▶︎ 0:01 This will be a series of lectures on Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, his theory of ethics, his psychology, and then culminating in his theory of love. We have to start with the man and his life, and his intellectual context.
▶︎ 0:16 Spinoza was a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher who was born into the Jewish community but later excommunicated for his heterodox views. And he is well-situated in the early modern period, alongside what we call the rationalists, who are also the big ones: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. We'll talk later about what this means, how it informed his intellectual life, as a Jew who was excommunicated but refused to convert to Christianity.
▶︎ 0:48 He is one of the only and first people that we know in the early modern period who lived completely without a religion, and that's why a lot of people today say that Spinoza was the herald of secularity and modernism in the way that we know it today. For a lot of people, Spinoza really exemplifies our modern lives today. And it's really interesting to see then what he actually said, what he really thought about God, and what he did in his texts.
▶︎ 1:24 life in early modern Europe. We're talking about early modern as in seventeenth century, and we are well into understanding the great effects that a scientific revolution which has started in the Renaissance, which we can put at the fifteenth century, has started to cause in the intellectual circles of Europe in the early modern period. Spinoza is half a generation after Descartes, and he is about a century after Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, who advanced the heliocentric view of the universe.
▶︎ 1:56 What we need to understand when we talk about Spinoza as a heralder of the modern age is that the biggest thing that was happening is a different understanding of what it means to obtain truth. We can look at the general drama of Western philosophy from its inception, and I'm talking even before Plato, I'm talking about Parmenides. We can talk about this great conflict between sensory experience and rational thought. We have the senses versus the mental or the rational, and usually, especially in the rationalist tradition, what we're saying is that sensory experience cannot give us truths about reality, but we need to have rational understanding that trumps it in a way.
▶︎ 2:39 For Plato, the mathematical paradigm was the best. This is where truth resides. Truth can never reside in sensory experience. For example, we all know that as finite beings, we have a certain subjective way of approaching the world, and this world that we understand through our embodied life has an inherently subjective aspect.
▶︎ 3:05 For example, if I see a certain shade of blue, and then someone else sees a certain shade of blue, but he calls it indigo, we understand that in reality, some sort of objective reality, there has to be some wavelength that corresponds to the color that we are seeing. But there is a dispute concerning the sensory data. And rationality is meant to overcome these subjective differences in order to reach an objective certainty.
▶︎ 3:37 The great thing that we all want as human beings is certainty. We want to be certain about things. We want to understand things. We want to know that there is a standard of truth that we and all the people that surround us, and we know that we depend on, can work for together.
▶︎ 3:52 Now, sensory experience is so fragmented, it's so problematic, it's so subjective that it has often been completely put to the side. So when people turn to sensory data in order to make their lives more comfortable, for example, in order... So we all know that the Greeks had very impressive architectural buildings. And obviously they did this with mathematics. But when they were trying to measure right angles, they always knew, and Euclid knew this very well, there is no right angle in reality. There is an approximation, just as there is no line because it's made of dots, and dots is something that has no, that can't take up any space. But we can't have access to anything that can't take up any space.
▶︎ 4:41 So there's this divorce. We can use mathematical truths. We can use things that we understand rationally in order to make our embodied lives more comfortable, but we know that that's not where truth resides. And for a very long time, this truth was found in religion. So we cannot understand truth as finite beings that live and die in the world, which we have mediated through sensory experience. But we are lucky enough to have had prophets who have given us books, and therein lies truth, and this truth is, in a very profound sense, inherently irrational. That's why it's based on faith.
▶︎ 5:24 So what was the big drama of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution? Suddenly there seemed to be a possibility to attain truth through empirical data, through sensory data. So it's not regular sensory data because the senses haven't really changed at all. These are the interesting ideas that now when it seems that things might be changing in today's world with Elon Musk's Neuralink and the ideas of maybe trying to attain some sort of maybe even objective sensory experience that is shared, now people are trying to rethink ideas of consciousness. They're trying to rethink ideas of rationality. They're trying to rethink ideas of intelligence. So this is why this really big shift of paradigms is happening now.
▶︎ 6:13 But this was the same then because one of the big things that happened, and in this it's very symbolic that Spinoza was quite in the center of it in a pragmatic way. Spinoza was a lens grinder. After he left the community, this is how he made his living, very modest living. But what I'm getting at is that telescopes and microscopes completely changed the way that sensory data can be achieved, and they gave rise to a different understanding of the rationality of the world that we live in. And suddenly, truth was able to be attained in a different way.
