Episode #034 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, I’d like to start off the program today by reading you all a poem. No, I haven’t turned into one of those people that sits around playing bongos reading poetry all the time. This is a good one. This is a poem about Baruch de Spinoza. And look, let’s hear what this person has to say about him.

“How much do I love this noble man?

More than I could say with words.

I fear though he’ll remain alone

With a holy halo of his own.

You think his example would show us

What this teaching can give humankind.

Trust not the comforting façade,

One must be born sublime.”

That poem was written by a guy named Albert Einstein. He was a big fan of Spinoza, if you couldn’t tell. Most notably, he was a fan of Spinoza’s concept of God. He seems to think in that poem that humankind has something pretty substantial to gain from what Spinoza showed us, and that we should just trust not the comforting façade. Well, what is he talking about here? Trust me, it’s all going to come together by the end of the show today. But like all great things, there’s a bit of a backstory that we need to get through first. And it starts with one word: substance.

So, as we’ve been going through the history of philosophy, we’ve heard a lot of things. We’ve been through it together. One thing that comes up pretty commonly from thinkers of all different backgrounds and all different time periods is the idea of God being an infinite being. Whatever God is to them during their time period, there is one thing that must be true, and that is that he is an infinite being. You know, sometimes when I read that I like to just nod my head along with it so that I’m more likely to agree with it. But is that statement as infallible as it seems, really? And if it’s true, what else needs to be true? I mean, if God is truly an infinite being, then can anything ever be outside of God?

Look, as many of you guys know, I have an English bulldog named Charlie. He’s adorable, but he snores all the time. He slobbers everywhere, and he smells absolutely terrible 99% of the time. Now, would you say that Charlie is God? Would you say that Charlie is outside of God? Yes. You probably would. Well, if God is infinite, how can he be? The fact that he exists and he is not God shows that at least in some small capacity God is limited and is, therefore, not infinite. If you say that God’s love exists in everything, how do you account for the physical matter or pretty much any other attribute of Charlie that’s separate from it? If God is infinite, then my dog Charlie needs to be a part of him. But on that same note, if God is infinite, don’t we all need to be a part of him, everybody listening?

This was the thought that Spinoza might have wished that he could go back in time and prevent himself from ever having in the first place. This single thought made his life vastly more complicated than it would be if he had never thought of it at all. Let’s talk about where it came from. Spinoza was a continental rationalist, one of the big three: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. In many ways during Spinoza’s life, he was commenting on and continuing thoughts that Descartes had brought up during his lifetime, the preceding rationalist. And as we talked about on the Descartes episodes, Descartes brought up a lot of new ideas to the region in his lifetime.

One idea that Descartes talks about quite a bit in his quest to find this universal, mathematical order to the universe is the idea of substance. For the record, this is something that Aristotle talked about quite a bit as well. And Descartes can really be seen as repurposing and rethinking-through the idea of substance that Aristotle laid out centuries before. Descartes defined substance—and listen, this is very important, heads up—that whose existence is not dependent on any other thing. This is a very nicely packaged way of saying it. I mean, there are a lot of different parts of Descartes’ work where he sounds a lot like Aristotle.

I mean, he talks about, in one of his works, about wax by a fire. When you melt the wax, pretty much everything changes about it. The consistency of the wax turns from solid to liquid. The shape changes to the shape of the bowl or whatever it is that you’re melting it in. The color of the wax changes. The temperature of the wax changes. But no one would argue with you if you said that it was the same exact wax as what you had before. It's just taken on a different form. So, what exactly are we talking about when we say wax if so much can change about it but we still see it as the same thing?

Now, this is the point of the episode where things could easily get extremely boring. It could devolve down into me talking about attributes of things, modes of things. But let’s talk about substance right now. We have to understand that Descartes spent his entire life trying to refute radical skeptics and find a way to show that what we see in the world is not just a giant illusion to us. Remember his example of the evil demon that could at least potentially be constantly deceiving you about stuff. Well, Descartes set out in his philosophy to deliberately prove that what we’re experiencing around us is accurate as long as we study it hard enough. Spinoza on the other hand said that there’s a whole lot more to this reality that we’re never going to be able to see directly.

