▶︎ 0:01 In the previous lecture, we talked about Spinoza's general metaphysics. We had God or nature, which is absolutely everything. And then we as human beings are parts of God or nature, and are expressed into parallel ways, which are a mind and a body. Our expression is in thought and extension, respectively.
▶︎ 0:24 The important thing to understand at first, and we will go back to this again and again and again as we proceed. Obviously, because we are parts of nature and we follow God's immutable laws, we have no free will. What is free will?
▶︎ 0:37 When we say, we throw this around all the time. Free will, the idea is that we just choose to do something because we want to do it. Why is it so difficult for us to let go of this idea of free will? Because erroneously, we think that our freedom to do what we want, that is what we conceive as expressions of free will, are essentially what we are. It is our precise sense of self. If you take this away, you take the "I" that we recognize as what we are.
▶︎ 1:14 Now, there is a lot of truth to this identification. As you will see also in Spinoza, we only come to know ourselves through understanding what we love and through our desires. Also through our aversions. When I say, "I don't want this," that's also a declaration of what I am. And if a free will is an expression to express these desires or aversions, by denying free will, what you're actually denying is me as I understand myself. This is a very, very painful thing to do.
▶︎ 1:48 The best way to understand the depth of this schism with the understanding of the self is with understanding Descartes. Spinoza, in a way, was a student of Descartes. His first published work was his commentary and exposition of Descartes' principles of philosophy. He knew Descartes well, and he respected him very much. And it's really interesting to try to position Spinoza in opposition to Descartes.
▶︎ 2:19 Descartes is very famous for his idea of dualism, of complete separation of mind and body. What Descartes did in his Meditations, which is obviously a wonderful text that everyone has to read, although we will not discuss it at length now. What Descartes did in his Meditations is he used the very powerful force of doubt, which, as we all know, is perhaps one of the most powerful forces in human life. Once we doubt something, we have a very hard time regaining the trust that we formerly had toward the doubted thing, and only through doubt can we achieve certainty. Certainty actually means something being beyond doubt.
▶︎ 3:01 Descartes' use of doubt is very, very sophisticated. It's really an ingenious move. And the way that he comes to his metaphysical rock bottom, Descartes' principle of certainty is what we call the cogito. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. What is so genius about Descartes' move? He posits the thinking thing, the thinking substance, as the basis of all metaphysical certainty. Through the thinking thing, he reaches God. Through God, he reaches the outside world, and from there, he builds his metaphysics and his science because Descartes, as not many people know, was first and foremost a scientist and a mathematician.
▶︎ 3:49 His metaphysics are only there to serve the advancement of the great project of the scientific revolution, as I also mentioned in the previous lecture. So one of the big moves of Descartes' cogito is that through the doubt that our embodied experience engenders, we are led to completely reject the existence of the body as something that has any pertinence to metaphysical understanding. We return to the body later through God and through proving the positive existence of reality and bodies and material existence together with that world. But the first step towards certainty is a rejection of the body.
▶︎ 4:42 Descartes' certainty pertains only to the thinking thing. And he really continues with this. He doesn't let it go ever. He says that there is a soul, and it is a distinct mental entity, which is a substance different from material substance, and it is completely divorced. It does not rely on the body. It relies on God. It is our only path toward truth. And, for a scientist, these are big things to say, but he really dies on this hill. It's a very, very big thing.
▶︎ 5:17 And this dualism really permeates his philosophy, and it goes on in a very interesting way to inform the way we understand science today. And what do I mean by this? Although I think that Spinoza's ideas of mind and body being two aspects of the same thing can feel very intuitive to a lot of people today, the actual truth of the matter is that the life we live in, the world we live in, is a Cartesian manifestation of a mechanization of nature, of soulless material and thinking things which are divorced from reality.
