May 11, 2026 • 44 mins
He is one of the most influential thinkers of the 17th century. He has a system that solves all the problems of philosophy, but it comes at a high cost. How is God related to the world, do we have free will, and how can we be happy? Who is the philosopher known as Benedict Spinoza?
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(00:00):
So he gets excommunicated. I don't know if you know
anything about Judaism, but theyare not cool with a lot of those
things I just said. He thinks it's just superstition
when when people are scared, that's what they do.
They they need some sort of religion instead of acting
according to reason. Now there's some second hand
evidence that a Jewish zealot actually tried to stab Spinoza
after his excommunication. Hello, and welcome to
(00:29):
Ideological, a podcast that is just a little bit more fun than
going to church with your grandmother.
I'm your host, Zach Lee, and today we are talking about an
enormous figure, a man who just towers among men, not
physically. He's not like Shaq, but his name
is Spinoza. And we're going to talk about
why he is an important figure and why you should care.
(00:49):
Why should you care about this lesson?
Why don't you go do something else?
Why don't you go invest in maybesome Blockbuster, some Beanie
Babies, or do something practical?
That would be a great decision. Well, I'm going to tell you why
because this guy is a huge deal.And he brings up some thoughts,
some ideas that are very, very powerful that later figures and
thinkers will use and kind of make their own.
(01:10):
So without further ado, we're just going to go ahead and jump
into this lesson. This lesson is brought to you by
what am I drinking today? San Pellegrino.
You know, San Pellegrino, it's not for the poppers.
You know, it's, it's more of a proletariat drink kidding,
bourgeoisie proletariat can't get this.
They have to have regular water.Spinoza, let's talk about him.
(01:37):
His influence is absolutely enormous. close your eyes for a
second. Think of an enormous influence
and then think of this is biggerthan that.
That's Spinoza. His influence, both in his own
time and since then is huge. He influenced Leibniz, Hegel,
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Einstein.
Now a lot of people will say, you know, a lot of people that
(02:00):
are theistic will say, well, Einstein believed in God and
he's a smart person. Einstein explicitly and famously
mentioned that his God was Spinoza's God.
We're going to figure out what that means here in just a
second, but we're going to find out that it has more to do with
like the ground of being than itdoes some sort of personal
creator God, Hegel, who's a big deal.
We've got an episode on Hegel. You should listen to that.
(02:22):
That will also make you smarter and all the people will find you
so attractive. When you talk about Hegel, he
said to be a follower of Spinozais the essential commencement of
all philosophy. That's powerful.
Hold on. I need some more rich water.
It's not for the the plebeians, it's for the patricians.
(02:46):
When Hegel, who's a big deal, says that you're a big deal,
you're a big deal. OK Nietzsche would say this
about Spinoza. He's very complimentary of
Spinoza. He says I am related to Spinoza
through the negation of free will, teleology, the moral
world, order, the unegoistic andevil.
We'll talk about all those things in a second.
But there's some things that Nietzsche's really going to like
(03:08):
because Spinoza's a little bit of a bad boy.
So I don't know who you think ofas a bad boy.
Maybe it's someone like James Bond, maybe it's some sort of
maybe it's Jay-Z. Maybe he's a bad boy.
But Spinoza is is a bad boy. He's he's philosophically and
theologically naughty before thecontemporary period.
(03:28):
He is probably the most influential Jewish philosopher
of all time #2 is probably a guynamed Moses Maimonides.
But Spinoza's probably going to become the most famous Jewish
philosopher, and he is a guy kind of like Kant, that is going
to make rationality almost like a religion where everything has
to be explained. Everything has to fit within the
(03:50):
system. Things that do not that fall
with that outside the system arenonsensical or have certain
problems or contradictions, or they go beyond what somebody can
know. And so he is a big logical
systematician. So he's very, very smart.
Whether you love him or hate him, he's smarter than you.
OK, but who is he? Let's talk about his life, his
(04:12):
thoughts and some weird stuff about this dude.
Here we go. He was born again.
Like most of the figures we talked about here, they're born.
They're not eternal. He was born November 24th, 1632
in Amsterdam to Michael, who is a Jewish merchant, and his wife
Hannah. Those are good Jewish names.
He was their third child. Now his Jewish name is Baruch
(04:35):
Spinoza, OK, Baruch Spinoza Baruch in Hebrew means blessed,
OK, like Baruch Hashem would mean like bless the name.
So his name means blessed. After being excommunicated,
which we'll learn was a big turning point in his life, he
actually took the Latinized version of his name, which is
Benedictus or Benedictus, which means also blessed, right?
(04:58):
So you see this on social media where something good happens and
someone's like #benedictus or #baruch, that's what they're
doing. They're, they're saying blessed.
They are blessed. His last name, Spinoza or
Espinoza, which it's a referenceactually to his Sephardic Jewish
family that he belonged to and the fact that they had come from
Spain. So the, the, the name Spinoza
(05:20):
literally means something like thorn or thornbush, which is
ironic because he would become athorn kind of in the side of his
opponents for the rest of his life.
But it's probably a reference tothe location in Spain that they
were from, maybe like a place that had thorn bushes or
something like that. So but they're in the
Netherlands. But originally a Sephardic
Jewish family to which he was born.
(05:41):
Now, as a good Jewish boy, he was sent to school to learn
Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible, what'scalled the Tanakh, the Talmud.
He eventually met a former Jesuit trainee and freethinker
named Franz van Vanden Enden. Franz Vanden Enden, You know
(06:02):
these, you know, these Netherlands names, these kind of
Dutch names, they're always likeoogas, luga, booga.
That's kind of this guy. But he is brilliant.
He was going to be a Jesuit, buthe became a freethinker, which
is typically somebody that is willing to push the bounds of
Orthodoxy and what people are allowed to believe.
And from this character, Franz, like Franz and Hans, if you
(06:24):
remember that, that's get VandenEnden.
It's hard to say. I just want to say Eden.
But Inden from this character, he would learn Latin, which
would be very important because that is the the language of the
educated world at this time. And he would also learn certain
elements of Cartesian philosophy.
Spinoza's actually going to try to improve upon Descartes and
(06:46):
make his system more consistent.When Spinoza was 8.
Listen to this. This is a this is an event
that's fascinating. I don't know the effect that it
had on Spinoza's life. He was probably aware of it to
some extent, but it's fascinating.
When Spinoza was eight, there was a famous excommunication of
a guy named Uriel Dacosta. OK, Uriel Dacosta.
(07:09):
And Uriel. You know, that's a good, that's
a good name we use today a lot. Like, I'm pretty sure that's the
name of the little girl from a Little Mermaid, Uriel.
This guy had denied the immortality of the soul, and so
he was kicked out of he was excommunicated from the
synagogue and they allowed him back in on the following
(07:29):
condition. He had to be flogged in the
synagogue and then he had to laydown at the door of the
synagogue so that people could walk over his prostate body as a
form of repentance. Again, why would you drink water
when there can be bubbles in it and you can pay a lot more for
(07:50):
it? St.
Pellegrino. So this guy Uriel repents, is
flogged in the synagogue, has tolay down by the front door so
everyone can step on him on their way out as a way of
seeking atonement. He was so ashamed by that, by
the way, that a few days later he shot himself. 16 years later,
(08:12):
Spinoza himself would be excommunicated for heresy.
What were the heresies that, youknow, young Spinoza, young
Baruch slash Benedictus held? There's a few of them.
He held that everything was God.We'll talk about that in a
second. There was no afterlife.
The Bible was a human invention.There was no special status for
the Jews, which, you know, when you're in a Jewish community,
(08:34):
that's a, that's a hard pill to swallow.
All religions were superstitious.
There's no such thing as free will.
And he promoted religious toleration.
So he gets excommunicated. I don't know if you know
anything about Judaism, but theyare not cool with a lot of those
things I just said. Now they condemn him in
especially strong words. Let me just share with you part
(08:55):
of the excommunication. I'm not going to read all of it,
but just a chunk of Baruch Spinoza.
Listen to this, by the way. You're going to hear a word in
here. The word is harem.
Harem, which means like the ban or the curse or kicked out.
It's a term that's used often times in the Hebrew Bible when
God is destroying like all theseGentile and Pagan nations,
(09:17):
they're put under the rim. And so that is the the the term.
I'm not going to always do the IT is it is it is what that
sound at the beginning, but I'm not going to do that as I read
it. I just want you to know that I
know it smart. Thank you.
By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we
put under harem, excommunicate, curse and damn Baruch de
(09:39):
Espinoza, with the consent of God, blessed be he.
Meaning that's God, not Spinoza.And with the consent of the
entire holy congregation before these sacred scrolls, with the
613 precepts which are written therein, with the harem with
which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha
cursed the boys, and with all the harems that were written in
(10:01):
the Book of the Law. Now listen to this about
Spinoza. Cursed be he by day and cursed
be he by night. Cursed be he when he lies down,
and cursed be he when he rises up, Cursed be he when he goes
out, and cursed be he when he comes in.
The Lord will not spare him. The Lord's anger and jealousy
will Rage Against this man and bring upon him all the curses
which are written in the Book ofthe Law, and the Lord will blot
(10:24):
out his name from under heaven. We order that no one should
communicate with him orally or in writing, nor show him any
favor, nor stay with him under the same roof, nor come within 4
cubits of him, nor read any paper composed or written by
him. Whoa, that's a lot of not being
blessed for for, for a guy whosename is Blessed Thorn.
