My favourite portrait of Spinoza. His excommunication was brutal, he was never accepted again by his…

My favourite portrait of Spinoza. His excommunication was brutal, he was never accepted again by his community. But his conviction, that only knowledge and understanding can ever set humans free, remained unmoved. This portrait is such a beautiful meditation on the tensions…/1 https://t.co/1mMK2I4KHU

…between social life and knowledge. Spinoza wasn’t just somebody transgressing social norms with other norms, plenty of people do that. And there are plenty of thinkers whose idiosyncrasies are really just rallying calls for a different community. /2 https://t.co/4rpx57TnDx

All thought is as social as any other activity. You can see it in the pandemic, with people rallying behind different expert opinions, and different experts building their own empires behind their ideas. That wasn’t Spinoza. His message was always that true understanding…/3 https://t.co/OnmkmNGLYR

…transcends all of that social team sports. He even had a metric for assessing whether true understanding had been reached. The feeling of joy. Any other feeling relating to knowledge meant you hadn’t yet fully understood something. I think he’s a model needed for our times. 4/4 https://t.co/kGkQKd7B7f