The Aspect of the Eternal

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
-Spinoza, The Ethics

It is in the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain aspect of eternity (sub quadam aeternitatis specie).
Spinoza, The Ethics, 1677 (R.H.M. Elwes translation, 1883)

Does the future somehow already exist?

By way of advice about living in a world in which nothing much is up to us, Spinoza said that we must try to look at life sub specie aeternitatis--from the aspect of the eternal.

This is the way God sees things. God exists outside space and time--indeed time and space exist in Him. He can, so to speak, take the great film of history and hold it up to the light and look at any frames He chooses. He can look at the end of your life and then at the beginning and then at the middle, He can see the end of time and then the beginning and anything in between. All of history, past, present, and future, is known to Him already. You and I, however, are caught within time.We cannot see the next frame from the one we are in at present. Although to God, everything that will happen has already happened, to us, our viewpoint is mired in the " now." We worry and wonder what will happen next, and we think it is all up to us ,. but it isn't, of course. So the proper mental attitude is acceptance of whatever happens and to try to understand life and events sub specie aeternitatis. We can't do much about events, we have no real freedom, except in our minds. In our minds we can try not to be worried and upset about what happens or what is going to happen.

The great psychologist Sigmund Freud said something very similar: although our lives are governed by rigid laws of cause and effect, and are the result of psychological forces set in motion in our childhoods, still we can try to come to understand those forces and perhaps modify their effects on us to a small degree. But we can never really be free of them.

Has everything that will happen already happened sub specie aeternitatis? Does this make sense?

Bibliography

Descartes, Rene', Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, The Rationalists, Anchor Books, Garden City, N,Y., 1974.

Hampshire, Stuart (editor), Spinoza, Penguin Books, Inc, Baltimore, 1962.