The metaphor of the sea and waves is misleading because it offers no readily accessible analogy for separateness and intention. People are vastly complex systems of systems. Intention and thought are emergent properties of these complex systems. The metaphor of the ocean is unhelpful. In the end most metaphors are misleading, but if we are going to use them, lets be more picky.
The dependence connectedness and implied causality discussed here are of course not linear at all, and only makes sense within rich systemic hierarchies. How can something be connected to everything unless that connecting all embracing something is wholeness – the theory of everything.
For humans we should use the analogy of gravity, perhaps. Gravity is a that relatively weak force that connects the Earth to the rest of the cosmos, but it also allows separateness. Somehow gravity is a product of matter which is, in turn, a product of subatomic forces and particles that build up in different ways and quantumly. The analogy to God here, is the undiscovered force that connects up atomic forces and planets; the life of a humans and that of a single cell.
Humans are bound to nature more freely and loosely than a single cell. Separateness here is merely an emergent property of a complex system. The more complex, the more ‘angelic’ and separate. The more complex and cultured we are the more we act independently and the less connected we are and the less we allow ourselves to be acted upon.
'Quasi' is the key word when talking about Spinoza's deductive logic. It is notional and therefore all encompassing. We appreciate Spinoza in the same way that he appreciates himself and what surrounds him. What he says 'feels' right. Feels 'modern'. And yet so does Newtonian physics, but only within a certain domain.
people say that our life is made up of choices and that each choice splits a universe. But behind each universe is no split. When you look back into the past there is continuity, a spurious reverse aeteology.
It's laughable really. Things that cannot be explained forwards, being explained backwards - and even then the relations are not understood. And even then there is no insight into the feedback and reverb and creation of complex systems - and even then there is no understanding of what really constitutes the aeteology of life mediated by sentience.
Embed three thoughts and you loose the lazy empiricists.
To say that mind is a substance different but related and of the same stuff as matter, is a mere hunch.
Th 'quasi' deductive thought processes of Spinoza that reflect his hunches about how thinking works can be taken only as seriously as the hunches of some new age guru propounding his or her own enneagram or Bible code or Dianetics, now.
Retrospectively the proponents of the current paradigm - which has failed miserably to explain the complexity of the mind from the outside, objectively - like Spinoza because retrospectively they pretend that his insight means that ultimately, the brain is the mind.
And so, retrospectively, we place Spinoza in a pantheon because we contextualise him in terms of modern debates.
I don't like this reading - forget being fobbed off by Spinoza's quasi rational morality - because the true import of the philosophical attempt to give Spinoza a semiological meaning he does not have is to justify scientific materialism. Because the absolute wetness of quasi rational morality without any fundament except for Spinoza's intuitions, is that this is then the perfect counterpoint to a hard and useful nugget of philosophy that ends up being used to support people like Singer.
I am sure Singer likes this modern reading of Spinoza. And Singer is for Euthenasia and embryo selection. For a modern version of eugenics.
Perhaps I am leaping to conclusions, but my hunch is that if Spinoza knew that his views were being used to give succor to eugenecists, then he would not be happy about that.
people say that our life is made up of choices and that each choice splits a universe. But behind each universe is no split. When you look back into the past there is continuity, a spurious reverse aeteology.
It's laughable really. Things that cannot be explained forwards, being explained backwards - and even then the relations are not understood. And even then there is no insight into the feedback and reverb and creation of complex systems - and even then there is no understanding of what really constitutes the aeteology of life mediated by sentience.
Embed three thoughts and you loose the lazy empiricists.
To say that mind is a substance different but related and of the same stuff as matter, is a mere hunch.
Th 'quasi' deductive thought processes of Spinoza that reflect his hunches about how thinking works can be taken only as seriously as the hunches of some new age guru propounding his or her own enneagram or Bible code or Dianetics, now.
Retrospectively the proponents of the current paradigm - which has failed miserably to explain the complexity of the mind from the outside, objectively - like Spinoza because retrospectively they pretend that his insight means that ultimately, the brain is the mind.
And so, retrospectively, we place Spinoza in a pantheon because we contextualise him in terms of modern debates.
I don't like this reading - forget being fobbed off by Spinoza's quasi rational morality - because the true import of the philosophical attempt to give Spinoza a semiological meaning he does not have is to justify scientific materialism. Because the absolute wetness of quasi rational morality without any fundament except for Spinoza's intuitions, is that this is then the perfect counterpoint to a hard and useful nugget of philosophy that ends up being used to support people like Singer.
I am sure Singer likes this modern reading of Spinoza. And Singer is for Euthenasia and embryo selection. For a modern version of eugenics.
Perhaps I am leaping to conclusions, but my hunch is that if Spinoza knew that his views were being used to give succor to eugenecists, then he would not be happy about that.