Original subtitles

Through anger and grief and rage.

What we're talking about is called mindfulness meditation and people who do

it believe that it makes their brains healthier and fitter. We're about to

cross the threshold into a new world. A Buddhist monk who's been called the

happiest man in the world.

If you ever wanted a complete scientific roadmap for how to live, a modern

philosophy to go by, A lens through which to understand a complicated world.

A foundation for life.

Well, the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza is as good as you'll

find. Today you'll learn how to see yourself as something bigger, something

infinite and awe-inspiring. How to see the world scientifically too.

what this means for reducing negative emotions, leading a more content,

fulfilled and rational and meaningful and joyful life.

He asked questions like, why are we so dogmatic?

What makes us so irrational?

Why do we live as slaves to our emotions and other people's opinions?

We'll find out why some of the most influential thinkers to have ever lived

admired Spinoza so much.

Einstein said if he believed in God, it was Spinoza's God.

And Hegel said that you are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.

We'll look at what made Spinoza one of the first truly modern and radical

thinkers, why he was the first modern psychologist, and how he revolutionized

how we think about concepts like God and nature.

In short...

And I think this is no exaggeration.

The world we inhabit today would not be the same, would not have taken the path

it has without Baruch Spinoza.

This is also the story of a man, lost in the forest, searching for a way out.

Statues, portraits, even streets bear his name.

He has become an icon of reason and not a solitary thinker.

I don't want to dwell too much on Spinoza's life, except to say that he

has a good claim on being one of the most consequential philosophers to have

ever lived, but he was also, as Bertrand Russell wrote, the noblest and most

lovable of the great philosophers.

He was one of the first enlightenment advocates for real democracy, and was

the first to really criticise the bible as just a text.

He was vilified for his perceived atheism and excommunicated from the

Jewish community where he lived, who said that the Lord will not spare him,

the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man and bring upon him

all the curses.

However, despite being ostracised from everyone, he searched his entire life

for what he called the true good.

He wanted to find out how to live an ideal and virtuous life.

How, ultimately, to be free.

Before we get to the juicy bits, we have to do the grunt work.

We have to map out Spinoza's idea of the universe.

Then we can understand our place in it.

It might sound a little bit complicated at first, but bear with me. If you get

this, or at least just let it wash over you and stick with it, it will change

how you think.

Give me a few minutes to get through the complicated bits and then we'll get to

the interesting stuff.

And it should all...

come together.

If you could condense Spinoza's metaphysics, his first principles, into

one sentence, it would be this.

Being is one.

Put another way, the many is one.

What that means is actually quite simple.

Everything. Us, the forest, animals, plants, stars.

The laws of physics are many things that are part of one thing.

Nature.

We forget this, of course. We think of ourselves as independent, as separate.

But we also know that we're not, and we know this even more in the modern

period. We know that we're made of atoms.

We know that we need food, water, oxygen, energy from outside of us to

sustain those atoms.

We know that we rely on wood and tools and gravity and of course each other. We

know about the circle of life, the interdependent ecosystem that the animal

kingdom and the plant kingdom lives within and we know that one thing

affects another.

In short, we know that everything is connected.

So how does he understand this many things in one nature truth?

Well, he wants to lay it out logically and represent it in a kind of

geometrical mathematical pattern so that we can use it to build more complex

ideas with.

So instead of just saying many things and one nature, he says that there are

three parts to the universe.

Substance, attributes and modes.

We usually think of substances as the different things in the universe.

Air, us, wood, deer, dirt, for example.

It's just the stuff that things are made out of.

Attributes, on the other hand, are the way we experience those substances.

Spinoza says there are two that we know of, extension and thought.

We have actual material trees and then the idea of trees in our heads.

A mode is the form or shape the substance takes.

The substance wood, for example, could be in the mode of a tree or a chair

or a door. It's the substance of wood in different forms, shapes, modes.

But wait.

Spinoza wants to be more specific.

A substance, he says, if it's to be defined properly, should be an

independent thing.

He provides definitions.

So

let's

take

A leaf.

Is it a substance?

