Episode 22 in which Ol and Val thoroughly confuse and mutilate their ideas

On Spinoza's Ethics Part 2 - Propositions 16 through 31

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello everybody, this is Luna Speaking. Luna, that is, local underground neighborly act. I have a bone to pick with somebody, and this is a shout-out, a shout-out to somebody who's actually dead. But nevertheless, uh, they should be floating around there in the other somebody somewhere. And I have a bone to pick with St. Augustine.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Oh, what is it?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Well, I just read the persecuted heretics. Uh-oh. He didn't just argue against them, he was a bishop. He had power, he had institutional power, and he organized like political campaigns and persecuted both the um Pelagians and the Manichaeans. Okay. So I'm all for a philosophical argument. You know me, Val.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Right, but persecution, religious persecution, I'm just gonna draw the line there.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

But isn't this the the isn't this the practical side of any philosophical enterprise? You know, like what's the point of having all of these big brand ideas if you can't, you know, go out and dissimulate them into the world? You know, well, this is the point.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

He should have just had a big neighborly feast and you know, very kindly persuaded them of their error. For such a great philosopher, his arguments should work.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Oh, okay. So are you advocating for this neoliberal free marketplace of ideas? The best ideas will will, you know, rise to the top. All we need to do is be rational free agents. You know, this is the whole Enlightenment ideal. And I feel like, look, you know, I don't I don't like, I don't want to shout out to you know Adorno or Hawkheimer, but I'm pretty sure they showed that this dialectic of the Enlightenment and the you know in the advancement of rationality hasn't really panned out the way that you know Dier Kant or Hegel thought it was.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

There should be no mentioning of those sad sack grumpy Frankfurt school philosophers. This is not neoliberalism, this is neo-republicanism. I'm talking about the Spartan model of throwing a feast for your neighbours and snapping them back into line. Yeah, I guess with a good chop in the hand and some mashed potato.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Yeah, this the Spartan model of also going out to war, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

Well, yeah, maybe let's just stick with the feast. That's what I'm just I'm arguing for feasts, right? If somebody seems to have some odd beliefs, get a good meal into them. That's my that's my advice.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

I do like this uh this kind of you know, this ancient Greek idea of hospitality, always invite people in, whoever they may be, for they may be a god in disguise, kind of thing. You know, like I like at that minimal level, I kind of like the gesture, you know, be hospitable to to strangers, welcome them in.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Well, precisely, and with food, and here we're already in the heart of Spinoza's anthropology and his theory of perception. Yeah, because what does he say? I mean, think about you and your encounter with a barbecue. You can have a vegetarian barbecue, I'm not against that. You can just be grilling some like capsicum on the barbie rice. Yes. Uh, and some corgettes, some zucchini, whatever, enough olive oil in it, it's all fine.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

But you've got to make sure that you know the bodies don't interact, you know, like people can get very upset if you, you know, you're grilling, you know, the vegetables that are meant for the vegetarians in the same area that you were grilling the meats, you know.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Well, this is yeah, it's a problem of mixing and confusion, absolutely, right? And I think we we you know it's all and this is where we're gonna have a really nice contrast in between Descartes and Spinoza for Luna, because Descartes are all about real distinction, about separation, about keeping things distinct. Yeah, if things are distinct, you've got to handle on the truth. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Make sure that make sure your substances are well divided, you know, mind, body, separate, you know, not for Spinoza.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Well, they're getting all tangled up in Spinoza. So he basically says that let's say I've got an idea of one of my bodily affections, right? Which is I've got some, I've got some chili, right? Go back to my chili example.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

You love the chili, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Yeah, yeah. This is actually black bean and chili oil on chicken. This is what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

You've consumed it, you're sweating profusely.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

That's right. And he says basically, the idea of my bodily affection, that the sweating and so on, caused by the external body, the chili, the red chili oil and black bean sauce, right? Yeah, it involves both the nature of the external body and the nature of our body in a kind of a mix.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Yeah, well, there's a composite, you know, there's a causal relationship between, you know, this external body that is acting upon me. And of course, I'm going to come to associate those two things, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah, but this is a huge problem for the Buddhists. Oh, what? Why? Well, because you're trying to meditate, Val. Let's say you're trying to calm your mind, reach some inner peace, you're meditating, right? And you're trying to go, um, or whatever other sound you want to make, you've got a mantra, right? And you're saying, I want to clear my mind. I want to clear my mind, right? What happens when you try and clear your mind?

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Oh, immediately you just start having all of these intrusive thoughts, you know, you start free associating in a way that would make Sigmund Freud proud. You know, I think if listener, I'm gonna cast uh the minds of our listeners back quite a while. Um, but I think I told the story once of on this podcast where yeah, we did this in high school. Um, instead of, you know, uh we in Australia we have the option to go to assembly, or you can go do religious practice. And because a lot of my mates were Buddhists, I went and did Buddhism instead of going to assembly and hearing all the sports news and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

But that but the assembly was the beginning of politics. I mean, that's the agora. You were saying no to politics and yes to religion.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Absolutely. Yeah, I don't know. I was just like, I had no, yeah, the beginning of politics, yeah. I don't know. I didn't I didn't quite like uh just being spoken at, you know, um by all of the the the people running the the whole high school. But anyway, but yeah, this is a massive problem. You know, people think uh, you know, people need to remember that like meditation is is a practice, right? What happens when you sit still and are alone with your own thoughts and having to try and concentrate is you start generating a tremendous amount of thoughts the moment you start trying to um break down the distinction between yourself and the outside world.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Absolutely. And and the paradox is is that what do the Buddhists want through and what is the the goal of meditation, the long, long, long-term goal? It's oneness with the universe.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Yes, the dissolution of self, the the the yeah, the dissolving of the ego, you know.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Yeah, and what Spinoza's saying is like, I'm really sorry, you already you're already one with the universe, you're completely tangled up in it, yeah, and that's why you can't stop being distracted all the time.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Yeah. So Spinoza's solution is not to um you know remove all of the thoughts and their relationship to the outside world, but actually start thinking more about the relationship that your thinking has with the external bodies and how they're caused by them.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Exactly. Get to know your chilies better. Yes. So basically, what this means also all, you know, also is that what we're actually perceiving most of the time is just as much the state of our internal organs and our organs of perception, right? Our our nervous apparatus, our stomach, our ears, how our digestion is working. It's just as much that as it is the actual external bodies.

