Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Deep Dive (pt. 3a): Spinoza On the Origin and Nature of Minds and Bodies

Episode Date: August 26, 2021

This is the first half of our third installment of the Dialects Deep Dive subseries. Matthew Furlong joins Breht to discuss part II of Spinoza's famous work "Ethics", and together, they contemplate it through the lens of dialectical materialism. Find the second half of this episode here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/deep-dive-3b Check out our first installment of "Dialectics Deep Dive" here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/dialectics Check out our second installment here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/spinoza Outro Music: "When Under Ether" by PJ Harvey ----- 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

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we're doing part three of our ongoing sub-series Dialectics Deep Dive with Matthew Furlong. So in previous instantiations of this series, we covered the history and philosophy of dialectical materialism. And in the last one, we covered the first part of Spinoza's ethics. In this one, we'll be covering part two of Spinoza's ethics, and also Marshall McLuhan and his work around media. And this was such a long episode, it was like a three and a half hour recording that we're going to break this part three into two. So it'll be Dialectics Deep Dive, Part 3A and Part 3B. Part 3A is going to be on Spinoza, his conception of body and mind, Cartesian dualism, a bunch of stuff related to that.

And then in part 3B, we're going to talk about Marshall McLuhan. And at the end of that, sort of tie everything together. So this is a fascinating deep philosophy, as I've said, in previous instantiations of this sub-series. It can be challenging. But it is among our absolute most profound and deepest episodes and our most profound and deepest sub-series that we've ever done on this show. So the reward of really wrestling with this stuff and getting into it,

even if some of it goes a little over your head, um, is really worth it. And time and time again, as we've done throughout this series, we try to bring examples and bring it down to earth, make it very understandable through examples and applicable through it's how it caches out in the real world. So although there'll be chunks of time where you're trying to get through, you know, some, some difficult philosophy, we always try to wrap it up with some common sense examples and applications to really help people learn this stuff because it's important that you learn it um so this again is uh part a to our um part three of the broader series

all right without further ado here is my conversation with matthew on spinoza and his part two of his ethics enjoy Hey, everyone. It's Matthew once again in the 902. Thank you to Brett and David for having me back. And today we're just here to follow up on our previous episode, which introduced Baruch Spinoza, also known as Benedict Spinoza, also known as Bento Spinoza. And I just wanted to make sure all three of his names were heard because last time I tried to enunciate them all and the file got clipped or something. So Baruch Spinoza is the subject of discussion again today.

And we're going to look in particular at the book two, or sorry, part two of his major work, The Ethics, which is called of the Nature and Origin of the Mind. And as I indicated last time, the interesting thing about, as part of the ethics is that Spinoza spends a lot of the time in this part talking about the body, bodies as such, human bodies individually and collectively in the kinds of compositions that both human and non-human bodies can come into together. And this in itself is following up on the first episode that we did together, which was just sort of a general overview of the concept of dialectical materialism in its history, starting primarily from Mao Zedong's

definition of dialectics in the paper on contradiction. Looking ahead, we have one more episode coming up in this sort of mini-series about Spinoza and different thinkers. Today I'm going to be introducing the thought of the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his thoughts on media and the relationship of our bodies to media forms, because I think he offers a lot of useful analytical tools and insights to help us think about our bodily and psychic lives in the age of late-stage capitalism. And next time we'll be returning to Spinoza probably to sort of run through books three, four, and five of the ethics

and introduce two thinkers or a sort of composite thinker that Brett has expressed interest in talking about, which is to say Gilles-Deleuze and Felix Poitari, and to talk about sort of what their contributions are, what their limitations might be, and to take a many-sided critical look at their thinking and their activism and their lives. Beautiful. So that's the trajectory of this mini-series, which we have dubbed Dialectics Deep Dive. As Matthew said, the first one was the philosophy and history of dialectical materialism. The last one was on Spinoza, and this one is going to be on Spinoza's ethics, part two of his ethics, as well as an introduction and a sort of, you know,

connection with Marshall McLuhan, as you mentioned as well. So just I like to, you know, reiterate that up front because we are covering so much ground in this series, and it's easy to sort of, you know, lose where we're at in that, and we're making so many different connections. But I'll link to the, in the show notes, to the previous two installments of this as well. You know, as always, it's probably helpful to go back and listen to them in order, but you don't have to, especially if you have some baseline knowledge of thinkers like Spinoza and McLuhan. You could probably dive in and then go back and check those out later. Everybody's different in that regard.

But it's awesome to have you back. I love this series. It's a fascinating one. I love spending time with Spinoza and on his thought. And I'm excited to get into Marshall McLuhan in the second half of this conversation. But let's go ahead and just start this off with an orientation to Spinoza. So in order to sort of reorient ourselves within Spinoza's thinking, let's begin by reviewing the 17th century mechanical philosophy in which Spinoza himself situates it. So go ahead and remind us, you know, what is the mechanical philosophy, how did it emerge, and what questions does it address?

And I'll have a follow-up question after that. Okay. Well, most broadly speaking, the mechanical philosophy is a philosophical approach to science of physics. that emerged in largely in sort of Western Europe in, I would say, in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries is where it really all coalesced. I'd say 17th and 18th centuries is where it really coalesced together. Early figures key in these developments being like Galileo, Galilei, who also actually lays the groundwork for the basic logic of relativity in his work, the dialogue on the two chief world systems. Francis Bacon from England, who is sort of often denigrated as the progenitor of this sort of industrialized, separate, you know, this mindset according to which we're separate from nature. But that's often an interpretation often taken at the expense of his observation that in order to command nature in any way, shape, or form, we must first obeyeth.

other major figures are Descartes, René Descartes, who we talked about last time, and Isaac Newton, who we talked about both in the first episode and in the last episode that we did. So basically, the mechanical philosophy consists in using mathematics to come up with accurate descriptions of and predictions about the behavior of bodies in what we now call the macroscopic world. So it's, you know, applicable to problems of, you know, how to, if you say you're engaging in warfare and you want to know how to get the enemy with the projectile you've loaded into your tributche, you can do mathematical computations to figure out how far you can make it go depending upon the weight of the object being hurled, the distance you would like to hurl it, the arc and all that sort of stuff. And our world has, for many centuries, or for a few centuries, at least, in societies like the United States, England, Canada, and other ones that are sort of attached to them, have, you know, been very influenced by this view and this philosophical approach to science.

And as Brett and I have discussed in the last couple of episodes, as people like Engels and Mao have pointed out, this is also given rise to a kind of, like a bourgeois metaphysics or a kind of ideology, an ideology in which because we operate the mechanical philosophy and we do this kind of science by breaking phenomena down into separated units, it means that fundamentally nature consists in this kind of separation and that we ourselves are sort of like the ultimate separate entity from nature, the only one that could possibly outstrip that being sort of like the Skyfather conception of God. Spinoza is very much influenced by this philosophy being a devotee of Rennie Descartes' thinking. And he describes the relationships that he wants us to think about between us and our own bodies,

our bodies and other kinds of bodies, and all the possible combinations and compositions that can, then bodies can achieve or generate according to this language. In that sense, he's limited by it because, as we'll see in part two of the ethics, he hints at or tries to gesture toward bodily relationships and bodily modes and bodily compositions that exceed the language of the mechanical philosophy. So as Ludwig Wittgenstein might say, the limits of my language or the limits of my world. And in that sense, the very language that gives Spinoza, the capacity to point us at these ideas or at these possibilities also creates limits. And therefore, we really need to think about developments in science that have happened since Spinoza wrote the ethics that can expand our imagination about what is going on in the world of our bodies. So, for example, in modern chemistry, we have concepts such as phase states in which chemical compounds. move in and out of forms of composition that are broadly defined as like liquid, solid, or gas.

And then there's, in very rare instances, a fourth kind of phase state known as plasma. And we have in physics, we've developed since Spinoza classical theories of fields, such as the electromagnetic field. And following on that, we develop concepts such as the quantum field. And all of these give us avenues for thinking about this life that. we're living that are not just reducible to the sort of mechanical machinations of like a cuckoo clock or a factory assembly line like you'd see in charlie chaplin's movie modern times or something like that and so with both the capacities that he has and the limits imposed upon him

by the concepts available at his time spinoza gives us this sort of sort of baseline to work from that we can use to explore subsequent developments in philosophy and science, in art, in politics, and economics, and all sorts of things. So I know you touched on this and alluded to it, but maybe you could go just a tad deeper before we start talking about definitions, because focusing on this idea of bodies, I think, is really important in fleshing it out completely is going to help this conversation go. So can you just talk a little bit more about what the role of bodies is in mechanical philosophy and sort of how that specifically goes on to inform Spinoza's concept of body?

