The translation is confusing you. I recommend Curley's...

Therefore, all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature
not only to exist but also to exist and to act in a definite way. Thus, there is no
contingency. — John

"Therefore all things have been determined from the necessity of divine nature, not only to exist, but to exist in a certain way, and to produce effects in a certain way. Thus there is no contingency"

Spinoza is dealing with logical structure here. Fire is determined by divine nature to exist in a certain way - as fire - and to produce certain effects - burning. If it wouldn't be so, then it wouldn't be fire to begin with. Atoms are determined by divine nature to necessarily swerve and produce such a range of effects. This isn't talk about what they empirically - and hence contingently - do. Spinoza is doing metaphysics in Book I, not physics.

The difference you're not seeing is that there is, for thought, post Kant, an ineliminable and inexpugnable indeterminable.

Your objection makes no sense to me. Spinoza makes no distinction between metaphysics and physics; between the noumenon and the phenomenon.

:s So you think Spinoza would confuse physics and metaphysics? Even Descartes separated them, at least conceptually if not in practice... The separation of metaphysics and physics was known since the Greeks.

What do you think the distinction between metaphysics and physics besides the obvious distinction between the infinite and the finite, would consist in for Spinoza?

Is he not speaking in these passages about the relations between God (the infinite) and the world (the finite)?

Maybe all this belongs in a 'Spinoza' thread, or a 'Differences between Kant and Spinoza' thread, since I don't think it is arguable that either are overrated.

That's the common misreading of Spinoza as a pantheist, where God is misread as the world. It's drawn from taking Spinoza's talk of necessay self-definition of existing states (e.g. the necessary logic expression of a rock , a tree, myself or you) as emprical comment, as you are doing in you latest objection.

Spinoza is actually talking about how the logical significance of existence is necessary and determined within causality. Contingent states cause something particular to occur (e.g. I push a rock off the cliff, which crushes a toy house), so while they are never necessary, they always have a necessary consequence in terms of logic. If there is a rock I push of a cliff, that logical significance is necessary. That meaning cannot be absent from the expression of the world.

This is actually how FREE WILL works. We and our decisions are contingent states. Any decision we do take, however, has a necessary expression, that is no other action or significance. If I choose to make this post, it is necessarily the choice to make this post. It cannot be any other choice or subject be to doubt (i.e. "How do you know if you really chose to make this post? Maybe and evil demon is tricking you? Spinoza's awareness of self-definition is basically the proper refutution of Descartes' doubt. Descartes only got part of the way there; he only grasped the self-definition of the concious entity).

If, for Spinoza, everything is an expression of the nature of God, and God is in everything and everything is in God; then Spinoza is either a pantheist, or a panentheist. I actually think his philosophy accords best with the latter, since he makes the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. But if he is the latter, then he allows transcendence which is what I have been arguing that his philosophy does all along.

Panentheism (meaning "all-in-God", from the Ancient Greek πᾶν pân, "all", ἐν en, "in" and Θεός Theós, "God") is the belief that the divine interpenetrates every part of the universe and also extends beyond time and space. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical,[1] panentheism maintains a distinction between the divine and non-divine and the significance of both.[2]

In pantheism, the universe and everything included in it is equal to the Divine. In panentheism, the universe and the divine are not ontologically equivalent. God is instead viewed as the soul of the universe, the universal spirit present everywhere, in everything and everyone, at all times. Some versions suggest that the universe is nothing more than the manifestation of God. In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "transcends", "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos. While pantheism asserts that 'All is God', panentheism goes further to claim that God is greater than the universe. In addition, some forms indicate that the universe is contained within God,[1] like in the Kabbalah concept of Tzimtzum. Much Hindu thought is highly characterized by panentheism and pantheism.[3][4] Hasidic Judaism merges the elite ideal of nullification to paradoxical transcendent Divine Panentheism, through intellectual articulation of inner dimensions of Kabbalah, with the populist emphasis on the panentheistic Divine immanence in everything.

You keep asserting that I am misreading in attributing the latter (transcendence) to Spinoza and at the same time, incorrectly claiming that I attribute the former (pantheism is, ironically, entirely in keeping with the notion of Spinoza as a philosopher of immanence) without offering any clear explanations for your objections or any textual evidence to support them. So, given that lack of clarity and relevance, and since you obviously pay little attention to what I say, why do you think I should pay any attention to what you say, Willow?

