod for philosophy. So there's a way in which his ontology is a prod for investigation and not an endpoint for investigation. And so it's that aspect of the world being out there and us being in it for us to understand that is enlivening about Spinoza. And I think it correlates with his liberal democratic disposition, which is to preserve the ability for that activity in the world, as opposed to having a theological disposition that is fundamentally prescriptive about how you should act and authoritarian in that respect.

You see that in the Ethics.

6:07 Unknown speaker: Now you'll notice that this episode 24 is actually just the first of two episodes that we did at the time on spinoza.

6:14 Seth: Yep.

6:15 Unknown speaker: Episode 25 is also on the Ethics, and we're not going to re release that, but yet I really want to get it in your hands. So here's what I'm going to do. Of course it is there for the taking along with all our other behind the Firewall episodes. For anyone who has a mere $5 to become a Partially Examined Life citizen, it is also for sale a la carte at our store. So a mere $2 for that. However, I'm going to go farther than that. I'm going to add to our Patreon page. So anybody that gives us $1 through Patreon sets themselves up for a recurring $1 donation.

You will receive a link to that Spinoza episode 25. And beyond that, if you don't even have a dollar, look for the Facebook post associated with the release of this reissue. Share that on your Facebook page. And if you share it publicly, in other words, I need to be able to go and look and see that you have shared it. Then I will send you the through Facebook Messenger a link to episode 25. So there's a lot of ifs there. I have to be able to see that you've shared it. And because it's through Facebook messenger and I'm probably not your personal friend, you have to look in the other messages category or something like that on Facebook.

Like it's not obvious when you get a message from somebody who's not your friend. So keep a lookout for that. If you do it and you don't hear from me, feel free to go to the Partially Examined Life Facebook page and bug us directly about it and we'll make sure you get the link.

7:41 Dylan: Absolutely. That's a Great idea.

7:43 Unknown speaker: If you enjoy what we do, we want you to do something to acknowledge that. But it's not like we really want to empty your bank accounts. That said, this is a wonderful trip down memory lane. And it's coincidental that as we're re listening to this, we've blown up on Reddit a bit. So I get to read feedback on the podcast not just from the people that like us and send us emails saying how they like us, but from sort of the wider Internet philosophy, which is a community that I'm sort of ambivalent about.

8:19 Dylan: Did you get more ambivalent about it, Mark?

8:22 Mark: Also, it just A lot of people,

8:24 Unknown speaker: when they're judging a podcast, they listen to the early episodes. And I feel like we've evolved so much over time that some people think that the early episodes are the best ones and some people, it drives them crazy and they really should just never look at their early episodes. They should only look at when we're a little more mature and responsible. I guess. I think we are now and don't have quite too much of a chip on our shoulder. I don't know that that comes off in this episode 24 very much, but those reviews, which again, I never know whether they're talking about us now or us five years ago about do we explain things well enough?

Are we really something that beginner philosophy students can understand? That caused yet another round of discussion about whether we should be putting more biographical information at the beginning of episodes like on this one you're about to hear, or having a more formal, longer summary by one person uninterrupted. There are many ideas floating around, so you can do your own comparisons and post a comment on the partiallyexaminedlife.com blog or our Facebook group as to whether

9:31 Mark: you like the old PEL or the

9:33 Unknown speaker: new PEL better, or what we could do now to improve things further.

9:37 Dylan: Maybe you don't think it's so different.

9:40 Unknown speaker: Maybe not. Maybe we're just exaggerating things in our own mind. In any case, thanks, Dylan, for introducing this with me. Do you have any last thoughts?

9:48 Dylan: I think it's a great prep for the episode we're recording right now to go and listen to even the one you're going to listen to right now. That was a good choice. And grab the other one when you get a chance. Cool, thanks.

10:10 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our primary question for episode 24 is what is the nature of God as communicated through Baruch Spinoza's the Ethics link to an online version of this, as well as discussion and other information. Please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com My name is Mark Linsenmayer, emanating from Madison, Wisconsin.

10:36 Seth: And this is Seth Paskin, rko ing from Austin, Texas.

10:40 Wes: And this is Wes Alwan conatusing from Boston, Massachusetts. Very nice conatusing. What is that, conatus? The perseverance to persist exists.

10:53 Unknown speaker: Ah.

10:54 Mark: How about we read the fundamental axioms which ground our entire discussion with deductive certainty?

11:01 Unknown speaker: Why?

11:01 Mark: There are three of them. We try not to assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. And number two, no fair name dropping. Instead of actually explaining yourself. If you have a point to make, just make it. And don't say, for instance, you would know what I mean had you only read God's Bosom by St. John of the Cross. I recommend the Larry Flynt translation of that. Number three. We shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except when we are not Spinoza. What do you guys think?

11:28 Wes: Love it.

11:29 Seth: What a massive, massive, massive intellectual. A powerful figure in the history of philosophy, no doubt.

11:36 Mark: So he's a follower of Descartes. He lived just a bit after Descartes and taught Cartesian philosophy for a living. For some of his life. Right. It's kind of privately. He's not a university professor. Yes. Should we give a little longer? I've got his Wikipedia page open that he was raised in an orthodox Dutch Jewish community, so in the Netherlands. His parents had come from Portugal. And in fact, I heard a little bit more background about this from. I kind of want to give a shout out to this before we got too far into this, because this will frame a lot of my thoughts on this.

Was the Karen Armstrong book the Case for God that I have been. I'm about more than two thirds through now and I had a blog post about it. I'll put something else up about it, but it's an intellectual history book, it's not a philosophy book. And it goes through from the people writing the Bible, through every medieval philosopher that you could think of and Jewish intellectual back then, putting together the Talmud and things all the way up through the Enlightenment, talking about Newton and Rousseau and Spinoza. And one of the things in there was in fact that atheism, since we're talking about God today, her big point of the overall book, I don't want to get too into this, but is that both atheism and the fundamentalism, which atheism objects to, that the new atheists now object to, the big hot topic in philosophy are both recent cultural phenomena.

Right. That fundamentalism doesn't mean this is like how people thought in the old days. In fact, fundamentalism, reading the Bible literally and following the doctrines that they do is for the most part a 20th century phenomena. And the emphasis that both of these schools have on what you believe about God, what creed you have, is again, a very recent thing and really was the Enlightenment. So starting with Descartes and Spinoza, when the turn went to that, more, you know, it's less about your attitude and it's more about what propositions you will intellectually assent to.

And one of the things in here was that the first real atheists, she said, were the Jews that were in the Netherlands that had fled from places like Portugal and Spain because the Spanish Inquisition was going on. So if you were Jewish, you had to pretend to be Christian. So there were some sort of secret Jews there that kept Judaism going, but they couldn't practice any of the rituals that got kind of divorced from what Judaism is all about, according to her at least, which is about doing things, not just about having a creed. And so when they went up to the Netherlands, we had a whole community up there.

And that was kind of like, you know, America is now in terms of, ooh, it's the land of free ideas. It's the place where the church is not going to come down on you and burn you at the stake for something. And that this was the, specifically the Jews. There were some of the first authentic, philosophically grounded atheists around. However, Spinoza was not one of, was not an atheist. Right. By age 23, after he had. So he was raised knowing all this Orthodox Jewish stuff. However, he also had an instruction in the intellectual history of the Roman Catholic Church and just the Christian and other intellectual trends of the day.

And then he wrote his first couple papers and put forth this idea that we're going to talk about of God, which is very different than the sort of personal God that makes a lot of laws that was popular with the Jewish community at the time. And so the Jewish community, when he was 23, did their equivalent of excommunication. What is that called?

14:59 Seth: The harem.

15:00 Mark: The harem. I would like a harem at age 23. Yes, yes. But, well, according to Armstrong, that actually only happened because there was still a lot of pressure on the Jewish community to sort of behave themselves. Like if you just, you know, if you're Just all good Jews, then that's fine. But if there's, if your Judaism is going to give rise to a lot of craziness, then the Christian church is going to come down on the Jewish community. So they were pressured essentially into kicking him out. But apparently he didn't mind this. He was by this time, you know, a very independent intellectual and he had denied all the specific legalism that Judaism had become.

And he taught and he supported himself grinding lenses. And he got offered a university position in Heidelberg and he turned it down. He didn't want to play that game. He could support himself with his lens crafting. And so then he died at 44 of a lung illness from grinding lenses, probably. So if you choose not to sell out, don't like work at a coal mine instead of being a philosophy professor or do something else hazardous like that, that is the lesson I get from here. And so he only published, you know, a couple of these, the things that got him excommunicated.

What was the, the Tractatus that you read, Wes?

16:18 Wes: Yeah, Politico Philosophicus.

16:21 Mark: Yeah, Tractatus Politico Philosophicus. I also read, I looked over his short treatise on God, man and his well being, which actually explains some of the bit of God that's from 1660. That's his first work to Tractatus is from 1670. So the book we're reading, the Ethics, sort of sums up his whole system. So even though it's called the Ethics and Ethics is the latter part of it, the first whole part is him going through his entire metaphysics, his entire ontology. He gives his solution to the mind body problem. He talks about his philosophy of physics like it's a pretty involved system.

And then eventually, after giving an account of the emotions, after he's really given a complete account of what he thinks is human nature and our place in the world, then he gets what should we do about that? What is the right and the good? And it's a pretty weird system given that he's a determinist. Right. So he can't say we're free to make ethical choices and you should make the right ones or something. He has to have some more complicated setup of that, which is what we're going to talk about this time. And I guess he was working on that a number of years before his death.

While he was working on it, rumors started spreading that he was completing this work that would deny the existence of God altogether. And so that was a scandal. And so he didn't publish right then. And then he Died. So they, his friends, published this and a couple other things the same year that he died, 1677.

17:37 Wes: Now, please summarize the ethics in a few sentences.

17:41 Mark: I'll let you guys do that. I set it up for you.

17:44 Wes: Theft.

17:47 Mark: Oh, gosh.

17:49 Seth: So I think the first thing to talk about is this style that he used, which was, I guess, like after the method of geometrical proofs. And it's the quintessential rationalist method in any great philosophical text. It is literally, you know, a step by step formal proof, if you will, of his points, purely from axioms, definitions and propositions, which, if you were trying to basically devalue the senses and focus on reason and ideas and concepts a priori, whatever, that this would be the way to go about doing it. And I think that's one of the things that I remember when I first read it, is all of the difficulty that we have, for example, reading Kant or even Wittgenstein for that matter. Maybe this is a.

18:41 Mark: Whose Tractatus was named after Spinoza's Tractatus?

