Exploring Spinoza by Howard Burton

Author:Howard Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Politics, Religion
Publisher: Open Agenda Publishing
Published: 2021-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Questions for Discussion:

To what extent do you think that our contemporary religious beliefs are compatible with religious pluralism?

Would most religious leaders today agree with Spinoza’s belief that science, politics and religion are three entirely separate domains?

IV. Determinism

Howard gets stuck

HB: Let me turn now—perhaps a bit self-indulgently, but what’s the point of having all of these conversations if you can’t take advantage of it now and again to satisfy your own personal issues—to a problem I’ve always had with Spinoza.

This is not really an issue with the TTP, but more a general point related to his famous equivalence between God and nature, where by “nature” most people today mean what we would call “the laws of nature”.

As you probably know, Einstein famously said, after being badgered to opine on his religious beliefs, “I believe in the god of Spinoza.”

Of course it’s not clear if Einstein really believed that or just wanted to shoo away a journalist with an opaque quote—or perhaps he never said it at all, the list of apocryphal Einstein quotes being as long as your arm.

I’m setting up my confusion. It’s taking me a while. So, the first part is about God and nature and Spinoza’s equivalence between the two. The second part is to note that, up until relatively recently what we meant by “the laws of nature” was something completely deterministic.

Which is all to say that, for Spinoza, it seems pretty clear that making an equivalence between God and nature means explicitly recognizing that things are deterministic. Now sometimes when you bring this sort of thing up people agree that determinism is at play but things are very complicated and we can’t ever figure things out in sufficient detail.

SJ: Right. We don’t know enough.

HB: Yes. But I don’t really care so much about that—my problem is in another direction. I can’t help but wondering that if you really believe that there are fundamental laws that are deterministic, laws that are governing everything—whether or not we can penetrate them or not is another question—then why do you bother writing works of philosophy at all? Why do you try to convince people that it should be this way and not that way and give advice to people that they should live their lives like this or like that?

Shouldn’t you just say something like, “Everything is the way it is—it’s going to play out according to some big equation somewhere”?

Do you see my problem with this?

SJ: Yes, absolutely. And Spinoza makes it very hard for himself. He gives himself this problem in a very intense form, because he says, Well, you don’t have any free will, it’s just an illusion that you do: your lack of understanding of the causes which are acting on you.

His way of dealing with this problem is to start from inside the system. I think that there’s something slightly misleading about presenting him as a modern style, natural philosopher, who thinks, OK, there’s the universe/God; and now we’re setting out to understand it—as though we were somewhere else, somewhere outside of it.

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