| In Spinoza's Divine Wisdom, I present and explain Spinoza's entire philosophy from the perspective of the third kind of knowledge, which is that intuitive knowledge Spinoza calls blessedness (beatitudo). I argue that the blessedness embodied and expressed by Spinoza's 'wise man' can be understood as kind of divine wisdom. What I mean by 'divine wisdom' is an absolute knowledge and affirmation of the natural and indivisible divinity of all existence. I present Spinoza's thought as being essentially monist, naturalist, and pantheist. I, therefore, read Spinoza's Ethics as a manual for becoming wise; that is, I treat the Ethics as a text that progressively shows us the way in which we can come to identify ourselves with the truth and necessity of the one substance that is the universe for Spinoza, what he calls 'God or Nature.' I argue that Spinoza's Ethics is a text meant to teach us to how live eternally. Through the activity of becoming truly blessed, we achieve an eternally joyful and infinitely loving existence that makes us indistinguishable from God himself. Thus, I present Spinoza's conception of intuition as being fundamentally practical and immediately relevant to our lives. I begin my work by introducing Spinoza through a methodological and typological analysis of his thinking. Through this analysis I argue that Spinoza's true method is what I call 'perspectivism,' or the 'sub specie' (under the aspect of) model, and that his true typological tendency is more Eleatic or Presocratic than it is 'radically,' or even post-, Cartesian. After establishing Spinoza's method and type, I then ask and answer five essential questions that lead us to the achievement of divine wisdom. These questions are: what is God, the mind, the affects, strength, and freedom?;Keywords: Spinoza, God, divine, wisdom, blessedness, beatitude, Nature, substance, perspectivism, indivisibility, infinity, eternity, power, absolute, joy, love, affect, affection, mind, strength, freedom, intuition, identity, difference, being, becoming, one, is, all. |