Perhaps the most immediate result is that in this model, the self loses any inherent epistemic privilege to itself: i.e. the self is an object of knowledge like any other. Or to put it somewhat starkly, the 'problem of the external world' applies to the self no less that that world: there is just as equally a problem of the internal world. This is why I said that Kant institutes a new transcendental topology: the relations of what counts as 'inside' and 'outside' are irrevocably changed after Kant. Gabriel: "The self becomes an object among others as soon as it is drawn within the sphere of representation." This on is own is pretty significant, overturning the naive tendency - operative pretty much everywhere still - to assume that we have an immediate epistemic relation to ourselves. No one who has properly read and understood Kant could subscribe to something as stupid as rational choice theory, for instance.

Another ramification has to do with the nature of thought itself: against the image of thought as the activity of a willing subject, thought equally becomes a matter of passivity with respect to the self (no different, again, from the way in which we are passively affected by things 'external' to me): "The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it." As Deleuze rightly notes, this is the key to Kant's 'Copernican revolution': not the banal change of perspective wherein the object must conform to the subject, but rather the radically changed status of the subject itself: "Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution."

This passivity in turn entails that thought can only ever take place by means of an encounter with what exceeds it: the imperative to thought only ever comes from beyond it: "Thought is entirely reliant on contingent encounters, which is to say, on events. Its necessity lies in its being forced by an event, which is to say by an encounter with the world, with something that does not depend upon us. Thought always implies a forced movement..." (Kieran Aarons, The Involuntarist Image of Thought). Contrary to the image of thought as something 'internal' to a thinker, the passivity of thought as recognized by Kant entails that thought itself is only ever guaranteed by such encounters; contra Descartes, it's not thought that guarantees the substantiality of the cogito as a thinking substance, but the encounter which guarantees the necessity of thought that happens 'to' a radically passive subject. The implications here can be explored endlessly, but I'll leave it at the above for now.

Another quirky implication of understanding error to be internal to thought is one with respect to the future of AI: if Kant is right, then any AI that can be said to 'think like a human' must have an 'in-built' risk of going mad. In fact, the whole question of the inherence of madness to thought has a huge literature in itself - there's a very famous debate between Derrida and Foucault on this, following precisely from the question of the Cogito in Descartes and Kant - and of course Zizek's whole oeuvre deals, in a sense, with precisely this problem (hence his constant linking of psychoanalysis to Kantian philosophy). There's more - a great deal more - that follows from Kant's conception of thought, but the above just captures a couple of points that follow. Again, if you don't see how 'this changes anything', I'd simply suggest that you pursue the literature here. There's plenty of it, and I would be careful not to mistake your unfamiliarity with these debates for a lack of significance.

What do you think the distinction between metaphysics and physics besides the obvious distinction between the infinite and the finite, would consist in for Spinoza? — John

Physics is what deals with empirical reality - with the series of on-going and particular causal events. Metaphysics deals with the logical structure which necessarily inheres in the said empirical reality (hence immanence), in each and every event from it.

Is he not speaking in these passages about the relations between God (the infinite) and the world (the finite)? — John

Not in the way you put it. He's speaking of God's immanence in the world - the fact that God inheres at each and every point of the world.

everything is an expression of the nature of God — John

Think of Plato. Every material thing has a form - a logical structure. That logical structure, which is infinite and perfect is an expression of the nature of God. The forms were the objects of knowledge for Plato, simply because only the forms allowed for certainty. Empirical reality couldn't be the object of knowledge, only the object of belief, because there was no certainty in empirical reality - empirical reality was contingent. But the form, contra Plato [well in the most common interpretations of Plato - there are also immanent interpretations I could suggest you some literature on it] (and as corrected by Aristotle - which is why I always claim that Spinoza is a certain kind of Aristotelian who follows on from Avicenna and Averroës), doesn't exist above and beyond the object in a separate and transcendent realm, but rather inheres within it. So yes, every existing thing has a form, and therefore is an expression of the nature of God. As Aristotle and Plato make it clear, it's the form - NOT matter - which has Being. Hence if there was something which wasn't an expression of the nature of God - ie didn't have a form - it really couldn't even exist. So everything that can exist must have a form, ie must be an expression of the nature of God QED. Furthermore, everything that exists is necessarily contingent because no particular thing can be God - no particular thing has Being because they are combinations of matter and form (and matter has no being). Hence every particular thing or state, by the necessity of its own finiteness, is contingent on the form - on God. Thus every finite thing necessarily is in becoming - the only necessity is contingency QED :-O In-so-far as one understands God, one becomes identified with God, and therefore one is eternal - by virtue of identifying with the eternal forms and not with their empirical manifestation. They are not eternal in the sense of infinite temporal duration, but in the sense of timelessness - one always exists as a possibility in God's mind - as a form. Thus there is a part of the mind which survives death, QED - or better said simply is unaffected by death, which always happens in time, but this part of the mind - the form - is timeless.