18:44 Seth: Yes, it's an allusion to it, at least.

18:47 Mark: Yes.

18:48 Seth: So actually, I shouldn't put Wittgenstein in the same class. I should say when we read Kant and Hobbes and Hume and Plato and these guys, and you're trying to figure out first what is the claim and then is the claim valid? What are the assumptions that are being made and so forth. With Spinoza and later on Wittgenstein, the claim is very, very clear. The assumptions are very, very clear. It really comes down to two things. You have to decide whether you agree or disagree with some of the assumptions and the axioms, or you have to agree or disagree with the definitions that are used for the words and see whether he's using them consistently.

So as a rationalist, he's sort of stylistically on his own level, and I think that's one reason why he was so admired by so many other philosophers. Is that the discipline that it takes to write in this style and to think this way, the years that it would take to put something like this together, I think all of them, I appreciated that.

19:47 Mark: It's actually called Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order. It's the title on the page we link to.

19:54 Seth: Yes. So that's the first part of it. And then the second part of it is that he essentially. This I find almost amusing, that he basically proves the existence of God. Oh, I'd say in the first. What about 20 page? The first couple of pages. And it's just like it's almost like, it's just step one on the way to the much larger project. So where a lot of the scholastics have these very elaborate proofs for the existence of God, Spinoza just kind of says, of course, here, A, B and C, there God. Now let's get on to the important

20:31 Mark: stuff, which is, well, but he's drawing on Descartes proof and the other stuff that's been done before, I think, assuming that his readers are going to be familiar with those proofs. And so he gives them in a very truncated way.

20:44 Seth: Yes, that's true, but it's the fact that he doesn't seem to feel the need to dwell on the subject, if you count, I would have to guess that the word absurd comes up in this. In the first section of the. Yeah, the first part probably 50 times, where he's talking about other people's views. And this is actually what I love about him, is that he's just a harsh, harsh critic. The last four pages of each of the sections, for example, where he wanders off into his kind of commentary, he's like, of course, I've proved this, but let me just say a few things. It's absolutely absurd to think this, that, and the other thing. It's just fantastic.

21:20 Wes: Yeah. Seth, just reinforcement of your point about the proof of God. In a way, it's more of a negative because God is going to suck up all of what substance means, right? So he's extracting substance from the natural world, and that's going to have huge ethical implications. Human beings are not going to turn out to be these substantial souls, and their passions are determined and part of nature. And so in a way, it's like, yeah, it's more of a negative project to say that, you know, the phenomenal world is naturalistic rather than a positive project of saying, here we need a God, and then God turns out to be nature anyway.

21:59 Mark: Well, should we just jump into the God stuff, or do you want to give more overview of the arc of the thing or something?

22:04 Seth: I'd say we just jump in because there's too much to just give an overview.

22:09 Mark: Yeah, so that was, I guess, the focus for this, even though the bulk of the book. And when he actually gets to talking about ethics, you know, he belabors the point in much the same way Aristotle does in his later parts of the ethics that we avoided reading or just skimmed his Nicomachean ethics in our past episode, you know, really getting into how all these emotions are built out of other emotions and just this very mechanical system but since we're not going to talk about that part, the focus on this, I thought, really everything flowed from this view that he has of God, which is just from the definition itself.

We should start with substance to make the point, because this is the point that Wes alluded to, that God ends up being the only substance. Right? Substances are not things in nature. Let me read the definition from the first page here. Definition 3. By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself. In other words, that the conception of which does not need the conception of another thing from which it must be formed. And this is supposedly the definition of substance more or less taken from Descartes and from Aristotle.

And in fact, I looked up Descartes on substance from the Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. Descartes criterion for substance is virtually the same as Aristotle's subject criterion. He defines substance as that whose existence does not depend on other things, and claim that there is, strictly speaking, only one substance, namely God, which is going to be Spinoza's point. However, although God is the only uncreated substance, created substances may be recognized because although they need the concurrence of God in order to exist, they're independent of any other created things, such as accidents or modes.

Instead, created substances are the bearers of properties, modes and accidents. A created substance, for Descartes, can be a thinking thing or mind, or it can be an extended thing or body. So there's what he's working off of.

23:58 Wes: So one way to think of substance is just what remains or is stable when you strip away all the properties of something, right? You know, what is it that is their substrate? And then another way of thinking about it is the end point of explanation, which is sort of where Spinoza's definition 3 comes in, meaning that you have this causal chain where you conceive of one thing through another thing, and you go on and on and on until you get to sort of the bedrock which no longer is understood through some lower level cause. And here, I mean, it's kind of ambiguous because cause, right, can mean what you understand something through, and then cause can mean actual, you know, one thing physically causing another in the world. And Spinoza kind of puts those two things together, right?

24:43 Mark: He says that's how we understand things.

24:46 Wes: Yeah, right.

24:47 Mark: The way I understand your actions is by understanding that, you know, you're the one doing them and understand something about you and what would bring about those actions. If I'm going to give an explanation of action, or if I see a phenomena in the world, if I see, you know, footprints on the ground. The way I understand that is to understand who made the footprints. So he thinks that just. That's how explanation works. Conception. Yeah.

25:06 Wes: And this is straight out of. This is straight out of Aristotle. To understand something is to understand its cause, to understand the why. So corresponds to, in the sciences, you know, creating general laws about things and saying that everything, for instance, operates according to gravity. Instead of just looking at one instance, you're connecting all the instances under a causal principle.

25:29 Mark: Yep. And so he takes this definition from Descartes and he just wants to make it consistent. He says, you know, forget this distinction between uncreated substance, God and created substances. Really, all these created substances. And I guess this is where I see the definition of God as infinite. Right. Everybody agrees if there is a God, it's infinite. That's the definition, right? Yeah, at least part of the definition. And that means that there can't be anything that is separate from God. It's not infinite like, ooh, this line is infinite because I can divide it up infinitely many times.

No, it is omnipresent. It is all encompassing. It is infinite in that sense. And so there can't be any separate substances from God. The contrasting. And you wonder, how could there be any other view? And another bit I will steal from Karen Armstrong is in the third century A.D. theologians came up with this idea that God in fact created the universe out of nothingness. You know, there was God there and there was the void, and he reached into the void and made the world out of the nothingness. So that ultimately what the nature of the world is is nothingness that's touched by God.

So anyway, you need some alternative if you don't want to have some view

26:34 Unknown speaker: like Spinoza, if you, if you want

26:36 Mark: to have a completely transcendent God that is separate from you and separate from the material world. I mean, we want to talk about individual bodies and minds, but we shouldn't call them substances because to understand what a body or mind is, we have to look at, you know, what has caused that? What has caused this body to be here? What has caused. So he talks about this in a couple different ways that we have to if we're giving explanations of individual things. Right. This man, why is this man here? Well, he had parents, you know, so there's physical causes. You give an account of that. And there's also just the essence of things. How do we understand humanity or triangle ness or something? And all those things he says in some other way rely on this underlying notion of God.

27:18 Wes: Right.

27:19 Mark: So you can't explain anything, he thinks, without referring to an infinite substrate that is underlying them. And then his argument for this is a little weird, which is just that. Imagine that there's a limited thing. Well, how is it limited? Well, something must be containing it. So think of space itself. Is space infinite or not? Well, if it's not infinite, then there must be an edge of it. It must be sitting in something. So if space is finite, then there must be an infinite thing in which it is sitting, the void or whatever.

27:48 Wes: Right?

27:49 Mark: And so that you have to have an infinite substance. And because he defines substance as you can talk about it in itself, you can talk about it without referring to anything outside it that causes it or contains it, then there can only be one thing that is that which is the infinite substance, which is go.

28:05 Wes: Yeah. And part of that depends right, on that. No two substances can share an attribute. That's an important step, right? So that if God is infinite and he has all the attributes and no two substances can share an attribute, then everything collapses into God. So I sort of imagine this part of the ethics. I always think of sort of something collapsing into a singularity or a black hole or something like that. He's following the implications of the concept of substance through. And what you get is this singularity in a way.

28:36 Seth: I think I read somewhere that the substance is basically your metaphysical simple. And I think, just like Wes just said, that if you get down to irreducible metaphysical simples, you have to have some way to explain how they have attributes and properties and how they interact and how they generate each other or don't generate each other. And that's part of the torturous task that you see many philosophers prior to Spinoza going through trying to explain with generating versus non generating or perfection. You know, that these things generate things, but they have less perfection than the things that generated them and so on.

And I think Spinoza basically sort of calls them out and says all those problems go away. If you just acknowledge the reality that the concept itself brings, which is that substance becomes one giant irreducible single. And this is probably what Leibniz argued with him about, or at least one of the reasons why Leibniz had a huge problem with him, obviously, is that Leibniz had a bunch of irreducible metaphysical simples that he tried to figure out, and then he had something that held them all together, not surprisingly, that had three letters and started with a G.

So I think Spinoza's solution is really rather elegant because it basically solves a lot of the problems that exist. It's the consequences of what he says of taking this position that people don't like. It's not that it doesn't solve any problems. In fact, it's very simple, clear and elegant. It's what happens to free will and independence and loving, caring, vengeful, moral God and so on and so forth. So, yeah, right.

30:16 Mark: So that's the big, just sort of jumping to the big theme here that I wanted to pull out today is if you have this notion of God as the infinite substance that is everything is the underlying part of everything, then in fact, I shouldn't even say the underlying part of everything. It's the container of everything. It is everything.

30:34 Wes: Right, right.

30:35 Mark: And you know, I don't want to say that God is only nature, then God is nature. In fact, he says God gives rise to an infinitely many things in infinitely many ways, or something like that. So he has way more attributes than just the attributes that we know him by through our experience of the world. So he transcends nature, but he is nature for sure. And to me that makes a lot of sense. If you have the notion that there's an infinite being, then everything you see has to be that being. It can't be, oh, there's the transcendent good part of all this stuff is God, but then there's the dirty material things that are corruptions of the divine essence. Some version of Platonism like that really doesn't make any sense if you actually believe in God as an infinite being.

31:21 Wes: Yeah. And I think another way of saying that is that ordinary things that we see in day to day life that were classified as substances. Right. You know, each of us prior to Spinoza would be a substance. He wants to naturalize that. He wants to say, actually those really don't rise to the level of substance. So I think he has good reason, I think one to mention Kant again. It's that extraction of the metaphysical from the empirical. You don't want to mix those up because you run into a lot of problems. So the sort of noumenal substance really lies at the edge of the periphery. And what you get with human beings now is phenomena and you get psychology. That's what he'll derive his ethical principles from. Rather than the metaphysics per se, the metaphysics is sort of negative, it's sort of delimiting a more naturalistic sphere, you know, with the passions and all of that stuff.

