Hi, I am from spain. high school´s teacher of philosophy. i read spinoza. spinoza is the name of a small town in spain (Espinosa). his family was portuguese exiled, etc.
very interesting question about radical enlightment, free thought and tolerance to religious practice. i remember that in Politics Treatise, or maybe in Theological-Politics Treatise, Spinoza wrote that free speech and free thought is prioritary, but he also wrote that all the people is not always able to think rigthly, so that is also necessary the tolerance to religious practice for democracy. ¿Spinoza vs. Locke? is not possible spinoza+locke? anyway, spinoza stated that the best religion, in a different way to locke, was catholicism: "God is love" from st. john is the nearest religious precept to "amor intellectuallis dei".
ximo brotons,
cheers
>From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: [lbo-talk] Spinoza v. Locke
>Date: Wed, 25 Jan 2006 11:54:18 -0800 (PST)
>
>
>On the Improvement of the Understanding" (even in English, what a
>lovely, clear and crisp phrase) I was hooked from the title which made
>serious promises the text kept. .d.
>
>----------
>
>I was thinking back when I was a high school kid checking out the
>abridged version of Aquinas. It covered several topics but the one I
>remember was his argument on first causes. Since Aquinas mentioned
>Aristotle a lot, I went back to the library and looked around on the
>same shelf, the `A's. I picked the smallest volume I could find, and
>unfortunately it was on `Physics'. I got nothing out of it.
>
>For some reason I wondered over a few more titles and tried Carl Jung,
>Psychology of the Unconscious. It sounded `deep'. When I took it to
>the borrowing counter, the library clerk told me I needed adult
>permission to check it out. I interpreted this to mean there
>was sex in it. So I called my mother and she came down and signed off
>on it, asking what the hell I was doing trying to read Jung. She
>seemed to know who he was. When I got home I tried for several days to
>get through the first paragraph and discovered I didn't understand
>half the words. Well, I understood the words themselves, but the
>totality of them all together alluded me. I had to look up some of
>them, like libido and archetype. So I was right. It had sex in
>it. Dirty thoughts. I certainly understood those. But I couldn't find any
>in
>Jung. I got a few other ideas out of it like collective unconscious, which
>seemed strange.
>
>How could everybody not know the same thing all at the same time? I
>decided I didn't believe in the unconscious in just about the same
>way I didn't believe in God. I `looked' really `deep' inside to try to
>figure out if there was some hidden place I was missing, or some
>thought I had, that I didn't know I had. All the lies and secrets
>seemed to be just where I thought they were. Nothing missing.
>
>The one thing I think I understood in very general terms was
>archetype. I couldn't come up with one on my own, but the general idea
>made sense to me. I thought of them as something like stone age
>sculpture.
>
>Well, at any rate, the key issue at that moment was God. What to do
>about God. I had a big fight with my father (divorced when I was two,
>and had another family) over refusing to be baptized. But it got me
>re-thinking God. The existence of God. Like the unconscious, I kept an
>eye out for him or it or whatever. I asked my mother if she believed
>in God and she waffled. I couldn't get a straight answer out of
>her. She had been raised in a family divided between Mormons and
>Catholics, and she had followed the Catholic side. I asked a couple of
>friends and after some prodding, most of them did. My girlfriend
>believed in God and we had an argument about it. That made me
>suspicious of her for some reason. I decided I didn't trust people who
>believed in God. They sounded like they were lying or pretending.
>
>I finally figured out that it made most people extremely uncomfortable
>and it was an obnoxious question anyway, so I stopped. I had tried to
>read some of the bible and decided it was complete mumbo-jumbo. How
>could anyone take any of that stuff seriously? But there was the
>art. I had already fallen in love with the art. Everything but the
>crucifix. The only one of those I liked was Grunewald's, because it
>looked like a horror show.
>
>So to the point about Spinoza. Following Strauss in his Zionist essays
>and then opening the Theological-Political Treatise brought all this
>back. Strauss was an atheist, but I am not sure when he decided
>that. It isn't at all clear from his writing, but I suspect that he
>was making up his mind about God during the time he was writing on
>Zionism which was in his mid-twenties. I suspect he was
>trying to figure out how he could be a `real' Jew and not believe in
>God. But this must have given him a serious headache, because the most
>godless of the Zionists were all Communists!
>
>The central idea Strauss keeps probing is revelation as opposed to
>reason. That is the main theme in Spinoza's Critique of Religion (SCR)
>and what he is doing is unearthing, doing what Foucault called
>`archaeology', unearthing the point in medieval Jewish thought when
>reason had taken center stage to replace revelation as a source of
>religious thought. But I stopped reading SCR at the beginning of the
>Maimonides chapter and decided I really needed to read Spinoza first.
>
>So I have some intellectual sympathy for Strauss on this particular
>point, but I can see he is taking a wrong or bad turn. I get the
>feeling he wants to find some form of intellectual security. The deep
>sense of intellectual chaos bothers him (not to mention the real chaos
>of Weimar). I know he has been reading Nietzsche in this period, but
>he never mentions him, or alludes to N at all. Why not? In the deep
>background are Kant and Hegel brooding like mountains in the fog, and
>he studiously avoids them. Why? I can't help but think he is afraid of
>them. They are vast and he doesn't know how to tackle them directly,
>so he has decided to pick away at Spinoza instead.
>
>Besides, just about every sentence in T-PT beats up on the `Hebrews'
>as Spinoza so quaintly calls them. If it were not for the fact that
>Spinoza was Jewish, T-PT would be considered an anti-Semitic
>classic. In any event, many passages are funny and arrogantly
>witty. There is a kind of flippant quality of complete disrepect. I am
>a little surprized he wasn't burned at the stake instantly. There is
>not wonder at all why his synagogue threw him out. Spinoza was what my
>father would have called a real smart aleck pain in the ass.
>
>CG
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