▶︎ 0:02 We have discussed the general nature of affectivity and the way that it informs our emotional lives and our mental lives, because affects are ideas essentially. And we talked a bit about joy and a bit about sadness, and now we want to talk about the most important affect of all, which is love.
▶︎ 0:22 Now, the fact that love is the most important affect is well known throughout several thinkers in the history of philosophy, most notably Plato, but also Augustinus, and that's a funny way of saying his name, but I never know how. Augustinus. There were a few medieval Jewish philosophers who were very interested in love, such as Yehuda Abu Haim. But oftentimes it also, since Plato put it so high on the pedestal in his erotic dialogues, it really did suffer a lack of appreciation, and maybe because, as it's so popular to blame today in identity politics, the fact that it was men, often unmarried, often without children, and then their appreciation of the importance of love in natural life was maybe diminished perhaps. I don't know.
▶︎ 1:18 Spinoza does not necessarily openly put love at the center of his theory of affectivity, but when you look for it, you understand that it is the single most important thread that runs through his work. So we have three versions of love, which correspond to the three kinds of knowledge that we have. Before I go more fully into what each kind of love entails, I want to read the definition of love.
▶︎ 1:47 It's in part three of the affects, the part that we discussed in the earlier lecture, Proposition thirteen in the scholium. So it's buried down in the scholium. It's in Proposition thirteen. It's after quite a few affects that have already been discussed. And he says this: "Love is nothing but joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause." And he immediately goes on to hate. "And hate is nothing but sadness with the accompanying idea of an external cause."
▶︎ 2:18 So it's really important to remind ourselves what joy and sadness actually are. Joy is an increase in our ability to act, and sadness is a decrease in our ability to act. So love is associating some object with an increase for our ability to act. Love is what we want to be next to when we want to do stuff. And if we can't be next to it, we will conjure up the image of the beloved thing because we feel that it helps us do more, be more. And that is why, very much like Plato, Spinoza is latching onto the idea that love is first and foremost an expansion of the self.
▶︎ 3:07 What does it mean that love is an expansion of the self in the classic sense? It means that through love, what we experience is that what we want for the beloved is what we want for ourselves. So we talked about before about seeing ourselves in the other, and that this being the basis of moral character. This is why love is the basis of all morality, because it is a sense in which I see myself in the beloved.
▶︎ 3:34 So I love my children. If you ask me why I want what's best for my children, it's not because I want them to be happy or pleased, and then I will be pleased and happy because my life will be easier, and they will fight less with me about brushing their teeth in the morning. This has nothing to do with it. I want my children to be happy because I experience them as an expansion of myself, and I want them to be happy even if I have no knowledge of it.
▶︎ 4:03 I will act in a purposeful manner to secure their happiness, even if I have no experience of it whatsoever. If it's after I'm dead, if I'm deaf and blind, if I'm somewhere else. I just want them to be happy because their happiness is my happiness. This is what signifies love. So it's a joy, but Spinoza here
▶︎ 4:28 He is emphasizing that it's a passion in the sense that it is accompanied by the idea of an external thing. So it's not self-love. He will have a really interesting differentiation between true self-love and non-authentic self-love, in which sometimes I can think of my own self as an external object which I try to pamper up. This is a very bad understanding of the self, and this is self-love which sees the self itself as an external cause.
▶︎ 4:58 When people think that they indulge themselves through self-love, well, actually their self-indulgence is feeding to an image of their own selves and not their true selves, which constitutes nothing but understanding. This is a really common misconception of what it means to love oneself. So even self-love can be joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause and not an internal cause.
▶︎ 5:28 Good. We understand why love is so central to the ethical project, and we will see that Spinoza really does acknowledge it through all three types of knowledge.
▶︎ 5:41 Most forms of love have an imaginative basis. Because we experience the thing as external, and then we want to be close to it. So I need an external object which causes me joy, which causes me an increase in my ability to act. Usually, this is experienced very clearly, not as love per se, but as beauty.
▶︎ 6:10 Beauty is constituted by love, and we only love what is beautiful because we think that something is beautiful only because we love it, and we don't love it because we think it's beautiful. So understanding that something is good or beautiful pertains to us attributing a value to it. This value has to do with the way that we personally react to the thing, and this is what constitutes our sense of love. If we do not find that thing beautiful or good anymore, that means we don't love it.
