Episode 15 in which Luna 'deliminates' Spinoza's project to liberate us from all prejudice

Ol and Val find a back door into Book I of Spinoza's Ethics, making everything a lot easier with some context: the Appendix to Book I where Spinoza critiques our theological prejudices which lead us to imagine God as some kind of super human  being. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello everybody. This is Luna Calling. Calling out all of those of us on a long journey who have found themselves in a second wind. Carry them along on this long journey in philosophy. We've got a bunch of students graduating.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

A crop, a fresh crop from the philosophy program at the American University of Paris.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Who have reached the end of the philosophical journey.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

I've emerged from a terrifying ordeal for which we share a little responsibility.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

We are partially responsible for the cause of their current distress, but at the same time also, you know, responsible for the passion that is philosophy. I don't know. Sometimes I get nice emails of students saying that, you know, oh, you know, you've you really inspired me to continue philosophy, you know, like That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

We're also waving flags at the finish line.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Yep. Cheering them on. So, um, as usual, uh, my name's Val. I'm Ol. And this week's Luna is Let Us Name All. So we started a new book last week, Oll. Is that correct? We did, Spinoza's Ethics. And this one's a bit of a tricky one, I've got to admit. I feel I was having a chat with Luna before and she found it a little bit complicated.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Well, you'd think it's entitled The Ethics. You'd think you'd get a guide about how to do good things, how to avoid doing bad things.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Living the good life, how to try how to treat your friends.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

What is happiness?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Yep. Instead, all I got confronted with was a bunch of definitions and axioms and scoliums and corollaries. It's so abstract. It's so weird. All about God.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah, but you know what? A little bird told me that there's like a tricky little way you can take a kind of hidden pathway around all the difficulties.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

What? Are you telling me that you try are you trying to take uh shortcuts when tr when reading Spinoza?

SPEAKER_01 2:13

I'll take any help I can get when it comes to difficult philosophy. And thankfully, some older and wiser uh friends told me that you've got to go straight to the appendix to book one.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

What? So you're jumping over all of the groundwork that Spinoza so carefully lets out, let's, you know, he puts puts in front of us, he says, you know, I'm gonna demonstrate this in geometric order. You're gonna have to follow it through step by step, and here you are being like, I'm just gonna skip to the back.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Look, I'm in the middle of book one, I got completely dizzy, I can't extricate it myself from it, but what I can do is go back and get some context, and that's what the appendix gives us. It gives us context for his project in book one.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Yeah, okay, so he's gonna he's gonna be saying, yeah, he's basically gonna be summarizing. Here's what I reckon I achieved throughout this book.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Yeah, but he kind of puts it in a completely different way. He he kind of says, in other words, and then gives you an entirely different perspective on on what he was actually doing. Right? So the appendix is basically critical. He's basically saying, here are all these other philosophers, and the way they talk about God and the universe and nature. I am not going to be doing that.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Um I've been, you know, people accuse me of following in the footsteps of others, but here is my line of demarcation. I'm deliminating delimit deliminating, yeah, what uh myself from from my forebearers, my predecessors, right? Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

So what does he do uh in book one? Well, we know that book one is all about nature and it's also about God. So we start at the largest, the highest, the ultimate kind of level, in a way.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

The maximum size, right? The biggest thing possible.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Exactly. It's kind of the opposite of Descartes, because Descartes kind of starts in his in his cozy little cottage and then basically narrows things down to just his mind.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

The journey in into the interiority of the self, um, which he then uses to reconstruct the universe with, right? Spinoza does the exact opposite.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Exactly. He's got the universe. Yeah. That's what amaz that's what's so amazing about the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

He starts with everything, not the most minimal unit, but he starts with the most maximal. And this is what I find is so disorienting about trying to read book one.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

Yeah. And Spinoza knows that you're disorientated, Val.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

He's got you covered.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

He anticipated this. He goes, look, I'm gonna have to, I'll just, I'll just run you through what is different about what is particular to my method, what are the conclude different conclusions that I've made, and why am I doing this in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Exactly. He says, he says, Val, I know there are obstacles to you understanding what I'm doing in book one, right? And basically, these are the prejudices that are stopping you from grasping, are you ready, the interconnection of all things?

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Is he trying to accuse me of being prejudiced against certain ideas? You know, I'm an op I'm an open free thinker, you know, I'm wheeling and dealing around the Netherlands, you know, the most open free-thinking state, and he's accusing me of being prejudiced and having certain preconceived ideas.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Well, he's doing nothing more than Descartes did, which is basically saying if you went to school, if you grew up in a culture, if you listened to any of your elders, then you've got an inchoate mass of absolutely inconsistent, contradictory rubbish swirling around in your minds.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

And we need to start doing the triage and sorting through, you know, through what these ideas are, and if we're going to start with the biggest idea, the preconceptions we have about the biggest idea possible. God.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

That's right. Time to call the cleaners, Valve.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Time to call the street cleaners, get the cachet out, get the high pressure hose out. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

We're cleaning the mind of all of your preconceived notions about God. Because what are people what are people saying about God?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

They're saying all kinds of things. But you know what Spinoza's going to do? And I think this is like for all of those, like, if any of you says, My God, what are you listening to a podcast on philosophy for? What's philosophy?

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Here's a beautiful definition that Spinoza gives us. Oh yes. What does the philosopher do? The philosopher summons prejudice to the court of reason.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

That's such a such a good quote, because I and I, if listeners remember from last week, you know, Spinoza is no stranger to the courthouse, being taken, you know, being presented before the law, you know, he's he's been condemned in various respects. He's getting excommunicated by his own Jewish community, right? He's no stranger to being summoned before the court.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

But there's a difference, Val.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

There's a there's a key difference.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

He's the judge and he's the prosecutor, all in one.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

Judge, jury, executioner, Spinoza. He's a judge dread of, I suppose, the 17th century. 17 uh 1600s. Yeah, 17th century. 17th century, 1600s. I always get that one mixed up.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

So, how does a trial start out? How does it start out? He's going to summon, he says, so he can't. There are so many prejudices that we're beset by. Yeah. And there are so many obstacles blocking readers from understanding the brilliance and the truth of his exposition of the absolute in book one. But he says, actually, all of these prejudices and obstacles are all summed up in one chief prejudice.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

The prejudice of teleology, if that if I'm not mistaken, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:35

That's a fancy word you're using there.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Oh, teleology. We should know this from all of our listeners have clearly read Aristotle. We should all know what teleology is. The the the ends. The ends to which all things strive, their purpose, their their their their yeah, their purpose, you know. To what end does something serve?

