Hi there,

My aim is to come to know what Spinoza, in The Ethics, calls blessedness.

I’m not interested in an academic reading of Spinoza, nor am I interested in a conceptual understanding of Spinoza. I have already spent far too much time on those and they have not brought me any closer to knowing this blessedness.

Nor am I, ultimately, interested in Spinoza. I ‘use’ Spinoza as one of the relatively few western mystics who can point me in the right direction. I might just as well use Socrates, through Plato, or …

So what is this Spinozan blessedness? Spinoza goes to great lengths, in The ethics, to define and demonstrate the possibility of this blessedness. But a more direct, if limited, description can be found in Spinoza’s essay On the Improvement of the Understanding (which predates The Ethics):

I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

It is my aim to come to know this continuous, supreme and unending happiness. My intuition tells me that, in order to do this, I must somehow move past a conceptual understanding of Spinoza, move away from analysis and comparison, and engage in some form of practice. One aspect of that practice is writing, which allows me to clarify and structure my understanding. This blog is that part of my practice. Please note that I do not write to convince the reader.

Perhaps a more important part of that practice is to develop a habit of observing the ‘affects’ (see The Ethics, last paragraph of chapter 5, proposition 10).

The reader may suspect that this endeavour seems difficult and the success unlikely. And Spinoza would agree, whilst insisting that it is both possible and worthwhile. In the very last paragraph of The Ethics he states:

If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labour be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

And so I continue. You might want to start here.