Spinoza argued that God isn’t a person or a being separate from the world but is identical to nature itself. Everything in the universe is part of a single substance, which he called God or Nature. This idea is called “monism.” Seems plausible.
The single substance has infinite attributes, but humans experience it mainly through two attributes: thought and extension. The mind is the idea or “mental representation” of the body. The body is the physical manifestation of that same entity. Mind and body run in parallel, they reflect the same reality but never directly interact. When we achieve a deep understanding of God/Nature through reason, our mind connects with the eternal, universal truths that transcend our individual existence. I mean, whatever.
Spinoza believed everything happens according to necessity and is determined by the laws of nature. Free will, in the traditional sense, doesn’t exist—our actions and thoughts are shaped by prior causes. That’s sketchier. We feel like we’re free because we’re unaware of all the causes acting on us. Yeah, that’s bullshit. I can drink my coffee now, or in 2 minutes. I decide. True freedom comes from understanding the causes that determine us. By using reason and understanding how we are part of the natural order, we can align ourselves with it. Bullshit again. Humans are free, yet part of a natural order that’s constrains them in some ways. At the most fundamental level, there’s an irreducible tension.
Spinoza thought the key to a good life was understanding how the world works and living in harmony with it. Sure, that’s so vague it’s meaningless.
Emotions aren’t separate from the rational mind but are natural responses to the world. By understanding and mastering our emotions through reason, we can gain freedom. Sure, that’s so vague it’s meaningless.
Spinoza saw all things as interconnected, forming one vast, rational order. Humans, animals, and everything else are just modes (or expressions) of the single substance. Sure.
I like Spinoza a lot. In philosophy, what is true is vague and tautological. Modern pluralism is vague and tautological. Modern pluralism recognizes and values the coexistence of diverse groups, cultures, perspectives, and interests within a single society.
Yet, if a group believes its perspective is universally correct, it may resist pluralistic compromises, seeing them as concessions to “inferior” or “wrong” views. That group’s perspective is problematic. Pluralism must balance tolerating diverse views with rejecting harmful or regressive ideologies that threaten the broader social good.
There’s obviously a “paradox of tolerance”; pluralism cannot tolerate intolerance that undermines its principles. We can, obviously, only be vague about all this. Vagueness, tautology, bullshit to some extent, are the main virtues of contemporary society. Schizophrenia, in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, is this process of “deterritorialization”; breaking away from conventional structures of meaning, identity, and control. Schizophrenia, this pure deterritorialization without reterritorialization, this pure nihilism where everything is not at all what it seems, where all oppressive coding of capitalist systems are considered as what they are, sad jokes, is the way to make sense of the world1.
Footnotes
Deleuze and Guattari would probably rather say: Schizophrenia, as a process of deterritorialization that resists the oppressive reterritorializations of capitalist systems, reveals the contingency of their codes, exposing them as fragile, arbitrary constructs. Far from nihilism, it affirms a space where new flows of desire and meaning can emerge—a radical lens through which the world’s oppressive structures can be disrupted and reimagined. Despite sounding opposite, it points to the same idea: oppression is everywhere. They think we can be serious about it. I don’t. Or, my view is that we can have love and art, but we can’t have philosophy, we can’t have society.↩︎