Baruch Spinoza’s ”On the Improvement of the Understanding”

[Music] Hey everyone, back again. Today we're starting Spin Oats up. So today I'm going to be covering on the improvement of the understanding, which was an unfinished piece by him, but my main focus is to cover the ethics, which is the name of his book, Ethics. So if you didn't know that. So this episode is going to cover on the improvement of the understanding, because I think it's a great primer for the ethics, which will start next week. And that'll be like six parts or something. So I have to figure out my life. But before jumping into it, hi, I'm David. I explain philosophical concepts and ideas and ways to make them accessible to you. So if you're new here, like share, subscribe. You can see my more than 300 episodes already up. If you're into that, if you found this on YouTube, you're going to be able to find it as a podcast. I'm pretty much any podcast platform. Or if you found this as a podcast, you can also find me on YouTube or sometimes I release videos. If you're into that at all, you can also find me on TikTok at theory philosophy or on Instagram, @theory_and_filosphere on Twitter at David Gignot. Links for all these things in the description. So you can easily access them. If you want to help me out, like share, subscribe. Tell your friends who knows they might get a kick out of it. You can help me out monetarily via Patreon or PayPal, but no pressure to do that. So yeah, let's jump into Spanozza's on the improvement of the understanding. Now, it's so clear that Spanozza is coming before Kant here, which isn't to poo poo what Spanozza's doing. It's super interesting. But there's so much of this that after you've read Kant, it's like, I know where you're being led astray. Spanozza. I know the mistake you're making. So let me please correct it. But I'm not going to do that. I guess this whole preamble was not necessary. I just like Kant a lot. And there's a lot that we can learn about Kant through Spanozza and vice versa, but I won't do that. So let's jump into on the improvement of the understanding. So like I already mentioned, this was an unfinished piece. However, it's still very important. And it is broken into two broad parts. The first half of the text is concerned with laying out the method and direction of the understanding in order to set it on the right path. And then the second part is concerned with the understanding, being geared towards good definitions as a source of knowledge of nature's essence. Now, when we read Spanozza, we have to understand that he was really writing against the grain at the time. So he was writing in the early 17th century. So in the 1650s, 1660s, I died quite young. But he's clearly a very religious person. However, his approach to God differs so much from Scripture that he got him very much excommunicated. He was Jewish and there were so many. He experienced a lot of oppression on that basis. So there's a lot here that we're going to be talking about in terms of nature and God that resist our any effort that we might do to personify God. To say that God is this person or to say that God has emotions like God loves us. Spanozza is going to be pushing against, back against all of that. Instead, God is for him very much found within nature itself. And by nature, we're not just talking about trees. I'm talking about the very fabric of existence that we all share. And it extends beyond into the universe, of course. We'll talk about that as we go on. So it's important to keep in mind here that when we talk about nature, we're talking about God unless we aren't and then I'll specify that. So this text starts out by him reflecting on his life and experiences. And having him wonder whether or not all things in their propensity to affect us is purely subjective. Or if there are truths out there in the world. So Spanozza was also very much influenced by Chane de Kalt. So Descartes, I see some funny, some funny comment. I don't know why you pronounce it the right way. You just sound so pretentious. Anyways, Chane de Kalt, who is obviously famous for the idea that there is a split between the mind and the body. That is, we can always be sure of our mind if we use the right method. However, we can't necessarily be sure of our bodies. We can always doubt our bodies. Now, Spanozza is indebted to that idea. However, he's not going to so neatly divide the mind and the body. So when he poses this question here, or he's wondering here whether or not there are things out there that aren't just like it's not just purely subjective, like that our universal or truths that we can grasp onto, he just wonders if that's the case. And so he asks whether there might be anything of which the discovery and detainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness. So he's, if I'm going to just apply my understanding of Spanozza onto you. And a lot of this is contested. No one can say they know Spanozza like the best. These things are always being negotiated. But Spanozza is confronted with a world that is absurd. A world that makes so little sense when you actually look at it, when you actually dig into it. So much suffering, so much confusion. Spanozza is like, what is the point? What is the point to life? Is it just to get through it? And that's it. Or is there something about it that we can uncover in order to live the best life we can? Because it's just, it's fleeting as far as we