Well, it's only a substance if it's in itself, if it's independent, if it's

conceived through itself, if it doesn't have to be formed out of something else.

But of course it does.

It's dependent on the branch and the tree.

So is the tree a substance?

Well, no.

because it's formed out of the soil, the air, and the birds that disperse its

seeds.

A substance should be an independent thing. Yet, thinking through this

thought experiment, everything is in some sense determined, dependent, an

extension of things outside of it.

So if we're defining substances strictly, it turns out there's only one.

Nature.

Trees, people, plants, animals, their, we're, all different modes, different

shapes of nature, of matter.

Spinoza saw nature as God.

In fact, he usually wrote God or nature.

They're one and the same thing.

Why is this?

Well, he thought of it like this.

God is meant to be this infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent, omniscient

lawmaker and lawgiver.

But if that's the case, he can't be outside of nature.

If he's not just part of nature, if he's not everywhere at once, he can't be

omnipresent. He can't be infinite.

He must, to be those things, be part of everything, with nothing inseparable

from him or her.

or it.

God couldn't be outside the universe, Spinoza realised.

He was the universe.

The ultimate laws were gravity, mathematics, the laws of physics, of

cause and effect.

So God, knowing all, seeing all, controlling all, had to not just be part

of those laws, but actually be those laws, as if they were an extension of

itself. Today this is called pantheism.

Spinoza was writing at the beginning of the enlightenment and during the

scientific revolution.

He was trying in some way to square an old universe with a new one, one of

science, of reason, of experimentation.

He saw that all things, if you studied them carefully enough, were implicated

and affected by everything else.

Everything was clearly part of one big ordered ecosystem, although he didn't

have that word ecosystem to use yet.

It was a revolutionarily modern scientific view.

Spinoza writes, In nature there is nothing contingent. All things have been

caused by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce and affect

in a certain way.

A storm pushes me one way, the wind pushes my boat.

Berries draw me towards eating them.

The tree grows depending on the rain and the sun.

The deer is frightened in a different direction when startled.

We all have desires we can't control.

We are all like billiard balls, set off by causes.

outside of us spinoza's universe is a description of a singular timeless fact

everything is connected being is one to understand ourselves

we must understand the natural world we are part of

you know when you come right

down to it there are only two views we can take

Either this all happened by accident or it's the result of design and plan.

You might just shrug your shoulders and say well it's just a matter of personal

opinion and let it go at that.

You might that is but for the fact that this is an issue which vitally affects

your whole life.

It's going to determine how you think and how you live.

There's a phrase that comes up often in scholars discussions about Spinoza's

universe. It unfolds.

Cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect.

This is the root of everything.

A seed unfolds into a tree.

A pang of hunger unfolds into the making of a meal.

The desire for sex unfolds into a new human life.

This path unfolds through the woods. And the cloud unfolds into the sky.

The universe, since the Big Bang, has unfolded into an infinity

of different shapes and modes i shall consider human actions and

appetites as if it were a question of lines planes and bodies what does this

mean that we can conceptualize trace and map lines through our appetites

actions and ideas

They're caused by something before them and they in turn were caused by

something before that and the effects of those causes go on into the future.

Spinoza writes, The infant thinks that he freely wants the milk, the angry

child that he freely wants vengeance, and the timid one that he freely wants

to flee.

The drunkard thinks it is from a free decision of the mind that he says things

which when he sobers up he regrets having said.

This forces us to confront a frightening proposition.

Are we free at all?

Spinoza says that all the evidence points to no. In the mind there is no

absolute or free will.

but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also

determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity.

We only think we're free because our consciousness sits between one of those

causes and effects.

Between, for example, the pang of hunger and the decision to eat.

But we see the effect of something like hunger or desire and then see that

effect as a volition, a choice, a voluntary action.

Let me explain.

I just heard a lion over there in the English countryside.

So I decide to go this way. Am I choosing freely?

When moving my leg this way was caused by the effect of the lion's roar.

Everything is cause and effect.

However, we rarely reflect on the long line of causation that came before.

