Baruch Spinoza

So I just wanted to say here that I think Joe's actually quite right.

So I think it's interesting that historically, somebody like Spinoza was branded an atheist.

Now, of course, if you read Spinoza's Ethics, it begins with the ontological argument for the existence of God.

But the difference is that Spinoza's God ends up being a base metaphysical principle of necessity, such that when we look around, well, whatever that necessity is that gives rise to all of this stuff... is what we call God.

In some ways, it's almost taking Aquinas' conclusion, and this all men call God, and saying, well, that absolute necessity that's just there, as if you just told all the scientists who say, well, matter can't be created and destroyed, and it gives rise to all this, and then you say, ah, yes, and this all men call God.

And that's essentially what you have, to oversimplify it, in somebody like Spinoza.

And I think, on the one hand, there's...

There's sort of two ways of looking at this.

In his Confessions, 397-400 CE, St. Augustine looks back on his devastation after a friend's death and diagnoses it as a spiritual mistake.

Why had that grief penetrated me so easily and so deeply, if not because I had poured out my soul onto the sand, loving someone who would die as if he never would? Baruch Spinoza, not religious in any conventional sense of the word, reached the same conclusion.

Sadness, he writes in his Ethics, 1677, is the mind's move to a lesser perfection, a loss of its power to act.

This means it can never be a good in itself, and its typical source is too much love for things that are impermanent.

It's something like, you know, at the height of her abilities she's speaking sort of more than six languages you know so kind of completely sort of you know kind of fluent to the level at which you can engage with philosophy at and so it's her who's I mean Walter Benjamin has a bit more of a profile particularly through Brecht because John knows about Brecht for I think first and that's partly through the seeing them the berliner ensemble and members meeting them through his sort of he sets up this thing in london uh called the the geneva club which is actually geneva it's confusing because he later lives in geneva but it's about the geneva accords which is about the sort of um the pre-american uh history of vietnam so it's a kind of anti it's a kind of anti-colonial um discussion group um and uh yeah it's Anya who all you know from the 60s to the 70s is the one who is um because she's working on alongside her sort of kind of day job at the UN in Geneva she's translating Lukács and Benjamin and all these because John um reads and speaks french uh but not not german which is strange because i often think he sounds quite germanic on recordings but um it's uh yeah it's andrew who's putting in front of him and i who is also kind of i suppose kind of passing it for him because he his i mean i'd be interested in your perspective on this but the set the sense in which he is a philosopher he's not in uh it's it's more on the sort of it often frustrates people certainly from an analytical philosophy tradition the way that he constitutes things but he's drawn far more to expressing it in the kind of the more mystical kind of poetic style of someone like Benjamin and he's the kind of the Kabbalistic dimensions of that also kind of have a there's a kind of Atalistic aspect of that because he knows his own

I think just to plug my own opinion, which obviously is far, far less educated on John, but I think it's really interesting that one i think the art criticism and the poetic language and this looking towards stories looking towards history is far more in line with a traditional view of continental philosophy more broadly which often uh you know the divide could be seen as a divide over uh logic and science versus uh you know a study of history and ideas obviously uh you know both sides uh would argue against this um but as broad strokes i think that's really interesting and i i will say um coming as trained as an analytic philosopher coming to john very much is like coming to someone like uh like benjamin like heidegger um in that categories are more fluid and his way of engaging I mean I think that I want to go on to talk about his relationship with Descartes and Spinoza because at the very least in interviews he says this is a touchstone throughout his life I don't know as the archivist whether or not that was true whether it was likely that he was reading Descartes and Spinoza um but um that it's very interesting you know this development against a sort of strict mechanical term turn rather um which i think someone like you know with and you're putting walter benjamin in front of him i think you know that that to me is like uh the debt could not be um undersold that you know that that sort of language is really powerful and really important for developing both his thought and the way that he goes on to discuss i think you know in terms at least of politics you can you can already see that you know this engagement both with anarchists and stalinists uh you'll you'll be able to get some of the social benefit but the philosophy that Ways of Seeing goes on to develop and perhaps we can talk about in more detail now is really thanks to Anya which is why I'm very happy to bring her up because it's really...

Yeah.

So in terms of, you know, turning more straightforwardly to, I think, obviously the novels G, the Booker Prize winning novel, should be somewhere that anyone who's not familiar with John goes to as an excellent read.

It's, it's really a magnificent biography that really gets into all of the different periods.

But one of the things that I wanted to ask about is, you know, later in life, he, he, um, goes on to write, um, uh, Bento's sketchbook.

Um, he, he goes and I think does a BBC interview where he says he's turning away, uh, from Descartes towards Spinoza, uh, And I just wondered, as a broader philosophical question to you, and just thinking about how his thoughts, his ideas were being changed, whether being drawn to Spinoza was also connected with Spinoza is being cast out.

So Spinoza was cast out of his Amsterdam Jewish community in a similar way much earlier in his life.

Yeah.

Jewish philosopher Spinoza.

What is it? Famously said, like, right now.

Yeah.

She made a comparison between two, what on the surface sound very similar points of view.

One is, I think it dates back to Spinoza.

He called it under the aspect of eternity.

I forget the Latin.

another point of view, which, uh, she calls the Archimedean view, the view from the Archimedean point, this sort of hypothetical point outside of existence from where you can view existence.

And, uh, she said that is a false view, a false consciousness that it's, uh, sort of simulated and delusive.

Whereas, uh, Spinoza's, you know, um, I struggle with understanding exactly the distinction she was raising.

But one, Spinoza's exists in the universe as it is and is not accessible to human beings, right? It's only the pursuit of trying to get there that we're able to do.

But sometimes you catch this sentence and you're like, how powerful this idea is.

And so when you read this, typically, one of the recent book I read was this story about Spinoza.

You know, it's not the book by Spinoza, but it's more like his life and The Problem Spinoza or something like this, I think it's the title of the book.

The idea of reading philosophy books or thought, you know, all these things sort of brings us back to a certain reality that we are not much, you know.

And so I'm trying every day to do things right for, you know, for the others and feel that it's a good motto.

So yeah, I don't really know if I fucking covered this idea very well.

I could go into more philosophers like Hume and Spinoza and shit, but they all fucking say the same thing in different ways.

And sometimes they go into other, like Wittgenstein goes into like, I guess a more word-based argument.

It's very hard to explain what he's trying to say.

And they have this idea.

of God, or if you will, all consciousness, if you will, the substance, for Spinoza maybe, right, or whatever, that is that which is underlying everything.

is basically playing a game with itself where it breaks itself up into a million pieces or more than a million, a zillion, a zillion, a zillion.

More than a million.