Ironically, when reason failed me, I could only find solace in the writings of a man who has been called a ‘rationalist;’ however, after making repeated and failed runs at being an academic and ending up in prison, what made me a kindred spirit with Baruch Spinoza was not reason, but stress disease.
Addiction to adrenalin highs as a prisoner guard, bottomed out in despair after a prisoner tried to kill me and some years later, I found a young prisoner who had hung himself on Mother’s day.
I contemplated suicide. Spinoza says, “…those who commit sucide are of weak spirit and are completely overcome by external causes, opposed to their own nature.” (Ethics, part Iv, Prop 20). This was not a moral judgment by Spinoza but an identification. He had been there.
Those who make Spinoza an ivory tower philosopher, amaze me. They are probably the same people who identify him as a rationalist. Spinoza, in as clear a way as possible, describes his stress disease in the Emendation of the Intellect. He says it was a sickness that could lead to death. He then identifies his chief purpose as finding a method to cure the intellect, (beginning with his own), from the malady of inadequate thinking and runaway emotions.
He completes this task in The Short Treatise on God, Man & His Well Being. Having accomplished it, he applies his method to ethics, religion and politics.
The philosophers who identify Spinoza as a rationalist, dismiss the Emendation and Short Treatise as immature, and only identify with his latter works, corrupting his message. This is as sensible as saying Bertrand Russell’s contribution to The Principia Mathematica and Albert Einstein’s works on Relativity were done when they were young and only their mature works count.
After almost 17 years I left prison on disability, carrying that misnomer label, Post Trauma Stress Disorder (PTSD), but the infection that had been hurting my family and myself for years, continued.
Reading Lee Smolin’s ‘Three Roads To Quantum Gravity’ I was introduced to Topus theory, a mathematical form of logic. I wanted more information and went on the internet. I found 5 topos theorists in Siberia who had posted a paper by the European philosopher, Rainer E. Zimmermann, ‘Loops and Knots as Topoi of Substance: Spinoza Revisited, on their website.
I had been introduced to Spinoza in graduate school. I was intrigued by what connection he could have to the vertex of modern science. I got out my university, Spinoza Selections, edited by John Wild (one of the philosophers with the ‘immature’ judgement of the Emendation & Short Treatise)
This was some time in 2000. I have been reading and meditating on Spinoza’s works almost every day since. In this respect, I have taken Edmund Husserl’s notion of adumeration to an excess. When I got my M.A. in Sociology, I learned the method of content analysis and this discipline has enabled me to see that the ideas Spinoza develops in the Emandation and Short Treatise are refined in his masterpiece, The Ethics, but are nevertheless the foundation of his work.
Spinoza broke with the humanist tradition which was being developed by post-cartesians and Leibniz in science and religion. Humanism is one of the prevailing ideologies of our age. Whatever way it swings, transcendental or atheist, Spinoza would say the positions are not logically possible.
Spinoza, who was limited by seventeenth century science, and was only adequate in appying it, prefigured the science of our age in his ideas.
This is why a philosopher of science, like Zimmermann and a neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio (Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow & The Feeling Brain), find Spinoza applicable to modern ideas in science.
Spinoza stated the purpose of religion was teaching ethics and God is only known through …”the world of nature.” Since we live in, and draw all of our thinking out of this whole, we cannot be atheists.
Like Bill Wilson said, in AA’s 12 Steps, Spinoza would say, true understanding begins with:
Step 1 “We admitted we were powerless over inadequate ideas and emotions’ (substituted for alcohol) – that our lives had become unmanageable’ and
Step 2 – “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
These are the first steps in dealing with stress disease. Any therapy that does not begin with these two steps, will fail.
The other day, at a doctor’s visit, my wife said, ‘Dick is cured of his PTSD.” “No!” I said. “I will never be free of stress disease, but now I understand what it is and how to deal with it.”
Like Spinoza, I first discovered ethics in religion and went through a series of religious programs. I am indebted to these systems for teaching me the hermeneutic method of reading a text and the importance of memorizing maxims. But what these religions did and what Christ taught, seem to be contradictory.
When I discovered philosophy, I went through a series of ways of describing God, beginning with Kierkegaard’s, ‘absurd paradox,’ so this question has always been important to me. As I’m sure Spinoza would, I eschew the pantheism label, as it is only an attempt to draw the discussion back into transcendent ideas.
What we mean by the symbol, ‘God,’ is revealed in nature without an anthropomorphic connotation. Why, we do not know, but as Spinoza said, it is a tool of our thinking, our essence.
These, then, are the ideas that guide this site and will develop as it does. I am presently working on Spinoza,’s contribution to the soul of science, along with Aristotle, Euclid, George Boole and Seth Lloyd’s Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On The Cosmos. A paper is forthcoming and will be posted here.