Well, again, as I said, in the mechanical view or in the mechanical philosophy, the problems that they're really trying to deal with pertain to bodies in the macro world. So, for example, even going back to Aristotle, you'll see Aristotle making statements about the relative rates of dissent of a body of a different, two bodies of different masses in like a liquid medium or say some kind of gelatinous medium or a gaseous medium or something like that. So there are these very early tributaries of observations about the sort of two and fro of the macro world, even in antiquity. And then in this sort of early high modern modern mathematics start getting introduced, you start being able to make more accurate predictions about, for example, the movements of celestial bodies, for one, thing and astronomy sort of ends up forming, I mean, it's such an important field in the, in the development of physics. They're looking at how stars and planets and comets and all these things interact and they're trying to come up with the laws. So they're looking at bodies, sort of the laws that can describe what they're doing. So they're looking primarily at bodies

that can be seen with the naked eye and be touched with the hand. And that is sort of what leads, as I said in the first episode, someone like Isaac Newton to presume that matter in and of itself has to be a body, even if it's very small, that can be in principle seen with the naked eye and held with the hand, or at least it must behave in such a way that even if it's too small for us to actually do it with the bodies that we have, in principle, we should be able to do it if we could adjust our body to be able to touch and see those things. And so that's really the key thing is that the mechanical philosophy deals with macroscopic objects that we can see and touch and have our other senses affected by directly or with

very little intervention. And that at once has created a whole world of possibilities, but it's also created a world of limitations. And these are the kinds of limitations that Engels and Mao talk about when they talk about the development of metaphysics out of science, where we apply the logic of rigid, impermeable, indivisible, macroscopic bodies to every aspect of existence. And this is what is created or helped generate bourgeois ideology and this horrible relationship to nature that we now have. And, you know, just to touch on that,

I'd just like to point out that I'm sitting here in Halifax and absolutely sweating my ass off as the world is burning. And in the spirit of curls of the roundtable, I'd like to thank our sponsors for this episode, the military industrial complex. And so this heat that I'm sitting in right now and when you, Brett, went to Seattle to visit your friend and you guys had to sleep with like ice blocks between your legs and all that stuff, all of that is part and parcel of the positive and negative outcomes of the development of this mechanical view, its practical applications, and it's sort of ideological implications in the sense of this thing called bourgeois metaphysics. Yeah, really, really well said and really important because, This high-minded philosophy that we're describing, as I've said throughout this series,

and we'll continue cashes out in very real ways in our everyday lives. And that example of climate change and the havoc, it's reeking, coming out of this certain way of viewing the world, brings that precise message home. And not only did that Pacific Northwest heat wave, I was there for that, but also I had a family trip recently. My wife's side of the family is Mexican. They have family in Mexico. they bought us a trip to go down to Mexico and we were flying back into Denver International Airport

and we were flying through the intense wildfire haze from the wildfires further out west and on the day that we landed in Denver first of all just optically coming in through the haze was a surreal experience I've never seen anything like that but on the day that we landed in Denver Denver had the worst air quality of any major city on planet Earth due to the wildfires further out west.

So twice this summer alone, I've been at the epicenter of pretty historic changes due to climate change. And it's unsettling to say the least. Absolutely. Let's go ahead and move on from just putting on the table what mechanical philosophy is, what its concept of bodies are. Let's move into Spinoza's use of this. term. So obviously Spinoza is coming out of it in some respect reacting to this mechanical

philosophy. So with that in mind, what is Spinoza's definition of body and in the context of that definition? How does he define the human body in particular? Okay. Well, just to help give the reader a bit of a roadmap here, I'm primarily interested in several pieces from part two rather than trying to run through the entire thing and those will be first of all from the definitions at the beginning of part two definitions one and three so that would be the definition of a body as such and the definition of an idea which is sort of the primary production of the mind then I want to look at proposition 13 and a series of what are called lamata which follows it. And as I think I mentioned in last episode, the, what is it, Beth Lord's book, A Guide to Spinoza's

ethics, she gives a good breakdown of what all of these components of the machinery of the ethics are. But the lemata, rather, there are propositions about bodies as such. And following up on that in the sort of appendices to Proposition 13, there are a set of six postulates concerning the human body and I'm going to look at that. And then we're going to look at very quickly as quickly as possible to look at Propositions 14 through 19, which will take us to, yeah, Proposition 19 will say the human mind has no knowledge of the body, nor does it know it to exist. That is to say, it does not know the body to exist, except through ideas of affections by which the body is affected. Then we will look at Proposition 29, particularly the scolium, which is a comment,

A scolium is a commentary in a proposition, and he will make a remark here that will very, very closely track to what Mao is saying on contradiction. And then finally, I want to look at Proposition 40, and particularly the scolium to that, because that introduces us to Spinoza's idea of what a true universal concept is, and that will help lay the way from when we look at Deleuze, because his concept of a universal comes directly, I would say, well, not entirely, but it's, it draws deeply on the scullium from opposition 40. Okay. So, and I'd also, I just want to point out to, um, uh, the, the last episode we did, I found, uh, I wasn't entirely satisfied with it in the end, but part of the reason for that is that it's extremely difficult to jump in from into the first part and really understand this concept of substance that is sort of his idea, his name for what everything in the universe has in common at all times.

There's a lot of, as I said last time, we have a lot of baggage from religion and the all the bullshit that the Roman Catholic Church has imposed on our minds and bodies, and then the sort of Protestant, like especially Calvinist sort of tendencies that have come out in reaction to that. And a really good thing about part two is that through exploring Spinoza's argumentation about bodily composition and the nature of bodies and how they move and what they are, that can actually help you get a better idea of what he means by substance or what he means by nature as such. And the propositions about bodies can help inform your day-to-day practice and your relationships with other people.

And that in itself, this pairing of working through the text in relation to your everyday life, that can help deliver a sort of clarification in your mind of what he means by substance. And Deleuze, he really sort of picked up on this in pretty much all of his comments about Spinoza, where he says the only real work you've got to do on Spinoza to make the system work the way that we wanted to is to make substance hinge on the modes, which is to say the finite things that we are and that we are surrounded by. And if you explore them deeply,

the sense of what he means by substance will itself emerge out of your everyday life. Okay. So in part two, definition one, he says, by body, I understand a mode that expresses in a definite and determinate way, God's essence in so far as he is considered as an extended thing. So as we'll remember for Spinoza, as far as we can tell, this nature that we're in

and that we are has at least two sort of dimensions or attributes, which is to say, the dimension of body and the dimension of mind or mentality or psyche or whatever you want to call it. And he's correcting Descartes here who construes mind and body as two fine things. kinds of substance that come out of an infinite substance that itself doesn't really seem to have any characteristics and it creates all this is what is called or one aspect of what is called substance dualism and in the last episode and in the episode before that I talk about how Spinoza argues or sort of criticizes this view and shows his shortcomings and says that

my view is superior according to which all of nature is just one unity that's infinitely differentiated and being differentiated and differentiating itself all the time. time. Definition three, he says, by idea, I understand a conception of the mind, which the mind forms because it is a thinking thing. And then he offers an explanation. He says, I say conception rather than perception because the term perception to indicate the mind is passive to its object, whereas conception seems to express an activity of the mind. So for him, mind is not a tabular asa that has things, a blank slate that has things imposed upon it and our minds, thus building our minds up out of these layers of these impressions and impositions, the mind

itself is just as active as the body and it's active in a heart, like a unity with the body. And then he says, also he offers another definition. He says, by an adequate idea, I mean an idea which insofar as it is considered in itself without relation to its object, has all the properties that is intrinsic characteristics of a true idea. And so one example he'll offer is the idea of a triangle, which is a three-sided polygon whose internal angles add up to 180 degrees. He's like if you got all, if you have those sort of predicates down of what a triangle is, you have a completely adequate idea of a triangle because you don't need any other information

to know what any kind of triangle is. So he's going to give us a picture in which, as we're moving through bodily life, our minds are developing ideas based on the feelings, the sensations, the affections that go through our bodies and ideas develop out of them. But as he's going to say, we don't start from a position of adequacy. And in this sense, he's going to move away from a lot of philosophers in the European tradition who seem to presume that we're sort of become preloaded with adequate ideas and we can only fail to recognize the world correctly of some kind of error gets in the way. For Spinoza, we start out from a position of inadequacy. So when you're a little kid, everything is much more fluxy and undifferentiated than it becomes

by the time you're an adult, and say you've gone through, you know, like Borshwa, Western liberal education, and you're taught to separate and split the world up and hold or put phenomena into strict categories and to hold them apart. And this can only be this and that can only be that. And this is what Mao is talking about