▶︎ 5:56 One of the problems is that this spiritual life has become very impoverished because we don't have religion anymore. And then we are quite stuck. This is why Spinoza can save us, but it's really important to understand that Descartes' mechanistic understanding of nature, it informs today's medicine, it informs the way that we see plants and animals, and it really speaks to this moment where people are trying to find their way back to infuse material reality with spiritualism, and they don't really know how because Descartes has become like this emblem of rationality and progress.
▶︎ 6:43 By the way, I really do think that Descartes was a genius and that his becoming this punching bag for dualism is really undeserved. I think that his work is phenomenal. I really, really like Descartes. But yeah, today it's really easy to see him as the father of all evils and how we've gone down this path that we don't know now how to undo. Good.
▶︎ 7:08 What does it mean that the mind is the idea of the body, as we said here? This is a very complicated thing in Spinoza. In part two, which is of the mind, Proposition thirteen, Spinoza says this: "The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body or a certain mode of extension which actually exists and nothing else." There is no mind without a body. And the idea which constitutes the human mind, its content is the body.
▶︎ 7:48 So every, we will call it, if we're talking in material terms, every atom or every cell of my body has an expression in the attribute of thought, and this expression is the mind. Now, everyone is probably imagining this second Noa sitting up there, which is half transparent like we all think about ghosts, and say, "This is the mind." She has her legs and her arms and her face. So this is not the case.
▶︎ 8:14 We want to imagine these things because our visuality is so important to us, but this is exactly the reason we think of God as an old man with a beard. This has nothing to do with reality. It's our imagination. It's like a foothold for our imagination. The actually existing ideas have no visual component. Just accept that they are ideas.
▶︎ 8:46 I know it's really hard to do at first because even if you think about a perfect mental entity such as the number one, either you will think of one thing or you will think of the symbol of the number one. You will have a very hard time accessing the truth of one insofar as it is a unit and the basic of your arithmetical procedures. But this is what you have to do. An idea is not an image.
▶︎ 9:25 In the corollary to this proposition. Remember, Spinoza has the definitions and axiom at the beginning of each part, and then he deduces propositions. Many times, these propositions have what we call corollaries and scholia. The single of scholia is scholium. And sometimes we can read from that. These are oftentimes the most interesting ideas that he has because that is where he just gives more.
▶︎ 9:56 The corollary to Proposition thirteen of part two reads like this. "From this it follows that man consists of a mind and a body and that the human body exists as we are aware of it." So a lot of times when we differentiate the mind of the body, which is, again, so natural and intuitive and easy to do. A lot of times we talk about overcoming the body. We talk about listening to our body. We talk about a lot of things in which we try to divorce our mental entity, which we really consider as the I.
▶︎ 10:29 And again, this is the Cartesian genius. He was right about this. When we talk about the I, the basic, the most basic building block of our metaphysical understanding of the world, what we talk about is a mental entity which is very closely connected to free will. Again, in Descartes, we will see that the only thing that does not fall short of being godlike is the will. Remember? Read Descartes, you'll remember. But the will, the human will and God's will are actually equal in force. So this is a very profound thing to say.
▶︎ 11:11 So this is a good point, I think, in general. A lot of genius people have lived and written, and we can disagree with what they would have done. Their genius many times serves to do nothing but just show us the truth, even if it's not written in their work, and I won't be so surprised if that's what they meant to do anyway. The fact that it's not written down and given to you with a silver spoon shoved in your mouth does not mean that that is not what the author intended to do.
▶︎ 11:49 Philosophy always, like Socrates and Plato has taught us, it works in different ways, and truth cannot be attained anyway when it's given to you. It has to be reached by itself. Certainty is something that is felt, not something that is given. So it's really good to take Descartes very seriously, even when you're studying Spinoza and you have this original sense that Spinoza is right.
▶︎ 12:21 So why do I like two P thirteen, or part two, proposition thirteen so much? Because after proposition thirteen, Spinoza goes into something which is radical. It's called, we call it in the profession, we call it the physical digression. It means that he suddenly talks about how material things work.
