Rational Psychology, Sentimentalism, Heliocentrism

The standard contemporary focus on Spinoza's Epistemology distracts from what is the perhaps most distinctive element of his Rationalism--the concepts of Pleasure and Pain as indications of an increase or decrease in strength.  This thesis is opposed to a fundamental principle of Empiricism, or, more precisely, of Sentimentalism--the irreducibility of Sense-Data.  In other words, perhaps his Rationalism is most important as not Epistemology or Metaphysics, but as the topic that constitutes much of the Ethics--Psychology.  Furthermore, it is in these passages that his thesis that a Mode instantiates Substance can be perhaps most clearly discerned--the concept of Modal behavior as an instantiating laws of Physics.  Now, Sentimentalism, according to which the fundamental aims of behavior are the seeking of Pleasure and the avoidance of Pain, is thus a variety of Egocentric Psychology.  But Egocentricism underlies Anthropocentrism, which underlies Geocentrism.  Thus, the challenge to Sentimentalism that Spinoza presents in the Ethics is part of his drawing out the Moral implications of the supplanting of Geocentrism by Heliocentrism, i. e. in which Human behavior can no longer be conceived as at the center of the cosmos, e. g. that the World is the arena of the Fall and Redemption of the Human Soul.  Kant's attempt to rescue that centrality in the Critique of Judgment at least recognizes this implication of Spinoza's doctrine, even if his merely a posteriori rejoinder does not suffice.