Spinoza’s Democratic Imagination

Abstract

Spinoza is the great philosopher of the imagination and the first great philosopher of democracy. Rather than seeing democracy as a form of government that has overcome the need for imagination and symbols, he shows in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that an enlightened state depends on three myths: the myth of the sovereignty of the people so as to reconcile democracy as rule by the people with each individual living as he or she wants to live; the myth that we are a people, emotionally and morally tied to some people more than to others; and, finally, the myth that the people comprises individuals who are responsible for their own destinies. The democratic imagination differs from earlier forms of politics in that the people construct the social imaginary for themselves and are guided by it without deception. It is the social imaginary thus created, or these three myths, that make room for freedom of thought and therefore for democracy.

Notes

1. Antonio Negri isn’t far off when he claims that imagination is the “primary, exclusive problem” of Spinoza’s thought; Moira Gaetens and Lloyd make things more specific by adding an adjective and calling attention to Spinoza’s Collective Imaginings. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 129. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999). Warren Montag, “Who’s Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104 (2005): 655–73. Etienne Balibar, “Jus-pactum-lex: On the Constitution of the Subject in the Theologico-political Treatise,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 171–206; reprinted in Spinoza: Critical Assessments, ed. Genevieve Lloyd (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. 4, 31–63. Cornelius de Deugd, The Significance of Spinoza’s First Kind of Knowledge (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1964), 8. ”Very few things in the history of philosophy... have been so thoroughly underrated as the significance of Spinoza’s conception of imagination in the totality of his system.” See too Louis Althusser, who takes Spinoza to be the first important theorist of ideology. Louis Althusser, “Spinoza,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8. Robert Misrahi, “Spinoza and Christian Thought: A Challenge,” in Speculum Spinozanum, ed. Siegfried Hessing (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 395; original emphasis.

2. Quotations are from Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (TTP), trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), with chapter numbers followed by page numbers; For the Latin text, see Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus/ Traité Théologico-Politique, in Oeuvres, vol. 3 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). For the Ethics I mostly rely on A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. and ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), although Samuel Shirley’s and older translations, and the Latin, occasionally creep in. Baruch Spinoza, The Essential Spinoza: Ethics and Related Writings, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006). I use the standard method of referring to the Ethics (e.g., 2p18 = Part 2, proposition 18; 2p18s stands for the scholium to 2p18; and 2p18d stands for the demonstration of the same theorem).

3. I approach the problem through the relation of reason and imagination because the more elaborate division of three kinds of knowledge plays no role in the TTP and none in the Ethics until Part 5.

4. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 123.

5. Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Incomplete Rationality in Spinoza’s Ethics: Three Basic Forms,” in Spinoza on Reason and the ‘Free Man,’ ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel and Gideon Segal (New York: Little Room Press, 2004), 7. The crucial distinction for understanding the TTP is between imagination and understanding, and so between what the Ethics calls adequate and inadequate ideas. The further refinement of the three kinds of knowledge plays no role, as it plays no role in the Ethics until Part 5.

6. “By the end of the seventeenth century… we see for the first time the appearance of what we might call republican exclusivism, the claim that republics are the only legitimate regimes.” Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 23.

7. Steven Fraenkel calls the myths superstitions, which I think is misleading. Steven Fraenkel, “Determined to Be Free: The Meaning of Freedom in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” Review of Politics 73 (2011): 75. “Spinoza opts for democracy because its superstitions, especially the belief in freedom and equality, accord more closely with our natural superstitions and thus are more stable. In contrast, when authority rests in the hands of an individual ruler as in theocracy, the belief in equality persists and tends to undermine stability. For example, the multitude “cannot help rejoicing at evil or harm to a commander and longing for him to have every evil and bringing it on him whenever they can, even though it comes with great evil to themselves as well. Furthermore, least of all can human beings abide serving their equals and being regulated by them” (TTP, 5.59). Theocracy is less effective than democracy because it depends on an inordinate amount of effort to suppress equality and thereby preserve the leader’s authority. The leader must continually “endeavor with the utmost strength to persuade the vulgar” that they have special authority. Even when a leader is successful, as was Moses when he convinced the Israelites that he was a messenger of God, the regime is likely to teeter after the demise of its extraordinary leader.”

8. What I call Spinoza’s democratic imagination therefore has affinities with what Negri and Alexandre Matheron, among others, call the democratic conatus. See, for example, Alexandre Matheron, “The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 207–17, esp. 216–17, and Antonio Negri, “Reliqua Desiderantur: A Conjecture for a Definition of a Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza,” in Montag and Stolze, The New Spinoza, 219–47, esp. 227–28. See too Louis Althusser, “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza,” trans. Ted Stolze, in Montag and Stolze, The New Spinoza, 9.

9. Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22–23. “Is it possible that democratic citizens have a special need for symbols and the world of fantasy precisely because their real political world does not and cannot give them the autonomy, freedom, and sovereignty it promises?… Democracies inspire in citizens an aspiration to rule and yet require citizens constantly to live with the fact that they do not. Democracies must find methods to help citizens deal with the conflict between their politically inspired desires for total agency and the frustrating reality of their experience.” See too Norbert Bobbio’s discussion of democracy’s broken promises in The Future of Democracy: A Defence of the Rules of the Game, trans. Roger Griffen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 27–39.

10. Chiara Bottici, “Philosophies of Political Myth, a Comparative Look Backwards: Cassirer, Sorel and Spinoza,” European Journal of Political Theory 8 (2009): 366, and “Another Enlightenment: Spinoza on Myth and Imagination,” Constellations 19 (2012): 591–608. On the other hand, in Myth and Modern Philosophy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990) Stephen H. Daniel looks at myth in Bacon, Descartes, Mandeville, Vico, and Herder, but not in Spinoza.Michael A. Rosenthal, “Spinoza, History, and Jewish Modernity,” in Philosophers and the Jewish Bible, ed. Charles H. Manekin and Robert Eisen (Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland, 2008), 128. “Spinoza does not offer a theory of historical progress in which reason triumphs over the imagination. He is not committed to the corollary thesis either, that is, the idea of secularization of political and personal life. The importance of the imagination and its narrative structure in human life, along with Spinoza’s deep commitment to an idea of God as the principle of intelligibility of all things, rules out the possibility of the total dissolution of religion.” Similarly, rationality does not lead to the withering away of the state.

11. See Yirmiyahu Yovel, “Spinoza: The Psychology and the Multitude and the Uses of Language,” Studia Spinozana 1 (1985): 305–33; reprinted in Lloyd, Spinoza: Critical Assessments, vol. 3, 64–87, esp. 64–65, and Firmin De Brabander, Spinoza and the Stoics: Power, Politics and the Passions (London: Continuum, 2007). H. M. Ravven calls these ideas “imaginative universals” in “Notes on Spinoza’s Critique of Aristotle’s Ethics: From Teleology to Process Theory,” Philosophy and Theology 4 (1989): 3–32.

12. See too TTP, 7.87. “Human nature is so constituted that what men conceive by pure intellect, they defend only by intellect and reason, whereas the beliefs that spring from the emotions are emotionally defended.” See too TdIE sec. 53: “If its necessity or impossibility, which depends on external causes, were known to us, we would be able to feign nothing concerning it.” There is a connection between this inverse proportion between imagination and reason and the relation between reason and obedience: “We cannot without great impropriety call a rational life obedience” (Political Treatise, 2.20). Compare Immanuel Kant, “The End of All Things,” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, 221 (6.327): “The imagination works harder in darkness than it does in bright light.” The Appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics is an analysis of what happens when people are guided by the imagination instead of reason. See too Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. Thomas Bergin and Max Fish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 185: “Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.”

13. “Since men are led more by passion than reason, it follows that a multitude comes together and wishes to be guided… by one mind not at the suggestion of reason, but of some common passion, that is, common hope or fear, or the desire of avenging some common hurt” (Political Treatise 6.1). See too TEI, 20: “By random experience… I know almost all the things that are useful in life.”

14. See “Can’t We All Just Get Along? Spinoza on the Rational and the Reasonable,” Political Theory 38.6 (December 2010): 838–58.

15. In “Philosophies of Political Myth,” 365–81, Bottici usefully compares Spinoza to Cassirer, who thought that myth should wither away to be replaced by the rule of reason, and Sorel, who saw the function of myth as a historical constant, with the growth of reason playing no role at all: “If political myths are a form of regression for Cassirer and a form of progress for Sorel, Spinoza, with his reflections on the role of prophecy in the constitution of the ancient state of Israel, shows that political myths can be the means for both” (367). For an example from Cassirer himself: “If we reduce the legal and social order to free individual acts, to a voluntary contractual submission of the governed, all mystery is gone.” Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 173.

16. Rulers can themselves be superstitious. In the discussion of Alexander in the Preface, Spinoza says that he had “installed his own credibility” (2).

17. Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 101. See too Paul Kahn, “Philosophy and the Politics of Unreason, California Law Review 97 (2009): 397: “The political is not an exercise in means-ends rationality, serving some extra-political end. Rather, it is a structure of the imagination that makes sense of experience by embedding it in narratives.” Thomas Hobbes, The Citizen, ed and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 195: “Two things therefore frame a democracy; whereof one, to wit, the perpetual prescription of convents, makes dêmon, the people; the other, which is a plurality of votes, to kratos, or the power.

