A Few Random Thoughts…Spinoza, Descartes, Latour

Descartes philosophized laying in bed, it is said, and Spinoza did so at the work bench where he ground lenses during the day. A difference in affects of philosophy.

Genevieve Lloyd says in her “Male, Metaphor, and the Crisis of Reason” that female designates the undifferentiated, and that the male designates the de-gendered soul to be appropriated by (male) Reason, while female designates that which is marked by gender (sex), by virtue of its alignment with the Body. One wonders, is Spinoza’s Substance to be read as feminine (perhaps here is where Schelling tries to grasp him)? Plotinus’s move of the One (Hen) is a quick shuffling from “male” (progenitor) to “female” (engendering) in a single line (Ennead V ii, 1).  She also says that Descartes was caught up in the analogy of motions of the mind (no doubt conflating physics and mentality). Is this why Spinoza thinks of the agency not as a motion, but as a shift in Being, and not an act of Will? Is all transparency masculine? Is there not a transparency of body? Are Latour’s black boxes female holes in the materiality of the body? Is it not the case that instead of a world of black boxes we have orbs of transparency?

Infinitely Narrow: How Spinoza Corrects Descartes’ Lenses

Corry Shores has another nice post up in his series on my study of Spinoza’s optical theories and practices. He is the only person, as far as I know, who has made an attempt to read through the whole of my study and it is with great appreciation to find my thoughts reflected there. Here, 6: Seeing Differences between Descartes and Spinoza. Some Observations on Spinoza’s Sight. [The Kvond Spinoza’s Foci Summary Series], he points out a power conceptual, and pictorial difference between Descartes and Spinoza. In my understanding it is hard to over estimate just how pervasive Descartes’ optical metaphor for consciousness and methodology for clarity became, in particular when it was grafted onto by Idealist notions of fundamental intentionality, self-hood, and subject/object duality. Spinoza’s correction to the hyperbolic lens, the lens that Descartes felt would unlock all the powers of clear, nearly unlimited vision to man, stands at a fundamental cross-roads in the history of philosophy, noting the turn-out where modernity could not branched off from the Idealism it followed.

This contrast between the narrowly clear and self-evident, and the broad spectrum, comprehensive intuition of a whole makes an interesting contact point to a discussion Carl Dyke and I have been having over at his blog, on the Infinity Standard (something he regards as an unhealthy societal influence), Existential infinity. Descartes envisioned an infinity as well, an infinite power developed upon the tunnel vision of narrow band precision of clarity, ultimately founded upon the notion of the “self” as indubitable. While Spinoza wanted to say of lenses, of eyes, and ultimately of consciousness, whenever we are perceiving something clearly it is always because we are already perceiving the vista of what lies beyond it. There is no narrow clarity that supersedes and establishes the role of the margin. In fact, as is the case in criticisms of philosophies of Presence, it is always the margin, the ground, that allows the narrow, bright center to have importance, or even substance at all. As I have mentioned before, recent concerns about objects and their centrality are grown out of the image of clear centrality itself, something that comes out of Descartes’ optics, and as I tried to show, Kepler before him.

We do not realize how much our folk and philosophical conception of consciousness and the world is governed by a metaphor of tunnel vision.

A related post: The Hole at the “Center of Vision”

Seeing Machines and Modes of Slavery

The Human Machine

Corry Shores puts up a wonderful response to some of my optical research on Spinoza, drawing on some threads and putting them together in a way that I just had not yet: Seeing Machines. There he picks out what for me are several vital issues that are found in not only Spinoza’s, but also Descartes’ preoccupation with optical matters, both theoretical and practical, and really touches the primary concern. How do these modes of production (ideas, machines) reflect, express and criticize the very rise of instrumentality and really Capitalized labor (and merchant class related freedoms) in which they arose?

Consider how Descartes proposed his own notions of a transcendent God and free will. His sharp division between mind and body was essential for his project. Spinoza, however, reconciled the two [by means of his parallelism]. He was not so narrowly focused on abstract rational conceptions. He did not just design lenses for seeing things with greater focus. As well, he ground and polished them with his own hands. Ideas and their material instantiations cannot be divorced. In fact, kvond writes, “a calculation, for Spinoza, must be seen as an act, the mathematical point, as a relation and expression, and an instantiation, a persistence.” We do not just see, we see from a certain conceptual perspective. [Descartes saw the world mechanically. This perspective might view slaves as machines and not people.] Kvond puts it that we are always seeing-with.

In my view this connection is exactly right. Descartes’ preoccupation with the narrow focus of optical (and mental) clarity, and the attendant vision of machinic Instrumentality, is precisely related, ultimately, to the question of human slavery. It is no mere metaphor that Spinoza uses in his Ethics when he devotes his fourth part to the subject matter of “Human Slavery”. He is speaking of the emotions, but for Spinoza ideational over-focus was material over-focus. Emotional Slavery expressed itself in physical slavery. And he is not only thinking of individuals. It would seem out of place to give Descartes responsibility for 17th century slavery (why not, so much else gets laid at his feet!), but there are valid, thematic, if not arguments, parallels to be drawn between Descartes’ pursuit of a machinic world vision (paired from Mind), his attempt build automated devices that would not be stained by human hand interference, the attempt to mentally isolate clarity in terms of a point of focus, and the general colonial trend towards labor efficiency that would eventually replace indentured servitude (practical slavery) with outright slavery itself (the evaporation of the “human” in the name of production). I see in the very “object” oriented, optical preoccupation with central clarity – the hallmark of much, if not all of Idealism that followed – the conceptual cornerstone for Instrumentality itself, the mode of thought that regards a clarity and sureness of an intentional part as the grounds for what human beings should know, and what they do.

Additionally, it is precisely how we eroticize the boundary (that which lies outside our view of clarity, the “object” of our orientation), that fuels – both literally and imaginarily – our very Instrumentalities.

This is no mere theoretical question, but a large scale question of concept and human action. Much, if not all of the value of philosophy is that at the widest level in a certain register, what hu/man is capable of thinking becomes reconfigured, and I cannot help thinking that the preoccupations with optics and lenses that distinguished many of the great, newly affluent minds of the mid-17th century, bears a conceptual connection to the real human and institutional relationships that constituted the nature of their wealth. Optics, Instrument and slavery are not divorced, or at least Spinoza would refuse to divorce them. Corry did not realize it, but in the time of my optical study of Spinoza I also found compelling the likelihood that Spinoza, and the Spinoza family had at the very least tangential ties to the slave trade enhanced sugar buisness, leaving me with the suspicion that slavery and its connection to commerce lead in part to Spinoza’s decision to leave the occupation of family merchant behind, and devote himself both to philosophy and lenses.

