Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Deep Dive II: The Philosophy of Spinoza & God-as-Nature

Episode Date: June 12, 2021

Matthew Furlong returns to the show to discuss the life and philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, the great 17th century Dutch philosopher, as a lens (no pun intended) through which to deepen our understanding of dialectics and our appreciation for the cosmos in which we exist. Check out our first installment of "Dialectics Deep Dive" here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/dialectics Previous Episodes on Dialectics: - Hegelian Dialectics: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/hegel - The Principal Contradiction: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/contradiction - Red Menace "On Contradiction": https://redmenace.libsyn.com/on-contradiction-mao Outro Music: "You're So Cool" by Hans Zimmer ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

This frugal, propertyless life, undermined by illness, this thin, frail body, this brown, oval face with its sparkling black eyes, how does one explain the impression they give of being suffused with life itself, of having a power identical to life? In his whole way of living and of thinking, Spinoza projects an image of the positive affirmative life, which stands in opposition to the semblances that men are content with. Not only are they content with the latter, they feel a hatred of life. They are ashamed of it. A humanity bent on self-destruction, multiplying the cults of death, bringing about the union of the tyrant and the slave, the priest, the judge, and the soldier,

always busy running life into the ground, mutilating it, killing it outright or by degrees, overlaying it or suffocating it with laws, properties, duties, empires. This is what Spinoza diagnoses in the world, this betrayal of the universe and of mankind. Hey, everyone. This is Matthew again, coming to you from Chiboktuk, slash Halifax. and today I'm here with Brett to follow up on our last episode and to begin a discussion about the thinking of Spinoza, also known as Benedict or Benedictus de Spinoza, and also again known as Bento Spinoza by his friends in Amsterdam. And part of the purpose of this episode, other than to get into Spinoza's philosophy, which is, I'd say, can only be described as a joy machine,

is to eventually lead us to a discussion that Brett and I talked about having about the thinking of Jules de Luz and Felix Guattari and basically so we'll start off this episode talking about Spinoza and who he was and to basically touch on his major work of the ethics.

The next episode, we will look at Deleuze's take on Spinoza and how Spinoza informed him as a person and as a thinker. And then in hopefully a third episode, we will turn toward the combined mind called delusine Guateri. Beautiful, yeah. And of course, for people that don't know,

we just recently did this episode with Matthew a month or so ago on the philosophy and history of dialectical materialism. The feedback to that was really wonderful. I personally just loved that conversation and knew immediately that I had to have Matthew back on. And Spinoza has been somebody who I've admired and liked for many, many years, going back to my, my days as a philosophy undergrad, somebody that's always sort of spoke to me and that I found

incredibly interesting and has dovetailed with my other interests in things like mysticism, Buddhism, Taoism, et cetera. And maybe we'll touch on some of those overlaps a little bit throughout this conversation. But I'm really, I struggled with trying to find a way to do an episode on Spinoza. I could have always just done like a, like a, you know, covering of Spinoza's life in his main works. And I probably would have done that if this opportunity. he didn't arise, but to try to understand Spinoza through a lens of like dialectics and Deleuze and building up to this other episode we're going to do. In the future, I thought it was like the perfect way to begin to cover Spinoza.

And I really have to say like, you know, if you are at all interested in philosophy, Spinoza is a figure you cannot skip over. And specifically if you're interested in dialectics, Spinoza is a really fascinating thinker. So we're going to dive into it and see where the conversation goes. Matthew, it's obviously an honor and a pleasure to have you back on. But I know that we talked before we started recording. And you said that you wanted to sort of recap certain features of our previous episode on Mao and his work on contradiction and the foundations of dialectical materialism. So before we get into Spinoza necessarily, can you just kind of speak to those features and explain how recapping them will help us with this conversation moving forward? Mm-hmm. Well, the first thing, I mean, and this is also to encourage listeners to go check out that episode, which was super fun to do. I just, I was sort of just walking around, you know, and at work and just thinking about different formula for trying to, you know, convey stuff to people in an accessible way. And I came up with three silly statements or objects that I think can help keep in your mind what Mao's talking about when he talks about what he calls metaphysics, which we discuss in the old. other episode. So I'm just going to use these little tools I've pulled out of a sort of

contemporary recent pop culture, mainstream culture, to sort of achieve that task of, you know, putting it into your mind what it is that mouse talking about. So the first thing is, what is the chief proposition of metaphysics according to Mao Zedong thought? And my answer to that is the chief proposition of metaphysics is nothing will fundamentally change. The second thing is what is the object or the concept or the logical structure of how things are in the universe in which things do not fundamentally change? What can we call that to keep it in our minds? And I would say the basic object and the sort of logical structure that we're talking about, we could call it the absolute unit. And if the universe is fundamentally defined by the absolute unit and because of the absolute unit,

Nothing will fundamentally change. What universe are we living in? And my answer to that is that we're living in the sea of balls. We're at the Chucky Cheese. And there's just enough for empty space in the sea of balls left over for the balls to move around. And this in many ways is the essence of modern Western civilization. Congratulations, everyone. We did great.

Everybody is profoundly confused. But it's all the more reason to go. I'll listen to the other episode. Totally. The second thing I wanted to do just to recap is to follow up on Engels' remarks and anti-Durring about what Mal will later call metaphysics. And again, you can go back and listen to the other episode about that. And there is a really interesting passage on page 34 of my edition of Ante During,

which is the third edition from Foreign Language is Publishing House, Moscow, 1962, and he actually makes a really interesting point about how metaphysics itself emerges dialectically out of science, which is good, and this is bad. Metaphysics is bad. He says, the analysis of nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies into their manifold forms, these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of nature that had been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy, the habit of observing natural objects

and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole, of observing them in repose, not in motion, as constants, not as essentially variables, in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon, here he means Francis Bacon and Locke, John Locke, from natural science to philosophy, it begot the natural metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century, and he means the 18th century. And so it's very interesting, right? So we come up with these tools to help us analyze nature. And this is in a way what, and I talked about Birch and Russell last time, this is what Russell will call metaphysics. They're sort of these concepts to help us do science. But what, you know,

according to Engels is 19th century vocabulary and sort of set of concepts that he's working with, those are scientific concepts. And then when they congeal into these dogmatisms that we just spit, you know, they're easy and they seem to make sense according to what we think of as common sense. It ends up becoming what he calls metaphysics. And that ends up being really, really bad because it puts us into the universe where everything is frozen and nothing is really growing and nature is just sort of a dead thing or a dead set of things that we exist inside and it's there for us to consume and ultimately to destroy. So taking a useful approach in science that is like a sort of means to another end, but then taking it as a sort of background premise,

assumption, turning it into common sense, that's where the error is made, right? Yes, absolutely. And I think I'd also like to mention that because when we're talking about Spinoza, we're going to basically be talking about causality the entire time. And in many ways, we're going to be talking about or largely talking about what philosophers for very long time after Aristotle called the moving cause. So in Aristotle's physics and also in his metaphysics, he talks about the moving cause in terms of, for instance, a metal worker striking a dent into a piece of copper with a hammer. And so it's the moving cause for Aristotle and I think also for Spinoza is actually sort of a complex kind of event or coalescence of a whole bunch of little like multiple lines of events that come together.

And this is important because the moving cause at some point in I think the Middle Ages, starts being called the efficient cause, or the causa efficians is what they call it, and that sort of is what leads into Hume's example of billiard ball causality, where people make mistakes about cause and effect, and the image he uses is, again, like, you know, billiard balls bouncing off each other, and even though he used that as a critical concept in the mode of what Mao and Engels called metaphysics, that itself, that image of billiard balls bouncing off each other as a sort of trope of how all things interact becomes its own dogmatism.

And just to give you an example, I don't know if like corporate yuppie types or whatever still do this stuff because they're all into like corporate mindfulness and corporate yoga and corporate I'm okay with my own okayness stuff right now, they used to have, instead of actually doing that themselves, they used to outsource it to little machines that would sit on their desk. And one of them is this little frame with four, I think five silver balls that are hanging together. And you pull one and you let it go. And it's the force that it hits the other balls with goes through them and they stay still.

And the one at the other end moves and then it goes back and forth. Have you ever seen one of those ones? Yep. It's funnily enough, it's called Newton's Cradle. And in the last episode, I used Newton's concept of matter to try to describe this sort of modern metaphysical way of thinking about causality. And that leads to all sorts of consequences, and hopefully we'll be able to talk about some of the consequences of this Newton's cradle notion of causality, you know, as though the universe coming into creation is somebody like pulling back the first. metal ball and letting it swing and then the rest of the universe is just this line of infinite line of other metal balls is clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, and

Spinoza can help us get out of stuff like that. So that's basically, that's sort of the basic recap that I wanted to do. And I think it's really best listen to you in conjunction with the other episode. Absolutely. Yeah. And I'll link to that episode in the show notes. If you've missed it, you could listen to this and then go back and listen to that in any order, whatever you're preferred approaches, but it does help to sort of fill out this entire conversation to at least have some engagement with that previous episode, because it sort of builds on some of the stuff that we talked about. But I think that recap is really helpful for people and at least sort of puts on the table a lot of the things that we discuss in that episode and we'll continue

to discuss in this one. But having said that, let's go ahead and move first, I think, into Spinoza as a person. It kind of helps understanding his ideas to understand the context in which he was operating in and thinking in and writing in. So let's talk about Spinoza's life and times, focusing on Spinoza's status as the child of Portuguese refugees, his excommunication from the Jewish community within Amsterdam, and his subsequent support for Republican politics as opposed to monarchical or, you know, yeah, sort of feudal politics, if you will. So when we say Republican politics, obviously you've got to keep in mind we're talking about

in his time in the, what was it, 16, 1700s? Yeah, he was born in 1632 and died in 1677. Right. So it's fair to say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that he was on the progressive left side of his current day politics? Yeah, I think that's pretty fair to say. Absolutely. So with all of that sort of in the air, just take it however you want to take it. Who was Baruch de Spinoza?

Yeah, well, he was, as I said, he was born on the 24th of November, 1632 in Amsterdam and what is known as the Dutch Republic. and I'll just briefly just say what that is in a minute. And he died at the age of 44 on the 21st of February 1677 in the Hague. His parents Miguel Spinoza and Anna Spinoza were water known as or were known as Maranos. So they were, Maranos were basically Jewish or Muslim people who either truly or performatively converted to Roman Catholicism under the pressure of basically the first the Spanish Inquisition and then the Portuguese Inquisition because they were suspected of not truly becoming Roman Catholic.

They were persecuted for this. So his parents fled to, I think along with his grandfather, fled Portugal to what is now the Netherlands. And they were from a community of what is called Sephardic Jewish people. And just, yeah, and so the Portuguese Inquisition, just as a little side note there, was kind of the wildly unpopular sequel to the equally wildly unpopular Spanish Inquisition, which evidently nobody expected, but some people expected this one and they got out of Dodge.

So Spinoza, he grew up, he went to, he just went to the, what is it called, the Torese school, in in amsterdam and he uh also you know his father was a merchant um and he was also you know training to learn how to run the family business his mother died in i think it was 1638 and then miguel's baruch's father remarried and uh had a baruch gained a stepbrother named gabriel out of that um so he as he grew up he started to get more and more interested in the sciences and philosophy. And at that time, the thinking of René Descartes, who we're going to talk about in a little bit here, started to become very influential and partly because he was really instrumental in developing forms of mathematics that could actually help do what we would think of as like classical physics or classical mechanics at this point.

