"After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness."
Controversial pantheistic doctrine of Dutch philosopher and theologian Baruch Spinoza or Benedict advocated an intellectual love of God; people best know Ethics, his work of 1677.
People came considered this great rationalist of 17th century.
In his posthumous magnum opus, he opposed mind鈥揵ody dualism of Ren茅 Descartes and earned recognition of most important thinkers of west. This last indisputable Latin masterpiece, which Spinoza wrote, finally turns and entirely destroys the refined medieval conceptions.
After death of Baruch Spinoza, often Benedictus de Spinoza, people realized not fully his breadth and importance until many years. He laid the ground for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern Biblical criticism, including conceptions of the self and arguably the universe. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporaries, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
Back in the somnambulant sixties, when the sneaky sneers of the sophomoric know-it-all鈥檚 at my uni, good old Button-Down U, (oh, you know it, do you? Give it a boot in the old caboose for me!) wore away my weary mental acuity with sheer ennui - I, one happy summer day, chanced on this book.
It reinvigorated my languishing spirit. It polished up the trophies of my youthful idealism and carefully placed them at the top of my highest bookshelf.
For with one pointed swathe of his rapier wit Spinoza sliced my burgeoning enemy the Minotaur鈥檚 right hoof clean off. And I was temporarily freed.
For Spinoza said the existence of God is an analytically true proposition - because His Essence involves Existence.
In fact, His existence is the One Thing we know for sure!
Spinoza had started his quest in On the Improvement of Understanding...
How can I make my mind Sharper, he asked himself?
How, in other words, can I see through the Bullies鈥� prevarications and their leading me down the old garden path into the Slough of my own Ugly Embarrassment?
And how can I tell if the information I鈥檓 receiving about the world is True... or a Lie?
I鈥檝e gotta stay alert!
How do I do that?
Like this: in this first unfinished masterpiece, Spinoza begins the long process of self-discovery to which the final triumphant capstone was the Ethics - one of the books that saved Albert Einstein鈥檚 young soul, and gave him the Confidence he鈥檇 later NEED for the many years he would live Wandering in the Wilderness - and being mercilessly LAUGHED AT by the World.
Until he became its Hero.
For yes, God exists. Maybe not the God you know in your churches, mosques or synagogues, in the early stages of the Encounter - but a God you can KNOW.
As Pure Being.
Pure Being IS. It involves, by extension and in its plenitude, the existence of all of us who now temporarily exist. And its Essence involves Existence. It cannot NOT be. And this Being Spinoza calls Nature.
NonBeing, though, cannot BE. Never could, never can. Nothingness is NOT.
You do not 鈥榞o back鈥� to Nothingness when you die...
There鈥檚 no such thing.
This Being, however, seems uncompromising to us in its pure self-sufficiency. Heidegger says we sense its proximity in the personal feeling of anxiety.
Its apparent objectivity - that which seizes us as a nothingness - is daunting.
Such then, is our quest, Spinoza seems to say. And such lucid awareness can not be long endured, as Susan Sontag found when faced with the terror of death by cancer.
But through maintaining a high level of awareness in the lengthy course of our own lives, Being will eventually - as Spinoza must have found - be subsumed within our traditional knowledge of the God of the theistic religions, and the No-self of nontheistic Buddhism.
Hic labor est - hic opus: for such is the Quest!
With this fateful outlook, Baruch Spinoza gave a SOUL to Science.
And he gave ME back my soul, in the days of those soulless minions of Button-Down U.
It is unfortunate that a lot of good philosophical thinking is undone by a few bad presuppositions. Such is the case with Benedictus de Spinoza's On the Improvement of the Understanding. This booklet is a great example of the extreme confidence in human rationality which characterized the Enlightenment (though it is not light reading)
For example, "The mind, in paying attention to a thing hypothetical or false, so as to meditate upon it and understand it, and derive the proper conclusions in due order therefrom, will readily discover its falsity"
or
"if we proceed with as little abstraction as possible, and begin from primary elements -- that is, from the source and origin of nature, as far back as we can reach -- we need not fear any deceptions"
In other words, if you think about something long enough, you can figure out what is false. This idea is patently false itself. Karl Marx thought about Marxism for a long, long time and STILL thought it would work.
What I thought was telling is that even this early in the age of confidence in reason, Spinoza has already realized that he needs an unshakable foundation to argue from. For the religious person, this is faith. But modern folks have forgotten Spinoza's lesson, that you can't know anything unless you can know something without doubt. And as Hume later shows, and Nietzsche with him, there is no way to prove anything without doubt.
My favorite quote is this "happiness or unhappiness is made wholly dependent on the quality of the object which we love."
