The Genius of Spinoza: A Better Point of View (Final Blog Post)

The Genius of Spinoza: A Better Point of View

By Nethianal Belmont

    I will begin this blog post by telling my story of why Spinoza made such an impact on me. The whole story isn't necessary but the mindset I was in when I learned about Spinoza is. I came to MTSU to better my purpose in life. I was an Episcopalian Christian who wanted to become a Priest in the church. I wanted to find a way to bring all of the different denominations of Christianity back together and I was determined to succeed. Theological debate was already in my blood so I wasn't worried about losing faith. I knew I could argue with the best of them and I had faith that God was going to show me the truth and I would be a part of it. However, there was a lot I didn't consider in my train of thought because I wanted a purpose in life so bad I was too blind to see it. In my first semester at MTSU, I took a class called Religion and Society. I learned about all the different mechanisms that make religions function around the world. I learned that Christianity wasn't so different. However, as I am sure any Christian could, it was easy for me to explain something like that away.  It would make sense that every religion would resemble one another because there is only one true God right? Well, things only got more complicated from this point forward. I learned that as values change over time within society those values are reflected within the religion, especially in Christianity. Due to the fact, my Religion and Society professor was an expert on Jesus most of our material was relevant to my personal educational development. The books that impacted me at this stage in my journey are Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy, and Studying Religion: An Introduction Through Cases.

    After that first semester, I was pretty lost as to what to think. However, I knew I wasn't going to get any answers from religion. I didn't find the answers I was looking for until my next semester when I took History of Modern Philosophy. In this class, I learned that many people have been asking similar questions without the comfort of an all-powerful God as well. However, none so fearlessly as Baruch Spinoza. Some might also know him because of his nickname "Jew from Hell" which I adore. It is because it highlights the risks he was taking within his community by talking about his ideas. In this blog post, I am more interested in extrapolating part of his work in  Ethics. However, for a more rounded view of who Spinoza was, I will put a link here:

     Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics Part 1: Appendix begins by establishing that the logic discussed prior, in the previous sections of Part 1, is carefully crafted and therefore true. That God is the universe, a self-caused cause, the only substance with subsequent modes and is perfect unto itself. However, Spinoza says that even with the explanation there will be those who have prejudices against it. The Appendix is his attempt to make sense of why people aren’t willing to understand or accept his logic and why their attempts to think otherwise are false. Furthermore, to continue with these false notions leads to a system of false teleological misconceptions about objects and their natures.

 Spinoza says this phenomenon is a result of the following two facts: “all men are born ignorant of the causes of things” and “all men want to seek their advantages and are conscious of wanting this.” He then elaborates to say that this results in men thinking themselves to be self-causing, that is to say, they aren’t in a causal relationship with anything beyond themselves. Therefore, they don’t give the slightest thought to any possible causes outside of the one type of cause they are familiar with which is a final cause. A final cause is a cause that has a result or an end to a goal. 

For example, if a person asks why it rains, they are asking “to what purpose does the rain serve?” as one might ask another person about their final goal like why they brush their teeth. Spinoza says that if a person can’t find the answer to why something happens, they will direct their question inward and ask themselves, a being of final causes, why they would do such a thing. A likely answer might be to make the plants grow or to supply drinking water. It is explained that this leads humans to see the entirety of the world through similar human final causes, in particular, final causes in aid of human goals like animals for food or sun for light. In other words, the world is made up of materials designed to help humans survive. Spinoza says that because these causes were established subconsciously while giving the impression of being discovered, it allowed humans to assign these powers to a being more powerful than themselves. This misconception further translates into a creator, an all-powerful ruler of nature who wants to help them.

Spinoza says that these conclusions are false for several reasons. It mistakes causes for effects and effects for causes, it makes nature follow rather than come first, and finally, it makes supremely perfect imperfect. According to Spinoza, the first two reasons are sufficiently handled by the definitions and propositions explained earlier in the Ethics. The third reason can be explained in a simple logical statement.  Spinoza explains that for God to be complete or perfect, you can’t give God a purpose. If God has a purpose that would mean God is lacking something and therefore is not complete or perfect. He says there have been many attempts by theologians, and the like, to reconcile these issues but rather than use the proper reasoning skills of reducing things to the impossible and possible, they reduce them to an endless cycle of questions designed to make a person give up and be content with ignorance.

Spinoza explains that this is a problem because it warps our ability to think accurately about nature (God) and therefore translates into objects. We become convinced that how an object affects us is intrinsic to its nature just like how we assume because God is favoring us it is intrinsic of God’s nature to do so. This results in evaluative thinking rather than mechanical sequence. An example of this might be thinking that apples are good just because an apple is good for the human body. An apple can be hot or cold which is a result of mechanical causes but it can’t be good or bad because those values are not part of the apple's nature. Essentially, Spinoza is saying that purposes are in users, not things. 

In understand this, I found a new peace about the universe I had not had before. It was the peace of finally understand the Universe and for that I will always be grateful.  No more did I have God telling me I had to live in some level of ignorance about the world around me. I was free to think and pursue the world as far as I can before I die and that is enough for me.

Other Links:

Spinoza's Ethics: 069119324X

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: 1400067219

Studying Religion: An Introduction Through Cases: 0073386596

How the World Thinks: A Globle History of Philosophy: ref=sr_1_1