.

and now for something completely obscure



Kant and Spinoza



I love that name


Spinoza



And I intend to say
it many times today,
just to amuse myself.

Spinozisms.


O, sweet Spinoza!
With all your heretical
adventures into immanence,
please speak to me
with geometric certainty.
Do you have an adequate
idea of what " I " is referring
to, certainty being nothing
else than the subjective
essence of a thing?

Whereas, Kant was always
rather busy devising critical
arguments for (some) a priories.
Are they really part of (our)
Nature, as he claimed? ...
something about categories
of reason(ing) and his adamant
resolve that knowledge is a thing
unto itself, a perfectly objective
thing.


I don't have that book, the one
with Kant's critique of Spinoza.

"Kant, by his own admission,
had been baffled in his attempts
(probably not very persevering)
to master Spinoza's philosophy."

(Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary
to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason)

Kant, who followed this dispute
with great interest, with purely
rational faith and his intervention
in the Pantheism debate.


But Spinoza's notion of knowledge
suits this morning better. Its hazy
late-spring sky, lakeful breeze and
all my westward what-if glances.
Honeyed Bavarian chocolate coffee
still hot on the tongue and cradled
beside my Spinoza-ed notion of
knowledge, like this day,
"a confused idea", a hybrid
comprised of more than one essence
(ie. mine, plus the thing I sense
(or reason about)). this crazy
Spinozist-Deleuzian amalgam
of a Canadian-Sunday morning
while Kind of Blue faintly floats
past all the plush green air
of early June.