panentheism maintains a distinction between the divine and non-divine and the significance of both.[2] — John

But Spinoza does not maintain the significance of both. Only God is real, the finite is illusory. The finite isn't pure form, and hence is ultimately illusory qua finite.

Physics is what deals with empirical reality - with the series of on-going and particular causal events. Metaphysics deals with the logical structure which necessarily inheres in the said empirical reality (hence immanence), in each and every event from it. — Agustino

I don't see it that way. Physics reflects the logical structure which inheres in our understanding of the "said empirical reality", and metaphysics is the attempt to explicate the logical structure of our understanding. This is exactly what Kant arrives at with the phenomenal/ noumenal and empirical/transcendental distinctions. It is physics/ immanent and metaphysics/ transcendental. But it might also turn on how one uses those terms.

Not in the way you put it. He's speaking of God's immanence in the world - the fact that God inheres at each and every point of the world. — Agustino

But what it means for God to "inhere in every point of the world" just is "the relations between God (the infinite) and the world (the finite)' that Spinoza is attempting to explicate. The way I see it, though, is that being the supreme rationalist, he mistakes the logic of our understanding of the world for a logic inherent in the world itself. This kind of mistake is exactly what Kant's philosophy corrects. Actually, good ol' Schopenhauer correctly notes this about Spinoza in a passage about his philosophy in the first part of On The Fourfold Root of the Prinicple of Sufficient Reason.

But Spinoza does not maintain the significance of both. Only God is real, the finite is illusory. The finite isn't pure form, and hence is ultimately illusory qua finite. — Agustino

Can you provide a passage where Spinoza explicitly states that the finite is illusory? I have never come across that idea except in definitions of acosmism, and to be honest the idea of acosmism, regardless of whether Spinoza professes it, makes absolutely no sense to me. Finite things are ( by definition) limited and transient, to be sure, but those facts are no grounds for calling them "illusions". I don't even know what that could mean.

I have been re-reading the Ethics a little to refresh my memory of it, and I'm afraid I cannot agree with your interpretations at all. But it doesn't matter anyway because scholars who spend their lives disagree on interpreting Spinoza, so it's not going to be settled on PF. I think if we continue we will just go around in circles repeating ourselves and coming form such different presuppositions that we will only succeed in talking past one another and wasting a lot of time and energy.

To be honest I just don't really care enough about this issue to continue discussing it, but thanks anyway for your input so far. You're in a good position here, Agustino; you're poised to have the final say, if you want to, since I most probably won't respond further.

In any case, thanks for making an effort, Agustino. We've even managed to remain civil with one another!
:)

We've even managed to remain civil with one another!
:) — John

Well yes, you should thank yourself for that, for not making any derogatory remarks and for being respectful. I always am respectful when others are respectful :P O:)

Well I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that I don't exactly see it that way. But nevertheless...

Physics reflects the logical structure which inheres in our understanding of the "said empirical reality" — John

Right, the logical structure of OUR UNDERSTANDING is physics. The logical structure of REALITY is metaphysics - and metaphysics explains our understanding by mere fact that our understanding is also real, and thus falls under the domain of metaphysics. But our understanding can be mistaken - which is why physical theories change all the time.

But what it means for God to "inhere in every point of the world" just is "the relations between God (the infinite) and the world (the finite)' that Spinoza is attempting to explicate. — John

Yes, which is why I said not the way you put it - not in the way you mean it. But the sentence can be read correctly, with the correct meaning.

The way I see it, though, is that being the supreme rationalist, he mistakes the logic of our understanding of the world for a logic inherent in the world itself — John

Take the principle of non-contradiction. It's not a principle simply of our understanding. It's a principle of reality itself.

Actually, good ol' Schopenhauer correctly notes this about Spinoza in a passage about his philosophy in the first part of On The Fourfold Root of the Prinicple of Sufficient Reason. — John

I remember something vaguely about that, and I wrote a critique of it on the previous PF, which of the Spinoza-knowledgeable people there agreed with.