Most of these are conjectural sketches, but because it seems that no one in Spinoza scholarship has much brought up the matter, they perhaps form a sketch of what is worth thinking about: Spinoza the Merchant, Caliban and the Prophetic Imagination, The London Question, Spinoza and the Ethiopian, The Sephardim and the Slave Trade, Spinoza Family Sugar Trade Timetable, Gabriel Spinoza and Barbados.

In this way it is possible perhaps to address the knot of questions behind recent talk about Ontology and Politics. The relationship between the two is I think best expressed by Spinoza’s political expression of ontologies, achieved through the erasure of the human/natural-world divide, descriptively turning Man into a force of nature, which is likely what it always was. But, as Corry helps me remember, this is not just a conceptual position, but also a part of the very intimacy philosophy bears to its time.

What is “Passing through Infinities”?

Corry Shores has another beautiful, traveling meditation and analysis of some thoughts that I raised (I certainly enjoy seeing my thoughts reflected in that mirror, as I discover things that I must have been thinking however dimly, or should be thinking). Here he takes on the trope of “passing through infinities” that I found in von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre”  and the appeal I made to Leibniz’s triangle. He does such an excellent job of explicating Kleist’s story, I recommend his post if only for this. There is a certain openness and journeying that marks Corry’s analysis of things, as he works his way forward, a real pleasure. And Corry does a wonderful job of bringing out the illustration of the concave mirror, and the reversal/vanishing of the image that occurs as the object approaches the focal point (passing onto Deleuze and Bergson). Again, Spinoza’s optics, his experiences with the building of telescopes (and perhaps likely use of mirrors and/or camera obscuras), is something no one has considered when weighing the meanings of Spinoza’s take on infinities. What Corry brings out, though not explicitly, is that Spinoza’s own position upon infinities was itself shaped by his work with lenses and mirrors.

Transverse Condensation

But I want to think to myself about what it means for us to “pass through an infinity” as Kleist claims that a conscious person must in order to attain grace. What I strongly suspect is that this is what Spinoza has in mind when he talks of the three tiers of knowledge, with emphasis on the latter two of these: the imaginary, the rational and the intuitional. Intuitional knowledge is that which is produced when rule-following, rational description is suddenly acceded, surpassed with a kind of accelerated leap of clarity, a clarity which is necessarily comprehensive and not apparitional: Spinoza uses the example of how we can do mathematics without having to move consciously through all our steps. As we journey down into the details of anything in the world, including ourselves, any rational ordering of “what is” not only employs imaginary separation of things from all else (their causes included), but there is a certain density that is achieved in any contemplation wherein one crosses through to the other side, having absorbed the orderings of our body. The confusions and conflations that mark out our imaginary engagements, bringing together under a certain mode of intensity, are first separated out into rational descriptions of causation, but then these delimitations are transcended. The world itself is not transcended. Only our imaginary/rational structurings of it are. And in this way Spinoza’s “intuition” bears a certain condensive similarity to “imagination” such that the two work to prepare and then exonerate the rational which lies inbetween.

I want to say that it is not enough to be analogical here, or more loosely, metaphorical. It is not that we cross through infinities like passing through the focal point of a curved mirror, or like a line crossing over another. Instead infinities are literally gathered up in bounded limitations, and pursued together along certain lines of traverse, and that then these infinities are passed through, onto the other side so to speak, unto a certain comprehensiveness, the kind of comprehensiveness that Spinoza (contrary to Decartes) urges us to start with.

Spinoza and Mechanical Infinities

The Mechanically Bound Infinite

I want to respond to Corry Shores’ wonderful incorporation of my Spinoza Foci  research into his philosophical project (which has a declaimed Deleuzian/Bergsonian direction). It feels good to have one’s own ideas put in the service of another’s productive thoughts. You come to realize something more about what you were thinking. And to wade back through one’s arguments re-ordered is something like coming to your own house in a dream.

This being said, Corry’s reading of my material thrills, for he is, at least in evidentary fashion, one of the first persons to actually read it all closely. And the way that he fits it in with his own appreciation for Spinoza’s concepts of Infinity certainly opens up new possibility for the Spinoza-as-lens-grinder, Spinoza-as-microscope-maker, Spinoza-as-technician interpretations of his thinking.

There is much to take up here, but I would like to begin at least with the way in which certain parallels Corry draws that change the way that I see what Spinoza was saying (or more exactly, what Spinoza was thinking of, and perhaps associating on), when talking about infinities. Key, as always, is coming to understand just what Spinoza had in mind when drawing this Bound Infinities diagram:

Corry points out in his analysis/summation of Letter 12, grafting from Gueroult’s commentary, that in order to understand the epistemic point (the status of mathematical figures, and what they can describe), one has to see that what Spinoza as in mind in writing to Meyer is a very similar diagram found in his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, of which Meyer was the active editor. There the diagram is not so Euclidean, but rather is mechanical, or, hydro-dynamical:

The diagram illustrates water moving at a constant rate (a “fixed ratio” one might say), but due to the nature of the tube it must be moving at point B, four time faster than at AC, and a full differential of speeds between. There you can see that any section of the intervening space between the two circles composed of “inequalities of distance”  in the Letter 12 diagram (AB/CD) is not really meant as an abstraction of lines and points as it would seem at first blush (the imaginary of mathematics), but rather real, mechanical differentials of speed and material change. The well-known passage

As, for instance, in the case of two circles, non-concentric, whereof one encloses the other, no number can express the inequalities of distance which exist between the two circles, nor all the variations which matter in motion in the intervening space may undergo. This conclusion is not based on the excessive size of the intervening space. However small a portion of it we take, the inequalities of this small portion will surpass all numerical expression. Nor, again, is the conclusion based on the fact, as in other cases, that we do not know the maximum and the minimum of the said space. It springs simply from the fact, that the nature of the space between two non-concentric circles cannot be expressed in number.

