Hey everyone and welcome to the Intellection Surge
My name is Dany, and in this episode on Spinoza’s philosophy
we’re going to talk about one of his most important concepts… God.
If you’re not familiar with philosophy, chances are you’ve heard about Spinoza through Albert Einstein.
It might even be how you got to see this video in the first place.
In 1929, Albert Einstein was asked if he believed in God. He answered:
Albert Einstein actually described himself as a “follower of Spinoza
But back to the topic: What is Spinoza’s God?
God is a central concept in Spinoza’s philosophy.
He actually dedicated the entire first book of The Ethics to define what God is
But you already understood from Einstein’s quote, that Spinoza’s definition of God is pretty different from what we commonly call God.
For Spinoza, God is equivalent to Nature. It’s the famous Deus Sive Natura, God or Nature.
In other words, God is everything that exists, has existed and will exist…
… from the extremely small, to the extremely large…
and this definition is very close to how we define the Universe today.
If you look it up, the Universe is defined as the totality of existence, which is exactly how Spinoza defines his God or Nature.
But the analogy with the Universe doesn’t stop there…
And this where Spinoza's philosophy can get tricky
… Spinoza actually defines God as an infinite substance of particles that makes everything that is.
Those particles are fundamental building blocks that arrange themselves into more complex bodies…
And these bodies arranges themselves into even more complex bodies... and so on... and so on...
Let’s imagine that atoms are those particles.
We know it’s not the case today, right, because there are protons, neutrons and electrons and even quarks and what not……
but let’s assume they are…
And by the way, atoms literally means “irreducible” which really fits the definition of Spinoza’s substance of particles.
So let’s take atoms… Let’s take an atoms of hydrogen and oxygen.
They can come together to create a more complex body… Water for example: H2O.
. Water can interact with another body and end up being part of a cell for example.
From compositions to compositions, the atoms we were talking about will end up being a part of your body.
With this example, we can already understand that the substance makes everything that exists by definition.
So if we are a result of this substance, it means that we are not only in Nature, but we are ourselves Nature.
And we follow this logic… this means that we are God, just like a mountain, a table, a bottle and everything that exists.
You're asking me if Ihave a God complex?
Let me tell you something...
I am God
Well it’s a bit more complicated than this.
We are not God but expressions of God
In other words, we are a way God expresses itself… just as everything else.
Let’s listen to my favorite French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, on this topic.
So... this absolute infinite and unique substance is the Being...
The Being as a being
That which exist is not a being...
What are they then?
We saw the answer
They are what Spinoza precisely calls modes
modes of the infinite substance
But what is a mode? A mode is not a being, it's a way/a manner of Being
It's a way of Being
So that which exists are not beings... There is only one Being, it's the infinite substance.
So as part of that which exist, we are not bodies but a way the substance expresses itself
So it's going to be a bit hard for me to translate what Deleuze just said.
But what he was saying is that basically we are not beings
There is only one being, and this being is God, it’s the substance, it’s Nature
What we are is ways of the being. A manner Nature expresses itself
a mode of Nature as Deleuze puts it
But why is this distinction between the being and ways of being so important? Why does it matter?
Well it matters the being, that is to say God or Nature, is absolutely infinite. This
This means that it doesn’t die. The particles just enter new compositions.
The being or substance really is the creative force behind everything…
it is what Spinoza called Natura Naturans… meaning Nature Naturing.
But the expressions of Nature are finite in the other hand. They die when their compositions decompose
Let’s take a wooden chair for example.
If we burn it, the particles that were part of the chair enter a new composition, the smoke for example,
but the chair won’t be a chair because it would have lost its compositions
This is different from Nature Naturing
this is Natura Naturata which means Nature Natured.
Nature Naturing and Nature Natured are two different ways of seeing the same thing.
But in one hand, we consider the infinite creative substance, and on the other hand we consider the finite results from Nature.
In other words, expressions of God
So you probably already started to understand why Spinoza had some problems with the religious authorities of Amsterdam…
His conception of God is really different from what we find in religion
and that’s something we already perceived in Einstein’s quote at the beginning of this video.…
But you know what? I’ll leave this topic for the next episode…
Let’s do a quick recap’ of what we’ve learned today!
We learned that Spinoza’s God is equivalent to Nature, that is to say everything that exists, has existed and will exist
We also learned that God is an infinite substance of particles that arrange themselves in everything that is.
We saw that we are not beings but finite expressions of the infinite being
And the finally, we’ve learned that there are two ways of considering God or Nature, through its finite expressions – this is Nature Natured
or through its infinite substance, that is to say Nature Naturing
Thanks everyone for watching this video on Spinoza’s God or Nature.
Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments and ask whatever questions comes to your mind.
Cheers everyone, and don’t forget to subscribe to get more of that good stuff!
