Think Least of Death

Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die

De: Steven Nadler

Narrado por: Christopher Douyard

In 1656, after being excommunicated from Amsterdam's Portuguese-Jewish community for "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", the young Baruch Spinoza abandoned his family's import business to dedicate his life to philosophy. He quickly became notorious across Europe for his views on God, the Bible, and miracles, as well as for his uncompromising defense of free thought. Yet the radicalism of Spinoza's views has long obscured that his primary reason for turning to philosophy was to answer one of humanity's most urgent questions: How can we lead a good life and enjoy happiness in a world without a providential God? In Think Least of Death, Steven Nadler connects Spinoza's ideas with his life and times to offer a compelling account of how the philosopher can provide a guide to living one's best life.

In the Ethics, Spinoza presents his vision of the ideal human being, the "free person" who, motivated by reason, lives a life of joy devoted to what is most important-improving oneself and others. Untroubled by passions such as hate, greed, and envy, free people treat others with benevolence, justice, and charity. Focusing on the rewards of goodness, they enjoy the pleasures of this world, but in moderation. "The free person thinks least of all of death", Spinoza writes, "and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life."

©2020 Princeton University Press (P)2021 Tantor

Fantastic

Great book. Great reading. A meaningful philosophy that anyone can learn from. It is good.

Amazing

This book is amazing. I have no criticisms of the book or of the performance.

Circular and antiquated

For his time, Spinoza was a philosophical genius, but his determinism is circular and contradictory. For his time, it makes sense to have that view in reaction to a religious culture of guilt where scientific and psychological reasoning hadn’t become ubiquitous even among educated people, so to take his ideas and apply them as if his philosophy hadn’t been improved on is like saying Newton would deny Quantum Theory. If he’d lived longer, I think the idea of freedom would have developed beyond determinism. The author shoehorns the philosophy into modern neo-spinozistic interpretation without accounting for temporal context. At one point he tries to critique Spinoza’s views of women as they relate to access of freedom, but that also is contradictory to a deterministic view of the will—where would the impetus for equality come from without it, especially if in his time it was apparently not true based on observation. The philosophy was good for its time, even vital, but outdated by any viewpoint not desperately trying to invalidate personal responsibility.

Superficial introduction

Nadler thinks he can skip over the metaphysics of parts 1 and 2 of The Ethics. He has emasculated Spinoza's whole vision, made it sound conventional. Hence this overview concludes with a lot of normative moral exhortation -- preaching about being rational, rather than addressing the individual's natural drive to realize his or her unique self. It is also telling that the conclusion makes Spinoza and Kant sound comparable, even similar. That misses the superiority of a shrewd psychologist like Spinoza to a moralist of duty like Kant. Quite misleading, if still edifying for the common reader.
The Ethics astonished profound thinkers like Goethe, Nietzsche, and Jacques Lacan. On Nadler's reading, one cannot imagine how that could have been so.