32:13 Mark: And Spinoza is just before his life, overlaps a little with Isaac Newton. And so another intellectual trend that came out of this Karen Armstrong book is that whether it's sort of religious oriented philosophers, seemingly like Spinoza and Leibniz, or the scientists like Newton, they really had this notion religion and science were very closely tied together, but in this Enlightenment way where Newton thought, you know, you can talk about the motions of all the objects by just using Newton's laws. But he still thought something had to push the things to get them going in the first place.

Right. Somebody had to set up these elegant orbits of the planets around each other. And so God was a completely necessary part of his system, the way he conceived it. And so the same thing is going on here with Spinoza that you can talk about him from his as this sort of religious, mystical figure. Ooh, everything is God, I'm God, there's God here, God there. But you can also see him as an enlightenment, somebody who's trying to make science modern that we don't have to refer to. The way he broke from Aristotle was that we need to talk about causation in terms of efficient causation, physical causation, and even thinks this is true in the realm of the mind, that we'll talk about that an idea has this cause, another idea has it caused another idea, etc.

But he doesn't want to use the language that Aristotle used of final causation, which is, oh, God set things up so that there is a purpose, like we talked about in our Aristotle ethics episode, of there being sort of a form of man or a form of any kind of living creature, and that we can, if we fulfill that form, if we fulfill our potential, then we're virtuous. If we fail to do that, then we're not virtuous. Well, no, there's no form of man in general for Spinoza, that, I mean, there's particular chemical, whatever causes within us that move us from point A to point B that make us do the things that we do, that make us develop in the way that we do.

But shouldn't be referring that to some sort of general form. Talk of God having purposes. And so just seeing how those two things are connected, that if God is conceived as this infinite thing that is everywhere in all things, then a lot of the attributes that we normally attribute to God, in other words, the way we talk about God having a personality, right, I have a relationship with God. Well, that implies that I'm not God. But no, I'm God just as much as everything else around me is God. You can't really have a relationship in the Way you might think with God, God can't be omniscient.

He actually says in this earlier essay he talked about this specifically the short treatise on God, man and his well being. He says God can't be omniscient because that implies God knows things. Right. That implies a difference between the knower and the known. Right. That's just what knowledge is. And if we're going to put that metaphor onto God, even talking about God having an intellect, we can't mean the same thing by God's intellect that we do about our intellect. Like it's just a fundamentally different thing. We can't understand how God could have an intellect or a personality or anything like that.

So therefore God can't have purposes for us that we can fulfill or not fulfill, etc. It really takes the guts out of. Even though he's proved, oh, God exists, but like, it's not the God that you thought, not the God that his Jewish and Christian friends thought of.

35:29 Wes: Yeah, he's very harsh about, you know, those who anthropomorphize God. Right. And this is one of the things I think that got him in trouble because you wonder, you know, you can see why he was accused of atheism. Right. If you're saying all there is is nature. Yeah, you can call that God. I mean, I know he's saying a little more than that, but once you get rid of the personal God, it becomes a problem for religion. Even though at the end of this, he does talk about some sort of religious. I think, yeah. It's a difficult part to say what we're left with of God and Spinoza.

36:01 Mark: Right. Because we're all God. Any relationship we have with God has to be some sort of attitude towards ourselves or. Well, we're all, we're all emphasizing. We're all modes of God. Yes.

36:12 Wes: So it's not like each of us is. I think the mode thing is important. Right. And so that's just. You have the attributes which are the essences which are infinite in God. Right. The only ones that we are aware of are mind and extension, but they're an infinite number that we don't know about. Human beings are modes of both extension and mind. So the mode part is sort of a particular thing which I guess partakes of being extended and thinking and stuff like that.

36:42 Mark: Right. So that's the metaphysical structure.

36:44 Seth: Let's not jump ahead there just yet to explain that because I think it's really critical to emphasize this point that he's taken this idea of substance sort of pushed it to its logical conclusion and essentially invented. Well, I don't know if he invented, but he created the modern notion of immanence. So by saying that there are not multiple substances that make up the world and getting into all that, he says there's just one substance, God, that underlies everything. And forget about how we're going to figure out how that substance gives rise to all these other things and how they're different.

And whatever the point is, is that Mark brought this up earlier. He's effectively destroyed the notion of transcendence, at least as far as God or some concept of God is concerned. God is no longer a transcendent God is immanent, meaning God is quote, unquote, in everything. That's why people say for Spinoza, God is nature, and that this simultaneously because the history of Western philosophical thought and the history of Western religious thought, all are predicated on the need for something transcendent, whether it's an idea that exists outside or an eternal realm, a form, a form of the good God, all of these things require transcendence.

So he. This is really an immensely radical thing that he is saying that is completely going against not just the philosophical tradition, but also the religious tradition. And you can imagine living in the 1650s or whenever it was even in Amsterdam

38:28 Mark: where he was smoking pot.

38:31 Seth: Yeah, Amsterdam wasn't exactly the. Amsterdam was religiously tolerant, meaning that people of multiple religions were allowed to live there without being persecuted, unlike in the Iberian Peninsula.

38:42 Wes: But it was like the seventies in San Francisco.

38:46 Seth: But it doesn't mean that, you know, at the time, Holland was still Catholic, and the House of Orange ruled the country, or at least ruled parts of what we now know as Holland. So getting rid of this idea of a transcendent God was going to get you in trouble with everybody, no matter where he lived or what time he lived in. And I think that's really important. And I also think it's just a radical, radical notion to come up with because it has all kinds of consequences, ethically and politically. Right. And actually, Mark, this is. I wanted to bring up this point.

I was going to get around this. I read a little bit of a book that Gilles deleuze, who's a 20th century French philosopher, was a big fan of Spinoza, and he wrote a couple of books about him. And in the one I was looking at called Practical Philosophy, he mentions that it was Spinoza's political connections with basically opposition Republicans that got him more in trouble with both the Jewish community and the larger Christian community. It was basically his alliance with the more republican elements in society versus the monarchist House of Orange that got him excommunicated.

And all that because Spinoza did associate with like his teacher Endon. Endon was an atheist and a republican of sorts. And so Spinoza's metaphysics is right in line with that approach to politics, which is much more egalitarian and obviously does not support hierarchies, at least in the sense of a traditional royalist.

40:12 Wes: Yeah, that immanence thing I think is a very good point, Seth. Although I would want to say again that we're in God rather than God is in us in the sense that God is substance and we are sort of.

40:23 Mark: Okay, but at the same time, substance modifications of that.

40:26 Wes: Right.

40:27 Mark: The only real substance, God does not have parts. So you can't say we are in God like we're in this part of a bowl. Well, I mean, like there's some.

40:37 Wes: But we are. We're properties in a way, we're modes of attributes. I mean, yeah, you get into all those ontological difficulties, but yes, whatever you want to mean by in. But yeah.

40:45 Mark: Before we talk about the attributes, I just want to read one more thing. So this is right near the beginning still Proposition seven. So he's laid out what substance is. And his whole proof for the existence of God then is it pertains to the nature of substance to exist.

41:01 Wes: Yeah, My translation has it as existence belongs to the nature of substances.

41:05 Mark: Okay. And the explanation in my translation is there is nothing by which substance can be produced. It will therefore be the cause of itself. That is to say, its essence necessarily involves existence. Or in other words, it pertains to its nature to exist. In other words, since there's nothing outside substance, substance is infinite, then nothing could have caused substance. Like that's the definition of substance. You don't have to think about a cause of substance. It is self caused, therefore it exists.

41:30 Wes: Right.

41:31 Mark: What do you think about that?

41:32 Wes: It can't be anything. It's infinite. So there can't be anything external because that would be delimiting to it and make it finite, you know, and it's just because it's substance. Right. The whole point is that it's not determined by anything else. It's not caused by anything else else.

41:44 Seth: And so that's actually the first sentence of the book. Mark, he's just rehashing it at that point.

41:49 Wes: Is it?

41:50 Seth: First sentence in the Elwes translation that I have, which is the old school paper edition. By that which is self caused, I mean that of which the Essence involves existence or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent. So basically all he has to do is say substance is self caused or God is self caused or what have you. But that's the very first definition of the book.

42:13 Mark: Right. By cause of itself. My translation says this is the.

42:16 Seth: Which in a kind of weird way makes. Which in a weird way makes sense. Right. I mean, if, if you say that something is self caused. Well, I don't know if that makes sense to say that its essence necessarily involves existence. If you say that something brought itself into existence, that doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't.

42:35 Wes: All these propositions are building up to this. It's. Yeah, it's actually elaborate, little as simple as it seems. Yeah. Because, you know, you have to go to the substance not being produced by anything external which follows from one substance can't be produced by another substance, and then go backwards to propositions two and three. I'm not sure we want to trace that stuff.

42:57 Mark: Right? Well, yeah, I think it was only about the first 10 pages of the book that I actually, like looked back when he referred to. This is proved, you know, by proposition 6, 7 and 3. And you know, me too, like after

43:09 Wes: just the first few pages. I mean, it's so impressive though. But I mean, it's at the same time. Yeah, I couldn't sustain it for long, but it's so beautiful.

43:18 Seth: I like the parts where he says, oh, I could prove this in a couple of ways. You could say this or you could say that.

43:23 Wes: Yeah.

43:24 Seth: And to think otherwise would be absurd.

43:26 Wes: Yeah. Well, the notes are really the things I paid most attention to because a lot of them are just kind of more typical explications of what he's just done geometrically. And then, you know, they, you know, there's some ranting in there. And so it's pretty good. Like the Note 2 after the first set of propositions is where he goes into the, you know, whole anti anthropomorphism of God things.

43:48 Mark: Right. Just for people that aren't looking at the book. It starts off by giving some definitions and axioms. And then the greater part of each book here is, you know, Proposition 8. And then it has a sentence proposition. And then usually after the propositions, it'll have a section that say demonstration and it'll give an argument for it.

44:04 Wes: And by the way, to see what it's modeled after, you should. I think listeners should take a look at Euclid's elements because it's the classic.

44:11 Dylan: Okay.

44:12 Wes: You know Euclid lays out definitions and axioms and then goes through the propositions, so.

44:17 Mark: And then corollaries and what. What is skol C, H, O, L. What is that?

44:21 Wes: Scholium.

44:22 Seth: Scholia.