Substance, to Descartes, is that whose existence is not dependent on any other thing. Now, Spinoza largely accepts this in his work, but he rephrases it a little. And he says that substance is that in which its existence explains itself. Now, let’s think about that for a second. Let’s think of an example of it. When I pick up an iPhone, does that phone’s existence explain itself? Well, the answer is no, far from it, in fact. Look, you can do a lot of really fun things on a smartphone. You can access satellites with it. That’s pretty cool. You can talk to all your friends using those satellites. You can surf the internet on it. You can spend 20 bucks on the app store and buy some really weird rainbow fruit game, and you can play it all day long on a Saturday. You can do a lot of stuff. But what all these things have in common is that they can’t be understood by themselves. They need to be understood in relation to some other concept out there.

In fact, just as a little experiment, let’s try it. Can we describe—is it possible to describe what an iPhone is to somebody without using anything but the nature of the iPhone? How would we do that? Spinoza thinks the answer’s no. I mean, after all, how can you describe what a phone is without referencing something else that it’s interacting with? If you tried to explain it, you’d say something like, well, you use it to talk to your friends. Well, what is talk? What is the concept of communication that you’re talking about? Can’t we break it down into smaller pieces and understand it by itself, not in relation to something else like communication? You could say, alright, well, a phone at its core is something that processes data. Well, what is processing? What is data? The phone itself is not self-explanatory.

Spinoza says, “If we have a definition, if it is to be called perfect, it must explain the inmost essence of a thing, and must take care not to substitute for this any of its properties. To illustrate my meaning, without taking an example which would seem to show a desire to expose other people’s errors, I will choose the case of something abstract, the definition of which is of little moment. Such is a circle. If a circle be defined as a figure, such that all straight lines drawn from the center to the circumference are equal, everyone can see that such a definition does not in the least explain the essence of a circle, but solely one of its properties.”

Look, this is similar to what we talked about with some of the Medieval philosophers like Avicenna. He talked about the difference between necessary and contingent existence. Contingent existences rely on something else to exist. Like you and I who rely on our moms and dads to be born in the first place, we, just like 99.9% of everything in this universe, are contingent on something else to exist. Well, this is one of those classic questions from philosophy. Is there anything out there that exists necessarily?

Let’s think about that for a second. Now, if you’re a Christian or if you’re a believer in some God, this answer is going to be pretty easy for you. But if you’re not, just try to think of something for a second. And look, even if you’re a Christian or a believer in God, join in on the discussion. Try to think of something other than God that exists necessarily. See if you can come up with what Spinoza came up with, that for existence to be a possibility, it must exist.

Well, Spinoza is what is known as a substance monist. Now, if you remember all the way back to the pre-Socratics, Thales was a monist because he believed that everything in the cosmos was made up of one thing. In his case it was water in all of its different varying forms. So, Spinoza as a substance monist believes that there is only one true substance. So, Spinoza sat down one day, and he started thinking about Descartes and his explanation of what a substance is, you know, something that’s existence is self-explanatory. And after thinking about it for a long time, what he realized is that if that is the definition of substance, then there’s really only one thing that falls into that category. And that is everything. No, not every single little thing. He means all of this stuff as a whole, the entirety of it all, the totality of all existence. Don’t think about you. Don’t think about your city or planet earth or the Milky Way galaxy or even the universe for that matter—everything as one whole.

See, all those smaller pieces are explainable only in relation to something else. But the entire thing—this entire glowing, giant mass of existence wherever it ends, if it even does—it is in its nature to exist. Now we come back to what we were touching on before. If God is truly infinite, then how can anything not be a part of him? I mean, really, if you’re taking up space and God is infinite, how can you not be in some sense a very, very small fraction of God? Spinoza says that that totality of existence, everything that is—he calls that God. But the really important part is that he also calls that totality nature. Now, how about that? That’s not something that a lot of people would disagree with now, is it?