▶︎ 12:42 So what's Spinoza doing here? I like to present it, and this is completely not like some given thing in the scholarship. It's something that I've been thinking about. I haven't read it anywhere else, and there's much work to do about it. But when I look at Spinoza's text of the ethics, I really do see some sort of contra Bible. I see a sort of holy book in which he takes up the same projects as religions, and he just does it differently.
▶︎ 13:07 And I think this can be sufficiently proven if anyone has the time or will to do it through what he says about text in the TTP, the theological political treatise. So after two P thirteen comes the physical digression in which Spinoza gives a very interesting account of how the material world works.
▶︎ 13:30 It's a bit similar to Newtonian physics. For example, his first axiom inside this small digression is all bodies either move or are at rest. And the second axiom is each body moves now more slowly, now more quickly. And the first lemma is very, very important. Bodies are distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance, which makes a lot of sense.
▶︎ 14:02 Usually, especially in Newtonian physics, when we think about the laws of motion, we imagine distinct substances using force on one another, and then we measure the amount of force, and we relate it to their mass and acceleration. This is Newtonian physics. We all know. Spinoza is saying something different. If substance is unique and single because it is God, and all the things that we perceive as individual things are modes of God, the only way that we will be able to distinguish one another is between the proportion of motion and rest between their parts.
▶︎ 14:46 Now, this truth about everything being in motion in the sensory world as we experience it is undoubtedly true. No one can deny this who thinks about it clearly. We have no experience of stillness at all. We can all try to stand up and even see if we're trying to stand as still as possible. We feel ourself all the time moving and adjusting in order to maintain the stillness. Nothing is ever still.
▶︎ 15:24 And it even goes so far as since everything is moving, maintaining a specific proportion of motion and rest is precisely what keeps individual things in what we would like to imagine is their stillness. The only reason that my body does not dissipate into the air now, into the other atoms. My body is made of atoms, and there are other atoms around me all the time. The only reason that this doesn't happen is because my body maintains a certain proportion of motion and rest between its parts, which is actively resisting its dissipation.
▶︎ 16:00 And this is true for absolutely everything else. This table remains as it is because its atoms retain a specific proportion of motion and rest to each other. Obviously, of course, if I'm a living thing and I am one of God, and God is living and God is everything, this table, of course, is living to a certain degree. Everything in reality is animate to a certain degree. So it will try to maintain its proportion of motion and rest and retain its individuality as long as it can.
▶︎ 16:31 If I bring a saw and work on it really hard, it will break. The table will no longer retain its proportion of motion and rest. And through this breakup of the proportion, by the way, it's what we call death. And when does a body stop being alive? When it is unable to maintain its proportion of motion and rest through its internal, how will we say, internal organization of motion. That's why it's an organism, because it's organized in a certain way, in a certain proportion. Good.
▶︎ 17:09 The lemmas and axioms following 2P13 are about these ideas of the way the material world organizes into individual things. And this is very important in order to understand our mind. Because our body is exactly the same thing. You know what? Let's read all the postulates following the physical digression because they are so very awesome.
▶︎ 17:38 One, the human body is composed of a great many individuals of different natures, each of which is highly composite. Two, some of the individuals of which the human body is composed are fluid, some soft, and others finely hard. Three, the individuals composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself, are affected by external bodies in very many ways. Four, the human body to be preserved requires a great many other bodies by which it is, as it were, continually regenerated, and so on.
▶︎ 18:12 Why is this interesting? Our bodies exist in the material world in constant interactions and relationships with other things. Some conduce to their health, and some things harm them. Our mind is exactly the same thing.
▶︎ 18:31 Think about a plane of ideas in which our mind is a composite reality of the ideas which make it up, and they are constantly affected and being affected by other ideas of an infinite amount of minds. You have a certain way in which the proportion of motion and rest between your ideas is good for you. And Spinoza says something really interesting.
