/lit/ - Literature

>From this it is clear that Spinoza’s God is not the same sort of divine being worshipped by theists. We can see why he thought “Nature” might be a better word for what he had in mind. Spinoza’s God does not decide to create things; instead, things flow or emanate from the one substance. Praying to Spinoza’s God would be useless, as this God cannot act in any other way; it would be like praying to gravity, or electromagnetism. And as Spinoza goes on to argue, none of the features we associate with persons, such as desires and hopes and fears, have any place in relation to God. Spinoza’s God or Nature is a great, cosmic, impersonal force, bringing about consequences with the same dispassion as a mechanical algorithm, and this force is neither disappointed nor cheered by anything that gets cranked out. Everything is equally natural, so far as Nature is concerned – a pile of stones, a pile of bodies, it matters not. Only humans (and some other animals) come to prefer some outcomes to others.

>Spinoza’s outlook may thus feel extremely cold.

maybe the reason land went bananas is because in fixating on kant, marx and deleuze what he really wanted to do was banish the elephant in the room - hegel - and in doing so he wound up becoming the next great spinozist. but in a very strange way: if you imagine Skynet as a *progressive spinozist deity* (that runs on your libidinal fantasies, or is them, aka cthulhu) you get...Capital as gnostic demiurge.