So... Is Spinoza's idea of ordering the affects basically the equivalent of finding God in some other thing that is more distant from the affect? That's fucking it?

>>24519894 (OP)
Ordering the affects makes you active and therefore you "exist" more you are the greater part of god and have more power. Not acting and not affecting god's other aspects you are disappearing and distancing yourself from him. Power=existence=god

>>24519904
I get that being the adequate cause of something is required for action (in the same sense God is its own cause), but what does that mean in terms of things that act on you? Like if I run out of coffee, the only coffee really thing I can be an adequate cause of is getting more. So my ability to act is decreased since I can no longer drink coffee or not drinking coffee, but only get more. Is that right?

>>24519921
privation is not the act of depriving, but simply and merely a state of want, which is in itself nothing: it is a mere entity of the reason, a mode of thought framed in comparing one thing with another. We say, for example, that a blind man is deprived of sight, because we readily imagine him as seeing, or else because we compare him with others who can see, or compare his present condition with his past condition when he could see; when we regard the man in this way, comparing his nature either with the nature of others or with his own past nature, we affirm that sight belongs to his nature, and therefore assert that he has been deprived of it. But when we are considering the nature and decree of God, we cannot affirm privation of sight in the case of the aforesaid man any more than in the case of a stone; for at the actual time sight lies no more within the scope of the man than of the stone; since there belongs to man and forms part of his nature only that which is granted to him by the understanding and will of God. Hence it follows that God is no more the cause of a blind man not seeing, than he is of a stone not seeing. Not seeing is a pure negation.

>>24519934
is this the idea of your body or the idea of your mind?

>>24519937
Both

>>24519942
is posting online the attribute of thought or extension?

>>24519894 (OP)
Godfather of totalitarianism

>>24519963
posting online is the substance it has both attributes

>>24519971
the OG question was basically just, if I am trying to quit smoking and write a song... is the song about quitting smoking?

>>24519894 (OP)
Spinoza autistically defines his terms only to continually smuggle in connotations associated with those terms in common parlance. He absolutely butchers the word "Love" (Amor). He asserts in Ethics, Proposition XVII that "God is without passions, neither is he affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain." The Corollary being: "Strictly speaking, God does not love or hate anyone. For God (by the foregoing Prop.) is not affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain, consequently (Def. of the Emotions, vi. vii.) he does not love or hate anyone." Wanna take a wild fucking guess how he characterizes God later? Here you go: "Proposition XXXVI: The intellectual love of the mind towards God is that very love of God whereby God loves himself, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be explained through the essence of the human mind regarded under the form of eternity; in other words, the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself." Corollary being: "Hence it follows that God, in so far as he loves himself, loves man, and, consequently, that the love of God towards men, and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are identical."

Incoherent, muddled, pompous ignoramus. Just an embarrassing excuse for a "philosopher".

>>24521225
The first definition is just to show that God is not a 'person' who loves or hates as a reward. The second is a more rigorous formulation of the cogito argument.

>>24521322
Why use "amor" when, as you point out, "cognitio" is the more accurate term? If you are dealing with something that is STRICTLY and DELIBERATELY impersonal and non-emotional, why employ a term that is perhaps the single word most steeped in the personal and the emotional? To do so is dishonest, so either Spinoza was being dishonest with his audience or dishonest with himself.

>>24521635
Filtered. Spinoza defines Amor as a feeling of joy i.e. an increase in power accompanied by an external object. God is not a man or manlike, by which I mean like a face in a landscape, such that there would be objects in his milieu that please or displease him. It is the privelege of philosophers to define their terms as they please, and not to adhere to the standards of the ignorant. He only wishes to show the folly of belief in divine punishment or reward.
As for your second point
>cognitio is the more accurate term
You do know what I mean by cogito argument, right anon? Well it suffers from a mediation problem that is addressed here, and also by Kant in a wonderful footnote to the transcendental deduction. In brief 'I' is in two places, being and thought. Cogito ergo sum. How do we relate doubt/thought about 'me' to 'my being' such that there is a more than arbitrary relation. It is problematic to relate thought to undetermined being, as there would be no qualifications in said being which could ground the synthesis. Love is the disclosure of being and thought in this usage and functions immanently. Love is disclosive and synthetic. Remember what I said earlier about it involving external objects? So love is Gods immanent differentiation into subject/thought and being. Amo ergo sum.