44:23 Mark: Scholium.

44:24 Seth: Right, Scholia.

44:26 Wes: Yeah, he see, Newton, do you remember

44:28 Mark: the difference between a scholium and a corollary?

44:30 Wes: I don't.

44:32 Seth: Then there's also Lemmas too. I remember, yes, lemmas, all somehow related. I think it makes more sense in geometry than it probably does here.

44:39 Wes: But yeah, Newton uses all of these things too. In Principia Mathematica it's presented in a very, what you would call synthetic way, like building up the system, one proposition to another. So. But Newton. Mark, you said there's. I'm not sure when Principia mathematica came out.

44:57 Mark: 1687 is the Principia Mathematica.

44:59 Wes: And then the Ethics. When was the ethics published again?

45:02 Mark: 1677.

45:04 Seth: But it was posthumously.

45:07 Mark: Yes, but it was the same year he died. I mean, that's when he finished it.

45:10 Seth: The ideas that were in the Ethics that he'd been talking to people about for years.

45:14 Mark: Yeah, right. He'd been writing the book itself for five years at least.

45:18 Wes: Both Newton and Spinoza are modeling themselves on Euclid, basically. And then so with Euclid you get definitions, like a point is that which has no part, and the points lie upon the line and very basic stuff. And then you build up to like the first book builds up to the. Is all for the sake of proving the Pythagorean theorem. A squared plus B squared equals C squared in a triangle. The thing we all learn in school. So it's that type of thing.

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48:46 Mark: right, let's get back to it.

48:47 Seth: So here's where we're at. We've got, you know, two or three pages in and we just found out that There is only one substance. That substance is God. It is infinite in all aspects, and there are no other substances. So a couple things we know. One is that this is not the God that we learned about in church, and two, that we ourselves are not substances.

49:09 Mark: Yep.

49:10 Seth: So if we're not substances, what in the world are we?

49:13 Mark: We know God by definition, being infinite has infinitely many attributes. Right. But we only know two of them. We know mind and matter. And in fact, he says each of those is a closed system of explanation. Right. If you, if you want to understand a bit of matter, you have to give a cause for it. That's also matter. If you want to understand a bit of mind, you have to give a cause for it that's also mind. And so the cause of our minds, our individual minds, is God's mind, insofar as he is one of his attributes is to be a thinking thing. Right. And all bodies, all matter is caused ultimately from this first cause, God, insofar as he is extension.

49:54 Wes: He's working out of the same Cartesian tradition where there's the whole mind body problem thing that we discussed and. Yeah, I think with the whole mind body problem thing. Right. Descartes is what. Well, some people think Descartes was what you call an interactionist. Right. Where there's the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. Right.

50:16 Mark: Well, he says they're separate substances.

50:18 Wes: They're separate substances. And the thing which sort of guarantees that your thoughts, thoughts, your clear and distinct thoughts conform to bodies and that there's, you know, that you can have something like truth is the fact that God isn't an evil deceiver. So he sort of needs God as the third party guarantor there too. And you can see in Spinoza, God is still there as guarantor in a sense, because, you know, he talks about the two sort of causally independent orders of thought and extension, and they don't causally interact with each other, but of course, course, they're both attributes of God. So they have the same sort of source guarantor. Right. And that's why they synchronize. So Spinoza is often called. Well, his theory is often called parallelism. Everything's in parallel. One order coincides with the other order, but there's no causal interaction between them.

51:07 Mark: Right. Proposition 7, the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. That's book two.

51:13 Wes: Yeah. I thought we had jumped ahead because

51:17 Mark: I think all the, Our translations are very.

51:19 Wes: Because we should talk about modes before. Right.

51:22 Mark: Yeah, yeah, okay, that's fine.

51:24 Seth: So here we are. Let me bring us back to where I thought we were. In part one, you have proposition 14. Besides God, no substance can be granted or conceived. Okay. Corollary to that is that extension and thought are either attributes of God or accidents of the attributes of God. Now I'm just going to go on

51:46 Mark: record here and say accidents is translated as modifications or modes in mind. Same thing.

51:51 Seth: I'm just going to go on record and say I don't 100% understand the whole accident attribute piece.

51:58 Wes: So every particular object, every particular is an accident of the attribute. So a particular extended thing is an accident or mode of extension in general.

52:10 Mark: Let's just use mode, because that's a typical.

52:13 Wes: That's a typical.

52:14 Seth: Okay, so I am a mode or I am an attribute.

52:17 Wes: You're a mode. I mean, in the traditional metaphysical systems, right, a mode was like a property, like a mode of this particular object could be its redness. But in Spinoza's system, it's another bizarre, revolutionary thing that he's done. The particulars themselves are modes of the essences.

52:38 Seth: Yeah, because there's no object, Right?

52:41 Wes: Well, they are objects in a sense, but they are. So it's a weird ontology. They're objects and yet they're modes of the essences.

52:48 Mark: Can I give an analogy, see if this makes sense for you. I was thinking about it this way. So if you have the sea, and you could say, well, you've got the H2O molecules, that's the substance. And then, well, its wetness is its attribute. That's how we know it, through its wetness, through it having liquidity. But then the individual waves on the sea are the modes, right? So in a sense that's not a single thing at all the wave. I mean, it's not the same molecules even going from moment to moment, but we identify it. So a mode is a purely epistemological thing, in fact, sort of a second order epistemological thing, because even the attribute is epistemological. It's not the molecule, it's not the substance itself.

53:29 Wes: So he's overturned the idea that like, say, particular human beings are themselves substances, and all substances push back into God. So he's left with saying what used to be substances are now modes of the ultimate substance. Instead of saying there's the ultimate substance, God, then there's a bunch of substances, and then they have properties which are their modes. He's saying one big substance, God, and then the particulars themselves are modes of

53:54 Mark: that And I think we should bring in some of the Book two stuff here about mind and body connection, because that's what he's getting at here, that we have these two modes, and like you said, that they seem to run in parallel. But because of that, he even thinks that what I am mentally as an individual is the idea of myself. The first thing which forms the actual being of the human mind is nothing else than the idea of an individual thing actually existing. That's book two, Proposition six in my translation.

54:23 Wes: Yeah. So just to be clear on that, right, we can have an idea of, say, a particular chair. And that idea is not caused by the chair because it's just a. It's the same thing under two different attributes, Right? The.

54:37 Mark: It is the chair. Right. The idea is the chair.

54:40 Wes: I don't think you can say identity because they are, again, they're two different attributes of the same thing. Just to say they're identical. They're two causally independent orders you have.

54:49 Mark: Okay.

54:49 Wes: One simply doesn't reduce the other. If it were.

54:52 Mark: Well, no. So I'd call him, if we want to bring in our modern terminology, he's a property dualist. Like, he really does think for any given bit of idea, there is a bit of matter that corresponds to it. And for practical purposes is they're the same things. And he talks about it a lot, even though, you know, he says, oh, we can't really understand ideas without understanding how they're caused by other ideas. When he's actually talking about perception, I mean, it sounds like he's talking about there's physical things and they bump into me. And this produces an idea that is. Comes out of the combination of myself as matter and the thing as matter. That those produce an idea somehow.

55:30 Wes: Well, no, no, no, no. The two orders are separate. The physical bumpings don't produce ideas.

55:35 Mark: Well, somehow I get an idea in my head as a result of those things happening.

55:38 Wes: Yeah. The idea is of, by the way, just to clarify one thing, right? You can have an idea of a chair and then the. The soul is a very special kind of idea because it's of one's own body, which is a very complicated, different type of thing than a chair. What happens between chair and you is the chair modifies your body. It doesn't create the idea per se. The idea is causally related to other ideas in its own order. And the chair is related to your body in its own order. And everything syncs up because they all lead back to the same cause. Right. Or they're two attributes of the same thing. So they're harmonized, but you don't want to say that they cause each other back and forth. The harmonization comes at an earlier point. Right.

56:23 Mark: Let's put aside perception for the moment just because we should inch our way there a little forward. But, I mean, it already becomes difficult to say how. You know, Seth, when you were saying, oh, this is how God is imminent and not transcendent, my initial reaction was to make the same picky point that I made when somebody used the word transcendent, I think, in the last episode, which is, oh, it's not transcendent, it's transcendental. The difference being, if you imagine God is completely outside of creation, then it would be transcendental.

If you imagine he fills creation, but he just exceeds it, that would be transcendent. My initial interpretation was that Spinoza has a view of God as transcendent. Right. God is mind, God is body. But God is also these other things that we have no ideas of. And he says that. But actually, if we want to say these are just attributes of the same thing, the same substance, then really, God is immanent. God is only in the world of nature. However, the world of nature has a number of attributes, ways of it being known. We know this mind attribute. We know this body attribute.

And so I want to say, if you really take this seriously, that the chair and the idea of the chair are two ways of knowing the same thing. That he's essentially like Searle was. He's an identity theorist of a sort. You could imagine, then that if it's the same substance that has these two different attributes, these two ways of showing itself to us, okay. And it has other ways of showing itself. And in fact, it has infinitely many other ways of showing itself, some of which maybe you could think aliens could see, or, you know, who knows?

57:52 Wes: Just to be.

57:53 Mark: That means that God is immanent still.

57:55 Wes: Well, just to be clear on the ontology, right, we have substance, God attributes, extension and mind, or thought. And then the mind are the particular cases, particular thoughts, particular objects which are extended or thought thoughts.

58:16 Mark: Yeah. And actually he has a problem which we hadn't talked about. I mean, if you're going to say God has an attribute of being extended. That sounds weird. Yeah, because we already said God was not extended. He's infinite. He can't be cut into parts. So how could he be extended at the same time? How could one of his attributes be extended?

58:34 Wes: Well, to be extended is to have a. He has the essence of.

58:38 Seth: No, no, I think extension. I Think we're saying it. I don't think that's saying it right. It's not saying that extension is an attribute of God. It's that extension itself is an attribute of the infinite. Did I just say the same thing in the same. With different inferences?

58:54 Mark: You did, but I think that's getting at what makes it difficult to say this. You don't want to say God is extended, so. Well, proposition God can be destroyed, described by extended. But God encompasses all ideas.

59:03 Seth: Yes. Extension is not something that can be predicated of God. Yes, Extension in itself is an attribute that is made possible. See, we kind of skipped over all of this.

59:13 Wes: See, proposition two, it's extension is an attribute of God or God is an extended thing. So it is. Actually, I don't think we can make the problem go away that easily.

59:23 Seth: Wait a second, where are you?