know. Well, he's more confident that it is not fleeting, that it continues afterwards. But in any case, he's trying to give us a road map as the best live a life, our lives. A life, our lives. Nice English David. So to begin this process, he prescribes that we look beyond everything we know about good and evil. What is good, what is bad? Because these are largely culturally determined, they're subjective. And instead, he wants us to look to something that might give us endless happiness. And this would mean escaping from our three obsessions that we have falsely associate with the good. That is, being rich, being famous, and experiencing sensual satisfaction, be it through lust, sex, or just, you know, just bodily pleasures. So we have to move away from these things as being the source of true happiness and think about true happiness, perhaps being found elsewhere. So each of these things might appear in almost divine good, because like, and if we might recall from Aristotle in, where did he write that? And maybe in his Nika Mackie and ethics, but it might not be that text. Anyway, Aristotle says that it is in our propensity to experience pleasure for almost no reason. Like, we just experienced it to no end other than the possibility of experiencing pleasure. Like, why does food need to taste as good as it does? If it was just about, if food was just about nourishment, we wouldn't pursue the best tasting food. We would just eat for the sake of eating. But we don't do that. We pursue, if we have the means, if we pursue the best food we can have. So Spinoza acknowledges this, but suggests that if we just cling on to these immediate pursuits as being our foray, foray, our path to unending happiness, we're going to be let down, even though they might seem to be given to us by God. Like, there seems to be no other reason that we really like the taste of some foods over others, if it's just about nourishment. Or we really like music, how something like music, which is music is really nothing. Like, if there was an alien species that showed up and we played them Miles Davis, like they would feel nothing from it, I assume. Or maybe they, I'm assuming they won't. But we, like, it moves us, like, at least I speak for myself. Like, Miles Davis moves the spirit in ways that feel like there's more to experiencing than just living, you know, just getting through the day or just existing, like as, as like a verse in human history. Like, we are just here and then we go away. It seems like there's more to it than that. But Spinoza wants to push us to really consider what might give us unending happiness. Now, this is a scary thing to issue, to get away or to send off these things that we attach to. Like, Rich's fame because we're certain of them. They give us immediate joy. And it's scary to get rid of them to just like go for the supreme good. So Spinoza is not saying like totally renounce these things. She's not diluted. Like, he doesn't think that we live in like some world where you can just do that. Of course, know, do things that make you happy, but keep in mind that they aren't necessarily going to be your source of unending universal happiness. So the key is not to fall prey to the idea that these things, like these fleeting happiness, like fame and riches, are ends in themselves. We can't treat them as such. We can treat them as means to an end if that end is the true good. And then in that case, they're fine. If they're just like stepping stones on the path through virtuousness, then they're fine. But, you know, what does the highest good or what does virtue really mean? Well, for him, when he talks about the highest good, and I use synonyms like virtue, the highest good, the understanding, highest understanding, infinite intellect is another term that will come up more in the ethics, I believe. But these are terms that while, like, at, you know, in their minutia are different, they all point to the same thing than same phenomenon. Which for him is this, the highest good is the knowledge of the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature. So this is to and also to bring as many people into the fold as that. So what does he mean, mean, mean by uniting the mind and the whole of nature? Well, it is about coming to terms with the nature's laws and properties in order to better furnish or cultivate a relationship with God. Because if there are universal principles in nature, they must point to some God figure, which might just be nature itself, in which case we owe everything to it, which, you know, certainly we could take a lesson from in the way that we are continually degrading nature. We are just consistently destroying it. But for, like, first penota, it is always pointing to this higher being, this God, this creator of nature. Now, I wasn't super familiar with Spanosa before I dug into this this past few, a few weeks, few months, and I read a bunch of secondary material. But something that I'd known about Spanosa was this idea of monism, the idea that there's just this, everything is connected. There's nothing that is like super transcendent. At least that's what it was kind of told to me, which is wrong. And at least in these two texts on the improvement of the understanding and ethics, this this monism idea doesn't really exist. Now, there is some truth to it in that we are always within nature. But that doesn't mean that God is within nature. I mean, God is