Rev Left Radio - The Nature of All Things: Spinoza’s Philosophical Odyssey

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Professor of philosophy Colin Bodayle joins Breht to dive into the profound, unique, and almost mystical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Together, they discuss the value of philosophy for all of us, Spinoza as a "philosopher's philosopher", his life and death in 17th century western Europe, his complex geometrical structure of writing, God as Nature as Substance, his forward thinking politics, Atheism and Pantheism, what Spinoza thinks a good life is, Stoicism and Buddhism, Marx and Engels connection to Spinoza, dialectical materialism, the underlying interconnectedness of all being, Breht's wild metaphysical speculation, the nature of consciousness, and much more. Outro Song: "Between Two Mysteries" by Mount Eerie Follow Colin on X ---------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get bonus episodes on Patreon Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have a fascinating, fun, entertaining, and deep conversation with philosopher Colin Bodale about the philosophy of Spinoza. We talk about dialectics, dialectical materialism, the strain of thought going from Spinoza through Hegel to Marx and Angles. We talk about obviously lots of Buddhism. the metaphysics of Spinoza, nature and God as simultaneous concepts, as synonymous, and just so much more. This is a really fascinating conversation. Whether you're very well read in Spinoza philosophy or brand new to it,

I think you will 100% get something useful and fascinating out of this wonderful discussion. So I'm really, really excited to release this. And just based on this episode alone, I know that Colin and I, We'll continue to work together and do these sorts of episodes because he is truly a kindred spirit when it comes to philosophy, our love of Marxism, et cetera. So I really am excited to introduce Colin to people that don't know him and to this conversation more broadly.

And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, it means so much if you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And for those who do not like to sign up to Patreon or be on a monthly subscription service, We also have Buy Me a Coffee forward slash Rev Left Radio, just a one-time donation if you find what we do here at all worth a couple dollars. It really means the world to us. It helps feed my family as well as producer Dave's family, and we're deeply, deeply appreciative to everybody who listens to the show, shares the show with friends and comrades, and for those who have enough disposable income to directly support the show. Because we are and always will be 100% listener funded.

All right, without further ado, here is my comment. conversation with Colin on the philosophy of Spinoza. Enjoy. Hey, my name is Colin Bodale. I live in Philadelphia where I teach philosophy and ethics at Villanova University. I have two master's degrees of philosophy from Duquesne and Villanova and I'm currently writing my dissertation on contradiction in the dialectical methods of Hegel and Marx. And it's a huge honor to be here because I'm a big fan of this podcast. I think it's one of the best resources for helping me and other people develop our political education. So it's a tremendous honor to be here.

Well, thank you. The honor is absolutely mutual. And as we were talking in the lead up to this episode, we had discussed some other episodes we could possibly do. And certainly, you know, more philosophy discussions about Hegel and Marx could happen down the line. And I would very much love to have you back on to discuss that. But today we are discussing one of my. my favorite philosophers of all time and it and you know his work dovetails with other interests of mine which we'll get into like Buddhism and you know probably even stoicism psychology etc and that is

the one and only Spinoza you know the philosopher philosophers as well as we'll also get into just a super well respected and you know brilliant and unique thinker from the 1600s and we're going to be discussing his philosophy today just the the worldview that emerges out of it the notion of nature and God as one in the same and also any political content that we can squeeze out of the work of Spinoza given his time that he was operating in. So I guess the best way to start, because when we do these philosophy episodes, I am always very aware that the audience for this show, you know, they're not all philosophers. They don't have necessarily, you know, philosophy classes or training in philosophy. So I do kind of like to set the stage and really help people understand

this stuff because you know you know with philosophy you can get in over your head quite quickly and that's true for even people who've studied it for a long time but so maybe a good way to start here with spinoza is can you tell us a little bit about well first of all your background in philosophy i'm interested in how you became interested in it and then how you became interested in spinoza um as well yeah so i took a philosophy course my first year of college and i fell in love with it. It's funny because when I was in high school, maybe until like the end of my senior year with like history classes and stuff, I was a student who didn't care about learning at all. I just wanted to go skate or whatever. But I took my first philosophy course and then I actually really fell in

love with learning and with philosophy and I realized I kind of can't not do this. And so with some, you know, sidetracking here and there. I've kind of been on this path since I was maybe 18 of studying philosophy, pursuing, you know, the PhD and wanting to kind of devote my life. And so, to philosophical research. So, you know, it's like a genuine passion, something I can't not do. Although, you know, now I'm expanding more into working on like political theory and things like that as well. As far as Spinoza specifically goes, I remember I first tried to read Spinoza with one of my

friends, I think, junior year of college. And we didn't get very far into the ethics at all. You know, we tried to read this really difficult book. But I knew something about, like, the God arguments a little bit earlier in my studies because, you know, I was kind of interested in metaphysics and things like that when I was, you know, early in my undergraduate. And, but it wasn't until my second year of my master's degree that I really got the opportunity to do a deep dive into Spinoza. And this was at Duquesne with Dan Salser, who's just somebody who really inspires me as a teacher because his graduate seminars were legendary. I was told when I arrived at the department, you know, take every concy offers. because he'll go in he went into like really close detail for every early modern thinker you know the historical context the political context the history of science how it all fits into debates over materialism and you know everybody who read that thinker and he did uh early modern political theory class on the the theological political treaties and political treaties where we read very quickly and then we did an ethics seminar we read so slow line by line i think you know we were done the

definitions and axioms a book one you know maybe until the fourth seminar of the course so obviously we couldn't finish the book but you know he was so excited by it that he's the whole summer we just started like meeting at a coffee shop to keep the class going until we actually read the entire ethics um and you know i i've since taken uh other classes on spinoza since uh throughout my graduate career and i've you know i've written about him a bit i haven't you know necessarily published anything on him, but like after this first read, Spinoza's philosophy just stuck with me. It's something that, I don't know, it's like there's like a self-help element to it. It's like, it's helped me think through like personal problems and life problems. And, you know, I've got to dive into some of the

deeper textual problems and debates. Although in fairness, it's been a while. So I actually was really excited to get to revisit Spinoza for the first time in a minute. And so yeah, I would say that Spinoza is up there, like, you know, he's definitely, I've made my philosophy, you know, tier list and the S tier is like Hagle Mark Spinoza. So that's a great S tier. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so just a little bit about my interest is, you know, I kind of had maybe a little similar of a development to you because I did ultimately get a bachelor's degree in philosophy. But coming out of high school, I was really not interested in continuing school. It was just something that I felt like I had to do if I wanted any future at all. But I quickly didn't have the drive or

motivation or the attention, I was much more interested in hanging out with my friends and doing crazy shit than I was, like, studying for tests. So I quickly failed out of college and just withdrew. But a year or two later, my girlfriend at the time became pregnant with my first child, who's 15 years old today, about to turn 16. And I was working at a gas station, and just this overwhelming sense of responsibility hit me is like, you have a human being coming. You have to raise this human being you have to provide for this human being you know what are you going to do with your life um you know you can't just be hanging out with your friends all the time and whatever and so i just started like voraciously reading books like just kind of at random at first um just like

you know i had uh i worked a night shift at the gas station so i would just you know i'd have a lot of downtime and i would just go through book after book after book on any topic i could come across and i stumbled very quickly into you know philosophy and became just deeply interested in and i told myself, if I'm going back to college, if I'm going to give this another shot, I need to pursue something that I'm interested in regardless of the consequences. So, you know, the job market for philosophers isn't great. And if you're just getting a bachelor's, it's non-existent. But I's like, if I'm going to get anything at all, it's going to have to be in something that I'm genuinely interested in. And philosophy was that, was that for me. And so obviously throughout that

process, I come across all these different philosophers. And I had an abiding interest in, at that time like Darwin and Marx and and Spinoza came to the forefront and Buddhism has always been huge in my life. And so when I came into contact with Spinoza, I just love that worldview. The worldview of like, of like, you know, we'll get into it more detail, but of like process ontology, of monism, of this sort of spiritual oneness, this totality of being in which we all participate, this lack of separateness. And so it just quickly dovetailed with my already existing interest and became a, you know, a lifelong thing. And I also agree with that self-help aspect of it, too, because, you know, Spinoza talks about the passions and the emotions. And, you know,

in a similar vein of Buddhism and stoicism, there's like this, this urge to not be enslaved by your passions, you know, dominated by your emotions, and to be able to have some distance from that and to live your life in a way that is more, you know, calm and contented and, and, and joyful in a lot of ways. So that kind of pushed me in that direction. But, you know, when it comes to philosophy, some people, especially if they don't have that already abiding love for it, will kind of feel like, what is the point? You know, it's just thinking about thinking. You know, there's no, like, it's not like we have science for the science stuff that we want to really understand the world. So what would you tell somebody who's kind of skeptical about why those of us who are on, you know,

my audience is going to be on the Marxist left? Like, what is the value of philosophy? for those of us that are interested in, you know, revolutionary politics and building a better world or just in general for somebody that might be skeptical of it, what would you say to that? Well, I think it has different degrees of use value based on what we're trying to accomplish. So when it comes to Hegel's Science of Logic or something like that, you know, there's a famous quote where Lenin says that you can't completely master capital without Hegel's science of logic. Well, the revolution's not going to happen if we try, everyone tries to completely. completely master capital by reading the science of logic, right?

That's a lot of work. It takes specialize knowledge. So, but at the same time, I think having a foundation in theory and having a foundation in philosophy helps us be, one, better able to analyze the world. And two, better able to analyze ourselves, to think about ourselves. Something I've been thinking about a lot lately, given kind of the state of the left, is like the kind of neglect of like ethics generally right because of a lot of people who kind of need to think about how to be caring and responsible to their comrades and things like

that so um yeah i think that i think that the study of philosophy will make you a better thinker and learning to think dialectically especially can help help help you navigate a lot of the dilemmas that come from trying to think about the social totality and trying to think about how to act within it and all the complicated contradictions that appear within that. So that would be my plug for philosophy. Also, it's very enjoyable. Absolutely. Definitely. And I think people that are interested in stuff like dialectical materialism and Marxist theory, I mean, it's just a very short, you know, hop over to philosophy more broadly. I mean, Marx himself as a philosopher as well as other things. But, Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think it sharpens your mind analytically. It allows you to think through complex, you know, argumentation and lines of reasoning and think through them sort of soberly and systematically. I know just my, you know, my education is just a bachelor degree in philosophy from a state school. It just did deeply broaden and widen and deepen my ability to analyze the world around me, to think deeply and systematically about. about things that I cared about. And then the ethical component is definitely true. I mean, I totally agree with you that it's often lacking in political corners all across the spectrum, including the left.

And a total lack of self-knowledge, being dominated by your ego, being dominated by your emotions. These things are counterproductive when it comes to working together to try to organize and work toward building a better world. So, yeah, I think philosophy is so important. And more than ever, in a time of constant frenetic distraction, where the attention span of the average person is decreasing, where we have these dopamine machines in our pocket, that we can just flip through, constantly just be hit with novelty, novelty, novelty, the ability to sustain a line of thought, to sustain your attention, to think through a complicated problem. I think that is like more important now than ever, and you have to cultivate that, you know, willingly and consciously if you hope to not be swept passively up by the tide of this cultural distraction. Because at any moment, at any time, we can just distract ourselves meaninglessly.

And you see people all around you doing exactly that 24-7. And to study philosophy, to read philosophy, to think about philosophy, I think can really hedge against the worst of, of what that does to your cognitive abilities, your memory and your attention span. Yeah, I remember there's something you've said on the show. I want to say is like, you know, within the last a couple months or something about like, just like the importance of finding time

for just doing like really deep reading. And that like resonated with me. And so at the beginning before school started, I was doing some deep reading of Hegel's philosophy of right. And I haven't really spent a lot of time with his political philosophy. And I literally like had a small tear of joy. I just can't just sit there and think about what I was reading for more than, you know, without having to, like, I have to read through this and go teach it, you know.

And yeah, it's like some of the great pleasures in life come from just sitting with a book, like the ethics and just sitting here and reading one proposition and thinking about it for a while, not moving to the next one, you know, so. Absolutely. Could not agree more. I always say three things that if you want to fight against the distraction culture is deep reading, meditation and spending time alone in nature without any device. And if you do those things in any order, more or less consistently, you will put yourself in a really good emotional, spiritual,

and existential place. So, um, all right. Well, let's go ahead and get in with the actual content of today, which is Spinoza. And the best way to start, I think, is just a brief biography. Of course, if people want to learn the full biography of Spinoza, there's many resources out there. But it is helpful to place him, you know, contextualize him. in his culture and his in his time so who was spinoza when and where did he live and why is he an important historical figure at all yeah so his name full name was baruch spinoza i think there was different baruch had like a different latin and a different dutch version as well um but he was born in 1632 in amsterdam uh within a portuguese jewish community and he was uh jewish and a member

the Jewish community. And then he died in the hog in 1677 at 44 years of age. So we actually lost him at a young age. He died, I think, of a lung infection, hostibly tuberculosis. Throughout his life, Spinoza was always brushing up against the political authorities, the religious institutions. We know that he was excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue in 1656 for, quote, monstrous deeds and abominable heresies. And we don't know what these crimes were, but given the nature of his philosophical works, we can take a guess. He was involved with various communities of free thinkers and intellectuals located in the Dutch Republic. And, you know, the Netherlands tended to be a more tolerant place, right?

Like, you know, a few decades ago, people would go to Amsterdam to smoke weed. Back in the 17th century, they went to Amsterdam to study materialism. So, Descartes, actually, I didn't know this until recently, but Descartes, you know, he's primarily known for being a French philosopher. He actually spent most of his life in the Netherlands. I don't know most of it, a lot of his life, like a lot of his pivotal work he was writing in the Netherlands. he died in the Netherlands.

He also caught a respiratory infection in some stuffy castle tutoring a spoiled princess. So I guess, you know, where all intellectual labor goes to die is like unappreciated, spoiled people for low salaries, I guess. I don't know. Something about it. But, yeah, what makes Spinoza kind of noteworthy and cool is that he's like a rebel philosopher. He wrote a book called, you know, he was kicked out of every, of the synagogue for heresy. He wrote a book called the Theological Political Treatise, or the Tractatus Theological Politicus, which is referred to as the TTP sometimes, which is the basis for modern biblical criticism, or one of the early bases for modern biblical criticism. And so it's like a book where he takes the Bible and reads it against itself to expose contradictions and inconsistency.

consistencies and to treat the text like a historical document and to kind of take away the power of the text and doing this with political goals in mind, religion being a major institution. And so like I've noticed like looking at biographies and stuff. A lot of people like read Spinoza in their young days like next to Hume's dialogues on Nathville religion. Like Hegel did this. Like you're just like, what was he reading?