▶︎ 6:46 But actually, this is how we sense it. Actually, the order of causality is reversed. We think something is beautiful because we love it, because we want it. The beauty is constituted by the love and not the other way around. Usually, we think when we see something, we see it's beautiful, and then we say, "I love it." And we think that the beauty preceded, but this is not the case.
▶︎ 7:08 And the easiest way to relate to this is when we see something that we think is beautiful, and then we want to be near it, and then after we get to know it a bit more, we understand it more, we go through these. We intensify our knowledge of the thing. Suddenly, we don't love it anymore, and suddenly it's not even beautiful. So everything is the other way around.
▶︎ 7:29 And by the way, the more that we learn to love something, the more we know it, and the more we love it, the more beautiful it would seem. So, beauty is completely constituted by love. That's why when people give up after three dates, it's funny because beauty, attraction is not necessarily something that is supposed to be there at the beginning. It's supposed to be there after knowledge. But this is another mistake of individuation.
▶︎ 7:59 This is how love manifests, and then Spinoza has a very, very clear idea of the way this emotion runs our life. Through our willingness to possess the thing we love and be as much with it as possible because it gives us a very strong sense of self. It makes us feel an increase in our ability to act. We can either want to empower it in a good way, in the proper way, through knowledge, or we would want to be possessive of it.
▶︎ 8:32 Usually, our will to possess it will eventually dissipate the relationship with the thing that we have thought we loved, and this is obviously a very painful thing for many people. This is what they usually experience. This is always a failure of understanding.
▶︎ 8:48 Now, one of the interesting things that happens when we proceed through the stages of knowledge with things that we love is that the feeling that we have that is strongly manifested in the imaginative early stages of love, which pertain to the idiosyncrasy of the individual, their irreplaceableness, their very strong sense of individuality, that's what falling in love feels like, like nothing can be like this. This is something that has to make way to an appreciation of rational common properties. The important thing to understand is that this needn't be something painful. This can be a deepening of affection, this letting go of idiosyncrasy, this letting go of the singularity of the beloved object.
▶︎ 9:41 This is very hard to reconcile. So a lot of very weak-minded people would rather fall in love to feel the rush with various people and then prevent themselves from getting to know them because they are addicted to this first notion of very strong. They are just, they have weak minds. They do not understand what is truly beneficial to them.
▶︎ 10:07 Now, a love can be deepened, especially with someone who has a maximal amount of shared common properties with the individual. So this is very important. The matchmaking truism that people should share values and should share histories and should share things in order to be as much attached as possible, this makes a lot of sense in Spinoza. But of course, at the end of the day, what he would want us to do is to get to the common properties which are as wide as possible.
▶︎ 10:40 And this is why in the Spinozistic progression from imaginative love to rational love, the highest form of rational love that can be imagined is friendship. This is the Aristotelian ideal of seeing the other as another self, seeing the vast degree of common properties with the other as a precise expansion of the self, and then seeing all human beings as brethrens in that sense. It's a sense of camaraderie. It's a sense of appreciation of common properties, which he calls friendship, and which leads to what he calls nobility.
▶︎ 11:22 This is a dark aspect of love. We can go to part three, proposition 35, which reads like this. If someone imagines that a thing he loves is united with another by as close or by a closer bond of friendship than that which he himself alone possessed the thing, he will be affected with hate toward the thing he loves and will envy the other.
▶︎ 11:43 And this is the demonstration to the proposition. The greater the love with which someone imagines a thing he loves to be affected toward him, the more he will exalt at being esteemed. That is, the more he will rejoice. And so he will strive as far as he can to imagine the thing he loves to be bound to him as closely as possible. This striving or appetite is encouraged if he imagines another to desire the same thing he does.
▶︎ 12:08 So when we see other people looking at our spouse, for example, as if they are attracted to them, at first it can be very pleasing to us. Because we feel that the thing we love is esteemed by someone else also. But the striving or appetite is supposed to be restrained by the image of the thing he loves, accompanied by the image of him with whom the thing he loves is united, so he will thereby be affected with sadness. This is jealousy. Accompanied by the idea of the thing he loves as a cause together with the image of the other. That is, he will be affected with hate toward the thing he loves.
▶︎ 12:45 When people feel jealousy, it actually engenders a hate toward the beloved thing, because suddenly the beloved thing has become a source of sadness to the individual. So he will be affected with hate toward the thing he loves, and at the same time toward the other, whom he will envy because of the pleasure the other takes in the thing he loves.