nature, but everything is an according to not so much God's will as God's existence. And we're going to get into this more with ethics. But it still signals that there is some degree of transcendence. Some other realm that is God's of which like we are just a part of. We're just one manifestation of all of that. Perhaps other dimensions are evolved. Like I don't know, different ways of who knows. But there is more to it than just like what we can immediately see and feel. And we have to acknowledge that which doesn't mean that we can't arrive at certain truths from what we see and feel in the world by looking at nature and nature's properties. Now, one of the key elements of Spanotes's thought is that this isn't an isolated project. You can't just do this on your own. It requires bringing more people into the fold because people can bring their own perspectives. People can participate in improving human knowledge about the world, not when we're sitting alone in some shack, but when we work together. So the task here in terms of the understanding, like what the understanding must do. Like what our minds must do. What we must gear ourselves towards doing is the following to conceive everything in terms of its essence or through its proximate cause. So this is to say that if the thing be self-existent, anything in the world is self-existent, which is the cause of itself, it must be understood through its essence only. If it is not self-existent, it depends on something else to exist. And we have to look at that other thing that makes it exist. We have to understand why it exists. So if there's something that exists on its own, without recourse to something else that we can understand, then it is self-existent. It exists in itself, like maybe the mind, for example, like the capacity for thought, that thing that appeals to some kind of godly instinct for spinosa. Why is it that we can have the capacity for thought? Like where does this come from? If not from something beyond the world that we know. Now if something is not self-existent, then we have to look for what causes it. If the better understand nature, we understand how water flows. I don't know. But we understand the force that is required to make water move, for example. So in order to do this to prep the understanding to gear it towards properly achieving the highest good, we have to understand nature, philosophy, education, medicine, and mechanics. We have to have a very rounded set of skills. But above all, spinosa wants us to purify our understanding to prepare for this task, which is what we're doing here before getting into the ethics, the book, you know, ethics. So this is our journey. And we can proceed along it while still living our lives. We don't need to totally renounce everything good. So so long as we follow the three principles, we have to speak in a way that is accessible to the multitude and to follow the ways of the majority so long as they comply with our objective, with our goal. Secondly, we have to indulge in pleasure so long as they are necessary to preserve our health, you know, not going and finding other things that will distract us. And thirdly, to attain only sufficient money and goods to preserve our lives. And this is right out of Aristotle as well. Like this is just screaming the idea of the golden mean. Like it's not about renouncing pleasure, but it's about moderating it. It's not about renouncing riches, but moderating it. You know, you don't need too much. It's better to have less and to make sure that your community has more for you to live a better life. Like because you might live in a big mansion, you might be totally rich, but your community might be totally desolate. Like what kind of life is that? Like it's one that I think that we're kind of heading towards with the few rich people on the planet. Like they just want to live in their gated communities and not actually have any connection to the world. They just want to be totally alone, have all the gadgets and toys they want and live absolutely miserable lives away from community, you know, in a way to build a world together. Instead, they just want to live and destroy the world on their own. But that's bleak, but I think it's true. So to begin with, you know, to begin by adjusting our understanding, we must first grapple with perception as that which allows us to affirm or deny something. Like we can only have a relationship to the world through our senses, through our perceptions, through our eyes, sight, touch, and so on. So there are four modes of perception he wants us to be aware of, tune to. The first is perception from hearsay or some sign that anyone may have put up, which is just false. Like it's a false image that we submit to, which misleads us. The second kind of perception is perception from experience that has not been refuted by our intellect. Now these might be things we're just not totally concerned with. Like, I don't know. The other day, I mean, I live in Montreal, right? The other day, I, downtown Montreal, there was a turkey just like in my neighborhood. I don't know, I guess you can find it where I live now, but there was a turkey, like a few blocks from my place and I was like, what the hell is that? Like it just didn't comply with anything I knew, but I didn't like reflect upon it. But you know, upon reflection, be like, okay, that makes sense. Like it's something that could happen in the world. It's not