All action is caused by something external.

Just because we watch over our own appetites, ideas and actions as they

enter and leave our minds, we think that we are free.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that consciousness is only a dream

with one's eyes open.

Consciousness, in other words, is being sat over the top of the waterfall,

watching mental stuff fly over it.

Spinoza writes, A body in motion moves until another body causes it to rest,

and a body at rest remains at rest until another body causes it to move.

Now, Here's the interesting bit.

What's the scientifically-minded approach to this? To understand how

things affect other things?

That's the key to the universe.

It is clear that we are driven about in many ways by external causes, and that,

like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not

knowing our outcome and fate.

He says that we have inadequate ideas about the effects of things.

The trick to life, of course, is to have adequate ideas.

or any other community problem, the first thing we have to do is get the

facts. Okay, imagine for one moment those lines of cause and effect running

through the universe.

Deleuze calls those lines the plane of immanence. The bird is something to the

tree, the tree to the soil, the soil to the worm and so on.

The lion to the person running.

There is a line that can be drawn from my first videos to the writing of this

one to me being in this forest and that line continues into the future.

When we think in terms of lines we realise that everything in the universe

is relative to something else.

All is a web.

This again has radical consequences that should change how we think.

It means that nothing is good or bad in itself, but only relative to something

else. The lion is bad for me, so I run from it. The berry is

good for me.

so I'm drawn to it.

We tend to think of things as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, true or not

true. We attach properties to objects and think of them as being certain

things. This is red, it's tasty, or it's poisonous, or that person is cheerful,

intelligent, or interesting, or that argument is a good or bad idea.

But we forget that it's always us that's attaching the property, the goodness or

badness, the ugly or beautiful, the wise or unwise, so that these appraisals of

objects, ideas or people aren't actually properties that are in the thing itself

but are descriptions of a relationship.

Everything is relative.

And the consequences of thinking like this get even more radical.

If things can't be defined by properties in themselves, but only by relations

between things, then they must be understood only in their capacities to

do things to other things, or the capacity to have things done to them by

other things.

This is what Spinoza calls simply their capacity to affect and be affected.

Oh look, a giraffe in the English countryside.

Why does it have a long neck?

The reason is not within the giraffe itself, a property of the giraffe,

but in its relationship to eating from trees or drinking water or fighting

with other giraffes.

This applies to everything.

Deleuze writes that beings will be defined by their capacity for being

affected, by the affections of which they are capable, the excitations to

which they react, those by which they are unaffected, and those which exceed

their capacity and make them ill or cause them to die.

cause and effect, then how should we think about our relationship to the

things around us? What do we want to surround ourselves with?

What do we want to avoid?

The answer is quite simple. We should want to surround ourselves with

perfection. We should try and organise our experience of the world so that we

encounter things that will affect us positively.

The things we call good, the things that our relationship with affect us

positively, we of course like, we approve of, we want more of.

A good shelter has the effect of sheltering us from the rain.

Great start.

This is why Spinoza sees goodness and perfection as synonymous.

But more than this, he says that by perfection and goodness he just means

existing. What does this mean?

A house that exists for a longer period is more perfect than the one destroyed

in a storm. A person that lives longer has a body that's more perfect than one

that dies from a disease.

A plant that gives us more energy is more perfect to us than one that

doesn't. God or nature is more perfect because it exists for a longer period of

time than an individual tree or a single animal.

Things generally want to exist for as long as possible, so whatever helps that

thing achieve that is more perfect in its relationship with it than something

that doesn't.

Spinoza says simply, Whatever helps us attain that perfection we shall call

good. And whatever hinders our attaining it, or does not assist it, we shall call

evil.

And we try to arrange our ideas of the world in this way as well, in such a way

as to achieve this perfection.

He says, After men began to form universal ideas and devise models of

houses, buildings, towers, etc., and to prefer some models of things to others,

it came about.

that each one called perfect what he saw agreed with the universal idea he had

formed of this kind of thing.

I think of fire in connection with emotions, because when you become

stirred up, when your emotions control your actions, it affects not only

yourself, but the people around you.

