Episode 16 in which Spinoza throws Luna into the indivisible and indistinguishable infinite

Luna ventures out into absolute substance, learning to equate a depersonalised God with Nature, Nature as the necessary unfolding of an intricate causal nexus. Val tries out the bad pantheistic hippy German idealistic reading of Spinoza but Luna rescues him because she is not a hippy but a punk.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Hello everybody, this is Lunacord. Luna is locating unforgettable new access.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

That was a very nice, very nice spontaneous one. We're talking about rolling about infinity. We're going back to Richmond's ethics because we put a bit of a fast one on you. Let's quite jump in you into the ethics. That was the easy way in. What's the easy way in? Because it's a bit of a complicated text, but now we're going to throw you back into the beginning and make you do the actual hard work of trying to understand what this book is, the ethics.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Yeah, and so just to just to try and structure things a little bit, um, the first thing we're going to do is talk about what it means to be suddenly thrown into the infinites. Like, how can a book actually begin by installing the reader in infinity? That's our first um big question. And then our second question is following from what we were saying about the appendix in episode 15, what does it mean to depersonalize God?

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Yeah, and what does it mean to, you know, um rid ourselves of all of the prejudices that we have going into this very project? Because in the previous episode, you know, we were talking about Spinoza's overall project, right? We've we've created this conception of God, God has a will, God is good, God does all of these things, God is the author. But Spinoza says these are simply our projections of our own prejudices onto the concept of God. And so for him to be able to clear away our prejudices, we're gonna have to get rid of, we're gonna have to come up with a different conception of God, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:50

Exactly. And that will be the third part, the third and final part of our episode today will be simply what happens when you strip away all the prejudices, what's left? How do we think this maximum being? What tools do we have? And we'll just start to touch on that. Um, and that will be the end of uh yeah, this episode.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

So, yeah, I mean, it's been a bit of a hiatus, so I'm I'm I'm working through the cobwebs here. I'm I'm having to cast my mind back to what it is that Spinoza has been telling us. And then of course, you know, I've been having to go back and reread the ethics from the beginning.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

You've had to come back to the old world. I mean, some of you listeners might not know, but uh Val's been off in the new world. I have, yes. And he bloody well came back and brought Trump back with him in his baggage.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

That was that's not my fault. I mean, to be fair, you know, I I went uh I was in New York City, which was of course used to be called New Amsterdam, right?

SPEAKER_02 2:44

Yeah, it's also Trump City, New York City.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

It's also Mamdani's city, and I, you know, it was a very stark contrast for me. Um, because the last time I was in the US was in 2015. This is pre-Trump, this is pre-everything, and I gotta say, last time I was there, I did not have a very good time. This time around, though, there's a sense of, I feel like there's a genuine sense of hope, you know, regardless of what you think about, you know, the the political future of democratic socialists, there's a there's a tangible sense that I think, I don't know, some kind of hope that people had.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Well, it's pretty rare to have a mayor like Mamdani in power in a major in a major city.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

I mean, in in the world in which we live, people have to cling on to just the even the smallest concessions, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Right, so Val comes back, brings Trump in his baggage, Trump goes and occupies Versailles. My daughter was super pissed off. She finished the baccalaureate yesterday, and then with all of her friends, they wanted to go out. All the public spec squares were closed, all the bus lines were shut down. Oh, of course. Was that just yesterday? Or was that just recently? There's been for about like four days or so. You couldn't park anywhere in Versailles. So yeah. Yeah. He's he found himself in the Hall of Mirrors.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

Yeah, I don't know how he snuck into my luggage. I've you know, they're very strict about you know baggage requirements here. So what he was doing in my luggage, I'm not quite sure.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

He was texting Melania. So let's let's turn to Luna, have some more fun with Luna. Um the start, the start of the ethics is like super abstract and difficult. And people famously open the ethics and just say, What's going on with these definitions? Yeah. And so what Luna did is she actually just you know flipped through the pages of the book. Yeah, and she landed on this amazing claim that is actually Proposition 14 and 15 of part one.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

And if we actually turn to these, we find that Spinoza writes, and this gives us a clue to his entire project. Yeah. And this is corollary corollary one.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

I struggle with that word, corollary. Corollary. Something about the Australian accent, some stumbles on corollary.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

We were not built to say these.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

Cassawary, corollary.

SPEAKER_02 4:55

Corollary one states, God is unique. That is, in the universe there is only one substance, and it is absolutely infinite. And then he continues in Proposition 15 by saying, Whatever is is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Yeah, so so like a just a very succinct, profound ontological claim, right? This is the universe. The universe is God, God is unique, God is one substance. And you know, so Spinoza from the outset is giving us a very different picture from what Descartes was giving us, right? For if if our listeners do recall, Descartes, for Descartes, there's two substances, you know, there's thought and right, hold on, the thought and extension.

SPEAKER_02 5:51

Yeah, there's two substances in us. We're yes, each of us joins together two substances, exactly. The mind and the body.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Mind and the body.

SPEAKER_02 5:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Spinoza, there's just one unique substance, and that one unique substance is God. And what is God? God is absolutely infinite. Yeah, and we're all inside God. And we're all a part of God. It's very it's very kind of hippy-dippy, and I I dare say, you know, like we're all one, we're all one in the in this universe, man.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

Like, man, it's a force.

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Yeah, don't you know that our consciousness is just the universe experiencing itself consciously?

SPEAKER_02 6:27

That is the bad, pantheistic, German idealist reading of Spinoza, and we're not gonna have any of that in this podcast. Luna's not up for that. She's not a hippie Luna, she's more like a punk if she's anything. Um, so basically, what Spinoza does like so Luna suddenly falls into the book in these amazing propositions, um, proposition 14, the crawlery, and proposition 15. And basically, what's happened is like a it's like a back door has been opened and she's fallen into the sublime.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Yeah, so I mean that's it's a very dizzying experience trying to think the absolutely infinite all at once. You know, I get I don't want to keep harping on about Descartes, but at least he was gentle. He started off us off with the very the most minimal substance. Spinoza does the opposite, he just starts us out in this maximally infinite absolute space, right?

SPEAKER_02 7:16

And it's I mean, I like I like to think of this via kind of an image. Like Descartes is like a teenager in his bedroom, yeah, right. And he tries to think everything from the position of an alienated teenager in the bedroom, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

With with your poster up of David Bowie on one side, you know, a stratocaster in the corner that's been neglected or that you can you know strumble out a couple of chords on.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Jesus and Mary chain poster on the other other wall.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Alone in his room, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

That's Descartes, whereas Spinoza, it's like the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Ah, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:49

Or it's like that scene in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, in which they, you know, he's passing through the black hole.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Right? So you you're thrown out into the universe in a way. And many of our readers will say, How on earth can you like? I know what it might mean to think the existence of a chair or an elephant or something. How do you think the infinite?

