# Spinoza's Ethics

## February 3rd, 2020

- Pre-class scribblings:

        Ah, stress
        we meet again
        bender of brains and wills

- You have an argument analysis assignment that is due **February 9th** (i.e. this coming Sunday!)
    - It's listed as being due on the 7th on the syllabus, but that was an error
- "Also, it feels like spring, which is nice - in keeping with Groundhog Day, which Spinoza would NOT have been a fan of"
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Okay, let's wrap up talking about Cavendish
    - On Wednesday, we read Elisabeth of Bohemia's version of the "interaction problem:" how can the mind interact with a material body if it's not material?
    - Cavendish tries to solve this by saying that EVERYTHING is made of matter!
        - ...however, she doesn't have a "materialistic" view of the world as just "stuff moving other stuff" deterministically, like Descartes seems to have
        - Instead, she thinks that living things (at least) have the ability to move themselves, a position known as VITALISM
            - However, since Cavendish is also a materialist, she thinks that this force is somehow part of matter itself; for her, it makes more sense for this force to be part of matter itself rather than just "floating" somewhere way off from the body, detached
            - From this perspective, everything is technically a little bit alive, a position known as "panpsychism"
    - "I'm not 100% sure I understand Cavendish, but this is how I explain her to myself"

- So, let's transition to Spinoza - who admires Descartes, but goes even further. Let's meet him!
    - Spinoza is born in 1632 in Amsterdam, born into a Jewish family and a free-thinking culture
        - Some of his ideas, however, were *radical*, and so he was ostracized from his family and connections, spending the rest of his life grinding telescope lenses and corresponding with other thinkers who respected his thoughts
    - Spinoza's method, however, did not look like Descartes' *Meditations*; instead, it looks like a bunch of geometrical proofs! He even starts with a list of definitions and axioms!
        - Because of how dependant it is on previous axioms, Spinoza can be dense and hard to understand - "you HAVE to keep flipping to the axioms when you're reading *The Ethics*"
    - So, let's start at the end: the appendix to Book I, page 188
        - "All the prejudices which I intend to mend [stem from] the widespread belief...that all things in nature...act with an end in view"
        - Spinoza thinks the idea that things happen "for a GOOD reason" or "for man's benefit" is a *prejudice*, and he's trying to fight against it
            - e.g. Natural disasters! Spinoza thinks people are biased in trying to "explain why" God let's this happen, retroactively assuming it must have happened for some divine purpose rather than it just occurring due to nature
        - Similarly, he accuses people of having an anthropocentric view of the world, seeing animals as made for food, the sun as helping us see, etc., rather than existing for themselves
            - Spinoza thinks this is *trash*, and is a biased way of looking at nature without a rational basis
        - Spinoza's point is that things in the world *don't happen for a purpose* (from his point of view), and that trying to explain them as such is a biased error
            - Notice, too, that he critiques religion as just a comforting example of this bias - right or wrong, that's his view

- So, that's the 1st prejudice Spinoza rails against in this appendix - what are the other 2?
    - On page 191, he point out that people ascribe moral judgments to nature based on its effect on us (e.g. saying slugs *are* disgusting, rather than that we find them so)
        - Spinoza would argue that the slug itself isn't good or bad, but that humans falsely ascribe our irrational judgments on them
        - For Spinoza, *all* existence is a piece of God, and therefore equally good, as we'll see

- Why is Spinoza doing this? Because he's trying to get beyond mere "human" views and see objective reality
    - Politically, too, Spinoza was a Liberalist - not "liberal" in the modern American sense, but a believer in radical free speech and self-expression and "freedom" (though he has some stuff to say about free will)

- So, that's where Spinoza's heading - let's try and dig a little more into the specifics of Book I
    - There are 3 definitions Spinoza makes immediately that are *super* important:
        - SUBSTANCE is something totally independent, that can be conceived without other concepts and doesn't need anything else to exist
        - ATTRIBUTES are a way of looking at substances
        - MODES are formulations of a substance
    - Spinoza believes there's only 1 substance: God, which is the *same* as nature, which we perceive through 2 different attributes: thought, and material matter
        - Spinoza thinks these are actually the same thing, but we perceive them as distinct due to human limitations
    - Finally for today, Spinoza presents 1 extremely important idea: the PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON (PSR)
        - Essentially, this says that *everything* has a cause - in particular, that everything has an "efficient" cause in Aristotelian terms and nothing else, and to understand the causes that made something is to understand the thing itself

- Okay, we'll try and wrap up Spinoza on Wednesday!