The Intellectual Love of God in Spinoza

ABSTRACT

One of the most famous and identifiable of Spinoza’s ideas is his amor Dei intellectualis (the intellectual love of God). It has been argued that this concept is somewhat alien to the main tenets of the Ethics, especially since it is reminiscent of more orthodox religious relations to God, and has a certain mystical (and so, nonrational) quality.In this paper, I will show that it is a consistent development of Spinoza’s interconnected and elaborate theories of knowledge and the affects. Spinoza discusses three kinds of love: passionate love, friendship and the intellectual love of God.The intellectual love of God is nothing but a necessary outcome of Spinoza’s rationalistic project as a whole. Moreover, by culminating his ethical theory with such a concept, Spinoza is placing himself in a rich tradition of thinkers who develop epistemological and ethical systems that put love (either as eros or philia) as the backbone of their philosophy. In order to illustrate the similarities between Spinoza’s philosophical use of love and that of his predecessors, I will address salient features of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought, emphasizing the relationship between love and ethics, as well as the nature of the philosophical impulse.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinoza
• affectivity
• intellectual love of god
• eros
• philia
• rationlism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ All references to Spinoza’s Ethics are marked by Part number, proposition/definition/axiom number, and scholium/demonstration. Thus, 2p40s2 indicates Part 2, proposition 40, scholium 2; 1a4 indicates Part 1, axiom 4. All translations by Edwin Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Princeton: 1985.

² See Whittaker (1929), Wolfson (1969, ii, 274–298, 305–6) and McKeon (1928). It is important to note that in the century following Spinoza’s death, his ‘“Jewishness” … was practically taken for granted. It was regarded, however, primarily as a matter of Spinoza’s relationship to ancient and medieval mysticism’ (Nadler 2009, 494). Solomon Maimon and Jacque Basnage are thinkers who viewed Spinoza as a Kabbalist of sorts (ibid, 495). This drastically changed in the late 19^th and most of the 20^th century, when Spinoza was read almost exclusively in the context of his most prominent philosophical contemporaries and precursors: Hobbes, Descartes and Leibniz. The mystic tendencies acknowledged by Whittaker, Wolfson and McKeon, for different reasons and in the context of different historical and philosophical studies, were not as easily accepted by other commentators, as I will show below.

³ McKeon (1928) goes so far as to see Spinoza’s mysticism as necessary and self-explanatory when viewed in a historical context: ‘Such a view […] makes the Spinozistic mysticism, instead of an anomalous addition, the natural outgrowth of the rationalistic Ethics: for in high scholasticism mysticism and rationalism may be in the same description of things, save that mysticism prefers to contemplate the return of the soul to God while rationalism makes the same journey more slowly and discursively that it may also satisfy its curiosity concerning the soul and the grounds of its knowledge. So Spinoza is no more a contradictory development out of Jewish scholasticism than Duns Scotus out of Christian, and both crown their high intellectual vision with a mystic completion’ (26–7).

⁴ Bennett (1984), 357. He regards Spinoza’s presentation of the intellectual love of God as ‘lame’, and goes so far as to refuse to discuss it at all: ‘I shall not expound the details, as the burden of error and confusion has become unbearable’ (ibid, 370). As for the mystical elements of the theory of the eternity of the mind, Bennet also regards it as a failure of Spinoza’s intellect and character. Others who have admitted Spinoza’s mysticism and have seen it as a forgivable, albeit a troubling or unclear aspect of his work, include Parkinson (1974) and Hampshire (1951, 175).

⁵ For some such treatments of the eternity of the mind, see Garber (2005), Garrett (2009), Laerke (2016) and Rice (1992). Recent discussions of the intellectual love of God have been presented by Melamed (2019), who remains inconclusive whether Spinoza manages to rationalize or fully explain the coherence of the intellectual love of God with the rest of his project; Carlisle (2021a) and Primus 2022) both offer illuminating interpretations of the nature of the intellectual love of God, the content of the third kind of knowledge and its distinction from the second kind of knowledge and the satisfaction of mind that arises from it.

⁶ Examples of such studies, often also centered on the eternity of the mind, can be found in De Dijn (1996) and Harvey (1981). A recent interpretation by Clare Carlisle argues for Spinoza to be read as an unapologetically religious writer, who uses religious staples because he is advocating (in the Ethics) a de facto religion (see Carlisle 2021a, 2021b).

⁷ It isn’t novel to compare the nature of Spinoza’s system to that of the Plato or Aristotle (see Nadler (2006, ix–x)); for an illuminating study of Spinoza and later Hellenistic thought, see Miller (2015). But emphasizing the role of love or eros in this context has yet to have received a thorough examination (which I argue to be quite necessary).

⁸ The intense correlation between knowledge and affects is the basis for Spinoza’s understanding of human bondage (4p8, 4p14, 4p15, 4p23, 4p26 ff.; as well as 5p7, 5p9, 5p11). For book-long studies that incorporate this correlation to different degrees in their arguments, see for example LeBuffe (2010) and E. Marshall (2013). However, it has also been argued, to different extents, that knowledge is ‘affectively inert’ (C. Marshall 2012, 143) by commentators such as Bennett (1984, 337), Lin (2009), Curley (1988, 129–132), and Della Rocca (2008, 191). This issue is closely related to the cognitivist account of Spinoza’s theory of the affects, which I cannot address in this framework. For its discussion, see Segal (2000), Gilead (1999) and E. Marshall (2008).