SPEAKER_03 6:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Right? We think we have like a pure perception of the external body. We can see its outline if it's visual, you know, it's got tactility. But of course, you will know from the relativity of like, think about what it would be like for an ant or a mite to crawl over this surface of this table. I think it's smooth. The ant's saying, You're joking, this is not smooth. This is like these are foothills within here.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Yeah, this is this is a horrifying odyssey across this this table, and you giants here, you know, like disrupting, you know, with your talking and things like that. Every time you breathe, it's like a mighty gale that, you know, exactly. Yeah, surprising, of course.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

So so we're basically when we're trying to have these clear and distinct perceptions of external bodies, we're projecting onto them, and we're not, and we're not interested in like cultural prejudice or or or or class prejudice or whatever. What we're projecting onto them is simply the state of our own body and the parts of our own body.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah, because we're coming to form associations between the external bodies and the ideas that they cause within us, and also the changes to our to our own body. So there's this kind of sense, yeah, like we're constantly in this uh, you know, this broth, this kind of mixture of causes and effects of the external world, bodies acting upon us. We get ideas from these bodies that are acting upon us, but of course, what Spinoza's going to um emphasize, and this is one of the things we were talking about last week, is that we're often confused about the relationship between these external bodies and our ideas of them, and also our ideas of our own body, right? This is the first kind of knowledge. We we exist in this immediacy, not really knowing what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, and he he actually recalls, he says, This is what I was talking about in the appendix to part one, right, which is where we started out. He said that whenever we call an external, whenever we make a value judgment of an external body, right? When we say that it's good or bad, beautiful or ugly, perfect or imperfect, as soon as we do that, we're actually projecting the state of our body out onto that external body.

SPEAKER_02 9:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

So that's precisely what he's talking about. Now, he's not actually talking about mistakes or errors yet. He's not talking about false knowledge. This is just his theory of perception, and it's going to slowly, I mean, this is what we're going to be doing today. We're going to be looking at his theory of perception and how it slowly becomes a theory of habits, and then it becomes a theory of the imagination. Yeah. And finally, that leads to his theory of error and mistakes, or what he calls inadequate ideas.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Right. So here we are, we're still we're still at a level of perception.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah. And yeah, it's just like at this immediate level of perception, all of our ideas are all jumbled and mixed and confused, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Yeah, it's it's it's it's a giant, um, it's a giant mix-up, basically. It's absolutely chaotic.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

And one of the reasons for the chaos, we hit this already in propositions 17 and 18.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

And this is a really strange one. I have to tell you, when I first read this, I just thought, what's what's going on here? Basically, we don't know when things or people have gone away. How so? Well, listen to this. Like, I'm, you know, forgive me, but I'm gonna read Spinoza out here. He says, Proposition 17 if a human body is affected with a mode that involves the nature of an external body, the human mind will regard that external body as actually existing or as present to itself until the body is affected by an effect which excludes the existence or presence of that body.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

This is a quite a bizarre proposition. Yeah, actually, reading back over it again. So, what is it? It sounds like, okay, there's things outside of me, um, you know, my human body is being affected by an external body that that external body is actually existing or present until the body is affected by an affect which excludes the existed. What kind of what kind of affect could exclude the existence or presence of a body that is that I'm interacting with?

SPEAKER_01 11:05

Well, somehow it has to like sort of knock it out of the way, basically, because at first you think, okay, sure, fine, you know, events, bodies, encounters with them can leave a lasting impression. Yeah, right? And and and so you can be, there's a kind of like inbuilt kind of nostalgia there. But he goes one step further than that. He says, No, you are going to just assume that that thing is still present in your body unless something else comes along and knocks it out of the way. Yeah. Right? Or replaces it with something else. Exactly. There has to be like a displacement or a replacement, otherwise you're kind of stuck. So what he's thinking here is like a uh and it's an equivalent to inertia. So that you know, the 1600s, yeah, uh, that's a century in which um with the rise of the of the new physics, that's where they discover principles like inertia and momentum, right? Yes. Uh, and you know, Spinoza's not renowned for his physics, but like this is the equivalence, like at a kind of mental level of inertia at a physical level. So basically, we've got a kind of level of insensitivity. We're like, we're just simply going to presume that things are staying the same. We're like sticking the muds, yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Until something, until something comes along and changes that, we're going to stick with the initial impression that we had. And I mean, I suppose this goes back to the that you drew this link. Uh I believe it was last week when we were going through, you know, Spinoza's kind of weird physics, mechanics, and you know, bodies at motion and at rest. You know, just as bodies are at motion and at rest in the way that Spinoza describes it, so too are our uh ideas or our thoughts, right? We can our thoughts can also be at rest until they're changed by a different idea.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

Yeah. And I think this is a point at which we, you know, a great moment to continue our scholarly dialogue with the Baron Field experience. And specifically, I want to single out Adam Bartlett.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Adam, you've got it, you two have got it in for each other.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

You can't just oppose Badu to Spinoza, right? Because here again, Spinoza has very clearly anticipated Badu, right? Yeah, Badu's philosophy of history as laid out in being an event. Yeah, you've got these moderately stable historical situations, yeah. The state, you know, uh completely covers the situation, like all combinations of elements that are programmed at the level of the state. Yeah. And then hey, presto, bang, an event comes along. Everything's upset, transforms the entire situation. If people are faithful to it, of course, right? Of course, yeah. But the overall schema, right, the the kind of the commonplace, the topos, is that of a long stretch of stability with an interruption.

SPEAKER_02 13:44

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Right? So you have duration and then you have the exception. Okay. And this is precisely what's at a micro level, suppose we're saying, well, hey, um, that's what happens all the time with our bodies, yeah, with everything.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and just and this just as this is happening in our bodies, so too is it happening in our minds and our thoughts, right? We have the kind of stable, coherent idea of something until something else comes along and disrupts it and changes it.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Yeah, and we also have here like a foundation, I think, but a foundation of a theory of dependency as well. Okay, right. So once we've got this connection with an external body, we're it's not it's not dependent in the sense of we feel helpless without it, but it's more dependent in the sense we will just assume it's there, yeah. Almost as a kind of a prop, right? Like we we we depend on a fixed image of our environment. Yeah, right, and we resist it being modified. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Well, I mean, of course, and this is something that you know, this is the famous uh example that you know psychoanalysis gets very um excited about, but also, you know, when we think about babies, you know, and before they have kind of objects permanence, you know, they see the parent there, and then when the parent goes away, it's like the parent has actually just completely disappeared, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Um, so well that's interesting because you can ask, like, obviously, for the baby, something has come from a phosphinosis point of view, something has gone come along and actually actively replaced the assumed ongoing existence of the parent. Yeah. Right. And so that would have to be, I would say, like, I think basically the baby doesn't care that the parent's gone away until they feel hungry or thirsty or tired, or that's gonna feel nappy.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

And that's then so the body, then the body calls out and says, Yo, come back here and and fulfill my need.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

