Spinoza: Life and Legacy | Hacker News Reader

Spinoza: Life and Legacy

thecritic.co.uk

115 pointspepys53 comments

There's a unique statue of Spinoza in Amsterdam, he has a coat of parrots. The tram drives past, its one of those 'blink and you miss it' moments. People mostly just walk by.

Being shunned at any time is hard. Being shunned in the 17th century could be lethal. Being a Jew is hard at any time, being a non-religious Jew, shunned by your community in the 17th century was loading the footgun. Still, he did what he thought was right, it seemed to work out.

In 17th century was it better to be a religious Jew in Belgium or non-religious Jew in Belgium?

He lived in the Netherlands

The "curse" put on Spinoza on his expulsion from the Jewish community left some impression on teenage me. I don't know if it's just a generic wording from existing sources but wow is it harsh

> Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law.

It's language straight from the Law, a mixture of phrases that emphasize the totality of the curse over all of life by reiterating it in a number of ways. See Deuteronomy 6 and 28 for examples of both the 'totality' language and the phrasing of curses.

I think all that attention to an individual will permanently sit on the Lord's backlog.

Shakespeare's tombstone quote:

The grave, where the playwright was buried in 1616, carries the warning: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forebeare, To digg the dust enclosed heare; Bleste be the man that spares thes stones, And curst be he that moves my bones."

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-35688546

> To sum up, all of you be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit; not returning evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead; for you were called for the very purpose that you might inherit a blessing.

Those persons don't understand the spirit of the One they serve. If they did, they would act differently.

Irrespective of the point you're trying to express, it's extremely odd to criticize jews based on a quote from the new testament...

its almost an inverse shema.

more accurately, it was a synagogue in Amsterdam that excommunicated him and the current Rabbi upholds this. But many in the Jewish community have called for it to be reversed. Excommunication is different in Judaism and Catholicism though, since in the latter Rome enforces this whereas in the former its very much local.

He has an interesting interpretation of g-d and it is understandable the friction this caused given the religious nature of Europe during the 1600s and the desire for the Jewish community be preserved. Given it was a Sephardic synagogue and this is only a hundred or so years after the Alhambra decree which forced Jews out of Spain lest they convert to catholicism. Portugal did the same, but did not allow Jews to escape so they either converted or were executed. Persecution against Jews continued in the Iberian peninsula for hundreds of years. As such, preservation of the Jewish community and way of life was extremely important.

> Portugal did the same, but did not allow Jews to escape so they either converted or were executed.

Yes, they did have the option of escaping. Portugal initially took in Jews expelled from Spain, in 1492, then in 1496 the Portuguese king Manuel I gave Jews the choice between conversion and expulsion. Those who who did neither by the Easter 1497 deadline were put to death.

lest -> unless ('lest' means basically the opposite from what you probably mean)

Spinoza used to live around the corner from where I live now, and I used to live a few hundred meters frome here, on the Spinozalaan (-lane). Another fun fact, a few houses down from where Spinoza lived, is the residence of the Huygens family. Christiaan Huygens is the inventor of the pendulum clock, amongst many other scientific improvements.

Apparently the two knew eachother... :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiaan_Huygens https://www.hofwijck.nl/nl/spinoza-op-hofwijck

Another amazing book that showcases Spinoza:

Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain by Antonio Damasio.

Not a bio on him but definitely showcases him and his beliefs and life. It changed the way I view the world and people forever.

Antonio Damasio is himself another super smart guy with very interesting theories and several books and talks about the thinking process and how the brain processes the world. Highly recommend as well!

Not sure if he was somewhat of a neo-stoic or not, but for some ideas he developed the stoic ideas further. For example the 4 basic emotions, he considered desire a positive emotion, as long as it is tempered. Desire is what drives a human, without desire there is no will or power. And his idea about fear was most remarkable, it's about choosing between two options that are both undesirable.

He had strong ideas how to live a good and happy life. These ideas are not that far from stoic ideas. There are values in life that far exceed our individual life. And we are more together than alone, even though we don't feel it that way.

His thoughts about state and society were valuable and quite original in the 17th century. State and church should be separate. State should be about freedom and serving the people.

Just some ideas, worded sloppily by me :) He had strong ideas about how you should live your life. Unlike many other philosophers who only could tell how not to live. Not to be rude to anyone, but Nietzsche and Arendt come to mind here.

In the spirit of enlightenment and the continuing progress of science I would just add to this that current thinking is there are 25 identifiable emotions which are often experienced in combinations together:

https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2018.0001...

I find Spinoza very approachable. Much of what he said resonates with me. For anyone unfamiliar, this is a light but entertaining introduction to some of his ideas:

(Spinoza: A Complete Guide to Life) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leoBccWOZfo

His ideas might be approachable, his writing certainly isn't.

