Episode 166: Spinoza on Politics and Religion (Part Two)

0:00 Wes: What's funny about those titles is they sound a lot more pious and straight edge religious than they turn out to be, because it turns out that it isn't really the word of God, except in this very general sense.

0:11 Mark: You know, it's the Word of God. If you say of God means just like he defined it at the very beginning of the book. Like if you look how the ancient Israelites actually used of God, they could just be talking about like anything. That's awesome. This is the sandwich of God, man.

0:28 Dylan: I always took it to be part of his rhetorical strategy to make a lot of room for religion until he makes it clear that religion and priests and religious figures really are part of the state. Subject to the state is what I should say, subject to the state.

0:50 Wes: So as far as the Word of God definition, that's section three, I think that might be worth reading since we haven't done much reading from the text. But they, that is, my adversaries will insist that even though the divine law is written on our hearts, the Bible is still the Word of God. And therefore we may not say that it is mutilated and corrupt any more than we may say this of the Word of God. Truly, though, I fear that they, on the contrary, try too hard to be pious. They are converting religion into superstition. Indeed, Verge unfortunately on adoring images and pictures I.e. paper and ink as the Word of God. I know that I have said nothing unworthy of Scripture or of the Word of God, since I have said nothing that I have not demonstrated to be true by the clearest reasoning.

1:36 Mark: I love that. That's a great rhetorical flourish to say you guys are actually idolaters.

1:40 Wes: Exactly.

1:41 Mark: By putting so much stake in the Bible.

1:43 Wes: And then he'll go on to say, well, what the Word of God means is just this universal divine law, certain general principles that are there in Scripture, not the text itself, not every literal word. There's lots of bogus stuff in there. But there are general principles that can be gotten out of it that are the Word of God.

2:07 Mark: He's always skating this fine line in terms of how pious he's being. And I think it's very easy to take some of his principles, as many subsequent people did, and try to apply them more widely and say, you know, actually, your tolerance should extend to atheists too. Or why assume, if you're going to say that some of this is metaphorical, some of this is reflecting of the dumb things that people believed in ancient society. But why insist then that the main points, the main historical points have been passed down intact? Or as far as this idolatry thing, I actually, in the book I wrote after I finished college, I had a kind of a personal revelation in there.

The name of God itself, just the act of being pious and using, talking about lordly things, that itself is idolatrous. You know, in the same way that you could say, I don't want to have pictures of God, you could say, you know, just like the ancient Israelite, I don't think you should even say God's name or take it even further. I don't think you should even be talking religious talk at all. I think ultimately, if you are really spiritual, you would not try to put it in such concrete terms. So you could take Spinoza's logic and

3:19 Wes: put very far, except that Spinoza is fine with all the stuff that he calls fabrications, right? Truth and piety are disconnected. Your lack of piety could be caused by true beliefs, and your piety could be caused by false beliefs. In fact, for most people, their piety is caused by false beliefs. It's just that piety is just a matter of obedience to God. You know that God exists, and you know that you have to love your neighbor because that's the way you connect to God as well. And that's all you need, whether it's one bit of religious trappings or Another, it just doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter if you believe a lot of false stories about ancient times as part of your beliefs, except insofar as it gets you to be obedient.

4:04 Dylan: Yeah. When he's separating reason and theology, he puts reason on the side of truth and wisdom and theology on the side of piety and obedience. And all of the prophets, all of the words of God, the word of God distills down to being pious and being obedient and loving your neighbor. All the rest of it is clearly all kinds of mistakes. And the prophets are talking from this point of view of their own context and experience. And all the rest of it has to be sort of interpreted. But that interpretation, as Spinoza says over and over again, is really pretty simple. Be pious, be obedient, love your neighbor.

4:46 Wes: And this allows them to say there's no conflict between faith and reason, and they have their own domains, much like Kant. What do you guys think of that? This idea of two harmonious, separate but equal, non conflicting domains?

5:00 Dylan: I think it's a valiant effort. But when you just lay down and you got a priest and you say, look, you have the piety, obedience side, we have the truth and wisdom side, it seems to me that that's not going to go down too well.

5:21 Mark: Well, even that the priest doesn't get the piety and obedience side because of the ultimate position that the priests have with regard to the state that we've been talking about.

5:30 Wes: But it is true that we ought to obey. Remember, there's that one little wrinkle where he basically says, so this is in chapter 15. So the core moral teaching of Scripture is to obey. And we know that's not in conflict with reason, and yet it can't be proven. So here's the ought is distinction coming up. Again, you can't demonstrate, using science, that we ought to obey the moral law and love our neighbors, so then why believe it? And then he goes into this account where. Well, in this case, yet revelation is required. This is a case where, because science is not going to give us the moral law, revelation is necessary.

And he talks again about the prophets and signs, the idea of these teachings accompanied by signs. But the thing that really stands out is the idea that there is this accord between what reason tells us about what's good for us and what's in Scripture, what's revealed to us. Again, because it's ethics, because it's normative, it can't be demonstrated in the way that math and science stuff can be demonstrated. But it's not totally outside of the realm of reason. It's not completely just this irrational thing. Oh, you have to have faith that loving thy neighbor is the thing to do.

You could say, well, look at human nature and this and that. You could make arguments.

6:48 Dylan: Doesn't that amount to saying that the whole book ends up being an argument to persuade us to have the right disposition with respect to religion and figure out a way to. To accommodate it, because we have to, because of all of its other power and role in life, but that in the end, if we didn't have religion, that would be okay.

7:13 Wes: Maybe he really thinks that, but he does seem to say that we do need it because most people are not reasonable and revelation has to fill in the gap for moral stuff. Plus, most people are not reasonable and they're not going to love their neighbors because you can show them philosophically that they should. They're only going to love their neighbors if you give them religion.

7:34 Dylan: Yeah, he does seem more closely aligned with Kant in that our moral precepts would come out of us through reason, even though you have it revealed in the Bible. It's not that they can only be revealed through revelation. They can be revealed by the natural light of reason as well.

7:58 Wes: They just can't be demonstrated. He said it is a little confusing. I don't know what to think of this because he says they can't be demonstrated, but that reason can help us see what's good for us. So I honestly don't know how to resolve that dilemma from the reading that we have.

8:13 Dylan: Yeah, he's not making a reasonable argument about it, but saying that it's in some funny way revealed through reason.

8:20 Mark: Well, it seems like that is a problematic formulation. I understand why you're saying that, but like he explicitly says, can you say it's reasonable to believe the Holy Scriptures? And well, if you do that, then in a certain way you're subsuming the Scriptures to reason. You're making them subordinate and he wants to keep them separate somehow.

8:40 Wes: So this is a confusing thing. But you are allowed to take scripture, do it a check against the natural light of reason. And when you do that, you find out a lot of the stuff is bogus. Like a lot of teaching of the prophets. It doesn't stand up. You have to discard it. What he objects to is Maimonides trying to rationalize everything to make it conform to what we know is reasonable. So it's not that we can't do that check, it's just that we shouldn't try and make every word of Scripture fit with what we know reasonably.

9:11 Mark: And he does have to say that we have reasonable grounds for believing that Scripture is authentic. Right. For believing that the basic histories were passed down to us accurately and that the moral teachings are true and the moral teachings are true. Thing, if you're reading it properly, it says, love thy neighbor. And then you use reason, and you see that that's the dictate of reason for what the good life would be as well. So that's a check.

9:39 Wes: So it's chapter 15, section 7. We're getting down to brass tacks at this point. Because then he says, well, yet since we are unable to prove by means of reason whether the fundamental principle of theology, that men are saved by obedience alone is true or false, are we not open to the question, why, therefore, do we believe it? And so he says, I reply that I hold categorically that the fundamental dogma of theology cannot be discovered by the natural light. We cannot use science. We cannot use philosophy or reason to discover that men are saved by obedience alone.

But then he says, or at least that no one has yet proven it. Yeah, that is why revelation is indispensable. But Mark, as you point out, there are other places where the implication is that, well, we can kind of derive that if we can reason about what's good for us, if we can get moral precepts out of reason, then we should be able to at least approach that.

10:35 Mark: Well, maybe it's the obedience part because he says explicitly that obedience to God, which is the main thing, that really the only thing that Scripture teaches is equivalent to love thy neighbor. But where do we get that idea that that's the equivalent, the love of your neighbor part is maybe something we could figure out through reason alone. But the way he puts it here, to find out that simple obedience is what we should do, like that's something that reason doesn't tell you.

11:03 Wes: He says, basically, God is love at some point. And to know God, the only way to know it is to actually do it. The only way to know God is to participate in charitable works revealing your love of your neighbor. That is actually the way we connect to God.

11:20 Mark: Right. It's not believing anything.

11:23 Wes: Exactly. It really is not believing anything except that we must obey God and that he's omnipotent and he's one, you know, very, very minimal thing.

