SPINOZA ON FREE WILL

Friend Eric in Mérida lent me his book "Spinoza's Book of Life" by Steven Smith. It's an overview of Spinoza's very hard to read book "Ethics," first published in 1677. My interest in Spinoza is his influence on monist thought, for I'm a blossoming monist. Monism isn't a religion but rather a manner of thinking about the Universe/Nature.

For centuries a big question has been whether humans have free will, or are we just acting out what we're obliged or programmed to do? The no-free-will position is formally known as determinism, and as science discovers more and more human traits determined by our genes, and more and more of our behavior determined by hormone levels and other physiological states of our bodies, the trend for a long time has been toward the determinist position.

Spinoza says that free will and determinism aren't incompatible, but rather that they're two ends of a chain that must be held together. At first, Spinoza seems a convinced determinist. He writes that the more a person insists that he's free to do as he wishes, the more that person is ignorant of what causes his behavior. However, his main thought on the matter is that free will can be attained if we learn why we think and behave as we do, and then, considering all the facts rationally, act according to our decisions. Not only does studying ourselves and the world we live in free us, but, also, "The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God," he wrote, expressing a very monistic view.

An important feature of this insight is that once we understand why we behave as we do, if we succeed in changing our behaviors we may regret, it helps us forgive ourselves for past errors.

Knowledge is a form of power that not only interprets the world, says Spinoza, but changes it.