Spinoza is pretty much the philosophy we need right now.
Hegel said, "The fact is that Spinoza is made a testing-point in modern philosophy, so that it may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted Gilles Deleuze to name him "the 'prince' of philosophers."
It's good theory. Why haven't you read Spinoza yet, user?
Basis for understanding Spinoza : everything that is is made of the same thing. In that regard, Spinoza is a monist. Monism is claiming everything is made of the same thing, be it matter, ideas or something even more fundamental to matter that is called substance. Read the Ethics if you really want to understand, it's technical but not impossible at all.
Everything being made of the same thing assembled into bodies (like the human body or a social body like a political party or something more trivial like a family or city) themselves being made of bodies etc.
You can imagine a sort of tree structure of individual people together spontaneously coming together to form social bodies and emergence starts to happen here. Emergence is the idea that simple entities when grouped together end up producing something qualitatively bigger than each of its parties taken individually and grouped together.
Think of the reason why knowing perfectly anatomy for instance won't let you explain why history happened the way it did, simply because in spite of history happening purely because of people doing things with their anatomies, more complex phenomenons take birth in the grouping of many anatomies together, such as royal marriages or warfare.
Therefore, Spinoza manages to unify the explaining power of determinism, monism while avoiding the nihilism of purely reductionist approaches and allowing some depassment of itself while being aware of its limitations.
The more you think of people in terms of subjectivities (people who feel things etc.) the less you think of them like objects (people who follow predetermined path because of historical reasons). If you think of light being both a wave of and a body, the same thing is happening with people. You can both claim at the same time people follow choices according to reasons beyond their control and they also act out of self-interest and sometimes even kindness without contradicting yourself. It's all about their material conditions of life, herein lies another fundamental contradiction of the intellectual world : if philosophy or history is necessary for everyone to form their own political thought, then how come only few people study one or let alone both?
The reason is simple : because of class relations. Classes are bodies of bodies of people. You can't really clearly delimit a class because it is a complex social bodies. You have proletarians who think of themselves as temporarily embarassed millionaires, bourgeois who think of themselves as middle-class, proletarians who think of themselves as middle-class and billionaires who think of themselves as "merely well-off" because they're insane.
Classes are hard to define and the more you try to clearly delimit them the more you miss their point. Class are social bodies therefore have conscience to some degree, as in "the bourgeois individuals feel aware of their belonging to the bourgeois class". The higher class consciousness the more powerful their social body is. The higher class consciousness, the more likely are all individuals to act out of collective interest and collective class interest surpasses individual interest qualitatively.
The proletarian class consciousness is low, therefore its power (puissance/potentia) is low. Power is the resource required to expand effort (conatus). All things that exist have a conatus : they try to keep existing and increase their own power. Affects are how things are felt. Affects can be either positive (they are joyful) or negative (they are sad) relatively to us. Affects are necessarily felt by a subject, be it a composite subject like a collective body, like class or an elementary school can be in its entirety.
Therefore, to make the proletariat the dominant class, it needs power. Granting power to the proletariat means making individuals aware they belong to the same class. This is done through education and practical action.
Education does not mean you're doing the education. It's all about self-emancipation, people need to feel personally, by themselves interested in theory, be it philosophy, history, natural sciences, mathematics, musicology, psychology, etc.
Education can also be done without needing to resort to teachers. Jacques Rancière, disciple of Althusser who spent much intellectual effort using Spinoza to read Marx, wrote an essay relative to this called the ignorant schoolmaster, attached here.
However people cannot comfortably learn by themselves if they have rent to play, family members to take care of, bills to pay, taxes etc.
This is why revolutionary federated autarkies are necessary, you let people come for the free food and shelter and let them stay for the non-spectacular (developed by Debord) life, giving them actual meaning, community feeling, physical and intellectual growth.
en.wikipedia.org
Phalanstères were originally intended to provide decent living conditions to workers. However ours are not meant to house workers but both the proletariat and its own avant-garde, educating, feeding, emancipating itself at the same time while encouraging more federated entities to break off from capitalism as much as they possibly can.
In the meantime, revolutionary theory will be everywhere on the internet, people of different philosophical traditions (for instance, I mostly read French authors but I'm also aware of Zizek's theory while most of the leftist intellectuals in France have never read him but most likely read authors like Debord, Bourdieu or Roland Barthes). The increasing intellectual exchange will lead to extremely powerful intellectual tools for our rhetoric, sourced with academic material and historical sources.
