A weedy florilegium

[...] the supreme right of deciding about religion, belongs to the sovereign power, whatever judgment he may make, since it falls to him alone to preserve the rights of the state and to protect them both by divine and by natural law.
[Theologico-Political Treatise, 199]

Where it is shown that authority in sacred matters belongs wholly to the sovereign powers and that the external cult of religion must be consistent with the stability of the state if we wish to obey God rightly.
[Theologico-Political Treatise, Ch. 19]

[1] Spinoza deduces many things from his concept of G-D, but one in particilar deserves mention for its central role in subsequent controversies. In Spinoza’s world, everything that happens, happens necessarily. One of the most notorious propositions of the Ethics is 1P3: “Things could not have been produced by G-D in any manner or in any order different from that which in fact exists”. This is a logical inference from the proposition that the relation of G-D to the world is something like that of an essence to its properties {circle to roundness}: G-D cannot one day decide to do things differently any more than a circle can choose not to be round, or a mountain can forswear the valley that forms on its side. The view that there is a “necessary” aspect of things may be referred to by the sometimes inappropriate name of “determinism:”

[2] Of course, Spinoza acknowledges, in the world we see around us, many things seem to be contingent—or merely possible, and not necessary. That is, it seems that things don’t have to be the way that they are: the earth might never have formed; this book might never have been published; and so on. In fact, Spinoza goes on to say, every particular thing in the world is contingent when considered solely with respect to its own nature. In technical terms, he says that “existence” pertains to the essence of nothing—save G-D. Thus, at some level, Spinoza stands for the opposite of the usual caricature of the determinist as reductivist, for, according to his line of thinking, we humans are never in a position to understand the complete and specific chain of causality that gives any individual thing its necessary character; consequently, we will never be in a position to reduce all phenomena to a finite set of intelligible causes, and all things must always appear to us to be at some level radically free. (In this sense, incidentally, he should count as a radical empiricist.) In somewhat less technical terms, we could say that, from a human point of view, everything must always seem contingent; even though from a divine or philosophical point of view, everything is nonetheless necessary. From the philosophical point of view—and only from the philosophical point of view—the distinction between possibility and actuality vanishes: if something may be, it is; if it may not be, it is not.
—Matthew Stewart’s The Courier and the Heretic; 2006

The third very fertile source of doubt is the fact that Hebrew verbs in the indicative mood lack the present, the past imperfect, the pluperfect, the future perfect, and other tenses most frequently employed in other languages; in the imperative and infinitive moods they are wanting in all except the present, and a subjunctive mood does not exist. Now, although all these defects in moods and tenses may be supplied by certain fundamental rules of language with ease and even elegance, the ancient writers evidently neglected such rules altogether, and employed indifferently future for present and past, and vice versâ past for future, and also indicative for imperative and subjunctive, with the result of considerable confusion.
—p. 109; c. VII, Of the Interpretation of Scripture; Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [Elwes]; Spinoza

Chapter II. Of The Mind; The Ethics

D2: I say that to the essence of any thing belonds that which, being given, the thing is [also] necessarily posited and which, being taken away, the thing is necessarily [also] taken away; or that without which the thing can neither be nor be conceived, and which can neither be nor be conceived without the thing. [my emphasis]

D3: By idea I understand a concept of the mind which the mind forms because it is a thinking thing.
Exp.: I say concept rather than perception, because the word perception seems to indicate that the mind is acted on by the object. But concept seems to express an action of the mind.

D7: By singular things I understand things that are finite and have a determinate existence. And if a number of individuals so concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one effect, I consider them all, to that extent, as one singular thing.

Spinoza’s epistemology is eerie, naturalistic, and strictly logical. However, this axiom is difficult to digest without qualms.

A5: We neither feel nor perceive any singular things, except bodies and modes of thinking.

Now, “feeling” and “bodies” are quite easily to conceptually grasp. We experience sensations and the corresponding bodies which exist are necessarily posited given that we do in fact sense something, namely the bodies given. “Perceiving” cannot be said to be only a form of “feeling”, as if just a synonym. Necessarily, for Spinoza, all our perceptions are of substance and its modes, but, under a more Spinozistic definition, what we “perceive” are the “modes of thought.” Therefore, our perceptions are constituted with what we perceive of the modes of thinking.

