Spinoza's joy

Dear Dino

I don't believe that Spinoza's "joy" was even remotely close to the everyday concept of "joy".
What Spinoza is an attitude towards life that is far from emotional. It is much closer to the Zoroastrian concept of "asha" as an ethical idea rather than a summary of the physical laws of the universe.
As such, it is ETHICALLY inreresting. Spinoza was clearly the first thinker to see radical aesthetics as a foundation for ethics. Art replacing religion as the ultimate horizon of metaphysics.

Ushta
Alexander

2009/9/14 Special Kain
- Dölj citerad text -



The problem with this ethical imperative is its call for undifferentiated affirmation. Do we have to accept anything that is going on? How do we draw a distinction between right and wrong choices? How shall this ethical imperative include our liberal hopes for a society that's less cruel? Where shall we draw a distinction between these liberal hopes and our private desires for self-creation and experimentation? If we are to seek joy in whatever we do, doesn't this mean that we have to become "partners in crime" and joyfully take part in our hegemonizing repression? These are questions that were posed decades ago, and they're still important. I haven't found any decent thinker who would have stepped beyond them and discovered new lands.
Yes, the will is a product of drives and contingency - an idiosyncratic and fragile construct that is continually being (re-)shaped. It's a collocation and arrangement of different drives that are competing with each other - a ceasefire.


Ushta, Dino