⁹ I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the issue of wonder, which is defined by Spinoza as an image which ‘is alone in the mind’ (3p52). I think that the meaning of wonder, in this context, is that the image remains unexplained, lacking any rational connection to other ideas. The disparateness of the idea which causes wonder does not necessarily mean that it has no affective consequences: as the next paragraph of the scholium explains, wonder caused by certain positive traits of the beloved makes the love greater, engendering devotion. The strengthening of love constitutes an affective change.

¹⁰ Colin Marshall gives a clear and illuminating presentation of this issue, and it is related, albeit different, from my own reading of Spinoza’s theory. Marshall acknowledges that philosophizing is the mental activity Spinoza points at when he discusses destroying the passions, and also states that ‘this activity necessarily draws attention away from the particulars of our surroundings’ (153), but doesn’t define it, as I argue here, as a progression through the three kinds of knowledge. Marshall sees philosophizing about the passions as ‘killing the mood’, and likens it to a mental distraction; but I don’t think this gets to the core of Spinoza’s meaning. What Spinoza is aiming it at is direct engagement, which, when done well and correctly, creates the only sort of change we are capable of making: change in our understanding of the object of thought. One of the major disadvantages of Marshall’s reading, and the main way in which it differs from mine, is the lack of relevance or continuity to the second half of Part 5, in which Spinoza uses his discussion of the movement from passivity to activity and the destruction of the passions as the basis for attaining the third kind of knowledge and experiencing the intellectual love of God.

¹¹ An excellent, general discussion of Spinoza’s theory of passion and action and its historical context is found in Susan James’ study (James 1997, especially pp. 151–156 and 200–207). Her discussion of the relationship between love, knowledge and power centers on Descartes and Malebranche (242–252).

¹² Ultimately, there are as many species of love as there are objects by which a mind is affected. Moreover, ‘as each [man] is affected by external causes with this or that species of joy, sadness, love, hate, and so on, that is, as his nature is constituted in one way or another, so his desires vary and the nature of one desire must differ from the nature of the other as much as the affects from which each arises differ from one another’ (3p56d). In her discussion of the intellectual love of God and its relation to other types of love, Carlisle (2021a) refers only to the idea of God as perceived through the first, second and third kinds of knowledge. That is, owing to the religious perspective which she adopts, the idea of an object which is not originally perceived as God is not considered. Although I find Carlisle’s discussion of Spinoza’s religiosity (and idea of God) compelling (especially as presented throughout her book on Spinoza’s religion, 2021b), I do think there is room to explore a different origin for the love which ultimately becomes the intellectual love of God.

¹³ For an excellent treatment of this issue see Nadler (2021). Until recently, the most substantial reference to this issue in Spinoza was to be found in Jeanette Bicknell’s ‘An Overlooked Aspect of Love in Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’‘ (1998). Bicknell defines friendship, or ‘self-determined love’ for others as the most rewarding of human relationships. I disagree with Bicknell in her assessment that friendship is based on adequate knowledge of the self and of the loved one – an adequate knowledge of a particular thing is defined as the third, and not the second kind of knowledge (with relates to common properties). As I show here, I think that the correct way to understand Spinoza’s account of love (in its various forms) is through his theory of knowledge. Nevertheless, I find Bicknell’s article to be illuminating and relevant; more than twenty years later, this subject is still largely ‘overlooked’. For different interpretations of Spinozistic love, see Rorty (2009) and Strawser 2019).

¹⁴ There is an undeniable resemblance between my analysis here and the ascent passage of Plato’s Symposium. I will return to this below.

¹⁵ Nicomachean Ethics 1166a31-2.

¹⁶ Spinoza’s political notion of friendship emerges quite clearly in chapters 17, 19 and 20 of the TTP (as a covenant between fellow citizens of a democracy).

¹⁷ For discussions of the epistemological aspects of the progression from one kind of knowledge to the next see Gilead (1994), Wilson (1996) and Curley, who goes so far as to state that there is some form of direct connection between the first and third kind of knowledge: ‘on Spinoza’s mature view intuition will always be based on experience of a certain sort’ (Curley 1973, 57).

¹⁸ Two interpretations of the nature of the third kind of knowledge, both of whom center on Spinoza’s theory of essences in order to explain the unique content of the highest kind of knowledge, are found in Garrett (2018) and Soyarslan (2016).

