To Be Is to Be Explicable

What reality is is the one and only system of necessary connections. That is the causa sui, the thing that explains itself, outside of which nothing can be conceived. It is logic itself, not its rules but its applications -- and the vast and infinite system of logical entailments that are not merely abstract, as we usually conceive of them, but rather coated with the substance of being.....

Outside of this infinite system of necessary connections there can be . . . nothing. This infinite system composes the the entire explanatory nexus, and were there to be anything outside of it, that something would be ipso facto inexplicable. And there can be nothing inexplicable in the universe -- this is the beating heart of Spinoza's rationalism -- no arbitrary elements that are simply there for no reason at all. The denial of a thing's explicability is tantamount to the denial of that thing's reality. To be is to be explicable.

--Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

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