Here’s every other section we covered:

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza

April 8 - Part I: Of God

July 23 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

July 30 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

Aug 12 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

Aug 19 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

I genuinely was not expecting this final section of Spinoza to be this spicy. The entire preface to Part V is a giant takedown of Descartes and his ideas about how the mind and body interact via the pineal gland, which Spinoza (rightly) finds absurd.

Some choice quotes:

“Such are the opinions of this celebrated man (so far as I can gather them from his work); opinions which, if they were less ingenious, I should hardly believe to have been advanced by so great a mind.”

“I genuinely was not expecting this final section of Spinoza to be this spicy. The entire preface to Part V is a giant takedown of Descartes and his ideas about how the mind and body interact via the pineal gland, which Spinoza (rightly) finds absurd.

Some choice quotes:

“Such are the opinions of this celebrated man (so far as I can gather them from his work); opinions which, if they were less ingenious, I should hardly believe to have been advanced by so great a mind.”

“Indeed, I cannot sufficiently express my surprise that a philosopher who firmly resolved not to deduce anything save from self-evident principles, nor affirm anything but what is clearly and distinctly perceived, and who so often reproached the Schoolmen because they sought to explain obscure things by occult qualities, should assume an hypothesis more occult than any occult quality.”

What’s funny about this is that just how he scratched his head wondering what Descartes was going on about, many philosophers seem to have felt the same about this final part of the Ethics.

The first few propositions are mostly rehashes, or slight improvements, on what was already demonstrated throughout the book. Primarily, Spinoza shows again that there is no such thing as the Will and we don’t need a Will to overcome passions or affects. Instead what is needed is self-determination via understanding, true understanding, of how the mind and the body are affected.

It feels a bit naive to say that all that is needed when you’re feeling sad at a funeral of a loved one, or scared when a robber points a gun at you, is to simply understand where those feelings arise from. And I think Spinoza would agree that some feelings, or passions, are impossible to overcome.

But reminding ourselves that everything in nature is necessary and determined serves as a counterweight. It is a recipe for modulating extreme feelings, for being more powerful and more free.

I think it bears some repeating that there is still freedom within determinism. The will to act a certain way did not originate out of nowhere, it has a cause. What Spinoza argues is that we can either be blown to and fro by the winds of external causes, or we can find and affirm adequate ideas which are part of our nature, and therefore already part of our mind’s essence.

We can make ourselves better, Beth Lord writes in her commentary, by “thinking positively, acting well, and seeking joy.”

The next few propositions to deal with the relationship between the person who truly understands their nature and God. Since we are part of God, we get closer to God by understanding our true nature. And since God is being, this “love of God” we develop is really a love of being.

I won’t get into detail here on the problematic part of this here, since I think my future piece on Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning would be a better venue for it, but I do think it’s worth noting that there are moments of extreme tragedy (war, famine, etc.) where it would be tough to love the beauty of God’s nature.

By P20, he outlines again his view of how to live well, which we’ve covered.

And then, he says that part—about how to live while we’re alive—is finished, and he moves on to the mind’s duration without the body. Let’s get into it.

If you remember back to the section about parallelism, Spinoza made the case that everything that happens in the body has a parallel idea in the mind. But now he seems to say that the mind doesn’t need the body to persist, which is…not what you would expect from the supreme rationalist and deterministic Spinoza. It sounds like he’s advocating for an immortal soul.

I didn’t fully appreciate it on my first pass through the book, but when he talked about finite modes, he essentially was saying that these have a duration. But substance, attributes, and infinite modes are eternal in their nature. So he has been hinting at this, I just didn’t really notice it until I got to Part V. After reading it over, and reading Beth Lord, it sort of makes sense though.

When the human body dies, it decomposes and goes back into the earth. It ceases to exist as a human body, but everything about it has simply reconstituted back into nature. The same is true of the mind. Its relation to the human body, via parallelism, is severed and it reconstitutes back into the infinite mode of mind. We have no awareness of our mind before we were born because things like memory, experience, and duration do not pertain to our eternal being.

The Third Kind of Knowledge that Spinoza then discusses is fascinating. The first two kinds of knowing were experiencing and thinking rationally. The third kind is intuitive knowledge.

In P25 and P27, Spinoza says this is the greatest virtue capable of the mind. Unlike rational thinking, which begins with a true understanding of our own essence and moves towards a adequate knowledge of God, intuitive knowledge works in reverse.

Finally, he ends on Blessedness. The “eternal joyful affirmation of intuitively knowing that we are in God and conceived through God.” The idea that God is Love.

The motivation for living well is not some promise of the afterworld, but is living well itself.

“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; and we do not delight in it because we conquer our passions, but because we delight in it, we are able to conquer our passions.” (P42)

The book ends on my all-time favorite quote from Spinoza, and maybe one of the all-time greatest quotes:

“If the way which I have shown to lead to this result appears very, it can nevertheless be found. And in truth, that must be difficult, which is so rarely attained. For if salvation were close at hand, and could be obtained without great labor, how would it be possible that it should be neglected by almost all? But everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”

Hey friends,

I’m headed on the road with the wife and kids for the next few weeks, with stops in Asheville, Cape Cod, and finally, the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

In the meantime, here’s 10 things I came across this week that inspired or moved me in some way:

1. I started reading Spinoza in the Spring, and then a freak accident set me off my schedule for a bit. But I’m back, and this week I posted my read-along notes on Part IV of The Ethics. The last part is coming out next week.
   
   

2. I’m in the middle of writing my debut novel (technically still a manuscript), and I’ve been thinking about how best to get it out into the world. Apparently, some people are getting literary agents in 48 hours, while others are proudly self-publishing by choice. I haven’t decided which route to take yet, I just want this to be the best work I can do and for it to reach as many readers as possible.
   
   

3. My novel will be a techno-thriller. To help me think through pacing, I’ve started re-reading great thriller novels and reverse-outlining them to see what makes them work. I’ve also been posting some first pages of novels to see what makes them work (or not).
   
   

4. Another approach to learn from other writers is to literally copyedit, or copy word-for-word the writings of other brilliant writers to get a feel for how they do what they do.
   
   

5. I don’t want to say too much about the story, but it has to do with the relationship between boys and their fathers. This clip of Alfred Molina talking about disappointing his dad is a powerful reminder to tell your kids how brilliant they are.
   
   

6. Why did I start writing? There isn’t a good answer other than I felt something inside and just started. I wanted to be creative and live a good, meaningful life.
   
   

7. Wendell Berry had a pretty good idea of the goal of life and work.
   
   

8. How do you put together a story, such as a novel or a feature-length film? I have no clue. David Lynch said all you need are 3x5 cards and the idea for 70 scenes.
   
   

9. Sometimes, just seeing the grunt work of research that goes into some of history’s greatest novels is a reminder that behind the glamour is enough of a reminder to stay focused and get back to work.
   
   

10. I asked Substack who are some good fiction writers to follow. Here’s who they recommended. Some of them are really good.
    
    
    Hope you are enjoying your summer!
    
    

    -th

A reminder of the (tentative) schedule below:

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza

April 8 - Part I: Of God

July 23 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

July 30 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

Aug 12 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

Aug 19 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

Spinoza made it clear all the way back in Part I that his metaphysics is in direct contradiction to Aristotle’s—that nature has no preconceived ends towards which it unfolds; it simply is and it simply unfolds. In the same vein, there is nothing inherently good or evil, as these are notion that suit humanity’s flawed understanding. Spinoza does not believe in absolute moral values.

He opens the definitions in this Part IV with good and evil:

“By good I understand that which we certainly know to be useful to us.” (D1)

“By evil I understand that of which we certainly know that it hinders us from participating in some good.” (D2)

These should seem very problematic to you. If everything is subjective, if morality is relative, anything can be justified as being good or evil in the eye of the beholder.

But the word certainly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it’s easy to miss if you didn’t follow along in the previous sections. To certainly know something, the way Spinoza means it, is to know fully and truly that something is good for our nature, that it increases our life’s flourishing. What we strive for can be good, bad, or indifferent.

Each of us possesses the capability of arriving at a true, full understanding of our nature, though this potential is rarely realized.

“By virtue and power I understand the same thing: i.e. (according to prop. VII, Part III) virtue is the very essence or nature of man, in so far as he has the power of doing certain things which can be understood by the laws of his nature alone.” (D8)

We learned in the last section, Part III, that the conatus is the essence of a thing, its “striving to persevere in its being,” and when we are determined to act by our essence we are the adequate cause of effects.

For Spinoza, this is virtue: the power to act according to our nature alone.

The power to actualize a person’s essence. That’s it.

As a person becomes more passive to the affects, or passions, their virtue decreases. They have become a slave to their passions.

He says that humans are modes that are always subject to the passions (P4C), which are caused by external things (P5), and that no matter how active a person becomes they might still be overpowered by an affect that just won’t leave them alone (P6).

Can they be restrained? Yes, says Spinoza. But only by a counterbalancing affect that is stronger than the affect to be restrained (P7).

As the quote on the cover of the George Eliot translation foreshadowed, blessedness is not the reward of virtue, it is virtue in and of itself. Virtue is based on each person striving to preserve his being, it is desirable for its own sake, it is virtuous to join together with other people, and virtuous people want what is best both for themselves and for others.

“The more a man seeks what is useful to him, i.e. strives and is able to preserve his being, the more highly is he endowed with virtue (or power); and on the other hand, as far as a man neglects to preserve what is useful to him, i.e. his being, so far is he weak.” (P20)

To seek what is useful, or to preserve our being, is first and foremost to think rationally. Because to think rationally is to strive towards understanding, which is in our essence.

And the greatest virtue is to increase our understanding of ‘God’ or ‘Nature’, not in the religious sense but literally in increasing our understanding and true knowledge of reality.

So how does he reconcile this seemingly personal nature of virtue with cooperation with our fellow man or woman?

In P30, he says that strongly affected people, who are irrational and are slaves to their passions, are not good for us and can be “evil for us.” We should avoid them, or better yet, help them restrain their affects and become more rational.

When people are rational, they live according to reason and they are good for one another. In P35, he says that by being virtuous we will strive for not only what is good for our particular nature, but also for the more universal human nature. Huh?

Spinoza has said several times that each person’s particular nature is a subset of the broader human nature, so therefore, a person who is guided by reason towards their own personal flourishing is part and parcel with nature itself, since there can be nothing within nature that is better than living according to our essence.

“For the more each one seeks his own advantage, and strives to preserve himself, the more he is endowed with virtue, or what is the same, the greater is his power of acting according to the laws of his own nature, that is, of living from the guidance of reason. But men most agree in nature, when they live according to the guidance of reason. Therefore, men will be most useful to one another, when each one most seeks his own advantage.” (P35C2Dem.)

I think this settles the question of whether Spinoza’s is a selfish view of virtue, and even though he says that people rarely always act in accordance with reason, it is still preferable to join forces with others and help one another instead of living a solitary life.

“To man, there is nothing more useful than man,” (P18S).

He then goes on to demonstrate that virtue is power, and power is the ability to live according to reason and to help others do the same.

A bad person is not someone who is morally bad, but rather someone who is bad at being a person. They are bad at recognizing, understanding, and actualizing their essence.

We are each to some extent good or bad, as no one is 100% in either direction.

I found P37 Scholium, where he takes a beat to discuss ethics and animals, interesting and confusing. Unlike philosophers of his time, he doesn't try to demonstrate that humans are superior to animals because of our ability to reason. Animals, though they are less complex than humans, can still strive towards rationality and being more active by forming groups. But then he says that just as animals will strive towards their essence by using other animals as needed, we are free to do so as well. He sees no issue at all in eating animals since their nature does not conform to ours.

It seems like this discrepancy is resolved by employing moderation. We can use rivers for water, chickens for food, and dogs to guard us but the moment we pollute rivers, abuse chickens, and mistreat dogs, we have crossed over some ethical boundary because those behaviors no longer serve in furthering our flourishing.

The latter part of the Scholium to P37 is about Politics.

Like Hobbes in Leviathan, he sees the civil state as the solution to the ills of the ‘state of nature’. The ‘state of nature’, as Hobbes wrote about it in 1651, was the pre-civil state period where each man was out for his own and was therefore in constant conflict with one another.

Life was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Spinoza slightly differs in that he believes that if every man was out for his best self, his true flourishing, it would by default also be the best for human nature and global flourishing, and therefore there would be harmony. But nobody is fully rational.

That’s where the State comes in. To control people who are themselves controlled by their affects, the State uses its own affects which are greater, i.e. the rule of law, monopoly on force, courts, prisons, etc.

Civil laws are necessary fictions, and where they go astray, according to Spinoza, is when they are erroneously based on religious doctrine, which pit human activities against the imaginary transcendent values of good and evil.

Spinoza’s ethics on joy were the best part of this section.

Anything that increases our mind and body’s capabilities is good. Books, sports, the company of friends, are all ethically good. Anything that detracts, like bug bites or exogenous compounds which negatively impact our body’s functions, is ethically bad.

Everything that brings us joy is good.

To forbid yourself pleasure, then, is a “savage and sad superstition” (P45S).

This can be seen as a response to Calvinism, which was ascendant during his time and preached meekness and despondency. God, he argues, does not take pleasure in our misfortune. By feeling joy, we participate more in the divine nature, because we increase our being and perfection.

Hope, fear, pity, humility, and repentance, then, cannot be ethically good (P47, P50, P53, P54). A few centuries later, Nietzsche would go on to call this type of Christian morality “slave morality.”

