Spinoza argues that God exists in own nature and acts alone from the requirements of his personal necessity and everything happening has a predetermination from God. I concur with his philosophy concerning the problems of desire and human servitude or freedom. Humans have anchored their actions with a view to an end. The belief has made man struggle to attain their wishes, but where they fail to do enough. Too often, they attribute their misfortunes to God. Too often human beings strive to achieve for their own advantage without making efforts to know why things happen the way they do. The primary goal of their actions is to meet the ultimate end of the desires without exploring the motivational factors of their efforts (Morgan and Shirley). In cases of success from a particular methodology in achieving an end to somethings, men seek to discover and reuse the same practices that worked for them in producing what they feel favorable to them. While man finds the means to achieve his ends and desires, they treat the natural things they perceive as the facilitators to their own advantage.
Nonetheless, most of the means are not man’s own creation, and thus they attribute them to God with the belief that God created them for their use and freedom. The ignorance about the causes of the means of nature that man considers useful makes them tie them to supernatural being forcing them to feel obligated to worship him. The belief influences the degree of honor man extends to God as he seeks to get more love beyond others and more favors to serve his blind cupidity and insatiable desires. This misconception that God made nature for human use has made them slaves since they only strive to explain the causes of all things and in the process of doing so, they perceive that nothing occurs in vain and everything occurs to man’s advantage. The desire for everything in nature to favor them makes them attribute occurrences they uncomfortable with to God’s anger at them for their wrongdoings (Morgan and Shirley). The mysterious ways of the unfortunate incidents and man’s ignorance about them had forced humankind into slaves of their own minds evading them of the truth until Mathematics that tries to explain the facts rather than the ends alone.
Man, in his quest to fulfill his desires as satisfy his ignorance continues to attach every happening to a purpose. People believe nothing occurs without reason and where they can not ascertain the meaning, they take refuge in the will of God. Human feelings about nature influence their perceptions about the good, bad, perfect and imperfect depending on their desires and imaginations. They consider their own efforts as complete but extend different opinions on things not meeting the expectations of their fantasies (Morgan and Shirley). The visions result in preferences of particular actions to achieve the desires since what they see conform to the generalized ideas behind these happenings. The mindset makes a man feel nature has failed where things don’t meet their preconceived notions. In a nutshell, humankind tends a selfish character of loving things that favor them and rebuke anything not going their way forcing them into slavery to uphold these views and persist in exploiting them to achieve their desires.
Relation to Nietzsche’s Philosophy
The Spinoza’s philosophy on how humans perceive and use natural components to meet their desires have same ideas as Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche dissects the human the human perception and response to moral issues. He explains that human beings interpret and treat the ethical aspects of life depending on how those values affect them. He attributes the changes in the fundamental values to the emergence of civilization and Christian moralization that seems to erode the traditional Christian-moral culture. The modern man’s life is full of over-moralistic language where people tend to defend their opinions and character from a modernistic view without looking into the origins and causes. People have become victims of incorporated errors incorporated into their ways of thinking, feeling and living. As such, too often, humanity tends to struggle to find a differentiating factor to satisfy their egocentric needs: they no longer adhere to the most crucial values. Instead, people seek unreasonable excuses to defend their actions and describe the values of life depending on the benefits they derive from these values.
The modern thinking assumes there is a single morality for all and hence no one wants to question any occurrences in the society. The society continues to values varying aspects as a means to an end and where one tries to explain the different life phenomena, they receive resistance from those who perceive such ideas as metaphysics thus have no basis in their life. For example, it is rather strange how different individuals would argue what is right, wrong or evil (Nietzsche). The views do not conform to traditional Christian values. Instead, there is the influence of modernization. All in all a close correlation exists between these two works of philosophy regarding human life. Both ideologies demonstrate an affected mindset on how people go about their lives. What comes out clearly is the self-center nature of human beings; a trait that has made them slaves in their own world.
Works Cited
Morgan, Michael L., and Samuel Shirley. Spinoza: The Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc, 2002.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