SPEAKER_01 7:54

So, like, that's teleology, right? So a television is the end to which my vision serves.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Exactly. Telescope, you know, same thing, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Seeing towards an end. Okay. So, yeah, this is it. He basically says, and and there's, you know, there's a kind of everyday way he puts this as well. He says the main prejudice, this principle prejudice that we have from which all our other prejudices flow and follow, is the supposition that all natural things act on account of an end, as people themselves do.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

Yes. All things move towards their natural end.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

They're all purpose-driven.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Yeah. Everything has a defined purpose according to the essence of whatever that thing is, you know. This table, the teleology is for me to put my equipment on and to put for me to put my things on.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Sounds like Wall Street on a bad day.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Every driving about, everybody busying about, trying to trying to gain as much as they possibly can.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah. But I mean, this this sounds this sounds right to me. Oh, you know, everything in nature has a purpose, you know, this chair has a purpose, you know. The objects around me all serve particular purposes. For me, surely everything in nature should have a purpose in it.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

How did you listen to Bob Dylan? Things just blow in the wind sometimes. They just blow in the wind.

SPEAKER_00 9:15

Yeah, sometimes times are changing.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

Floaty, floaty. Why do things have to be driving towards an end all the time? Yeah. It's making me anxious, even just reading this out.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah. And so, and so what Spinoza's saying is that this is one of our this is our main misconception or preconception about God or nature, that God and nature is moving towards a particular end. Now, this has really kind of weird theological consequences as well, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Well, absolutely. I mean, first of all, like people say everything natural is driving towards an end, right? And then they suppose that God's him, herself, themselves, right? God themselves is actually trying to achieve an objective, trying to fulfill an aim, trying to realize a purpose.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Yes. And I mean, this is I mean, the the the I suppose one of the easy ways to think about this is that you know, the purpose of God is to show us towards a good life so that we may uh ascend to heaven at the end of our lives, right? That's a classic kind of like Christian teleological notion of you know, God. God's purpose is to, you know, judge what is good and bad, and then we act according to that purpose so that we may ascend into heaven, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:31

That's a kind of teleological but Val, I mean, there are obviously clear problems with this entire framework because humanity acts up. Humanity doesn't do its job properly. Oh humanity turns away from God. There's sin.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

There's sin everywhere. You know, that that humanity turning away from God is the reason, you know, according to the Bible, we get cast out from Eden, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:51

What about all the locusts? Locusts? What about the swarms of frogs? What about the you know the black rain falling from the sky?

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Oh, that's like you know, the Old Testament is just catastrophe after after catastrophe, right? You know, like Job getting you know stripped of all his possessions so that, you know, um, you know, God and the devil can play dice, you know, or not play dice, but you know, they have your little bet.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Exactly. You can see how bad things are going to get. I mean, because you can say, like, you know, if God actually did make humanity for a purpose, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

And as Spinoza says, God created all other things so that they could serve human human beings. So he created the vegetables, he created the fennel. I like fennel, by the way. Created apricots, yeah, created sea breams, sea bass as well for us to eat. They're all for us.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

That means, you know, everything in create I mean, this is another kind of you know theological idea that everything in creation was created to serve mankind or humanity.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Yeah, but the problem is basically he's setting out like a kind of a chain, right? So God creates animals as a means to an end, right? So there are enough animals, if they're at a pool, you know, we catch them, kill them, burn them on a barbecue, yeah, stuff them in our gobs, right? Yeah, humanity survives. Why does God need humanity? He needs to be worshipped, Val. He can't just be God on his own.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Well, he needs some recognition. What point's a God that doesn't get worshiped? Like the ancient Greek gods knew this very well, you know. It's like if you don't provide the right sacrifices to us, then we're gonna rain down calamities and catastrophes upon you.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Right, right, exactly. And you think that God was perfect, he didn't need recognition, but here you go. This is a traditional theological setup. Every link in that chain could possibly be a weak link.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

Yes, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:36

So you can look at certain natural things, certain animals, and just say, look, that's not particularly edible, right? That average, the bush cocky, which I spent a lot of time trying to tame in my first year at university life, I can tell you.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Oh, yep.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

The bush cocky, like, how enough, how on earth does that help humanity to survive the existence of that animal? Right? That's a weak link in the chain.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah, and this weak link in the chain is what establishes a kind of hierarchy, right? So this is going back to you know a very Aristotelian conception of nature, right? Nature is fundamentally uneven, unequal, you know, according to your essence, you know, it gets structured into a hierarchy, uh, into a yeah, into a hierarchy. And Spinoza doesn't like this at all because it gives us a particular conception of God and a particular conception of the entire universe, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Absolutely. He's against all of this hierarchy. Yeah. And uh, you know, you can have basically in the hierarchy the end to which everything else aspires and drives is the highest in the hierarchy. Yeah, and as far down you can possibly go in the chains of means, right? You're gonna be going lower down in the hierarchy. Yeah, okay. So basically you're going down through all the vegetables, the vegetables that feed the animals, the weeds, and then go from the vegetables to all the minerals they extract from the soil, and it goes down and gets smaller and smaller and smaller, right? Yeah, it's all prejudice.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

These are all, yeah. Prejudice from who is that a human prejudice? Is that some kind of idea that maybe we have created?

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Well, absolutely. I mean, this is what's so great about Spinoza. He's not just like, you know, a hater on the internet just saying, Oh, that's all rubbish.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

No.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

He's going to show us why it is that we come up with these prejudices in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Yeah, and that's the first task that he's gonna try, and that's the task that he is setting himself in the ethics and and you know, for his other works. You know, he's trying to look at what are the origins of our prejudices, our superstitions, the things that prevent us from understanding the way that God or nature actually is, and he's going to demonstrate this kind of point by point.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

