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This is interesting to me. For one, as a particularly close comparison, some deeper Mormon doctrine teaches that God created the entire world spiritually before He created it physically, and holds that at least some of God's power is sourced from His more complete understanding of the laws of the universe (physical and otherwise). Basically, very similar to the mirror idea. It's really fascinating where Spinoza seems to take this idea instead. It also reminds me a little bit of that one "Psychocybernetics" book, where it's claimed perception leads to power, and action is guided by your (accurate?) self-image. I think in both cases, it seems there is broad agreement that most of what you need to be happy and satisfied and strong comes mostly from rejecting bad beliefs and finding more accurate ones - although I don't know enough about philosophy to say if this is really all that unique, it certainly appeals to me. I have long felt that a surprising amount of human behavior and attitude is related to how much control one feels they have (the perception of control though, to be clear, not necessarily actual control). Although in my case, I tend to think that some degree of humility is necessary as clearly our own agency and life's circumstances will always have some limits we will come very clearly up against.
I'm curious as to how it followed that Spinoza claims that humility is an evil emotion? Is the implication that humility is a false pretense, and thus an inaccurate way of viewing the world, or something else like it being wholly extrinsic to our actual selves? Or is it more about the control and power point, where humility is too closely related to a sort of passivity and acceptance of one's fate being imposed on them?
(It's interesting that you instantly highlight animals as a connection, or maybe that was original to Spinoza; that wouldn't really have occurred to me as immediately related. We Mormons also have a follow-on belief that animals do have spirits, and that killing animals without need is immoral. With that said the more practical implications of this are not really all that commonly expressed beyond a recommendation, rarely followed, that it is good to eat meat only sparingly. That is not to say that we were ever encouraged to be vegetarian or never eat domesticated animals, that's more famously the Seventh Day Adventists)
Just as a nitpick/sidebar, it's "vice versa", it's Latin and apparently you can pronounce it two ways, both acceptable: as it looks (two separate words, "vyse ver-suh") or as "vy-suh ver-suh" because the e would be pronounced alone in Latin, this is considered slightly more fancy. "Vy-see ver-see" or any variant thereof, flat wrong. I pronounce it the first way because a) it's more accessible and doesn't make me feel as silly, and b) the alleged Latin way to pronounce it is like, wrong. It's the academic Latin reconstruction, so effectively modern, not even the ecclesiastical one, and certainly not the original Roman one, so might as well just go whole hog and use a modern English pronunciation.
If we're going to stay faithful to actual latin pronunciation, apparently it would be "weekeh wersah" because latin "v" is pronounced like an english "u" and latin "c" is pronounced like "cat" not "cell."
Of course, as a proper anglophone of the 21st century, I find this abhorrent, and never actually use it. It's "Veni, Vidi, Vici" not "Wenny, Weedy, Weeky" damn it!
That would be the pronunciation in classical Latin, but ecclesiastical Latin would be different. I believe there it would be more like 'vee-chay ver-sa', the way you pronounce ce in Italian.
Or we just stick with the traditional English pronunciation and be done with it. It is kind of strange that the 19th century trend of pronouncing Latin as Italian still has such wide-spread acceptance today.
Why is this strange? Italian is the closest living language to Italian.
Because for hundreds of years, different nations had their own native pronunciations of Latin. This style survives in English in legal Latin (“de jure,” “bona fide,” “prima facie,” etc.), in the pronunciation of Latin loanwords (agenda, species, index, camera, “et cetera,” etc.), and in common names and titles (Caesar, Cicero, Julius, Tacitus, etc.).
Besides, if you want an artificial, unified pronunciation, why pick Italian, rather than just using the reconstructed classical pronunciation?
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I am fairly sure Gaius Julius Caesar (gai-us or ga-i-us, yoo-li-us, kai-sar) never spoke ecclesiastical Latin.
'Vice versa' is not a Caesar quotation.
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