11:32 Seth: Yeah, he has a whole section where he talks about faith and works. And essentially obedience to God or love of God is the equivalent of faith. It's a. It's a Conceptual experience and the works part of it. The way in which you manifest love of God is love of one's neighbor.

11:51 Mark: That's the way that you can tell if someone has the knowledge of God. You know, and this is the weird part, and what makes it, I think he says explicitly someplace, you know, the kind of the. Can the heathens be saved? Yes. If they love their neighbor, then even if they've never heard of the Bible, yeah, they're saved. They are on the right side of the moral landscape there. But at the same time, he says this is at the end of chapter 15, he wants to stress that the usefulness and necessity of holy scriptural revelation he holds to be very great. For given that we cannot discern by the natural light alone, that simple obedience is the path to salvation, and revelation alone teaches us that it comes from a singular grace of God which we cannot acquire by reason, it follows that Scripture has brought great consolation to mortal men.

12:41 Wes: So this seems. I mean, overall, this does seem kind of on the track of the odd is distinction and saying we can derive fundamental moral precepts from science or philosophy.

12:54 Mark: Yeah. Because all it would tell us is that there would be more harmony if we cooperate. If you love your neighbor, well, why do I care if there's going to be more harmony?

13:03 Dylan: But that gets back to the stuff we talked about earlier with the self interest that drives us to form a state. I guess there's a little controversy about whether this was guided by reason or not, but that coming out of the state of nature to form a government, we do that as an act of self preservation. And what I like about Spinoza is that it's not as dark and dreary as Hobbes. It is an act of self preservation, but it's also an act, a gesture towards self flourishing.

13:36 Mark: Cooperation.

13:37 Dylan: Yeah. To become what we can be. Right. It's not so much of a rear guard action as an act of flourishing. And it's in our best self interest, not in just our defensive self interest.

13:49 Wes: Yeah. He'll go on to say the ultimate aim of the state is to help us to be free.

13:54 Dylan: Exactly.

13:55 Wes: Which is, by the way, is not unrelated to the love your neighbor thing. Right. So if you think of it in Kantian terms as treating people as ends in themselves, which really means to respect their autonomy, to respect the fact that they are free entities. Similar idea that we see in the existentialists. Freedom becomes really the fundamental guiding principle here. And it's one of the reasons he prefers democracy, by the way, because it preserves so many of the rights that we have in the state of nature, it's maximally preservative of those the state should help us be free because that is ultimately our good, it seems to me on this view.

14:33 Mark: So there still might be, though a. This is not directly responding to you, Wes, but a disconnect between, as Dylan was saying, how self interest drives us. You might say reason in its basic form is instrumental reason. In other words, how do I maximize my self interest as opposed to just eating the cake that's in front of me? How do I think long term? But at the same time, the call to love your neighbor requires more the maximizing your self interest. Getting you into a society points to the direction, but the loving your neighbor jumps in that direction quite a bit.

So there is still a leap beyond what self interest itself seems to dictate toward us. And maybe this comes to realizing, you know, he has this notion we talked about at the end of our episode 25 of Instead of arguing for life after death, he argues that we actually have immortality now insofar as we are reasonable, we are partaking of our godly nature. You know, uses the same language here, love towards one's neighbor by means of which each person is in God, to use John's language, and God is in each person. It is in your interest to be in God like that, but that doesn't really capture it.

It's not just in your interest.

15:56 Wes: So what's in your interest if you know. So if I'm right, that it's like. So treating people as ends in themselves, as reasonable entities and as autonomous entities, if those things are all related and they're all somewhat equivalent to loving thy neighbor, then the rationale that you get, at least for de Beauvoir, we have to be oriented towards other people's freedom if we are to be free ourselves. And the same thing for Kant. So love thy neighbor. You can't be actualized and free unless you respect that in others. So it's not just a do unto others in the sense of, well, I should be nice to people because I don't want to get hurt by them.

It's more direct than that. It's my well being in the sense of my autonomy is directly tied to my comportment towards the autonomy of others. So that's how you can get a philosophical justification for love thy neighbor. I'm not saying that is what Spinoza is doing necessarily, but his talk about the aim of the state being freedom and all the rest of it about reason, I think is Evocative of all that.

16:59 Mark: I feel like we should keep in mind the Borg like nature of Spinoza's take on individuals and reason, that the more that we are reasonable, the more alike we all become. That's why it would be so easy to run a society if everyone were completely reasonable. Because it's not that you and I would say, oh, well, we each want different things and are very different in character and we can live together in harmony, like, well, no, that's what we have to do in the practical world. But if we were all perfectly reasonable, then we'd essentially be partaking in the form of God and we would actually think alike, like a computer.

So it's just that weird implication of reason giving you participation in God and immortality, I think, makes this very distinct from existentialism, which is more fundamentally pluralist, even in the best possible circumstance. Right. I think for Spinoza, you're pluralist by default, by de facto, the way the world is. But that's really all because just we're imperfect, not because diversity is wonderful.

18:06 Seth: Yeah.

18:06 Dylan: I mean, it's a consequence of. Or at least in line with his determinism.

18:10 Mark: Right.

18:10 Dylan: To the extent that everything aligns with reason, then everything would just operate smoothly, one thing after another, just like nature does by itself. Nature doesn't do anything wrong because nature just does what nature does. And if all of us lived by the light of reason, everything would just be hunky dory, doing. Well, I take that back. Everything would just work as it does. And there's a funny way in which there's a tension with this, because earlier on he says the fact that we see things as good and bad in some level has to do with the fact that we don't see the whole picture. So he still has this Augustinian.

18:52 Seth: Yeah.

18:53 Dylan: That the whole world is operating is always good. Everything that happens is just the way it's supposed to be because it's a reflection of God's activity. And it's only because we have a partial view that we see as something's good and some things bad that we have even that judgment at all. And that if we were to see the whole mess of it, we would see none of it was good and none of it was bad. It all just was. And I don't know that he goes as far as someone like Leibniz to say that in fact, it's all good. I feel like he's much more. We mentioned this before, sort of beyond good and evil, kind of with respect to the activity of nature, that it doesn't admit of those distinctions, that those are somehow human distinctions.

19:42 Mark: Yeah, it is weird that even though I was making this distinction before between right and good. You know, he doesn't use the word good that often. Like you were saying, Wes uses beneficial. He's talking about interests and in fact maybe the ultimate unity, the love thy neighbor. Maybe that's not a matter of diverting from in your interest, but redefining your. Is identifying yourself with the whole, with God. So you're still pursuing self interest. It's just that the self is everything.

20:12 Dylan: Yeah, that sounds right, Mark. It's understanding where the authority is, and especially with a democracy, that you are part of that authority, even though you aren't singularly the sovereign.

20:24 Wes: So we are all just players on the stage of God's narcissism, is gazing in the mirror and we are pieces of that.

20:36 Mark: That would be Hegel.

20:39 Dylan: It's funny that you put it that way, Wes. It doesn't seem to be the way God would work in Spinoza's universe. Right. Because it's the activity of the natural world just playing out there. Isn't that God consciousness? That would be narcissistic.

20:54 Mark: Right.

20:55 Wes: I wasn't endorsing the premise of that joke, I just riffing off. Mark, Mark, why don't you come in on that?

21:02 Mark: Well, I think this is a good transition to talking about these articles of faith, because if you listened to the Spinoza On Theology episode 24 that we did so long ago, we stressed in that discussion that really God is an impersonal God. God, according to the light of reason, does not resemble anything that regular religious people think of when they think of God. But yet throughout this book and in these dogmas of universal faith, he's certainly using language that sounds like more traditional religious language. So that God could have a personality, could be a personal God in some way, that it's page 182, number 10 in chapter 14.

Nor will I hold back from listing the dogmas of universal faith, or the fundamentals of the intent of the whole of Scripture, which as follows very clearly from what we have shown in these two chapters, all tend towards this that there exists a supreme being who loves justice and charity, and that to be saved, all people must obey and venerate him by practicing justice and charity toward their neighbor. From this principle, all the specific points are readily derived and there are no others besides these, there is a God, a supreme being who is supremely just and merciful, or an exemplar of the true life whom no One who does not know or who does not believe that he exists can obey or acknowledge as judge.

He is one. For no one can doubt that this too is absolutely required for supreme devotion, admiration and love towards God. Devotion, admiration and love will arise only from the preeminence of one above all others. Number three. He is everywhere present and all things are manifest to him. For if things were believed to be hidden from him, or if it were not known that he sees all things, there would be doubts about the equity of his justice by which he directs all things, or it would even be unknown. Number four. He possesses supreme right and dominion over all things.

I'm not going to go through all these, but you can see already just the fact that he has to know things. He has to love us, we have to worship Him.