Absolutely. This is task one, and and basically he's showing that it's possible to have a science of error. We can develop a scientific analysis of the mechanism that leads human beings into these false beliefs about nature and God.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Yes, and so to do that, yeah, so he's gonna have to do a couple of he's gonna make have to make a lot of lot of kind of maneuvers because he's going against an entire, you know, theological apparatus, right? So he's gonna be trying to create a science of of error. Why it why it is that we fall into error, why do we have these kind of misconceptions? The base, the fundamental basis of this error in his view is that we have this preconception of a teleological view of God or nature, right? And he thinks that this is wrong. This creates a hierarchy, and this is one of the sources, maybe you know, if I dare say, the primordial source of our errors.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Absolutely, and that's task two, like showing that this teleological view of the universe, whereby everything is directed towards a purpose, a final cause and end, he's gonna show that's wrong. And then finally, the third task, what's he going to do? He's going to make good on his earlier claim that all of our other prejudices are derived from that fundamental prejudice. And he's going to show that whenever we talk about things being good or bad, or we blame somebody for doing something wrong, or we praise somebody for doing something fantastic, whenever we see order, whenever we see confusion, whenever we say, Oh my god, that bicycle is so beautiful, oh my god, that electric scooter is so deformed, right? Yeah, all of those, Val, those are prejudices.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

They're all just value judgments. Exactly. So he's going, he's he's almost saying, like, everyone, everyone's too relative with all of these notions. I'm gonna try and cut a clear path through all the morass, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yeah, and let me tell you, dear listeners, try and get through just one day of your life without using some of these prejudices good, bad, beautiful, ugly. Uh somebody deserves good things to happen to them, somebody else doesn't. I mean, it's just basically it's like the foundational bedrock of all gossip.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't have any gossip whatsoever if if you won't be able to make these kind of value judgments over what is good or bad. But yeah, so again, I feel like Spinoza is setting, much like Descartes, he's setting an incredibly high bar. And this is one of the things that I think is really difficult to orient yourself around when you are uh uh first reading him, is exactly you know, he's demanding something that is just that goes against all your intuitive senses, right? Much like Descartes, you know, Descartes says, you know, cast cast away, doubt away all of the external world, everything you know through your sense perceptions, which is already uh an incredibly wild ask. Spinoza's doing a very similar thing, right? He says, cast away all of your prejudices, we're gonna clear the ground, and we're gonna get back to the actual the real nature of things.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

That's the promise. I mean, he will later on in books three and four like scientifically address all of the obstacles that are gonna make it very difficult for us to do this. Right. So he's not just gonna say like Descartes, oh, just use your free will, you've got free will, get on with it.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Oh no, Spinoza is far more um thorough, thorough going into his investigations, as we'll see, into the different sources and reasons why we have these prejudices, why we experience things like joy, sadness. He has an incredible kind of taxonomy of all the different emotions and what combinations of things give rise to the different emotions. It's quite, but anyway, we'll have to we'll have to be patient and wait a little bit, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:39

So let's get into this first task, Val. The first task is as we as we said just before, showing why people have this prejudice and believe that everything is purpose-driven in nature.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

So he's he's departing from a kind of the first the first premise that he's going to be using is that humans are born ignorant of the causes of things. Yeah. That's uh I don't know. I I feel like I've got a pretty good understanding of the causal world around me.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

You were a baby once, Val. Don't you remember?

SPEAKER_00 19:11

No, I don't I don't remember.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Exactly. You're you're ignorant of your own cause, that means. So you just proved that you just proved spinners alright.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Oh man. Here I was trying to trying to trying to throw a spanner in the wheels um and immediately disproved myself. So we're born ignorant of the causes. So it's really so he's just having a go at babies. That's is that what he's trying to tell us?

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Yeah, he's just saying these ignorant bastards, like who do they think they are?

SPEAKER_00 19:37

What are they what do they know? They think they know stuff about the I mean they've got a pretty good sense of cause and effect. I cry, mother comes, you know, mother feeds me or changes my diet, but or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

That's a yeah, that's a that you're talking like six or nine months before that happens, I can tell you. It's just like a bundle of urges at the beginning. So I mean, it doesn't let's leave the babies alone. I think I think that's a little unfair. Let's take your average university student, okay, yeah, or your average middle-aged man, even worse. Um, and uh, I think we can say that you know certain phenomena happen to us every day. Yeah, the wind. Remember your your problem with the winds.

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Yeah, still can I still don't know. I'm still you explained it to me, something about air pressure. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:19

I'm not convinced.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Things are blowing in the wind, but we don't know why. Yeah, right? So that's the first premise. All humans are born ignorant of the causes of things. So phenomena happen all around them, yes, but they don't know precisely why. They don't have scientific knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

No, right? We don't investigate into the causes of every single thing that happens around us. You know, we couldn't. We couldn't. No, because there's a sense in which we go through our day and we we just we just take things for granted, right? We don't investigate into the causes. You know, I you know, I took the metro to get here, I don't know how the entire metro system works. I just go, train shows up at time and I use it, and the the rest of the series of causes that go on to making that actually happen, I'm largely ignorant of, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Yeah, but this is a second premise. What were you doing in that blissful ignorance? You were seeking something useful to you, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Yes, and I wasn't I was trying to work out, you know, why it was useful to me. And you know, I think about you know, yeah, I have to think about this, you know, this particular I mean that maybe the metro example is not the best one, but we are consciously seeking out and you know things that are useful to us.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

It seems like a pretty well this is like a very early anticipation of what became like a dominant understanding of human behavior with classical economics after utilitarianism in the late 1700s. And Spinoza, along with Hobbes, is one of the early founders of this whole approach to human motivation. Yeah, he basically says all humans consciously seek what is useful to them. That's what we're doing all the time. We're looking for what is useful to us. We seek the good, yeah. Right. And the consequence of this, like the immediate consequence, is because we because we know that we're doing this, right? We think we're free. I believe that I am free, Val. Right?

SPEAKER_02 22:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Not because I can fly, right? Not because I'm Superman, but simply because I'm conscious of having wishes, right? Yeah. And I'm completely ignorant as to how it is that I have these very particular wishes. Ah, yes. Right? So I was dreaming of egg, bacon, spinach, an avocado with Tabasco sauce in a wrap.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

On the way in, right? And I don't know why I was dreaming of those things, but I felt free because I desired the breakfast wrap.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Well, I feel like as your unofficial psychoanalyst, I can actually provide you the cause of that dream is that that's something that we often eat after we've finished recording these podcasts in the um AMX at the university.

SPEAKER_01 23:05

Why do I always eat it? This is the problem. I had one colleague said, Well, what's your cholesterol with all that bacon?

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Yes. Um, but yes, that is that is the question. What why is it in the first place that out of all of the things that were presented before me, I consistently choose that one? Because yeah, we often just don't even think about why it is that we have a certain preference for this this thing or another thing, right? We've never really investigated a lot of the reasons behind why we choose one thing or another, but one thing that we do kind of spontaneously think is that I am making a free choice.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Yeah. And in doing that, because we're seeking what is useful, another way of putting that is that we're consciously seeking to um fulfill a purpose. We're trying to realize an objective, an aim, and a goal, right? And so what are we doing? We are conscious of ourselves being goal-driven, right? That's that's that's just part of our everyday experience.