In Spinoza’s Metaphysical Thoughts, appended to his exposition of Cartesian philosophy, he distinguishes between “modes of reason (or thought)”, “chimaeras”, and “ficticious beings.” The first, modes of thought, are concepts such as love, sorrow, doubt, and so on; chimaeras would be contradictions, such as the proposition “She loves me, and she does not love me” (not that she hates me, because “hate” is but a contrary to “love”—Spinoza admits we can have contraries existing in our minds with the same object as a target of these affects, hate and love); and ficticious beings, or fictions, are propositions we take to believe because those propositions appeal to our finite intellects which constantly battle with our passions.

Yet, given this axiom, by Spinoza’s understanding, fictions and contradictions are never actually and truly perceived or felt. Perhaps, neither of these entities truly exist in Nature. Could we say, at least initially, that we posit the “contradiction”—or the law of noncontradiction—as a cognitive instrument or, even worse, a tendency of our minds? But what of the “fiction”? Can we deny that our states of belief contain meaning? I’m sure we could doubt the claim that belief-states do. Of course, this is all hinged on the assumption that Spinoza maintained his views consistently since the publication of his Metaphysical Thoughts up to the publication of his Ethics. We have no reason to believe he did not, and we should try our best to understand seemingly inconsistent notions from the text for our lack of understand may simply be an attempt of our mind to simply reject the consequences which perturb us. Namely, an argument may be raised which proposes “yes, of course we experience or perceive real, or classical, contradictions” or “people latch onto, after perceiving, fictions all the time!”

Indeed, it is difficult to take Spinoza at face value for a postulate he takes to be an axiom. It is strange that he would consider it as such without any hesitation (by “hesitation”, I refer to something like his disclaimer at P8 of Chapter 1 regarding P7), but, of course, he labored rigorously over the Ethics. So, he must have had good reason to grace the chapter with such an axiom, rather than attempting to demonstrate it as a proposition. That said, I will adhere to the Principle of Sufficient Reason so that I may determine the true nature of this seemingly strangely axiom; it may be a trivial answer or a mere lapse in my recollection of Spinoza’s text, but nevertheless, an answer shall be obtained!

6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

6.45 The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.
The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical feeling. [my emphasis]
—Tractatus; Wittgenstein

Definition VIII: By eternity, I mean existence itself, in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal.

Explanation: Existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal truth, like the essence of a thing, and, therefore, cannot be explained by means of continuance or time, though continuance may be conceived without a beginning or end.
—Ethics; Spinoza

Scholium: If we look to men’s general opinion, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse eternity with duration, and ascribe it to the imagination or the memory which they believe to remain after death.
—Scholium to Proposition XXXIV of Ethics; Spinoza

Yesterday in my “Proposition 5 of Ethics” entry, I attempted to shed some light on my own understanding of the crucial demonstration of that proposition. In fact, it is so crucial, I form three contentions:

1 that the whole of Spinoza’s demonstration in the Ethics for substance monism depends on the clear and sound exposition of that proposition;

2 that should we take Leibniz’s response to the accusation of his own Spinozism at face value, found in a certain correspondent letter, proposition 5’s proof decisively determines whether or not “He would be right, if there were no Monads.” That is, in Leibniz’s metaphysics, the world is constituted by a infinite quatity of infinitely complex substances called Monads. Their proposition exists as a direct contrast to the possibility of a single infinitely complex substance.

On the contrary, it is precisely by means of the monads that Spinozism is destroyed. For there are as many true substance—as many living mirrors of the Universe, always subsisting, as it were, or concentrated Universes—as there are Monads; whereas, according to Spinoza, there is but one sole substance. He would be right, if there were no Monads.
—Letter to Bourguet, 1714

3 We see that Proposition 5 concerns itself solely with our relation, in so far as our intellect can distinguish between them, to Substance qua substances or Monad qua substances. Fundamentally, Substance and Monad are the same concept; whereas one Substance constitutes Spinoza’s metaphysical outlook, infinitely many Monads (Substances) constitute Leibniz’s metaphysical outlook.

3.1 It seems apparent that the difference between Substance Monism and Monadology is essentially epistemological. That is, regardless of their inconsistent truth values, can we ever know the conclusions of the doctrines per se or even distinguish between them?