▶︎ 6:49 This is the big point. So if truth is no longer completely and totally in the province of religion, it has to be somewhere else. And that's why Spinoza's secularity was such a huge deal, because he took this the next step forward. And we are obviously all living in this, in the aftermath of this thing.
▶︎ 7:12 But it's really important to say that in the early modern period, both rationalists and empiricists, so we can say that the great empiricists were Locke, Hobbes, and Hume. So Hume was edging into the 18th century. He's a bit later. But those are the big three of the empiricist camp. By the way, of course, the rationalist-empiricist divide is quite ridiculous. We do not endorse it in any way. It's just a very useful rule of thumb in order to divide these people.
▶︎ 7:44 So all of them, with the exception of Hume, who was of course later, are religious people. Locke is a Christian, Descartes is a devout Catholic, Leibniz is a devout Christian also, German Protestant, of course. So they have to deal with the pressures of blending together religious faith, religious dogma, truth through religion, and truth through science, which is a much heavier burden than Spinoza does. But Spinoza's greatest tension in his life is religion and politics.
▶︎ 8:18 So the great challenge that Spinoza is trying to take up is, can we achieve certainty through reason? Now, of course, a lot of people say, "Yeah, it's been done before, and everyone has done it." And you can see it in all sorts of thinkers, again, from Plato onward. So we have Plato who had to contend not with monotheistic faith, but with polytheistic faith and his philosophical idea of a rational God. And then again, of course, we can go through Aristotle, who was the empiricist par excellence, and even in Christian thought. We can talk about Augustinus. We can talk about Rambam, who, I'm sorry, Maimonides, who spent a lot of his energy in trying to reconcile scientific inquiry with religion.
▶︎ 9:22 There is something very bold about the Spinozistic project and, to the question whether we can achieve certainty through reason, Spinoza's answer is very much yes. But it has to go through our idea of God. It has to go through divinity. And I think that today, as children of Spinoza and people who live in a very strongly secular age, this is something that we ought to remember. He didn't do this just because of where he was born. Spinoza, if he doesn't want to do something, he doesn't do it. So if he wouldn't want to talk about God, he wouldn't have talked about God. He wanted to do it because he thought it was important.
▶︎ 10:02 And he made a very big point of not publishing The Ethics until his death, although it was completely done, and we know this. We know that he finished writing it about five years even before he died. He put it in his desk. He refused to put it out because he was afraid of persecution. So he's not trying to make himself likable. He's not trying to make himself palatable. He is undoubtedly very disliked and very unpalatable to a lot of people. And yet he wanted to talk about God. So we'll try to understand why that is.
▶︎ 10:35 Another thing I wanted to say before we start. The classic question of whether philosophy can attain the same kind of knowledge as mathematic and science is taken up in this text, and that is why it is written in the geometrical order. What does that mean? If we open The Ethics, this is the Curley translation. This is the standard English translation. We have this Spinoza reader. It's nice. It has an anthology. It has The Ethics in full and various excerpts from other texts, which are very good.
▶︎ 11:04 You can have the Penguin edition of the Curley translation, which is spanning only The Ethics, and of course the collected works, which have everything. They come in two volumes. The Ethics is in the first one, and then the political writings are in the second, and the correspondence is interspersed. The correspondence that, of course, wasn't burned after his death, so no one would see.
▶︎ 11:26 If we open up The Ethics as a first part, we see that it's divided. It's a text in geometrical order. That is an ethical text. So it's supposed to teach us how to live. That's what ethics is. Ethics is what we should do and why, if it's good ethics. Sometimes it's just like dogma. But we want it to be good ethics.
▶︎ 11:49 So Spinoza's ethics is presented in geometric order. It's divided into five parts. It begins with God. It ends with salvation, such a religious undertaking. And what makes it geometrical is that it starts with definitions and then axioms, and then we have propositions which are deduced from the axioms and the definitions. And each part proceeds like this.
▶︎ 12:14 Sometimes he gives an essay writing. He gives an appendix or a preface, which are a lot of times very good. He gets very angry in those. He gets also angry in the scholia to his propositions. But generally his idea is to say that this is necessary truth. It cannot be understood otherwise, and I will take all of my ideas to their logical conclusion. There is no other way.
