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Ode to Man
Tho’ many are the terrors,
not one more terrible than man goes.
This one beyond the grizzled sea
in winter storming to the south
He crosses, all-engulfed,
cutting through, up from under swells.
& of the gods She the Eldest, Earth
un-withering, un-toiling, is worn down,
As the Twisting Plough’s year
into Twisting Plough’s year,
Through the breeding of horse, he turns.
& the lighthearted race of birds
all-snaring he drives them
& savage beasts, their clan, & of the sea,
marine in kind
With tightly-wound meshes spun
from all-seeing is Man.
Yet too, he masters by means of pastoral
beast, mountain-trodding,
The unruly-maned horse holding fast,
‘round the neck yoked,
& the mountain’s
ceaseless bull.
& the voice & wind-fast thought
& the passion for civic ways
He has taught, so from crag’s poor court
from under the ether’s hard-tossed arrows
To flee, this all-crossing one. Blocked, he comes
upon nothing so fated.
From Hades alone escape he’ll not bring.
Tho’ from sickness impossible
Flight he has pondered.
A skilled one, devising of arts beyond hope,
Holding at times an evil,
But then to the noble he crawls,
honoring the laws of the Earth, &
Of gods the oath so just,
high-citied.
Citiless is the one who with the un-beautiful
dwells, boldly in grace.
Never for me a hearth-mate
may he have been, never equal in mind
He who offers this.
Ode to Man
A BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree—to the degree corresponding to
the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent
of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it
changes gradient. "No organ is constant as regards either function or position, . . . sex organs sprout anywhere,... rectums open, defecate and close, . . . the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments." The tantric egg. After all, is not Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?
Ode to Man
But human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power of shaping to our use those things which are without us. Nevertheless, we shall bear with an equal mind all that happens to us in contravention to the claims of our own advantage, so long as we are conscious, that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist. For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavour of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.
This is great. The appeal is clear. I’m reminded so much of Stoicism.
Carl,
There’s a lot of Stoicism in Spinoza (or at least parallels), though I have read that Spinoza took stands against Stoicism because he was mostly familiar with a Christianized version of it.
There also seems to be some Buddhist parallels, though I have never read this comparison.
Kudos for this post.. thanks for writing and sharing these insights
Agree with the other commenters.
“14. Understanding how something works is key to freedom.”
I like this one best, but they’re all very good, with a nice, active, you might even say aggressive optimism (but not really a utopian sensibility) to them.
Thanks AL, I tried to put them in differnt nomenclature, so to bring them out of some of the philosophical framework which makes them sometimes inaccessible, or less appraisable. Most of these actually strike me as rather uncontested, or at least something one could rather easily embrace with some very positive consequences – outside of the typical philosophical oppositional way of thinking about things (every position has its irresolvable contradiction).
I like how you put that, agressive optimism. I think I recall that James used to say that philosophers had dispositions reflected in their thought, and used Spinoza to illustrate something of a “sunny” disposition. I had forgotten about this until your comment. And yes, I like 14 quite a bit. Althusser did too, which is why he attempted to reclaim Marx as a scientist.
Less Is More! Thanks.
Nicola, thank you too.
Thanks, kvond. I think you’ve convinced me that I must return to Spinoza for some careful study.
14, “Understanding how something works is key to freedom,” brings to mind a personal epiphany I had about Nietzsche the other day. It’s nothing profound, but I remembered a question that a fellow student had in class: “How can Nietzsche both laud the affirmation of everything, the whole world and the history of the world, and simultaneously be so critical of modernity?” How can he point out all these things that are wrong with philosophy and culture and demand a new philosophy and a new culture, and yet affirm everything as it is? After leaving this problem on the back burner for some time, I finally thought that in order to really affirm something one must first understand it. Otherwise, what does one affirm? Nietzsche does not point out all these problems with a view to improvement, but rather with a view to correction. It is understanding that gives one freedom to affirm the eternal recurrence of the same.
May I request a clarification?
