semi-automatic waffle

Yes. Buckle up. You asked for philosophy, which is humanity’s favorite way to feel smart while being deeply unsettled.

Spinoza is extremely deterministic. Like, aggressively so. No wiggle room, no “but what if I try really hard,” no cosmic exception for your vibes.

Here’s the core idea, in plain English instead of 17th-century Latin flexing:

1. Everything that exists follows necessarily from God/Nature

Spinoza says there is one substance, which he calls God or Nature (Deus sive Natura). This is not a bearded sky manager making choices. It’s reality itself, operating according to necessity.

Everything that happens follows from the nature of this substance with the same inevitability that a triangle has three sides. Not “usually.” Not “unless Mercury is in retrograde.” Necessarily.

So:

Trees grow because of prior causes
Planets move because of prior causes
You decided to eat cereal instead of eggs because of prior causes

You are not special. Sorry.

2. Free will is an illusion caused by ignorance

Spinoza’s most famous (and meanest) line of thought:

People think they are free because they are conscious of their actions but ignorant of the causes that determine them.

You feel like you chose something freely because you don’t see the entire causal chain that produced the choice. If you did, the feeling of freedom would evaporate like confidence after rereading your old tweets.

So when you say:

“I could have done otherwise”

Spinoza says:

No, you absolutely could not have, given the exact same causes.

3. Determinism doesn’t mean chaos — it means order

This isn’t nihilistic “nothing matters” determinism. It’s more like hyper-rational clockwork.

Nature is:

Fully intelligible in principle
Governed by laws
Not random, not arbitrary, not emotional

If something happens, it has a reason. The universe isn’t making it up as it goes along, unlike humans at brunch.

4. So… are we just doomed puppets?

Here’s where Spinoza does something sneaky.

He redefines freedom.

Freedom is not:

Choosing without causes (that would be random, not free)
Being uncaused (only God/Nature qualifies)

Freedom is:

Acting from the necessity of your own nature, with understanding.

You are more free when:

Your actions follow from reason
You understand why you want what you want
You are less driven by blind emotions and external pressures

You are less free when:

You’re yanked around by impulses, fear, resentment, or TikTok
External causes dominate your behavior

So freedom is about self-understanding, not metaphysical independence.

5. Ethical payoff (the part Spinoza actually cares about)

Once you accept determinism:

You stop hating people as “evil”
You stop blaming yourself in cosmic moral terms
You focus on understanding causes and increasing your power to act

Instead of rage or guilt, Spinoza wants clarity and calm. Very on brand for a guy who got excommunicated and still didn’t subtweet anyone.

In short:

Everything is determined
Free will as people imagine it is fake
Freedom = understanding necessity, not escaping it
The universe isn’t judging you, but it is unimpressed

If you want, I can compare Spinoza’s determinism to:

Descartes (his former frenemy)
Modern neuroscience
Stoicism
Or why this philosophy makes some people very chill and others deeply uncomfortable

Your move, little causal node.

What if causes are external to oneself, wouldn't it then make sense to understand external causes?

Correct. Congratulations, you just noticed the thing people usually miss while busy arguing about “free will” like it’s a personality trait.

Spinoza would say: yes, absolutely—understanding external causes is not optional, it’s the whole game. The “self” you’re supposed to understand is not some sealed-off inner soul bunker. It’s a node in a causal network, soaking up influences like a damp sponge with opinions.

Here’s how he’d frame it (minus the Latin intimidation tactics):

1. You are mostly made of external causes

For Spinoza, you are:

Your body (affected by food, sleep, weather, hormones)
Your mind (affected by upbringing, language, social pressures, past experiences)
Your desires (triggered by things you didn’t design or vote on)

So when he talks about “self-understanding,” he doesn’t mean introspective navel-gazing like:

“Why am I like this?”

He means:

“What causes are currently running me like background software?”

Spoiler: many of them are external, ancient, and do not care about your self-image.

2. External causes don’t negate freedom — ignorance of them does

If you’re driven by external causes you don’t understand, Spinoza calls that passivity. You’re being acted upon.

If you understand those causes:

How praise manipulates you
How fear shapes your decisions
How scarcity, power, or desire hook your emotions

Then your actions start to follow reason, not blind reaction. That’s what he calls activity.

Same causes. Different relationship to them.

Think of it like this:

A puppet who doesn’t know there are strings: “I’m free!”
A puppet who sees the strings and learns how they move: relatively freer, and much less embarrassing.