23:08 Wes: Number seven. He forgives the repentant their sins.

23:11 Mark: Yeah. So what do you think about that? I mean, that seems to totally fly in the face, but yet he says this is the universal religion, right?

23:19 Wes: And all of this stuff, we should remind ourselves this is meant to be the bare bones God which is not subject to doctrinal dispute, right? All the specific doctrines that theologians argue about and that people get into fights about are, according to him, irrelevant. And the common person needs to know very, very little. But this does seem like a little more than a little.

23:43 Mark: Number six. All who obey God in this rationale of living and only they are saved, those who live under the sway of pleasures are lost. That sounds pretty specific.

23:53 Wes: Yeah, and it sounds like the sort of thing another theologian might dispute, which means that he hasn't risen above that in the way that he wants to.

24:03 Mark: But he says no one can fail to recognize that all these things absolutely need to be known, so that all men, without exception, may be able to love God by command of the law explained above. For if any of these is removed, obedience too is gone.

24:16 Wes: But what God or the exemplar of true life is, for example, whether he is fire or spirit, or life or thought, etc. Is irrelevant to faith. So that's the doctrinal stuff I was talking about that gets people into fights.

24:30 Mark: The way he maybe gets us out of this problem is later in that same section there on 183, section 11. Indeed, everyone, as we have already said, must adapt these doctrines of faith to his own understanding and to interpret them for himself in whatever way seems to make them easier for him to accept unreservedly and with full mental assent. For as we have pointed out, faith was once revealed and written according to the understanding and beliefs of the prophets and of the common people of their time. And in the same manner, everyone in our day must adapt faith to their own views so that they may accept it without any mental reservation or hesitation.

So I took that as a challenge. Like, could I think about, there is a God, a supreme being who's supremely just and merciful, an exemplar of the true life. Well, if I throw away the specific idea of Jesus and throw away any notion of a guy who did something to create, but actually just say, I have faith that the world is in harmony, that we do not live in a Schopenhauerian, mad, insane setup like that, that instead there is justice and mercy in the world somehow. Like, I think there's a highly abstract way you could take that and be a complete atheist.

25:42 Dylan: I think you're right. You could be complete atheist, because I think that he's taking out of faith and any particular content. I mean, if you just keep going in that paragraph on top of page 184. For faith, as we showed, requires not so much truth as piety. And since faith is pious and apt for salvation only by way of obedience, no one is faithful except on the grounds of obedience. It is therefore not the man who advances the best reasons who necessarily manifests the best faith faith, but rather the man who performs the best works of justice and charity.

How salutary and necessary this doctrine is in a society. If we wish people to live in concord and peace with each other, how many of the causes of wrongdoing and disorder it abolishes, I submit to everyone's judgment. So you're absolutely right, Mark. This completely makes room for atheists. As long as they perform acts of justice and charity, it doesn't matter. Your faith is only revealed by your acts and by your obedience to justice and charity.

26:52 Wes: Yeah, you have to be an atheist who believes in God. It's just that your atheism would have to redefine God in some way. So remember all those basic principles. There is a God who is supremely just. All the things that Mark listed, you'd have to reinterpret those in a way consistent with atheism, which I think you might be able to do, but it's certainly the case here. It doesn't matter whether you're a Muslim or a Christian. I think that certainly follows from all the stuff that he's saying. Muslim, Christian, or a Jew or something else. Just doesn't matter. In fact, it's irrelevant. Yes, it's not even relevant except insofar as it gets you to be obedient, it's truth or falsity is irrelevant. It's just operationally relevant.

27:36 Dylan: There's no question of testing your faith by asking what you believe or having you testify or assent to any particular

27:45 Wes: thing at all, except for those things that he mentions. Although again, maybe we could.

27:51 Dylan: He completely undermines them with this section right here. That follows. Right. Because he has the test of faith, no one is faithful except on the grounds of obedience.

28:01 Mark: Right. But the reason that you have to believe those things is because you couldn't be obedient.

28:04 Dylan: The person who manifests the best faith is the man who performs the best works of justice and charity.

28:10 Wes: Yeah. So if knowing God and believing in God and loving God, if that's somehow reducible to loving your neighbor and acting on that, doing these charitable works, being a good person. Yeah. You could just reduce God to something else and say, okay, I've gotten rid of God through this reduction. Yeah, I totally see that possibility. And that's why he was accused of being an atheist. There's a lot of talking about God, but it makes you suspicious.

28:37 Mark: Number four, I didn't read this before. He possesses supreme right and dominion over all things. Nor is anything that he does compelled by laws. But he does all things at his absolute pleasure and by his unique grace. For all men are obliged to obey him absolutely, but he is obliged to obey no one. How do you translate that to an atheist or transcendentalist?

28:59 Wes: Because natural law is not itself subject to natural law.

29:03 Mark: That just means they're in different categories. It would be a category mistake to say natural law is subjected to natural law.

29:10 Wes: This kind of brings us back to this distinction he makes between faith and reason. That's reminiscent of Kant. So I'm looking at chapter 14 again, section 13, where he basically says there's no interaction between theology and philosophy. They really just don't even hook up with each other. And it's very reminiscent of Kant, except Kant, of course, had this very fancy explanation of why they don't hook up. So, for instance, the soul. You might believe that there's such a thing as a soul, this metaphysical entity. Well, for Kant, that is just a reification of the structure of experience, which is the structure of the mind and of the world, because those two things amount to being the same thing.

So you reify the structure of experience, and then you treat that reification as if itself were an object within the domain of experience, within the empirical realm. The consequence of that is all the antinomies, all the metaphysical disputes, which are parallel to the doctrinal disputes that Spinoza wants to get rid of. Right. Kant wanted to get rid of those metaphysical disputes by separating faith and reason. Spinoza wants to get rid of these doctrinal disputes.

30:19 Mark: Yeah, Some of those could be the same exact ones. Did God create the world or was Jesus coextensive? Just illustrating.

30:26 Wes: Yeah. So for Kant, his conclusion is that maybe there is such a thing as a soul, but we couldn't know it. We can't know it scientifically. It wouldn't be within the empirical realm. It would be this metaphysical entity outside of the causal order of space and time. Those metaphysical questions of whether there's a soul and stuff that doesn't link up causally with the world. So there can't be any evidence in favor of it, but there can't be any evidence against it. Which means that even though we can't know whether there are things such as souls, there is room to have faith in them.

That's the sense in which you get this strict division between faith and science, or faith and reason. Separating them that way opens up the possibility of faith and it opens up science. Right. If they really do hook up with each other, then they are at war. And you have to choose. You have to choose a side and you have to say, all right, I'm the priest and I'm going to suppress the sciences because they are impious. Or you have to say, I am the scientist and I am necessarily an atheist because religion is BS that can possibly be consistent with science.

So ruling by his absolute pleasure. One of the upshots of Kant is that God is sort of this reification of the causal order. Right. He's just this ultimate cause outside. He's the cause of the causal order. When I look at a passage like this, all men are obliged to obey him, but he is obliged to obey no one. Being obliged to obey no one is just another way of saying that he's outside of the causal order. He's outside of the the realm of experience. And everything that's subject to natural law, which is important. It's a sort of important kind of distinction to keep in mind that goes along with the strict distinction between science and faith.

32:06 Mark: So if only being saved by going along with God, it really just means defer your rebellious individual instincts, because those all just have to do with base desires. And if you instead are looking at the interests of the group of all of creation, then you are aligning yourself. That's what obedience is, and it's freedom through Obedience, because again, you've shifted your identification from this little individual organism to the whole. One way of describing that is you have abdicated your individual selfhood.

32:44 Wes: Well, you free yourself from your desires by obeying something else, whether it's reason or the state or God. It's the only way you can free yourself from your desires, which is really what Spinoza thinks is slavery and unfreedom. So, and you can see too, there's a virtue like this whole idea of obedience, if you really think it through. I mean, it does matter what the laws are. But absent the analysis of whether a law is good or bad, it's helpful to be ruled by some sort of law. It's helpful to be able to say no to oneself. That's kind of boundary creating, which goes along with the idea of preserving oneself in one's state.

It could be like, I like to go running every morning, which seems like a virtuous good thing to do. But there's also a virtue to saying, well, because it's the thing I want to do, I'm going to say no. Just that idea of being able to say no to oneself, I think is of fundamental psychological importance, and it gives some idea of how you could rationalize this idea of obedience, even absent the specifics of what you're being obedient to.

33:45 Mark: But if you're the one who's saying no to yourself, then you're not actually abdicating your freedom of choice there. It's more like if you say in advance, I'm going to obey the app that says when I should exercise and when I should eat and subvert my desires to this thing.

34:01 Wes: Well, you subject yourself to reason. So you could subject yourself to the state or to reason, or to. In cases of where you're checking your own desires, you're still subjecting yourself to reason.

