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Baruch Spinoza: Ideas
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Spinoza's monism extends to mind and matter: each is a different characteristic, or way of rationally appreciating the essence of the same one eternal reality. Like Descartes, Spinoza believed that it is the intellect rather than the senses that discloses the essential nature of things. A complete and adequate idea of God shows that he has two attributes: he can be conceived under the heading of extension, or under that of thought. In other words God, or reality, can be conceived in these two incommensurable ways, and each discloses an attribute or part of his essence (a problem in interpreting Spinoza is that God is supposed to have infinitely many attributes, although only these two are found). Understanding aims to increase our knowledge of God (or the universe) by discovering the way in which it makes up a closed system, self-sufficient and completely unified, in which everything that happens is necessary, and nothing could be otherwise than it is.
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Spinoza pioneered secular philological criticism of the Bible and advanced a unique theological and ethical philosophy that was complex and easily given to misunderstanding. His ideas inspired diverse Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers and thinkers from Heine to Hegel and Schopenhauer, and from Bergson to Hess and Einstein. Bergson stated that every philosopher has two philosophies: his own and Spinoza's. Bertrand Russell called him "the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers."
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Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism, but he differed sharply from the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can be displaced or overcome only by a stronger emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He ... held that knowledge of true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key ideas of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.
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Even in relatively tolerant Holland, Spinoza was persecuted. He was accused of being an Atheist, yet defended by statesman Jan de Witt, who was killed by a mob for his efforts. Spinoza's religious ideas comprised a nuanced redefinition of God which more closely resembled Pantheism. He agreed with Descartes' sharp distinction between matter and spirit, but claimed these as "attributes" of one being which he called God.
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A Portuguese Jew living in Holland, Spinoza was excommunicated because of the unorthodox view he took of God. Spinoza wrote in the rationalist style of a geometric proof to develop his idea of God as the infinite, indwelling cause of all things, a unified causal system that is virtually synonymous with nature.
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Despite the impossibility of any causal interaction between the two, Spinoza supposed that the inevitable unfolding of each these two independent attributes must proceed in perfect parallel with that of the other. "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." (II Prop. vii) (And so, of course, must be the order and connection of each of the infinitely many other attributes of god.) Since the development of each aspect of the divine nature follows with logical necessity from its own fundamental attribute, and since all of the attributes, in turn, derive from the central essential being of one and the same infinite substance, each exhibits the same characteristic pattern of organization even though they have no influence on each other.
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