Thinking requires corrections, nuances and subtlety, not ready-made dogmas from the fast-food world of thought.

The Spinozist is an adherent to the philosophical system of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) and advocates that man’s primary problem is a lack of understanding or “bondage” as Spinoza calls it and fundamentally arises due to a significant ignorance regarding the nature of reality.

It is due to this ignorance, that we become vulnerable to external causes that negatively affect our psychology. However, when a true idea replaces a false one, our involvement in thought and action increases.

Ergo, comprehending the truth of reality and that our emotions and exteriority principally control us, will, in a way, light a fire under one’s belly to move towards liberation.

Nevertheless, Spinoza himself recognises the difficulty in attaining this goal :

“If the way I have shown to lead to these things now seems very hard, still, it can be found. And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard. For if salvation were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

It is unlikely that most of us will attain the Spinozistic ideal.

Through divergent articles, many covering Spinoza’s ideals, The Spinozist will endeavour to clarify and aid this process.

Philosophy does not belong to a privileged domain. But neither is it a divertissement. It tries to elucidate, through reflection, questions which both concern everyone deeply and for which we often do not have an answer.

It is the aim of the Spinozist to try and shed more light on some of these questions, but not to provide answers.

By encouraging an awareness of the scope of these questions, as well as a decisively clear conception of them, would already be a considerable contribution to the universal search for meaning.

The method of reflection should be, routinely, simple in terms of the vocabulary used, rigorous (as much as possible), in terms of the description of the efforts of perception pertaining to our object, and independent of supposed methods. scientific reflection and a concern for dissemination and reception.

The desire, to tackle vital questions without going through technical, scientific or ideological detours, is based on a simple idea, established and repeated throughout, that every human being, cultivated or not, is a conscious subject who can become a conscious and reflective subject.

Every human being is first and foremost a conscious subject. In other words, every human being can learn to read, write and speak, in order to improve their everyday life.

This also means that any subject, who does not wish to burn books, can think when reading "philosophy" and thus increase their pleasure as a being and their existential well-being.