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Okay, it's my entire self-identity, you know. I'm just I'm goals driven all the time. You know, I'm always thinking about the next project, what's the next thing that I'm going to be doing, where I'm going to be in five years, you know, that's just me 24-7. I'm not that's right. I'm always grinding, thinking about my goals.

SPEAKER_01 24:19

Yeah, and Spinoza knows this about you, Val, right? And he basically says that when you see something like a bee floating around, right? Or a bush cocky scurrying out of a compost heap that's been badly managed, right? You say to yourself, What's he after? What's he doing? What's he going for? Yeah, why is he doing that? Where what is he?

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Where is he off to? What business does he have scuttling around?

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Yeah. You think there's something there, there's like a natural phenomenon, you're ignorant of its causes. So what do you do, being a typical human, you project your own mechanism onto the foreign, unknown, obscure thing.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

I start attributing it ends and reasons and causes as to why it I begin speculating as to why it might be doing that using my own frame of reference.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

This is why it is a prejudice, because you are prejudging that poor animal, Valve.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Yeah. I'm attributing it reasons that it may, you know, I don't know what's going on in its head. I can't tell. Yeah, it was just going about, and then I attributed it a cause and a reason in a hierarchy. So heavy, you know, and I put you know, I put it beneath myself because I'm I'm an object of a larger size, you know, like this is what Spinoza's trying to get.

SPEAKER_01 25:34

It's gonna get its revenue.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

No, 100%. So, okay. So we're going about living in ignorance, thinking that we're free, we don't really know what the causes are. We're kind of just we have a spontaneous orientation in the world where we're kind of like trying to, you know, go towards things that are useful to us if we don't understand the reason why something's happening. We just project a reason onto it without actually investigating.

SPEAKER_01 26:04

Exactly, exactly. And and and he adds a third premise here, which is that here we are, we're just like wandering through the garden of the universe, and suddenly we find things around us that are useful, right? We find things in our bodies, so think, oh my god, these nails are actually quite useful.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

Yep, scratching my back, you know.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Exactly, right? It's just I can scratch, right? My eyes they see, my teeth can chew, and oh my god, I really like this fish. I think I'm gonna eat this fish, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:30

My hand, my hands can write philosophy. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

And so we suddenly say, right, well, everything natural must be there in order to suit us.

SPEAKER_00 26:39

Yeah, we are the kings of the universe, we we are the alpha and the omega, right? So again, this is this kind of this is classical theology that he's that he's trying to go against, you know, human being as the center of the universe. Everything in creation was created for us and our benefit.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

Sounds like a huge ego trip, right? It is, but there's a cache. So Spinoza, he's not going, it's not just like pure critique. Um, he's not just bad-mouthing humanity because he says that humans are quite aware of the fact that all these useful things that exist outside them and that suit them and are appropriate for their needs, humans do recognize and do admit that they didn't create those things themselves. Yeah. Right? Humans do make things, yeah. Right. That's that's part of being driven by purpose, right? Yes, but they know they didn't make the fish.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

No.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

Right? So they say, another big projection, they say there must be some governor of nature that freely makes things for us.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

This is reminding me of a certain somebody that Luna has recently abandoned back in The Hague. This sounds like Descartes. That's right. Descartes and his author God, right? You know, like Descartes' idea is, you know, God is the perpetual author of everything in existence. Does he say that God made everything existence for my benefit? Not necessarily, but there's still this idea that there is an external creator of all things that is somehow separate from creation.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

And there's this odd oscillation between this projection of this governor of nature. That governor is seen in a position of mastery because it created all things, right? And at the same time, it's a little bit weird because this governor is also in the position of a waiter in a restaurant. Because when you when you need something, this waiter comes along, goes, What would you like, sir? Yeah, what would you like, madam?

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Oh, I heard your press. Yeah. What can I get for you?

SPEAKER_01 28:41

Would you like duck à l'orange?

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Yeah. And I mean, this is one of the other things that there is a kind of projection. Um, you know, we kind of go, okay, so there must be a creator for these things around me. You know, somebody I didn't create the fish, somebody must have created the fish. You know, if we go back to Descartes, I'm just thinking one of the things that um uh I I suppose always bothered me a little bit in his conception of the author god, and this is what I view as Descartes' projection, is that Descartes says, yeah, but God is good. God would never do anything evil, you know, God would never deceive me, God is good, you know, and this is the way in which we can understand Spinoza's saying that we project things onto, you know, we have this idea of a creator god, an author god, but we can project some of our prejudices into that conception of God. And Descartes does exactly that. He goes, Well, God can't lack anything, he's only he must be good, you know, therefore, my God is good. And that's an example of of a kind of prejudice that one may project onto this kind of creator god of some description.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

Yeah, it's interesting though, because what Spinoza points out is that we also project things onto God that are all too human.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Because he shows that God, in creating all these natural things that are useful for human beings, right? Yeah, being the master and then also serving human beings, he did this in a very self-interested way. Yeah, right. He did this to put humanity into his debt. He's like a mafia boss. Uh-huh. Does you an enormous favor that you didn't even ask for, right? And then you're going to be in the boss's debt, right? And sooner or later he's going to come calling and say, Yeah, I'm going to ask you to do something for me, and you're going to have to do that favor.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Yeah. And I mean, that's kind of you know one of the iterations of Catholicism, right? You were born in sin, you were born with a debt, and you know, you need to, by your good actions, you can earn your way into heaven. Well, I don't maybe earn your way is not exactly the right, but by your good deeds, you know, you can pay off this debt that will allow you to get into the kingdom of heaven, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Right, exactly, yeah. And he actually says that. So he says, Why does God benefit humans by creating all these useful natural things for for them to eat, right? Yeah, he says, in order to, I quote, bind men to them and to be held by them in highest honour.

unknown 31:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Right. So the God, the God, God wants to bind human beings to himself and to be held in honor. And then the consequence, right, is that human beings, once they've projected this master of the universe, right? They invent different ways of worshiping and pleasing God. Right. Because, like you said, they're trying to pay off that debt, right? Um, so that God will continue to do good things for them, like bring a bring it about that there's a good harvest, for example.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Well, I mean, we should be very clear at this point in the conversation as well. Spinoza is not against the idea of God, he's just against a particular conception of God, one that is born out of our own prejudices. Of course, you know, book one of the ethics is he's going to be explaining here is my understanding of what God is, right? It's what he's doing here is a critique of a particular anthropomorphic God, a human god that is separate from creation. This is the this is the god that he is critiquing, right? It's not the idea of a god, you know, uh or whatever. Like he has a different conception. He's just laying out what are the dangers of having this kind of separate creator god idea.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Yeah, and there's a massive danger, which we all know very well. It's it's called the problem of evil. I distinctly remember making uh a scripture teacher cry um by coming up with it when I was 13 years old with a bunch of friends, and we got chucked out of the class actually for doing that.

