/lit/ - Literature

everything is the universe, separation is an illusion based upon memory, so being right typically makes you well-liked

He's not well-liked in the philosophicsl tradition. Up to 200 years ago being called a Spinozist would have been the end of your academic career.
Things changed a bit with German Idealists (especially the early Schelling, and Hegel), but even then, it was only a partial acceptance of his theories (in the form of "Spinoza was wrong about everything, but he got this one crucial bit right"). Since then his reputation has increased, peaking in the middle 20th century. Nowadays he is respected, but not revered. Currently there are no genuine Spinozists, which means that his philosophy is dead.

>>17438933
He gives atheists a way to LARP as theists

>>17440252
No philosophy that's ever been important ever "dies." They aren't term papers whose contents disappear into the ether once you burn them.

>>17440334
A philosophy dies insofar as its central tenets are not taken seriously anymore. This is what's going on for Spinoza. You might find interesting bits here and there to incorporate in your own philosophy, but from the point of view of Spinoza you're killing his theory by doing so. This mentality of yours is very typical in our time, where people will say that past philosophies are not dead because you can treat them as some sort of supermarket, where you go in, take something out, and then leave. I think it's a very cynical mindset.

>>17440352
No, that's not what I meant. Modern philosophy builds on previous philosophy, for the most part. There'd be no Marx as we know him were there no Hegel, no Hegel as we know him were there no Kant, no Kant as we know him were there no Hume, etc. If any one of those philosophies "died" depending on what we arbitrarily took seriously at any given moment, we'd never find more than a few percentage points of the entirety of philosophy "alive."

Again, philosophers by definition aren't islands.

>>17440406
There's no Marx without Hegel, but if Marx is right, then Hegel philosophy is immediatly suppressed (insofar as his philosophy is refuted): it just becomes a pedagogical tool used to better our understanding of Marx. From the marxist point of view, Hegel's philosophy is still alive insofar as it is required to correctly interpret certain texts; from the hegelian point of view, Hegel's philosophy is 100% dead, since its aim was to be a comprehensive and true philosophical system. Hegel would have disagreed that his philosophy is alive because it is necessary to interpret Marx' intellectual history. The same can be said about Spinoza and his contemporary readers.

>>17439592
>everything is the universe
imagine thinking this is a stunning philosophical revelation and not something you can come up with in middle school when you're bored.

>>17440252
this. It’s fairly recent. Thanks Einstein, Deleuze...

>>17440702
That method of thinking presupposes a dangerous linearity. Just because Marx came from/because of Hegel doesn't mean the former replaces the latter. Think of the history/evolution of philosophy not as a single line, but rather a series of coordinates on a Cartesian plane with a positive correlation. They all remain independent, but together they point in a certain direction. To call Spinoza's ideas "dead" is to say his coordinate disappears from the graph.

>>17438933
Because he loves God and BTFO Abrahamists

because he was an insufferable virgin, so some people relate

>>17440761
Did Deleuze even read Spinzter?

>>17440779
He was a chad patron of gladiatorial games between his champion spiders.

>>17440767
>Because he loves God
His God is fake and built upon nihilistic atheist subversion.

>>17440825
>Spinoza's god is fake because he denied that a god would take pleasure in the suffering of others
So your god is an abusive parent? Figures

>>17440755
Yea but he used a bunch of autistic proofs, definitions and axioms to prove it.

>>17440767
>there are still legally designated Spinoza-free zones to this day
I can only hope to achieve this level of based in my lifetime.

Because she was a cutie

>>17440764
Well, what i'm contesting is that a philosophy can live as a mere influence (or stepping stone). This is better exemplified by my disagreement with this claim:
>Just because Marx came from/because of Hegel doesn't mean the former replaces the latter.
My point would be that if Marx is right (let's assume he is for the sake of the argument), then Hegel is in fact replaced, insofar as the content of his philosophy is literally refuted: If Marx is right, what Hegel says about, for example, the sistematicity of philosophy, the Subjectivity of the Absolute, the nature of the dialectical method, etc., all these things are wrong. This is not a superficial disagreement between Hegel and Marx: it's a matter of complete refutation. This is a pressing matter especially for highly systematic thinkers like Hegel and Spinoza (where contraddicting any of their major claims entails a refutation of their entire philosophy)

It seems to weird that a philosophy can be "alive" as a mere influence, after its complete refutation.
That's why i described it as a cynical move earlier. It simply discounts the point of view of the philosophy itself, and instead it treats it as a mere stepping stone in intellectual history. To me it seems an evidently anti-philosophical position, which should be relegated to other fields, like history of philosophy or hustory of ideas.

>>17440761
Dunno about Deleuze, but from what I know, Einstein would be a good examplemof the supermarket-mentality I've described earlier. It is evident from his writings that Einstein does not actually accepts Spinoza's arguments, rather he accepts certain conclusions. He believes in the Spinozistic God because it resonated with him, it seemed plausible to him, etc. He did not believe in it e because he thought that Spinoza's rationalist arguments definetely proved that God exists and that it had this or that property. A good litmus test to understand wether one is a committed Spinozist or not is to ask them wether God/Nature has more than 2 attributes: a committed Spinozist would have to say that God/Nature CERTAINLY has infinite attributes; Einstein would have probably said that we know 2 of them, and that maybe there were some more, but I seriously doubt he would have conceded that it must be the case, a priori, that Nature has infinite attributes.