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is this is what is so disorienting about Spinoza's whole project as something that it immediately confronts the reader because you're yeah, you're exactly you're presented with this totally disorienting, dizzying array of everything whatsoever. So it's how do you then find a point of orientation through this? How do you even relate your thought to what this infinite is?

SPEAKER_02 8:35

And the crazy thing is that you know, generation after generation of students have found their way in Spinoza, you know, they do find their way, and I think this for me, there are two different aspects. Like on the one hand, he's de-personalizing this absolute, so it's not about you our little subjectivity, it's about the infinite. Yeah, and at the same time, there's a kind of joy in Spinoza because he's beginning with this affirmation, he's beginning with this outpouring of being. Yeah, and it reminded me of um, you know, one of my masters when I was doing my undergraduate degree was Jacques Derrida. And one of his most difficult and most beautiful books is called Of Spirits, and that's where he tries to come to terms with Heidegger, which is not easy, the uh black forest dwelling Nazi philosopher. Yes. And uh one of the things that Derrida says is that Heidegger harps on and on and on about the question being primary in philosophy. Yes, what it is, and what Derrida argues is actually before you can ask any question, before you can engage in any critique, uh, before you can be a skeptic, right? There has to be some kind of presupposition, some kind of primordial affirmation.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Yes, exactly. The famous what comes before the question. Exactly. What are the conditions under which the the question can even be posed? That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:01

So what does he do now in part one? Like, what is like there are five parts to the ethics. We know that. Yeah. What is the project of part one?

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Well, I mean, he's going to be laying out exactly what this substance is or what his conception of God is, right? And so that's he's going to be giving us the various ways in which he understands, yeah, the the the I suppose everything, the way he understands existence itself. So it's it's uh and its essence, right? So it's uh he's going to be basically just caching out his ontological framework, the question of what is there, and he's starting with, well, there is absolutely everything. But for us to be able to understand what this everything is, he's going to have to describe it in particular ways, right? So there's a number of like very striking ways in which Spinoza is going to start talking about what his conception of God is, right? So the first one is, and this is a this is a bit of a technical philosophical term, God is imminent, right? God is present in all, or maybe present is a bit of a Heideggerian word, but God is imminent in all things. God is absolutely everywhere. Everything that is is a part of this one substance that He's talking about, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Yeah, yeah. There's two, I mean, there's two references there. So when I was uh uh an adolescent, um, despite my terrible misadventure with the scripture teacher, which my mother was shocked to hear about. Oh yes. And she said, Why is it I'm hearing about things about you as a teenager that I never knew when you were a teenager? Yeah. Um I felt sorry for I feel really sorry for the scripture teacher. Being a teacher, I actually feel really guilty about that. I feel terrible for the scripture teacher.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

It is one of those experiences once you become a teacher, you think back to yourself as a student, you go, God, man, I was like completely. I was a god-awful student. I'm like, I never once, I never once went to office hours, I never once asked for help and any. I was just you know, I'd probably talk too much without having done the reading. You know, I was just one of those people.

SPEAKER_02 12:06

Yeah, my mother said, Well, she shouldn't have thrown you out of a class, she should have just given you an answer to the problem of evil. So, anyway, um uh two references, like when I was an adolescent, you know, I mean, thrown out of the scripture class, but absolutely fascinated by Jesus. And so I read um Nikos Kazankakis's novel The Last Temptation of Christ. Ah, yes, you know, the one that lies behind the great Scorsese film. And there's a line in which I remember Willem Dafoe playing Jesus saying, I look into the shiny black eye of an ant and I see the face of God. Oh, and I've I found that absolutely sublime as a statement of faith. Um and then, of course, um Aldous Huckley Huxley in the Perennial Philosophy, which is a book that my dad gave me, um, talks about what it means to think an imminent God and locates that thinking of immanence, because of course you've got the transcendent god in the Christian tradition, but mystics like Meister Eckhart would see God in a rose, for example, yeah, and would talk about God being within every single tiny thing.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

Yeah, so again, this uh so yeah, subtending this idea of an imminent god, obviously it has the theological kind of stakes, right? You know, Spinoza is immediately rejecting the idea of a transcendent god, God up there in heaven, being an author of everything that exists down here on earth, exactly as you say, you know, God is present in the eye, in the eye of the ant, or or in a rose. You know, God is imminent in all things. And of course, you know, the other big kind of philosoph, the big philosophical move here is that he is not starting out from a subjective position, he's not starting out from the position of I as subject, yeah, right? Starting out with everything that is out that is depersonalized. Well, it's it's God is not a subject either. Exactly. God is not a subject, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

So it's not like so. When when we, you know, when I refer to um uh you know Dafoe as Jesus saying, you know, I see the face of God in the shiny black eye of an aunt, ant, this is not to say that like baby Jesus is inside every single ant or living being, because it it's not a personal God, that's a whole thing. Like God is present as these infinite causal networks, yes. Um and so that's what's really difficult to get your head around because there is a way in which you immediately generate a kind of hippie mystical spinoza.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yeah, it's he leaves himself open to that so easily, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

And and so we've got to be careful, yeah. Um I just wanted to like lay out the overall framework briefly for our readers so they don't get lost in the ethics. Yes, just to reassure them. So, part one, we're starting out with this really abstract conception of maximum being. He's laying out his theory of existence of the entire universe, that's what we call an ontology. But from there, things get more and more concrete. So basically, it gets more and more reassuring. In part two, we actually start to meet minds and bodies, and specifically the human body and the human minds, right? He also talks about the mind of God, and then he goes through all of our habit-forming mechanisms, the imagination, how prejudices are formed, why we fall into error so many times. Yes, and finally he holds out like a beacon of hope at the end of part two about the possibility of adequate and true knowledge. Yes. Yeah, then part three, my favorite part theory of the emotions.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

That's right, the passions. Yeah, it gives it gives you a very detailed, like pedantic to such an incredible degree of all the ways, um, all the causes of all of your emotions, right? It gives you a kind of taxonomy. He goes, you know, if you feel joy, if you feel sadness, if you feel pride, if you feel and it goes through and it shows, oh, pride is a combination of this and that. Um, and so yeah, it gives you this kind of really beautiful, you know, theory theory of the emotions and how you can understand the causes that led you to feeling these things.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

Exactly, and how other people's passions and objects enter into the constitution of your own passions.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Yeah, absolutely. He's very collective, he's a very collectivist kind of thinker, Spinoza. There's no individuals, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 16:26

It's all about socializing, what it means to be socialized, how to learn to get on with people in a group, how a group is formed, find the passions.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:34

I mean, it's a lot of fun. You can start drawing diagrams of of your entourage and of your your close friends and family in just in part one.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

It's a good diagnostic tool, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

And then part four is actually why is it that we're enslaved to the passions?

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yes, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 16:49

Why are we, even though you know it's the whole problem of what Aristotle calls accrasure or incontinence, why is it that I do the wrong thing even though I know what the right thing is, right? And so part four is that about being subordinate, subordinate to the passions as our masters. Yes, and then finally, I like to think of um book five is we go back up the Big Dipper, we go back up the other side to the absolute again. Yeah, and this is the story of emancipation from the passions, the story of liberation, and it's basically how can we gain true knowledge of the absolute?