Spinoza does see some merit in humility and repentance as far as social cohesion is concerned, but that it is more useful for people who might otherwise would lean irrational. Better to be humble and fearful than proud and unafraid. For Spinoza, Christianity as a religion, and Jesus Christ as a leader, are seen as a rational ways to organize irrational people.

The closing of this section touches on the concept of the free man.

Free, in this case, does not mean free will, which we’ve discussed in previous sections as being in conflict with Spinoza’s worldview.

The free man, Spinoza says, “complies with no one’s wishes but his own, and does only those things he knows to be the most important in life, and therefore desires very greatly” (P66S).

We don’t need free will to be autonomous, to act with self-determination. To be the causes of our own actions. Our true self. Our essence.

“A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.” (P67)

Spinoza’s ethics are an understanding of our place within nature, doing what is good for our being, which, in turn, is good for the broader being of humans in general.

A reminder of the (tentative) schedule below:

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza

April 8 - Part I: Of God

July 23 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

July 30 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

Aug 6 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

Aug 13 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

Part III is where Spinoza’s core ideas behind the Ethics, of how one should live, start to crystallize. We move from grand metaphysical ideas of modes and attributes and substance, from God being synonymous with Nature, to a more grounded understanding of the day-to-day workings of mankind.

Spinoza takes a chainsaw to Descartes, who viewed passions, or affects, as a flaw of human nature. Something to be overcome with reason. Spinoza disagrees and says that passions are part of nature and follow the same necessity as everything else in nature, which is determined. There is nothing to denigrate.

Instead of repressing our feelings, we should seek to understand them and their causes.

Unsurprisingly, if you’ve been reading along or reading my series on Spinoza so far, you are familiar with his materialist approach: there are no intentions just like there is no free will. Everything has a cause. Everything physical has a physical cause which can be explained by referencing physical causes alone.

In Part III, Spinoza introduces one of his most important ideas, that of the Conatus:

“Every thing, as far as in it lies,* strives to persevere in its existence.”
(P6)

Conatus is a thing’s striving to persevere in its own being, or, a thing’s endeavor for what is advantageous to it.

Spinoza says that this is where our desires and appetites come from.

Each of us strives to carry on living and flourishing and we try to avoid anything which threatens or diminishes that. As he says in P7, this is our essence.

What I appreciated about this analysis is the recognition that our desires are not only things that preserve our being—we also have desires which have nothing to do with that. Sometimes, as Spinoza points out, our desires are simply reflective of experiences we have had and the association of the images and feelings those experiences imparted on us.

He lays out where joy and sadness come from, sympathy and antipathy, envy and schadenfreude, praise, blame, ambition, and shame. A wide range of emotions, of what it means to be human, can all be explained. And in many cases, those explanations point to social conditioning.

Then I got to P35:

"If we imagine the being we love united to another with the same or stronger bond of friendship than that which hitherto attached him exclusively to us, we shall feel hatred towards the beloved being and envy towards our rival.”
(P35)

This is the sexually frustrated Spinoza, and I know this only because I’ve watched several documentaries on him and read the excellent historical fiction novel The Spinoza Problem by Irvin Yalom, which goes into a bit of detail about Spinoza’s crush on Clara Maria van den Enden, the daughter of his teacher Franciscus van den Enden who taught him Latin and Philosophy, and his subsequent envy towards his classmate, Dirck Kerckring, whom she ended up marrying.

“For he who imagines the woman he loves, as giving herself to another, not only feels pain because his desire is frustrated, but also, because being obliged to connect the image of the being he loves in the most intimate way with that of another, he feels disgust towards her.”1
(P35S)

As much as philosophers think of Spinoza as this sort of ultra-rationalist, I found it amusing and relatable that he, too, felt the same sort of heartbreak and envy that we mortals feel in relationships.

The entire book is written in a detached, analytical style, but then little passages like this slip through to remind you that Spinoza was a man, a man who once loved and had intense feelings for others, and that those experiences undoubtedly shaped his philosophy.

The main part of Part III that stood out to me, and that I was most excited to read about, was his treatment of the Conatus. The striving that is inherent in mankind’s essence.

To Spinoza, the Conatus is always present and can either increase or decrease in strength. When we are ruled by our passions, when we are more passive in life, when we allow sadness to overcome us, our Conatus shrinks.

When we increase our activity of thinking, of acquiring more rational knowledge, and when we are more active in life, our joy increases as our Conatus grows.

We can experience joy in passivity (think eating chocolate), but we can also experience joy through action. That type of joy is stronger and different in flavor (pun intended).

I’m excited to see how he pulls it all together in the final two parts of the book to arrive at his morality and ethical claims.

Now I’m back and it’s time to wrap up Spinoza.

Revised schedule below with a healthy dose of TBD.

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza

April 8 - Part I: Of God

July 23 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

July 30 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

Aug 6 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

Aug 13 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

After laying out his conception of Nature and God being identical, and in fact everything in the universe being part of the one substance called Nature/God, Spinoza moves forward with how he views the mind, which in his framework is part of the attribute of thinking.

What follows is less of a summary and more of a handful of points that stood out as I worked my way through this chapter.

1. Ideas

Spinoza defined substance back in Part I as “what is in itself and is conceived through itself.” And that conceiving happens through the Attribute of Thinking.

In the explanation to Definition 3, he clarifies that he wants to use the word conception as opposed to perception, but he wants to make clear that an idea is not the result of something else acting on the mind, it comes from and originates the mind.

Idea is the activity of thinking, according to Spinoza.

2. The attributes of thinking and extension

Unlike Descartes, Spinoza has no doubt about the existence of the body or the nature of bodily sensation. That Man thinks and feels is indisputable to him.

For Spinoza, if there were a creature with no body that could only think—something like an AI—it would be unable to feel sensation and perhaps unable to understand it as embodied beings do.

Sensation, therefore, cannot be pure thought. It must be caused by physical bodies.

Fair enough. But what about the materialist position that thoughts are nothing more than physical processes of the brain? It seems like Spinoza is saying that thinking just is different, which could then be accused of sounding a bit like Descartes’ dualism.

Spinoza doesn’t deny there is a duality, but doesn’t see it as dualism. There’s only one substance, but within it, thinking is the one attribute through which all the others (including itself) must be conceived.

The way I read this is that Spinoza keeps some of the aspects of dualism without its problems (i.e. how two different substances interact).

3. Parallelism

Ideas are caused not by physical bodies but by God as the attribute of thinking, as God/Nature is the only thing that can cause itself. In that sense, there must be a long causal chain of thought, that must also be parallel with the causal chain of physical bodies.

The thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that.

So also a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways. (P7S)

But if every physical thing in our bodies corresponds one-to-one with its idea in thought, why do we not have any ability to think about, or have true knowledge of, everything that goes on in our bodies? We don’t feel our organs working.

Why are humans only able to comprehend extension and thinking but not the other attributes of God?

The things we have shown so far are completely general and do not pertain more to man than to other individuals, all of which, though in different degrees, are nevertheless animate. For of each thing there is necessarily an idea in God, of which God is the cause in the same way as he is of the idea of the human body. And so, whatever we have said of the idea of the human body must also be said of the idea of any thing. (P13S)

Minds are not exclusively human, Spinoza argues, and even animals, bacteria, plants, and rocks have minds. These minds are all part of the infinite intellect of God.

I don’t think Spinoza is suggesting that cats and stones have minds like humans, but that the difference is one of complexity.

4. Bodies, Individuals, and Capabilities

Spinoza’s view of physical bodies is like the analogy of waves being part of, not separate, from the ocean. All physical bodies—you, me, the chair I’m sitting on, etc.—are all part of one infinite physical body, not separate substances.

What I found interesting was Spinoza’s comment in L1 that bodies are distinguished from one another by rates of motion and rest.

It reminded me of Itzhak Bentov’s Stalking The Wild Pendulum, where he argues that reality can be understood in terms of oscillations.

He also makes the case for the complexity of bodies. Humans are more complex than other animals, though Spinoza imagines that there might be individuals in the universe (he doesn’t call them aliens) that could be more complex than humans. I think what he means is groups of individuals being more complex, since that would constitute a collection of physical bodies.

The way I understood this section was as a sort of nod to the hierarchical, or maybe even fractal, nature of the physical stuff in the universe. Molecules to cells, cells to tissues, tissues to organs, organs to organisms, organisms to populations, populations to communities, and so on and so forth.

5. Sensation, Experience and Consciousness

Spinoza now makes a giant leap by taking us from his account of mechanical sensation to his radical claim about self-consciousness.

For his theory of vision and the physics of sensation, Spinoza borrows from Descartes’ Optics: external objects set particles in motion, and those motions travel through the fluid parts of the body and press against the soft part—the brain—leaving physical traces.

This is an obsolete view but it’s not so far different from what we know about photons hitting retinas producing neural impulses. The larger point is that sensation is a physical interaction between bodies.

Every sensation is a record of an encounter. We never get the tree as it is, only as it affects our sensory organs.

“The ideas we have of external bodies indicate the condition of our own body more than the nature of the external bodies."
P16C2

According to Parallelism, the mind has the idea of whatever state the brain is in. So the mind’s idea is of the compound event (tree affecting my organs), not the tree alone.

If you’re old enough to remember the “what color is this dress” phenomenon, you’ll understand Spinoza’s point here. Pure objectivity is impossible because subjectivity is baked into everything we experience.

“The mind does not know itself, except insofar as it perceives the ideas of the affections of the body.”
P23

This part is one of his biggest breaks from Descartes.

Even if you know nothing about Descartes, you likely have heard the infamous phrase “I think, therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum).

Spinoza rejects that and says that you can’t actually know yourself without your body getting in the way, and you can’t know your body without the world getting in the way.

6. Imagining

Images are traces of ideas that are left in the mind. When the mind thinks about things insofar as they are, or have been, experienced, it imagines (P17S). These images don’t necessarily have to be visual, they are simply the traces of the experiences that we encounter.

In Beth Lord’s commentary she writes:

“Imagining encompasses experiencing, reflecting, remembering, anticipating, dreaming, hallucinating, representing, fictionalizing and every other activity based on experience. Imagining therefore takes up an enormous amount of our mental activity.”

For centuries, experience seemed to teach people that the earth was flat. Spinoza anticipates David Hume by saying that obviously knowledge cannot only be empirical but must also be based on mathematical reasoning according to “the order of the intellect, by which the mind perceives things through their first causes, and which is the same in all men.” (P18S)

7. Essence and Existence

P12 said the mind perceives everything that happens in the body, but we also just said that the theory of experience shows we understand almost nothing of our bodies. The mind, Spinoza claims, exists at two levels.

Your mind in its essence is the complete true idea of your body, AND your mind in its finite existence is a partial "confused" consciousness of the body's affections.

My understanding is that there are two vantage points for the same mind: God’s view (outside) and our view (inside).

From inside, we understand that we are entangled with other bodies we interact with, but from the outside, our mind is the complete, perfect idea of our body. Our self-knowledge always arrives mixed with ideas of other things.

8. Adequate and Inadequate Knowledge

On one hand, there is the true understanding as it exists in God’s infinite intellect and on the other hand, a partial understanding of the finite mode who is always bound up with experience and images.

This is what Spinoza differentiates as adequate and inadequate knowledge.

In D4 Spinoza defines adequate as:

“…insofar as it is considered in itself, without relation to an object, has all the properties, or intrinsic denominations of a true idea.”

An adequate idea is an idea that is understood truly and fully.

The adequate idea of anything must include an understanding of its causes and of its determination through the necessity of the divine nature (IP29).

My takeaway is that Spinoza believes true understanding is actually possible. It’s within our essence. But the default state is one of misunderstanding, or only partial understanding.

From our finite perspective, meaning our flawed partial understanding, we confuse things to be “contingent and corruptible” (P31C), i.e. could have been otherwise. Since nothing in nature is truly contingent, this is an inadequate idea.

“I say expressly that the mind has not an adequate but only a confused and mutilated knowledge of itself, of its own body, and of external bodies so long as it perceives things from the common order of Nature—that is, so long as it is determined externally, from fortuitous encounters with things, to regard this or that. It is not so when it is determined internally, from the fact that it considers a number of things at once, to understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions. For whenever it is disposed internally in this or another way, it regards things clearly and distinctly, as I shall show below.” (P29S)

9. Common Notions

The common notions for Spinoza are the things we know with certainty and are how we get to adequate knowledge.

Spinoza suggests that reason, rather than experience alone, is how we tap into the universal truths that are out there and these he calls adequate ideas.

10. Three Kinds of Knowledge

So the first kind of knowledge is through experience, which Spinoza says is partial understanding and therefore inadequate knowledge.

The second kind of knowledge is reason, which he says is an understanding of a thing’s causes and its necessity within divine nature. These come about from the common notions which lead to adequate knowledge.

Reason is not something we are born with but rather it is something we develop.

Experience, though flawed, is how we build up our common notions which allows us to develop the muscle of reason.

Then he introduces the third type of knowledge—intuition—which he will come back to in Part V.

11. Denial of Free Will

Since the mind is a mode of thinking, it cannot determine itself freely (P48). There is no absolute faculty of willing. What he means by this is that no part of the mind can be the absolute causal origin of an effect.

We only think we are completely free because we possess a partial understanding, or inadequate knowledge, of ourselves.

In a letter he wrote to Schuller, Spinoza offered the image of a falling stone that, if it were conscious, would believe it is in full control of its movement and would be ignorant of the causes acting on it.

That’s Spinoza’s metaphor for humans.

