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ABSTRACT
In the first half of Part 5 of the Ethics, Spinoza presents his directions for mitigating the passions through reason. He touts his account of the power of reason over the passions as ground-breaking and unique, while positioning himself squarely within the traditional debate of akrasia, or weakness of will. Spinoza claims he is the first to identify the affects through their characteristic effects, and demonstrate the way these effects can be countered by the mind’s activity. It follows that Spinoza’s claim for originality can be explained in (at least) two ways: first, passions themselves have been misunderstood, and second, previous philosophers have misunderstood the relationship between reason and the passions. In the first part of this paper, I place Spinoza’s discussion of the passions and reason’s power over them in a historical context. Next, I present Spinoza’s definition of the affects, and his directions for ‘destroying’ the passions. In the third section I point to the differences between my interpretation and that of recent commentators. Finally, I discuss the way in which Spinoza’s directions for mitigating the passions serve as the psychological basis for his moral theory.
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Notes
1. All references to Spinoza’s texts are from The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I, trans. Edwin Curley,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, Citation1985). The following common abbreviations refer to
Spinoza’s writings: Ethics, a = axiom, d = definition, c = corollary, p = proposition, s = scholium (following a proposition reference, d = demonstration), exp. = explanation, DA = Definitions of the Affects. Thus, ‘E2p40s2’ refers to Part Two of the Ethics, proposition 40, second scholium; ‘E1d4’ refers to Part One, definition 4; ‘E4p18dem’ refers to Part Four, proposition 18, demonstration.
2. We know for certain that Spinoza read Hobbes’ De Cive, which alludes in Chapter 15 § 9 to different types of passions and their effects. Maimonides, too, especially in Mishneh Torah (in Hilchot De’ot) gives an Aristotelian account of natural proclivities, passions and their effects. And Spinoza straightforwardly quotes Cicero in his own definition of ambition (E3DA44exp, G/II/202).
3. In E3d2, Spinoza does not define passion as something that happens to us which is from an external cause alone: ‘I say that we are acted on when something happens in us … of which we are only a partial cause’. That is, there is an asymmetry between action and passion, in that actions can be understood through our nature alone, while passions cannot be understood by external objects’ natures alone. This explains the claim in E2p16c: ‘ … the ideas which we have of external bodies indicate the condition of our own body more than the nature of the external bodies’. An idea of an external object (or the passive affect that follows from this idea) is from a combination of partial causes. An adequate idea, which characterizes an active affect, has a single, innate cause. Platonic and Cartesian dualism is the most important target of his Spinoza’s polemic (for a detailed analysis of Spinoza’s break with the identification of passions with the body and activity with the mind, see James (Citation1997), 151 ff.).
4. See E2p48: ‘In the mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another; and so on to infinity’, and E2p49c: ‘The will and the intellect are one and the same’.
5. This same quote was apparently a common go-to example of akrasia for early modern philosophers (see Lin Citation2006; see also Bramhall Citation1999, 12 (as well as Hobbes’s reply in 34–5) (Ragland Citation2017); Locke also quotes the line, in his chapter ‘On Power’ in Essay Concerning Human Understanding). It is of course quite counter-intuitive to discuss Spinoza in the context of will, since he categorically denies the existence of free will, and equates the will with intellect (E2p49c). Nevertheless, this is the context which best frames his discussion which is, as he claims, quite innovative.
6. In this context, the debate regarding Spinoza’s relation to Stoicism is relevant, but beyond the scope of this paper. It is a general tenet of Stoicism that the highest good is to ‘live according to Nature’, understood in a variety of ways by different Stoics over centuries of thought; and that human virtue consists in rationality. This seems quite congruent with Spinoza’s philosophy (especially since in all various iterations, Stoics consider Nature as deterministic and humans as an inseparable part of it). Nevertheless, Spinoza’s definition of knowledge and rationality as affective make this a thorny issue. For more on this, see James (Citation1995) and Miller (Citation2015, 202–210).
7. Cartesian dualism is, of course, very different from Platonic dualism, especially with respect to their theories regarding body-mind interactions (although it is beyond the scope of this paper to address it properly). I would like to thank an anonymous referee for emphasizing the need to acknowledge these differences, specifically since Descartes himself references the Platonic division of the soul and rejects it (‘ … these is only one soul in us, and it is not in itself divided into different parts … ’ Passions of the Soul, part 1 art.47, Citation2015, p.214).
8. I will return to the issue of intellect and essence below.
9. Martin Lin (Citation2009) has more recently claimed that Spinoza’s directive to destroy passions is based on the cultivation of reason. According to Lin, Spinoza believes that cultivating reason inevitably leads to its power being stronger relative to the passions, and therefore it will naturally come to dominate them. That is, the more intelligent and educated the individual, the better he or she will be in overcoming their passions. Lin argues that this is simply not true: plenty of highly intelligent individuals are greedy, immoral and at the mercy of their passions (Lin Citation2009, 282–3).