Letter 12

The Lathe Buried Under the Euclidean Figure

But, and this is where Corry Shores alerted me to something I did not formerly see, the relationship between the two diagrams is even further brought forth when we consider Spinoza’s daily preoccupation with lens-grinding and instrument making. It has been my intuition, in particular, that Spinoza’s work at the grinding lathe which required hours of patient and attentive toil, MUST have had a causal effect upon his conceptualizations; and the internal dynamics of the lathe (which fundamentally involve the frictioned interactions of two spherical forms under pressure – not to mention the knowing human eye and hand), must have been expressed by (or at least served as an experiential confirmation of) his resultant philosophy. If there was this heretofore under-evaluated structuring of his thought, it would seem that it would make itself most known in his Natural Philosophy areas of concern, that is to say, where he most particularly engaged Descartes’s mechanics (and most explicitly where he refused aspects of his optics, in letters 39 and 40). And as we understand from Spinoza’s philosophy, Natural Philosophy and metaphysics necessarily coincide.

What Shores shows me is that Spinoza’s Bound infinities diagram (letter 12), his very conception of the circle, is intimately and “genetically”  linked to the kinds of motions that produce them. It is with great likelihood that Spinoza is thinking of his off-center circles, not only in terms of the hydrodynamics that circulate around them, but also in terms of Descartes’ tangents of Centrifugal force.

There is a tendency in Spinoza to conflate diagrams, and I cannot tell if this is unconscious (and thus a flaw in his reasoning process) or if he in his consummate philosophy feels that all of these circular diagrams are describing the very same thing simply on different orders of description. But the connection between a tangential tendency to motion conception of the circle (which Corry makes beautifully explicit in terms of optics) and Spinoza’s consideration of bound Infinities in the letter 12 (which remains implicit in Corry’s organization of thoughts), unfolds the very picture of what Spinoza has in mind when he imagines two circles off-center to each other. Spinoza is thinking of is lens-grinding blank, and the spinning grinding form.

One can see the fundamental dynamic of the lathe from Van Gutschoven’s 1663 letter to Christiaan Huygens, illustrating techniques for grinding and polishing small lenses,

And it is my presumption that Spinoza worked at a Springpole lathe, much like one used by Hevelius, Spinoza’s Grinding Lathe: An Extended Hypothesis, the dynamics of which are shown here:

In any case, when one considers Spinoza’s Bound Infinity diagram, under the auspices of tangential motion tendencies, and the hydrodynamic model of concentric motions, I believe one cannot help but also see that the inner circle BC which is off-center from the first, is representationally the lens-blank, and the larger circle AD, is potentially the grinding form. And the reason why Spinoza is so interested in the differenitals of speed (and inequalities of distance) between two, is that daily, in his hand he felt the lived, craftsman consequence of these off-center disequilibria. To put it one way sympathetic to Corry’s thinking, one could feel them analogically, with the hand, though one could not know them digitally, with math. The human body’s material (extensional) engagements with those differentials (that ratio, to those ratios), is what produced the near perfectly spherical lens; and the Intellect intuitionally – and not mathematically – understands the relationship, in a clear and distinct fashion, a fashion aided by mathematics and figure illustration, which are products of the imagination.

What is compelling about this view is that what at first stands as a cold, abstract figure of simply Euclidean relationships, suddenly takes on a certain flesh when considering Spinoza’s own physical experiences at lens-grinding. Coming to the fore in such a juxtaposition is not only a richer understanding of the associations that helped produce it, but also the very nature of Spinoza’s objection to the sufficiency of mathematical knowledge itself. For him the magnitudes of size, speed and intensity that are buried between any two limits are not just abstract divisions of line and figure, or number to number. They are felt  differentials of real material force and powers of interaction, in which, of which, the body itself necessarily participates. The infinities within (and determinatively outside of) any bound limits, are mechanical, analogical, felt and rational.

Corry raises some very interesting relationship question between the Spinoza Bound Infinities Diagram and the Diagram of the Ideal Eye from letter 39. They are things I might have to think on. The image of the ideal eye is most interesting because it represents (as it did for Descartes) a difficult body/world shore that duplicates itself in the experiential/mathematical dichotomy. Much as our reading of the duplicity of the Bound Infinity Diagram which shows mathematical knowledge to be a product of the imaginary, the diagram of the ideal eye, also exposes a vital nexus point between maths, world and experience.

From Mechanics to Optics (to Perception)

It should be worthy to note that Spinoza’s take on the impossibility of maths to distinguish any of the bound infinities (aside from imposing the bounds themselves), bears some homology to Spinoza’s pragmatic dismissal of the problem of spherical aberration which drove Descartes to champion the hyperbolic lens. When one considers Spinoza’s ideal eye and sees the focusing of pencils of light upon the back at the retina (focusingswhich as drawn do not include the spherical aberration which Spinoza was well-aware of), one understands Spinoza’s appreciation of the approximate nature of perceptual and even mathematical knowledge. This is to say, as these rays gather in soft focus near the back of the eye (an effect over-stated, as Spinoza found it to be via Hudde’s Specilla circularia), we encounter once again that infinite grade of differential relations, something to be traced mathematically, but resultantlyexperienced under the pragmatic effects of the body itself. “The eye is not so perfectly constructed” Spinoza says, knowing as well that even if it were a perfect sphere there as yet would be gradations of focus from the continumof rays of light so refracted by the circular lens. What Spinoza has in mind, one strongly suspects, and that I have argued at length, is that the Intellect, with its comprehensive rational in-struction from the whole, ultimately Substance/God, in intuitional and almost anagogic fashion, is the very best instrument for grasping and acting through the nature of Nature, something that neither bodily perception, or mathematical analysis may grasp. Indeed, as Corry Shores suggests in his piece, it is the very continuum of expressional variability of Substance (real infinities within infinities) which defies the sufficiency of mathematical description, but it is the holistic, rational cohesion of expression which defies experiential clusterings of the imagination: the two, mathematics and imaginary perception, forming a related pair.

In the end I suspect that there is much more to mine from the interelationship between Spinoza’s various circular diagrams, in particular these three: that of the relationship of the modes to Substance (EIIps), that of the the hydrodynamics of circulating water (PCP, implicit in the Letter 12 diagram of Bound Infinites), and the Ideal eye (letter 39), each of these to be seen in the light of the fundamental dynamics of the lens-grinding lathe to which Spinoza applied himself for so many years, and at which he achieved European renown expertise.

