Spinning off Spinoza One Last (And Perilous) Time: Dangerous Emotions

This past Thursday we concluded our six part salon series organized around the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza with a trek down the rocky road of emotions. Considering that Spinoza saw emotion as 'suffering' - albeit suffering which could, when carefully examined, pave the way to unfettered joy - we were not without trepidation as we set out on this last leg of our Spinozist journey together. Attaching 'dangerous' to the venture did little to quell our fears. On the other hand, we were well aware that poor old peace-loving Spinoza - though wary of conflict and prepared to do almost anything to avert a quarrel - still succeeded in scandalizing his contemporaries and turning philosophy into that most 'dangerous' of pursuits both during his lifetime and for centuries afterwards. What to do with this cruel twist of fate? we asked ourselves. We decided that in a world where you just can't win, you don't have much to lose. We went for it.

Taking a deep breath, we plunged headlong into the emotional quagmire: grappling first with Aristotle's approach to 'educating' the emotions so as to tame them, master them, and put them at the service of less volatile reason; comparing this to Spinoza's somewhat more holistic way of dealing with those pesky passions, which was to accept that you were stuck with the damn things, do all you could to form "a clear and precise picture of them," and use what you had learned about yourself and nature more generally through this exercise in active thinking to inch your way towards blissful and eternal life. In Spinoza's simple no-nonsense words: "Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."

With Spinoza's infinitely practical approach to those 'inadequate' yet inevitable and ultimately salvageable emotional highs and lows in mind, we re-visited our take home exercise from last month's 'unleashed traveler' salon evening. Participants had been asked to take two walks in the company of their Deleuze and Guattarian Body without Organs or BwO...Using this portable little experimental milieu that each of us is born with (it's our risk-taking, system-bashing side!) to test out the differences between tracing a familiar route and mapping out an unknown route as an affected and affecting body moving through time, space and a whole host of other affected and affecting bodies.

Okay, so it sounds complicated...Perhaps you had to be there...But for those who were, interesting light was shed on the exercise when we looked back at it through emotion-tinged spectacles and wondered how to reconcile this ambulatory attempt to 'lose the self' in nomadic movement with the shaken and stirred 'moving out of oneself' suggested by the Latin origins of the word, e-motion. A walk in the park taken by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway provided some additional food for thought as we considered what it meant to "slice like a knife through everything" and to no longer be able to say with any degree of certainty, "I am this" or "I am that."

And yet, in spite of Virginia's best laid plans, here we still all were...Trying to make meaning of our emotions and feeling, in the process, more like pottering potato peelers than cut-throat knives. We found our way to "the mattering map" - an alternative way of exploring what it's all about which, unlike the more constricted terrain of meaning, can stretch itself to "encompass and enfold, to embrace meaning and caring, mind and heart, feelings and ideas" (Ellyn Kaschak, 2011). Interestingly, this feminist 'construct' or 'tool' for working with what Kaschak calls the "complexity, multiplicity and motion or morphing of the energetic field of mattering" also led us back to where we had started out on our Spinozist journey: to Rebecca Goldstein, our first literary touchstone for exploring Spinoza's life and ideas, and also the thinker behind "the mattering map."

Bringing this emphasis on 'what matters' together with ethno-philosopher Alphonso Lingis's (2000) intriguing suggestion that the source of our emotions lies in the environment - in the "troubled ocean currents...the continental plates shifting and creaking...the whimsical fluttering of butterflies" (18) - we explored Lingis's insistence that our emotions, in turn, are "forces we discharge" and which, at the end of the day, are more visibly present to others than our body's own physical contours. If all this talk of forces and energy fields connected us back  to Spinoza insofar as he treats the nature and strength of the emotions in terms of motile and geometric lines, vectors and planes, the time had also come to get down to work: designing our own personal Spinoza-style signet ring reminiscent of the one he wore; incorporating into our designs the image each of us felt best illustrated our way of being in the world (Spinoza’s chosen image was the thorny rose) and our personal ‘watchword’ for getting through life (Spinoza’s was ‘Caute’ – ‘Cautiously’). 

Using this exercise as a springboard to pinpointing the ‘dangerous emotions’ which we felt most curtailed our personal passage to greater perfection (joy) and most encouraged our passage to lesser perfection (sorrow) - Spinoza’s were doubt-filled ‘hope’ and ‘fear’ respectively - we brought the series to a close with a revealing exploration of our selves as emotional beings: striving in true Spinozist fashion to understand the nature of those forces which threaten to rob us of our vitality and put a damper on our joy; finding in our very striving a possible road map towards greater fulfillment and happiness. It has been a challenging, exciting  and life-enhancing journey with you all over these past few months, and it has been a joy to discover Baruch Spinoza in your company. Thank you. 