▶︎ 19:05 The way we have to understand this idea of motion and rest in the mind, it's really easy to understand in the body because we actually feel our body as having a certain proportion of motion and rest. And you can say that it's on a spectrum from sleep to physical exertion, like running. And then all the types in between, which each have a certain function and effect which are conducive to the general health of the organism. And if we don't understand this properly, we can create great harm to the individual body.
▶︎ 19:50 The mind is the same thing, but then we don't want to talk about motion and rest because motion and rest pertains only to the material world and not to the mind, and I want to try and take us away from images as far as possible. I don't want you to think of my mind as this transparent, like a Casper ghost floating around up there, because it's not what it is at all. What we need to understand as parallels of motion and rest are the intellect. Ideas pushing against each other, working in proportion, and creating what we feel as emotions.
▶︎ 20:30 These are the affects. So these fluctuations in ideas and understanding are exactly like the body. And you can nourish the body, and you can nourish the mind. So if you want to nourish your mind, you will entertain thoughts, if we can say that, or you will attain thoughts that conduce to a healthy proportion of motion and rest between your ideas.
▶︎ 20:55 I think we all know what it feels like to have a clear, healthy mind. The easiest way to understand what it is would be to feel that the mind is able to work in the best way possible according to its nature, that is to understand. There is no moment where we feel worse mentally than when we feel utterly confused. It is a sense of deep disorientation. By the way, at that moment, we might grasp at even the most horrible things to think about just in order to stop the state of confusion. Because confusion means that we can't get anything straight.
▶︎ 21:42 Some people have greatly confused minds most of the time, and then they grasp at ideas which are maybe comforting and helpful in the short run, but in the long run, they are not, and they have very distressed mental lives. What Spinoza is trying to help us do is the opposite. His very early work, which we haven't discussed at all, I haven't even mentioned it, is called Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. What he wants you to do is emend your intellect. You have to straighten out your ideas and straighten out their proportions and the way they react to each other so that you feel healthy, and health means being able to understand.
▶︎ 22:23 We all want, when we go about in life, that as soon as something happens, we understand it well. We don't get caught up in bad emotions and misinterpret it. We don't get confused. We have a clear understanding of what it means, what's imaginary about it, what's rational about it, and how we should act. And this is what a healthy mind does.
▶︎ 22:42 And we all know, when we think about people who we see as mentally healthy, this is exactly what makes them special. You throw things at them, and they're like, "Wow, okay." They know the right thing to say. They understand. They see through a lot of noise, and they could get at the truth of the matter. And they're usually very pleasant people. They're very kind people. They're very loving people because they don't want to hurt anyone. Hurting doesn't, it's not conducive to anything. They just see things as they are. They see mistakes and blunders as what they are. They are confusions. And this is because they have a mind with an ability to understand.
▶︎ 23:22 By the way, even these people, if something rattling enough happens to them, they can just lose it. Everyone can get confused. We're all finite beings. It's like, even a very healthy body, if it gets shot by a gun, no amount of health. I mean, obviously a healthier person might be able to recover, but there are some injuries which no one can recover from. So, that's always something to think about.
▶︎ 23:49 But I want here to emphasize the limits of the imagery of parallelism. When mind and body are seen as one and the same thing, it doesn't mean that you can imagine a mind being just a body. Good. It's a relation of ideas, the body. Excellent.
▶︎ 24:13 So we have this picture of the mind as the idea of the body, and we have this picture of the mind being ideas which interact with each other in better or worse ways. Better or worse ways, again, means the ability to understand, to understand the world.
▶︎ 24:29 Now, this is where we get to Spinoza's epistemology. Spinoza's theory of knowledge or theory of mind. What does it mean to have a theory of knowledge? It means how we get to know things in the world. Know does not mean a very positive thing. That is, to know is to understand. It's just knowledge, as in acquaintance. We can be well acquainted or not well acquainted. So this is his theory of knowledge.
▶︎ 24:57 He gives it in, I advise you all to open it up, of course, in two P forty S two. What does this mean? Part two. We're in the ethics. We're not leaving the ethics at all in this lecture series. Part two, proposition forty, scholium two. It's a very long proposition. You will get there.