18. Bernard Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 104: “In a community we imagine things that we share as sources of mutual concern and loyalty. In an organization we imagine shared practices and institutions as the means of making many individuals act as one. With the people as constituent sovereign, in contrast, we use our imagination to strip away something that we currently possess: a set of mutual connections created by the state’s authoritative means of coordinating our individual actions.”

19. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings, 73. See too Etienne Balibar, “Individualité et transindividualité chez Spinoza,” in Architecture de la Raison: Mélanges offerts à Alexandre Matheron, ed. Pierre Francois Moreau (Fontenay/St. Cloud: ENS Éditions, 1996), 35–46.

20. David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), xv: “Whereas nondemocratic societies see themselves as having simply emerged at some indefinite point in history or as having been founded by divine revelation, democratic societies see themselves as having been founded by specific human agreement. … At best, when democracies are rationally represented, these democratic societies take their deliberate construction to be the result of philosophical imagination. In other words, they do not see themselves as being without a deliberate human beginning or as the result of God’s deliberate election. That is why philosophy is more central to democratic self-understanding than it is to its political alternatives.”

21. Hobbes too thinks that the social contract is based on a calculation of utility, but for him this implies that the sovereign must terrorize the people, and that the people must fear violent death above all things.

22. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, with Explanatory Notes (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 44. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 41: “All citizens must confront the paradox that they have been promised sovereignty and rarely feel it. Herein lies the single most difficult feature of life in a democracy. Democratic citizens are by definition empowered only to be disempowered.”

23. Gilles Deleuze, Expressions in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 270.

24. See “Enough Is Never Enough: Spinoza on the Desire for More Power,” in preparation.

25. Morgan, The Essential Spinoza, 153: “The sovereignty of the people is a much more complicated, one may say more fictional, fiction than the divine right of kings. A king, however dubious his divinity might seem did not have to be imagined. He was a visible presence, wearing his crown and carrying his scepter. The people, on the other hand, are never visible as such. Before we ascribe sovereignty to the people, we have to imagine that there is such a thing, something we personify as though it were a single body, capable of thinking, acting, or making decisions and carrying them out, something quite apart from government, superior to government, and able to alter or remove a government at will, a collective entity more powerful and less fallible than a king or any individual within it or than any group of individuals it singles out to govern it.” Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43: “Traditional despotisms could ask of people only that they remain passive and obey the laws. A democracy, ancient or modern, has to ask more. It requires that its members be motivated to make the necessary contributions of treasure (in taxes), sometimes blood (in war), and always some degree of participation in the process of governance. A free society has to substitute for despotic enforcement a certain degree of self-enforcement.”

26. See TTP, 17.199. Life under the Hebrew commonwealth “was one long schooling in obedience. ... Therefore to men so habituated to it obedience must have appeared no longer as bondage, but freedom. ... No more effective means can be devised to influence men’s minds, for nothing can so captivate the mind as joy springing from devotion, that is, love mingled with awe.”

27. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

28. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “The Metaphysics of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” in Spinoza’s ‘Theological-Political Treatise’: A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Michael A. Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 135: “Obviously, the believer must believe that the tenets of faith are true, but those who disseminate and teach faith should not be much bothered by the truthfulness of the doctrines, but rather by their usefulness.” The three myths resemble Kant’s transcendental illusions. “Transcendental illusion… does not cease even though it is uncovered” (Critique of Pure Reason, B353). “The transcendental dialectic will content itself with uncovering the illusion in transcendental judgments, while at the same time protecting us against being deceived by it; but it can never bring it about that the transcendental illusion (like logical illusion) should even disappear and cease to be an illusion. For what we have to do with here is a natural and unavoidable illusion which itself rests on subjective principles and passes them off as objective” (B354).

29. Therefore Daniel Garber gets things exactly backwards in “Dr. Fischelson’s Dilemma: Spinoza on Freedom and Sociability,” in Yovel and Segal, Spinoza on Reason and the ‘Free Man,’ 191. “Looking back over the arguments for community discussed above, it would seem that those arguments depend strongly on our own imperfection and inadequacy; it is precisely because we are the imperfect and limited creatures that we are that we need the help of other people. ... Furthermore, even though Spinoza does seem to assert from time to time that the perfectly free and completely rational individual is social, a closer look shows that he has no real arguments to that conclusion.”