Spinning off Spinoza 5/6: The Unleashed Traveller

"I want to race through life with the wind in my face!"

So exclaims the heroine in one of the many novels about daring-do women penned by renowned British "lady-explorer," Rosita Forbes (1890-1967). A worldwide wanderer par excellence, a prolific writer of both adventure-packed fiction and personal travelogues that read like fiction, Rosita Forbes and the fictional characters through which she expressed her hell-bent and windswept attitude to life would seem to epitomize the trope of the unleashed traveller. More than this, Forbes and her flamboyant alter-egos appear to fly in the face of the more sedentary and home-bound image we have of well-to-do Edwardian womanhood.

As wine women and philosophy members well know, however, anything that ruffles the feathers of the expected is likely to be given its fair due during the course of a wwp salon evening, and this past Thursday was no exception. Let's just say that in our race through the potentia and perils of unleashed travel, no stereotype was left unturned, no mappa mundi left untrammelled. And if a Spinozist wind was blowing a fine gale all around us, the knowledge that it was ultimately there to maximize our motile joy and minimize our all-too-static sorrow definitely propelled us along.

We began the evening with the usual etymological unpacking of key terms, though on this particular occasion it was more like an exercise in what to pack: determining just how much 'unleashing' - how much 'freedom from constraint or control' - each of us was willing to throw into our kit-bags as we struck out into uncharted territory; balancing the somewhat dubious weight of 'travel''s Old French and Latin roots (from travail - 'hard work' - and trepalium -  'instrument of torture') against the unbearable lightness of expeditionary expediency in the era of Expedia.

As if this didn't present departure gate dilemmas enough, we brought Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti on board: probing the difference between travelling arborescently (think the rooted family tree) and travelling rhizomatically (think crab grass with its web of sprawling and criss-crossing connections, disconnections and re-connections) courtesy of the former; dipping our toe into the swirling post-identity whirlpool of nomadic becomings and ethics courtesy of the latter. In addition to helping us understand the difference between tracing and mapping our way through the world, we couldn't help noticing how these thinkers' rejection of starting points and end points in favour of a fluid, always-in-the-middle sense of Self and Location resonated with Spinoza's call to develop 'the View from Nowhere' (see our first Spinoza session back in December 2012).

As for the actual mechanics of shedding those Spinozist 'passive markers' when travelling either physically or virtually, an exercise in writing ourselves into our own travelogues highlighted the difficulty of seeing our body as nothing more than a force entering into fleeting composition (and decomposition) with a multiplicity of other forces. On the bright side, the prose to emerge from this writerly experiment was pure poetry in motion. Creative juices a-flow, we tumbled into our next task: ripping into an old road atlas; using the salvaged fragments to map out a Nomadic Cartography of the Self. This graphic rendering of a life lived not only gave us important insight into Spinoza's itinerant boarding house lodger lifestyle as compared to our own respective lifestyles; it also illuminated Rosita Forbes' suggestion that the charm of the map lies in the lines that lead off from, and surpass, it - that "other side of the horizon where everything is possible."

With this lofty thought in mind, we took leave of each other - committing as we did to doing a spot of homework (read legwork) in the coming weeks in preparation for our final Spinning off Spinoza session in mid-May. This consists of taking two walks with Spinoza...One in the form of a tracing, one in the form of a mapping, both in the spirit of Spinoza's notion that travelling bodies, when unleashed into the world, are necessarily defined by their chance collisions and encounters, by their capacity to affect and be affected...Neighbourhood Watch Committees be warned.

Spinning off Spinoza Take 4: Perfection(ism)

Though it is tempting to wax lyrical about last Thursday's salon evening - to see in this particular coming together of lively minds and creative energies and adventurous spirits a felicitous happening that came close to, well...Perfection! - there is something about Baruch Spinoza's take on the "P" word that makes one wary of throwing it around too blithely. Certainly, a sobering qualifier like "close to" is required. For to call the evening pure perfection would be to fly in the face of Spinoza's key assertion about perfection: that only infinite Nature can lay claim to such a state; that to say we've attained perfection is akin to saying that we have the whole Big Picture sussed, that there's nothing left to learn, that it's game over...time to pack up our bags and call it a day.

