Spinoza

[hoopla]

I might read some. Can anyone tell me, what Negri took from him, and if/how it /he is important.

Cheers

:unsure:

[BurnTheOliveTree]

I've only heard of him in the context of Einstein, who once said that he believed in "Spinoza's God". He seems to be a good egg though, by all accounts.

-Alex

[hoopla]

He's (Negri) written a book on Spinoza, called "The savage anomoly". Its fairly well known, I think.

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoza

Philosophical debate during had a lot to due with epistemology. As a rationalist, Spinoza was on what I consider to be the wrong side of the epistemological debate on how we obtain knowledge/truth, et cetera. However, I enjoy Spinoza's elaborations on determinism, and I appreciate his religious criticisms and pantheist views (which are inherently atheistic but recognize/propagandize the idea that the universe is intrinsically a thing of beauty).

There are those who say Einstein was a follower of Judaism. They are incorrect as he was an atheistic pantheist. The extent of his belief in religious value was that of a postmodern desire to construct the idea that the universe's beauty is self evident. This, he did, because science was continuously suggesting the idea of a nihilistic universe. Einstein, and Spinzoa, in my opinion, attempted to use a Nietzschean approach to making life valuable.

Spinzoa, unlike Einstein, however, was a bit too mystic (in my opinion) but he was a victim of his time.

[blake 3:17]

For a readable secondary text, I really enjoyed Looking for Spinoza. I have interests in neuroscience and social history and it covers both.

A review:
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain
by Antonio Damasio
2003. Harcourt Inc., Orlando
Reviewed by Roy Sugarman, Ph.D., Senior Clinical Neuropsychologist, Glenside Campus/RAH, Clinical Lecturer, Dept of Psychiatry, Adelaide University, P O Box 17, Fullarton SA 5063, Australia.



Yet another review of this now famous trilogy that began with Descartes Error, and continued with The Feeling of What Happens. One of the leading neuroscientists in the world, Antonio Damasio, together with his wife and colleagues continue to explore how we interpret somatic sensations, and Damasio continues to write books.

One might question why he has chosen to write books, as opposed to his myriad publications and interviews and other media expansions on the themes he chooses to investigate.

Reading them makes it clear we are watching his thinking in progress, his musing, using direction from famous case histories, and from philosophical works. Apart from the view of a fatherly God in Heaven, Spinoza, the great 17th Century Jewish philosopher, taught us to look for a god everywhere, and in everything, within and without ourselves, not a disconnected God in heaven, male, grey haired, with a charismatic presence from a distance.

Instead, Damasio follows up on Spinoza, inspired when he tried to verify a previous reference to the great ancestor of emotional thought, to write this third book.

As neuroscience has come of age, neurologists are no longer confining themselves to only what they can see, and psychiatrists not only to what no-one can. Psychologists, well, let’s not go there; we are still defining ourselves in that milieu, to the benefit of neuropsychology. Damasio’s musings may lack scientific rigor, but hey, he leaves that to his scholarly journal articles, this is his hobby we are examining here, and we should not expect ultimate closure. He is developing things gradually in these works, blending theory and facts so that hypothesis testing can take place, and his workshop is the book, not the laboratory. In short, Damasio is offering us a personal peek into his psyche and his mind, into the feelings of what happens when he thinks with Descartes or Spinoza’s words subsuming his own thoughts. It’s a great idea, worthy of Hughlings Jackson and other predecessorsLink. (http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/spinoza.html)

[Epoche]

As neuroscience has come of age, neurologists are no longer confining themselves to only what they can see

...which is why Spinoza's metaphysics and its ambiguity works so well to accomodate theorists who fail to understand the difference between existential truths and metaphorical truths. Spinoza's schemata, his systematizing of technical terms such as "cause," "attribute," "extension," are treated and applied as if they are "objects" in themselves, as if they are sensible, but they are not. They are metaphors that involve complex premises which constantly refer backward to some ideal original "term" from which all others might arise, to the point where everything said is almost completely interchangeable.

Don't get me wrong, I fucking love Spinoza, but neither am I a philosopher.

So Spinoza attempted to create a narrative which acted like a physical shape, a physical form, something which maintained logical rigidity outside of language, while the foundation was nothing more than a decided "place to start" in terminologies, from which a structure would be erected. In a sense you can "say" something logical if the form of the statement follows certain rules, but this is not to say that all statements must be about an objective state. This is quite unfortunate and par for the course in philosophy. For example, what could "having adequate knowledge of causes," as Spinoza is cited to say, possibly mean?

Well...it could mean several things, and therefore, it won't work.

I agree with Rosa here in that Spinoza is quite possibly a terrible mis-use of language, so severe that he himself could not recognize. Its typical philosophy. It is metaphor ridden and because of that, it strays away from anything "objective" to the utmost limits. Once these neuroscientists decide that quantifiable, empirical, and indifferent demonstrable objects are "not enough" to explain the nature of "mind," anything goes. Enter the metaphor. Neuroscientists then approach a model of mind without any direct reference to its objective state; they coin the term "somatic" and attach to it certain psychologistic metaphors. This one is "happy," this one is "anxious," etc., etc. The mistake here is the association of behavior to contexts which are metaphorical to begin with.

There is no such thing as a mental state, so neurologists are looking for something which doesn't exist.There can only be observable physical states in a first-person perspective, under Sartrean criterion, in the cogito. An analysis of mind must revert itself to an analysis of consciousness, rather than treating mind as an observable objective state which can be understood without "confining themselves to only what they can see."

Spinoza is a dualist in disguise. That's right. He has done nothing but sublimate man's anthropological concern for morality in a godless universe to a new universe where moral afflictions are overcome while maintaining a divinity. He refurbished theology with a material metaphysics. Spinoza was an ontological psychologist. His work treated priests and philosophers who were asking the same question Kierkegaard was asking the Cartesian God. Spinoza fixed one thing...creating a new problem:

"God is everything," says Spinoza.

"Okay....now what?", asks Kierkegaard.

The irony in the last five hundred years is that the language for the invention of metaphysics is original to an existential class consciousness. Ideology has nothing whatsoever to do with the existential, and "philosophy" can absolutely never provide a solution to anything. Spinoza was no more fixing anything than he was inventing anything or creating new problems. There is no grand scheme to this universe, it has no metaphors. Man is his work and there is nothing more.