So the big question, Val, is what is the mechanism behind this inertia? Like, why, you know, why is it that the human body um retains traces of its encounters with other bodies, such at the level of the mind, we assume things are still there.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Yeah, I mean, this is a really this is a really kind of fascinating mechanism, right? And I suppose it's got something to do with you know this weird description he gave um when he was talking about the mechanism of of bodies uh we were talking about last week. There seems to be some kind of like fluidity there. There's something that that transforms and changes. I don't know, like this mechanism is a something that I found quite difficult to wrap my head around.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

So, well, what I want you to imagine, Val, right, is imagine some external body, it impacts you, right? Yeah, so okay, so you're eating a banana, I don't know, right? That's that's or or you bump into somebody on the metro, yeah. Okay, or you're hot because it's a heat wave, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 16:27

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Yeah, um, what that external body does is it leaves traces in a fluid part of your body. Yeah. Your sweat, let's say yeah, right. Uh, or or your saliva if you're eating the banana, right? It's leaving traces. Uh, and so what happens is that fluid kind of medium, right? It's retained these qualities, these traces from the external body, and then it transfers them, right? Because it's a medium, it transfers them on to some of the softer surfaces of the body. Right. Right. So you don't think about your bones, just think about the inside of your stomach, for example.

SPEAKER_00 17:02

Your internal organs, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

And so what happens is that in doing that, it's not a perfect communication of those qualities. Those traces that have been left by the external body in the fluid medium, they continue to agitate the fluid medium, right? Okay. And what's what also seems to be the case is that um is that there's a rebound effect.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

Right. In that the fluid medium impacts in turn the soft parts of the body, yeah, and that imparts motion back onto the fluid. Just think of a tennis ball bouncing against the wall or something. That impert imparts motion back onto the fluid medium so it's more agitated, right? And then it goes back and it impacts the soft parts of the body again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

So very much.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

So there's a continuing train of transmission of agitation.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yeah, because I mean, like one of the things that it's easy to do with Spinoza is think that he has a very kind of linear sense of causality, right? But here we have a great example um of precisely the reciprocal um nature of causality in Spinoza's system, right? It's not just that there are external bodies that are impacting smaller bodies, there is uh there's a reciprocal action between both of them, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:18

This is a basic theory of turbulence, right? I mean, this is like this is like you know, the kind of like things that the chaos theorists got really happy about and complexity theorists got really happy about in the 90s. Yeah. Um, it's not linear, you've got like butterfly effects happening all over the place. But you've got this continuing kind of agitation, right? Yeah. And you know, I think that we can we can think of this model of inertia and this continuing agitation, these mechanisms, with regard to the classic example of the breakup.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Right? Yes. Because there's a period of mourning, there's a period of grief for for or of relief, depending on what side you're on, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Yeah, the body, the other person is no longer there, you know, all you are left with is the ideas of them.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Yeah. And those ideas are very, very complex because they involve all kinds of different parts of your life.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Uh shared morality, like shared experience, shared stories, yeah. Uh shared perception of your like your you know, your hopes uh and your desires for your feet for your own future. Yes, yeah. And what's the classic thing that people say to you, Val, after a breakup? If they see you being a bit of a sad sack.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Oh, she'll be right, get over it.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Well your friends are a bit rough.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Nah, we uh emotional, emotional um uh compassion was not something that uh they taught us very much of in uh Queensland, unfortunately. No, but of course the classic line that everyone says is uh you know, time will time will heal all wounds, you know.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Right, yeah, yeah. And that's a classic one for parents, for parents to to tell like adolescents when the adolescents have been through some kind of crisis. Yeah. And uh and of course it's completely untrue. No, right? Because you can stay in your room and mope and get depressed and do nothing and not go out, you know, and and mourn your loved, lost one, right, for as long as you want, right? Yeah, so it's not time that's healing all wounds, it's the impact of other bodies. Yes, and I do not mean this in a crude sense, yes, Valentin. I mean this in a completely scientific sense. You need to basically have as many encounters as possible with all kinds of other bodies, yeah. Extreme sport, for example, would be a great solution.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

Well, I mean, this is really interesting as well because my my sibling was telling me about this theory of of grief that they were they were um reading about, and the the thing that I found really fascinating was the image that they said um that they used was that grief doesn't diminish over time, it's just that your experiences grow around it. The size of grief never changes, it's just that your experiences around it grow. And that's so it's something that you'll always hold with you, it's something like something that has impacted you, you know, really affected your life. But that will always stay the same, you know. Uh in terms of its size, it's just that uh your experiences grow around it, right? So very similar to exactly what you were kind of saying.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

Yeah, and then I mean he he illustrates this well in the scolium to proposition 17 with this with this I mean he and with this strange example, he says let's consider the difference in between our idea of another person and that other person's idea of themselves, right? Yeah, so I think this is fundamental, like you know, this is something like in any long term friendship or in any long term like a romantic relationship, yeah, if you're in a couple, like this is something that absolutely becomes quite important, is like your partner's or your friends' self perception, yes, and whether or not you can help them from your perspective in maybe just more. Modifying slightly that that self-perception. Yes. But here, I mean, what's his example? He just picks these two names.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Yeah, Peter and Paul, you know.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Yeah, well, I think this is obviously another biblical reference, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Do you reckon he's talking about St. Peter and Saint Paul? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

I think you know he's thinking he's talking about Paul's idea of Peter versus Peter's idea of Peter. Right. Now the thing is, it's not particularly reciprocal, it's not fair, because like Paul came along quite a long time after Peter, right? And uh Peter didn't give a fig for Paul because he didn't even know he existed. And Paul comes along, right? Constructs this image. Yeah, and I think he's quite envious. I think he could have, you know, he would have liked himself to have been the rock upon which Christ founded his church.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

Yeah, well, you know, that's unfortunately, you know, he came up, he came just later in the causal chain of events, right? So he all he had was this idea.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Um don't you think it's odd? Because what he's suggesting here, like he's bringing it home. He's saying your idea of another person is just an idea of an external body like any other.

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

And so your idea of another person is completely determined by the constitution of your own body.