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Yeah. Not much has changed.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Well, she couldn't give me a decent answer um to the problem of evil. Yeah, right. So basically, and this is something that Spinoza brings up. He he says, look, um, those people who have this teleological vision of the universe, right? They're trying to show that nothing that nature does is in vain, right? So everything has a purpose that's natural, right? But all they succeed in doing is showing that nature is just as mad as human beings are. Yes. Because look at earthquakes, look at volcanoes, look at floods, look at tsunamis, look at plagues, look at the hantavirus. Who put the hantavirus there? What's the point of that? All those poor people on a cruise ship, yeah, and that woman in hospital Bichard, very close to where you live, by the way. I thought I'd warn you about that.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

Oh, you should, yeah, thank you. I did I was not aware of this. So there's a new virus going about town, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 33:32

That's right, going about Paris. Yeah. Well, hopefully it's confined in that negative pressure hospital room just a kilometer north of where you live.

SPEAKER_00 33:39

Yeah, yeah, we've all heard that one before. And then we're locked inside for two years. Okay, so like yeah, okay, so so we have this idea of God, like, yeah, so the problem of evil is if you say that everything in the natural world has a purpose and that God created this natural world, then God also has to be the author of everything that evil that has ever occurred in in the in the world, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Yeah, but the believers have an answer for that one, Val.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

Oh, okay. They've got you.

SPEAKER_01 34:13

Yep. They've got you. Do you know why that earthquake erupted?

SPEAKER_00 34:17

To teach me a lesson about how to be a good person.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Do you know do you know why that victim of Hantavirus is residing just a kilometer from where you live?

SPEAKER_00 34:26

I think I I don't know. I'm I'm often uh I'm very Leibnitzian about these things sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

I think You don't know.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

I think it's just because we live in the best of all possible worlds, and so it could have been much worse.

SPEAKER_01 34:37

That's my pretty bad God is angry at you, though. That's okay. This is what the believers say. Like if a natural disaster happens, it's a sign, it's an expression of God's anger. It's basically the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

God is throwing a tantrum all the way through the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_00 34:52

Okay, and so God is angry. I've done something wrong, um, therefore I need to placate God by some by either changing my behavior, you know, not offering a sacrifice that's a bit too pagan and and you know, ancient Greek mythology, Norse, but you know you could say some prayers. I could ch Yeah, I could say some prayers, I could go to confession. I could go to confession, I have to pay off the debt, right? Something bad has happened because God is angry at me or humanity. Um, so we gotta do we've got to change our behavior.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Yeah, but watch out. Yes. Spinoza's got a counter.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

Alright, the fierce of throwing a punch, he's throwing a counterpunch, he's saying, This is ridiculous. You're going on about natural disasters as an expression of God's anger because we haven't behaved correctly. What about all of those angelic young children who live in the 18th arrondissement like you? Yeah. What did they do to deserve this proximity of the hantavirus victim?

SPEAKER_00 35:46

Well, I mean, it's just it's it's the collective sin of humanity, right? We're all we're all we're all responsible. It's all of our fault.

SPEAKER_01 35:54

Now we're gonna go into unbaptized babies being thrown into purgatory. This is ridiculous.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

No one is innocent.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

Yeah, Spinoza basically says look, disasters befall the pious and the impious alike. Your worshipping makes no difference in the end. Yeah. Nowadays, we we would say it's purely statistical, yeah, right. Um, and so no one is favoured in the long run. Yeah, and basically what he's doing here, I mean, I like this point because basically what he's trying to do is he's trying to neutralize a point of extreme religious controversy and conflict in the 17th century. Yeah, because remember, Europe had just gone into a 30-year war, yeah, that had devastated Elizabeth's life, yeah, over the difference in between Catholicism and Protestantism.

SPEAKER_00 36:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:40

And part of the war was about religious dogma and it was about differences in how you worship gods.

SPEAKER_00 36:47

Yes, and Spinoza is trying to create a sort of unity, you know, and all all of these differences in religious dogmas are based on the fact that these religions have a teleological conception of God, but they think the teleology goes in different directions, right? Exactly. Spinoza's trying to equalize an uneven playing field. Actually, it just reminded me of um when you were talking about, you know, what about all the other innocents in the 18th arrondissement? I remember my my uncle told me the story of when he was in primary school, um, this was at this was in Brisbane back in the 60s, and he went to a Catholic school, and you know, so was taught by nuns, and often what the nuns would do is that whenever one kid was playing up, the nuns would punish the entire class.

SPEAKER_01 37:41

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 37:41

And so one time my uncle, you know, he very foolishly puts his hand up because yeah, he was he was a troublemaker, so he is constantly getting, you know, wrapped on the knuckles, beaten, whatever. But one time he put his hand up to protest and he says, I would I didn't do anything, I'm innocent. Why do you know why why do I have to you know get punished for the actions of somebody else? And the nun said to him, the innocent must suffer with the guilty.

SPEAKER_01 38:06

Oh my god. What a line!

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Yeah, and that's so that's a cat, that's a kind of Catholic position in in some respects. It's like, you know, disasters befall all of mankind rather than you know it being concentrated on the people doing wrong, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:21

So this is a and this is I mean, this is one of his points. Like from the position of prejudice, and you know, it's a tough battle of reason against prejudice because prejudice always has a response. At this point, if you actually said, Why should the innocent always suffer with the guilty? Um maybe the nuns would have gone into the story of Adam and Eve, right? Um, or they could have said, Don't question the mysterious ways of God.

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

This is the law.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

There is a divine plan, you know. God has a plan for everything, and who are you, little puny human, to question what that plan is? Exactly. Who are you to question the distribution of good and evil? God has a place for all of it. We just don't, we're just ignorant of it. We just don't know what it is.

