Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Register here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life (a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living).
This Friday, we continue our exploration; we’re calling How to Live — Like Spinoza (Part I), Spinoza on Free Will & Living Well (Part II) through selected passages of Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction.
Check out the bookshelf below for upcoming (and previous) reading!
Living the Right Way — According to Spinoza
In his book Think Least of Death, Steven Nadler (a previous podcast guest) explains that readers of the ethical parts of the Ethics inevitably may end up puzzled by particular aspects of what Spinoza presents as the “right way of living.” More generally, they may also wonder about the nature and legitimacy of his entire moral project.
According to Nadler,
It seems, moreover, that the best way to become free is to act as the free person would act—to do what a free person does and, as far as one can, assume a free person’s temperament. This means following the dictates of reason. At first this will not involve following those dictates as the free person follows them—naturally and as the necessary effect of one’s own adequate ideas—but rather with an intentional commitment, as a kind of obligation to externally imposed commands. […]
The unfree person, then, should act like a free person, obeying the dictates of reason. Eventually, as he acquires a deeper understanding of those dictates, he will become habituated to reason’s guidance.
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