Betraying Spinoza
05 Jul 2025 - 31 Dec 2025
- book by Rebecca Goldstein. Picked it up at random in a Berkeley used bookstore when we were out to see that Holocaust play, Here are Blueberries.
- The betrayal is this: she tries to situate Spinoza 's thought in his very specific cultural context, that is, Jewish, specifically part of the Portugese Jewish community that had settled in Amsterdam to escape the Inquisition. This is betrayal of Spinoza's own beliefs and values, which were universalist in the extreme.
Notes
And Spinoza's project is metaphysics on a grand scale — the very grandest, in fact....Logic alone, he argues, is sufficient to reveal the very fabric of reality. In fact, logic alone is the very fabric of reality. And into this fabric are woven not only the descriptive facts of what is, but the normative facts of what ought to be (p48)
- Danger signals going off, I do not place that high a value on logic, quite the contrary. Although Spinoza may have something deeper in my mind than the lame propositions. of formalists.
the fundamental intuition underlying Spinoza's thinking: ... all facts have explanations. For every fact that is true, there is a reason why it is true. p57
- Argh this just seems wrong? Even under materialism. What if facts do not have single reasons but are the result of the working out of physics on the interaction of everything in the universe with everything else? Spinoza believes nothing can be inexplicable or arbitrary. She calls this the "Presumption of Reason". But it is an unstated axiom.
What he will assert...is that logic itself is the world, which can be conceptualized alternatively as God or nature. The world is self-aware logic. p58
- p63 Spinoza as mind-altering drug.
One feels oneself change, however impermanently, as one beholds Spinoza's final point of view—the point of view that approaches, though it can never match, "the Infinite Intellect of God".
- p64 Spinoza as original jubu
- p68 "to the extent that we are rational, we , all of us, partake of the same identity." See I Am You.
- p69 "the first-person point of view that I am is relinquished for the view from Nowhere, which is the same for all of us."
- Yeah not sure I believe in that. Not sure. I'm pomo and supposedly worship difference, minds that are radically situated in their specifics and so irreconcilably different. But what if that has gone to far and we do need to pay more attention to the unity of all minds?
- p82 Spinoza "could not have been more irreconcilably opposed to all teleological thinking". Hm.
- p91 Is Kabbalah responsible for "the distinctly Platonic tone of Spinoza's philosophy, which consists not so much in his actual picture of reality but in the ecstatic impulse that irradiates it, and that sharply distinguishes his rationalism from both Descarte and Leibniz"
- ...to be continued...
- p160 conatus
is simply a thing's special commitment to itself. It is its automatic concern about its own being and its intent to do whaat it thinks it takes in order to further its well-being.
- I see pre-echoes of Goldstein's forthcoming book on Mattering
- Distinguishes it from mere selfishness (Randism). It's not even ethics at this point, more metaphysics.
- p181
I shall, therefore, treat of the nature and strength of the emotions according to the same method, as I employed heretofore in my investigatgions conscerning God and the mind. I shall consider human actins and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids. (Spinoza, Ethics III)
- p183 correcting erroneous judegments, I think this misses the big point that we have no objective standard to correct our judgements. We just have the judgements!
- p186
The word "ecstasy" derives from the Greek for "to stand outside of." To stand outside of what? It is in that original sense that Spinoza offers us something new under the sun: ecstatic rationalism. He makes of the faculty of reason...a means of our salvation.
- p191