|
May 5, 2006
I've done little more than quickly read Spinoza's texts as part of my education in the philosophy of modernity. As I really disliked the deductive style of Spinoza's texts, his idea of Substance and his conception of reason based on mathematics, so I have little idea of what Spinoza stood for. I have a vague sense that he rejected traditional political philosophy, wrote a defence of democracy, grounded it on a Stoic conception of an eternal order that underlies and regulates the human order, and assumed that passion is grounded on passion not reason.
I've seen people turn to Spinoza in the last 20-30, and I've often wondered why? I've more or less read it in terms of wanting to bansh teleology from philosophy. What does he have to offer? What is his political philosophy about? Does it have any relevance for today? If so what is that?
One account is offered by Hasana Sharp in an article entitled 'Why Spinoza Today? Or, "A Strategy of Anti-Fear"', which was published in Rethinking Marxism (Vol.17, No. 4, Oct 2005). Sharp says:
...according to these historical arguments, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel are the conscious of our thought that needs to be examined in order to know ourselves, to learn what we have become, and to gain some critical power through reflecting upon what Marx famously refers to as the nightmarish weight of the dead.
Spinoza, on the other hand, is that which was repressed in order for such weight to assert itself. In order to know not only our conscious life but that which operates offstage---what conditions our conscious life like some kind of shadow that reveals thelight---we may turn to Spinoza. In order to ascertain, then, not only the manifest content of our self-consciousness but what is being concealed by such content, we can study Spinoza. Spinoza is often named as the thinker whose "heresy" was so great that he has been relegated to the dark underbelly of our history, while remaining available to those aiming to animate such heresy in our own time. What has come to be known as the Enlightenment, at least one recent book suggests, was built upon the suppression of a far more materialist and emancipatory discourse of "radical Enlightenment," of which Spinoza is the paradigmatic figure (Israel 2001).
That's a bit of a suprise, I have to admit. Modernity and the Enlightenment did not emerge uncontested. Modern liberal Enlightenment principles triumphed not only over the anti-democratic discourses of absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings, but also over a more radically democratic, republican, and materialist tradition. The retrieval of Spinoza, according to his advocates, is the discovery of an alternative that "might have been."
'Tis an interesting reading don't you think? Makes you want to re-read Spinoza to discern the 'might have been'.
This is a Spinoza who is interpreted as is a "savage anomaly" ; one radically discontinuous with his own time, and, because he provoked such horror in then, a voice of protest in our own. Spinoza allows us not only to identify faults with the dominant tradition, but to consider living alternatives that may have always been present, but that remained obscure for various reasons.
I'm happy to accept such an interpretation, even though I'd thought that Spinoza had an aristocratic understanding of democracy based on the classic distinction between the minority of philosophers and the overwhelming majority of the unphilosophical multitude. It is like starting over again isn't it.
next
|
Goethe, Lessing and other German Idealists were greatly influenced by Spinoza. This is from bartelby.com
Metaphysics
Spinzoa's philosophy is deductive, rational, and monist. He shares with Descartes an intensely mathematical appreciation of the universe: Things make sense when understood in relation to a total structure; truth, like geometry, follows from first principles with a logic accessible and evident to man's mind.
Whereas for Descartes mind and body are different substances, Spinoza holds that the two are different aspects of a single substance, which he called alternately God and Nature. Just as the mind is not substantially alien to the body, so Nature is not the product or agency of a supernatural God. The universe is a single substance, capable of an infinity of attributes, but known through two of them: physical "extension" and "thought." God is not the creator of a Nature beyond himself; God is Nature in its fullness.
Spinoza's rationalism, unlike that of later idealists, does not proceed at the expense of empirical observation. "Adequate ideas" are a coherent logical association of physical experiences. When ideas are confused or contradictory it is not because they are false (in the sense of contrary to fact) but because they are incomplete or improperly related to the totality of experience.
Ethics
Spinoza's ethics proceed from a premise similar to that of Hobbes--that men call "good" whatever gives them pleasure--but they reach very different conclusions. Human beings, indeed all of Nature, share a common drive for self-preservation, the conatus sese conservandi. By this drive all individuals seek to maintain the power of their being, and in this sense virtue and power are one. But in Spinoza's system power is discovered to be a knowledge of necessity. Powerful, or virtuous, persons act because they understand why they must; others act because they cannot help themselves.
To be free is to be guided by the law of one's own nature (which in Spinoza's rational universe is never at variance with the law of another nature); bondage consists in being moved by causes of which we are unaware because our ideas are confused.
Another important feature of Spinoza's ethical system is his view of the intellect as active. He rejects the distinction between reason and will that assumes that ideas can be passively entertained. All thinking is action, and all action has its accompaniment in thought. What accounts for action is not an agency (the will) beyond the intellect, but ideas. Ideas are active and move us to act; an absence of action may be accounted an absence of insight: knowledge, virtue, and power are one.
Political Philosophy
Politically, Spinoza and Hobbes again share assumptions about the social contract: Right derives from power, and the contract binds only as long as it is to one's advantage. The important difference between the two men is their understanding of the ends of the system: for Hobbes advantage lies in satisfying as many desires as possible, for Spinoza advantage lies in an escape from those desires through understanding.
Put another way, Hobbes does not imagine a community of individuals whose desires can be consistently satisfied, so repression is always necessary; Spinoza can imagine such a community and such consistent satisfaction, so in his political and religious thought the notion of freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, is basic.