Just another writer with a first draft asking, 'What now?"
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.
I’d say I’m sorry for interrupting my normal history and writing and vampire posts with something so modern, but really, I’m not. Because this matters. A lot. And it’s what Spinoza would want, anyway.
What we might see as free will is just an illusion, Spinoza says. If you read this post, it’s because it was always in your nature to do so. If not, well, that was in your nature, too.
I’d like to hear from other writers: How have you approached writing about characters or topics that were out of your league? How did you do research enabling you to write about them with authority? How did you write around things that remained above your pay grade? I want to know how we write about things we don’t understand logically, but get on different level.