>>17438933
being right about everything will do that to a nigga

>>17440955
Ms Spinoza... I kneel.

>>17440783
Spinoza was his primary influence. He called him the “christ of philosophers”.

>>17440955
>hi anon, would you like to come back to my house and play with my pet spiders

>why is so well-liked

Yeah... what a great guy. Except he looks like the ass end of a dolphin.

>>17438933
He's the progenitor of Darwinism

>>17441112
And the big bang

>>17440955
>tfw no femnoza gf
Why would God do this to me?

>>17438933
PoC insert

>>17438933
People are OBSESSED with monism, no matter the form of it, and they have a weird bias against philosophical systems which posit multiple entities as irreducible to one another, such as Leibniz's monadology.

>>17441079
Y-yes

>>17441556
>People are OBSESSED with monism
In the sense that the Western philosophical tradition has been deathly opposed to it and Pluralism ever since Plato, yeah, sure. /lit/ is a good example of this.

>>17441051
>It seems to weird that a philosophy can be "alive" as a mere influence, after its complete refutation.

I see what you're saying. If Marx says A and Hegel says ~A, and you and I discover that A, then Hegel's ~A is false and his philosophy therefore "dead." It follows then that Hegel's ~A, insofar as it is false, is only "alive" by virtue of its "mere influence" on Marx's A, and this is "anti-philosophical," as you put it, because it's reductive.

I think the most immediate and simplest response to this is that we've yet to discover that A, and on those grounds ~A still stands. The opposite of Spinoza's philosophy hasn't been proven, so that cannot be why it's considered "dead." But that wasn't even your definition of the description at the outset - you defined a "dead" philosophy as one whose "central tenets are not taken seriously anymore." But, again, most contemporary philosophers have very narrow focuses, and by your logic the vast majority of philosophy would be "dead," at least implicitly, to the vast majority of philosophers. And that just doesn't strike me as true, not remotely. I've never come across that attitude in my years of studying philosophy.

Thanks for the conversation - I appreciate your taking the time to reply to me.

>>17440317
Pretty much my dad

Spinoza BTFOs jews, christcucks and the like, while also offending moralfags of the modern age. So uhh... I'm gonna say based.

>>17440406
>philosophers by definition
using that expression wrong.

>>17440812
Lol thanks man, I didn't really mean it though I don't like the guy

>>17438933
Because he was an autist fedora tipper but on the theist side. Seriously, read the only work he released, it looks like a deductive logic textbook. He didn't philosophize so much as logician his way to fame. I think there's more mathematical formulae in the Ethics than there are sentences

>>17442208
Sounds based.

Just jews promoting their own

>>17442208
>No, I have never read Spinoza
>Yes, I will speak with Authority on his writings

>>17439592
This is not what spinoza believes, and I doubt you have ever read a page of Spinoza.
>>17438933
Extreme rigor and clarity of thought, emphasis on blessedness through thought, was a counteractive force to Descartes dualism with his parallelism, didnt try to shoehorn in christian metaphysics.

>>17440764
>Just because Marx came from/because of Hegel doesn't mean the former replaces the latter.
Yes it does. If marx improved upon hegel, then hegel is dead.

>>17441772
>The opposite of Spinoza's philosophy hasn't been proven, so that cannot be why it's considered "dead."
Yes, the opposite of many of the positions that Spinoza took have been rigorously disproven.

>>17438933
Question, /lit/. Spinoza's parallelism is a billion times better than materialism and dualism. Why is the collective intellectual zeitgeist so far behind the philosophers? Fuckers are still debating this shit when Spinoza solved, or at least got the closest to solving, the mind/body problem 300 years ago. And these motherfuckers haven't even read wittgenstein, who in many ways was borrowing from Spinoza who argued language isn't as important as the effects it had on those who heard it. Why is the collective so retarded?

>>17441121
No he isn't. Spinoza though substance was eternal. Did you even read the first book of the ethics?

>>17441051
You misunderstand Spinoza's use of the word infinite, because it is different from the modern sense of the word. Infinite means "all" to Spinoza, so when he says substance has infinite attributes he means substance has every attribute that exists.

>>17443350
Members of the "intellectual zeitgesit" don't deal with general problems, so they just end up absorbing whatever everyone else says as a solution to it without ever thinking deeper about it.

While parallelism is superior to dualism, it still has it's problems. It implicitly accepts lockes primary and secondary characteristics instead of the kantian repudiation of the difference between them. And then kant has problems because he accepts a noumena which he can't state anything about, which leads to either a berkeleyan or whiteheadian system, but then you realize you actually have no idea what is conscious and what isn't, and all ideas of what is and isn't conscious are just assumed from arbitrary characteristics of objects, which makes you realize that nothing outside you matters, that you can only know yourself (this is the lichtenbergian system), and that any desire to change something outside of you is yet again just a desire to change yourself, since any idea you have of something outside of you is yet again a synthesis of ideas in you. The noumenal is yet again only appearance, morality is yet again only aesthetics. Cue outro music.

