15th May 2008, 01:22 AM
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Originally Posted by metis
Here's your follow up:
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Originally Posted by Harvey1
Wickedness is being apart from God and focused on negative emotions.
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Everything's fine until your last sentence. What I'm going to do is to quote from Wikipedia, even though it's not my favorite source by any means (but it saves time
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Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are. . . Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.
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This last part seems to me to leave the door open toward confusing Spinoza's "attributes of extension" and "attributes of thought":
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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. When Spinoza claims in Proposition Two that "Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing", he was almost universally — but erroneously — interpreted as saying that God is literally corporeal. For just this reason, "Spinozism" became, for his critics, synonymous with atheistic materialism.
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 bodies; 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. (Steven Nadler, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, 2005)
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So, it's important to ask the question is the action done by a human being (or animal) an attribute of extension (of God's essence), or is it a mode or attribute of thought (of God's essence)? Spinoza clearly did not think that all knowledge was equally a reflection of the divine nature since he defines three types of knowledge and equates the third type of knowledge as the highest endeavour:
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E5: PROP. 25. The highest endeavour of the mind, and the highest virtue is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge. (Spinoza, Ethics)
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In the case of wickedness as an attribute of thought, Spinoza ranked it as the lowest endeavour of the mind and not an eternal mindset:
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E5: PROP. 40, Corollary.--Hence it follows that the part of the mind which endures, be it great or small, is more perfect than the rest. Ibid
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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 them, the more we are subject to passions and the less active and free we are. The upshot is a fairly pathetic picture of a life mired in the passions and pursuing and fleeing the changeable and fleeting objects that occasion them: "We are driven about in many ways by external causes, and … like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate" (IIIp59s). The title for Part Four of the Ethics reveals with perfect clarity Spinoza's evaluation of such a life for a human being: "On Human Bondage, or the Powers of the Affects". He explains that the human being's "lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects I call Bondage. For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but of fortune, in whose power he so greatly is that often, though he sees the better for himself, he is still forced to follow the worse". It is, he says, a kind of "sickness of the mind" to suffer too much love for a thing "that is liable to many variations and that we can never fully possess." (Steven Nadler, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza, 2005)
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