34:10 Mark: Okay, it sounded like you were just being like, I want to say no to myself just because I'm kind of being spiteful of myself.

34:16 Wes: You know, the reasonable part of it. Yeah. It wouldn't be to be spiteful to yourself. It just. It would be for the benefit of exercising the faculty of being able to check one's desires. Let's say it would be like practice,

34:28 Dylan: but it's similar to the act of reason that you give authority over to the state.

34:35 Mark: Right.

34:35 Dylan: It's the same kind of reasonable act of submitting to another authority for your own good, for your own self interest, for your own flourishing. That seems to be very much in line with the example that Mark gave of you're going to submit yourself to your app or to an exercise regimen, or to college or to something like that, because it is for the sake of your own good and your own flourishing.

35:00 Wes: We all need structure.

35:02 Dylan: Yeah.

35:03 Wes: That's what obedience on this account is about.

35:06 Dylan: Yeah. I think it's that issue of we all need structure is one thing that struck me about Spinoza. Reading him this time is as much as he deals with some of the beginnings and ends, the bookend cases, the state of nature, and a little bit of what leads to the dissolution of society, he really is not preoccupied with those things. What he's most occupied with is what is it going to look like when it's working well and everybody's just getting along and how that's good for us. Just take the example here, when you say I'm going to submit myself to this regimen or that regimen.

For Spinoza, he's not going to get all wound up about whether or not you're losing your freedom or something like that. He's going to be focused on the fact that, yeah, that gives you structure and that's good for you. And there'll be cases that you can kind of see over the edge of the paper of if the state is bad enough, you're going to have to rebel against it. But he's not really worried about that area very much. He a doesn't want that to happen. He thinks it's really, really bad on very Burkean grounds.

36:19 Mark: Yeah. Like if there's a revolution once, then there's probably going to be more revolutions. If you rip down a tyrant and without addressing the circumstances that gave rise to the tyrant, you're just going to have another tyrant. Like, that's just what happens with revolutions. You need to just move things forward by rational discussion. And if the tyranny doesn't allow that something that we'll give eventually.

36:40 Dylan: Yeah. He seems that he isn't going to be a revolutionary. It's not clear to me where he would fall depending on how bad the circumstances got and whether he would covertly support revolutionaries or not.

36:56 Mark: He says only if you have made a deal with God where He has promised to deliver you from your oppressors like the Israelites. But otherwise. No, he explicitly says that.

37:06 Dylan: That doesn't seem so unique, Mark. I mean, it doesn't seem so hard to imagine that someone would feel exactly that way, that by revolting I will get delivered from my oppressors. Right. He doesn't take into account being enslaved. Right. And whether or not on that grounds that should you, because that government is unjust with respect to you. Can you revolt against it? He basically isn't that engaged with the question of the right of revolution or anything like that.

37:38 Mark: Page 241. I had a quote here, chapter 19. He's talking about slavery in the ancient Hebrew times. Strive for the peace of the state to which I have brought you as captives. So, yeah, he explicitly says, even if you're enslaved by a hostile power, you should support the hostile power because it's still better. He's like a pretty hard line Hobbesian on this point, but I see where you're going. He shouldn't think like that. There's room within his views for one to give a different take.

38:10 Dylan: Well, but you also have to be careful in these sections. Whether he's analyzing the Bible and what the consequence of that is, or he's endorsing it.

38:19 Mark: I felt like I should start a, you know, one of those comedy shtick thing, you know. You know, you're a Bible nerd if like you use discussions of ancient Israel as the sole exemplars almost. He brings up England in the revolution there once, but almost the sole exemplar for your political discussion. The sole illustration of acting under different degrees of freedom and what you do in different circumstances. And he has a weird asymmetry. You know, on the one hand he says throughout, like, look, we don't have prophets anymore. It's going to say, you know, even if you felt like God was going to liberate you from your oppressors, that doesn't happen anymore.

Like, I guess I'll deal with that. If you actually have reasonable, you know, if you can produce the requisite miracles and you're teaching good stuff like, you know, in other words, we have the same criterion available for us to judge you as possible prophet as they did back then. But he says early on, like, we just don't have prophets anymore. That's just as a matter of fact. So on the one hand, he's pointing to ancient Israel largely to tell the story about, look, hey, you want a theocracy now? Well, look, back then when they actually did have a real theocracy, when they explicitly said, we're going to just serve God.

Now, as a matter of fact, they were too chicken to go and serve God, so they kind of made Moses the only one who could interact with God. And they in effect served Moses, but at least it was Moses, things straight from God, which we just don't have that now. You cannot then take a government right now and have that government clutch the Bible and say, I'm going to be just like Moses and I'm going to rule over all you with that degree of strictness and treat you all like sheep in the way that Moses did. There's a fundamental asymmetry between the past, that part of the history, and the present, such that we can't do that, even though he says, look, we actually have the same justification for believing the crux of the Bible now that the people back then did for believing in the prophets.

Right. So again, it's through even the miracles. But it's the miracles that we read about. Do we feel like we have given sufficient motivation for believing that the Bible is useful? So this is chapter 15. One of the fundamental disagreements that Wes and I were having last time was, for instance, does he really think that miracles happened at the time? I was reading Spinoza to say, yes, they did. We just need to interpret them as not deviations from, you know, we need to interpret them in light of the philosophy of science in a sensible way. But there were miracles, and those were the proof, along with the fact that the prophet was teaching authentically good works as you could confirm yourself by reason.

I saw this quote in chapter 15. Should we believe the miracles as described in the Bible? Yes, because we know that the main historical narratives of the Bible have been passed down to us uncorrupted. Why we know that, I don't know. Here's the quote. This is why we too are obliged to believe in Scripture, that is the prophets themselves on precisely the same grounds teaching confirmed by miracles. Since we see that the prophets commend justice and charity above all things and plead for these alone, we deduce they were sincere and not deceitful in teaching that men are made happy by obedience and faith.

And because they also confirmed this with signs, we are convinced that they were not speaking wildly or madly when they prophesied.

41:42 Wes: Mark, you and I don't really disagree on this. It's just that, yes, there are miracles, but they're not miracles. They're not violations of the nature or interview. Yeah. Of the natural order. So we can call them miracles if we like. They're really just coincidences. And yeah, the prophet can interpret them in a way that their revelation is reinforced by that. And you could call that a sign from God, you know, you could call it a, say, give me a sign and it starts raining. Well, it's not that God jumped in and made it rain at that point. That was going to happen anyway for all time. That was preordained if we're determinists, but in the sense that God is the primary mover behind the causal order, then he did make that happen.

42:29 Mark: And because it was unusual, someone could point at it as a sign. It was unusual enough.

42:35 Wes: Right. So we can call that a miracle. Like, functionally, it's a miracle or a sign. It serves that role in making the prophet certain of their revelation. And I guess Spinoza thinks it's confirmatory in some sense, even though it's not really a miracle in the strict definition of, you know.

42:54 Dylan: Well, and part of it is the status of. As a miracle is also partly due to our ignorance and the ignorance of the prophets. Right. They just didn't know enough to have understood the causal chain there. It's both those aspects.

43:08 Wes: I think Mark's right to, like, emphasize that because it is odd. There's no way around the oddness of saying that those signs. Because at this point in the reading, he's trying to tell us that this is in the why believe it?

43:20 Mark: Section.

43:20 Wes: Why do we believe that obedience is necessary? And he's saying, well, revelation is required, but also we do have to bring our judgment to bear on this and see if we can obtain a moral certainty that's similar to the ones the prophets had when they got the revelation in the first place. It's not like a sign is going to appear to us to give us certainty about what we're reading about.

43:41 Mark: The other quote I picked out was just on the next page, which it sounds so much like William James. It's crazy this far in advance. It is a sound judgment to accept this fundamental principle embracing the whole of theology and Scripture, even though it cannot be demonstrated by mathematical proof. And here we're talking about just believing that the main historical narratives are true. And for it is indeed ignorance to refuse to accept something just because it cannot be mathematically demonstrated when it is confirmed by the testimonies of so many prophets is a source of great solace for those whose capacity to reason is limited, is of great value to the state, and may be believed unreservedly without danger or damage, as if we should admit nothing is true for the prudent conduct of our lives, which can be called into question by any method of doubt, or as if so many of our actions were not highly uncertain and full of risk.

He has very few of those.

44:32 Wes: Yeah. And earlier on. So he basically, he brings up the whole moral certainty thing, which we saw on our. We talked about a little bit in our last episode, the moral certainty of the prophets comes from their vivid imagination, the sign or miracle and the fact that they have a mind devoted to justice and goodness. Then there's in this section, he's going to say, okay, that's their moral certainty, but what about our moral certainty that's going to motivate us to believe them? We don't have the same vivid imagination. They're unique in that sense.