(10:49):
What is happening that those aresome strong terms.
They do not like Spinoza. That will be a big turning point
in his life where he realizes, hey, I can't just try to adapt
this to my Judaism. I am doing a new type of system
now. There's some second hand
evidence that a Jewish zealot actually tried to stab Spinoza
after his excommunication. Do you hear the sound?
(11:13):
Water, Fancy water. And supposedly, again to the
second hand evidence, Spinoza kept his cloak that had the hole
in it from the knife. He he, he, you know, was not
killed. He worked as a lens grinder for
microscopes and telescopes. That will be important later on.
(11:35):
In 1673, he was offered a professorship in philosophy at
the University of Heidelberg, which would have been great.
Most of the thinkers in the early modern period were very,
very bright, some of the smartest men in history, but a
lot of them were not professional professors,
professional academics. Kant is an exception, and
there's a few other exceptions, but a lot of these guys are not.
(11:55):
Whereas like in the Middle Ages,they're almost all philosophy
professors or theology professors or teaching the arts
faculty or whatever it is. So Spinoza was going to get a
chance to be a professor, but hewas only going to be hired on
the condition that he wouldn't cause too much of A stink.
So he's not able to because he knows I'm going to say some
things that are going to ruffle some feathers.
(12:17):
He died again, not eternal. He died on February 21st, 1677,
at just the age of 44 from some type of respiratory ailment.
We don't know if it's tuberculosis or what it is, but
it was probably exacerbated by all the years of breathing in
little tiny pieces of glass as alens grinder.
So if you're a lens grinder, you're making this glass,
(12:39):
breathing it in all day. And so whatever lung ailment he
had, that probably did not help it.
OK, that's his life. Cool.
This is life Zach. Why is he important?
We talked about him. He's he's got some interesting
stuff. You know, a big into to knowing
some things and getting in trouble at the synagogue.
OK, what are his big ideas? Let me give you several of them.
(13:01):
Now this is where it gets a little technical.
This is where we're going to separate the the thinkers from
the non thinkers. His first major idea is what is
called panentheism. Panentheism.
OK, not exactly pantheism. Pantheism is the belief that
everything is God. Panintheism is that everything
(13:22):
is part of God, but God is more than those things.
So I think he's more accurately classified as a Panintheist that
God is in all things ontologically.
But there are things that God has that go beyond just the
things that we we can perceive, the attributes that we can
perceive. Anyway, let me explain what that
(13:43):
means. There has been a question in
philosophy that is bedeviled philosophers for as long as
there have been philosophers. And it's the question of how can
different substances interact? Like how can my mind or my will,
which supposedly is immaterial, like the decisions I make or the
thoughts I have in my head that you cannot see with an MRI?
(14:04):
You can see the part of the brain that lights up, but you
can't see the thought. How can that immaterial thought
move my material hand? That's wild.
OK, This is why we think of our friend Casper the friendly
ghost. You remember he's our friend.
That's why we think of him as walking through walls, 'cause
he's of a different substance. There's the wall and there's
Casper, and Casper's a ghost, which is not supposedly
(14:26):
material. He's a spirit, so he can walk
through the wall. So the question is, how can
material things and immaterial things, God, souls, angels, for
these thinkers, the mind, numbers, propositions, these
things that seem to be immaterial, how can they
interact with things that are material?
So for somebody like Descartes, Descartes, he doesn't know how
(14:50):
they interact. He comes up with some theories
about a little bland in your brain, but it's kind of dumb and
other people come up with other theories.
Here is Spinoza's very simple answer.
There's only one substance. There's not a spiritual or
thought mind substance and an extended physical substance.
Everything is the one substance,which is God.
(15:10):
You know when when Descartes defined a substance, A substance
and philosophy. All right, let's get real nerdy.
Let's just get nerdy with it. A substance is what stands
under, hence the term substance.It's a thing that exists on its
own to which other attributes are attached or attributed.
So I, Zach, am a substance to touse Aristotle's example, I would
(15:34):
be a substance, the individual man, Zach.
But if I lost all my hair, that's just an accident.
That's not Zackness. That's not really what makes me,
me, my, my hair or lack of hair,what Jean Paul Sartre called
emboldment, which is a great attribute.
Hair or lack of hair doesn't exist on its own.
It has to be attached to to me. I'm the substance.
(15:57):
Well, Spinoza's like, hold on a second.
There's only one substance that exists on its own that doesn't
rely on any other things to exist.
There's only one substance that's essence is its existence.
And that substance is God, the eternal, the necessarily
(16:17):
existent, this kind of stuff. And So what he's going to say
is, listen, there can't be two substances.
They can't interact. Also.
They would all be attributes because they all need something
else to exist. Unless everything is God,
everything is something whose essence is existence.
That's his idea. So in his mind, everything must
(16:38):
be the same substance and we would call that substance God.
Now let me be very, very clear. This is why, by the way, Spinoza
has a very famous line that people over quote where he says
that you can call this substanceDeus siwa natura.
OK, Deus siwa natura meaning Godor nature in Latin.
(17:00):
Notice that those are the same thing.
God slash nature slash the universe slash.
What exists is all the same stuff.
OK, so let me be very clear. Spinoza's going to get called an
atheist a lot. There are others that call him
God intoxicated because so much of his philosophy has to do with
substance, and substance is God.Let me just be very, very clear.
(17:21):
When you hear Spinoza talk aboutGod, do not think of what most
people typically think of when they think of God.
He does not mean a personal creator God of a revealed
religion that is different from creation.
He means something like everything that is the ground of
being, the thing that exists, and therefore everything exists
in him. He means something like that.
(17:42):
Not personal. OK.
He actually really hates a lot of revealed religious texts and
ideas because he thinks that's just an anthropomorphization of
God, that you're just, you're just, you're describing him in
anthropomorphic terms. So like when you think of an old
bearded man sitting on a cloud saying ZAP with a lightning
(18:05):
bolt, you're thinking of Zeus, right?
You're not thinking of God like eternal, all powerful being
itself, immutable, unchanging, whatever.
You don't think of that you're you're thinking of Zeus.
So he kind of makes fun of anthropomorphic views of God in
in revealed religion. Substance, which we just
(18:27):
established is everything it hasin God.
God slash nature slash being slash stuff has an infinite
number of attributes. But we as humans only know two
of these, thought and extension.So he's trying to tie together
these things that seem very different to us, but ultimately
(18:49):
have to somehow to go together because there's only one
substance. Individual objects or items are
simply modes, IE ways of being of the one substance.
They are states of the substance.
They are modes of God. This, this can again this
episode brought to you by God. This can a mode of God
(19:10):
individual things. My phone, right.
Throw it on the ground now so noone calls.
You can't hear it if it's on theground.
The can, the book, whatever. These are individual modes of
the one substance. Our minds are just collections
of thoughts in God's mind. OK, again, we are God.
(19:31):
God is more than us, but we are part of God.
Again, He, he is. This is what is called one ISM.
This is a very strong monism. They're not different
substances. There is one substance.
So panentheism, listen to this as well.
Because there's only one substance, our minds and bodies
don't actually react, OK? They don't actually like
causally react, rather, there's a correlation between mental
(19:56):
events and physical events, meaning different ways of
conceiving the same thing. So they're two separate ways of
explaining the same things. Think of it this way.
Don't think that my mind causes my body to do something or my
body causes my mind to do something.
Why do they go together though? Like why do I?
You know, feel pain in my hand and then make a willing decision
to move away or whatever it might be.
(20:18):
Perhaps the most common way of explaining this is that they run
in parallel, but they are not reacting to each other.
To say it another way, pretend that I've got French going on in
my mind and I've got German going on in my body.
They're two different languages,but they correspond to one of
them. They can be saying the same
thing in French that it's sayingin German, but are different
(20:40):
languages and not reacting. How do you how do you feel?
How do you feel knowing that you're God, but also like your
toilet is and also like, you know, a spider is and all?
Like does it make you feel great?
Does it feel weird? Is that is that what
philosophers typically mean whenthey think of God sometimes?
(21:00):
What about religious thinkers? Interesting, interesting.
Again, because he's not saying you are gods like you're like
some powerful, but he's just saying if something exists, it's
the one substance and that substance is nature.
You don't really even need the term God.
Like This is why people accuse him of being an atheist, because
his God doesn't really serve a purpose.
(21:21):
You don't really need God. He just has to use that language
because that's what people are going to expect.
Again in the 1600s. Number 2, the principle of
sufficient reason. Spinoza holds a stronger form of
this than his, a guy that he metLeibniz.
So the principle of sufficient reason, the PSR, you'll see it
sometimes abbreviated in philosophical textbooks.
(21:44):
It's the idea that there cannot be any brute facts or
randomness. OK, there has to be a cause for
why something is one way insteadof another way.
Leibniz says it very famously with why is there something
rather than nothing? There has to be a reason for
that. You can't just say it is.
You can say that, but then you've stepped away from
rationality. Why are we even doing
philosophy? If I walk into the room and I
(22:05):
see a Lego on the floor, I mightnot know how it got there, but
like, it would be wildly irrational to think that it was
just a brute fact. Like there wasn't a reason for
it or it it was, you know, why is it there instead of some
other place? And I was just like, there's not
a reason. I might not know the reason, but
there has to be a reason. And so Spinoza will take this
(22:27):
idea and develop it to the NTH degree.
