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May 11, - According to Spinoza, the intellectual love of God represents the very peak of human achievement and happiness. But when we turn to the.
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Spinoza has forsworn the Jew's love of that history. That was the love that was too heartbreaking to bear.

Baruch Spinoza (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

As Goldstein sees it, Spinoza developed a philosophy that renounced identity because his Jewish identity was too painful, both in his own excommunication and in the history of his people, the Sephardic Jews. Much of "Betraying Spinoza" follows the history of this people, beginning with a golden age in the tolerant, culturally sophisticated, Muslim-ruled Spain of the early Middle Ages. When European Christians finally regained control of Spain in the 15th century, a bloody campaign of persecution and eventually expulsion against Spanish Jews began.

Spinoza was descended from Sephardim who were driven by the Inquisition out of Spain and into Portugal, and eventually out of Portugal to Amsterdam.


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Spinoza, Goldstein suspects, could no longer countenance the Jews' insistence on their status as the people chosen by God and their efforts to reconcile this belief with the seemingly endless sufferings they had endured. According to Spinoza's philosophy, the idea of a special or chosen people is absurd -- even the idea that humanity constitutes some special category of creation, in fact even the idea of creation is absurd.

Spinoza's vision of the world as "the all-embracing web of necessary truths, intelligible through and through," countered the Jewish notion of a God of arbitrary laws and murderous rages and kabalistic fantasies of unfathomable mystery. In effect, Goldstein is claiming that the fact of Spinoza's Jewishness makes itself most felt in the way his philosophy seems custom-designed to refute the premises of Judaism as he knew it.

The Greatest Thing: Spinoza, Loving God, and Being Loved in Return

For Stewart, on the other hand, Spinoza's Jewishness is an ancillary issue. He sees the philosopher as a fundamentally political thinker. Looking around him, at the prospering and religiously tolerant Dutch Republic, Spinoza formulated a vision of the ideal state as a secular, democratic authority that ensured what he christened "freedom of conscience. In a way, Spinoza was a proto-American.

Stewart is so taken with this aspect of Spinoza's legacy that he makes the not very credible claim that it is the true root of the philosopher's thought. That is, his metaphysics would be intelligible principally as the expression of his political project, to overthrow theocracy. If only we could always assume that the easiest part to understand in a philosopher's work is also the most important part!

A Spinoza whose dearest goal is to overthrow theocracy and ensure the freedoms of a democratic secular state is certainly more appealing nowadays than the one who insists on his own weird, impersonal, indifferent "God" and the supremacy of reason over passion. But it seems more likely that Spinoza's quest to discover the nature of reality came first, and that it was the efforts of various religious authorities to squelch his questions and ideas that led him to conceive of the ideal of a secular, tolerant state.

100 Most Inspiring Quotes by Baruch Spinoza

Likewise, a Spinoza who honored his Jewish heritage enough to devote his life to transcending it seems more sympathetic than a Spinoza who cold-bloodedly tossed it out as a collection of absurd superstitions and tribal delusions of grandeur. Both versions of Spinoza -- the crusader for freedom of conscience and the tragic Jewish intellectual -- humanize the philosopher in ways congenial to our modern principles of liberal individualism.

And certainly Spinoza, as both Goldstein and Stewart point out, is one of the prophets of modernism. But there is also Spinoza's materialism, which makes him a "protobiologist" in Damasio's view, and perhaps a deterministic proto-Darwinian to others. Some might see the philosopher's advocacy of "radical objectivity" as harmonious with the Buddhist doctrines of non-attachment -- even if Spinoza's geometrically derived rationalism has little in common with the mind-emptying practice of meditation.


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Maybe someone will even eventually come along to admire the philosopher's "ruthless high-mindedness. If Spinoza was right about the universe, he's not around anywhere to either appreciate the irony of this or to rail against our solipsism. And that's just one more reason for us to love him so much.

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Everybody loves Spinoza Atheist Jew, champion of modernism, and kind and sociable man, the 17th century lens grinder who was "drunk on God" continues to win hearts and minds with his breathtaking philosophical vision. Related Topics Books.