They're prodigies. So we can leave that out, but we can look at their teachings using reason to analyze their teachings. We can tell if it's reflective of a mind devoted to justice and goodness. So that's one thing. And then there's the miracles, which he just, it's really hard to figure out why he thinks with all the stuff he said about the Bible, with all the debunking and all the stuff he said about how so and so wasn't really the author and that so much of it is corrupt, it's unclear why we're supposed to believe these old second hand accounts of miracles.

How that could ever give us any sort of moral certainty. It doesn't make sense to me. The nugget that I got out of that that does make sense is this idea that you can look at the Bible's fundamental teachings and say, well, is that in accord with an ethics that we would get just by reasoning without the Bible? And if they really line up really well, then that's a good piece of evidence. And I think he's, he's saying that

45:57 Dylan: here it's either part of his rhetorical bent to try to make it as easy as possible for reason to rule and therefore not overstepping the bounds and overemphasizing rationality a la someone like Maimonides, where he's most interested in reason being the arbiter as much as possible and, and probably more fundamentally there being able to be freedom of thought and speech in the society. And so insofar as there are things that we know not just through the light of reason, but through the light of other things. And maybe insofar as we don't completely understand how we know the things we do know through the light of reason, then we have to take certain things.

He might use the word faith, but we have to not be too persnickety about what people believe and why they believe it. There's this whole sort of realm of stuff where I feel like he's saying, eh, okay, so you believe in this is a miracle or that's a miracle or whatever. He has a lot of room for Allowing sort of these things that are. You're like, well, isn't that inconsistent? I feel like he's not worried about having too much consistency required, as long as it maintains the order of allowing people to think what they want to think and follow the light of reason as much as they possibly can.

And carving out the possibility for that is more important than making sure that everybody thinks the same thing.

47:35 Wes: Yeah, and we know that the prophets are saying conflicting things and things that are just wrong about whether God has hands or stuff like that. Right. So. So it's completely irrelevant whether someone believes that stuff. What's important about those revelations is that they stimulate obedience. And that just complicates the question of what he means by the revelation being confirmed by a miracle. I mean, what's being confirmed is just that we ought to obey that there is a God and that we ought to obey God. That's it. It's not that God has hands. It's not that God looks like this or that or any of that stuff

48:06 Mark: when he also thinks it's just reasonable for us to believe the main historical outlines like that Jesus existed, that Moses and the ancient state of Israel did exist. Page 171 in chapter 14 he's been talking about what could have gotten changed over time. The languages change, so the meanings of some peripheral things or we may not know, like what people, the prophets, actually believed at the time. So we really don't know how to interpret what they were talking about. However, you could not get rid of the central meaning of the Scripture is love thy neighbor.

And if you change that, then it would just de gut the whole thing. It would just fall apart. It wouldn't even make any sense. We therefore conclude unreservedly that the entire divine universal law which Scripture teaches us has come into our hands unadulterated. There are other things too we cannot doubt have been passed down to us in good faith. For example, the outlines of the biblical histories. Because these were well known to everyone at one time, the common people of the Jews were accustomed to sing of the ancient deeds of the people in Psalms.

Likewise, the main points of Christ's deeds and passion were immediately reported throughout the Roman Empire. Unless therefore, most of mankind have engaged in a conspiracy together which is not credible, one cannot believe that later generations have transmitted main lines of these histories otherwise than as they received them from the earliest generation. So that seems a little too cavalier dismissal of the people who argue against the existence of historical Jesus etc. But I guess that reflected the scholarship of his time.

49:37 Dylan: You Know, it's just a very pragmatic attitude. Right. It's directly in line with. He's saying, well, a whole bunch of people seem to believe it. Why not? With regards to religious issues, he's not at all concerned about truth. It just doesn't matter.

49:52 Wes: And this is what grounds freedom of thought. So it's at the end of chapter 14. For the aim of philosophy is nothing but the truth. But the aim of faith, as we have abundantly demonstrated, is simply obedience and piety. The foundations of philosophy are universal concepts and philosophy should be drawn from nature alone. But the foundations of faith are histories and language and are to be drawn only from Scripture and revelation. As we showed in chapter seven. Faith therefore allows every person the greatest liberty to think so that they may think whatever they wish about any question whatever, without doing wrong. Because he said before that you can't do anything wrong by believing the wrong thing. You can't lack piety by believing the wrong thing. You can only lack piety by doing the wrong thing. By doing something uncharitable, for instance, you

50:40 Seth: can only by disobeying.

50:42 Mark: So that's the tension that we have. We should just read what his definition of faith is. This is in chapter 14, 180. On the basis of the foundation we have laid down, faith can only defined by, indeed can be nothing other than acknowledging certain things about God, ignorance of which makes obedience towards him impossible and which are necessarily found wherever obedience is met with. So that sounds like faith is not just works. It does involve actually believing stuff.

51:08 Wes: He'll later say that faith is not enough for salvation. Faith is necessary to obedience, but we need obedience to. To get salvation, and we need works. So you're not saved by faith, you're saved by works. Necessary but not sufficient.

51:23 Mark: But faith is necessary for works, he thinks. And you might say, oh, of course I could do a nice thing. Like, why do I have to believe anything to do a nice thing? But to do it consistently, to consistently love your neighbor, he thinks, does involve some belief and not just the belief, I should love my neighbor. That would be kind of like a private language. Like if you just have a tenant that you hold to yourself, it could kind of morph over time. And, you know, there has to be the surrender, the obedience element, that it's not just you making up what loving your neighbor is from moment to moment. That would not be probably disciplined.

51:57 Wes: Yeah. And then he just goes on to say differences in belief are irrelevant, that faith requires not true dogmas, but pious dogmas. Even if those dogmas are false. Whatever moves the mind to obedience, even if it's false, that's good. As long as the believer doesn't know it's false, that would be a problem. So what I want to emphasize here is that faith grounds freedom of thought because it lowers the stakes. It just doesn't matter what you believe. Yes, this is something where I really sympathize with Spinoza, because I think a lot of the things that people argue about politically, they're just really not actually as relevant as they think they are. They're bullshit. So that's. My political cynicism is sort of. I'm reading some of that into Spinoza here. He's cynical about religious specifics. It just doesn't. He doesn't think they matter. And I think he's right.

52:48 Dylan: He also goes so far as to believe that even following rule, the law is similar, that we need to be careful about making too many rules, because a making too many rules is going to just encourage vice. And that, in fact, we ought to be not worried too much about how people are even behaving, as long as they're basically behaving okay.

53:13 Mark: I don't know that I saw that in Spinoza. I thought he said, you get as many rules as you want about action. It's just about belief is really. That government is really treading where it should not tread.

53:23 Dylan: It's the end of 20 that he says that you're just encouraging vice if you have too many rules.

53:29 Wes: Yeah, the sovereign has the right to make as many rules as they want, but, yeah, if they want to stay in power and for the sake of the good state. He's pretty libertarian, obviously. So that leads us into the free speech part of things, which comes out of this idea in chapter 17, and then goes off on a tangent in 18 and 19 onto other things, but comes back to it in 20, which is that the foundation for freedom of speech is just. Or freedom of thought, first of all, is that we can't transfer all of our right to the sovereign. Sovereigns actually can't control our minds or emotions fully. They're things that can control to some extent. They can persuade, they can manipulate, but fully, they can't do that. So it's just not transferable. We retain that right because we retain the power. The power is not fully transferable.

54:21 Mark: And I found it peculiar that he didn't echo Hobbes point about this when Hobbes emphasizes, actually we always retain the right to physically defend ourselves. So that if I submit to the government, you know, by the social contract. But the government decides I am to be executed, I will always have the right to just try to fight off and kill those who are coming to kill me. And Spinoza doesn't really have. No, no. You could actually give the entirety of your action legitimately to the government. It's just your.

54:49 Wes: Yeah. This is one of the confusing things about Spinoza, because he's treating the transfer of right as if it's just a transfer of power. We don't really lose those powers. We retain those powers. We retain the power to do all sorts of things that the sovereign prohibits. It's just we're gonna get punished for it.

55:05 Seth: Well, it's not just that you don't transfer the power. It's that there are some things that the sovereign authority. Let me just say that instead of sovereign. The sovereign authority only has as much power as what can be compelled by either fear or reverence. And you cannot, for example, compel either by fear or reverence. Belief.

55:28 Wes: Okay, That's a good way of putting it.

55:30 Seth: Yeah. So it's not a question of transferring the power, it's just the sovereign authority only has power over certain things.

55:36 Wes: Spinoza hasn't heard of room 101, apparently.

55:39 Seth: I'm glad you brought that up. It was exactly that point that, you know, he says, well, for example, the state can't make you hate somebody or love somebody because those are dispositions, and it's not under the power of the state to sway that. And my thought was. I thought exactly of Orwell and room 101, because when the hero in Orwell is compelled in room 101 to turn on his beloved, I thought, well, Spinoza just couldn't comprehend. And that what Orwell was trying to do was trying to paint a picture where that was exactly the case for me.