when he says metaphysics. And I realized recently that I keep meaning to say the ultimate representative of this kind of metaphysics is Ian Rand. Her first principle of metaphysics is A equals A, which is to say, whatever it is, they say X equals X. Whatever X is, X is absolutely identical to X, and nothing can get between that, and nothing can undermine that, and nothing can change that. And that is, that sums up in spades, what Mao means by metaphysics, dialectical materialism is based on the idea that everything that comes into being is comes into being through a different processes of differentiation

and even forms of identity and self-sameness are themselves processes of differentiation and there is no identity except through change and this is where this is where Spinoza is kind of working so in you know and randy and or bourgeois metaphysical outlooks more broadly things are sliced up categorized sort of static and taxonomic and in the dialectical worldview, things are defined by their constant sort of interaction, relations with everything else, their relation to the totality in which they exist, and their relationship to never-ending change. Is that fair? Yes, that's fair. And as I mentioned or I cited the Buddhist monk Tikna Khan last time I believe

when he says, there is no self without non-self elements. That's the condition of existence. okay so um i'm going like i said i'm going i'm going to skip over this he makes these sort of preliminary um remarks about ideas and i'm just going to skip over them um except just to know just to follow up on something i just said proposition seven he says the order and connection of ideas is the same and the order and connection of things this is what has been come to be known as his doctrine of parallelism which is to say that in physically corporeal and mental phenomena happen in this kind of like synergy or this kind of unity. And this itself is another correction of Descartes who argues that the mind acts directly

on the body and the body acts directly on the mind. So that's where you get like mind over matter talk from. For Spinoza, what we are is this sort of complex differentiated unity that seems to be expressible according to two kinds of vocabularies. and this will create as we see problems for traditional metaphysical conceptions of the freedom of the will and stuff like that. So we're going to come back to that. But I'm just going to jump into Proposition 13 and go through his remarks about bodies as such. Okay.

Okay. So Proposition 13, the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, i.e. a definite mode, of extension actually existing and nothing else and nothing else. So I'll just read it again. The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body, i.e. a definite mode of extension actually existing and nothing else. And as I said on the phone yesterday, I wanted to jump in or sort of insert some marks here just to give us a more expansive idea of why. the body actually is, is a definite,

actually existing thing and actually existing mode of extension. Marx says in economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, this is on page 75 of the Merck's and Ingle's Reader by Norton Press. The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man, like the end, animal lives on inorganic nature. And the more universal man is compared with an animal, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, the air, light, etc., constitute a part of human consciousness in the realm of

theory, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art, his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment, which he must first prepare to make it palatable and digestible. So too in the realm of practice, they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically, man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, or whatever it may be. The universality of man is in practice manifested precisely in the universality which makes all of nature his inorganic body, both inasmuch as nature is one, his direct means of life, and two, the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity.

Nature is man's inorganic body. Nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself the human body, man lives on nature, which means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse. course, if he is not to die. That man's physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself for man as a part of nature. So I think in Western societies like ours, we probably are prone to thinking about the human body in terms of like the limits of our skin, how tall we are, how much we weigh, how broad we are, how long of a reach we have. I often think of that drawing by Leonardo da Vinci called the Vitruvian

Man, which depicts a human adult male, sort of two images of him superimposed at each other. So one with his legs, his feet close together and his arms hanging by his side, and one with his arms stretched out and his feet spread far apart. And there's a square inside a circle behind him. And it's, I think this is also part of the development of the mechanical view and the mathematician of nature. Da Vinci is trying to present an idealized image of the human body as consisting in these mathematical harmonies and perfections. And a lot of us probably, if we look really deeply, that's probably in there for us somewhere. For someone like Marx and someone like Spinoza, the boundaries between our body and what is not our body are very, it's very porous and it's not

very certain where they are at all. And for Marx, if all of nature is our inorganic body, then there definitely isn't any hard and fast boundary between us and not us. And that means that in a very real sense, all the bodies on earth of our brothers and sisters are our body as well. And I think this is very important for Spinoza. So he says, the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body that is a definite motive of actually existing and nothing else. And then he goes on to give, he says, I'm going to give a brief preface concerning the nature of body. So he says, axiom one, all bodies are in either emotion or at rest. axiom two each single body can move at varying speeds and he says lemma one bodies are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest quickness and slowness and not in respect of substance and now here he doesn't mean substance in the very generalized sense that he means in book one here he means it in a very much more narrow sense like aristotle gives the word substance or usia the greek word usia in his work and so

he looks at, okay, like my cat, she's lying, she's so hot, she can't move, she's lying over on a carpet over here, and Aristotle would say, okay, well, I can distinguish that cat from the carpet that she's lying on top of, and there's the doorframe, okay, through the door frame, that's there. So she's an identifiable thing that can be thought of itself, and that's what I mean when I say usia or substance. It's an individuating term. So here, Spinoza means it in a more colloquial sense. That is to say, bodies are distinguished from one another, they are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not in respect of how they can be individuated at this given time through the eyes and through the hands. That's basically what he means.

Lemma, too, all bodies agree in certain respects. And then he says, as proof, all bodies agree on this point, he was trying to say, that they involve the conception. of one of the same attribute, that is to say extension. All bodies exist in extension, space and time, motion and rest, coming and going, generation and corruption, and also that they may move at varying speeds and may be absolutely in motion or absolutely at rest. Lemma three, a body in motion or at rest must have been determined to motion or rest by another body, which likewise has been determined to motion or rest by another body, and that body by

another and so at infinitum and now i also want to stop here and comment on lemma three because here's a place where we can we can run the risk of falling into that sort of mechanistic mechanized um uh ideology of bourgeois metaphysics uh that i talked about last time um which sort of presupposes that um everything is uh impermeable impenetrable and it exists in and of itself and it can only um have contact with other things as though, as billiard balls do. And if you can't establish that kind of visual relation where you see one thing impact another thing that is separate from it, then you can't talk about causality. And you see this kind of logic all over the place in our society. For example, when that dirtbag, Rush Limbaugh used to be on the radio, rest in piss,

inciting people to reactionary violence for decades, decades. I remember my crazy right-wing uncle used to send his newsletter to my grandfather, and I'd read this as like 92 or something, and it's just, you know, it's absolutely mind-blowing this stuff that this guy would stay. And people would go out and behave violently because of the stuff he was saying. And you would see a lot of especially right-leaning liberals, is what you guys in the States called conservatives.

Or the liberals called conservatives. They would say, well, you know, it's not like, Rush isn't the cause of that guy doing that. I mean, they didn't sign a contract. There wasn't a handshake. There wasn't Rush saying,

you go do this. And the guy's saying, yes, I'll go do that. Right? And there's sort of a billiard ball logic to this idea of this explanation of cause and effect. Whereas the,

and this is what McLuhan is useful for. The effect that Limbaugh is having on these people's minds is much more environmental. It's almost like its own ecology of symbols and of inferences and of feelings. It's much more complex than that. We saw the same exact thing with the January 6th Trump thing, where everybody tries to deny that Trump had any sort of culpability in it, even though he's out there fomenting the crowd and saying, you've got to be strong, you can't be weak. But they're like, he never told them to ransack the Capitol. Like you have to have that billiard ball, hit that billiard ball in order for there to be any

culpability at all. And they overlook the broader emotional and effective context in which he's operating and the sort of subtext of what he's saying. Yeah, it's almost like they would need to see a contractual document with Trump's signature up top and then whatever, like who's ever the representative of all those wackos that's form exactly uh the capital and so trump signature would be the would be the stand in for the cue ball and the there's their group signature would be the stand in for the ball that the cue ball hits to go into the pocket which in this case is the attempted i don't know what the hell anyway yeah uh fascist riot

that's what i call fascist fascist riot and and uh you know uh yeah um and this and this itself and i'm I keep going back to Aristotle, right? Because Aristotle's idea of the four kinds of cause, the material, the efficient, the formal, and the final, which through history has been known as the causal fourfold, pertains to different aspects of phenomena that we observe. And for Aristotle, he would say, you can't really causally explain anything unless you ask these four questions about these four aspects. of causality about each thing, whereas in the age of mechanical bourgeois ideology, we've collapsed all the functions of those three other kinds of causality into this one form, the efficient cause, which Aristotle more properly calls the moving cause, the efficient cause,

which is precisely perceived through this ideology as billiard ball causality, and we try to make that very reductive, reductionist form of causality, do the explanatory work for all kinds of phenomena that it doesn't apply to. So like what we're dealing with right now with climate change, that is not billiard ball causality. That's environmental causality. That depends on the form of life that is fomenting it. And that's far more complex than one thing, smacking into another thing. And just to give an example, I've been dying to use this anecdote for years and years and years. Even though in sort of popular ideology, this seems to be the way of thinking about cause and effect that prevails.