Spinoza is pretty confident that that day never comes - that knowing everything there is to know about everything is, well, a pretty tall order, nay an impossible one, for us humans. Spinoza also feels pretty safe in assuming that perfection is just one of those destinations we're never going to arrive at: not in the context of a wwp salon evening; not in any of our respective lives. This isn't to say that we shouldn't keep trying to get there. Indeed, for Spinoza, our very striving to understand the true nature of Nature - to think through what makes it Real (with a capital "R") and hence, what lies at the very heart of its perfection - ensures that we ourselves become more perfect. In fact, this thinking ourselves towards ever more knowledge about Nature's perfection (or Reality) is what making yourself a 'good life' is all about. And perhaps it is here, in this very Spinozist notion of actively thinking yourself into a good life (as opposed to living up to some craggy old philosopher's ideal of the good life) that we get closest to Spinoza's conception of perfection, and incidentally, to the original meaning of the word itself.

Perfect: from the Latin roots for per - "thoroughly" - and fect - "to do, to make".

So here's the big question: why is it that what we have come to understand as perfection (and certainly perfectionism) in today's world has to a large extent lost this vital Spinozist aspect of doing, of making, and become focused on the more obsessively compulsive thoroughly instead? If unpacking the "P" word was a collective task we embarked upon early in the evening, our discussion of what happened as we nouned it, verbed it, adjectified it and adverbed it shed important light on perfection's journey from those original etymological roots to the anxiety-ridden perfectionist who can never quite make it thoroughly enough.

To help us with this task we drew on a number of prods, prompts and props. Youtube videos of Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' as delivered by artists ranging from Susan Boyle to U2's Bono eased us into the topic at a visceral level. The myth of the 'deliberate imperfection' as expressed in the 'humble blocks' of Amish quilters, for example, allowed us to explore perfection's fallible (albeit debatable) flipside, as well as celebrate those mistake-makers who serve as important 'moral exemplars' for girls and women. I'm thinking here of Le Tigre's Kathleen Hanna who, in her rebellious riot grrrrrl Bikini Kill days, saw hitting a sour note up there on the stage and carrying on anyway as sending an important feminist message to aspiring female musicians whose fear of failure was stopping them from at least giving it a go.

Prompted by one of our Scottish members, Kim, who participates from afar in our various wwp activities, we turned to a clip from Oprah's Super Soul Sunday: an interview with Dr. Brene Brown, author of The Gifts of Imperfection. Brown's suggestion that our fear of being seen by others to be anything less than perfect means that we not only refuse to show our real selves to the world, but that the cloak of perfection becomes our "20 tonne shield"  protecting us from that world, led us to speculate on the contrasting place of 'the Real' in Brown's version of perfection, and in that of Spinoza. If Brown's striving for perfection found her becoming less true to who she actually was, driving her further away from her own reality the more she propelled herself into the wider world, it was clear that an increase in Spinoza-style perfection would have the opposite effect: making Brown truer to her own reality, propelling her closer to her own nature and - because she and Nature share the same Substance in Spinoza's metaphysical understanding of the human psyche - closer to that wider world as well.

Enjoying Spinoza's liberating spin on perfection and seeing in it a possible way to 'treat' the pathological perfectionist, we built some text book 'patients' out of selected quotes and props and, working in pairs, created first a psychological treatment plan for them, and then a philosophical one. If this exercise triggered some interesting discussion around why we tend to go to a psychotherapist with our personal 'problems' rather than take them to a philosopher, it also allowed us to explore how philosophy might provide an eye-opening and life-enhancing alternative to the more traditional session with the 'shrink'. After four weeks of exploring Spinoza together, most of us seemed ready to go the metaphysical route and ask our doctors for a reference to him.

Certainly, Spinoza makes life into a wonderful puzzle: our primary task being to use our power of thinking to tease out the most elusive details of what makes Reality real; our reward coming from the sheer joy - or as he would see it, that passage to greater perfection - that the activity of thinking tout court affords us. In treating life as a puzzle - as some great tantalizing mystery that objectively exists 'out there' and that is ours for the taking, if only we take the time to figure it all out - Spinoza is not alone. Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel - he of the two "incompleteness" theorems - saw mathematics in this way: as a whole slew of numbers actually flying around out there like Platonist Forms in some abstract but tangible reality, just waiting for a good logical head to come along and figure out as much about that reality as could humanly (and therein lies the fallible incompleteness of it all) be grasped. Physicist Albert Einstein saw the "utterly surprising physical reality" of light beams and speed of sound and gravitational pull that exists "out yonder" in much the same way: as some "great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking"*.

