The obsessive among you may have noticed that Your Humble Blogger wrote about Spinoza from the advanced vantage point of page fifteen, but not in the four weeks since then. Well, I'm on page 77, now. I don't have much to say, since I find his tone utterly repellent, his assumptions wrong, and his exegesis (or, more accurately, eisegesis) clumsy. His logic, on the other hand, kicks ass. He's a brute, but it's a challenge when he comes up with a conclusion, to find out where and how it is wrong, and it (as far as I can tell) is almost always not in the argument but in the premises.
The most annoying thing to me at present is his bald statement that "the intellect is the best part of our being." Not only does he consider this to be true prima facie, but he relegates the rest of our being to secondary status, considering any attention to it detrimental to the best part, the intellect.
Now, I am, in my own humble way, an intellectual. I value the intellect. I'm no hedonist. But to say that the joys of the intellect are inherently superior to the joys of the body requires some sort of evidence or argument, as far as I'm concerned. And to suggest that the enjoyment a human can get from exercise is detrimental to the self requires a sense of self that is totally separated from the body.
I actually think that the body dictates to the mind quite a bit. I am who I am, in part, because my body has had its part in my experiences. Think about how your perception of the universe would be different if you were a foot shorter, or a foot taller. I don't just mean (although this is important) the different things you would notice about a room, or a sculpture, or a tree. I mean that people would always have treated you somewhat differently than they actually did; your initial impressions on people when y'all were children and teenagers would have been different and therefore your ultimate relationships would have been at least somewhat different. Your habits. Your expenses. Your leisure activities. And that's just height—add your looks, your metabolism, your eyesight, and all the various ways in which your body limits your own actions or elicits actions from others.
I don't know if you are what you eat, but you are what you are, and forgetting that in favor of a mind/body split is bad thinking. I remain astonished that so many good thinkers are prey to it.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.