There, everything has to be rational.
He hates brute facts. He wants to know why we can
explain this this way. He wants the whole system to
fit, which is why he's, again, whether you like him, hate him,
disagree with them, agree with him.
He is a sharp philosopher. You cannot argue about that.
So this episode brought to you by Legos.
Legos step on them at night. I feel like hell is actually
(22:52):
just a floor full of Legos and you're barefoot.
The end. I mean, I I can't prove that's
what Hell's like, but I mean, that's a pretty good guess.
This is a benefit of Spinoza system because everything has to
be reasonable. He is doing big ticket
(23:13):
philosophy. Listen to this quote.
For each thing there must be assigned A cause or reason both
for its existence and for its non existence.
What cannot be conceived throughanother must be conceived
through itself. Causation by the way, for
Spinoza is nothing more than theability to explain or to make
things intelligible. So don't think of causation is
(23:35):
like this thing bumps this thingfor him because again, mental
and physical, this is all the one substance.
Causation is the ability to explain something by something
else. OK, that's what we mean by
'cause it's an explanatory definition of cause, not just a
physical or something like that.Number three, he holds to the
(23:57):
falsity of the Bible, religion and of miracles.
He thinks that the Bible is merely a human book and should
be used to interpret itself. The parts that seem absurd
should be cast out or reinterpreted to protect the
pure parts. The problem with me drinking
fizzy water is now I'm always like suppressing the burps.
(24:17):
You know, you can't let it out. So you do this like weird face
thing. We're like, you look like a frog
puffing up anyway. Meaning what he wants to do is
he wants to go through the Bibleand look at the Bible as the
Bible and the parts that are ridiculous or that are what he
thinks to be contradictory, you have to give them a different
reading. A lot of the early church will
(24:39):
do this on the Christian side because they'll say, hey, we
need to interpret this allegorically because if you
take it literally, it leads to some weird, weird conclusions.
And so he does that and he also,he would say he's defending the
Bible. He's like, I've got to take out
the bad parts so that it doesn'tcorrupt the parts that are
obviously good. That's his view.
Miracles to Spinoza are not violations of nature.
We typically think of like nature's kind of is.
(25:01):
It's really a deistic way of thinking of it.
We think of nature is just like a clock that's just doing its
thing and you know, atoms are bumping into other atoms.
And a miracle is when God like intervenes as if he's not always
intervening. Depending on your theological
system, something God's far off doesn't intervene.
Something's God is intervening all the time.
Some thinkers of this time thinkthat God is continually
(25:22):
recreating or sustaining everything actively at all
times. It depends.
But for someone like Spinoza, a miracle is not an intervention
of God. It's just when we don't
understand, they're misunderstandings.
A miracle is where we misperceive or we misunderstand
something. So a miracle can tell you
nothing. It's a misperception.
It's it's where you lack knowledge.
(25:43):
There's an actual 'cause there'sa reason for it, principle's
sufficient reason, but you lack what that is.
And so you think that it's breaking the rules.
Someone like Spinoza would say that if God has to do miracles,
then creation is worse. He's a bad creator.
I'm going to say it this way andagain, God's eternal.
Everything's eternal. So even calling him creators,
not exactly the right term. But think of it this way.
(26:06):
If you have a car that always runs perfectly, like it never
breaks, it's a well functioning car.
Is that better than having a carthat you constantly have to take
back into the mechanic so the mechanic can intervene?
Well, we'd say the first car is better.
That's what Spinoza's going to say about, you know, miracles.
He's going to say, yeah, God is better if he doesn't intervene
(26:28):
because that means he planned everything right from the
beginning. If he has to intervene, then
he's not as good of a creator. Also, a lot of miracles for
Spinoza will, I mean, not all, not a lot.
All miracles would be naturalistic.
For example, he, he gives us as an example, the sign of the
rainbow with the Noah story. So in the in the story again in
(26:52):
the Hebrew Bible, God floods theearth and Noah and his family
are saved in a large boat. And then the sign that God will
never again flood the earth is the sign of the rainbow.
Well, Spinoza's like, I mean, what was sign?
That's just the way you're viewing light through water
particles. Like, can you, do you create a
(27:13):
rainbow or did no one ever see sunlight through the clouds,
like, and see a rainbow? Now, that's not what they're
thinking in the Old Testament orthe Hebrew Bible.
What they're thinking is God hastaken his weapon of judgement,
his bow, and he's killed mankindand now he's hanging it up,
right? It's pointing back at him.
He's not going to flood people again or something.
(27:33):
Spinoza's like, that is ridiculous.
It is light particles. We all know what a prism is.
Get over it, OK? He believes that religion causes
fear and binds men. Why does it bind them?
Because it bids them not to think as hard.
It bids them not to use their reason, not to be caught up in
worldly philosophy, but rather to just trust a type of ignorant
(27:54):
faith. For Spinoza.
Spinoza uses his vast knowledge of the Hebrew Scripture to point
out many what he thinks to be contradictions in the Bible.
He's actually one of the first major proponents of what's
called biblical higher criticism.
Biblical higher criticism is where you take the supernatural
elements or the Bible supposedlybeing God's word, and you remove
those presuppositions and you just interpret it like any other
(28:17):
book where you call out errors or you call out what you think
to be contradictions or whateverit might be.
It's called higher criticism andit will take off in Germany
later on. He's not the first one to do
this. Hobbes and other thinkers before
him did it, but he does make it very popular with a a work that
he has called the Tractatus, theTractatus Theological Politicus,
(28:38):
the Theological political treatise.
I always want to say Tractatus Logico Philosophicus because of
Wittgenstein, but there you go. That was super nerdy.
What else do we want to talk about here?
He will point out that the Old Testament doesn't really have a
clear conception of an afterlife.
Remember our our friend slash The Little Mermaid, Uriel
(28:59):
Decosta of the Doesn't that meanof the coast that that might
actually work for for Ariel? He got excommunicated because he
denied the existence of a soul saying there's no afterlife.
Well, Spinoza is going to say, hold on.
In the in, in the, the Torah, the first five books of the
Hebrew Bible, it's very fuzzy when it comes to some sort of
(29:23):
afterlife. You get the idea of judgement or
resurrection or whatever. Maybe later in the prophets,
like much later, you get that inthe New Testament.
But he's Jewish. He didn't believe the New
Testament. He'll say, hey, the, the
conception of a afterlife is notprimarily there in the Torah,
which is why the Sadducees and the Pharisees disagree on this
issue, whether or not there are angels or whether or not there's
(29:45):
an afterlife, all these kind of things.
So, so he's going to say, hey, listen, the, the promises are
just about earth. That's why the, the curses are
like, you're you, you will miscarry and these nations will
destroy you. And the blessings are you will
have a bunch of sheep and you'llhave land like it's very this
worldly that gets him in trouble.
And Speaking of the superstitionof religion, he says this,
(30:07):
listen to this quote. And it is especially when they
are helpless, in danger that they all implore God's help with
prayers and womanish tears. He thinks it's just superstition
when when people are scared, that's what they do.
They they need some sort of religion instead of acting
according to reason. And then he is what is called a
theological liberal. A theological liberal is not the
(30:27):
same as a political liberal, although most theological
liberals would also be politicalliberals.
A theological liberal is somebody that denies any of the
supernaturalness in the Bible. So what What Spinoza wants you
to do is to love God by using your reason and to be kind and
have moral actions towards otherpeople.
So it's not about doctrine, it'snot about dogma, it's not about
(30:49):
believing certain things. It's about being a good person,
loving other people, and just generically having this
knowledge of God through reason and being #4 Spinoza.
He holds to strict determinism, something stronger than
determinism, what's called necessitarianism.
Necessitarianism is even stronger than determinism, that
(31:11):
everything, all truths are necessary truths, all existences
are necessary existences, and everything happens necessarily
the way it does, and it could not be otherwise, even for God.
You by rainbow water full of bubbles.
(31:34):
Now listen to this. Let me describe it this way.
I think this would be a good wayto ask the question.
Could God have made the world? And again, we're using creature
language and Spinoza's, but follow me.
Could God have made the world any way other than the way he
made it? You think?
(31:57):
Yeah, he could have made it someother way.
There could be more stars, therecould be more people, maybe
there could be like less earthquakes.
And you say, oh, well, why didn't he do that?
Well, because God knows what's best, and he created the best
world to him. This goes back to Leibniz's view
of this being the best of all possible worlds.
(32:18):
He's not saying that you think it is.
You're a dumb human. He's saying from God's
perspective, it obviously is because God knows everything and
this is what he he does. Like is, is God going to create
the 432nd best universe he can make?
No, he's going to create the best.
SO and if that's the case, then then God couldn't actually have
created the world in any other way.
He couldn't have actually done that because if he has to act
(32:40):
according to this nature, and his nature is already set and
that's who he is, He doesn't have free will.
He just necessarily does what hedoes.
So for Spinoza, this will also get him in trouble.
Everything happens the way it must happen.
God doesn't even have a choice. And he has this quote where he
(33:01):
says in nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have
been determined from the necessity of the divine nature.
God does what God has to do based on what He is necessity of
the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain
way. Things could have been produced
by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have
(33:22):
been produced. So does God have free will for
Spinoza? No God is a substance, and His
substance requires that things be exactly the way they are, at
the exact time, in the exact order of all of it.