There is something about each of these meta-thinkers that sets the seemingly static world into beautiful poetic motion: that makes you want to hop onto a passage to greater perfection or a curling '2' or a beam of light and go for a ride. Such journeying will be the subject of the next salon evening, on April 18, when we take a look at the Spinozist 'unleashed traveller'. In the meantime, we want to thank Marianne for suggesting the topic of perfection(ism) to us, and all of our wwp salon participants for stretching their minds in such elegant style last Thursday. In Spinozist terms, I think we all became just that little bit more perfect as a result of pooling our power of thinking and generating some collective joy.


*Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, 2005, 42-43.

Happy International Women's Day to all our Members and Friends

This past year we have been contributing regularly to Women for Women International which is doing some terrific work for girls and women caught in war zones around the world. We also signed the petition to get rid of page 3 girls in The Sun newspaper in the UK. Check out these links to both these causes if you want a little inspiration on this special day for women everywhere.

Spinning off Spinoza Take 3: Desire and Appetite

Last Thursday - 336 years to the day of Baruch Spinoza's death from consumption at the age of 44 (February 21, 1677) - wine women and philosophy members came together to explore this unconventional philosopher's take on desire and its more bodily sidekick, appetite. Given that desire was central to Spinoza's metaphysical positing of a life lived freely, happily and ethically, the subject matter itself would seem a fitting choice with which to honour his life. That Spinoza's understanding of desire strays wildly from that of the majority of his Western Philosophical confreres renders the synchronicity downright uncanny.

For whereas desire for these latter is generally about what isn't there - a longing or a yearning for some object outside of us that we lack - Spinoza's desire is our very essence: the very life force of our life. And Spinoza went all out and celebrated this life force. Along with joy, there wasn't much more to life for Spinoza than this active and self-actualizing striving to be named desire. In fact, for Spinoza death was a far less worrying prospect than being alive but only passively so: devoid of desire, emptied of essence, just going through the motions, thinking other people's thoughts. To desire your own desiring, to think your own thinking - these were the active ingredients constituting 'the good life' for Spinoza. In other words, what better way to mark the end of Spinoza's life all these many years after the fact than to unpack the affect (life force) and essence (fundamental nature) that gave him life.

Desire, for Spinoza, is synonomous with conatus: a term explored over the course of our first two sessions in this series, and which is best understood as the endeavour of each person to persevere in her or his own being. We began the salon evening with a review of this term and other terms encountered on our Spinozian journey thus far: in part to bring those participants new to Spinoza up to date with our recent meanderings through his Ethics and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus; in part to get those who had been present at earlier sessions reflecting pace Nel Noddings on "what sticks" - the little bits of insight and information that do remain in our memory bank being akin to those burrs that just seem to attach themselves to your clothing as you make your way across a field.

Pooling our Spinozian 'burrs' enabled us to collectively cobble together a fairly good picture of his philosophy as explored by the group to date, as well as to see how desire and appetite fit into it all as the evening proceeded. And here's the rub: in addition to getting closer to 'getting' Spinoza, the tide was also turning for Spinoza at an affective level. From an initial hostility towards this most rationalist of philosophers who used Euclidean geometry to ascertain the best route to ethical behaviour and for whom giving your passions free rein is to seriously curtail any chance you have of any real freedom, the crowd was definitely starting to soften towards him as round three hit the midway mark.

 'I'm actually starting to like this guy," commented one of our regulars as we delved into Spinoza's refusal to assign values like 'good' and 'bad' to objects in and of themselves, but rather to see goodness (or badness) in the degree to which an individual's desire to affirm her moment in time and live it fully (ie. desiringly) is either increased (or diminished). Bringing Spinoza's greatest twentieth century supporter, post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze, into the conversation certainly helped to notch up those popularity points. You cannot throw around Spinoza-inspired Deleuzian terms like "Desiring Machines" and "Bodies without Organs"  and "Lines of Flight" of an evening and not feel a certain fondness for the man behind it all. Countering the self-negating and object-driven 'desire as absence' hypothesizing of classic psychoanalysis with Spinoza's self-reliant and self-generating 'desire as life' approach wasn't a bad way to get people on board with the man either. Hand a group of intelligent women a spirited challenge to Freud's Penis Envy or Oedipus Complex theories and you're bound to attract some fans.