As a reminder, here are the order of the chapters. I’ve updated the dates to reflect the delays caused by my injury. They may change:

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza

April 8 - Part I: Of God (we’re here)

April 15 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

April 17 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

April 22 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

Apr 29 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

On Monday, March 30th, I tore my left achilles tendon playing basketball, almost nine years to the day when I first tore my right achilles, also playing basketball. I’m scheduled for surgery later this week. Nine years ago, that surgery had major complications including severe MRSA infection, so I’m a little nervous going under the knife again. Now, nine years later, I am older, a bit wiser, have some experience dealing with this particular injury, and I get to enjoy Spinoza’s teaching in how to confront my own emotion of fear.

To begin his grand argument he starts off with his metaphysics, Of God, where he lays out important definitions and axioms followed by arguments in the form of propositions and scholia, about the nature of being, substance, God, and Nature.

The reason this chapter in particular, and metaphysics in general, seem difficult is because they don’t appear to be about anything concrete or real. Metaphysics has long gotten a bad rap for being close to nonsensical and a waste of time given the stretches it has to make. Still, man is always in search of knowledge and the quest to understand what is the true, fixed, underlying nature of reality has always perplexed us.

The opening chapter primarily deals with ontology, the theory of being. As Beth Lord writes, “before we understand what things are, we need to understand what being is.”

Spinoza believes that we need to start with being because being is not a conceptual abstraction; it is the concrete ground of all of reality. Only once we understand what being is will we have the right basis for understanding objects, people, ideas and the universe. Spinoza’s basic idea is that being is one, that being is equivalent to God and that all the individual beings we experience are ‘modes’ of being and thus ‘modes’ of God. This is what Spinoza tries to convince you of in Part I.

Before we go further, a bit of context. In the tradition of philosophy, Spinoza is responding to those before him who he feels got something terribly wrong. In this, he is challenging the worldview of Descartes and Aristotle. Specifically, he is challenging what he sees as confused definitions which invariably lead to faulty conclusions.

The Aristotelian principles that were the basis of science and metaphysics for hundreds of years stated that the world is made up of substances and their attributes. Substances are the basic, independently existing ‘things’ of the universe, and attributes are their changeable properties. Attributes depend on substances for their existence while substances depend on nothing but themselves.

Descartes revised this to say that while the universe is indeed made up of innumerable substances with changeable properties, every substance has one fundamental, unchangeable, property that is essential to it. “Substances which are bodies,” Lord writes, “have the property of extension.” Extension is the term philosophers use for the way things take up space, i.e., their physicality. A point extends itself in space to become a line. Extension as such doesn’t change, even if the extent of a body changes.

He also believed in non-physical substances which he called minds, whose essential property is thinking. These essential properties, thinking and extension, he called ‘principal attributes’. The changeable properties (red, green, tall, short, human, animal, etc.) he called ‘modes’ of those attributes.

To add the confusion, Descartes argued for “a necessarily existing infinite thinking substance, God, who creates and sustains the existence of all these substances.” So that’s two principal attributes of substances, namely body and mind, or extension and thinking, plus a third—God.

What Spinoza does is brilliantly destroy these arguments by beginning with good definitions in order to arrive at a true conception of reality, a single substance which is God.

Are the definitions themselves true? Spinoza was asked this very question in a letter by the Collegiants, a philosophy study group in seventeenth Century Netherlands that would get together to discuss Spinoza’s ideas during his lifetime.

Definitions may be accurate descriptions of real things, as in the definition of a mammal. In this case, the definition is true in the sense that it coincides with what is real. Alternatively, definitions may be clear explications of how we understand certain terms, as when we define a radius from the nature of a circle. The truth of this definition does not consist in its coinciding with really existing circles and radii. The definition of a radius is true because it is fully explained from the nature of a circle, whether or not any circles actually exist.

A good definition, Lord argues, is one that is well-conceived and understood clearly, distinctly, fully, and consistently. Spinoza believes his definitions correspond to reality, but that’s not what makes them true. What makes them true is the intrinsic truth of the ideas behind them. He asks us to accept them, for now, on trust in order for him to make his argument and, once we’ve reached the end of the Ethics, their truth will become evident to us.

Definition 1: By a thing which is its own cause, I understand a thing the essence of which involves existence, or the nature of which cannot be conceived except as existing.

Spinoza is saying here that something that causes itself brings about its own existence and therefore, logically, must already exist. A being that is cause of itself cannot not exist, since its nature, or essence, involves existence. It also can never have ‘started’ to cause its existence because that would entail a ‘prior’ to existence, which doesn’t make any sense. Nor could it ever ‘finish’ causing its existence and continue to exist. Cause of itself must be of an eternally active nature. It is eternal both in its eternally existing and eternally bringing about its existence. It is both a noun (existence) and a verb (actualizing).

Definition 3: By substance I understand that which exists in itself [in se est] and is conceived through, or by means of, itself: i.e., the conception of which does not require for its formation the conception of anything else.

The word ‘in’ here means more of a logical dependency, not ‘inside of’. By telling us that substance is in itself, he is saying that substance depends, for its being, on itself alone. “A substance requires nothing beyond itself to exist and a true understanding of it requires nothing outside of the concept of the substance itself.” It is ontologically (its nature) and epistemologically (the knowledge of it) independent — it requires nothing outside of the concept of the substance itself.

Definition 5: By mode I understand the affections of substance, or that which exists in something else [in alio est], through which it is [also] conceived.

In other words, where a substance depends only on itself, a mode depends on something else and can only be understood through the concept of that logically prior other thing. Affections of substance here means changeable properties of substance.

From these three definitions alone, you can already start to grasp the entire picture. “Substance is that which is prior to, and independent of, its modes.” Pure, indeterminate being. A substance depends on itself for being suggesting that it is ‘cause of itself’, so we can say that being as such is the power of making itself actual.

It makes sense now to look at Definition 4 where he defines Attribute.

Definition 4: By attribute I understand what the mind [intellectus] perceives of substance, as constituting the essence of substance.

I had to read this several times and, as I’ve done heavily for this chapter, relied on Beth Lord’s excellent guide. The idea here is that attributes are the different ways substance can be perceived. We, as thinking sensing humans, know of two attributes of substance: thinking and extension.

Similar terminology to Descartes, but the order (and essence) is moved around to be more precise and coherent. Instead of the Cartesian thinking and extension representing properties of infinite substances in the universe, Spinoza says there is only one substance and thinking and extension are two ways of perceiving substance. They are two expressions of its essence.

The axioms are the basic logical principles which Spinoza assumes readers will treat as self-evident, eternal, and uncontroversial truths. From there, he builds out his propositions which depend on the axioms and definitions, which if you’ve read Euclid’s Geometry is exactly where he got the inspiration for this type of structure. This is what is meant when you hear people refer to Spinoza as using ‘geometrical proofs.’

In Proposition 4 he begins to lay the groundwork by getting you to agree that there are only two ways of distinguishing substances: either by their attributes or their modes. The reason is that reality consists of nothing but substances (as their attributes) or the modes of substance.

By Proposition 5, he makes his break from Descartes. Can there be more than one substance of the same attribute? No. This is because either two substances share the same attribute with different modes, or two substances have two different attributes and also differ in their modes. An attribute, if you remember from above, is simply what the substance exists as. A substance without its attributes is simply a “pure, indeterminate being.” If two substances share the same attribute, you’re just talking about one substance underneath. If the substances with the same attribute have different modes, Spinoza says we’re just talking about different modes, not different substances. This is because, as we saw in Proposition 1, substance is prior to its modes, and according to Definition 3, substance is understood through itself, not through its modes.

So he’s now shown that Descartes is wrong for proposing multiple substances that share the same attribute (either thinking or extension) but it still leaves the possibility for multiple substances each with its own unique attribute. Propositions 6-14 shows this is incorrect, that there is only one substance, and that substance is God (or Nature). In Proposition 6, he reminds us that there can’t be two substances of the same attribute, and that one cannot cause the other. Proposition 7 and 8 say that the nature or essence of substance is to exist, since Definition 1 stated that it must be its own cause, and therefore, by Proposition 8, substance is necessarily infinite. For something to be finite, it must be limited by some other thing. “A plant is prevented from growing infinitely large, or living infinitely long, by other physical things that limit it.” But a substance can never be limited by something else of the same nature because there are no two substances of the same nature.

The simplest way to understand this is that ordinary finite things cannot be substances and, therefore, substances do not have a beginning and end time in time or any limitation in space, as everyday finite things do. He has shown that it is logically inconsistent to see everyday things as substances and thereby dismantles the entire Cartesian project. At this point we’re only half way through the chapter.

The more reality, or being, a thing has, he says in Proposition 9, the more attributes belong to it. And taking this further, a being with many attributes stretching out to infinity is really just another way of saying an absolutely infinite being, which was defined in Definition 6 as…God.

In Proposition 11, he lays out the claim for the necessary existence of God.

If you think you can conceive of God not existing, then, by A7, his essence does not involve existence. But P7 demonstrates that it pertains to the nature of substance to exist, because substance is cause of itself. It would be absurd to say that the essence of a substance of infinite attributes did not involve existence. Since God is that substance (by D6), God exists necessarily.

This may seem like a circular argument of the type:

“God is by definition the greatest being you can imagine. A being that doesn’t exist is less great than a being that does exist in reality; so if God were only imaginary, he wouldn’t be the greatest possible being. Therefore, God must exist.”

It’s not. He’s not starting with God, he’s starting with a substance of infinite attributes which cannot not exist. God is defined as a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence (Definition 6). God, for Spinoza, is a pure being, perceived as every attribute there is. Every way that being as such expresses itself is substance, of which is there only one, which is the same as God.

If your head is spinning at this point, I don’t blame you. But if you go back to what I wrote up top, about noun and verb. A substance is not a ‘thing’, it is the power of actualizing its own existence. A substance of infinite attributes actualizes itself in infinite ways, it has an infinite amount of reality, power, and being. Its essence involves existence, both logically and actually.

Beth Lord outlines 3 major objections people have when they get to this part:

1. You accept that Spinoza has demonstrated the existence of a substance consisting of infinite attributes, but not the existence of God.

2. You follow his argument, but do not believe in God and so you cannot accept his conclusion.

3. You follow his argument, but you believe in a personal God and so cannot accept his definition of God.

These are pretty fair critiques on the surface. And yet they are also wrong.

On #1, it’s true that Spinoza demonstrates the existence of ‘a substance with infinite attributes’ and then defines God as this substance (how convenient). But, Lord argues, he believes all philosophers, theologians, and religious authorities would find it uncontroversial that the essential nature of a divine being is to be a substance with infinite attributes expressing eternal and infinite essence, i.e., ontological independence, infinite power, and eternal being. “If you accept Proposition 11 has demonstrated the existence of substance with infinite attributes, and if you accept that the being which has those qualities is what we understand by ‘God’, then you must accept that Proposition 11 has demonstrated the existence of God.” The harder question, whether Proposition 11 itself succeeds in demonstrating that substance, is the one I'll come to in a moment.

On #2, Spinoza isn’t arguing the existence of the God of the Bible, simply a substance of infinite attributes. You can call it whatever you want. A shape with three sides is conveniently called a triangle but it can also just be a shape with three sides. You can call this substance of infinite attributes Nature, being, substance, power, whatever. What you can't easily do is deny that being is real in some sense, and that's what Spinoza needs to make his claim.

On #3, Spinoza says that what you essentially believe in is the same thing, only that different religions have anthropomorphized this substance of infinite attributes who intervenes in the affairs of humankind. But none would say that their God is not an infinite being of infinite attributes. The religious believer's deeper objection, of course, is that Spinoza's God can't love you back, hear you, or care what you do. For most religious traditions, that's the whole point. Spinoza is arguing that's exactly the anthropomorphism he's trying to strip away. Whether what's left still deserves the name 'God' is a question each reader has to answer for themselves, and it’s why Spinoza goes with God or Nature.

I’ve tried to resist this part in the chapter, mainly to see if I could find holes in his arguments but I ended up finding them plausible, which then started seeping into all the different ways I see reality. I think Spinoza knew this would be hard for people during his lifetime to accept, and it’s still a bit weird for us now to think of these arguments and their implications. We’ve all heard the New Age “we’re all one” mantra, and we are all made up of matter, but it is surprisingly difficult to fully let go of the individualistic, subjective experience we have as an ‘I’ that is distinct from others. But if you probe through Spinoza’s arguments, that notion becomes increasingly untenable.

The answers to those questions will come in future chapters.

One of the other Propositions that stood out to me in this first chapter was Proposition 18:

“God is the immanent and not the transient cause of all things.”

God, in Spinoza’s system, is the creator, but not in the same way that Descartes meant, since everything that is, is in God. This is why he is called immanent, because there is nothing outside of God or separate from God. As Beth Lord writes, “God’s causality of modes is the actualization of its own being.” Remember, noun and verb. In the Scholia to Proposition 29, he uses the terms Natura naturans, referring to God as cause of itself, and Natura naturata, referring to God as effect of itself. Both the cause and the effect. I like the analogy Lord uses of you causing your own facial expressions.

Propositions 21-25 were some of the toughest for me to parse, even with Lord’s guide in hand. Here’s how she explains it which sort of helped me grasp and visualize what he’s saying:

God, or substance, has infinite attributes. Of these infinite attributes, we can conceive of two: thinking and extension. God exists as thinking being, and God exists as extended being. So thinking being and extended being as such exist, necessarily and eternally… Because each of these attributes has infinite essence, what follows from the nature of the attributes must also be infinite. This means that each of the attributes expresses an immediate infinite mode: there is an infinite way in which thinking is expressed and an infinite way in which extension is expressed. What follows from the nature of "thinking being" as such is the infinite intellect, i.e., infinite true understanding. What follows from the nature of "extended being" as such is infinite motion and rest. Infinite intellect and infinite motion and rest are caused immediately by the absolute nature of God's attributes. In other words, infinite, thinking, being necessarily includes, causes, and expresses itself as infinite intellect. Infinite extended being necessarily includes, causes, and expresses itself as infinite motion and rest.