OK, it is strong necessitarianism that leads to
this question. Do humans have free will?
(33:44):
Absolutely not #5 there is no human free will.
That would be absurd to think that humans have free will.
We think we have free will because it feels like I can
decide to want to raise my righthand or my left hand, right
tricked you. I wonder if that looks left to
you on the screen Anyway, So, but really what happened is, you
know, a long time ago an atom bumped another atom that changed
a chemical that did this, that caused me to think this way,
(34:06):
that caused me to do this podcast that caused me to do,
and I had to raise my right hand.
I think it's a free choice, but it can't be uncaused.
There's a series of causes goingback maybe forever, maybe to
some point that doesn't matter. But like, you don't have free
will. You just do exactly what you had
to do. You feel like you have free
(34:27):
will, but your feelings are false.
OK. Your will, by the way, is not
something different than your other ideas.
There's nothing special about it.
It's just another idea. My mind is merely God's idea of
my body. My mind is God's idea of my
body. Now for Spinoza, we're going to
see why this is so important in just a second.
(34:50):
When we talk about his ethics, it's going to be a, a, something
that there's a similarity to certain elements in Spinoza's
thought that is similar to Stoicism.
We've got a lecture on the Stoics, of course, that you
should listen to if you want to be a smarter, better person.
But you know, his beliefs and stuff are not the same as the
(35:11):
Stoics. Number six, we're going to come
back to that in a second. Panpsychism, Panpsychism, what
is pan? Pan again means all, like
pantheism or pantheism, God in all, or God, or God being
everything, or God being in everything.
Panpsychism is this, this idea, since thought is an attribute of
(35:31):
God, remember everything's God, everything's the one substance,
which is thought and extension. And these other attributes that
we don't know, but there's an infinite number of them.
Since thought is an attribute ofGod slash nature, then
everything has a mind. Now let me clarify this.
He doesn't mean a conscious mind.
He doesn't mean that again, the very expensive, I mean just
(35:55):
lavish bottle of sparkling water.
This is a can can of sparkling water has like a conscious mind.
It's not like I, I pick up the can and I give it a little
squeeze and it's like, Ouch. You know, it's not like that.
It's not a conscious mind. What he's trying to say though,
is if everything is God and God has this attribute of thought,
then there's a sense in which everything is thinking.
(36:16):
There's there's a every physicalthing has an idea in God.
So the pan, the desk, the pen, humans are have a conscience,
but we're more aware of it. But if everything has this, if
you want to say mental element, then there's this idea of what's
called panpsychism, which is just sukhe, which means soul or
mind pond means all these are Greek words.
(36:38):
Yeah, yeah. Very fancy.
The konatus. A lot of times you hear people
say konatus. You know, I'm from Texas, so
they're like Konatus. The Konatus, which is this,
everything that exists tries to stay in existence.
We try to get to a higher level of existence.
We're all striving for higher and higher levels of being OK.
(36:59):
This explains, for example, why we want to stay alive.
It explains why we want to better ourselves.
It explains why we want to be more intelligent, all these kind
of things. It also explains emotions for
Spinoza, Joy for examples. When you have an increase in
power of acting and sadness is when this decreases.
OK, so everything is trying to stay in existence, reach higher
(37:20):
levels of power, higher levels of existence, and that is a good
thing for Spinoza. That leads to his view of
ethics. What did Spinoza call his magnum
opus, his greatest work? He didn't call it God is
Everything, including your little toe.
He didn't call it, you know, Benedictus slash Baruch, the
(37:40):
deconversion story. He called it ethics.
Why do you call it ethics? All this has a point for
Spinoza. Thinking of God a certain way,
thinking of free will a certain way, thinking of religion a
certain way leads to, for Spinoza, an ethical, peaceful,
peaceful life. And here's what he means.
It is right and good for Spinoza, for someone to seek to
(38:04):
keep yourself in being and to have more power.
Good is what contributes to yourpower and bad is what doesn't
contribute to your power. Notice this is the opposite of a
judeo-christian ethic in his day.
In a judeo-christian ethic, the idea is you don't seek out your
own good. You don't seek to out to make a
bunch of money, you seek to giveit away.
(38:26):
You don't seek to become overly fit and handsome.
That's vanity. You're wasting your time on
things that are earthly, that don't matter.
You don't seek to become the most educated just so you can
know stuff. You can become educated to know
God and love God, but you can't just do it for vanity.
And so this isn't the opposite ethic of a judeo-christian ethic
again, going on in the 17th century, The more power you
(38:50):
have. Let me tell you why it's good.
Why he thinks good, by the way, he he thinks that like we don't
desire things because they're good.
They're good because we desire them, OK?
They're not like inherently good.
They're, they're useful to us. They're they increase our power.
Why does Spinoza think that goodthings increase your power and
(39:11):
bad things take away from it? Because the more power you have,
the less control that passions, that emotions have on you.
We say something that is now a little more down to earth, which
also is God for Spinoza. Most of your suffering is
mental. Most of your suffering are your
(39:31):
passions. Most of your suffering is from
your passions. You freak out and stress out
about a billion things that never happen for everyone that
does, and you usually suffer more in imagination than in
reality. Again, listen to the Stoic
lecture. I deal a lot with that here, a
lot with that there to say it another way, every man dies
(39:53):
once. The anxious person dies
thousands of times. Most of our suffering is
internal. It's mental, it's anticipation.
It's it's, it's our emotional state.
It's not that we actually are experiencing a ton of physical
pain all the time. Well, if that's the case, then
the way to have a happy life is to have more and more power over
those passions and emotions. And you can do that.
(40:16):
The more you know, the more. Control you have, the stronger
you are, the more power you have.
And listen, this is and when yourealize that things couldn't
have been any other way that that that lack of free will is
actually like a comforting blanket.
Oh, everything happened the way it had to happen.
Why am I stressed about that? Like it couldn't have been
(40:38):
otherwise. I can take a big breath.
I don't have this burden on me to make sure that I get it all
right. Things are going to be the way
that they are going to be. Our ability to explain how
things affect us and to know that everything that happens is
determined gives us the ability to lessen the power of the
passions. That's Spinoza's view on ethics.
And then one more thing here andwe are almost done.
(41:00):
Religious toleration for Spinoza, like a lot of thinkers
during this time, right? This is going to be true for
Voltaire. This is going to be true for
Baal. It's going to be true for a
bunch of major thinkers around this early modern or
enlightenment period. People should be free to think
whatever they want as long as they don't physically go break
(41:20):
the law. OK, Now there's going to be a
problem with this later on whereyou're like, wait, you can think
what you want. Can you say what you want?
And can you go act upon your beliefs?
Because that's then going to affect things physically.
But for Spinoza, he wants freedom of thought.
He wants this ability to not force people against their
conscience to have to believe orascribe to certain things.
He wants freedom of thought. Even if you can't go act on it
(41:42):
'cause it would be breaking the law, you should be able to think
it. The state should protect people
from the rule of religious leaders.
OK, that's a strong thing in Spinoza.
He does not want a again, a Christian Middle Ages where you
could be killed for believing something different.
What we today call the separation of church and state,
Spinoza would have been very forhe even thinks that the state
(42:05):
can regulate public religious practices, but cannot demand
belief against what one holds. The role of the church,
according to Spinoza, is morals,not metaphysics.
And he's actually fine with several forms of government.
He he seems to favor democracy, but he thinks that these things
can, you know, you can have goodgovernments that are set up in
different ways. But but one of the things he
(42:25):
talks about is the government cannot be too harsh or too LAX.
If they're too LAX, people will break the laws because they
don't care. But if they're too harsh and
people are oppressed, they'll rebel and break the law.
So you got to find this kind of kind of happy medium of
government authority. Well, what do you think of our
boy Spinoza? Do you like him?
(42:46):
Do you not like him? What do you think of his view of
everything being God? That's certainly not a historic
theological view. If everything is God, is
anything God? Or should we just say nature,
just say the universe? What do we think of his views of
things like free will in, in determinism?
(43:06):
What do you think of? Again, whether you love him or
hate him, you need to know who he is because he's a big deal.
He's going to influence a bunch of people and he is very, very
smart. Again, whether you agree or not,
he he does write out his works in like geometrical proofs.
He is hard to refute, not impossible, but he is hard to
refute. And So what should you read?
(43:28):
If you want to read some stuff about Spinoza, let me give you
two of his primary works that you should read if you want to
know more about Spinoza. The first is his ethics, what's
called ethics demonstrated in geometrical order, Nerd alert,
but very, very smart work. And then the other one I've
already mentioned, which is his theological political treatise
or the theological political treatise, or the Choctatus
(43:52):
theological Politicus. Anyway, however you want to mix
up the words, that's ideological.
If you love this podcast, you love what we do, that you're
getting like a free graduate level education with laughs and
jokes and you get to look at this just I mean, whoa, easy on
the eyes host. Let me tell you how you can
help. Not going to ask for money.
(44:13):
That's what you think. This isn't this isn't some sort
of telethon. The best way to support the
podcast is to subscribe, hit your notification button and
share it with people. Now, I'm not going to be one of
those influencers that's like, go ahead and smash that like
button or you're going to have 10 years of bad luck.
Ha ha, ha, My name is Bricks or something like that.
No, if you like this, spread theword, share the links, share the
(44:37):
episodes, post them and subscribe to stuff.