SPEAKER_00 23:13

Yeah. Well, I mean, I I find this is one of the most fascinating, um, and one of the most it's like at at like one and the same time, it seems quite intuitive, but then like the consequences that you can draw out from it are really, really kind of fascinating. Just this very simple idea that my idea of the other person is not the same thing as the idea the other person has of themselves, right? And like you were saying before, I mean, isn't that just the source of so many different conflicts that you know we've had in our lives when somebody starts when a you know, you know, you get into a dispute with a good friend, and you know, you go, you aren't behaving in the way that you usually do, which is another way of saying, you know, you're not behaving in the way that uh in accordance with my idea of you. Like, why is this external body not behaving in the way that uh my ideas that I've constructed about them is is is how is this like why is this not working in the way that it's supposed to work, right? Um and then then also it's not just my the idea of another person that I've constructed, but that other person also has their own ideas of their own self-image, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Yeah, and I think we have to be really careful here because Spinoza in no way is anticipating this sort of contemporary ideology which says that only the individual has a true image of themselves, which is intact and pure, and everybody else has a corrupted and unfair vision and partial vision of it. Because in no way does he think that we actually have an adequate understanding of who we are, right? There's a massive difference between our understanding of our own history and another person's, even if that person is like a psychoanalyst, say, yeah. But that doesn't mean that we actually have some kind of like untrammeled access to the truth of our own history.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like quite the opposite. And in the same way, you know, not only is it you don't have an untrammeled access to, you know, the truth of yourself, you also don't get to determine the truth of the other person, right? You know, for Spinoza, it's going to be more about, you know, what do we do in light of this mismatch when we have a kind of confused idea about the other person? It's well, we have to go and investigate what are the causes behind, you know, perhaps these changes in behavior. Because, like we were talking about before earlier in the episode, you know, we have a tendency when the world or when somebody else stops behaving in the way that we are used to them behaving, we start projecting.

SPEAKER_03 25:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

And we start trying to work out through our own prejudices and our own ideas, we're trying to account for what what what is the reason for this other person's change in behavior, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

You know, and he's saying, well, this is an imaginary kind of construct, you know, this is just uh because of the way that we are constituted, we are always trying to, you know, work out based off our own presuppositions and prejudices, what are the causes behind this? But you know, for Spinoza, he's going to say, Well, you know, the only way to kind of move through this mismatch or you know, this confused idea that we have is to go and investigate the causes. Why has this why is this person behaving in a different way? Why aren't they in accordance with the idea that I've constructed of them? Because maybe the idea I've made of them was incorrect.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Yeah, and I think there's a really important contrast here between Plato and Spinoza on this question of people having false knowledge of external bodies. Because on a Platonic basis, you could quite easily say, Oh, the other is caught up in doxer, in opinion, um, they're still stuck in the cave, they don't want to come out of the cave, yeah, or they're one of those sailors quarrelling over who gets to be like the helmsman on the boat or the ship of state, right? And um, Spinoza's quite different because, unlike a lot of other philosophers, and unlike just about everybody in society today, he's not in a rush to call the other stupid.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

No, no, that is that that's nice. You know, you often get this kind of gesture from philosophers being like, oh, I have the truth, I know the way, you know, yeah, just follow my 12-step program and you'll be fine. I'll solve all your problems.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

And like one of the best-selling books in philosophy in the last 20 years was that book on bullshit, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:30

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

And um, it's an enormous amount because people people love to be able to denounce other people the other's stupidity, yeah. Right. And um, one thing that Spinoza does is he actually says, Look, the imagination itself is not to be condemned. No, like the imagination itself is not making mistakes, its mechanism is working perfectly well, yeah, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:53

That's just how it functions, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:55

But his project here, and this is what he announces in in the scolium to proposition 17, he says, I'm going to begin to show what error is.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Right? So he actually tells us, he tells the reader what he's trying to do, and he immediately introduces some new terminology. He says, I'm gonna call those affections of the human body whose ideas represent external bodies as present to us, images of things. Okay, so he's given us a definition of images.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Yeah. So the image, the image is the idea that we have formed to represent an external body.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

As present to us.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

As present to us. Right. So long as it's present.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

Yeah. So and what is the imagination? The imagination is just like a whole set, a whole system of images, of interconnected images.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Yeah, that we've constructed by you know going out and interacting with the world. Uh, you know, some inner images have stuck with us, and we're yeah, and and you know, we've retained them in some respects, but you know, yeah, this is kind of just this the set and the connection of all these different images.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

Yeah. And so he says at this point, he says, and now in order to begin to show what error is, I want you to realize that the imaginations of the mind considered in themselves contain no error. Or that the mind does not fall into error as a result of imagining, but only insofar as it is considered to lack the idea which excludes the existence of things it imagines to be present.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Oh, this is a bit of a complicated little scolium.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

Okay, so I'm gonna give you an example, right? All right. Can you imagine your worst neighbour ever? Yes. Right, you've got him or her in mind. Yep. Okay, you thought that that neighbor was a complete ass, right? Yes, okay. Okay, and that was connected to a series of like um acts of complete disrespect with regard to neighborly boundaries. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You're wrong. You were wrong, Val. I'm wrong. That person was a saint. Oh. Right? Yeah. And you didn't realise that that person had already donated a kidney to a starving baby, right?

SPEAKER_02 30:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

And already saved three dogs that were about to be run over by a truck, right? Okay. And gave 50% of their income always to Amnesty International, which by the way was founded by Quakers. Did you know that?

SPEAKER_00 30:25

I did I did not know that. This sounds like you're describing, you know, a Peter Singer's ideal person.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

So anyway, Harry, your neighbour, right? The problem is, is you don't have you lack the idea of Harry's kidney donation to the starving baby child, right? Okay. You lack the idea of the three rescues, daring rescues of dogs from the path of oncoming trucks.

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Oh, right. So this is just that kind of wisdom where it's like an enemy is just somebody who you haven't gotten to know well enough, right? Like, I just if only I knew. What if I go and investigate, and it turns out Harry's even worse than I originally thought.

SPEAKER_01 31:04

Well, then you then you would have been wrong as well. Harry is not just an arc, Harry is a psycho killer. And we should have denounced him to the police already, right? So the first hint is is this is our first hint, right?

SPEAKER_02 31:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

To um this terminology he's going to start using again and again, which is that inadequate ideas are either confused, but we've met that one already, like they're mixers, right? But they can also be mutilated. Ah, oh, in that they're missing bits, they're missing key ingredients. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

So the imagination per se can't be condemned, right? Because it's just a natural mechanism. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Right. It's our way of being in the world.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Right. And what he's driving towards here is that error in itself is nothing positive.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:52

Right? It's just a lacking idea.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yeah. Precisely. You know, and I suppose this goes back to you know the example I was using before of, you know, when somebody starts, you know, when a good friend of yours starts behaving in a way that's different to your idea of them, you have a confused and mutilated idea, mutilated idea insofar as you haven't gone out and investigated what these other bits of information are that I'm lacking.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Yeah, you're your your friend is being impacted by and is in connection with a bunch of external bodies that you're unaware of.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Yeah. Maybe they, yeah, maybe they had an awful day, something happened to them that you're completely unaware of, and then you're attributing a false cause to them. You're like, oh, this person's you know being really, you know, being really insufferable and mean and curt with me when normally they're really quite warm and loving. And it's like you just haven't understood that they've been impacted by other things that are completely external to you.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Yeah. Yeah. And I think like there are enormous stakes in this idea that error is not something positive, yeah, that it's just a lack. Um, there's a kind of a political and strategic stake, which is that if error were something positive, then it could build upon itself and become something very, very powerful and dangerous, right? Um, and then there's also uh a historical stake because it's not often that you find traces of church fathers in in Spinoza in a positive way.