SPEAKER_01 39:07

Yeah, and Spinoza is very, very clear on this point. He basically says, You are just taking shelter behind ignorance when you say that. You all you are saying in a fancy way is you don't know. Yeah, right. And for him, as one of the great founders of the Enlightenment, that is completely unacceptable.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

No, your ignorance is not an argument, as a certain uh Karl Marx once said, right? It's you cannot, you cannot, and this is the thing, you are projecting your ignorance onto the world. You are trying to give causes to things you don't un actually you haven't investigated, you don't understand, you're just using your prejudices and you're projecting them upon the world, right? What Spinoza wants to do is no, we can actually investigate into the causes and the reasons of things. Why does this occur? Why is there why do bad things happen? Why do I feel this way? Why, you know, why did this thing make me feel sad? Why did this make me happy? You know, there's a there's a mode of investigation that is good that is going to be the driving force of the entire ethics.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

Exactly. And so with this first task that he's been carrying out in the appendix to book one, um, we've seen this kind of battle play out, this boxing match in between the theist and the rationalist, uh, and they've been going at each other. And the theist, the religious person in the end just basically says, Don't question the mysterious ways of God. And Spinoza says, That's really weak, you're just taking refuge in ignorance. And the religious person will just repeat again the position, don't question the mysterious ways of God, right? And Spinoza knows that there's going to be a kind of a deadlock here between the philosopher and the theist, the believer, right? And so he mentioned this is the famous bit in the ethics where he actually says humanity would have been doomed to millennia of such prejudice had it not been for one fantastic discovery.

SPEAKER_00 41:04

What possible discovery? What what could have that been?

SPEAKER_01 41:08

Geometry and mathematics.

SPEAKER_00 41:10

Just when I thought I'd gotten away. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 41:15

For all of those, you know, learning your um your trig, your your what is it, so sofa car or whatever the cosintan. Is this fit? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:24

That's the nature of the Socotar.

SPEAKER_01 41:26

That's what it is. That's the that's the way you memorize them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

That's the nature of the universe. Investigate that, you've got a perfect. Okay, so Spinoza says that this is oh, actually, sorry, I just want before before we we go back like this this debate between the the philosopher and the theist is there's there's a very kind of odd thing, argument that the theist is putting forward, right? When it when you when you say it's all just part of God God's plan, don't question it. But Spinoza, what you're effectively saying is don't try and understand God. Yes, don't try and know anything about God. Don't exp you you have no relationship to God. God is cut off, it's out there, there's some plan, don't question it, just go along with it. Spinoza says, but you've cut me off from God. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

Yeah, you've put a barrier up, you've put a fence up where in fact we could start investigating things.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

It's the barrier of your own ignorance is cutting cutting humanity off from its relationship to God that we're gonna, yeah, that we're gonna be seeing throughout the ethics.

SPEAKER_01 42:26

But mathematics shows us another way. Yes, because you can't argue with mathematics. No, mathematics is not an opinion.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

No, it's democrat it's universally valid for all of those who are engaged in it. Yeah, well, even if you are ignorant of it or not, you know, triangles triangle, you can't have a square triangle or a circular triangle, you know. That's just the case for everyone.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

Mathematicians do argue, but they don't actually argue about the discipline itself or its findings, they argue about who is first to make a particular discovery, yes, and who's come up with the most elegant way of coming up with a proof, for example.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Yes, of course.

SPEAKER_01 43:04

So, second task: nature has no purpose.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Okay, so this is he's just gone, all right. You've all attributed nature a purpose, a teleology, an end. I need to establish, well, I have already established through the this first part of the book, this first part of the book, that nature has no purpose. You cannot attribute to nature an end or a telos.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

So here he goes pretty quickly. He just basically says, Look, I'm sorry, but you do have to read book one.

SPEAKER_02 43:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Uh I have shown there that infinite things follow necessarily from the nature of God and not from any supposed free will that picks out purposes. No. You've just got this continual proliferation, this infinite mushrooming of creation and of things that follow from the nature of the universe.

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yep. Creation is always happening out there, it doesn't have a particular orientation. Or end creation just is nature and God just is everything.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

It's just continually spilling over any kinds of limits.

SPEAKER_00 44:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:08

You know, it's basically one big mess. Yeah. You know, the saucepans have boil boiled over completely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:14

And this is the infinite, this is what's so disorienting about trying to think, you know, the infinite is that it just keeps going. It's, you know, and this is why, you know, Spinoza just throws this out into everything in the world. He doesn't start with the minimal subject as Descartes does. He goes, Let's try and consider everything all at once. Yeah. And this everything doesn't have a purpose. Because the moment you start trying to assign it a a particular purpose, you're projecting your in ignorance onto it onto it, right? We need to have a different orientation towards it.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

Exactly. You're limiting it. So he basically points us towards he says, You're gonna have to go back to book one to find out you know, to find my full argument for why this is false, this idea that nature has a purpose. I can show you a different way that nature works, right? But he does give us what he does do is he gives us three further problems that he has with with teleology, with this idea that nature is driven by a purpose. And his first one is he says, look, basically you're getting things upside down, yeah, right? Because what you're doing is you're taking something that is actually a cause, right?

SPEAKER_02 45:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

Um, so you have uh a change in the chemical composition of the soil because you know certain types of fertilizer have been used. Um there's been a it's monocultural agriculture, the soil has got completely exhausted, right? And you have a bad harvest and you don't have the same amount of wheat that that turns up, you know, in August. And basically he's saying you think that God is punishing humanity by a bad harvest because they didn't go to church on a Sunday enough, right? And what you've done there, right, is you've taken what was the actual cause, yeah, the soil fertility problem, the exhaustion of the soil, and you've turned it into a means for a later end, which is God having to punish human beings to slap human beings back into line, right? And so things are getting topsy-turvy, right?

SPEAKER_00 46:16

Yeah, you've you're making you're making a mistake in the order of things, right? In the order of of nature. Um, and in particular, one of the things that he's going to be stressing in in book one, and this is you know why it's what we're gonna have to go back and go through it in more detail, is that we continually confuse causes and effects. Yes. We take as effects they we think that effects are causes. Whereas, you know, in the example you just gave, you know, or the absence of a cause means that we have to create an effect. You know, we have to say, you know, I can't explain this for this so like I can't explain the change in the soil fertility. I'm gonna have to invent a different cause because I haven't taken the time to actually investigate what the real causes of things are.

SPEAKER_01 47:02

Yeah, so say you're Aristotle, basically Aristotle says that purposes or objectives are final causes. Yes, right? So, with the example I was using, Aristotle would say slapping humans back into line was the cause that the soil fertility diminished.

