brain storming for spinoza final (20pg)

The idea of the supernatural is an inadequate understanding of the nature of God. God, being the infinite essence of which all things are attributes and modes, there is necessarily nothing in existence throughout eternity that does not receive its essence from God’s nature. Therefore, because God is Nature and all things originate in God, all things are natural.

In the Ethics the foundation of inadequate ideas is an ignorance of the ultimate and proximate causes of effects. This is essentially the same argument he makes negating the reality of miracles. Miracles are nothing more than natural phenomena which surpass the observer's understanding of the forces of nature which could have cooperated to produce such phenomena. In the same way that God has no choice but to infinitely express his essence through his attributes as realized in finite modes of existence, humans have no choice but to be acted upon by external causes. The only freedom that humans have is to employ reason to understand what the causes are that determine their actions, and amend their understanding of them so that the awareness of causes helps to increase ones power to preserve ones existence, which is ones inalienable sovereign natural right.







p.s. Stooges, Fun House = probably the best album ever in the history of rock music.

"Man has free will to the extent that he knows who he is."

Since Spring Break I have been suffering through a slump, otherwise known as a crisis of motivation. Researching for my senior work proposal sapped all my intellectual energy and after the break I just stopped doing my work. As you can imagine, this had negative consequences, both in my academic and personal lives. Fortunately, the gravity of the situation finally sunk in. This happened largely due to a debilitating case of bronchitis, which forced me to stop drinking, needlessly socializing, and generally wasting time. Instead, for the past week I have done little besides sleep and try to read for class. This weekend I finally picked up (three weeks late) my copy of Spinoza's Ethics. I am presently still in the first section, "Of God", which is fascinating and less difficult, or so it seems, than I was led to believe. I'm not only reading it because I was supposed to for class, but also because I intend to write my final paper on God, as conceived by Spinoza (a conception which I find very attractive).

Yesterday, my professor emailed this to us, a lecture by Alan Watts pertaining to our classroom discussion, which you should find interesting regardless.