59:24 Wes: Proposition 2 of Part 2. Extension is an attribute of God or God is an extended thing. In my translation.

59:30 Seth: Let me find and see what Elwes

59:32 Mark: says it, how he explains it.

59:34 Wes: He just says the proof is of this proposition is similar to that of the last, where he says God is a thinking thing.

59:40 Mark: Well, let's read the thinking thing. That one then.

59:42 Wes: Okay, so basically the particular thoughts are the modes which express the thinking nature of God. That essence, that thought, essence, attribute in

59:54 Mark: a certain indeterminate manner says mine.

59:57 Wes: Mine says. It says a certain conditioned manner in mine. Okay, so God therefore possesses the attribute of which the concept is involved in all the particular thoughts. The attribute is thought in general, which the latter are conceived thereby. So in a way, I think of this as almost Platonic. The particular thoughts. Well, let's not do that. Let's not say partake. We'll just say the particular thoughts are modes of the attribute thought, which belongs to God. Thought therefore, is one of the infinite attributes of God, which expresses God's eternal and infinite essence. In other words, God is a thinking thing. Yeah, I don't really follow this. I'd have to.

1:00:35 Mark: Okay, I guess here's the thing. So God is kind of the world mind has all the ideas in it. But you could just again think of the waves. So an individual wave is maybe like an individual thought that it's really just part of the whole ocean or whatever. But it's just kind of the way it shows up in some particular circumstance.

1:00:54 Wes: Yeah.

1:00:55 Mark: Or some from some particular epistemic point of view. And so the same thing with extension. God is infinite space. Right. That's one of his attributes. He is infinite and he is spatial. And so the way that that shows up in our perception is individual objects in space. So he encompasses those and he is those in the same way that if you imagine there's sort of this ether that encompasses all of space and is all the pattern of super strings or whatever it is that you want to describe it as, but it's singular and it encompasses everything. I still don't know if that resolves the apparent contradiction that he's not extended, but yet he's extended.

1:01:34 Wes: Where does this say he's not extended?

1:01:36 Seth: Yeah, where does it say he's not extended?

1:01:38 Mark: Well, it says earlier, it says he can't be divided up.

1:01:40 Seth: And he says, no, he can't be divided up simply because if you can divide a thing, then by definition it's not infinite.

1:01:50 Mark: Right.

1:01:50 Seth: So he's the thing which is extended but cannot be divided. That's really what that proposition, I think, is trying to say.

1:01:57 Wes: I mean, it sounds to me like in the case of the thinking thing, for any given particular thought, we could say, you know, for, say, my thoughts, for instance, you could say Wes is thinking that. Or we could say God is thinking. Then. No, does that not sound right?

1:02:11 Mark: We can't say God is thinking that. That's not the way.

1:02:14 Seth: No.

1:02:15 Wes: Well, God possesses all the thoughts, but God doesn't think.

1:02:19 Mark: Yet he's thinking.

1:02:22 Seth: God is.

1:02:22 Mark: Okay, so we have the same paradox with mind as with body.

1:02:26 Wes: Yeah, that's so I was thinking that. So for each particular extended thing. Well, almost just what you were saying, Mark. This is all God. This is all part of God. But I don't know, let's stick with

1:02:36 Seth: extension for a second because visually it's easier to come up with it. So if I take a loaf of bread.

1:02:45 Wes: Sorry.

1:02:46 Seth: And I break it. And I break. I tear it in half. So I'm breaking bread. Right. The bread is extended and I am dividing that extension, but it is not a substance. Right. The bread is just a mode of the attribute of extension.

1:03:04 Dylan: Okay.

1:03:05 Seth: There's never a point at which God has his extension as a mode of himself, he as a substance, or it as a substance, rather is extension or is an extended thing.

1:03:20 Mark: I think you could say he because he has a giant penis. Sorry?

1:03:25 Wes: Well, he has an infinitely long penis.

1:03:31 Seth: And an infinitely deep corresponding set of female genitalia.

1:03:37 Wes: We have to be politically correct.

1:03:40 Seth: Well, no, I'm just saying that's what follows. If you look at.

1:03:42 Wes: No, you're right. It does follow.

1:03:43 Seth: Corollary 12 to Proposition 55.2.

1:03:49 Wes: It absolutely follows.

1:03:50 Seth: So you couldn't say that a mode of God had any attributes or had any characteristics or anything that God did not itself possess. So you couldn't say like, oh well, Seth has extension, but God doesn't. So God is an extended thing in this kind of. In the sense that he has to be extended because I am a mode of God and I am extended, but that.

1:04:13 Wes: Are you a little piece of God?

1:04:15 Seth: I am a little piece of God.

1:04:19 Wes: Which, which part? Which, sorry.

1:04:22 Mark: Because God doesn't have pieces.

1:04:23 Wes: This is.

1:04:24 Seth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so just say God is a thinking thing. Doesn't mean that God thinks the way we do. In fact, he says that very explicitly in part one. He says the idea. I want to read this because I

1:04:39 Wes: love the fact that we dived deep into the ontology with this is the

1:04:44 Seth: Note to Proposition 15 in Part 1.

1:04:48 Wes: Yeah.

1:04:49 Seth: So he gives it says, whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be or can be conceived. Some assert that God, like a man, consists of body and mind and is susceptible of passions. How far such persons have strayed from the truth is sufficiently evident from what has been said. But these I pass over absurd. For all who have in any wise reflected on the divine nature deny that God has a body. Of this they find excellent proof. Blah, blah, blah. It's so long, it's so deep. Whatever, sorry, broad and so deep.

1:05:22 Wes: Getting back to the penis.

1:05:25 Seth: It is the height of absurdity to predicate such a thing of God being absolutely infinite. And then they try to show other sorts of things. And basically what he says is. Hence we draw the conclusion that extended substance is one of the infinite attributes of God. However, in order to explain more fully, I will refute the arguments of my adversaries. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:05:46 Mark: He says, I've already answered the arguments. The arguments are that God can't be substance, since the sole foundation of them is the supposition that bodily substances consists of parts. A supposition which I have shown to be absurd.

1:05:59 Seth: Wherefore it can in no wise be said that God is passive in respect to anything other than Himself, or that extended substance is unworthy of the divine nature, even if it be supposed divisible, so long as it is granted to be infinite and eternal. So God is extended substance.

1:06:17 Mark: Yeah.

1:06:17 Seth: We are not extended substance. We are extended extension, extended modes.

1:06:24 Wes: That's a good way to think about it.

1:06:25 Seth: And that's what I was going to say is that even as I break the bread, all the molecules, the two pieces of the bread, the air between them, my hands, it's all part of God's Extension, so to speak. So there's no divisibility of God in the same way that there's divisibility of any individual modes of extension.

1:06:46 Mark: You could say God is, you know, space itself and everything in it, or something like that, except conceive of those as one indivisible entity.

1:06:55 Seth: Yes.

1:06:56 Mark: So in a sense, it is not divisible, but at the same time, you can localize things. You can say, you know, I am at longitude, whatever, latitude, whatever on Earth, because that is a particular spot in space, in God.

1:07:12 Wes: Well, let's say it's not indivisible in the sense that you're not gonna cut the universe into two pieces. I know that's not entirely accurate, but that's. That's sort of what I have.

1:07:22 Mark: Right.

1:07:22 Wes: Intuitively, yeah.

1:07:23 Mark: Whatever you would do to, like, try to scoop a piece out of the universe, it would still be connected to the rest of the universe. And in fact, he says somewhere in here, he doesn't believe in vacuum. He thinks a vacuum is absurd. You know, how could it be that everything is packed so tightly together with no vacuum possible if, you know, if there weren't underlying unity to everything, which obviously we found that there is vacuum.

1:07:47 Wes: Well, there's a cure. Vacuum is there?

1:07:50 Mark: Right. Maybe you could say that there's areas that are empty of atoms and molecules, but rays can go through them.

1:07:57 Seth: Yeah, but they're not in extension, Right?

1:07:59 Mark: Yes.

1:08:00 Wes: Right. Yeah. So that in his sense of.

1:08:03 Seth: Yeah, they're empty of matter, maybe, but not extension.

1:08:06 Mark: At this point, they thought that the ether, you know, was everywhere underlying, even what is apparently vacuum.

1:08:13 Wes: Right.

1:08:14 Mark: Anything else from this part? One where he's talking about. Don't anthropomorphize, that you want to talk about.

1:08:19 Seth: Yeah. The other part, that everything that is done is done necessarily, and that God has no truth. That's kind of a biggie. After he establishes that substance is indivisible,

1:08:29 Mark: he says we are modes, not substance.

1:08:32 Seth: It says the necessity of the divine nature that follows. There's an infinite number of things in an infinite number of ways. That is all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect.

1:08:42 Wes: Sounds like the plenitude.

1:08:43 Mark: That sounds like possible world theory to me.

1:08:47 Wes: Plenitude thing where everything is the great chain of being. Everything is filled up. Every possibility is part of this world. I don't know.

1:08:55 Mark: Well, Leibniz thinks that we are in the best of all possible worlds. Which means does he believe then in the reality of all the other possible worlds? I don't know.

1:09:03 Seth: Well, I don't know if he thinks of it that way. I think what he's trying to get at here is basically that when you're talking about an infinite divine nature, whatever can follow from that, there's no.

1:09:15 Wes: So Jack the Ripper follows, Hitler follows.

1:09:18 Seth: There's no limit to that. There's no limit to the number of things that follow from an infinite nature. Infinite nature begets infinite things.

1:09:26 Mark: Yeah.

1:09:27 Wes: Including everything we would think of as evil. Right, right.

1:09:31 Mark: Well, infinite is an ambiguous term there because, you know, like we were saying, you can divide up a 3 inch long line into an infinite number of little sections so that there's different degrees of infinity.

1:09:41 Seth: Yeah.

1:09:42 Mark: So that could just mean that time is eternal and an infinite number of things in space is eternal. And so yeah, you have an infinite number of things going on. That doesn't mean all possible things. That in the strong sense that, you know, I have a mustache in a possible world and I don't have a mustache, you know, that those all simultaneously exist or something. That's two senses of infinite. I think you're right that he probably means the less obnoxious one. It does not involve possible worlds. In fact, the actual world is the only possible world.

1:10:09 Seth: Is what he talks about something here that comes up earlier. He has this rule or law that the more reality a thing involves, the more it expresses. And this is very Cartesian, that the idea of like a horse involves more reality than the idea of a griffin. Because a griffin is a mythical beast. Right. And horses actually are extended in front of us and this sort of thing. And he just kind of throws that in at one point. It may be one of those like assumed.