The mediate infinite mode, which Spinoza says follows the immediate infinite mode, is what he calls the face of the whole universe, in a letter to a study group which asked him to explain these passages.1

Multiple cells and micro-organisms make up a fish and multiple fish, plants, stones and water make up rivers, and rivers and mountains and land make up the earth, and multiple planets make up a solar system, and so on.

In Proposition 29, he makes the obvious conclusion that nothing is contingent, everything is determined. God causes everything both at the level of finite modes causing each other (you are alive because your parents created you and their parents created them, etc.) and at the level of causing the essence of humans to be what it is, “insofar as God exists as infinite intellect and infinite motion and rest.”

This is, according to Spinoza’s logic, a fully determined universe with no room for free will. Not only do we not have free will, but to think of God as having free will is to misunderstand God. He says this outright in Scholia 2 of Proposition 33:

“But I do not doubt that many will reject this opinion as absurd, and will not deign to apply their minds to it, on no other ground, than because they are accustomed to attribute to God, another kind of liberty, far different from that which we have attributed to him, namely, Absolute Will.”

He argues that all one has to do is meditate on the subject and the flow of his arguments which he has presented, and you will also come to the same conclusion. To not do so, he says, would be “a great obstacle to science.” To think of the risk he took writing and publishing these thoughts in the time period he did is astounding.

The Appendix, to me, was the real treat of slogging through Chapter 1. Freed from the geometric structure, Spinoza drops the formality and takes on the boogeymen of his day, namely, the prevailing ideas of the anthropomorphic God of the Bible, intelligent design, and the moral concepts of good and evil. He lays out why we believe these things, why they are false, and the impact on us and society.

His main angle of attack is to dismantle the notion of ‘final causes’, a term popularized by Aristotle’s metaphysics. A ‘final cause’ is simply the aim or purpose for the sake of which a thing exists or acts. As humans, we tend to believe that our actions have a purpose, and Spinoza believes we mistakenly ascribe that same purpose-oriented idea to nature or God. The Christian world-view of the seventeenth century was that God acts with intention or purpose, God organized the world for the sake of human or divine purposes, that natural things exist for the sake of human or divine purposes, and that the universe itself has a final purpose and is in constant movement towards fulfilling that purpose. If you were a philosopher at the time, you would be expected to fit your philosophy into that framework and the Aristotelian notion of ‘final cause’ was a useful one.

The doctrine of final causes derives from basic human experience. We are mostly aware of our desires and ambitions, but we can’t even dream of all the causes impacting us every second of the day. We also tend to do things for some purpose which we imagine is a better state than the one we’re in, and then ascribe this same purpose-orientation to other things outside of ourselves. We also enjoy different aspects of our bodies (teeth for chewing, eyes for seeing, etc.) that it seems on the surface that these must have been given to us by some ‘ruler of nature’ who provides these things for the sake of mankind. It’s no surprise then, Spinoza argues, that since we can only know our minds, we ascribe the same kind of mental pattern to this ruler or rulers and believe that if they share the same kinds of minds as us, certainly we can curry their favor by one-upping each other with prayers or sacrifices or other superstitions.

The discovery of mathematics, Spinoza says, was the first time humans began their escape from the trap of ignorance about God because it is not concerned with final causes, but with the essences and properties of figures. It is another ‘standard of truth’ that does not depend on experience.

Our standard image of God is simply a maximized version of humans and if triangles could speak, they would say God is ‘eminently triangular’ in nature. This human-centric way of viewing the world leads us to judge things according to what is useful to us, developing a host of value-terms to judge natural phenomena such as good, evil, order, disorder, beauty, ugliness, etc. But from the perspective of God, as Spinoza advocates, none of those terms is relevant. Nature, and God, simply is. Nature has no purposes and makes no judgements.

“For if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks.”

Spinoza’s God is specifically not mysterious, but is simply being and therefore fundamentally knowable. By gaining true knowledge about the world, we gain more true knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is to be found through mathematics, science, and philosophy, and “not through religious texts or the doctrine of priests,” Lord writes. As if this were not already a huge slap in the face to the Church of the seventeenth century, Spinoza goes on to write that it is specifically theological doctrine which is superstition and keeps people ignorant. To gain true understanding of the universe, we have to break free from these superstitions.

It’s clear why he was branded an atheist in his time and his work banned for over a hundred years. But why go through all of the process to prove God if he was a committed atheist? One answer is that during the time he lived, this was about as far as anyone could go without risking real harm. But that doesn't quite hold up when you read his private letters, where he's just as committed to God-as-Nature in correspondence he never expected to be published.

The more I dig into Spinoza, the more I see something more than simply a hard materialist weaving in spirituality to placate would-be haters. I see someone deeply spiritual but in a way that would not, and could not, forsake reason. And for that, I think he deserves the credit he was given in posterity.

As I head into surgery tomorrow, I think of all the decisions that led up to this second achilles rupture. For nine years, I avoided playing basketball precisely because of the fear of re-rupture. So why did I decide to play again this year? Spinoza says it couldn’t have happened any other way, and as much as I want to fight that, to say ‘no, I could have chosen not to go’, I can’t actually know the causes impacting all of my decision making in the moment. I can, and did use reason to weigh probability in my head, but that’s an imperfect science. Maybe the pressure to bond with friends in a sport I denied myself for almost a decade was too great? Maybe I needed close to a decade to finally ‘feel safe enough’ to try the sport again? Maybe if I’d worn different shoes or didn’t choose to play the fourth game and stopped after three? I don’t know, and no one knows. What Spinoza would say is that it just is and there’s no use in concocting stories of blame or superstition or bad luck. Sometimes, it just is. The best we can do is try to understand more, while accepting the limits of what we can know.

As a reminder, the schedule of chapters for this read-along is as follows:

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza (we’re here)

March 20 - Part I: Of God

March 27 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

April 3 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

April 10 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

April 17 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

Philosophical texts can often seem impenetrable to people outside of the discipline. There is a specific use of jargon that builds on the tradition and is obvious to those inside the circle of philosophers yet arcane to those of us on the outside. When I found out that Spinoza had been translated into English by a novelist, I had a suspicion that was the version that would make the most sense for someone like me. And while we still haven’t gotten into the meat of Spinoza’s text this week, the introduction chapter to George Eliot’s Spinoza has already given me that bit of pleasure I anticipated when choosing this version.

What we learn in this opening chapter is a bit about the woman behind novels like Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and Daniel Deronda. We learn that she lived an untraditional life for 19th century England. That she was in a romantic relationship with a married man who she referred to as her “husband” though they never married. And we learn that she was determined, in both the metaphysical and psychological sense, to chart her own course when it came to study and choice of career. That she translated such a monumental book and wrote as many great novels as she did under a pen name to hide her identity—and gender—is a testament to how powerful her will must have been.

And through her diary entries and letters to friends, we begin to learn a bit about the 17th century Jewish Dutch philosopher whose ideas we are about to embark on. We learn that he was not, in fact, an atheist as his critics claimed but was a pantheist, or, more precisely, a panentheist. The idea that everything is in God. And once you understand the interdependence and interconnectedness of everything, you begin to understand how much we are impacted by, and depend on, those around us. Eliot, in her literary work, wanted to unravel “how human lives are shaped, even determined, by influences beyond their control.”

Mary Anne was so taken by Spinoza’s ideas, which she claimed spoke to something she felt but hadn’t yet seen put into words. In a way, the best literature evokes the same feeling in us. And so, she spent most of 1855 and the early parts of 1856 working on translating Spinoza from the original Latin into English before finally completing it and deciding it was time to begin in earnest her true passion of writing literature.

On September 22 of 1856, she wrote in her journal that she began working on a story and, six weeks later, another entry recorded that she had finished writing. That first piece would go on to be the trilogy Scenes of a Clerical Life, and launch her as the powerhouse novelist she would become. Throughout all of her novels she imbued her stories with the deterministic lens she picked up from Spinoza but fused with freedom. Human relationships form a “vast and complex web of causes” but it is through her characters “gaining greater understanding of themselves and their relations to others” that they achieve some sense of liberation, enlargement of soul, quiet empowerment, and, therefore, a measure of happiness.

One area I’m particularly excited to understand more is how Spinoza manages to thread the needle of a determinist universe while avoiding reductive materialism. Elasticity despite the fixed causal nature of things. And despite himself living a frugal and unmarried, seemingly celibate, life, he didn’t advocate for self-denial the way the ascetics did, nor did he advocate for overemphasis in the other direction of material pursuits of wealth, status, or power. His philosophy, it seems from this opening introduction, is one of moderation not too dissimilar from what we got out of Montaigne. Marriage, as one example, is cited as “in accordance with reason” if it “expresses a mutual desire that is produced ‘by the love of possessing and wisely educating children; and if, besides, the love of both the man and woman is not excited by the [physical] person alone, but is chiefly caused by freedom of soul’”.

Human friendships are also important to the Spinozist, and Eliot, worldview.

Given George Eliot’s Spinozist insight into the irreducibly interdependent “web” of human life, the solution to this problem can never be one that cuts a person off from her community or puts her fundamentally at odds with it. We see this very clearly in the case of Silas Marner, who leads a “withered,” barely human existence on the outer margins of his village; though that community is very far from enlightened, Silas begins to flourish as his relationship with an abandoned child, Eppie, draws him into it. Indeed, his growing dependence of his neighbors is portrayed as a kind of empowerment.

God, Eliot would come to believe, was found within the very best of human nature. Sympathetic friendships are core parts of her novels, especially non-romantic ones between men and women. Friendships irreducible to “romantic love or political comradeship” but rather to something more. Call it spiritual, call it cosmic, call it whatever word feels appropriate to you. But fundamentally, it is about kindred natures.

That’s what Spinoza was after and what we hope to arrive at by reading Eliot’s translation of his work. To understand at a deeper level the interconnectedness of everything and within that knowledge, how to live a good and meaningful life.

Before I get into schedule of readings and why I chose this book, a quick heads up: if you want to keep getting my newsletter but prefer not to follow the Book Club read-along click here and toggle off ‘Book Club’. You will still get my regular essays and other updates.

I’ve read bits and pieces of The Ethics over the past year, but I wanted to go through it systematically. Reading it together with you will help us grapple with the more difficult parts of the text. The juice will be worth the squeeze.

The schedule of chapters (for now) is as follows:

March 13 - Introduction: George Eliot’s Spinoza

March 20 - Part I: Of God

March 27 - Part II: On the Nature and Origin of the Mind

April 3 - Part III: On the Origin and Nature of the Emotions

April 10 - Part IV: On the Servitude of Man and on the Power of the Passions

April 17 - Part V: On the Power of the Intellect, or, On Human Liberty

Spinoza has always been a polarizing character. During his lifetime, he managed to be excommunicated from the Jewish community he grew up in, accused of heresy, atheism, and somehow also being drunk on God. It was only about a century after his death that his ideas started to spread beyond his inner circle.

In The Ethics he sets out to prove the interconnectedness of all things in the universe and to derive a philosophy for how to live a good life out of that knowledge. It’s both metaphysics and ethics in one comprehensive system.

The German philosopher Hegel said that “one is either a Spinozist or not a philosopher” and Nietzche was apparently enchanted by his discovery of Spinoza’s writing. Goethe remarked that "every philosopher has two philosophies: their own and Spinoza's.”

Albert Einstein was once asked if he believed in God to which he replied “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” Einstein even penned a somewhat mediocre poem for Spinoza, while Jorge Luis Borges wrote two far better ones. He clearly touched many great thinkers but why?

He is often lumped with his Descartes and Leibniz as the 17th century philosophers known as Rationalists, whose ideas are pitted against British philosophers from around the same time period—John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume—collectively known as Empiricists. Rationalists believed knowledge comes from reason, intuition, and innate ideas alone, independent of sensory experiences. They emphasized deduction from first principles. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am.’ Empiricists, on the other hand, argued that knowledge derives from sensory experience and reflection, rejecting innate ideas in favor of a tabula rasa, a blank slate, with the mind built through induction and observation.

But I think even this flattens Spinoza a bit, and what he meant for future generations. He was the only one of either camp of philosophers to be labelled an atheist. He managed to anger both the Jewish and Christian communities of 17th century Netherlands, and Leibniz pretended he never had any connection, affiliation, or had even met Spinoza, which ample evidence suggests otherwise. So what was so dangerous about his ideas and why have they stood the test of time and influenced so many?

In Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, he writes:

Spinoza is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.

Spinoza was a radical. He proposed ideas that people during his time were not willing to hear. To the religiously devout, his ideas sounded like heresy. To believers in free will, it sounded too mechanistic. To individualists, his ideas sound too mystical. The truth, as we’ll come to see, is more complicated.

Above all, Spinoza was a man of integrity which is why I think he became so beloved posthumously. He walked the walk as few philosophers have. He declined an offer of professorship so that he could keep his mind clear from the pressures of academia and any risk of censorship. He lived a humble life as a lens grinder by day and philosopher by night, ate the same simple meal everyday, never married, never lost his temper in public, and walked away from both familial wealth and the comfort of the Jewish community he was raised in, all in the name of living philosophically and contributing to the grand human project.