Every shortcoming of the capitalism will be read by much more people as elements fitting in a larger overarching historical structure, that of collapsing capitalism and its depassment by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The federated commune will eventually be numerous enough their combined power will replace the state, through revolution once a critical unstoppable mass has been reached. In that meaning we are both Marxist-Leninist-Maoists and Spinozists.
How to get started on Spinoza :
1): The important book, Ethics, is way shorter than the Capital
2): It's written like a geometrical demonstration
3): Everything in it is true provided the axioms are correct (check them for yourself)
4): You will not "get" it the first time. Most certainly not on the second time.
5): It goes from talking setting the groundwork with definitions to substance, god, etc etc. Very fundamental stuff that is of very little use at first but necessary to intuitively grasp at some point to really be comfortable with the whole system.
Then it talks about people, how the human mind works, society and finally ethics.
The whole thing is extremely consistent and I think it's a good you can't waste time rereading, every single time you get something new out of it.
Philosophers who use Spinoza in their work :
Althusser, Bergson, Deleuze, Diderot, Einstein, Fichte, Freud, Hegel, Henry, Leibniz, Lessing, Lordon, Macherey, Marx, Mendelssohn, Misrahi, Negri, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein
Contemporary people who worked on Spinoza :
Frédéric Lordon (criticism of the rationality, capitalism as explained in a spinozian system, imperium which is pretty much what revolutionary action should be in a MLM united left front. I found a book translated from French to English, attached here.
Althusser : reading Marx with Spinoza.
Frank Fissbach, Pierre Macherey both using Spinoza to read Marx as well.
No, we need to return to H E G E L.
Shut up and read the Ethics already.
Without succumbing into my tendency to ramble on and on at length, could you recommend a publishing house where I can purchase philosophical works in French?
No.
Bump because good thread
ok
So nothing is contingent? everything literally had to happen the way it did? Theres no room for free will? how is this compatible with modern quantum physics?
The same way that classical physics is compatible with modern quantum physics, you shitcunt. All the shit that's fucked up and probabilistic on the scale of subatomic particles averages out by the time you get to macroscopic scales. By the same token, individual people can have all sorts of random-ass fucked up dumb ideas (case in point: 'free will'), but society as a whole trucks along the course determined by its material conditions without those statistical deviations in ideology affecting it.
I really fucking hate it when dogfuckers like you try to use quantum mechanics to justify clinging to ridiculous spooky Christian notions like 'free will'. You fuckers and the New Age-y Deepak Chopras of the world need to get it through your thick cunt skulls that 'quantum mechanics' isn't an empty buzzword that you can use to justify your bullshit idealism.
HAHA NO NOTIN PERSONNEL KID
...
Marxism is not deterministic though, it is probabilistic and affords for some speculation about, say, how individual actions at key points could have actually changed history.
The axiomatic approach to philosophy is quite appealing, and nobody does it better than Spinoza.
It's been nearly a decade since I read any of his work, so forgive me if this is addressed in his works, but would the basic structure of atoms (or quarks or whatever smaller iteration) be consistent with his flavor of monism? I remember him being opposed to the dualists, so the monism of what is purely material makes sense - we just typically see 'monism' in much earlier philosophies, like people believing everything is water or fire. Is Spinoza's monism essentially just materialism, or is it different in some way?
Determinism is a logical conclusion following a mathematical approach to materialism. He makes a pretty good argument for it.
One could do a lot worse.
Monism is basically stating everything is made out of a single substance of which we can't really say anything.
Ideas are real however and dialectics are as real as the material systems they rely on. Theory IS reality and reality IS theory.
Its materialism is just much more radical while paradoxically allowing a transcendantal synthesis (transcendantal as seen by each of its individual part) from objects of all identical ontological status (the substance, thus the monism).
bump because good thread and I've been a Spinoza fan boy for years even tho' am too much of a brainlet to into Ethics. His political theory is quite good, though. he separated the church and state and wasn't afraid of anything
Fuck you, everything is absurd
I recomed you will read Being and Nothingness but i know you don't understand because you prefere stupid plato, not Great and Powerfull HEGEL.
You go suck Bourgeoisie.
I'm sure there's nothing better written than some dude from a thousand years ago who thought freedom doesn't exist and it's all the will of the force or something like that. Quantum physics wrecked his balls anyway.
if you're a hard determinist i don't see you dipsroving race realism ever.
The absolute state of brainlets
Disprove my 30 inch CRiSPR dick BIATCH
en.wikipedia.org
Spinoza pretty much offers a golden way to criticize implicit paradigms of bourgeois social sciences.
