Spinoza on art and the cultivation of a disposition toward joyful living

ABSTRACT

This paper forms part of a larger project which seeks to derive a theory of art from a close reading of Spinoza's work. It focuses on the importance of the aligned terms of ingenium and dispositio, which are both used to discuss the central importance of “dispostion” to our capacity to live well. While it is not possible to avoid affects, it is possible to order them in such a way that their negative impacts are lessened and their positive impacts are enhanced. We begin by underlining the importance of disposition to opening the way to understanding. We connect this to Spinoza's acknowledgement of the importance of art in helping to provide a plan for living. We turn to readings of ingenium in the work of Moreau and Balibar to further explore how the concept of disposition helps us to recognise the capacities of works of art to affect their audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinoza
• disposition
• ingenium
• art
• plan for living

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the Australian Research Council. This paper forms part of an ARC funded project “Spinoza and Literature for Life: a Practical Theory of Art”, DP170102206. Thanks also to Inja Strakenski and Jason Tuckwell, who have worked tirelessly on the project, and to the Spinoza reading group that also includes Danielle Celermajer, Timothy Laurie, and to Robert Boncardo.

Notes on contributors

Anthony Uhlmann is Professor of Literature in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. He is the author of four monographs concerned with literary history and the interaction between literature and philosophy: Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge UP, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge UP, 2006), Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov (Continuum, 2011), and J. M. Coetzee, Truth, Meaning, Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is the author of a novel, Saint Antony in His Desert (UWAP, 2018).

Moira Gatens is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin in 2007–2008. In 2010 she held the Spinoza Chair at the University of Amsterdam. In 2011 she was President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. She has research interests in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, early modern philosophy, and philosophy and literature. She is presently co-investigator on an ARC grant on Spinoza and Art with Anthony Uhlmann.

ORCID

Anthony Uhlmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0140-5064

Notes

1 There is much recent interest in the topic of Spinoza and art. See, for example, Gatens, Spinoza's Hard Path, “Spinoza on Goodness”; Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature, “The Eyes of the Mind”; various chapters in Lord, Spinoza Beyond Philosophy; Thomas, “Complex Bodies”; various chapters in Bal and Vardoulakis, “An Inter-Action: Rembrandt and Spinoza”; and a special issue of Textual Practice, 2019, 33, 5, “Spinoza's Artes”, edited by Gatens and Uhlmann.

2 Quotations from Spinoza are from The Collected Works of Spinoza, translated and edited by Edwin Curley (1985 and 2016). References follow the standard abbreviations for Spinoza's Ethics: E for the Ethics, Arabic numerals for the five parts, P for Proposition, S for Scholium, C for Corollary, Appen for Appendix, and DefAff for Definition of the Affects that appear at the end of E3.

3 Recall here Spinoza's definitions of joy and sadness: “Joy is a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection”; “Sadness is a man's passage from a greater to a lesser perfection” (E3DefAff, II and III). He also notes that to pass to greater perfection is to become more “real”, to realise one's essence, to experience the increase in one's capacity to act rather than be acted upon. Whereas sadness diminishes or restrains us, joy enables the actual expansion or amplification of our existence (E3GenDefAff).

4 Our approach is in strong agreement with the position adopted by Ursula Renz, who argues against the readers of Spinoza who see his metaphysics as involving a “neccesitarianism” that “precludes the idea of individual subjects who are endowed with non-actualised mental capacities” (Renz, “Explicable Explainers”, 79). Balibar, Transindividuality, and Moreau, L’éxperience et l’éternité, make similar points. In contrast to this position, she argues that particular things do have dispositional properties. We argue that the use of terms specifically related to disposition, which we discuss throughout this paper, underlines and affirms the accuracy of this view.

5 Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise (henceforth TTP), ch. 17, in Works Vol. 2.