Psychologists find that control of emotions can be gained by understanding

the stimulus-response pattern.

Okay, so lines of cause and effect run through everything, and everything has

different capacities to be affected by and affect other things.

Let's think about those affections.

Look, a gorilla!

In the English countryside, I hear the gorilla, I see the gorilla, I feel fear.

The gorilla's capacity to beat me in an arm wrestle affects me, and I'm pushed,

I'm affected into running.

Spinoza says that Unpleasure is a man's passing from a greater perfection to a

lesser.

Now again, this applies to everything.

Our sad, angry, fearful, hungry, annoyed, stressed, anxious, frustrated

feelings about things are signals that something is affecting us in a negative

way, that we're passing into a lesser state of perfection.

Think about hunger.

You're literally

decomposing. So the hunger pushes you to eat for sustenance.

Stress is based on the fear that, I don't know, if you don't finish this

task, you'll be judged poorly by others and it will hurt your career.

On the other hand, he says, Pleasure is a man's passing from a lesser perfection

to a greater.

Like the term unfolding for the universe and lines for cause and effect,

our emotions and feelings are signals of the potential passage to a better or

worse condition, a reaction to objects we encounter in the world.

Spinoza calls feelings, emotions and passions the affects because they affect

us. He thinks that All affect spoil down to three main ones, from which all the

others derive.

Joy, sadness, and desire.

And they're all related to Spinoza's idea of perfection.

Joy is the experience of our condition being improved.

Sadness, our condition worsening. Anger, fear, hunger, feeling cold are all sad

effects. Sad passions, he calls them.

Whereas love or confidence are examples of the joyful effects.

But remember, everything is relative.

The effects are always about something, in that line of cause and effect.

So he says that Again,

it's the relationship we have to focus on.

We try to organise our lives rationally around how often we'll encounter, use or

avoid certain things.

We want the shelter for more warmth and less rain. We want the good ideas about

raising our children or choosing new hobbies.

We want to avoid the things that make us sick.

So how does this relate to Spinoza's big idea, the thing he spent his entire life

trying to discover, finding what he called the true good of being free?

The next step is to consider different opinions based on the facts.

And the final step is to weigh the facts and opinions with understanding and

objectivity. These standards apply to everyone.

Whether it's a family planning where to take a vacation, or a group of students

discussing a school project, or a women's club planning a charity drive,

or a city council debating a community problem, all of them have to have the

facts before they are able to reach intelligent decisions.

OK, so we're affected by things. We want to be affected by good things. We want

to become more...

perfect in Spinoza's words.

Everything's a relationship too.

How do we begin to bring all of this together?

First, Spinoza is an ethical egoist. That means that essentially what is

good and bad for us individually guides us in what we do, how we think and act.

He said that reason demands that everyone love himself.

seek his own advantage, and absolutely that everyone should strive to preserve

his own being as far as he can." He called this an organism's conatus, which

he defines in various ways at various times as an organism's striving,

endeavour, tendency, force, and power of acting.

It applies to the tree as much as it does to us.

Every organism strives to increase its conatus, to exist for longer, to achieve

a better state of perfection.

He says simply that each thing, as far as it can by its own power, tries to

stay in existence.

Because of our conatus, we have a desire for things that increase our well-being.

Food, sex, love.

shelter, good ideas, and an aversion to those things that decrease it – poison,

violence, lions, gorillas.

But how does Archonotus guide us in doing this?

What are we doing?

Of course, we have those natural urges, and some things are of course better for

us and others not.

But as usual with Spinoza, he takes the insights one step further.

In knowing that the lion is bad for us and the berry good, we're doing

something else too.

We're understanding those lines, the affections, the causes and effects in

the world.

The conatus needs to understand, to comprehend so as to increase its power

of doing the right thing to live longer.

This is why Spinoza is a rationalist, understanding, is the key to everything.

Understanding is the key to freedom.

How can Spinoza argue that we're all pushed around by affections out of our

control and argue that we can be free?