French materialism Spinoza like all this. you know, it's like, I don't, it's almost like undignified to dropless comparison, but like it's, because I hate the new atheist, but right, like, this is like the god delusion of the day or something, but it's more sophisticated than that, right? Yeah. But, um, yeah, somebody called the theological political tree is a book forged in hell. Mm-hmm. But anyone doing, like, reading Spinoza after that time is really reading them in secret.

it um there's uh yeah so it's like the kids like you know are like in school and they had their textbook open but smuggled between the pages they had the ttp um but um his books were like banned by the catholic church obviously um but uh but interestingly interestingly enough a lot of people don't know that day cart's books were also banned for the catholic church because he was seen as him too too materialist um which really like if you look at the way people read day cart back in the day, it's way different than the way we read Descartes today. Back then, Descartes was like the cool materialist philosophy who, yeah, I had this book, Meditations on First Philosophy that was not considered as important as more materialist works. And I think one of his books,

I believe it was the ethics, and I couldn't like source this claim beforehand, but I remember reading this, that it was banned somewhere before it was even printed, because it was rumored that it had an irrefutable proof of the non-existence of God. Which is like, think about that like ideologically what that means. Like this person is like, we need to protect God from the proof that he does not exist that cannot be refuted. Like, it's like, okay. Like, how can you believe these two things?

It's crazy. But yeah, so Spinoza is like under the table, illegal. Nobody's reading him except in secret until he experiences this resurgence in Germany during an ordeal called the pantheism controversy, which I won't go into all the details. It involves like a lot of like people trying to out publish and outflank each other. But it has to do with a guy named Lesing,

who was a very famous, German and like kind of free thinker, popular philosopher type person allegedly confessing that he was a follower of Spinoza on his deathbed. And then everyone like fighting to be his like intellectual descendant. And then this big controversy about pantheism, emerges in Germany and Emmanuel Kant

presents the critique of pure reason as his like answer to the pantheism controversy and then the German idealists afterwards are all kind of secretly like Jacobinism and Spinozaism so there's like this kind of like Spinozist

undercurrent of like you know either like pantheists or atheistic liberal revolutionary ideas in Germany after Kant So that's the kind of like overview of Spinoza's life and what his, I guess, legacy of where his books went. Wonderful. Yeah. So, you know, the charge of heresy and the charge of atheism, it'll be more clear. We'll get into that as we go through and learn about his metaphysics and his conception of God, which is obviously antithetical to the theistic and Abrahamic conception of a personal God. And, you know, the idea that if God is everything, then God is nothing from the theistic point of view.

that gave rise to the charge of atheism. But we'll parse out the atheism versus pantheism idea here in a bit. The only thing I wanted to add to his biography is that he lived a humble life, right? He's excommunicated from his religious community. He was still in deep correspondence with the intellectuals on the continent at the time. And obviously that was a lifelong thing that he kept up. So he wasn't a completely isolated individual. But his day-to-day life, he lived in this small attic that he rented out.

and he made his living by grinding lenses for, I think, microscopes and, you know, things at the time that needed certain lenses. And, you know, doing it in this probably not well-ventilated, shitty, stuffy attic apartment that he lived in, it gave rise to the fact that he would breathe in these tiny glass particles. And I think there was also a genetic predisposition in his family for lung illnesses. And so that's ultimately, I think, what people settle on the cause of his death, in his 40s was that he would just be grinding these lenses to make a living and inhaling the fine particulate dust that would come off these lenses. And there's something metaphorical about, you know, grinding lenses to get a better view and use in scientific equipment and the dawn of more and more clarity and Spinoza dedicating his life to creating these pieces of glass that would, you know, be used scientifically and be used to understand the world better and better and ultimately dying for it. almost like a philosophical martyr, if there was one.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. But I, yeah, I forgot about the lens grinder thing. That's completely, yeah, I remember that now. Like, yeah. And that's, yeah, you're right. It's like, it's some poetic. It is, yeah. It is. Yeah.

And it makes, it makes him a sympathetic figure for those of us interested in the working class because, I mean, he wasn't, he didn't live this super comfy, you know, this super comfortable life where he, you know, had leisure and that he was well taken care of in a privileged financial situation. Like, he risked it all. He could have probably had that, but he risked it all for the pursuit of truth and sort of lived a kind of abysmal day-to-day life, although he took great pleasure in it.

So interesting, interesting guy, just philosophically, personally, his role in history, fascinating. So let's get more into his philosophy. You know, Hegel once said, quote, one is either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all. Albert Einstein famously said, if I believe in God, it's the god of Spinoza. Bertrand Russell said Spinoza was, quote, the noblest and most lovable of all the great philosophers. And I could go on, but what emerges here is that Spinoza really was, as I said earlier,

a philosopher's philosopher. So what about his philosophy made him such a lofty figure in the eyes of so many great thinkers, despite the differences between the thinkers and the different realms of thought and, you know, science and philosophy that they were operating in? everybody seems to have a respect for Spinoza. And what about him gave rise to that, in your opinion? Yeah, it's, so I think it's really hard to explain the effect that Spinoza's philosophy has on the reader, unless you've struggled through Spinoza and got maybe even gotten to the end because at the beginning, it's very, like, very difficult.

It's in this geometrical method. Yes. But there's a quote by Heinrich Heina, who was one of Hegel's students. And he wrote a book about the history philosophy of Germany, and he was a Spinozaist and pantheist. And I wanted to quote a little bit from his book here about Spinoza, because I think it's really beautiful the way he puts it. He says, when we read Spinoza, we are seized with a feeling like that of seeing nature at its grandest in most vigorous repose. A forest of thoughts tall as the sky whose blooming tree tops sway back and forth. While imperturbable trunks stand rooted in the eternal soil,

there is a certain soft breeze in the writings of Spinoza, which is inexplicable. It stirs the reader with the winds of the future. The spirit of the Hebrew prophets still rested perhaps on their late descendant, and skipping a hell a little bit. It has been established that Spinoza's life was free of all blemishes, as pure and immaculate as the life of his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like Jesus, he suffered for his teachings and wore the crown of thorns. Everywhere a great spirit expresses its thoughts in Golgata.

Wow. So, yeah. I kind of liked Spinoza a lot, but, you know, this is the kind of effect. This is how he felt moved by this text. But when you really, like, when you explain someone, like Spinoza to someone, if you give the like, you know, I don't know, like the five-minute YouTube version of Spinoza, it sounds wild, right? it sounds like some kind of you know very parmenity in position god is nature everything's one thing we're all parts of it our minds are modes of god's mind our bodies are modes of the body of god so this either

sounds like some form of mysticism not to discount you know taking it in a mystical direction or it sounds like one of the other wacky early modern metaphysics right and there are a lot of wacky early modern metaphysics, right? You know, Descartes probably isn't one. Descartes probably, you know, intro text, stuff like that. Descartes's probably pretty relatable. But then you go to someone like Leideness, right? Leibniz is like, everything's just a cloud of little minds called monads. They have no causal effect on each other, but they're all ordered according to the prehistobstarmony and everything is organisms all the way down, tiny little things, right? Or malab branch. Everything that happens in the world is divine intervention, right? These are crazy early or wacky early mob.

modern metaphysics, right? Barclay, everything is in the mind of God, and that's why the chair in the other room still exists when I walk out of the room. Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so you might think Spinoza is just another cool, yet wacky, early modern metaphysician. But the thing is, when you dive into Spinoza

and see what he's actually saying, it's actually, like, not that wacky. And the view of the world he presents is actually pretty plausible, I think. As opposed to Leibniz, when you dive into Leibniz, you see that it's even more wacky than what you thought it was. Right.

You're like, what? Absolutely. And so, and another thing, too, is that when you break down Spinoza's philosophy, he's presenting something that's very much like a materialist view of the world. Yet he's doing this in a subversive way. He's using theological and scholastic languages, and Cartesian language, but it's a kind of dialectical critique of scholasticism and Cartesianism, just like the theological political treatises.

kind of dialect of critique of scripture um and so yeah spinoza uses the geometrical mode of presentation and the ethics which makes it very difficult to read and i think hyna has a good point here too where he says the mathematical form gives spinoza a bitter appearance but like the bitter shell of the almond it makes the kernel all the more sweet so there's something like really harsh about the form of spinoza's text that you have to sit and like do euclidean geometry but with philosophy but what you get out of it is amazing and it's a shame that like it's in like you know I hate to say this but it's a shame that it's in the geometrical mode of presentation because I would love to teach Spinoza to undergraduates but how you you can't give them this and expect them to

work through it you know um it's like uh and like here like you know with heinous comment about the the bitter shell of the almond but the sweetness on the inside he's almost the exact opposite of Lucretius, the Roman epicurean that was really influential on Marx, where Lucretius writes about materialism and atoms, but he puts it in the shell of a poem written in Dactelic Exameter, where Spinoza puts his beautiful philosophy in this bitter shell of Euclidean geometry. And for, like, Hegel says all philosophers must be Spinozists. And this is something that Hegel does that's both very spinosistic and is his relation to Spinoza, which is that this idea of philosophy is imminent critique. He says that the only way to beat a philosopher is to go to their fortress and occupy it. You can't go fight them somewhere else. You have to fight them where they stand and beat them on their own terms. And so he says the only way you could ever go beyond Spinoza is like through Spinoza. You have to take Spinoza as the true standpoint and then push it fire by its own dialectic. And you can't really be a philosopher.

Hagel says unless he wrestled through it, so. Absolutely. And then you can, what emerges immediately from that is like you can see that this line where Hegel is deeply influenced by wrestling with the work of Spinoza, and then that leads straight to Marx who's deeply wrestling with and, you know, going over the philosophy of Hegel and taking from it. So the line from Spinoza to Marx is really not that, you know, there's not that many detours. It's pretty straightforward, but, you know, it's obviously very different, but just the

the impact that Spinoza had on all the philosophers that came after him, I think, is one of the major points. And it's still resonant today, you know, unlike, I think, you know, Barclay and Leibniz. And I remember doing a paper on Leibniz and his conception of monads. And it's fascinating. It's fun to get into that worldview. But it is very, you know, quirky. But what's different about Spinoza is I think whether you're looking at it from a spiritual perspective, a psychological perspective, or a raw scientific perspective, that Spinoza's philosophy still has a lot of traction in today's world. And that's why one of the leading figures of science of the last century,

Albert Einstein found so much resonance in the philosophy of Spinoza because what, you know, the world and the cosmos that was emerging from the mind of Einstein, in very interesting ways, dovetailed beautifully with the philosophy of Spinoza. Pinoza several hundred years earlier. And, you know, science was by just getting started in the 1600s, you know. And so to have a philosopher push forward ideas and a perspective on the world that is later still so relevant to modern science, modern spirituality, modern psychology. I think that's just he left an indelible mark on human knowledge writ large. And I think that's one of the other reasons why obviously he's such a well-respected figure.

but let's go ahead and move forward and one of the aspects you know spinoza's talking about everything so you know spinoza also talks about politics and you know you can imagine an enlightened thinker like spinoza operating in the relative barbarity of the 1600s and he certainly saw barbaric political crimes and the mob mentality and brutal violence in his time and was repulsed by it and he was ahead of his time politically I think I'd say that's not wrong to say that Thomas Hobbs is operating in the 1600s and, you know, the political philosophy that emerges from Hobbs is much more authoritarian. Spinoza was much more enlightened and what we might call progressive in the way that he thought about politics. So let's start with that.

Like, you know, what were Spinoza's politics and what was Marx's relationship to the philosophy of Spinoza as far as you can tell? Before getting to that, you mentioned the barbarism and there was this moment where this guy named DeWitt, who was kind of a, I guess, more progressive politician that Spinoza liked got killed by this mob. And Spinoza wanted to go out there with a sign that said, the ultimate of barbarians, like, to, like, go protest the mob. And his landlord held him back. And so he was not torn to shreds by doing that. So I guess critical support for Spinoza's landlord in this sense. Absolutely. You consider to remind me that story. But Spinoza's politics. So Spinoza is,

quite progressive. He advocates for democracy. He thinks democracy is the best form of government. And that's pretty rare for a lot of people in the history of philosophy. He advocates for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, which I think most philosophers secretly did, but it's rare to find them that we're very public about it in that sense. And he also says that society should be based around the common interests of the citizens. And so I think in this way he's a very progressive figure at least in some respects as we'll see but the way he argues for this position is really counterintuitive and cool so spinoza adopts a fully hobzian standpoint he's almost like an einrand style standpoint as his starting place he says that everything we should we do should be to

maximize our own happiness maximize our self-interest and increase our own power Yet according to Spinoza, the best way to do this is through altruism, loving other people, and bringing joy to others, right? So that's the kind of like dialectical twist on Hobbs. And that's what's so fun about Spinoza. That's his rhetorical strategy of like taking positions and then turning them into the opposite ones. So yeah. Coincidentally, I just taught Hobbs's Leviathan on Friday. So I'm actually fresh in my mind. So I was going to do a little bit of comparison of Hobbs and Spinoza. Because you're like, you're like, listeners might be more familiar with Hobbs and Spinoza because Hobbs is, I think, a more accessible philosopher. And one that I find quite interesting. You know, I'm not a monarchist, but I think Hobbs is very interesting as an early materialist and as a theory of how monarchy functions in some respects. Absolutely. But Hobbs argues that because we want, we have desire, and we want to keep preserving our ability to go after what we desire and get what we desire, human nature desires power because power is a way that we can secure and protect our ability to get what we want

to for our desire um to continue desiring and so he says that there's an endless endeavor or canadas which we'll talk about um of power after power that ceases only in death and spinoza actually completely adopts this hobstein standpoint human nature for spinoza pushes us to love ourselves to seek our own advantage to find things useful for us to strive to preserve our own being, our own existence, and to increase our power as much as possible. Most people are aware of who have studied philosophy, and we're going to talk about it in greater detail, but most people are aware of the formulation, Deos Seaway Natura, God, or Nature, which is Spinoza's famous phrase that he uses to talk about God, which can be understood by some as God, by which I mean,

nature. Well, Hobbs has a similar formulation in his political philosophy, juice seaway potencia, right or power. That is, right, by which I mean, power. And so there's a Hobbesian and Machiavellian, right, makes right kind of foundation to his politics. Actually, Spinoza has a very weird reading of Machiavelli. This is a tangent. I wanted to mention. He thinks that Machiavelli was a lover of freedom who wrote the prince ironically to be like and this is what you get

if you elect tyrants interesting yeah so because he's like nobody as intelligent as Machiavelli could have actually

been a Machiavellian so but um so for Hobbs this general like condition of mankind where we push for our own advantage we seek after our desires

and we seek after power to get what we want produces competition distrust and what he calls like a desire for glory basically just wanting to like hurt other people to make ourselves feel like tough and bigger right and this leads to what hobbs calls this war of all against all which hobbs says right reason commends is to get out of the state of nature and then to seek peace right so we're all self-interested individuals we're fighting over resources and so we elect a monarch to keep the peace so that we're not fighting against each other Moses draws a very different conclusion from the same premises as Hobbs. So he says that we should strive to preserve our own being, strive for happiness, and increase our power as much as possible. And the best way to do this is to seek things outside of ourselves, right? Like, you're not as powerful.

