A Curious Little Blog

The political part of this book is much smaller and less convincing than the theological part.  Spinoza tries to outline an entire theory of politics in far too little space.  He begins with a Hobbesian state of nature in which everyone has a "right" to do anything: every individual has sovereign right to do all that he can; in other words, the rights of an individual extend to the utmost limits of his power as it has been conditioned. (16:8) Now it is the sovereign law and right of nature that each individual should endeavour to preserve itself as it is, without regard to anything but itself. It seems odd to assign everyone a "right" to do whatever they want.  What is the point of such a right?  If I have a right to shoot you, and you have a right to shoot me, then it seems to me that rights are pointless.  Of course, this is a pre-social setting, so there is no judge to decide rights in any case; but it seems like a more sensible starting point w...

Spinoza is a famous philosopher about whom I have heard very little.  I had a vague notion that he believed the world to consist of monads, and that he conceived of "God" as the same as natural laws.  Apart from that, I couldn't have told you anything about his ideas.  I used to think that this relative obscurity was because Spinoza did not influence other philosophers to a great extent, but I am learning that some people admired him greatly.  I suppose that he is not associated with a single idea that makes him easy to locate in the history of philosophy, the way Hume means scepticism, Kant means "thing-in-itself," and Decartes means dualism.  Or, it could be because his philosophy is too obscure to sum up. This particular work is certainly not obscure.  It is about as clear as anything could be, which is something that I appreciate, having no stomach for writers who try to enhance their fame by writing in a way that no one understands.  In fact, th...