The Infinities Beneath the Microscope

I would like to leave, if only for Corry Shores’ consideration, one more element to this story about Real Infinities (and I have mentioned it in passing before on my blog). There is an extraordinary historical invocation of something very much like Spinoza’s Bound Infinities in the annals of anatomical debates that were occurring in last decade of Spinoza’s life. I would like to treat this in a separate post and analysis, but it is enough to say that with the coming of the microscope what was revealed about the nature of the human body actually produced more confusion than understandings in what it revealed, at least for several decades. Only recently was even the basic fact of the circulation of blood in the body, something we take for granted, grasped. And in the 1670s the overall structure or system of human anatomy was quite contested, contradictory evidence from the microscope being called in support one theory or another. Among these debators was Theodore Kerckring, who was weighing in against the theory that the human body was primarily a system of “glands” (and not ducts). Kerckring’s  connection to Spinoza is most interesting, much of it brought to light in Wim Klever’s inferential and quite compelling treatment of the relationship of Van den Enden  and Spinoza. In any case Kerckring  is in possession of a microscope made by Spinoza (the only record of its kind), and by virtue of its powers of clarity he is exploring the structure of ducts and lymph nodes. Yet he has skepticism for what is found in the still oft-clouded microscope glass leads him to muse about the very nature of perception and magnification, after he tells of the swarming of tiny animals he has seen covering the viscera of the cadaver, (what might be the first human sighting of bacteria). He writes of the way in which even if we see things clearly, unless we understand all the relationships between things, from the greatest breadth to the smallest, we simply cannot fully know what is happening, if it is destruction or preservation:

On this account by my wondrous instrument’s clear power I detected something seen that is even more wondrous: the intestines plainly, the liver, and other organs of the viscera to swarm with infinitely minute animalcules, which whether by their perpetual motion they corrupt or preserve one would be in doubt, for something is considered to flourish and shine as a home while it is lived in, just the same, a habitation is exhausted by continuous cultivation. Marvelous is nature in her arts, and more marvelous still is Nature’s Lord, how as he brought forth bodies, thus to the infinite itself one after another by magnitude they having withdrawn so that no intellect is able to follow whether it is, which it is, or where is the end of their magnitude; thus if in diminishments you would descend, never will you discover where you would be able to stand.

Spicilegium Anatomicum 1670

Several things are going on here (and in the surrounding context), but what seems most striking given our topic, we once again get a glimpse into the material, and indeed historical matterings of what bound, mechanical infinities might be. (As a point of reference, at the time of Kerckring’s  publishing Spinoza had just moved to the Hague and published his Theological-Political Treatise, having taken a respite from his Ethics approximately half done, and he will have died seven years later.) Kerckring  in a remarkable sense of historical conflation looks on real retreating infinities with Spinoza’s own microscope, and exacts much of the same ultimate skepticism toward human scientific knowledge, as per these infinities, as Spinoza  does in his letter to Meyer. This does not mean that we cannot know things through observation, or that imaginary products are not of use to us, but only that there is ultimately for Spinoza and Kerckring  a higher, rational power of interpretation, the comprehensiveness of what abounds. Neither measurement or calculation is disqualified, in fact Spinoza in his letters and experiments and instrument making showed himself to be quite attentive to each. It is rather that the very nature of human engagement requires both attention to the bodily interaction with devices and the measured thing, and also a sensitivity to anagogic, rational clarity, something found in the very unbroken nature of Substance’s Infinity. What Kerckring’s description does is perform the very consequence of conception in scientific observation itself, almost in Spinoza’s stead (expressing very simililar  sentiments as Spinoza does in Letter 32 to Oldenburg on lymph and blood, and the figure of the worm in blood,

Let us imagine, with your permission, a little worm, living in the blood¹, able to distinguish by sight the particles of blood, lymph, &c., and to reflect on the manner in which each particle, on meeting with another particle, either is repulsed, or communicates a portion of its own motion. This little worm would live in the blood, in the same way as we live in a part of the universe, and would consider each particle of blood, not as a part, but as a whole. He would be unable to determine, how all the parts are modified by the general nature of blood, and are compelled by it to adapt themselves, so as to stand in a fixed relation to one another.

There is great conceptual proximity in these two descriptions, suggesting I imagine that Spinoza used his microscopes as well, for observation, not to mention that Kerckring and Spinoza come from a kind of school of thought on scientific observation of human anatomy, perhaps inspired by or orchestrated by Van den Enden, as argued by Klever. Just the same, at the very least, Kerckring  presents greater context of just what kinds of retreating infinities Spinoza  had in mind in his letter 12 diagram, not simply a differential of motions, but also a differential of microscopic magnitudes, each of which were an expression of an ultimate destruction/preservation analysis, something that falls to the very nature of what is body is. Spinoza not only ground lenses, but also made both telescopes and microscopes, gazing through each at the world, this at a time when the microcosmic and macrocosmic, nested infinities were just presenting themselves to human beings. And as such his critique of scientific observation and mathematical calculation preserves a valuable potentiality for our (postish) modern distancings and embrace of the sciences.

Spinoza on the Infinite, the Unbound: Part I

Preliminary

Key to understanding Spinoza’s approach to the Infinite is appreciating that for him, primarily and speaking generally, The Infinite is Unbroken. And following this, modifications of the Infinite (how Spinoza defines the modes) do not break that unbroken state. For Spinoza, any treatment of Substance must follow from this understanding.

What makes this compelling, and ultimately germane to any assessment of the status of rational knowledge as it is found in logically related descriptions, and at the seeming apex of such, mathematical descriptions, is that insofar as numerical designation indicate a limitation, a bound, a break in The Infinite, this is an imaginary product and is not adequate knowledge. Perhaps, penultimately: mathematical, scientific knowledge stands at a skeptical remove from the true nature of Nature. Which is not to say that mathematical relations, and the various fields of mathematical description, do not play a significant role the human being coming into some form of absolute knowledge of God/Substance/Nature. At most, the internal coherence and powerful indications of mathematical forms act as Augustine’s finger, pointing to Substance’s moon.

One can see this in Meyer’s preface to Spinoza’s early career more geometrico treatment of Descartes’ philosophy, The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. Meyer explicitly sets out Spinoza’s distance from Descartes’ matho-scientific treatment of Nature:

This [work] must not be regarded as expressing our Author’s own view. All such things, he holds, and many others even more sublime and subtle, can not only be conceived by use clearly and distinctly but can also be explained quite satisfactorily, provided that the human intellect can be guided to the search for truth and the knowledge of things along a path different from that which was opened up and leveled by Descartes. And so he holds that the foundations of the sciences laid by Descartes and the superstructure that he built thereon do not suffice to elucidate, and resolve all the most difficult problems that arise in metaphysics. Other foundations are required if we seek to raise our intellect to that pinnacle of knowledge.