like totally outlandish. Anyways, whatever, maybe a bad example. The third kind of perception is when we infer the existence of a cause, when we see the effect. So for example, if we see a house, we can infer that there were builders who built that house. Like the existence of builders having built it, which is like almost guaranteed to be true, unless there was an army of, I don't know, mice who built it, which seems very unlikely. But in any case, this is a kind of perception. We infer the existence of a cause when we see the effect. And then the fourth kind of perception is knowledge of something by knowledge of its essence. For example, a triangle, if we are seeing a triangle, dealing with a triangle, we know that it has 180 degrees within it. We know it has three sides. We know that depending on the type of triangle, the hypotenuse is going to be longer than the two other sides, not combined, but each and so on. And there are other properties as well. And the these modes of its existence, these elements, these qualities are absolutely part of its existence itself. So they are bound up with its essence. So here we have four modes of perception. And if you've been listening, you'd know that the first one is like not really reliable, and the second one may be not so reliable, finally the most reliable. So they escalate in terms of reliability. So the first one not so reliable, right? Not not useful. The second one not that useful, but we see things in the world that we can't necessarily confirm whether or not they're true, but we still exist among these things. The third one can really teach us elements of the world. Like it's common properties, how things work. We infer various causes by looking at effects. And then the fourth mode allows us to compare results with our nature and power and to actually search for the essence of things in order to understand how things work in the world and why they exist. Maybe they're created like do triangles really exist in nature? It has anyone ever found a triangle in nature in any shape that has exactly 180 degrees with three equal sides. Like I don't know or perfectly straight sides and maybe they have, but I feel like they haven't. In any case, we want to use the fourth, the fourth kind of perception because it will really drive us towards the essence of things and point us to an effect or cause. So like how nature provides us with materials to make tools that we can use to create things in the world, nature also furnishes our mind with the means to produce tools to arrive at wisdom. So we can actually build ideas in our brains, what he'll call adequate ideas that actually help us to better understand the world, better understand ourselves and better understand nature and therefore God. Now it's important here to distinguish real things from true ideas and then from ideas. So for example, let's say there's a guy named Peter and he uses biblical references, but there's a guy named Peter. Peter's a real dude. Like I saw him on the street the other day. Peter's doing well. Don't worry about Peter. He's doing good. The true idea of Peter is the reality of Peter represented subjectively and is in itself something real. So that's what I have in my head right now. It's I have the true or I have a representation of the real Peter, the reality of Peter in my head. Now as I was saying this, you know, you aren't just going to be content with a name. You probably put a face to it. You probably conjured up a face. You made up someone to stand in for Peter to have, you know, you know, the Peter's doing good. Like you needed to attach that to someone you could associate with. Maybe you use the image of someone you already know. Maybe you use the image of someone new. That is the idea of an idea of Peter. You aren't basing that idea off of the reality of Peter, the thing that we see in the world. You are instead basing it off of what I said, which was pretty much nothing. It is just an absolute, it's out of nowhere. Just like poofed into existence. Now, in order to get the best sense of Peter we can, I don't really need to consult you, right? To say, hey, you know, what did Peter look like? Because you'll give me some, I don't know, some random description that won't have anything to do with Peter. Like it's all made up. There's no attachment to reality. That at least that might be our first instinct. However, spinota, when he's talking here, he suggests that there is value in the idea of an idea. Not necessarily because it will tell us the truth of Peter. But the very fact that we have that capacity to conjure something up in our minds, to create something out of nothing, seemingly out of nothing, which is what we do all the time in the world. Our capacity to do that really signals something to us. And we can learn a lot about ourselves and dare I say our essence by considering this capacity for thought, for creating things in our mind. Because it's important to acknowledge for spinota that's, you know, anything we do, anything that we think, only comes about in order to know what I know, I must first know. We have to have this capacity for knowing. For you to have known Peter, to have created Peter, but still it reflects that capacity we have. So knowing the true idea or the subjective essence is enough to have certainty of truth. Now my truth is going to be better. I saw Peter, you know, I didn't actually, I don't know Peter, but, you know, humor