Spinoza vol 1 ebook: concluding remarks, preview of vol 2 and bibliography

Concluding Remarks

In this blog ebook, I have put forward my interpretation of Spinoza, given my reasons and provided textual evidence from both his TTP and Ethics to support my view. I hope I have shown how and why I suggest he remained an orthodox Jew throughout his life and how this informed his philosophy. This ebook has dealt with some of the topics and arguments in Spinoza’s philosophy, however others remain. In my next volume on Spinoza, I shall go on to examine his philosophical thoughts on life and death.

Preview of Research Thoughts on…Spinoza - volume 2:

‘Spinoza on how to live well and die well’  

In this book, I explore how, in his two major works, Ethics and TTP, Spinoza may have approached the theme of life and death through his concept of the intellect (Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, Elwes translation 2004, cited as TTP and Spinoza, Ethics, White and Sterling translation 2001 cited as Ethics). I start with Spinoza’s view of living well then show how he relates this to dying well and the eternal through the intellect in his Ethics and TTP. So, on Spinoza’s account in these texts, we can almost simultaneously examine the ways in which we live collectively and why and how the way we live as an individual during our lifetime impacts on how we survive death. In this way, I hope to explore the under-researched topic of Spinoza on death in these two texts and show that it plays a more important role in his philosophical system of thought than is usually claimed. Also, I try to show how his views on death, eternity and how they impact on how we live and die span across his metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics.  

I shall begin by examining the topic of life and death in Spinoza’s Ethics. For Spinoza, living well during our lifetime entails honing our intellect and reasoning capacity. For him, this is achieved by increasing our knowledge and understanding of necessity, the nature of God and God’s actions and attributes, as far as the human mind is capable of doing so. This is because Spinoza sees God as the basis that supports knowledge and knowledge is important as it is the essence of our mind. This principle has the following two main implications. Firstly, it informs us about how to live well. As an individual, a key part of our true happiness lies in using our intellect to gain intuitive knowledge of God. Moreover, by increasing this third kind of knowledge, according to Spinoza, we decrease our level of fear of death. For Spinoza a free, virtuous, wise man focuses on life not death and so lives better and enjoys, for instance, eating well. Similarly, he goes towards what is good rather than avoiding things in life out of a fear of death. A developed intellect also helps us see the reasoning behind why living collectively by helping each other means we live better than living as isolated individuals. Secondly, the intellect, unlike the imagination, survives bodily death and is eternal. So, the more we develop Spinoza’s second and third kinds of knowledge during our lifetime, the more we increase the eternal part of our mind. This is because, Spinoza reasons, these types of knowledge protects us from the negative affects, including a fear of death since intellectual love of God increases the eternal part of our mind and in so doing, prevents it from dying. 

Spinoza carries on the above concepts about the intellect, life and death into his TTP. In this text, he brings out the tensions between developing our intellect, which survives our death, and some oppressive forms of political states. On the one hand, Biblical Solomon states that we should develop our intellect and be wise in order to attain blessedness, which amounts to the knowledge of God gained through the intellect. Despite this, it is not in human nature for everybody to always act according to reason so political states create social order via laws. On the other hand, laws created for social order have led some forms of government to punish those with a developed intellect with death sentences. This means that, although it is rational to live collectively in a political state, if, however, this is within an oppressive form of government, it prevents us from living well and dying well in accordance with our nature. Thus, Spinoza concludes that, since our rational capacity to judge is part of our human nature, a democratic form of government is the most in accordance with our nature. This is because it recognizes that we do not all naturally think in the same way so living well collectively in harmony consists in mutually agreeing on and voting for a particular action that holds until a better possible solution arises later from our further reasoning.                

In this volume, I try to show that by analysing Spinoza’s concept of the intellect, we can unlock the key factor underpinning and explaining Spinoza’s approach to philosophizing about death and its impact on life throughout his metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. Furthermore, I endeavour to show how Spinoza has attempted to have a philosophically cohesive, rather than theologically structured, account of living well and dying well by making the intellect his focal point.

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