The Ethics are considered a more difficult read but we will work through it, section by section. For this read along, I’m using the George Eliot translation. If you’re not familiar with Eliot, she was a 19th Century English writer and author of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, and Daniel Deronda. She was also the first person to translate Spinoza into English and his philosophy influenced her to such a degree she infused it into her novels. So hers is the version I am choosing but if you have or prefer another one, feel free to do so.

I may reference the Beth Lord companion guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, as well as Steven Nadler’s Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction, and where I do I will make sure to be clear about that. I believe in reading primary texts first before companion guides, but I’m not above asking for help when needed.

Spinoza will seem much more comprehensive, systematic, and confident than Montaigne. His Ethics sought to find that link between the interconnectedness of all things and to fuse it with a guide to living well. Let us see what we can learn from this Dutch philosopher ourselves.

I am incredibly excited to kick this off together. See you next week.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. Our last Montaigne read-along post went live this week. Getting to the end was a slog but we did it.

2. The Zoom Q&A for the Montaigne read-along will be this week. Paid subscribers will receive details only, so if you’d like to support my work, and do fun things like jam out with other like minds about philosophy, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

3. Interest in old books, and the “Great Books”, is seeing a surge in renewed interest. In addition to the excellent work of Johnathan Bi, the Free Press is now launching a podcast called Old School by Princeton professor Shilo Brooks. It’s really good.

4. It finally feels like Autumn in Pennsylvania and the leaves are just starting to turn different hues of yellow, orange, green and red. Here’s a beautiful poem about Autumn from author Emily Jungmin Yoon.

5. A wonderful article about how our brain builds perception from experience, not by measuring objective reality.

6. What it means to slow down and begin paying attention.

7. A new startup is building a wearable to help you understand your mind in real-time.

8. Our brains apparently turn down pain when survival instincts kick in.

9. Openness to experience, and to our full range of emotions, is step one in the three elements of a good life.

10. A new book by Conjecture Institute with a new approach to copyright, or copyleft as they call it:

    

As a reminder, here’s what we’ve covered and what’s left for the remainder of this read along.

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers

• Sept 15: Book III-2 On Repenting · Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse ·

• Sept 22: Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 29: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Oct 6: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

When we first set out on our Summer of Montaigne, I promised you this would be a philosophy book for people not sure how to get started with philosophy namely because, well, Montaigne didn’t consider himself a philosopher.

In that first issue of the read-along, I wrote:

Montaigne is the perfect candidate to begin with, since he makes no pretension about being a philosopher. That was not his goal. He wanted to examine his own mind, and, in doing so, invented the format of the essay. Whereas philosophy, especially Aristotelian philosophy, began with the idea of human beings being roughly identical versions of the same ‘form’ which they could analyze and reason about in the abstract and then apply universally, Montaigne did the opposite. He began with himself.

In these final two chapters, we finally get to the grand finale of this project of his, to examine what it means to live a good and virtuous life.

The first of the two chapters, On the lame, is about how we know what we know, or as is called in academic philosophy, epistemology. Ever the skeptic, Montaigne lays out a series of arguments and anecdotes full of tales from the French countryside where the common folk would claim to have run into witches or experienced miracles.

Montaigne doesn’t so much as reject these out of hand, but admits that the wise approach is to suspend our judgement, “neither believing nor rejecting.”

Instead, he tells us, he would instruct his sons (if he had any) to default to trained responses such as What does this mean?, I do not understand that, It might be so, and even Is that true? so as to behave more like an apprentice at age sixty than a knower of all things at age ten.

“Anyone who wishes to be cured of ignorance must first admit to it.”

A skeptic is not a cynic. He goes on to explain that “amazement is the foundation of all philosophy” and that “inquiry its way of advancing” while “ignorance is its end.”

That last part seems a bit out of place. If we begin with wonder, and use reason and rational thinking to inquire about the world as a means of advancing our knowledge, why on earth would we—should we—be content with arriving at ignorance of all places?

Let’s come back to that in a moment.

Montaigne begins with a story about the Gregorian reform of the calendar of 1582, about two to three years before he wrote the essay, and how nobody around him seemed to notice any difference. If our senses, which help us understand things like time and place, gave no indication of a shorter calendar year, what do our senses actually tell us?

“So gross is our faculty of perception.”

Empiricism, the idea that knowledge comes to us through our senses, dates back to 600 B.C.E with the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy. In Ancient Greece, the proto-empiricists advocated against the idea of innate ideals of the mind we are born with, and instead advocated for the concept of the mind being a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that is filled only through contact with reality. Empiricism, as we know it today, would really come into clarity and detail by Montaigne’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, and later Hobbes, followed by Locke and Hume.

But Montaigne was no rationalist either. He critiques rationalism as well, arguing that there is no way to pure inquiry that is universal since we all have bias, emotion, and custom, leading to “a hundred contradictory ones about one and the same subject.”

Quoting Cicero, he writes towards the end of the chapter:

“Nor, like those other fellows, am I ashamed to admit that I do not know what I do not know.”

If there’s one thing I appreciated in reading Montaigne, it’s his inclination towards moderation. He has no qualms saying that both the rationalists and the empiricists are both wrong for being so stubborn in their extreme positions:

“So as it happened in the school of philosophy: the pride of those who attributed the capacity of all things to the human mind created in others, out of despite and emulation, this opinion, that it is capable of nothing: the one maintain the same extreme in ignorance that the others do in knowledge; to make it undeniably manifest that man is immoderate throughout, and can never stop but of necessity and the want of ability to proceed further.”

If experience and empirical evidence are not the full story, Montaigne begins the next (and final) chapter with a warning:

“Experience is a waker and less dignified means: but truth is so great a matter that we must not disdain any method which leads us to it.”

“No desire,” he quotes Aristotle as saying, “is more natural than the desire for knowledge.” When reason fails us, we should turn to experience.

Not only that, we should never feel satisfied, as there is always more to learn. “When the mind is satisfied,” he continues, “that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities.”

Writing about the lack of original thinkers, he complains there there are more books about other books than any other subject.

“All is a swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.”

He tells us that freedom should be a high value of all people, and at the bare minimum it is his highest value.

“I so hunger after freedom that if anyone were to forbid me access to some corner of the Indies I would to some extent live less at ease.”

As we’ll see when we get into other philosophical texts, they can at times feel to be so abstract and removed from reality that we lose sight of its true purpose: to better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit. And we, as mortal humans, do not live in the abstract or in some higher dimension of reality, but right here, right now. Even “kings and philosophers shit,” Montaigne reminds us, “and so do the ladies.”

Ultimately, what Montaigne provided humanity with his invention of the essay format was none other than the ability to reason and inquire beginning with ourselves, not the abstract, “universal”, man. “I would rather be an expert on me,” he writes, “than an expert on Cicero.”

“I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.”

On the “highest throne in the world,” he concludes, “we are seated, still, upon our arses.”

We are a week behind on the schedule. Next week I will send out the Zoom Q&A for paid subscribers, as well as updates for the next read along which will be Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Thank you to everyone who joined along for the ride. I am glad we got through it together and pumped for the next one.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. If you haven’t read it yet, here is the second-to-last week’s read-along of Montaigne’s Essays where we get into cultural relativism and sex.

2. If philosophy, thinking, and reading is important to you (I assume you would have unsubscribed by now if it wasn’t), then this article on why we are becoming a post-literate society should fill you with terror.

3. Derek Thompson, who co-authored the book Abundance with Ezra Klein, documented the 25 most interesting things he’s discovered so far in 2025.

4. This passage from Carl Jung is just so good

   

5. RatFest, the Critical Rationalism philosophy conference organized by Conjecture Institute, is in Philadelphia so I’ll be attending. If you’re a fan of Karl Popper, David Deutsch, or Brett Hall then you probably know about this. I’ll do a write up on it next week.

6. Speaking of Brett Hall, I recently added my thoughts to a debate about why LLMs (as in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) are amazing technology but not anywhere close to Artificial General Intelligence. I’ve arrived at this from reading Brett and David’s writing on superintelligence.

7. I’ve long been a fan of Kevin Kelly ever since I first read his theory about 1,000 true fans. This interview with him is fascinating as it is eye opening. It’s titled Flounder Mode which is perfect.

8. What the U.S. could look like if Tylenol actually caused autism

9. Is Stoicism compatible with Mysticism?

10. Here’s what David Deutsch had to say on the topic of mysticism in an old resurfaced interview.

Thank you for reading. My goal is to always keep these ad-free and AI-free. If you want to support the monthly book club read-alongs, these weekly round-ups, and other content I’m working on, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

As a reminder, here’s what we’ve covered and what’s left for the remainder of this read along.

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers

• Sept 15: Book III-2 On Repenting · Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse ·

• Sept 22: Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 29: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Oct 6: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

The chapter On Some Lines of Virgil was an amusing chapter to read. For starters, it was neither “some lines” but rather over 70 pages (it could stand as a mini-book in itself), nor was it really about the ancient Roman poet Virgil. It’s all about sex, marriage, and the difference between female and male sexuality. Along with all the self-deprecating humor we’ve grown accustomed to reading from Montaigne.

He begins the essay by pulling us in to the tales of a wise old man whose best years are behind him. You almost start to feel for him and appreciate his willingness in his old age to try to be as real and raw as he could through his writing.

“I hunger to make myself known. Provided I do so truly, I do not care how many know it.”

After all of this foreplay, pun intended, he gets to the heart of it. “The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right,” he begins, “what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation?”

I told you Montaigne was a down-to-earth philosopher.

It’s important to remember that Montaigne was honest about his project. It is about him and his thoughts. But more importantly, it is his self-analysis that he uses as a way of arriving at universal lessons of mankind.

When he talks of marriage, he believes that marriage that is solely based on good sex is a mistake, and instead should be based on loving-friendship, a sort of lifelong relationship based on faithfulness, dependability, trust, and myriad ways we can be devoted partners.

“No wife who has ever savoured its taste would ever wish to be the beloved mistress of her husband.”

He admits that he was somewhat of a womanizer in his youth but that he has been more faithful in his marriage than he ever dreamed he would be.

As if giving a piece of advice to those who think the grass is greener, he says “few men have married their mistress without repenting of it.”

And on the topic of sex, he pokes at the uptight nature of French society in the 1500’s by pointing out the clear double standards in society, namely that women are expected to be chaste while men not so much. Worse, men expect their wives to be both chaste and uninhibited.

Montaigne laments that women and men don’t get to see each other in the nude more often, for if they did then perhaps women wouldn’t be as surprised by the size of their lovers. If you read this as an admission by Montaigne, I think you’re right.

What’s funny to me about this chapter is how he weaves in Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and the founder of Stoicism Zeno to say Hey! If the pagans could talk openly about this stuff, why can’t we?1

And really, this is all meant to paint a bigger picture that when it comes to human life, we shouldn’t place unnecessary and arbitrary limits on what we can and cannot enjoy:

“Philosophy does not do battle against such pleasures as are natural, provided that temperance accompanies them: she teaches moderation in such things not avoidance.”

In the end, he reminds us that men and women aren’t really all that different, it’s that society pretends that’s the case because men made all the rules, favoring themselves.

“I say that male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not great. In The Republic Plato summons both men and women indifferently to a community of all studies, administrations, offices and vocations both in peace and war; and Antisthenes the philosopher removed any distinction between their virtue and our own.

It is far more easy to charge one sex than to discharge the other. As the saying goes: it is the pot calling the kettle smutty.”

On Coaches has to be one of the most mind-bending, chaotic, and rambling essays I’ve ever read. Like our first chapter, this one too bears little connection to its title.

What starts off as a discussion about authors who wrote about first causes turns into a quick discussion about the origins of saying “bless you” when someone sneezes to eventually becoming a discussion about the luxury and degeneracy of the France he lived in with plenty of biting words for the way Europeans behaved in the New World.

My favorite part was the natives’ response to the Spaniards, who had given them a laundry list of demands and stated their supposed purpose.

The Spaniards told the natives they were men of peace, sent from far away on behalf of the Spanish King and greatest monarch in the whole world, whom the Pope being a vicar of God had given dominion over all the New World, and that if they were to pay tribute they would be treated kindly. They specifically asked to eat and receive gold for “medicinal purposes” and, to add an extra layer of hubris, insisted on there being only one true God.

The natives responded that if they were men of peace they certainly didn’t look the part, their kind must be poor if he sends his people begging all over the world, and if this Pope gave something to a third-party which was not his to give, he must love dissension and look to pick a fight with the native inhabitants. They would happily provide some food but they confessed they had no use for gold save for the little amount they gave to their Gods. As for there being one God, they politely declined and preferred to stick to what they knew which had worked out just fine for them until that point. They finished by saying it would be wise for them to leave as soon as possible, since they didn’t take too kindly to foreigners who came with weapons making threats.

Like the essay On Cannibals, this one showed Montaigne for the early cultural relativist he was.

Friends,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. A 9 year old asked his dad why grandparents have bigger houses than parents and it kind of blew up on X. My response quoting Montaigne.

2. Speaking of Montaigne, can you believe there are only two weeks left? This past week’s chapters were largely around what it means to live with no regrets. For all the new subscribers here due to the post on X taking off, welcome!

3. If you don’t live in an apartment building, have you considered building a Little Free Library in front of your house? It beats doom-scrolling and is something I want to do as well.

   

4. The 18th century British Philosopher, and Empiricist, David Hume helped free literature by making philosophy more technical and accurate.

5. Speaking of 18th century England, notes from David Bowie suggest he was working on a musical about 18th century London.
   