And more and more people will get more smarter like you and
me. Thanks for joining us again on
Ideological. We will see you next time.
So he gets excommunicated. I don't know if you know
anything about Judaism, but theyare not cool with a lot of those
things I just said. He thinks it's just superstition
when when people are scared, that's what they do.
They they need some sort of religion instead of acting
according to reason. Now there's some second hand
evidence that a Jewish zealot actually tried to stab Spinoza
after his excommunication. Hello, and welcome to
(00:29):
Ideological, a podcast that is just a little bit more fun than
going to church with your grandmother.
I'm your host, Zach Lee, and today we are talking about an
enormous figure, a man who just towers among men, not
physically. He's not like Shaq, but his name
is Spinoza. And we're going to talk about
why he is an important figure and why you should care.
(00:49):
Why should you care about this lesson?
Why don't you go do something else?
Why don't you go invest in maybesome Blockbuster, some Beanie
Babies, or do something practical?
That would be a great decision. Well, I'm going to tell you why
because this guy is a huge deal.And he brings up some thoughts,
some ideas that are very, very powerful that later figures and
thinkers will use and kind of make their own.
(01:10):
So without further ado, we're just going to go ahead and jump
into this lesson. This lesson is brought to you by
what am I drinking today? San Pellegrino.
You know, San Pellegrino, it's not for the poppers.
You know, it's, it's more of a proletariat drink kidding,
bourgeoisie proletariat can't get this.
They have to have regular water.Spinoza, let's talk about him.
(01:37):
His influence is absolutely enormous. close your eyes for a
second. Think of an enormous influence
and then think of this is biggerthan that.
That's Spinoza. His influence, both in his own
time and since then is huge. He influenced Leibniz, Hegel,
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Einstein.
Now a lot of people will say, you know, a lot of people that
(02:00):
are theistic will say, well, Einstein believed in God and
he's a smart person. Einstein explicitly and famously
mentioned that his God was Spinoza's God.
We're going to figure out what that means here in just a
second, but we're going to find out that it has more to do with
like the ground of being than itdoes some sort of personal
creator God, Hegel, who's a big deal.
We've got an episode on Hegel. You should listen to that.
(02:22):
That will also make you smarter and all the people will find you
so attractive. When you talk about Hegel, he
said to be a follower of Spinozais the essential commencement of
all philosophy. That's powerful.
Hold on. I need some more rich water.
It's not for the the plebeians, it's for the patricians.
(02:46):
When Hegel, who's a big deal, says that you're a big deal,
you're a big deal. OK Nietzsche would say this
about Spinoza. He's very complimentary of
Spinoza. He says I am related to Spinoza
through the negation of free will, teleology, the moral
world, order, the unegoistic andevil.
We'll talk about all those things in a second.
But there's some things that Nietzsche's really going to like
(03:08):
because Spinoza's a little bit of a bad boy.
So I don't know who you think ofas a bad boy.
Maybe it's someone like James Bond, maybe it's some sort of
maybe it's Jay-Z. Maybe he's a bad boy.
But Spinoza is is a bad boy. He's he's philosophically and
theologically naughty before thecontemporary period.
(03:28):
He is probably the most influential Jewish philosopher
of all time #2 is probably a guynamed Moses Maimonides.
But Spinoza's probably going to become the most famous Jewish
philosopher, and he is a guy kind of like Kant, that is going
to make rationality almost like a religion where everything has
to be explained. Everything has to fit within the
(03:50):
system. Things that do not that fall
with that outside the system arenonsensical or have certain
problems or contradictions, or they go beyond what somebody can
know. And so he is a big logical
systematician. So he's very, very smart.
Whether you love him or hate him, he's smarter than you.
OK, but who is he? Let's talk about his life, his
(04:12):
thoughts and some weird stuff about this dude.
Here we go. He was born again.
Like most of the figures we talked about here, they're born.
They're not eternal. He was born November 24th, 1632
in Amsterdam to Michael, who is a Jewish merchant, and his wife
Hannah. Those are good Jewish names.
He was their third child. Now his Jewish name is Baruch
(04:35):
Spinoza, OK, Baruch Spinoza Baruch in Hebrew means blessed,
OK, like Baruch Hashem would mean like bless the name.
So his name means blessed. After being excommunicated,
which we'll learn was a big turning point in his life, he
actually took the Latinized version of his name, which is
Benedictus or Benedictus, which means also blessed, right?
(04:58):
So you see this on social media where something good happens and
someone's like #benedictus or #baruch, that's what they're
doing. They're, they're saying blessed.
They are blessed. His last name, Spinoza or
Espinoza, which it's a referenceactually to his Sephardic Jewish
family that he belonged to and the fact that they had come from
Spain. So the, the, the name Spinoza
(05:20):
literally means something like thorn or thornbush, which is
ironic because he would become athorn kind of in the side of his
opponents for the rest of his life.
But it's probably a reference tothe location in Spain that they
were from, maybe like a place that had thorn bushes or
something like that. So but they're in the
Netherlands. But originally a Sephardic
Jewish family to which he was born.
(05:41):
Now, as a good Jewish boy, he was sent to school to learn
Hebrew, the Hebrew Bible, what'scalled the Tanakh, the Talmud.
He eventually met a former Jesuit trainee and freethinker
named Franz van Vanden Enden. Franz Vanden Enden, You know
(06:02):
these, you know, these Netherlands names, these kind of
Dutch names, they're always likeoogas, luga, booga.
That's kind of this guy. But he is brilliant.
He was going to be a Jesuit, buthe became a freethinker, which
is typically somebody that is willing to push the bounds of
Orthodoxy and what people are allowed to believe.
And from this character, Franz, like Franz and Hans, if you
(06:24):
remember that, that's get VandenEnden.
It's hard to say. I just want to say Eden.
But Inden from this character, he would learn Latin, which
would be very important because that is the the language of the
educated world at this time. And he would also learn certain
elements of Cartesian philosophy.
Spinoza's actually going to try to improve upon Descartes and
(06:46):
make his system more consistent.When Spinoza was 8.
Listen to this. This is a this is an event
that's fascinating. I don't know the effect that it
had on Spinoza's life. He was probably aware of it to
some extent, but it's fascinating.
When Spinoza was eight, there was a famous excommunication of
a guy named Uriel Dacosta. OK, Uriel Dacosta.
(07:09):
And Uriel. You know, that's a good, that's
a good name we use today a lot. Like, I'm pretty sure that's the
name of the little girl from a Little Mermaid, Uriel.
This guy had denied the immortality of the soul, and so
he was kicked out of he was excommunicated from the
synagogue and they allowed him back in on the following
(07:29):
condition. He had to be flogged in the
synagogue and then he had to laydown at the door of the
synagogue so that people could walk over his prostate body as a
form of repentance. Again, why would you drink water
when there can be bubbles in it and you can pay a lot more for
(07:50):
it? St.
Pellegrino. So this guy Uriel repents, is
flogged in the synagogue, has tolay down by the front door so
everyone can step on him on their way out as a way of
seeking atonement. He was so ashamed by that, by
the way, that a few days later he shot himself. 16 years later,
(08:12):
Spinoza himself would be excommunicated for heresy.
What were the heresies that, youknow, young Spinoza, young
Baruch slash Benedictus held? There's a few of them.
He held that everything was God.We'll talk about that in a
second. There was no afterlife.
The Bible was a human invention.There was no special status for
the Jews, which, you know, when you're in a Jewish community,
(08:34):
that's a, that's a hard pill to swallow.
All religions were superstitious.
There's no such thing as free will.
And he promoted religious toleration.
So he gets excommunicated. I don't know if you know
anything about Judaism, but theyare not cool with a lot of those
things I just said. Now they condemn him in
especially strong words. Let me just share with you part
(08:55):
of the excommunication. I'm not going to read all of it,
but just a chunk of Baruch Spinoza.
Listen to this, by the way. You're going to hear a word in
here. The word is harem.
Harem, which means like the ban or the curse or kicked out.
It's a term that's used often times in the Hebrew Bible when
God is destroying like all theseGentile and Pagan nations,
(09:17):
they're put under the rim. And so that is the the the term.
I'm not going to always do the IT is it is it is what that
sound at the beginning, but I'm not going to do that as I read
it. I just want you to know that I
know it smart. Thank you.
By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we
put under harem, excommunicate, curse and damn Baruch de
(09:39):
Espinoza, with the consent of God, blessed be he.
Meaning that's God, not Spinoza.And with the consent of the
entire holy congregation before these sacred scrolls, with the
613 precepts which are written therein, with the harem with
which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha
cursed the boys, and with all the harems that were written in
(10:01):
the Book of the Law. Now listen to this about
Spinoza. Cursed be he by day and cursed
be he by night. Cursed be he when he lies down,
and cursed be he when he rises up, Cursed be he when he goes
out, and cursed be he when he comes in.
The Lord will not spare him. The Lord's anger and jealousy
will Rage Against this man and bring upon him all the curses
which are written in the Book ofthe Law, and the Lord will blot
(10:24):
out his name from under heaven. We order that no one should
communicate with him orally or in writing, nor show him any
favor, nor stay with him under the same roof, nor come within 4
cubits of him, nor read any paper composed or written by
him. Whoa, that's a lot of not being
blessed for for, for a guy whosename is Blessed Thorn.