▶︎ 12:41 Bergson famously said that everyone has their own philosophy and Spinoza's. So Spinoza is, in a way, irrefutable. But I'm biased. I do think he's, he's lovely. He's a lovely guy. So that is the structure of the ethics.
▶︎ 13:00 And I want to start with talking about what a definition is. Definition comes from the word define, and I'm talking only in English, of course. I don't want to get into the Latin philology of it, so it's because I don't. But let's talk about it through our everyday understanding of what it is.
▶︎ 13:19 Our mind works in a dialectic manner in the sense that it can only understand things through their negations. So when I define something, I necessarily make a border around it, and I differentiate it from other things. That is the nature of rational thought. There is no other way to understand things, so the only way we can attain truth is through an understanding of difference, and through a differentiation, we attain intelligibility.
▶︎ 13:58 Think of it as focusing a lens. With focus, through taking the blurry away, we have a clear definition. That is what we intuitively understand as intelligibility. We have no other way to understand what it means to be intelligible. Intelligibility is the opposite of vague, so certainty and truth would pertain to that.
▶︎ 14:22 Good. The idea that reality itself possesses an intelligible order, that it can be understood in a definitive way, that's what rationality is. Someone like Hume, who is super interesting. I can't say I love it. He's a really good guy to read. He's very, very interesting. Hume and Spinoza, they share these very basic anti-religious tendencies, which make them very interesting to compare.
▶︎ 14:52 Hume is a guy who rejects. It's like he has gone above the need for certainty. He doesn't need certainty anymore. This is not a human, a very human trait. We need certainty. And we have a strong desire. We have a drive toward, Plato would call it an erotic drive toward certainty. Toward knowledge, toward intelligibility.
▶︎ 15:21 It's very difficult for us to let go and say, "Well, you know, maybe it's like this, maybe like that," or saying, as it is so common today because people have no consequences for their lives, saying, "This is my truth. That's your truth." Because no one's trying to kill you for it. In your house you can say that. Outside, it doesn't work. So this is a very big deal that regards context and the things that we are willing to live with. Which make a difference. When you're trying to live, who you're trying to live with, and so on.
▶︎ 15:55 I would like to assert, and I think this is non-negotiable, that human nature in itself drives for certainty. It wants certainty, and it would rather have true certainty than false certainty. And if we talk about religious people who are willing to take faith in a God that they do not have physical proof for its existence and say, "No, this is not real certainty," I'm not sure that you are right. Maybe you should have a deeper conversation with these people about what they really talk about when they talk about God. If they're intelligent, of course. So we said that the idea that reality itself possesses an intelligible order, this is rationalism.
▶︎ 16:31 The big question that we have to talk when you talk about rationalists and empiricists, and again, this very convenient but inaccurate division between rationalists and empiricists, really puts this in the light that I want to. What do we want to achieve through understanding? And this is another aspect of the scientific revolution that we are the children of, that I think should be very much put into account when we talk about Spinoza. Do we want to understand nature, or do we want to control and manipulate nature?
▶︎ 17:08 So I don't know if you read Francis Bacon. No. Francis Bacon was a British philosopher, a huge behemoth of the scientific revolution. Really a very, very important guy. He was almost a century before. I think he died by sixteen twenty-three, so he died ten years before Spinoza was born. And he had such interesting text, really.
▶︎ 17:30 So he wrote the Novum Organon, which is, he wanted to redo Aristotelianism. Aristotle had the Organon. He wrote the new tools. This is how we should understand reality. And he's the one who, his famous quote is, "Knowledge is power." And what he was aiming for was an understanding of nature through the scientific revolution, which would lead to domination over nature. So understanding nature, all it can lead to, the best things that we want, is domination, is more comfort.
▶︎ 18:02 Nature is not to be understood as a thing in and of itself. Once we understand it, then maybe we can turn to understanding ourselves. But our physical needs, he was like a precursor of the Maslow principle. Our physical needs are so huge. We are so overtaken by fear of death and fear of sickness and mortality and inconvenience and all this pain that let's first dominate nature, let's do whatever we can to master it, and that is what the scientific revolution is for.
▶︎ 18:37 Now, obviously, a rationalist like Spinoza is the opposite. Francis Bacon is the father of the inductive method. We like to call him. Of course, this is also again these funny, how do you call it? These funny titles that we put to people. But he did write a brilliant text about the inductive method, and that's a really easy place to see because Spinoza uses the geometric method, which is a deductive method, that they are completely opposed in what they think the scientific revolution ought to do.