Can you provide a passage where Spinoza explicitly states that the finite is illusory? — John

The finite consists of modes right? Modes are not Substance itself, and hence are illusory - impermanent.

I have never come across that idea except in definitions of acosmism, and to be honest the idea of acosmism, regardless of whether Spinoza professes it, makes absolutely no sense to me. — John

Hegel read Spinoza as an acosmist as well. How do you square that with your own reading of Spinoza as a panentheist?

I have been re-reading the Ethics a little to refresh my memory of it, and I'm afraid I cannot agree with your interpretations at all. But it doesn't matter anyway because scholars who spend their lives disagree on interpreting Spinoza, so it's not going to be settled on PF. — John

Well I've read a vast majority of contemporary Spinoza scholars, and I think the disagreements are more in their way of conceptualising Spinoza's system, and how deep they each penetrate. But those who go the deepest subsume all the others under them. I've even read some whose works aren't even translated in English comme Le Bonheur avec Spinoza par Bruno Giuliani ;) Nadler, Negri, Curley, Hampshire, Deleuze, Yirmiyahu Yovel etc.

Hegel read Spinoza as an acosmist as well. How do you square that with your own reading of Spinoza as a panentheist? — Agustino

Can you cite a reference for that? Even if it were so, what makes you think I could not disagree with Hegel?

Can you cite a reference for that? — John

https://archive.org/stream/lecturesonphilo03hegegoog#page/n351/mode/2up/search/spinoza

One of the few I remember being cited.

"Spinoza says what is, is the absolute substance, what is other than this are mere modi, to which he ascribes no affirmation, no reality" - Yours Truly, Georg Hegel :P

The thing-in-itself is of interest only to the degree that it can be rendered impotent to the mind. The goal is to transcend its material constraints so as to live in the splendid freedom of a self-made world of semiotic sign. — apokrisis

But isn't the madman the only one who lives in a self-made world of semiotic sign?

Of course, living beings can't actually ignore the world. They must live in it. But the point here is the direction of the desires. — apokrisis

So the direction of desire is towards madness and the mad is the most successful of us all? :s

There is a good reason why humans want to escape into a realm of "fiction" - and I'm including science and technology here, of course. As to the extent we can do that, we become then true "selves", the locus of a radical freedom or autonomy to make the world whatever the hell we want it to be.) — apokrisis

:s

So the direction of desire is towards madness and the mad is the most successful of us all? :s — Agustino

Why do you have to drag Trump into every conversation? But yes I guess.

Why do you have to drag Trump into every conversation? — apokrisis

>:O

But yes I guess. — apokrisis

So you really believe madness is the telos of the human being? The fulfilment of our desire lies in madness? I think that's quite a mad philosophy.

I think that's quite a mad philosophy. — Agustino

And I find your replies trivial.

And I find your replies trivial. — apokrisis

It seems that you have already reached the end-point of your philosophy :P

You sound threatened somehow.

You sound threatened somehow. — apokrisis

Why do you say that?

If you find my point trivial that is an indication that you have already gone mad - ie reached the end point of your philosophy. You yourself have said:

Of course, living beings can't actually ignore the world. They must live in it. But the point here is the direction of the desires — apokrisis

So presumably if human beings could actually ignore the world - by say, implanting their mind within a simulation - they should do so, as this is what their desires are ultimately aimed at. And clearly the madman does exactly this - the madman is mad because he ignores the world and lives only in his head.

If you want to discuss this seriously, define madnesss properly.

Are you talking paranoia or bipolar mania or what? A primary symptom of schizophrenia is a breakdown of perceptual predictability. So a loss of control over experience rather than a gain.

If you want to discuss this seriously, define madnesss properly. — apokrisis

I defined madness in the sense I was using it: living entirely in your head, completely broken off from the external world. The mad person, who walks naked on the street screaming, shouting, yelling, talking to himself, etc. lives entirely in his head, that's why he doesn't respond to any of the cues he receives from his society. I'm not sure how such people would be labelled in medical terms, but they certainly do exist.

I do agree that we live in our head - most of our life is actually in our head. Most of our synapses for example 99.99% are not connected to or affiliated with our sense organs, such as the eyes, etc. So it's clear that our brain produces a model of the world, and then navigates mostly using that model. However, there must still be a link with the world (however small) - if that link is lost, the result is madness.

Get back to me when you want to discuss what I actually said and not what you are pretending I said.

