Spinoza's Religion by Clare Carlisle

Author:Clare Carlisle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

When this communitarian ethic is understood in light of Spinoza’s principle of being-in-God, it suggests a religious ethic of loving both oneself and others as ‘in God’. On this point, Spinoza shares Augustine’s view that joyful communion with others is our highest happiness: ‘that we may thoroughly enjoy God and that all of us who enjoy God may enjoy one another in God’.20

CHAPTER EIGHT

Eternal Life

HALFWAY THROUGH PART FIVE of the Ethics, Spinoza pauses. He will now, he declares, turn from what ‘relates to this present life’—the various ‘principles of self-government’ and ‘remedies of the emotions’ he has enumerated thus far—and consider the eternity of our minds (E5p20s).1 Having asserted that ‘the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something remains of it, which is eternal’ (E5p23), he repeats the verb sentire three times in quick succession to emphasise that we know this truth with the intimacy and immediacy of ‘feeling’:

It is impossible that we should remember ourselves to have existed before the body, since there are no traces in the body of this pre-existence, and eternity is not defined by time, nor can it have any relation to time. Nevertheless we feel, we experience [sentimus, experimurque], that we are eternal. For the mind no less feels [sentit] those things which it conceives by the understanding, than those which it has in the memory. For the eyes of the mind, by which it sees and observes things, are themselves demonstrations. Although, therefore, we do not remember that we have existed before the body, we feel our mind [sentimus mentem nostram], so far as it involves the essence of the body under the form of eternity, to be eternal, and in this sense its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration. (E5p23s)

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