So like this thing happens and then that thing happens. This causes that to happen and that's distinct from this. You can see even in sort of like the high levels of capital, when it's convenient, a more philosophically subtle understanding of causality coming out. And I'm going to read a little bit from this book. It's called The Ocean Ranger Remaking the Promise of Oil by a former teacher and then colleague of named Susan Dodd. And the Ocean Ranger disaster,

and here I'm bringing out another Newfoundland anecdote because you've got to write about what you know. The Ocean Ranger was an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland that sank on February 15, 1982, taking down 84 men with it, including Susan's brother, and this is why she wrote the book. And it was, I think it was the first oil rig disaster of its sword,

sort of on in quote unquote North American waters. And Susan has a really interesting passage about how the insurance company used a more complicated notion of causality to argue its way out of having to pay out the insurance payments because the oil company didn't want to cover like the various funeral costs and payouts of the families and all that stuff on its own. So during the investigation, the investigation, the insurer rejected the industry's attempts to narrow the quote-unquote cause of accidents to technical chains of bad luck and equipment failure and invoked a commonly quoted ruling. To treat proxima causa as the cause which is nearest in time is out of the question.

So it's like, was there this one thing that somebody did that was wrong or stupid? And that's what caused the oil rig to tip over and explode. Causes are spoken of as if they were distinct from one another as beads in a row or links in a chain. But if this metaphysical topic has to be referred to, it is not wholly so. The chain of causation is a handy expression, but the figure is inadequate. Causation is not a chain, but a net. At each joint influences forces events and precedents simultaneously meet, and the radiation from each joint extends infinitely.

At the joint where these various influences meet, it is for the judgment as upon a matter of fact to declare which one of the causes thus joined at the joint of the effect was the proximate and which was the remote cause? Coerced and that's the end quote of the insurer's lawyer's argument. Coerced in a metaphysics, the insurer explained that a quote unquote net of causation was more adequate than the image of a chain of technical mishaps. So they, you know, you might go to Borswell universities and they'll tell you the philosophy is not good for anything. thing. But in this case, if you're an insurance company dealing with this horrible oil corporation, and you're also a horrible corporation, you can use philosophy to get out of having

to pay up potentially billions of dollars. Yeah, right? Jesus. But this goes to show, right? Like, even though insurance, the insurance industry is total shit, and the oil industry is total shit, that's still a correct argument about causality. Correct. Which also goes to show that philosophy won't necessarily save you. you for making you a good person. So anyway, sorry, I've gotten off track a little bit. That's all right. It's interesting. But yeah, I'll go back to, yeah, so repeat lemma three after having read that.

A body in motion or at rest must have been determined to motion or rest by another body, which likewise has been determined to motion or rest by another body and that body by another and so on at phonotum. So in the language of the mechanical philosophy, Spinoza is almost bound. to writing in a way that is going to give us this impression of the beads and the chain or the billiard balls or components on an assembly line or something like that. But he's also, as we're going to see,

going to try to point beyond that as best as he can with the language that he has. So he says, then he has another axiom. He says, all the ways in which a body is affected by another body follow from the nature of the affected body together with the nature of the body affecting it. So that one in the same body, move in various ways in accordance with the various natures of the bodies causing its motion.

And on the other hand, different bodies may be caused to move in different ways by one in the same body. And here you're starting to get a hint of this greater complexity. And now that we have things like modern chemistry and biochemistry and all that, where we can talk about metabolic change and, you know, chemical transformations constituting our body and not just mechanical macro objects and their sort of motions and points. of contact and their differentiations, we have a much broader, more complex set of vocabularies that we're able to deal with, whether we do it through actual scientific experimentation or philosophical interpretation that can give rise to sort of like new superstructural features

to help us move through the world. Lemma four, if from a body or an individual thing composed of a number of bodies, certain bodies are separated, and at the same time, a like number of other bodies of the same nature take their place, the individual thing will retain its nature as before without any change in its form. So here, again, just to touch on metabolism, right? We have a nutritional digestive cycle, and that helps us maintain the homeostasis of our bodies. We have to keep replenishing every single day our bodies with food, with water, with oxygen, with light, and all these things. And it's a never-ending cycle. And all of of the, you know, when you, you know, I'm, I've got a bottle of water right here and I'm drinking

from it as we talk and later I'll pee it out or I'll sweat it out and it will go back into the cycle and it will become all these other things. And so this is, this is how Spinoza is like starting to get beyond this mechanical language of it. He says if the parts of an individual thing become greater or smaller, Lemma 5, but so proportionately that they all preserve the same mutual relation of motion and rest as before, the individual thing will like likewise retain its own nature as before without any change in its form. So you might look at growth processes. You watch your kids growing up and they increase in size and some things about their shape changes, but the general sort of ratio of composition and the sort of unity of the

parts remains the same and they remain identifiable for as long as this process of life goes on. lemma six if certain bodies composing an individual thing are made to change the existing direction of their motion but in such a way that they can continue their motion and keep the same mutual relation as before the individual thing will likewise preserve its own nature without any change of form so you know in that sense we're quite lucky we can you know do a 90 degree turn really fast around a corner without our bodies just like flying into sort of disintegration And everything stays the same, even though we can orient ourselves in very many different ways in space and time. And then finally for the lemata, lemma seven, furthermore, the individual thing so composed retains its own nature, whether as a whole it is moving or at rest, and in whatever direction it moves, provided that each constituent part retains its own motion and continues to communicate this motion to the other parts. And he just says in the scullium, we thus see how a composite individual, like a human body, can be affected in many ways and yet preserve its nature.

So then he goes on and he gives these six much shorter postulates about the human body. And once I read those, I'm going to turn to this passage from Beth Lord's Guide to Spinoza's Ethics that I discuss with you on the phone. So postulate one, the human body is composed of very many individual parts of different natures. each of which is extremely complex. And in this day and age, we know that, quote unquote, human cells are not even necessarily the majority of the living matter in the human body. We have microbial cultures and all of this stuff going on on our bodies. Two, of the individual components of the human body, some are liquid, some are soft, and some are hard.

Three, the individual components of the human body, and consequently the human body itself, are affected by external bodies in a great many ways. The human body needs, this is a postulate four, the human body needs for its preservation a great many other bodies by which, as it were, it is continually regenerated. Postulate 5, when a liquid part of the human body is determined by an external body to impinge frequently on another part which is soft, it changes the surface of that part and impresses on its certain traces of the external body acting upon it. So here, I feel like he's thinking about the eyeball and the lens and the ret. Postulate 6, the human body can move external bodies and dispose them in a great many ways. And so here I'm just going to jump to Beth Lord and just, I mean, he's talking about speednesses and slownesses, liquid parts, hard parts, soft parts.

And this is a very different starting point from the way I think that we're used to talking about bodies and bodily life and societies like ours. Again, I think we're used to thinking about ourselves and each other as these sort of impenetrable particles. And in fact, I remember many, many years ago, a high school friend of mine was in law school. And they absolutely hated it. And part of the reason they hated it is because it had led them to the conclusion that that's what, in fact, we are, these impenetrable particles that bounce off each other. And the role of law is to intervene and rectify things when we bounce off each other in pursuing our interest because it's simply not in our nature to be capable of anything else. So it turned my friend, or it not didn't turn them into something, but it made them extremely depressed, extremely unhappy, and convinced them of the idea that human beings are necessarily intrinsically opposed to each other in the practice of everyday life and that there can be no harmony or unity, otherwise why would law exist, right? it's this logic it cuts deep and it goes all over all these different fields and this is why next

episode when we look at DeLis and Guatarii's concept of transversality is so important because he shows how you can analyze the same logic appearing in different vocabularies and in different practices and our job you know as Matt would say is to move beyond the perceptual to logical and so So transversal is a logical concept enabling us to get beyond immediate perceptions and see the commonality of motions that we're being subjected through in what Qutari calls integrated world capitalism. Yeah, no, I think it's great. And just touching on some things that stood out to me, the idea, just to recap of Cartesian dualism

versus what Spinoza is trying to do here in the Cartesian framework, the mind and the body are seen as basically two fundamentally separate domains. hence the term dualism. Under Spinoza, although he's operating within this framework of mechanical philosophy, he's also at the same time trying to transcend it, go beyond it, break out of it. He's sort of thinking of the mind and body, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but as a sort of simultaneous process that is inexorably connected, not two fundamentally separate domains.