You just like stay cooped up in your mind. Like, you know, it's a bit of like bizarre idealist or whatever. And the best things that increase our happiness are things that are similar in nature to us, namely other human beings. especially people who are kindred spirits and are of a similar nature to ourselves. So the way to increase our power is to like link up with people. Which goes against Hobbs' idea of the sea of nature is this, you know, like war of all against all. Right. Spinoza then makes the very interesting claim that when two or more individuals come together, they form a new individual, say two individuals come together.

form a new individual who's twice as powerful as the previous individual. So this is kind of Hobbsian because Hobbs thinks of the Leviathan as like this artificial life form that's created out of all of the subjects of the Commonwealth with the sovereign at the head. Yet Spinoza presents this in a completely unhobesian way. He says there's nothing more helpful for our own preservation than that we should come together and strive to preserve our being while seeking the common advantage of all. So he says if we're governed by reason, that is if we're rationally calculating how to best

seek our own advantage and to choose the better option, out of options, a rational person would conclude that, quote, they want nothing for themselves that they do not desire for other men, hence they are just honest and honorable. So he thinks that this Hobbesian self-interest would actually lead people to be just honest and honorable, not through some kind of invisible hand calculation, just because they would realize, oh, what's in my self-interest is, like, working together with people. Right. And I think this is an interesting argument, and, you know, maybe there's stuff that we might find, you know, worried you're criticizing about it. But I think that it does make sense on a certain level, right?

Think about, like, organizing, right? We recognize that what's in our self-interest is what's in everyone's self-interest, and we should combine our powers together and work for the common good, the, like, pool, our interests together, right? What we need is not individual power, we need group power. Yeah, you can see how this also can get pushed into a

right-wing Nietzschean direction as well. You know, Nietzsche like hates most philosophers. Spinoza's one of the ones he doesn't like, he doesn't dislike. He likes Spinoza. Because Spinoza has that idea of power that he wants to, you know, turn to the will of power. So there is like

different directions you can go with this, but I think Spinoza would definitely go. go in the more progressive direction with this. Yeah. And that's, yeah, that's fascinating. Keep going, though, if you have more to say. So there's some differences with him and Hobbs on the issue of sovereignty. So he rejects the idea that we can actually give up all of our rights to the sovereign.

So Hobbs, you know, you give up all of your power and it becomes the power of the monarch or the sovereign. It doesn't always have to be a monarch for Hobbs, but that's the one he likes the best as sovereignty goes. but Spinoza says they're actually like this can happen in theory but in practice you can't actually give up all your rights to the sovereign and he gives an example like the sovereign can't command you to hate someone who treats you nice like so you have the right to hate whoever you want uh or love whoever you want um and so there's a sense in which Spinoza thinks that the absolutism of Hobbs's theory of sovereignty is kind of objectively refuted by practice that um but he does say stuff that's really interesting like but like sovereigns and monarchs

and things like this like people have the ability to plant ideas into the crowd to get them to go along with them you know such a superstition is one of his big ones that he criticizes so spinoza spinoza's preferred form of government as i mentioned is democracy and this involves everyone transferring their power to society as a whole whereafter the society becomes a supreme power that everybody either has to obey or gets punished for not obeying um he defines democracy as a united gathering of people that collectively has the sovereign right to do all that it has the power to do so notice their right and powers linked uh together again and the the demos the sovereign democratic power of the majority is bound by no law nothing can you know it's it's sovereign

in that sense. Everyone must obey it or face the consequences. But he thinks that democracy is preferable to monarchy or aristocracy for several reasons. He thinks that the majority is going to be more likely to make a rational decision than an individual, because again, the logic of we combine our minds together, we have a more powerful mind, right? He also thinks that we don't just blindly transfer our power to a monarch in the manner of Hobbs. But, but, But he thinks that, you know, in transferring it to the majority, which is a whole of which we are apart, he claims that under this majority, we are just as equal to each other in the democracy as we would be in the state of nature, which is an interesting claim. And there's a sense in which the state of nature here for Spinoza and the civil society aren't in opposition like they are in Hobbs or even Rousseau. as far as what Spinoza thinks the best form of government is

I have some really interesting things to say he thinks that it's one where people live harmoniously and obey the laws but he makes a claim against Hobbs which is that if there are rebellions, wars, or violations of the laws then this does not reflect upon the wickedness of the subjects but the corruption of the state and this point is extremely anti-Hobbsian so Hobbs thinks

Hobbs is like a classic conservative or classic reactionary. He thinks the problem with society is that people keep thinking they can do a better job than the monarch, right? Because for Hobbs, everybody has these inflated egos and overestimates their own intelligence. And so they start civil wars. They go around in protest, you know, and they mess it up for the philosophers who just want to, you know, read Aristotle and, you know, work on physics or whatever, right? So it's like, Hobbs is like the classic, I think, like more intelligent conservative who's just like at 80s. political who turns reactionary, right? Hobbs would be like, things aren't perfect, but stirring things up to try to change the world

makes things worse, according to Hobbs. Spinoza is completely antithetical to the, or it takes a completely antithetical position to this conservative impulse. He says that political unrest, crime, rebellions, etc., that is not the subjects messing things up. That shows that there's something wrong with the state. and it's on the state those conditions

the blame for those conditions are on the state or not providing a society where people actually feel like they belong and like they're part of a community that's working together for the common good.

Damn. He has an interesting point about Hobbs' theory about war on this too where like Hobbs famously defines peace as all other times are peace other than war. And Spinoza says no, that's not the case. There can be open war

or you know when the war will to battle is known, as Hobbes defines it. But if the subjects are too afraid to take up arms and rise up against their government, while they're not at war with the state, they're definitely not at peace with the state either. Because to actually be in peace, you would have to have your will aligned with the will of the state. And if it's not aligned, then, you know, if you're just too afraid to rise up and overthrow your masters, then you're being, he says, led by sheep, like sheep who only know how to be slaves. and he says that's not a commonwealth, that's a wasteland.

So I think that was really interested, too. Yeah. One last point I wanted to make, too, is about, like, where his political writings can be found. So there's the theological political treaties, which is mostly a book about the Bible and, you know, biblical criticism. But it also is a book about political theory that we'll talk about both, you know, the kind of biblical side of politics, like the ancient Hebrews and things like this. But also superstition and its role in politics, how we vacillate between hope and fear and then look to superstitious beliefs, and then some of the kind of foundations of his theories of right and democracy. But then there's his main political work, which is called the political treaties. But this was left unfinished because Spinoza died while writing it at the worst possible moment.

So he starts to outline, the book starts by him outlining. his theories of rights, and then he goes to the different types of government. He goes through monarchy, aristocracy, and then democracy. And then democracy is the form of government that Spinoza prefers. But he dies while writing the section on democracy after having only one said one thing about democracy, namely that he thinks women are naturally subordinate to men and should not be allowed to vote or run for office. And so it's like, not a good look, Spinoza. He's like, I'm going to write about democracy. Hmm, what's the first thing?

Women can't vote. Oh, shit. It's like, you know, I don't know, like, God or nature like canceled him for writing that. So that's very unfortunate. And it's actually, that's what's ironic about that is that that is one issue where Hobbs is more progressive than Spinoza because Hobbs denies any natural basis for the subordination of women to men and says there's no natural basis. for patriarchy and says that women can be sovereigns because he was born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. So it's a shame that Spinoza held this position. It's certainly not excusable. And it's even, you know, more troubling that a more reactionary thinker, namely

Thomas Hobbs, held a more progressive position than Spinoza on the rights of women. So, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then Marx's relationship to Spinoza. Now, I wish I could have spent more time looking into this, because it's very clear that Marx held Spinoza in high regard, both marks and angles, and they recognize them as a forerunner of materialism. And I think there's a notebook somewhere. I wasn't able to find it where Marx writes about the theological political treaties. But, and you know, as you might know, Marx worked by like copying out passages and writing like critiques and responses of it. So like that would be interesting to look at. But a lot of the influence, as we were talking about, of Spinoza on Marx, comes through Hegel, who took a lot

of Spinoza's ideas, and then they came into Marx that way. But there are also some interesting parallels between Spinoza and a Marxist-style critique of ideology. And then there are various Spinozist forms of Marxism throughout the 20th century, specifically in the USSR and in France. So Plankanov, who was Lenin's teacher, claimed that Marx was a follower of, sorry, that Marxism was a form of Spinozism and said that Ingalls allegedly told him that Spinoza was, quote, quite right when it came to matters of ontology. So at least according to Plunkinov, and, yeah, it doesn't strike me as odd that someone like Engels would say, oh, yeah, like totally Amundwerp with Spinoza, right? Because Spinoza and Hakel have a lot of similarities already. So there are some connections there. it is kind of scattered and there's no like book by marks just on Spinoza besides maybe this

manuscript I haven't looked at but that's like kind of some general lines oh yeah and then in France it's like the Althesarian crowd really really in a Spinoza yeah super interesting and you know we'll get into this more but you can see how Spinoza's view of of a singular substance of the totality of oneness in the cosmos and how everything is deeply and inexorably connected to everything else would fit quite nice into a dialectical apprehension of phenomena. So you can see why angles in particular would like and get a lot out of Spinoza, even regardless of Spinoza's connection to Hegel. But on some of the politics stuff, just very quickly, just I love how deep you went with it,

the idea that, you know, disorder, crime, you know, whatever riots, social dysfunction is actually not the fault of the subjects, which is, that's the conservative view, right? Turn on Fox News and crime is the fault of criminals. Poverty is the fault of the poor. You know, everything is to blame the people, the mob, you know, people that don't work hard enough, et cetera, et cetera, right? Blaming the subjects, blaming the subjects. But actually, we understand from our position as Marxists that, you know, what is crime but an outgrowth of poverty? What is, you know, racism but a way to divide people for the accumulation of profit by the ruling class, among other things. The disorders that we find in society are symptomatic of the dysfunction of the system

under which we live. You know, people born in certain environments behave in certain ways. If they have no opportunity, if they're surrounded by crime, if they're doomed to a life of poverty without any way of getting out, then yeah, they're going to behave in a very different way than somebody born into an upper middle class leafy suburb with good connections and two professional parents with a lot of income. And we can see how the system as a whole fails poor people, fails colonized people, fails the marginalized in a million different ways.

And even though that the system and those who defend it will immediately blame the victims of that system as individually accountable and at fault for those problems, we understand that if the systems were organized in a different way, we would get different collective and communal outcomes. And so the fact that Spinoza's already thinking in that direction. Contra Hobbs, I think is just indicative of the forward-thinking elements of him. And I think it's united or it's connected to his view of unity, that everything

is deeply connected. And, you know, you're talking about how he starts from a position of exploring self-interest, but takes it in this really altruistic, connective way as opposed to this and Randian or Hobbesian separateness that they take it in. And that is like, that's like a view. you know we'll talk about it maybe subspecia eternitatis of the view from eternity where if you zoom out just a little bit yeah okay the the the ann randian or the hobesian notion of self-interest kind of makes sense but if you keep zooming out you zoom way the fuck out right you can see everybody's deeply connected connected you can see that your well-being is connected deeply to the well-being of those around you to the social functioning of your society at large right we understand that we benefit when

as individuals, no matter your position in society, when there is no poverty, when everybody has genuine opportunities, when everybody has a social safety net, everybody has access to high quality education, healthcare, et cetera. It makes all of our lives better. It makes the society as a whole better. And so you could start from a position of mere self-interest and end in a position of like collective and communal good and, you know, policies that support that. And, you know, all pitch in to make sure that everybody has a high quality of life, et cetera. So, you know, that's super zooming out, that zooming way out and looking at the causal connections of everything is indicative, is like sort of core to Spinoza's philosophy. And you can see how things like, you know, his views on politics can come out of that.

It is politics of democracy, of mass politics, and of deep causal union and unity amongst everything. There is no separation ultimately in Spinoza's picture of the world. And I think that's what's beautiful about it and also what's true about it. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Very well said. Cool. Well, let's go ahead and move forward. So the philosophy professor Michael Roka said, quote, it cannot be overemphasized how the rest of Spinoza's philosophy, his philosophy of mind, his epistemology, his psychology, his moral philosophy, his political philosophy, his philosophy of religion flows more or less directly from the metaphysical underpinnings

in part one of the ethics, end quote. And what I just said about his political philosophy relating to that, I think, is completely in line with this quote. So this is probably, in my estimation, the most interesting aspect of Spinoza's thought, which is his metaphysics. So let's cover that. You know, what is Spinoza's metaphysics? How does he understand nature and God? And maybe you can talk about attributes and modes. Just take the question in whatever direction you want. Yeah. Well, I'm going to cover as much as I think will be accessible and helpful to kind of newer audience Spinoza, there's obviously so much in this

metaphysics that we could cover, including the whole, like, some of the more, like, detailed ways of how, like, different modes link up and all of that. But I think one of the, the kind of clearest ways to make Spinoza click is to look at what he's doing to Descartes.

and that's because that's where Spinoza gets this terminology of substances, attributes, and modes. So I'm going to give an explanation of how Descartes understands them what the problems with Descartes understanding are and how Spinoza adapts to these problems. Cool.