23 states that “Thinking involves starting from the widest and working in.” The protocol I have followed in philosophy is to begin with learning the parts and then attempt to apprehend the whole from them. Even in your list reasoning begins with connecting parts after imagination has already separated them out (4 and 5). In what sense are you using the word “widest” here?
Shane,
I look forward to clarifying #23, and responding to your thoughts on #14. I just want to give it my best. Tomorrow I’ll respond.
Shane,
I did not have in mind Nietzsche’s affirmation, and Spinoza diverges a little from Nietzsche with a much fuller faith in that understanding consists in understanding something through its causes. And this is a knowledge that we certainly can participate in, rationally. Nietzsche likes to cast a much deeper suspicion on this.
As to #23, you ask:
“23 states that “Thinking involves starting from the widest and working in.” The protocol I have followed in philosophy is to begin with learning the parts and then attempt to apprehend the whole from them. Even in your list reasoning begins with connecting parts after imagination has already separated them out (4 and 5). In what sense are you using the word “widest” here?”
Here Spinoza makes, at least for me, a rather profound break with a great deal of the philosophical tradition that followed after Descartes. If interested wrote on this with some precision of reference to Cartesian texts here: https://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/downunder-central-clarity-consciousness-ccc/ (skip the introductory paragraphs). But if I could put it simply, Descartes and much of the philosophy after him was concerned with “the part”, that is, if we can isolate the sure, definitive, core clarity, (or the clarity of clarity itself) upon that we can build all else. This in my view was distinctly driven by an optical metaphor of focus and lenses.
But what Spinoza saw was that ANYTIME we understood or saw something with clarity, it was because ALREADY we were understanding things outside of it. In fact, the periphery was giving the context, the frame which made it all make sense. So insteaad of trying to get to the central clarity, the “phenomena”, one had to start wide, at the widest, and work in. One had to uncover all the breadth of what makes a certain part clear.
You are right indeed that reasoning works on the parts that imagination separates out, but Spinoza will tell you that reasoning is ALREADY working because even the processes of imagination employ, however dimly, a “idea of God” (the immanent connectivity of all of it), and the power of causal explanation. When you are learning the parts of something, a mechanism, let’s say, the only reason why you are able to learn what they do is that the connectivity that lies beyond them is operating. What Spinoza wants us to do is to first look outside, beyond the point of our focus and realize how much of what we understand is coming from the border, however unconsciously.
Wittgenstein makes a similar point in his Philosophical Investigations when criticizing the Idealizations of language that occur in much of analytical philosophy. When we treat a cognitive operation as a “part” we are often missing “the rest of the mechanism”, so to speak.
” “I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever.” — Yes, given the whole of the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separated from its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothing.”
PI, Remark 6
For Spinoza, “the rest of the mechamism” is the entire causal and immanent structure of God/Nature/Subtance. You cannot even make the most rudimentary of cognitive operations without some idea of these. Wittgenstein was an engineer, Spinoza was a technician and a craftsman. I believe what is being thought here is that there is always a sense that the power of a local truth always relies on something outside of it, an awareness OUT OF WHICH our cognitions occur.
So for Spinoza, he wants us to begin at the limit, and work in. Each thing is connected to the other things, and learning how they are connected is what sets us free, makes us more powerful, makes us more Joyous. The “rest of the mechanism” is ultimately the concern for the whole of philosophy, of which Science plays a radically imporatant part as well.
Spinoza makes this point actually against Descartes in the realm of optics, from which much of the philosophical presumption of clarity arose. He objected to Descartes’ hyperbolic lens because it fundamentally misrepresented how the eye, and analogically, the mind worked. That we see anything clearly is due to as many rays of light, from the full field of our vision, are drawn into focus. Or, we can say, out comprehension of the background allows us to see the foreground (even if our imagination *seemingly* is able to separate out the foreground from the background altogether).
I hope that answers your question, or at least I hope my reasoning is clear, because I feel that this is one of Spinoza’s strongest criticisms to modern philosophy as it was begun from Descartes.
Cheers.
22. Everything thinks, however dimly. Which is another way of saying that things are all to some degree organIZNG, and not merely passively organized.
Congratulations 🙂 For me it’s the deepest insight into quintessence of Spinozism.