And that's where the term parallelism comes through, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, although the way that that, term gets used and taken up in sort of contemporary philosophy or, you know, the philosophy of the 20th century in itself leads, can often lead back to a vulgar mechanical thinking, despite many of these philosophers trying their hardest not to do that. I, I, I, the image of the parallel is, is good, but I like thinking of it in terms of the structure of a Mobius strip. Because simply by attending to your existence as one attribute as extension,

by exploring that you are naturally led to your existence as mind, psyche, and then by exploring that, you're naturally led back to the other one. So there's this kind of spiraling activity that goes on. And this is, I think this is how Spinoza is a dialectician. and so you have this one substance diversified into this sort of this spiraling unity that never ends and this is I mean really for us like rocks don't necessarily experience this like that but yet parallelism but we really need to avoid the illusion of separateness that can come along with the concept of things being parallel is parallel but in a unity like the sides of a Mobius strip which are really just one side that is always diversified. and differentiated. Yeah, so that framing that I put it in is a simultaneous process versus two separate domains. Is that sort of helpful in getting at what you're implying here? Yeah, absolutely. And someone who's done pretty good at talking about this in the American

tradition is Donald Davidson, who I think I've mentioned to you before. I think you said you know who he is. Sure, yeah, through philosophy training as an undergrad. Yeah, he's a really cool guy, died at the age of 87 after a downhill skiing accident, and that didn't kill him, but he died on the operating table because he broke his leg. And so he had an interesting life, and if you can go out downhill skiing, that's better than a lot of fates. But he has an interesting way of interpreting this kind of mind-body unity or parallelism that he calls anomalous monism. And yeah, there's a lot of good stuff that he does with Spinoza. What's the anomalous part?

The monism is there's like the shared fundamental reality that is deeper than both the things involved. Some shared grounding between mind and body. What does the anomalous aspect account for? The anomalous aspect, I think it's the response that he comes up with to a lot of other philosophers in the quote-unquote, like American analytic tradition who they want to be able to describe mind and body according to one set of laws. And because of that, because they're working from certain assumptions that are very consistent with and probably grounded in this sort of bourgeois metaphysics, these philosophers, especially these Anglo-American philosophers, are trying to accept that mind and body inhabit one reality. And then they're trying to explain both kinds of phenomena according to one set of laws. And what you see routinely is that they immediately, presumptively, default to try and explain things according to like mechanical clockwork interaction between macro bodies.

And because of that, they end up being unable to explain the mental because the mental also includes things like, you know, intentions, forms of, you know, solidarity with other people. These are things are super structural things in a way or they're symbolic things. And so what ends up happening then because those phenomena cannot be strictly explained according to. into a set of laws that are primarily applicable to billiard balls, you know, bouncing off each other, they end up eliminating the mental altogether. And you end up with these weird conclusions, which are like, everything you're experiencing right now is an illusion and not in the sense that Buddhism means it, right? Where you, if you're not paying attention, you may experience things as fixed and permanent, but when you do start paying attention, you see that that apparent

permanence is just a moment. It's like a part of, it's the way of particle duality. You're just catching particles, but once you start paying attention, you get into the wave. It's not like that at all. What they're saying is psychic life isn't real. Only the mathematically expressable mechanical laws of nature are real. And the fact that we have to get to those laws through this thing, this experience that we've now judged not to be real, we're just going to not talk about that. Right. And it got to the plan, my friend Brooke, who is, at University of Guelph with me, he was forced to take one of these seminars from one of the people that thinks these things. And he ended up finding himself in a room for the people who

had fallen for it. And they were really enthusiastic about the idea. And I think about this in the context of separators from nature, white settler colonialism, a hostility towards the global South, and just an indifference to all these things that are going on. They were very enthused about the idea that what they were actually experiencing their psychic lives weren't real and they could just throw that all away with this idea of this like weird clockwork mechanism going on underneath it all that they could rely on and Brooke came he met me um for lunch or something after class and he told me that he'd finally turned to them and said so he's like are you telling me that you're not experiencing what we're experiencing right now and they looked at him and

they were like, yes. Yeah. And in philosophy of mind, it's referred to as a liminivism, right? Yeah, exactly, a limitivism. And I did, when I was at doing my master's studies, we had to do a metaphysics course about this that was taught by a guy who had a background in my quantum physics and stuff like that. And it was so frustrating.

It was just so infuriating to read paper after paper after paper, espousing this nonsense. And we finally got to the end. And he was like, so what did you notice? And we were like, what do you mean? What do we notice? And he's like, didn't you notice that none of this works? And they're all, he's like a background in physics. And these guys call themselves the physicalists.

And he's like, this is not scientific. This is not grounded in anything real. This is just basically ideology, right? So, yeah, that's what that all means. Anomalous monism, the search for law-like explanations that can account for both body and mind, and which ends up destroying the reality of mind. and leads us into situations where, say, mental health issues, it's easier to rely 100% solely and just entirely on pharmaceutical interventions because under that mode, you're thinking, well, I mean,

since psychic life isn't real, you don't need to talking cure, you don't need to meditate, you don't need to exercise, you don't need to eat better, you don't need to do this, that, or the other things. You don't need to change your social conditions. You don't need to change your material conditions. Exactly, Brett, thank you. You just need a pill. You just go take a pill, right?

And, you know, a lot of us have been there. You've been there. I've been there. And in my experience, what that stuff ends up feeling like when it's taken only on its own and that's all there is. And that's the thing you lean on. It's like you're firing box shot at something that needs like a scalpel. Exactly. And all of the other aspects of mental health issues are left by the weight side.

And not only that, according to this vulgar modern materialism, that is. taken up institutionally in academia, in the pharmaceutical industry, in medicine, and all this other stuff, you're told, yeah, just shut up about that stuff. That's not real. So again, you know, very abstract conceptual stuff leads back necessarily into everyday stuff that makes that, that matters to your life and our lives and everybody's lives. Exactly. How much real world suffering is caused by this pharmaceutical only approach that, you know, leaves out the bulk of life and the causal net of why somebody might be going through a mental health episode.

It causes an immense suffering, so it's not just highfalut and abstract philosophy. As I say, over and over again, it caches out in these very real everyday ways. Yeah, and I mean, just to take it back to that example from the book about the Ocean Ranger, by that insurance company's logic that it used to get out of having to pay any money, that approach to mental health issues doesn't and cannot work. So even these bunch of lawyers working for this capitalist corporation could tell you that when it's convenient for them. But when it's not convenient for them, no, we're right back to billiard balls.

Exactly. Exactly right. All right. So so far we've been talking about the concepts of bodies as such and that of the human body in particular. But the title of ethics part two is, quote, of the nature and origin of the mind. So what is Spinoza's concept of the mind and why does he begin a desolate? discussion about the mind by talking about bodies. Well, first of all, he talks about bodies to get into the conception or the idea of the mind

because mind itself is, and this is really counterintuitive for people who lived in the world of bourgeois metaphysics. Mind itself is an idea of the body. And this is, it gets a little bit complex here. It's an idea of the body, and we have to remember that what he calls mind and ideas, these are motions. These are almost like events. It's almost no different than a kind of particle coming out of the wave and going back in. I know that's not purely accurate to how the science works, but it's almost like they're like waves in the ocean. We talk about this in relative to meditation and all that. I think in the sand spirit, it's like, sanskara, their formations, they come and go. They're not these things that are latently hidden

inside us in some sort of metaphysical thing like the pine needle gland or something like that. They come and go, they form in relation to what's going on with our body, and then they go out of formation relative to the same thing. And it's, as you say, this sort of unified parallel process and it's primarily explicable only in the vocabulary of the mind, right? And this is something that societies of separation and bourgeois metaphysics have a really hard time with because our temptation is to always try to reduce mental vocabularies back to bodily vocabularies. And every time we do that, we run into disaster, as I just described.

So the mind is sort of, it's an activity. you could in many ways take Spinoza's concept of mind back to Aristotle in his treatise on the mind or I guess in the Middle Ages it was more called the soul de anima and Aristotle for what he calls mind he uses the Greek word suke which is where we get psyche for and suke is grounded in the sense of touch so if we were not corporeal beings in contact with our own bodies and with other bodies nothing like mind would emerge. And for Aristotle, the extent to which there is mental separability, to the extent that we can step back and say,

oh, this is happening to my life, this is happening on my body, this is happening, you know, this, that, and the other thing. And I can reflect on it as though I'm separate and I'm observing from somewhere else. In reality for Aristotle, it's an effect that it comes out of bodily life, out of natural generation, and it begins with touch. It's based on contact. And this is really what Spinoza is talking about as well, I think.