So a substance is defined as something that does not depend on anything else for its existence. That's Descartes's way of defining it. Spinoza gives a more complicated definition than that. And the attribute of a substance is what defines the substance as the kind of substance that it is. So for Descartes, there are two types of substances. There are putting it in simple terms, bodies and minds. Cartesian dualism.

Yeah, exactly. Bodies are defined by the attribute of, extension, which basically means they, like, you know, take up a certain amount of space. They're, you know, extended it in dimensions and kind of thing. And minds are defined by thought. A mode is the opposite of a substance. It's something that depends on a substance for its existence. For example, shape depends on an extended substance for its existence, right? There cannot be a shape without a body that takes up that shape, right? Or, you know, even if you imagine a shape in your mind, you're imagining the shape extended, right?

Maybe two-dimensionally, but you're imagining something that is taking up space. Motion depends on extension as well. So motion is another example of a mode, because moving is a way that a body can be. So that's what a mode is. It's a way that a substance can be. Even duration, right, which is what Descartes understands time to be, is duration, is a way that a substance can be. And that is one that can work for either type of substance. Our thoughts, right, have a duration. Like, we think about something for a while, then we think about something else.

Just like a body, you know, can move here for a while, then stop for a while and have a duration as well. That's a way that a body can be. So again, there are these three ontological categories and then, like two types of things, substances and modes. Independent things that don't depend on anything else and then the ways that these things can be. But here's the problem. There's an ambiguity in Descartes, which is that in one sense, an individual body and an individual mind is independent. But in another sense, it's not independent because God gives them existence, right? All things depend on God for their existence. So you have finite substances and infinite substances, but the finite substances

depend on the infinite substance for their existence. And so what does Descartes do about this problem? He says, well, it's an analogy, which is, you know, classic scholastic cop-out. My Tomist friend is probably not going to agree with me on that. But, you know, I've had a lot of interesting debates with Thomas and there's usually, it revolves around analogy for how unity and difference problems

are solved. But yeah, so Descartes says finite substances are substances in an analogous way to how God is a substance. Spinoza gets rid of the entire analogy. For Spinoza, there's just one substance, and the individual things are modes of this substance. But very importantly, Spinoza does not deny the existence of individual. things or persons. It's not that we're all the same thing. It's that we're all the same substance. And I think that that is something to be careful about because because of

Harmonities, the ancient Greek Presocratic philosopher who denied that there was any such thing as difference between things, that there was any such thing as motion or change or any of any of this stuff, a lot of people are really quick. to attribute that point of due to Spinoza. And there are some people who make arguments for this position. It's certainly, you know, one way of reading Spinoza. But I think for Spinoza, modes are real individuals. And we do have a personal identity distinct from other modes.

They're just not substances. So let me give an explanation of how this works. So the identity of the human body, like or any living organism in general, for Spinoza, persists as long as it maintains a certain proportion or ratio of the parts of the body in relation to each other. And so, like, right, like, all my organs are, like, in sync with each other and they, like, communicate to each other in a certain way.

And as long as they maintain a certain, like, ratio or proportion, right? Like, you know, I might grow bigger and bigger, but they're still, like, in communication and in proportion to each other, then I'm still alive. and they do this while affecting everything around it or like I do this I like maintain my my organs while I'm constantly affecting everything around me and being affected by everything around me so my part of a causal totality where there's external causes pressing on me and I'm causing things around me but within my mode my my body there's a certain ratio that's maintaining itself but what this is is a way that extension can be. Extension can be in a certain ratio of parts centered around a whole organism. A death of an organism or death of the body is whenever that ratio or proportion is destroyed and the parts no longer communicate with each other.

And I don't think that this is something that's like very counterintuitive. I think it's kind of how things work. like we do have bodies that have to our organs have to like work together for us to stay alive in a certain proportion and our bodies aren't these independent substances that can just be plucked out of their surroundings but are constantly in a causal relation to everything around them and being affected by everything around them And then if we contrast this to something like Descartes famous example of the wax, which I'll just summarize real quick. So Descartes famously gives this example of he has a piece of wax and he throws it into the fire. He says that everything about the wax changes except what he calls its intelligible properties, namely the fact that it's an extended substance and that it's mutable, flexible, changeable,

all of these things. And so this is his argument to say that this is, this remains the same substance despite all these modal changes. So, like, that leads to, like, weird conclusions. Like, what would we say that the ashes of a person's body are still that person's body? In one sense, yes, and one sense, no, right? I mean, they're not there, right? Like, what's the status of a corpse?

This is a problem that goes back to Aristotle. But it gets even more funky when you think of things like, okay, so, like, the plant is a mode. But then I, like, take that plant and eat it, and part of it becomes part of my body. part of it is extraman that maybe you know fertilizes other plants right and like the pieces are everywhere now right so you're going to say that's one independent substance right right and thinking about these as modes as ways that the one extended substance can be configured I think gives it more plausible account of identity than Descartes has but there's this problem where it just doesn't doesn't make sense of what like actually distinguishes individual bodies from each other

I think there might be somewhere where Descartes even acknowledges. I don't remember exactly. So that's like, if we're our way that matter can be, then the way that our matter is can change. And if it changes in a way that takes our body out of whack, we die, right? So that's like one big move that Spinoza makes saying that there is just one extended substance. But the next move, which is controversial, heavily debated, is that there isn't a difference between the extended substance and the thinking substance,

that this is one and the same substance considered under different attributes. In fact, there's an infinite number of attributes, two of which we can know, namely thought and extension. The other ones opens up this whole infinite attribute problem. and all of these debates centered around how can there be an infinite number and all this stuff but in layperson's terms ideas and bodies mind and matter

are two sides of the same coin and so yeah this is where we get one of Spinoza's really important innovations and I think this is really helpful for materialism too and it's the idea that the body and the mind are the same thing considered in different ways under different attributes

and Descartes traditionally is understood to be a dualist right so that you have the extended substance and the thinking substance and they're completely different from each other right but in practice Descartes is kind of just confused here so he has like weird stuff like he claims like there's like the pineal gland that somehow accounts for the relationship between the mind and body and then there's Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia who he has a dialogue with and they have this exchange of letters

and she really takes him to task on this issue of the mind and the body and Descartes says something like I'm done with this problem because it requires me to think of the mind in the body as both one thing and two things right I mean Descartes should have read

you know studied dialectics because he needs it you need this kind of dialectical account to figure out how can we distinguish between ideas and things while also realizing that like we have brains and we have minds and they're not really two things like they're both connected to each other in a such a way in spinoza's uh solution is one of the most elegant ones

and i think it's the foundation for the way that hagel and marks understand this as well um and that's to say that the the mind and the body are one thing considered under different attributes um this develops into a very complex epistemology that i it would be really part to go into all the weeds of, but he famously makes this claim that the order and connection of ideas are the same as the order and connection of things. So there's a parallelism between the ideas and the bodies or the thought and extension. And one way where I could explain like where this epistemology works is his theory of what makes an idea false. So Spinoza says, and this is something he takes from Descartes but modifies as well,

There are no such thing as an intrinsically false idea. Falsity occurs whenever we mistake an inadequate or incomplete idea for an adequate or complete idea. For example, there is nothing intrinsically false about the idea of the unicorn. It's only a false idea when I forget to include the fact that, you know, unicorns aren't real. They're just made up things that I combined together with, you know, horses and horns. another example that comes from Descartes but is discussed by Spinoza in the principles and some other works by Spinoza is this idea that okay I have this idea of the sun the sun is so small I can cover with my hand whereas the earth is large and even looks flat Spinoza would say this is a true idea, right? This is true idea.

The sun is small and the earth looks flat. The problem is whenever I, is that I'm confused about what my idea is about. I think, if I think that this is the idea of how the sun is, I'm wrong. What this is an idea of is of my body as it is affected by the sun. The sun presents a false image of itself to my organ. so when I think the idea in my organs is the real sun, then I'm confused. But when I keep Galilean astronomy and figure out where the sun's size actually is and all of that stuff, then I have the correct idea of the sun.

But the false idea of the sun is only false when I regard it as an idea of the sun, as opposed to an idea of how my body, and then my body is in parallel, you know, how my body is affected appears in the mind. because the mind and the body have this parallel structure. It's how my body is affected by this. And so I think that illustrates at least part of how this parallelism works and then how the epistemology works here. And also I think it's interesting that this is where some of the like thinking

and like Alphazir and others about ideology can really like be fleshed out in Spinoza. Is this idea that like part of how our bodies. are configured and how causes affect us are such that they produce false ideas. The reality produces false ideas of itself in us in a kind of, you know, camera obscura type way. Yeah, that's, it's fascinating. And I know for some people, I mean, for everybody, it's, it's sometimes can be difficult to, to keep up with all of that. I mean, it is very deep. And it, it is in dialogue with other philosophies. But to kind of, you know, summarize some of the main points you made. You can think of what everybody is more or less familiar with,

Cartesian dualism, the split between the body and mind. And in Descartes' philosophy, these are two separate substances. And but then the question arises, well, how do they interact? They seem to be in parallel with one another. And so then he has to retreat into these ideas of the penile gland and like that's the mechanism physiologically through which the body and mind correspond. But you can see the theological takeaway from the, from Cartesian dualism, is that the mind is fundamentally a different thing than the body, such that when the body dies, the mind can continue on. And you can see why that would be just in the air and philosophy would be working in that direction. But what emerges with Spinoza is what could be called monism, which is that actually

the body and the mind are not two separate substances, two separate fundamental things. They are aspects of a singular substance. That singular substance, that singular substance, has other aspects to it we can't know those right we are in the world of body and mind mind and matter um so we can't know those things we can set aside the question of infinity and all the problems that that brings up but what we what we engage with is a single substance with its attributes of mind and matter and then the individual modes that that gives rise to right Colin is it fair to say Colin is a mode and Brett is a mode right yeah yeah exactly yeah and so and we we have mind and matter

matter, but they're fundamentally, you trace them back to the same source. And so in philosophy, we use the word substance, but the famous quote from Spinoza is nature is God, God is nature. So whether you want to use the word God or nature, when you look out at the cosmos, that is the matter attribute of the single substance that we can call God or nature. Substance, God, and nature are kind of synonyms here. And so a really interesting thing emerges wherein, you know, on the deepest level, ontologically, everything is profoundly connected and comes from a single source. And our minds, our individual minds, our minds within the big mind of God or nature, right? Like, your mind is not, whether you're not,

you believe in God, like, you're a conscious being with a mind, and that is a product of the cosmos. It's a product of the natural world that you have that mind. And you can think of it as like our individual minds are participating in or are small aspects of big mind, which is an attribute of God. So our minds are participating in a limited way in the singular mind of God. All conscious beings, perhaps, all sentient beings in the cosmos are participating in this. And then bodily, physically, you know, our individual bodies are individual expressions of the ultimate body of God. And perhaps what's included in the body of God is everything we can see physically. All the planets, the trees, the sun, you know, the dirt, the rocks, our physical bodies, our hearts, our organs, this laptop in front of me.

You know, these are all, these are all the aspect of matter, right? This is the attribute of matter and extension in the world. So, like, we are not separate from nature or God. It's the same thing in the end. We participate in it in a limited way. But importantly, and you can correct me if I'm wrong about anything. here. Importantly, it's not that the substance, God, nature is the sum of its parts. So it's not like if you just take all the individual minds and combine them together, then you get the big

mind or you take all the individual physical bodies in the world, put them together, and then you get the body of God or the body of nature. But actually that, and this comes from Neil Grossman, and somebody who wrote books on Spinoza and is a philosopher, it's that the whole makes the parts. So it's not like that you take a bunch of discrete things, put them together and then nature and God emerge from it, but that we are participating first is the divine being, if you will, nature, everything. And we participate in it.

So the whole top down, the whole exists first and then the parts are expressions of it. it's not that you just take a bunch of atoms and put them together and then you build your way up to the sum of its parts, right? And that's kind of an interesting aspect here, right? Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah, it might be interesting, too, to, like give one of Spinoza's God arguments real quick, because God arguments are fun. I'm not convinced that they work because of some dialectical reasons and things like that. But it's always nice when you find a good one because it can often be a fun discussion. point, even if you don't think it's possible to prove the existence of God. You know, I teach, you know, whenever I teach God proofs used to my students, I'm always like, okay, you might not think God exists. Tell me why it's wrong then, you know? But Benoza's God proof is really fascinating. It's basically something along these lines. Everything that exists has a sufficient reason for its existence. That's like a principle

of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason. But then he says that everything that does not exist has a sufficient reason for its non-existence, which is really interesting. So not only do you have a principle of sufficient reason for the existence of things, but that if something does not exist, you have to explain why it doesn't exist. And so then his argument is that if God did not exist, there would have to be a principle, there would have to be an explanation or reason for his non-existence. God's not inherently contradictory, so it can't be that. So it has to be something outside of God. But then that would mean that something exists. Not only that, but something powerful to stop God from existing,

which would basically just be tantamount to God existing. Right? And so it's like, but the kind of effect of this argument, if you take away the theological language, is just that something must exist. because if nothing existed, there would have to be a reason for nothing existing, which would be something existing. And so there's already kind of, I think, a hint of some dialectical moves there that are quite interesting. Yeah. So, I don't know, this, you can see the spiritual

aspect of this notion of God and nature, this almost mystical element, if you will, of Spinoza's philosophy, wherein God, there's not a personal God that is. separate from you, right? Like in the traditional theological, Abrahamic religions, monotheism, God is up there somewhere. You are separate from God. And you can appeal to him, pray to him, have a personal relationship with him. But fundamentally, it's a separate thing. And what emerges here is that there can be no separation. It's all ultimately singular substance. And so, you know, you, this is very Eastern, right, that you and all living beings are particular participating in God. You know, your little mind and your little body are your contribution,

your penny in the well that ultimately is expressions of God. And then you can also see that that defeats separateness, like me and another human being, we are not fundamentally, in this final analysis, we're different modes. And there's an individuality there for sure. We're not trying to completely eradicate that. But in the final analysis, there's a deep underlying unity in which we all participate. And that's against like this atheistic, I mean, we're going to get into atheism in a second here, this atheistic view, modern atheism in the West, it conceives of us as as more or less fundamentally separate from each other, from the cosmos and it's kind of meaningless, right? That this is nature is this thing outside of us and

