Human freedom/ free will ? Perhaps just a hint of in reality but only thru striving for knowledge & grasping the world around us/ourselves does change come . Ultimate good & moral relativity ? Please, enough Christians killed each other in the last 1500yrs arguing about the right path to goodness to snap even you to attention.
Human Freedom, Spinoza see's things as it & we, really are:
Whether there is any meaningful kind of freedom which humans may genuinely have is, in Spinoza's picture, at least contentious. He certainly claims that there is a kind of freedom, namely, that which is arrived at through adequate knowledge of God, or, what is the same: the universe. But in the last two propositions of Part Two of The Ethics, P48 and P49, he explicitly rejects the traditional notion of free will.
In the Mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the Mind is determined
to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this
again by another, and so to infinity. [3]
So from this we get a strong sense of Spinoza's Naturalism, that is, that the natural and human orders are contiguous. With that being the case, human freedom of a kind which would extricate us from the order of physical causes is impossible. However, Spinoza argues, we still ought to strive to understand the world around us, and in doing so, gain a greater degree of power, which will allow us to be more active than passive, and there is a sense in which this is a kind of freedom. [3] For more, see: Stanford.edu
|
