Just another writer with a first draft asking, 'What now?"
Spinoza’s philosophy, with its insistence that everything has already been determined and none of us has free will, gives rise to a lot of Really Big Questions.
This philosophy isn’t a cure, or at least, it hasn’t been yet. But it is a help. Especially, I find, with things that are far beyond my influence, such as the upcoming election. It’s comforting to find a way to let go of some of that anxiety. And that, at least, is something.
What is Spinoza’s G-d up to, anyway? What’s G-d good for, if not meddling about in the affairs of mankind? If G-d’s not going to help me on my upcoming statistics test, what the heck do I need a G-d for, anyhow?
“Equal by Design” is a documentary dealing with the affordable housing crunch in the UK and people who are working to solve it. And a running theme throughout the film are the philosophical beliefs of Spinoza, including ideas such as equality, ratio, reason and wellbeing.
Cause and effect is a law of the universe. No one questions it. No one, it is, until our big brains get in the way and ego gets involved. All of a sudden, the idea of free will enters the picture and the primacy of cause and effect flies out the window. Or does it? Let’s take a look.
In this series of posts, I’ll take a look at Spinoza’s concept of determinism and attempt to explain how it’s possible to balance it against an innate sense of self insisting we have free will.
True tolerance — not grudging, not hesitatingly offered. That’s a model of how we should act and the kind of country we should be. Between Locke and Spinoza, one of these philosophers had a vision for it – and the man who inspired the American Revolution wasn’t it.
July 27, 2019. On this day, 363 years ago, Baruch Spinoza was kicked out of the Portuguese Sephardic community in Amsterdam. We know the words that were uttered as he was drummed out of the insular society, but there is so much more that we don’t know about that event.