30. Spinoza seems to deny the impossibility of total alienation in the Preface. The Turks “hold even discussion of religion to be sinful, and with their mass of dogma they gain such a thorough hold on the individual’s judgment that they leave no room in the mind for the exercise of reason, or even the capacity to doubt” (3). “The Turks” constitute a contrast to the function of the ceremonial laws in the “commonwealth of the Hebrews.” “In order that a people incapable of self-rule should be utterly subservient to its ruler, Moses did not allow these men, habituated as they were to slavery, to perform any action at their own discretion. ... This, then, was the object of ceremonial observance, that men should never act of their own volition but always at another’s behest, and that in their actions and inward thoughts they should at all times acknowledge that they were not their own masters but completely subordinate to another” (5.65). Thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this strain of thought.

31. Bottici, “Philosophies of Political Myth,” 376. “When the prophets called the Hebrews ‘the chosen people,’ they were performing a function essential to any society: they were using imagination to transcend individual interests and to create a common standard of judgments and of behavior.”

32. The myth of the democratic nation has affinities with what Bernard Yack calls the myth of the civic nation. See Bernard Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” Critical Review 10 (1996): 193–211; and Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), whose project is to explain why “The age of liberal individualism has been the great age of nationalism as well” (5). Charles Taylor, “How to Define Secularism,” at: http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv4/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__academics__colloquia__legal_political_and_social_philosophy/documents/documents/ecm_pro_067143.pdf. A modern democratic state demands a ‘people’ with a strong collective identity. ... Democracy obliges us to show much more solidarity and much more commitment to one another in our joint political project than was demanded by the hierarchical and authoritarian societies of yesteryear. In the good old days of the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, the Polish peasant in Galicia could be altogether oblivious of the Hungarian country squire, the bourgeois of Prague or the Viennese worker, without this in the slightest threatening the stability of the state. On the contrary. This condition of things only becomes untenable when ideas about popular government start to circulate. This is the moment when sub‐groups which will not, or cannot, be bound together, start to demand their own states. This is the era of nationalism, of the break‐up of empires. ... I have been discussing the political necessity of a strong common identity for modern democratic states in terms of the requirement of forming a people, a deliberative unit. But this is also evident in a number of other ways. Thinkers in the civic humanist tradition, from Aristotle through to Arendt, have noted that free societies require a higher level of commitment and participation than despotic or authoritarian ones. Citizens have to do for themselves, as it were, what otherwise the rulers do for them. But this will only happen if these citizens feel a strong bond of identification with their political community, and hence with those who share with them in this.

33. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place, 44. The inevitable note here must be to Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

34. Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics (London: Verso, 1998), 112.

35. Andre Santos Campos, “The Individuality of the State in Spinoza’s Political Philosophy,” Archivfür Geschichte Der Philosophie 92 (2010): 32. Campos imputes to Spinoza “a general project of human individuation through natural rights.”

36. Novak, The Jewish Social Contract, xvii. “One enters a social contract not from a minimal position of isolation into a greater sociality, but, rather, one enters a social contract from a ‘thicker’ communal background and agrees to accept its ‘thinner’ terms in order to be able to live at peace with persons coming from other communal backgrounds and develop some common projects.”

37. Talad Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5: “Secularism is not simply an intellectual answer to a question about enduring social peace and toleration. It is an enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion. In contrast, the process of meditation enacted in ‘premodern’ societies includes ways in which the state mediates local identifies without aiming at transcendence.”

38. Susan James, “When Does Truth Matter? Spinoza on the Relation between Theology and Philosophy,” European Journal of Philosophy 20 (2012): 104. See too Susan James, “Creating Rational Understanding: Spinoza as a Social Epistemologist,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 85 (2011): 192. “One of the aims of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is to narrow the gap between knowledge of the first and second kinds, by developing an imaginatively-based way of life that is oriented towards reasoning. Against theologians who give priority to revealed truths, understood as supernatural pronouncements of the deity, Spinoza’s defense of the authority of religion rests on an examination of the natural events with which philosophical reasoning is also concerned, and urges us to explain religious phenomena in ordinary causal terms (TTP III/29).” See also “Spinoza on Why We Shouldn’t Imitate God but a Model of Human Nature,” Philosophy and Theology 24 (2012): 155–90.

39. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Substance: The Substance-Mode Relation as a Relation of Inherence and Predication,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2009): 40–41. “In the Short Treatise Spinoza characterizes an immanent cause as one in which the agent and the one acted upon are not different, in which the agent ‘acts on himself,’ whose effect ‘is not outside itself,’ and in which the effect is part of the cause. A transitive (or transient) cause has precisely the opposite characteristics.”