Mature Enough/
i)Spinoza starts of book three with a challenge. Are we mature enough, he asks to understand that passions have a logic beyond us? That is are we mature enough to accept the fact that we might not exist? We all nod of course we are.
ii)And yet there then comes that moment in Ethics where Spinoza start as to prove why we love others, or care for them or hate them or hope for ourselves r for the world. We All then begin to chuckle again. Why the thought rises in he back of ones head does one do this? Why does one need it? What on earth is going one hear?
iii)Or even more bizarrely we start to talk of Freud and our modern theories of the self and anti0sekf. We start to patronize…
iv) We slip into our immateriality so very easily you see.
v) We loose sight of why Spinoza is doing what he does.
vi) The point of the geometric proof is to remove us and our nice little ego from the picture.
vii) We understand as ourselves are a point in this process- we are a conatus, which begins it (perhaps), and a desire which erupts into it.
viii) But we are not its master.
ix) On the contrary our min is needlessly populated b affects we have little or no control over- affect that are ours simply because of the mechanics of existence- and for no other higher reason.
x) Our affects, our minds are therefore, what we are inside. That is our desire, our conatus is what it is as it is caught within the whirl of affects, or what passions are already dong.
xi) e assert our ability to desire therefore within a mind which does not up to that point really allow for an u as such. The passions work their own turned.
xii) In this tune the critical element comes in the distinction between oneself and anything else. Passions clearly do not feel this distincio as a thing of kin merely degree, or better degrees.
xiii) Around every passion strong or weak there are speheres elements which are wihin me as they are qithin you (liens of sympathy), elements that tunble into a me because of you, and elements that are in a me.
xiv) This spheres though are utterly muddled up. In a sens it is folly to distinguish them, as it is the point of the synthetic proof that these elements are conjoin within a sing feeling. As feel I am me and you.
xv)The difference between a me and a you is merely a matter of degree. The feeling I feel in you name will not overwhelm the body and the originates only in parts of my brain- it will not sweep me up therefore.
xvi)The you in me is fractures because them of the body, and I am free to play with it or plug it into other yours or other me's. It is a toy to me a reality to you.
xvii) We are different but not because of anything about having a self or a soul or even an essence for that matter, We remain essentially the same (or as near as damn it).
xviii) We different merely because or bodies are only partially caught up in what we are caught within and reacting to.
xix) And yet of course Spinoza is no pure empiricism at this point. His point is the body is caught up participating in the world from a point of high texture and prescience, and we are within that point. We are never therefore a blank canvas- our minds had the selves that occurs within those minds is not as powerful as all that!
xx) But also This body is already another body as well as well; This other is then made all the more complex as it is clear that Spinoza unties the essence of an individual on a conatus, .A conatus that has two main ingredients. Firstly each individual passion sparks its own series of desires. These desires might be pitched against the wide interests of the body as a whole and merely relate to the body in the whole but as it Is a part to something else.
xxi)But at the same time in the one body I have overarching communities of desires. We are all in this together.
xxii)A body is therefore the point that desire will have an urgency or a pitch a sharing together. All my conatus rise and fall as I am.
xxiii)I cease therefore as such simply to be a me. I am a fracturing of interlayer desires pitched into a body. And yet that very pitching is never absolute. A can in part share my desires with others, both other me (me's of the past) but also with a you who feel and desire the same. We are in this together. A together that actually of itself changes and challenges the desire.
xxiv)Even then the desire that holds be together might to a last degree be shared by the main of reasons.
xxv)My feelings that is my passion therefore always pull a mind beyond any one incarnation of themselves (they make the mind greater or lesser constantly, make it other) – while the minds desire then within this spectrum of challenge and change is not exclusive to any oneself.
xxvi)In short to be mature enough to hear Spinoza s to give up on the beefy self confidence of ones own being or even ones own time.
xxvii)That innocent ‘a posteri clue’ about time and the self is the worse of signpost – in led philosophy utterly in the wrong way.
xxviii)That is it lead it to the heroic attempt o generate a self that was adequate to time or being. This is all me you know – because it is all My idea o at least my process.
xxix)This was never were Copernicus need to go, and never whether admitted fact the body or the whatever changes experience to have it necessarily leads.
xxx) The experience f a e within time needs no big brother me elsewhere making it. It does not even need an It; a single process for the making- I might just need a thou.
xxxi)That is a little brother or a twin in the world demanding that a change or tumble. Capturing in a gravity an dispelling towards a being.
xxxii) what I am is then fractured into these gravities, they point others 9all the way up to the necessarily and infinite other of the infinite immediate mode0 are pilling what I and what we are.
xxxiii)We are therefore within time (and not a time).
xxxiv)There might be an infinite time as there is an infinite mode, but that time is merely the necessarily point into which we all cohere to be. this a time we share.
xxxv)But it is not the only time or the only possible. Other coagulations of being allow for othering reality.
xxxvi)This is Spinoza great message therefore- the logic of the passion, a logic that marks a rhythm of a change within which minds are is that that rhythm falls on the mind from outside. I am in a time a temporality because I am being challenged or change y another.
xxxvii)The rhythm of this change might vary, and with it the time vary or perhaps better the type of time vary.
xxxviii) The mind is then within and very much within not merely the physics of many body, and much pooling of what it is but also the pooling of tenses.
xxxix)That is time loose its simple overarching it is what is shattered across individuals and what they desire within and through.
xl) I am not just you, but in tumbling into a you I stop having a simple time or tense I loose sight of one time and enter another.
xli) The conatus then occurs within this loosing sight of the one. It erects as a striving nice little unities. I struggles to allow for and make a space for a me or a growing of a me a direction a joyous direction within a time.
xlii)It makes a space and yet even more time and therefore highly textured, and I am caught up in feeling the sharing or that texture. I am caught up therefore in no longer being same at all. Or better I am what is always inside something that is moving off in wildly different direction. I am the strident attempt to marry these directions.
xliii)In this marriage the role of other linked me is a vital point.
xliv)To have others a me is to have a chance that together within the chaos of shifting tense we might forge a universe of time. That is a single sharing a pooling of what we are in the fog of being.
xlv) Is this therefore to open out relations, which are not but between you and me, but also in that between sets us as pole for exchange. In such exchange one needs to be clear, it is not just you and I, but also in the crystal we are everything else.
xlvi) Together our take includes the texture of the world which will to a degree coalesce with us.
xlvii) We erupt therefore on really strange lines taking us out of the room we are in, and cooperating within u within that room and within our relation.
xlviii)We open into folded strange journeys in this sharing of what we are. The universe is filled in this swapping in this being as poles.
xlix)Or better it is included in some manner or way. We reach out from or point to cosmologies and complexities to strange journeys of the mind and the soul. W open out into a wider plain, which we then share.
l) Spinoza’s final gambit is then that this opening of the shared elements can be expanded into divinity, and opened to the third type of knowledge and its love. Appoint then next of these introductory essays turns.