I had to get this basic beginning out so that I can move on. Hopefully to follow soon: Spinoza’s hyper-proximity to Badiou (and Badiou’s intention misreading), Cantor’s attempt to in-concretize Spinoza’s Infinite (as transfinite), and, the Place of Mathematics within Spinoza’s theory of the Intellect and Knowledge, the weight of Letter 12  (or something of these sorts).

The Unmarked Font of Metaphysics and Truth: Helvetica and Belief

 

The Metaphysics of Fonts

My last post on the documentary Helvetica (2007) had me musing deeply today. Not only does one suddenly begin to notice fonts used in public signage, in omnipresent fashion that invokes thoughts of Ideology (a cultural perspective taken that must be taken for things to be seen clearly, coherently) – “No Parking” and “Please Clean Up After Your Dog” are two interpellative Helvetica commands I pleasingly read today, but one begins to think about metaphysics itself, the way in which metaphysics attempts lay hold of the very invisible, or largely unseen normative rules and restrictions which essentially condition our capacity to make sense of the world and others, as they are. In distinction from Ideology, Metaphysics is trans-historic, or aims to be. Can Helvetica and its largely ubiquitous, in-visible presence in Western Cultural centers of political command and commercial invitation, give us some clue or evidence towards bothMetaphysical aims, and Ideological functioning (with the understanding that Metaphysics and Ideology bear some relationship to each other)? And, in looking at the dominance of Helvetica, is there a metaphysical/epistemological position that may more coherently than others help us make sense just what is going on in Political imperative and Commercial invitation?

Now surely many others have written on Helvetica with far more erudition and historical knowledge, as the profound thoughts offered on the font by various designer/philosophers in the documentary reveal. These are merely the application of other thoughts I have thought in other contexts to the phenomena of Helvetica as social phenomena, as a point of musing. I have no special insight here, and would enjoy others bringing to my attention any studies/theories that would collaborate or counter my line of thinking.

What comes to mind though when one gazes at the clean, tailless, space-embraced lettering of Helvetica that in the 1950’s swept away so many inconcordant typefaces in both advertisements and eventually government documentation, is the fundamental distinction between the Marked and the Un-marked. An Un-marked element is one whose input or information passes relatively cleanly through it. It stands as clean of any distinction that would draw undue attention to its form (any sub-element that would be read as “marked” would direct the mind at least in part to the consideration of the making of the form itself, a looking into its own history which may or may not comment upon the substance of its report…to use an obvious example, drunken scrawl left from the night before might markedly direct one’s attention to suspicion about the accuracy (or alternately, inspiration) of the content.

The Marked and Un-Marked: Turning One’s Gaze

The concept of Marked and Un-Marked goes a very long way of giving us an epistemic, though non-essential, binary which may help explain why in Western Culture things like White and Non-White, or Male and Non-male, or Citizen and Non-citizen have such wide-spread and organizing determinations. The Un-marked allows information/content to pass rather cleanly through. The Marked causes us to pause, inspect and ultimately judge the worth of value of the report (and this rather inevitably seems to direct us to the bodily, affective realities of the Marked thing, ultimately viewing the report under an affective, imaginary register). Helvetica, as it’s cultural place has come to evolve and entrench itself in many modern, Political/Commercial, Western contexts, has become a near definitive Un-marked font. 

Now let me deviate for a moment so to pass back into metaphysics and an interesting disagreement that arose in succeeding generations in the mid 17th century, newly modern Dutch Republic. Descartes was all the rage, presenting to forward thinking persons of nearly every ilk, a remarkably clean, efficient, and decidedly mechanistic view of the world. As we all well know as inheritors of the Cartesian mindframe, the world was made up of two Substances, one of which was that of Extension, by which we could view everything as operating as a kind of machine of causes. The other was that of Soul, and the problem was in articulating how the one connected to the other. For Descartes, imbued with a Christian view of the world, a most required connective part was the Will (voluntas), a faculty of judgment with operated upon passive and effortless human perception and its ideas, actively assessing out from neutrality both those which were true, and those which were false. (In this neutrality, perhaps you get the first glimpse of where I am going as per the neutrality of Helvetica as a font.)

Descartes on the basic distinction between comprehension and assessment: 

“All that the intellect does is to enable me to perceive, without affirming or denying anything, the ideas which are subjects for possible judgments”

“That we have power.., to give or withhold our assent at will, is so evident that it must be counted among the first and most common notions that are innate in us”

But, perhaps the foremost Dutch commentator on Descartes in the next generation, the outcast Jew and microscope maker Baruch Spinoza, had a radically different correction to offer to Descartes’ idea of judgment.

The Elder, Truth

Though Truth and Falsehood bee Neare twins, yet Truth a little elder is.

–John Donne

Spinoza denied altogether the basic distinction between acts of comprehension and assessement, denying in fact the Cartesian freedom of Will. This is more than simply a perverse or subversive denial of free volitions as they seem to be to us most obviously. Rather it is part of a very different conception of Mind, and how it operates:

E2p49 – In the Mind there is no volition, or affirmation and negation, except that which the idea involves insofar as it is an idea.

Or, as James later will sum of Spinoza:

All propositions whether attributive or existential, are believed through the very fact of being conceived.

The above citations and framing of the question is drawn from one of the more interesting Spinoza-influenced articles I have read in my now growing years of reading Spinoza literature: “How Mental Systems Believe,” by Daniel T. Gilbert (Feb 1991, American Psychologist). [Click Here for Download]. The article covers the consequences of an elementary disagreement between Descartes and Spinoza, a forgotten disagreement. Gilbert argues that the loss of the disagreement has lead AI designers, who have largely inherited the Cartesian view of mind, to build cognitive models (at least up to the ’90s) on an unquestioned comprehension/assess distinction. This is how the author opens the essay, in the broadest of terms:

Everyone knows that understanding is one thing and believing is another, that people can consider ideas without considering them so, and that one must have an idea before one can determine its merit. “Everyone knows the difference… between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its truth” (James, 1890, p. 283). Nonetheless, this article suggests that what everyone knows may be, at least in part, wrong. It will be argued that the comprehension and acceptance of ideas are not clearly separable psychological acts, but rather that comprehension includes acceptance of that which is comprehended.