¹⁹ ‘Suppose there are three numbers, and the problem is to find a fourth which is to the third as the second is to the first … ’. For interpretations of this issue (namely, the correct way to interpret the mathematical example and the identity of the number 6 in all three kinds of knowledge), see Curley (1973) and Soyarslan (2016). Soyarslan, in her discussion of the difference between the two highest kinds of knowledge, gives this issue special consideration – her argument for a ‘content’ and not a ‘method’ interpretation relies on this distinction. I think that the two ways to consider an idea, namely, ontologically and epistemologically, can’t be divorced from each other, but understood as complementing one another. That is, each idea exists as an idea with certain epistemological characteristic insofar as it is perceived by different minds, and insofar as it exists as a part of God’s infinite intellect; different aspects of the same ontological entity present themselves as different ideas, corresponding to different ‘methods’ of understanding. Therefore, there is a sense in which the content of all three methods is identical.

²⁰ The issue of essences is perhaps the one most relevant to the subject at hand which cannot be addressed in this paper due to its intense complexity. Not only does love fit perfectly in the ongoing debate on essences (see especially Spinoza’s own connection in 3p57s), but I think it actually points to a solution regarding the scholarship on shared and unique essences (see Lahav Aylaon (2021)). On the connection between kinds of knowledge and essences, see Garrett (2018) and Soyarslan (2016). For a more general discussion see Hübner (2015), Garrett (2009), Viljanen (2008), Lærke (2017), and Martin (2008).

²¹ See 5p30: ‘Insofar as our mind knows itself and the body under a species of eternity, it necessarily has knowledge of God, and knows that it is in God and conceived through God’. See also 5p33s, which expounds on the nature of the intellectual love of God: ‘Although this love toward God has had no beginning (by p33), it still has all the perfections of love, just as if it had come to be (as we have feigned in p32c). there is no difference here, except that the mind has had eternally the same perfections which, in our fiction now come to it … ’. Another proposition which emphasizes the unity of the mind with the object of love, God, is 5p36: ‘The mind’s intellectual love of God is the very love of God by which God loves himself, not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar as he can be explained by the human mind’s essence, considered under a species of eternity’.

²² My interpretation differs significantly from Sanem Soyarslan’s (2021), who argues that the main difference between Aristotle and Spinoza lies in their conception of the highest kind of knowledge being either ‘useless’ or ‘especially useful’, respectively (517). It is important to keep in mind that Spinoza and Aristotle both see human contemplation, insofar as it is the soul’s essential action, as a good in itself which is inherently useful, and needs no further utilitarian justification. For Aristotle in fact, the very definition of happiness presented in Book 1 of NE is based on happiness being wanted for its own sake. In a similar vein, Spinoza states that the satisfaction that arises from the intellectual love of God is a necessary effect of the nature of the mind itself (5p33s, 5p38dem) and that the drive for its attainment is nothing but virtue (5p42). Therefore, virtue and power are attained in the pursuit of knowledge definitively, by the nature of the mind itself. There is no doubt that in terms of will and teleology Spinoza and Aristotle have much they disagree on; but if there is one thing I think they can agree on, it is that intellectual activity is good first and foremost for its own sake – defined thus by the nature of the mind. For a recent and illuminating discussion of Plato’s eros and its imprint on the Aristotelian treatment of friendship, see Burger (2019).

²³ Numerous studies take Plato’s theory of love as a central concern; for examples of excellent book-length studies, see Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium: the Ethics of Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Thomas Gould, Platonic Love (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

²⁴ All translations by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, from Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1997).

²⁵ In a letter to Willem van Blienburgh (Letter 19), Spinoza writes: ‘To me, of the things outside my power, I esteem none more than being allowed the honor of entering into a pact of friendship with people who sincerely love the truth; for I believe that of things outside our power we can love none tranquilly, except such people. Because the love they bear to one another is based on the love each has for knowledge of the truth, it is as impossible to destroy it as not to embrace the truth once it has been perceived. Moreover, it is the greatest and most pleasant that can be given to things outside our power, since nothing but truth can completely unite different opinions and minds’. (IV/86/28-IV/87/27)

²⁶ NE 1170b18-19. (Aristotle 2011, 205)

²⁷ see Book 9 of the NE esp. 1166a-1167b and 1170a-b

²⁸ see (Rorty 1978, 354).

²⁹ See NE 1156b25-35; on the difference Aristotle identifies between friendship and comradeship or compatriotism see 1161b11-18.

³⁰ This view is adopted (often implicitly) by contemporary philosophers who write about friendship. For an overview of this topic, see Helm (2017).

³¹ For an excellent account of Maimonides’ account of friendship (which Spinoza was surely familiar with), its indebtedness to Aristotle, and its divergence from the Aristotelian tradition, see Seeman (2015).

³² See Nadler (2021).

³³ For a fascinating account of Spinoza’s debts and innovations with respect to Aristotle, see Heidi Ravven’s ‘Notes on Spinoza’s Critique of Aristotle’s Ethics: From Teleology to Process Theory’ (1989), as well as her ‘Ratio and Activity: Spinoza’s Biologizing of the Mind in an Aristotelian Key’ (2015). For a book-length study, see Fréderic Manzini, Spinoza: une lecture d’Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (2009).

³⁴ NE 1177b25-30; see 5p10s for Spinoza’s claims regarding our abilities to sustain true knowledge and love of God. For a more general review of Spinoza’s version of eudaimonia, see Miller (2015, 189–202)