SPEAKER_00 17:26

Yeah, what what is free? We're on the half pipe of being and we've gone back up. That's right. And it is exactly like that is the the last, you know, the very famous uh a lot of ink has been spilled over part five of the ethics because it is it is how do we know the absolute? What is the relationship between thought and the absolute? And what and and a question that always fascinates my students is what is freedom? What is free because as we'll see when we start going through part one, you know, Spinoza has this very rigid determinist, what seems like this rigid deterministic universe in which everything, you know, it seems like everything's predetermined, etc. For absolutely every single thing that happens, and it seems like there's no room for our individual will or freedom. But as I always reassure them, it's a process, and I think it's really important when we are talking about Spinoza is exactly this passage between part one and part five. Each of the books, you know, it starts from I think it's Mashere who makes this kind of structural point about the ethics. It starts from the abstract and moves towards the concrete.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

Yeah, yeah. Because the the the point of emancipation and liberation is precisely gaining the capacity to know the absolute in the singular thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Yes, and to know how you were acted, like freedom lies within knowing how you were acted upon by the outside world, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Yeah, it's knowing your place in the universe, exactly, and it's accepting it as a kind of dynamic place. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

So that's a kind of yeah, overall architecture of the ethics as such. Okay, so we've got we've got immanence. So we've got imminence, and I and we also I feel like you know, to help our listeners along, we should be providing some references. So in Proposition 18 of book one, when Spinoza is talking about immanence, he says that God is the imminent, not the transitive cause of all things. So going back to that distinction between immanence and transcendence, in proposition 18, he says God is imminent. God is the imminent cause of everything in existence. Right?

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Yeah, and like all of these things, like the opposition between imminent cause and transitive cause, all of these basic concepts, these oppositions bear um, give us fruit, give us, give us ground for a whole inquiry. Right. So basically, you know, you can take any of these oppositions and just workshop them. And you're not just like diving down into the grass and getting going down a rabbit hole by doing that, because what it gives you is a whole way of thinking, thinking the universe, of thinking what it means to exist. So, like there's a for example, one way of thinking about transitive cause is that Descartes' author god is separate from his creation, yes, and therefore he's a transitive cause because he creates things, and then things exist after that act of creation, yes, according to the way in which God made them at the origin. So there's a chronological separation as well as like a kind of existential separation. Yes. Whereas Spinoza's God, there's no separation of kind between the cause and the effects. So all individual things are effects of the ongoing causal activity of God, yes, and they're within God, right? And basically, one way of thinking this is that God is the unfolding of what we call the laws of nature. Yes. Right? God is gravity, for example.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

Yeah, exactly. You know, it's like, and this is uh this is the second striking property, or one of the other striking properties that Spinoza gives to God. God is self-causing, right? So Spinoza is working within a system of causes and effects. The ultimate I have to be really careful with my language here because it's as he says at the very beginning of the ethics, um, God is or substance is self-causing. Yeah, right. It's not that there is an ultimate essence out there somewhere that you can finally arrive at in this ultimate causal chain. There's almost like this very strange God is a self causing substance, right? And so it's a causal system that continues out infinitely, right? And with an infinity of c with a with that many causes, there's also an infinite number of effects, right?

SPEAKER_02 21:52

Yeah. I mean, there are a number of ways of thinking about this. One is is that he's basically just taking Descartes' conception of God. Where Descartes basically says, um, if something is um infinite and perfect, then obviously one of the perfections is existence. Yes. If it's infinitely perfect, therefore it must exist. It must, yes. So God's essence is to be um completely and absolutely perfect, therefore he must exist. Yeah. So he's borrowing that conception.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 22:22

And at the same time, what he's doing is he's saying any substance whatsoever has to be like this. And here he borrows something from Aristotle and the whole tradition and just exacerbates it, which is that substance was always supposed to be independent.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

It's always supposed to be autonomous, right? And to be truly autonomous, to be truly independent, you cannot be caused by something external.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Exactly. Right? God cannot have a creator, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

You have to be, you have to do a kind of barren Munkhausen act. Yeah. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and pop yourself into existence.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Yeah, and it's also interesting, like where Spinoza says self-cause, you know, and not God is the cause of everything, is again to go against this idea of authorship, right? It's not that God is cause of, like, as in God is a creator of everything, it's a self-cause. Exactly. Right? So again, he's he's going against this idea of God being a transitive, transcendental thing. And this is how he's kind of building his system off this position of imminence. From imminence, it has to follow that there is self-cause, because if it was just a cause, that would mean that God would either also have to have a creator, and if God was cause, that also has a theological kind of you know, reading that God is the creator God in in um in a lot of kind of Christian traditions. So these are the kind of theological and ontological stakes of his positions that he's setting up, right? In this construction.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

And another way, you know, another way to understand this self-causing substance is to simply think of the kind of question that somebody who wants to make a physics teacher cry would ask, which is okay, fine, I'm gonna give you the big bang. Yeah, but what caused the big bang? Classic, right? And you have to, like in a certain point, you have you know, the physics teacher has to say, well, the big bang causes itself.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

Exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_02 24:20

And that's and that's Spinoza's self-causing substance.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

Yeah, it's very impressive that uh Spinoza, that's because that's always the example I I use, you know, it is just Spinoza anticipates the Big Bang in this kind of self-causing idea of the universe, right? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 24:36

So we're immediately installed in the infinite. We know that it's imminent, that we're all inside it, that it's causing us all the time. We know that it's self-causing, it's got this affirmative outpouring of existence all the time.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:49

Um, and then we also know that it's infinite, not just in a mere quantitative sense, but that its essence can be known in infinite ways. Oh, yeah. Now, this is kind of mysterious because this is when he starts to talk about attributes.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

Yes, this is where it gets really you're asking the wrong person. What is an attribute? I've I all I know reading, going through this book is that I know that there's an infinity of attributes. So an attribute can be any an attribute's kind of just like it's like the word, it's like it's what is the quality? Like what is what is this kind, like you know, what is an attribute of this, you know, whatever table, hardness, whatever the flatness, yeah, flatness. It's attribute, it's just the quality of it.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

Attributes are easy in like Aristotle and and and Descartes, you know, they're just basically the properties of things, yes, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:39

But I mean Spinoza just has to make it difficult by saying, well, it's just there's an infinity of these different attributes, right? Yeah, and he doesn't even leave it there.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

Well, that's what he says he says because we're so limited as human beings, we only know two of them. Like, what? Uh so many. How can you say there are so many if we only know two?