SPEAKER_02 33:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

Um, but here he seems to be echoing um Augustine's solution against the Manichaeans. Yes. Right? So the Manichaeans said that there were like two principles like vying over the future of the cosmos. Yeah, one was matter, uh, one was mine, and matter is evil per se, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:32

Very binary thinkers of well, I mean, that's still the that's the contemporary usage we have of it now. When you say somebody's being Manichaean, yeah, they're being binary.

SPEAKER_01 33:39

So Augustine says sin itself is not a positive expression of the material world. Sin itself is just lack. Yes, right, it's lack of virtue. Um, and so you know, this he's he's thinking in line with with this move, this strategic move that Augustine made, right?

SPEAKER_00 33:59

Is this the same Augustine that goes out and and uh you know puts heretics on trial, you know? Absolutely. So this is why you were talking about him at the beginning of the state.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

This is why I've got a yeah, I want to find out a little bit about Augustine. I mean, I am I am reading the the um the confessions at the moment, and I wanted to find out even more about him when I was on the train on the way in. Yeah um but this has actually led us, so we so we've got these two things, right? We know that we know that we've got mutilated ideas sometimes, we're lacking an idea that's gonna come along and displace this assumed continually present external body, right? Now he's gonna talk about another fundamental function of the human mind, right? And this is gonna be something that basically David Hume is gonna build his entire philosophical reputation on, yeah, right. Um, and that's association, right? So we're back on the you're back on the couch again with Sigmund Freud, right? You're free associated.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Can I get away? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

He says, again, I'm gonna read out proposition 18. If a human body has once been affected by two or more bodies simultaneously, when the mind afterward imagines any one of them, it will immediately recall the others.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Yeah, right. So yeah, I mean, there we have, you know, just a great, you know, succinct theory of you know recollection and memory. Exactly. Right. You know, whenever you recall any kind of memory, you associate it with all the other things, you know. Um and that's one of the things that, you know, to go back to our earlier conversation, it makes breakup so hard. You know, you could just be walking along an innocent street, and then suddenly you go, I used to walk along this street with this person, you know, and then suddenly it's back in, you know, you've you've your your mind's been affected, you know, suddenly you're you're filled with sadness or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 35:40

Yeah, people avoid entire neighborhoods and entire cities.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

Sometimes entirely, yeah. Because of this process of recollection when you've been affected by more.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

But also's got a perfectly practical solution to that, which is like go back to the neighborhood, go back to the street and do something spectacularly stupid with another friend. Yeah. And it'll just like dwarf, it'll dwarf that experience you've had. It'll replace it. Unfortunate X, yeah. Yeah. So um, we've got this association of ideas, right? And he actually immediately gives us, as you said, Val, a definition of memory. He says, memory is a connection of ideas involving the nature of things outside the body, yeah, a connection made in the mind, yeah, in accordance with the order and connection of the affections of the human body.

SPEAKER_02 36:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

Right? So he says here that memory is not a faithful photograph of what actually happened. No. He says it's a connection of ideas that does not causally explain the external body.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

No. Yeah, this is this really fascinating kind of separation that Spinoza, well, I don't want to call it separation, you know, entirely because of the way, you know, we've been talking about how everything partakes in one substance, but there is this difference that he keeps articulating between our thoughts and the external world. And you know, this comes this comes through really clearly with with memory. It's like the memory, as you said, is not a pure and simple, faithful snapshot of the thing that actually occurred, right? There's there's something different about the memory or the thought and the body.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

Yeah, but it is a snapshot of what was happening in your body at that time, at that time, as mixed up with that external body.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:23

Right? So that's why he's saying imagination per se is not an error. No. Because it is a faithful snapshot. It's just not of the truth of the external body. It's not he says it's not um it's not an intellectual order of uh of ideas, it's the corporeal order of ideas that's being uh recorded and transmitted with memory. And then can we talk about the the fable of the soldier and the farmer?

SPEAKER_00 37:51

Oh yes. So to illustrate this um this little distinction um about the way that we connect a certain set of ideas with a particular body, is he gives us this little um example. He sets a scene. You know, I do like it when you know Spinoza uses an image to describe how images function, right? So the example Spinoza gives us is he says, when a soldier, for example, sees the footsteps of a horse in the sand, he will move directly from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from there to thoughts of war, etc. But a countryman or a peasant will move from the thought of a horse to the thought of a plough, a field, etc. And so everyone will move from one thought to this or that other thought, depending on how he has been in the habit of combining and connecting images of things in this way or that.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

Yeah, I think this is an amazing example, right? So good. It's it's it's very short, it's very succinct, but there's a lot in there because for me, he's he's not this is not just individualistic relativism, which is like the contemporary ideology. He's not just saying, Oh man, you had a different experience to me of what actually happened at that barbecue. Yeah, right. What he's saying is that it's not so much the individual, it's also like it's your profession, yes, it's your socioeconomic position.

SPEAKER_02 39:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:14

Right. I mean, he's he's not just contrasting anyone, he's contrasting a soldier who's like part of the state, right? Yes, even though there were mercenaries back then, of course, with a peasant, somebody who belongs to what Hegel will call the first estate, agriculture, yeah, right? Uh who's got this close relationship to the land, which the soldier soldier doesn't. No, right? Um, and he's saying it's not like a question of like culture or education or upbringing, it's simply the order of the affections of your body.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

Yeah, right? Depending on the context in which you received them, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:48

Yeah. Because what does a soldier do with a horse?

SPEAKER_00 39:50

Well, rides it rides it into battle, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:52

Right. What happens to the bloody horse? Oh, no one can't. No, the soldier doesn't care. Horse gets shot to pieces. Yeah. What does a peasant do with a horse? He doesn't jump on it and gallop off.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

No, the horse, the horse put the the the peasant.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

No.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

He goes, Alright, I need you to help, you know, either take my produce to market or you know, to help me till the field, etc. etc. You know, there's a there's a reciprocal relationship of, you know, labour and the land, whereas, you know, the soldier. Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 40:21

And I think this is what Spinozis is is inviting us to think. He's inviting us to think um this difference of perspectives at the level of the body, because the peasant sees the horse and thinks of the movement of literally putting the harness for the plow onto the horse, yeah, right, and thinks of the movement by which you trace the furrows in the field as you do the ploughing, right? And that, I tell you, is a completely different physical sensation to that of trying to stay on the back of a horse with a nice saddle when it's galloping into battle, right? Yeah. So you're actually remembering it's it's muscle memory, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

Yeah, and I mean this is also the the the way in which you know, like uh interactions with external bodies will also give rise to different emotions, right? You know, so like you know, when the soldier sees the the the tracks of the horse in the sand, you know, thinking of war, which necessarily, you know, will bring up thoughts of glory, of of fear, of terror, etc. etc. You know, whereas you know, the peasant will get a totally different set of emotions from interacting with the same body, right? Being out in the fields, you know, you know, the the dignity of labor and toil, you know, you know, a sense of injustice, being forced to work on the land, etc. etc. Right, you'll get two different sets of emotions from the same body, right?

