You Are the Universe Experiencing Itself

I was watching a YouTube video by Aperture and the narrator was talking about a philosopher called Spinoza. The title of the video was "You Are the Universe Experiencing Itself." I found the title interesting so I decided to watch to the end. From the beginning, Spinoza sounded like a very fascinating man partly because of how the narrator portrayed him, and also because the narrator was clearly convinced by arguments that were in their own right, very interesting. As I went on, the narrator also mentioned that Spinoza's philosophy was so compelling that even Einstein said he believed in the God of Spinoza. Like everyone else in the world I have always been awed by Einstein so that sentence motivated me to watch the whole 42 minutes of it without skipping to understand why Einstein revered the God of Spinoza that much.

According to the video, Spinoza's philosophy grew from two sources: his community and his mind. His family were Sephardic Jews who had escaped the Portuguese Inquisition and found refuge in Amsterdam. The community was held together by shared trauma and survival and they leaned on religion for identity and protection. Questioning religion was thus a threat to the fragile structure keeping everyone safe. From his late teens, Spinoza could not stop asking dangerous questions. Whether scripture was literal, whether God intervened in human affairs, whether miracles were real, whether the soul was immortal. He was brilliant and deeply curious and could not accept certainty without examining it first. The tension between those two things produced his philosophy and he became very threatening because he rejected religion, dismantled the framework and rebuilt from scratch. At 23, he was excommunicated. The decree forbade anyone from speaking to him, helping him, or standing within a certain distance of him. I am glad he never recanted because now I am sitting here learning about him and his philosophy and I will never know of the people who excommunicated him in the first place.

In most religions, God is infinite. Spinoza took that premise and argued that if God is truly infinite, nothing can exist outside of God because if something exists independently from God, God would no longer be infinite. There would be something beyond him so there can only be one infinite substance. By this logic, everything that exists is a modification of that one substance hence making us expressions of God or the universe.

I agreed with him but a few questions arose as the argument built up. If we are God or modes of God or expressions of God and we stop thinking of ourselves that way, does that make God less infinite? And if God requires us to be fully himself, wouldn't that make us necessary to God? if that's the case then we are not just waves on the ocean. We are what makes the ocean whole. Additionally, if God is truly infinite, wouldn't every possible mode be expressed? A God who could create a particular form but did not would be a God with unexpressed potential. Which means he would not be fully infinite. So every mode is not just possible but necessary. The ocean must contain every wave it is capable of producing or it's not infinite.

Spinoza's second argument was that God has no emotions because emotions imply change, and change implies imperfection. He added that a being who becomes angry or pleased is reacting to something outside of themselves but God is infinite reality itself. Nothing exists outside him to provoke those reactions. So God has no preferences, no feelings, no responses. At this point in the video I got a little bit confused because if God didn't have emotions that would contradict Spinoza's first argument. I did some research online to find out what he actually argued and I found his actual position. His real argument is not that emotions don't exist or that they are not in God. His argument is that God has no passive emotions, that is, no reactive emotions caused by something external because nothing is outside of God to cause a reaction. He allows that active affects; feelings arising from a thing's own nature, are different.

Well, from my standpoint, for God to be truly infinite even passive emotions like grief or confusion are modifications happening within God. They are not external. They are modes of the infinite and we are his modes. Our emotions are God feeling himself from the inside. I don't think it's correct to say God is infinite and then remove something real like emotion from him. That is placing a limit on God. Which contradicts the first argument. He could counter this by saying that God contains emotion as a modification without experiencing it as a subject. However if God is the only substance, then there is no separate experiencer for the feeling to belong to. The experience would have nowhere else to go. So when I feel, God is feeling literally because there is no other substance in existence that the experience could belong to. The distinction between containing and experiencing collapses the moment you accept that God is the only thing that exists.

Spinoza's third argument was that free will in the absolute sense does not exist. He added that we feel free because we experience desires from the inside without seeing the causes shaping them. Like a stone that thinks it's flying by choice. But understanding changes this. The more clearly we see the causes behind things, the less we are controlled by them. Passive emotions dominate us when we do not understand their causes but understanding dissolves them. This, according to Spinoza was the path to freedom.

From my own lived experience, I know that understanding is not enough. I can see the truth and my response will still be another thing. I sometimes watch myself spiral while knowing I am spiraling. Knowing my limitations helps me function better sometimes but it does not close the gap between knowing and being. I think he overestimated what clarity could do. He further added that we are finite modes, and a finite mind cannot achieve complete understanding of infinite causes. If that's the case, the freedom he promised that would come from understanding would require a capacity he already told us we do not have. My problem is not that I do not understand enough. It's that adequate understanding, the kind that would actually dissolve the pattern is structurally unavailable to any finite being. He prescribed a cure that only God can take.

In his fourth argument Spinoza said we do not need God as judge, heaven or hell, reward or punishment. Ethical life should focus on increasing understanding, cooperation and human flourishing. From what I have observed and understood about the world and myself, understanding cannot hold society together. Everyone has their own version of flourishing and understanding. My common sense is not someone else's common sense. If the world was run through people's own common sense we would all be in serious trouble. The world would be in chaos. I understand why there are systems. I understand why religion exists and I would not even want to dismantle it because without rules and those systems there will be a lot of harm. Whoever made those systems knew exactly what they were doing. The problem is not the systems. The problem is that a lot of people take the indoctrination we are given by society, home, school and they succeed monetarily and they think that is wisdom. But it's not wisdom. It's just knowledge. They are stripped of the capacity to think but they think that they think and Spinoza's framework cannot tell the difference. He asks for understanding but he has no way to distinguish real understanding from the kind that has been handed to you and never questioned. A society built on his ethics would not look like liberation. It would look exactly like what we currently have.

There is also a structural problem. Spinoza's ethics requires people to be able to tell the difference between wisdom and indoctrination but indoctrination works by removing exactly that capacity. People do not know they are not thinking. It is impossible to build a rational society out of people who have already been made unable to recognise the difference. His system needs the very thing it cannot produce.

On his fifth argument he said most people experience life from an intensely narrow perspective. The ego interprets every event in relation to itself but stepping back until the individual life becomes part of a vastly larger process frees people from destructive emotional patterns.

Following the argument that the universe is experiencing itself through billions of forms simultaneously. I agree. Each form is conscious but bounded. It knows itself as whole but is actually part of the whole. Like a department that does not know it is part of a company. It just knows its own work and reality without knowing there is a whole receiving all of it. However a question arises here; If we are indeed finite and we are modes of the infinite, and the infinite is experiencing itself through us, how is it that we are finite at all? If the infinite is experiencing itself through us, then what is doing the experiencing? The infinite. So if we are the aperture and we are finite, the substance looking through the lens is not. The limitation is in the form. Not in what is doing the seeing. With that logic Spinoza himself was a finite mind, standing in one department, looking at his own walls, making definitive claims about the whole company. The finitude he used to limit us limited him too. His philosophy is not a view from infinity. It is one corner's best attempt. Which might be brilliant. But it cannot be final.

I understand why Einstein admired his philosophy but I will not side with Einstein today.