And to his credit, Hegel will pick up on this in his thinking that that mind is grounded in touch in the tactile. And I think to turning to the next proposition between 13 and 19, so proposition 14, this gives us another way into thinking about what the mind is that doesn't depend on coming up with a preliminary definition, but rather by like the Lowe's wants us to do with the concept of substance arrive at a concept of mind through an exploration of bodily life. So he'll say, Spinoza says in Proposition 14, the human mind is capable of perceiving a great many things. And this capacity will vary in proportion to the body of states which its body

can assume. And as proof, he says, the human body is affected by external bodies in a great many ways and is so structured that it can affect external bodies in a great many ways. But the human mind must perceive all that happens in the human body. Therefore, the human mind is capable of perceiving very many things, and he's like, and so on and so forth, because I've already given some arguments for this. And so this is really what he's really interested in doing is getting you to pay attention to all the ways in which your body is being affected

and you are affecting, your body is affecting other bodies at all times. And by paying attention to that, your mind will. grow, or rather, more of it will come to light through the attention that you're giving. And out of that, there's more material that emerges for what, you know, in the Marxist tradition, we will call like building superstructural artifacts to help us in communication, organized life together. And he says, the idea, this is Proposition 15, the idea which constitutes the formal being of the human mind is not simple, but composed of very many ideas. So, for example, If you're living in the world of just vulgar mechanical materialism, bourgeois metaphysics,

whatever term we're using for it, if you're sitting under a tree, all you might really be thinking about is just the fact that it's helping you sit up and you've got your back pressed against it. If you understand the relationship between human respiration and the way that trees process carbon dioxide and release oxygen, And you can actually pay attention to that. So, for example, when I used to live in Toronto, there was a little park I like going to, because it was quite compact and the trees were very close together. And, you know, if you're in Toronto, go enjoy it for Toronto bursts into flames because of climate change. And after I started really reading more about plant biology and thinking more about these cycles,

these interrelated cycles, right, we release carbon dioxide as a side effect of breaking down the nutrients in our bodies that we received from food. And part of the purpose of releasing oxygen is the same thing. Like it's a side effect of breaking down the nutrients that the trees get. So we're both helping each other. And I remember after reading that, like going, you know, thinking about all this stuff, going to this park and sitting under the trees. And suddenly it dawned on me, holy shit, I can actually feel this coolness being

propelled down onto me from above, and then I realized that how deeply intertwined my bodily existence was with the bodily existence of the tree. And then my idea about, you know, my mind, it's like polishing up a lens to keep with the lens theme with Spinoza, that something became clearer. And I was like, wow, there's a positive interchange here, and our bodies are concretely connected. And so now my body, at least while I was in this, in this relationship with the trees, included the idea of what the tree's bodies were. And then my idea of my body changed so that it doesn't exclude the body of the tree and not just the visibly tangible corporeal things, but the things that are a little bit more nebulous, like gaseous elements that are being

exchanged all the time in the form of chemical transformations through metabolism, right? Exactly. And that speaks directly to that Mark's quote that you read earlier. And, you know, taking that seriously, it's literally scientifically true that in order for you and I to be here talking and respirating at all, we need the trees just as much as we need our own set of lungs. And I think that's a crucial point to that Marx quote and to what you're saying right here. Yeah. And I mean, I can't remember that many years ago I read this pretty cool David Suzuki quote about respiration. And he's like at the level where you're getting down to almost almost like the quantum level in what the interactions that are happening between your lungs and the air in breathing, there ceases being a hard and fast. There is no limit between the inside of your body and the outside of your body, which is to say that your inside is not necessary. Like the idea of a pure inside ceases making as much. much sense and that helps break down these illusions of separateness and viscerally within meditation what what the basic training especially initially of meditation is is precisely to start seeing

your inner phenomena as if they were external objective events so in the same way that you would watch a bird fly through the sky you watch the thought fly through your consciousness and it comes and it goes and by doing that process You're sort of objectifying elements that you once took to be fundamentally interior and therefore separate from the rest of the world. And this is why it's so important too in meditation. I just went out in 15 minutes earlier on the back staircase there outside. It's so important to get over these assumptions that a lot of people still have and probably will have for a long time that you've got to be still like a stone. You can't look around.

You can't think. you can't, well, the whole point is to let yourself fall into all that, and to learn how to recognize when you're being swept away by your thoughts, you know, as you've described it, we just, like, we chat, we have, we chatter inside all the time like birds. And these become sort of like bales that we throw up to protect us from what's really going on, which is this, you know, grand, you know, ongoing, continuous transformation, like oceanic waves, you know. And, yeah, no, that was really helpful insight. Did I, did I neglect to read the, the Beth Lord quote about the physical continuum? Because this would be a good case. Yeah, you mentioned it, but yeah, read that

beautiful quote. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to do that. So, yeah, Brett and I talked about this passage on the phone. And just think about, think about what I said about the trees, me and the tree and the other trees, and the fact that my idea of my body included the tree very vividly, especially while I was in that relationship with them while I was sitting there that day. As we saw, this is Beth Lord, as we saw in part one being substance, God, nature, the infinite, the mediate infinite mode of the attribute of extension. So she means mediate infinite in the sense that we're thinking about it abstractly instead of through actual particular bodies.

So instead of like the actual modes themselves. So we've got this mediate concept. And it's infinite in the sense that it's not susceptible to any people. particular form, and it sort of has an infinite potentiality for taking on form. The attribute of extension is understood both as the infinite body of physical laws, which we continuously find ourselves discovering we know, we think we know more than we find out we know less, and as an infinite continuum of physicality. Spinoza describes this as, quote, the face of the whole universe, end quote. All of physical reality is a single physical continuum which contains

and expresses every finite body. In part one, I use the analogy of the ocean to make this clearer. The infinite continuum of physicality is like the surface of the ocean, which varies as waves, form, move, rise, and fall. The waves are not separate from the ocean. They exist and move in it and eventually disappear by collapsing back into it. The finite modes, which is to say you and me, Brett, my cat, who still appears to be comatose over there and everything,

else. The waves are not separate from the ocean. They exist and move in it and eventually disappear by collapsing back into it. I just read that. The finite modes are like waves, surface features of an infinite continuum of physicality existing and moving within that continuum. This suggests that physical bodies, your body, the chair you are sitting on, the floor beneath you, the air around you, the person next to you are really one continuous physical body. Since everything is in, quote unquote, in God slash substance, and she doesn't say nature, but let's just say slash nature. And since substance cannot be divided, there can be no spaces between things. But if all physical reality is one single continuum, how are physical bodies distinguish from one

another? We already know that individual bodies are not substances. And so they cannot be said to be distinct on the basis that they are ontologically independent of one another, which which is to say an ontology, this comes from the Greek word on, which means being. So my cat, she's over there. She's within the world of macro perception and this rate of change that we exist in that allows the human world to exist. She's one on and I'm another on. And we're according to the logic of the on.

So ontologically thinking we are distinct from one another. But substantially we're not distinct from another because we're both waves that will collapse back into the same ocean at the end of our lives. Instead, Spinoza says in Lama 1, bodies are distinguished from one another by their different rates of motion and rest. Your body is distinct from the chair because it has a certain rate of motion

that differs from that of the chair. Neither your bodies nor the chair's rate of motion is fixed. To be sure, bodies move at different speeds at different times and are caused to move by other bodies that affect them. And here she cites lemma 2 and lemma 3. But individuals differ in their capacities from motion and rest, and in the ways they are able to move and be moved. Although you and the chair may both now be at rest,

only you will move if the fire alarm sounds. That is what makes you and the chair distinct individuals. Nothing physically distinguishes one individual from another except this difference in capacities for motion and rest. and this is everything the example I gave about me sitting under the tree and recognizing our sort of interdependence and our unity in that moment is some sort of captured by this because we came into composition my breathing actually did participate in their you know their breathing so to speak and their so to speak breathing did participate in my breathing in a very very real way because I've literally sitting under there sniffing in the oxygen that they're expelling and expelling carbon dioxide that they can absorb. And that's a that's that made us a composite body. And in the story I told last time or maybe the time before about when I went to that farm,

that rural farm, when I was using the scythe that was right handed, although I'm left handed, and I got used to it and I was able to use it properly, we became a composite body in a very real spinostic since then. And this leads to all sorts of implications about things I mentioned like near the end of the episode, but like Rosa Luxembourg's take on what it really needs, what it takes to accomplish a general strike, for example, that sort of bodily compositeness and the relations of affectivity and the interdependence of our bodily lives. And then in the case of human beings into interacting our mental lives, that this, this, this. This logic that Spinoza is laying out touches on all of those things.