▶︎ 25:20 So he gives his theory of knowledge in two P forty S two, and then he has, and it's tripartite. Again, people like to divide things into threes. We all do. So we have the first kind of knowledge is imagination.
▶︎ 25:34 I'll spare you the Latin, even though it's very close. It's imaginatio. The first kind of knowledge is imagination, and the way Spinoza defines it is that it is sensory experience and things that we get haphazardly. Why is this important? Nothing that pertains to truth can have to do with sensory experience as we know it. Again, as we said in lecture one, truth has to do with certainty. Nothing that is embodied is certain.
▶︎ 26:07 The idea is that we understand our sensory experiences as happening in space and time. Putting aside the Newtonian idea that space and time are absolute, because this is not something that we have any subjective sensory understanding of. That's exactly why they are absolute. Truth cannot pertain to those issues because they are inherently a subjective understanding of a specific place and a specific time. We want truth to pertain to that. We want to say, "But this really happened." In a way, that's fine. Yes. You can make all the necessary qualifications of in a certain place of time after the birth of Christ, and then say, you give it the coordinates.
▶︎ 27:02 This doesn't give you anything. This is not the sense of truth that we want to understand when we want to talk about metaphysical certainty. Because by the way, you think that you know this, and you want to say, "This is the truth, this is what happened," someone else can come and say, "No, it's not." And they can even say, "I was there." Where will that take you? Maybe even you dreamt it up. Maybe you hallucinated. Sensory experience will never be a place of certainty.
▶︎ 27:34 Certainty necessarily pertains to eternal truth. Truth is necessarily eternal. Truth pertains to an idea like one plus one equals two. And what's so dramatic about one plus one equals two is that it doesn't matter if when you started out math and your mom told me, "Yeah, we take one apple and another apple, and then we get two apples. And then you take one house and two houses, and it's one house and two houses, and it's three houses," and you count from there. It doesn't matter that you could find an imagery and sensory experience that gave you this understanding of numbers.
▶︎ 28:11 The idea is that if you say that one plus one equals two, you say it's not true, then obviously either you don't understand what one is, or if you don't understand what plus is, you don't understand what equal is, and you don't understand what two is. Because if you did understand them, they would be true. Their truth lies in their definitions. The truth has nothing to do with reality. Understanding it pertains to its truth. That's the important thing.
▶︎ 28:38 Imagination, which is based on sensory experience and haphazard knowledge, can never pertain to truth. So this is untrue knowledge. I think it's nice that it's called imagination. He also calls it opinion, by the way. Opinion is also something that truth does not pertain to. And these are what he also calls confused ideas. But that's a big issue. I'm not sure that we'll get to it. Confusion versus adequacy.
▶︎ 29:12 The idea is that when someone is wrong, when someone's not saying the truth, he's just confused or he's imagining. I think what I like about these wordings is that they really speak to the fact that non-truths aren't necessarily evil. They're just a mistake. And then we have the two other kinds of knowledge, which are both rational knowledge, which are both true.
▶︎ 29:42 The first is rationality, rational thought. In the Latin, it's ratio. That's very easy. And the third is intuitive knowledge.
▶︎ 29:58 And now I'll go back and say what each is. Rational thought pertains to common properties. It has to do with relations between ideas. And it never is about anything specific. Mathematical knowledge is a form of rational thought. You can never really understand a singular thing through rational thought. That's a really important point to make. You can only understand it as an abstraction. Again, it pertains to common properties.
▶︎ 30:32 Intuitive knowledge, this is very much discussed in the literature. I won't go into the controversies, and I won't give you my answer because that's not fair, because there are so many controversies. But you know what? I'll just read what he calls intuitive knowledge so I don't get messed up with anyone. He says it's a kind of knowledge that proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things. So imagine that you could have a penetrating understanding of singular things insofar as they pertain to the essence of God. Sounds awesome. It sounds like religious revelation.