>>17439592
"universe" is nothing but an illusion
FOOL

>>17443458
>It implicitly accepts lockes primary and secondary characteristics instead of the kantian repudiation of the difference between them

Can you explain?

As for the rest, ethics being an aesthetic because all that we perceive is our own phenomenal reality, I don't feel that's a problem. I think Kant and other philosophers were too committed to ethics being deontological and duty based; if you accept that ethics is a subjective phenomenon that slowly refines itself because all subjects exist in a single objective space, and therefore must compete and over time harmonize their mutual attainment of "aesthetic subjectivities," the issue falls away. Its more fatalistic/ hegelian, saying ethics is fundamentally subjective, but that an objective process guides the evolution of subjectivity towards universal good.

>>17443343
Name them

>>17443354
Have you? All the modes of substances we see around us have their origin in stars. All stars can be traced back to an infinitesimally small and dense substance that contained all matter and every attribute imaginable. No one knows how long this thing was around, what made it, where it came from. Why can't this be what Spinoza called God?

>>17443735
what spinoza calls God is all the nebulae, every second of existence that made them into stars, every second of existence that made those stars supernova, etc etc unto this very moment, and not only the physical aspect of reality but also the mental aspect of reality. You feeling warmth is a part of God, you thinking thoughts is a part of god, you feeling emotions is a part of God. God is everything that is was and ever will be, and also perhaps more as he argues for a sort of immortality of the soul.

Even if the big bang happened Spinozan philosophy would imagine it emerged from some prior universe or something else that exists. The "beginning" of the big bang would just be another iteration of a never ending cycle. There is no ontological beginning for Spinoza

>>17443735
Big bang implies origin implies substance isn't eternal. Substance is necessarily eternal since it is self-sufficient. Substance is also infinite, meaning it can't be that infinitely small garbage you confused it for. Third, Spinoza specifically expresses two attributes of reality, on material, the other ideal. The material attribute which would correspond to the physical world is extension, not your infintely small garbage misreading shoehorning in of modern ideas to a philosopher you know nothing about.

>>17441556
>>17441771
what if i don't like substance in general, whether monism or not

>>17443693
I don't have all day so I'll name a few:
1. At the start of the ethics Spinoza confuses causes and reasons, leading him into a logical error where he confuses different roots of reason (see schopenhauers intro to the fourfold root of sufficient reason).
2. Spinoza sets up an equivalence between existence and power, and then sets up an equivalence between power and perfection, which he then confuses for the other definition of perfection in reference to value, which leads him to think that every mode of substance is striving towards power/greater existence/perfection. A basic error of false equivalency.
3. PROP. IV. Nothing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.
A time bomb should refute this claim. His entire ethical philosophy is based on it too, because it is this which leads him two propositiobs later to say that everything endeavors to persist in it's own being.

There exist others, more specifically in the first book (though most of the ontological problems in part 1 follow from problem 1).

>>17438933
He kinda reminds people of Mr. Bean.

>>17443555
Extended materialism as an abstract idea that can't even be imagined is implicit in Spinoza's parallelism. Hence primary and secondary characteristics exist in Spinoza.
As for ethics actually being aesthetics, it is certainly not a problem. People that know nothing about what I said act in the same manner. They get pleasure from certain appearances, and from others feel pain.

>>17443895
Dear God how can someone misread spinoza this badly. Look up beth lord's explanationof the ethics and read it.

>>17443788
>>17443796
You both make similar points but I don't see how what you are saying refutes why the big bang does not line up with Spinozan philosophy. The big bang was an event where all matter began to expand from a single point which contained it all. That point and the matter itself had no beginning that we could ever know. It could have been eternal or started from another universe or been a cosmic fart. While we can trace the big bang back to a starting point, we cannot do the same for the point that started it.

>>17440755
It's really an eastern philosophy thing

>>17440783
Have you ever read Deleuze?

No one in this thread has read Spinoza

>>17445955
I’ve read all of Spinoza’s available works, but I just post memes about his spiders

>>17442208
He was an aesthete. He was writing a modernist novel.

>>17445987
Ok, one person in this thread has read Spinoza.

>>17445996
Actually the Ethic was a baroque novel, akin to Don Quixote.

>>17440783

Deleuze wrote a book on Spinoza called "practical philosophy", it's possibly one of the best, if not the most nuanced, companions to the ethics. Deleuze's thought is founded on the Univocity of being, on which Duns Scotus had the first, and arguably final, say - but Spinoza's system is arguably univocal in its ontology as well.

>>17439592
If everything is universe, then what's the universe?

>>17443367
No, he specifically means that there is an infinite quantity of attributes (with infinitene extension and intension). In fact the examples regarding triangles in the first section of Ethics makes it clear that limited quantities (i.e. saying that there are 3 attributes) always entail a limitation (which, in the only Substance, is impossible).

>>17441104
hue hue hue hue

deleuze