▶︎ 19:15 And I think we today are getting this struggle. Do we want to dominate nature? Do we want to understand nature? Can nature be both? Can nature be dominated at all? And could it be that only through understanding of nature we can maybe not dominate it, but get the best out of it, which is actually what the dominators really wanted. It's not that they wanted to destroy everything, right?
▶︎ 19:41 Good. So do we want to impose human purposes on the world, or do we want to achieve happiness through understanding? Spinoza would say that we want to achieve happiness through understanding, and this is what he's trying to do here.
▶︎ 19:59 Spinoza started The Ethics with part one, of God. Part one of five. And he has the definitions that start the book. And we would think that if he's trying to be very orderly and very organized, that the first definition of part one would be of God, and he does define God. It's not a proposition. It's not something that he deduces, but he gives it in definition six. The first definition is causa sui. Causa sui means cause of itself.
▶︎ 20:30 And this is a very interesting definition, and I want to talk a bit about why he does this. So here I'm going to present an idea which might be refuted by other scholars. The definition of causa sui is this: "By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing." This definition of causa sui has been called by Nietzsche the greatest perversion of rationalism in the history of philosophy. And it's funny because it's true. No, it's not. It's not really true, but it is a perversion in a good way. It is an interesting thing.
▶︎ 21:15 Why? Rationalists need to have a special place in their hearts for causality. The whole point of everything they're doing is causality. By the way, we talked about Hume before. This is exactly why he is the arch empiricist because the very thing that he refutes is causality itself. What rationalists are saying is things are intelligible. Things can be understood, and understanding them means one thing, understanding their causes.
▶︎ 21:50 I wish we could read together the paragraph from Plato's Phaedo when Socrates explains why he got into. That's like the first presentation of the theory of forms when he said, "Once I thought that by understanding causes, I would understand everything. And I thought that the philosophers of nature, like Anaxagoras and Anaximenes, they had answers for why things happen because they showed me chronological phenomena in nature and says, 'Yes, this is the cause of this because it precedes it.'" But then I understood, this is what Socrates said, then I understood this is not what causality is really about. I can never be sure of the essence of the effect by its cause. This is exactly Hume's refutation.
▶︎ 22:45 So this is the thing where people will be very pissed, "Oh, she's complaining." But I think that the idea here is the same. That is why Plato said, that's why he's the ultrarationalist, "Causes can only be found not in the plane of sensory experience." And again, this is what Hume is saying. We only have a plane of sensory experience, therefore, there are no causes because causes do not exist there. They only exist in an understanding of mental entities, of ideas.
▶︎ 23:23 Spinoza takes this challenge head on, and instead of asking us to have a refutable relation of cause and effect, he starts the whole The Ethics with causa sui, cause of itself. He collapses the effect and the cause. This is like the most important idea ever. And of course, the only thing that will be causa sui, the only place where effect and cause are infinitely united are in God. That's why everything is God.
▶︎ 23:58 So maybe if anyone knows any cliché about Spinoza, that's what he says, that God is nature or God is everything. Now we'll see why it's so. This is the only way that he finds to rescue rationalism from the clutches of religion.
▶︎ 24:15 The whole idea of religion. He starts by cause of itself. How does the Bible start? I won't say it in Hebrew. But I don't remember the English version. So in Hebrew, it's "In the beginning, God." In English, it's something like, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth." The whole idea of the beginning of the book is to state that God is a transcendental external creator who is the cause of the world and is chronologically prior. That's why it's not just "Bereshit," "in the beginning," we have a point in time. There was a thing that came before time, and the world is entirely dependent on that.
▶︎ 24:53 And that is the transcendental causality of everything, and that's why that's where the truth is. That's why I said before that religion and rationality have this very complicated relationship, and that if a rationalist in the early modern period wants to seriously contest religion as the only source of truth, this is what he needs to take up. And this is why Descartes had so much trouble with the church. So this is what he does in the first thing. He collapses the cause and the effect. He denies transcendental creation. And this is, in a sense, where everything will come from. That's why it's the very, very first definition.