me. There was a Peter. The certainty of truth. So certainty is identical with such subjective essence for spinota. So in this case, the true method is the process of learning, the order to arrive at truth itself or the subjective essence of things or ideas. This method in his words is the discernment of a true idea by distinguishing it from other perceptions to learn about our power of understanding. And to be able to say that one is more true than the other, no one would say that all you listeners have a better idea of Peter than me because I know Peter. I don't, but you know what I was saying. You know, I know Peter. And it is the fact that we have this like gradient of this or this to use a more accessible word. Like Spinoza said earlier has to be accessible, which is always what I try to do. We have this kind of escalating degree of truth or proximity to truth, where I am closer, but the very fact that we can gauge this, we can assess this signals that we have some propensity to understand nature. And therefore we should always try to understand it, to understand truth, to understand the world. So the point is to have in our minds or to have our minds directed toward the more, the most perfect being. And we can train our minds to do this by acquiring new ideas and by understanding a greater number of natural objects. So we have to really welcome different perspectives. We have to really welcome seeing more things in the world, understanding more things in the world, in order to better understand the world and to arrive at a more perfect being or view of the world and ourselves. Now this is to make the mind more perfect. However, perfection is reserved for minds that comprehend the absolute perfect being, which we steer towards as we grasp things in nature. Because as we become more familiar with nature's universal laws, like laws like the laws of physics, for example, are very legitimate in this respect. As we become more familiar with them, we become more familiar with the universals, which only point to what can be absolutely good and true and that we can therefore align ourselves towards to live the most good and most true lives. However, if it's necessary to train, kind of like to train your mind and to purify our minds, how true is the thesis that we all possess this capacity to grasp the perfect, or the absolute perfect being? The very fact that this text exists reveals that it seems as though this has to be learned, then it is innate. It's not like we're born with this capacity. Well, he says that this is precisely because we can contemplate and pursue the perfect or the true as it complies with our reasoning. But we can also look at all those other things that will lead us astray or distract us from this process. And in the ethics, which we'll start covering next week, he says that there are things that produce in his words in the English translation, produce sorrow, that inhibit our capacity to actually think and act in this way that distract us. So in a sense, this is to apply Descartes' method to nature instead of just to the self. So we don't exist apart from nature. We can't say that nature is just like pure illusion. It's just duping us, which is the way in which Spanosa is not really on, totally on board with Descartes' skepticism, or Descartes says, like, I can't be sure of everything. I can only be sure of my mind. So, you know, I can doubt everything. Spanosa is like, no, no, no, no, no. Like we exist in this world. We have to acknowledge that. We all share this world. We all, despite the fact that we have varying different experiences, can still form community, can still have agreements. It's not as though we're just like you know, bumping heads, you know, sometimes it feels that way. If you ever drive a car, you know, the rage you feel at everyone who seems to be a worse driver than you are, which is, you know, just happens. And we have to acknowledge that there is this common experience that we have. And for the Kantians out there, you're probably like, ah, there's so much more to say here. But go listen to my content episodes if you're interested in that. So if we're working within the realm of perception, we have to be able to discern a true idea from a false idea. So in this sense, fictions or falsities are those things we are only aware of as existing without knowing their essence. They could be totally made up. Peter doesn't actually exist. I mean, I just made that up. But it still did this thing for you and perhaps give you this false idea. Or, and this is one we'll return to, a false idea is that the sun is only an inch long. When we know that the sun is many times larger than the earth, a few thousand times larger than the earth, or however much bigger it is. But we for a very long time had the false idea that it was much smaller, because it looks that way. The sun looks really small. So therefore, it might be small, but this is false. And we can use this to better understand the world that our perceptions are not always accurate. And they can lead us astray, which is why we have to incorporate different perspectives, different tools to measure the world that we create to have a better understanding of the world. Like I said, we'll return to that example probably a couple more times, but like, yeah, just to give you an idea, like another false idea would be like, if I saw Peter leaving his house and I was like, oh, he's coming to see