56:19 Dylan: That was on page 250, where he says, controlling minds is oppressive.

56:24 Wes: So he returns to that in chapter 20. But chapter 17 is where it first comes up. So in vain would a sovereign command the subject to hate someone who had made himself agreeable by an act of kindness, or to love someone who had injured him. You know, you think immediately of room 101 and Julia, right?

56:43 Seth: Yep. I'm in a different part of the text. So I'm in the Political Treatise, chapter three, section eight. So, too, by what rewards or threats can a man be brought to love one whom he hates or hate one whom he loves? And to this head must likewise be referred such things as are so abhorrent to human nature that it regards them as actually worse than any evil, and as that a man should be witness against himself or torture himself or kill his parents, or not strive to avoid death and the like, to which no one can be induced by rewards or threats.

But if we still choose to say that the commonwealth has the right or authority to order such things, we can conceive of it in no other sense than that in which one might say, say that a man has the right to be mad or delirious. And I was put in mind of Orwell talking about. It's. I'm sorry, I'm forgetting the characters names, but the one who's part of the inner circle, who Orwell thinks is his friend, and he says, don't you see? We're trying to create a society where children hate their parents and rat them out. And that is exactly like this secret place that Spinoza can't conceive could possibly be the case is exactly what Orwell was trying to portray.

And in a weird way, it binds these two texts together and it tells a story over hundreds of years about something that we've seen, the evolution over the Enlightenment, where this thing that we think of as so abhorrent and inconceivable in Spinoza's time that it's not even metaphysically possible. Right. It's not possible to sway somebody by the time of the 20th century, becomes something that we can conceive of and fictionalize. And it was a really weird bookend. And I don't know if it was intended on the part of Mark, I guess, who drove the readings that these things would come together, but it certainly did for me as well.

58:44 Mark: No, it's always just serendipity.

58:47 Wes: Yeah. I mean, and you could call this treatise Notes on Factionalism. Right? Factionalism is the thing that recurs over and over again. And it's just. He's talking about Orwell's nationalism, nationalism, broadly conceived. So there's so much in common between the stuff that Orwell is thinking about and Spinoza is thinking about here, what's in room 101. What is it that you can do to really control people's minds to the point where they might hate a loved one. Well, it's the worst thing in the world, right? That's what's in room 101, which is really personal.

For Winston, it's rats. And so what it is, it's trauma. And it's through trauma that you make the collective, the group, the faction, a place of intimacy. Right. O'Brien putting his arm around Winston in between torture sessions in a way that's reminiscent of his mother's protective gesture or the refugee's protective gesture towards a child even as they're getting gunned down. The whole goal and what it means to love Big Brother is to make the collective seem like it can be a place of intimacy, seem like it can be like a person that you can relate to.

And it takes trauma to push you there. So that's how you get. Nationalism is basically the way you get people to hate those who they love. It's factionalism. So I think it's completely relevant here because he's on and on about what factionalism does to a society. So even though he's saying you can't control people's minds at this level, and I think he's right to some point in his talk of factionalism, he understands that factionalism could turn parents against children and brother against brother and so on.

1:00:28 Seth: Yeah.

1:00:29 Mark: And in his society, they have Sunday school, the Jewish community equivalent. The trauma of the particular faction imposing its young people to thoroughly attempt to brainwash them. And he wants to at least keep that authority away from private individuals and sects and put it in the hands of the government, which then in turn will be restricted by the fact that he thinks that it will destroy itself if it employs such crazy things.

1:00:56 Wes: Yeah, so that's the other argument. You know, one of them is just that. And in chapter 20, he repeats this idea that it's impossible for a person's mind to be absolutely controlled. But then there are lots of other arguments, and one of them is just that. Basically, governments that oppress freedom of thought and opinion and speech is risky for rulers on the one hand, and it's not consistent with what's good for people and the state. Section three of chapter 20, page 251. So while conceding that they may by natural right employ a high degree of violence in governing and arrest citizens or liquidate them for the most trivial reasons, nevertheless, everyone will agree that this is not consistent with the criteria of sound reason.

Indeed, rulers cannot do such things without great risk to their whole government. Hence, we can also deny that they have absolute power to do these and similar things, and consequently that they possess any complete right to do them. For as we have proved, the right of the sovereign authorities is limited by their power. So they don't have the right to do it because they don't really have the power to do it. They don't have the power to do it because you can't completely Control men's minds and because your government will self destruct if you do that too much.

But then this third thing, which is kind of weird for him to bring up because as Mark pointed out, he doesn't bring it up that often, that it's not beneficial. Which is a whole different standard than that of right.

1:02:18 Dylan: Isn't it in line with the second criteria, the third criteria of self preservation of the government.

1:02:25 Wes: So you could. A monarchy or a tyrannical government. Yeah, I mean, it's in line with self preservation, but yeah, I'd have to think about that.

1:02:33 Dylan: What's weird about it for me is that on the one hand you're admitting that you can do this. It feels a little bit like he's being sanguine about the likelihood of a government being this oppressive because he thinks

1:02:47 Wes: the state will fall apart.

1:02:48 Dylan: That seems cold comfort. If your state is around for 50, 100, 300 years while you're being savagely oppressed and, oh, it falls apart eventually. That seems like cold comfort's the right word.

1:03:03 Wes: There's freedom of thought and then there's freedom of opinion. Right. Those are two different things. So State could really punish your free speech. They could prevent free speech, but they can't. As he says, by the supreme right of nature, everyone remains master of their own thoughts. So leaving aside the Orwell example, the idea is that no matter what the regime, you're still in your own mind. You're free to think what you want.

1:03:25 Dylan: But he refers to some of this earlier, where he has language like, you agree to do these kinds of things even when the state says to do it. And he has a lot of culpability of people agreeing and conceding to authorities above them.

1:03:44 Wes: But that's in the realm of action. So the way he ends this, he basically said, yeah, the sovereign controls everything related to action, but heart and mind, you possess that. That's between you and God and your freedom of thought.

1:03:57 Dylan: All I'm wondering is, and I basically agree, but I'm kind of wondering how awesome that is when you're on the rack just before you go into the Iron Maiden, or that you're enslaved, or that you are sitting at a prospect of debilitating and poverty because of your role as a serf and with no possibility of getting out of that circumstance because of the structure of the government that you're in. That's been true for hundreds of years. I get it. I understand it as part of the stability question. But if you're not in a place where you have a Government that is tolerably designed for the flourishing of all of its citizens. It seems pretty rough.

1:04:45 Mark: You remind me of a. Apparently one of the more famous quotes out of here, but it's from one of the annotations that he wrote after the fact. It's on page 271 of our version. It's an annotation to chapter 16. A person can be free in any civil state whatsoever. For a person is certainly free to the extent that he is guided by reason. However, contrary to what Hobbes says, reason recommends peace without reservation, and peace cannot be had unless the general laws of the state are maintained, contained inviolate. Hence, the more a person is led by reason, that is, the freer he is, the more resolutely he will uphold the laws and obey the commands of the sovereign authority whose subject he is.

1:05:19 Wes: Obedience is freedom. War is peace. Obedience is freedom.

1:05:26 Mark: I was considering this as just part and parcel of the optimism that we see in Plato and Boethius about, you know, if you're evil, you're not going to be happy, and so the same is going to go for a state. If you're a tyrant, it's just not going to work out for you. You're not going to achieve worldly success. Just kind of denying the fact of that apparently truly evil people, or regimes in this case, can achieve their goals and be successful. Like, there's just by definition, part of the faith in God. The faith in God is that you don't believe that. That you believe the world is ultimately just.

1:06:02 Wes: He might historically be right, though, about. I mean, the history may have borne out seems to me bears out the idea that those regimes just don't last very long.

1:06:12 Dylan: Who cares, right? Who cares if you only last for 50 years? Who cares if you only last for 10 years or 100 years or 500 years, whatever it is, right?

1:06:22 Mark: Clearly you need to identify with the bigger whole, Dylan, and not just your own individual short life.

1:06:27 Wes: Come on, Spinoza's not saying it's not a bad thing. I mean, I think this is a good segue into the purpose of the state. And this is section six of chapter 20. We've talked about power and right and the state being necessary to not be in the misery of the state of nature. But this is a more positive account. So section 6. It very clearly follows from the fundamental principles of the state, which I explained above, that its ultimate purpose is not to dominate or control people by fear or subject them to the authority of another. On the contrary, its aim is to free everyone from fear, so that they may live in security so far as possible.

