Pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography

People] find—both in themselves and outside themselves—many means that are very helpful in seeking their own advantage, e. And knowing that they had found these means, not provided them for themselves, they had reason to believe that there was someone else who had prepared those means for their use. For after they considered things as means, they could not believe that the things had made themselves; but from the means they were accustomed to prepare for themselves, they had to infer that there was a ruler, or a number of rulers of nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for them, and made all things for their use.

And since they had never heard anything about the temperament of these rulers, they had to judge it from their own.

Pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography: This paper presents a

Hence, they maintained that the Gods direct all things for the use of men in order to bind men to them and be held by men in the highest honor. So it has happened that each of them has thought up from his own temperament different ways of worshipping God, so that God might love them above all the rest, and direct the whole of Nature according to the needs of their blind desire and insatiable greed.

Thus this prejudice was changed into superstition, and struck deep roots in their minds. I, Appendix. A judging God who has plans and acts purposively is a God to be obeyed and placated. Opportunistic preachers are then able to play on our hopes and fears in the face of such a God. They prescribe ways of acting that are calculated to avoid being punished by that God and earn his rewards.

Nor does God perform miracles, since there are no departures whatsoever from the necessary course of nature. The belief in miracles is due only to ignorance of the true causes of phenomena. This is strong language, and Spinoza is clearly not unaware of the risks of his position. The same preachers who take advantage of our credulity will fulminate against anyone who tries to pull aside the curtain and reveal the truths of Nature.

For they know that if ignorance is taken away, then foolish wonder, the only means they have of arguing and defending their authority is also taken away. It is not clear, however, that this is the proper way to look at his conception of God. Of course, Spinoza is not a traditional theist, for whom God is a transcendent being. But does Spinoza's identification of God with Nature mean that he is, as so many have insisted for so long, from the early eighteenth century up through the most recent edition of the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophya pantheist?

In general, pantheism is the view that rejects the transcendence of God. According to the pantheist, God is, in some way, identical with the world. There may be aspects of God that are ontologically or epistemologically distinct from the world, but for pantheism this must not imply that God is essentially separate from the world.

The pantheist is also likely to reject any kind of anthropomorphizing of God, or attributing to the deity psychological and moral characteristics modeled on human nature. The pantheist's God is usually not a personal God. Within this general framework, it is possible to distinguish two varieties of pantheism. First, pantheism can be understood as the denial of any distinction whatsoever between God and the natural world and the assertion that God is in fact identical with everything that exists.

This is reductive pantheism. Second, pantheism can be understood as asserting that God is distinct from the world and its natural contents but nonetheless contained or immanent within them, perhaps in the way in which water is contained in a saturated sponge. God is everything and everywhere, on this version, by virtue of being within everything.

This is immanentist pantheism; it involves that claim that nature contains within itself, in addition to its natural elements, an immanent supernatural and divine element. Is Spinoza, then, a pantheist? Any adequate analysis of Spinoza's identification of God and Nature will show clearly that Spinoza cannot be a pantheist in the second, immanentist sense.

For Spinoza, there is nothing but Nature and its attributes and modes. And within Nature there can certainly be nothing that is supernatural. If Spinoza is seeking to eliminate anything, it is that which is above or beyond nature, which escapes the laws and processes of nature. But is he a pantheist in the first, reductive sense? The issue of whether God is to be identified with the whole of Nature i.

After all, if pantheism is the view that God is everything, then Spinoza is a pantheist only if he identifies God with all of Nature. Indeed, this is exactly how the issue is often framed. Both those who believe that Spinoza is a pantheist and those who believe that he is not a pantheist focus on the question of whether God is to be identified with the whole of Nature, including the infinite and finite modes of Natura naturataor only with substance and attributes Natura naturans but not the modes.

Thus, it has been argued that Spinoza is not a pantheist, because God is to be identified only with substance and its attributes, the most universal, active causal principles of Nature, and not with any modes of substance. Other scholars have argued that Spinoza is a pantheist, just because he does identify God with the whole of nature. However, this debate about the extent of Spinoza's identification of God with Nature is not really to the point when the question is about Spinoza's alleged pantheism.