me. I know I don't know. I don't know if he is. I'm totally diluted at this point. I'm just saying something. It has no grounding in reality. So in the case of Peter leaving his house, maybe coming to see me, this is an example that is concerned with a possibility, not a necessity, or something that's impossible. Like, Peter might be coming, but I can't know for sure. Necessities are those things whose non-existence would imply a contradiction. Whereas possibilities are things whose existence or non-existence don't imply a contradiction. And impossibilities are things whose existence poses a contradiction. So if Peter leaves his house, I don't know, the necessity is that he left his house. There's no denying that he's outside of his house. I couldn't say otherwise without being contradictory. Like, everyone would be like, what's wrong with you? Of course, he's left his house. He's not sitting on his couch right now. A possibility is that he's coming to see me. But if that's false, you know, it's like, okay, that's fine. He's going to do something else. Like, it could be any one of these things. And an impossibility would be that Peter is going to go to the moon. Like, Peter left his house or a battery, Pluto, whatever. Peter left his house, he's going to Pluto. Well, I guess, I guess in spinotes as terms that would be technically that's possible. What's something that's impossible? Peter will spontaneously, his atoms will line up in such a way as to meet all the empty space of the atoms underneath him in the ground. And he will fall through the earth all the way to the center of the earth and get burned by the middle of the earth. You know, totally impossible will never happen. But you know, I said it, maybe that's possible. And he was an impossibility is something that won't happen. So this dubtails obviously with fictions, people create fictions. And in some cases, fictions tell us truth. Like, we use fiction all the time to reveal truths about the world. So for example, not dealing with those kinds of fictions, but a fiction would be that if someone said the earth is flat, like, we know the earth is round. And if anyone says different, they are false. And that's just, that's just the way the world is. Like, for example, like, spinotes are says how it is an eternal truth that God exists. However, it might be a fiction to say that Peter thinks. So this is an important moment in this text, and especially in the ethics, because spinotes are just, takes it for granted. He just accepts that God exists. Things like this, God exists, God is perfectly good. Yada yada yada. Which even if you accept that God exists, like, doesn't necessarily imply that God is good. How do we even apply this metric to God? Is it redundant to say that God is good? If God can have no judge, you know, whatever. So on. Whereas someone later like Kant is like, wait, we have to rethink these assumptions. Like, we can't just say that God is the cause of everything. And like, that's just uncritical thought. That's pure reason, as he might say. It doesn't actually tell us anything about the world. So there are these moments here. In any case, they're going to come up again and again and again. Now, there may be, or there can be some assertions that appear false, but that are nevertheless true, like a hypothetical, you know, I could create a situation like seeing Peter the other day, and I conveyed the truth of this book or this text for you. So I think it's safe to think of this as a kind of like thinking about science today in that the truth sees referring to resonate with nature's laws, like the laws of physics, like astrophysics, like, I don't know, any other physics, optics, knowing how water works, how velocity works, everything like that. Now, he says that of false ideas and fictions, he suggests that only ideas which are clear and distinct can never be false. Because if they are opaque, if they are shrouded in ambiguity or mystery, then of course, they might be false. But if something is clear and distinct, they can't be false, which is very difficult to accept, because many of the examples he gives, like the sun being not just like an inch long or a foot long, is hardly clear and distinct. I mean, to explain this is incredibly complicated, to explain the way that distance will actually shrink an object according to our perception, how it takes the light that we're seeing however many years between the sun and the earth to get here. But this is one of the things he says, like it's it's clear and distinct, so it must be true without like we have to it's like if it makes sense to us according to him, then it must be true. But a true idea doesn't necessarily need to exist out in the world to be true. So he gives the example of like an architectural plan for a building, which is true, it's a true idea, it has potential in the world and it'll work perfectly because all the math was done right we assume. So it is a fiction, but that may nevertheless be true and might actually expand human knowledge of the world. So here we arrive at the point where he suggests as I intimated earlier that thought is true, not necessarily having a cause or the mind. So he says that thought is true when it is free from being caused by an external object or we treat it as its own cause. So he says that thought is true if it involves this subjectively, the essence of any principle which has no cause and is known through itself