▶︎ 13:06 And the scholium says this. This hatred toward the thing we love, combined with envy, is called jealousy, which is therefore nothing but a vacillation of mind born of love and hatred together, accompanied by the idea of another who is envied. So people who delude themselves into thinking when they are jealous that they are only driven by love, they should take note that they are also being driven by hate, and this hate is directed toward the things that they think that they love, which actually they don't really.
▶︎ 13:33 Moreover, this hatred toward the thing he loves will be greater in proportion to the joy with which the jealous man was usually affected from the love returned to him by the thing he loves, and also in proportion to the affect with which he was affected toward him with whom he imagines the thing he loved to unite itself. The classic friend triangle of the best friend and the wife. For if he hated him, he will thereby hate the thing he loves because he imagines that what he loves affects with joy what he hates, and also because he is forced to join the image of the thing he loves to the image of him he hates.
▶︎ 14:04 This latter reason is found for the most part in love toward a woman. For he who imagines that a woman he loves prostitutes herself to another, not only will he be saddened because his own appetite is restrained, but also will be repelled by her because he is forced to join the image of the thing he loves to the shameful parts and exertions of the other. To this finally is added the fact that she no longer receives the jealous man with the same countenance as she used to offer him. From this cause, too, the lover is saddened, as I shall show. And he goes on about these sorts of things.
▶︎ 14:39 He goes on in 3P37 to say, "The desire which arises from sadness or joy and from hatred or love is greater the greater the affect is." In 3P40, "He who imagines he is hated by someone and believes he has given the other no cause for hate will hate the other in return." This is how hate is engendered in someone who was previously indifferent to the person hated. By the way, this happens even if he only imagines it. So he doesn't really have to experience the person hating him. Even if he imagines this hatred, he will already hate him in return.
▶︎ 15:19 "The striving to do evil to him we hate is called anger, and the striving to return an evil done us is called vengeance." "Hate completely conquered by love passes into love, and the love is therefore greater than if hate had not preceded it." And the demonstration goes, "The proof of this proceeds in the same way as that of P38. For he who begins to love a thing he has hated or used to regard with sadness rejoices because he loves, and to this joy which love involves there is also added a joy arising from this, the striving to remove the sadness hate involves."
▶︎ 15:57 So if you will be able to overcome your hate and learn to love something that you have hated, you will have the love even increased as if you had not hated the thing in the first place. Very recommended.
▶︎ 16:10 A very good question that arises from this is how do we navigate life with mean, unintelligent people, which we are all surrounded by, and Spinoza was surrounded by also. Should we love them insofar as they are irrational? No. We aim to learn to love them through the common properties they share with us. So every human has a potential for rationality, which is always inherent in them, and we can love them to that extent as we can express our shared properties together.
▶︎ 16:49 Sometimes there are people whom the best thing we can do is stay away from, because we have to take care of ourselves. This is precisely the reason that Spinoza refused to publish The Ethics in his lifetime. If he was so sure, so Jesus was crucified for saying things that aren't that far away from this. And a lot of philosophers from then on, they're not willing to put themselves in this public situation. And they are very right to do so.
▶︎ 17:21 So let's look just a moment before we let go of imaginative love, because it's so interesting, and it's so relatable, and he has such important things to say about it.
▶︎ 17:33 Let's just look at Proposition forty-nine of Part Three, and he says this. Given an equal cause of love, love toward a thing will be greater if we imagine the thing to be free than if we imagine it to be necessary. And similarly for hate. Why is this so interesting? We discussed our regular constitution of our sense of self, our contingent constitution of our sense of self as pertaining to will. And will is pertaining to freedom. We know ourselves, and we love ourselves at the beginning before we have this rational amendation of the intellect that Spinoza wants us to go to, and then understand that freedom is actually a necessity, because everything is necessary, because God is necessary.
▶︎ 18:24 This strong connection between freedom and love is one of the most inhibiting aspects of our emotional lives. We somehow feel, because we are so connected to our sense of self, the Cartesian cogito, the I, me, me, me. I understand, I will, I want, I, this individuation, this false individuation, that our freedom is what makes us lovable. And then somehow we feel that things are more lovable the more free that we conceive them. So that's why you always have in the movies the free spirit is the ultimate object of passion. The freer the thing is imagined to be, the more of a self it is, the better it is, the more lovable it is. It relates to our most cherished sense of imaginative self.