I mean, look, it’s tough doing this show sometimes because when I say that Spinoza calls the totality of all existence God, I get resistance from both popular ways of thinking in this time period. Religious people think that he’s an idiot because he doesn’t see God as this man that sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake. And then on the other end, needlessly hostile atheist people just hear the word “God,” and they’re just like, here we go again! Magical thinking. Aesop’s Spinoza weaving his pathetic little fairy tales again about God.

So, let’s not even use the word God. Let’s use the other word—the other word that Spinoza thought was synonymous with the totality of everything—nature. Now we’re talking, right? I mean, think about it. For our whole lives we’ve been told that science is great at identifying patterns of nature, but it has limitations. We can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that gravity exists, but we can’t ever know why gravity exists. We can prove beyond a reasonable doubt how and when life began, but we can never objectively prove why life exists at all or why there’s some software programmed into life to evolve and adapt in very calculated ways to the environment. What explains that? There’s really not as much of a divide as these people think.

I mean, a devoutly religious person and a militant atheist could go on a walk together. And if they were walking through the woods, they would both look around them and say, “Wow!” They would both marvel at nature. They might disagree on what brought those forces of nature into existence in the first place, but they wouldn’t disagree that there is this self-sufficient framework to the universe that’s seemingly ordered.

But let’s not mistake what we’re talking about with nature. I mean, in modern times it’s really easy to think of nature as just what you see when you go camping—all the animals and plants. But does nature really end where the trees end? No. The forces of nature are ubiquitous. They’re everywhere. When you grow a plant on your windowsill at home, does it grow based on a different set of laws than if it grew out in the woods somewhere?

Make no mistake, we’ve worked really hard to create these cities that make us feel exterior to nature. But Spinoza has news for you: you’re still a part of it. Our solar system is a part of it. The Milky Way galaxy, the Andromeda galaxies are a part of it. See, to Spinoza, each and every thing including each and every one of us listening to this podcast right now are part of one giant totality of existence. We are all a very small piece of that totality. We are all aspects of God or nature.

Now, if this is true, if we are all individual facets of God and God is the totality of all existence, what are the implications of that? Well, one major one is that if God is nature, then God cannot by definition be supernatural. Anything he does, although it seems like magic to us as mere humans, is just a part of the natural way of things; it’s part of his nature. This is something Spinoza’s very clear about. He says, “As regards miracles, I am of opinion that the revelation of God can only be established by the wisdom of the doctrine, not by miracles, or in other words by ignorance.”

Now, another implication of this worldview is that if God is nature and we and everything around us are just a part of God, then God cannot be this transcendent being that a lot of people have in their head where he just sits on a throne and judges who won this ethical obstacle course that’s going on. He is not a transcendent being. He’s an imminent being. He’s around us all the time. We are a part of him.

Now, keep in mind, the only reason I’m saying “him” when I’m referring to God is because it’s something that people are familiar with. Make no mistake, this totality of existence, this supreme imminent being that causes everything—this thing is far from having male genitalia or having an affinity for SportsCenter. Like we’ve talked about before, Spinoza points this out. He says that humans have learned to project their characteristics on God. And really he doesn’t fault them much for it. He says it’s only natural.

He famously said that if a triangle could talk, he thinks it would say that God is obviously a triangle. He said, “When you say that if I deny, that the operations of seeing, hearing, attending, wishing, etc., can be ascribed to God, or that they exist in him in any eminent fashion, you do not know what sort of God mine is; see, I suspect that you believe that there is no greater perfection than such as can be explained by the aforementioned attributes. I’m not astonished; for I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.”

