Over the last few weeks I've been re-reading Spinoza's Ethics yet again, this time inspired by a review of Kieran Fox's newly-published spiritual biography of Einstein, which noted that when pressed about his religious beliefs the great scientist claimed to believe in Spinoza's God.
Even though I took a graduate-level course on Spinoza back in college and have read the Ethics several times, I must confess that I find the nature of Spinoza's God to be rather opaque. However, I'm not alone in this regard, because apparently it's a matter of some scholarly contention. Clare Carlisle's recent book Spinoza's Religion might clarify matters, but I haven't read it yet.
My professor at Columbia repeatedly enjoined us to "don our Spinozistic glasses" when attempting to understand Spinoza's ideas, but I'm finding it helpful to don a wide variety of glasses: Platonic, Aristotelian, Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist, even Randian! Following Hannah Arendt's suggestion that "the god of the philosophers" is being itself, as I'm reading I will sometimes test Spinoza's statements about God by substituting terms like Being, What-Is, Existence, the All, the One, the Infinite, Brahman, and Tao. Some of these work at times, but not at others; for instance, although Spinoza talks about "the mind of God", I can't make sense of phrases like "the mind of Existence" or "the mind of Tao".
Given my immersion in Aristotle and Greek philosophy more generally, substitutions for other terms can ease the path to understanding, at least for me. Here are a few examples:
These substitutions aren't always workable, and I suppose they might take me further from Spinoza's intended meanings, but as Aristotle said we often need to start from what is more familiar to us, especially when the intellectual road is rough and full of impasses.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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