▶︎ 25:39 So this is why Spinoza is one of the most ambitious philosophers, because what he's saying is, if you want philosophy to give a true way to live life and give certainty regarding reality itself, two things you cannot depart with, and that is causation, because without causation, there is no understanding, and the idea of God, because God is the ultimate cause of everything. Now, people until then have always tried, and I think this is very admirable also, because they understand that they are living with other people in the world, and these other people have their own ideas, and through a love of these other people, they want to help them and understand, they have to in some ways take into account the ideas of the age. Aristotelian endoxa. We take all the doxa and we talk about it, and we can have a rational idea that stems out of that, and through the respect that we give to a plurality of ideas, we can maybe achieve change.
▶︎ 26:56 Spinoza says, "I don't care. Life is short. I know the truth. I know the answers. We have to have a completely different idea of God. Not only that, I will show you that what I talk about God, this is actually what you talk about God. You're just lying to yourselves because you are so consumed with imagination and confusion and false ideas and tradition. But it's fine. I will be there for you. I will create a very, very structured book. You will get the definitions in a very orderly manner. If you follow it through, you will understand that what I'm actually reflecting," and this is the rationalist idea here, "what I'm actually reflecting is the status of your own mind. You will not be able to object to it. It will be unrefutable."
▶︎ 27:42 So this is the project. So yeah, ambitious maybe is a good word, but he has really complicated things to say about ambition. But generally, he's all for it. He understands that causality, God, and rationality are intertwined. He is maybe the first guy to say, "It's fine that you're confused. I want what's best for you, but I cannot pander to your idiocy. So I'm starting at the beginning, and you're gonna do it right from the beginning."
▶︎ 28:20 And this is a problem. Spinoza is not the only smart guy to live in the world. There were smart people before him, and there were smart people after him. There is something about his approach which takes this conflation of causation, God, and rationality and does something very drastic with it. And I think that's why today he has this very strong following, because it's so attractive, because we have been very much released, as he would say, from superstition and imagination that has plagued Western civilization for so many years, and we are very much open to reading him. We don't get a gut reaction.
▶︎ 29:05 So when you read the text that followed his publication of the theological political treatise anonymously in 1670, wow, it's painful to read. It really is painful to read. There's also, in the correspondence, one bad letter. This awful guy called, I'm sorry, maybe his children's children are still around, but this awful guy called Albert Burgh, he writes him this letter telling him, so this guy has converted to Roman Catholicism, and he has gone insane. And he writes to Spinoza, and the things that he says, it's painful to read. It's so harsh. He hates him so much. Also because he's a Jew, but also because of, because he really is like, for these people, blasphemy, this is the biggest point, and this is a very Aristotelian point.
▶︎ 30:01 The intelligibility of the world is promised to you by the nature of your own mind and not because God made it so. A lot of times in religion, they say we are in the image of God, and through our rationality, which is the thing that is closest in us to God, that's why the world is intelligible. And then people like Maimonides, for example, or even Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina, and Thomas Aquinas also. A lot of these medieval religious philosophers, the way that they can make scientific thought and religion compatible is because God made the world intelligible, and we owe it to him, and then it's not blasphemous in any way to study nature. So they make it work.
▶︎ 30:48 Spinoza is saying because this transcendental story is an imaginative lie, it has no place, and he also says, and I think in this sense it's very accurate, that even if a lot of the effects that we want to achieve through religion are very positive, like loving thy neighbor as thyself, the risks that we take in perpetuating these imaginative stories cause unbelievable misery, and we have to think very long and hard, are they worth it? Or we have to just understand what they truly give us, and this is what he does here. This is what he does in the TTP. This is his big project. Can we make a structure of society that is irreligious? I'm not sure that the answer is yes. I don't think he thought the answer was yes. He just thought that we have to create a political structure that uses religion in the right way.
▶︎ 31:55 Good. I will say this sentence because it is very important. This is why he writes the ethics. When people accused him of atheism during his time, he hated it. By the way, there is a very good book by Steven Nadler, Spinoza Atheist, which argues that Spinoza is indeed an unqualified atheist. I don't want to say if I agree or not.
▶︎ 32:22 But the idea is that when Spinoza writes in a letter, "I very much object to being called an atheist," he says, "How can I be an atheist? I'm such a moral guy." Because back then, to be an atheist means to be a bad person. What kept people in line was their God-fearing personalities.
▶︎ 32:43 I was just in a lecture, and this guy, very confident guy, very old and self-loving, distinguished guy, was talking about how all religion is crap, and it's the single most horrible thing to happen to humanity, and religion is to blame for everything. Dun, dun, dun. And how it is. And then he said, "And we know the stories about the popes who on their deathbeds were crying for their mothers and weeping in." And then they died.