Remember, he says it's clear that we are driven about in many ways by external

causes and that, like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss

about, not knowing our outcome and fate.

It's that tossing about that he wants to address.

The affects, passions, and emotions are passive. They happen to us, like the

wind hitting a sail, a wave crashing over a ship.

i see cake and my mouth salivates and i eat it i feel like an idea is a good one

so i do it i think the sound is bad so i run but often our ideas

are mistaken about whether those affects are really helping us What we want to do

is understand the real causes and effects of what we do. We want to know

what really caused that sound in the woods before we run, if it's really

harmful and where we're going, if that cake is really what I want to improve my

condition, if that idea is really accurate.

Spinoza says that just relying on feelings and affects is basically a

state of slavery because we're pushed around by them, not understanding and

choosing for ourselves.

Instead of being passive, we want to be active.

The difference between a man who is led only by an affect or by opinion and one

who is led by reason, or the former, whether he will or no, does those things

he is most ignorant of, whereas the latter complies with no one's wishes but

his own, and only does those things he knows to be the most important in life,

and therefore desires very greatly.

Hence I call the former a slave, but the latter a free man.

Okay, so what does being active actually entail?

Someone who is active is guided by their conatus, their desire for longevity, for

joy and perfection.

And they should be what Spinoza calls the adequate or sufficient cause of what

they're doing. To do this, we use our reason to study the causes and effects

of those relationships between things around us. We want to understand those

affects on us and the effect they might have in turn on things in the future.

Adequate ideas are clear and distinct knowledge about what increases a

person's conatus because a person has studied the causes and effects of things

around them.

Okay, an example.

Inadequate knowledge is eating because you desire to, because you're hungry.

It might have a good effect, it might not.

This berry might actually poison me.

Adequate knowledge, however, is eating in a rational way, knowing the

nutrients, where it grows, what goes into it, and the effect it has on you in

the long term, how much it contributes to your health, all the factors, all the

causes and effects.

That's why I have my foraging guide.

I don't know why I'm throwing my cowberry away.

I wonder, is that actually a cowberry?

Cowberry, can you see?

Description, also known as the lingonberry.

This is a small evergreen. Cowberries are acidic but can be eaten raw. They're

best used to make an excellent jelly, commonly added to jams, pies and fruit

sweets.

Spinoza writes that when a rational being is truly active insofar as he is

moved by the knowledge he possesses, the things he does are guided by a true

understanding of what is in his own best interest and thus bring about an

improvement in his condition.

In other words, the free, active, reasonable person is driven by self

-determination.

Being active and reasonable requires thinking through the causes and effects

of things sufficiently enough to be able to overcome our simple passions and

emotions.

In knowing that I'm hungry or that I can store them and that the berry

contributes to my vitamin C intake, I've done the research.

I know how much I need.

I know where to find them. And then I'm acting.

Picking, eating, storing in an active way, not a passive way.

An adequate idea of what to do takes into account all the factors.

And if we do this, he says, reason will overcome the weaker impulses or

misguided ideas.

Deleuze writes that, once we have attained adequate ideas, we connect

effects to their true causes, and consciousness, having become a

reflection of adequate ideas, is capable of overcoming its illusions, forming

clear and distinct ideas of the affections and effects it experiences.

Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler gives the example of the choice between staying at

home and studying or going out partying with friends.

In the moment, going out might have a stronger effect on your desire, but if

we consider all the factors about our finances or the job we might get from

the effect of staying in studying, we might come to the conclusion that it's

more rational to stay in and study.

Alternatively, we might still decide we need a night off because we're

overworked.

Spinoza is not saying that one thing is better than the other, only that we have

to consider our options.

We have to really understand the effects of our choices.

We have to use our heads.

Nadler writes that a person is therefore free when his adequate ideas are more

powerful, effectively speaking.

than his passions or inadequate ideas.

For Spinoza, freedom is about reason, and someone who is free is someone who

acts according to the dictate of reason.

He says that, The only thing that reason makes us try to get is understanding.

We're going to explore several different realms of God's creation.

Before we're finished, I think you'll agree that our God is a wonderful God.

