Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

behemoth wrote (edited )

Chapter 1: Life of Spinoza

"In every society, Spinoza will show, it is a matter of obeying and of nothing else. This is why the notions of fault, of merit and demerit, of good and evil, are exclusively social, having to do with obedience and disobedience."

This sounds thoroughly individualist, that is, equating social organisation with authority. To this Errico Malatesta replied:

"The source and justification of authority lie in social disorganization […] So, far from conjuring up authority, organization represents the only cure for it and the only means whereby each of us can get used to taking an active and thoughtful part in our collective endeavor and stop being passive tools in the hands of leaders."

However, in this context (the life of a philosopher) I empathize with such a yearning for autonomy and innocence. Thought, especially Spinoza's vital, elemental, kind, escapes all social necessities.
I guess the point here, in any case, is that the thinker, the philosopher, must find their way in the peripheries of society, where the rules and norms fade, and day-to-day practicalities are trivial.

"[...] he never confuses his purposes with those of a state, or with the aims of a milieu, since he solicits forces in thought that elude obedience as well as blame, and fashions the image of a life beyond good and evil, a rigorous innocence without merit or culpability."


"In his whole way of living and of thinking, Spinoza projects an image of the positive, affirmative life, which stands in opposition to the semblances that men are content with. Not only are they content with the latter, they feel a hatred of life, they are ashamed of it; a humanity bent on self-destruction, multiplying the cults of death, bringing about the union of the tyrant and the slave, the priest, the judge, and the soldier, always busy running life into the ground, mutilating it, killing it outright or by degrees, overlaying it or suffocating it with laws, properties, duties, empires - this is what Spinoza diagnoses in the world, this betrayal of the universe and of mankind."

Oh lord, such poetry! And when did this anarchist spirit take the stage?
This emphasis on affirmation, this reckoning for collective sado-masochism, of course brings to mind Nietzsche, but also Camus. Camus, whose word of advice for the anarchists is that not everything is to be destroyed after all, but we seek out and fight for the good that exists in the world. Beauty, truth, joy. These things precede morality and intellect, and if we deny they exist now, we deny that they can ever exist.

"In his view, all the ways of humiliating and breaking life, all the forms of the negative have two sources, one turned outward and the other inward, resentment and bad conscience, hatred and guilt."

For Nietzsche, resentment is the expression of weakness, the root of 'slave morality'; and bad conscience, or guilt, is a Christian horror, the mutilation of life.

"Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy, and in vision. He let others live, provided that others let him live. He wanted only to inspire, to waken, to reveal."

A man after my own heart. Is this not the anarchist way? Is this not the way of freedom?

1

behemoth wrote

In fact, the similarities are so striking that I am wondering just how much Deleuze is projecting Nietzsche's views onto Spinoza.

1