And so, my obsessions collide.

There is, then, a philosophy of "life" in Spinoza; it consists precisely in denouncing all that separates us from life, all these transcendent values that are turned against life, these values that are tied to the conditions and illusions of consciousness. Life is poisoned by the categories of Good and Evil, of blame and merit, of sin and redemption. What poisons life is hatred, including the hatred that is turned back against oneself in the form of guilt.

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1970)

24 september 2023

my first ever university assignment :D (I have no clue what’s going on Spinoza is confusing me)

I’m sick rn but hopefully I’ll be better in time for my first actual classes next week!!

Every philosophy of philosophy that excludes Spinoza must be spurious.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

In the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, conatus (/koʊˈneɪtəs/; wikt:conatus; Latin for "effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving") is an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This thing may be mind, matter, or a combination of both, and is often associated with God's will in a pantheist view of nature. The conatus may refer to the instinctive will to live of living organisms or to various metaphysical theories of motion and inertia. Today, conatus is rarely used in the technical sense, since classical mechanics uses concepts such as inertia and conservation of momentum that have superseded it. It has, however, been a notable influence on later thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Wikipedia

"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Page 29)

Spirit feels, ego thinks.

How could feelings ever be

wrong when they were

meant to be felt?

An idea is small if it affects only the way you think about some things. An idea is big if it changes the way you think about everything. To whom big ideas are given, an equally significant responsibility is entrusted.

modern insanlık tarihi ne kadar ilerlemiş olursa olsun, o hala felsefenin özel alanı ve ayrıcalığı olan "değer" sorunuyla ilgilenmiyordu.

frederick beiser - hegel'den sonra

Renée Gailhoustet's Cité Spinoza. Photos by Anthony Saroufim.

A leftwing architect, Gailhoustet is best known for her work around social housing.

ArchDaily wrote about this project: As stated on Frac Center-Val de Loire's website, the raw concrete building contains 80 duplex social housing units, a young workers' hostel, and collective services, all distributed by interior streets. Gailhoustet wanted a hybrid building with a program mix. He fragmented the structure into three bars linked by a central vertical circulation. The activity rooms, the workshops, the medico-psycho-pedagogical center, as well as the children's library, are all located on the first floor. The facilities are structurally independent, as they are composed of modular elements that can be adapted and enlarged as needed.

“Kendime soru olarak yaratıldım.”—Augustinus

“Tanrı benimle ne kastetmiş olabilir?” —Kierkegaard

“Kendi varoluşunun bir nedenini bulamayan şey, var değildir.” —Spinoza

“İnsan kendi varoluşuna hayret etmekten de acizdir.” —Jung

i used to really dislike the concept of "shards" in worm. at first i read them as being a kind of midichlorians for trauma. however i now isee them as something almost mystical. it represents that perfect middle space between medieval mysticism and enlightment rationalism that finds its apotheosis in hegel. i think of the way it mirrors the idea in lurianic kabbalah that at the time of the Fall adam's soul fractured into 6000 "shards" (one for each member of israel at sinai for the revelation), and that for israel to inaugurate olam haBa, the world to come, it is first necessary to "elevate" said soul-shards through mitzvot to their prelapsarian proximity to the godhead. this notion, obliquely, finds its christian (and therefore proto-hegelian) counterpart in the work of meister eckhart, who was the first to preach the doctrine that the center of humanity was in God Himself, not the individual soul. the rationalist version of this idea--that is to say, Hegelianism--would see God, or the Absolute, as the center of humanity. scion is therefore a kind of physical manifestation of the Absolute Spirit: parahumans are not separate individuals but modes of one rational entity, finding self knowledge through rational dialogue between elements of himself--through conflict. parahumans are all parts of one thing, headed inevitably for the End of History, total self-knowledge. shards represent a primordial oneness, a movement toward what french mystic rolland (who incidentally was the one to introduce to idea of "oceanic feeling" to freud), speaking of spinoza (himself another influence on hegel), might call "le soleil blanc de la substance," the white sun of substance, that is to say, a sense of the primordial oneness of all things, a sense of being part of a univocal God or Nature.

Essential Reading for Me

How to Make Our Ideas Clear by Charles Sanders Peirce - This is essentially the first work of philosophical pragmatism and goes into how an idea can be clear and meaningful as well as what can be meant by reality. While I think Peirce undervalues symbolic thought somewhat and is a bit overly confident in our ability to know, it is a great work on the nature of what a clear idea is as opposed to a vague or meaningless idea and does a great job cutting through the needless navel-gazing so unfortunately prominent in intellectual discource

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus - The seminal short work on absurdism. Gives a brilliant summary of how the absurd comes to be. While I disagree with his idea on how to live given the absurd, I find his summary of the absurd brilliant

Ethics by Baruch Spinoza - This book serves as a brilliant argument for a pantheistic worldview and a deconstruction of dualism and a takedown of the idea of free will as well as serving as an interesting interpretation of human psychology. While Spinoza's extreme rationalism often gets the better of him, in my opinion, and a lot of the second half of the book is based on a barely founded assumption of a common human nature, and Spinoza's morality can lean a bit too heavily into asceticism in my opinion, its metaphysical analysis is an excellent conception of reality in my opinion, and it still has plenty of good ideas for living. It is overall a great read and guaranteed to shift your way of thinking about things, even if you don't agree with it.

The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway - An excellent text proposing a new myth of the cyborg that moves past old dualisms, nostalgias, and millennialisms. Also an excellent analysis of the society of control which, while dated in some places (being written pre-World-Wide-Web) is extremely prescient in others. Useful both as a critique and reconstruction of feminism and as a broader view of restructuring how we all think about ourselves.

Zeroes + Ones by Sadie Plant - An excellent text of cyberfeminist theory that deconstructs orthodoxies of our society and shows the complex fluidity of what we do often assume to be linear and simple. While sometimes a bit too fervently antihumanist, it is overall a great read that will change how you think about a lot of things related to life.

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher - An excellent deconstruction of late capitalist culture and its contradictions. While obviously some things have changed since it was written in the 2000s, I would argue that we are still trapped in capitalist realism despite what some idealists say - with the right being the main opposing force and the left mostly being either being glorified social democrats or ineffectual moralists - though the fact that the genuinely revolutionary left is regaining some degree of relevance, especially among the young, is a sign of potential improvement.