Now, it’s important to think about this as we consider God to be the totality of all existence. This is important to consider when we think about the fact that Spinoza considers God to be the cause of everything. Now, when I say this, I’m not just talking about God creating everything. Look, at this point in history, when philosophy refers to the cause of something, we’re usually referring to Aristotle’s idea of a cause: Aristotle’s four causes. The cause of something is more than just the final cause of something. In modern times we would see it differently. To Spinoza, this totality of existence, or nature, causes everything. I mean, think about it. It provides the material that it’s made out of. It provides—through some intricate software that we really don’t understand—it provides its shape and size. It provides a purpose for the thing within its overarching framework, although we may not really understand what the human species is.

Several months ago, I was watching a video on YouTube where Joe Rogan gave his commentary on the world. Loved listening to it. But what he said is that we as a species, as humans, we may need to be willing to accept that earth is an orange or some piece of fruit and that humans are like mold, and that our job is to eat the orange or eat that piece of fruit. Now, there’s a lot to disagree with there, but one thing that he is really effectively talking about is an overarching purpose of the human species or of life as a whole, for that matter. What he’s getting at is, like, if the world is not this constant ethical proving ground—you know, where a supernatural God assesses how nice you are to other humans—if that is not the case, then what are we exactly? Where do we fit into the whole framework of nature? What are we exactly?

And look, you may be saying, why do we need a purpose? If you think that humans and the ability to be self-aware is just some freak evolutionary accident, what is the purpose of life as a whole? Well, one of the four causes that Aristotle lays out for any thing is, what is the purpose of the thing? And in Spinoza’s philosophical system, nature explains ours. The most important part of all of this is that God causes everything, to Spinoza.

Now, if all the things that happen in the world are just one steppingstone in a giant causal chain set in motion by nature, or God, that changes a lot about the way we have to view the world, now, doesn’t it? One of the most interesting, and one of the most relevant to us, is how it affects the idea of free will. See, to Spinoza, our actions are caused by nature. Free will to Spinoza is a complete illusion. When somebody’s sitting around their house and they choose to get in their car and drive down to the store and buy a bag of Doritos, when someone thinks that they’re making a spontaneous action completely free of any outside influence, they aren’t. They’re really just ignorant of the true causes of their actions.

And this is something I can relate to. I think all of us can, really. I mean, like, have you ever been driving down the road, or really just doing anything in your life, and had the same reaction in the same place two days in a row without any sort of conscious thought? It’s really hard to think of a good example of this on the fly. I guess the one that comes to mind for me is—up here in Seattle there’s a radio station called The Rock of Seattle, 99.9 The Rock of Seattle. And I was driving down the road one day, and I saw this billboard advertising for the radio station. It was pretty simple. It said, “I love The Rock!” like in quotes, as though they took that quote from the person. And there was a picture next to it of this person smiling and holding some giant pitcher of beer or some alcoholic beverage, you know? Because that’s part of their demographic. If you’re going to listen to their radio station, you need to be a closeted alcoholic as well.

But the important part of this is that when I saw that billboard, I had some sort of subconscious reaction to it that caused me to just go, “I love rock ‘n roll!” For some reason I wanted to pretend like I was Joan Jett singing her hit song, “I Love Rock ‘N Roll!” like I was drunk, like I was a severely drunk Joan Jett at karaoke night. That’s what my brain came up with. I saw the sign, “I love The Rock!” the person drinking the beer, and that’s what came out. Look, you guys think I like this example? You guys think this was what I wanted to come up with for the show today? There is nothing you can say to me that makes me feel worse than I already feel now, you know? How do you think it feels living in this body, being trapped with these thoughts?