And in the process of all that, and, you know, working at his father's business, he met a lot of local Dutch Protestants who were anti-Calvinists, which is really important because sort of Calvinism is where you get, you know, there's nothing, it doesn't matter if you do good works. You're either screwed or you're not screwed, and there's not, you know, either you're one of the good ones or you're not one of the good ones and too bad. And this group of anti-Calvinist Protestants were more back then, I guess, what you could call liberal, not in the sense that we mean today, but in the sense of, you know, permissive, easygoing, generous, like all of those sorts of things, right? So in scripture, when it says, you know, it behoove someone to be liberal, that's what they mean, generous, easygoing, like not judgmental, not trying to screw around with people. and eventually his associations and his interest in philosophy and the sciences led him to become sort of like less observant about what was considered necessary for the Jewish faith to be practiced in that community and he was eventually excommunicated from that community and what that really means in context that he's living in is that basically nobody in the

community was allowed to do business with him or to help him any way. to talk to him or even to be physically near him. And that included his father, and I can't remember of his grandfather, who was still alive at this point, his father, his stepmother, and his stepbrother. So he was basically completely ostracized from everyone that he loved growing up,

like his entire family in his community, which is a brutal vape to suffer. Yeah, really quick. Did his father die a year or so before the excommunication, or am I missing something there? Actually, that's a good question. And let me look that up real quick. Okay.

Because I feel like his father had already died. That created some space for him to be more outgoing with his subversive ideas. And then that resulted in his excommunication. Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you're right. It looks to me like he died in 1654. So, yeah, good catch on that. Okay, yeah, two years before his excommunication then. Yeah, that's right.

And it's also, you know, important to remember that when this happened to Spinoza, he was only 24 years old. Yeah. That's harsh. That's just awful. So he was forbidden or I mean basically put out of doing any business because no one was allowed to do business with him. And as a result of that, he took up the trade of lens making, lens grinding, which is really important to his philosophy, as I think we'll see, because he's literally in lens grinding as a philosopher while he's thinking about what he's doing, while he's doing what he's doing. And with lens grinding, he's literally helping human bodies change their relationship to the natural world and to themselves.

And as someone who needs to wear corrective lenses, like, God bless him. Thank you for that. So if you think about the importance of not just corrective lenses, but also telescopes and especially microscopes. And I think it was just the, might be just the year before he died or several years. close to around the time he died, that through the use of the microscope, the first reports of microorganisms were issued or became public. And so for him to engage in lens grinding is, was a very, it's at once philosophical, scientific, and I would say ethical. And that's a really important component of his work. He's not a bookish academic philosopher

in any way. In fact, he turned down opportunities to be. a public philosopher to teach at universities precisely because he wanted to maintain his own lifestyle and his own mode of thought and not have to bow down to any institutions or organizations that might try to sway or contain his thought and work, right? Yeah, absolutely. And he lived a very frugal life. You know, I did a fair bit of couch surfing, didn't really have many possessions. And in Deleuze's small book that we've both been looking at, the practical philosophy, he talks about how that through this sort of voluntarily assumed kind of poverty and frugality, it enables him, it frees him to really develop as, I don't

want to say a thinker in the sense of someone that goes out and, you know, professes his thoughts or anything like that, but someone that's fully engaged in nature as a thinking process. So as a result of everything, you know, first his family having to flee the Portuguese inquisition and then his own excommunication by the community in Amsterdam, he obviously became very much in favor of what we just called Republican politics. And so the Dutch Republic, so he, I mean, he was more or less outside of his community within the Dutch Republic. He was not persecuted for being Jewish, and he was also not persecuted for not being Jewish enough. And he associated with a lot of Dutch Republicans, and two of the really famous ones were Johann De Witt and his, and Johann's brother, Cornelis.

And Johann DeWitt was what was called the state pensionary of the Dutch Republic into the, I think it was the 1650s. And in that time, and I should say too, the Dutch Republic emerged because the Dutch provinces rebelled against Spanish. They were controlled by the Hatsbirds after a series of, you know, Game of Thrones style, you know, marriages and succession. and all this kind of stuff, and the Dutch provinces ended up in the hands of Spain, and the Dutch Republic rebelled against that, and they were, you know, free for a while, and then the French invaded, and I don't think they sacked, they don't think they sacked the Dutch Republic or anything like that, but it caused a lot of outrage that this was even able to happen, and Johan was forced to step down as the state pensionary, and then not long after that, he and his brother were murdered by an angry mob,

And if I remember correctly, they were actually, like, literally disembowels in public and their corpses were hung up in public. And this really affected Spinoza to the point that he intended, apparently, to go to the site of the murders and put a sign there saying, ultimi barbarorum, which means ultimate barbarians. And apparently he was on his way to do it, and his landlord ran out and physically restrained him. Like, don't please don't, like, bro, who's going to pay my mortgage? or something. Yeah. Well, he basically, basically knowing that if Spinoza did that, he'd be even more deep shit, would have a wave of reaction against him personally. So whether his, whether his desires

were to prevent him as his landlord or as his friend, it amount to the same thing. Please don't do it, bro. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, he was constantly sort of, like, on the verge of getting in trouble with the authorities all the time. I remember, I can't remember if this is in a by the Luz, but I seem to remember reading an account of after finding him, after he found about the murders running through the streets just screaming, murderers, like he was so incensed and so disgusted. And he ended up, this is sort of at the root, I think, of his, some of his political works, or I mean, his two political works, the political treatise and the theological political treatise, which is a much bigger book, and it's really about asking, how is it that

people get led into these frenzied mobs based on complete falsehoods and just nothing but fear, nothing but illusions? I mean, this is very topical, right? There's a lot going on about that right now. And so he didn't, he managed to, you know, stay under the radar, really. His works were eventually put on the index of banned books by the Roman Catholic Church. So he's in good company with John Scotus, I mentioned last time, who was condemned by the church and wasn't pardoned until 2009 by Pope Benedict, the 16th. And he eventually died of a pulmonary disease, and the sort of commonly accepted theory is that it was probably because of inhaling the dust from the ground glass of the lenses he was grinding.

and he died. He left a lot of friends who were really interested in what he was doing. They were, I think he really first came to prominence with his analysis of Descartes' work, the principles of, sorry, the principles of philosophy. And Spinoza's commentary is called the principles of Cartesian philosophy. And his ethics, which is mainly what we're going to end up discussing today, was published posthumously. And there was a, one of his, friends ended up publishing it after he died.

Yeah, yeah. So this paints the sort of the heroic philosopher archetype as somebody who, you know, refused to be kowtowed to the status quo of his time, refused to tone down his ideas and his vision for the sake of making other people comfortable. He lived a life of, as you said, no attachments, no property, in poverty. he turned down his father's inheritance when it was offered. And instead of making a life in academia, he made a life toiling away, grinding glass to make lenses,

which, as you said, has like a triple meaning in the sense of what he's actually doing with his life, as well as like just the vision of his own philosophy, his relationship to the Enlightenment, trying to bring clarity and truth to the world. and so that there's a very sort of metaphorical element to how he spent his life and that it ultimately killed him at the untimely age, even for that time, of 45 years old. He could have, he had so many opportunities to live a much cusier life. In fact, before he was excommunicated, the sort of Jewish leaders of the community in Amsterdam

offered him what would today be a six-figure income to just not say shit, to just keep his mouth close and live off. of that money that they were going to provide him, he had a million opportunities to live the absolute cushiest life and refused it at every single option, every single pathway that was presented to him. And also, as we mentioned his excommunication from his community, it was also coupled with an assassination attempt on his life by a fanatic. You know, Spinoza was called, he was slandered in numerous ways, but was also, you know, slandered as an atheist. And, you know, and other things, but there was an attempt on his life, which an assassin went to stab him,

cut through his coat, didn't actually get to him, but he kept that coat for the rest of his life saying, you know, treating it as a reminder of how men fear thought. And I always think that is really indicative of the sort of person that he is. And if you want to learn more about his sort of backstory, the incident where he had to be held back by his friend and landlord from going out and calling these this mob barbarians check out the episode on spinoza on the podcast philosophies this great podcast i love it uh does a great little 30 minute episode on spinoza i think it's a it's a two-parter um but yeah definitely definitely check that out just to follow up um it's just it's really hard to overstate like how much of a hero he's really considered to be

in the history of philosophy like for example the man hagel himself said either you are are Spinoza's or you're not a philosopher at all. And I wish Hegel might have listened to himself a little bit more about that. And Deleuze said that in his estimation, the way he feels about Spinoza is that he's the prince of philosophers. And I think there's a nice, potentially a little duble entendre to be drawn out of that because he certainly has all the soul of the man from Paisley Park. And Albert Einstein's favorite philosopher was Spinoza as well. And he has that quote where he's like, I believe in the God of Spinoza talking about Spinoza's work on God or nature, which we'll get to here in a bit. So his impact on philosophy and science and on

humanity continues to live on and obviously touches the hearts and minds of some of the greatest thinkers that have come in his wake. And if I can just follow with one more follow up on that, because you mentioned Einstein, there is a really interesting philosopher, assistant philosopher from France, who died six years ago named Bernard Despignat, and in his great book on physics and philosophy, and this will help us get ready for Descartes, he says, it might be that when Descartes put forward his two leading ideas, a clear splitting between matter and mind and mechanism concerning matter, he could not imagine the more than two centuries-long error to which he thereby gave the quote-unquote starting flick.