SPEAKER_00 47:21

Yes, right? So God punishing us, yes.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

Yeah, so God manages to slap us into line end of August, September, when we suddenly go, oh my god, there's no there's no harvest, we're going to starve to death. Over the winter.

SPEAKER_02 47:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:34

Um, he says that's the cause of something that happened back in the spring earlier, right? Which is just a means, and so that's an effect of God's plan, right? Because God has the plan. I want to slap humanity into line, so I've got to think backwards, and now I have to actually cause the soil fertility to go downhill back in the spring, right? And so that's why the cause is happening later on in time chronologically, uh, to the actual effect, which is a soil fertility decreasing, which happens earlier in time. So that's what Spinoza means by it being upside down, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:08

Oh, okay. Yeah. So the chain of yeah, so the chain of core, yeah. So yeah, that's actually just a total reversal. We've just been thinking about things back to front this entire time.

SPEAKER_01 48:19

Exactly. And uh and we and we do that because obviously when we um, if we're instrumentalized and if we're organized, we also like back plan in a way. You think I want to buy a new bike, I better either steal my neighbor's bike or save up enough money to actually uh buy the bike, and then you think, how do I save up money? Blah blah blah. And you go back, you back, you know, you plan backwards, it's retroactive, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:43

Okay, yeah. So it's kind of retroactive. Again, so it's like kind of you know, it makes sense what Aristotle is saying because, in a certain sense, it's our intuitive way of understanding the world.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

That's how that's how we do things, right? But Spinoza's just basically saying only human beings, all right? And only human beings who haven't read my book as well.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

But so we need to turn it all around to get us back on the right track.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

Yeah. Now, second problem, Val. You ready for this one? Okay, what are we why God's perfect? Absolutely perfect.

SPEAKER_00 49:13

Obviously, not lacking in anything. I I remember my Descartes.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

Right, so why would he go about creating anything? If he's got it all, if he's perfect, yeah, what on earth could motivate God to create something? Because what that implies is that he was missing something and he needed to make it for himself. It's like me with my breakfast wrap. Yes, right? I need to make it, I'm lacking it. My stomach is crying out for it.

SPEAKER_00 49:41

Yes, right? Yeah, how could you possibly desire something that you are already in possession of? Right? This is the great moment in um in uh one of the great moments in Plato's Symposium, right? Where they do, they do this exact, they do a dialogue over this exact question of, you know, is beaut is love beautiful? And and then Socrates does this whole thing where he says, you know, but why would the the goddess of love need to acquire something that she already has, right? So it's this question of desire. If you actually think that God is perfect, why would God need to create something separate? You know, that's right. God cannot be lacking, you know, in a different but also in a different sense to the way that Descartes is talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 50:27

So, I mean, he actually, you know, the and the third problem is just basically he goes back to what he was talking about earlier. He was saying, you know, when people analyze events that happen, they say, Oh, the tile fell off the roof and killed somebody because the wind was blowing, why was the wind blowing? I say low and high pressure systems. Yeah, and somebody says, Well, why were there high and low pressure systems that caused the wind to blow and the tile to fall off and kill the man? Yeah, right. And then you explain, they ask more questions, and in the end, you're forced to say it's the will of God, right? And he says, you know, when you analyze any mechanical series of causes far enough, yeah, because of this kind of perspective error whereby you're just looking at it from the end of a great chain of causes, yeah, it looks improbable. You're gonna say, why is it that Tom was killed by this tile falling off the roof, right? Yeah, or or Harry or whoever, right? Yeah, why were they killed by this tile? So many things had to fall into place in order for it to happen, right? And that's the perspectival error.

SPEAKER_00 51:27

And infinite seemingly infinite number of things had to have all occurred in this particular configuration so that this particular event could have occurred, right? And this is what becomes so dizzying. There's a certain exhaustion when you're trying to explain a causal chain where I can kind of I can empathize, right? I kind of go, it's like when a child asks you why, you know, or like it to go, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to make fun of babies and children, but there's something again, but there's something, you know, very I think it's it illustrates this really good, uh, really well. Any of us who have ever interacted with a child and they want to understand why something is the case, we all have probably experienced a scenario where they keep going, yeah, but why? Why did that happen? Why did this happen? And you keep, and at a certain point, you give up and you go, that's just the way that it is.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

But if you don't, and this is the point he wants to sneak in here. Yes, if you are um a scholar, if you are a scientist, after the style of the new science that Descartes and Spinoza are trying to promote, you're not gonna go give you. You're gonna continue. You're gonna continue scientific investigation into mechanical causes. Yes, and the mob are gonna see you, Val, yeah, and they're gonna take you for a heretic, they're gonna see you as impious, and they're going to proclaim you to be a heretic, and they're gonna tell on you, and they're gonna tell the priests about you, and you're gonna get excommunicated.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

Again. You know, Spinoza's already excommunicated, he's asking for it again.

SPEAKER_01 52:55

You know, it's terrible this mechanism.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

It is terrible.

SPEAKER_01 52:59

So task three, right? These derived prejudices.

SPEAKER_00 53:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 53:04

So he says, look, humans consider that all natural things have been made for them.

SPEAKER_00 53:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

And then when they're considering these things and looking at these things, they single out one salient property in that thing that makes them useful. Yeah. Right? There's something that stands out about the rose where I think this was made for me to savour the beauty of the universe, this particular smell of the rose, the beauty of the petals, and so on. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

This was made for me to cut, to give to my love, you know.

SPEAKER_01 53:36

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

It was fate. It was fate. This was, yeah, this was here at the right moment, ready for me to pluck and give to somebody that I care about.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

You're giving a set of steak knives to your partner. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 53:47

Yeah, it's a nice Valentine's gift. Yeah, that's always yeah, it's useful, it's useful, it's practical.

SPEAKER_01 53:51

And he says, this is how we form notions by which we think we explain the nature of things. Notions like good, bad, order confusion, hot, cold, beauty, and ugliness.

SPEAKER_02 54:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:04

But these are the notions, Val, that drove Plato crazy in the first place, right? Because he says we always think that we know things when we say they're a mess or they're in order or they're good or they're bad.

SPEAKER_02 54:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:15

But all of these notions are relative.

SPEAKER_02 54:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:17

Right? Because what you call bad, I'll call goods.

SPEAKER_02 54:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:21

What you think, what my son thinks is an ordered room, I'll see as a complete bomb crater.