Spinoza was a real sweetheart; one can't help but admire and sympathise with the enthusiasm with which he endeavors after truth. On the Improvement of the Understanding was one of his earliest writings; it was never completed. A lot of what he discusses and explores here would be more thoroughly developed in his masterpiece, The Ethics. Indeed, this book provides the Spinoza fan with many fascinating insights into some of his most impressive and lauded notions, presented here in their germinal form. One can already find the sketches for ideas such as the parallelism of EIIP7, the conceptualisation of acting vs. being acted upon, monism, the associative nature of memory, and the internal positivity of ideas.
Spinoza wants to understand the power of the understanding, as far as the understanding can be understood... And he wants to help us get there too. As is befitting an enlightenment era philosopher, the standard of truth is paramount to him. Indeed, one can imagine a devilish smirk lighting his face as he writes of the Skeptics: "If they affirm or doubt anything, they know not that they affirm or doubt: they say that they know nothing, and they say that they are ignorant of the very fact of their knowing nothing. Even this they do not affirm absolutely, they are afraid of confessing that they exist, so long as they know nothing; in fact, they ought to remain dumb, for fear of haply supposing something which should smack of truth."
Later on, in the Ethics, Spinoza will tweak and redefine his notions regarding truth, falsity and fiction. Here, as pertains to true ideas, he seems to be saying that they must either be conceived through their essences or through their proximate causes. As I grasp it, essence-ideas are those which are known through themselves... perhaps we can say that this is an intuitive knowledge; these ideas need not be explained by anything outside of themselves. The two sides of the cogito seem to give us examples of this: whilst I am existing I cannot deny or hypothesize upon whether or not I exist; likewise, whilst I am thinking. Another example that I like to spin around in my brain is that I cannot deny that my thirst is quenched when it is quenched. Each of these cases seem to represent inner truths. The idea in our mind here has precisely no difference to the experience; the thought in our mind is a pure representation of the experience.
As pertains to knowledge through proximate cause, Spinoza again gives us a very convincing example. He tells us that a true definition of any thing must encompass its proximate cause; it must not merely explain its properties. Saying that a circle is "a figure such that all straight lines drawn from the centre to the circumference are equal" clearly does not contain the cause of the circle, it merely points out an extrinsic characteristic. On the other hand, a true definition of a circle would be "the figure described by any line whereof one end is fixed and the other free." Could a skeptic respond?
Spinoza's philosophy encompasses nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. It earned Spinoza an enduring reputation as one of the most important and original thinkers of the seventeenth century.
Samuel Shirley, who translated Spinoza's complete works into English, summed up the significance of Spinoza's philosophy as follows:
To my mind, although Spinoza lived and thought long before Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and the startling implications of quantum theory, he had a vision of truth beyond what is normally granted to human beings.[1]
Spinoza's philosophy is largely contained in two books: the Theologico-Political Treatise, and the Ethics. The former was published during his lifetime, but the latter, which contains the entirety of his philosophical system in its most rigorous form, was not published until after his death in 1677. The rest of the writings we have from Spinoza are either earlier, or incomplete, works expressing thoughts that were crystallized in the two aforementioned books (e.g., the Short Treatise and the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect), or else they are not directly concerned with Spinoza's own philosophy (e.g., The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy and The Hebrew Grammar). He also left behind many letters that help to illuminate his ideas and provide some insight into what may have been motivating his views.
first book in vacation it's a very short preview for all Spinoza's philosophy not only this book 1- Spinoza's Metaphysics we can deal with Spinoza's rational philosophy as a stoic pantheism as a part of speculative metaphysics of 17th century like Decart's and Leibniz's metaphysics . his metaphysics depends mainly on scientific method on proving the double aspect monism view of world . Spinoza's world consists of one all-inclusive being substance of TWO attributes : 1-Thought which is conscious intelligible organization of world 2-Extension which is material existence God for the Spinoza is the only overall infinite truth . other conditions can be described as a finite moments of thought or physical condition in the all inclusive one (God) . so we can consider modes ( today or yesterday thoughts or bodily condition ) as a modifications or changes within an infinite non changeable all-inclusive truth (god) .
2-Spinoza's Epistemology :
there are three kinds of knowledge A-opinion : referring to senses experiences for him this kind isn't reliable can lead us to delusions B- imagination : it's some sort of knowledge we gain by deduction and can mislead us in different sites C-Reason : is the clear indistinct knowledge like knowledge we find in mathematic for him we find truth only this sort of knowledge
Spinoza's Ethics :
Spinoza's find that Good and evil is some sort of imagination . we are confused when we see that some act is a good and other is bad . our pleasure comes only when our will coincides with nature of world when we realize that our finite thought or acts is determined by previous mode of nature or thought which is all-inclusive in god's essence .
