Governing between reason and affects: Spinoza and the politics of prophets

ABSTRACT

Through a close analysis of Spinoza's views on prophecy and the Hebrew Republic, this article contributes insights into how certain modes of governing succeed in aligning and entangling affects with reason. I argue, first, that the prophet must be seen as a political figure immersed in the imaginative-affective domain. Through the imagination, signs, and a moral compass, the prophet utilizes affects such as humility, repentance, and devotion to exhort people to live in accordance with the guidance of reason. In this way, prophetic authority underlies a mode of governing that utilizes imaginative and affective means to reach rationally expedient ends. However, since affects are inherently inconsistent and fluctuating, something needs to be invoked to make commendable affects durable, intense, and lasting. I therefore turn to Spinoza's analysis of Moses’ government of the Hebrews to argue that by commending collective, repetitive, and bodily performances of ceremonies, rituals, and liturgy, he was able to habituate individuals to certain moods, values, and virtues that conform with the prescripts of reason on an affective basis. It is my hope that the article will enhance our ability to see that, although affects are governable, not all affects can be entangled with reason and that the difference between true and false prophets is small.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinoza
• affect
• reason
• prophets
• governing
• ceremony
• ritual

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All references to Spinoza refer to Edwin Curley's The Collected Works of Spinoza in two volumes (1985; 2016). The Theological-Political Treatise is abbreviated TTP, and adnotations, Adn.; the Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus) is abbreviated TP; Letters (Epistolae) are abbreviated Ep; and references to the Ethics take the conventional form, e.g., EIVp54s, which indicates Part IV, proposition 54, scholium. Other abbreviations include: ax for axiom; def for definition; d for demonstration; c for corollary; pre for preface; app for appendix; DefAff for definition of affects. Refences are followed by the Gebhardt pagination, e.g., GII/214, which refers to Volume II, page 214 in the Gebhardt edition.

2 That sad passions can serve as positive foundations for the state has persuasively been argued before; see especially Matheron (2020, 124–36) for his analysis of ‘indignation’ and Jaquet (2018) for her analysis of 'longing for vengeance' as such passionate foundations of the state.

3 On the face of it, the notion Spinoza conveys here, namely that ‘those who are subject to these affects can be guided far more easily than others, so that in the end they may live from the guidance of reason’, seems to contradict Spinoza's mature view in the Political Treatise where he writes: ‘So those people who persuade themselves that a multitude, which may be divided over public affairs, can be induced to live only according to the prescription of reason, those people are dreaming of the golden age of the Poets. They’re captive to a myth’ (TP, Ch. 1, §5 | GIII/275); or as he writes in the TTP: ‘But only very few (compared to the whole human race) acquire a habit of virtue from the guidance of reason alone’ (TTP, Ch. 15 | GIII/288). The claim expressed in the Ethics is not, however, that the multitude should be induced to live ‘only according to the prescription of reason [ex solo rationis praescripto vivant]’ or ‘acquire a habit of virtue from the guidance of reason alone [virtutis habitum ex solo rationis ductu acquirunt]’, but rather the more modest view that through the socializing function of affects they may become capable of living more reasonably.

4 It is important to clarify what ‘prescripts of reason’ means in this context. As is well known, Spinoza presents his strictly epistemological views on reason in EIIp40s2, which consist in attaining adequate ideas about singular things in a rational and orderly manner through the second and eventually third kind of knowledge. However, the understanding of reason I expound in the following could be called reason in the practical sense. In Ethics part IV, Spinoza is interested in examining ‘what reason prescribes to us, which affect agree with the rules of human reason, and which, on the other hand, are contrary to those rules.’ Reason, he says here, makes no demands contrary to nature, since it consists in following the laws of our own nature. Hence, reason demands that people strive to persevere in their being; that they desire what is useful to them; and that they seek their true advantage or utility (EIVp18s | GII/222; cp. TTP, Ch. 15 | GIII/191). Now, individuals normally seeking their own advantage under the sway of the passions, which sets them at odds with one another and jeopardizes sociality. According to the Spinozan programme, the immense task and toil (hoc opus, hic labor est) is to incite people to seek their own advantage in ways that is mutually beneficial to all, i.e., to turn individual self-preservation into collective self-preservation, ‘so that everyone, whatever his mentality, prefers the public right to private advantage’ (TTP, Ch. 17 | GIII/203). In a recent book, Dimitris Vardoulakis astutely shows how this understanding of practical reason or phronesis in terms of calculating one's utility comes from Spinoza's Epicurean affinities (2020, 29–37). For the purpose of this article, it is worth noting that Spinoza turns to Moses and thus singles out the prophet as a figure who is able to direct the affects in accordance with the dictates of reason, for he goes on to ‘note and weigh those things divine revelation once taught Moses for this purpose’ (TTP, Ch. 17 | GIII/205; cf. M. Rosenthal 1997, 219; DeBrabander 2007, 22).