▶︎ 33:18 And then after he was done with his rant, this really young, nice guy raises his hand and he says, his name, I don't remember his name. He says, "I'm a recent Catholic convert, and I take great offense to what you've said about religion in general, and I actually think that if these stories are true, and they very well might be true that popes have cried on their deathbed for their mothers, maybe they had very good reason to cry because they knew what they'd done. They were going to hell. So, this is not the thing. That's what I have to say about that." And he said, "Wow, that's such a great response." And this is what I needed to get from this course, and I didn't go back to the rest of the lectures.
▶︎ 33:59 But I think this is very much the case. Once atheism was seen as just bad people. You don't know who you are. You're not a God-fearing person. That means you're a bad person. God is for these people then, God was just the internalization of conscience.
▶︎ 34:21 So if you're an atheist, means you're just a crappy person. You just don't care. You think nothing will happen to you. You act completely on your instincts. You're more an animal than a person.
▶︎ 34:31 So religiosity, understanding of the divine, a connection to the divine is what makes us human. It's the most beautiful part in us. Again, this is the conflation of religion and rationality, which was the truth in Western Europe at that time. Spinoza is saying, and that's why he calls it the ethics, "We can do it differently, and let me show you."
▶︎ 34:52 Good. And then we have the second definition, about what a finite thing is. I'll just go back to that later. That's not what I want to do now.
▶︎ 34:59 Now I want to talk about Spinoza's tripartite ontology, which is substance, attributes, and modes. This is very, very important. So substance. So definition three in part one is by substance I understand what is in itself and conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing from which it must be formed. So a substance has to be what we understand at the substrate of our understanding.
▶︎ 35:31 If Aristotle gave us substance as opposed to qualities? Because you cannot think of a quality as not carried by something that underlies its existence. The idea of substance is the thing that actually exists. So regardless of the phenomena of which we can sense it or think about it, or if it was here before but then gone the next, the substance would only pertain to the existence of the thing. The substratum.
▶︎ 36:04 Obviously, for Spinoza, substance would be God. The only thing that existence pertains to its essence and is necessary would be God, which is reality itself, absolutely everything. We'll talk about this in a moment. So again, even traditionally, substance is the thing that we posit it exists, its existence as rationally irrefutable. We cannot think of existence as not through substance, but its qualia, its qualities are understood as somehow distinct from it. They pertain to the way that we approach it, and that's how we get to attributes.
▶︎ 36:44 That's definition four. By attribute, I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence. So this has to do with perception. What we constitute, what we understand as constituting the very existence of substance, and Spinoza says that we have access as human beings to two attributes, which are thought and extension. Extension means material matter, just being embodied. And thought is thought.
▶︎ 37:25 So usually for rationalists, we have this division between, as we said before, the great drama of Western philosophy between senses and rational thought. So in a sense, Spinoza is continuing this dualism by giving two types of attributes, thought and extension. But because they are two ways that we can perceive of existence or substance expressing itself, they are actually two sides of the same coin. So thought and extension are the two attributes through which we understand reality and nothing else.
▶︎ 38:03 The way I like to think about attributes is to think about senses. Through our bodies, we have five senses through which we access the world, and these senses understand reality through different mediums, which in a sense pertain to the same thing, but in completely unrelated ways, except the substance. For example, I see a lemon. So I have a lemon. So I can feel its texture through my fingers, and it's smooth. I see that it's yellow. If I taste it, I will taste that it's sour, and if I smell it, I will smell the lemony smell. Even if I drop it on the floor, I will hear the thud that it makes because of its material.
▶︎ 39:02 All of these are parallel expressions of the lemon, which are in a sense unrelated. They pertain to different senses that I have, but they all pertain to the same substance. So this is how we understand the world. We understand the world through thought and extension.
▶︎ 39:22 Spinoza is even happy to concede that there are an infinite number of attributes which we, sometimes I think that maybe we can even imagine, for example, radio waves as being another attribute or sonar. So there are animals who have a sonar sense, so they understand reality. They don't have maybe the same visual. They don't access reality in the same way. Maybe this could be. But it's actually impossible for us to think of an attribute which we have no access to. I think the best metaphor for it is the metaphor of the senses, which invokes parallelism and shows how these attributes have no causal connection between them.
