Cangrejo libinia spinoza biography

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Religious leaders are generally abetted in their purposes by the civil authority, which threatens to punish all deviations from theological orthodoxy as “sedition”. “Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind” (TTP, chap. Spinoza believes that these were, in fact, all composed by a single historian living many generations after the events narrated, and that this was most likely Ezra the Scribe.

Whatever happens in the body is reflected or expressed in the mind. The free person neither hopes for any eternal, otherworldly rewards nor fears any eternal punishments. If the Bible is an historical (i.e., natural) document, then it should be treated like any other work of nature. Spinoza is a psychological and ethical egoist. This account also provides for the possibility of genuine human knowledge, which must be based ultimately on the coordination of these diverse realms.

As he explains,

A circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing, which is explained through different attributes. 2021. All beings naturally seek their own advantage—to preserve their own being and increase their power—and it is right for them do so. (Vp6s)

Our affects or emotions themselves can be understood in this way, which further diminishes their power over us.

Spinoza’s ethical theory is, to a certain degree, Stoic, and recalls the doctrines of thinkers such as Cicero and Seneca:

We do not have an absolute power to adapt things outside us to our use.

We are essentially a part of nature, and can never fully remove ourselves from the causal series that link us to external things. Opportunistic preachers are then able to play on our hopes and fears in the face of such a God. They prescribe ways of acting that are calculated to avoid being punished by that God and earn his rewards. Their election was thus a temporal and conditional one, and their kingdom is now long gone.

This conatus, a kind of existential inertia, constitutes the “essence” of any being. Since that idea is just a mode of one of God’s attributes—thought—it is in God, and the infinite series of ideas constitutes God’s mind or infinite intellect. In reply, I have to say that such objectors are carrying their piety too far, and are turning religion into superstition; indeed, instead of God’s Word they are beginning to worship likenesses and images, that is, paper and ink” (TTP, chap.

His definition of God—condemned since his excommunication from the Jewish community as a “God existing in only a philosophical sense”—is meant to preclude any anthropomorphizing of the divine being. Knowledge of God is, thus, the mind’s greatest good and its greatest virtue.

What we see when we understand things through the third kind of knowledge, under the aspect of eternity and in relation to God, is the deterministic necessity of all things.

A close analysis of the Bible is particularly important for any argument that the freedom of philosophizing—essentially, freedom of thought and speech—is not prejudicial to piety.