february 6th,2026

spinoza's ethics: a five part contemplation... i want to be free, man!!

live on fm radio: february 6th, 2026

For the love of God, today… I am feeling like Spinoza.

All I’ve been doing is reading, writing, and criticizing, and sometimes I feel like I’m going to be thrown out of the room just for saying the wrong thing. You know what I mean? Welcome to Feral in the Barrel with Diogenes! A show, every Friday from 4-6am, where I play you two hours of great music while talking about a philosopher or philosophical topic of my choosing… today, of course, we are talking about Spinoza!!

Spinoza, an important modern philosopher, was born in Amsterdam during the early 17th century, as his family had moved from Portugal to the Dutch Republic, which was much more tolerant of their religion.

However, Spinoza’s controversial views quickly got him expelled from the Jewish community at age 23; the exact reason for this expulsion is not known. I like to imagine him as the predecessor to the modern day philosophy student, perhaps a little annoying, perhaps a little insufferable, talking too much, cutting people off– but if Spinoza was criticizing Judaism in the community as he did in his later work, his expulsion is really not surprising.

What did Spinoza write about, you may be wondering? Well I actually took a semester-long course taught by Steven Nadler (of Spinoza fame) specifically on just that: Spinoza’s Ethics.

‘Ethics’, is believed to have begun as a response to the work of Descartes. It quickly, throughout its five parts, turns into moral philosophy backed by an incredible descriptive and cryptic metaphysical framework. So today, my show will also be split up into approximately five parts, with a lovely playlist bringing together the topics, language, words, and origins of Spinoza’s work- loosely.

This brings us to… PART ONE - OF GOD!!! The layout of Spinoza’s Ethics is very interesting. Although, controversially an atheist, he begins with an appeal to the widespread religious audience. He begins, through axioms and postulates, and using dense vocabulary that he does define but quickly flexes and uses in a way which will make you doubt your very sense of the English language, to lay out God as one may come to know him in the old testament. He says God is an infinite substance. He says God is the only infinite substance. He says that from this, and a few other axioms, P15: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God”

What are the implications of this, “Whatever is, is in God.” So insofar as all things that exist are in God, I am in God! Yippee!! I am in God, does that make me a God?? Wait… am I God?? Maybe we should keep reading…

P33: “Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced”

Which brings us to understand Spinoza as a necessitarian: that everything that has happened necessarily happened, and that it could have been no other way. “The will cannot be called a free cause but a necessary one.”

Part One tells us that God is everything. Everything is necessary. And as part of God, our actions are not based on will or free cause but a necessary cause- all of which is in God.

This brings us to our second song of the morning. Earlier, around the 4am mark you listened to the wonderful music of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sun is a Hold Sun is Vapors. But now… we have put our Spinoza caps on and we have begun to question God. Where is God? Is he… in an alcove?

Hopefully throughout that music break you were able to come to terms with the fact that everything is God. Maybe even you’ve come around to Spinoza’s necessarian view- something which I find fairly compelling. You just listened to ‘I can't escape myself’ by the Sound; an english post-punk band from South London, which formed in 1979, with ex-members from the band ‘the Outsiders’. I see that song as maybe a little nod to Descartes; so we’ll say it’s on theme!

We have been dropped by the post-punk wave, to PART TWO - OF THE MIND! This section of Ethics is where Spinoza begins to get a little bit more poetic with his writing. He says, “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing.” And he introduced the most confusing, at least to me, part of his metaphysical framework: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”

This makes sense when we think about a thought compelling us to do something. Like I am thinking about raising my hand, and I raise my hand; I can see the duality there; however there are my other examples where it seems that the movement of a plant in the wind could not have a connected parallel idea.

This is Spinoza’s parallelism.

Spinoza begins to outline something that feels crucial but also unfamiliar in his style of writing, in PART THREE - OF EMOTIONS Spinoza begins to explain to us what is happening when we feel things like love, hate, sadness, fear, and so on. The beauty of Spinoza is that he outlines love as understanding. He believes that hate occurs only when we do not understand things.

For example: Let’s say, as it were, someone punches me in the face. Spinoza says, if I were irrational, I would probably hate this person. If I was being led only by my emotions I would be very compelled to hate this person, because they had hurt me. However, if I use my rational brain, and pursue an understanding of the chain of events which caused my hurt, I may come to learn something useful. Maybe I was not punched in the face on purpose, but the man who punched me was actually pushed into me by someone else, who was pushed by someone else and so on. With the understanding of this chain of events, I can feel that the hatred fades away.

This is what Spinoza calls for us to do. Seek understanding in the causal chain, and you will soon not be compelled to hate another. He calls this understanding an ‘adequate idea’. Saying in P3: “The actions of the mind arise from adequate ideas alone, the passions depend on inadequate ideas alone”. This is to say that…

Which brings us to the end of today’s show, and the last line of Spinoza’s Ethics; ‘All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.’

For the love of God, today… I am feeling like a freeman!!