That is, so that they may retain to the highest possible degree their natural right to live and to act without harm to themselves or to others. It is not, I contend, the purpose of the state to turn people from rational beings into beasts or automata, but rather to allow their minds and bodies to develop in their own ways in security and enjoy the free use of reason, and not to participate in conflicts based on hatred, anger or deceit, or in malicious disputes with each other. Therefore, the true purpose of the state is in fact, freedom.

1:07:44 Dylan: Yeah, that's the most awesome paragraph in the whole book.

1:07:47 Wes: That's the climax.

1:07:50 Dylan: So I love that. It's absolutely awesome. And that by itself is like. Where he clearly is pointing is trying to have a community, a government that is all about structure for the sake of the flourishing of the people who are part of that community and even including the supreme authority of that state. That all makes sense. What I find a little bit not disheartening or whatever is the checks and the structure required for making that state work. He seems to think that'll happen more or less naturally, or isn't maybe very astute about what those are.

Some of the basic principles are there. What the state needs to be preserving is there. But something like that would go as far as genuine checks and balances and a government structure that would. Would tame the tyrannical impulses of the leadership. Things like that. He seems to tiptoe up to, but not get all the way there. Which makes you just think that he sees so many oppressive societies around them. He is so interested in just being in a place where he can think what he wants to think. He's a nerd.

1:09:01 Wes: Yeah. So he goes on to say that what you surrender in the state is your right to act according to. To your own will. You have to act according to the will of the sovereign, but not to think or judge. You retain that and there's no restriction on it, except he has some exceptions around hatred, fraud, anger and treason.

1:09:22 Dylan: Yeah.

1:09:23 Wes: And this is where Mark was pointing out, well, yeah, there are limits to free speech.

1:09:27 Dylan: It has to be honest speech, right?

1:09:29 Wes: Well, I don't know if it has to be honest. It just can't be fraudulent, at least in my translation.

1:09:33 Dylan: What's the difference?

1:09:34 Wes: Because you could lie without defrauding someone. To defraud is to lie in order to get something out of them, to take their property or something like that.

1:09:43 Dylan: I think we're reading the same translation. Mine says that provided they speak or teach by way of reason alone, not by trickery or in anger or from hatred, or with the intention of introducing some alteration in the state on their own initiative. So trickery, fraud, so the limits to

1:10:00 Wes: free speech, that becomes a very, very complicated subject. I would read Spinoza as putting in those general caveats, but probably being quite a libertarian, really, when it comes down to it, on those things.

1:10:12 Dylan: Yeah, I think that's so.

1:10:13 Wes: For instance, the problem with saying something like, well, let's outlaw hate speech or racist speech is that, first of all, there are actually benefits to people being able to express their hatreds in society as opposed to simply acting on them. But aside from that, it comes down to, well, what's racism? Some people now have very, very broad definitions of racism, and it could be as simple as a microaggression. So then your task comes down to defining that and saying which particular expressions of racism are okay and which aren't, and based on what criteria, when they're actually criteria independent of that, which have to do really with harm.

And that really are not racism specific. So, for instance, you can't say, just go up to someone on the street and say, f you. That's kind of the fighting words restriction, or yelling fire in a crowded theater. And I would even say, you know, marching through Catholic neighborhoods. If you're Ulster Unionists, I see that as an act of intimidation. There are lots of exceptions for free speech that surround the idea of harm, actual harm. But you can't just say, oh, well, it'll be okay as long as we're just going to outlaw the bad things, you know, the bad people's bad thoughts and the bad things they might say.

That, of course, is a slippery slope because, you know, people disagree about what's good and what's bad. And that's really where a lot of the political debate lies. So you would really just be ruling on in many cases for one side of a political debate. I think when someone like Spinoza points to the freedom of thought and the importance of it, we have to take that really radically. I think we have to say that it's important actually that people have the freedom to have bad thoughts, that they have people freedom to have sinful thoughts, licentious thoughts, hateful thoughts.

It's when the speech verges on action that that becomes a problem. We don't want people to act on those things. But trying to purify their thoughts, purify people of all their bad thoughts, is actually not the way to get them to behave. And he even says that in here, the more you deprive people of the freedom of speech, he says in section 11, the more they resist. So the more you try and purify people's thoughts, I think the more bad action you're going to get.

1:12:25 Mark: The quote you just read doesn't mean what you just said. It means, though, it doesn't talk about purification or bad thoughts.

1:12:32 Wes: I know, I'm generalizing. He's talking about freedom of speech in that particular.

1:12:36 Mark: Okay, let me read an actual quote from him. So, bottom of page 253, we've seen from the principles of the state how everyone may enjoy liberty of judgment without prejudice to the right of the sovereign power on the basis of the same principles. We can also readily determine which opinions are subversive in a given state. It is those views which, simply for being put forward, dissolve the agreement by which each person surrenders their right to act according to their own judgment. For example, it is seditious for anyone to hold that a sovereign power does not have an autonomous right, or that one should not keep a promise, or that everyone should live according to their own judgment and other views of this kind which are directly contrary to, to the aforesaid agreement.

So I would think a lot of, like, protests and things would be ruled out here. It is subversive, not so much because of the judgments and opinions in themselves as because of the actions which such views imply. By the very fact that someone thinks such a thing, they are tacitly, explicitly breaking the pact that they made with the sovereign, even thinking such a thing. Not that you should necessarily try to outlaw it because you really can't. It is still bad. Accordingly, all other opinions which do not imply such act as breaking agreement or vengeance or anger, etc.

Are not subversive, except perhaps in a state which is corrupt.

1:13:46 Wes: Well, we're talking about treason and we're thinking about it as planning or conspiracy, which is the way the law treats it as. Well, you could be conspiring to be treasonous. This is treason in particular, though.

1:13:57 Mark: But treason is taken very strongly where you're not just like, perniciously, ah, I'm going to overthrow the government. But, like, the government has decided something and you decide to go against that. So I don't like the deal that my government has made.

1:14:11 Wes: That's just breaking the law. I mean, government decides that murder is wrong and you commit murder and you've committed treason. I don't think so.

1:14:18 Mark: Yeah, it's very much like the crito,

1:14:21 Wes: that every time you break the law, it's Treason.

1:14:23 Mark: Exactly. It's like the Crito. You are. You are breaking your. That's Spinoza's view.

1:14:29 Dylan: No, I don't know, Mark.

1:14:30 Mark: You're breaking the agreement that you have with the state to give up your judgment for them.

1:14:36 Dylan: You think that goes so far?

1:14:37 Mark: I'm not using the word treason. Like, I don't see the word treason all over here in this section that Wes says that I just read is about treason. The word treason is not in here. It's just. It's breaking the compact. So I'm not saying it's the worst kind of thing you can do.

1:14:50 Dylan: In this section that you read From Mark, Section 9, that line says, determine which opinions are subversive in a given state. And it doesn't seem to me that any kind of breaking of a law would be subversive to the state.

1:15:04 Wes: Yeah, I agree.

1:15:06 Dylan: I would read subversion as equivalent to treason and not that I go and steal an orange. That's not subversion.

1:15:14 Wes: I think that we should have a minimum income for people, but the state, currently, the law is against that. I mean, in that case, you wouldn't even have the right to lobby for different laws, like, because the laws on the books, you wouldn't be allowed to have opinions contrary to what is the law. And it doesn't make any sense. You wouldn't be able to legislate. It can't be that opinions that are currently out of sync with current law are necessarily subversive.

1:15:44 Dylan: It's also wholly contradictory to the whole section here about freedom of speech. There has to be more than saying that you disagree with a law. Clearly, you can say, you can disagree with the law.

1:15:56 Mark: You can say it. But the state could, for instance, regulate how and where you could say it, I think, according to Spinoza. So that's why I thought that our classic examples of peaceful protest of I'm going to sit in the road so you can't pass. So I can protest whatever economic thing or whatever injustice. I think. I don't think Spinoza would allow that. I think that would be a specifically undermining through action.

1:16:23 Wes: I disagree. I don't see why you couldn't protest.

1:16:26 Dylan: And we also have it that those people can get arrested. In fact, they aren't allowed to do that. They are breaking the law doing that. And the fact that people do successfully sit in the road for a certain amount of time has wholly to do with trying to make sure managing the public space on the place of the authorities that they are choosing not to go in and arrest Those people in those cases, but they totally have the right to, by law, to go do that.

1:16:54 Wes: An opinion that's subversive to the state in a democracy is. I think democracy is bad. We ought to have a monarch and a dictatorship or something like that.

1:17:03 Dylan: We ought to secede.

1:17:05 Wes: Yeah, let's secede. So you're not allowed to lobby for that. On Spinoza's view, that's lobbying for the dissolution of the state.

1:17:12 Dylan: That guy in Texas who is constantly advocating for the secession of Texas, Texas from the Union. I would agree that on Spinoza's view, that would be treasonous.