It was an envigorating task, working desire through a Spinozian lens. As a society, we are so entrenched in the "desire as absence" mindset that it takes some good hard thinking to think it otherwise. This, one suspects, would have delighted Spinoza, as would our concerted efforts to build desiring 'assemblages' of Christmas baubles, cribbage boards, and various other nuts and bolts. Thank you to all those who took part...We just relished your good grace and gusto. Next time - Thursday, March 21 - we'll be looking at Spinoza's understanding of Perfection. All you perfectionists...Time to start preparing right now!

Joy and Sorrow: Emotions?...Affects?...None of the Above?

Our second salon to spin off Spinoza kicked off 2013 for wine women and philosophy members this past Thursday, and a joyful experience it was too. This was fortuitous, given that half of the evening was devoted to the topic of joy...The other half revolving around joy's more sober relation, sorrow, which impacted our understanding of joy if not our communal mood. It was good to get the old wheels turning again with our valued 'veteran' members. It was good to welcome new members into our midst and benefit from their energy and insight. It was good, in short, to be back in the salon saddle.

We began the evening with one of those questions we return to every so often..."What is philosophy for you today?" The responses always inspire us, enabling us to build upon our ongoing conception of what philosophy is and how it can enhance our lives. They also affirm for us that the way we engage with philosophy at wwp is helping to break philosophy out of the elitist and exclusive packaging that all too often surrounds it. That philosophy is seen by our members as a creative and experimental activity - as an exciting route into both the ordinary and extraordinary experiences that make us and the events we live through what they are - is reassuring news indeed.

Then it was time to draw on some of those experiences: opening our discussion of joy and sorrow with moments of one or the other that had come over us during the holiday season - a time that often triggers these contrasting states on the emotional spectrum. Having established that though frequently seen as opposites, the line between joy and sorrow can be thin, we looked into whether the word 'emotion' should even be applied to joy and sorrow: exploring first, through the 'Emotions Game,' just how easy a wide range of emotions are to recognize in others; examining next, through Aaron Ben Ze'ev's tautology of a 'typical' emotion, whether joy and sorrow actually qualify. Happily, the jury was out on the matter - confirming that good philosophy is more about dissensus than consensus. Our lack of agreement over joy's and sorrow's respective statuses as emotions also provided an excellent segue into Spinoza's contribution to the evening's procedings: both in terms of his celebration of thinking as an action designed to free us from conformity of thought, and in his positing of joy and sorrow not as emotions but as affects - that is, as energy-charged passages between greater or lesser states of being rather than as states in and of themselves.

For Spinoza, our movement towards joy and our movement away from sorrow are key to living pleasurably and freely, without pain and without fetters. For Spinoza, everything hinges on how we 'manage' these two affects: for manage them we can, using good clear thinking ('adequate' ideas) to bring us closer to who we truly are, and by extension, to joy; rejecting the kind of 'sad' same-old-same-old thinking that stunts our ability to grow and thrive, and by extension, drowns us in sorrow. Within this equation - and an equation it certainly was, Spinoza's whole Ethics emerging out of a mathematical approach to working things out reminiscent of Euclidean Geometry - our ability to act increases with joy, decreases with sorrow. And to act, for Spinoza, is paramount to living well: acting (or thinking) our way to greater perfection - to being more 'real,' more true to our nature - falling within the affective realm of joy; failure to act (or think) leading to a state of lesser perfection, and with it, a tumble in the affective realm of sorrow. Naturally, this being the reasoning of the greatest Rationalist philosopher of them all, it is better to strive for active joy - that is, joy that you actively think yourself into, and hence is of yourself - than passive joy, which is dependant on an object beyond yourself, and hence might better be understood as a passion. Given that freedom of mind and spirit for as many people as possible is the ultimate good for Spinoza, it is easy to see how the joy you make for yourself is a better bet by his reckoning than the joy that depends on some other thing or self.

Thinking joy and sorrow through a Spinozian lens led us to re-think the link between joy and sorrow - pulling out the old construction paper, coloured pens and cellotape in true back-to-school fashion and creating joy/sorrow connections in the form of flip-side bracelets, edge-defying Mobius Strips, and experiments with the fold. If these latter jettisoned us out of Spinoza's monist universe (everything is an expression of one single Substance) and three centuries on in time into post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze's 'Origami Cosmos' - more on this next time! - it also served as a bridge between these two philosophers. For Deleuze saw Spinoza as a "Prince" among philosophers, and was hugely influenced by his emphasis on active, affecting bodies when it came to evolving his own version of a 'doing' philosophy. Incidentally, Einstein too was a fan of Spinoza...A point that was not lost on us as the evening drew to an end and with it, considerable confusion over which boots belonged to whom. An indication of Einstein's brilliance, it has been said, lay in his inability to tie his own shoes. An indication of our members' brilliance, it follows, must lie in them going home in each others' boots.