SPEAKER_00 25:58

Oh yeah, but we'll that's we'll we'll we'll get to what that is. That's at the beginning of uh part two, right? You know, but anyway.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

I want to read this definition, definition four, right? First, we're all still on the first page, Val.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Oh god, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

By attributes, I mean that which an intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

Clear as day.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

So basically, an attribute is whatever, it's the way in which you think a substance, yeah, right. And here he's gonna go very, very large, very general when it comes to the two attributes that he names. Yes. He's gonna say one attribute is thinking, yep, and another attribute is extension.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Yeah, and so we should be familiar with both of these attributes because that's what Descartes was banging on about with his mind-body dualism, right? We have thought and we have extension, right? We have but you know, of course, Spinoza uh is famous for being a monist instead of a dualist, right?

SPEAKER_02 26:58

Right, but Val, let's just say that you're Matthew McConaughey going through the black hole in Interstellar. All right, all right, all right. There you go. So you're surrounded with this like pouring of light and matter, like being sucked down through into the black hole, yeah, right. And apparently they actually did consult, like Nolan actually consulted with a contemporary physicist to say what would the edge of a black hole actually look like. Yes, yeah, and the images they came up with were completely informed by the reasoning of that particular scientist. Yeah, okay. Um, so it's not arbitrary, not completely arbitrary. So you are Matthew McConaughey, yeah, right? And you know, people can say, how can you think the absolute, how can you think everything that is? And Spinoza's got a really simple answer. He says, Well, look, you know that we think things either as physically extended, like all that matter pouring through the black hole, yeah, or you think of it through Matthew McConaughey's character, I forget the name, actually having the experience and thinking it and saying, What the fuck? You know, what's going on?

SPEAKER_00 28:00

Yeah. The incomprehensibility of your own experience in face of this infinite thing that's passing by you kind of at infinite speeds, right?

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Well, it's not just of the infinite, it's Anne Hathaway passing by.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Oh, yes, and even maybe I saw the the infinite in Anne Hathaway's eyes.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

So you think you think substance, right? He claims it can be thought in all kinds of different ways. Each way that we're thinking it, we think substance as mind or we think it as extension, yeah, that's a way of thinking its essence. Yes. That's a way, and what is essence? Essence is the kind of thing that something is, yes, right. I mean, this is another classical like philosophical terminology. This is not just Spinoza.

SPEAKER_01 28:44

No.

SPEAKER_02 28:45

Many philosophers through the tradition talk about essence versus existence.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:49

So essence is what a thing is, and existence is that it is.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Yeah. And how it is, how it is existing in the world. Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

As a kind of yeah, as a verb.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

So I mean, like, I mean, I I I I felt I struggled quite a bit uh this semester with all of my terrible examples to explain these distinctions, but you know, like we can just use the example of a tape, a table or a chair, right? There's we can kind of say it is the essence of a table to, you know, to have this particular form, shape, da-da-da-da. But then its existence is there are many different kinds, right? There's many different kinds of tables that come in different shapes and sizes, but more or less we have an idea of what the essence of a table is at least something that we can put our stuff on in some respect, you know.

SPEAKER_02 29:35

Um and when you um Spinoza says when you talk about the existence of a thing, uh then there enters the question of how long does it exist for, its duration, yeah, and how many of those things exist, and what external causes bring it about that a table exists.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Yeah. And so, okay, so we've got an infinity of attributes, right? Right, because and I mean that that kind of stands to read when you start trying to think about what the attributes of something is, you know, it can continue on, it can continue on in this sort of infinite way, right? That is the way in which thinking works. You know, we keep trying to attribute different attributes and different uh to different things, right? So he's saying there's an infinity of attributes, but then he doesn't just leave it there. No, more terminology located in an infinite number of modes. Exactly. Now modes are modes.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

Tell me what please. Let's go for another definition.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Ah, here we go.

SPEAKER_02 30:35

By mode, I mean affections of a substance or that which is in another thing through which it is also conceived. Okay. Right, so two different parts, two parts to that definition. First one, a mode is an affection of substance. Yeah. So basically, it's a kind of a modification. I like to think of it as a little fold, a little twist, a little tuck in the fabric of being. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 31:00

It's just it's something that if you know, it's something that that changes in in extension, right? But yeah, it's a modification, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:08

And um it gets different philosophers talk about this term in different ways. Um, and Descartes certainly talks about modes and modal distinction, but they're kind of like minor properties or whatever of a of a body in Descartes. Whereas here, Spinoza is eventually going to say any particular thing, any particular human being, any particular animal or building or whatever, they're all modes, yes, right? Um, and how are they in something? Well, you can only think of a human being within the category of animals, within the category of hopefully rational animals, within the category of a family, of a society, um having a certain age. And so you always think a human being within a context, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:54

We're all expressing humanness in in the various different ways, right? Right. I mean, and another like I mean, again, I'm gonna continue with my my my terrible examples, but you know, like if we think about if we wanted to take the example of water, you know, water has different modes, right? You know, when it gets colder, it turns into ice, when it when it heats up, it turns into steam, right? These are different modes of water, right? And water itself is a mode of blah blah blah, but it keeps going backwards causally, but that's just another way of thinking about it, right?

SPEAKER_02 32:27

Right. So we've got this basic terminology. We have substance at the top level. Yep, substance expresses itself in these infinite attributes, and then within each of these attributes, there are infinite modes, yeah, right? So we have, for example, the attribute thinking, yeah, and within the attribute thinking, there are just you know billions of human minds having various thoughts.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

All thinking different things all at the same time. Sounds like a mess. Yeah, but it is a mess. I'm not sure if you've looked out into existence recently, Al, but it is a little bit of a mess. And trying to chart a course through it all, you know, it takes a little bit of time and a little bit of discipline, right?

SPEAKER_02 33:05

So, fourth characteristic of this infinite that we've suddenly found ourselves in at the beginning of book one, yeah, is that much to our surprise, you know, Spinoza famously says it can be called God or nature, it makes no difference. Yeah. This is the famous doia sive natura. Yes. Like it's one of the great slogans of Spinoza.

SPEAKER_00 33:27

Um but a very, again, philosophically curious choice because, you know, arbitrarily, like it's it seems like an arbitrary different uh difference in the name, but then why give it two names? Why could you say it's God or nature? And actually, if I wanted to complicate it even further, being a little bit tricky, adding in the third term, why isn't it just called substance?

SPEAKER_02 33:54

Well, I don't think substance speaks to anybody as I mean, maybe there's a kind of rhetorical ploy here. I mean, he is making this massive intervention into the tradition and fusing two categories that previously have been separate, been completely separated.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

God as the creator of nature, as the creator of existence, and suddenly Spinoza has has fused the two. And you know, if we think back to the bit of uh the the biography um that we did of Spinoza a couple of episodes ago, you know, he was taking some risks with this one.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

Oh, yeah. I mean, this is like you know, many people read, um, and a lot of commentators that I follow read Spinoza as an atheist.