▶︎ 31:33 These are the three kinds of knowledge. They are very important. The ideas in our mind have a certain proportion of relation to each other, which make up one of these three. When we talk about real things, we imagine things. When we understand things truly but through the common properties, we understand things rationally. And if we attain this third kind of knowledge, which is very, very rare, we have intuitive knowledge.
▶︎ 32:06 The only thing that is the object of intuitive knowledge is the necessary understanding of my own existence as a part of God. It cannot ever pertain to anything else because individuation, understanding something as distinct from me as a distinct mode, would always have to do with individuation, and that has to do with imagination. If I understand a single thing, I can never understand a singular thing outside of me as necessary. I can only do it for my own self. So in a way, that's the coolest thing about this. It's an inversion of the cogito, do you see? The pinnacle of Spinozistic thought, intuitive knowledge, understanding my necessary place in reality is understanding the I as a part of God is exactly what he starts with, which is very telling.
▶︎ 33:03 What I'd like to say is, what can we have? I gave examples of rational thought. So mathematics, which pertain to common properties, that would be the object of rational thought. Now, in a sense, we can be satisfied with having only imagination and rational thought in our regular lives. And then we'd want to make rational thought the dominant part of the proportion of ideas in our minds, because then we would meet things through imagination, we would meet things in real life, and then we could understand them through their common properties, the rational laws that they necessarily conform to, which sometimes can be very obscure. Sometimes we say, "How did this happen?" But then we can understand how it happened. And then it makes it better. At least it helps us react to it in a better way.
▶︎ 33:57 What does this mean? What would it mean to have an intuitive knowledge, an intuitive understanding of the immanent? Now it's immanent with an I, both I's, I and I at the end. An immanent truth of a single thing.
▶︎ 34:23 My interpretation of what Spinoza means by intuitive knowledge can only be the unmediated understanding of the necessity of my own existence. Because it has to be a diving inside into the conscious ideas of the mind, and it cannot ever pertain to something outside of me because that has to be imaginative. Everything that I understand to be different from me is necessarily something that I experience through my senses. This has to be completely divorced from the senses. Now, the only thing that I can have access to, which is completely unmediated, and this is the idea of intuition.
▶︎ 35:25 Rationality always has to do with discursive knowledge. It has ideas that come in a consecutive order, and they express some sort of mechanism of my own thought that gives them this order, this truth. The truth, actually, it lives in the order of the propositions, in the order of the way the things are organized. For example, the one plus one equals two, it's because the plus is between the ones and not between the one and the two equals one that makes the statement true. Otherwise, they're just ideas. So rational thought always has to do with discursive knowledge. This is exactly the opposite from intuitive knowledge. Intuitive has to be immediate. No discursiveness. No string of propositions.
▶︎ 36:22 By the way, when you look at Aristotle's ideas in the Organon, in the categories about what truth pertains to, this is exactly what he says. This is how he made syllogisms, and then you could just put in the content in the, every A is B, every B is C, then every A is C. The whole idea of not having the content, but truth pertaining to the structure of the sentence. This is exactly it. That's this. This cannot have discursive knowledge.
▶︎ 36:51 Again, if we go to what we talked about in the former lecture about the relationship between certainty and truth and religion, it's exactly that. When people say they know that God exists, this knowledge is immediate. The truth is that the truly religious people don't need proofs. They're already there, and this is it. That better?
▶︎ 37:18 Audience: So it's my direct, immediate connection to God and-
▶︎ 37:23 Exactly. That's the only thing it can be. And the understanding of yourself as a mode of God. Now, the way that this will be expressed is by the necessity of your very existence. And you see the cogito? It's existence and thought. I think therefore I am. Now, you remember that the ergo in the "I think, therefore I am," that was in the discourse, and then in the Meditations, the later work, he cut the ergo. And he said, "I think I am. This is it." It has to be immediate, and that's why the I is so important. There's no mediation between me and myself. It always has to be an intuitive understanding of my own existence and nothing else.