The best advice I ever got regarding Spinoza's Ethics was to read it backwards, and focus on the corollaries (and notes at the end of sections).

If you start the Ethics at the end you find a great introduction to reading Spinoza:

> But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

It's from this I also derive my belief that if you find Spinoza "approachable" then you probably haven't spent enough time with Spinoza.

The axioms in Ethics took me an hour and I still wasn't happy.

Beth Lord has a great guide to the Ethics.

One thing about Spinoza I find incredible is his description of how god must be a substance that permeates all nature and how god always and everywhere behaves the same way.

It takes right to my Science class in school: the laws of nature are the same everywhere. But I haven't read about any link between his philosophy and science from that age.

It's a mechanistic, deterministic philosophy that takes the form of a rigid geometrical proof system, starting with the axiom that God is nature. It follows the rationalist scientific tradition of Cartesianism which believes that all knowledge can be derived a priori with deductive reasoning, accumulating an ever-increasing body of knowledge and projecting it on a neat coordinate system.

>One thing about Spinoza I find incredible is his description of how god must be a substance that permeates all nature and how god always and everywhere behaves the same way.

Somewhat loosely matches with ideas in Advaita Vedanta, up to the words "all nature".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

Personally I don't think that the Wikipedia article is a good description, but I am not a scholar; my opinion is just based on having heard and read about the subject from family and friends, and reading some books about it.

> One thing about Spinoza I find incredible is his description of how god must be a substance that permeates all nature […]

Standard Thomas Aquinas (and Aristotle?): [Gg]od is Being itself. Do a search for the term ipsum esse subsistens.

That's not the same thing. The classic formulation is saying that for God, existence is essential, while other beings (not god) do not essentially exist. Spinoza is arguing that God's existence underlies all of existence.

> […] God's existence underlies all of existence.

How is that different than Aquinas/Aristotle?

Most simply, because they aren't addressing existence of things other than god in their formulation. They're making a statement about God's own existence. Spinoza is talking about (the connection between God and) the world.

> Spinoza is talking about (the connection between God and) the world.

And so does Aquinas: "Article 1. Whether God is in all things? […] Article 2. Whether God is everywhere? […]"

* https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1008.htm

1. I was responding to a comment invoking ipsum esse subsistent, and it remains true that it is not related to the position of Spinoza being discussed here.

2. According to Aquinas (as you linked), God is "present" inasmuch that God acts on all things ("God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works"), and Spinoza was certainly more extreme than that. Spinoza thought the world (and everything in it) is a "mode" of God.

Baruch de Spinoza, Francis Bacon, Hans Christian Andersen, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I wonder if we would have enjoyed any of them had they been allowed to enjoy love. Let's pray in gratitude for the moral laws that made them possible (/s).

I had read this Spinoza quote some years ago in some book, and liked it:

"I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them."

From:

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/baruch_spinoza_387348

There are different versions of it online with different wordings, but the meaning seems to be essentially the same.

I like this shorter version too:

"Not to laugh, not to weep, not to lament, but to understand".

This was also a great book- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117008.The_Courtier_and_...

Juxtaposition of the two, Spinoza and Leibniz, together made it a great read.

Spinoza sections are very very good and make you understand why Einstein would say that he believes in Spinoza's God

Thank You. Big fan of both, and I had never realized they had met.

I did try going through Ethica [1] some time ago, but to be honest the axiom, theorem, proof format did not resonate with me. Maybe I should give it another go or read a digested account of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_(Spinoza_book)

For a first pass I highly recommend reading the Ethics backwards, and only focusing on the collaries and the notes at the end of each section. Ignore the axioms and proofs for the first few passes through the book.

The content and notes at the end of sections are much easier to read and quite beautiful.

When I first read Ethics in the order presented I was deeply confused as to why Spinoza was considered the "prince of philosophers". After revising my approach he's rapidly becoming one of my favorite.

Despite it's presentation, the Ethics is much better approached in a very non-linear fashion.

edit: I also recommend Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. If you've read Deleuze's other work you may or may not be put off by this recommendation, but his work on Spinoza covers a lot of ground an is very readable.

This totally makes sense. The axiomatic derivation and "mathematical" presentation may have had good motivation at the time (maybe to intimidate critics?) but it seems to raise the bar unnecessarily high given this is philosophical text, not rigorous mathematics. Reading it sequentially and taking the mathematical form seriously makes it subject to a "propagation of errors" type pathology [1] (the unease that the next statement simply follows logically from the previous ones keeps growing).

In the end what is interesting is to understand his philosophical world view which no doubt had internal coherence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty

Philosophical texts are not novels; they are more like scientific publications, requiring prior study. Unless you have a solid grounding in the history of philosophy, they are incomprehensible.

