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from Harry Frankfurt's On Truth

He quotes Spinoza:
"Love is nothing buy Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause. . . "
Ethics Part III Propostion 11 Scholium
"Joy is that passion to a greater perfection. . . ."
Ethics Part III Propostion 11 Scholium

Conversation with Spinoza

Conversation with Spinoza:
A Cobweb Novel

by Goce Smilevski

Northwestern University Press, May 2006
5-1/2 x 8-1/2, 152 pp.
Cloth Text
ISBN 0-8101-2375-4 / $ 44.95

link:

"Prizing ideas above all else, radical thinker Baruch Spinoza left little behind in the way of personal facts and furnishings. But what of the tug of necessity, the urgings of the flesh, to which this genius philosopher (and grinder of lenses) might have been no more immune than the next man-or the next character, as Baruch Spinoza becomes in this intriguing novel by the remarkable young Macedonian author Goce Smilevski.
"Smilevski's novel brings the thinker Spinoza, all inner life, into conversation with the outer, all-too-real facts of his life and his day--from his connection to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his excommunication in 1656, and the emergence of his philosophical system to his troubling feelings for his fourteen-year-old Latin teacher Clara Maria van den Enden and later his disciple Johannes Casearius. From this conversation there emerges a compelling and complex portrait of the life of an idea--and of a man who tries to live that idea."

"A young heir to Gunter Grass and Jose Saramago, Smilevski might be the newest of a rare thing--a living European novelist with a message for the future of his continent, with an imagination borne against inheritance with such force that even Spinoza might have approved." --Forward

"Not only does Smilevski fulfill the difficult task of explaining Spinoza's dense ideas, dropping sly references to Darwin and Kundera into 17th-century Dutch life, but he makes a hidden life wonderfully manifest." --European Jewish Press

Link: http://nupress.northwestern.edu/title.cfm?ISBN=0-8101-2376-2

The Understanding

E4: PROP. 28:
The mind's highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind's highest
virtue is to know God.

Proof.--The mind is not capable of understanding anything higher than God,
that is (E1D6), than a Being absolutely infinite, and without which (E1P15)
nothing can either be or be conceived; therefore (E4P26 and E4P27), the
mind's highest utility or (E4D1) good is the knowledge of God.

knowledge and sensation

E2: PROP. 10
...The nature of God, which should be reflected on first, inasmuch as it is
prior both in the order of knowledge and the order of nature, they have
taken to be last in the order of knowledge, and have put into the first
place what they call the objects of sensation;
-----

Things as defined attributes of God

E1: PROP. 25, Corollary:
-- Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God,
or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and
definite manner.
---------

--He who, guided by [PASSIVE] emotion only, endeavours to cause others to
love what he loves himself, and to make the rest of the world live according
to his own fancy, acts solely by impulse, and is, therefore, hateful,
especially to those who take delight in something different, and accordingly
study and, by similar impulse, endeavour, to make men live in accordance
with what pleases themselves. Again, as the highest good sought by men under
the guidance of emotion is often such, that it can only be possessed by a
single individual, it follows that those who love it are not consistent in
their intentions, but, while they delight to sing its praises, fear to be
believed.