▶︎ 19:27 The point here is that it is imaginative. No one is free. Nothing is contingent. Everything is necessary. And all this individuation, and this idiosyncrasy that we so strongly hold onto in the cases of imaginative love, they're just harmful. They're childish. They're not intelligent. And they will, if we don't learn how to mature them properly, they will be very harmful. Of course, they don't have to.
▶︎ 19:59 Love changes and matures through knowledge. The more that we learn to know another individual, the more that we learn to cherish our dependence on them through common properties, the better the love will be. It seems counterintuitive at first, and it seems very frightening, but this is the truth. Yeah, so that is a point that I wanted to make about this bridge between going from imaginative love to rational love and the importance of freedom through it.
▶︎ 20:34 Excellent. Now I'm going to follow Spinoza's progression in the text because the text is so important. What we have is the text. I'm not a philosopher. I'm a historian of philosophy. So I work with the text, and the way that he... And sometimes he has these movements which I find very important, so I want us to go over this together. This is the very end of part three, but before the definitions of the affects.
▶︎ 21:09 He has spent a very long time. We have reached Proposition Fifty-Seven. So he has spent a very long time. Since he has defined the affects in the definitions, and one through fifty-seven, essentially what he's talking about is passions. You remember that we have the types of affects, so we have actions and passions. Actions are what stems from the nature of my mind alone. They come from me. I am their adequate cause. And passions are from outside. I suffer them. I am passive towards them. They work on me.
▶︎ 21:42 And obviously, as a powerful mode of God, I want to act as much as possible. So we have spent fifty-seven propositions discussing the different types of passions and how they work, and these loves, and these joys, and these envies, and sadness, and hate, and anger, and lots of things. And part three will very soon be over. We only have fifty-nine propositions, and then we only have one place for the actions, which I will talk about in a moment.
▶︎ 22:11 So there's a very good lexicon on Spinoza, which has just come out, and Henri Krop, a wonderful scholar, Dutch scholar, is one of the editors. And it has given the best explanation of why we have only two propositions on the actions and fifty-seven on the passions. And the reason is that like in sickness and in health, the body works well in more or less one way. When things function, they function. But it can be diseased in an infinite amount of ways.
▶︎ 22:47 We have a million types of sicknesses. The heart, when it works, it pumps blood in a certain way, but it has so many ways that can go wrong. You can have a tiny hole in the valve, or you can have a problem in the septum that divides the rooms or the, or the... something with the arteries. A million things can go wrong. Passions are things going wrong. Actions are very easy. You know the nature of the mind. You know how it's supposed to work.
▶︎ 23:08 It's exactly like a body. Again, the Aristotelian teleology of being parts of nature, and when things work, they work in a certain way. And human beings have a certain purpose, and that's it. So building up to these last propositions of part three, which are so beautiful, let's see how he begins. He tries to sum up this, and he
▶︎ 23:27 He says this in Proposition Fifty-Seven: "Each affect of each individual differs from the affect of another as much as the essence of the one from the essence of the other." And he says in the scholium this: "From this it follows that the affects of the animals, which are called irrational, for after we know the origin of the mind, we cannot in any way doubt that the lower animals feel things," this is contra Descartes, "differ from men's affects as much as their nature differs from human nature. Both the horse and the man are driven by a lust to procreate, but the one is driven by an equine lust, and the other by human lust. So also the lusts and appetites of insects, fish, and birds must vary."
▶︎ 24:11 Therefore, though each individual lives content with his own nature. This is maybe one of my favorite insights of Spinoza. Always remember this. People always are content with their own nature. It's so rare when people are discontent with how they are.
▶︎ 24:30 So therefore, though each individual lives content with his own nature by which he is constituted and is glad of it, nevertheless, that life with which each one is content and that gladness are nothing but the idea or soul of the individual, and so the gladness of the one differs in nature from the gladness of the other as much as the essence of the one differs from the essence of the other. Finally, from this it follows that there is no small difference between the gladness by which a drunk is led and the gladness a philosopher possesses. I wish to mention this in passing. This will be enough concerning the affects which are related to man insofar as he is acted on. It remains to add a few words about those which are related to him insofar as he acts. And then he goes on to 58.
▶︎ 25:17 This is very important. 3P59 scholium. The only propositions that relate to man insofar as he acts are 58 and 59. And in 59, he writes this: Among all the affects which are related to the mind insofar as it acts, there are none which are not related to joy and desire. A powerful person feels only joy and desire.