>>24521635
>To do so is dishonest, so either Spinoza was being dishonest with his audience or dishonest with himself.
Let's suppose the former were true--and what, exactly? He wrote a book (unpublished during his lifetime) with a synthetic (i.e., "Euclidean") presentation while signing off on his friend Ludwig Meyer's preface for his The Principles of Descartes' Philosophy where that presentation results in an "assent [which] is extorted from the reader however unwilling or unyielding he may be." Consider Descartes himself, who says in a letter to a friend,

>Do not propose new opinions as new, but ***retain all the old terminology for supporting new reasons; that way no one can find fault with you, and those who grasp your reasons will by themselves conclude to what they ought to understand***. Why is it necessary for you to reject so openly the [Aristotelian doctrine of] substantial forms? Do you not recall that in the Treatise on Meteors I expressly denied that I rejected or denied them, but declared only that they were not necessary for the explication of my reasons?

And in another letter to a different friend,

>...there are many other things in them; and I tell you, between ourselves, that these six Meditations contain all the foundations of my physics. But that must not be spread abroad, if you please; for those who follow Aristotle will find it more difficult to approve them. ***I hope that [my readers] will accustom themselves insensibly to my principles, and will come to recognize their truth, before perceiving that they destroy those of Aristotle***.

Spinoza is very similar in this respect.

>>24521734
>Valid criticism after reading the text and thinking about it rationally
>"FiLtErEd"
You are everything wrong with /lit/

Spinoza goes out of his way to explicitly say that God feels no love or hate, is affected by no emotion of pleasure or pain. You simply cannot assert this, and then go on to say that God has "amor". It is contradictory by the author's own explicitly stated definition.

I think you are just talking past my point, since the only thing you wrote which actually addresses what I posted simply confirms the contradiction I pointed to. If "amor" is tied to a feeling of joy, it is impossible to attribute this to God when you have defined God as devoid of feelings.

Further, to your point, the mediation problem is a canard. The statement "Cogito ergo sum" is the statement that my thoughts exist, and by necessity, everything necessary for thought to exist must also exist. Also, remember, I am making this statement since I am apprehending that I have thoughts. Thus, not only thoughts exist, but an apprehender of the thoughts exist, namely, "I". Thus, we can be certain that both thoughts and their apprehender have being in some form. At not point does love enter into it.

>>24521825
God considered as an infinite self caused substance does not feel amor. God as a mode can feel amor. The intellectual love of God is God's love for himself from the modal perspective towards the infinite.

>>24521825
>The statement "Cogito ergo sum" is the statement that my thoughts exist, and by necessity, everything necessary for thought to exist must also exist
What do you mean by everything? I think you mean a set of discrete objects that are joined by cause and effect. This is the problem. Do not go from that to the absolute just verbally, there is more to it. I is another. I is in both thought and being. It is both, but undetermined being cannot be related to the discursive intellect without mediation.

>>24521854
Defining God as a mode is to alter the fundamental characteristics of how he was previously defined. Again, we have a shifting and expanding definition until the word being used loses all meaning at all. The "amor" being felt is by a human mind in this example, and you seem to be taking that and exporting it to God through this modal sleight of hand.

>>24521864
Anything that exists has some form of being. If I apprehend a thought, even if I apprehend an illusion, that thought or illusion has being, just as I, the apprehender have being.

>>24521879
If God is infinite and omnipotent then it would be contradictory to posit a limit on God such that man would be 'numerically' distinct. Man can only be modally distinct. The intellectual love of God is the love one feels for oneself as a mode (of substance considered under the attribute of thought) towards oneself in their 'being' (substance sub specie aeternitatas). Therefore I draw the parallel to Descartes relation of thought and being.
>If I apprehend a thought, even if I apprehend an illusion, that thought or illusion has being, just as I, the apprehender have being.
Beings are not being. 'Am-ness' is mine when the doubts are about my being. How do we relate these two 'me's? The me on the side of being, and the me as object of discourse, whether doubt or affirmation.

>>24521225
Everybody replying to you is wrong and a coping retard.
>Incoherent, muddled, pompous ignoramus. Just an embarrassing excuse for a "philosopher".
Youre completely right. The worst of philosophy is the god obsessed post hoc rationalization type.

>>24521225
God to Spinoza is a force and not a fat Jewish man with a beard sitting in the clouds. Spinoza's God does not contradict himself, he does not love or hate. He just is. Spinoza was godfather of spiritual but not religious

>>24522368
>Spinoza was godfather of spiritual but not religious
The Greeks, anon. Start with the Greeks.

>>24522406
Spinoza and Descartes for that matter are important because they revived that sort of idea in the rationalist age. Then you had devout "the Bible is literal" Christians like Pascal on the opposing end in the same time frame. Europe was alive with heterogenous ideas striking crippled orthodoxies.

>>24522368
Why does he bang on about God's love for himself and God's love for man and then in the next breath exclaim "BUT DON'T GET THE IDEA THAT GOD CAN LOVE!"???