Spinoza's Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics

by Steven B. Smith

Overview

Most readers of Spinoza treat him as a pure metaphysician, a grim determinist, or a stoic moralist, but none of these descriptions captures the author of the Ethics, argues Steven B. Smith in this intriguing book. Offering a new reading of Spinoza’s masterpiece, Smith asserts that the Ethics is a celebration of human freedom and its attendant joys and responsibilities and should be placed among the great founding documents of the Enlightenment.

Two aspects of Smith’s book distinguish it from other studies. It treats the famous “geometrical method” of the Ethics as a form of moral rhetoric, a model for the construction of individuality. And it presents the Ethics as a companion to Spinoza’s major work of political philosophy, the Theologico-Political Treatise, each work helping to explore the problem of freedom. Affirming Spinoza’s centrality for both critics and defenders of modernity, the book will be of value to students of political theory, philosophy, and intellectual history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300100198
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/10/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Steven B. Smith is Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Read an Excerpt

Spinoza's Book of Life

Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics

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By Steven B. Smith

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2003 Steven B. Smith
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10019-8

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Chapter One

Thinking about the Ethics

Spinoza's Ethics is by general consensus one of the most difficult books ever written. This is so in part because the ideas that Spinoza sought to convey are inherently difficult. The themes of substance, attribute, necessity, and eternity are not such as to allow easy access. But Spinoza's work is made doubly difficult by the method by which he attempted to communicate these ideas. As a work written in more geometrico, the Ethics consists of formal propositions, definitions, scholia, and corollaries, all of which are said to follow from one another in the manner of a formal geometrical proof. Philosophy means for Spinoza reasoning in a deductive manner. Taking Euclid's Elements as its model, his work is set out as a moral geometry intended to lead the reader from a condition of moral confusion and chaos to the one true way of life. Its theme, as Leon Roth claimed years ago, is not just the True but the Good.

The difficulties with the Ethics do not end here. Not only are there inherent difficulties with reading the book, but Spinoza's thought has proven peculiarly resistantto classification. What, exactly, has been Spinoza's achievement? Was he a medieval or a modern or, as Harry Wolfson believed, a modern with one foot still in the medieval world? Was he a soulless materialist and atheist as Bayle and Hume believed or a mystical pantheist and "God intoxicated man" as Goethe, Novalis, and Emerson laid claim? Was he a ruthless determinist who believed that nothing, not even our innermost thoughts and beliefs, escaped the causal order of nature or an apostle of human freedom whose philosophy sought to liberate the mind from bondage to false beliefs and systems of power? A forerunner of German Idealism or Marxian materialism? An individualist or a communitarian? The answer is to some degree all of the above.

Perhaps we can gain some clarity by examining Spinoza's major influences. But even here we find ourselves on no firmer ground. Like his older contemporary Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza is remarkably sparing with references to his predecessors, and when he does mention them, it is often brusquely to dismiss their various errors and fallacies. This has not stopped readers of the Ethics from attempting to situate the work within different intellectual contexts and traditions. According to Wolfson, Spinoza's philosophy is a kind of mélange of the works of the great Judeo-Arabic philosophers of the Middle Ages. For some, notably Edwin Curley, Spinoza belongs entirely to the world of modern philosophy, especially the Cartesian aspiration to create a "unified science" of man and nature bringing together metaphysics and morals. For others, Spinoza was a product of the Marrano culture of Spain and the Iberian Peninsula who still utilized the forms of expression characteristic of a people living under the threat of persecution. And for still others, Spinoza's philosophy constitutes a reworking of certain ancient Stoic moral positions.

However much we can learn from historical studies of Spinoza's background, there is a sense in which he cannot be reduced to his various intellectual and cultural contexts. These may be useful for explaining this or that aspect of the Ethics, but all such attempts must necessarily fail in trying to make sense of the work as a whole. Spinoza was neither a renegade Maimonidean, a Cartesian, a Marrano, nor a Stoic. His work incorporates even as it transcends these various descriptions. His formal education both began and ended in the world of the Talmud Torah. This was a world deeply hostile to philosophy. The conflict between philosophy and religion, "Athens and Jerusalem," forms one of the essential motifs of his thought. Spinoza was himself a philosophical autodidact whose work drew on but was essentially independent of any particular tradition or school of thought. His readings in the philosophical literature were extensive but eclectic. He was an original who in the deepest sense of the term was a product of his own making.

To the extent that it is possible to classify the Ethics, it is as one of the great monuments to the modern enterprise. To be sure, modernity is an almost endlessly porous term. It can mean many things to many people. It has been defined by the rise of a scientific worldview often associated with mathematical physics, a skeptical disposition regarding religion and other traditional sources of authority, the emergence of the secular state, and the assertion of the autonomous individual as the primary locus of agency and moral responsibility. Spinoza endorses all of these features of modernity to varying degrees, although the aspect of his work to be emphasized here is his reading of human life as an adventure of self-discovery. The Ethics is nothing if not a testimony to the powers of human agency and the self-direction of the mind.

The Ethics is a singular achievement written by someone who valued his own singularity. Its supreme achievement is to explore the moral and psychological postulates of freedom in a world that had been stripped, partly by Spinoza himself, of its previous theological, cosmological, and political moorings. His questions is: what place is there for human freedom in a world radically divested of divine purpose, devoid of telos, and in which human beings no longer occupy a "kingdom within a kingdom" but are rather fully articulated within a single self-contained system of nature? In this abyss of loneliness-the proverbial night in which all cows are gray-what conceivable grounds are left for the assertion of human dignity and moral responsibility? Despite its claims to geometrical certainty and mathematical truth, the Ethics conceals a deeply personal, even existential, work written out of an author's confrontation with his own solitude. In spite of its apparently selfless style and the author's injunction to rise above the limited human standpoint and embrace the perspective of eternity, the work is a celebration of freedom and life with all of its legitimate joys and pleasures.