3. The boundary between “internal” and “external” is fake anyway

Spinoza is ruthless here.

What you call “external causes” eventually:

Become ideas in your mind
Alter your body
Shape your desires

At that point, they are part of your nature.

So freedom isn’t about eliminating external causes (impossible, calm down), but about integrating them into understanding.

You don’t escape causality.
You comprehend it.
And somehow that’s the best deal on offer.

4. Ethical payoff (again, because Spinoza is annoyingly consistent)

When you understand external causes:

You judge less
You resent less
You panic less
You stop pretending people woke up and chose to be awful “for no reason”

Including yourself, tragically.

So yes:
Understanding external causes is not a contradiction of Spinozist freedom. It is Spinozist freedom.

You are free to the extent that:

You know what is affecting you
You respond through understanding rather than reflex
You stop telling yourself heroic myths about independence

Which is humbling, stabilizing, and frankly devastating to motivational posters.

If you want, I can:

Contrast this with Kant (who would scream)
Show how this maps onto modern psychology
Or explain why Spinoza sounds cold but is secretly running a very quiet self-help program

Let me know, enlightened causal sponge.

Andrew Solomon said in Noonday Demon that depression is intractable to knowledge, that it makes no difference how well you understand it. He also said that language has power and learning about depression did help, so he contradicts himself perhaps. Other writers on the subject of mental illness say that it shows how hubristic it is to think that we are in control. Not sure how this connects to Spinoza.

This is actually a good question, which is annoying for me, because now I have to take you seriously for a minute.

You’re circling a real tension, not a contradiction, and it lines up uncannily well with Spinoza—despite him being dead centuries before SSRIs and memoir culture.

Let’s slow it down.

1. Solomon is right that depression is often intractable to knowledge

When Solomon says depression doesn’t yield to understanding, he’s pointing at this brutal fact:

You can know you’re depressed
You can know why you’re depressed
You can know it’s neurochemical, situational, inherited, whatever

…and still feel like your mind is a flooded basement with the lights off.

Spinoza would not argue with this.

Why? Because for Spinoza:

Understanding is not magic
Ideas don’t automatically overpower bodily states
The mind does not rule the body like a king; they are the same thing expressed differently

Depression, in Spinozist terms, is a state of diminished power to act (potentia). When that power is low enough, your capacity to form adequate ideas is impaired.

So yes: depression can block the very understanding that might help it. That’s not a paradox; it’s a feedback loop from hell.

2. So why does Solomon also say language helped?

Because not all “understanding” is the same.

Spinoza distinguishes:

Abstract, detached knowledge (“I know what depression is”)
Adequate ideas that reorganize how causes are felt and integrated

Language matters because:

It gives structure to chaos
It allows experience to be shared, not just endured
It turns raw affect into something intelligible

In Spinoza’s terms, language can:

Convert passive suffering into some degree of activity
Increase your power slightly, not cure you instantly
Interrupt isolation, which is one of depression’s favorite hobbies

So Solomon isn’t contradicting himself. He’s saying:

Knowledge alone doesn’t save you — but some forms of articulation can still change the terrain.

That’s very Spinozist. Annoyingly so.

3. The “hubris of control” critique fits Spinoza perfectly

Other writers say mental illness humbles us, showing how little control we have.

Spinoza nods and says:

Correct. You never had the control you thought you did.

But here’s the key difference:

Spinoza does not conclude:

“Therefore agency is an illusion and we are helpless”

He concludes:

“Agency was misunderstood from the beginning”

You were never:

A sovereign chooser
A detached rational commander
The CEO of your neurotransmitters

You are:

A finite mode in a vast causal system
Subject to forces you didn’t choose
Capable of partial understanding and partial reorientation

Depression exposes this because it strips away the comforting lie that “if I just think right, I’ll be fine.”

Spinoza would call that lie sad superstition, not empowerment.

4. So how does this all connect cleanly?

Here’s the synthesis, since you earned it:

Depression shows the limits of reason’s power
Understanding does not equal control
But understanding can still:
- Reduce self-blame
- Reduce moralized suffering
- Open paths to treatment, support, and endurance

For Spinoza, the ethical goal is not mastery but increased capacity—sometimes by knowledge, sometimes by medicine, sometimes by community, sometimes by sheer persistence.

He would hate the idea that:

“If you really understood yourself, you wouldn’t be depressed.”