SPEAKER_01 41:42

Yeah, and the exciting thing is, and I think you know, this is this is also explored in all kinds of novels. Like what's coming to mind is the scene in Anna Karenana in which I think it's Nicolas, the landowner, who actually goes and joins his peasants reaping in the field at the moment of harvest. And of course, he's completely hopeless at first because he's an aristocrat and he's never lifted a tool in his life, and he's getting blisters on his hands from holding the scythe or whatever. But after like a good half day, he finally gets into the rhythm and realizes that you don't pull a scythe through wheat, you actually let it fall, you let the weight of it fall down through it, right? Yeah, by the way, Val, I am talking from experience.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

I have scythed away in my time, right? You said you spoke with such authority. I would hope that you'd spend time out in the field scything.

SPEAKER_01 42:32

And so he gets into this rhythm and works out that everybody is scything at exactly the same pace, and you have like this line that advances over these undulating fields of the carving down of the uh of the wheat, and he's becomes part of it. And it's one of the most beautiful um descriptions I've ever read in literature of an experience of work in which it's no longer work or labor, it's just the expression of some kind of natural rhythm.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

Yeah, and I mean this is also a very uh beautiful example of the way that practice changes theory or the way that practice, practical activity changes our ideas about the world, right? We have a particular set of ideas about what it means to labor in the field, etc. etc. But you know, before, you know, until we've actually gone down and done it and worked in the field, you know, um, we'll just remain with our this kind of image of it. And then once you go and actually partake in the activity, it transforms the ideas that you formed about it, right? Until, you know, as Spinoza was saying before, until a different body changes the idea that you had, you know, you will remain with this idea until another body comes along and changes it, right?

SPEAKER_01 43:40

Which is yeah, Val, I think we've got another piece of practical advice for our young listeners.

SPEAKER_00 43:45

Go and work in the fields.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

Yeah, especially if you've been through a romantic breakup.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Uh there's one solution get gardening.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

Yeah, go, yeah. Go find a community garden somewhere, you know, wipe the wipe the the earth with your hands, you know.

SPEAKER_01 43:58

So now we've come to the most Exciting bits of this entire episode for Luna. And it's particularly exciting because finally we're going to be able to wrest Spinoza away from the one of the dominant contemporary readings amongst people getting into European philosophy, and that's out of Delars, because here we can actually start to construct the elements for a Laconian or a Badusian reading of Spinoza.

SPEAKER_00 44:25

And how are we going to do that all?

SPEAKER_01 44:27

Well, you've got to read you've got to read Lacon's um Lacon's uh seminars, especially the ones um in the late 60s and and early 70s.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

I mean, haven't our listeners suffered enough?

SPEAKER_01 44:39

Well, so there's there are some like contemporary concepts that have been like going around uh around a lot ever since the Slovenian school got their hands on Lacon and Hegel. Um and there's a particular fascination with things like um incompletion, yes, right? Yeah. Uh with regard to uh topology as well. Yes. And so what I actually want to argue here is that between propositions 19 and 23, Spinoza is giving us a brief topology of the human mind.

SPEAKER_02 45:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Now, what is a topology? It's basically just a map, right? And we always have a simple topology of the human mind, yeah, in that we think of our inner life versus our outer life. Yeah. So ever since like Descartes and other philosophers, we think, and especially people like Rousseau, the romantics, um, we think of our inner life as being composed of all the our internal access to our own self, our perceptions, our memories, our desires, our thoughts, right? And the outer world is a world of perceived bodies. Yes. Right. Yeah. And so we've got a very simple topology, which is there's an inside versus an outside.

SPEAKER_00 45:47

Yep. Right? There's the the my private realm of my own thoughts that I generate out of my own kind of will, my thoughts you know, go in whatever direction I choose them to be. And then there are the things outside.

SPEAKER_01 45:58

Right. And there, you know, there are certain people who've looked at the history of the philosophy of mind and said that we always, like, you know, European philosophers um have always thought of the mind as a kind of theatre.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Right. And ever since like Plato's Cave. I mean, Plato's Cave is a space of interiority. Yes. Right. Um, so you always have a very simple topology. And one of the great things that Lacan does is he just comes along and says, look, um, that's just like a very basic topology. Let's just explore some other topologies. Yeah. Right. The mathematicians have been thinking about complex spaces for all for you know for decades now.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

Let's just try them out and see what they can enable us to think about the mind. And so he starts out by just thinking about how the mind has access to itself.

SPEAKER_02 46:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Right? So self-knowledge. Okay. And he starts out with a very simple thing, which is that you can have an idea of an affection of your body. So you say to yourself, ah, I'm feeling hot. Oh, feeling hungry. Yeah. Right. And then you can also have an idea of that idea. Oh no, that sounds dangerous. Well, you can say to yourself, Do I feel hungry enough to go and get a snack? Or can I really wait until lunchtime?

SPEAKER_02 47:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

Right? Um, how how hungry am I? Yeah. Right? Uh, or how hot am I? Do I need to turn the eye con? Or can I just like put a fan on? Yeah. Um, and then he says the problem is is that you can have an idea of the idea of the idea. Right? Oh no. So what you've basically got is a local relationship to the self.

SPEAKER_02 47:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:28

Right? In that you're thinking about one of the ideas that you have in your mind.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

Yeah, and it's immediacy.

SPEAKER_01 47:34

Yeah. And ideas are representational, so they can represent anything, they can represent other things or other ideas, right?

SPEAKER_02 47:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

So you can get lost. This is proposition 22, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 47:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:44

Your mind can get lost, Val, in a self-referential maze of mirrors.

SPEAKER_00 47:50

Yes, I feel like this whole uh idea of an idea of an idea, just you know, I'm gonna get lost in infinity. At one point, I'm gonna have to take a decision, I'm gonna make a decision on one of these ideas, right?

SPEAKER_01 48:00

Well, Emmanuel can't saw you coming, Val.

SPEAKER_00 48:02

He's very worried about you. He should be, he should be.

SPEAKER_01 48:05

Yeah, and in his anthropology, from a pragmatic point of view, what does he say? He says, Don't get too self-aware, Val.

