User:Yesselman/Sandbox 2

From Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic 2006; 0393058980, p. 177:

The intellectual love of G-D is the same thing as the knowledge of G-D contained in the first part of the Ethics. Spinoza identifies it as "the third kind of knowledge," or "intuition," in order to distinguish it from sense experience ("the first kind") and the reflective knowledge that arises from the analysis of experience ("the second kind"). To know his G-D in the third way, Spinoza claims, is the same thing as to love G-D. Furthermore, this love is greater than any other possible love, and can never waiver. Since the individual is just a mode of G-D, the intellectual love of G-D is G-D's way of loving itself {5P35}.

At this point, where we reach the long sought union of man and G-D (or Nature), Spinoza goes on to say, we achieve a kind of immortality {5P36, Curley, Parkinson,}. Contrary to what he seems to imply in his philosophy of mind, Spinoza now contends that "the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body." The eternal part of the mind, it turns out, is the "intellect"—the faculty with which we grasp the eternal truths of philosophy. The immortality Spinoza offers here, however, is not of the kind that would provide much solace for the superstitious: we take with us no personal memories of who we were or what we did in our journey to the eternal ideas, and we receive no rewards other than those that come from having such beautiful thoughts in the first place. In fact, Spinoza's immortality doesn't really occur "after" life; it is something more like an escape from time altogether. By immortality Spinoza means something like the union of the mind with ideas that are themselves timeless.

The end point of Spinoza's philosophy—the intellectual love of Page 178 G-D, or blessedness—transfigures all that precedes it. It can sometimes sound paradoxical and more than a little mystical. It is the union of the individual and the cosmos, of freedom and necessity, of activity and passivity, of mind and body, of self-interest and charity, of virtue and knowledge, and of happiness and virtue {5P42}. It is the place where all that which was previously relativized in Spinoza—the good, which was relative to our desires; freedom, which was relative to our ignorance; self-knowledge, which was relative to our imperfect perceptions of the body—suddenly reappears in the form of absolutes: absolute good, absolute freedom, and absolute knowledge.

It cannot be overlooked that Spinoza assigns a stupefying onus to the faculty of reason. It is one thing to say that reason can help bring order and acceptance to our emotional lives; it is quite another to say that it may lead us to supreme, continuous, and everlasting happiness in an eternal union with G-D. Spinoza's ambition for philosophy was, by any measure, extreme.

That overweening ambition returns us to the paradox that first emerged in the consideration of the young Bento's unusual behavior in the context of his expulsion from the Jewish community. On the one hand, Spinoza's philosophy clearly represents a "transvaluation" of traditional values, to use a Nietzschean phrase. The dominant religion of Spinoza's time—and perhaps most religion, viewed in a general way—promises happiness {PcM} in exchange for an unhappy virtue. But Spinoza says that happiness is virtue {5P42}. Religion generally makes charity the highest good. But Spinoza names self-interest as the sole source of value, and reduces charity to one of its incidental consequences. Religion tends to reserve its most lavish praise for those who deny themselves the pleasures of the body. But Spinoza says that the more (true) pleasure we have, the more perfect we are. Religion tells us that happiness results from submission to an external authority—if not G-D, then his representatives {parts} on earth. Spinoza stakes his life on the claim that happiness is freedom.

On the other hand, there is clearly more than a little piety in the iconoclastic spiritual journey recorded in the Ethics. The longing to transcend the limits of the human condition and the ultimate arrival at a kind of immortality and a union with G-D—these are the staples Page 179 of religious narratives throughout history. Many commentators, beginning in the seventeenth century, have gone so far as to interpret Spinoza's work as the expression of a characteristically Jewish theological position. His monism {Elwes:37}, they say, may be traced to Deuteronomy ("the Lord our G-D is One"); and his seemingly mystical tendencies link him to the Kabbalah.

If indeed it is a religion—a very problematic possibility—then Spinoza's philosophy is in any case one of those religions that offers itself only to an elect few. The philosopher's last words on the highway to salvation are "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare" {5P52n}. Part of the rarity of his way, no doubt, stems from the fact that it is very difficult to read tracts like his, written in the geometrical style and stuffed with medieval barbarisms like "substance" and "attributes." But there is another sense in which salvation is no easy task.


 * Spinoza's God is a tremendous thing (actually, it is every thing), and it is bound to inspire awe, wonder, and perhaps for some even love. But it is not the kind of thing that will love you back.


 * It cannot be said that G-D loves mankind, much less that he should love them because they love him, or hate them because they hate him {5P17}.


 * He who loves G-D cannot endeavor that G-D should love him in return {5P19}.

Spinoza's G-D, in other words, will make no exception to its natural laws on your account; it will work no miracles for you; it will tender no affection, show no sign of concern about your well-being; in short, it will give you nothing that you do not already have. Spinoza's G-D is so indifferent, in fact, that one may even ask whether it is reasonable to love it. For, if love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external object as its cause, as Spinoza says, then of what pleasure can such an unhelpful G-D be said to be the cause? Spinoza, to be sure, devotes a number of his intricate and arduous proofs to the proposition that loving G-D is the finest expression of reason. But his many beautiful words on the subject do not necessarily close a gap Page 180 that some would say can be crossed only with a leap-of-faith. In any case, there can be little doubt that the road he traveled was difficult and rare {5P42n}.