Why You Are Controlled by Things You Don't Understand — Spinoza

#philosophy #spinoza #philosophyforsleep You did not choose to feel what you are feeling right now. Not entirely. The anger arrives before you decide to be angry. The fear is present when you wake up. The love that reorganized everything did not ask your permission. The patterns that run through your responses to particular people in particular situations — you recognize them, you have named them, you understand where they came from. And they keep running. Baruch Spinoza — the Dutch-Jewish philosopher born in Amsterdam in 1632, excommunicated from his community at twenty-three, attacked in the street, who ground lenses for a living and refused every prestigious position offered to him and died at forty-four of the glass dust — called this bondage. Not bondage in the dramatic sense. The specific, philosophical, entirely accurate description of a being who is moved by forces it does not comprehend. Who mistakes the reaction for the choice and the compulsion for the preference. And he spent his life arguing that understanding these forces — tracing them back to their causes, seeing clearly what is actually moving you and why — is the only freedom available to a human being. Not freedom from feeling. Freedom in the feeling. The freedom of the person who understands what is causing them. Which is, Spinoza believed, more than enough. This video is the full philosophy — the excommunication, God or Nature, the emotions as forces, the common notions, what freedom actually means, the intellectual love of God, and what the lens-grinder in the small room in The Hague left behind. — Topics covered: Who Spinoza was — the excommunication, the lens-grinder, the refusals God or Nature — the most dangerous idea in Europe The emotions as forces — joy, sadness, bondage The three kinds of knowledge — imagination, reason, intuition Freedom — what it actually is and what it is not The intellectual love of God — what understanding produces What Spinoza knew about living — hope, fear, and the free man The lens-grinder's room — what he left behind — Hearts Country Philosophy — long-form essays on philosophy and the inner life. For the hours when the questions get serious. 🎧 Best with headphones.