With the alternative to the telos of bourgeois 'material essence' being another telos. The issue that sparked the revolution of Marxian/Marxist philosophy was not the existence of a system of social relations that best ascribes to 'reality' as such, but rather that a system could attempt to create and how it creates a collective reality, even when it is so necessarily contradictory. Marxism thus, while owing a great deal to Spinoza and his contributions (particularly in asserting the enlightenment subject against traditionalists like Jacobi), cannot become Spinozist Marxism because of the even greater enduring contribution of Hegel. You would not be wont to say otherwise, lest you want to argue against the whole of the legacy of Marxist philosophy.
Spinoza is the man, man, he enabled everything right about Marxism since 1910s like Alhtusser.
can someone link ETHICS by spinoza in pdf form?
Spinozas idea of god is one of the few I don't hate, speaking as an atheist.
If every religious fundie was a spinozist, the world would be better place
Spinoza:
Marx:
Fromm:
Fromm argues with Spinoza but is more consistent and refers to many current problems.
Why is Holla Forums so reductionistic? We as living human beings are more than simple material. We have a free will since each of our selfs is able to regulate, be aware and transcend itself!
The only one appraising it as "simple", is you.
what an idiotic post, my got
No, really, almost everything this pseud idiot writes is plain wrong.
By Nietzsche's will to power he repeated Spinoza and Spinoza didn't restrict his usage of conatus in therms of power of others (e.g. Boehler, 2017; Yovel, 1986; Boehm, 2017).
Spinoza's pantheism is a widely accepted reading in the scientific comunity(e.g. Copleston, 1946; Dewey, 1882; Levine, 1994; Parkinson, 1977) and AFAIK this reading has never been refuted .
Reductionistic determinism is a tautology but to be redundant is for some encyclopedic readers important. And once again, Spinoza being deterministic is a widely accept reading (e.g. Sprigge, 1989, Russel, 1984; Naess, 1973; Nagler, 2006).
Labour fetishism means that the importance of the active transformation is overrated. In accordance with value criticism, labour is only (e.g. Krisis, 1999). Just like Marx conceptualized commodity fetishism as the fallacy to transform subjective values into objective, inherent processes, labour is in his view the essential moderator between humankind and nature. But it is not labour, but our self-consciousness which moderates thhis and influences labour as well. Self-regulation, self-awareness and self-transcendence are the conditions that cause and remove distortions or biases (see Vago & Silbersweig, 2012).
I agree that history follows a mainly unconscious procedure. This is why our main task is to fight against the unconsciouss of society as a whole (see Dutschke, 1967). To contemplate may be the condition for active transformative behavior.
Spirituality is not the same as religion, mysticism, occultism or spitirualism and doesn't refer to spooks but indeed can be naturalized (Letheby, 2017). Self-transcendent brain patterns are mainly linked to deactivations than activations (my thesis actually deals with these phenomena).
Marx is sporadically obscurantistic because he does not make it clear how history can be target-orientated in a materialistic world, how patterns can be reasoned by following patterns and how prognoses for the course of history are possible without a transcendent sphere (e.g. Popper, 1952; Popper, 1957 [I hate to cite this anti-dialectic prick ;_;]).
I never wrote neither "only deductive" nor "only inductive" but classified their general methodological approach. Spinoza. Spinoza's practical philosophy of identity is based on axioms and hypotheses from which he extrapolated just like in mathematics. That his approach is deductive is also widely accepted (e.g. Rice, 1977; Hooker, 1980; Bennet, 1984). Marx' historical materialism is based on empirical sociological observations of his time and follows the pattern of material production througout the history of humankind. If you disagree with that, you have not even grasped a sense of Marx' approach.
Fromm is quite superficial but he's the philosopher the plebs would be able to comprehend and allow themselves to be convinced. As an academic philosopher, I'm often asked who is my favorite one. I always recommend him for practical reasons. On that account, most o them were inspired and actually changed their mind towards a leftist view. Try that with Spinoza, Marx or any other philosopher.
Let's do an video discussion for YouTube! I let you chose the topics.
PS: I'm just a poser and my degree in philosophy is clearly undeserved.
PPS: Shoudln't have wrote my post after a saturday night. But guys,
, get your arguments together.
PPPS: I would have cited Spinoza directly but unfortunately I've worked through some of his German translations.
Spinoza is was a faggot /thread
who /KojeveGang/ here?