1:17:23 Mark: All right. Well, not a lot really rests on this point of interpretation, because you could still see him as, given his historical time and place, amazingly liberal, and thereby laying the groundwork for even more radical takes on free speech, et cetera, et cetera. It's just the only issue is whether you see the words here about it as themselves inspiring or you merely grant that as a piece of the historical puzzle. It sure is great that Spinoza was around to inspire those that in turn inspire those that inspire us.

1:17:57 Dylan: To underline my part of it, the next section 10. He says, trying to control everything by laws will encourage vices rather than correcting them. Things which cannot be prevented must necessarily be allowed, even though they are often harmful. How many evils arise from extravagance, from envy, greed, drunkenness, and so on? These are nevertheless tolerated because they cannot be prevented by authority of the law, even though they really are vices. How much more should liberty of judgment be conceded, which is without question a virtue, and cannot be suppressed? Further, the disadvantages which do arise from it can all be avoided by the authority of the magistrates. I should also add further that this liberty is absolutely essential to the advancement of the arts and sciences, for they can be cultivated with success only by those with a free and unfettered judgment.

1:18:50 Mark: Are there more sections in here we need to hit, or can we give sort of closing statements?

1:18:54 Wes: Let's close it out.

1:18:56 Mark: Seth, start us on your closing.

1:18:58 Seth: I keep going back to listening to us talk about the ethics from 2010. And one of the things that Wes was very enamored with the ethics. He thought it would be really dry and tedious, but that he found himself enjoying it. And I have a special kind of feeling. I have a special sort of disposition towards Spinoza. And there's an elegance to his movement from metaphysics to. To ethics with a natural religion that sort of grounds his political philosophy. And he is in some way an epitome of a systematic philosopher. In that he has this complete picture of the way things are, the way people should be, and it hangs together neatly around a very well ordered structure based on reason.

So he acknowledges the passions, but rather than putting reason in the service of overcoming them, sort of acknowledges that they're there. And he uses revelation as a way to supplement or somehow overcome the deficiencies that Plato and Aristotle, Plato specifically tried to put reason in the service of. So there's this magic in the way that he managed to bring all this stuff together and the fact that he was doing it the time he was, in the circumstances he was. I find him particularly admirable. I feel very strongly that his notion of universal religion and the fact that the trappings of religion, of organized religion, are merely that trappings, and that the key message of love one's neighbor as oneself.

I can't speak for the other monotheistic religions, but it strikes me as getting right to the heart of what a moral system should be and then extending it into the political sphere and taking the tact where he combines it with this notion of God as an eternal substance. I saw echoes of Schopenhauer's universal will here. So he's still my favorite philosopher. And the more we read of him, the more I saw echoes of subsequent philosophers in him, and the more I feel as though he achieved something spectacular, unprecedented, and since then, unparalleled in the history of philosophy.

1:21:44 Mark: Well, I guess I would generalize what I was just saying about my take on his free speech in terms of I don't admire him as much as I admire people who he influenced or rose removed from that. I just think that he himself, even though he was very much in favor of things like not reading the Bible literally, which is, I think, great, but he was so careful, at least in this treatise that had specific audience in mind of skating a thin line so as not to offend people. Yet it gives rise to these things we had some back and forth about. Well, maybe piety is just a matter of action, but yet action requires some belief.

You do actually have to believe in God and believe. Oh, but, but we could reinterpret those beliefs, that they really just melt down to just action. Like, there's a weird dynamic here that I don't find particularly stable. Like, I. I would not come away as a Spinozist in this sense. I didn't have quite this reaction when we were reading the Ethics, which again, is more of a straight up text of metaphysics, for one thing. Although maybe if I thought about the specifics more There I would likewise feel like, yeah, I don't actually like Spinoza's monism, but I like monism in general.

And just the fact that he was a monist and made monism okay, it was a great service. I also mentioned a lot of the sort of modern things that creep into his practical advice regarding statecraft, which is the one thing I think we really didn't touch on so much here as well as maybe you shouldn't be a tyrant. But he also just in considering really at great length ancient Israel and then he's got whole sections of the Tractatus Politicus where he's even just like, well I don't really like monarchy that much, but if you, if you're going to have a monarch, here's how you should do it and here's how the assembly, you know, who should be allowed to have kids.

So like, one of the things he says when he's talking about ancient Israel is it was kind of good that post Moses, there was a division of power between the rulers, the judges and then the priests, because the priests kind of would answer questions about the will of God, but they were not themselves rulers. So it wasn't actually a theocracy at that point. So in other words, he's advocating separation of powers, which is very forward thinking thing to think back then. And there are lots of other examples of just little things like that that you could again see some shape of ideas that were hugely influential in the future.

Another good thing about the ancient state of Israel is nobody felt like they were being subject to someone who was their equal. Like people are pissed off if someone is ordering them around who they see as their equal equal or the fact that land was divided equally between all of them and they would keep that land in perpetuity even if they kind of lost it in some kind of economic exchange, it would be restored to them. So he has a lot of these little pieces of advice that perhaps would make a state more stable. He explicitly mentions Machiavelli in one point in the Tractatus Politicus he says the most ingenious Machiavelli is giving this advice on how to keep a state intact.

Even though, you know, of course Machiavelli was maybe serving self serving tyrant wannabes still he was talking about stable statecraft. And just the fact that like that kind of influence got straight into Spinoza here in a way that I don't see in Locke or in Hobbes or other folks like that makes me find this a very rich text.

1:25:04 Dylan: I really like this book and going through it again, the piece that just sticks out to me is just how much he is about the orientation of the state is for the proper flourishing of its citizens. And that part of it, whether it be through freedom of speech or through the disposition of the government, and that he's trying to cut this path through taming the tyrant and reducing rebellion. It all resonates for me. And I think he does really a good job with it. I think the part where I find it most wanting is just that it is in a lot of ways aspirational, even if it's trying to be very convincing on the religion side and that religion is subject to the state. It makes me think more of the work done in something like the Federalist Papers to structure a state so that you could realize those ambitions.

1:26:05 Wes: Obviously. Yeah, I really love Spinoza as well. But the thing I would want to think more about is that whole obedience, freedom dynamic and the sense in which we're related. And it's kind of a recurring theme philosophically. And here comes the inevitable psychoanalysis connection. I also thought about Lacan and Freud, so in our Lacan episodes, part of what it means to become a subject. And here I'm thinking in terms of a subject as a human being within self conscious inwardness, as opposed to a subject in the state. But I think they're related.

But anyway, so for Lacan, to become a subject means to become a subject to the law, to these things, these prohibitions and rules, and sort of the cultural stuff that one internalizes. It's at that point that you become a subject. And I think here for Spinoza, I like his emphasis on the importance of obedience and the way in which becoming a subject in a state is actually essential to our freedom and our subjectivity, let's say, that goes along with that. So that whole dynamic is something I would need to think a lot more about before I could really say anything coherent about it other than what I just said.

1:27:15 Mark: Today's closing musical selection I thought appropriate, given the limits of speech discussion, is a song called Shit Talkers. It's by Ken Stringfellow. And this very song is discussed by me and Ken on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 39. You can check out that podcast@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com well, next time we're going to be talking about Hume's dialogues on natural religion. Folks should go take part in this discussion by going to partiallyexaminedlife.com joining our Facebook group, following us on Twitter. There are lots of ways to get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you. Thanks guys for insightful and really long conversation.

1:27:54 Wes: Yeah.

1:27:55 Mark: Good night everybody.

1:27:57 Wes: Good night.

1:27:57 Unknown speaker: Good night. Ha.

1:28:28 Mark: A bad sign.

1:28:31 Unknown speaker: It was an overnight wait. Kids in the clubs won't even touch this stuff. It's a hard sell. Act not heaven, act not stay a hand cause I can't recall telling me how I feel the hurt it was so real a bat dude won't protect me from you boys you should have come to me first. Who's gonna help you now shit talkers? Who's gonna help paint your skies all the unpaid beauty. Back when you started there was envy all around you and your set of sides became so acquainted. The parano is antiquated. I was into you cuz you were so understudied. But take it all back cuz I don't want your bright money you you were into me for the last time I got news for this town. All you shit talkers. Unlicensed dog walkers, we're about tax enemy heartstalkers you can take it oh

1:30:12 Seth: and

1:30:12 Unknown speaker: put it where the pope don't even smile. You only do it cause you're bored. Shit talk us have you somewhere else do what I always did keep building the street safe from american kids. Back when you started there was envy all around you and your set of size became so acquainted, paranoia, antiquated I was into you cause you were so understanding. We'll take it all back cause I don't want your blood money. You were into me for the last time over innocence it never was a good game sooner or later you flick up in the eyes of pain. Immolation's absolute you can't say what you said and give up the cutest high, high, high highs defamations absolute. Take it all back what you said now take it back you went behind my back for the very last time.