Spinoza spends a lot of time in The Ethics commenting on virtue, vice,

emotion and feeling, and trying to understand their relationship to reason.

He is a rationalist, after all.

He wants to make the case that using our reason will direct us without error

along the correct path.

A vice, for example, is An immoderate love or desire for eating, drinking,

sexual union, wealth, and esteem. This might bring pleasure in the short term,

but they're harmful over a longer period.

Fortitude, for Spinoza, is a virtue above all others.

He says, From the guidance of reason, we want a greater future, good, in

preference to a lesser present one, and a lesser present evil, in preference to

a greater future one.

Fortitude is the act of working hard, looking forward, thinking broadly,

investing our time in understanding how the world works so that we can reap

future rewards.

in everything.

God is perfect because nature just is. It's that unfolding line of cause and

effect that runs through everything.

It's the fact that the many are one.

All is one substance.

Well, he says to overcome acting passively and to choose the rational

thing, to live with fortitude, we must look to God.

to nature, to see what lasts, what works, what's most perfect and most

beautiful, to increase our own conatus as a species in a relationship with the

rest of nature.

He wants to look from what he describes as the perspective of eternity.

God offers to create in us a new life, a life of peace instead of turmoil, a life

of victory instead of sin and defeat.

Think about how people give up smoking when they have kids, or maybe get more

humble and tolerant from travelling the world.

The wider the view, the more long-term orientated you become, the more things

you consider. You look at causes over the perspective of a longer period of

time, across a broader space.

Looking to eternity is the most godly way of thinking.

Looking at everything from a god's eye view.

from the perspective of eternity and what causes things, what affects things

over the long term.

To take one more example, think about growing a plant to eat.

We learn from God, from nature, by watching, by experiencing, by seeing

what happens when it rains, what soil it grows best in, which nutrients and how

much sunlight it needs.

In building a house, say, we look for the strongest wood that's the best

insulator and lasts the longest, is the most eco-friendly.

Spinoza says simply that everything in life works in the same way. He says

young petals have a fragrant aroma.

True. And are worth harvesting and use if you have the patience.

Once enough petals have been gathered, use them to make a light panna cotta,

swirl them into a sweet cake, or infuse them with a little chili in home-brewed

mead. He says,

Spinoza says a few things about the free person's character, and talks at length

about different virtues, emotions, and vices.

But fundamentally, the person led by reason and guided by understanding

nature will have two things.

Strength of character – that's the fortitude, the striving, the will to

understand the world.

and they'll be active, choosing by reason, not passive, pushed around by

the affections.

Spinoza was influenced by the Stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome.

Instead of relying on capricious and unpredictable joys like sensual pleasure

and fears or anger, ultimate freedom, he says, is grounded in reason.

And from this comes a joyful serenity that arises from the knowledge that

doing the rational correct thing should pay off in the end.

Joy, remember, is the feeling of an increase in arconitus, an increase in

power, so Spinoza's ethics is grounded in increasing an active, in control,

rational joy.

But because we're part of the universe will also take joy in seeing the

affections and relationships of the world for what they are being Integral

to it a thing within it He says a person who sees the necessity of things regards

their passage with calm and composure

Getting frustrated and angry at the universe is the result of seeing the

world through the lens of inadequate ideas.

Imagine getting angry with the lion, blaming the lion for wanting to eat you.

You know it's not the lion's choice, not her fault, she's not morally

responsible.

Spinoza just says that we should look at the rest of the world in this way too.

Seeing from the perspective of eternity means looking at how different

affections, different causes and effects affect things with different levels of

power. So the power of the lion biting your leg has its cause in the lion's

hunger. We don't get angry, upset or frustrated with the lion personally.

Now imagine asking someone for directions in the street and the person

ignores us. We get a little frustrated, but then we discover that the person

speaks a different language, or is deaf, or is scared of us because they were

harassed on the street last week.

There are causes we didn't consider and have a powerful affect on the person,

and when we look from the perspective of eternity, it becomes difficult for us to

direct our negative emotions at single people, ideas, or objects.