6. These Gaudi sketches and notes.

7. Do not ask your children to strive by William Martin.

8. Ryan Holiday has the only copies of Stefan Zweig’s biography of Montaigne and I want a copy.

9. Alex Petkas from Cost of Glory on why the “Great Books” is for losers.

10. And finally, why science hasn’t solved consciousness yet.

Thank you for reading. My goal is to always keep these ad-free and AI-free. If you want to support the monthly book club read-alongs, these weekly round-ups, and other content I’m working on, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

As a reminder, here’s what we’ve covered and what’s left for the remainder of this read along.

I’ve also decided on the next book we’ll be reading. Scroll to the end to see what it is.

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers

• Sept 15: Book III-2 On Repenting · Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse ·

• Sept 22: Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 29: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Oct 6: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

One day last Spring, I went for my usual 5k run from my house. As I passed my neighbor’s house down the street, who sits on the corner of an intersection, I saw him trimming the thick, large American Holly trees that surrounded his property in such a way as to make the bottom half of the tree bare, leaving the thick leaves only on top.

When I asked why, he said simply, “I want to be more neighborly. I don’t like the seclusion.”

Most people do the opposite. They erect large fences or, in the town where my family lives, plant large shrubs, bushes, and trees to provide even more seclusion. To keep the outside, well, out. To develop a private inner home life without peering eyes.

Montaigne understood this difference at a deep level. Not just about how we arrange our home’s exterior, but how we approach life, our behavior, and our innermost thoughts.

In the first chapter this week, On repenting, he deals not so much with repenting in the religious sense, but in the way we repent internally, and privately, about our past actions. In writing what was, at the time, a very innovate book whose subject was the author himself, he understood that he was laying it all out to bear, warts and all.

And in thinking about the decisions he made in life, he has no qualms telling us that while he may think back on certain actions for the sake of understanding them, he doesn’t let his mind wrestle with whether he could have, or should have, done otherwise.

“I rarely repent….my conscience is happy with itself.”

Why? Because he understood at a young age, either through reading old books or lessons from his family and teachers, that virtue is its own reward. “A noble feeling of pride,” he adds, “accompanies a good conscience.”

Without a strong inner model, he says, we are lost.

He goes on about this concept of an inner model to explain that ultimately, what matters most, is whether we can look ourselves in the mirror. There’s a quote from Naval Ravikant about self-esteem being nothing more than your reputation with yourself. Do you like yourself? Answer honestly, but keep it to yourself.

The interesting part of this essay was getting a glimpse of Montaigne’s metaphysics. He mostly writes about practical philosophy (how to act virtuously, how to live a good life, etc.) but he has a line where he tells us that despite being a practicing Catholic, he actually subscribes to the Stoic metaphysical view.

“My doings are ruled by what I am and are in harmony with how I was made. I cannot do better: and the act of repenting does not properly touch such things as are not within our power.”

And

“I am always comforted by the thought that they had to happen that way: there they are in the vast march of the universe and in the concatenation of Stoic causes; no idea of yours, by wish or by thought, can change one jot without overturning the whole order of Nature, both past and future.”

This was the view of the Ancient Stoics that is largely missed by the modern rise of Stoicism self-help. The Stoics believed that there was a divine order to Nature that was determined and rational. That not only is everything determined by a prior cause, but that the whole plan is benevolent and rational.

Nietzche’s idea of Amor Fati (love your fate) is a direct extension of the Stoic’s views, which it seems here Montaigne subscribes to as well.

He concludes:

“If I had to live again, I would live as I have done; I neither regret the past nor fear the future. And unless I deceive myself, thing within have gone much the same as those without.”

The second essay, On three kinds of social intercourse, give us a clear picture of which three interactions Montaigne finds most pleasing and enrich his private life.

They are: (1) deep male friendships (2) loving romantic relationships with beautiful, and if possible, intelligent women, and (3) reading books.

When Montaigne was younger, he developed a very close friendship with a man by the name of Étienne de La Boétie, whom he met while working in the French government. They developed such a strong friendship that when La Boétie tragically died at the age of 32, it hit Montaigne extremely hard.

I confess that one of the attributes of Montaigne that drew me to him was this exact scenario. When I was in high school, I met a new kid who had just transferred to our school and we instantly became close friends. Always hanging out with each other, talking about the same things, watching the same types of films and reading the same types of books. We were inseparable. A year later, after I had graduated and began college and he was a senior in high school, his mental health deteriorated and he would eventually take his own life.

It shocked me unlike anything I’d ever felt by that age and when I think back on it, it felt almost as if my heart was ripped out of my chest in an instant. Such a sudden trauma is difficult for anyone, but given how close we were and how in the dark I was about how he felt, it would take me several years to fully process and overcome the grief.

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to have several close male friendships come in and out of my life and each time there is something deeply rewarding about them.

Having tasted this same type of deep friendship, Montaigne decided that anything less than that was simply not worth spending time on. There is no need to bother with people who provide nothing more than small-talk and pleasantries.

If they don’t share the same desire to live a rich, intellectually-stimulating life, he would rather “flee like the plague.”

But once he has found someone who is on this level, any topic of conversation will do, so long as there is “frankness, goodwill, gaiety, and affection.”

Besides good, close, male relationships, the other kind Montaigne enjoyed was meeting and talking to “beautiful and honorable women,” though its clear he understood that he would need to mind his intentions given how powerful his taste for the opposite-sex was.

The final type of activity he tells us is his favorite is the reading of books.

“In war and in peace,” he says, “I never travel without books.” Just having books around, even if he is lazy to pick them up and read them, is enough to give him comfort and solace, knowing that if and when he wants to, he can pick them up anytime.

This is one reason I recommend buying physical books and not just e-books or audiobooks.

There is something powerful about knowing that, even if there is no wi-fi or internet, or if you’re waiting in line for something you can’t control, you can always grab a book and begin reading. It is the opposite of doom-scrolling in so many ways.

Finally, he tells us about his home library. How he designed it, how it measures, and why he made certain design aesthetic choices. Above all, it is private.

For us, this may mean a basement, or a den, or even waking up earlier or staying up later and doing our reading and writing at the kitchen table. But we must have a place that is all our own, for a period of time during the day, to let our minds explore.

“Wretched the man (to my taste) who has nowhere in his house where he can be by himself, pay court to himself in private and hide away!”

The next book we’ll be doing a read-along to is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I want to tackle even deeper philosophical texts but this should be an easier, more contemporary read, that is still powerful in its lessons for how to live a good life.

Friends,

Consider this the first of a new weekly format I’m experimenting with. These will include links to my own posts throughout the week, as well as other things I felt you’d find interesting. Feel free to unsubscribe if you don’t enjoy these. (I never look at who unsubscribes).

With that out of the way, here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. This format is inspired by Austin Kleon's weekly newsletter. I just finished reading Steal Like An Artist and decided to check out his work. He and I obviously write about different things but I absolutely loved his end of week roundup style email. As he says in his book, “imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.” This is my attempt at emulating.
   

2. Anne Bradstreet, a Puritan-era female Poet wrote a poem called Contemplations, that begins with a beautiful description of the fall season.
   

3. I read about a creative retreat that the German philosopher, Nietzche, attended in Sorrento, Italy in the Autumn of 1876. It so completely changed his outlook on life and reinvigorated him that he dropped his previous pessimistic philosophy (inspired by Schopenhauer), and came to what would become his defining idea: Will to Power. One day I would like to organize something like this, but in the meantime my friend Vizi is hosting an Art & Philosophy retreat this coming October in Transylvania.
   

4. Speaking of Nietzche, this line about self-mastery might make you feel something as you wind down over the weekend and prepare for next week.
   

5. We wrapped up Book II of Montaigne’s Essays this week with chapters detailing stories of female heroism, virtue, and an example of Montaigne’s skepticism. Only two more weeks to go. If you want to read more philosophy but never seem to get around to it, these book club read-alongs should give you the nudge to follow along. I’ll be announcing the next book we’ll be reading after we finish with the Montaigne book, sometime next week.
   

6. The answer to burnout by Joel Uili
   

7. G.K. Chesterton on why Seriousness is not a virtue
   

8. My iPhone (12 Pro) died while we were vacationing in Cape Cod this summer. Not caring about the new iPhone 17 coming out, I decided to get a 16e and turn it into a dumb-phone. I can’t begin to describe how much more freeing it is to let go of that shiny screen that pulls us in.
   

9. I spent the better part of last year researching for a book on consciousness. The tl';dr is that no one has any idea what consciousness is, or where to find it. But this article does a good job of explaining why that’s the case.
   

10. Our five-year old started Kindergarten last week. She’s already reading chapter books, because we sat down together with her when she was three-years old to teach her. We began with phonics and worked up from there. This is more possible than people believe. Neuroscientist Erik Hoel wrote about how he taught his three-year old to read in this piece on aristocratic tutoring.

Thank you for reading. My goal is to always keep these ad-free and AI-free. If you want to support the monthly book club read-alongs, these weekly round-ups, and other content I’m working on, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Until next week,

Tom Harari

I made the decision to push On Repenting, the first essay in Book III, to next week to keep this week about the close of Book II. I’ll explain more below.

As a reminder, here’s what we’ve covered and what’s left for the next two weeks:

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers

• Sept 15: Book III-2 On Repenting · Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse · Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 22: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Sept 29: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

Humans have always looked to stories to pass on lessons to one another.

Aristotle noted that of the three types of argument—logical (logos), credibility of speaker (ethos), and emotional (pathos)—it is stories or emotions that most convince an audience.

Montaigne was obsessed with stories and their ability to teach each passing generation a lesson. But in contrast to fictional tales which are meant to teach some lesson, he preferred real stories from history. In particular, the stories of the real life deeds of the ancient philosophers.

In the second to last essay of Book II, On Three Good Wives, Montaigne shares three distinct stories of women who displayed what he refers to as near-perfect virtue. Their courage and heroism in the face of bad fortune or injustice towards their partners stands in contrast to the cynicism and fakery he witnessed among the married couples of his time.

Speaking of the wives in his century, he notes that they too often reserve their displays of love for their husbands only after the husband is dead. When he would see a widow crying and tearing her hair out, clawing at her face in agony, he would ask one of the staff how she and her husband actually got along when he was alive. “Women who weep most,” he recounts an old proverb as saying, “grieve least.”

“Their lamentations are loathed by living husbands and useless to the dead ones. We husbands will willingly let them laugh afterwards if they will only laugh with us while we are alive.”

If the marriage sucked, he says, let the widow laugh outwardly and inwardly. If it truly was a beautiful and loving relationship, then it makes sense to be upset. Otherwise, why is there a need for charade and pomposity?

Having gotten his dig towards French aristocratic women of his day out of the way, he finally turns to what he really wants to talk to us about: the virtue of three wives from history.

The first is of a common woman during the time of Pliny the Younger (Ancient Rome, first century). On seeing her husband suffer extreme pain from ulcers on his privates, which may or may not have been sexually-transmitted, suggests that he should end his life. Before you think that this was some ruse to punish her husband (it doesn’t seem she suspected infidelity), she offers to join him when she notices his hesitation and fear.

“You must never think, my Beloved, that the pains which I see you suffer do not affect me as much as you, or that to deliver myself from them I am unwilling to use the same remedy that I am prescribing for you I wish to be your companion in your cure as I am in your illness: lay aside your fears and think only that we shall have the pleasure of that journey into death which must free us from such torments. We shall go happily away together.”

Eventually, they agree to jump out a window, holding each other, into the sea. To make sure they never let each other go, she tied their waists together. In another dig towards the aristocrats of his time, he mentions that the woman in the story was from a lower class where such rare goodness is more common.

Most of us will see this story, and the ones that follow, as a tragedy. Montaigne doesn’t care. He isn’t trying to show a simple moral lesson but instead a complex reflection of human nature, courage, loyalty, and the contradictions of life and death.

By using this particular story as his first after discussing the insincere and performative displays of mourning by widows during his time, he shows the depths to which authentic relationships can go. Real stories to demonstrate what real human bonds look like.

Since he admits that goodness and virtue are more common amongst lower classes, he then gives two more stories from rich and noble women who he, again, reminds us are significantly more rare to find.

In the year 42 AD, a Roman Senator named Aulus Caecina Paetus was arrested and sentenced to death for allegedly taking part in a revolt against the Emperor Claudius. As was customary at the time for nobility, he was allowed (forced) to kill himself as his death sentence.

But when the time came, he hesitated out of fear of death. His wife, Arria, couldn’t stand to see her husband show fear of death and took the blade and stabbed herself first to encourage him to go through with it, famously saying “Non dolet, Paete!” (It doesn't hurt, Paetus!).

“…even with the final words of her life her only thought was of removing from him his fear of following her by taking his life.”

Paetus followed suit but Montaigne is convinced there must have been more than a little shame that he needed “so costly and so precious a lesson.”

The final story he shares is a famous one if you have read Stoic philosophy, or maybe any philosophy. It is the story of the final days of the Roman Senator and Stoic philosopher, Seneca. The Emperor Nero, who was once Seneca’s pupil, decides in a fit of rage to punish anyone he deemed as traitorous or conspiring against him and includes his former teacher Seneca.

Seneca, who wrote many letters on the importance of facing death with dignity and honor, and showing no fear, finally had his chance to show in deed what he preached for so long in word.

When the Roman guards come to tell him of the news, it’s made clear to him that he is to get on with it and not waste much time. They even refuse him material to write a last will and testament. Instead, he turns to the loved ones around him and says the only thing he can leave them with is his moral deeds and lessons, which he hopes will be written or preserved. He even knocks them for crying saying “Where are all those beautiful precepts of philosophy?” In other words, have you learned nothing from all of my teachings, he asks?

