Sub specie aeternitatis

lectia de azi:
relativizare

punere in perspectiva

detasare

egolessness

mindfulness

meditatie

pesimism

acceptare

Stuart Hampshire:

”All our ordinary time-determinations, our tenses and temporal predicates such as ‘past’ and ‘present’ are merely ‘aides to the imagination’ (auxilio imaginationis’), and they will not occur in expressions of the highest level of knowledge; for at the highest level of knowledge Nature is presented sub specie aeternitatis; Nature must be understood not as a temporal sequence of events, but as a logical sequence of modifications necessarily connected with each other. … it is a timeless, logical necessity that the order of nature should be what it is…”

– Spinoza, Harmondsworth, 1951, p. 174

H.A. Wolfson:

“Imagination sees things only in their fragmentary and unrelated condition, or it puts together ‘diverse confused ideas which belong to diverse things and operations of nature.’ It is the imagination, too, through which ‘we look upon things as contingent with reference to both the past and the future.’ But reason (ratio) … sees things in their necessary and eternal aspect …

These necessary and eternal aspects of things, Spinoza proceeds to say, are the immediate infinite modes: motion and rest under extension, and absolutely infinite intellect under thought. These infinite modes, again, are what Spinoza calls ‘fixed and eternal things’ ” … without which one cannot conceive of individual things.

– The Philosophy of Spinoza, Cleveland, 1958, ii, p. 161