6 Edwin Curley, in questioning Jonathan Bennett's reading of desire as inconsistent throughout the Ethics, suggests that the concept, and how it is connected with conatus and appetite, is puzzling (Curley, “Bennett's Spinoza”, 49); also see Bennett, “Reply to Curley”. Both these readings address how desire might or might not be linked to teleology in determining our actions. Gatens and Lloyd underline the manner in which desire, or “the determination of a man's essence from an affection of it to do something (Spinoza E3Def. Aff. 1), in being connected to conatus, forms a kind of basis for understanding and action” (Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings, 27). While not addressing teleological readings of desire here, the reading that follows aims to shed light on the importance of the particular dispositions of individuals to their actions.

7 Spinoza, Ethics, E3P9S.

8 Spinoza, Ethics 2P38–39. Gilles Deleuze develops a detailed reading of common notions in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, which seeks to establish them as a bridge between active affects and adequate ideas, something in turn that opens the way to Deleuze's understanding of Spinoza's importance to aesthetic ideas (Deleuze, Expressionism, 273–88). Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon, Etienne Balibar develops a concept of “transindividualism” through his reading of Spinoza's common notions that opens the way to using this idea to think the nature of human collectives (Balibar, Transindividuality). This idea is developed further by Patrick McGee, Political Monsters.

9 Spinoza, Ethics, E4P37S2.

10 Ibid., see E5P10; E5P20.

11 Ibid., E4P35.

12 Ibid., E4P36S.

13 Ibid., E1Appen.

14 Ibid., E1Appen.

15 Ibid., E1Appen.

16 Ibid., E1Appen.

17 Ibid., E4P37S1.

18 Ibid., E4P45.

19 Ibid., E4P45S.

20 Ibid., E4P45S.

21 Ibid., E5P17S.

22 Ibid., E3P31S.

23 Ibid., E5PS.

24 Susan James considers the relation between the unvirtuous and the virtuous individual in these sections of Spinoza's Ethics with reference to the traditions of Stoic philosophy (with which Spinoza was familiar), whereby the moral disposition of an individual is the cause of actions. For Spinoza, she argues, “people act when they follow their own nature and are acted on when they do not” (James, “Spinoza the Stoic”, 144). We seek to add to this by arguing that dispositions can undergo transformation insofar as one is able to achieve a more adequate understanding of things.

25 Spinoza, Ethics, 4P45S.

26 As we noted earlier, in EP1Appen, Spinoza associates the fool and the slave with the doctrine of final ends, namely the illusion that “all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end”. Spinoza says that this doctrine “turns Nature completely upside down” and he names it “the sanctuary of ignorance”. The wise understand that “Nature has no end set before it, and that all final causes are nothing but human fictions”.

27 Shelley, “Defence of Poetry”, 418.

28 Spinoza, E4P45S.

29 This point was eloquently made by Aurelia Armstrong in her presentation “Aesthetic Affects in Spinoza's Ethics” at the Spinoza Workshop, held at the University of Sydney, 10 May 2019.

30 Shklovsky, Shklovsky: A Reader, 63–73; North, Novelty, 169–72.

31 Kafka, Letters, 16.

32 Eliot, Selected Essays, 110.

33 Spinoza, Ethics, E4P4.

34 Thomas, “Theory of Art”, 372.

35 Ibid., 372.

36 Balibar, Transindividuality, 6–7.

37 Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 29.

38 Ibid.

39 We are extremely grateful to Robert Boncardo, who is currently working on a translation of this important work by Moreau. Boncardo kindly shared drafts of his translation with us, which is being published as Moreau, Experience and Eternity, in 2020. Chapter 3 of this work focuses in some detail on how the concept of ingenium relates to experience in Spinoza's system. Since the English version is not yet published as we write, all references to Moreau in this paper are to the French edition, although all translations are by Boncardo.

40 Moreau, L’experience et l’éternite, 357.

41 Montag, Bodies, 49.

42 Moreau, L’experience et l’éternite, 396.

43 Ibid., 397.

44 Ibid..

45 Ibid., 398.

46 Ibid..

47 Spinoza, Ethics, c.f., E4Preface.

48 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 115.

49 Spinoza, E1Appen.

50 Ibid., E2P17Schol.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., E1D7.