5 While Maimonides (1963, 2:360–78), like Spinoza, argues that prophecy is conditioned on a perfect imagination and a perfect moral habitus, he also claims that prophets need to be in possession of a perfect rational faculty to receive the divine overflow through the active intellect. It follows that the prophets, in Maimonides view, can ‘indubitably grasp speculative matters.’ For Spinoza's relation to Maimonides’ prophetology, cf. Strauss (1997, 183–92), Ravven (2001), and Nadler (2015).

6 Spinoza notes, however, that many court-prophets were more conflictual in their dealings with kings. Micaiah, for instance, ‘never prophesied anything good to Ahab.’ (TTP, Ch. 2 | GIII/33) The wicked King Ahab, it must be recalled, had five encounters with prophets (twice with Elijah, twice with two unnamed prophets, and once with Micaiah cf. 1. Kings 17–18; 20–22). They all condemned Ahab, predicted droughts, and confronted him with his unjust actions. Similarly, the court-prophet Nathan spoke truth to power when, in 2. Sam. 12., he rebukes King David for killing Uriah the Hittite ‘with the sword of the Ammonite’ in order to take his wife Bathsheba. Keith Green (2019) has argued that Spinoza generally locates prophetic authority in the ‘immanence’ of a tradition of law. Accordingly, Moses is the inaugurator of this tradition of law and successive prophets exhort trespassers back to the Mosaic law. However, Green also shows that in cases of outright tyranny, Spinoza's conception of prophets can accommodate an ‘outsider prophet’ who wages fiercer social critique at injustice and amorality with the aim of rebellion. For a modern view of prophecy as a mode of social critique in political theory, cf. Walzer (1993).

7 Spinoza, shying away from his principle of explaining prophecy and miracles from scripture alone, conjectures that because there was much ice in the air (cf. Josh. 10:11) a greater refraction of the light made it seem like the sun stood still. Likewise, in the case of Isaiah, ‘the sign could really happen and be predicted to the King by Isaiah, even though the prophet did not know it's true cause’ (TTP, Ch. 2 | GIII/36).

8 Prophetic authority would thus be authority in the strong sense of the term according to Alexandre Kojève, who defines authority as ‘the possibility that an agent has of acting on others (or on another) without these others reacting against him, despite being capable to do so’, since ‘any discussion is already a compromise’ (2014, 8–9). See also Vardoulakis (2020, 77–108), who has devoted an important chapter to the concept of authority in the TTP with regard to Moses. Vardoulakis argues that Spinoza neither understands prophetic authority as primarily political nor theological. Rather, because immersed in the imagination, prophetic authority originates from error: First, because the common people disdained the natural knowledge common to all and instead desired rare things, they misapprehended the exceptional potentia of the prophets. Secondly, the prophets themselves misunderstood God by anthropomorphizing Him and assuming that His authority reinforced theirs because they were His mouthpiece. It follows that authority according to Spinoza is not sui generis but rather artificially self-constructed in the interplay between the people and the prophets.