▶︎ 38:12 But this is my interpretation. Other scholars, excellent scholars, maybe one day, I don't know, other scholars, of course, do entertain the possibility of having intuitive knowledge of things that are not me. Memory is a form of imagination, and it pertains to the association that our minds and bodies have been accustomed to of different ideas and sensations.
▶︎ 38:41 Memory is completely random experience. We think that it's central to our conception of self. Of course, Spinoza would want to say that a rational conception of the self would have nothing to do with memory. And through memory, you form habits, expectations, and meanings, and this is maybe the most important aspect of our day-to-day lives. So when we want to make an amendation of the intellect that makes it more rational and therefore a more healthy mind, we have to take a very long and hard look at our memories and the imaginations that are ingrained in the way that we understand the world, the paradigms through which we understand the world.
▶︎ 39:19 Each and every idea can be understood either through imagination or through rational thought or, let's say, theoretically through intuitive knowledge. This is a really, really important thing. Each idea has these aspects. When we imagine things, we understand them insofar as we understand ourselves as finite modes of reality and the other external thing as another finite mode of reality. So we have this idea of the distinct body and our idea itself.
▶︎ 40:01 Now, Spinoza says, and it's a very good point I think that he makes, that these inadequate ideas, these ideas of which I am not the adequate cause, not the sole cause, the only cause, these inadequate ideas a lot of times tell us more about the nature of our own mind than the nature of the things that we are perceiving. This is true about everything. When I see, for example, something, and I think that it is beautiful or ugly, it tells me more about my own mind than it does about the thing, because it's necessarily a sort of amalgamation of the two things, and that's why it's a confused idea. It has a confusion of sources. It has multiple sources. It's an inadequate idea.
▶︎ 40:43 By rational thought, I impose the laws that pertain to everything onto the things that I understand. The ability to understand something rationally is always in the thing itself because it always conforms to the immutable laws of God. It's just the question is, am I conscious of these laws or not? So it's always this game between my ability to understand the things that I am meeting and the sense and the aspects in which they are confused or rational in relation to me. It's always a relational story. Now, the things that I meet affect me in different ways, and these emotions that the ideas elicit, they are the affect.
▶︎ 41:40 They are the emotions. That's what we'll talk about at length in the next lecture. But the very basic thing I want to talk about now is all of these affects are in a way, how will I say, they are subjected to a single most important aspect of my existence, which is desire. Or in Spinoza's words, in the Latin, I'll put it here, conatus. Conatus means drive, means desire.
▶︎ 42:10 Why is conatus so important? Because it is the basic way in which I encounter different things outside of me and either want them or am repelled by them. So repulsion is not really a thing because when I'm repulsed, all I want is something else. It's always, it has to be something positive. But the sense is that a conatus or life drive of what we would call Platonic eros is the basic underlying force of all the affectivity. And the more my conatus or my essence or my drive is aimed toward things that better my existence, the more rational I am, the more true to my nature I am.
▶︎ 42:53 Now, in terms of the mind, the essence of the mind is to understand. So my mental conatus is always toward understanding. My bodily conatus, we can see it as health. We can see it as a form of striving to persevering being with being pertaining to my continued existence. This is an arguable idea. So, for example, Spinoza would deny that death is necessarily something to be avoided by a person with a healthy conatus. Because if the way that the body perseveres is not conducive or it does not express the essence of the individual, then maybe death is better.
▶︎ 43:44 So that's a big deal. Death is not the only way that a person can be annihilated, let's call it. Like, that his essence can be negated. But yeah, death is a really interesting issue in Spinoza. And conatus is the striving by which each thing persevere in its being. So we have the mental aspect of this and the physical aspect of it.
▶︎ 44:07 Good. So in the next lecture, we will see how human conatus or the desire to persevere manifests itself in emotions, in our affective lives, and the way that rational understanding can inform or disinform, the self-affectivity.