▶︎ 40:11 By attribute, I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence. Essence here should be replaced with the word existence. So thought and extension are what are the basic condition of anything becoming real for me. Because all I can ever meet are ideas and things. That's the thing. So it pertains to the essence of the substance. We're not at particular things yet.
▶︎ 40:49 So now we're at particular things, modes. That's D5. By mode, I understand the affections of a substance or that which is in another through which it is also conceived. The best way to understand the idea of modes. Modes, as we will see, will be finite things or what we understand as individual things, like a table, a chair, me, you. New York City. They are finite things because they are defined by their finitude in terms of temporality, in terms of space.
▶︎ 41:34 They share with other things, unlike God, which is of course infinite and doesn't share with anyone. He's everything. And these are modes. So everything in reality has to be always linked. We can imagine it like when we go to a viewpoint and we see a 3D topographical map. And then we see that, and this is of course one of the famous analogies of philosophy in understanding anything. It gets us back to dialectic and the idea of definitions and making things and making a border between things.
▶︎ 42:09 We can see that the valley and the mountain are actually continuations. They are one and the same thing, which can only be understood as different insofar as they are negating each other. This is what modes are. So when I hold this chalk, in a sense, the chalk is. It can be a part of me insofar as it is, if you want to define it like that. We'll talk later about how Spinoza specifically defines the limits between different things. But it has to be very, very fluid.
▶︎ 42:45 So the way that I so easily say that I see here three things, a table, a chair, and a carpet, that's ridiculous. I define them like this because it's convenient for me in order to, again, manipulate them. This distinction between understanding reality and manipulating reality. In truth, they are all matter, and they are interconnected, completely interconnected.
▶︎ 43:08 Why did I write this on the side? Because I want to talk about very special modes, which are human beings, finite things. So every mode which is a human being is a mode of God, of substance, and it's understood as everything is, through the two attributes, thought and extension. Under the attribute of thought, it is a mind, and under the attribute of extension, it is a body.
▶︎ 43:32 So what is really interesting here is that my mind and my body, so I'm Noa. I have a mind and a body. These are two aspects of the same identical thing. And one of the most important things that comes out of this identity between mind and body and their expressions in two different attributes is that there's no causal connection between mind and body. So the obsessions that we have with mind-body causality, this is not something that exists in Spinoza. It makes absolutely no sense.
▶︎ 44:04 Something happens in the body, and then something happens in the mind. We can have access to different aspects of the occurrence, but nothing can ever be chronologically prior. So you can't tell me, "Noa raised her hand, and then I raised my hand," and, "Ooh, I thought about it, and then I raised my hand." This is not the way it works. There was a thought of the raising of the hand simultaneously with the action that is perceived through extension because my mind and the body are exactly the same thing, understood once under this attribute and once under the other.
▶︎ 44:37 So another important thing to understand about this tripartite ontology of substance, attributes, and modes is the relation when we jump from substance to modes. So we talked about the relation of human beings to God as being a bedrock of rationality forever because God is the infinite. God is the ultimate cause. That's what makes Him God, and He also expresses what we understand to be infinite. So when we talk about God, we talk about infinity. It is the thing that is not bounded, that has no limitations. That's what defines God as God.
▶︎ 45:14 Now, what defines us as us is that we are finite, and everything that we know and everything that we meet through sensory experience is defined by its finitude. It's always. There's always something larger than it. There's always something that will take it over. There's always something that will replace it as time comes. And that's why the relationship between mode and substance is also the relation between the finite and the infinite. And that's another reason that we will see that substance is, in fact, God.
▶︎ 45:47 One of the most important ideas to keep in mind always is that God is substance. It's also causa sui, cause of itself, and 17 times throughout the Ethics, there is the most famous version of this where Spinoza calls it Deus, God, sive natura, God or nature. God, that is everything. So sive is an or. It means or, which is a replacement or. It's an identification of the two. God is nature.
▶︎ 46:28 That's maybe one of the most important formulations that has made Spinoza very famous. And the identification of God with substance and nature itself is precisely what makes it causa sui in the sense that all effects are collapsed into a cause which is not transcendental. So human beings are finite expressions of nature, and as parts of nature or parts of God, they have no way to escape the causal order through which they exist.