10. I will return to this issue in section 5 below.
11. This is evident in the closing section of the Appendix to Part 4, where Spinoza sums up his idea of bondage. I will return to this reference below.
12. Another excellent and illuminating interpretation of this issue can be found in Eugene Marshall’s The Spiritual Automaton. He writes: ‘Instead of being ordered from without by fortuitous experience, they are ordered internally, in accordance with reason. What’s more, we order them, as opposed to their being ordered by an external, and largely random, series of events. Finally, we order them because we have a certain kind of self-knowledge, specifically, we understand that doing so will reduce our bondage and increase our peace of mind and happiness. Thus, we reorder our ideas and this new order has our own rational striving as its cause’ (Marshall Citation2013, 193–4). The rationality and self-knowledge Marshall is referring to here is, again, opposed to the inadequate externally-caused affects. Marshall sees self-knowledge as instrumental in achieving peace of mind. I argue that self-knowledge is itself peace of mind, and it arises from an intrepid and accepting contemplation of our passionate affects, while finding the rational and self-determined aspect of them as they as in themselves.
13. Curley’s translation does add the qualification ‘some’ in his translation of the demonstration and the corollary. For a reinforcement of this qualification, but with relation to the content and meaning, and not to the Latin, see (Marshall Citation2013), 195–6.
14. Michael LeBuffe reads the scholium of this proposition as a prescription to avoiding the strong influence of imaginative present temptations (such as delicious cookies). Although he does not provide a precise interpretation of the directive itself (‘It is not altogether clear how Spinoza thinks that we may attain a clear and distinct understanding of our affects in the way recommended by 54ps’, LeBuffe Citation2014, 218), he does consider it an instance of passion being removed by active reason, whereas reason is conceptually distinct from the existing passion. That is, LeBuffe implicitly subscribes to the mutual exclusivity of reason and passion, against which I am arguing in this paper.
15. The way in which the mind can be trained to recognize the aspect of the affect that pertains to its nature and is distinguishable from the external object relate to understanding things via the second kind of knowledge. Through a sustained and accurate knowledge of the common properties of things, we can recognize them in our reactions to specific objects, and carefully disentangle what we contributed to the affect through our own essential nature (our striving to persevere in being) and what was contributed by the external object, which we cannot adequately understand insofar as it is perceived as a separate and external object.
16. For a detailed account of affects as sources of ‘axiological information’, see Andrew Youpa (Citation2020), esp. 34–6.
17. This is contra to both Sanem Soyarslan in ‘The Susceptibility of Intuitive Knowledge to Akrasia in Spinoza’s Rational Thought’, and Ronald Sandler (Citation2005) in‘Intuitus and Ratio in Spinoza’s Ethical Thought’, which assume an overlapping between objects of intuitive knowledge (which are eternal) and ideas of the individual insofar as they exist in duration (which are necessarily inadequate). My interpretation separates these aspects of ideas completely; therefore, intuitive knowledge is not susceptible to akrasia, but any idea perceived under a species of duration certainly is.
18. The Ethics has several clear and specific references to these connections, e.g. 5p15, 5p31s and 5p42s.
19. Miller (Citation2005, 195), Lin (Citation2009, 283).
20. Soyarslan (Citation2014a, Citation2014b). It is beyond the scope of this discussion to address the difference between my interpretation of understanding things under an aspect of eternity and Soyarslan’s interpretation, although this is pertinent to establishing the difference between our views of subjectivity and self-knowledge. This is in an important issue that may be argued for at length in a separate paper.
21. There is a wealth of illuminating commentaries on this issue, and the well-known 3p53: ‘when the mind considers itself and its power of acting, it rejoices, and does so the more, the more distinctly it imagines itself and its power of acting’ (see Marshall, Spiritual Automaton, 211–214; Michael LeBuffe (CitationForthcoming), ‘Spinoza’s Psychological Theory’; Schmitter, ‘17th and 18th Century Theories’, entry on Spinoza; and Lilli Alanen, ‘Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge: The Case of Pride’, (Citation2012); Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to live and How to Die, 2020, 87–94). I agree with the main point that guides these interpretations: that healthy self-esteem arises from a rational contemplation of one’s owns abilities. I simply stress the point that this self-esteem is rational only to a certain extent – as emphasized by the demonstration to the proposition, this affect is related to the imagination of the mind of itself. It is not a cognition of the mind as a mode of God under an aspect of eternity, but as an individual under the aspect of duration.