and in itself. And the mind can create truths without causes themselves like unless the cause is the mind itself like creating a triangle. So like I said, we don't see triangles out in the world complying with the laws that we've attached to them, which we've used to infer many more laws about many more things like from Pythagoras theorem. A squared plus B squared equals C squared or dealing with parabolas, which is like a big U on a graph or like an upside down U, which the quadratic formula being x is equal minus B plus or minus the square root of B squared minus 4 AC all over 2A for example, which is burned into my mind from grade 10 math. But we know these things and we've developed these knowledges which have been used to do real things in the world to expand knowledge all from artificial constructions like triangles, like parabolas, like what the hell is a parabola or like any geometric shape is created by us and not necessarily found in nature, which isn't I'm not waiting, waiting into the waters of it if math is real or discovered or true or whatever it is. I'm just saying that these in these cases, these things don't exist. We've created them but that they give us certain truths about the world. So so long as we are tuned to nature, not not necessarily the incorrect laws, he says like that the earth moves around the sun, but you know the true laws. So as long as we focus on nature and begin with the source and origin of nature, we need not fear any deception. So here in the term nature, he's implying the conclusion to his point because nature for him the way he understands it is totally true and it has these properties. If we haven't discovered them yet, that's our problem. Like this is nothing about nature. So we just need to be properly attuned to nature and we're going to be all good. We won't be deceived. So here there is a meeting of knowledge and experience. So like like I said with the sun, it appears small to us, but it's actually huge. Now in such a case, there's the problem of doubt. So doubt emerges when we are confronted with something or some idea that doesn't comply with our beliefs. Someone doubts when they are confronted. with the fact of the sun's size. They'll say no. It looks like it's the size of a basketball to me. However, this is doubt fueled by a lack of faith in God to not deceive us. If instead we expanded our knowledge of nature, that is God, we would know of truth of nature without doubt. Clearly, many assumptions here that in the centuries, following Spanoto, we would come to understand and know. Insofar as there are vested interests behind establishing some things as being true in order to dissuade people from thinking other things because of certain interests, which is great. A lot of the time what we learn from science is magnificent and we have to keep learning about it. We have to keep funding scientific research obviously. But there are, numerous cases in which it has been used, co-opted in order to say that carbon emissions aren't actually bad for the planet, even though there's a scientific consensus that carbon emissions or CO2 emissions are bad for the environment. We can hold both. He's saying that nature is totally true. We can be led astray though and part of our task is to distinguish between false ideas from true ones and that's the path to virtue here. Like he doesn't really give it much attention how we can be led astray here. We'll talk about it more in the next in ethics but for now. Anyways, shut up David. So here he turns to consider memory and what memory is. Where he says that memory is separate from the understanding is the actual sensation of impressions on the brain, accompanying accompanied with thought of a definite duration of the sensation. So you look back upon that impression and you're able to recall something in your mind. So he also says that the imagination is only affected by particular physical objects and has little bearing on the understanding and the soul, which the imagination for him can only go so far. So words belong to the imagination and memory as they are not universal communicators of truth. Because like when I said Peter, we all had different ideas about what Peter meant. If I say a tree, every one of you is going to have a different image of a tree pop up in your heads. So words can only take us so far. We know this from Nietzsche a few centuries later as well when he talks in truth and lying in an extramural sense. I mean, we're always going to be one degree removed from truth if we rely purely upon language to convey that truth. Like words representing things. I think there might be a case to be made that language when used poetically or maybe metaphorically can point us to other kinds of truths that you won't find in just language itself. But in any case, we are going to be limited if we just attach to words as the source of truth. And they are certainly not universal. Now at the beginning, if you were listening, you'd know that there were two parts to this text. Now we're moving onto the second part and we're about to finish because this is an incomplete text. This is where he was going to get into all the definitions, which we will just slightly but barely. And I think it really a lot of what he developed here gets continued in the ethics. I don't know if I'll cover any more spinouts so let me know if you'd like me to. But I kind of hesitant, but who knows. Maybe I'll do the