SPEAKER_00 48:11

Yeah, don't think about yourself too much.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

No, no, no more, you know, just put a stop to all this reflection about your own ideas, right?

SPEAKER_00 48:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:18

So what Spinoza says, he says, Oh my god, I've unleashed hell. Like we've got like this infinite, you know, infinite mirrors opening up. We need to organize this, right? Yeah. So we've got this multiplicity of ideas, and what does he do? And this is where, like, um uh Task on the Truth Function, the great Polish um logician that Lacan makes a big fuss of when he's trying to get to that proposition, there is no meta-language. Yeah, yes, yeah, right. This is basically what Spinoza is arguing, yeah, right? He's basically saying there is no idea of the mind. That's the same thing as saying there is no meta-language, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:53

Uh yes, okay.

SPEAKER_01 48:54

Because what he's saying is uh you've got Alfred Task, right? It's like you've got levels of languages, right? And and truth is always something that you say about a lower sentence on a lower level of language, right? So what's Spinoza going to do? He's going to say we have strata or levels of ideas, yeah, right? And at the lowest possible level, you've just got the ideas of the basic affections of the body.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:20

Right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 49:22

I am hungry, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:22

Exactly. Right? Or there's a pain in my stomach. I am hungry might be a slightly higher level already. And then you have the oh, what kind of hunger is it? That's the next level up again.

SPEAKER_02 49:33

Okay. Right.

SPEAKER_01 49:33

So we're in a kind of like a building with with stories to it. Yeah. Right. Um, and what he's going to do is he's going to not just have this multiplication of levels, because if you're not careful, you're going to be in one of Nolan's films, you're going to be in Inception.

SPEAKER_00 49:46

Yes, you're going to be.

SPEAKER_01 49:47

Right. Or you're going to be in Cronenberg's existence. Yes. Right. Um, you're going to have this, like, you don't know what level you're actually at. Okay. Okay. So what he does is he says, I'm not going to have some stupid spinning top and have like viewers say, oh my god, the spinning top, like, was he actually still in a dream?

SPEAKER_02 50:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:03

Right. What he's going to do is he's going to anchor these levels, right? At the bottom, he's going to anchor it in our actual individual body, which is real, right? And material, right? And the top, he's going to anchor it in the mind of God.

SPEAKER_00 50:16

So we've got a minimal and a maximal.

SPEAKER_01 50:18

Exactly. Right? Got a minimum and a maximum.

SPEAKER_00 50:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:21

So you can see how Baji's super happy here and very inspired. Yeah. Right. And he wrote his uh his original thesis. Okay. Yes. Um, what does he also say? He says that we've got this local anchoring of ideas. I've got an idea of an idea. They're at different levels, right? But he wants he's he wants them in one ordered hierarchy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:41

Okay, we've said that. This is the connection of ideas, right? You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:46

But what he's also going to do is he's going to say, we are always, we can always have an idea of the ideas at a lower level.

SPEAKER_02 50:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

Right? But we never have an idea of the entirety of the level on which we are.

SPEAKER_00 50:59

No.

SPEAKER_01 50:59

Right? So what does he mean by this? What does he say? He says, proposition 19, the human mind does not know the human body itself.

SPEAKER_02 51:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:09

It only knows that it exists, the body, right? Through the idea of the affections by which the body is affected.

SPEAKER_00 51:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

So unlike all those people out there in the contemporary hellscape that is social media who are preaching body awareness and you know, um, Spurs is saying you can't get there completely. No. Right? You will never have a complete idea of the whole of your body.

SPEAKER_00 51:38

No, because everything is in a constant state of change. You know, there's this danger of, you know, oh, it's not even a danger, it's just that at the level of our ideas and also at the level of the affectations of our bodies, it can go on infinitely, right? And you can't capture it.

SPEAKER_01 51:52

Man, you're back in the river again with Heraclitus. I am. This is not Heraclitus. I never left. This is Polish logic, right?

SPEAKER_00 51:59

Yeah, but but you can never close in all of those different ideas under one singular idea. That's the point I was getting to, right? You could continue on to infinity, but this is a bad, like, this is just where you're going to be confused forever, right? Um, you know, the idea that you can just have one idea that encloses every single idea that you have or every single affectation of the of the body is not possible, right?

SPEAKER_01 52:23

Yeah. So he also says, proposition 23, we do not have an idea of the mind as a whole.

SPEAKER_00 52:30

No.

unknown 52:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 52:31

Only God has that.

SPEAKER_01 52:32

Right, exactly. So what you actually have, writes, um, is a situation in which the mind cannot grasp itself as a whole.

SPEAKER_02 52:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:43

So full self-reflexivity is impossible. And this is like a clear shot across the bowels with regard to Descartes.

SPEAKER_02 52:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:51

Because what does Descartes say? He says, our knowledge of mental things and specifically of ourselves is far more clear and distinct than any knowledge of external bodies.

SPEAKER_03 53:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

Uh yeah, I have the clear and distinct idea that I am a thinking thing, right? No one can call that into question. I have I've closed off all of thought with this singular thing.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

There's a form of transparency there, right? And what Spinoza is saying, in contrast, is the mind is always filled. Like the mind is an idea, but it's not the idea of its own idea.

unknown 53:24

No.

SPEAKER_01 53:24

It's the idea of all these lower level ideas, which are the affections of our body.

SPEAKER_02 53:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 53:29

Right? Um, and so the idea of the mind is united with, he says it's united with the mind, just like the mind is united with the body.

SPEAKER_02 53:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 53:41

It's this really interesting analogy, right? Okay. So what I think this means is that in practice, it's indistinguishable from it. The mind is indistinguishable, the idea of the mind is indistinguishable from the mind itself as populated by all these ideas of the affections of the body. Yes. Okay. So this is like this is getting a little bit complicated, but what's what's super important, I think, for listeners is that each philosopher has at least one signature move that they make, like one big conceptual move that they make, right? A kind of a trick that they pull, right? And and many philosophers are one-trick ponies.

SPEAKER_02 54:20

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:21

And this is Spinoza's one of Spinoza's main conceptual signatures, right? It's imminence within a totality that cannot be mastered.

SPEAKER_02 54:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:31

Right? So you're within a whole that you cannot name, totalize, or unify yourself.

SPEAKER_02 54:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 54:40

So from your standpoint, that hole is incomplete because it's non-unified.

SPEAKER_00 54:47

Yeah. So I mean, this is also, you know, because you know, from at the very beginning of the ethics, you know, like there's this idea that, you know, for Spinoza, substance is one. One single thing. Right. But here he's showing that imminently to this one single thing is this complete infinity of different causes, um, the the movement of bodies, movement of thought, the relationship between them that can't just be totalized under a singular thing. Yeah, sure, he gives it the name God or nature, but here we have an imminent kind of infinite proliferation of things, right?