So this has immediate political and social implications as well. Yeah. Things that jump to my mind, especially listening to that Beth Lord quote, and to really take that idea seriously, like I always say like there's the intellectual way of understanding that point, which in and of itself has plenty of beauty and fascination within it. But then there's the like the training through practices like meditation where you can come to physically, immediately, viscerally,

feel the truth of that deep underlying connection. And when we go do science itself, all of what we know about science confirms and reconfirms this point. If you zoom way in or you zoom way out cosmically, you will see the deep interconnectedness of everything. And from this relative middle point that we exist in size-wise and speed-wise, we see things from a certain relative perspective, but if you were able to take a god's eye view or a quark's eye view of the cosmos, you would not see anything other than the deep inexorable connection between things. And, you know, Albert Einstein, whose favorite philosopher was Spinoza and who famously said, I believe in the god of Spinoza, came up with E equals MC squared, which is, in some sense,

another brick in the wall of making this point that energy and mass are literally identical and that what we see of as mass or as separate objects is a temporary form that energy itself, which is neither lost or gained in a closed system, produces. It is energy solidifying for just a moment as you or as I or as your cat and then dissipating back into the underlying ocean of whatever. cosmic energy you can talk about it as at a soup of atoms or whatever they're all sort of crude linguistic ways of getting at a much deeper underlying interaction and connection and in a crude silly but pop cultural way the thought that comes to mind is like the matrix when neo is fully

sort of self-actualized and begins to see the matrix not as the world around us but as all green code. That's just a funny way of making that deeper point of like really being able to see what Beth Lord is saying in that quote as like the interconnection of absolutely everything. Yeah, exactly. Sorry, I just couldn't help but laugh. I was thinking about him dodging the bullets. But, you know, absolutely.

That's a great, that's a great example. So I'm just going to, we've been doing this for a little while now. So I'm just going to jump through Proposition 17 and 18 and not really. go into explaining them too much, because they sort of are, I think this story about the tree and what you just said, and talking about the cat and all that, sort of illustrates these points. So Proposition 17, if the human body is affected in a way, and then in brackets, there's the Latin term, modo, so in a manner, in a mode, in a style, in a fashion, that involves the nature

of some external body, the human mind will regard that same external body as actually existing or as present to itself until the human body undergoes a further modification, which excludes the existence or the presence of the said body. So in memory, I can remember that relationship I had with the trees in the park and we're complimenting each other's life cycles. But now I know that that's a memory and they're not actually present to me anymore yet. Nonetheless, my idea of my body and my mind includes that possibility that I was shown or not just a possibility. And an actual existing relationship that remains possible if I go outside after this and sit down under some trees again. And so potentially, my body includes the body of the trees.

Actually, at the moment, I am slightly too far away from them to have that immediate connection where I feel that my body is part of them and their body is part of mine. Proposition 18, if the human body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, when the mind afterward imagines one of them, it will straightway remember the others too. So think about, I mean, if you are part, any kind of organizing, for example, the experiences, the human, the emotional experiences that we have, if we're involved in organizing, will include the ideas of the other people that were involved in it with us and what they were able to do and what they presented for us is, possible capacities that we could take on or capacities that we could build together as a group. And that too grows our mind and grows our bodies. Proposition 19, the human mind has no knowledge of the body, nor does it know it to exist, nor does it know that the body to exist further, except to the ideas of the affections by which

the body is affected. So in other words, our idea that we have of the body is never, it never occurs in a vacuum. It occurs, as we've been talking about, in the context of the living, infinite, never-ending process of change and growth and, you know, appearance and disappearance and rising and falling. So those were the sort of key, that was sort of the key run of propositions I wanted to go through to get us to think about bodies. And there's just a couple of things I wanted to touch on. First of all, the scolium to Proposition 29, as I said. And this actually does follow on Proposition 19 pretty well. Proposition 29, he says, the idea of any affection of the human body does not involve adequate

knowledge of the human mind. He says the idea of an affection of the human body does not involve adequate knowledge of the body itself. In other words, it does not adequately express the nature of the body. So, for example, even though in some ways I theoretically sort of understand what is going on chemically in my body at all times, I don't have an adequate idea of that. So therefore, have an adequate idea of the body and therefore I also don't have an adequate idea of my own mind because those things the idea that I'm capable of having if I were to understand those things on a much deeper level is not realized and so therefore my mind is not in a completely transparent relationship to itself and this kind of makes me think of what is it like what

H.P. Lovecraft says at the beginning of the call of Cthulhu and he's like if the if the human being, human mind were able to coordinate all of its contents. What does he say? It would lead to insanity or something like that. Our minds would just collapse. And, you know, there's definitely something to that there. But in the scolium, and this is where I think we really can sort of touch back on Mao and his characterization of dialectical materialism, he says,

I say expressly that the mind does not have an adequate knowledge, but only a confused and fragmentary knowledge of itself, its own body, and external bodies, whenever it perceives things from the common order of nature, which is he's talking about just everyday macroscopic events and objects when we're not really dealing with them scientifically or paying close attention to them. That is, whenever it is determined externally, namely by the fortuitous run of circumstance to regard this or that. And so you think about like Lennon and those guys like talking about one-sidedness

eclecticism. So like on the one hand, this, and then on the other hand, that, and then there's no coherent, unifying logic that can actually help you do anything or think anything. And so whenever it is determined externally, namely by the fortuitous run of circumstance to regard this or that, and not when it is determined internally through its regarding several things at the same time to understand their agreement, their differences, and their opposition for whenever it is conditioned internally in this or in another way, then it sees things clearly and distinctly, as I shall later show. So there is that one into two logic.

There is that idea that you cannot possibly understand the external differences between things unless you understand how each thing is differentiated, differentiating in and of itself, and that is the condition of its existence through things that, if you're not paying attention you would consider to be not it. And this is really important for Deleuze because in his first real philosophical work of his own, difference in repetition, he makes a fundamental distinction, even though there's still within a unity, between what he calls differentiation, differentiation with a C, and that's that internal inherent one into two differentiation process that marks all things. And then once you get

to the level of the world of, that can be described to the classical mechanics, the mechanical philosophy, then there's differentiation with a T. And he's like, you can't really think about difference in identity unless you provisionally adopt this distinction that I propose between differentiation and differentiation. So Exponosa very much influences Deleuze in that way and brings Deleuze very close to Mao in that way. And as we'll probably talk about next episode, this also leads Deleuze to be close to someone like Mao in the sense that following Spinoza, he doesn't deal with what Hegel would call the negation of negation, which is kind of the source of this false impression that we get that Hegel is talking about

two into one, rather, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The negation of negation sort of leads to that perception that you can have. But like Mao, Deleuze is, he rejects the negation. of negation and sees identity as sort of a side effect of a complex of differentiating processes. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there for the next episode. And the very last thing, I just wanted to read from the Scholarly and the Proposition 40. He talks about how we come up with these sort of abstract categories such as entity or thing or something, or like universal or man or horse or dog

and you know in like quote unquote scholastic philosophy or metaphysics these are called the universals Spinoza says that he says from similar causes of arisen those notions called universal such as man horse or dog that's what I was just reading often etc that is to say so many images are formed in the human body simultaneously for example that of quote unquote man, that our capacity to imagine them is surpassed, not indeed completely, but to the extent that the mind is unable to imagine the unimportant differences of individuals, such as the complexion and stature of each and their exact number,

and imagines distinctly only their common characteristic insofar as the body is affected by them, for it was by this that the body was affected most repeatedly by each single individual. the mind expresses that this by the word quote unquote man and predicates this word of an infinite number of individuals for as we said the mind is unable to imagine the determinate number of individuals and so what he's saying is that um these these are far these are actually not universals in any meaningful way these are generalizations that we come up with because our minds inherently, you know, because we're relatively short-lived, and usually when we encounter things, it's not for very long, we fail to notice their differentiation, the distinct difference

that makes them what they are within and of themselves. And so this is also a big influence under Léz, in that, in sort of traditional Western academic philosophy, there's a line drawn, a connection drawn between the universal and the particular, and following Ms. Spinoza will say, No, that's a bad scheme. The only thing that the particular relates to is the general, and the only truly universal thing there is is singularity. And as you'll see, if you look at Spinoza's, like the ethics in the Latin, generally when he's translated in English as having said individual in Latin,

he said singularity. And so that is the true universality for Spinoza is the singularity of each thing, which is infinite because we're composed, I mean, I mean, we're talking about quantum fields. and stuff like that at this point, things moving at infinite speeds and we're composed of them and go back to them, right? So I just wanted to put that out there

that, you know, what we're told in sort of bourgeois metaphysics to think of as universal categories are really for Spinoza forms of inadequate knowledge that lead us into these false separations and lead us into what Marx and everyone following them what later call these forms of alienation from nature and ourselves on each other. All right. Well, we are deep into this time-wise. We're aiming for an episode that'll

give our Stalin episode a run for its money regarding duration. I just listened to that recently, and it was amazing, actually. Yeah, thanks. I kind of want to do this last part, kind of together, if possible. Now, we're going to talk about human freedom, causality, and determinism before moving in to Marshall McLuhan and this could be you know as so many things with this depth of philosophical inquiry an entire episode about Spinoza's ideas of human freedom the role causality plays and determinism specifically but instead of going too deep into these things because I fear that it will extend the show to like five hours just say some say what you think is most important about his sort of view of human freedom how all everything we've discussed

so far, what implications it has for human freedom, and then Spinoza's determinism more broadly? Yeah, so basically, and thank you for trying to put those parameters on here because we're deep in. Spinoza rejects the idea of free will. And what he means by that, he's responding to Descartes. And for Descartes, the concept of freedom of the will is that in your choices, you are entirely uncaused. You come to your own choices by yourself without any being determined by anything else to feel a certain way. So, like, if you choose to eat this or that for dinner, there's absolutely, there's no causal process that led you to eat this as opposed to that.

