For whatever reasons I do things, I picked up Spinoza’s Ethics again. I have a few tabs and highlights in it, but I gave up on it when he kept saying how absurd things are (referring to what he considered contradictions) and many of his propositions were based on a simple “first cause” argument. However, on review, I see I missed the things that got him in trouble. I would agree with those who say he was not an atheist, but now see more clearly why many said he was, or at least a pantheist.
Without doing a treatise, here’s something from the Appendix of chapter 1, where he is summarizing and “proving” the God he has defined, including tearing down the God he was raised on. In this statement “final cause” is a reference to Aristotle’s concept of the “purpose” of things. He has just spent a paragraph talking about the history of how people learned to fool themselves by assuming the cause of all things must be something like themselves, since they cause things. But Spinoza’s nature doesn’t have reasons, it is based on laws. Those are the cause, not the effect of something else.
“Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together.”
It’s a sophisticated and dangerous proposition for the mid 17th century. Sadly, it still hasn’t really caught on.
Since we’re all mad, we should take care to be nice to each other. You don’t want to rub a crazy person the wrong way. (Tho some of them can be awfully irritating.)
I know you’re kidding, but as Mike says, point being, if you believe that God created nature using whatever mysterious powers there might be, and believe the people created fictions to account for all the horrors nature provides us, that is indeed madness. Nature can’t really be argued with, so believers and non-believers tend to agree on what it is. Spinoza’s definitions, as Stanford’s Encyclopedia puts it, “consists in showing that our happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue; nor in the related unreflective attachment to the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason.” Accomplished by observing what is. Perfectly sane.
My tiny brain doesn’t untangle the writing of the original well enough to make reading it worth my time. It takes work and lots of time to decipher each sentence, and I get mentally tired within minutes. It’s the same with Hume, Kant, Hegel and others like that.
They’re all just names to me. I have no clue who said what or when they lived. I wish I could sit down and read their stuff, but I just can’t.
“...consists in showing that our happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue; nor in the related unreflective attachment to the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason.”
My interpretation of that is, 'we won't be happy if we're concerned with instant gratification, material things or religion, but we will be happy if we concern ourselves with reason.' Sounds reasonable.
The quote you quoted is from Stanford, a great website on philosophy, although it can also be dense at times and you can get lost following the links. Spinoza helps you out by numbering his points and referring back to them. But really, I skip around, and can’t say I really have it right. But that’s the fun of philosophy, no one ever gets it right.