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Monthly Archives: July 2009

Some Easy Spinoza

Spinoza is a difficult thinker, not so much to understand, but to tolerate.

That is, there is something so tutorial about his main work the Ethics, it sometimes takes a great deal of effort, or merely exposure, to realize that he has quite benign intentions and realizations, and that there is something even more than a cold wind that blows through the architecture of all those propositions, proofs and scholia. But the work somehow always even upon embrace sits uncomfortably in the mind. It seems to be at the same time obviously false (or intellectually presumptuous), but also evocatively true in ambition and even somehow in reference.

I had a bit of a light-weight epiphany the other day when spending the afternoon down by the creek. The sun was radiating down, the water rushing in that relentless and still pleasurable way, and I lifted my head and stared at the huge boulders that filled the very small valley. In their very size, and the luminosity of the sun upon them they possessed a kind temporality what was in distinct contrast to the ephemera of the day, and of course of myself.

It was in those rocks that something about Spinoza occurred to me, that the kind of things that Spinoza is arguing for in all his elaborate ways are really pretty simple. They are listable.

1. There is one world, which means that when you and I are talking about it, or reacting to it, we are talking about and reacting to the same thing.

2. Things may change in that world, but it is still the same world.

3. We are part of that world, and being part of it is what allows us to communicate and be.

4. Through imagination we helpfully separate out one part of that world from the rest.

5. Through rationality we connect the separated out parts, which are not really separate.

6. Intuition is the flash of this connection. We all experience it.

7. We have very little control over ourselves (much less than we think), and the control we do have comes from thinking clearly.

9. Blaming (and overly praising) things external to us is largely a mistake.

10. Our salvation – in the grand sense, and the daily sense – depends on the salvation of things/persons external to us.

11. No soul can be freed without the body.

12. At any moment you can achieve greater freedom by changing the way that you think.

13. Any thorough embrace of “I” in the most selfish sense, undermines the sense of what an “I” is.

14. Understanding how something works is key to freedom.

15. We are our machines and techniques.

16. Nothing is completely unreal.

17. Everything outside of us has an explanation (causes), but an explanation which we can never be completely clear about.

18. Eternity is just the term for something that is not bounded, but is merely and entirely expressive.

19. The more we become like eternity, even in the most pragmatic situations, the freer and more powerful we are.

20. Gaining control involves separating out yourself from that which is outside of you, then reconnecting yourself by realizing that you were always connected but not in the way that you thought.

21. Things could not have been different than they have been, a thought that makes things very different in the future.

22. Everything thinks, however dimly. Which is another way of saying that things are all to some degree organizing, and not merely passively organized.

23. Thinking involves starting from the widest and working in.

24. I necessarily feel and see the world through others.

25. When we’re wrong, we’re only partially wrong.

This certainly is not exhaustive of Spinoza truths, and some of them may simply be inaccurate. They are a kind of intutional snap shot of much of my reading and thinking on Spinoza recently, and are worth putting down.


What is “Passing through Infinities”?

Corry Shores has another beautiful, traveling meditation and analysis of some thoughts that I raised (I certainly enjoy seeing my thoughts reflected in that mirror, as I discover things that I must have been thinking however dimly, or should be thinking). Here he takes on the trope of “passing through infinities” that I found in von Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theatre”  and the appeal I made to Leibniz’s triangle. He does such an excellent job of explicating Kleist’s story, I recommend his post if only for this. There is a certain openness and journeying that marks Corry’s analysis of things, as he works his way forward, a real pleasure. And Corry does a wonderful job of bringing out the illustration of the concave mirror, and the reversal/vanishing of the image that occurs as the object approaches the focal point (passing onto Deleuze and Bergson). Again, Spinoza’s optics, his experiences with the building of telescopes (and perhaps likely use of mirrors and/or camera obscuras), is something no one has considered when weighing the meanings of Spinoza’s take on infinities. What Corry brings out, though not explicitly, is that Spinoza’s own position upon infinities was itself shaped by his work with lenses and mirrors.

