Author | Gilles Deleuze |
---|---|
Original title | Spinoza: Philosophie pratique |
Translator | Robert Hurley |
Language | French |
Subject | Baruch Spinoza |
Publisher | Presses Universitaires de France, City Lights Books |
Publication date | 1970 |
Publication place | France |
Published in English | 1988 |
Media type | Print (Hardback and Paperback) |
Pages | 130 (City Lights edition) |
ISBN | 978-0872862180 |
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (French : Spinoza: Philosophie pratique) (1970; second edition 1981) is a book written by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze which examines Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, discussing Ethics (1677) and other works such as the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), providing a lengthy chapter defining Spinoza's main concepts in dictionary form. Deleuze relates Spinoza's ethical philosophy to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Willem van Blijenbergh, a grain broker who corresponded with Spinoza in the first half of 1665 and questioned the ethics of his concept of evil.
Deleuze discusses Spinoza's philosophy, providing a chapter defining Spinoza's main concepts in dictionary form. [1] He relates Spinoza's ethical philosophy to the writings of Nietzsche, citing On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) and an 1881 letter to the theologian Franz Overbeck, [2] and Blijenbergh, a grain broker who corresponded with Spinoza in the first half of 1665 and questioned the ethics of his concept of evil. Deleuze observes that Spinoza's letters to Blijenbergh are the only place in his work where he "considers the problem of evil per se", making them of unique importance, and records Spinoza's developing frustration with Blijenbergh. [3] Explaining Spinoza's use of the body as a model for philosophers, Deleuze writes that, "When a body 'encounters' another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts...we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threatens our own coherence." [4]
According to Deleuze, Spinoza sees consciousness as "transitive": "Consciousness is the passage, or rather the awareness of the passage from these less potent totalities to the more potent ones, and vice versa." Consciousness "is not a property of the Whole...it has only an informational value, and what is more, the information is necessarily confused and distorted." [5] To show how decomposition works, Deleuze uses Spinoza's example from the Hebrew Bible: the forbidden fruit that Adam eats in the Garden of Eden. [6]
When Adam hears God's command not to eat the forbidden fruit, he understands it as a prohibition. Deleuze notes that God's command refers to a fruit that will poison Adam if he eats it, which he describes as "an instance of an encounter between two bodies whose characteristic relations are not compatible...the fruit will determine the parts of Adam's body to enter into new relations that no longer accord with his own essence." Deleuze writes that, "...because Adam is ignorant of causes, he thinks that God morally forbids him something, whereas God only reveals the natural consequence of ingesting the fruit." He explains that Spinoza believes that everything defined as "evil" is of this type: "bad encounters, poisoning, intoxication, relational decomposition." [6]
Spinoza thus replaces morality, which in Deleuze's words "always refers existence to transcendent values" and which represents God's judgment, with ethics, "a typology of immanent modes of existence". The opposition between good and evil is replaced by "the qualitative differences of modes of existence", an opposition between what is good and what is simply bad. In Spinoza's account, as described by Deleuze, "consciousness misapprehends all of Nature", and "...all one needs in order to moralize is to fail to understand." Misunderstanding a law makes it appear in the form of a moral 'You must.'" [7] The domain of the eternal truths of nature and that of the moral laws of institutions can be separated through considering their effects. Deleuze writes that, "Law, whether moral or ethical, does not provide us with any knowledge; it makes nothing known. At worst it prevents the formation of knowledge (the law of the tyrant). At best, it prepares for knowledge and makes it possible (the law of Abraham or of Christ)." He believes that ontology has historically been compromised by an error "whereby the command is mistaken for something to be understood, obedience for knowledge itself, and Being for Fiat." [8]
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy was first published in 1970 by Presses Universitaires de France. In 1981, a revised and expanded edition was published by Les Éditions de Minuit. In 1988, the book was published in Robert Hurley's English translation by City Lights Books. [9]
Hurley credited Deleuze with making clear the kinship of Spinoza and Nietzsche. Observing that Spinoza: Practical Philosophy is difficult, Hurley wrote that, "...the situation is helped by the author's word to the wise: one doesn't have to follow every proposition, make every connection — the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway." Hurley suggested that the book should be read like poetry. [10] The philosopher Pierre-François Moreau wrote that Deleuze sees in Spinozism a philosophy of power. [11] The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggested that Deleuze provided a reading of Spinoza's thinking compatible with the view that the mind arises from the body. [12] The philosopher Alan D. Schrift wrote that, together with Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy "influenced several generations of French Spinozism". [13]
Baruch (de) Spinoza, also known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza, was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin. A forerunner of the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza significantly influenced modern biblical criticism, 17th-century rationalism, and Dutch intellectual culture, establishing himself as one of the most important and radical philosophers of the early modern period. Influenced by Stoicism, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Ibn Tufayl, and heterodox Christians, Spinoza was a leading philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age.
In ethical philosophy, ethical egoism is the normative position that moral agents ought to act in their own self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest. Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism, which holds that it is rational to act in one's self-interest. Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are ethical.
Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.
Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, usually known as the Ethics, is a philosophical treatise written in Latin by Baruch Spinoza. It was written between 1661 and 1675 and was first published posthumously in 1677.
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Willem van Blijenbergh (1632–1696) was a Dutch grain broker and amateur Calvinist theologian. He was born and lived in Dordrecht. He engaged in philosophical correspondence with Baruch Spinoza regarding the problem of evil. Their correspondence consisted of four letters each, written between December 1664 to June 1665. Blijenbergh visited Spinoza at his home in June, after which their correspondence ended.
Steven Mitchell Nadler is an American/Canadian academic and philosopher specializing in 17th-century philosophy. He is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and was Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is also director of their Institute for Research in the Humanities.
Heidi M. Ravven is the Bates and Benjamin Professor of Classical and Religious Studies at Hamilton College, where she has taught her specialization, Jewish Philosophy, and general Jewish Studies since 1983. She is a Fellow in Neurophilosophy of the Integrative Neurosciences Research Program, which is co-directed by Vilayanur Ramachandran and Kjell Fuxe. She has been appointed Visiting Professor of Philosophy in the School of Marxism at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China, for 2017-20.
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Robert Hurley is a translator who has translated the work of several leading French philosophers into English, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille. For example, he led the team translating selections from Foucault's three-volume Dits et écrits, 1954-88.
This is a list of philosophical literature articles.
John Llewelyn was a Welsh-born British philosopher whose extensive body of work, published over a period of more than forty years, spans the divide between Analytical and Continental schools of contemporary thought. He has conjoined the rigorous approach to matters of meaning and logic typical of the former and the depth and range of reference typical of the latter in a constructive and critical engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.
Buddhist thought and Western philosophy include several parallels.
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza is a 1968 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in which the author conceives Baruch Spinoza as a solitary thinker who envisioned philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification. Deleuze sees how the univocity of Being fits into the theory of substance and looks into the relationship between the theory of ideas and the production of truth and sense, the organisation of affect to achieve joy, and the organization of affect in the theory of modes.
Beth Lord is a Canadian philosopher specialising in the history of philosophy, especially the work and influence of Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza, and contemporary Continental philosophy. She is currently a Professor and Head of School in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, where she has worked since 2013.
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