We live in a complex word and it seems hard to make sense of it.
Ancient Greek thinkers used the word, ‘logic,’ to describe the process of trying to make sense. These thinkers made up rules, like a game, for how to play logic. The rules got very complex.
Today you can learn Polish logic in a game called, ‘Wff & Proof.’
The original Greek thinkers, (we call them, philosophers), believed that logic and its rules were part of the fabric of the universe. Today, many philosophers believe logic is only a game man has invented.
In this respect, making sense of the world depends on where the person who observes it, is positioned. There is much truth to this idea which is called, ‘relativity,’ but it even makes our world more complex. We will call this truth, ‘a thing of reason,’ so as to distinguish it from what we will later discuss, as a ‘thing of understanding.’
Like the ancient Greek philosophers, the seventeenth century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, believed logic was in the universe but it was not just a part; it was the whole of the fabric. He called it nature or God.
The ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, believed logic was the expression of a true reality or ideas of which our present existence is only a shadow. His predecessor, Aristotle, got rid of Plato’s mysticism and placed logic in universal expressions of ideas that existed in. ‘With these ideas we make sense of things,’ he said.
This seems sensible. But the more abstract language is, the more complex it becomes. Spinoza grabbed Plato and Aristotle by their tales and flipped them around. .
He said ideas are not abstract. They are expressions of concrete things.
Only the whole of things exist. There is no universal idea in nature. If we want to make sense of our world, we have to make sense of the things in it. This is a logic of things and their operations in nature.
Spinoza’s logic had the potential to be simple and not complex, but because of the baroque nature of seventeenth century writing style, he failed to accomplish simplicity. In an age where religion ruled, science had to be hidden behind God-talk.
While Spinoza had little patience with Plato’s, ‘ideas in the sky’ approach and dismissed him disdainfully, his relation with Aristotle was more one of a pupil who has outgrown his teacher. Aristotelian ideas are woven throughout Spinoza’s writings, even though he sometimes pulls some of the stitches loose and discards them.
Spinoza’s true mentor in science was Euclid. It was in Euclid that Spinoza discovered the logic on which he modeled his thinking. This is why The Ethics is written in geometrical form and why quotes and examples from
Euclid, punctuate Spinoza’s writing. .
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In Euclid, Spinoza discovered what the logician, George Boole, later rediscovered, that mathematics and logic are only two expressions of the same subject.
When Spinoza applied what he had learned in Euclid and Aristotle, to theology, it did not go so well for him. He was kicked out of the Jewish faith. No Jew was allowed to communicate with him. There is even a story that the synagogue put out a hit man on Spinoza, )Vh()/ tried to stab him.
Alienated from friends, family, career and church, a stress-damaged Spinoza was thrown into the world of Gentiles. He landed among the other malcontents of his community; free thinking humanists who had banded together around their latest fad; reading the writings of Rene Descartes.
Spinoza did to Descartes what he had done to Aristotle, absorbed him and then flipped him on his tale. Descartes’, ‘I think I exist,’ which has unjustly become the egocentric expression of modem thought, Spinoza turned into, ‘things exist, I think.’ Spinoza was strongly influenced by Descartes’ scientific methodology but his contribution to making sense of the world of logic was modeled after Euclid.
Spinoza says the foundation of thinking are, ‘common notions,’ and he took the common notions (or axioms), directly from Euclid’s listing of them as four different expressions of equality, and the statement, ‘The whole is greater than the part.’
Later, George Boole, the nineteenth century logician, would take Euclid’s common notions and make them the axioms of his Laws of Thought. They are the foundations of his discovery that enabled the most important tool of our age to develop: the computer.
In the common notions of Euclid, both Spinoza and Boole discovered the foundations oftbinking. Armed with this discovery, Boole was able to reduce all mathematics to 1 and 0 and to describe the logic gates; (and, or, not and identity), that operate by this binary mathematics.
Whenever a computer is opened, the ideas of Euclid, Spinoza and Boole, guide us in the thinking that makes sense of our world; logic made simple and reduced to gates that open and close. It is a simple step from gates in a computer to doors in our lives.
Before we make this step, however, we must ask why Boole, like Spinoza, obscured this simple step in complex language. Here we have our answer: language.
In his first book on how to cure our intellect, Spinoza finds a contradiction. We know what exists independent of language as an immediate perception (things of understanding), but we need language to describe this knowledge. This leads to abstraction and complexity or ‘things of reason.’
This leads to the dilemma all thinkers’ experience. We know what we want to say but when we try to articulate this in speech or written words, the results seem woefully inadequate.
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Poets dance around this stammering with metaphors, but Descartes, Spinoza and Boole are not satisfied with metaphors, as they are not the, ‘clear and distinct’ ideas that these thinkers want to achieve with logic and language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a book on the problems of language, Philosophical Investigations, and suggested … “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” (1ge). Note that this statement itself is a poet’s dance. As Wittgenstein said, language does certainly, ‘bewitch’ us.
The problem arises because conceiving things and collecting them as parts into a whole or separating them out of a whole into its parts, (Boole, p. 32), is a singular innate activity of our brain (things of understanding).
Once, however, we begin to compare the relation the parts have to one another and the whole, we enter into the complexities of language (things of reason), and this is a communal activity. The grunts or primitive recognition of things that exist, give way to all the sophisticated twists and turns that language can take.
When discussing his laws of thought, Boole cautions, ” … that this is a law of thought, and not, properly speaking, a law of things.” (p.30). In his, Programming the Universe, Seth Lloyd, an information scientist disagrees. Lloyd says the universe was generated the same way our thinking is, out of things, (’bits’ in computer language), through logic gates: (and, or, not and copy), into complex relations.
Because our thinking and the universe manifest the weirdness of quantum mechanics, this is not a straightforward process, as on a digital computer. A thing can be both existent and not existent until a choice is made to put it through a logic gate. This is why relativity is an important part of human understanding.
Lloyd says the universe is a giant quantum computer – ‘It from Quibit.’ We can trace the complexity of the universe to the things (bits) and the logic gates (and, or, not, copy), out of which it was generated.
Spinoza, devoid of the advantages of logical mathematics and quantum mechanics which we have- (how excited he would have been about this development!) – nevertheless generated out of Aristotle and Euclid, a theory of knowledge which is echoed in its modern counterparts.
How do we make sense of our world? By the doors that have opened or closed, (logic gates), that have generated our universe and understanding; how these doors operate in our thinking about the whole of nature (God).
This is how Spinoza suggested we could cure our intellect from inadequate thinking and runaway emotions. Let’s be practical.
I wanted to get a PhD and teach in university. I made two separate attempts at getting a PhD in philosophy. On both occasions, circumstances closed the door and I eventually chose to go to prison (as a prison guard) ..
I loved this job (maybe too much). I loved the adrenaline highs. After a prisoner tried to kill me, and observing too many brutal” and violent events,
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the highs became downs. I had to leave the prison, stress damaged. Steel bars closed behind me.
I have known many Jude the Obscures who have never recovered from academia, and many prison guards who have never recovered from adrenaline downs. Some have killed themselves.
But it was this last closed door that led to my discovery of a stress damaged philosopher whose purpose in life became to cure his intellect and to teach this method to his neighbours.
Spinoza said his purpose in life was 1) to taste union with Nature/God. 2) Produce true ideas in himself. 3) Make all these things known to his neighbours.
I am privileged to be a neighbour of Spinoza. His purpose is now my purpose. This is a door that can never close. If he is right, it is open for all eternity, generating the logic of the universe.