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Related Articles Is everything getting worse? Maybe not Chauncey DeVega. Steven Pinker and the annoying white men Phil Torres. How do dual-career couples make it work? Mary Elizabeth Williams. Show Comments. He rejects Descartes's characterization of love insofar as it involves imagining oneself joined to the loved object ; he dismisses the role given the pineal gland as both anatomically incorrect and non-explanatory; and most importantly, he denies that we can gain control over our passions, holding that it is metaphysically impossible for the human mind to be autonomous in the way Descartes held.

On this last point, Spinoza is even more at odds with the Stoics, although at the same time he is quite sympathetic to their desire for escape from the passions. Indeed, he shares with the Stoics an ideal of freedom, in contrast with being hostage to fortune, in a world that unfolds according to its own law. Spinoza's debt to Hobbes is less ambivalent than his borrowing from other predecessors.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza holds that the passions endemic to human life breed conflict. And like Hobbes, he argues that the disadvantages of the state of nature can be resolved through the institution of a sovereign imposing a common and public measure for right and wrong. For all the mining of earlier sources, Spinoza's approach to the emotions is distinctive, beginning with his vocabulary.

But the connection between the modifications of the body and ideas is not quite as casual as this definition may sound. Spinoza's parallelism holds that the mind is constituted by its idea of the body; we become aware of the body, however, largely through its changes. So it is really the affects — whether active or passive — that constitute the mind.

Parallelism further entails that the affects involve both the body and the mind passing to a greater or lesser perfection without, of course, assuming any causal link between the two. And although, Spinoza takes the mind's striving for its own perfection to be tantamount for the most part to striving for a more perfect body, the striving itself is best explained through the economy of the affects.

What makes an affect a passion is that it is confused, and therefore inadequate. That is, the mind is not the adequate cause of the affect; rather, it responds to some external thing, which can thus be considered the active cause. We turn passions into actions insofar as we conceive some idea clearly and distinctly, or adequately. It is in our interest to do so, since bondage to the passions is not a happy state of affairs. Nevertheless, the experience of some passions is part of the human condition, insofar as humans are not God, but merely finite parts of the whole substance of the universe.

Spinoza recognizes various other states that are emotion-like, but which he is reluctant to call passions, or even affects. For instance, he discusses wonder and contempt among the passions, largely because of their significance for theorists such as Descartes. But Spinoza takes them to mark more the absence than the presence of a passion.

Moderation and related states indicate strength of mind, not the affects thereby controlled. Shamelessness, on the other hand, is an absence of affect an affect that we would normally expect. In a different vein, God's love for himself cannot count as an affect, since God is immutable and this love is essential to God. Similarly, blessedness [ beatitudo ], by which humans approach to God, doesn't seem a proper affect.

Other kinds of affects, e. All of the affects proper derive from what is essential to the mind, its conatus, or drive toward self-preservation.

An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers.

Pleasure, joy and delight [ laetitia ] involve passing to state of greater perfection, that is, to greater power. Pain, displeasure, and sorrow [ tristitia ], in contrast, involve passing to state of lesser perfection and power. These affects are passions when the causes of the bodily changes are at least in part external; they are thus ideas of such things as increase or diminish the body's power of acting. The affects and passions express this conatus, without being designed for any end; they are merely appetites lacking final causes.

One of Spinoza's most general principles is that we all strive to preserve our own being, or what comes to much the same thing, to increase our power of acting. This explains the attractive and aversive aspects of joy and sadness, which are simply the affects involved in a change in the power of acting. It also explains why the distinction between active affects and passions is important to Spinoza.

The mind can act to pass to greater perfection, that is, to preserve its own being and increase its power of action; indeed insofar as it genuinely acts it is doing both, and so acting as such generates affects but not passions of joy and desire. By the same token, the mind feels no affects of sadness insofar as it acts: painful passions are all passions, and as such, involve passing to a state of lesser perfection. Only active affects and those passions that signal an increase in our power of acting are enjoyable.