His wife, Paulina, who was much younger than him and from a very noble Roman family, wiped her tears and made it clear to her husband that she had every intention to join him.

“I do not want you to think that the virtuous examples of your life have not yet taught me to know how to make a fine death. When could I ever die better, or more honorably, or more as I would wish to, than together with you?”

In his final words, Seneca says that while he hopes to be remembered for showing resolve in this moment of death, his true hope is that it pales in comparison to her resolve and courage.1

Montaigne notes that while Paulina offered to die alongside her sentenced and convicted husband, it was Seneca who previously agreed to prolong his life so as not to upset his wife. He was ready to die many years prior but the love she showed him, and the care she had for his health, made him realize that while the Stoic philosophy might teach resilience in the face of death, there is nothing in it that says one must desire it either.

“The man who does not think enough of his wife or of his friend to prolong his life for them and who is determined to die is too fastidious, too self-indulgent…Sometimes we must make a loan of ourselves to those we love: even when we should wish to die for ourselves we should break off our plans on their account…Thus my Paulina has laid upon me not only her fears for me but my fears for myself as well. It is not enough for me to consider with what resolution I could die: I also have to consider how irresolutely she would bear it. So I have compelled myself to go on living. Sometimes there is magnanimity in doing so.”

Those words, Montaigne writes, are as excellent as are his deeds.

The final essay of Book II, On the resemblance of children to their fathers, has little to do with filial resemblance and more to do with a central theme of Montaigne and one that would make him a favorite amongst modern day writers like Nassim Taleb: skepticism.

If you’ve noticed a theme throughout the essays so far, it is probably skepticism. Montaigne’s favorite line to use is Que sais je? - What do I know?

In particular, in the final essay of Book II2, which at one point was the final chapter of all his work, he writes about his skepticism towards the field of medicine, which in those days resembled more art than science.

This skepticism reflected a philosophical doubt about human knowledge. The medicine of his time was fraught with uncertainty, error, and ineffective treatments. Doctors often relied on guesswork rather than reliable knowledge.

Montaigne, taking note of what was happening around him and not simply going with the crowd, understood how fallible humans were.

He critiques doctors who gave conflicting advice, or would espouse some exotic herb from a distant land, asking if people in those distant lands also prized the cabbages and parsley of France, since those were exotic and from a distant land to them.

He notes that, much like in our time of drug advertisements, the side-effects of certain medicines seem worse than the illness they are meant to treat. And he is particularly fond of bath houses, which he says have been used for centuries and cannot for the life of him understand why some doctors tell their patients to avoid them and instead take cold showers—in winter no less.

Since Montaigne traveled at one point all across Europe, he had experience among the different bathhouse rituals in each country. In that too, there were conflicting rituals, recommendations, and advice.

“So much then for the only branch of medicine which I have frequented; it is the least artificial but has its fair share of the confusion and uncertainty you see everywhere else in that Art.”

The worst rebuke Montaigne saves for doctors who don’t even follow the same advice and prescriptions to offer to patients. “If that is not openly mocking our simple-mindedness,” he asks “what is?”

The whole essay has hilarious stories, anecdotes, and musings on the absurdity of 16th century medicine. And while I’m not an anti-vaxxer by any stretch, I can’t say I have never thought some of the customs and practices of our modern medicine are all that different.

“Aesop, a most excellent author, and of whom few men discover all the graces, pleasantly represents to us the tyrannical authority physicians usurp over poor creatures, weakened and subdued by sickness and fear, when he tells us, that a sick person, being asked by his physician what operation he found of the potion he had given him: “I have sweated very much,” says the sick man. “That’s good,” says the physician. Another time, having asked how he felt himself after his physic: “I have been very cold, and have had a great shivering upon me,” said he. “That is good,” replied the physician. After the third potion, he asked him again how he did: “Why, I find myself swollen and puffed up,” said he, “as if I had a dropsy.” — “That is very well,” said the physician. One of his servants coming presently after to inquire how he felt himself, “Truly, friend,” said he, “with being too well I am about to die.”

As a final disclaimer, Montaigne reminds us that he has no problem with anyone who chooses to disagree with him. “In the world there has never been two identical opinions,” he writes, “…their most universal characteristic is diversity.”

Author’s note: This essay and read-along touches some heavy topics like death and suicide, which I assure you I do not take lightly. Please do not read into this any more than the philosophical musings from a 16th century aristocratic writer drawing from ancient Stoic traditions. Many later philosophers, including Kant, developed compelling moral arguments against suicide that challenge these earlier views, and I don't subscribe to the notion that the ancient perspective represents the final word on this question. I lost my best friend at age 18 to suicide and I can assure you it was devastating for his family and friends and totally unnecessary had he gotten help. If you land on this page with any feelings of suicidal thoughts, please reach out to a therapist or call 988, a suicide and crisis lifeline.

As a reminder, here’s what we’ve covered and what’s left for the next four weeks:

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers · Book III-2 On Repenting

• Sept 15: Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse · Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 22: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Sept 29: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

I often find myself forgetting that Montaigne wrote during what was essentially a post-Middle Ages period of Europe. Most historians would agree that the Middle Ages ended with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the discovery of America in 1492, and the Reformation starting in 1517. That makes Montaigne, who wrote his Essays in 1572, all the more incredible. Whether it’s his essay on how parents should show love to their children and handle inheritances, the different types of virtue, his harsh stance against cruelty, or why we often misinterpret old books, Montaigne almost seems to be writing from our present day.

He begins the first essay, On the affection of fathers for their children, which itself is a letter to a Madame d’Etissac, with a reminder of what he is attempting to do in his writing: get over melancholy and write, if about nothing else, himself. He admits that this format was considered strange and probably the only such book like it in existence. Getting formalities out of the way he tells her simply that he admires her for the love she has shown her children and wishes for her son to grow up to repay her with duty and gratitude. He had taken her son on his travels throughout Italy and is now preparing to offer to him, via this letter to the child’s mother, his own views on the parental duty to children.

Montaigne says that the love and responsibility we feel as parents towards our children might as well be considered a universal Law of Nature, one akin to the need for self-preservation and the avoidance of suffering. This affection makes sense since Nature is concerned with “the effective propagation of the successive parts of the world which she has contrived.” In that sense, it shouldn’t be surprising that the love flowing in the opposite direction, from children to their parents, isn’t always reciprocated.

Citing Aristotle’s Nicomechean Ethics, he writes:

“…that anyone who does a kindness to another loves him more than he is loved in return; that anyone to whom a debt is owed, feels greater love than the one by whom the debt is owed; and that every creator loves what he has made more than it would love him if it were capable of emotions.”

To Montaigne, there is something noble in the act of creation because it relates to our being, which he describes as consisting of motion and activity. To create a thing, or a person, is an act of nobility. The recipient, the thing or person being created, has merely served a purpose, which Montaigne calls usefulness.

“The things which have cost us most are dearest to us — and it cost us more to give them to receive.”

But Montaigne then makes a point which would probably sound strange to our modern ears. He admits that he doesn’t feel all that much love for newborns the way many of us do. Instead, he lets the affection grow with time as he develops a relationship with the child and sees them grow up. Before you jump to conclusions that he is cold-hearted, he makes the following case: most people are moved by the tricks performed by kids but are unimpressed and cold towards their activities when they are fully formed, as if we are the ones who only viewed them as “playthings or as pet monkeys.”

“Some fathers will give them plenty of toys when they’re children, but will resent the slightest expenditure on their needs once they have come of age.”

How many times do we see fathers become jealous of their sons, and resent them for returning in their young adulthood asking for assistance. I’ve known many such cases and it makes me wonder at what point they decided that they simply had no real love or affection for their child. Children are the responsibility of parents since they never requested to be born and had no say in the matter.

“we ought not to undertake to be fathers, if that frightens us.”

For Montaigne, not inviting children to be part of the family business or inheritance is cruelty, a cardinal sin in his eyes. He goes on to decry old men, who can barely move, cling to their money while their children, now grown adults, struggle to survive.

In my own family, I’ve seen this happen. My grandfather, who I loved, kept his finances hidden from his sons and even went as far as to never bother with a will before he died, leaving them both in the dark and scrambling to make sense of what would be given to whom. In truth, they could have used the inheritance years ago before he passed, when the money was doing absolutely nothing for him in his old age. History changes but human behavior stays the same.

The opposite is also a vice. Old men who think that their accumulated wealth will keep their children close to them are held in low opinion by Montaigne.

“We should make ourselves respected for our virtues and our abilities, and loved for our goodness and gentlemanliness.”

From here, Montaigne makes a transition to discussing the ways in which we educate and discipline children. As mentioned in a previous essay we did, he is against the use of physical violence and coercion.

“I hold that you'll never achieve by force what you cannot achieve by reason, intelligence, and skill… I have never seen caning achieve anything, except making souls more cowardly or more maliciously stubborn.”

If we want our children to love us back the way we love them, the only sure path is to “enrich their lives with whatever we have at our disposal.” In order to ensure that we can accomplish this lofty aim, Montaigne cautions against marrying at too young an age. He was thirty-three when he married, Aristotle recommended thirty-five, and Plato viewed the age of thirty as the bare minimum (he also viewed fifty-five as the maximum).

The danger, he and his philosophy predecessors saw, was the young adult years of the kids overlapping with our own adult years, which can cause bitterness, envy, and strife. But just as it is dangerous to be a young parent to young adult children before we have accomplished anything in the world, it is also important to know when to bow out and make way for our children when we reach old age. This inability to recognize when one is at too old an age and step aside to let their children shine “has ruined the reputation of most of the world’s great men.”

“There are so many drawbacks in old age, so much powerlessness; it so merits contempt, that the best endowment it can acquire, is the fond love of one's family: its arms are no longer fear and commands.”

He goes on to give a clear set of instructions to fathers everywhere: tell your children you love them often, even when they are grown; don’t leave your inheritance solely to your widow, ensure that she is taken care of but be extremely generous towards the kids.

Spawning Brain-children

He makes a pivot at the end of the chapter to address a different, albeit no less important, type of offspring that he calls ‘the brain-child’.

Brain-children are the creative works we produce within our lifetime. These could be our writing, poetry, sculpture, paintings, music, inventions, etc. These are the offspring of the mind, and according to him, “more purely our own,” since they did not require any mating partner to produce and have no life of their own the way biological children do.

“Plato adds that such children are immortal and immortalize their fathers — even deifying them, as in the case of Lycurgus, Solon and Minos.”

Writing about certain great authors whose books were burned, he calls that the first case of the death penalty being inflicted on books and erudition. When the Greek philosopher Epicurus lay on his deathbed, he is said to have been consoled by the great works of philosophy he bestowed on mankind. Montaigne wonders whether even the best and noblest of children could have given Epicurus the same consolation.

Virtue must be difficult

Montaigne continues in the next essay, On Cruelty, with a discussion on the nature of virtue, which he says cannot be the same as the tendency towards the Good which is innate. Virtue, according to Montaigne, “presupposes difficulty and opposition, and cannot be exercised without struggle.” That, he says, is why he and his fellow Catholics call God good, mighty, bountiful and just, but cannot call him virtuous.

Citing the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, he goes on to say that it is not enough to simply live according to reason and have our “souls in a good state.” Instead, we should seek challenges for ourselves where we put our ability to use reason and be virtuous to the test. If someone is naturally reasonable and seeks the path of least resistance in life, they are not practicing real virtue. Virtue, he says repeating the myth of Hesiod, demands a rough and thorny road.

Is it better to simply have the disposition of someone who isn’t tempted by vice, or someone who is but learns to tame those temptations through the development of their intellect and reason? Montaigne says the latter. Some of the well known virtues, he notes, come to us naturally anyway with age as our bodies grow weaker (chastity, sobriety, temperance). He goes on to admit that he is of the former type, and this is not something he is proud to admit.

It’s easy to miss but he also makes a comment that seems to me to be about free will. Remember, he is a practicing Catholic and the common wisdom at the time was that we have a libertarian free will that could choose to do otherwise. Montaigne admits he can’t claim credit for his genetics nor for his upbringing by a great father, so how much of his ability to resist vice and temptation is his own will and how much of it has already been determined for him at birth?

He recounts the story of Socrates, who when confronted by a so called Physiognomist named Zopyrus for having the physical features of a sex-crazed imbecile, admits that he was born that way but has overcome those inborn traits through discipline and reason. Montaigne, on the other hand, tells us that “any good that I may have in me I owe to the contrary to the luck of my birth.”

He then tells us the one vice he loathes more than all the rest: cruelty.

Of the seven deadly sins, cruelty is not one of them. And for Montaigne, during a period of intense religious-inspired civil war, cruelty was all around him. He rails against torture of humans as well as cruelty to animals.

All is one, he tells us:

“…there is a kind of respect and duty in man as a genus which link us not merely to the beasts, which have life and feelings, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men: and to the other creatures who are able to receive them we owe gentleness and kindness. Between them and us there is some sort of intercourse and a degree of mutual obligation.”

How to read old books

This final essay was shorter but no less strong in importance. While seemingly a defense of Seneca and Plutarch, what Montaigne actually does in this essay is tell the historians of his time how they ought to be interpreting ancient texts.

Instead of reading them with modern lenses, Montaigne tells us to read with empathy for the context in which these ancient stories took place. To decide something is unbelievable merely because we cannot imagine behaving that way is “brute-like stupidity” and so is to apply a modern judgement to a vastly different historical context.