And it was just your pure decision-making power and had nothing leading up to it. And it came out of nowhere other than your own self. And I guess, to put it briefly, Spinoza would say, well, then you're just trying to you're trying to act like God. You're thinking of yourself as God. You're an uncaused cause. You're the cause of your own effects. And that's not consistent with your claim, Renee, that you're finite.

It's making a part of you immediately infinite. And so it's really, he's just saying it's a bad concept. Now there's another kind of concept of freedom of will, which you get in late antiquity in the Middle Ages, which is that the will becomes free when it's in touch with the truth that it knows, or the good that it knows, and you have, you gain insight into how to act. Now, DeLos has criticism to that, but anyway, that's for another time. But the danger with this is because of the limits of the mechanical philosophy, you might be tempted to think that Spinoza is therefore saying that you're nothing other than an automaton.

And if you were to take the vulgar materialist, the bourgeois metaphysical view, then that is what you turn out to be. However, as he indicates, the human body is affected by a great number of many kinds of bodies in a great number of kinds of ways. And through the development of science and philosophy since Spinoza, we've come up with other ways of understanding how we're caused that are not the same thing as that reductive billiard ball mechanistic notion. So his notion of freedom is that the more you understand the ways in which you are determined to be able to act, the greater you understand your own capacities. And the best way to learn more about your capacities and your capacity for being affected and for acting is to be with other people. And for

Spinoza, I think the highest form of being with other people is in political action in building a community of people whose vital forces are in some sort of harmonious, relatively harmonious dynamic with each other. This is kind of like what Russo would later call like a general will or something like that. And through, you know, belonging to a community of human beings and also animals and plants and all this stuff with differentiated, always changing, you know, novel capacities, that's how you become free is through this growth of your knowledge. your understanding together with other people and with the whole world of what a body

can do, whether it's your own body or whether it's a composite body with other people including technical apparatus like when we're using science. Now that's very counterintuitive and into people who've grown up in societies like ours that run on bourgeois metaphysics that might sound hideous

but once you see how hideous bourgeois metaphysics really is this becomes a great relief and freedom for Spinoza is becoming self-caused through a comprehensive understanding, an increasingly comprehensive, increasingly adequate understanding of all the ways that everything can be caused and therefore, and all the ways that everything is free.

Yeah, so this is very complex and very deep. Yes. But there is, within Spinoza, a certain, as you made very clear, free will as we commonly think of it, doesn't have room to exist in this framework. And interestingly, in Buddhist practices, meditation practices, this is taken for granted by anybody who's achieved what we would call Satory or awakening or enlightenment is by seeing through the illusion of a separate self, a sense that you have a separate self behind your eyes between your ears, by seeing through that illusion, you automatically and necessarily see through the illusion that that little, fake illusory self can have control over anything. And so in that sense, everybody who is credibly awakened or reach in high levels of

enlightenment just says it is just viscerally, immediately, unapologetically obvious that free will does not exist. But there's a paradox of freedom here because there's a sort of new freedom that arises when you see through the illusion of a separate ego. and the false sense of control that that tends to give. And that, I think, is dovetailing with the freedom that comes out of what you were saying, Spinoza's arguing for, this hyper clarity and newfound awareness of the sort of causal net in which you exist. And so enlightened beings, if we can use that terminology, in Buddhism,

we'll talk about this radical freedom that comes when the smaller sense of freedom, the common sense of free will, dissolves and that is this spontaneous freedom that you enjoy as sort of experiencing yourself not as a separate cutoff substance that's different from the whole but rather as a wave function in the whole as a force of nature that has its own sort of bodily intelligence and sort of way of being and moving and interacting and responding to the world that doesn't need a separate ego up in the head calling all the shots. And so there is this lack of free will, which could sound horrifying to people.

And in fact, the first experiences of it through meditation can be scary. But through that, there's this new sort of freedom that arises, this sort of meta-freedom, if you will. And it's really hard to put into language here. And this is something that I have not fully myself felt and experienced. So I'm limited with my own experience as to how, I can talk about this, but I think that is worth mentioning in this discussion because it's much more complex than just we either have free will or we don't. Yeah, it's more like free will is just a bad concept. I think so. It's just a bad concept. And once you get through these

kinds of clarifications, like same thing if you study area Jena, who I mentioned two episodes ago, once you get through these clarifications and you recognize that it's just a bad concept, it ceases being attractive. It just sort of seems irrelevant and fake. And you're more free, no pun intended, to just engage the world just as you are without subscribing to this idea that you're like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You're pulling the levers. You're making things happen.

And there's something, I mean, it's so deeply bourgeois in the sense that it's what it ultimately amounts to is you going to market and like choosing between different commodities of your preference and going, you know what I mean? It's like in the Godfather Part 2, and what's the guy that Vito Corleone kills that Don? And he's just walking through the streets and like picking apples up out of apple carts and, you know, and nobody, none of the vendors do anything because he's the boss of the neighborhood or whatever. And it's something really like, it's that kind of freedom is sort of like that. Yeah. Just here I am. I'm connected to nothing and I just take what I want. And I evaluate things from this, you know, purely metaphysical objective standpoint.

and it's just my judgment projected on the world and it's i mean it's jeff bezos yeah exactly it's it's mark suckerberg it's all these guys right it's the it's the it's the delusion of the self-made man it's the delusion of the self-made man and i remember just to tell an anecdote i was in a class once and there was a student there that was like not really um getting getting this and he was like look maybe i'm just maybe i just don't get it maybe i don't get it but when i hear the word freedom i think hey got a lot of options and the teacher took his glasses off and threw them down under the desk and he said, Jesus Christ, that is not freedom that's going to the supermarket. And that's what it is. And in the age of COVID, going to the supermarket has become especially

odious. So there you go. That's that freedom of the will, it's not worth hanging on to. Right. Yeah. In addition to the self-made man and a bunch of other mythologies, we tell ourselves about wealth and who deserves it and who doesn't and how it's connected to moral character, there's also the intense legal ramifications. of a bourgeois system that views every individual as a separate agent, fully informed and fully culpable for their behaviors without taking into account the social conditions from which that individual arises. And thus you see people born into poverty, into ghettos, into these terrible social conditions have a higher rate of crime and poverty. And what the

reactionary liberal will often say is this is either their individual fault and will treat it as such in a court of law or it is more broadly a dysfunction of black culture and something wrong with the black community in and of itself, obviously racist colonizer tropes to explain the sort of crime that grows out of social conditions specifically. So this again has a million different ways where it cashes out. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's, it's, I mean, when I went out, like, when I started doing philosophy in school, all these grownups and just also, you know, high school friends of mine or whatever, people I knew in high school, they'd be like, philosophy, what are you going to do with that? Yeah, me too. I heard it a million times. A million times. And I, I used to think,

like, someday they're going to eat those words and we're going to see, more and more of us will see how immediately connected philosophy is to everyday life and to the everyday exercise of power, whether it's the power of capital or the power of people. And it's always been immediately connected to everyday concerns. And that's why, you know, in universities that most people can attend, all this stuff is being thrown under the bus, in private institutions, privately the wealthy are being educated to know all this kind of stuff because philosophy has always been associated with the exercise of power.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. and there's also this reductive like marketability like you know philosophy is not really marketable unless you subordinate it to like going into law school and being a good argue or on behalf of corporations so it's like in lieu of any you know marketable like you can't go out and immediately get a job at the philosophy factory it seems like a useless thing and that and that certainly um defends some some dynamics of bourgeois society to see the engagement of critical thought and understanding your world and answering the big questions and the irrelevancy it has for somebody

who is made to be a worker in a broader capitalist system. It's seen as irrelevant because of that broader structure. Yeah, absolutely. Like if we generally, like I went, like I said before, I think I went to a parochial school run by the Ivers Christian brothers. And it was a very one-size fits all curriculum that was basically rested on the assumption that most of you, well, the fishing industry collapsed. So most of you are probably going to work at a gas station. So we don't need to worry about the bigger connections. Just add these numbers. Show us you can spell these words. Then we're good to go. Exactly. Exactly. above my eyes.

When under ether the mind comes alive but conscious of nothing but the will to survive I lay on the bed Waste down undressed, look up at the ceiling, feeling happiness, human kindness, the woman beside me is holding my hand, is holding my handness, I point at the ceiling

She smiles so kind Something's inside me Unborn and unblessed Disappears in the ether This world to the next Disappears in the ether One world to the next Human kindness