For many years now, I have had a big book by Spinoza called Ethics. It is written in a complicated way, with propositions, axioms, and definitions. It is philosophy in the form of an equation, you might say. I thought it might be interesting to feed some of my notes into a chatbot and have it present them using what is called the geometrical method, the way Spinoza writes in his book.

So you can read my thoughts, but in a form I could never produce myself at the moment. At the very least, it gives me hope that I can follow the way the book is structured, but it is still a lot of work.

Read his work here on Gutenberg.org

On Thought, Truth and Human Nature

An exercise in the geometrical method

Definitions

Definition I. By one’s own thought, I understand the way a person thinks, rather than the individual thoughts that occur to him.

Definition II. By common thought, I understand the ideas, values and conventions that a person inherits from the society in which he lives.

Definition III. By truth of one’s own, I understand a conviction that a person experiences as true, without this experience establishing its universal truth.

Axioms

Axiom I. No person chooses the circumstances into which he is born.

Axiom II. A person cannot think without being influenced by the world in which he lives.

Axiom III. The certainty with which something is believed does not determine whether it is true.

Axiom IV. Understanding a force that acts upon us does not necessarily free us from that force.

Axiom V. What humanity has created, humanity can, under different circumstances, create differently.

Proposition I

What a person considers his own thought necessarily contains common thought.

Demonstration.

By Axiom II, no person thinks independently of the world in which he lives. The language, knowledge and values through which he understands himself are already present before he begins to question them. Therefore, even what he experiences as his own way of thinking contains what he has inherited from others.

Scholium.

We may recognize this in other people more easily than in ourselves. Someone can understand why others think as they do and still believe that his own thinking is independent. Even the recognition of this contradiction does not free him from it.