9 Antonio Negri, alone among commentators, is an exception to this rule. He claims that the analysis of the Hebrew Republic ‘remains an unsuccessful attempt, a tangential trajectory’, that the ‘arguments are not very Spinozian’ and that ‘Spinoza's investigation wanders aimlessly’ (1991, 116). Steven B. Smith opines that Spinoza viewed the Hebrew Republic under Moses as ‘a paradigm for the kind of state he wants to recommend’ and that he enlists scripture ‘in the service of a democratic republic’ because the Mosaic law's focus on actions grants freedom of conscience and belief (1997, 146–47). According to Firmin DeBrabander, Spinoza drew important political conclusions from the history of the Hebrews, above all the lesson that religion is key to fashioning citizens: ‘Though religion is a necessary ingredient of flourishing public life,’ he notes, ‘serious measures must be taken to mitigate its damaging tendencies, while drawing from its sociable elements. Spinoza provides an outline for this, selectively adopting elements of the Biblical Hebrew state, or learning from its errors in some cases … ’ (2007, 20). Along the same lines, Michael Rosenthal argues that Spinoza used the Hebrews as an ‘exemplar’, in the technical sense, to ‘tell us something about the constitution of society and the nature of political language itself’, namely that prophetic language makes ‘appeal to an imaginative narrative example that claims universal authority in order to justify a particular set of institutions’ (1997, 210). Sharing this constructive view of the Hebrew exemplar, Vardoulakis argues that Spinoza uses the Hebrew Republic to show a state of authority that caters for the utility of the people, thus exemplifying a more or less successful solution to the ‘dialectic between authority and utility’. From this perspective, Vardoulakis claims that Spinoza casts ‘theocracy and the Hebrew state as paradigmatic of how the path of the emotions can achieve the good and virtue’ (2020, 263–95). In what follows, I attempt to complement the latter three readings with more affective insight.

10 The radicality of Spinoza's views on the Hebrew Republic derive partly from the conclusions he draws from his political realism and philosophy of immanence (cf. TTP, Ch. 3 | GIII/46) and partly from his ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, which compels him to use extra-biblical sources in analysing Hebrew history, in particular the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (Abolafia 2019, 38). Josephus’ role in early modern political theory is becoming increasingly clear. Eric Nelson (2010) has shown that a number of Christian Hebraists, such as Hugo Grotius and Petrus Cunaeus, saw Josephus as a fitting source for the development of a new political theory that cast sacred history and a divinely inspired polity in the idiom of ancient constitutional and political theory. Nelson argues that this ‘political Hebraism’ generally defended republican exclusivism, redistribution of wealth and land, and principles of religious toleration. Jacob Abolafia (2014; 2019) has persuasively added that in parallel to the political Hebraist evocation of Josephus, prominent Amsterdam-Jewish thinkers such as Joseph Semah Arias, Orobio de Castro, and Spinoza's former teachers Menasseh ben Israel and Isaac Aboab da Fonseca for a number of cultural reasons strongly identified with Josephus. They used Josephus both for apologetic purposes and ‘to legitimate the idea of communal (ritual) life as equal in importance to sovereign politics’, i.e., that Jewish political life could be fully realized in the diaspora; an ideal Spinoza clearly opposes in chapter 3 (2019, 36–37). It is beyond doubt that Spinoza had the ‘Josephism’ of these groups in mind while crafting chapters 17 and 18. Although Josephus is only cited once in these chapters, Spinoza makes abundant use of Josephus’ account and terminology in reconstructing the political features of the Hebrew Republic. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that when explaining the fall of the Hebrew Republic, Spinoza does not use the exposition from Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum but instead cites Tacitus’ affective account in his Historiae that considers the ‘mentality of the people’ and ‘their superstition’ (TTP, Ch. 17 | GIII/215; Abolafia 2019, 38).

11 A more thorough analysis along these lines, which is outside the scope of this article, must be complimented by Balibar's suggestion that ‘in the case of collective (social or political) individuality, what determines the identity of the composite is first of all the degree and mode of composition of minds, whereas in the case of singular individuality, it is first of all the mode of composition of the body.’ (2020, 161). Balibar's article Potentia multitudinis, qua una veluti mente ducitur from the same collection is a promising point of departure for such an investigation.

12 Although the analysis of the Hebrew Republic in the TTP is the paradigmatic example of a governance of affect, I surmise that Spinoza was deeply concerned with the government of affects in laying down the best foundations for monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies in the TP. At the end of the discourse on aristocracy, for instance, he writes: ‘I conclude, then, that those common vices of peace which we’re speaking about here should never be prohibited directly, but only indirectly, by laying down foundations of the state which will result, not in most people being eager to live wisely–that's impossible–but in their being guided by affects more advantageous to the Republic’ (TP Ch. 10, §6 | GIII/355–6). Of all Spinoza's main works, the TP has received least scholarly attention and an affective reading of it is especially needed (Melamed and Sharp 2018, 1–4).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Harmat

Jonathan Harmat is PhD-fellow at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen. His research interests are at the intersection between affect theory and political theory with focus on the history of philosophy, especially Spinoza and his reception.