During this time, his followers respectfully, much too respectfully, kept to the second idea, so that is a mechanism as the basic structure of nature, and progressively came to reject the first one. The end result was universal multitudinism, so this is the sea of balls, and reduction of all beings to machines or, at best, computers. Today, we know that with the idea of the unity of substance, Spinoza, on the whole, was better inspired. And this guy actually work. He's like a experimental like particle physicist as well as a philosopher. So I think that's also glowing recommendation from not that long ago. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And you mentioned Descartes. So let's go ahead and move towards him now. So in conversation, the last episode as well as off recording, you've told me that although Spinoza has had many influences, his single most important influence was probably Renee Descartes, known as the grandfather of modern philosophy, whom we discussed in some length last episode. This was not a relationship where Spinoza was in 100% alignment with Descartes by any means, but it was clearly a huge sort of impetus to his thought and sort of bouncing off of

Descartes' thinking, which had permeated the European society at that time. So can you speak further to Descartes' philosophy and specifically Spinoza's relationship to it? Well, I think the sort of primary feature of Descartes' philosophy is his involvement in what is known or what these thinkers, these scientific practitioners, these people, called the mechanical philosophy. And basically, that's the realization that, or it comes out of the realization that through mathematical means, you can actually measure. and compare and contrast and make predictions about natural phenomenon

and primarily what they're dealing with is the movements of bodies in what we would call in the wake of the emergence of quantum physics, just the macroscopic world. So the movements of the planets,

you know, if you throw an object, like what kind of arc it makes and where it'll come down, you know, all of this like navigational stuff, like all sorts of features of nature are opened up by this, what they call the mechanical view. And, you know, just go back to angles there. This, the mechanical view, the mechanical philosophy methodologically consists in breaking down that tangled hole,

that vast, you know, infinite cosmos of nature that we are a part of into these smaller bits that you can sort of separate kind of like billiard balls and to make inquiries about them on the, you know, on the, on the, on the level of those, that's those smaller subdivisions of the bigger entangled hole. And as we've seen, I mean, we continue to see with, with modern, like, contemporary physics, mathematics is really the, the, the vehicle of that. And in that regard, one of Spinoza's, I'm sorry, Descartes, is really important works, is called La Geometry, the geometry in which he sort of works out the mathematics of being able to treat natural phenomenon

scientifically rigorously and it's important to note though so the last time just with reference to the last episode we talked about how Isaac Newton he's working on the same stuff and he sort of in some ways clarifies and refined some of Descartes concepts

so for example in I guess the Middle Ages in European countries people thought we lived in what it was called the Ptolemaic cosmos in which the earth is at the center of the universe as we know it and it's surrounded by these sort of spheres and on the sort of circumferences of these spheres you could say different planets and heavenly bodies move around

and the sun is one of them and there are you know stars and they're fixed and all that stuff But I think it was with, now I'm going off the top of the head, I think it was with Johannes Kepler. I hope I'm not wrong about that. Anyway, yeah, I think it was Kepler was one of the first ones to really notice that there were planets or heavenly bodies that had irregular motions or retrograde motions. They looked like they were going in one direction. And then the next night or two nights later, they would seem to have jumped back and then go again. and people had to come up with explanatory

sort of techniques for that. And Descartes was really actually quite ingenious. He kept the spherical structure. But what he said was instead of there being, you know, the Earth and then the Moon and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Existing, I guess the Earth existing, like, it's at the center of everything, so it's not sort of revolving around the perimeter of a sphere.

He keeps the spherical concept, and he says, well, every heavenly body has a sphere around it, and what that sphere is or what that zone is, is it consists in a vortex of matter, like little particles of matter that are whirling around. And you might say the planets are the sort of biggest, most clumpiest, densest sort of section of that. And he says that his explanation for the irregular movements, of some heavenly bodies is that these things move and all the different vortices and whatever is within them are all pressed up against each other and the irregular motions come because these bodies move along the lines like the zones of pressure between the different vortices and they

just follow their own path along these lines and that's just how they are and obviously we would not accept anything like that today but it's actually quite ingenious but then so newton comes along and he says, well, no, it's not that there are vortices of swirling matter with these, like, you know, more condensed objects within them. It's that there are these forces impinging on everything, and generally

the forces all move in a linear manner rather than a spherical or circular manner. And we can explain circular motion by sort of this infinite impingement of like many, many, many, many, linear lines of force. And this is why you start to necessitate the calculus, which both Newton and Leibniz sort of develop at the same time. But Newton, interestingly, goes into this weird metaphysical conception of matter, which consists in these, as he says, these hard, massy little

impenetrable particles that underlie everything that appears, and that's what's really, really there. We talked about that in the last episode. Descartes, on the other hand, says that's ridiculous. There's no such thing like that. There's not anything in nature that can't be broken down further in. If a creature can't break it down further, like if we're, you know, today, you know, we'd say like try to split the atom or whatever, nature can still do it and we maybe just haven't perceived it yet. So he doesn't have this weird metaphysical baggage that Newton has, and he really contributes

a lot to like the rise of classical physics. And I think that's what Descartes, I'm sorry, that's what Spinoza really fundamentally admires about him. And I should just say as an historical note, I mean, you and I, Brad, have both attended Anglo-American universities. And I don't know if this is your experience, but in Anglo-American universities, you're given the impression that the meditations on first philosophy are the center of his whole work. Did you receive that impression? Absolutely. And the whole system of his thinking revolves around the cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. I think I just said that.

I think therefore I am, yes. And I think Descartes would be shocked to know that that's the interpretation that he has, that he has received in modern academia, because the whole point of the meditations is to get ready to be able to do science. And the question he's asking is, at what level of my experience do I need to do doubtable things start? Where do I need to start doing science? And he tries to doubt everything and doubt everything. And he's like, well, maybe I don't even exist. Oh, wait, I just had to think to say that.

So I exist at least insofar as I had to say that and think that in order to deny my own existence. And a lot of philosophy, I would say especially in the 20th century, especially a lot of French philosophy, which is going to be important for our discussion about DeLuz, seems to revolve around this idea that his main object and concept. is the ego, right? This cogito irgo sum. And in fact, I mean, his attitude to it is like, okay, now that I know the division or the dividing line between what can and can't be doubted, I'm just going to let the cajito go, and now I can start doing science. I think that's a really important thing to know about Descartes.

And I think he would probably consider a work like his principles of philosophy to be the most important contribution that he gave to the world. And it would be interesting to see a sort of reassessment of Descartes along these lines. However, and this is going to get into where Spinoza differs from him, we talked about this last time as well, and this is the problem of Cartesian dualism. And Descartes says, well, there's actually a double problem. There's the problem of Cartesian dualism. So the division into two different kinds of what he calls substance. We'll get into that in a second.

Croporeal substance or extended substance, as he calls it, and incorporeal or mental substance. And when we turn to the first book of the ethics, I'll come back to that. But that's basically body mind dualism, right? Body mind dualism, absolutely. And Spinoza resolve, we'll talk to talk about that when we get to the first book of the ethics. But there's another thing he does. And I defended him about dualism last time by saying that when he says substance, he doesn't mean stuff, right?

He means things that can be comprehended in and of themselves. And he's like, well, clearly we have a vocabulary about mind that's very distinct. And we have a vocabulary about bodies. So they're substantial. These vocabularies are substantial in and of themselves. And then he gets into in the set of objections and replies. from different philosophers whom he presents this work to. Thomas Hobbes ends up making the mistake of thinking that

when he's talking about incorporeal substance, he's talking about an incoporial caporeal. And Descartes gets into it with him, and they just sort of talk past each other, and eventually Spinoza's like, I told you shouldn't have said it like that, dude, you screwed up. But he screws up even worse. I mean, this is just such, like, a colossal,

goat fuck, if I can put it that way. Absolutely. And this is, he tries to defend himself against Hobbs by saying, I'm not talking about incorporeal, corporeal stuff. That doesn't make any sense. But then when he tries to explain how mind-body dualism works and what the interaction is, he completely screws up by positing the existence of a caporeal, like a part of the body that mediates between the corporeal and the incorporeal. The pinnial plan. And I'll just read from his letter to a friend of his from 1640, so the year before he puts out the meditations, and he says, I received your letters an hour or two before the messenger was to return. That is why I will not be able to reply punctually

to everything this time. But since the difficulty that you propose about the conerium, And this is what this is the Latin term he uses for what we call pineal gland, seems to be the most pressing. And since the honor afforded me by the person who wants to defend publicly what I have touched on in my diopteryx obliges me to try to satisfy him, I do not wish to wait for the next trip to tell you that the pituitary gland does indeed have some relation to the pineal gland in that it is also situated between the carotids and in the straight line by which the spirits come from the heart to the brain. but for all that there is no reason to suspect that it has the same use since it is not like the pineal gland in the brain but beneath it and entirely separate from the mass of the brain and a concavity of the spheroid bones specially made to receive it even below the duramatter if i remember correctly besides it is entirely immobile we experience when we imagine that the seat of common sense that is to say the part of the brain in which the soul exercises all its principal operations must be mobile But it is no wonder that the pituitary gland is found where it is between the heart and the conarium, since there is, since there it encounters a sufficient quantity of small arteries, which make up the plexus mirabilis and which do not at all reach to the brain. And he just ends up going on this like discussion about, it's like, yeah, this somehow this physical thing mediates and contains and receive spiritual things. And it's just, it's a mess. And I'll just read Spinoza's response to it from the fifth, the beginning of the fifth.

book of the ethics and he says, this view is much favored by Descartes. He maintained that the soul or mind is united in a special way with a certain part of the brain called the pineal gland by means of which the mind senses all movements that occur in the body as well as external objects and by the mere act of willing it can move the gland in various ways. He maintained that this gland is suspended in the middle of the brain and in such a way that it can be moved by the slightest motion of the animal spirits. He further maintained that the number of different ways in which the gland can be suspended in the middle of the brain corresponds with the number of different ways in which the animal spirits can impinge upon it, and that furthermore, as many

different marks can be imprinted upon the gland as there are external objects impelling the animal spirits toward it. And he goes on for a bit, and then he says, such is the view of this illustrious person, as far as I can gather from his own words, a view which I could skirm have believed who had been put forward by such a great man, had it been less ingenious. Indeed, I am lost in wonder that a philosopher who had strictly resolved to deduce nothing except from self-evident bases and to affirm nothing that he did not clearly and distinctly perceive, who had been so often censured the scholastics for seeking to explain obscurities to occult qualities should adopt a theory more occult than any occult quality.

What, I ask, does he understand by the union of mind and body? What clear and distinct conception does he have of the thought closely united with a certain particle of matter? I should have liked him indeed to explain this union through its proximate cause. So he's thrown a few burners at Descartes there. And this is really going to be the basis of his idea, as Bernard Despenet said, that being or substance is univocal, it's one. and so but but he will still take forward the mechanical philosophy while resolving these problems with this idea of the oneness of substance yeah so he he's completely countering de cart's dualism and actually pointing as we're going to get into in a little bit towards ammonism a higher

totality and unity that does away with this idea that the body and mind are fundamentally separate substances right absolutely yeah and it's also as a side notice it's also kind of funny how the the pineal gland has become an interesting touchstone in a lot of like new age hippie pseudo spiritual bullshit because even in de carte's time it was that it was just dressed up in more philosophical language but people like modern new agey stuff they get into that stuff they get into the pineal man oh yeah yeah absolutely i don't i'm not deep into it so i couldn't articulate the role that it plays but more or less the same it's like feeding into this body mind dualism and that the pineal gland plays some special role in its, like a doorway to the spiritual realm,

etc. So it's really interesting how it gets bastardized, vulgarized, and turn into this new age hippie shit. Yeah. And I would say it's also really worth noting how the way that even good philosophical ideas often become widespread and popularized, it's through a series of bastardizations to the point that when it becomes sort of ecclesiations, It's so far removed from the formulation of the thinker. So a big one that I often see online is the way that the concept of the death of the author, which was invented by Roland Barth, he's really making a rather modest point about not treating works of literary art from the standpoint that this sort of like egoic absolute unit is like the first, you just, you know, there's this intention and this. authority and just it infuses the entire meaning of everything that a person writes.

And oftentimes, and I see it thrown around now, it's just through, well, you just can mean anything and, you know, it doesn't matter. I can make up any meaning I want for a text. It can make anything mean anything, you know, and that's the kind of, it's kind of like the telephone game when you know, your little kid, you sit in a circle and someone whisper something in your ear and you have to whisper it to the next person and then at the end, you see how it sounds. Yeah, exactly.

There's like a Simpsons episode where they, during a teacher's, where Principal Skinner shows up at the back of the striking teachers or no, Bart does, sorry. And he whispers into Mrs. Crabapple's ear. He says, you know, they're talking about, I think, taking some more radical action and Bart whispers into the air.

