Defending Pantheism

[vulcanlogician]

Nice.  

For those that don't want to read the whole thing, it's not so much that spinoza argued for unity, as that he built his metaphysics outward from the assertion in a thorough fashion.  He didn't really need to come up with the broad strokes of it, he was working within an existent tradition to that effect, but wanted to make a single crucial alteration to it.

What I was talking about with unity was Spinoza's assertion that "Determination is negation." This deals with the separation of an object from the entire whole.

The "unity" discussed in the article has to do with Spinoza's merging of mind and body into one substance. Spinoza was a monist, and his metaphysics was a rejection of Cartesian dualism. Instead of Descartes' two substances: body (with extension) and mind (with consciousness/thought)... Spinoza proposed that mind and body are in fact different attributes of a single substance. To Spinoza there was one primary substance which he (annoyingly?) named God.

In the least complicated way possible: to Spinoza, sates of the mind...(ie. various emotions, thoughts, feelings etc.) corresponded to states of the body. There is no state of mind that exists without a corresponding physical state. This may seem like "no duh" to us moderners, but you have to remember that Spinoza immediately followed Descartes and wrote this stuff when everybody still had "Descartes fever." Pretty impressive that he nailed the refutation when Cartesian dualism was still hot out of the oven.