Get back to me when you want to discuss what I actually said and not what you are pretending I said. — apokrisis

:-} Well what have you actually said? How is what you said different from how I've rephrased it? Instead of being all arrogant and so forth, you could actually correct my (mis)understanding of your position.

Are your close reading skills really as challenged as you pretend?

(Of course, living beings can't actually ignore the world. They must live in it. But the point here is the direction of the desires. Rationalism got the natural direction wrong - leading to rationalist frustration and all its problems concerning knowledge. Pragmatism instead gets the direction right and thus explains the way we actually are. There is a good reason why humans want to escape into a realm of "fiction" - and I'm including science and technology here, of course. As to the extent we can do that, we become then true "selves", the locus of a radical freedom or autonomy to make the world whatever the hell we want it to be.) — apokrisis

Okay I don't understand how that is different from the way I've read it. If our desires are aimed towards ignoring the world ("direction of the desires"), and our desire is ultimately aimed at "escaping into a realm of 'fiction' [created by our own mind]", then it seems to me that we would do well to follow this desire to its conclusions as far as we can. And if we do that, then it seems that we'll live entirely within a fantasy, breaking any link with the actual real world, similar to the madman. Where am I going wrong with that?

"Spinoza says what is, is the absolute substance, what is other than this are mere modi, to which he ascribes no affirmation, no reality" - — Agustino

But what is being said by Hegel here is not as clear as taking it out of context in this way makes it appear to be.

"With Parmenides that which is known as determinate Being is no longer present or existent at all. By Jacobi, on the contrary, determinate Being is regarded as affirmative, although it is finite, and thus it is affirmation in finite existence. Spinoza says, What is is the absolute substance; what is other than this are mere modi, to which he ascribes no affirmation, no reality. Thus it cannot perhaps be said even of the Substance of Spinoza that it is so precisely Pantheistic as that expression of Jacobi, for particular things still remain as little an affirmative for Spinoza as determinate Being does for Parmenides, which, as distinguished from Being, is for him mere Not-Being, and is of such a character that this Not-Being is not at all.

If the finite be taken as thought, then all that is finite is understood to be included, and thus it is Pantheism. But in using the term finite it is necessary to draw a distinction between the finite as represented merely by this or that particular object, and the finite as including all things, and to explain in which sense we use the word. Taken in the latter sense, it is already a progressive movement of reflection, which no longer arrests itself at the Particular; “all that is finite” pertains to reflection. This Pantheism is of modern date, and if it be said that “God is Being in all determinate Being,” this expresses a form of Pantheism found among Mohammedans of modern times, especially the Pantheism of the Dechelaleddin-Rumi. Here this everything as it is is a Whole, and is God; and the finite is in this determinate Being as universal finitude. This Pantheism is the product of thinking reflection, which extends natural things so as to include all and everything, and in so doing conceives of the existence of God not as true universality of thought, but as an allness; that is to say, as being in all individual natural existences."

Even if it is accepted that the modes or modifications of substance are somehow other than, distinct from, the being of the substance itself, insofar as the being of the substance is eternal and infinite and the being of the modifications are temporal and finite, I don't see how this warrants a conclusion that the modifications are "illusions", which is apparently the central claim of acosmism, rather than merely a conclusion that the reality of the modifications is finite as opposed to the infinite reality of the substance. I asked you earlier to cite a passage from Spinoza where he claims precisely that modes are "illusions".. You haven't provided it and nor have you made it clear what you think "illusion" could even mean in this context.

This is the salient issue that needs to be resolved in our disagreement. Involved in this issue is also the corollary (as I see it) that if the being of substance is distinct from the being of the modes (which it must be if one wants to say that the former is real and the latter an illusion) then how could it be thought to not be the case that the being of the substance is transcendent of the modes, just as reality is transcendent of illusion?

Now, I said I would probably not respond further, and yet I have responded, but I only want to deal with this one issue until I am clear on exactly what you have to say about it and what you think Spinoza has to say about (although I don't really care too much about the latter). It seems to me that you have a tendency to evade difficult issues like this by changing the subject or mentioning how many books you have read. I am not interested in any of that; I just want to address this one issue to see whether you can give a coherent and consistent account of yourself. If you can give a clear and consistent account, then good; I will then be able to discover whether I can agree with it. If I find I cannot, it won't matter, because at least then I will know exactly what I am disagreeing with, and why. Otherwise, frustration ensues and I might become cranky again; which I want to avoid at all costs.