1:10:37 Wes: And doesn't he say a horse is a horse? Of course, of course, sorry, accumulator.

1:10:42 Mark: He says somewhere else that by reality he means the same thing as perfection. So if you're talking about greater degrees of reality and greater degrees of perfection, those mean the same thing.

1:10:50 Seth: Okay, fine. In that case this makes a lot more sense because it's two or three levels down. The whole point of saying this is that is that if God is the source of all things, the infinite nature of God spawns infinite things in infinite ways. Then God must by definition be the cause of himself. In other words, God's own nature is self causing. That's really all he's getting to with that proposition.

1:11:15 Mark: Yep.

1:11:16 Seth: And then he's going to get very quickly to the free will piece that God is not constrained by anybody else, acts according to his own laws. Which doesn't mean that he's a Free actor or a free cause. Rather, he acts solely by the laws of his own nature and is not constrained by any other nature, which makes sense because he's the only substance. God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. Eternal essence and existence are one of the same.

1:11:45 Mark: Yeah, I had a note from this God, man and his well being. The earlier essay that he wrote more than 10 years earlier talks very explicitly about the idea of the omnipotence of God. That. Well, my objectors say that God could do whatever he wanted and he could make the good evil and the evil good. He could really twist things around. However, he could choose. He is unrestrained in his choice. And that's what freedom is, and that's what omnipotence is. And he says that actually dis is God's omnipotence. Right. If there are all these things that God could do that he could imagine, but that he does not in fact do, that would be like, oh, what? You can't do all that at the same time. Ha ha, God, you're not omnipotent enough. No. In fact, everything that is conceivable to God. Right. That is conceivable at all, he does.

1:12:34 Seth: And for God, being and thinking and doing are all the same thing.

1:12:38 Mark: Yes.

1:12:39 Seth: And so it's this series of. He sets this up so that you have kind of one trick that he can repeat over and over again. And the trick is this, he can say something innocuous about a mode, particular mode, something which is not objectionable, like anything which is conditioned to act in a particular manner. Like, let's say a dog or a horse has necessarily been thus conditioned by God. And that which has not been conditioned by God cannot condition itself to act. So everybody says, oh, of course, Right, of course. It makes perfect sense that God conditioned this dog or this horse to act this particular way.

And the trick that Spinoza plays is that because God is this infinite thing that is in all of things, basically what he says is, well, God can only condition himself. So everything he says about a particular mode, he is able to turn back and then have God apply to itself as well. That's how you kind of eat away at this idea of a free acting, somehow independent, separate, willing, willful, passionate deity that is choosing to act in this way or that. He doesn't choose anything. His nature dictates that everything that gets done, everything that is, is the way his nature dictates it.

And he has to.

1:13:56 Wes: Right. And when we say nature, it's like the nature of a triangle. He gives that example, the nature of a triangle.

1:14:02 Mark: I was going to say exactly that.

1:14:04 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:14:04 Wes: Three angles are equal to two right angles. That is the sense in which all things causally and necessarily flow from the divine nature. Which really gets us back to that concept of immanence. Right. Because I. It's not like he's an underlying substance causally producing things in the way we think in physics. It's more like geometry where it just flows from the essence in a more immediate or imminent way.

1:14:29 Mark: Well, let's talk about that, because that's 18. God is the immanent and not the transitive cause of all things. Because actually it seems like God is the cause of any given thing in multiple ways. That if you're talking about a particular material object, there is a chain of material causation that does go back to a prime mover, that is God. But what he's saying here is that's not the only way that causation happens. I mean that's the way we have to give mechanical causation accounts. And the only way that it could end is with God or it has to go on forever.

And the totality within God, but it's also imminent. So every single thing from moment to moment, and this sounds more like Leibniz or Berkeley or somebody like that is being caused by God just because it is emanates from his nature. And I know somebody on the Facebook page had said you guys should talk about Plotinus. So there's our Plotinus shout out that his Plotinus theory was that everything emanates from God. Yeah.

1:15:27 Wes: Very mystical Neoplatonic philosopher. Yeah, the one he talks a lot about. The one.

1:15:33 Mark: The one, yes.

1:15:34 Seth: By the way, that's also like one of the fundamental Jewish prayers.

1:15:38 Wes: Oh really?

1:15:40 Seth: Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one.

1:15:43 Wes: Oh, okay.

1:15:44 Seth: Of course that's obviously not intended in some sort of medieval substance.

1:15:50 Wes: Right.

1:15:50 Seth: The groupers, I think more.

1:15:51 Wes: It's more like no golden calves.

1:15:54 Seth: Yeah. No pantheism, but undoubtedly worked somewhere in his subconscious.

1:16:00 Mark: Since you bring up the term pantheism, I mean, let's just stop for a second. So Spinoza was accused of being atheist for this view of God, this non personal God. But from the Armstrong book I got the notion that atheism was just a word that was thrown around for anybody who's kind of a heretic. You know, maybe a heretic would somebody be who has a very slight deviation from orthodoxy. Whereas if you, you're too much, you're just an atheist. And it was also just used as a general refer to somebody who's a drunkard. It was like just a general slur.

1:16:30 Wes: Right. I think even Descartes had to worry about ungodly. Yes, And Descartes. Yeah.

1:16:36 Mark: So we shouldn't take that seriously. Obviously, he believes in a God. It's just the question of what kind of God. But he's also known as a pantheist. Right. If God is everything, if God is me and God is this chair and things, that sounds like there are gods in everything. I guess the difference. I mean, does pantheism necessarily imply that there are lots of little individual gods? Kind of like Shintoism has something like that.

1:16:58 Seth: I'm sorry, I meant polytheism, but I understand your point.

1:17:00 Mark: Oh, sorry, okay.

1:17:01 Seth: No, that's. Yeah, I meant that the original Hebrews were that Lord is one is referring to single unified God, not the polytheism of other.

1:17:10 Wes: Yeah, the pants. The pantheism still preserves the unity of the one God, I think. Right.

1:17:15 Seth: Yeah, it's just. It's.

1:17:16 Wes: God is just everything collected together or. Well, there are different ways to interpret it, but. Yeah.

1:17:21 Seth: Yeah.

1:17:21 Mark: Well, aren't some of the. Like the Native American. You know, there is spirit of rock, spirit of tree. I mean, isn't that also called pantheism?

1:17:30 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right, but I don't think Spinoza would be a pantheist in that sense. Right.

1:17:35 Mark: No, because clearly it has to be one. Whereas Leibniz actually. Right, right. Everything is a monad, so there. There is a mind. He's a panpsychist. Panpsychism.

1:17:47 Wes: Right.

1:17:48 Mark: Which is not quite the same thing as saying all the little monads are God, but not that far. Anything else you want to say about this, but him not being person, like,

1:17:57 Seth: only just that he doesn't have free will.

1:18:00 Mark: Well, actually, I mean, it does tell you what the definition of true freedom is that you don't have to think of its uncaused. So in a sense, God is the only thing that has freedom. But what freedom means is not the freedom to choose or not choose on a whim. It's that it doesn't have a cause that's outside of itself.

1:18:18 Seth: That's what freedom means.

1:18:21 Wes: The only coherent way to think of free will is the internal cause, which is all the things flowing from God's nature. So there's. Right. Mark. As opposed to external causes. And human autonomy will turn out to be very similar at the end of the ethics, meaning our passions being driven by objects outside of us, as opposed to Internal rationality, let's say.

1:18:45 Seth: Let me just say on this point, though, he's extremely clear. He says will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary cause. He says will is only a particular mode of thinking, like intellect. Therefore no volition can exist or be conditioned to act on this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So he's speaking specifically about our concept of will, will as a mode of thinking, as a mode of thought. And he says, God does not act according to freedom of the will.

1:19:10 Mark: And he says, or will at all.

1:19:12 Seth: No, will and intellect stay in the same relation to the nature of God as do motion and rest and absolutely all natural phenomena which must be conditioned by God in the first place.

1:19:22 Wes: Right, but it's. In a way, though, he's just saying that that idea of free will is incoherent, right? So there's still a notion of freedom that holds, which is that God is not constrained by anyone. He acts solely by the laws of his own nature and is not constrained by anyone. But that distinction isn't very important to Spinoza, right? The idea of acting from one's own nature or from internal causes versus from external constraints, that's the only idea of freedom that makes sense to him. So, yeah, it's a rejection of the traditional free will as a complete lack of constraint. But I still think he thinks of that as autonomous in a sense.

1:20:03 Mark: I think freedom and contingency, I think, similarly, he wants to deny them both. Absolutely. He says, look, everything that happens, happens, necessarily, it emerges from God's nature. So really nothing is contingent, everything is necessary. At the same time, he then wants to say contingency is an epistemological feature, right? Things look, as far as we know, we didn't know that that was going to happen. So it seems like it was contingent. And it's the same thing with freedom, that when you're talking about people, and this is again jumping ahead to the ethics a bit, but to explain their behavior, if you have to talk about the external cause, like he only did that because he wanted that chick, whatever, or because somebody pushed him, then he was not acting freely.

But if you don't have to refer to the external cause, if you just refer to the person and that person's decisions and rationality or something like that, then you can call it freedom. And in fact, that's the kind of freedom that we should shoot for, even though that's really ultimately just as determined as everything else that we do.

1:21:05 Seth: Right?

1:21:06 Wes: So in a way, he's a compatibilist, right? I Guess that's the word people would use. Right. It's like. And I think we saw something similar in Hume. Right. And again, I think that the idea of unconstrained will. Right. It just doesn't even make any sense. It's like, who wants that version of freedom? Right.

1:21:25 Seth: Can I read the proposition immediately following that one?

1:21:28 Wes: Yeah.

1:21:28 Seth: Proposition 32 in part one is will cannot be called a free cause, but only. Only a necessary cause from which he gets. Hence it follows that God does not act according to freedom of the will. Reminding you that that's like saying God doesn't sneeze. Will is just a way of thinking just like any other, like crying, like being sad or happy or whatever. Proposition 33. Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which is in fact obtained. Right.

1:21:59 Mark: That's. Everything that has happened was necessary.

1:22:02 Seth: Yes. And so right there, that necessity thing does not jive with your explanation or your concept of freedom even from being.

1:22:11 Wes: Well, no. I mean, because he's gonna, for him, the only coherent. Right. This just semantic. Right. There's no such thing as freedom of will in the traditional sense. But he does want to distinguish between external constraints and what flows from internal necessity. Internal and external necessity. So God is unconstrained from the outside. The word constraint doesn't even apply the fact that everything flows from necessity because it's internal necessity, it's not constrained. Right. And there's another proposition which says not God is not constrained by anything. So you have to reconcile those. I think.

