Spinoza the Transcendentalist

autophoron

A Loxian
J.,


" I do wonder whether your attempt to reclaim a Plotinian/Scholastic heritage for Spinoza is as much to do with your own project"


Oh, very much so. Only by putting several projects side by side do we get a better understanding of what the thinker believed and also achieved (and yes they are different things). I for one was drawn to Spinoza specifically for his non-transcendent thinking, for it seemed like he provided a grammar with which one could describe the world effectively, without resorting to transcendent thinking. But as I read him I grew disappointed as I began to see a subtle transcendentalism lurking behind his words, so much so that it seemed like this transcendent state actually served as a grounding of his work. The closer I looked, surprised to find this considering his reputation among modern philosophers, the more I saw the fingerprints of Neo-Platonism, in one form or another. I've come to the conclusion that Spinoza had cornered himself by making his philosophy still too humanistic. Although radically departing from the humanism of his day, his focus on man and the emotions and the essence of the soul forced him into a virtual contradiction. He had to achieve a kind of salvation of man based on the powers of reason alone, completely independent of the institutions of the day.

What I suggest is that Spinoza needs to be radicalized in the two directions that he was pulled. I feel that his exploration of the diachronic reality and description of the relation between bodies in terms of speeds and intensities has been taken up fairly successfully by Deleuze, and perhaps others. The primary compromise that held him back was the principle of essences and the need to find that humans had an essence per se. When one realizes that all consonances between parts must have essences, any resonance of bodies or ideas, the human being becomes only a fleeting existence of a much more broadly occurring process. His dependence upon the "noun" should perhaps be shifted to the "verb" and perhaps Leibniz' "Natura non facit saltus" (Nature does nothing in leaps) would be helpful. That bodies are everywhere, in constant creation and annihilation would be a sufficient conclusion to draw from Spinoza the trans-humanist, and certainly one could stop there. But I also suggest that he must be radicalized in the other direction, the synchronic one (or achronic). Firstly, it would have to be acknowledged that this formed a major part of his project, and was not some "falling down", or unfortunate misstep. Secondly, if one returned to Plotinus, catches his drift regarding the centrality of the conatus and embraces the fundamental precept of gradations of Being. Spinoza would be proposing a universe which is moving towards greater and greater number of effects, all brought forth by "knowing", a knowing that by definition would constitute Being. This would be a true pantheism, one is which all things shared consciousness in gradations in virtue of, and a reflection of their Being. The consonance that everything is heading for, the production of effects is an inter-relating of which human beings are playing a very, very small part. The profit of radicalizing in this way would be a broadening of the definition of consciousness, of knowing and of Being, an unhinging of Spinoza from a fixed near-ideological "form of eternity" and making of the process a universal immanence, which is what I imagine that Spinoza would have preferred altogether. Only the prominence of the human being, that centrality of focus, as much as he tried to decenter his philosophy, created the transcendent as an anchor behind his texts.




in thanks, autophoron
 
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