The psychological tests the author appeals to in support of a Spinoza epistemology may very well have been superceded by others after it. I have not seen the direction of research that has followed. What is memorable about the article, and why I strongly recommend it, is that it helps to concretely explain a very fundamental difference in theory that may have quite lasting and rippling effects, not only across cognitive science, but also perhaps within social criticism, as I am attempting to draw forth in the example of the Helvetica font. It gives a sense how a rather arcane sounding distinction made in the 1600s may have a lasting effect on the powers of our present day descriptions.

The Library of Knowledges: Fiction and Non-Fiction

But let me press on. Gilbert by way of an expert analogy shows us just what the difference between a Cartesian and a Spinozist cognitive system is. He asks us to imagine a vast library into which new books are continually being introduced (generally, in the human mind perceptions and ideas). There are two main ways new books can be coded as fiction or non-fiction (true or false ideas), what he calls the “tagging system” of each…

Imagine a library of a few million volumes, of which only a small number are fiction. There are (at least) two reasonable methods by which one could tag the spines of books so that fiction could be distinguished from nonfiction at a glance. One method would be to paste a red tag on each volume of fiction and a blue tag on each volume of nonfiction. Another method would be to tag the fiction and leave the nonfiction untagged. Either of these systems would accomplish the goal of allowing a librarian to distinguish fiction from nonfiction without necessitating that he or she actually reread the book each time such a discrimination needed to be made.

It is only a mild oversimplification to say that Descartes considered the mind to be a library of ideas that used something akin to the red-blue tag system. A new book (new information) appeared in the library (was represented in the mind), its contents were read (assessed), and the book was then tagged (recoded or rerepresented)as either fiction (false) or nonfiction (true). New books unassessed ideas) lacked a tag, of course, and thus were not identifiable as either fiction or nonfiction until they had been read. Such new and unread books were “merely” represented in the library.

Spinoza, however, argued that the mind was more like a library that used a tagged-untagged system. In Spinoza’s view, books were represented before they were assessed; but because of the particular tagging system that was used to denote the outcome of that assessment, a new book that appeared without a tag looked exactly like a work of nonfiction. In a Spinozan library, a book’s spine always announced its contents; no book could be “merely” represented in the library, because the absence of a tag was itself informative (or misinformative) about the content of the book. Analogously, ideas whose truth had been ascertained through a rational assessment process were represented in the mind in precisely the same way as were ideas that had simply been comprehended; only ideas that were judged to be false were unaccepted, or given a special tag.

The author passes through a variety of comprehensive though anecdotal evidence that the Spinozistview is correct, credulity, initial correspondence of belief withcomprehension is supported by a child’s gullibility, which only latter grows discerning with experience and the suseptability to suggestion when persons are fatigued or purposivelytortured. (In fact it is with a view towards an economy of processing powers that Gilbert argues that the human mind evolved to believe first, and deny later.) Of interest for our examination of the font Helvetica is his solitation of marked and un-marked words, how the Un-marked term is conceptually more basic than its marked counterpart:

Unmarked terms are thought to describe operations that are more conceptually basic than their marked counterparts. The Spinozan hypothesis states that unacceptance is a more complex operation than is acceptance and, interestingly enough, the English words that indicate the acceptance of ideas are generally unmarked with respect to their antonyms. Thus, people speak of propositions as acceptable and unacceptable, but (unless one is a neologizing psychologist) not as rejectable and unrejectable. One’s statements may be true or untrue, but they may not be false and unfalse. People hope their ideas are correct, accurate, and credible rather than incorrect, inaccurate, and incredible, but they cannot grammatically wish to be unwrong. Indeed, people even speak of belief and disbelief more naturally than they speak of doubt and undoubt. To the extent that one’s words for mental processes do reveal something about the processes themselves, the structure of the English lexicon suggests (as did Spinoza, who wrote in Latin) that the rejection of false ideas is more complex than the acceptance of true ones.

For Gilbert, and I may well agree, there is an essential and operative binary here, in which initial embrace, belief-as-comprehension precedes the counterpart of negation. This allows him the conclusion that all sentences are coded as true until further critique is to be done on them. It is here that I want to depart from Gilbert’s paper which goes on to speak of experimental evidence for the Spinoza hypothesis (again, evidence that science may or may not have suprassed at this time). I want to turn to, in fact involve, this essential dichotomy of marked and unmarked to consider again the powers of the Helvetica font in our society.

 

The Powers of Helvetica

As I pointed out in my last post, there is much mystery about the lasting power of Helvetica, not to mention its strongly persuasive effects in both the political and the commercial realms. From the above description I feel it is safe to say that the sans-serif font Helvetica has come to be the Un-Marked font of both of these domains. And while it seems most likely that it would have been a sans-serif font that would become the un-marked term, there does seem something quite gridlike and balanced in the Helvetica that further enforces its unmarked status.

If we grasp Spinoza’s assertion plainly, we understand that the unmarked term/idea/concept/sentence is the one already believed in its very comprehension, a belief that might be equated to the powers or failings of children. When we read Helvetica, we partake not only in a certain kind of neutrality, but it is a neutrality of affirmation. What is printed in Helvetica by its very form is already a form of belief, we can say. And certainly there are other fonts in other conditions which are the unmarked form, for instance the serif Times New Roman is the glassy clear in textbooks or newspaper publications. Yet, Helvetica, as it stands towards all other fonts which we experience, perhaps because of its dominance of the most significant organizing spheres of our persons (political and commercial power), is Un-marked beyond all.

So, is Helveticaa kind of metaphysical font, a communication of the very weft and woof of perceptions, beliefs and truths? I think we can contingently go in this direction. Wittgenstein in his rejection of metaphysical speculation wanted to turn the most mysterious seeming statements like “All rods have a length” (withsome reference to Kant), into simple grammatical statements. The great truths of philosophy are just sentences which show how we use words, with nothing profound beneath them. For instance “All rods have length” just shows us how we use the words “rod” and “length” and no amount of experience withrods and length will give us evidence to falsify the claim. Grammatical statements are those which cannot be negated, not for mysterious reasons, but because negating them would end up producing nonsense.

