Classics and the Western Canon discussion

The Second Part of the Ethics doesn't get any easier. In fact, the Scholium to Proposition 11 is actually an encouragement by the author to keep going: "Here, no doubt, my readers will come to a halt, and think of many things that give them pause. For this reason I ask them to continue along with me slowly, step by step, and make no judgement on these matters until they have read through them all."

The subject of the Second Part is "The Mind". What is the Mind for Spinoza? And how does the mind relate to the body?

What makes this a difficult question for me is that Spinoza has separated the two attributes of Substance/God -- thought and extension --that seem always to occur together in human experience. Either we know things because we experience them physically and create abstract generalizations based on our physical experience of the world, (ala Aristotle) or we start with a priori abstractions and generalizations and apply them to the physical world (ala Plato.) The mind and the body of a person are inextricably linked, but Spinoza separates them.

And yet he says "The human mind is the idea itself, or knowledge, of the human body." (P 19) What does Spinoza mean by this?

After reading through this section, and flipping back and forth, it seems to me that Spinoza is rejecting the notion that ideas are formed by human minds based on observations of the world. The mind only knows ideas, which are modes of thinking. A mode of thinking is a finite expression of Substance/God in a determinable way. An idea in the human mind is analogous to an object in the extensible world; both are finite expressions of infinite attributes.

So how does the human mind approach the human body as an object? It doesn't, at least not directly.

The human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the body is affected. P19

The human mind only understands ideas, not extensible bodies. If it is to understand the human body, then what it understands is not the body itself, but its idea of the body, which includes ideas of the way in which the body is affected. The human mind does not understand passion, for instance, but it understands the idea of passion as an affection of the body. We can't understand love, or pain, or hunger, but we can understand how these things affect us.

"The human mind is the idea itself, or knowledge of the body," suggests that without the body, the mind has no object. It might also suggest that the mind and the body are just different aspects of the same thing, but they are completely independent aspects.

I must say I am failing in digesting this book.This is indeed a challenge for me. Not sure i I am goinig to finish it. My brain hutrs. Sorry

Eva, it's completely understandable to find Spinoza's Ethics challenging; it's a dense and complex work and just understanding his terms requires much effort. Don't be too hard on yourself, you are not alone.

Feel free to use our group discussions to ask specific questions about confusing parts. Remember, we're here to support each other. Share what you're finding difficult, and we can work through it together.

Also feel free to take it at your own pace. The moderators do not close these discussions so you are sure to get a response from someone, now and well into the future after the group has moved on to other books.

Eva wrote: "I must say I am failing in digesting this book."

Understandably.

• It's been said that there isn't any significant evolution in Spinoza's thought, but rather a progressive deepening. His Ethics the way we know it is a late work and the result of at least twelve years (1662-1674) of multiple elaborations and long-standing discussions with friends; the confluence of Spinoza's "Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect", of the "Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being", and of the epistolary. These works provide context and tools to approach the Ethics.

• In Ethics Spinoza can often afford to present his definitions as necessary and obvious, because he draws from, implies or implicitly refers to Descartes' well-known results, in particular to his "Meditations on First Philosophy" (1641). Here's more context and tools to climb Spinoza's Ethics.

• The "geometrical order" of Spinoza's demonstrations present a high-polish, mirror-finish, hard-to-climb surface; Nietzsche called the Ethics «a sleight of hand by which Spinoza masked his philosophy and defended it as if by a bronze armour» (in "Beyond Good and Evil"). In other pages Spinoza presents his thought in a less formal, possibly more approachable way.

Eva wrote: "I must say I am failing in digesting this book.This is indeed a challenge for me. Not sure i I am goinig to finish it. My brain hutrs. Sorry"

I already know that I'm going to have to re-read this and look at secondary works later, so I'm considering it just a dip in the ocean of Spinoza. We're going through this stuff too quickly to really get a grasp on the details.

But one technique that helped me when I felt absolutely stymied by the text was to just read the main assertions, the definitions, axioms, propositions, etc. without any of the argumentation that follows each one. I did this to get an overview of where he was going, and it helped. After I had the "what" I was able to go back and deal with the hard part: the "why."

Fed wrote: "Nietzsche called the Ethics «a sleight of hand by which Spinoza masked his philosophy and defended it as if by a bronze armour» (in "Beyond Good and Evil")"

This is a lovely phrase. But I wonder, are we reading the mask or the philosophy?

Thomas wrote: "...are we reading the mask or the philosophy?."

Ha! which takes us back to the intrinsically poetic nature of philosophy, before and after Parmenides.

«In any extensive body of words and concepts, the precise structure of concepts represented can be represented only by the precise structure of words given. The "same" content represented in a different form – in a different medium or mode or style or language – is not the same: what is the same through all variations of the form is only a tenuous abstraction , a précis of the full content.» — Duncan Robertson: The Dichotomy of Form and Content; 1967; author's italics