▶︎ 25:45 All these types who think that suffering is good, it's ridiculous. And people who want to suffer for their art, all they're saying is that they value their art more than their lives, and they don't understand what empowerment really is. They subject themselves to something different. They think that this is an empowering thing. Like a lot of religious people and fanatics think that this is an empowering thing. Spinoza would completely disagree. Life itself is enough. Life itself is all there is.
▶︎ 26:17 I'm reading the scholium to 59. All actions that follow from affects related to the mind insofar as it understands, I relate to strength of character, which I divide into tenacity and nobility. A powerful person is a person with strength of character, obviously, and these are divided into two different routes. By tenacity, I understand the desire by which each one strives solely from the dictate of reason to persevere in his being. By nobility, I understand the desire by which each one strives solely from the dictate of reason to aid other men and join them to him in friendship.
▶︎ 26:58 And these are two sides of the same coin. This is the single way that the strong man acts from the power of his own mind. I will say a few words about rational love or friendship and the origins of the state.
▶︎ 27:13 This is around the last 30 propositions of Part Four. He gives a very interesting story of state of nature. State of nature is a form of a thought experiment, very common in political thought. We have it in Locke, we have it in Hobbes, we have it in Rousseau much later, where the philosophers discuss their understanding of human nature through a hypothetical state in which civil society has not yet formed. And for Spinoza, the understanding of common properties and love between people, their bonding together, this is the origin of the state. This is his idea of state of nature.
▶︎ 28:02 And he says this in 4P34. Insofar as man is torn by affects which are passions, they can be contrary for one another. Only through passions can people fight. And in the next proposition, in 35, he says, "Only insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason must they always agree in nature." What does this mean in relation to what we talked about regarding actions and passions? If passions are their only cause for strife, only when people are overwhelmed by external stimuli, things they fear, things they are angry about, things they love, can they be threatened in such a way that they will be contrary to one another. And only through a rational understanding of their place in nature can they act together and create a society, a society that is peaceful.
▶︎ 29:06 Insofar as men are torn by affects which are passions, they can be different in nature and contrary to one another. But insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, they are said only to act. Hence, whatever follows from human nature, insofar as it is defined by reason, must be understood through human nature alone as through its proximate cause. But because each one, from the laws of his own nature, wants what he judges to be good and strives to avert what he judges to be evil, and moreover, because what we judge to be good or evil when we follow the dictate of reason must be good or evil for all, it follows that insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, they must do only those things which are good for human nature, and hence for each man. That is, those things which agree with the nature of each man.
▶︎ 29:52 There is never anything rational by doing something to someone else which we wouldn't have done to yourself. And this is how civil society is maintained.
▶︎ 30:06 Now let's jump to Part Five. Part Five is on human freedom, or our ability to overcome the affects. We don't have time now to discuss how exactly we overcome the affect. It's discussed in propositions two until ten of Part Five.
▶︎ 30:25 He has a more detailed approach, and it's in essay form in the Treatise of the Emendation of the Intellect, but the treatise is quite an early work. And in the early propositions of Part Five, we find the closest thing that he would have to a manual on how to overcome your passions. The problem is that it's quite obscure.
▶︎ 30:46 He does make a very nice point about the use of maxims. He said, "As long as you don't understand through your own nature the maxims that teach you how to live well, you have the propositions in this book. If you memorize them, and you commit them to your heart, you say them again and again, maybe they will help you become more at peace, more rational." It's a bit of a fake it till you make it situation.
▶︎ 31:14 But in any case, exposure to rationality is always a beneficial thing because it will help to expose the rationality that is inherently the structure of your own mind. Good. So if we go to 5P20, which is
▶︎ 31:34 A very dramatic proposition, in part five, we can see the road through which we reach the highest form of love there is, which is called the intellectual love of God, and it corresponds to intuition. So, where are we? We have discussed in Spinoza's theory of knowledge that he has three kinds of knowledge: imagination, reason, and intuition. And we have talked about the way that affects or actions and passions correspond to each of these types of knowledge in terms of adequacy or inadequacy.
▶︎ 32:15 Because in an action, I'm the adequate cause of my affect. In the passion, I'm the inadequate cause. The more I'm the inadequate cause or the more I'm only partially responsible for the affect, and I'm very much overwhelmed by the external force, this is an imaginative affect. The more the proportion of reason is greater, so the more I am acting, I understand the structure of what is happening before me as a structure, as an abstract property, which is not an, it isn't gonna be, oh, this.