Finite things, on this reading, while caused by the eternal, necessary and active aspects of Nature, are not identical with God or substance, but rather are its effects. But this is not the interesting sense in which Spinoza is not a pantheist. For even if Spinoza does indeed identify God with the whole of Nature, it does not follow that Spinoza is a pantheist.

The real issue is not what is the proper reading of the metaphysics of Spinoza's conception of God and its relationship to finite modes. On either interpretation, Spinoza's move is a naturalistic and reductive one. God is identical either with all of Nature or with only a part of Nature; for this reason, Spinoza shares something with the reductive pantheist.

But and this is the important point—even the atheist can, without too much difficulty, admit that God is nothing but Nature. Reductive pantheism and atheism maintain extensionally equivalent ontologies. Rather, the question of Spinoza's pantheism is really going to be answered on the psychological side of things, with regard to the proper attitude to take toward Deus sive Natura.

And however one reads the relationship between God and Nature in Spinoza, it is a mistake to call him a pantheist in so far as pantheism is still a kind of religious theism. What really distinguishes the pantheist from the atheist is that the pantheist does not reject as inappropriate the religious psychological attitudes demanded by theism.

Rather, the pantheist simply asserts that God—conceived as a being before which one is to adopt an attitude of worshipful awe—is or is in Nature. And nothing could be further from the spirit of Spinoza's philosophy. Spinoza does not believe that worshipful awe or reverence is an appropriate attitude to take before God or Nature. There is nothing holy or sacred about Nature, and it is certainly not the pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography of a religious experience.

Instead, one should strive to understand God or Nature, with the kind of adequate or clear and distinct intellectual knowledge that reveals Nature's most important truths and shows how everything depends essentially and existentially on higher natural causes. The key to discovering and experiencing God, for Spinoza, is philosophy and science, not religious awe and worshipful submission.

The latter give rise only to superstitious behavior and subservience to ecclesiastic authorities; the former leads to enlightenment, freedom and true blessedness i. In Part Two, Spinoza turns to the origin and nature of the human being. The two attributes of God of which we have cognizance are extension and thought. This, in itself, involves what would have been an astounding thesis in the eyes of his contemporaries, one that was usually misunderstood and always vilified.

According to one interpretation, God is indeed material, even matter itself, but this does not imply that God has a body. Another interpretation, however, one which will be adopted here, is that what is in God is not matter per se, but extension as an essence. And extension and thought are two distinct essences that have absolutely nothing in common.

The modes or expressions of extension are physical pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biographies the modes of thought are ideas. Because extension and thought have nothing in common, the two realms of matter and mind are causally closed systems. Everything that is extended follows from the attribute of extension alone. Every bodily event is part of an infinite causal series of bodily events and is determined only by the nature of extension and its laws, in conjunction with its relations to other extended bodies.

Similarly, every idea follows only from the attribute of thought. Any idea is an integral part of an infinite series of ideas and is determined by the nature of thought and its laws, along with its relations to other ideas. There is, in other words, no causal interaction between bodies and ideas, between the physical and the mental. There is, however, a thoroughgoing correlation and parallelism between the two series.

For every mode in extension that is a relatively stable collection of matter, there is a corresponding mode in thought. Every material thing thus has its own particular idea—an eternal adequate idea—that expresses or represents it. Since that idea is just a mode of one of God's attributes—Thought—it is in God, and the infinite series of ideas constitutes God's mind or infinite intellect.

As he explains. It follows from this, he argues, that the causal relations between bodies is mirrored in the logical relations between God's ideas. One kind of extended body, however, is significantly more complex than any others in its composition and in its dispositions to act and be acted upon. That complexity is reflected in its corresponding idea.

The body in question is the human body; and its corresponding idea is the human mind or soul. The mind, then, like any other idea, is simply one particular mode of God's attribute, Thought. Whatever happens in the body is reflected or expressed in the mind. In this way, the mind perceives, more or less obscurely, what is taking place in its body.

And through its body's interactions with other bodies, the mind is aware of what is happening in the physical world around it. But the human mind no more interacts with its body than any mode of Thought interacts with a mode of Extension. One of the pressing questions in seventeenth century philosophy, and perhaps the most celebrated legacy of Descartes's dualism, is the problem of how two radically different substances such as mind and body enter into a union in a human being and cause effects in each other.