It becomes unreasonable.

Spinoza says,

Powerfully, we should think of all of the causes of things.

Again, giving us a God's eye view.

also lessening the blame or negative emotion we feel towards one isolated

thing or one isolated person.

As Steven Nadler writes, This view serves to distribute the causal

responsibility for the effect widely, and dilute its power significantly,

perhaps taking away its strength altogether.

The intensity of the effect is weakened as it becomes less focused on one

particular individual, and more on a long sequence of necessitating causes.

The same applies to our own negative emotions, our own problems.

We must have knowledge about their causes and effects, otherwise we become

slaves to them, because ultimately we want to increase the joyful effects and

decrease the negative ones.

He says, So someone who was led solely by his love of freedom to moderate his

affects and appetites will try his hardest to come to know the virtues and

their causes and to fill his mind with the joy that comes from the true

knowledge of them. He will not think about men's vices or disparage men or

take pleasure from putting up a show of being a free man.

If you observe these carefully, they aren't difficult, and regularly put them

into practice, you will soon be able to direct most of your actions according to

the command of reason.

If you follow his advice, Spinoza says, you'll find your way out from the

confusion of the forest of affects.

You'll be able to see the wood through the trees.

You'll see the bigger picture, the one from eternity, the God's eye view.

You'll have perspective.

And Spinoza's ethics have been applied to many areas and have only just

scratched the surface here. But it boils down really to this.

Reflect on the causes of things.

But you might be wondering, what has any of this got to do with morality?

His most famous work is called The Ethics, after all.

Spinoza's picture of the world seems to be quite self-centred. So, before we

end, I want to touch on what Spinoza says about community, morality and

benevolence.

For Spinoza, morals can only be grounded in the simple fact that every organism

and being wants to increase their own conatus.

Spinoza's morality, or benevolence, is based on the idea that it's rationally

wise to surround oneself with other people who are also rational, as

rational people, he says, will want the same things as one another.

He says that There is nothing more useful to a man than a man. Men, I

repeat, can wish for nothing more helpful to their staying in existence

than that all men should be in such harmony that the minds and bodies of

them all would be like one mind and one body, that all together should try as

hard as they can to stay in existence, and that all together should seek for

themselves the common advantage of all.

The opposite of a joy grounded in understanding and an increasing conatus

are a life lived under the influence of the sad passions, so it's only logical

to want to minimize negativity.

We assemble the world rationally in order to avoid the sad passions.

We put the effects of different things together and create assemblages of

medicines, technologies, norms and values, entertainment, information,

family and friends.

As a species, we have common ideas.

He says, The body has been affected, most forcefully, but what is common to

all men.

We all want to preserve the things that are good for our nature, and many of

those things are common to us all.

And if we're arguing, angry, suspicious and fearful, rather than joyful, calm

and rational, we're increasing our sad passions, and that shouldn't be anyone's

foundational goal.

Moreover, two heads are better than one when it comes to tasks, and the rational

person should always want to convince the other to come over to their cause,

to be rational too.

Or take the example of trying to work out how to grow this bush, this tree,

these flowers.

The more people working on the problem with the same goal, the better it will

be.

Scholars have been critical of Spinoza's view here.

People have different goals, different values. But I think his point is that we

should come together.

positively and ground any disagreement or debate or competition in those joyful

effects rather than the sad passions, the negative ones.

I'm not going to summarise. It's impossible to.

I'll leave you with the last few lines of The Ethics. The road to these things

that I have pointed out now seems very hard, but it can be found.

And of course, something that is found so rarely, is bound to be hard.

For if salvation were ready to hand, and could be found without great effort, how

could it come about that almost everyone neglects it?

But excellence is as difficult as it is rare.

Thank you so much everyone for watching this video.

I really, really enjoyed making this one. And a huge thank you to Epoch

Philosophy for lending their voice for the Spinoza quotes.

You can check out their great channel through the link below.

There's a video on Deleuze and Spinoza you should watch if you liked this one.

So thank you to them. And most of all, as always, thank you to my Patreons, all

these incredible people.

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