Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect · §§4–6
Episode 2
What are the costs of conventional success? Michah and Clare examine hedonism, pursuit of wealth, and honor-seeking and the difference between an unreliable good and a lasting good we may not yet know how to attain.
Editorial preview These show notes are drafts for review.
§4 Pleasure and the occupied mind.
In this first passage, Spinoza begins to define the distractions that he laid out in the previous passage: wealth, honour and sensual pleasure. He begins with how sense pleasure can lead to absorption and the sadness that can follow. Michah and Clare ask whether this pattern applies to every pleasure, while exploring his broader concern: what happens to attention when the mind is taken up with sense pleasure?
§4–5 Money, honour and approval.
Spinoza continues with this and goes on to write that wealth can serve other ends, but honour is often treated as valuable in itself. The conversation asks how the desire for approval shapes us now, and why honour can come to stand in for a sense of being valued.
§5 Wanting more.
Michah and Clare consider repentance after pleasure, including regret, bodily limits and cultural expectations. They discuss that wealth and honour appear to have no similar stopping point. Competition and disappointed hopes reveal costs that the pursuit of success leaves out.
§5 Whose values are we following?
Spinoza here goes on to write that pursuing honour can make us organise our lives around other people’s judgments. Michah and Clare discuss how Descartes and Plato’s cave offer comparisons for the challenge of thinking for oneself while living among others' judgments.
§6 Two kinds of uncertainty
Spinoza here draws a distinction between two types of things that can be uncertain: goods that are unreliable by their nature and a lasting good whose attainment remains uncertain. The distinction changes the terms of his decision, but it does not yet resolve it. The question of how to live and pursue true joy remains open.
A few useful terms
An end in itself
Something pursued for its own sake, rather than as a means to obtain something else.
Repentance
The translation’s term for a response after pleasure. The hosts consider both religious guilt and the broader experience of regret.
Uncertainty
Here it has two senses: a good may itself be unstable, or it may be stable but uncertain whether we can attain it.
Read alongside us
The edition used in the podcast
A Spinoza Reader
The Ethics and Other Works · Edited and translated by Edwin Curley
The hosts read from this Princeton University Press anthology. It includes the Ethics and selections from Spinoza’s other writings. Follow the paragraph numbers listed with each episode; page numbers vary between editions.
Exclusive podcast offer: buy A Spinoza Reader, edited by Edwin Curley, direct from Princeton University Press and use code SPINOZA (all caps) for 40% off.