It's like, Skinner says you guys don't have the grapes, pass it on. And then by the time it gets to the front of the podium, Mrs. Oh, Lisa's teacher, she says, Principal Skinner said we don't have the guts to do this. also Purple Monkey Dishwasher. Do you understand that? If you think about that example, many philosophical concepts become popularized and widespread in exactly

the same kind of process. 100%. And there's always a Simpsons episode to highlight any point you want to make as well, which is funny. It's an infinite wealth. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on. And as you mentioned earlier in your biographical remarks about Spinoza, he was the son of a merchant

who worked for a while with his stepbrother running the family business. why and how was his entry into the trades after his excommunication so important for his philosophy and what lessons can we take from his career as a tradesperson to analyze and critique the shortcomings of like modern forms of training and education? I think we've already touched on a little bit about how it was important for him as a person and for his thinking and for his relations with other people. I mean, he legitimately wanted to help other people see the world more clearly on on a number of levels, whether, again, it's helping your own eyes adjust to being able to

see properly. Again, like, I need glasses without them. I can't see anything. It's a nightmare. Or telescopes to see heavenly bodies or microscopes to see, you know, microorganisms and even things smaller than that, as we know. But I guess I really, with this question, wanted to focus on certain dogmatisms we have in societies like ours about what it means to be educated,

what it means to be trained in the case of like trades, and what your sort of fate is deemed to be, what's possible for you if you go down one or the other path? And I think it's really important to note. So I think Spinoza was expelled from the Torah School, if I remember correctly, or he withdrew. He might have withdrawn. And then he attended lectures.

He did study at the University of Leiden, probably mostly on the principles of Cartesian philosophy. But if you go to his Wikipedia page, there's a really interesting little note about that that I find very inspiring. And it says underneath the university attendant, it says no degree. He didn't get a BA, didn't get an MA, he didn't get nothing like that. And yet, nonetheless, I would say he is absolutely a doctor of philosophy. And just a little comment on the term doctor,

it comes from the Latin term docao, which means I teach. So the word doctor literally means teacher. And so, for example, we usually associate the term doctor with medical doctors, but that's what a medical doctor is someone who can do surgery or be a physician, but who has now been deemed able to pass that knowledge on. And so, for example, there's a series that came out on Showtime or something like that, call the terror. It takes place in the Arctic and it's about the Franklin expedition through the, try to find the Northwest Passage. And there's a guy on the boat who's a physician

and he's actually doing a little bit of surgery from some of the sailors get injured. And in the scene, one of the other guys asked him, so are you going to become a doctor? Right. And to us today, that would seem really counterintuitive because we just assumed to be a physician or to be a surgeon is already to be a doctor. And I think that's, you know, without this formal training, this, you know, this really high level of academic training and all that, he is absolutely a doctor and one of the greatest in the history of philosophy. And so just to, you know, jump off from that, I'd just like to pull apart just a couple of more little concepts, I guess. And again, I'm thinking of the episode about the principal contradiction with Torkel-Laweson.

And in that, he said, he noted that Marx wasn't an academic. And I think that's really, that's absolutely right. He was not an academic. However, he did receive a doctorate in philosophy. He wrote a dissertation on the different atomist systems of democratist and Epicurus. Likewise, we know that Mao Zedong was not an academic. However, he was a trained scholar. And I think it's really worth, because in modern, especially in Anglo-American academia,

all these things have been sort of smushed together into this undifferentiated kind of mess. We really need to distinguish between a scholar, a teacher, a whatever, like you're a philosopher, biologist, some practitioner, let's call it that, and an academic. And I think an academic is a really relatively recent kind of subjectly type, if I can put it that way. And as capitalism has really, especially in the neoliberal phase, has really closed in on the things about academic activity that are actually quite free, the things that are freest about it in inquiry and engagement with other people, it's become more and more academic. And principally, what it means to be an academic is to be a middle manager. You are responsible for overseeing the labor and disciplining labor of casual academic workers. And you spend a lot of your time doing bureaucratic work.

And as I said, the ones in university last time who are the best of doing that, they move up the ranks really, really high. And you end up, you know, you become a dean. And then a lot of them become presidents. and you look at the ones who become presidents who are like the most academic of all, and you realize these people are just corporate lurks. And I think, you know,

the person who really made me start to see these sort of these divisions that need to be made is Foucault. There's an interview somewhere where someone says to him, so how do you integrate yourself in the society in your role? And he goes, what? How do I integrate? Like, just think, for example, like, that sounds kind of antagonistic, but just think, for example, what if Karl Marx had thought it was his job to be a professor to integrate himself in the society? That would have been an absolute catastrophe.

And so Foucault is like, look, you know, yes, the university, as we know it, necessarily has this kind of integrating function into the dominant sort of force in what, you know, Laoson called the principal contradiction with. within the society. But that's not my job. I'm not here for that. I'm just doing what I'm doing in that medium, and I'm just moving through. I'm not trying to be involved in that sort of thing. And I think that that's really important insight in Spinoza's life is a really important example, because in our society, we're just in academia and in the trades. We're funneled into these silos where nobody can talk together, and even more importantly, nobody can practice together. So what I've observed in university systems is that, and this is something quite alien to the French university system, say in the time that Deleuze and Foucault, and these guys

were going to school, where everyone taught, historians, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, anthropologists, medical doctors, all sorts of different practitioners and thinkers were always talking to each other, always engaging with the public. And a lot of it, probably, like most of it, was freely, people could just show up and have a conversation. conversation. In modern universities in Anglo-American sphere, there's tons of gatekeeping. Everything's super expensive. If you want to do anything, you're basically rolling the dice on your entire future and taking on this debt load that you'll never be able to pay off. And what I've observed in the so-called sciences, which is now being grouped into this disgusting thing that's just, you know, relatively

recent called STEM, is that young people get funneled into forms of, um, material production, in the vulgar sense of material, like stuff, engineering, producing that stuff, where there's no real fundamental critique of anything. And then the so-called humanities, and I think that concept, too, is also a piece of ideology. You're funneled into these forms of symbolic production that could become more and more and more impotent and more and more self-referential and just more and more useless. And I think that accounts for a lot of the sad passions that a lot of, like, humanities academics suffer from, which is really brutal.

And then again, in the trades, and I should mention here, before I went to university, I got a trade. So I went to trade school in Newfoundland, and I got an apprentice chef certificate in what's called commercial cooking. So basically, if you add like an ocean, like try to like learn how to swim out of a helicopter that's down and wait around in a life jacket for another helicopter to come get you, if you add that in, it's basically commercial cooking is just cooking on oil rigs or if without that going out to Alberta and cooking out there, you know, doing that kind of stuff. And that's really informed my relationship to academia. But what I also have observed in the trades, and I have a lot of friends in the trades, is, and maybe this is lightened up a bit, I don't know, but certainly when I was in trade school and then working in the industry, which I've done on and off over the last

couple of decades, there's this kind of really sad machismo about hurting your body and about proving your virtue by destroying yourself. And in a healthy, that is a communist society, these walls and then the various sad passions and the various incapacities that these divisions that we now have sort of breed into us wouldn't be there. And I think we would be able to have forms of education and training that are more well-rounded, more comprehensive, and that enable all of us to do more, to contribute more, you know, to be able, you could teach, you can go be a carpenter building houses, you can go out and, you know, get up a four o'clock every morning for a year and work on a farm, you can know, and, you know, all this kind of stuff.

And I think Spinoza, that's one of the reasons he jumps out at me and many people the most is that here's this guy, he wasn't a public professor, he wasn't some big shot author giving, you know, speaking towards, he was just a human being who was just with his friends digging into reality in the most like committed and authentic way possible. And I think there's so much to learn there from him and his friends and from other people like them about what's wrong with training and education today and how we might make it better. Absolutely. Incredibly well said and a really unique and important point. And there, I think we saw, we see hints of this sometimes in proletarian revolutions, attempts to build

communism, there's this blurring of the line between like, you know, university students and the toiling peasants, sending, you know, them into the countryside, etc. There's like these little hints at what could be, but in my personal life, like, as like you, almost all my friends that I grew up with are in the trades, are in unions. And there is this like division within the trades as there is within academia, this specialization, and this sort of like hostility between like the electricians and the steam fitters. And it's kind of surface level. It's not really that deep. But it does exist and it does sort of reinforce these divisions. And certainly I think you see that in academia as well. But, you know, while we're trying to build this world where those

divisions would no longer exist and would give rise or allow people to self-actualize in these different routes, these different ways of manifesting your humanness, you know, learning, building up the intellect and building up your capacity to labor and do trades and engage with these different ways of using your hands to literally build the world. While we're waiting on that and working towards that, I would say to people who have the capacity to try to do that within yourself. Like maybe you do have a job that is either in the trades or an academia or something and that's in neither, but in your personal life, especially with the advent of things like the

internet and shows like this, hopefully, you can develop your intellect, and then you can find hobbies like carpentry or brewing or gardening or, you know, working to become an electrician to build up your capacity on those fronts as well, and do it all in the same time. And I find in my own life, I'm really trying to do that. Like right now, I am working towards trying to possibly get into the electricians union, the local IBEW, or I'm even reaching. out to breweries around town to see if I can get in on the production side of a brewing company to sort of get my hands dirty, learning how beers produce one of the oldest human productive activities if you think about it. But I just, I don't know exactly my point except to say that

there's something there that can be developed and an over one-sightedness or playing into the divisions between, I'm an academic, I don't do that blue-collar shit or I'm a blue-collar worker, I'm not about that book learning, right? Those things need to fall down. They can fall down collectively through revolutions, and they can also fall down individually through the attempt of the individual to form a well-rounded sort of sense of self. I would say, I mean, this is not a call-out, but it also kind of is. I have observed the deepest sad passions amongst academics in the so-called humanities. And just, it just. What do you mean by sad passions exactly?

And this is, and we're going to get into this with Spinoza. Basically, sad passions are feelings, affects that you undergo that diminish your capacity to act, not just on your own, but even more importantly, in concert with others. And a lot of, quote-unquote, humanities academics really, you know, like, sort of this like, oh, I'm just little on me. I don't know what's going on outside these walls there in this world. you know you hear that something or did the absent-minded professor or um this idea like oh i couldn't possibly chop a tree um i couldn't possibly get up at four o'clock every morning or three o'clock every morning for a season and go out in a little longliner and fish um i couldn't possibly do these things and for example uh there's another call back to last episode i mentioned um the podcast from

it's not just in your head with katherine you're talking about whether or not the professional managerial class is totally out of its mind. And this is not to criticize her, but really, I want to say this in support her. At one point, she says, well, I couldn't build a car. And I thought, well, first of all, who builds a car other than hobbyists? You'd be working on a production line. And you manage all sorts of production lines. They just don't involve cars. They involve like symbolic production or getting grants or like, you're really telling me if someone trains you and showed you what to do, you couldn't help build a car in a production line. And I've noticed a lot of humanity's academics think that way. I remember saying to this

person I worked with once, who was very, very much into this mode. I said, you know, I think there should be at least a one year embargo on all paper publishing in all conferences. And this person was absolutely flat. And they said, well, what will we do? Go outside, be with people, learn from people, learn how to do things, help build things, all sorts of stuff. And they shook their head. kind of chuckled and walked away. And then sometimes you also see this sort of like hostility toward the outside where I had a classmate in my graduate studies who said, well, you know, I have to end up getting a job in this thing because how could you live outside with all those vague thinkers?