Spinoza, in effect, denies that the human being is a union of two substances. The human mind and the human body are two different expressions—under Thought and under Extension—of one and the same thing: the person. And because there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body, the so-called mind-body problem does not, technically speaking, arise.

The human mind, like God, contains ideas. Such ideas do not convey adequate and true knowledge of the world, but only a relative, partial and subjective picture of how things presently seem to be to the perceiver. There is no systematic order to these perceptions, nor any critical oversight by reason. Under such circumstances, we are simply determined in our ideas by our fortuitous and haphazard encounter with things in the external world.

This superficial acquaintance will never provide us with knowledge of the essences of those things. In fact, it is an invariable source of falsehood and error. Adequate ideas, on the other hand, are formed in a "pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography" and orderly manner, and are necessarily true and revelatory of the essences of things.

It involves grasping a thing's causal connections not just to other objects but, more importantly, to the attributes of God and the infinite modes the laws of nature that follow immediately from them. The adequate idea of a thing clearly and distinctly situates its object in all of its causal nexuses and shows not just that it is, but how and why it is.

The person who truly knows a thing sees the reasons why the thing was determined to be and could not have been otherwise. To perceive by way of adequate ideas is to perceive the necessity inherent in Nature. Sense experience alone could never provide the information conveyed by an adequate idea. The senses present things only as they appear from a given perspective at a given moment in time.

And Reason perceives this necessity of things truly, i. But this necessity of things is the very necessity of God's eternal nature. The third kind of knowledge, intuition, takes what is known by Reason and grasps it in a single act of the mind. Spinoza's conception of adequate knowledge reveals an unrivaled optimism in the cognitive powers of the human being.

Not even Descartes believed that we could know all of Nature and its innermost secrets with the degree of depth and certainty that Spinoza thought possible. Most remarkably, because Spinoza thought that the adequate knowledge of any object, and of Nature as a whole, involves a thorough knowledge of God and of how things related to God and his attributes, he also had no scruples about claiming that we can, at least in principle, know God perfectly and adequately.

Pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography: “La memoria y sus

No other philosopher in history has been willing to make this claim. But, then again, no other philosopher identified God with Nature. Spinoza engages in such a detailed analysis of the composition of the human being because it is essential to his goal of showing how the human being is a part of Nature, existing within the same causal nexuses as other extended and mental beings.

This has serious ethical implications. First, it implies that a human being is not endowed with freedom, at least in the ordinary sense of that term. Because our minds and the events in our minds are simply ideas that exist within the causal series of ideas that follows from God's attribute Thought, our actions and volitions are as necessarily determined as any other natural events.

What is true of the will and, of course, of our bodies is true of all the phenomena of our psychological lives. Spinoza believes that this is something that has not been sufficiently understood by previous thinkers, who seem to have wanted to place the human being on a pedestal outside of or above nature. Descartes, for example, believed that if the freedom of the human being is to be preserved, the soul must be exempt from the kind of deterministic laws that rule over the material universe.

Spinoza's aim in Parts Three and Four is, as he says in his Preface to Part Three, to restore the human being and his volitional and emotional life into their proper place in nature. For nothing stands outside of nature, not even the human mind. Our affects—our love, anger, hate, envy, pride, jealousy, etc. Spinoza, therefore, explains these emotions—as determined in their occurrence as are a body in motion and the properties of a mathematical figure—just as he would explain any other things in nature.

Our affects are divided into actions and passions. When the cause of an event lies in our own nature—more particularly, our knowledge or adequate ideas—then it is a case of the mind acting. On the other hand, when something happens in us the cause of which lies outside of our pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography, then we are passive and being acted upon.

All beings are naturally endowed with such a power or striving. What we should strive for is to be free from the passions—or, since this is not absolutely possible, at least to learn how to moderate and restrain them—and become active, autonomous beings. We will, consequently, be truly liberated from the troublesome emotional ups and downs of this life.

The way to bring this about is to increase our knowledge, our store of adequate ideas, and eliminate as far as possible our inadequate ideas, which follow not from the nature of the mind alone but from its being an expresssion of how our body is affected by other bodies. In other words, we need to free ourselves from a reliance on the senses and the imagination, since a life of the senses and images is a life being affected and led by the objects around us, and rely as much as we can only on our rational faculties.