I got an impression of self-righteousness of the writer along my reading. And there seems also a force of ideas that the readers must agree with, and if a reader doesn't agree, then they "must either be arguing in bad faith, or [he] must confess that there are men in complete mental blindness either innate or due to misconceptions..."; that such readers are just automata who don't know what they are talking about because they don't agree with him. And I also got an impression that the writer is trying to lead his readers to accept the existence of God. This isn't said out loud, but in the end all his abstract ideas go to the (forced) conclusion that God exists--which can be seen from his explanation at the end of the book. Here I have to say that I believe in God, but I just don't like the way Spinoza herd his readers to that idea in such a blanketed way, as if his readers are just fools who will automatically accept his statement once the blanket is uncovered. And all this is made more obnoxious by the abstract and ambiguous writing.
Generally dull. Except for one claim: you can always, always, find what is a lie by breaking it down into its smallest parts. There are no exceptions.
鈥淚deas which are clear and distinct can never be false: for ideas of things clearly and distinctly conceived are either very simple themselves or are compounded from very simple ideas鈥� that is, are deduced therefrom. The impossibility of a very simple idea being false is evident to everyone who understands the nature of truth or understanding and of falsehood.鈥�
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
T眉rk莽e 莽eviri kitaplar谋 daha pahal谋 olunca ingilizcesini alay谋m zaten film dizi izlerken dil problemi ya艧am谋yorum demi艧tim , demez olayd谋m. 陌lk defa ingilicze felsefe kitab谋 okudum ve roman ya da hikaye kitaplar谋na g枚re ger莽ekten a臒谋r bir dil kullan谋l谋yormu艧.
Spinoza y una muy bien lograda visi贸n del genero humano y de sus verdades y falsedades, mas el m茅todo para su identificaci贸n. La profundidad de esta obra me impiden hacer un review significativo, cada cual le debe dar su interpretaci贸n a mi me aporto bastante
Fiquei um pouco decepcionada por faltar uma parte quando estava acompanhando o racioc铆nio - mesmo tendo sido avisada no pr贸logo. Mas ainda assim, me senti instigada a procurar mais obras do Spinoza. Gosto muito da tem谩tica.
This short book, unfinished and energetic, is a fascinating glimpse into the autobiographical motivations and the almost superhuman optimism of this brilliant Enlightenment thinker.
The basic argument of the text, also found in Ethics, is that knowledge is power and the route to lasting happiness. Newly acquired (rational or empirical) knowledge, or, what comes to the same thing, the emendation of our false ideas into true ones, can increase our powers of flourishing.
As an introduction to the empowering philosophy of Spinoza this is not to be recommended. Ethics should serve best for that. The text of this treatise is unfinished, and the arguments incomplete.
One feels that a lot of things are left unsaid, and problems inadequately dealt with. The writing is lucid and crystal clear, as one would expect from an Euclidean whose style anticipates analytical philosophy, but the arguments can be tough to follow. The self-evidence of some propositions is intended to be taken at face value. Unlike Ethics, or his political works, the leaps of logic, here, can be counter-intuitive; and the missing sections would undoubtedly have clarified some issues.
But the genius of Spinoza is in full display in some of the remarkable statements, especially those that deal with the nature of knowledge. He highlights the human need for rational standards of self-evidence (in the vein of Descartes). And while he overestimates, from today's standpoint, the capacity of human minds to conceive of true, self-evident statements - and consequently underestimates our capacity for systematic and well-meaning error - he does acknowledge the difficulty of the undertaking of acquiring true knowledge in the face of the complex order of nature.
There is an ambiguity between Spinoza's enthusiastic view of the powers of human reasoning and his anthropologically acute and psychologically realistic estimation of our fallibility and follies. (The latter perspective might be subdued and underdeveloped, but it complements his rationalism.)
Familiar themes from Ethics abound: the intimate relationship between the order of necessary truths (both analytic and synthetic, to use Kantian terminology) and the necessary order of nature; the role of God/Nature as the ultimate foundation and immanent cause of the necessary order of the world; and the relationship between human knowledge, human powers and human happiness.
Spinoza's optimism can be either off-putting or exhilarating, depending on one's mood and disposition. The fundamental quest for clear and distinct ideas as the immanent basis of knowledge is supposed to serve as a self-evidently reliable and powerful measure of truth and falsity in our fierce and unapologetic quest to expand our human powers, and thus human happiness, towards ever-higher levels of achievements - a paradise in this life to replace the paradise in the next one.
Whether the Enlightenment attempt to perfect knowledge and supreme happiness succeeds or not - the evidence so far is ambiguous - it is an undertaking worth pursuing, if only to know where the limits are, rather than giving up before we even try to go forward. And nobody pursued this further than Spinoza. Whether human psychology is ever capable of reaching absolute levels of certainty, and whether lasting happiness truly is within the reach of mere mortals, the mere belief in the possibility of human transcendence within our own lifetimes might serve as a motivating force to rid ourselves of harmful unrealistic dreams, otherworldly reveries and supernatural consolations.
Out of all the myriad and trendy attempts to replace humanity with humanity plus, living as we do in the age of progress, I believe Spinoza's is the least perverse. Transhumanism is 400 years old.