Transverse Condensation

But I want to think to myself about what it means for us to “pass through an infinity” as Kleist claims that a conscious person must in order to attain grace. What I strongly suspect is that this is what Spinoza has in mind when he talks of the three tiers of knowledge, with emphasis on the latter two of these: the imaginary, the rational and the intuitional. Intuitional knowledge is that which is produced when rule-following, rational description is suddenly acceded, surpassed with a kind of accelerated leap of clarity, a clarity which is necessarily comprehensive and not apparitional: Spinoza uses the example of how we can do mathematics without having to move consciously through all our steps. As we journey down into the details of anything in the world, including ourselves, any rational ordering of “what is” not only employs imaginary separation of things from all else (their causes included), but there is a certain density that is achieved in any contemplation wherein one crosses through to the other side, having absorbed the orderings of our body. The confusions and conflations that mark out our imaginary engagements, bringing together under a certain mode of intensity, are first separated out into rational descriptions of causation, but then these delimitations are transcended. The world itself is not transcended. Only our imaginary/rational structurings of it are. And in this way Spinoza’s “intuition” bears a certain condensive similarity to “imagination” such that the two work to prepare and then exonerate the rational which lies inbetween.

I want to say that it is not enough to be analogical here, or more loosely, metaphorical. It is not that we cross through infinities like passing through the focal point of a curved mirror, or like a line crossing over another. Instead infinities are literally gathered up in bounded limitations, and pursued together along certain lines of traverse, and that then these infinities are passed through, onto the other side so to speak, unto a certain comprehensiveness, the kind of comprehensiveness that Spinoza (contrary to Decartes) urges us to start with.

Looking at the Limb-loosener: Between Image and Word

Roxana Ghita over at the floating bridge of dreams posts a gorgeous photographic expression of the “limb-loosener”, drawing in part on my own thoughts of Sappho’s erotic figure. She seems to specialize in the transposition of photography and poetry, and the site is haunting,  and the poem there by Amy Lowell called to mind another Sappho fragment, number 2, of which I include a lexically highly experimental translation.

…there, water cold-soul’d was ringing through braids

of apple-wool, as with roses, the whole child-place

had cast shadows, and from the shimmering of leaves

a coma was pouring down.

What is elegant about her image (and it is set askew by my cropping) is that the overt sensuality of the gaze, the hair, is captured by its frame. Not the border of the photograph, its frame. This is the marvelous thing about the internet. A single strain of thought encounters an image at a cross-section, and the duplication produces a marking, indulable transverse change of direction, beyond the imagination of each. This, not to mention, that 2,500 years lives suddeny compressed into a relative instant.

I want to say, do peer as well (…the way my eyes squint when I look at some of these condensations), into her the beautiful fullishness of things. And the visually fragile however fallible. Something quakes.

The Bear with the Rapier: Kleist on Leibniz and Microscopic Infinities

Dancing Bears Passing Through Infinities

More on Corry Shore’s “Deleuze and Dance…” post. In the comments section of my last post an exchange lead me to recall von Kleist’s wonderful “On the Marionette Theatre”.  – There is some debate as to how much irony is in the story, if there is a kind of Kierkegaardian reverse or distance, but I suspect that given the power of the von Kleist oeuvre and the place that he gives to the power of the sudden and the supernatural communication, any irony is subsumed by a certain belief, or trust – but what struck me was the kind of (unconscious) parallel between a point Corry was making in calling up Leibniz’s triangle of differentials, appealed to by Deleuze, and Kleist’s own striking analogy of passing through infinities.

First though, Kleist presents the figure of a bear that is able to fence with extraordinary deftness, such that man cannot even approach:


The Microscopy Beneath Human Sagacity

We are returned to Spinoza’s “we do not even know what a body can do”, the sense in which there are powers within our body which cannot be completely absorbed, understood or even anticipated. (Corry makes use of this to speak of the kind of apparitional capacties of Michael Jackson, for instance his introduction of the moonwalk.) We are like fantastic sleepwalkers…


But I want to return to Corry’s Deleuzian citation of the Leibnizian triangle of differentials, and the sense that Spinoza has in mind a kind of bound infinity of parts that grow infinitely smaller within any one delimitation, almost combustable (at least combustable to knowledge) bodies within bodies, growing infinitely minute:

Deleuze characterizes these smallest bodies as being inextensive; they are like calculus limits, or Newton’s “vanishing” (“évanouissants“) quantities. So these infinitely small bodies are not themselves “things” but are more like the differential relations of calculus. (Deleuze, Cours Vincennes: 10/03/1981)

 To better grasp what Deleuze will say about these differential relations, we should take his advice(Cours Vincennes – 22/04/1980) and briefly examine Leibniz’ simple triangle explanation of the differential ratios. [Click on images to enlarge].

