Baruch Spinoza and the art of thinking in dangerous times

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/12/baruch-spinoza-and-the-art-of-thinking-in-dangerous-times

by mitchbob • 2 years ago

162 71 2 years ago

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/2024.02.05-142256/https://www.newyorker.c...

fiforpg• 2 years ago

In addition to being a very independent philosophical thinker, Spinoza was deeply interested in more practical study of nature, something that may have had to do with his day job as a lens grinder. He published two short texts on probability and optics of the rainbow (the latter following Descartes).

A philosopher interested in the real world: something that became quite a rarity in later times...

lukan2• 2 years ago

"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly."

Henry David Thoreau

csours5• 2 years ago

... live [..] a life of simplicity, independence, ...

Can one live a life of simultaneous simplicity and independence?

It is commonly held that Thoreau faked it.

verisimi• 2 years ago

I like the quote, but except this bit which is terrible, and undermines it all:

Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live.

Living is still admirable. Professing without living is just so many words.

slumberdisrupt2• 2 years ago

Where exactly do you suppose philosophy went wrong? In any case I've heard this assertion from Neil deGrasse Tyson for years; it's philistine. The phrasing of the assertion totally gives away its limits: what is the real world, and who else but a philosopher is equipped to even ask that question? Then the question then becomes its opposite: where have the natural scientists gone who are interested in the real world?

techno_tsar• 2 years ago

The assertion is not grounded in reality at all. It’s a common myth among people who live in a STEM echo chamber. Personally, I don’t know why people who haven’t even done more than a cursory overview of philosophy feel entitled to make meta philosophical claims. My only explanation is that it’s a way to defend a dogma of naive scientism. Why? I don’t know, probably the same reasons why people cling onto religion.

nathan_compton4• 2 years ago

A philosopher interested in the real world: something that became quite a rarity in later times...

Absolutely ridiculous. There are tons of contemporary, living, philosophers who are interested in literally every single one of the physical sciences. There are entire departments which specialize in philosophy of physics. There are philosophers that study biology, brains, computers, etc etc etc.

I've literally been in rooms where you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a philosopher deeply interested in physical reality.

mkoubaa3• 2 years ago

I disagree. Deeply interested in the idea of biology but not interested enough to work on biology puts you firmly out of the Spinoza category.

ryloric2• 2 years ago

Do they see themselves as philosophers on the <topic> or <topic>icians who focus on philosophy?

ramraj072• 2 years ago

Yeah I gave up after trying to ask this simple question in philosophy forums: is there a justification for eating meat? And for the most part the answers from actual academics is no. Then the simple follow up is are you vegetarian. The answer is very commonly no. So everything is just theory for them. Like a cardiologist with heart disease (also common). No wonder it's all gone south.

bloat• 2 years ago

https://www.routledge.com/Why-Its-OK-to-Eat-Meat/Shahar/p/bo...

Why It's Ok To Eat Meat

By a philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans.

eynsham3• 2 years ago

There is more to philosophy than moral philosophy, and I don’t see why philosophical findings would be devalued by the moral failings of philosophers any more than cardiological findings would be devalued by the alleged unhealthiness of cardiologists.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

Of course there's a justification. Meat contains a lot of calories per gram, specifically in the form of proteins and fats, as well as a bunch of other micro nutrients.

eynsham3• 2 years ago

What is the basis of your experience of philosophers? I know lots of philosophers who are well-versed and interested in, i.a., physics, mathematics, cognitive science, linguistics, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and history. Some of them even make contributions to those fields primarily of interest as works within the relevant field rather than of philosophical interest. This is considered a good thing in modern analytic philosophy. Armchair theorising is considered an important tool, but exclusive use thereof is considered unsound and unwise. I cannot speak for philosophy in general but the sort of milieu to which I've been exposed is not particularly small.

kragen4• 2 years ago

the practical study of nature, including probability and optics, is part of philosophy — uncontroversially so in espinoza's time, however fashionable it may be to forget that in our own

what would it even mean to be a scientist who does not prize knowledge?

novosel• 2 years ago

If I am not wrong, De Iride (On rainbows) is considered lost.

toss1• 2 years ago

Two ke strategies he employed:

1) >>Spinoza stuck to Latin, the language of the learned élite. In the preface to the “Tractatus,” he declares that he is writing only for philosophers and discourages “the multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude,” from reading the book: “I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont.”

2) >>When the “Tractatus” provoked a hostile reaction anyway, Spinoza decided not to publish anything else. He also turned down an offer to become a professor at the University of Heidelberg, on the ground that holding an official position would expose him to even more attacks. All of his work, including the “Ethics,” was left in manuscript form for his friends to print after his death.

Certainly playing the long game. And winning.

Possible today?

