Spinoza’s Motivation and the Unity of Science Sample Clauses

Spinoza’s Motivation and the Unity of Science. Spinoza’s project was one of major, world-changing reform that would lead to banishing all obstacles to human empowerment. However, his program did not consist only of critique of those structures which stood in the way of human progress, although he engages in such critique, his program does not consist only of setting up a model of what is best for humans, although he constructs such a model. The most revolutionary aspect of Spinoza’s project is that he tries, in order to change society and to increase the power of human individuals to understand them. He tries to understand humans as part of nature, as creatures driven by their affects, as beings who could not be perfected, but who could nevertheless become empowered. Spinoza shows us that the projects of human emancipation and naturalizing social and political philosophy are not in tension; rather they can be, in the right hands, one in the same project. By pretending that we are something that we are not, that we transcend the body, that we are pure mind, that we have access to a realm of moral truths outside of time and human life, we continue to misunderstand ourselves. We build great idealist systems and moral philosophies which stand as monuments to our ignorance of ourselves and what we can actually become. By taking God and human beings to be part of Nature, Spinoza threatened those religious and political institutions in his own time which sought to keep the people in ignorance of their own natural power. Consistent naturalism and its resultant focus on the importance of the affects may be as important and radical in our time as it was in Spinoza’s.481 Spinoza was motivated by what he saw as theoretical and theological obstacles to human empowerment and to scientific exploration, which he saw as an important vehicle for human empowerment. Spinoza’s science was the science of causes. To understand causes was to understand the principles of the natural world, and for Spinoza there was only the natural world. Several things stood as impediments to the free exploration of the natural world. First, and most difficult, those penalties, mainly of religious origin, but set down in law, that prohibited investigation of certain topics, considering the biblical-ancient interpretation of some physical phenomena to be authoritative. Questions of the origin of the universe, the size and shape of the earth and other heavenly bodies, and the origin of human life could not be explored seriously, given that the ...