It was an evening of intense and joyful thinking. It was an evening of which Spinoza would have no doubt approved. Thank you to all who participated. We look forward to seeing you again on February 21, when we take a flying leap into Spinoza's provocative conception of desire and appetite.

Spinning off Spinoza into the Realm of Joy and Sorrow

This Thursday - January 10 - will see wwp salon members coming together to consider those oft-twinned states of being, joy and sorrow. One aspect of our communal task on this first salon evening of 2013 is to grapple with a number of different ways that joy and sorrow have been philosophically positioned - as personal feelings, as unruly passions, as passages between greater and lesser states of perfection, as impersonal affects...to name just several of those ways! Another is to examine why joy and sorrow are so readily twinned - probing not only the relationship between joy and sorrow, but the nature of the connection and its relevance to our own lives. Yet another task is to continue our exploration of Baruch Spinoza -  a 17th Century philosopher whose unconventional approach to ethics hinged on joy and sorrow, and around whom this year's salon series revolves.

At our December salon we embarked on our journey of getting to know Spinoza...For those of you who attended, this quick recap can serve as a post-holiday season refresher. For those of you who weren't able to make it out to our introductory session, let's hope it whets your whistle!

Born in the relatively tolerant city of Amsterdam in 1632 to Jewish parents who had fled persecution in Portugal, Baruch Spinoza was a solemn and thoughtful if unusually questioning student - quietly challenging his teachers at the Hebrew school he attended when ideas presented as 'written in stone' struck him as illogical or inconsistent; leaving formal education at the age of 16 to pursue private studies with some 'free thinkers' of the time when his views about God and the Torah began to conflict too radically with the 'Truth' as presented by those responsible for his education. Accused of betraying Judaism and labelled a heretic, he was ex-communicated in his early twenties for basically, believing in nothing - notably waiting until after the death of his father (his mother had died when he was six) before going public with his reasoned deduction that "God is nothing but nature" and that "there is no world-to-come after death" so as to spare his parents the shame and humiliation that his stance, not to mention his ex-communication, would provoke. As philosophers go, Spinoza was unconventional in that philosophy was his pastime - his job as a lens-grinder providing him with his income as well as precipitating his early death from TB at the age of 44. Given the scandal that bubbled around him in life and the blacklisting of his small body of work that dogged him for centuries after his death, it is incongruous that his motto was 'caution' and his general countenance private and unassuming.

These details of Spinoza's life and the background against which it unfolded - a Europe caught between a Papist reign of terror that saw tens of thousands of Jews either killed or forced to convert to Catholicism and a dawning of the Enlightenment era characterized by rapid scientific advances and the rise of rationalist thought - were unpacked through a lively Q&A session. Bridging the life of the man with the ideas that made Spinoza what Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, in her fabulously insightful and highly readable Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (2006), terms "the first modern Jew," we grappled with one of the tasks Goldstein sets for herself in her book: reconciling Spinoza's extraordinarily rationalist and impersonal philosophy with our personal interest in him!

Moving on, then, to the philosophy itself, we picked up on Spinoza's central concept of conatus - that is, a thing's special commitment to itself, or more simply, each individual's drive for self-preservation - to begin our look at what constitutes a 'Self'. Some small group exercises enabled us to come up with our own lists of what it is to be a Self. We compared our lists to Spinoza's list, which eshews those traditional markers of identity such as religion and ethnicity (markers which Spinoza sees as mere "accidents" of identity assigned us by history, and thus nothing more than passive yet deeply divisive impediments to creating a world made up of truly ethical Selves) in favour of a Self defined by rigourous and logical thinking - by rational activity alone. We experimented with stepping outside of our selves in order to cultivate a Spinozian Self and with it, what Spinoza sees as our place of ultimate salvation - that is, a place with a "View from Nowhere."

Pictorial depictions of what we and other things look like from this 'place' - should it be understood as a utopia? a dystopia? an atopia? none of the above? - were attempted, and briefly discussed. We are holding on to these artistic representations and plan to return to them as our understanding of Spinoza expands over the coming months. In the meantime, our task over the holiday break was to make note of those moments where joy or sorrow crept up upon us or completely overtook us or never even made an appearance...Stay tuned as we Spin off Spinoza for a second time.