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Um, he did not advertise that himself at all. Um, so he wants to retain the name God, and in fact, part one is called of God. Exactly. It's not called of nature, it's not called of substance, it's of God.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

So, I mean, the question for me is like okay, we know you're gonna argue there's just one substance, and that kind of fits our monotheistic view that there's just one God, yeah, right? Um, but how can you still call this maximal substance, this absolute God, when most of the theological attributes of God are completely missing? I mean, this is not a good God, yeah. Um, this doesn't at the moment appear to be an omniscient God, though that's gonna change later on. Yeah, it doesn't appear to be omnipotent in the way that an author god is, no, though that is gonna change later on. Um, we do get eternity coming in later on, yeah, but you know, this God does not answer prayers, right? This god doesn't judge human beings at the last judgment and cast them down into hell or invite them up through the pearly gates.

SPEAKER_00 35:37

Yeah, there's no good or evil in this for this god, right? There's no, yeah, like there's no domination, there's no there's all there's like no human relation that we have to this god in the kind of classical way that we think about it, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:52

Exactly. And I think that's why there's a there's a certain moment if you've had any kind of like religious education or any exposure to religion whatsoever, or if you are a believer, there's a moment where you feel a bit let down in reading the ethics because you just think, well, what is there for me to love? Yeah, what is there for me to trust? What is there to support me going forwards during my life, which is full of various ordeals, um, um, depending where you've been born, of course, yeah. Uh, if there's not a personal God. And this brings us now to the second part of this episode.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Yes. Depersonalizing God. It is depersonalizing. Yeah, because I want to know where is what what will be my eternal reward for being a good person in this life, all. That's what you know, that's what I want to know. And Spinoza has taken it away from me.

SPEAKER_02 36:37

Well, I want to kind of cut the chase and say your reward is here and now. Your reward is like with the people, basically in this life. In this life, cooperating with the people you love, yeah. That's the that's the reward, it's its own reward. Virtue is its own reward.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Virtue, very, very Aristotelian of him, you know. Virtue is a good unto itself.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

Yeah. So here, part two of this episode: how do you de-personalise God? Yeah. Well, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to strip God of all intentionality.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 37:09

God does not have a purpose. God is not realizing a plan.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

Yeah, God does not have a plan for you, you know.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

For anybody.

SPEAKER_00 37:16

Yeah, God doesn't have a will. God doesn't judge what is good or what is evil. God doesn't intervene, cause floods, etc., etc., you know. So again, like he's being very I can understand why people were accusing him of being a heretic and an atheist, because he's basically just like, you know, has he read the Old Testament? God's constantly intervening, you know, he's making wages with the devil, you know, stripping Job of all of his, you know, um, earthly possessions to see if Job will still retain his faith, you know, and it's like, what is what's Spinoza doing here?

SPEAKER_02 37:52

He's just Well, to be fair, in another book, a great book that he wrote called the Theologico-political treatise, he develops a long critique of the very idea of miracles.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:02

And he says basically, if you look very closely and dig underneath the metaphorical language, each time there is actually a scientific explanation available for that herd of swine running off a cliff. Yes. Right? It wasn't possession by demons, you know, um, a bunch of, you know, a swarm of bees like went after them or something, right? So he's got a critique of miracles um in in another text. Uh basically, he's going to say that what God is is the necessary unfolding of law-like phenomena.

SPEAKER_00 38:36

Yes, of the determinate laws of nature, right? God it God is imminent in what the laws of nature are, what these relationships of cause and effect are. And so, as such, you know, it can't be an anthrop anthropological, well, anthropomorphized kind of man up there in heaven with a beard.

SPEAKER_02 38:55

No, absolutely. It's just the way things work, yeah. To make it to make it very, very simple. Yeah. And it's not, um, it's not as though God took a moment and was free to choose different laws of the universe and thought, I think I'll have these three rather than those four, right? Um, because that introduces arbitrariness and the image of God as some kind of monarch, you know, um, into it.

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Who just picked and choosed willy-nilly, you know, how this is how I was feeling on this time of day, the laws of the universe, Spinoza's gonna say no. Again, this is a conception of God, you know, that does things arbitrarily. What Spinoza's going to be saying is no, God is the necessary laws of the universe. God is what is, yeah, to put it in another really simple way.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

And we get to this bit. I mean, if if if some of our readers are actually like like flicking through part one, this is basically propositions 26 through 29, yeah, where he talks about necessity, the modality of necessity, as uh as the nature of the universe as it unfolds in causal form.

SPEAKER_00 39:59

Yeah, and I kind of like this, like you know, because there's so many accusations against Spinoza of you know being an atheist and a heretic, and it's kind of interesting when you see him push back, um, and he says, you know, you are the ones being heretics by saying that God has free will and arbitrarily decides stuff, right? You know, like you are the ones who are saying that you know God is lacking some kind of you know perfection or whatever. It's like you know, if if you subscribe to the idea of this, you know, interventionist God, then God can make decisions arbitrarily. My God, you know, for Spinoza said, my God doesn't do that, my God operates according to the necessary laws of this universe, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:40

Yeah, I mean it's a tricky kind of game to play, and like all of these theologians and the scholastics played it, which is whose God is better, mine or yours. Exactly. Yeah, and and Spinoza's got a winning card here because he's basically saying as soon as you humanize God, yeah, you're rendering God imperfect, right? Because humans are imperfect, right?

SPEAKER_00 40:59

Yeah, and that was one of the things I uh this is one of the things that Spinoza's responding to that I found very um unsatisfying with Descartes, because you know, for one of one, you know, if I'm going to be you know a little bit mean to Descartes, I'll say that you know his conception of God is that God is good, and that's one of the grounds under which that I am not deceived. That's the kind of guarantee God is good, God wouldn't deceive me, etc. etc. But when you say God is good, that comes into contradiction with the idea that God is perfect, because if God is necessarily good, that means God cannot be evil or God cannot be bad, but that means that God lacks something. God is no longer perfect, God does not have something in existence, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:44

Well, that's another thing that Spinoza does. He strips out all of the moral terminology when referring to God.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:51

So this is no longer a God as a judge, God is no longer evaluating our actions, he's no longer handing out praise or blame, he's not making sure that a divine system of cosmic punishment is at work, like Dante's you know, inferno with the nine rings of hell. Uh, there's no reward, there's no benevolence, there's no malevolence either. Yeah, right. Um, so all that we have is we have, well, what do we have? This is the question. What do we have what's left once you've depersonalized God? We've basically got um just these really abstract definitions at the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 42:28

Yeah, so we're still we're still we're still in these very abstract definitions. And this is again, this is where, you know, dear listeners, you have to you have to, you know, stick with us because it's going to get progressively less abstract, right?