(10:49):
What is happening that those aresome strong terms.
They do not like Spinoza. That will be a big turning point
in his life where he realizes, hey, I can't just try to adapt
this to my Judaism. I am doing a new type of system
now. There's some second hand
evidence that a Jewish zealot actually tried to stab Spinoza
after his excommunication. Do you hear the sound?
(11:13):
Water, Fancy water. And supposedly, again to the
second hand evidence, Spinoza kept his cloak that had the hole
in it from the knife. He he, he, you know, was not
killed. He worked as a lens grinder for
microscopes and telescopes. That will be important later on.
(11:35):
In 1673, he was offered a professorship in philosophy at
the University of Heidelberg, which would have been great.
Most of the thinkers in the early modern period were very,
very bright, some of the smartest men in history, but a
lot of them were not professional professors,
professional academics. Kant is an exception, and
there's a few other exceptions, but a lot of these guys are not.
(11:55):
Whereas like in the Middle Ages,they're almost all philosophy
professors or theology professors or teaching the arts
faculty or whatever it is. So Spinoza was going to get a
chance to be a professor, but hewas only going to be hired on
the condition that he wouldn't cause too much of A stink.
So he's not able to because he knows I'm going to say some
things that are going to ruffle some feathers.
(12:17):
He died again, not eternal. He died on February 21st, 1677,
at just the age of 44 from some type of respiratory ailment.
We don't know if it's tuberculosis or what it is, but
it was probably exacerbated by all the years of breathing in
little tiny pieces of glass as alens grinder.
So if you're a lens grinder, you're making this glass,
(12:39):
breathing it in all day. And so whatever lung ailment he
had, that probably did not help it.
OK, that's his life. Cool.
This is life Zach. Why is he important?
We talked about him. He's he's got some interesting
stuff. You know, a big into to knowing
some things and getting in trouble at the synagogue.
OK, what are his big ideas? Let me give you several of them.
(13:01):
Now this is where it gets a little technical.
This is where we're going to separate the the thinkers from
the non thinkers. His first major idea is what is
called panentheism. Panentheism.
OK, not exactly pantheism. Pantheism is the belief that
everything is God. Panintheism is that everything
(13:22):
is part of God, but God is more than those things.
So I think he's more accurately classified as a Panintheist that
God is in all things ontologically.
But there are things that God has that go beyond just the
things that we we can perceive, the attributes that we can
perceive. Anyway, let me explain what that
(13:43):
means. There has been a question in
philosophy that is bedeviled philosophers for as long as
there have been philosophers. And it's the question of how can
different substances interact? Like how can my mind or my will,
which supposedly is immaterial, like the decisions I make or the
thoughts I have in my head that you cannot see with an MRI?
(14:04):
You can see the part of the brain that lights up, but you
can't see the thought. How can that immaterial thought
move my material hand? That's wild.
OK, This is why we think of our friend Casper the friendly
ghost. You remember he's our friend.
That's why we think of him as walking through walls, 'cause
he's of a different substance. There's the wall and there's
Casper, and Casper's a ghost, which is not supposedly
(14:26):
material. He's a spirit, so he can walk
through the wall. So the question is, how can
material things and immaterial things, God, souls, angels, for
these thinkers, the mind, numbers, propositions, these
things that seem to be immaterial, how can they
interact with things that are material?
So for somebody like Descartes, Descartes, he doesn't know how
(14:50):
they interact. He comes up with some theories
about a little bland in your brain, but it's kind of dumb and
other people come up with other theories.
Here is Spinoza's very simple answer.
There's only one substance. There's not a spiritual or
thought mind substance and an extended physical substance.
Everything is the one substance,which is God.
(15:10):
You know when when Descartes defined a substance, A substance
and philosophy. All right, let's get real nerdy.
Let's just get nerdy with it. A substance is what stands
under, hence the term substance.It's a thing that exists on its
own to which other attributes are attached or attributed.
So I, Zach, am a substance to touse Aristotle's example, I would
(15:34):
be a substance, the individual man, Zach.
But if I lost all my hair, that's just an accident.
That's not Zackness. That's not really what makes me,
me, my, my hair or lack of hair,what Jean Paul Sartre called
emboldment, which is a great attribute.
Hair or lack of hair doesn't exist on its own.
It has to be attached to to me. I'm the substance.
(15:57):
Well, Spinoza's like, hold on a second.
There's only one substance that exists on its own that doesn't
rely on any other things to exist.
There's only one substance that's essence is its existence.
And that substance is God, the eternal, the necessarily
(16:17):
existent, this kind of stuff. And So what he's going to say
is, listen, there can't be two substances.
They can't interact. Also.
They would all be attributes because they all need something
else to exist. Unless everything is God,
everything is something whose essence is existence.
That's his idea. So in his mind, everything must
(16:38):
be the same substance and we would call that substance God.
Now let me be very, very clear. This is why, by the way, Spinoza
has a very famous line that people over quote where he says
that you can call this substanceDeus siwa natura.
OK, Deus siwa natura meaning Godor nature in Latin.
(17:00):
Notice that those are the same thing.
God slash nature slash the universe slash.
What exists is all the same stuff.
OK, so let me be very clear. Spinoza's going to get called an
atheist a lot. There are others that call him
God intoxicated because so much of his philosophy has to do with
substance, and substance is God.Let me just be very, very clear.
(17:21):
When you hear Spinoza talk aboutGod, do not think of what most
people typically think of when they think of God.
He does not mean a personal creator God of a revealed
religion that is different from creation.
He means something like everything that is the ground of
being, the thing that exists, and therefore everything exists
in him. He means something like that.
(17:42):
Not personal. OK.
He actually really hates a lot of revealed religious texts and
ideas because he thinks that's just an anthropomorphization of
God, that you're just, you're just, you're describing him in
anthropomorphic terms. So like when you think of an old
bearded man sitting on a cloud saying ZAP with a lightning
(18:05):
bolt, you're thinking of Zeus, right?
You're not thinking of God like eternal, all powerful being
itself, immutable, unchanging, whatever.
You don't think of that you're you're thinking of Zeus.
So he kind of makes fun of anthropomorphic views of God in
in revealed religion. Substance, which we just
(18:27):
established is everything it hasin God.
God slash nature slash being slash stuff has an infinite
number of attributes. But we as humans only know two
of these, thought and extension.So he's trying to tie together
these things that seem very different to us, but ultimately
(18:49):
have to somehow to go together because there's only one
substance. Individual objects or items are
simply modes, IE ways of being of the one substance.
They are states of the substance.
They are modes of God. This, this can again this
episode brought to you by God. This can a mode of God
(19:10):
individual things. My phone, right.
Throw it on the ground now so noone calls.
You can't hear it if it's on theground.
The can, the book, whatever. These are individual modes of
the one substance. Our minds are just collections
of thoughts in God's mind. OK, again, we are God.
(19:31):
God is more than us, but we are part of God.
Again, He, he is. This is what is called one ISM.
This is a very strong monism. They're not different
substances. There is one substance.
So panentheism, listen to this as well.
Because there's only one substance, our minds and bodies
don't actually react, OK? They don't actually like
causally react, rather, there's a correlation between mental
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events and physical events, meaning different ways of
conceiving the same thing. So they're two separate ways of
explaining the same things. Think of it this way.
Don't think that my mind causes my body to do something or my
body causes my mind to do something.
Why do they go together though? Like why do I?
You know, feel pain in my hand and then make a willing decision
to move away or whatever it might be.
(20:18):
Perhaps the most common way of explaining this is that they run
in parallel, but they are not reacting to each other.
To say it another way, pretend that I've got French going on in
my mind and I've got German going on in my body.
They're two different languages,but they correspond to one of
them. They can be saying the same
thing in French that it's sayingin German, but are different
(20:40):
languages and not reacting. How do you how do you feel?
How do you feel knowing that you're God, but also like your
toilet is and also like, you know, a spider is and all?
Like does it make you feel great?
Does it feel weird? Is that is that what
philosophers typically mean whenthey think of God sometimes?
(21:00):
What about religious thinkers? Interesting, interesting.
Again, because he's not saying you are gods like you're like
some powerful, but he's just saying if something exists, it's
the one substance and that substance is nature.
You don't really even need the term God.
Like This is why people accuse him of being an atheist, because
his God doesn't really serve a purpose.
(21:21):
You don't really need God. He just has to use that language
because that's what people are going to expect.
Again in the 1600s. Number 2, the principle of
sufficient reason. Spinoza holds a stronger form of
this than his, a guy that he metLeibniz.
So the principle of sufficient reason, the PSR, you'll see it
sometimes abbreviated in philosophical textbooks.
(21:44):
It's the idea that there cannot be any brute facts or
randomness. OK, there has to be a cause for
why something is one way insteadof another way.
Leibniz says it very famously with why is there something
rather than nothing? There has to be a reason for
that. You can't just say it is.
You can say that, but then you've stepped away from
rationality. Why are we even doing
philosophy? If I walk into the room and I
(22:05):
see a Lego on the floor, I mightnot know how it got there, but
like, it would be wildly irrational to think that it was
just a brute fact. Like there wasn't a reason for
it or it it was, you know, why is it there instead of some
other place? And I was just like, there's not
a reason. I might not know the reason, but
there has to be a reason. And so Spinoza will take this
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idea and develop it to the NTH degree.
There, everything has to be rational.