it produces things. And we're one of the things that produces, but it doesn't. care about us. Nature itself is blind. You know, there's no mystical unity here. When we die, we're just eradicated off the face of the cosmos forever, and nature keeps plotting along. And so there's a way in which this is antithological and a way, I think, it also went that it is maybe antithetical or hostile to modern atheism, because modern atheism sort of implicitly accepts this fundamental separateness of your own mind and body from the totality. I don't know. I guess we could get into deep arguments and some atheists would have different views of that. But that helps us kind of move in this next direction, which is this view of God was condemned

at the time as atheism by the religious leaders of Spinoza's time. But people nowadays talk about it as a form of pantheism. And people in the know back then also wrestled with this idea of pantheism. And so I would love to hear your views on why it was condemned as atheism, what you understand it in terms of pantheism, and kind of what this means for our spiritual or mystical or cosmic worldview of, you know, what is going on here? Then what is this profound mystery we're in and what ultimately, you know, comes out of it, what views come out of it. Yeah. So I think it's a real controversial issue and thorny topic to talk about Spinoza's relationship to God. because we have to remember that Spinoza is writing under intense political oppression and Spinoza also has a very playful method

where it's not always clear what he means by what he's saying, right? Like, you know, he starts the TTP but being like, we're going to take every word of the Bible just on its own as like the source of truth and by the end you're like, and there's nothing true in the Bible like, you know? So there's like something playful about him. And you have to always

wonder if, you know, Spinoza's dog whistling a kind of atheism. And we know from recent events that the whole point of dog whistling is to do it in an ambiguous way so you can always provide yourself a plausible deniability for what you're really saying, right? You know, my heart goes out to you. And then, you know, his heart went in a very specific drift in recently, right? Yes. Not to compare Spinoza to that Nazi Elon Musk, but. You know, so something I've noticed in, you know, in Hegel, too, that Hegel is, you know, always kind of not one, you know, he says a lot of stuff about God sometimes, and then sometimes you wonder whether, you know, how much he buys it. But there's also a sense of, in a political climate like this, that people will find spots between atheism and full, fully being religious. and, you know, a way to preserve a certain amount of one's faith

while having more scientific, more materialist commitments. And so what I want to stress is that I think that Spinoza's relationship to God has the kind of inherent ambiguity to it, and that's on purpose. Now, I'm not sure if it's correct to call Spinoza a pantheist, although there certainly are many people who understand you a pantheist. And pantheism has a lot of different definitions, too. Because a pantheist would say, you know, sometimes means somebody who believes that everything is God. Right.

So like, I'm God, your God, the tree over there is God, et cetera, right? And you might find this in like Hindu philosophy, right? Like, ultimately each of ourselves is a, is God's self in a certain way. That's, that's, I don't think that's Spinoza's view. because what we are is modes of substance and substance is God. So it might be possible to also say that what we are is in God. So then it would be a pan-antheism. But I'm throwing this out there as, you know, these are, these are,

there's a spectrum of views you can take on this. And I think, you know, everyone should read and decide for themselves. And I certainly don't want to impose one reading over others. If we consider him a theist, I think it'd be more correct. call I'm a pan-entheist, but it's a heavily debated topic, and there are plenty of very plausible pantheist readings. There's also, you know, some, like, some like key points in Spinoza and in how one read certain passages on what reading you end up in.

But I also want to entertain that Spinoza might not be entirely serious about his theism, right? Because he uses this phrase, Deus, Ciblet, not true, God, or nature. And he tends to use it in such a way that has suggested to many people that he's saying, God, by which I mean, nature, which could provide a playful cover for a more atheistic position where he's like, sure, I believe in God. If by God he means nature, an unthinking, uncaring, material thing that we're all part of. Yeah, right? Like, God, sure. And Spinoza would claim that any attempt to assign a traditional, like, theological or religious quality to this God,

would be anthropomorphism. Yet even like, you know, atheistic people say stuff like, like, I hope the universe sends me XYZ, right? Right. As this form of superstition. Because like that's ultimately, Spinoza is very much against superstition. Now, there are many people who are against superstition that are at least ostensibly not against gods entirely.

I think this is going back to Epicurean philosophy where there's, you know, a kind of attempt to de- spiritualized or de-deify the universe. verse, uh, without necessarily saying there are no gods. But, you know, there's, there's a lot of different ways to read this. Um, I think that God, uh, it's very clear that Spinoza thinks that God does not act with the purpose. God does not, God's not aim, the universe is not aiming at anything. Because Spinoza says this would involve placing an end or a goal outside of God, which would imply that God could be something more than he is or could, you know what I mean? Like to aim at something means you're trying to achieve something you don't have.

Spinoza does, though, have these, you know, these weird, you know, moments like his concept of immortality, right? And many philosophers, I think, have thought about this in quasi-mystical terms. So, Wittgenstein's tractatus, logico-philosophagus, which the name is a homage to Spinoza. Yeah. Although, in. interesting fact that's only the name of the english translation the german has a is i forget that german title off the top of my head but it's they were looking for a way to translate the german title that was better and the translator suggested that to the sign so um that's just actually the english title but just like spinoza's concept of of god

um there's a kind of immortality in vikenstein but it's an immortality that's not really immortality right so basically this is this is spinoza's idea of immortality as a As I understand it, we have a body, right, and because of the way things work, there's a, our body is a mode. There's a mode of God under the attribute of extension that is the body. And then there's a concept or an idea that expresses the essence of that body in the mind of God. That idea or concept follows from the necessity of God. And in this sense, it's always going to be true, right?

So there's a sense in which Spinoza says we have immortality insofar as it's like always true that we will have existed, which is at least how Wittgenstein also understands it. And so that's like kind of like the way I read it is that because there's like a side of God that's like eternal and a temporal that we will always exist in the mind of God. Like he'll always be in, well, we'll always be in God's thoughts as it were. And so that's where the immortality of the soul comes in, or the kind of immortality that we have. Whereas the body is fully destructible, but it's kind of like the thought of it or the way it is in God is somehow eternally preserved.

That resonates with another concept and philosophy of like the block theory of the universe, where you have the three spatial dimensions, and then you have the fourth dimension. of time and in the block universe from a god's eye view if such a thing is even possible you can zoom out from even time itself and see like almost like an animal trapped in amber you can see there's there's like slices of time where you existed so no you know you die and then billions of years occur and you can zoom out but you can see time almost spatially such that you always exist in this block universe, you are experiencing it perspective-wise from

your point within it. And so it feels like you're a finite being within it. And, you know, you technically are. But that life that you lived is now scarred into the block of the cosmos. And that in some sense, kind of in this way that you're talking, there is an immortality. But it's certainly not the immortality of the personal God, of the, like, the idea that the mode itself has eternal life like after your body dies you know the the mind continues on yourself continues on that that can't be true under this way of seeing things there's this idea also that our individual minds this is not spinoza proper but you know the the effects and the ways you could take this idea of that we all are we all have minds we all participate in the

in the big mind if you will and that when you're individual mind is snuffed out through death, that yourself, your personal memories, your personal preferences, all those things are obliterated, but your pure awareness, you know, your consciousness itself, because it's participating in this broader flow of consciousness, that that you sort of like are zapped up into the singular mind, right? And that you just abide as a timeless, spaceless awareness that gives rise to all the individual awareness. That's just the sort of, you know, idea that comes out of this. But one thing that you can't deny, whatever your view on Spinoza, whatever your view on God, whatever your view on what Spinoza's view on God is, is that, you know, what I think about is like, through us, through our consciousness, nature itself is becoming conscious.

Like, you know, that nature, you know, let's say it starts at the Big Bang. Who knows what fucking came before it. But, you know, the cosmos is now this process that is playing out. And as that process plays out, eventually it gives rise to complex beings who become conscious from a very limited perspective, right? Brett on Earth from this time to this time, I'm viewing it. The frog on the log over there is viewing it. It has some consciousness and it's expressing that awareness.

The owl in the tree. Aliens on planet ZZX300, right? These are all individual ways that nature becomes conscious of itself. but from a very limited perspective. And the idea in Hinduism is like there's a big self, capital us, that we all participate in. And that's, you know, you bow to the God in the other. And upon the annihilation of your individual self, you know, you rejoin this big self. And it's kind of like God, you know, God loses itself in the many, you know,

loses itself in the multiplicity of perspectives in order to have experience at all. but ultimately it flows from a singular divine consciousness. So that's just an interesting side note. But the other thing I wanted, go ahead if you have anything to say on that. Yeah, I just want to say I hadn't heard of the block theory of time, but that's like really a good way to visualize it and how I try to think about it. So I want to look up more about that. And I wanted to mention the thing about the universe becoming conscious of itself.

When Germans in the 19th century take up Spinoza, it's really along these lines. Shelling, but also Frederick Engels. There is like a line somewhere where he actually says that like, it's strange because it's a strange comment for a materialist like Engels to make where he says something along lines of like, well, evolution would have given rise to consciousness because like the universe needs to like have a concept of itself. And I was like, wow, angles. That's like very interesting.

I wouldn't expect the claim from from him. But like, you know, that's like there is a way of like that there's something true about that um that like yeah yeah so i just really wanted to to mention that um or to repeat those points and to mention the thing about angles i don't remember what texas it's from but um but i think that that's like a really a cool way to read spinosis to think about the universe kind of knowing itself through our own mind so yeah and it kind of feels like a necessity because can you imagine the whole cosmos exists but there's no consciousness there's no perspective from which it can be apprehended there's no experience of it and then the question arises well does that even exist at all

if there if you know it could just exist in its brute fact but there is not a single consciousness in the cosmos from which to view the physical reality of the universe then you know there's a there's a way in which it exists less than when it is apprehended by a consciousness right and that gets into a whole other realm of thought about consciousness itself being fundamental and then we can argue about materialism and idealism and all of that. But it is an interesting idea of like the brute material fact of the cosmos without anybody either from a God's eye view or from inside of it to view it and then what that means for its actual existence.

Yeah. But the very last thing I wanted to say in regards to this is, and we'll kind of get into this when we talk about free will of like, you know, Spinoza's like, you know, align your will with the will of God or of nature. and in Zen Buddhism, this is 100% what's happening. In Zen Buddhism, it is, you know, this idea that you exist separately, or Buddhism writ large, that you exist separately is false, that you have your own free will, ultimately is false, that you are a product of nature, that nature expresses itself through you,

and this little thing that you call an ego, this separate sense of a self, is ultimately illusory. And when you do these practices and see through the, the, um, illusion of self. You also simultaneously see through the illusion of free will and you feel yourself not as a subject looking out on a world that is alien to you, but as the entire sort of cosmos experiencing itself from that one perspective. And what you feel viscerally is that what you took to be your individual will, you know, is actually nature flowing through you. You're a force of nature. There is no will. You're not in control. You're not a separate thing. You know, just like the tree manifests and the ocean and waves and you know the apple tree produces apples the cosmos

has produced you and you are at its whim you're not actually in control and this is called enlightenment or non-duality when you viscerally experience your oneness with everything when that subject object barrier is eliminated experientially such that you feel yourself that there is no division you look up at the night sky and that's just as much you as looking into your hand. And what emerges there is, is this, yeah, this, this, you know, pleasantness, this, this, this baseline contentedness, this, all the fear and anxiety of being a separate self that will be utterly obliterated at death is completely evaporates. And not intellectually, it's experiential. And that's, that's Buddhist enlightenment. That's non-duality, non-dualism, that you'd stop

experiencing yourself in a subject-object way, but you experience yourself. as a mode of one substance, you know? And I think there's a fascinating dovetail there. Yeah, yeah. I think it's really, really, there's a lot of similarities there. And I think we're going to talk about Buddhism again soon, right? So, yeah. So we'll get there more.

Okay, so this is really fun. We get lost in these detours, and I'm sorry if I contribute to that. But I think it makes the conversation better. Yeah. I agree. So moving on, a core aspect in Spanish. philosophy is this idea of conitas, however you pronounce it. So what is the conitas in Spinoza's philosophy and why is it important for understanding human behavior and motivation? Now we're

resuming into our individual lives and trying to understand that. So can you talk about conatus? Yeah. So he takes the idea of the conatus from Hobbes. And if you read the Leviathan in English, rather than Latin, I don't know why anyone would be reading it in Latin since it wasn't originally written in Latin. Um, in the English translation of the Leviathan, or the English original of the Leviathan, which is then translated into Latin, uh, the word canadas is endeavor. I just wanted to mention that in case people wanted to make the, the connection there between the concepts. Um, it's usually translated in Spinoza as striving, which has a kind of Buddhist ring to it, right? Um, right? Because like, what does the Buddha say? This is enough for striving at one point. Um, um, and so book three, Proposition 6 of the ethics Spinoza writes Each thing As far as it can by its own power

strives to preserve itself in its being He then says that the striving The Conatus by which each thing strives to preserve in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing That's Ethics 3 Proposition 7 So Conatus is the striving to continue

existing um using your power it's a striving for being striving to be and uh for those who have dabbled in nietzsche this is you know a forerunner of the will to power like there's a that's one of the places where there's a slight affinity exactly um when it comes to the mind alone if it's just the mind that's striving for something spinoza says that's the thing called the will right Like, you will something to be in your, just in your head. If it's both the mind and the body together, it's called the appetite, like being hungry. It's like, I'm striving for food in a way. And desire is whenever we are conscious of the appetite, right?

So it's not just you, your body strives to something, but you feel the striving. That's when you have desire. And something just important to mention about Spinoza's methodology. He is very inspired by Hobbs. And so there's a kind of nominalism to Spinoza, where he says, says like, by desire, I just mean appetite with consciousness of the appetite. It's like, just like working through

definitions of, of things in this way. Spinoza says, along some lines, we don't strive for something because we believe it to be good. We believe it to be good because we strive for it. Right? So like, I'm not, I don't think that food is good.

I don't strive for food because I think that food is good. That would be a kind of platonic or Socratic way of thinking about it. I think that food is good because my body, my essence, who I am as a human being strives to keep eating. Like, and staying alive. This force you're not in control of compels you forward

towards the thing. And that's what makes it good in your perspective, from your perspective. Exactly. Exactly. And then he builds his psychology out of the Canadas and builds like a table of

of Athex. And this is how, like, early modern psychology works. And Spinoza has the best one, I think. Like, it's a really compelling psychology. I would really like to sit down and see, to what extent Freud drew off Spinoza. I've heard people say that, yeah, he definitely was reading it and familiar with it. The inspiration for this psychology is, again, Hobbes's Leviathan. Because, like, Hobbs and Dickart are really just, like, I mean, Spinoza has a lot of influences.