▶︎ 32:56 For example, when something happens which is surprising and unpleasant to me, my only way to overcome it is to understand that this surprising and unpleasant event was necessary and not contingent. An infinite series of causes made it happen. It has nothing to do with me. The blame is not on me or on any single thing outside, and by subjecting the occurrence to a rational structure of reality, it appeases me as much as it can. Of course, if this is a catastrophic event, this will be very, very hard to be effective.
▶︎ 33:38 But we are only finite creatures, and this is what it is. But the more that we impose the structure of reason on occurrences that seem to be contingent, the more we understand them rationally, and the more we are the adequate cause of our understanding and the stronger we are through it. So generally, because reason is an understanding of common properties, a love that is rational pertains to friendship. It's a love of other people who share common properties with me. Intuitive knowledge or the understanding of the essence of singular things in God would give rise to a very special affect or emotion called the intellectual love of God.
▶︎ 34:29 So in Proposition 20 of Part Five, he is ready to put behind him his discussion of our lives as seemingly individuated things in reality. In a sense, it's our imaginary lives and the extent to which we can understand our imaginary lives as rational. And then he goes on to what he calls the eternal part of the mind, and scholars go nuts about this. This is where they say he lost his mind. He was pandering to religious people. He was just, this is where a lot of people have become very angry with Spinoza.
▶︎ 35:07 I'm not sure that this is a reason to be angry. And the interesting thing is that this proposition is about love, and that's why I really think there's a very good argument to say that love is the single most important affect that goes through the ethics as a whole.
▶︎ 35:27 The buildup to Proposition 20 is Proposition 15, which says this: "He who understands himself and his affects clearly and distinctly loves God and does so the more, the more he understands himself and his affects." This makes a lot of sense to us now, because if understanding myself and my affect is understanding myself as a mode of God, it's actually loving God because I am God, and it's an emotive and intellectual understanding of this very thing.
▶︎ 35:56 Now we can go to P20. Proposition 20 reads, "This love towards God is the highest good which we can want from the dictate of reason, and it's common to all men. We desire that all should enjoy it, and so it cannot be stained by an affect of envy, nor by an affect of jealousy." A truly religious person loves God and is never jealous of this love of God because he just wants everyone to love God just like he does. On the contrary, the more men we imagine to enjoy it, the more it must be encouraged.
▶︎ 36:27 And the scholium says, similarly, we can show that there is no affect which is directly contrary to this love and by which it can be destroyed. So we can conclude that this love is the most constant of all the affects, and insofar as it is related to the body, cannot be destroyed unless it is destroyed with the body itself. What the nature of this love is insofar as it is related only to the mind, we shall see later. And with this, I have covered all the remedies of the affects.
▶︎ 36:56 What he's saying is, if we understand that God is substance, a substance is reality, or God is nature, the single most important love everyone should hope to attain is a love of reality itself. Hannah Arendt called it amor mundi. Nietzsche called it amor fati, love of fate. The love of reality itself is what the philosopher always aims for. And Spinoza is trying to say that only through understanding the particular things in ourselves through which we live this life can we have an understanding of reality itself and therefore of God.
▶︎ 37:34 And then he says this, it should be noted that sickness of the mind and misfortunes take their origin especially from too much love toward a thing which is liable to many variations and which we can never fully possess. For no one is disturbed or anxious concerning anything unless he loves it, nor do wrongs, suspicions, and enmities arise except from love for a thing which no one can really fully possess. From what we have said, we easily conceive what clear and distinct knowledge, and especially that third kind of knowledge, whose foundation is the knowledge of God itself, can accomplish against the affects.
▶︎ 38:10 Insofar as the affects are passions, if clear and distinct knowledge does not absolutely remove them, at least it brings about that they constitute the smallest part of the mind. And then it begets a love toward a thing immutable and eternal which we really fully possess, and which therefore cannot be tainted by any of the vices which are in ordinary love, but can always be greater and greater, and occupy the greatest part of the mind, and affect it extensively.
▶︎ 38:36 You could say he's describing here some sort of religious exaltation. A sense of being one with the universe, which proves a sense of love, which is the ultimate source of action. So we can ask. We see some sort of progression here, some sort of erotic ladder like Plato. If we recall from Plato, we start from a loving of a single body, then a loving of a lot of bodies, and then a loving of souls, and then a loving of laws, and then a loving of... And then we reach the view of the good, which is also intuitive. Remember, we glimpse and we go down. So similar.
