The Spinoza Problem

Psychiatry is a strange field because, unlike any other field of medicine, you never really finish. Your greatest instrument is you, yourself, and the work of self-understanding is endless. I'm still learning.

You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.

We should cherish things because they are true, not because they are old.

Each time a goal is attained, it merely breeds additional needs. Thus more scurrying, more seeking, ad infinitum.

When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.

Why does the same book elicit such a range of responses? There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself. There must be something lurking deep in the mind—or, as this Freud says, the unconscious—that causes a particular reader to fall in love with a particular writer.

Fame, for example, consists of the opinions of others and requires that we must live our life as others wish.

Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... "I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... "He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it--that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." p.

I dare to hope that one day we will have AI that will listen to all the dumb shit we write and say and will point out (just to us, maybe) our cognitive biases, uninformed assumptions, and prejudices

Don’t complicate your life with such trivial goals as riches and fame: they are the enemy of ataraxia. Fame, for example, consists of the opinions of others and requires that we must live our life as others wish. To achieve and maintain fame, we must like what others like and shun whatever it is that they shun. Hence, a life of fame or a life in politics? Flee from it. And wealth? Avoid it! It is a trap. The more we acquire the more we crave, and the deeper our sadness when our yearning is not satisfied. Lads, listen to me: if you crave happiness, do not waste your life struggling for that which you really do not need.

Spinoza says that reason is no match for passion and what we must do is to turn reason into a passion.

I submit that God has no wishes about how, or even if, we glorify Him. Allow me, then, Jacob, to love God in my own fashion.” Franco’s

Miracles exist only through man's ignorance. In ancient times any occurrence that could not be explained through natural causes was considered a miracle, and the greater the ignorance of the masses about the workings of Nature, the greater the number of miracles.

I dare to hope that education will get a much-needed facelift, incorporating not only therapeutic practices to help children with their emotional development, but also letting them run around and scrape their knees and get into all sorts of trouble.

Not exactly a certified philosopher—my degree is in engineering and architecture, but my true home was philosophy, and even at the Polytechnic I found some learned professors who guided my private readings.

Look. Everyone is on the move. Scurrying back and forth all day, all their lives. To what end? Riches? Fame? Pleasures of the appetites? Surely these ends represent wrong turns.

People like people who are interested in them.

Husserl—he’s one of the greats. His term noema refers to the thing as we experience it, the thing as structured by us.

Yes, Bento had one weak spot, and Simon had discovered it. Bento was in love with books—not only the reading of books but the possession of them.

…It seems impossible to overestimate their capacity for irrationality. Somewhere in this world, with every blink of the eye, a fool is born.

You say that imperishable happiness lies elsewhere. Tell me about this ‘elsewhere.’” “I only know that it does not lie in perishable objects. It lies not outside but within. It is the mind that determines what is fearful, worthless, desirable, or priceless, and therefore it is the mind, and only the mind, that must be altered.” “What