The Will to Exist: Reflections on Desire and the Good in Western Culture

This article was originally presented as a keynote speech at ISSEI’s 14th International Conference, “Images of Europe: Past, Present, Future,” The Catholic University of Portugal, Porto, 4–8 August 2014.

Abstract

In my essay I argue that the critical distinction that Spinoza makes between two concepts of desire, as also between two concepts of the good, captures the distinction that Tertullian makes in posing the question: What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? In identifying the good with desire—desire with the good—and in denying that desire is dependent on the good in itself (e.g., Plato’s form of the good), Spinoza shows us that philosophy, as ethics, belongs to Jerusalem, to the Bible, and not to Athens (ancient Greek philosophy). We see, then, that the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem is not the distinction between philosophy and the Bible, between reason and faith, between the secular and the religious.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Jason Harman, Jason Hoult, Christopher Irwin, and Wallace Katz for reading a draft of my lecture and for sharing with me their comments on it. I also want to point out that I use “man” in the sense of person or human being, i.e., in the non-gendered sense of homo (as distinct from vir), consistent with the texts that I make central to my essay.

Notes

This article was originally presented as a keynote speech at ISSEI’s 14th International Conference, “Images of Europe: Past, Present, Future,” The Catholic University of Portugal, Porto, 4–8 August 2014.

1. Spinoza, Ethics, in Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925), vol. 2, part 3, prop. 9, Scholium.

2. Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, prop. 21.

3. 1 John 5.21. All citations from the Bible are taken from the Revised Standard Version.

4. See Political Treatise, in Benedict de Spinoza, The Political Works, trans. A. G. Wernham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 271f.

5. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 69.

6. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), 12.585–87.

7. St. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dodds, et al. (New York: The Modern Library, 1959), 11.26 (370–71). I have slightly modified the translation to enhance its clarity. Immediately prior to the passage that I cite Augustine writes: “For we both are and know that we are, and we delight in our existence and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these things by some bodily sense. ... [For, regarding all these] sensible images, it is the images resembling them, but not themselves, which we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory and which excite us to desire the objects” (370).

8. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (together with A Treatise on Human Nature) (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1966), 183.

9. Michel de Montaigne, “The Apology for Raymond Sebond,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 392.

10. Montaigne, “The Apology for Raymond Sebond,” 422. Montaigne also declares that, if we agree with Theophrastus (fourth century BCE) that man is ignorant “of first causes and principles, let him boldly give up all the rest of his knowledge. If his foundation is lacking, his argument is flat on the ground. Discussion and inquiry have no other aim and limit but principles; if this terminus does not stop their course, they fling themselves into infinite irresolution” (421).

11. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 56f.

12. Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, prop. 18, Scholium.

13. King Lear, in The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 1997), 4.1.27–8. When Edgar responds to the questions of the Duke of Albany—“Where have you hid yourself? / How have you known the miseries of your father?”—he tells Albany that what taught him to escape the death sentence on his head by shifting “Into a madman’s rags… [and by assuming] a semblance / that very dogs disdained….” was “O, our lives’ sweetness! / That we the pain of death would hourly die / Rather than die at once!” The Norton editor provides the following paraphrase of these lines: “how sweet must life be that we prefer the constant pain of dying to death itself” (5.3.178–87).

14. Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, 3.1.58f.

15. See Søren Kierkegaard, “Love Is a Matter of Conscience,” in Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 135–53.

16. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 14.