1:22:45 Seth: So let me ask you this then. God is not constrained by any external anything.

1:22:49 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:22:50 Seth: Everything flows from God and everything from his nature. From his nature. And everything flows necessarily from his nature. So the question is, could God's nature have been different or is God capable of changing his nature?

1:23:07 Wes: These are the things that keep me up at night.

1:23:09 Seth: And if you can't answer that, if the answer to those is no, then there's truly no freedom whatsoever. There's less freedom for God than there is for us.

1:23:20 Wes: But I don't think idea of freedom is. Makes any sense, though.

1:23:24 Seth: I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying this is what.

1:23:27 Wes: That's not a kind of freedom that we need to save because it's internally incoherent. Right. Just to say free will must be something that is uncaused. It doesn't or doesn't flow from any determination or necessity. What does that look like? Just some sort of arbitrary random thing that happens. I don't think it gives us a conception of free will that we would want anyway. Right. To say that.

1:23:50 Seth: No, no, no. And I'm not trying to salvage something for us from that. I think I'm trying to point out how radically different Spinoza's conception of God is from our conception of ourselves and our conception of any kind of anthropomorphic deity whatsoever. That our experiences in willing thinking, this is all setting up the stuff that comes later. Right. Is that what we do as human beings in having bodies that get impacted by other bodies in various ways and by willing and striving and all this kind of stuff? We have to understand that all of that is caused or made possible by God and that we do it.

It follows out of necessity. But we cannot transfer this picture of ourselves onto God. And that's really, really important for him to make that distinction, which is to basically, again, chip away at the foundation of the entirety of the Western tradition and all those artworks and everything, all that great art out of those churches. And so I think that's just the point, is that he reinforces that say, not only does God not have freedom of the will, because God doesn't have a will, because it doesn't even make sense to talk about God thinking and whatever.

Like us, God doesn't even function in the same way, according to the same rules. You need to get that entirely out of your head. And that's what this whole first part is about. We've got the infinite extended God early now. It's about just pounding you with, like, how this is not, you know, this is not your grandfather's deity.

1:25:24 Mark: And can we say how this solves the problem of evil? Yeah, he talks about this at pretty great length in the appendix. Okay, so this is in the middle somewhere. My translation says it is to be observed that man has given the name Good to everything which leads to health, and the worship of God, on the contrary, everything which does not lead thereto, he calls evil. But because those who do not understand nature affirm nothing about things themselves, but only imagine them and take the imagination to be the understanding, they, therefore, ignorant of things in their nature, firmly believe in order to be in things.

For when they are so placed that if they are represented to us through the senses, we can easily imagine them and consequently easily remember them, we call them well arranged. But if they are not placed so that we can imagine and remember them, we call them badly arranged or confused. In other words, the problem of evil arises because we say God is supposed to be good. Right? God is supposed to be perfectly good. However, it looks like the world is crummy. There's a lot of mess. Even if you can point and say, oh, look how beautifully the planets spin around each other, it must have been a God who designed that.

There are plenty of other things that look messy. And he wants to see that both of those kind of arguments are human fictions that what God has created is perfect by definition, but that has nothing to do with any notion of perfection. In other words, good and bad, that we might have as humans come up with, which he thinks refers to our own pleasure and pain and aesthetic sense that grows out of those.

1:26:46 Wes: Yeah, God stands beyond good and evil, right?

1:26:49 Seth: Yes. Yes. Which is, I think, again why Deleuze wanted to write that book, Spinoza Practical Philosophy. But actually, I'm glad you brought this up, Mark, because this is actually my favorite part of Spinoza is these appendices where he goes off on these things, because he does it in the theological political treatise as well, where he goes on a rant about biblical prophets, calling them men, not particularly greatly endowed with intelligence, but vivid imaginations. And he goes through this detailed, this detailed list of how he's like, well, this guy's vision came to him and it looked like this.

And it's like, of course he did. He was a shepherd, so of course he would see sheep in his vision, you know, and this guy lived in the city. And so, you know, he just basically points out that they were entirely conditioned by their, you know, by their upbringing and environment to have the visions of, you know, the revelations that they did without denying that they were revelations. He's trying to make the points like, hey, settle down, settle down, people. And that section you just read from is a beautiful one where he says, people judge other natures by their own.

This is further. They find in and outside themselves many means which assists them not a little in their searches, which is useful. For instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing herbs and animals for yearling food, the sun for giving light. And he says, as we look upon all these things, we can't believe them to be self created, but of course, they must have been created by somebody for us. The world was created for us to consume. And then you get into this idea of, oh, well, some people get more, some people get less. And since there's this thing that's creating all that stuff for everybody to have, I'm going to change the way I worship so that I can get a little more favor from this guy and get more stuff.

He's just like, this Is, of course, absurd. Right, right. I absolutely love this. I mean, this is just.

1:28:35 Mark: Don't waste your time sucking up to God.

1:28:37 Seth: That's right. That's exactly it.

1:28:39 Mark: Things are going to play out the way they do.

1:28:41 Seth: That is exactly right.

1:28:43 Wes: They already have.

1:28:44 Seth: They already have.

1:28:46 Wes: We live in the Matrix.

1:28:49 Seth: Well, but it just makes a good. Didn't we bring this up? Where else did we talk about this, though? That you see, good and evil is bound up with the concept of, like, having and not having disease and illness versus health. Yeah.

1:29:03 Wes: And for him specifically. Right. It's the increase in capacity to act.

1:29:10 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:29:10 Mark: That's the same as pleasure is increasing capacity to act.

1:29:13 Wes: Okay, that's right. I'm thinking about pleasure and pain now, which. But good and bad are defined in terms of pleasure and pain at some point, aren't they? They're not the same thing, but yes, they are defined.

1:29:23 Mark: I mean, that's the whole second half of the book.

1:29:24 Seth: Yeah.

1:29:25 Mark: Yeah. Okay.

1:29:25 Seth: But I mean. Yeah, so basically, there is no good, there is no evil. There's just we thinking makes it so. Yeah. We add those terms because we want things. And when we don't have them, it's bad. And when we have them, it's good. And people abuse us. They're evil. And we're nice to people, we're good. It's all just false. I love it.

1:29:43 Wes: Yeah.

1:29:44 Unknown speaker: All right.

1:29:44 Mark: Can we go back to boring metaphysics now?

1:29:47 Wes: Okay, well, we're going to do the second. We're going to do another one. Right.

1:29:51 Mark: So we're going to do the rest of the book. Yeah.

1:29:53 Wes: Okay.

1:29:54 Mark: Which really, you can skim the last half of the book, I should say. In fact, this book that I referred to in the last podcast, I'd had this before. The Ethics of Spinoza. Not Spinoza's Ethics. The Ethics of Spinoza, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, subtitled the Road to Inner Freedom, which takes a lot of the particular propositions from Spinoza's ethics and stuff, like this appendix and stuff, and just puts them out, like aphorisms and reorders them. So it's like it avoids the entire geometric structure. In fact, he starts with the ethical stuff and ends with the God stuff, so you don't get the overall shape of his argument.

However, it was extremely useful once I had read the first half of this, the part we talked about today, to then turn to this abridgment to get through the rest of it. So I, like, got the essence of his ethics without having to actually slog through, you know, 200 pages of detailed lemmas and crap like that. Anyway, so just a pointer for the listeners that if you've got the foundation of listening to this episode, that might be a fine thing to turn to. If this geometric thing sounds too formidable for you.

1:30:55 Wes: Stanford Encyclopedia, philosophy, that works, too.

1:30:58 Mark: But you. But this has its actual words. It's not summing it up. It's just an abridgment. It's not.

1:31:02 Wes: Okay. I didn't realize that.

1:31:03 Unknown speaker: Okay.

1:31:04 Mark: To make it accessible. And so that's why I had this book for years, and I thought it was the actual original book by Spinoza, because it just says. By Baruch Spinoza. Yeah.

1:31:14 Wes: I have something which is similar, called the. I think it's called the Philosophy of Spinoza, and it's taking from all the different stuff, but it's. Yeah. In its own order and, like, thematic by topic and, you know.

1:31:26 Mark: Yep.

1:31:26 Wes: Yeah.

1:31:27 Mark: So let's just finish up the metaphysics here, quick. I mean, we talked about substance and attributes and modes, and I want to say, if really you're talking about what his ontology, his list of things that exist, it's just the substances. Right. God is really the only thing that really exists. But at the same time, if we have to have ways of talking about God, so we. We have the attributes or the ways in which we understand him. The modes are the individuals that pop up, that appear to us. In a way, it seems like these are epistemic categories. I'm not. He doesn't really talk about them in that way, but.

1:31:56 Seth: Really?

1:31:56 Wes: Yeah. I'm not sure.

1:31:58 Seth: No, I don't.

1:31:59 Mark: All right. That's my interpretation, anyway, that, you know, that's like the wave on the ocean thing. I'm taking that a little literally here.

1:32:06 Wes: Okay.

1:32:07 Mark: But there's one other element here which is essences, which is going to be important for his epistemology. If you have adequate knowledge of something, that means you clearly and distinctly understand its essence. You've been affected by its essence. Its essence is sitting in your mind with you. Whereas when something just bumps into us, well, okay, that car that just ran over my foot, it has an essence, or it has a lot of essences involved with it, but that's not what affects me. It's just like the part of the wheel that ran over my foot is all that affects me.

So as far as I'm concerned, it could have been an elephant stepping on me. It could have been a truck, it could have been any number of things. So I don't get an adequate idea of the car. Just from it running over my foot. He says in part one here, proposition 21, all things which follow from the absolute nature of any attribute of God must forever exist and must be infinite. That is to say, through that same attribute, they are eternal and infinite. And so those are really the essences. Like what he thinks, again, he's going to. Geometry is going to be his key thing.

1:33:05 Wes: Yeah.

1:33:06 Mark: So this kind of sounds like Kant's categories of. Or the sensibility, at the very least.

1:33:11 Wes: Well, it is, Right. He's talking about those three orders of knowledge, which are in a way, like sensibility, understanding and reason. So the sensibility is sort of the inadequate manifold, or knowledge of particulars. And then when you're doing science, I think you get to the essences when you're doing science, Right. You're looking at causal connections. You're taking random experiences and you're talking about. About them in terms of their order and necessity. And that's where you get the second type of knowledge of essence. And you could say the same thing in geometry or in physics.

