Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS December 18 & 25 2015 from Steven Nadler's review of Jon Miller's Spinoza and the Stoics : Both Spinoza and the Stoics identified God with Nature and believed it to be the unique, immanent casual source of all things. Spinoza, however, rejects the Stoic idea that this "divine" power acts teleologically, and especially that it does what it does for the benefit of human beings. While the Stoics would agree with Spinoza that there is nothing outside of God or Nature that serves as a goal for its actions, Spinoza goes further and makes it absolutely clear that God (or Nature) does not act to achieve any ends or purposes whatsoever.  With respect to moral psychology, Miller examines the striving for self-preservation that both the Stoics and Spinoza identify as the nature of any individual. He shows that, in fact, the ancient thinkers had the more complex view of this fundamental tendency, whereby it develops into an elevated pursuit of rationality and also...

An affect cannot be restrained or neutralized except by a contrary affect that is stronger than the affect to be restrained. In other words, Spinoza recommended that we fight a negative emotion with a stronger but positive emotion brought about by reasoning and intellectual effort (12). * . . . his (Spinoza's) notion that the human mind is the idea of the human body (12). * Spinoza prescribed an ideal democratic state, where the hallmarks were freedom of speech-- let every man think what he wants and say what he thinks, he wrote--separation of church and state, and a generoud social contract that promoted the well-being of citizens and the harmony of government (15). * Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind (28). * The single word homeostasis is convenient shorthand for the ensemble of regulations and the resulting state of regulated life. . . . We can picture the homeostasis machine as a large multibranched tree of phenomena cha...

In Amsterdam, that curious strand, a man of trading blood was banned for thinking it was very odd for man to worship man in God and not the God of love's demand. Demand of me, my Love, demand I give up all to understand the ordinary and the odd in Amsterdam. Devoting all to understand what stayed or traded on that strand, he thought, therefore I am--how odd!-- the intellectual love of God, the love that binds, what once was banned in Amsterdam.

from Don Garrett's review "All Necessarily So" of Steven Nadler's Spinoza's "Ethics": An introduction : . . . the whole [ Ethics ] is arranged in a forbidding "geometrical order", an austere and magisterial structure of definitions, axioms, postulates, propositions, corollaries, demonstrations, and scholia modelled on Euclid's Elements . . . . Spinoza was a necessitarian, holding that everything follows with absolute necessity from its equally necessary grounds or causes, in a way that leaves no room for contingency in nature. Nadler takes seriously the worry that the content of the Ethics therefore requires expression in its deductive geometrical format. * . . . many . . . have seen in Spinoza's monistic metaphysics - positing as it evidently does a single space-time entity whose local variations of forces, governed by pervasive natural laws, constitute physical "objects" as states of the universe rather than as component pa...