This provides Spinoza with a foundation for cataloguing the human passions. For the passions are all functions of the ways in which external things affect our powers or capacities. Being a passion, joy is always brought about by some external object. Love is simply Joy accompanied by an awareness of the external cause that brings about the passage to a greater perfection.

We love that object that benefits us and causes us joy. We hope for a thing whose presence, as yet uncertain, will bring about joy. We fear, however, a thing whose presence, equally uncertain, will bring about sadness.

Pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography: TRATADO DE LA REFORMA DEL ENTENDIMIENTO

When that whose outcome was doubtful becomes certain, hope is changed into confidence, while fear is changed into despair. All of the human emotions, in so far as they are passions, are constantly directed outward, towards things and their capacities to affect us one way or another. Aroused by our passions and desires, we seek or flee those things that we believe cause joy or sadness.

But the objects of our passions, being external to us, are completely beyond our control. Thus, the more we allow ourselves to be controlled by themthe more we are subject to passions and the less active and free we are. The solution to this predicament is an ancient one.

Pensamientos metafisicos de spinoza biography: This document summarizes Baruch Spinoza's metaphysical

Since we cannot control the objects that we tend to value and that we allow to influence our well-being, we ought instead to try to control our evaluations themselves and thereby minimize the sway that external objects and the passions have over us. We can never eliminate the passive affects entirely. We are essentially a part of nature, and can never fully remove ourselves from the causal series that link us to external things.

But we can, ultimately, counteract the passions, control them, and achieve a certain degree of relief from their turmoil. The path to restraining and moderating the affects is through virtue. Spinoza is a psychological and ethical egoist. All beings naturally seek their own advantage—to preserve their own being—and it is right for them do so.

This is what virtue consists in. Since we are thinking beings, endowed with intelligence and reason, what is to our greatest advantage is knowledge. Our virtue, therefore, consists in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, of adequate ideas. The best kind of knowledge is a purely intellectual intuition of the essences of things. They are apprehended, that is, in their conceptual and causal relationship to the universal essences thought and extension and the eternal laws of nature.

But this is just to say that, ultimately, we strive for a knowledge of God. La esencia de Dios implica su existencia, por su misma naturaleza, tiene atributos ilimitados, infinitos. Spinoza escribe: «De la necesidad de su naturaleza divina deben seguirse infinitas cosas en infinitos modos» Prop. XIX, parte I. Entonces, Dios y sus atributos son eternos.

En esta parte, sobre la mente y el cuerpo humano, Spinoza vuelve a oponerse a proposiciones cartesianas. Argumenta, al contrario de Descartes, que el pensamiento y el cuerpo, son uno solo, pensado de dos maneras diferentes. No se pueden mezclar estas dos cosas, la naturaleza puede, en su totalidad, describirse en forma de pensamiento o de cuerpo.

Descartes apoya la idea de que ambas se afectan unas a otras, el pensamiento afecta al cuerpo o viceversa. Al decir que Dios es materia, no quiere decir que tenga un cuerpo. Spinoza's Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione On the Improvement of the Understanding provides additional guidance on the epistemological consequences of his metaphysical convictions.

Here Spinoza proposed a "practical" method for achieving the best knowledge of which human thinkers are capable. Spinoza applied similar principles to human desires and agency in Books III-V of the Ethicsrecommending a way of life that acknowledges and appropriates the fundamental consequences of our position in the world as mere modes of the one true being.

It would be moral bondage if we were motivated only by causes of which we remain unaware, Spinoza held, so genuine freedom comes only with knowledge of what it is that necessitates our actions. Recognizing the invariable influence of desire over our passionate natures, we then strive for the peace of mind that comes through an impartial attachment to reason.

Although such an attitude is not easy to maintain, Spinoza concluded that " All noble things are as difficult as they are rare. Spinoza's psychological theory by Michael LeBuffe. Yesselman's tribute to the philosophy of Spinoza. The thorough collection of resources at EpistemeLinks. A section on Spinoza from Alfred Weber's history of philosophy.

An unfinished article in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.