Alright, but as long as we’re this far along with it, the important part of this wonderful story is that I drove past that exact same billboard two weeks later. And I didn’t even think about the first instance at all. It was just—it was completely unprovoked. And at the same time, I sung the exact same terrible rendition of “I Love Rock ‘N Roll” by Joan Jett in the exact same way. And after I did it, I realized, wow, my brain is like a terrible computer program. I get a certain input—in this case the billboard—I filter that input through all of the experiences I’ve had in my life—all the times I’ve heard drunk people singing, all the things I would possibly relate to the words “I love rock”—and after filtering all that stuff through my head, I react with that drunken, terrible rendition of Joan Jett’s famous hit song. It felt like it was against my will. It felt like it was going to be my reaction before I even did it.

Well, this is what Spinoza’s talking about. Do we truly have free will simply because we feel like we could have made a different decision? Or are we just ignorant of the causes of our actions? Based on all of our conditioning, all of our life experiences, we really had no choice but to make that decision. Whether we realize it or not, we were always going to conclude that the one that we chose was the most reasonable based on the software that being a part of nature affords us.

Now, some of you may be saying right now, well, what if I decide to just pull my shirt over my head, spin around in a circle, and sing “Stairway to Heaven” backwards. Surely that has to be free will because there’s no way nature could ever know that I would make that random decision, right? Well, what if all of your life experiences ensured that you would be the type of person to contemplate free will as you just did and, therefore, be the type of person who’s more likely to do some super-random act like that to prove that you have a sense of autonomy. There’s no escaping it, to Spinoza. If we truly had free will, we would be the causes of ourselves and, therefore, substances. But to Spinoza, there’s only one substance—that thing that we’re all individual ripples of—God.

He says, “In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause, which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.” See, just as we as physical beings are aspects of this whole of existence and we can be understood by this giant causal chain—you know, your mom and dad created you; their mom and dad created them, and so on—just like our physical bodies can be understood based on what caused them, our emotions are the exact same way. The way we feel or are inclined to act is based on some thought that was caused by some other thought, and so on and so forth. Again, we can understand things best by understanding the causes of it. And God causes everything. Therefore, we don’t have free will. We just think we do.

Spinoza talks a lot about navigating the world and how our actions are either caused by what he calls passive or active emotions. There are passive emotions. I mean, the best examples would be something like anger or frustration. You can see how these things would be seen as passive. They are very reactionary. I mean, if we get cut off in traffic by somebody and we get angry at that person, we are passively going throughout life, and we’re being enslaved by all these other things that are happening to us that we really have no control over. It’s very stoic, very Epictetus-like. But on the other hand, there are active emotions. And what defines an active emotion is not that it’s a good feeling, necessarily. On the contrary, anger could be an active emotion as well. But what separates something from being a passive or active emotion comes down to whether we understand the true cause of the emotion or not.

Spinoza says, “If an emotion is a passion, it ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it. I say that we are active when something takes place within us or out of us of which we are the adequate cause, i.e., when from our nature something follows either within us or out of us which can be clearly understood by that nature alone. On the other hand, I say that we are passive when something takes place in us or follows from our nature of which we are only the partial cause.”

He talks a lot about how we feel like we’re at the mercy of this hurricane of complex emotions and decision-making. But really, all of these emotions that we think are driving us all the time can be distilled down to one thing—a tendency to increase power. That’s what we seem to be programmed to do by nature. That’s what we’re all searching for. When we feel joy or good feelings generally, that’s just the feeling of an increase in power to Spinoza. When we feel sadness, that’s merely a decrease in power. When we love something or hate something, we think that we’re making some free decision based on our personal taste. But to Spinoza, in reality, it comes down to this striving for power.

There’s much more to talk about with Spinoza and his ethics. But maybe the most powerful notion that we can extract from it this week is this: if we are all aspects of God, then we are all parts of one being. And it would be ludicrous for your left foot to declare war on your right foot or to try to hurt it in some way, because their existence depends on each other, and really, they’re both parts of the same being. Just like that is ridiculous, all humans should see themselves in this way too. What he concludes is that there’s no reason to ever hurt or cause suffering to anything. Because by doing so, you’re simultaneously causing damage to yourself as well.

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.