theological, political, treatise thing. So now onto the second part. Concerned with these definitions, not concerned so much with axioms. We'll get into that in ethics, but here it's important not to confuse the definition of a thing with its properties. So if we are talking about an object that has been created like a circle or a triangle, its definition will include info about its cause. And the info to supply anyone with knowledge about it. So for example, a circle is any line drawn from the center to the side of a circle will be equal in length. So if I have a circle and I do a little dot in the middle of it and I do a line from that dot to any point on the circle. So there's like a line from the very middle to the side to that's the circle part. All those lines that I create there will be the same length. That's how circle works. At least this is one of its properties. So the definition will include these types of properties. It won't just say like, oh it's it's around. It's a line that connects to itself because that's not very that's not actually giving us elements that are specific to it. Whereas that thing already described where each line would be the same length is specific to the circle. It exists nowhere else. You won't find that in any other shape that I know of. I think I don't know. Tell me if I'm wrong. I'm size. But the same other triangle. Triangles are the are they the only shape with three sides and 180 degrees total in them. I don't let me know if I'm wrong. I think that that's true. But anyways, so these these things are just are absolutely bound up with them. I think it would also be good to point out that they don't exist in Nate like they are created but no less true. So as for uncreated things, the definition must one not include info of a cause information of a cause. It number two has to be clear and certain in its existence. Third three, it can't be explained with adjectives or abstractions and four all properties should be clear from the definition because if you weren't if you didn't follow these things, you weren't clear, you know, you were you didn't give all the necessary properties. The person you were describing this uncreated thing to it have no idea what you're talking about. So it has to be very clear. Like when communicating the first circle to someone or the first triangle, you know, people could pick up on it because there were these very clear properties. So we must first, even though the text is about to end, we must first of all locate the union of all physical things that are eternal, not by compiling their abstract qualities but by acknowledging their place in accordance with nature's laws. So before proceeding, he gives us the definition of the understanding and this is the last point. The understanding number one has certainty that a thing exists in reality as if it is reflected subjectively. Number two, forms some idea absolutely and some from others. Like it gets the idea from somewhere else or from it's like from itself. Third, the absolute ideas are infinitely expansive like quantity that we are aware of without needing to know quantity of all things. Fourth, it forms positive ideas. Fifth, positive ideas in that it produces something. It's not saying something, it's like if I was going to describe Peter to you, I don't say he's not wearing a blue shirt. That doesn't tell you anything about Peter at all. Like, or I say that Peter doesn't have blonde hair. You know, that means nothing to you. You might be able to narrow it down, but that means nothing. It doesn't actually tell us anything about Peter. So fifth, the understanding measures things in relation to the infinite and eternal, not as determinant number, duration and quantity. Number six, things appear clearly to it to the understanding. Number seven, it can build on information supplied from the mind. And number eight, it can supply some, it can supply seemingly infinite ideas. So I want to jump back to one of those I just said because I think it's pretty nice to explain. So number five, it measures things in relation to the infinite and eternal, not as determinant number, duration and quantity. This relates, it will become more clear in ethics because if we're going to talk about the path to unending happiness, we have to concern ourselves with things that are going to be infinite and eternal. Eternal truths about the world, at least this is what the understanding has to be geared to in order to best understand those parts of us that are true, real that we have to gear ourselves towards, not things that are going to just disappear in time. We have to find out what's really universal. And you know, maybe all the new stuff that we're learning in the past like century about space and even calling into question, many of the laws we assumed, because if we take Newton's laws, they don't apply if we go to other planets in some cases or to other other types of possibilities that we've conjured up. In any case, and then this ends here. So tell me what you think, because are anything excluded? Do you believe it? Anything I got wrong, I'd love to hear about it. Next week, we're going to start ethics, which is probably what most people are interested in. And there's going to be some repetition, but that text is like 300 pages long. So there's going to be, you know, not all repetition. And yeah, if you like what I did, like share, subscribe, and I'll catch you next week. Take care.