22. Sangiacomo’s interpretation put the understanding of the object as the heart of the matter. According to this reading, rational thought is a comprehension of the common properties between the mind undergoing the passion and the external object. Therefore, understanding the object rationally, through its common properties, is the key to destroying the passions. This is clearly a valid point. Understanding rationally mitigates the negative feelings towards the object of passion and also empowers the mind through action, engendering joy. Moreover, as soon as the object is understood for what it is, namely, an object determined to be the way it is due to an infinite series of necessary processes (and not as imaginatively free, E3p49), its rationally understood properties, which are common to it and others, come to dominate its perception in the mind. This helps us detach from the object and empower ourselves through understanding, simultaneously.
23. This interpretation differs from Steven Nadler’s illuminating account of freedom and rationality in his Think Least of Death: Spinoza on how to live and how to die in one main point: for Nadler, being active and free means being determined to act only by reason, even when we continue to feel passive, harmful affects (‘Freedom, in other words, is entirely a matter of whether a person does what he does because of what he knows or because of how he is made to feel by external things and the opinions formed from such fortuitous encounters.’, Nadler Citation2020, 39). Nadler opposes ‘what [one] knows’ from ‘what [one] is made to feel’. But according to my interpretation, and in accordance with Spinoza’s claim that ‘the will and the intellect are one and the same’ (E2p49c), there is no real distinction between what I know and what I feel. Therefore, every time I behave in a certain way, it is a direct expression of my understanding (and the affect that accompanies that understanding).
24. In an interesting and related interpretation, Valterri Viljanen (Citation2019) has argued that activity can be understood through an idiosyncratic understanding of essences, based on the different constitutions of individual minds (for another helpful analysis of essences, see Noa Lahav Ayalon’s ‘Love and Essence in Spinoza’s Ethics’, Citation2021). Although it offers an illuminating explanation of the conundrum regarding Spinoza’s monism and his account of activity and passivity, it does not explain the active aspect of passive affects, as I do. Moreover, Viljanen presents a what may be understood as a ‘hierarchy’ of essence-constitutions, but since it is not evaluated according to rational actions (even though all human essences are rational entities, as correctly stated in p.170), it is unclear how the evaluation is to be done. That is, taking the triangle analogy seriously, why is an isosceles triangle ‘better’, i.e. more self-determined, than any other form of triangle? In terms of human life, Spinoza goes to great lengths (throughout Parts 3, 4 and 5) to explain why and how a rational individual is more essentially loyal to himself (and therefore self-determined and happy) than any other sort of individual. It is unclear why a triangle is more active as an isosceles triangle – triangles, unlike people, do not act. In the sense that Viljanen argues for an understanding of passivity that must relate to the changing constitution, and therefore essence and active aspect of the human mind (168), I agree with him; but it remains unclear from his interpretation how to untangle, as much as possible, the passive and active aspects of a given affect. My interpretation offers a solution to this problem, namely, addressing the aspects of the passive affect that I can positively state as rational or aiding my perseverance in being.
25. For a discussion of this topic, and the type of ethical egoism Spinoza endorses, see LeBuffe Citation2022.
26. On the dependence of the individual mind on others, and the constitutive effect of intersubjectivity, see Lenz (Citation2022), especially 56–72. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the complexities of the metaphysical commitments that serve as the infrastructure of Spinoza’s theory of human connection (or compare it to other models, such as that of Humean sympathy, also discussed at length by Lenz).
27. As Sangiacomo (Citation2019) shows, Spinoza’s ethical end-goal is a cultivation of moral societal norms. Moderation of passions is not only an important aspect of moral interpersonal relations, but also a tenet of societal structure as a whole. Sangiacomo’s interpretation of Spinoza’s account of moderation is explicitly linked to Spinoza’s general interest in political philosophy.
28. As far as this paper is concerned, the remedies for the passions and finding tranquility in this lifetime are largely summarized by this proposition. The intellectual love of God, which promises the highest kind of happiness, does not relate to the human mind’s relations with other finite things, perceived in a certain time and place. It pertains to the mind insofar as it is eternal, and therefore has no bearing on the discussion above. For the purpose of my argument, 5p10 summarizes Spinoza’s directives for overcoming the passions (granted, of course, that under an aspect of eternity there are no passions).
29. This is the sense in which contemplation of our minds in duration is indeed inferior to its contemplation under a species of eternity, but is worthwhile because it is nevertheless the only thing communicable in our current lives and with respect to the people around us (whom we interact with under an aspect of duration, and whose positive bonds enable our ability to achieve scientia intuitiva and the intellectual love of God). Justin Steinberg (in Spinoza’s Political Philosophy) addresses this point precisely. Although I agree with his interpretation of the role of society and the state in promoting cognitive achievement, and the importance of this achievement for well-being, I am not sure that the durational and political existence is the only thing ‘about which it makes sense to care’ (Citation2018, 215). It is perhaps the only thing about which it makes sense to try and communicate with others.