▶︎ 39:18 What does this idea of progression mean about our former loves, our other loves? It's different from Plato in the sense that we don't climb a ladder and then leave it. It's like an onion peeling to reveal the kernel of truth within, within. If you love something truly, even in the human temporal love, even this love, when you peel away the imaginative aspects of it, it's also a love of God. But the experience of it as a love of God has to be completely divorced from any sense of imaginative qualities like time, place, and again, difference.
▶︎ 40:08 Remember the idea of the expansion of the self, which pertains to the idea of union. The intellectual love of God presents an absolute union with the divine, which is actually reality itself. So a lot of times when we say divine, it feels like it's something that goes up. I'm constantly pulling us down. It's an embeddedness in the nature of reality, a feeling of one with reality. So you can have these expressions, you can have these imaginative expressions. It's not contradictory. It's just a different aspect of the idea seen more or less imaginatively, seen more or less in proportion to the adequacy of the causes.
▶︎ 40:58 So when you have intellectual love of God, it's a perfection of adequacy. You are the completely adequate cause in a very deep sense. When you have passionate love, it can be a very good love. It can be a loving love, but it's with the peels of the onion on it. So it's not a progression where you leave something behind. Everything is always there all the time. This is also an aspect of necessitarian philosophy. Everything is always there all the time, especially in Spinoza when he says so clearly that time and space are imaginations.
▶︎ 41:32 Kant said it worse, because it's an imaginative faculty of the way we understand our lives in time, but time has nothing to do with eternity. Eternity is necessary and has nothing to do with time. It's just existence itself.
▶︎ 41:54 What is the definition of the intellectual love of God? In 5p32, Spinoza writes, "Whatever we understand by the third kind of knowledge we take pleasure in, and our pleasure is accompanied by the idea of God as a cause." Things we understand ultimately, we understand as an ultimate necessity, it brings us a sense of pleasure because it brings us a sense of powerfulness of our intellect.
▶︎ 42:19 The demonstration of Proposition 32 says this. From this kind of knowledge, the third kind of knowledge, intuition, there arises the greatest satisfaction of the mind there can be. That is joy. This joy is accompanied by the idea of oneself, and consequently, it is also accompanied by the idea of God as its cause.
▶︎ 42:40 And the corollary states, from the third kind of knowledge, there necessarily arises an intellectual love of God. It's really important to put the emphasis on this necessarily. In a sense, the intellectual love of God is the effective register of the intuitive love of God. It's not that there is a lapsing in time. It's not that I understand God and then I love him. The understanding and the love are one and the same thing.
▶︎ 43:06 Remember that we said in the previous lecture that affect and/or emotion and intellect are actually two sides of the same coin. We have no idea that doesn't have an effective register. So the corollary to Proposition 32 says, from the third kind of knowledge, there necessarily arises an intellectual love of God. From this kind of knowledge, there arises joy accompanied by the idea of God as its cause. That is love of God, not insofar as we imagine him as present, but insofar as we understand God to be eternal. And this is what I call intellectual love of God.
▶︎ 43:40 A true understanding of divinity, a true understanding of God has nothing to do with an imagination of him as present in time or in place. It's an appreciation of his eternity and our eternity as part of him. And this happens as the immediate effective register of the intellectual understanding of God or the third kind of knowledge.
▶︎ 44:08 Proposition 33 states, the intellectual love of God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge, is eternal. And the scholium says this, "Although this love toward God has had no beginning, it still has all the perfections of love, just as if it had come to be. There is no difference here except that the mind has had eternally the same perfections, which in our fiction now come to it, and that it is accompanied by the idea of God as an eternal cause. If joy then consists in the passage to a greater perfection, blessedness must surely consist in the fact that the mind is endowed with perfection itself."
▶︎ 44:50 So this is a discovery of the reality of our existence itself, which brings us such an immense amount of joy and peace that it redefines eternity as in time as an experience that we can achieve, and therefore, it is salvation itself. At the beginning of the lectures, I said that in a sense, Spinoza takes up the religious project of talking about God and ending in an idea of salvation, and this is how he reaches it, through his idea of love.
▶︎ 45:21 So salvation would be a peace of mind in which we find the eternity in the reality of our lives themselves and reach it, and then of course, we have to wake up. We have to come back, but that is salvation itself. Salvation must be imminent, just like God is. Thank you.