Hello to all,

I would like to ask any of you to comment about an area of Spinoza's main ideas that bothers me.  I am particularly referring  to his main emphasis on Reason and Intuition as the premier ways of understanding God/Nature.

Reason and Intuition are ways of Thinking. But Spinoza clearly claims that Thinking is one of the Attributes of Substance, Extension /Materiality the other (among an infinitude of attributes). So Reason is extracted, in my view, from Materiality and disembodied, placed above it and declared the only way to know God/Nature. I ask What is reality without a body?.

Once I read a statement from a book: Why does E=MC2?, in it I found the following "You can invent any object or idea you like, but if there is no way of observing it or its consequences, you haven't made a contribution to the scientific understanding of the universe." Can Reason/Intuition stand alone to comprehend all that there is? It seems to me that Materiality and its manifestations would have as much to say (albeit in a different manner). Spinoza did not seem to like physicalness as much. He did not like the earthy, crawly, down and dirty aspects of Matter, with its closest allies: passions, affects , sensations and the like. He prefers to soar with his Reason/Intuition up into the ethereal  pinnacles of the gods, almost in the manner of the otherwordly Platonic Forms.

I am afraid that my thinking is rather concrete and limited and lacking a good understanding of the whole of Sipnoza. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Luis