SPEAKER_02 42:43

Exactly. And this is where I just want to shout out to um Katja Diefenbach, who's somebody who I um who works in Berlin and who I worked with at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht like 20 years back. And she gave um a fantastic uh talk at this uh Erasmus funded BIP. Now, a BIP is a blended intensive program.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 43:07

And that basically means it's blended in that you get students, master's students, and undergraduates from all over Europe, and you say, Hey, come here, and we're gonna do an intensive workshop on Spinoza, and it's basically focused on the students' learning, and you invite experts to talk about different aspects of Spinoza, right? Fantastic. And so um Philip Delacese, a mate of mine um from the Civenatura International Center of Spinoza Studies, along with Pascal Severac of um uh Paradis uh Nanterre, uh the Department of Philosophy, those two organized this fantastic workshop. And Katya gave this amazing talk on Gilles Deleuze and Antony Negri's readings of um the beginning of the ethics. And one point that she she basically made is what we're given at the very beginning are just a series of empty definitions. She's not saying there's only he, I mean, Spinoza doesn't say straight away there's only one substance, it's called God or its nature, infinite attributes. He basically says um substance has to be self-causing. Yes, right? He says that um substance has to be something that is um in itself, you don't think it through something else, right? Um and he says that it's conceived or known on its basis, not via another thing, yeah, right. And that's definition three, and then in definition six, he says substance qua God consists of infinite attributes. Yeah. So we've got three different ways of thinking of thinking about substance, right? Self-causing, it's in itself, yeah, right, and it's got infinite attributes.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

And what he's gonna do in the initial um like nine or so propositions is he's just gonna slowly unpack the consequences of those definitions.

SPEAKER_00 44:58

Yeah. And I mean that's what's so beautiful about the text. Once you kind of get past this initial, very disorienting, like I said, because I think I've said this before, but this is one of the still to this day, I've never read a philosophy book like this. It's very, very bizarre in its beginnings, and a lot of kind of philosophers have made a big deal about this. But baked into the very structure of the ethics is this relationality, right? You get these definitions, you get these axioms, but then when he starts writing out his propositions, you see the way in which these different elements relate to one another and how they they build upon one another. And you know, like, and again, you know, he says it in the title of the book, you know, it's ethics proved in a geometric order. So you have to follow this building, it's a construction, it's like it's an absolutely masterful construction, but with relationality built into every single moment of it, right? So, yeah, the definitions by themselves don't do very much, but then once you start putting them together and combining them, combining them with the axioms in different propositions, etc. etc., that's just there's this really kind of yeah, incredible way in which they relate to one another.

SPEAKER_02 46:12

Yeah, there's uh I mean each of these definitions will be referred to later on in the demonstrations of the propositions. Exactly. And there are these people at Boston University, I think it is, who engaged in this astonishing project in which they actually diagrammed the logical relationships between the propositions in the five parts of the ethics.

SPEAKER_01 46:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

So you can click on any, so they each part of the ethics is like a cloud of dots, yeah. And each dot is a proposition, and you click on one of the propositions, and then it it unfolds all these like purple lines, yeah, going to back to all the different other definitions that that proposition presupposes.

SPEAKER_00 46:55

No way, that would have been so useful to have. I mean, it still is very useful, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:02

Basically, yeah, so they diagram the argumentative logic of the ethics, yeah, to see if it actually holds together.

SPEAKER_00 47:09

Because I know um, I think maybe we've already talked about this on the podcast before, but Alain Badou's um doctoral dissertation was exactly on Spinoza's ethics, and I think it was either just book or part one or maybe part one and part two, and from what I understand, it was him trying to say, does this actually follow the Euclidean order of geometric demonstration? So he was trying to do, he was trying to see exactly what is the lot, does it actually logically relate in the way that Spinoza claims that it does, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:42

Sure, yeah, yeah. And so, of course, like you know, another question, you know, for for for our listeners is when you read one of these great philosophies, um one reaction that we always have is that of feeling overwhelmed and thinking, am I just going to become a disciple of Spinoza and become dogmatic about Spinoza? And you can always gain some kind of freedom, some kind of distance in your relationship to a new philosopher by simply asking questions about, and and with Spinoza gives you all kinds of opportunities to ask questions because each of the steps in his demonstrations potentially doesn't work. Oh, yeah. So, for example, now I've got a problem with definition six because he sneaks God in, right?

SPEAKER_01 48:23

He does, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:24

He says God is one, right? Yeah, and I reckon you need a demonstration there, but he sneaks it straight into a definition. So I think he's got a little bit sneaky there. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:32

No, he's you know, yeah, he's definitely this there's and I I think that's this is one of the other experiences that people have, and you know, and I suppose this is a common accusation against philosophy. It's like these are just arbitrary choices, like he's just decided, he's presupposed that this definition is imminent in and of itself true. Um, and you know, I've often I've had this experience with students quite a bit, and they go, This is just arbitrary choices. And I go, in a certain sense, yes, it appears initially as arbitrary, but it ceases to be arbitrary when you start looking at how they're deployed in the argument. That's what you're looking at.

SPEAKER_02 49:12

Yeah, you need to because it works as part of a whole, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

It works as part it if it doesn't work, show me. Show me where he made a mistake in the argument, you know, like yeah, and they're they're also they're not arbitrary in that they're all grounded in the tradition. Exactly, they're not arbitrary whatsoever. Um, you know, but it's their place within the broader argument that you have to critique them, you know. Yeah, you know, because you know, as much as everyone hates to admit it, we all presuppose stuff all of the time, you know, like with there's always a there's a bit of arbitrariness built into everything that we do, you know?

SPEAKER_02 49:48

Like well, he's trying to unpack those presuppositions, and he basically, I mean, I think the first definitions and axioms of book of part one are his list of the absolutely primordial suppositions that you need to think anything whatsoever. No, yeah, absolutely. This lies at the basis of any thinking.

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Oh, yeah, no, 100%. And yeah, this is often the challenge that I I say to you know, any anyone really, and I I go, okay, start trying to tell me about everything in existence. How are you going to go about doing that? Right? Yeah. And it's a very it's a very it's like this is Spinoza, this is Spinoza trying to do that, you know. You try and do it, and you know.

SPEAKER_02 50:31

I think you have to admit, Val, that one way to think totality is you have to say that totality is not existing inside something else. Yeah. Because if it is the totality, it has to be in itself, right?

SPEAKER_00 50:45

It has to be in itself, otherwise it's contained by something else which is bigger than then you don't have the totality in it. Then that's just a total, yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_02 50:53

So now we've come to part three of episode 16 of today's episode, and this is simply the question: what is this absolute? Right? We we know how he's unfolding it, we've we've seen some of the initial characteristics of it, and I just want to throw an interpretation out there right now. Um, and that is I think that what it means to be in Spinoza's absolute, what it means to think Spinoza's absolute, is to think your your enfolded participation without any boundaries in an expanding we or us. Oh, okay. It's all about cooperation there. I'm going Sesame Street on this.

SPEAKER_00 51:46

No, yeah, I feel like this is this is where Spinoza leaves himself open to, you know, very hippie interpretation.