And so maybe I'm betraying my own reading by, pointing at Hobbs and Descartes is like the main ones because there's also like the Jewish mystical tradition, like medieval philosophy, the Islamic tradition, all of these other aspects as well. But you really do find the table of passions in the Leviathan. I mean, Hobbs is giving, or sorry, and Spinoza is giving his version of that as well. And really quick, you mentioned Islam. I think there is a connection with his father's business and or something like that in which it's pretty clear cut that Spinoza, at least at one point in his life came across Sufism and Sufis, which is the mystical branch of Islam.

We've done a whole episode on it. So, you know, that absolutely is in the mix of things he's engaging with and thinking about. Yeah, I didn't know about that particular, but does not surprise me given how much I've seen, like, people talk about his, because, yeah, probably Al-Ghazali is one of the more famous, I believe he's a Sufi philosopher, if I remember right, and he's kind of in the conversation at this point in time and early modern philosophy. too. So, yeah, that's something, I mean, there's just so, there's so many depths you can dive into Spinoza's influences. And I've only expressed the surface for this. Okay. So his psychology

and the Conodas and the striving. So every, like, philosopher who has this kind of early modern psychology, they always have like two like gears, like the forward and backward gear, as it were. um like uh i think for hobbs it's like it's like like appetite and aversion or something like that i can't remember the two but it's like one's like forward and one's like away from things for spinoza out of desire it's um joy and sadness what joy is for spinoza is it's the feeling of like an increase in power so it's not higher power it's the feeling of the power going up sadness is the feeling of the power going down so it's like a transitional state between the two so then what's interesting about his psychology and this is some of the stuff that i found

the most interesting in terms of its like practical application is that we have a psychological drive conatus to imagine things that increase our power and when we ever we imagine something that restrains or decreases our power we try to recollect or imagine things that will exclude the existence of that thing right so like i'm trying to think of an example like um right like some some i can't get what i want so i make up some scenario where i can get it anyway and deceive myself like that kind of that kind of thing is what he's thinking about. So this is a very descriptive way of thinking here.

He's influenced by the, by the nominalism. He doesn't say, for example, we love things because they increase our power. He says, love is nothing but joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause and hate, nothing but sadness with the accompanying idea of external cause.

That's Ethics 3P13 corollary. So love is just, the name for things that we view to be a cause of an increase in our joy. So then one interesting aspect that's a kind of implication

of his view of Canadas, that we strive to exist and exclude things that would remove our existence is Spinoza's view on suicide. which is one of the most

unique views on this topic in the history of philosophy because Spinoza argues that suicide is impossible metaphysically it is impossible to kill yourself because existence is conatus it's striving to continue to exist and the conatus excludes everything that could oppose existence

which means that's what suicide for Spinoza is is not the mind or the body turning against itself but it's always the result of an external factor overwhelming us and overtaking it to the point it destroys us. And I think that's very interesting and either I think complicated ethical implications to this viewpoint that would, you know, be

maybe worth exploring, you know, be a good paper topic, you know, because there's a sense in which like this says like, you know, when someone is like, you know, we do feel like a duty when somebody is, you know, at risk to themselves of like intervening because and part of the explanation you'd be that because it's an external

it's an external thing overtaking them right but then there's like another you know there's all the ethical questions of like oh well when should you then you know is there like you know the whole like euthanasia style stuff which you know get into that whole thing but you know not that I want to take the conversation there

I just wanted to open that up is I think that's a very unique philosophical position to actually say that there is no such thing as suicide it's metaphysically impossible for it being to kill itself yeah fascinating um so yeah i i'll get more into the kind of implications of the psychology when we talk about kind of his ethics ethics but that's the kind of like building blocks we have we want to imagine things that make us feel powerful we want to imagine things that exclude things that don't make us feel powerful and the things we like are the things that make us feel powerful because they you know increase our power the things we don't like are the things that

make us feel impotent. Impotentia. That's the word for lack power in Spinoza. Yeah, so you mentioned in there Nietzsche's will to power and even like, you know, ideas in Freud and his relationship with Spinoza. And the thing that jumps out at me, and we've done episodes on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Freud all throughout our back catalog for people interested. But this conitus, this is sort of this animating force of all modes, this sort of, you know, the intractable force of nature which pushes things forward, pushes the tree to grow and reach its branches into the sky towards the sun, pushes the animal to hunt its prey, etc., pushes us to want to do new things, to move forward, and we often feel bad or what we would call depressed when we're sort of, prohibited from expressing that striving forward. There's also a sense in which, you know, in the Buddhist sense,

this striving makes us unhappy. It's this desire after desire after desire, strive, strive, strive. And that is the, it's one of the core problems in Buddhism to be solved. And in Schopenhauer, you know, who is the predecessor to Nietzsche,

it's this will to life, this will to live, this sort of, you know, Schopenhauer paints it in rather dark tones of like, this blind striving forward toward nothing that is felt within us individually as this constant dissatisfaction, this constant desire, replaced by desire, replaced a desire, no matter how many times you fulfill your desire, once you get it, a new desire takes its place and kind of pushes you forward, pushes you forward, and Schopenhauer's solution is like, dismantle your

desire. Just stop participating in that game of desire and retreat. into, you know, aesthetic and artistic contemplation, you know, music and art for Schopenhauer. Nietzsche picks that up and turns it into the will to power and, you know, to not retreat from it, to not try to abscond from it or get yourself outside of it like Schopenhauer is saying, but to totally give vital force to it, to pursue it relentlessly. And that's like this will to power. And the Uber Mench comes out of this idea of like where Schopenhauer, retreats from it, Nietzsche moves towards it.

But then all these things is like there's this blind force that is propelling us forward that we don't fully understand that we can't extract ourselves from, really, ultimately. And you can see how in psychoanalysis through Freud and Jung and Adler and modern psychology, this gives rise to the idea of the unconscious, that there's this blind, you know, it's often irretrievable for us. It's murky. We can't contact it. We can't often make it conscious, but it's this unconscious that propels us forward

that pushes us into self-sabotaging behaviors or into forms of neuroticism or, you know, just even if it's not clinically bad, but it's just like our drives, our behaviors, they come from this murky depth of the unconscious, which was radical at the time of this idea that even our mind isn't controlled by us, right? that the part of our mind that we are aware of is like the tip of the iceberg and underneath the water is this this unconscious that is propelling it forward and that the consciousness utterly depends on this this ground of unconsciousness so you can see how this idea in the 1600s of conatisk you know moves in to many other things but you know goes through

Schopenhauer's will to live manifest and Nietzsche's will to power and it continues on into the unconscious in psychoanalysis and I always found that that line of of philosophical development to be, to be fascinating. Does that, does that sound right to you? Yeah, absolutely. And then, um, yeah, like, there are definitely forms of, I guess, like, kind of more like vitalist or neovitalist philosophy today that, um, you know, sometimes present themselves as alternative materialism to Marxism, um, that draw upon these kinds of ideas of canadas and, you know, the will is the basis of matter, um, which, you know, not necessarily views I agree with

as a dialectical materialist but are interesting nonetheless. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Well, that ties into this next question, which is, you know, if Spinoza is arguing that kind of everything in the universe is determined ultimately by these laws of nature and, you know, even Conitus is something

we don't really have control over. It just animates us and flows through us and compels us forward. What does this all mean? mean for for free will in spinoza's system yeah so spinoza is the arch determinist in a certain way like there are plenty of determinist philosophers around this time hobbs is a determinist ladenus is a determinist but no one is more of a determinist i think than spinoza because um the very notion that things could be possibly different like of a possibility outside of what is

is a fiction based of our inadequate knowledge of causes. Whereas for someone like Leibniz, there are other possibilities God has just selected the ones that make the best possible world. For Spinoza, there's no, it's pure fatalism. All things are absolutely determined, necessary, and could not be otherwise.

It's just God actualizing itself. And future follows from that. And Spinoza is quite interesting in his critiques of free will. And he gives this example of a stone, which I think, you mentioned Schopenh. I think Schopenh actually picks this later up, this example up later. But let's suppose I throw a stone. So I'm the external cause of the stone's motion.

Yet after I've thrown it, the stone keeps moving without me continuing to act on it, right? The stone is moved by its own conatus. It's striving. And Spinoza says the same can be said of any finite thing. It's all necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and to produce effects in a certain way. The stone's been thrown and it's going. And he says, okay, now let's suppose that the stone could think. If the stone thinks as it strives, right, as it has its conatus after it's been thrown,

it will be conscious of its striving and being conscious of its striving it will believe itself to be free and moving of its own accord and preserving in its own emotion because it will host to it. And then he says that you know we brag about the human freedom

and human or human free will right and free will in the sense of like I can just make arbitrary choices off the top of my head whichever one I want. Often, you know, call it Cartesian free will because Descartes is the one who gives kind of the most well-known argument for this kind of free will. He says, this is what they are talking, people are talking about when they talk about free will, that men are conscious of their appetite and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. So free will is being ignorant of how you are being determined.

And so he says, by this logic, the baby thinks they freely want the milk, the angry boy wants vengeance, the coward thinks they freely flee from battle, and the drunk thinks they freely say the things they later regret. That's the greatest example, right? It's like, oh, my will's so free, I don't say anything, right? I'm drunk off my ass. It's like, yeah, that is the least free you can be, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. And crazy people believe themselves to be acting based on like free spontaneous decisions of their mind, but they're just carried away by impulses. And they're ignorant of these impulses. And that's why they can't control themselves. And so this is what Spinoza makes of free will in the Cartesian sense. It is like arbitrary, not real freedom. And both Hegel and Marx really take that position up.

I think that it's right to read Hegel and Marx as compatibleists, not as arch determinists in the matter of Spinoza, but they don't like the arbitrary sense of freedom, or free will. Now, Spinoza does have a concept of freedom, and this concept of freedom, which he develops in book five, is incredibly important, I think, for Hegel's notion of freedom, for Marx, an angles notion of the relationship between freedom and necessity. You know, I think like angles or marks, maybe both of them say somewhere like, oh, yeah, we don't need to deal with the topic of free will because Hegel solved it. And this is, again, that idea of Hegel, like taking Spinoza's position and trying to push it forward,

trying to develop the standpoint of the ficti and free will within Spinoza's ultimate determinism, right? Because you're the ultimate dietician, right? Just like Spinoza takes Hobbes and turns it into altruism, if you can take Spinoza and turn it into free will, you've united the opposites. So what is Spinoza's idea of freedom? Freedom for Spinoza is when we are led by reason, when we are led by a clear and distinct idea of ourselves.

The drunk person making arbitrary choices might be like seen to be free in a kind of Cartesian and I can make arbitrary decisions sense, but they're not truly free. The truly free person is self-determined by their own clear and distinct concept of themselves and their actions, right? the drunk person the person who's aware of themselves and controlling their behavior is the real free person um freedom is ultimately freedom from the passions as we'll get into uh in in a in a in a in a more detail but um freedom from being determined by external causes without knowing what these are and i think even ideas of like self-determination like in the sense that like lennon talks about with like the self-determination of nations has it resonates

with this idea of freedom, like the nations that are in control of themselves that are able to act according to their own self-concept and not be determined by external forces knowingly or unknowingly, right? And yeah, like the idea of in Marx is that freedom is when you, and I think it's angles who actually clarifies this a lot in more detail. I believe it's an anti-during, but there's also places I think in capital or some, you know, other places in Marx

where he kind of adopts the same position. You know, I don't like dividing marks and angles from each other. They're, you know, their best friends. They, they were talking to each other all the time. But, you know, it's important to at least acknowledge the differences there, but, um, or that, you know, there are different people talking about these things.

But yeah, like this, this idea of like, of freedom in angles is being determined by one's own necessity, by one's own concept, consciously. And choosing an, um, another, example, I think Hegel uses this. It's like falling in love, right? You can't just like choose

arbitrarily who to fall in love with, right? Like, you know, if you're like drunk and like go home with someone, that's just like arbitrary circumstances, whatever, whatever. Like, it has to be this fall. It has to come out of you. It can't be an arbitrary choice. It is precisely something like a true

like it's like your innermost essence and that's precisely why falling in love is the most free thing it can't be forced right nobody can point a gun to your head and say fall in love right now

but you can't arbitrarily just be like hey I'm gonna fall in love with that person you know like right and so that's I think where that that dialectical account of freedom really draws from Spinoza to develop a much more rigorous concept of free will. We're not, we're, we're not purely determined. But there is a

sense of which determinism dialectically turns into its opposite of freedom. And that moment is starting to be present in Spinoza. However, there's the big problem, which is that, well, aren't you determined to be thrown into the situation where you make this decision to be determined by yourself in this whole way? And Spinoza's like, yeah, of course, right? But, um, That, yeah, that, that, that is Spinoza's concept of freedom, which is done within an arch determinist position and completely fatalistic, but it's not exactly free will. Yeah, this, this gets, it certainly gets complicated with, let's just say, the self-determination of an oppressed peoples, right? There, you can, you can think about it in determinous terms of the conatus, you know, manifesting and animating your, you know, because it goes back to like, your design. not to be dominated by another person which reduces your power which means it's bad and you

you don't determine what society you're born into you don't determine you know who the people around you are this situation has been foisted upon you you're there's something deep within you that you know this this like human desire to be free from the boot of another you don't even you don't control that but does the freedom come in when you you know align your reason and your will with that determined force, like, you know, like the, like, I don't, like, I don't, like, I don't control the fact that I don't want to be dominated. That's just, that arises in me. And, um, I'm going to fight this, whatever, this revolutionary battle for self-determination for me and my people. And I don't determine any of the things that the situation I'm thrown into, the desire for

freedom. All of these things just manifest, um, you know, sort of in a determined fashion based on causes that really no individual human mind can fully comprehend the domino effect of causes going all the way back through history and into physics. But by aligning myself with that urge for self-determination, that that is where the freedom comes in? Can you kind of help me with that a little bit? Yeah. It's slightly different. I would say that for Spinoza and Angles endorses a very similar point, the more you know, the more you can be constantly, conscious of the clear and more adequate your concept of everything is, the freer you are. So if you're thrown into battle and you have no idea what the hell is going on, you're just