As an appreciator of Spinoza you can tell that I cannot fully embrace Wittgenstein’s position, but it does do something to reveal the nature of Helvetica commands or invitations for purchase. In a sense, Helvetica has become the aesthetic manifestation of something close to the Grammatical Statement. Not only as an Un-marked form of a dominant sphere of social organization, and as such by default believed, the form itself induces a Grammatical Statement like bind wherein one can only deny the truth of the belief at some cost of coherence. The truth of the Helvetica-expressed idea, at least at this point in time, has a lasting, affective ballast, which I believe remains even after its negation or disbelief. Contingently a Helvetica expression may be false, but coherently it is true. In our society this is the two pronged force of the Law, and I believe it is Spinoza’s Marked and Un-marked conception of the Mind that points us to this realization.

It remains to be decided just how ideological and how metaphysical these effects are. That is to say, Do the powers of Helvetica participate in, not just historically contingent hegemonic organizations of persons and affects, but also within a more profound potentia  of belief? When Spinoza laid out his claim against the foremost philosopher of his Age, denying a fundamental freedom of the Will, grounding comprehension and perception itself in belief itself, he saw all belief to be an activity, an affirmation of one’s body in a very real and concrete sense. When we perceive we affirm our flesh under a certain degree of power. And we are only made more free through making more powerful affirmations of ourselves. If this is so, the very Un-marked clarity of Helvetica points a kind of absolute relation, a stream of power unto which we are forever orienting ourselves. And it is up to us to separate out our imaginary relations that for instance impell us to buy The Gap clothing out of its very Helvetic form, and the absolute value of the Un-marked itself. Or, to put it another way, we must see that Un-marked categories/terms/concepts/forms are not just devices of control, but also powers that derive their potency from a greater univocality. And it is the Marked term, in all of its developmental and expressive quality, that causes us to realize this.  

What we recall is that these issues and determinations are not those of armchair philosophies, of rare disciplines or their categories, but the very lived realities of experiential Marked and Un-marked Reals. Helvetica speaks metaphysical truths. And we daily read it. This makes room for both the grasp of and resisitance to, Helvetica.

The Ubiquity of the Clear, the Human, the Humane: Helvetica

Many thumbs up for the documentary Helvetica (2007), that happens to be on Netflix Instant Play. I just love the uncovering of these kinds of things, pointing out the omnipresence and therefore degreed omnipotence of something we regularly fail to see. (And since Hofstadtler wrote on fonts in Metamagical Themas, I have to say I have retained a fascination over their incredible expressivity.

The film follows the literal and cultural history of the font Helvetica, up to present day, a font whose ubiquitousness is compared by some interviewees, to air and gravity or at least off-white paint…its just there. Is it a McDonalds of mal-nutricious typeface, ready at every corner, or an elegant expression of what IS? For instance Massimo Vignelli, a “high priest” of design modernism, compares the life work of a designer to the work of a doctor. Whereas physicians fight against disease, designers fight against visual disease, ugliness, which he finds all around us. Typography, we are told, isn’t even the art of black and white, but really the art of the white, the space between the black, like music which is the art of the space between the notes. And Massimo generously numbers the quantity of quality typefaces at barely a dozen, using himself only three.

Driven by legibility, Helvetica is the model modern typeface, carrying the right connotations, perhaps the very “clear and distinct” yet embodied idea of Descartes. Codifed high modernism. Described as “doing away with the manual details” of the 19th century typeface, it achieved a certain gridlike “neutrality” that was and is perceived as “meaningless,” non-occluding.

As one admiring explicator tells it “Its not a letter that’s bent into shape. Its a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space…the figure-ground relationship properly executed”.

But it is not only clear and distinct, but also commanding or unquestioning in its clarity. Paradoxically, still, a commanding quality that is not authoritarian, rather rounded, softly exact, an accessible humanity-clarity. It seems to hold a power beyond even our familiarity with it, our cultural, historically contingent associations. It practically speaks “man” in the blankest of senses.

This kind of beautiful expressiveness of typeface has a power beneath message of course. As one designer speaks of typeface choice: one might not be conscious of a typeface, but one will be affected, in the way that an actor miscast in a role will affect the believability of a story, while not impairing the ability of an audience to follow the plot. The choice of typeface is that of a casting director.

And then in the film is the marvelous, self-confessed typo-maniac Mark Spiekermann (above), who practically spits out in disgust in description of Helvetica: “The guy who designed it tried to make all the letters look the same. He-llooo. That’s called an army, that’s not people. That’s people having the same fucking helmet on”

His engaging, typographical driven English blog is here  – he has a German blog as well. And I must say that I feel compelled to type in his FF Meta typeface. Practically on principle, but also out of aesthetic embrace. (I wish I knew how to download and default typefaces.)

Another designer commenting on it being the urban signification system beautifully calls Helvetica the perfume of the city. Something we would miss if it were not there. And we must wonder if that is not true.

We follow the anti-Helvetica warning “Don’t confuse legibility with communication,” and muse about its radical dominance for half a century while nearly everything else has changed, if “it contains s certain design program” or how a typeface can become an “unfixable” typeface.

These thoughts bring me to a past contemplation of mine, on perhaps the very first anti-Helvetical font, centuries before printed type: Lindisfarne: The Rise of Illuminative Script

Personally I am conflicted about Helvetica, for I cannot deny that profound and fundamental effect the typeface has on me, in particular in commercial circumstances (though surely in government and legal contexts as well). It is indeed reassuring in a kind of subtly rich, nurturing fashion, denying me my status in the revolutionary aesthetic guard, no doubt. But when I think about the things and passions spoken by the Anti-Helveticans, I am also stirred, finding my way, conceptually, somewhere close to the want for an aboriginal deviation that I have not quite found. Helvetica is never sufficient for any personal communications. (I’ve changed my email default many times, and seem to enjoy the serif Sylfaen.) The wish is for a kind of doctrinal handwriting of a typeface, if there were such a thing as a personal typeface (how one would tire of that in a way that one does not tire of one’s handwriting).

In any case, the font we use becomes politicized, aestheticized, in such very important and beautiful ways. Typo-philes are a kind of literal philosopher who gazes at the actual frame in which messages appear. Perhaps we should choose and read more carefully.

 

An Illusion of Free Will: “I moved my mouth. I talked. What did I say?”