SPEAKER_02 51:51

But no, like in in this is the hippies don't have a monopoly on saying we.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

No, they stole it. Yeah, they stole it. They stole it. But there is a the absolute, I totally agree with this. It's there's something that the other really disorienting thing, you know, particularly following on from Descartes that has gives us a theory of the subject, Spinoza doesn't give us a theory of an individual, right? He's looking at relations, relationality, and as such, you know, and this is one of the things that you know uh philosophers have you know um criticized him for, you know, note uh most notably uh certain uh German philosopher Georges Wilhelm Friedrich Hegert, in my terrible German accent, Spinoza gets accused of not having a theory of the sub of a subject. But we can think about in terms of what Oliver said there's a col there there's a sense in which we are all always already relational to everyone else. It's a collective subject. There is no I, there's no I mean mine. There's you're always embedded in a network of relations, if you want to put it in that kind of language as well, you know, and what Spinoza's trying to do is to think this infinitely large network of relations.

SPEAKER_02 53:16

Yeah, and and and the problem with this network is as I said before, it's without boundaries.

SPEAKER_00 53:21

Exactly, it continues infinitely.

SPEAKER_02 53:24

And uh one of the things, so thinking cooperation without boundaries is is and and experimenting with it is quite difficult. Yes. One of the ways in which he he names this absence of boundaries is the indivisibility of absolute substance. Oh yes. And this is basically propositions 12 through 15. Yeah. And of course, we've already seen with Descartes that we can hold that our minds are indivisible in that they do not have distinct parts. We might have different capacities, we can imagine, we can um we can memori, we can remember, right? We can calculate, uh, we can judge, we can wish, etc. So we can do different things with our minds. Um, so maybe we can speak about faculties of the mind, yeah, but it doesn't have distinct parts, right? The mind. So we and I think most of us will grant that the mind is indivisible, yeah. But when it comes to extension, when it comes to bodies, most of us want to be able to operate a saw, yeah, right, and divide two things. Exactly. You know, I've got my wheat bicks and I'm gonna chop it in half, right?

SPEAKER_00 54:31

I'm still I I I don't I don't know why I'm so still so adamant on this division, but I'm Vita Brits. I think Wheat Bicks devil's work. Vita Britz for me is the first problem. Anyway, but but this this this is but exactly to be able to divide something in half, right? But there's a particular problem oh you're gonna run into what happens when you divide infinity. You want to try and cut my infinite substance in half. What are you left with then?

SPEAKER_02 54:59

You just keep cutting it.

SPEAKER_00 55:00

You just keep cutting it.

SPEAKER_02 55:01

So this is actually, you know, one of the famous problems in the whole history of metaphysics is the relationship between the continuum and the discrete. Right. And you hit this in Aristotle precisely through the question of dividing a distance infinite times. Yeah, um, do you still get little bits or can they be infinitely divided? Like, is there are there actually discrete building box building blocks of the universe? Is the universe basically made up of Lego rights? Yeah, or does it all just become flow all the way down? Just a Heracletan flux. That's the continuous side, right? And so, of course, the Christian theologians have already said that the specific thing about Christianity, and priests that I know, yeah, I know two priests quite well, they always insist on this point. They say, look, Christianity is very specific because they because it says God incarnates himself in one particular human body, which just happens to be that of Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, right, yeah, and this is no other monotheistic religion does this. No. Um, so Christianity does say God can become body, yeah, right, but Spinoza one-ups them. He basically says God is all bodies. Yeah, exactly. God is all extension, he's the space between bodies as well, yeah, right? And so what we need to think, Val, and I think this is a real challenge, is you get very happy with a knife and fork chopping up your lunch, right? But it's indivisible, Val. How do you think that? How is your lunch indivisible?

SPEAKER_00 56:34

How is my lunch indivisible?

SPEAKER_02 56:36

Even when you use chopsticks, I tell you, it's indivisible.

SPEAKER_00 56:39

Even despite all my best efforts. But I mean, I mean, the the the thing that Spinoza's going to respond to. Oh, okay. How how am I going to think this?

SPEAKER_02 56:50

You've got a clump of sticky rice between your chopsticks.

SPEAKER_00 56:54

Yeah. Well, I mean, these are just modes, these are just expressions of God. But substance, it's I think the way that Spinoza does this uh really quite eloquently is he says, Okay, I'm talking about substance as a whole, as this infinite, you know, this infinity of infinite things, right? You know, you can't divide substance in two because what do you do? Like what happens when you just divide something in two? You either get two finite parts, yeah, you know, or you get two things that are infinitely large. And of course, you fall into a contradiction for Spinoza, you know. Unfortunately, he does, you know, he's writing a bit before the advent of set theory. He says it is incoherent to have two infinitely large substances, right? Because that means they are no longer infinite, right? And infinity can't just be the sum of two finite parts, right? So that's so when he's talking at the level of substance, he's saying, yeah, you can't divide an infinitely large thing because the moment you do that, it is no longer infinite, and therefore it is no longer perfect, and it is therefore no longer God.

SPEAKER_02 58:08

Dear listeners, Val has just unknowingly reenacted the great scene from Apocalypse Now, where Dennis Hopper explains dialectics and says you can't get to infinity via fractions, man.

SPEAKER_00 58:22

Yeah, you can, man. I should have got my bandana on.

SPEAKER_02 58:27

So Spinoza kind of sums this up in the scolium to Proposition 15. Yeah. He says, matter is everywhere the same, and parts are not distinguished in it, except insofar as we conceive matter as affected in various ways. Right. So this is the key. What this basically means is that material bodies are not demarcated, right, or delimitated in your lingo, right, by apparent surfaces or figures or shapes, right? It's rather changes in those bodies as they participate in interactions with other bodies that actually uh allow us to distinguish them, right?

SPEAKER_00 59:14

Exactly. So I'm still allowed to cut up my lunch and I'm not doing any great violence to the infinity of substance, right? I'm allowed to cut up extension, divide it, because these are modifications or transformations that all partake in this infinite thing.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Yeah, well, those grains of rice, I mean, you're pretty quick when you eat, I've seen you, like with those chopsticks and those clumps of sticky rice. But each individual grain of sticky rice is drying out slowly, right? It's absorbed a fair bit of water through the steaming process, right? And it's on its way to a terrible fate inside your digestion system, right? So it's undergoing these continual changes, right? It looks like it's static, it's not. So, you know, Spinoza is a thinker of a dynamic universe.