▶︎ 47:10 So there is no contingency. Contingency means things could have happened differently. This is a completely deterministic approach to reality. A lot of times, even the word determinism is too light for Spinoza, and people call him a necessitarian. Everything is absolutely necessary. If God, as the infinite structure of reality, permeates everything, insofar as He is infinite, it's inconceivable that He would be overcome. That's what makes Him God. That's the whole idea. That's why we call Him God.
▶︎ 47:48 In that sense, nature can't be overcome in the sense that everything always has to happen according to its laws. It would be inconceivable that something would defy the laws of God or nature. And if you would, in any chance, want to conceive this out of weakness of your mind, that would at once remove the certainty that rationalism aspires to. Spinoza says you can't really be a rationalist, and you can't really be a God-loving man if you do not accept that everything is absolutely necessary. These religious people who want to talk about miracles as aberrations of nature, or sometimes God suddenly intervenes, and suddenly His laws aren't good enough, and He has other laws, no, this makes absolutely no sense. If you love God as He is, an immutable being which controls absolutely everything and is completely wise and true and the cause of everything at all times.
▶︎ 48:48 When religion wants to discuss, or even, it's more than discuss, it wants to somehow assert its power through miracles, which it wants to frame as aberrations of nature, that is, as breaking of God's laws, Spinoza is claiming that this is the height of blasphemy, and this is exactly what religions get wrong. A religious will can very well be a rational will, but then it has to stay rational all the way. It can't accept something like a miracle. It can't accept something like an aberration. It can't accept, this is what I'm going for, free will.
▶︎ 49:35 In Spinoza's system, there is absolutely no free will. We are parts of nature. We work in it through its causal laws, its necessary causal laws. The only reason that we mistakenly think that we have free will is that we are conscious of the desires that we have, and we are unconscious or unaware of the reasons behind these desires. But the reasons exist. They are just not accessible to us because of certain finite mechanisms so far of our mind, and this is perfectly fine. The fact that something is unpleasant to you does not mean that it's just wrong in the sense of what God wants it to be. God is everything.
▶︎ 50:25 One of the biggest ideas that Spinoza is latching onto in the terms, again, of this relationship between rationalism and religion is that religion, and, of course, this is very, very in broad strokes, and religious people might be quite offended because I'm maybe doing it a bit flat-footed. But a big part of the drama of religion is that it posits a benevolent God who grants people free will and tells them what's the right thing to do, and that says you should do it through an expression of freedom. And this is precisely what Spinoza is going for. He says, "I'll give you what God is. You are parts of him." And the endpoint would be freedom. But he does this in a radically different way in the sense that God is not transcendental. He is the world itself. And freedom would be to better understand the necessary order of nature.
▶︎ 51:29 Freedom will never be an objection to God's laws, to God's rules, which is in a sense exactly the picture of free will that religions want to paint. They say the laws or the rules of your human nature, they bend towards sin. They bend toward the bad. And then you fight with your God-given free will. Who knows where that came from. And you achieve salvation. And more often than not, that salvation will be outside of the world after you die. So there's no way to prove it, right? But this is exactly what Spinoza is going for in the mirror image of this. God is everything. He did not create the world in any point of time. Your freedom lies in your understanding of necessity, and salvation is imminent. That is, salvation is within this lifetime.
▶︎ 52:21 After this, we will transition to the discussion of Spinoza of the human being, and I just want to go over the parts of the ethics as a whole. We started with of God, and then the second part will be of the nature and origin of the mind. Part three, of the origin and nature of the affects. Affects are, in a sense, emotions. We'll talk about this at length as we go along. Part four is of human bondage, the power of the affects. And part five is of the power of the intellect or human freedom.
▶︎ 52:53 Why did I want to read the whole layout of the book now? Because the important thing is before we start to talk about Spinozistic psychology and the fact that it is just a series or a structure of laws that are part of nature itself, that Spinoza is zooming in. So first we have God, and God is absolutely everything. And then we zoom into the human mind. We see how the mind works insofar as it is a mode of God and an idea of the body.
▶︎ 53:26 And then we look at the emotions of the mind itself. Then we look at the bad emotions that cause bondage, and then we look at how we overcome these bad emotions into freedom or salvation, which is, again, very close to the structure of the way religions work. We have a story of a beginning, a story of ultimate causality, which is God, and then we have a series of maxims on how to live. Spinoza says why. Usually religions don't really say why. They just say it as it is. They give the commandments. They're giving us commandments. And then we build toward an idea of salvation. And this is what he's doing here.