SPEAKER_01 55:25

Yeah. We're stuck in the middle of gods.

SPEAKER_00 55:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:27

Right. We're stuck in the middle of nature, um, and and and we're stuck in the middle of our body.

SPEAKER_02 55:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:32

Right. And so what we have is we're we're, it's, it's also in a weird way, it's kind of democratic and egalitarian because we're we're always at the same level as the ideas of the affections of our body.

SPEAKER_03 55:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:45

But there's no position, I mean, there's no bird's eye or god's eye point of view. There's no the French would say supplombi. You can't supplombi. You know, you can't have a total vision of the field because you're stuck down amidst it.

SPEAKER_00 55:58

Well, yeah, I mean, we we are we are finite modes of of this infinity, right? You know, we can never raise ourselves up to the level of you know being able to capture every single thing, you know.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

Well, it's one big party in the neighborhood, it's a feast.

SPEAKER_00 56:13

It's a feast, it's a feast of friends. But I mean, like another, like uh, you know, I was trying to explain this in a certain um in a bit of a roundabout way uh in class one time, where I just said, look, you know, when you think about the amount of thoughts that you have, yes, for us, it can seem like in our immediate experience that they go on infinitely. But Spinoza's point is that even though it seems to us that it goes on infinitely, there's still a finitude, you know, there there is a limit that we ourselves can't grasp to the what's what seems like the infinity of our own thoughts. And my students were kind of looking at me a little bit confused still because they were saying, Well, I'm a I'm a bit of an overthinker, I've got a lot of thoughts. And I said, Yeah, sure. You have a lot of thoughts in your head, but do you have all of the thoughts that are also contained in my head as another finite body? And they was like, Well, no, I'm like, well, then you don't contain all of the thoughts in existence, right?

SPEAKER_01 57:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 57:12

So this was like a bit of a weird way of trying to explain the same thing, you know, like you cannot totalize all of the thoughts in another body, or you know, exactly, or you know, in the same way that you can't totalize all of the thoughts in your own mind.

SPEAKER_01 57:27

Sure. But one, I mean, what he is going to hold out to us a little bit later on is that we can actually share thoughts with other people. Those are the common the common notions.

SPEAKER_00 57:36

Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's no, it's not it's not to say that you know there's plenty of overlap between the different ideas that we share, it's just that I can never have the same set of thoughts that you do, even though there's a significant overlap between them, you know, particularly if we're in class and we're you know engaging with the same kind of ideas, there's an overlap there, but I don't have you know, you have your entire or your life's experiences and things like that. But I mean this is also what I think is uh very disorienting Spinoza is that this is still the mechanism in which we partake in the infinity of nature, right? We are finite expressions of this in of the infinity of nature, right?

SPEAKER_01 58:18

Absolutely, and what he's saying is that um as we're having as we're generating all these images that are either confused or mutilated in inadequate um images of our environment, that's just the imagination working perfectly well, working naturally, right? And it can all be explained. Let me just propose to you, Val, right now, to to come to an end in this episode. Why don't we just like catalog just how many inadequate ideas we have?

SPEAKER_00 58:46

I I've I thought I thought I only had one inadequate idea of myself.

SPEAKER_01 58:50

Oh no, oh no, let me let me let me list them for you. And maybe you can give me some examples as we go along, right? So you have, Val, inadequate ideas of parts of your body.

SPEAKER_00 59:02

Oh, I like to think that uh yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to think what what inadequate ideas of of my oh, you know. I'm I'm probably far more physically fit than I think I am. Or or in the inverse, I'm probably way I'm way less in shape, and I've still retain this false idea because you know I'm just like chain smoking all the time. I'm probably in way worse shape than I actually am.

SPEAKER_01 59:28

Well, let's talk about those cigarettes. Yeah, apparently you also have inadequate ideas of external bodies.

SPEAKER_00 59:33

What are you talking about? Cigarettes are the best thing for you, they're only good for you. Um you should no, actually, no, I should not.

SPEAKER_01 59:39

Dear listeners, I think I think Val has helpfully illustrated the Spinoza's point there. Not only that, but Val has an inadequate idea of his entire body.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

Yeah, exactly. Cigarettes are good for the body. Um, pretty sure I read that on the cigarette packet.

SPEAKER_01 59:54

Uh also you have inadequate ideas of the affections of your body, of what the cigarettes do to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:00

I'm pretty sure they make me feel great. Nicotine is nothing but uh a positive positive has nothing but a positive impact upon my mental well-being.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:10

Let me add that you have inadequate ideas of your own minds.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:13

Oh, yeah, no, this is me. This is you we can see uh, dear listeners, all my imaginary illusions on the table right here.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:22

And now this gets a little bit sad. So let's stop talking about Valentine's Like, let's talk about uh let's talk about my cat or myself. So we have an inadequate idea of the duration of our own body.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:33

Yeah, well, I mean, in in that respect, you know, to put it in, I suppose, yeah, um different you don't know how long you're going to live, right? It's that it's that's no one has any idea, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:45

You know, and this is I think it's an important point to mention that like Spinoza is one of the great philosophers who goes against Socrates and basically says, I don't really care about death. No, death doesn't give me anything to think whatsoever. No. I'm a philosopher of life.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:58

Yeah, I think.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:58

And this is where death just comes in as a kind of like footnote in the ethics. Yeah. Um finally, you we also have inadequate ideas of just how long other particular external bodies might last.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:10

No, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:11

I know. So things could up and end, yeah, but we're not sure. We don't know when it's going to happen, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

And for all those people who thought that we're taking a long time going very slowly through Spinoza's ethics, can I just point out that in three minutes we went through seven propositions?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:24

Right. I mean, we should keep up that pace and we'd we'll be done with the whole of the ethics by you know next episode.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:30

Yeah, that's proposition 24 through 31. Thanks very much. Which will bring us to what, Val, for next episodes? Proposition 32. We'll bring us to the truth. I'll finally have a chance of having an adequate idea.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:46

Okay, okay, because here I was lounging about an era. I was having a good time with my inadequate ideas.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:50

Actually, stuck in the middle of things with my imagination.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:53

Actually, I feel like I don't want adequate ideas about cigarettes because then it will ruin my enjoyment.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:59

Well, let's let's say you can have an adequate idea of the Pacific Ocean.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:06

That'd be uh easier builders wallow than uh than the truth about smoking.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:12

So let's leave you, listeners, with an image of a fowl lounging uh on a towel in front of the Pacific Ocean with an adequate idea of its sublime just cigarette in head.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:26

Alright, see you next time. Bye bye.