The image is of an infinitely diminishing triangle as the intersection of lines near an vertex descrease:

Kleist has something of the very same kind of thought, he may even have Leibniz in mind, but he complicates it, implicates it, as to the very process of coming through or passing through those miniscule infinities.


The human being passes through the infinitely small point, entering into the “looking glass” so to speak, but it is not a reversal in the Hegelian sense of reflective consciousness, or a transcedence, so much as an actual process of engagment, something I think Spinoza also might have in mind.

Corry does well to cite the possible Spinozist Theodore Kerckring’s thoughts that were induced by the looking through human anatomy by virtue of the powers of the an early microscope made by Spinoza. The human being as it swims down into the smaller and smaller bodies has a literal encounter with the limits of the mechanical infinite:


Spicilegium Anatomicum 1670

[Discussed also here: Spinoza and Mechanical Infinities ]

Much as Kleist speak of the passing through concavity, of knowledge passing through an infinity, Kerckring finds that microscopy will only induct us to an infinity that resists us, or at least our eyes. There is a certain regard in which the delimiting mind must release its apprehension to a kind of apogogic comprehension, letting itself be comprehended, so to speak, with a sewn-in result that it is ever and always the body through which powers are channeled and therefore expressed.

Whence Salvation?

Somewhere between the first photo of an imprisonment of powers (the bear chained to perform out of its reservoir of powers), and Leibniz’s evocative minuscule infinities of abstract mathematical division is located Spinoza point about what Infinities are, and perhaps just as importantly how they are to be unlocked, or tapped into. Freedoms are and must be material engagements, combinations, things of which our own bodies are composed, and must be achieved through the soterial collection of that which appears not to think (feel, and act) as much as it can.

Die and Dance in Spinozist Terms

Corry Shores has done a beautiful rumination spurred by my last short post on Deaththat really for some reason stirs me. In serpentine fashion he takes us through the infinimicules of existences, early views in microscopy (citing my favorite, under-read Spinoza document, Kerckring’s testament of animalcules), Deleuze’s conception of bodies in variation and thoughts about Michael Jackson (of whom I have been a little media’d out, but here I enjoyed contemplating). I like very much the thought that we have to ask ourselves, What has our body done in this life? And I love the thought that in living longer we simply expose our bodies to greater variation of expression (and experience), no matter how hard we strain to maintain the border of the same. We should say, What are our bodies enfolding (in dance), what are they expressing? We do not own them. One thinks of as well Spinoza’s Spanish poet (E4p39s), who no longer could recognize his own poetry, and so was no longer “himself”. Reminding us that there are many kinds of death, and thus many kinds of openings.

Death, Bodies, Last

When a body dies, there is a change in the echo of external events. Perhaps that is all there is. And therefore a body does not truly die, which is not to say that there is no change, but that the very notion of change is negotiable, perceptual. A “change in the echo” is to say, it has been dulled, muted, mortified, but it has not ended. This perhaps is what Spinoza means by “God”. Past events continue in their echoeous life in other taken-to-be-living bodies, how Mozart lives across us, and our instruments, our material etchings; but the body itself, as it once was, opens itself up to other confabulation, other involvements. And we think of the first as “ghost” and the second as “decay”, when in fact this splitting is only a growing wide of, and a variant to, Donne’s Compass. Due to the former half, the persistence of the echo taken from its source, some people want to say that there is a fundamental alienation to these processes (poor Mozart can never get back to his “body”); and some people want to see in death a return to a wholeness from which conscious life poses some primary alienation. Instead of course, neither of these is correct. Death is not “lack” nor entropy, but best understood as an opening.

Spinoza and Mechanical Infinities

The Mechanically Bound Infinite







Letter 12

The Lathe Buried Under the Euclidean Figure









From Mechanics to Optics (to Perception)





The Infinities Beneath the Microscope



Spicilegium Anatomicum 1670




Spinoza and Optics and Pirates


}∅{ The Full Set

The Full-ness of a Body








Playing With Symbols



Spinoza on the Infinite, the Unbound: Part I