He would say instead:

“Your depression is part of the causal order, and understanding it is one cause among many that may or may not increase your power.”

Which is bleak, honest, and strangely compassionate.

5. Bottom line (before I get too earnest and ruin my brand)

Solomon isn’t contradicting himself.
Spinoza doesn’t promise control.
Mental illness doesn’t refute reason—it exposes its limits.

Understanding is:

Not omnipotent
Not useless
Not morally obligatory

It’s just one tool in a system that was never designed to care about your narratives of self-mastery.

If you want, we can:

Map this onto modern psychiatry vs CBT vs meds
Compare Spinoza to Freud (who would make this worse)
Or talk about why people cling so hard to the idea of control even when it keeps disappointing them

Say the word. I’ll be here, reluctantly thinking with you.

So, Spinoza didn't see feeling, mood, emotion and sensation as equal to and as working in concert with reason, he placed reason above them so speak?

Short answer: no — but it looks like yes if you read him with modern self-help goggles on.
Long answer: welcome back, you’re asking the right question again, which is frankly suspicious.

Spinoza does not think reason is a boss sitting above emotions like a disappointed middle manager. He thinks reason is a mode of affect—a very special, stabilizing one—but still continuous with feeling, mood, sensation, and desire.

Let me untangle this without pretending it’s intuitive (it isn’t).

1. Spinoza rejects the “reason vs emotion” war entirely

The classic picture (which Spinoza hates):

Reason = rational, pure, clean
Emotion = messy, animal, bad
Moral task = reason beats emotion into submission

Spinoza says: absolutely not.

For him:

Humans are not divided into faculties
Mind and body are the same thing expressed differently
Emotions (affects) follow laws just like thoughts do

So emotions are not errors or intruders. They are natural events, governed by causality.

If you feel sad, angry, elated, numb — that’s not reason failing. That’s nature doing its thing through you.

2. But… he does privilege reason in a specific sense

Here’s where people get confused (fairly).

Spinoza distinguishes between:

Passive affects — emotions that happen to you
Active affects — emotions that arise from adequate understanding

Reason matters because it produces active affects, not because it floats above feeling.

Example:

Fear driven by vague imagination = passive
Calm resolve grounded in understanding = active

Both are feelings.
One increases your power to act; the other constrains it.

So reason isn’t anti-emotion — it’s emotion with a backbone.

3. Reason works with emotion, not against it

Spinoza is blunt about this:

An affect can only be overcome by a stronger, contrary affect — not by reason alone.

That sentence alone should disqualify him from the “reason uber alles” club.

Reason helps by:

Generating new affects (confidence, equanimity, joy)
Reordering how causes are felt
Weakening destructive passions indirectly

You don’t argue yourself out of sadness.
You gradually replace it with affects that carry more power.

That’s not Stoic suppression. That’s emotional ecology.

4. Sensation and mood are not inferior — they’re unavoidable

Spinoza knows:

You are embodied
Your moods track sleep, health, environment
No amount of reasoning will cancel hunger or depression on command

Which is why he:

Defends medicine
Defends social life
Defends joy, friendship, and pleasure (scandalous for a philosopher)

Reason alone is weak. Reason embedded in supportive conditions is effective.

Again: no hierarchy, just leverage.

5. So what is reason, then?

In Spinoza’s system, reason is:

A way the mind organizes causes
A form of understanding that reduces confusion
A source of stable, expansive affects

It is not:

A tyrant
A moral judge
A magic override switch

Think of reason as emotional clarity, not emotional domination.

6. Why this matters for your Solomon / depression question

Spinoza would say:

Depression isn’t a moral failure of reason
It’s a state where passive affects dominate
Reason may be impaired by the condition it’s supposed to help with

Which means:

No blame
No hubris
No fantasy of total control

Just the slow work of increasing power where possible.

Bottom line (before I accidentally become kind)

Spinoza does not place reason above feeling.
He places clarity-producing affects above confusion-producing affects.
Reason is just the most reliable way humans have found to generate the former.

If that sounds less heroic than “mind over matter,” good.
Spinoza isn’t selling heroism. He’s selling realism with better emotional outcomes.

If you want, next we can:

Compare Spinoza to modern affective neuroscience
Or explain why he makes both rationalists and romantics uncomfortable
Or talk about why people keep misreading him as cold when he’s quietly obsessed with joy

Your call, emotionally embodied reasoning machine.