And I looked at them and I was like vague thinkers outside. Have you been in here? Have you looked around in here? And this is all of these kind of just mental stumbling. blocks that it's they don't fall into this because they're assholes that's what the institution tells them to think and they actually you know if they're trying to um uh you know get that income get that lifestyle they want to be comfortable right they have to accept these on some level these sort of lies about themselves and that's what's as spinoza would say that diminishes their

capacity to be a full well-rounded human being that's the kind of stuff we've got to get out of our lives. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's also true, and correct me if you disagree, but on the other side of that, like a lot of my union friends will sort of think that the intellectual capacities and that side of themselves maybe just aren't really there to be developed in the first place. So, you know, they come up with excuses for why they don't have the time to develop them, et cetera. And so, like, there's sort of that, there's like the inverted form of that as well. Do you think that's true? Yeah, I mean, I've certainly noticed that, you know, I, I, had, you know, when I've worked in trades jobs or service jobs or whatever, I'll take books

with me and read them on my break. And sometimes I've, you know, I've had a friend or co-worker say, can I have a look at that? What are you reading? And I'll say, here, check it out. And not a lot, but one or two times I've gotten a really hostile reaction. Like, they open it for a second and then they slam the book shut. They're like, they just want to sound smart. This is bullshit. Right. And I, you know, and then, you know, I'm not trying to shit on that at all. I understand where that comes from. And but what I think to tie it back to Spinoza for our friends in the trades and all that is that for Spinoza, this is part of what he's so awesome. He's so cool is that to develop your body is to develop your mind and to develop your mind is to develop your body.

So if you really think that engaging in intellectual practice is a diversion away from your bodily reality of Spinoza is here to tell you, no, no, no, no, no. that's not true. That is time well spent and it will change your body in ways that you don't know you. Exactly. That's the key point. Yeah. Yeah. Well said. Well said. I love that point. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on. Now, Spinoza is renowned, among other reasons, for his geometrical method. And like this, it's sort of the way that he writes his philosophy almost as if they're like mathematical axioms. And it's it can be, it can be intimidating for people to try to dive into his work because of the way that it's structured. But, you know, sort of, I was, maybe you could talk about a little bit.

What is that geometrical method? When did it first appear in Spinoza's writing? And why is he doing it? Why is it central to his philosophy? Mm-hmm. Well, it's, the geometrical method is something that has a really, you know, an honorable history. It really in many ways goes back to the Greek mathematician Euclid, who's element, he wrote

a work called the Elements. And it's a foundational work in geometry and basically, you know, in many ways, underpins the possibility of like physics in the macro world. And the, it's interesting because it allows, it ends up allowing Spinoza to throw out these ideas at you in a very non-dogmatic way. So he'll start out by with, as we'll see when we get to just look at book one of the ethics, he starts out with a set of definitions and he is like, By this, I mean this.

And he does that, you know, I think there's seven definitions at the beginning. And then he has a bunch of axioms. And axiom basically, the way an axiom operates is sort of like, let's allow X to be the case, right? And this is very different than, you know, just a straight ahead essay or a treatise, where, like, for example, Emmanuel Kant starts out the critique of pure reason, just with this assertion. What is it? Concepts without intuitions are empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind. You're like, okay, bud. You're like, okay. And then, but Spinoza, he makes it very evident using this structure that I'll explain here in a second to say, look, I'm trying this out. I want you to come along with me. And maybe you'll find something in here that you have to reject and it'll take my whole system down.

Or maybe you'll end up agreeing with me. And I'm going to use these different. components, like break down my, what could have been a treatise into this sort of machinery, this sort of logical, conceptual machinery, and I'm going to make all the different components and all the functions they're performing obvious by saying, this is a proposition, this is a demonstration of the proposition, this is a corollary to the proposition, which means something that follows from or, you know, has to be the case if this is the case. And it just, it's, it seems, like it could make things harder. So like the first time I opened up the ethics,

a friend of mine, my buddy Dave, he said, wow, this was in first university. And he said, man, this guy, Spinoza is just, you know, he's off the hook, you've got to read this guy. And I opened up the ethics. And the first thing I said was, oh, my Jesus Christ, and I just closed it again. Exactly.

And then I didn't read it again until many years later when I was working at a call center in Montreal, all, the service was helping deaf and hard of hearing people communicate over the phone. And that gave me a lot of food for thought about Spinoza's concept of simple and composite bodies. And we can talk about that in a bit. And so just to give you the components of the geometrical method, I'm going to turn to a really, a really great little introductory book.

It's called The Guide to Spinoza. is by a Canadian philosopher who I believe she lives in Scotland named Beth Lord. And she put this book out in 2010. I think it's really helpful. I mean, it's written for an academic setting. So there are often prompts through, like, this is what your professor will be looking for in a paper, that sort of stuff. But it doesn't have to be restricted into that. So this is what you'll find when you open up the ethics.

So you will find, and I'm quoting from Lord here, definitions which set out the meanings of key terms, axioms, which set out basic self-evident truths, propositions, the points that Spinoza argues for and their demonstrations, corollaries, which are propositions that follow directly from the propositions that they are appended to, lemma, propositions specifically related to physical bodies, which only appear in part two, postulates, assumptions about the human body that are drawn from and apparently justified by common experience. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, scolia, explanatory remarks on the propositions. In the scolia, Spinoza comments on his demonstrations, gives examples, raises, and replies to objections,

and makes pecan, so spite hot takes, pecan observations about people's beliefs and practices. The scolia are some of the most interesting and enjoyable passages of the ethics. and in effect, like Deleuze, he loves the scolia, and he says that in his view there are actually two ethics in once, one of the two. There's the mathematical, mechanical, logical part where Spinoza helps you move and adjust your body in your mind to the logical motions. And then there are the scolia where he just lets her rip, but he just lets you, like I just read you the preface to part five, which is in its way of scullium. And he's just letting her rip and he's being and funny, sometimes he's angry, sometimes he's really stoked on stuff.

And DeLis says, so yeah, there's this kind of logical procedural ethics, and then within it, alongside it within the whole thing, there's Spinoza, just the guy just, you know, showing you his mind and showing you who he is and all that kind of stuff. And so it's really like the sort of logical rigor of it and the clarity of it and the fact that, like, it just doesn't go in a sequence. So if he's making a point in the proposition or a demonstration that depends on a point that he made before, in brackets, he'll put in the section or the little component that was before. And so go back and look at this, go back and look at this. So it almost becomes like a dance.

You don't just read it in a linear fashion. You're going ahead. You're going back. You're going ahead. You're going back. You're going ahead. You're going back. And it really does make a difference.

It has kind of a unique effect on your understanding of and your engagement with the text. Yeah, so while at first it can be sort of intimidating, like the first time you open it up, and I had the same exact reaction, like, oh, shit, it's actually very nice because he's walking, he's really walking you through it and allowing the structure to be very helpful in your understanding of his arguments. There's like a deep clarity to it, which is not always true of philosophers, right? Yeah, and I would say it's almost like he's leading you through the steps of a dance. Exactly.

A very complex dance. That's very beautiful. Totally. All right. So now that we've gone over the role of trades in Spinoza's thinking as well as his life, along with his general method, the geometrical method that you just outlined, let's turn to his major work, the ethics, which was written in 1677. What is the ethics? Why did Spinoza write it? And importantly, what can we say about it that is of most practical use, perhaps, to introductory level learners who are really interested in this stuff but may have never encountered a work quite like this before? Well, the first thing I should say, just as a little helpful kind of sidebar, there's a really interesting, a wonderful French historian and philosopher named Pierre Haddo, who lived from 1920 to 2010, and worked alongside his wife Ilsetrault, who's still living, I believe. And they were both sort of scholars of like Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, all that kind of stuff. And Pierre Haddo's work is really fascinating because he kind of, through his historical research, overturns some assumptions about philosophy and philosophizing that are very prevalent in the modern, especially Anglo-American academic world, as I had just described it a little bit ago. And that is his, he demonstrates that in antiquity and even into the Middle Ages, and I would say even beyond that, philosophy was never just a bookish thing where people just sat around and talked and traded verbal propositions.

It was always engaged in, you know, sciences and crafts and all that kind of stuff, but also specific spiritual, concrete spiritual and physical exercise. that followed from philosophical ideas and fed into philosophical ideas. And his sort of his main concept, is philosophy as a way of life. And in that sense, you know, I come to see some of the things that like Marx says in a little bit of a critical light. So when he says, I think in the manifesto, him and Engels say, up until now the point has been to understand the world and now the point is to change it, Marx isn't there.

Marx and Engels aren't 100% correct that up. until their time it was just sitting around and like whistle and dixie it was really bodily really engaged and there were structured sort of practical ethics however i can understand why marx and angles had that impression because they're living in uh you know a prussian system post hagel that's super academic and super bookish and so if they're wrong about it or a little you know a little bit mistaken they come by completely honestly and it's completely understandable But in order to really understand Spinoza and the ethics, you really need to sort of take on board and try to get the vibe of Hado's concept of philosophy as a way of life. And so what the ethics really is, is it's one of the first, you know, the greatest modern and Spinoza is sometimes called the Last Ancient, which is very important and interesting, I think.

it's it's sort of like it's a machine that it initiates you into philosophy as a way of life in the most like immediate and vital way possible because it ends up it really wants you to get in touch with your body and to the extent that you get in touch with your body you are getting in touch with your mind and to the extent that you're getting in touch with your mind you are getting in touch with your body and so this is really a philosophy for everyday ordinary people. And it can be understood. It's very understandable. And it basically the way it works is that he starts out. The first part of the ethics is about what he calls nature or God or substance. The second part is about the human mind. It's called on the nature of the nature

and origin of the mind. The third part is called on on the emotions or in Latin affect you. And so on the affects, which is an important concept. And he gives, and this is really sort of a rejoinder to, you know, is very common in Anglo-American societies. This idea that emotions

or affects or feelings are the opposite of reason. And he basically gives like a logical account of the emotions and the logic of the different emotions. Part four is called of human bondage. In the Latin, it's servitude.

or the power of the affects. And he basically, in part four, he gives an account of how we are given towards different intensities of joy and sadness, which either increase our capacity to act on our own or with others or decrease it. And he sort of gives like really interesting analyses that could be used to think about things like dealing with childhood trauma, for example, or a traumatic event that's. happened to you or if you're hung up on hung up on an old love or something any number of things and he really sort of it's very therapeutic and not a flaky sort of modern corporate mindfulness

kind of way and then the last part is called it the power of the intellect or human freedom in which he gives an account of how to build and compound the joyful passions and to how can I put it? Almost kind of like judo the sad passions out of your way or to get out of their way. And so it's really practical philosophy on a very immediate level that I think dovetails quite nicely with a lot of the stuff you've been doing on the show about psychedelics and spiritual practice and meditation and all that kind of stuff. It's very much in touch with all of those issues and can be grafted quite nicely into discussions about all of those issues and problems. Absolutely, and I appreciate those kind words there. I certainly see what we're doing as an attempt at that. And there's something philosophical, there's something scientific, there's something beautiful about Spinoza's work. There's also something almost, I mean, mystical. There's something deeply profound and spiritual.