He hates brute facts. He wants to know why we can
explain this this way. He wants the whole system to
fit, which is why he's, again, whether you like him, hate him,
disagree with them, agree with him.
He is a sharp philosopher. You cannot argue about that.
So this episode brought to you by Legos.
Legos step on them at night. I feel like hell is actually
(22:52):
just a floor full of Legos and you're barefoot.
The end. I mean, I I can't prove that's
what Hell's like, but I mean, that's a pretty good guess.
This is a benefit of Spinoza system because everything has to
be reasonable. He is doing big ticket
(23:13):
philosophy. Listen to this quote.
For each thing there must be assigned A cause or reason both
for its existence and for its non existence.
What cannot be conceived throughanother must be conceived
through itself. Causation by the way, for
Spinoza is nothing more than theability to explain or to make
things intelligible. So don't think of causation is
(23:35):
like this thing bumps this thingfor him because again, mental
and physical, this is all the one substance.
Causation is the ability to explain something by something
else. OK, that's what we mean by
'cause it's an explanatory definition of cause, not just a
physical or something like that.Number three, he holds to the
(23:57):
falsity of the Bible, religion and of miracles.
He thinks that the Bible is merely a human book and should
be used to interpret itself. The parts that seem absurd
should be cast out or reinterpreted to protect the
pure parts. The problem with me drinking
fizzy water is now I'm always like suppressing the burps.
(24:17):
You know, you can't let it out. So you do this like weird face
thing. We're like, you look like a frog
puffing up anyway. Meaning what he wants to do is
he wants to go through the Bibleand look at the Bible as the
Bible and the parts that are ridiculous or that are what he
thinks to be contradictory, you have to give them a different
reading. A lot of the early church will
(24:39):
do this on the Christian side because they'll say, hey, we
need to interpret this allegorically because if you
take it literally, it leads to some weird, weird conclusions.
And so he does that and he also,he would say he's defending the
Bible. He's like, I've got to take out
the bad parts so that it doesn'tcorrupt the parts that are
obviously good. That's his view.
Miracles to Spinoza are not violations of nature.
We typically think of like nature's kind of is.
(25:01):
It's really a deistic way of thinking of it.
We think of nature is just like a clock that's just doing its
thing and you know, atoms are bumping into other atoms.
And a miracle is when God like intervenes as if he's not always
intervening. Depending on your theological
system, something God's far off doesn't intervene.
Something's God is intervening all the time.
Some thinkers of this time thinkthat God is continually
(25:22):
recreating or sustaining everything actively at all
times. It depends.
But for someone like Spinoza, a miracle is not an intervention
of God. It's just when we don't
understand, they're misunderstandings.
A miracle is where we misperceive or we misunderstand
something. So a miracle can tell you
nothing. It's a misperception.
It's it's where you lack knowledge.
(25:43):
There's an actual 'cause there'sa reason for it, principle's
sufficient reason, but you lack what that is.
And so you think that it's breaking the rules.
Someone like Spinoza would say that if God has to do miracles,
then creation is worse. He's a bad creator.
I'm going to say it this way andagain, God's eternal.
Everything's eternal. So even calling him creators,
not exactly the right term. But think of it this way.
(26:06):
If you have a car that always runs perfectly, like it never
breaks, it's a well functioning car.
Is that better than having a carthat you constantly have to take
back into the mechanic so the mechanic can intervene?
Well, we'd say the first car is better.
That's what Spinoza's going to say about, you know, miracles.
He's going to say, yeah, God is better if he doesn't intervene
(26:28):
because that means he planned everything right from the
beginning. If he has to intervene, then
he's not as good of a creator. Also, a lot of miracles for
Spinoza will, I mean, not all, not a lot.
All miracles would be naturalistic.
For example, he, he gives us as an example, the sign of the
rainbow with the Noah story. So in the in the story again in
(26:52):
the Hebrew Bible, God floods theearth and Noah and his family
are saved in a large boat. And then the sign that God will
never again flood the earth is the sign of the rainbow.
Well, Spinoza's like, I mean, what was sign?
That's just the way you're viewing light through water
particles. Like, can you, do you create a
(27:13):
rainbow or did no one ever see sunlight through the clouds,
like, and see a rainbow? Now, that's not what they're
thinking in the Old Testament orthe Hebrew Bible.
What they're thinking is God hastaken his weapon of judgement,
his bow, and he's killed mankindand now he's hanging it up,
right? It's pointing back at him.
He's not going to flood people again or something.
(27:33):
Spinoza's like, that is ridiculous.
It is light particles. We all know what a prism is.
Get over it, OK? He believes that religion causes
fear and binds men. Why does it bind them?
Because it bids them not to think as hard.
It bids them not to use their reason, not to be caught up in
worldly philosophy, but rather to just trust a type of ignorant
(27:54):
faith. For Spinoza.
Spinoza uses his vast knowledge of the Hebrew Scripture to point
out many what he thinks to be contradictions in the Bible.
He's actually one of the first major proponents of what's
called biblical higher criticism.
Biblical higher criticism is where you take the supernatural
elements or the Bible supposedlybeing God's word, and you remove
those presuppositions and you just interpret it like any other
(28:17):
book where you call out errors or you call out what you think
to be contradictions or whateverit might be.
It's called higher criticism andit will take off in Germany
later on. He's not the first one to do
this. Hobbes and other thinkers before
him did it, but he does make it very popular with a a work that
he has called the Tractatus, theTractatus Theological Politicus,
(28:38):
the Theological political treatise.
I always want to say Tractatus Logico Philosophicus because of
Wittgenstein, but there you go. That was super nerdy.
What else do we want to talk about here?
He will point out that the Old Testament doesn't really have a
clear conception of an afterlife.
Remember our our friend slash The Little Mermaid, Uriel
(28:59):
Decosta of the Doesn't that meanof the coast that that might
actually work for for Ariel? He got excommunicated because he
denied the existence of a soul saying there's no afterlife.
Well, Spinoza is going to say, hold on.
In the in, in the, the Torah, the first five books of the
Hebrew Bible, it's very fuzzy when it comes to some sort of
(29:23):
afterlife. You get the idea of judgement or
resurrection or whatever. Maybe later in the prophets,
like much later, you get that inthe New Testament.
But he's Jewish. He didn't believe the New
Testament. He'll say, hey, the, the
conception of a afterlife is notprimarily there in the Torah,
which is why the Sadducees and the Pharisees disagree on this
issue, whether or not there are angels or whether or not there's
(29:45):
an afterlife, all these kind of things.
So, so he's going to say, hey, listen, the, the promises are
just about earth. That's why the, the curses are
like, you're you, you will miscarry and these nations will
destroy you. And the blessings are you will
have a bunch of sheep and you'llhave land like it's very this
worldly that gets him in trouble.
And Speaking of the superstitionof religion, he says this,
(30:07):
listen to this quote. And it is especially when they
are helpless, in danger that they all implore God's help with
prayers and womanish tears. He thinks it's just superstition
when when people are scared, that's what they do.
They they need some sort of religion instead of acting
according to reason. And then he is what is called a
theological liberal. A theological liberal is not the
(30:27):
same as a political liberal, although most theological
liberals would also be politicalliberals.
A theological liberal is somebody that denies any of the
supernaturalness in the Bible. So what What Spinoza wants you
to do is to love God by using your reason and to be kind and
have moral actions towards otherpeople.
So it's not about doctrine, it'snot about dogma, it's not about
(30:49):
believing certain things. It's about being a good person,
loving other people, and just generically having this
knowledge of God through reason and being #4 Spinoza.
He holds to strict determinism, something stronger than
determinism, what's called necessitarianism.
Necessitarianism is even stronger than determinism, that
(31:11):
everything, all truths are necessary truths, all existences
are necessary existences, and everything happens necessarily
the way it does, and it could not be otherwise, even for God.
You by rainbow water full of bubbles.
(31:34):
Now listen to this. Let me describe it this way.
I think this would be a good wayto ask the question.
Could God have made the world? And again, we're using creature
language and Spinoza's, but follow me.
Could God have made the world any way other than the way he
made it? You think?
(31:57):
Yeah, he could have made it someother way.
There could be more stars, therecould be more people, maybe
there could be like less earthquakes.
And you say, oh, well, why didn't he do that?
Well, because God knows what's best, and he created the best
world to him. This goes back to Leibniz's view
of this being the best of all possible worlds.
(32:18):
He's not saying that you think it is.
You're a dumb human. He's saying from God's
perspective, it obviously is because God knows everything and
this is what he he does. Like is, is God going to create
the 432nd best universe he can make?
No, he's going to create the best.
SO and if that's the case, then then God couldn't actually have
created the world in any other way.
He couldn't have actually done that because if he has to act
(32:40):
according to this nature, and his nature is already set and
that's who he is, He doesn't have free will.
He just necessarily does what hedoes.
So for Spinoza, this will also get him in trouble.
Everything happens the way it must happen.
God doesn't even have a choice. And he has this quote where he
(33:01):
says in nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have
been determined from the necessity of the divine nature.
God does what God has to do based on what He is necessity of
the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain
way. Things could have been produced
by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have
(33:22):
been produced. So does God have free will for
Spinoza? No God is a substance, and His
substance requires that things be exactly the way they are, at
the exact time, in the exact order of all of it.
OK, it is strong necessitarianism that leads to
this question. Do humans have free will?
