The Canon / Foundational / Idealism & Process Philosophy
Foundational · 1677
Ethics
Idealist & Process PhilosophyEthics presents reality as a single infinite substance, Deus sive Natura — God or Nature — of which all particular things are modes or expressions. Mind and matter are not two substances but two attributes of this one reality, running in perfect parallel, so that the order of ideas is identical to the order of things.
Composed in austere geometric form, proceeding from definitions and axioms to demonstrated propositions, the work argues this double-aspect monism rigorously and extends it to human life: freedom and blessedness arise not from altering the world but from understanding one's place within its necessary order, an alignment Spinoza names the intellectual love of God.
It stands as a crucial ancestor of the unity and pantheist intuitions later voiced in New Thought and perennialism — one universal reality in which all minds participate, with thought and world in lock-step. The honest qualification is that Spinoza's God is impersonal necessity, nearer to Stoic acceptance than to any will responsive to desire.
In its words
human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.
Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being.
The endeavour, wherewith everything endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.
Desire is appetite with consciousness thereof.
Practices it teaches
Vigilance of Thought — guarding and purifying the quality of one's thinking
Agni Yoga calls itself "the yoga of... responsible, directed thought." Its premise: thought is a real force. Roerich wrote, "It is not the hand, but the thought which creates and kills," and "The power of thought…
Striving — daily one-directional aspiration toward the higher
At the heart of Agni Yoga ("the yoga of fire," or Living Ethics) is striving (ustremlenie): a sustained, willed aspiration — a warm reaching of the whole being toward the higher, the good, the Light.
Beauty as a Path — 'through Beauty we pray': contemplating beauty as spiritual practice
For Nicholas Roerich, beauty is not decoration but a path — a real means of raising consciousness. His refrain: "In Beauty we are united! Through Beauty we pray! With Beauty we conquer!" The practice is to…
Lineage
The author
Baruch SpinozaSubstance monism; God-or-Nature
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Key terms
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