Spinoza, Exile

I bought a book Ethics by the philosopher Spinoza a while back, having seen him described him as "a philosopher's philosopher", not that this particularly induced grand expectations, though perhaps I was missing out on something vital, and so in homage to fair-mindedness the book was bought. Having dipped a little into said book, it seems clear that what "a philosopher's philosopher" signifies is is "an accountant's accountant"; everything neatly cross-referenced, a great tidy self-made structure within which the conceiver of the structure apparently finds much desired security. The 'self' as a point within a mental structure of its own devising. Where would he be otherwise if he couldn't bow down to something? Even the bowing down is an act of existence after all, and if one enacts acts of existence, then one must, naturally, exist.

All merely adding to the thought that inevitably arose in my head at some time that the normal condition of man almost seems to be to be a slave; a condition so deeply ingrained as to be almost, or even more than almost, a biological condition; a mental software in perpetual self-creation, whose innate sense, because it is so innate or has been subtly conditioned to become so, is utterly invisible to the subject of the condition. An example being the recent look into Beckett's line about being an "inorganic singleness": in other words that to be alive is to be not free, not alive even. He declares himself the worst kind of slave: that there isn't even anything but enslavement- and this 'realisation' of this damned, hopeless condition is applauded and welcomed by other slaves. "This is realism!" They used to think they were in exile from truth, now they think exile is all there is, that what you're in exile from doesn't even exist. The slave furnishes thoughts proper to his condition.