Spinoza, but without skipping demonstrations
In February 2025, I devoted my spiritual life to an experiment that was long overdue: reading the Ethics of Spinoza without skipping its very dry & demanding demonstrations. I call it overdue because, for years, I have tried to internalize Spinoza’s philosophy, and finally, my experiment of March 2024 with “spinozist mindfulness” forced me to confront the fact that this could not be done fully without actually taking the plunge into spinozist logic. This new experiment gave me a new fervent appreciation of the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise: reasoning in geometrical order. Last time I talked about practising Spinoza’s philosophy on this blog, I was trying to figure out what the paradigmatic spinozist philosophical exercise would be, and if it could be a form of mindfulness meditation . This reflection culminated in the following conclusion/confession: the “geometrical order” that Spinoza claims as a method, and which consists ...