SPEAKER_00 54:28

Absolute chaos.

SPEAKER_01 54:30

Right. And so all these concepts are relative to our perceptual apparatus, our cultural upbringing, etc. etc. Right? And he says that it's because human beings consider themselves to be free in how they desire and act, yeah, that they also use these other notions of praise and merit and wrongdoing, and they engage in blaming and shaming. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 54:57

Well, I mean, it's part, it's it's all part of the education of the next generation. You know, if you want your prejudices to continue, you have to be able to tell them, you know, this is what's good, this is what's bad, you know. Like if you want to perpetuate your own your own worldview, you need to be able to say to, you know, the next generation, that's good, that's bad, but this is not what Spinoza wants us to be doing, right? We we have this this problem because we consider ourselves to be free. You know, there's a problem of this kind of like relativization. Everyone thinks they're free. It's like, well, you know, how can one's how can one person say that this is good or beautiful and another person say this is ugly? That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

Now, for this next one, let's take a good solid Australian example. I want to talk about ticks.

SPEAKER_00 55:43

Oh, yep. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 55:45

Many many of our listeners will be familiar with these, right? Yes. And uh, my kids are certainly going to risk their fair harvest of ticks when they go out in their scout camps uh in France. Um, let's say we're trying to understand the tick, right? Okay. And so what happens? He says, look, normally humans imagine things and they think that they're actually understanding it when they're imagining it, but basically they're still living in a fantasy bubble. Because how does this work? Well, our imagination is affected by the senses, okay, right? So what do we see of the tick? We just see this nasty little bump protruding out of our lower lower calf or something, right? And we just see this black little body, we can't even see the head of the tick because the head of the tick is barrow barrowed into our skin. Yes. There's a kind of a red welt around it.

SPEAKER_02 56:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 56:29

And so our imagination is affected very selectively. Do we know, Val, the sensation of pure bliss that that tick is in is experiencing drinking our blood?

SPEAKER_00 56:41

No, I mean I could I I can only imagine it would be like for the human being to be continually just you know, Ivy dripped up to a bottle of red wine or something like that, or just guzzling it down.

SPEAKER_01 56:52

Exactly. I mean, this this tick had a terrible winter. He's having the time of his life. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

Who am I? Who am I to to extract this poor tick from the state of absolute bliss that it is currently experiencing?

SPEAKER_01 57:04

Yeah, you're just like basically crying because you've got a red welt on your on your on your and you think you've got um Lyme's disease, you're about to contract Lyme's disease. Exactly. Suck it up. And and Spinoza says these human beings, their imagination always focuses on things that are easy to imagine. So you're just thinking, poor me, I'm a victim of the tick.

SPEAKER_00 57:21

It's very self-centered. It's kind of just like, yeah, you know, what about my well-being? You know, you're not thinking about the collective experience.

SPEAKER_01 57:28

Exactly. And so, beautiful quotes. Spinoza loves to talk about the ignorance. Yes. I always feel that he catches me out when when I read this. Oh my dear, I might be ignorance.

SPEAKER_00 57:37

Yes, I can I can tell you that uh you and I both. We're all the same boats.

SPEAKER_01 57:42

Yeah, yeah. So he says, the ignorant say that something is good or bad, healthy or putrid or corrupt, in accordance with the way in which they are affected by it.

SPEAKER_02 57:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 57:53

Each person has judged about things in accordance with the disposition of her own brain. Or rather, she has accepted the affections of her imagination as things.

SPEAKER_00 58:09

So again, ignorance is just projecting your own prejudices onto the world around you to explain things.

SPEAKER_01 58:17

Based on your very selective the very selective operation of your of your senses. Yep, right.

SPEAKER_00 58:22

Of your upbringing, you know, it's just yeah, you've you've kind of just divided up the world according to how I see it better or how I see it should be.

SPEAKER_01 58:32

Exactly. When I look at the tick, I imagine one of my cats who disappeared, no doubt, because of a tick. Yep. Uh we're quite successful in getting ticks off that cat for a while, and then the cat just disappeared because we lived near the bush.

SPEAKER_02 58:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:44

Uh so here we are, and what's amazing about that little that little bit just there is he's basically anticipated all of book two.

SPEAKER_00 58:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

Right? The whole account of how false knowledge, how error actually emerges from habits, from the habits of the imagination, from the operation of the senses, everything that he will elaborate over about 30 pages in book two. Here he summarizes in a few lines. Yeah. So what happens as a result?

SPEAKER_00 59:12

There's going to be this movement that is going to take us out of our self-imposed ignorance, shall we say? Maybe, maybe I sound a bit too Kantian there, but he's going to be getting us to to yeah, to to go through the causes of our own ignorance so that we have a clearer, sharper understanding of what the world around us is. Not a world subordinated to our own proper interests. You know, he's going to take us outside of the individual in a lot of respects.

SPEAKER_01 59:41

Exactly. And why do we need to go there? It's very simple for Spinoza. He states this at the end of the appendix. He says, ignorance leads to conflict. Yes. Right? Each person judges things by the disposition of their own brain, body, and imagination. And as a result, I quote, it is not surprising that there have arisen amongst men the many controversies that we experience from which skepticism has finally arisen.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:09

Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

So not only do we have conflict, but because you and I disagree about the colour of that wall and many other things, people think, well, human reason can't actually grasp the nature of reality. No. So not only are we fighting each other, but some people have given up completely and are skeptics.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:25

Yeah, there's nothing this is something I always find quite beautiful in Spinoza. He's really trying to work out what we have in common. What is the common ground that unites us, that that is able to dispel this kind of veil of ignorance that surrounds us, you know, how we're bound by our prejudices. And he's trying to think, what is the human being in common? Where is by what mechanism can we find a common ground? What is the thing that unites us? You know the answer, Val.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

You know the answer.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:56

Is it I swear, is it mathematics again? It is, it's mathematics.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:00

And this is why he's going to employ, dear listeners, what he calls the geometrical method.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:07

And that's where we're going to start in the next episode. Yes. With those definitions and with those axes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:12

We're going to go back to the beginning of book one and see what we can make of it now that we have this kind of this context wonderfully given to us by the appendix.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:22

We're going to dive into the infinite, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25

And it's very big and it's very scary, but as long as we follow the geometric method, I think we can find a way to navigate through it towards human freedom. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:35

As always, it's been a great pleasure to have you all on board.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

Thank you very much. Thanks for the feedback. And look forward to reading more with you so much.