Anus gazing with Spinoza

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

Spinoza's Ethics, as contrasted with Descartes'
Meditations, presents an impersonal order of ideas
that reflects his idea of an ordered nature. Man as
the thinker of these ideas does not even appear in the
demonstrations until Part II, and the intuitive
knowledge of individual existence from which Descartes
began is treated, impersonally, an d only at the end,
in Part IV. Spinoza's detachment from subjectivity is
also evident in Spinoza's dispassionate treatment of
the passions. At the beginning of Part III, he says
that he will consider human actions and appetites just
as if he were considering lines, planes, and bodies. 



I do not forget, that the illustrious Descartes,
though he believed, that the mind has absolute power
over its actions, strove to explain human emotions by
their primary causes, and, at the same time, to point
out a way, by which the mind might attain to absolute
dominion over them.  However, in my opinion, he
accomplishes nothing beyond a display of the acuteness
of his own great intellect, as I will show
in the proper place.  For the present I wish to revert
to those, who would rather abuse or deride human
emotions than understand them.  Such persons will,
doubtless think it strange that I should attempt to
treat of human vice and folly geometrically, and
should wish to set forth with rigid reasoning those
matters which they cry out against as repugnant to
reason, frivolous, absurd, and dreadful.
However, such is my plan. Nothing comes to pass in
nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for
nature is always the same, and everywhere one and the
same in her efficacy and power of action; that is,
nature's laws and ordinances, whereby all things come
to pass and change from one form to another, are
everywhere and always the same; so that there should
be one and the same method of understanding the nature
of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature's
universal laws and rules.  Thus the passions of
hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in
themselves, follow from this same necessity and
efficacy of nature; they answer to certain definite
causes, through which they are understood, and possess
certain properties as worthy of being known as the
properties of anything else, whereof the contemplation
in itself affords us delight.  I shall, therefore,
treat of the nature and strength of the emotions
according to the same
method, as I employed heretofore in my investigations
concerning God and the mind.  I shall consider human
actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as
though I were concerned with lines, planes, and
solids.

I don't recall Spinoza being mentioned in a Pynchon
novel. However, Pynchon does make extensive use of Max
Weber's  Facts and Value. 

In M&D, Dixon says that Newton is his deity. The rest,
as they say, is history. 

I don't have the time to address Pynchon's passionate
interest in Judaism and how religious texts are
contrasted with scientific ones in his novels. And
it's not so much how they are at odds, but how, as
move into the Enlightenment, science and reason are
mixed with religion and technology and end in
holocaust.    Let me say that the texts he works with
again and again raise the same problems that the Jews
were interested in for centuries. In Job, for example,
the question whether a man's fortune on earth bear any
relation to his conduct is considered. Ecclesiastes
cannot make up his mind whether life is worth living,
and how to make the best of it once he finds himself
alive, whether by seeking wisdom or by persuing
pleasure. Job is a long and beautiful poem and I don't
dare claim that my one line accounts for even its most
imortant conflicts or argument. The truth is, Job does
not go very far or come to overhwelming conclusion
about the nature of things. Ecclesiastes is rambling
rather than analytic, and on balance, negative. The
Talmudists were puzzled in their attitudes to both
these books. No finality. No closed system. Nothing
finished. They were not, after all, Greeks or
rationalists,  their texts were books of revelation,
not reason. They would never consider human actions
and desires in exactly the same manner, as though
concerned with lines, planes, and solids. 



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