If his vision of the world is really taken on board, not only is it like profoundly sort of dialectical and dovetail so well with lots of other mystical traditions. But it's just, it's gorgeous. You know, and seeing the world through the crushed lenses of Spinoza's worldview is a beautiful pair of glasses to sort of put on in one that deeply informs, you know, my entire worldview. And there's this element, like, within his work that, as I said, is mystical. And one of his quotes is, like, you know, things like this could be said by, like, the Buddha or the Stoics, right? He says, the more you struggle to live, the less you live. up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real

within you, for that alone is sure. You are above everything distressing. And he makes points about the emotions and one's relationship to it, while also painting the picture of the cosmos as this gorgeous totality with an infinite variety of attributes or manifestations. And I think a great way to shift from that last question to this next one is to quote a little bit from DeLuze's Spinoza Practical Philosophy, Chapter 6, Spinoza and Us, it's just sort of a recap and points well to this next question. DeLu says, generally one begins with the first principle of a philosopher, but what counts is also the third, the fourth, or the fifth principle.

Everyone knows that the first principle of Spinoza is this, one substance for all the attributes. But we also know the third, fourth, and fifth principle. One nature for all bodies. One nature for all individuals. nature that is itself an individual varying in an infinite number of ways. So with that in mind, and as you just sort of covered, the first book of the ethics is about what Spinoza calls God or nature or substance. So why is Spinoza's analysis of this concept so important? And maybe you can

talk about how it's a response to Descartes' philosophy and also what it has in common with like Plato's dialogue in the Parmenides. Okay, so before we jump into book one of the ethics, to help stoke our imaginations a little bit, I wanted to turn to a text by a Buddhist monk who has been very important to me for quite some time, a Vietnamese monk named Technot Han, who was nominated in 1967 by Martin Luther King for a Nobel Peace Prize. And this is from Chapter 27, it's the last chapter of his book, The Heart of the Buddhist Teaching, and it's called the links of interdependent co-arizing. And I'll just read from that. Interdependent co-arizing,

Pratitia Samutpada, so I'm not, my Sanskrit is probably horrible. Literally, quote, in dependence, things rise up, end quote. It's a deep and wonderful teaching, the foundation of all Buddhist study and practice. Pratitia Samutpada is sometimes called the teaching of cause and effect. But that can be misleading because we usually think of cause and effect as separate entities with cause always preceding effect and one cause leading to one effect. So remember the image of Newton's cradle from the beginning of the never-ending line of the absolute unit. Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. According to the teaching of interdependent co-arizing, cause and effect

co-arise, Samutpada, and everything is a result of multiple causes and conditions. The egg is in the chicken and the chicken is in the egg. Chicken and egg arise in mutual dependence. Neither is independent. Interdependent co-arizing goes beyond our concepts of space and time. The one contains the all. The Chinese character for cause has the character great. inside of a rectangle. Cause is great, yet at the same time limited. The Buddha expressed interdependent co-arizing very simply, quote, this is because that is. This is not because that is not. This comes to be because that comes to be. This ceases to be because that ceases to be. These sentences occur hundreds of times in the discourses of both the northern and southern

transmissions. They are the Buddhist genesis. I would like to add to this sentence, quote, this is like this because that is like that end quote in the sutras these this image is given quote three cut reeds can stand only by leaning on one another if you take one away the other two will fall end quote for a table to exist we need wood a carpenter time skillfulness and many other causes and each of these causes needs other causes to be the wood needs the forest the sunshine the rain and so on the carpenter needs his parents breakfast, fresh air, and so on. And each of those things, in turn, has to be brought about by other conditions. If we continue to look in this way, we'll see that nothing has been left out. Everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table. Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, we can see the table. The one can be seen in the all, and the all can be seen in the one.

One cause is never enough to bring about an effect. a cause at the same time must be an effect, and every effect must also be the cause of something else. Cause and effect inter-R. The idea of a first or only cause, something that does not itself need a cause, cannot be applied. Okay, and that's the terminology there is going to clash a little bit with Spinoza's terminology, but the concepts, they vibe quite nice. And if you really listen to that quote, you'll see why Marxist dialecticians, Buddhists and Spinozists are all interested, should be interested in one another and are saying things from different, radically different perspectives, often in radically different languages that are

getting at the same goddamn thing. And if you understand that, then you understand why we're doing these conversations and this series. And so much of what we do on RevLeft Radio. I love that quote. And that was a wonderful sort of outside of what we're talking about reference that makes sense of it. Very well done. outside inside there you go just one more comment before we get into

this book and that's about the nature of the Latin language and by extension the Greek language how they don't fall prey to some of the kinds of metaphysical effects as now we call it of English whereas in English

in order to issue forth a verb in a proposition or a sentence there has to be a person pronoun like I or he or she or they or something like that attached to it separately. But Latin is what's called an inflected language, which means that the endings of all the words, not just verbs, all the words change to indicate something about the action and something about who or what is doing the action. so at the beginning in English this is the English translation I have the first definition it says by that which is caused I mean that whose essence involves existence or that whose nature can be conceived only as existing in the Latin you don't have anything like a separate eye the first in the Latin the first definition it says if I can find

here. Per caosem sui inteligo id, curious essentia involved existentium, sibeidid, curious natura non-potest conchipi nisi existence. And in that, the verb for I mean is intelligo. So in Latin, in the present indicative, if someone's speaking from the first person, you'll see an O at the end. The word change, the verb changes to indicate the first person. And this is part of what

many philosophers prize Latin and Greek is because the subject is included in the action. It's not a separate thing, you know, the U particle, the eye particle that kicks off the action. It's totally woven into it. And that's key to understanding what's going on here. And many, many philosophers that we read in translation and in their original languages, that separateness of the ego is just not there. So just put that in the background, I would say. Okay.

So let's turn to book Part 1 of the Ethics, which is about, it's called Concerning God in Latin De Dale. And for Spinoza, it's really important to remember that he does not. And this is really important for us because especially in these North American settler cultures, we have been pulverized by so much fucking bad religion. I'm a baptized and confirmed Roman Catholic. I'm furious at the Roman Catholic Church, not just for its crimes against children, you know, to drop a little Newfoundland thing in there because you can take the buy out of Newfoundland, but you can't take the Newfoundland out of the buy. Most people have forgotten this, but the first place in the world where sex, child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church came to light was in Newfoundland. First, in the form of a priest, I think he was in a town called Trapacity, which he's like down on the, oh, shoot, I can't remember which bay it's in.

named Father James Hickey, and then it was revealed there was an orphanage, a boys' orphanage, not far from the house where I largely grew up in, called Mount Cashel, and it came out that there was systematic child sexual abuse of young boys by these Christian brothers for decades and decades and decades, and it completely shattered the trust of Newfoundland people in the Roman Catholic Church. And in the case of Mount Cashel, there was a movie, very well, done really hard to watch but worth watching called the boys of st vincent um starring the american i think he's american actor named henry churny and a bunch of a bunch of newfoundland actors and so i think like and beth lord talks about this in her book a guide to spinoza of essex is that chances are

especially if you grow up in a society like this you are going to react badly to seeing the word god and uh you know it's you know it's it's a concept that's come under so much mockery like you know the sky theory right um all this kind of stuff and the roman catholic church in the main has done almost nothing to dispel the idea that that's what they're talking about if you look at even um a recent writing like the loud at to see by pope francis about the environment and nature it's clear he's not talking about anything like a goddamn sky fairy instead the roman catholic church instead of debunking that shit they waste their time worrying about kids getting turned under witchcraft by Harry Potter when they should be worried about the getting turned on to

liberalism. So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. So if you feel a hostility as the listener, if you feel a hostility to the terminology that's coming out here, you are completely justified in feeling that way. And I don't blame you. And a priest friend of mine, he said to a group of people at a retreat, I cooked that once. He said, if religion doesn't work from you, walk away because there was a lot of bad religion out there. A lot of bad religion out there. And, you know, that needs to be kept in mind.

And for the record, I think the Roman Catholic Church had all of its wealth and treasures melted the fuck down and sold off. Amen. They should be as poor as Spinoza. So anyway, just to get it. So basically what Spinoza is trying to do in the beginning of the ethics, in the first book of the ethics, is to fully work out the logic of overcoming, Descartes substance dualism. And in a way, this problem goes all the way back, at least to Plato. And in Plato's dialogue, the Permanities, so many of us who've gone through Anglo-academic, Anglo-American academia, have been told that Plato is this guy who believed in these forms

that exist somewhere else, and somehow they're the causes and the underpinning of the things that we see around us. And in the Parmenides, and I have a feeling that in his lifetime, Plato was accused of this by people around him, and the Parmenides is sort of his way of saying, you're not going to pin this on me. And so basically, the Parmenides is about the young Socrates, so he's just full of fire, and he's got this theory called the Forms, and he shows up at a discussion circle where Parmenides, who's one of the two most famous pre-Socratic philosophers, along with Heraclitus, whom we discussed last time,

is hanging out with Zeno, who's known for Zeno's paradox of motion. And they ask him, they sort of like, well, yeah, you're all proud of this theory of forms. So you want to try it out on us? And Socrates is like, God, I'd love to, please. And he basically says, okay, so for every man, every human being you see, there's an abstract form existing somewhere of the human being and Parmenides

and Svina are like, okay, and then he says likewise for a triangle. You see a triangle and somewhere there's a form somewhere else of a triangle. And he gives all these examples and they basically boil it down to sing so could we put it this way, So

what you're saying is that for every one thing there is there, it's that thing's on this, it's unity, depends on this abstract oneness that exists in somewhere else and Socrates says yes and they're basically

then like so like how does that work it's in Socrates his answer sort of comes out like well it's just this really like oney kind of thing but it's not here it's somewhere else and they're like it's a oney kind of thing so what accounts

for the oneness of that and then Socrates goes uh oh and this is what's called the third man problem. So if you're going to describe the form of individual things by appealing to this abstract oneness and then just say that, well, it's a oneness is that it's a one-e kind of thing as well,

then you've got to come up with an account of how both of those things share in this oneness and then you end up at an infinite regress. And it even gets to this part that I've always found quite funny where they start giving them a bit of a hard time. So he says, Permanity says, you know, so yeah, what about the form of a human being

separate from us and all those like us? Is there a form itself of human being or fire or water? Socrates said, Permanities, I've often found myself in doubt whether I should talk about those in the same way or as the others are differently. And then Permanetti says, and what about these Socrates, things that might seem absurd like hair and mud and dirt. And in the Greek it's cacao, so it's shit.

or anything else totally undignified and worthless. Are you doubtful whether or not you should say that a form is separate for each of these two, which in turn is other than anything we touch with our hands? And then Socrates says, not at all, Socrates answered. On the contrary, these things are in fact just what we see. So there is no form. So shit has no form. There's an exception.