Plutarch and Seneca were incredible people, he says, despite the harshness and barbarity of the times they lived. To judge them with a modern lens is an act of stupidity, and one we can still learn from today.

As a reminder, here’s what we’ve covered and what’s left for the next four weeks:

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers · Book III-2 On Repenting

• Sept 15: Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse · Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 22: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Sept 29: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. We will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

We often like to imagine ourselves as having distinct personalities that are constant through time. We do the same with others who we judge, by assigning them adjectives as if we are fixed creatures with inborn, unchangeable personally traits. There is some truth to this, I can attest, as a young dad seeing my five year old and eight month old up close.

Montaigne cautions us that while we may have inborn traits, who we are, and how we will behave, is much less fixed than what we want to believe.

The Ancient Philosophers, which Montaigne was fond of reading in his library, those like Seneca, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and even Thomas Aquinas, wrote at length on the importance of inner consistency and the “stable self.” In this essay, Montaigne all but shreds these illusions. In real life, humans are much more fickle and inconsistent.

“Our normal fashion is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, left and right, up and down, as the winds of occasion bear us along. What we want is only in our thought for the instant that we want it: we are like that creature which takes on the colour of wherever you put it… it is all motion and inconstancy.”

In this way, Montaigne is in a way arguing against free will:

“We float about among diverse counsels: our willing of anything is never free, final, or constant.”

However much we think we can simply will ourselves to live a set and desired routine, without any bumps in the road, Montaigne’s philosophy reminds us that we are in the end human. And humans are anything but perfectly stable.

“To judge a man” Montaigne says, “we must follow his tracks long and carefully.” That is where you can find glimmers of an stable arc, amongst those who have thought carefully about their life and designed it in such a way so to as to reduce the ebbs of flow of chance.

“Our projects go astray because they are not addressed to a target. No wind is right for a seaman who has no predetermined harbor.”

In the second and third essay, On Drunkenness and On Conscience, we get a view of Montaigne’s stance against two regular occurrences of his time—alcohol and torture.

While viewing drinking as a “gross and brutish vice” he, in typical what do I know? fashion analyzes it from all angles and comes to the conclusion that, while he abhors all the negatives alcohol does to the body, he admires its ability to get people to open up and reveal their true inner selves. And he particularly admires that alcohol becomes one of the last remaining bodily pleasures available to us with age, even if it doesn’t particularly suit him.

If you’re going to enjoy alcohol, Montaigne says, best to not have picky taste.

“The Germans enjoy drinking virtually any wine. Their aim is to gulp it rather than to taste it. They get a better bargain.”

As for torture, he sees through it as nothing more than a test of endurance, not a way to produce the truth from a prisoner. “Thousands upon thousands,” he writes, “have falsely confessed to capital charges.”

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers · Book III-2 On Repenting

• Sept 15: Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse · Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 22: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Sept 29: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. We will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to join those and get other subscriber-only content, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

There is a cliche of leaving the corporate rat race. Walking away from the constraints of a traditional career. Going off on your own. Sometimes, that even looks like leaving a “perfect” career.

What we often read about is one of two paths: leaving the apprenticeship phase of life to ‘strike it out on your own’ or completely going off-grid and disconnecting from society.

The latter has its lore and romance. Think Henry David Thoreau going off into the woods near Walden pond for solitude, seclusion, and soul-searching.

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Montaigne’s essay, On Solitude, is nothing of the sort. On the surface, it is about solitude. But dig just a few passages in and you understand that what Montaigne is concerned more with is a state of mind, not a physical place.

The masses may be prone to bad behavior and we, in their company, may be tempted either to hate or mimic them. Both are dangerous if what we truly want is a quiet mind.

“Now the end I think is always the same: how to live in leisure at our ease. But people do not always seek the way properly. Often they think they have left their occupations behind when they have merely changed them. There is hardly less torment in running a family than in running a whole country. Whenever our soul finds something to do she is there in her entirety: domestic tasks may be less important but they are no less importunate1.”

Leaving behind office politics and the troubles of the corporate life don’t translate into the removal of the “primary torments of our life” as he calls them: ambition, greed, uncertainty, fear, and desires. Just because we have changed our landscape, he says, does not mean that these real emotions which are innate in all humans disappear.

Quoting Horace, he writes:

“It is reason and wisdom which take away cares, not places affording wide views over the sea.”

When Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel, he responded “I am sure he wasn’t, he went with himself!”

Ram Dass, the Harvard psychiatrist turned spiritual teacher, said something similar: “I learned a long time ago if I was neurotic in New York, I'd be neurotic in Chicago.”2

What we must first do, Montaigne wrote, is learn to lighten ourselves and our souls.

“That is why it is not enough to withdraw from the mob, not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession”

Montaigne is describing a re-calibration back to our true inner selves. True solitude, he writes, can be enjoyed in towns and in kings’ courts, even if it is more convenient to do so apart from them.

How does he suggest we do this? By turning to the lessons of Stoicism.

He shares a story from Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, about the Greek philosopher Stilpo who, after his country was captured and his children and wife lost, appeared happy to the conquering Demetrius. When Demetrius asked if he had suffered any harm, he replied “I have all my goods with me!” The Cynic philosopher Antisthenes took it even further saying that a man should only have “unsinkable goods” which could float out of a shipwreck with him.

Clearly, there is a treasure that is greater and more private to us than anything external. That is what we must learn to cultivate and cherish.

“We should have wives, children, property and, above all, good health…if we can: but we should not become so attached to them that our happiness depends on them.”

Instead, we should “set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop.” This can be a private office at home, the kitchen table in the early hours before the rest of the family wakes up, or it can even be a private journal. Somewhere that is truly ours and ours alone, something “of ourselves, with ourselves.” A place to meditate on life, to be grateful for what we have, while imagining the worst so as to strengthen our minds and our resolve.

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself.”

Montaigne borrowed heavily from the different schools of Hellenistic philosophy, including Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism (Pyrrhonism). But he agrees with Seneca that the Cynics go too far with their asceticism. There is no need to be egregious about renunciation, which he calls “virtue taken to excess.”

made the case in one of his lectures that Stoicism is hypocritical because Seneca himself, who called external goods like wealth a preferred indifferent, amassed something to the tune of 300 million sestertii3. But Seneca, and the Stoics, respond to critics that there is nothing wrong with having external goods. But that you should lose no sleep or tranquility if you were to lose them. Montaigne would agree.

So once you’ve resolved to enter a period of solitude, what occupation should you take on? “It depends on each man’s individual taste.” Whatever you choose, he cautions, do it in moderation. The point of solitude is to strengthen your mind, not to exchange one type of slavery for another.

And to spend time alone, in solitude, whether it be for a period of life, or as a final chapter of life, but not spend any time contemplating things outside this world (the existence of an afterlife, your soul, etc.) is to miss the point, Montaigne argues.

On the topics of which books to read during this period, Montaigne is clear:

“Personally I only like pleasurable easy books which tickle my interest, or those which console me and counsel me how to control my life and death.”

Physical exercise, walks in nature, studying, and even sports are perfectly acceptable ways to spend part of your solitude but whatever you choose to do, do so in moderation up until the point where it starts to turn into torment. The goal is to find ways to occupy your time and avoid the perils of idleness.

In the next essay, On Prayer, we learn that Montaigne was still very much a practicing Catholic. He devotes this essay to share a personal pet peeve of his: people who recite prayer from memory devoid of any feeling or emotion. What is the point, he asks?

He also reserves harsh judgement against his fellow Church-goers who insult the sanctity of worship by asking for nonsensical and ridiculous things in their private prayers.

In the final essay we read, a short one at that, On the length of life, he makes an interesting point: dying of old age is so rare that we, and all of society, should act as if it is more likely that we will pass at an early age from all manner of tragic circumstances. His moral recommendation comes down to letting younger people start their lives earlier. In a way, it can be seen as a defense of giving younger people past the age of 18 even more agency. Montaigne would probably be horrified to learn that in the U.S. you can’t drink, buy tobacco, or gamble until 21 and can’t hold certain public offices until 35.

I suppose it’s only fitting then that the essays we cover next week will be On the Inconstancy of Our Actions, On Conscience, and On Drunkenness.

If you enjoyed these essays, let me know in the comments.

• July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness

• July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

• Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities

• Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence

• Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life

• Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience

• Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

• Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers · Book III-2 On Repenting

• Sept 15: Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse · Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches

• Sept 22: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience

• Sept 29: Live Zoom Q&A Finale

All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work here on Substack, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:

Subscribe now

Ever since the earliest days of man, we have regarded outsiders and strangers as other. Different from us. They appear to be human, but we denounce them as less-than simply for being different. The Romans described the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe as barbarian, and the Greeks before them once described the Romans as barbarian.1

In 16th century Europe, as the New World was being “discovered” by the European powers, the native peoples of the Americas were also described as barbarian and savage.

“There is nothing savage or barbarous about those peoples, but that every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to…”

Montaigne recounts what he has learned with the help of a traveler who spent a little over a decade in the New World. He tells us that even Plato, in his Republic, could not have imagined such a pure and simple people. He wishes that he could tell Plato directly all of the ways in which these people’s lives are superior, by use of desirable negatives.2

“…those people have no trade of any kind, no acquaintance with writing, no knowledge of numbers, no terms for governor or political superior, no practice of subordination or of riches or poverty, no contracts, no inheritances, no divided estates, no occupation but leisure, no concern for kinship – except such as is common to them all – no clothing, no agriculture, no metals, no use of wine or corn. Among them you hear no words for treachery, lying, cheating, avarice, envy, backbiting or forgiveness.”

Then he gets to the part that most of his readers in 16th century France, and certainly today’s readers in 2025, would find abhorrent. The cannibalism.

Instead of judging and talking of depravity, he offers a different spin. He lists all the ways in which we ought to find value and virtue in their way of life. The elders preach only two things: bravery in battle, and love for their wives. They fight wars with steadfastness and have no concept of cowardice. All they concern themselves with is courage. They never fight battles to conquer new territory, only to defend their honor. If they are captured in battle, their captors feed them well and taunt them that they will soon be burned and then eaten, unless they ask for leniency and mercy.

And yet, these prisoners would taunt their captors right back, instead of showing any sign of defeat, saying that if they are to be eaten, their captors will simply be eating their own forefathers and relatives that they had eaten before.

“Sometimes it is the bravest who may prove most unlucky.”

If you find these practices depraved, Montaigne warns, consider the horrible practices of torture in Medieval Europe sanctioned by the Church. If we can criticize these tribal peoples at all, he says, it is via reason, and not via comparison.

Montaigne is often accused of moral relativism, the idea that there is no objective moral truth. I disagree with this framing. He goes on to criticize these tribal peoples for what he sees as practices and behaviors that are deeply immoral, then criticizes his own culture. A moral relativist would just say there is no point in criticizing culture, since there is no external standard.3

In many ways, he views these tribal people of South America as superior to the French. At the end of the essay, he tells the story of three natives who, desiring novelty, agreed to leave their “calm skies of home to come and see ours.” In Rouen, France they visited the court of King Charles IX, who at the time was only twelve years old.

After being shown all the royal ceremonies the King asked for their opinion of French culture. They admitted they were baffled that the strong, adult males of the royal guard would obey a child, but mostly they were horrified by the gap between the rich and the poor.

“They are still in that blessed stage of desiring nothing beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities: for them anything further is merely superfluous.”

Not bad, Montaigne says, for a bunch of savages. Unfortunately, “they don’t wear breeches.”

Whereas Montaigne’s writing is usually littered with quotes from the Roman Stoic philosophers, making him appear as “a cool, gracious source of Hellenistic wisdom”, this essay was one of the pieces which made him a favorite of the Romantics and the Enlightenment Era two centuries later.

18th Century French Philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau both admired Montaigne and tried to copy, or emulate, his style and approach to describing the tribal peoples of the world. They romanticized primitive culture’s “simple life” and “state of grace”, where the only thing necessary to find happiness was to “follow nature”. Rousseau went even further, stating that only when civilization makes man “sociable and a slave” does he lose his manliness. What these writers were describing was the idea of the Noble Savage.

Montaigne was different. Through his writing we find a continuous thread of a hatred of cruelty, and he is as quick to call out his fellow countrymen as he is the tribal people of South America.

In the second essay we read, Judgements on God’s ordinances must be embarked upon with prudence, he has a simple and straightforward message: it is a mistake to view both the good and bad fortunes of man as some sort of sign from God.

In his day, and really not much has changed, people would view military victories as a sign of God’s grace. The tribal people of the New World would pray to the Sun, which some viewed as a deity, for good luck in battle. How is that any different, he asks, than Europeans attributing their successes to God?

It is these sorts of short, concise chapters combined with the longer ones which captured me the first time I read them. He takes as much, or as little, space as he feels he needs to make his point.

He even hints, in On Cannibals, at how much it pisses him off when people over-embellish to make their point. “A man may well have detailed knowledge or experience of the nature of one particular river or stream,” he writes, “…but in order to trot out his little scrap of knowledge he will write a book on the whole of physics!”

As I promised you at the outset, Montaigne does not disappoint.

Additional Montaigne Readings

I came across two other Montaigne readings in my preparation for this week, and while I didn’t have a reason to cite any of the material from them, I still felt they were worth your while.

One is Trent Portigal’s Rehumanizing Cannibalism on Medium, and the other Montaigne’s Maxims by Jared Henderson here on Substack.

Both are fun reads if you’re itching for more Montaigne.

Next week, we cover (arguably) one of his best essays, On Solitude.