On the Improvement of the Understanding / The Ethics / Correspondence by Baruch Spinoza
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Perhaps it is the repeated exposure to Deleuze’s Spinoza and readings of this slender collection that leaves me a little blank on what to say. Spinoza remains the imminent thinker of substance. Pre-Kantian, he shows us a world where relation and thought interact as pure geometry. His aesthetics for human understanding and interaction remain inspiring, even after all these years. While he encapsulates his system through the excessive nominalisation of God, Spinoza is able to return for us not a transcendental limit, of a lesser obscurity, one that reflects our limitation as beings of finiteness. This is different from a transcendental completeness, in which inconsistency is hidden through contingency. For Spinoza, there is only one manifold of infinite variety but of the same substance. Spinoza still preaches a completeness through God’s perfection but he shows us that inconsistency is only given our modality as finite beings.
Still strange and interesting is his conception beyond Good and Evil, in which these are layers of human localisation. This is almost Buddhist in conception. What makes Spinoza a philosopher is His calibration to the “faculty” of rationalism as the modality for emotion, understanding and modal being. His religiousity is instead, an extension of his thought, a characterization of the common mode of relation available for him at the time. If Spinoza were alive today, he might as well extended his geometric volume from pure relation of substance to algorithmic functionality.
His correspondence is interesting though, as it is able to show how he deals with a variety of different people and points of view.
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