Everything else does, because this is not worth thinking about it does. I don't want to talk about. He says, surely it's too outlandish to think that there's a form for them, not that the thought that the same thing might hold in all cases hasn't troubled me from time to time. Then when I get bogged down and that I hurry away, afraid that I may fall into some pit of nonsense and come to harm. But when I arrive back in the vicinity of the things we agreed a moment ago have forms like the good and the beautiful and the just, right? I linger there and occupy myself with them. Well, that's because you are still young, Socrates, said Permanides, and philosophy has not yet gripped you as in my opinion it will in the future.

once you begin to consider none of the cases beneath your notice. Now, though, you still care about what people think because of your youth. And so this is a very, very old problem. And in Descartes comes in the form of the concept of substance. So, like, finite things are accounted for by their substantiality, and they're underpinned by an infinite substance. And then Descartes is then in the position of having to explain, well, what defines that substance?

and they clearly have something uncommon. So we need a sort of binding term, a term that connects them together. And in the language of platonic scholarship, that's called a third man. And you end up in this infinite regress and you do fall into nonsense. And so Spinoza's response to that is to say,

there isn't finite caporeal substance, finite mental substance, and then finite or infinite substance, that's complete bullshit. That doesn't make any sense. If the word substance, the concept of substance is going to be applied at all, there can only be one substance for all appearances, all things that come about. And it's really worth commenting, too, on the term substance in a very sort of immediate way, we might note that it sort of means something like that which stands under, which is not really suitable for Spinoza's thinking, because there's nothing underneath any of this. It's all, everything is here, right?

And it's the Latin substantia is sort of the Latin equivalent of a Greek term, which if I were written in the ethics, I would use this term and said, which is usia. So to us it might look like OUSIA, but it's in Greek, it's Omicron, Upsilon, Sigma, Iota, Alpha. And it comes out of verbal forms of the word, the Greek word for a being. so like ta on and it's a derivative of of what's called um a participle which is sort of like a combination between a verb and a noun so when we say i'm going running right that's a verb but when you say running is good for you you're using running as a participle it's sort of like a verbal kind of noun sort of and usia is derived from the feminine um present active

participle of to be, which is Usa. And when you add an iota in between the sigma and the alpha, it becomes like a fully verbal noun. And it's like when you see it, it's not meant to indicate just this dead idea. Like it really is meant to indicate living activity. And the sort of Latin writers use substantia to mediate this concept. So when the first thing to really know about substance. It's not this stuff that's underlying anything. It's just activity. It's it's usia. It's being in the most active possible sense. And his job is to rearrange these concepts that Descartes totally screws up and to make something out of it. So he he has this scheme according to which substances, what you might call the universal wave

function. And then it has within it what are called attributes. And Spinoza says that they're actually infinite attributes, but because of the way that we're composed as bodies, you know, as beings, we can only perceive two of them, which is extension and thought or mind and body, right? And I just wanted to do a callback to your recent episode with Joshua Con Russell, where he talks about visiting his friends and I'm so sorry to Joshua that the country he spoke about escapes me at the moment where he engages in ayahuasca practices and in the spiritual practices that from the sounds of it really helped get him out of the shit and helped improve his mental and physical health and increased his joyful passions to the benefit of everybody and they said

I remember the part where he's like you know their friends recognizing that you know we live in the sea of balls and we're subject to the governance of the absolute unit, who has told us that nothing will fundamentally change. And he says, his friend said, well, you guys are fucked up. You think that we're backwards, but we have technologies for engaging with facets of the universe that, you know, you guys have no idea about. And I think that's really dovetails nicely with this idea that there are infinite attributes to substance, but we can only, in our normal sort of comportment access some of them, right? And quantum physics really raises a lot of interesting questions about this issue.

Let's just get into the text. And so I'll just, what I'm going to do is try to, as quickly as possible, move to the first five propositions of part one of the ethics. And in Proposition 5, this is where he says that there can only be one substance. There can only be one activity. And this will be disappointing to all the fans of the various multiverses in pop culture out there because what Spinoza will kind of imply is that even if it's a multiverse, it's still a universe. Exactly. Because they're all contained within, like, they can't, it just logically, you will fall into an infinite regress and you won't be good for anything.

So he starts out with these definitions. And he says, definition one, by that which is self-caused, I mean that whose existence involve, sorry, whose essence, sorry, whose essence, essence involves existence or that whose nature can be conceived only as existing. And in a certain sense, this calls back to Parmenides' claim very early on that non-being is not. There is only being. Two, a thing is said to be finite in its own kind when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature. For example, a body is said to be finite because we can always conceive of another body

greater than it. So, too, a thought is limited by another thought, but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by body. Now, definition three, by substance, substantia, I mean that which is in itself and conceived through itself. That is, the conception of which does not require the conception of another thing from which it has to be formed. So you might find it useful now to think about meditative practices, right? And when you come and you sit, or your meditating while you're working with your hands or whatever else, you get in touch with just the sort of the unary nature of the springing forth of the interdependent colorizing of everything. And you realize, you know, what really is truly permanent is that impermanence,

that change, right? Like the science fiction writer Octavia Butler will say, God is change. Now, by attributes, this is definition four. I mean, that which has the, that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence. And so our intellect, because we cannot apprehend infinite attributes, we just apprehend the corporeal and the mental. Now, this is a really important definition. By mode, I mean the affections of substance. So this is the term that Spinoza uses to replace Descartes' concept of a finite substance.

And this is really a wonderful concept in Latin. It's modus. And what it means is like a manner or a style or a way or a fashion. And this is what he uses to replace the concept of things. And this is one of the most powerful concepts that he comes up with. And it's it just, hopefully I would like to unfold it as much as possible, especially I think in the next episode with Deleuze. And then sixth, definition six, by God, and he also, you know, he'll say, or nature,

I mean an absolutely infinite being that is substance consisting of infinite attributes of which each expresses eternal and infinite essence. Now, a lot of people are going to immediately jump to that old definition of God. The Sky Fairy God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient. For Spinoza, that is way to like Rinky-Dink. that is way to giving into anthropomorphizations of nature in a way that just ultimately doesn't help us in the end very much because people fall prey to weird fanaticisms and all the violences that come out of that and all the rest of it. So again, you know, this is not the absolute unit, this is not or the absolute absolute unit, which would be God in this mode that I'm making fun of. metaphysics. A better way to think about what Spinoza is talking is to imagine a sheet of origami paper. And to aid your imagination, I recommend a really good documentary about

origami called Between the Folds. I recommended this to the students I had 10 years ago and one of them laughed at me in front of the whole class and I'm here to say that documentary can help you understand so many things. So do not laugh at it. So imagine what Spinoza is talking about as a a sheet of origami paper that is constantly folding and refolding, that retains traces of the past folds, and yet at the same time remains completely smooth and flat. And once you've done that, take away the image of the paper and keep everything else I said. And then you'll be on the path to understanding what Spinoza is talking about. So he, you know, he issues forth a couple of explications.

So he says, I say absolutely infinite, not infinite in its kind. For a thing is, if the thing is only infinite in its kind, one may deny that it has infinite attributes. So example, for example, an infinite series of counting numbers. But if a thing is absolutely infinite, whatever expresses essence, and essence is another way of saying usia in a way, and does not involve any negation belongs to its essence, right? So he's really trying to get you to break out of these ideas of, you know, the sky fairy, God, the person, the guy with the white beard, Jesus has your personal savior, whatever Joel Austin is talking about,

all that kind of crap. And then he has a number of axioms. So he's like, okay, let me, let me just like, come with me on this. Let me, you know, let's work through this. So he says, all things that are, axiom one, either in themselves or in something else like that makes that makes a lot of sense i could see that axiom two that which cannot be conceived through another thing must be conceived through itself axiom three from a given determinate cause there necessarily follows an effect on the other

hand if there be no determinate cause it is impossible that an effect should follow axiom four the knowledge of an effect this is really crucial depends on and involves the knowledge of the cause. So the knowledge of us, like ourselves, we need to understand how we're caused. And I mean, this totally feeds into what Marx is trying to do and many people after Marx is trying to do. If we want to understand what we are and where we're at,

we need to understand how we're caused in all the possible ways that we can be caused. And to the extent that we do manage to do that, we complete our understanding and we become more and more able to act and we're more and more interconnected with nature in the whole universe. Axiom five, things which have nothing in common with each other cannot be understood through each other. That is, the conception of the one does not involve the conception of another.

So, for example, you can't understand the concept of a birthday cake to the concept of a tax return, right? Axiom six, a true idea must agree with that of which it is the idea, the idiotum, so the object. And so, I mean, that's a way. way of getting into the discussion about ideology as a false perception of your actual circumstances and then axiom seven if a thing can be conceived of as not existing its essence does not involve existence and that's us and everything else around us and again when you say meditate you understand the impermanence of all of us and everything around us and then the sort of thoroughgoingness of just the endless change endless change endless change endless change

god has changed right okay and now i'm just going to to speed. I know this is getting a little bit long, so I'm just going to speed through the propositions. So he says one. Proposition one, substance is by nature prior to its affections. And he doesn't mean prior an order of time. So this isn't God or nature as the guy who set up, you know, tipped over the dominoes and, you know, now, you know, we're at a certain stage and the domino's falling over. He means logically in the same way that, again, when you meditate, you see logically the priority of change over the priority of permanence and sameness. And he says, proof, this is evident from definitions three and five. So you can go back to three and five and you're like, okay, that's what he

means. That's what he said that. Proposition two, two substances have different attributes, have nothing in common. It's like, yeah, he said that in definition three as well. Proposition three, when things have nothing in common, one cannot be the cause of the other. And then in the proof, he says, okay, I'm appealing to axiom five and axiom four and i'm hoping you'll come along with me and allowing those axioms to carry this argument or this discussion this conversation so go back have a look at them and think about it and then come back and proposition uh sort of proposition four two or more distinct things are distinguished one from another either by the difference of the attributes um of the substances and now he he sort of allows himself to speak sort of

of casually in a way about, you know, different things that can be thought of in like Brett or Matthew or the microphone in front of me. So he's sort of, he's not, he's not a fascist about terminology, right? It gives a proof of that. And then Proposition 5, in the universe, there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute. And again, you know, the multiverse thing. It's so popular right now. It's in many different. pop culture formations and it's kind of you know people think it's really trippy and weird but I hate to

break it to you but it's really all just one there's just one one verse and that's it and for anyone who's interested in multiverse stuff in pop culture I cannot recommend one I think finer and more beautiful and wonderful than Stephen King's despite the bullshit he gets up to on Twitter

in the Dark Tower series and in insomnia and I think he very spinozist, very mystical, and really showing the sort of unity, the unary nature of all these multiverses and how they're all tied together in that. Even if we discovered them, we would still be at home in the same universe.

So that's basically like he's trying to work, work his way down to this picture in which everything is here, nothing is left out, even lies are true, in the sense that we can use our bodies and our minds to figure out the things that had to be true in them in order to be lies, that sort of thing. Even illusions, weird, odd phenomena.