SPEAKER_00 59:58

Oh, absolutely. You know, against all the charges that Hegel lays against him of being, you know, static, immobile, which I would think is very, very unfair. Um, it's a completely dynamic system. And I think, you know, um uh a French philosopher who I've referred to quite a lot because I really appreciate his reading of Spinoza, in um in his book or part-by-part breakdown of the ethics, he drew my attention to a very um very obvious point in the very first definition um of Spinoza's whole system against Hegel's charge of you know Spinoza having a static immobile system. Mastery just goes, the first definition is is a causal one, it's causality, it is it is movement. Like you you you cannot you cannot accuse Spinoza. I mean, there's there are obviously other parts of this debate, but a very simple one is Spinoza is dealing with a causal system where everything is in this dynamic relationality that is constantly moving, transforming, changing, etc. etc. Yeah, yeah. Um so we've got indivisibility, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:06

And then this is the the last you know character of Spinoza's absolute substance that we're gonna talk about today, yeah. We've got this indistinguishability, right? In other words, you can't distinguish another substance, yes, right? So for me, in a funny way, this fact that there's only one unique substance also means that apart from speaking of it in these abstract philosophical terms, you can't throw a boundary around the substance. Like in a certain sense, because it's this infinite unfolding, it's also incomplete.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

Yes, right. Um, yeah, well, this is this is this is a claim that I have often made and have gotten into a lot of trouble with uh Melbourne's finest Spinozus, uh Janice Richardson and John Rubin. I've I've made exactly this point before that there's a sense in which, because you can because it is limitless, there's also a sense in which it is incomplete. And we had many, many long nights at the Clyde Hotel in Melbourne and Carlton arguing over this exact kind of point.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:18

But there's another denizen of the Clyde Hotel that we need to reassure here. Yes, and that is Adam Bartlett's.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:24

That is Adam Bartlett's. Bless his hearts. Ah, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:26

We just like to thank him for his love letter to Luna recent episode of the Baron Field experience.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

Yes, on ideology, and I would just like to say in in um as a little response, I cannot recommend their podcast highly enough. Um, some of my my great, you know, I'll make them uncomfortable and call them my masters, but also my very good friends who are very um instrumental in my own intellectual formation, you know, Justin Clemens, Adam Bartlett, Brian Cook, you know, and the fact that they have a this wonderful podcast together where they go in every single direction and and draw some kind of sense out of the spontaneous use of thought.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:07

I really yeah, and then Justin sums it all up and synthesizes it and comes up with like one three-line sentence in which he names the current ideological condition.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:18

Amazing work. Cannot help but recommend them highly enough.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:22

Um so let's reassure Adam. Yes, this oneness at the same time is this infinite un you know unfolding. And I think that for all of Badu's posturing and his way of trying to distinguish himself from Spinoza, which is just a way of him saying, Don't read Tony Negri, read me, because I want to be the great philosopher of the left, right, and of communism. Um, all of this like distinguishing his own work from Spinoza at the same time, you can read inconsistent multiplicity very easily into the beginning of the ethics of part one.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:52

Yes, and exactly in this kind of you know, this moment of it being you know of indistinguishability, you know, and and what appears as a monism and as a unique substance actually has a kind of incompleteness baked into it because it it's a causal system that continues out and extends out infinitely, right? That cannot be bounded, you know. And in my own kind of you know, uh reading of you know Bad Jew's big, you know, moment in Imminence of Truths, where he's talking about the absolute V universe. Yeah, you know, the temptation is of course to call him a Platonist, and that's what he's trying to do in many respects. But you know, I think you can also read this V universe as the Spinocest one.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:36

Well, I think like I I just want to make this point quickly because we're gonna get into this in the next episode. Like, how does he actually think there's just one substance? Yeah, you can read that maxim dois sive natura as suggesting sive something else, si ve history, si ve something else, and just continuing. Ah, yes. God or nature or something else or something else, like a whole list of names. That's one way in which you can think the inconsistent multiplicity of Spinoza's absolute. But I mean, just from an you know, from an everyday like cursory knowledge of the history of philosophy, we know that Aristotle, like every every dog, every stick, every table, every person is a substance.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

Yeah, in an infinity of substances.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:19

There are substances all over the place.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:20

Same with Leibniz, right? With infinity of monads, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:23

Right. So you can say, like, why if if if every single particular thing is a substance, yeah, what on earth was Spinoza thinking when he said everything is just one substance, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:35

And the thing is, like, I spent like six months of the first year of my PhD in absolute hell reading Aristotle's metaphysics and then diving into 2,000 years of commentaries on the metaphysics of people, very erudite, famous professors trying to make sense of the metaphysics. You think they give up after 2,000 years of methods?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:55

Yeah, apparently not.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:56

We've we've still yeah, and the thing is, the thing is, is like, first of all, if I To the French commentators, Pierre Aubonc, who's brilliant, who writes The Problem of Being, that's his great book. He just basically says it's unsolvable. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, he admits it. Why not just say that? He says it's unsolvable. Aristotle had massive problems in pinning down the unity and identity of substances.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:17

Yeah, you couldn't like there's a massive problem when you have this, yeah, like a massive philosophical problem when you have this infinity of different substances. It's like, yeah, what is their identity? But more importantly, and this is, I think, where Spinozo gets around us problem. What is their relationality? Like, how do they interact, right? Because we saw this with Descartes, right? When you have two substances, you know, Descartes spent so much time trying to think about what how do two different substances interact with one another. That was Princess Elizabeth's point. Exactly. Aristotle, well before the letter, has only gone and made that problem infinitely larger.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:53

Yeah, I mean, Aristotle had a massive problem, which is how do the two different parts of a substance interact, form and matter? Exactly. He can never, because they're totally different. Like form is discrete, it can be defined, matter is plastic and indefinable at first, and then form comes and gives shape to matter. Um, matter is indefinite, so how does the definite relate to the indefinite? He had all these problems, and he also says substance is whatever underlies both change and all properties, right? So it's a kind of a matrix in which all properties in here, right? And then if you say that oneness is a property, then your question is, well, that matrix itself, how is that one?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:32

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:33

If oneness is just a property, for example. And so even within the tradition, yeah, the unity and identity of substances was a massive problem, yeah, right. And so what Spinoza is going to do, and it's going to be a series of negative demonstrations, like demonstrations, demonstrations via the absurd, in the first like eight or nine propositions of book of part one, is going to show that every single time you try to distinguish multiple substances, yeah, it all falls apart. Yeah. It doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:04

You run into these kind of ridiculous contradictions, you know, like in the like one of them I already kind of outlined was you know, you can't have two substances of infinite sizes, because that just that's just a contradiction. It it doesn't, it's no longer infinite if there's two things that are infinitely expanding, right? So that's one of the ways he's going to do that. Um, so yeah, I mean, like Spinoza in one fell swoop is is in my view gotten around a lot of the the problems that have been haunting philosophy for you know, since at least Aristotle, if not before, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:39

Yeah, and at the same time, he's making there's a great affirmative political message which is super contemporary, yeah, absolutely important for our times, which is he's basically saying, all of your distinctions fall apart.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:53

All of your distinctions fall apart.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:55

We need to think what is nature and our place in and our relationality to nature, not as something separate and distinct. Not nature is not something made by God to be used by us. We are a part of nature, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:09:10

We're in an indivisible totality, and we need to think that in an expansive sense. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:16

I think that's a pretty good I think that's a good spot.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:19

Yeah. Expansive, thinking.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:24

There's a political valence to it, you know, and I think yeah, I think it's a good spot to leave off.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:33

So thanks everybody for being on board again and for coming with us during the break.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:38

Yes. We promise it won't happen again. See you later.