I minored in Undergrad. I thought the program would be easy because the credit hours required was lower compared to other similar program's requirements. Boy was I wrong. When I took metaphysics the reading list in the syllabus was roughly as large as your average English Lit. course, but I probably spent twice as much time on that 300-level three hour class as I ever spent on any other similar class. I pride myself in my reading comprehension skills. Even today I typically only have to read the majority of things once before understanding it. I think I re-read everything in that class at least twice if not more depending on the philosopher.

Not questioning your intelligence or your studies.

But I wouldn't presume to understand a paper in, say, topology or number theory, without a degree in mathematics.

Philosophy has the appearance of accessibility, because it uses ordinary language. But without an MA in Philosophy, a working knowledge of Latin, and some notion of context (Renaissance culture and Judaism) I wouldn't expect to understand Spinoza.

Sure, I wouldn't either. When I said the majority of things, I meant literature, documentation, and common legal documents, not so much advanced theoretical papers or if I'm being completely honest, most things in mathematics. I re-read those too.

I have a BS in Math and a great deal of papers that are in topology or number theory are basically inscrutable to me without significant effort to get the relevant background information.

Math and philosophy are both extremely challenging subjects with deep wells of information to draw from.

Several times I have attempted to turn Ethica into a graph notation form that I could then run through query tools, in multiple translations even. (Most recently in my first couple weeks at RelationalAI where I began to encode it into their graph-relational Rel language.) I never finish. It's too much work.

But I think this is actually the missing piece. Reading it as a text end-to-end is just pain. I'm sure Spinoza himself was able to mentally "browse" the text and it all fit together for him, but this would require incredible discipline.

Having nice tools to query and analyze it and project it to be readable in multiple forms would go a long way with that text (and maybe others written in the 'geometrical' form).

Maybe I'll give it another whirl in a Datalog variant like CozoDB etc. And maybe just restrict my efforts to the first section only. And maybe something like ChatGPT and/or CoPilot could help.

Yeah, I had the same experience, but I found video series on youtube where they discuss each chapter which I found very helpful.

I'll recommend a video series on it also, for the same reason. While I enjoy the content, the presentation just didn't click.

I'm surprised dual aspect theory as a solution to the mind-body problem isn't better known (at least, I hasn't heard of it.)

As a locus for philosophy i.e. asking questions with no possible final answer I find Spinoza a great starting point for (modern western) philosophy.

A distinction needs to be made between his later reception (18th century to now) and his influence during his times in the 17th century. His later reception is much charaterized by talking/writing about his works in terms of influence. As with other works (Newtons's Principia, Kant's Critique or Wittgenstein's Tractatus come to mind) with some inital investment required by the reader very few actually read his works in its whole context; e.g. Nietzsche probably only read an introduction to Spinoza's philosophy by Kuno Fischer [0].

Spinoza's work (especially Ethics) can be seen as systematic dismantlement of the all pervading scholastic thinking of his time which already suffered heavy losses by prominent brilliant minds as Francis Bacon ("Empiricism") or Descartes' ("Rationalism"). Exceptional in the Classics he was casting his radical thinking in Ethics into the form of Euclid's "Elements"; back then - arguably the most accomplished kind of reasoning: strictly deducting from evident truths (axioms). [1]

At the time the impression of someone reading the forbidden "Ethics" must have been something like: throwing a half-assed Cartesian Dualism in its own black hole and emerge with an undeniable singularity, later coined by Raphson as "Pantheism".

This vantage point totally freed from any remnants of scholastic shackles allowed for a livley discourse e.g. the pantheism controversy [2] in Germany about a century later and I guess also a deeper appreciation for Eastern philosophy (see: Schopenhauer).

Its influence on psychoanalysis is not as widely covered, this book I find an accessible introduction to Spinoza in this regard [3].

[0]https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/niet.2012.41....

[1]humanas actiones atque appetitus considerabo perinde ac si quæstio de lineis, planis aut de corporibus esset. ("I will consider human actions and appetites just as if the question were about lines, planes or bodies.") https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/spinoza.ethica3.html

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism_controversy

[3]https://www.routledge.com/Clinical-Spinoza-Integrating-His-P...

"Success is a stale finale. The struggle /is/ the success." - Spinoza

Edit: this is probably wrongly attributed. I don't know why

More commonly attributed to Eugene O'Neill: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Success+is+a+stale+finale.... A playwright would be more likely to use the word "finale", and in any case the thought is too modern for Spinoza. But most probably it was neither of them—quotes like this are nearly always misattributed.

"The journey is the reward" - Steve Jobs

As long as the journey contains ethics (no Spinoza pun intended) from DRM to discarded children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com