There's nothing coming in from outside. There is no outside. It's all just here. And I just, you know, in that sense, wanted to correct something I said last time at the very beginning, which really plays into, like, you know, an old friend of mine said, you know, we don't realize it. We might be even studying all this cool stuff, but we're still Cartesian foot soldiers in ways that we don't realize. And I spoke in a way at the beginning about growing up in Newfoundland, and I said, when I came into the world, and that is a very anti-Spinoza's thing to say. There's nowhere else to come into the world from.

As Alan Watts says, you come out of the world, yet remain within it. Like apples out of an apple tree. Like apples out of an apple tree, absolutely. Yes, the apple tree appling. 100%. So that's sort of, you know, there's so, I mean, each one of these parts is so complex. And my dream would be able to, like right now I'm working in this facility of processing shipments and soft and hard goods,

work with my hands on my feet all day. And my dream would be able to get off work and go meet up with people in a park and just work through this together with them. I'd love to be able to do stuff like that. But just for the sake of this very general introduction, That's sort of the basic logic of his concept of the universe. All right. So, yeah, that was a wonderful exposition.

And, you know, there is a depth and a complexity to it. So if you didn't, you know, follow every single logical step, that's totally fine. But the picture that emerges is a really beautiful picture. And I think of it, like, you can look through a telescope at the cosmos and see Spinoza's God. You can look at the most powerful microscope at the smallest little chimpanzee. chunks of Adam are at the quantum level. See Spinoza's God. You can look in a mirror into your own eyes and see Spinoza's God. God is not outside of the cosmos creating it, putting us into it. If God exists at all, he is this action, this unfolding, this perpetual changing thing that we see as the

entirety of the cosmos of nature. And you and I are not separate from it. We're not little ego separated from it, experiencing it, we are an expression of it. And so that sort of view, especially at the time he was operating in, gets him called two things, a pantheist or an atheist, right? And he is an atheist in the sense of the traditional sky daddy, judge, father figure in the clouds who stands outside the Cosbos and creates it. He doesn't believe in that God. So in that sense, he is an atheist. And he is a pantheist in that if God exists at all, it is everything. And it's the unfolding mystery of the cosmos that is that thing that we call God. So he is both an atheist and a pantheist, which seems like a contradiction in terms, but really isn't. And I think a good

analogy in like the Hindu or Buddhist traditions would be the concept of oneself versus no self, like Ottman or the universal self, which loses itself in the myriad infinite manifestations of conscious beings across the cosmos. It's almost the same as no self. It's almost the same as no self at all. There is no individual separate self outside of this stream, this mysterious unfolding of the cosmos itself. So that atheist-pantheist sort of division is not really a division at all. And the one total self in which the self is enlarged to encompass everything, or the no-self, where there is no self separate from the thing at all, those seem on the surface to be contradictions, but they're actually getting at the same exact thing through different doors. And I find that,

I find it beautiful. I find it fascinating and I find it if such a thing exists, true. And not, it's not, yeah, not just true, but also like practicable. Yes. Like you were saying, like, it involves doing science. It involves doing trades and crafts and, you know,

all sorts of agriculture, medicine, music, all everything, like literally everything. Yes. And the more Spinoza says, the more you do that with your body and your mind together with other people, the more real it becomes and the more intense it becomes and the more powerful you become, not in the sense of might,

but in the sense of what the French we'll call povoire, it can do, capacity to do. And, you know, we're, this is, I think real, we've turned, this has been a very substantial discussion, but I want to very briefly touch on part two, which I think we'll turn to more next time probably. And it's about the mind and the very interesting thing about the mind, the book about the mind, is that the very, it's like, okay, okay, concerning

the mind, okay, definition one in the section about the mind. By body, I understand a mode that expresses in a definite and determinate way God's essence insofar as he is considered as an extended thing. So it's really funny. I'm going to talk about the mind now. Oh, wait, let's talk about bodies. And as he says, right, the mind is really an idea of the body. And I, um, I, this is the real thing I want to touch on, is that for him, all bodies can sort of exist simply in and of themselves, but they can come into combinations with other bodies and he's most and create new things. And he's most interested in how human beings can do that, right? And it can, you can take very simple examples. So for example, about five years ago, I had an opportunity to go

out to rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which is known by the McMahon, as Unimaki. And I got to go work on a little farm. And one morning, my job was to get up and sigh it down an entire field. And I had to use a right-handed side and I'm left-handed. So it was a little bit awkward at first. But as I did it, as my buddy said, I was like, this is awkward. And my buddy said, just do it until it feels right. it'll be okay and I did and eventually my body started working in that way and then as that was

happening I was like oh wow yeah that's just my mind grew this new idea of my body as my body was building a new capacity and and that is really what Spinoza is trying to say but I also like he doesn't distinguish um categorically between a single body and a composite body so he doesn't distinguished between an individual and a group of people. And it really made me think about, just as an example here, this might have been 2019, I think, when you did this, this essay of, sorry, episode about Rosa Luxembourg. So the first of that two-part series with your friend Simone, the comedian,

who was great. I really, what you said at the end, she's a working class hero. Like, to do that self-education, that she's badass. And I really admire her a lot. and I think she probably has got a lot of stuff going on that a lot of academics can't even wrap their heads around at all. And really, I was listening to this the other day, and her discussion of Luxembourg's analysis of the mass strike is a really good way to get into thinking about Spinoza's idea of human group bodies, right? So she says, Luxembourg says, it's in part to the mass strike, a historical and not an artificial product. She says, if therefore the Russian revolution teaches us anything, it teaches above all that the mass strike is not artificially, quote unquote, made, not quote unquote decided at random, not quote unquote propagated, but that it is an historical phenomenon which at a given moment results from social conditions with historical inevitability.

It is not, therefore, by abstract speculations on the possibility or impossibility, the utility or the injuriousness of the mass strike, but only by an examination of the, those factors in social conditions out of which the mass strike grows in the present phase of the class struggle. In other words, it is not by subjective criticism of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is desirable, but only by objective investigation of the sources of the mass strike from the standpoint of what is historically inevitable that the problem can be grasped or even discussed. And so if Spinoza were reading that or in on this discussion or listening to your episode with Simone, he'd be like, yeah, you can't just, yeah, you can't just, yeah, you can't just policy. see it out. You've got to become a body. You can't just be these individual, isolated, silo

you know, and I think we really, Luxembourg's critique of critique of trade unions, very important to read because a lot of unions are fucked up and reactionary. And really, they've got to be dealt with. Including in my country, professorial unions, which in my view uphold reactionary sort of status quo politics in a way that makes me look at them in a very similar way to police unions. Sorry to my friends who are actually maybe still working. I'm not trying to shit on you, but it's true. And what am I trying to say? Like, yeah, like when you're at work, like I've been in workplaces that I wanted to unionize and I, you know, there was one place I worked at and talked about it with, you know, some people that work in the movement and all that kind of

stuff. And we realized what would have happened is that because the employer had, you know, all the workers cross-appointed to multiple departments, it would have created what's called a scope issue, like who counts in the bargaining unit, who belongs to the bargaining unit, and it would have ended up at the labor board forever, it would have been an intractable problem. So they kind of set it up so you couldn't unionize. You would end up bogged down forever at the labor board. And in these environments, like people are, especially a lot of like kitchens, food service, people know they're getting treated like shit, they're pissed off and they're sad, but the really brutal things that they're often so lonely.

And what we need to do is become bodies together, and we need to figure out ways to overcome the obstacles to doing so, right? And that's a really tough problem, especially inside the Imperial Corps. We're still living with the effects of the bribery of the working class. So, yeah, I think there's every, and because this is revolutionary left radio, there are all sorts of ways that Spinoza and Spinozaistic thought can be brought into class analysis into Marxist theory and Marxist politics and all the rest of it. Absolutely. And that is hopefully what we're trying to convey in part through an episode like this and this series

more broadly. Is there any last points you want to make before we wrap this episode up? And also, do you want to go ahead and gesture toward our next episode and what that's going to contain, sort of how it builds off this conversation? Yeah, I think what we'll do next time is pick up on Spinoza part two on bodies and then start to integrate more fully DeLuze's commentary on it. So the main one we're going to look at is the one that you've been reading recently and I've been rereading is Spinoza Practical Philosophy. But there's also a big Spinoza book called Expressionism and Philosophy, which is really

hardcore and I may be able to pull some of that stuff into it. But most importantly, I found this really fun lecture, not really a lecture, because The stuff that those guys do was, we weren't really elections, it's like they're in, you see videos of it and they're in what looks like a lunchroom somewhere and it's just pat, jam packed for the people and everyone's talking and hanging out and asking questions. And there's a really interesting one of these things from 1974 where Deleuze does sort of an extended discussion of Spinoza's theory of the affects and the power to act. And it's super funny. It's incredibly funny, really plain spoken and shows how these guys were. very like very much engaged good faith actors contrary to how they've often been represented in anglo-american academia or they get treated like these postmodern wackos or just some bullshit that has nothing to do with what they thought

and i think it's a really good way to continue uh on the you know the really human lines of spinoza show the humanity of this guy deluz um as just the human being who loves spinoza and to sort transition into the further discussion. And so two last things to say. One is that Brett has graciously granted my request for the outro music, which is a little bit different than what usually comes on at the end. And what I wanted to do is to offer it as sort of like a musical scolium or a musical commentary on what Brett and I had been talking about, because this is the first piece of

music I think of when I think about Spinoza as a thinker and a human and the kind of like especially if you can put a little, lie down and put a speaker on your chest or your laptop and feel the vibrations going through and the complexity of vibrations, I think it will impart something Spinoza's to you. And the very last thing I want to do is to honor my teacher, Karen Hul, who supervised my doctoral work over 10 years ago at the University of Wealth, who is one of the most badass human beings I've ever known in my life and I may I'll probably bring her up again next time and I wanted to close um with this thing from a little paper she wrote called farm as ethics not even a paper it's just sort of a little testimony and somehow at the university of wealth I'm not

entirely sure how this works she's managed to get at the university to give her space I'm not totally wrong about this yes it is on the agricultural college grounds so she can do philosophy as farming classes. And this is the, I'm going to close with Karen's words. And by the way, for anyone out there is thinking about that Karen joke, my Karen is the anti-Karon, and she's the baddest. I'm a Spinozist. This means that there is no mind that is not also an expression of a material dimension

to which it is ontologically welded like a gestalt. The body that can act to dance is the mind that is dancing. With my hands to help students identify a carrot seedling from a pineapple weed seedling, the health of the human mind is the health of the human body. Mine and that of whomever else will have the luck of eating these delicious, happy, and not expensive carrots. This is the health of the soil in which I kneel and in which these carrots will grow because the soil is not being poignant each year anew with synthetic agrochemicals.

In fact, they will be healthy for me and for the worms in this super alive soil because they are surrounded by the decayed grandmother carrots, which were peeled. in campus kitchens and their peels brought back to this farm, then wheelbarrowed by hand onto this tender, thin skin of our mother earth. She can be supported in her natural spiraling will toward being alive and active, expressing in all things, rocks, speculations, couplings, the singing vitality that is complex unsplipped being, one hectare at a time. I don't know I'm going to

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be the one of the I'm going to

I'm going to I'm going to I'm the I'm going to I'm so I'm

Thank you. POMAYOR. So, you know, and you . I don't know.

I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to be

the I'm going and I'm I'm You know, you know, Thank you.

Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you. Thank you.