It was Spinoza who said that the greatest of all imperfections is not existing. I have always thought that a life full of adversities to non -existence is preferable to nothing. Consciousness, even if miserable, is a gift to which we cannot … nor should we give up. Spinoza claimed that the essence of being is to persevere in what it is. It is also true. In other words, man is always a project towards something, even if only to fill a void. We live driven by an eternally dissatisfied desire.
This philosopher, born in Amsterdam in 1632, wrote that there are two ways to conceive the world. The first manifests in relation to the contingent: the time and place where there are things, unstable and mute. The second has to do with the whole linked to the divine order, to which Spinoza calls the substance. From this point of view, what exists would be part of the nature of God. “Deus Sive Natura,” he said.
In a paragraph of its ‘ethics’, it points out: «The soul does not conceive anything from the perspective of eternity, but as it conceives the essence of its body from that perspective, that is, as it is eternal; And so, to the extent that it is eternal, it has the knowledge of God ».
This appointment summarizes better than any other Spinoza’s thought, which, exposed simplified, argues that we can only understand what we are and what we surround us if we think about it under the prism of divine designs. Everything makes sense, even evil, because God has foreseen it in his infinite wisdom.
Spinoza’s philosophy is deterministic because it presupposes that the future of things is due to a logic established by God. That idea is tempting and seductive. The ‘ethics’ was on my nightsting for many years. I slept reading their axioms, definitions and corollary, all in the context of the ‘geometric order’ that supports the world.
Spinoza resorted to the term ‘Sub Specie Aeternitatis’ to express a subsumed existence in the eternity of God. The laws of physics and the movements of the planets would corroborate that precision mechanics designed by the great watchmaker. A conception that fascinated Leibniz.
At my age and in a time shaken by wars and natural disasters, it costs me a lot of work to continue believing in the idea of Spinoza that fascinated me so much and that I was in my Catholic education. The latest events since Trump came to power make them very difficult to trust divine providence. That universal gear that Leibniz also alluded is inconceivable in this valley of tears.
We do not live in a world ‘Sub Specie aeternitatis’ but in another in which irrationality and low passions show that the human condition has no arrangement, there is God or not.
#Pedro #García #Cuartango #Specie #Aeternitatis