1:33:46 Mark: And essence still seems epistemological to me because it's talking about conception. The essence of something is, you know, if it didn't have those properties, it wouldn't be that thing. So it's sort of how we understand the thing or how we conceive the thing. That word conceive is interesting that it's kind of. Well, see, I think he's kind of epistemological.

1:34:03 Wes: I think he's blurring the distinction, though. I think for him, the epistemology and the metaphysics sort of blend together. Yeah, it's like we were talking about God, the sense in which things flow necessarily from God being like geometry. And yet in some sense we want to think about it as physics too, you know, in sense of. As an actual cause of everything. I don't know. So I think. Yeah, but like, the notion of cause can be thought of in terms of. Of explanation, cause and cause. Cause the way we understand cause. And I think Spinoza definitely blends those two conceptions together. Explanation and.

1:34:37 Mark: Yeah, it's also a difference between the essence and the particulars. So the essence is going to be common to the particulars. And this sounds very much like Plato or Aristotle. Like, you have the essence of man, even though he said elsewhere that, like. Well, you can't for ethical purposes talk about the essence of. Of man and the potential in the way Aristotle did. But in any case, there's something that, if you understand what a person is, there's some idea that you have some particular qualities that you're talking about, and that is the essence.

And that essence is. It's an idea. So it's therefore eternal. I don't know if we want to say because it's an idea, it's therefore eternal, but in any case, it is something that is not dependent on the existence of any particular man. All the men could die, the individual man, but the man concept would still be out there in some sense. It would still.

1:35:21 Wes: Yeah. So that's where we get our afterlife. Our sort of, you know, sort of weak version of the afterlife.

1:35:27 Mark: Well, that's. I think there's much more to that story to tell and we can't fit it in right now. But yeah, there is something that, you know, what is common to all is something. What is essential is what we're going to know most, necessarily. Our understanding that our being more reasonable is what loving God and being focused on God and participating in God is all about.

1:35:47 Seth: Yeah.

1:35:48 Mark: So it's a very short version, if you want some sort of denouement here that it sounds like, don't suck up to God, don't pray, don't be religious at all. No. In fact, he has a way back to this that if you're participating with the essences, somehow, if you're being as reasonable as possible, if you're acting freely in the way that you were talking about, Wes, that you're self directed, which means you're paying attention to reason, which in the very much the Kantian sense. Kant obviously, you know, stole from this.

1:36:17 Wes: Yeah.

1:36:18 Mark: It means you're acting according to laws that, you know, would make sense for everybody, that sort of take everybody into account that you're not just pursuing your own private pleasures and private ends.

1:36:30 Wes: And also I think just doing science and philosophy are in a way, because it's comprehending nature and that turns out to be God in a sense. That's what substitutes worship in the sense that of going to church and listening to someone.

1:36:45 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:36:46 Mark: But he does distinguish then between the essence of man, which has sort of as its cause God directly, and individual men, which if you're going to say, why is this man here? Again, you have to give a material reason for that. His parents, whatever. So even though God is ultimately causing both of those things, if it flows from his essence, then it's eternal. So really all the essences flow from God's essence in this way. But if it is finite, if it has a specific duration, then it sort of flows in a more indirect way. You might say it's A mode.

1:37:17 Wes: Yeah.

1:37:18 Mark: It's not an essence.

1:37:19 Wes: Yeah. And so why talk about all this stuff? Well, it'll have those big ethical implications. Right. Since he's sort of naturalized human beings. And so what we'll get to in the next half of this will be all the ethical implications of that.

1:37:33 Mark: Look forward to that. Next time. We will talk about the rest of the ethics of Spinoza. We'll get his epistemology, we'll firm up that mind body discussion, and we'll cover the ethical implications. Actually, his. The most of the part of the ethics is talking not about, you know, what rules you should follow as an ethical being. It's talking about human emotions and what makes them up. So it's again, talking more about human nature and how it flows from, you know, by necessity, from nature itself, from God.

1:37:59 Wes: It's like psychology. I mean, really, it's a. It's a whole psychology, which I, at several points I thought about Freud, which we'll be reading after Spinoza. So anyway, yeah, it's beautiful.

1:38:09 Mark: Okay. Any other closing thoughts? Seth, you got anything?

1:38:13 Seth: Yes. I will end this by saying that Spinoza was always one of my favorite philosophers and not least partially because he blended traditions. And that was something that I was striving to do when I was still in school and working on my dissertation. But also because he was one of the few philosophers prior to the 20th century that was Jewish and sort of successfully found a way to mix his religious criticisms and along with his philosophical views and so forth. But I really got a much even deeper appreciation this time reading than I did back in school. And I just think for anybody who has never read Spinoza, it's definitely a must do.

1:38:56 Wes: Yeah.

1:38:56 Mark: And he was a successful lenscrafter. That's a nice profession. Why don't you do that, Seth? You could, you could make a nice living. Just don't breathe in the. Just wear a mask.

1:39:07 Seth: Well, it's funny too, because, you know, the one example we have. So there are great thinkers in the Jewish tradition that never cross over, right? Because they never see the need. I mean, you've probably heard the name Maimonides, but you have no idea when he lived or what he did or who he talked about or why he was important or Rashi or any, any of those kinds of guys. But, you know, Spinoza was a full fledged, full blooded rationalist philosopher of the tradition who was influential and respected by everybody. And yet was this completely, you know, he was clearly an odd, odd, odd human being and a real outcast, living sort of on the Margins and in the political opposition of his time.

I guess it's something you can't understand if you've grown up Christian, where you have all of these heroes of the church who are also great philosophers and also scholastics and churchmen and things like that. We don't have anything like that. So Spinoza was kind of like a little mini hero of mine, you know, until we get to the 20th century, where you have a lot more Jews that break out and. But also he spawns. There's so much stuff in these books, covers everything, and there's so many ideas that are new and radical, that give birth to so much that follows after, afterwards.

It's really, really rich.

1:40:22 Mark: Well, I'm not known on this podcast for being the most religious of them, and generally I don't have a lot of tolerance for some of these theological treatises. But this notion of God that we talked about here, if you're going to believe in God, this notion makes a lot more sense to me than the more anthropomorphized ones. That's kind of what rubs me the wrong way and seems like a dead option to me. A God that commands your obedience and acts like a petulant king, as pictured in some of the old stories. This one, there's much less to obviously object to, even though I think you

1:40:58 Unknown speaker: could still argue against his version of

1:41:00 Mark: the ontological argument and things like that.

1:41:02 Wes: Yeah, I really enjoyed Spinoza. It's been a long time since I've looked at the ethics, and I don't think I ever looked at it carefully. I think I just got intimidated by all the propositions, and it looked dry and. But it's really. I don't know why I enjoy this type of stuff that looks really intimidating and dry now. Yeah, there's so much there that's relevant to modern philosophy of mind. And I think this guy Damasio has used Spinoza and neuroscience and talks about all that stuff together. And then I recently read a book called The Courtier and the Heretic, which, which is sort of a parallel biography of Leibniz and Spinoza, sort of culminates in their meeting, and it gives an account of their meeting, and it's a really interesting contrast between them and their relationship with each other and all that stuff.

So I would recommend that if listeners are interested in Spinoza as a person,

1:41:56 Mark: are there any Spinoza movies? Sounds like there should be a Spinoza movie and a Rousseau movie, since they're both.

1:42:04 Wes: There'd be a lot of crazy guys doing his lens Crafting. Right. He did that in the evenings actually, and did his thinking and studying all day. And then he would go up to the attic or wherever it was he was staying with a friend at that point in his life. It was later on he was basically supported by friends. And there's another scene, by the way, where there's a lynch mob or something and he tries to come out and stand down the whole mob and his friend drags him back in the house. And very courageous person.

1:42:33 Mark: Who would play him?

1:42:35 Wes: Mel Gibson.

1:42:36 Mark: Adrian Brody.

1:42:40 Wes: Mel Gibson, for a touch of irony. Adrian.

1:42:42 Mark: Adrian Brody.

1:42:45 Wes: Sorry, Seth.

1:42:46 Seth: That's a good question. That's a very good question.

1:42:50 Mark: I think Mel Gibson could do Rousseau, it sounds like.

1:42:53 Seth: Yeah.

1:42:53 Mark: Is that kind of crazy?

1:42:54 Seth: Without doubt. You could do a two act play just about Rousseau when he was living in England and just being a miserable son of a bitch to Hume and all those guys.

1:43:06 Mark: Well, I hadn't realized. I posted a link to a lecture on our partially examinedlife.com page, which you should check out, that talked about how Rousseau had five kids that he abandoned. Yeah, yeah. And that's a good segue because you can contribute to this discussion by going on partiallyexaminedlife.com, reply to the post that has this episode on it. If you have comments about things we missed. We also have a Facebook discussion page. You can follow us on Twitter. You can sign up to get emails sent to you every time the blog is updated. All sorts of fun stuff. There's videos, there's reviews. It's like being one with God, I would have to say.

1:43:47 Wes: Absolutely.

1:43:48 Mark: All right.

1:43:48 Seth: It's like being a mode of the one.

1:44:09 Mark: All right, good night, everybody. See you next time.

1:44:12 Wes: Good night.

1:44:14 Unknown speaker: Seems like a good day to be in space fire, What with all the stuff that's been going on. I just got some music. Was going to put it on, but I thought I should probably write my own. Try and stop and be done get the stucco out of my skull When I thought she'll be gone Leading wheels come take me on it's not like I've been sitting here doing nothing Got a spirit so in sick Laying on my knees and the stuff that I've been pushing Said you know where you can go Slash your chest Let out the freaking be. Don't think I know how to be inspired. Music not in love However I try to focus I am forever outside my focus I can't seem to find too much to say these days.

Try and stop and being dull get some stucco out of my skull When I fall out she'll be gone Bleeding wheels come take me on it's not like I've been sitting here doing nothing Got a spiritual insect praying on my knees and the stuff that I've been pushing since you know where you can't go Slash your chest let out the brigand please and on other things I will paste a cloth alongside of my

pillow

Wipe the sweat that comes with my disease and I will pull the sheets up nail them tight and I will cough my teeth up Thought I might need every weapon I could get to vet my passion I have yet to vet my passion I have yet to to vent it I will throw up what I can and it's not like I've been sitting here doing nothing Got a spiritual insect praying on my knees and it's not that I'd be and push it since you know where you can't go Slash your chest let out the freaking be.

1:48:32 Seth: Sam.

1:48:58 Wes: It.