 

 

Ed Young posts on recent experiments in brain stimulation that produced something of the illusion of a freedom of will, or at least the solicitation of the desire to act in a particular way: Electrical stimulation produces feelings of free will (found through Speculative Heresy) The original journal article ,“Movement Intention After Parietal Cortex Stimulation in Humans”, tells of how stimulation of the Posterior Parietal Cortex in patients produced not only the distinct feeling that they wanted to move parts of their body, but when the stimulation increased also the belief that they actually had completed the action, though they had not. Ed Young provides an excellently concise summation of the findings, and even makes mention of Cartesian Dualism.

The Flying Stone of Free Will

I am not one for feeling that scientific observation usually resolves long-standing philosophical issues which are born of conceptual and terminological circuits, but this does seem to be something of a a check on the Spinoza side of the ledger (perhaps to be added to the several entered by Damasio). As Spinoza saw the issue of the freedom of the will, the sense that we are freely acting was merely the awareness of an appetite to action combined with an ignorance of the causes that determined that appetite, bringing it into being. We, like a hypothetical thinking stone that is flying through the air, only imagine that we are freely acting, while we have been “thrown” by any number of external (and internal) forces.

The core of this position is found in his letter 62/58 to Schaller (October, 1674), which I quote at length because he presents his vision so compactly. It is interesting that some of Spinoza’s most revelatory position passages come from his letters:

I, therefore, pass on to that definition of liberty, which he says is my own; but I know not whence he has taken it. I say that a thing is free, which exists and acts solely by the necessity of its own nature. Thus also God understands Himself and all things freely, because it follows solely from the necessity of His nature, that He should understand all things. You see I do not place freedom in free decision, but in free necessity. However, let us descend to created things, which are all determined by external causes to exist and operate in a given determinate manner. In order that this may be clearly understood, let us conceive a very simple thing. For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause, a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased. The permanence of the stone’s motion is constrained, not necessary, because it must be defined by the impulsion of an external cause. What is true of the stone is true of any individual, however complicated its nature, or varied its functions, inasmuch as every individual thing is necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and operate in a fixed and determinate manner.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined. Thus an infant believes that it desires milk freely; an angry child thinks he wishes freely for vengeance, a timid child thinks he wishes freely to run away. Again, a drunken man thinks, that from the free decision of his mind he speaks words, which afterwards, when sober, he would like to have left unsaid. So the delirious, the garrulous, and others of the same sort think that they act from the free decision of their mind, not that they are carried away by impulse. As this misconception is innate in all men, it is not easily conquered.

The Moving of Lips

How amenable is this non-dualistic framework to the conditions that Ed Young reports, wherein the motor action was able to be parsed from the mere feeling of intention, so much so that subjects even could be caused to hold the belief that they had not only a volition, but also had acted upon it,

Desmurget, on the other hand, could only ever produce the illusion of movement by focusing on the parietal cortex. And his patients’ descriptions of their experiences made it very clear that they were feeling some sort of internal intention to move, rather than feeling compelled by an external force. Without any prompting from the researchers, they all described their feelings with words such as “will”, “desire” or “wanting to”. One of the patients said, “I felt a desire to lick my lips”, after a low burst of current. With more stimulation, he said “I moved my mouth. I talked. What did I say?”

More than ever we get the sense that Spinoza hit upon something significant when he qualified the ideas we have about the world as really ideas we have of our body being in a certain state or other. And even more so, we get a glimpse into the finesse behind Spinoza’s denial of the freedom of the will, a “freedom” that resided under the veil of our ignorance (all the while still asserting a rigorous ethics). It was no mere abstract imposition of determinism for the sake of determinism. Nothing is more tiresome than the well-worn arguments of the freedom of the will, it seems. But what this study suggests is that if we look at the materiality of our freedoms, the means by which we experience our intentions as free, perhaps another kind of freedom is available, that of knowledge of causes a path of freedom advocated by Spinoza.

Further, our experiences and beliefs about the factuality of our actions, our very autonomic natures, seem to be fundamentally tied to our experiences of our appetites as such. It is not simply the case that we can ask, “Was that movement freely willed?” but also must ask, “Did we actually do what we thought we wanted to?” Our very desires, if strong enough, are part of the perception of action itself, suggesting that the understanding and appreciation for our actions, or intentions, may spring from an understanding of desire and appetite itself, just as Spinoza thought.

Of course, once we start untangling the weave of free intentions, the consolidation of a pure human “subject” also begins to unspool.

Spinoza’s Optical Letters: Redux

As some know, primarily last summer I spent my time researching and theorizing on Spinoza’s lensgrinding and optical concepts, a largely underdeveloped field in Spinoza studies. The greater portions of my findings are listed here on this site under the sub-heading Spinoza’s Foci. A spearpoint of this research was uncovering the substantive arguments and conceptions that lay behind Spinoza’s rejection of Descartes’ optics, as found in his two letters 39 and 40, letters that have be nearly completely ignored by commentators on Spinoza, or if address, addressed in what seems a delinquent, or dismissive fashion. Spinoza is mostly thought to not know what he is talking about. On the other hand, Spinoza’s objections if carefully examined reveal both technically an alternate position on the problem of “spherical aberration,” but more deeply, a radically distinct conception of what vision is, in particular how it works as an insufficient analogy for consciousness. While Descartes wanted to emphasize the power of the central clarity powers of hyperbolic vision (both in the human eye, and in his proposed lenses), Spinoza understood vision and conciousness both as holistic events, ones best approached with the pragamatic appreciation of our limitations. I provide very little philosophical extrapolation here, though the implications are vast, perhaps running through down to the root of Idealism and Phenomenology. This epistolary commentary also does not touch on such other important factors such as the kind of lathe Spinoza likely used, nor much on his likely technique, and kinds of instruments he made and calculated for, which form a significant secondary branch of my research. Yet as these letters remain nearly the only first hand statement Spinoza made on optical matters, they are the anchorage point for anything else that is likely to be asserted.

For the convience of interested readers I here post a Word document version of my line-by-line explication of these rarely read and rather under-interpreted letters. I realized that the previous weblog versions were very difficult to read and browse through, hopefully something this version will correct. The two entries that can be found in this document are: Deciphering Spinoza’s Optical Letters and  Spinoza: Letter 40 and Letter 39. These are both the English translation of the two letters by Spinoza, and then my explication. This version is not footnoted (though there are citations), and it retains some of the idiocyncratic paragraphing and color coding. It is a 14,000 word document (48 pages), though Spinoza’s letters are only 900 words or so.

[click download]: Deciphering Spinoza’s Optical Letters Line by Line