IggleSniggle• 2 years ago

Possible for the already famous or fabulously wealthy, with enough preexisting prestige to make people care about their work prior to investigating its content.

jackcosgrove• 2 years ago

Spinoza decided not to publish anything else

You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

csours5• 2 years ago

Yes, people publish studies that never get seen all the time.

cubefox• 2 years ago

That's the problem today. What use is it to not be persecuted for publishing politically incorrect information when the information is censored or ignored by the information amplifiers, like journals, the press, Wikipedia, social networks etc. There is so much information out there already that it is easy to drown some of it by denying it a platform.

jan_Inkepa• 2 years ago

( His Latin, fwiw, is quite friendly/readable from what I've seen of it! )

xhevahir• 2 years ago

I really hope this Straussian stuff, which is basically obscurantism as public philosophy, doesn't come back into vogue. It was Strauss's disciples, like Paul Wolfowitz, who led us into Iraq with their noble lies. No, thank you.

dvt• 2 years ago

I think this is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the reality lived by Strauss and his contemporaries. I guess there's an argument to be made that the West's hawkishness isn't de facto moral (though there's a lot of work to be done here, considering the alternative, i.e., China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and so on, are hardly bastions of moral virtue).

I mention the "reality lived" as Strauss was a German Jew that had to flee Germany after Hitler took power. In fact, the most scathing critique of Strauss[1] (Altman's 600-page tome) is fairly universally regarded as being quite weak in its arguments (though, to be fair, incredible in its scholarship and research).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/German-Stranger-Strauss-National-Soci...

everybodyknows• 2 years ago

Is there any actual evidence that Strauss considered deceiving the public a legitimate political tactic?

katabasis• 2 years ago

Agreed – I enjoyed this article, but the conclusion (that philosophers or intellectuals may need to come to terms with self-censorship or obscurantism to avoid drawing the ire of the masses) strikes me as very pessimistic.

We've gained a lot of freedoms since Spinoza's era and we shouldn't be so quick to surrender them.

midiguy2• 2 years ago

It took Europe a pretty long time to produce a thinker who would restate the pantheistic ideas that the Upanishads described vividly before the birth of Christ. I wonder if Spinoza had any exposure to Hindu thought.

splintercell• 2 years ago

Are Upanishads pantheists or panantheists?

comonoid• 2 years ago

Upantheists.

midiguy2• 2 years ago

Interpretations of the Vedas vary widely. Name any 'eism' and you will find groups of Hindus adhering to it.

kragen4• 2 years ago

they're books, not people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads

espinoza didn't have access to them directly (he didn't speak sanskrit, and as far as we know nobody had yet translated them into any of the four languages he did speak) but of course the upanishads have influenced western thought indirectly since before classical times. the upanishads deeply shaping the worldviews of the gymnosophists and later of the romani people and, to a smaller extent, the medieval european philosophers whose learning derived from the islamic golden age. khayyam, who brought us a new conception of numbers, at least outwardly endorsed sufism, which has profound and well-known connections with vedic doctrines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Islamic_relation...

i'm not claiming that the flow of ideas was one-way, and because much of it happened before written history (which began rather late in india) or otherwise outside the written record (consider consultations with romani fortune-tellers today, and try to extrapolate to centuries before gutenberg) it's difficult to tell which direction each idea flowed. but clearly there was an enormous amount of philosophical interchange, and at least some of it

however, espinoza's ideas don't seem to have been especially influenced by the upanishads; if anything, he was going in the opposite direction

buddhu• 2 years ago

Not very likely. Spinoza lived in the 1600s, and European knowledge of classical and pre-classical Indian thought didn't really take off until about the late 1700s. On the Upanishads in particular, there was apparently a translation of some of them into Persian in the 1600s, but Spinoza would have had no exposure to that. A translation into Latin came along in the late 1700s.

zoogeny• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if Spinoza did or did not have access to Hindu/Buddhist thought but at least Schopenhauer was influenced by the Upanishads. I also think it is reasonable to see connections in some themes in the Upanishads to the transcendental idealism of Kant.

aj72• 2 years ago

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wqc0g5UGkz2YVIET4hnA3le_iP7...

falseprofit• 2 years ago

What is this, a private file?

aj72• 2 years ago

No, I unprotected it so people could read it.

I guess I’ll have to be more explicit.

zw123456• 2 years ago

My grandfather wrote something one could only describe as a manifesto while he was in prison in the 1930's for moonshining, which he was doing to save the family farm during the depression. He sighted Spinoza multiple times which is when I first discovered Spinoza. He included it in his memoir and it really influenced me in a lot of ways. So, thanks to the poster for throwing this up.

potsandpans• 2 years ago

Post manifesto

flashfaffe2• 2 years ago

Prévois thread on Spinoza here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37150843

kragen4• 2 years ago

No American has to fear Adriaan Koerbagh’s fate

this is utter foolishness

eugene v. debs

emma goldman

margaret sanger

junius scales

martin luther king, jr.

fred hampton

benjamin chavis

geronimo ji-jaga pratt

mumia abu-jamal

aaron swartz

julian assange

gurpatwant singh pannun

when we rightly celebrate the progress that liberalism has made in places like the united states, we must remember that preserving that progress requires continued vigilance. rather than publishing such self-congratulatory nonsense, we must recognize how much progress still remains to be made

kragen4• 2 years ago

minor correction: espinoza's possible silicosis would not have been caused by inhaling particles of glass, which are comparatively harmless, but particles of quartz used as an abrasive to cut the glass. that is why bead-blasting with glass beads is so much safer than sandblasting with quartz sand

Baruch Spinoza and the art of thinking in dangerous times

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