(33:44):
Absolutely not #5 there is no human free will.
That would be absurd to think that humans have free will.
We think we have free will because it feels like I can
decide to want to raise my righthand or my left hand, right
tricked you. I wonder if that looks left to
you on the screen Anyway, So, but really what happened is, you
know, a long time ago an atom bumped another atom that changed
a chemical that did this, that caused me to think this way,
(34:06):
that caused me to do this podcast that caused me to do,
and I had to raise my right hand.
I think it's a free choice, but it can't be uncaused.
There's a series of causes goingback maybe forever, maybe to
some point that doesn't matter. But like, you don't have free
will. You just do exactly what you had
to do. You feel like you have free
(34:27):
will, but your feelings are false.
OK. Your will, by the way, is not
something different than your other ideas.
There's nothing special about it.
It's just another idea. My mind is merely God's idea of
my body. My mind is God's idea of my
body. Now for Spinoza, we're going to
see why this is so important in just a second.
(34:50):
When we talk about his ethics, it's going to be a, a, something
that there's a similarity to certain elements in Spinoza's
thought that is similar to Stoicism.
We've got a lecture on the Stoics, of course, that you
should listen to if you want to be a smarter, better person.
But you know, his beliefs and stuff are not the same as the
(35:11):
Stoics. Number six, we're going to come
back to that in a second. Panpsychism, Panpsychism, what
is pan? Pan again means all, like
pantheism or pantheism, God in all, or God, or God being
everything, or God being in everything.
Panpsychism is this, this idea, since thought is an attribute of
(35:31):
God, remember everything's God, everything's the one substance,
which is thought and extension. And these other attributes that
we don't know, but there's an infinite number of them.
Since thought is an attribute ofGod slash nature, then
everything has a mind. Now let me clarify this.
He doesn't mean a conscious mind.
He doesn't mean that again, the very expensive, I mean just
(35:55):
lavish bottle of sparkling water.
This is a can can of sparkling water has like a conscious mind.
It's not like I, I pick up the can and I give it a little
squeeze and it's like, Ouch. You know, it's not like that.
It's not a conscious mind. What he's trying to say though,
is if everything is God and God has this attribute of thought,
then there's a sense in which everything is thinking.
(36:16):
There's there's a every physicalthing has an idea in God.
So the pan, the desk, the pen, humans are have a conscience,
but we're more aware of it. But if everything has this, if
you want to say mental element, then there's this idea of what's
called panpsychism, which is just sukhe, which means soul or
mind pond means all these are Greek words.
(36:38):
Yeah, yeah. Very fancy.
The konatus. A lot of times you hear people
say konatus. You know, I'm from Texas, so
they're like Konatus. The Konatus, which is this,
everything that exists tries to stay in existence.
We try to get to a higher level of existence.
We're all striving for higher and higher levels of being OK.
(36:59):
This explains, for example, why we want to stay alive.
It explains why we want to better ourselves.
It explains why we want to be more intelligent, all these kind
of things. It also explains emotions for
Spinoza, Joy for examples. When you have an increase in
power of acting and sadness is when this decreases.
OK, so everything is trying to stay in existence, reach higher
(37:20):
levels of power, higher levels of existence, and that is a good
thing for Spinoza. That leads to his view of
ethics. What did Spinoza call his magnum
opus, his greatest work? He didn't call it God is
Everything, including your little toe.
He didn't call it, you know, Benedictus slash Baruch, the
(37:40):
deconversion story. He called it ethics.
Why do you call it ethics? All this has a point for
Spinoza. Thinking of God a certain way,
thinking of free will a certain way, thinking of religion a
certain way leads to, for Spinoza, an ethical, peaceful,
peaceful life. And here's what he means.
It is right and good for Spinoza, for someone to seek to
(38:04):
keep yourself in being and to have more power.
Good is what contributes to yourpower and bad is what doesn't
contribute to your power. Notice this is the opposite of a
judeo-christian ethic in his day.
In a judeo-christian ethic, the idea is you don't seek out your
own good. You don't seek to out to make a
bunch of money, you seek to giveit away.
(38:26):
You don't seek to become overly fit and handsome.
That's vanity. You're wasting your time on
things that are earthly, that don't matter.
You don't seek to become the most educated just so you can
know stuff. You can become educated to know
God and love God, but you can't just do it for vanity.
And so this isn't the opposite ethic of a judeo-christian ethic
again, going on in the 17th century, The more power you
(38:50):
have. Let me tell you why it's good.
Why he thinks good, by the way, he he thinks that like we don't
desire things because they're good.
They're good because we desire them, OK?
They're not like inherently good.
They're, they're useful to us. They're they increase our power.
Why does Spinoza think that goodthings increase your power and
(39:11):
bad things take away from it? Because the more power you have,
the less control that passions, that emotions have on you.
We say something that is now a little more down to earth, which
also is God for Spinoza. Most of your suffering is
mental. Most of your suffering are your
(39:31):
passions. Most of your suffering is from
your passions. You freak out and stress out
about a billion things that never happen for everyone that
does, and you usually suffer more in imagination than in
reality. Again, listen to the Stoic
lecture. I deal a lot with that here, a
lot with that there to say it another way, every man dies
(39:53):
once. The anxious person dies
thousands of times. Most of our suffering is
internal. It's mental, it's anticipation.
It's it's, it's our emotional state.
It's not that we actually are experiencing a ton of physical
pain all the time. Well, if that's the case, then
the way to have a happy life is to have more and more power over
those passions and emotions. And you can do that.
(40:16):
The more you know, the more. Control you have, the stronger
you are, the more power you have.
And listen, this is and when yourealize that things couldn't
have been any other way that that that lack of free will is
actually like a comforting blanket.
Oh, everything happened the way it had to happen.
Why am I stressed about that? Like it couldn't have been
(40:38):
otherwise. I can take a big breath.
I don't have this burden on me to make sure that I get it all
right. Things are going to be the way
that they are going to be. Our ability to explain how
things affect us and to know that everything that happens is
determined gives us the ability to lessen the power of the
passions. That's Spinoza's view on ethics.
And then one more thing here andwe are almost done.
(41:00):
Religious toleration for Spinoza, like a lot of thinkers
during this time, right? This is going to be true for
Voltaire. This is going to be true for
Baal. It's going to be true for a
bunch of major thinkers around this early modern or
enlightenment period. People should be free to think
whatever they want as long as they don't physically go break
(41:20):
the law. OK, Now there's going to be a
problem with this later on whereyou're like, wait, you can think
what you want. Can you say what you want?
And can you go act upon your beliefs?
Because that's then going to affect things physically.
But for Spinoza, he wants freedom of thought.
He wants this ability to not force people against their
conscience to have to believe orascribe to certain things.
He wants freedom of thought. Even if you can't go act on it
(41:42):
'cause it would be breaking the law, you should be able to think
it. The state should protect people
from the rule of religious leaders.
OK, that's a strong thing in Spinoza.
He does not want a again, a Christian Middle Ages where you
could be killed for believing something different.
What we today call the separation of church and state,
Spinoza would have been very forhe even thinks that the state
(42:05):
can regulate public religious practices, but cannot demand
belief against what one holds. The role of the church,
according to Spinoza, is morals,not metaphysics.
And he's actually fine with several forms of government.
He he seems to favor democracy, but he thinks that these things
can, you know, you can have goodgovernments that are set up in
different ways. But but one of the things he
(42:25):
talks about is the government cannot be too harsh or too LAX.
If they're too LAX, people will break the laws because they
don't care. But if they're too harsh and
people are oppressed, they'll rebel and break the law.
So you got to find this kind of kind of happy medium of
government authority. Well, what do you think of our
boy Spinoza? Do you like him?
(42:46):
Do you not like him? What do you think of his view of
everything being God? That's certainly not a historic
theological view. If everything is God, is
anything God? Or should we just say nature,
just say the universe? What do we think of his views of
things like free will in, in determinism?
(43:06):
What do you think of? Again, whether you love him or
hate him, you need to know who he is because he's a big deal.
He's going to influence a bunch of people and he is very, very
smart. Again, whether you agree or not,
he he does write out his works in like geometrical proofs.
He is hard to refute, not impossible, but he is hard to
refute. And So what should you read?
(43:28):
If you want to read some stuff about Spinoza, let me give you
two of his primary works that you should read if you want to
know more about Spinoza. The first is his ethics, what's
called ethics demonstrated in geometrical order, Nerd alert,
but very, very smart work. And then the other one I've
already mentioned, which is his theological political treatise
or the theological political treatise, or the Choctatus
(43:52):
theological Politicus. Anyway, however you want to mix
up the words, that's ideological.
If you love this podcast, you love what we do, that you're
getting like a free graduate level education with laughs and
jokes and you get to look at this just I mean, whoa, easy on
the eyes host. Let me tell you how you can
help. Not going to ask for money.
(44:13):
That's what you think. This isn't this isn't some sort
of telethon. The best way to support the
podcast is to subscribe, hit your notification button and
share it with people. Now, I'm not going to be one of
those influencers that's like, go ahead and smash that like
button or you're going to have 10 years of bad luck.
Ha ha, ha, My name is Bricks or something like that.
No, if you like this, spread theword, share the links, share the
(44:37):
episodes, post them and subscribe to stuff.
And more and more people will get more smarter like you and
me. Thanks for joining us again on
Ideological. We will see you next time.
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