like being tossed around by the wind, that's way more different than if you go into battle with a clear head, paying attention to everything and choosing and acting rationally. That's what like being free would be. Does that make sense? Yeah, even though you, even though the situation you're in is totally determined. Yes. I see. It's a weird paradox because, like, yeah, like you've been determined in such a way that you happen to have been put onto the right path to determine yourself, right? Yeah. And that's that's where it gets, I think, ultimately unsatisfying. But that, thus is the nature of free will debates, right? Yes. Is, you know, you can always come up with with ways of explaining how you lucked into being determined in such a way that you could be free, namely free as in being conscious. of all the forces around you because being conscious of the forces around you

ultimately changes how you act, right? Yes, exactly. But unfortunately, I don't really think that Spinoza puts it like to the point of they're actually being a dialectical shift where like like the thought and body like feed back on each other in a certain way

through practice, but maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. Yeah, the interesting interplay, I go back to Buddhism, because that's my mind is, you know, that's the soil of how I think. But, you know, there's this interesting interplay between freedom and determinism and Buddhism because, you know, enlightenment is seeing fully and with complete clarity the lack of a self and therefore the lack of free will, but it's precisely in that full seeing of the fact

that you are determined that a radical freedom is allowed to you, that by understanding yourself as a sort of flow of nature without the illusion, the curtain of delusion that is this idea that I'm a separate self with my own free will to radically choose my life, etc. Once that veil is stripped from you, you see that there actually is no self or a will that could be free, that you are this force of nature, but precisely through seeing that and aligning yourself with it, there is this radical sense of freedom that you are no longer separate from life, but you are life itself unfolding, right? And you don't control how it unfolds, but you can be true to it or you can try to gum up the works through these delusions

of, actually, I'm in control. This is what I want. I'm going to do, you know. And so the fact of realizing how determined you are is synonymous with a radical freedom you couldn't get otherwise. And maybe that's kind of moving in the direction of what you're talking about. Yeah, because I think like a more dialectical conception of freedom has to do with ultimately the fact that like for something to determine on you you have to not know

it is determining because the second you know it's determining you there's something that frees you about it and I don't think Spinoza is as extreme as making that conclusion which you find in like someone like Sartre or something like that and I think Hegel and Marks have kind of indications

of thinking in that direction somewhat I don't think Marx is a total determinist, like Spinoza necessarily, he's someone who kind of sees them as related to each other. And yeah, I think the Buddhist conception, as you're describing it, too, like, probably is more akin to Spinoza. I actually haven't ever, I've studied some Buddhism, but I don't think you've ever read Buddhism on free will. So that's really interesting. But, yeah, I think it's more along that lines of, like, you are liberated because, but you're not necessarily, like, choosing a different path, I guess. Whereas it seems,

like sometimes I get the impression from people like Sartre or even Hagle that it's like once I know how I'm determined that's like the freedom to change how I'm determined but yeah this is like you know huge complex topic but yeah yeah important dialectical battleground to fight is that that particular this particular question I think so I love how you know we don't have all the answers of course this is deep philosophical questions for a reason but that you're bringing in the dialectic constantly as you think through these questions, I think is awesome and exactly what we should be doing. And I applaud you for that. And it really does help make sense of these very

complicated topics as well as showing you how to engage with these questions in a dialectical manner. So that's wonderful. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on to the next question. Spinoza's philosophy, if you can't tell already, is lofty, inspiring, systematic, and very original. He covers every major branch of philosophy in his work. And one question at the center of philosophy since its inception really is the question of what is a good life? You know, how should we live our lives on this planet in this cosmos, in this great fantastic mystery that we call existence? So what is Spinoza's conception? Based on everything we already know about his other philosophies and other realms of thought, what is his conception of a meaningful and a well-lived life? And what

about his work do you find personally inspiring in that vein? Yeah, so it's interesting because I think most people know Spinoza primarily as a metaphysician. As somebody who, you know, talks about how everything's one substance, we're all modes of it. My God is God or nature. Yet the book's called ethics, right? And so, yeah, I was always like, wait, why is it called ethics? Because I had only known about the god proofs and stuff like that. And so when I did my first really intense reading of the book, I was surprised at how much I resonated more with the ethical and psychological dimension of Spinoza's work.

And, you know, because, you know, I think a younger me would have probably not found those sections as interesting as, like, the more metaphysical sides. And I think Spinoza is also, like, very playful in his ethical theory, as we already kind of talked about with this Hobbesian standpoint that he kind of dialectically inverts into its opposite. And so

Spinoza's ethical viewpoint is based around the idea of loving one's neighbor and that we should love other people because it brings us happiness. There's no greater joy than we find

when we love people and our love back, right? And he built this out of his theory of the passions. and we kind of already talked a little bit about his psychology of human emotions. And the idea that everything we do is aimed by trying to increase our power, which is joy, right, the feeling of the increase in power. So, like, let me give an example.

You know, like, when you meet someone and you share common interest and start vibing, right? And you start getting, like, really incredibly happy and excited, kind of like when two people who like Spinoza talk about Spinoza. Yeah. Right? And you start going back and we're talking about how you like the same things. And you just, like, get happier and happier and happier. That's, like, this vehicle to, like, joy that comes through friendship and the coming

together with people who are like-minded and this feeling of, like, loving the same things, bringing us increases in our power and increases in our joy. But then what happens when, and, you know, we've all had this happiness and we've all done it to people, Well, what happens when someone comes in and they start shitting on the thing we like, right? Somebody comes in and they're like, fuck Spinoza, right? What's man? What, what's wrong with you, right? Yeah, like our favorite band or favorite book or Spinoza or, you know, further philosopher.

And somebody comes in and they start saying horrible things about the person we care about, right? Well, we don't like this person because they're subtracting from our joy when somebody doesn't, when somebody hates something that we love since that thing we love is a source of our and the increase in our power they stand in the way of the increase of our power and so it decreases our power and so we hate that person

right so here's where it gets interesting like I said when somebody hates something that we love right so somebody comes in and they hate Spinoza Spinoza is this source of joy so that's decreasing my power decreasing the joy

and whenever we perceive something as decreasing our power we hate that person because hate is just a word for perceiving someone as a cause of the decrease in our power right well what do we love most of all ourselves right

you know we're at the end of the day these self-interested beings although in a weird way it's um you know it's we're also care about each other's because of this so whenever we hate someone right we hate the person who should hate you on spinoza they see us as hating something they love namely themselves what they love more than us at all right so now they hate us back right and so for spinoza there's no like Darth Vader thing or like hating someone is somehow a source of power, right? Like the dark side, you know, whatever.

Hating is impotentia, impotence. It's a decrease in the power. So if we hate somebody because they hate us, we try to decrease their power in response by tearing them down, and then they try to hate us back and tear us down, and then we just end up shitting on each other and decreasing each other's power mutually, right? but then what if we follow the dictates of reason and when someone hates us we like love them back

right that like messes them up because now we love something they love the thing they love more than anything else themselves and so when someone hates us and we respond with love this really messes with their head because now they perceive you as a cause that's increasing their power when they're trying to decrease yours. And so at the end of the day, this entire battle to outdo each other, and I remember you did an episode a while back on social media

and despite me not learning the lessons of that podcast when it comes to social media all the time. I really did appreciate that podcast because it really didn't help me think about be more conscious of what social media does to our minds. Because social media is a place where we end up just like all feeling shitty because of the endless battle to outdo each other. But this entire view of people hating us and decreasing our power and all this,

this is all going on in our heads. Because ideas ultimately are products of the thinking mind. So it's not that the person is making me impotent. It's that I am perceiving this person as the cause of my impotent. And that's what's, and thus I hate them And thus I feel in Picta. It's the thought of this person That lowers my joy.

It's the thought of the thing that excludes my joy. But I'm the cause of this thought. Right? My thoughts have the products in my own mind, right? So it's like Somebody cuts you off on the road And you're really upset at this person. You think this person ruined your whole day.

If this person isn't the person cause of you being upset you are the cause of yourself being upset and what bondage is bondage to the passions is when we view these things outside of us as having so much power over us which is false what has power of us is our own thoughts our own representations of these people hating us right and especially in our in our social media world right somebody says something mean about us and like you read it for a second but it's in your mind all day absolutely it's making you feel pissed you want to go get him back right like so freedom again freedom from bondage of the passions is when we have an adequate idea like we were talking about with his account

of freedom it's about knowing yourself in terms of like the more knowledge you have the more freedom you have if you have knowledge of yourself and you have an adequate idea of a passion That is, when you clearly and distinctly disconceive of the cause of a passion, it ceases to be a passion. That is, it's no longer something passive where I'm being affected by an external cause. Because what's going on is actually active, namely, I'm representing this external cause. That's the source of my impotentia. I'm the one sitting here brooding about them and plotting revenge. Right?

Yes. But once I realized that my own, what seems like passivity is my own activity, the own activity of my mind, and I recognize it as my own duty or doing, that's the secret to freedom. However, you can't just mind over matter this. You have to retrain your body and retrain your affects and build these habits of your learning to control your emotions and remember each time when you're angry that I'm the cause of my anger. That person is not the cause of my anger. I'm representing something in my head that's making me

really feel impotent right now. Now, one should be careful to never like use this on other people who are angry to guess like them at the same time. Right? Like, you know, there's like a wrong side. You can take this the wrong way. But I really think that this,

this theory of the passions and this way of thinking about I mean, just like how other people negating the things that we like, negating us, all negating our friends, whatever, really can like bring about this negativity that brings us all down. And that one can respond to that by rewiring the way one looks at things. Yes. Yeah, I mean, I think that is so wise, so beautiful, so fascinating, so applicable.

I often, in this, you know, through Buddhism, there's a very similar thing. Through stoicism, there's a similar thing of not being enslaved by your emotions, of seeing cause and effects such that meeting hate with hate only creates more hate on both sides. And there's actual practices, like within Buddhism, for example, that I consciously try to do, which is to, you know, if somebody is cruel to me, it can be as simple as somebody cutting me off in traffic or, you know, a cashier being like very dismissive or flipping as if I don't even matter. treating me poorly or somebody online attacking me um you know and whatever saying terrible shit about me like there's always the initial impulse to like fuck this i'm fighting back right um but when you

when you consciously meet that with love it just completely diffuses the entire bomb within yourself so i'll say something somebody cuts me off in traffic i'll immediately feel the rise of anger I have enough distance within my mind to like watch the feelings arise without necessarily and immediately being caught up in that and identifying with it. You know, you can say, oh, here anger is. I can see what I want to do, maybe speed up, cut them off, flip them off, whatever. But instead of doing that, I'll say like a Buddhist phrase is like, may you be happy, may you be safe, may you have well-being, right?

May you feel love. May you feel safe. May you be healthy and happy. and just to say that out loud even in a car they can't hear you right they're speeding off like fuck that guy i got him and you know but just to meet that in my own self of being like i hope that person genuinely is safe and okay and loved right and i don't know what they're going through i wish them the best immediately within you you feel the rightness of that in the way that that makes you feel when you indulge hate anger jealousy when you perpetuate it through self-righteousness and and meeting hate

with hate you actually understand that you're hurting yourself right buddha it was a buddhist quote like having anger at somebody else is like holding a hot coal in your hand with the intention of throwing it at them you're the one that gets burned it's a very unpleasant feeling but the way that you can jujitsu this is if you if you use love as you were saying in this in this sort of petty way where you're still positioning yourself is morally superior so this person doesn't bad thing I'm going to meet them with love because I'm a more advanced person than them. I'm more sophisticated than them. I know more about Buddhism than them.

I'm more spiritually developed than them. So I'm meeting them with love instead of hate. Now, now you're just back into hate with extra steps, right? You're still putting yourself above the other instead of actually embracing that feeling of love. And you can think about Jesus saying love your enemy, turn the other cheek. You can think about MLK saying you don't defeat hate with hate. feed it with love, you can think about Fred Hampton. We don't think you fight fire with fire. We think you fight fire with water. We're going to fight racism, not with racism, but we're

going to fight it with solidarity. We say that we're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism. We're going to fight it with socialism. And this is actually the solution to those problems, right? In the same way as meeting hate with love is actually a solution to that problem instead of its perpetuation. And this does take practice. This is not something that you can just start doing in the sense that you're going to be great at it right away because your whole force of of affect and emotion is pushing you in the opposite direction and that takes some sort of you know call it whatever you want spiritual meditative contemplative practice and going out in the world and being met with this feeling over and over and over again and using that as an opportunity

to practice to sort of elevate yourself in that proper way and you know even but you know you can still love somebody and fight them right like you can you can still try to understand the other, this reactionary, who is a threat to the people I love, you know, who has the worst politics imaginable, antithetical to everything. There's some part of me that can simultaneously say, I'm going to do everything I can to stop you from hurting others, including violence. At the same time, is there a place in my heart where I can cultivate an understanding of how you came to be like this? You know, is there a place in my heart where I could almost cultivate some level of compassion that you are in some sense a broken person and i'm not saying

that in a way to put myself over you because i'm broken too but i am saying that in a way of deep understanding while at the same exact time refusing to allow you to hurt other other people by any and all means right that's the fascinating um you know co-incidence of opposites right that i can love and understand and have compassion and still put my foot down and say no fucking more right yeah yeah yeah and not that i feel like is like some like i mean they called him like how they called him like jesus christ right that's some like like deep you know uh very very morally perfect behavior right there i think there are like some other examples too that i've been thinking about with respect to the theory of the passions that maybe are less

less pure in terms of of moral compassion for the other, but also involved kind of reversing feelings. And one I was thinking about was the statement of mouth, like, it's good to be attacked by the enemy, right? Where you are attacked and you kind of just like think instead of being angry at being attacked, you're like, damn, I must be doing something right. And you know, like, you kind of just like, okay, I'm not going to let this tear me down. Or one of my friends, told me that the way that one of my friends who's black said that one of the ways he deals

with racism is just laughing like, you really pull him you over right now? Do you know what like a meme you are right now of a cop, you know, stuff like that? Like, where it's like, you know, you try to respond to what's going on with something that doesn't bring you down. And I think that that's a very spinosistic way

of thinking about things. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And like, you know, when I started this podcast, you know, just by virtue of what I'm talking about, you're going to get hate. Right. People are going to fucking hate you. Not only on the right, not only in the center, on the left itself. You know, I get the most hate from people and other factions of the left throughout, you know, eight or so years of doing this. And at first, it really fucking bothered me. Like, I was like, I hate this. I don't want this level of attention. These people don't even know me and they absolutely fucking hate me. Over the years, I've cultivated, like, what you were just saying? Well, I'm talking about politics. What the fuck do I expect? Do I expect everybody to like pat me on the back and,

ruffle my hair and say, good job, bud? No, I'm talking about the deepest divides in our society, the clash of our deepest values and principles, our entire worldviews, are smashing against one another. I talk about it with, with swagger and sometimes arrogance in my own way. Of course, that is going to bring out vitriol and anger in the other. And if you're going to fucking do this of speaking publicly about how you feel about politics, that's baked in. You have to totally embrace that, accept that, not back down an inch, but also not get worked up about it, not let it knock you off your balance. This comes with what you're doing. If you're going to talk publicly about politics, somebody is going to fucking hate you. Lots of people are going to fucking hate you.

In fact, pretty much everybody from every other faction along the political spectrum is not going to think highly of you. And that just, that comes with it. Can I radically accept that while still living in alignment with my values and my deepest held principles and also understanding that those people who hate me, you know, they're trying to live according to their deepest values and their deepest principles. And so, you know, it goes back to this hate thing and stripping power from one another. When I have a worldview that is antithetical to yours, that's going to feel like somebody is a threat to your joy and your vision and your beliefs. And so it's going to bring out that, you know. And so I think being very clear about that, understanding that, putting yourself in the shoes of the other, I can see where they're coming from.

I understand why that conservative guy with that background and those values is saying the meanest things he can possibly come up with towards me right now. You know, I can totally understand that. And in fact, if I was in his shoes, I had those exact experiences. I would be saying those exact things as well. And so right there is understanding and then a little bit of compassion, but there's still my values over here and I'm doubling down on those two. without necessarily hating you for hating me you know i don't know it's it's fascinating and i would just i would just encourage people to play with these ideas even if you disagree or you have a divergence of opinion here that there's something deeply mature about trying to take on this bigger perspective right

and it involves getting out of your own ego it involves setting that part of you that's offended and angry and self-righteous aside for a moment and seeing deeper dynamics of cause and effect And who better than Spinoza to teach this lesson? I mean, who was hated more than Spinoza, right? Exactly. He was kicked out of, like, so he was Jewish, so he had to deal with anti-Semitism. The entire Jewish community exiled him and hated him. The political community hate him, the Christian community to hate him.

He's branded as a heretic. His books were banned before they even came out. So if anybody knew how to deal with being hated for political and religious and philosophical opinions, it was definitely Spinoza. So, yeah, the martyr, right, perspective of the, yeah, absolutely, beautifully said. All right, let's go into this last question now. It's going to be redundant because I've been spreading Buddhism throughout this entire conversation, but still I want to give you a chance to give your thoughts. So one aspect of Spinoza's thought that I've always enjoyed is the conduciveness,

not only with modern science, but the philosophy of Buddhism. Spinoza's philosophy and Buddhism converge in their emphasis on interconnectedness, the illusion of a separate self is fundamentally real, the transformation of emotions, ways of living ethically, the importance of wisdom and understanding and achieving freedom and human flourishing. Both Buddhism and Spinoza's philosophy also have a shared dialectical apprehension of reality, broadly conceived. So what do you make of this comparison, any other comparisons you would like to make, the role of dialectics, and maybe other areas of knowledge where you find resonance with the philosophy of Spinoza? That's a big question. Take it in any

direction you want. Yeah. So I think there are very close similarities between Buddhism and Spinozism. Just like there are similarities between Buddhism and dialectical materialism and spinosism and dialectical materialism. Buddhism is concerned with freeing us from bondage, which is the goal of the ethics. Finding relief from suffering, freeing us from the passions. And now here, I'm going to generalize a bit about Buddhism, right? There are different schools of Buddhism. There are lots of Buddhist philosophers. There's a rich Buddhist philosophical tradition that's, you know, as rich in detail as the Western philosophical tradition, which is, you know, criminally understudied in philosophy departments.

And, you know, I, you know, I make an effort to teach Buddhist texts and try to encourage other people to do that so that we don't have this kind of Eurocentric view of philosophy. Because there's so much rich stuff there. But so general, if I'm allowed to generalize about Buddhism, what I've observed in studying both traditions, Buddhism and Spinoism, is that they both offer a path to liberation, a way of being free from suffering and the things that paint us. And that very importantly, both Buddhism and Spinozism emphasized that to find the path to liberation, we need to understand the causes of suffering

and we need to understand them in the correct causal sequence so um right there's like the I don't know the poly name move but the the greater discourse on cause where it's just like you know um sense perception leads to cashman to desire etc etc etc etc right I think there is though a big difference between buda the Buddhism and spinosism

and that's with kind of the where they aim or where they see what they seek is the path for freedom from bondage. The goal of Buddhism, as I'm sure you're aware, and most people probably know, is to achieve nirvana.

And what nirvana is, is it comes from the word to blow out, which means to extinguish the flame of desire. All right. Where Spinoza differs, is that he claims that desire is, quote, man's very essence. And so Nietzsche, who, you know, tends to mock and ridicule the majority of philosophy, like Spinoza, doesn't like Buddhism.

And it's because Spinoza is like pro-Khanodas, pro-desire, and can be seen as in this kind of forerunner of the world's power. And Nietzsche maybe is like the dark Spinozist. Like he didn't take Spinoza's lessons about loving ones and amies to heart. You know, there are occasionally moments in Nietzsche where Nietzsche is. like you know psychotic yeah yeah so um yeah so i think that spinoza's are kind of desires and driven by the things they love and by desire and by like things like self-preservation and things like this in a way that is maybe more attached to things than to than in buddism

um and that there's a sense of like loving to increase one's power not as a kind of you know not in a a hegemonic sense, but in the sense of like collectively increasing our joy, our love of things, the things that bring us together and things like this, which is not to say that like, you know, Buddhists don't experience joy there, you know, ultimately, um, there is like supposed to be joy on the path to Nirvana. But I think that, yeah, like I always joke like, you know, like the reason I'm not a Buddhist is like I'm, I'm too 80s to meditate. and I'm like too desirous to be unattached. I like things too much.

Yeah. And so that's why I'm a spinosis instead, I get. I love that. Yeah. So I think that's like the important difference, but they are like, there is like really similar things going on. And there's so much that you can learn from each, each tradition in this way. And regarding the dialectical aspects of Spinoza, there's something inherently very dialectical, as I've been saying, about the way Spinoza argues, right?

The ethics starts off like a scholastic treatise about God, has like God-proves, classical, metaphysical arguments, yet it tweaks things in just the right ways to draw completely opposite conclusions to someone like Thomas Aquinas. God is nature, a substance with attributes that include material extension and thought, the theological political treaty. likewise begins by saying that we're going to use scripture alone to interpret scripture only scripture no reason no outside sources let's just see what the bible says and then the conclusion is everything in scripture is completely self-contradictory and the only lesson we can draw is love god and love your neighbor which reason could have told us already um similarly the political philosophy it's been as it starts with hobbs everyone's self-inter just going to act in their own self-interest like little i'm randy in subjects and what are we

going to do? Well, the best thing we can do is work collectively together for the good of everyone. That's the most self-interested thing. Right? So that's very, very dialectical of Spinoza. And, you know, there are other little, like, little tiny pieces I could look at that are dialectical is a lover of dialect. As a person who spent most of my recent philosophical career to studying kind of dialectical arguments. But at the same time, I want to point. out that there's a limit to Spinoza's dialectic, and when compared to the dialectic of Hegel and Marx, so Frederick Engels writes in Ludwig Feuerbach in the end of classical German philosophy that, quote, the paramount question of the whole of philosophy is the relation

of thinking and being, right? And Spinoza's viewpoint, that thought and matter are two sides at the same coin, the same mode viewed under different attributes. I think this framework's incredibly useful for helping us think through the relationship between the mind and the body, between the idea and matter or its realization. But what's missing from Spinoza, at least, you know, there might be hints of it, but I don't find it as articulated. But present in Hagle and Marx is this explanation of the transition between the two, right? It's not just the unity of opposites, but like the interpenetration and transition of opposites into each other. And for Hagle and marks, it's practice that actualizes the inner content of thought, bringing the content of the

mind into the world through your own activity. And so, I think that that move of transition, and there are, you know, there are arguments where you can point to certain places in Spinoza. I think there's somewhere where he talks about, like, drawing a triangle or something with his hands that the Russian philosopher, Ilyankov talks about is a kind of example of, like, a predecessor to this. But I think really like this, we need to, like, to put it into terms of that will be familiar to anyone who works in the Marxist tradition it's not just that the base and superstructure

are two sides of the same coin it's that they inter like the dialectically co-determined and interact with each other right? Yes. And so I think that that's the thing that we really get in Hegel and Marxist dialectic is this this movement between mind and matter

which is much more materialist in Marx, but I think there are already hints in Hagel of this kind of framework, even though he is absolutely an idealist. He's, you know, he's an idealist who has moments of materialism in him at times. So I think that that is an important thing to think about how can we use this framework that I think Spinoza offers that's really compelling for looking at the mind and body as two sides of the same coin, but also understand that they're two sides that kind of dialectically turn into each other.

and then the second is that Spinoza's viewpoint is incompatible with a commitment of dialectical materialism regarding contradiction and the inner penetration of opposites within matter itself right so this is like right like this thesis for like why suicide is metaphysically impossible is because nothing can like have a nothing can be self-opposed right um and deluz is a kind of anti-hagalian which i think is ultimately a secretly anti-Marxist a gesture presents Spinoza as this completely affirmative thinker without negation. And I think there's something, there's something like somewhat correct about this statement. Like Spinoza endorses a metaphysical version of the law of non-conjection at one point saying

things are of a contrary nature that is cannot be in the same subject insofar as one can destroy each other. So you can't have two things that destroy or exclude each other in a same subject. But I think something fundamental to Marxism that Marx takes from Hegel and is this idea that everything has these inherent seeds

of contradiction within them that are ultimately the source of their own destruction, right? And that's, I think, the thing that's really dialectical that's that where Marx and Hegel went beyond Spinoza. Yeah.

Yeah. As far as like the way he argued use and like the kind of broader picture of Spinoza, there's there are incredibly interesting dialectical points as well as just the the idea of the two or infinite attributes, but really two that we can know two things being something being both two and one at the same time as far as mind and body go. Yeah. That's brilliant, brilliant stuff. I mean, yeah, this conversation has been absolutely amazing. Colin, I couldn't actually. for a better guest to tackle this topic with and the thought of Spinoza and your ability

to relate it to dialectics and not only talk about where they overlap, but talk about their divergences, which are just as important and just as interesting as the overlap, as the similarities, not only with Buddhism, but also with, you know, Higalian philosophy, Marxist philosophy, dialectical materialism more broadly. It's wonderful. You started off that answer with a really important point about how philosophy in the West sort of criminally underrepresents the philosophy of the east. And one book that I've been sort of, you know, dealing with lately is this book called Absence on the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East by Korean philosopher, but operating out of Germany named Beyond Chul Han. And the whole book is, the book is called

absence. The whole book is wrestling with Western philosophy starting with the concept of essence and Eastern philosophy starting with its inverse absence. And so he goes through Western and Eastern philosophy talks about how they start from these different starting points and the different conclusions that are drawn from them and then tries to sort of synthesize in some ways, you know, as much as he can. And I'm not fully through it. That's really interesting. Yeah. And just the whole, I'm trying to get into this guy's work more broadly because he writes a lot about capitalism, the death drive, neoliberalism, etc. But he does a lot of work on Zen Buddhism, the importance of a contemplative life

and yeah, this book absence where he's really wrestling with Eastern and Western philosophy and kind of juxtaposing them and working through them. So people who are interested in that definitely check that book out and that might interest.

It's only 120 pages. He writes really short, hard-hitting book so it's kind of nice not to have to slog through 900 pages. So if any people are interested, check that out. But Colin, thank you so much for coming on the show.

This has been wonderful. Absolutely, you're coming back on. I won't even let you say. now. I'm going to make you come back on. We'll talk about more stuff. I can't wait. Yeah. It's very much a feeling of a spiritual union. When me and you have this conversation, it feels as if I'm talking to a kindred spirit. And I know I am. So thank you for sharing your time and your knowledge with us today. Before I let you go, is there anywhere that listeners can find you in your work online or any other recommendations or plugs you'd like to make?

Yeah. So I'm primarily operating on Twitter nowadays, although I just recently launched a TikTok and a Red Note account. Nice. So I'm going to see how that goes with TikTok and whether they ban it again or not. But basically I just wanted to do some short, like, bite-sized kind of philosophy slash Marxist theory stuff for helping people with, you know, understanding concepts or knowing what to read, things like that. And I might launch a YouTube channel sometime this year focusing on philosophy and kind of giving some, like, making some lectures available for the public. just because I'd like to do that and you know I think a lot of academia is kind of turning to this online content creation stuff too for you know a lot of the people in the adjunct position regarding red note by the way the the Chinese app that a lot of people fled to from TikTok I just wanted to say it's been truly fascinating so anybody who's relatively active on social media should check it out because talking to Chinese students about Marxism and a country where Marxism is taught in high school is super fascinating. and humbling in a lot of ways. So yeah, Twitter, TikTok, red note, and then, you know,

look out there might be a YouTube channel soon. Sweet. Perfect. I'll link to as much of that in the show notes as possible. And yeah, hopefully you're down to continue working together and we can continue doing, you know, these sorts of discussions because you're really good at explaining complex topics and tying them to broader strains of thought within philosophy. So it's been a real honor and a real pleasure, my friend. Let's do it again sometime soon. Absolutely. Thank you so much. I've seen summons buried in more air, buried in space, and I just lie down in the snow, buried in space.

I've seen moss covered stones Taking all shapes Black wooden mythologies I know a place layer after layer of comprehension welling up in morning light between two mysteries the town rests in the town rests in the valley, Beneath twin pieces

Buried in space What goes on up there In the night In that dark glories place Driving to work in the morning We live in graves Always trying to climb out of the hole buried in space. And the song's fate

And the singers died But my heart Will not stop thumping The shapes in the dark Still look convincing So here I am You know, I'm sorry.

You know,