Above all, Spinoza taught us to appreciate and value life-both our own and that of others. Accordingly he repudiated the classical depreciation of life as "mere" life. He also rejected the messianic emphasis on the world to come at the expense of the here and now. What is to be appreciated is not just the biological fact of existence, although this is not to be despised, but the consciousness of ourselves as rational beings who strive to increase our power and freedom even as we create obstacles that serve to frustrate those ends. The Ethics is a celebration of life, of joy and laughter, of sociability and friendship. Spinoza's philosophy culminates not in the grim and remorseless recognition of necessity, as is often portrayed, but in the enjoyment of the pleasures of mind and body working together as a unified whole that helps to secure the conditions for human autonomy. He is a tireless advocate of individual liberty in its moral, psychological, and metaphysical dimensions, and these taken together form a pendant to his liberal politics.

What Kind of Book Is the Ethics?

The kinds of questions raised above are made even more problematical when we ask what kind of book this is and who is its intended audience. Spinoza himself gives little by way of introduction. The title page announces only that it is a work in five parts which treats of the following subjects:

1. Of God

2. Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind

3. Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects

4. Of Human Bondage, or of the Power of the Affects

5. Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom

Spinoza's relative taciturnity on the purpose of the Ethics and its readership stands in marked contrast to the TTP, his major work of political philosophy. In the preface to the TTP he is remarkably candid about the larger aims of the work. It was written to separate the claims of philosophy from theology and to put them on entirely different footings (TTP, pref, 27; III/10). Philosophy is concerned with the realm of truth, theology with moral practice and obedience to God. Spinoza presents himself as protecting philosophy from those who would make reason bow to the claims of Scripture, and also protecting the sanctity of religion from the philosophical systematizers and rationalizers. Furthermore, this distinction is said to serve a political end. The goal of the TTP is not merely to protect theology from false systems of philosophy but to demonstrate that freedom to philosophize can be granted without any injury either to piety or to the peace and security of the state.

In addition Spinoza tells us a great deal about the intended audience for the TTP. In a letter written to Henry Oldenburg five years before the book was published he spoke frankly about whom he was trying to reach:

I am now writing a Treatise about my interpretation of Scripture. This I am driven to do by the following reasons: 1. The prejudice of the theologians; for I know that these are among the chief obstacles which prevent men from directing their minds to philosophy; and to remove them from the minds of the more prudent. 2. The opinion which the common people have of me, who do not cease to accuse me falsely of atheism; I am also obliged to avert this accusation as far as it is possible to do so. 3. The freedom of philosophizing, and of saying what we think; this I desire to vindicate in every way, for here it is always suppressed through the excessive authority and impudence of the preachers. (Ep 30)

The distinction Spinoza draws here between the "prudent" reader (prudentiorum) and the "common people" (vulgus) is repeated in the preface to the TTP, where he refers to the "philosophical reader" (philosophe lector) and the "multitude" (multitudo) (TTP, pref, 33; III/12). Yet, while claiming to address the philosophical reader, in the very next breath Spinoza notes that everything to appear in the work will be "more than adequately known to philosophers." He seems to be positioning his audience between the "vulgar" or the "multitude" who live under the sway of superstition and prejudice and the true philosophers who already know what he is saying and for whom the book will be redundant. The audience seems to comprise not philosophers in the strict sense but potential philosophers, philosophers in the making, who still remain under the partial sway of theological prejudice but who can be induced by reason to reflect critically on the source of prejudice. It is a book written by a philosopher for potential philosophers out of a love for them and indeed out of a love for philosophy itself. The TTP is a book addressed to those who, in the words of Leo Strauss, "love to think."

If the TTP is a work addressed to potential philosophers in order to cure them of their prejudices, the Ethics is a work that takes no prisoners. "I do not assume that I have discovered the best philosophy," he confidently asserts, "but I know that I understand the true one" (Ep 76). This sense of confidence pervades the work as a whole. The Ethics is addressed to philosophers pure and simple. What Spinoza means by a philosopher is addressed in a letter to William van Blyenbergh in which he alludes to his correspondent as "a pure philosopher who ... has no other touchstone of truth than the natural intellect and not theology" (Ep 23). To be a philosopher means to accept the authority of reason pure and simple. A work of philosophy, as Spinoza understands it, is a work that can be understood by reason or the "natural intellect" alone. It makes no concession to time, place, and circumstance. It requires only a reader who can follow a chain of reasoning and accept unflinchingly what is found there. It will accept no argument that is not acceptable to reason. Spinoza's silence about his audience expresses the anonymity of reason itself. The Ethics is in the literal sense not Spinoza's philosophy at all; it is the philosophical biography of the idea of reason. In this respect the Ethics can truly be called a book for everyone and for no one.

Yet the impersonality of the book and its audience can be overstated. Even if the intended audience for the Ethics is smaller, perhaps infinitesimally smaller, than for the TTP, Spinoza still wrote the book with a practical intent in mind. The perfect philosopher, like the ancient sage, is at best an ideal, a heuristic, against which any actual reader should be judged. In the preface to part four of the Ethics he speaks of "a model of human nature to which we may look" (IV pref/208). Although he never uses this expression again, it is clearly the idea of the philosopher or the philosophic life that he is thinking of. Presumably for such an exemplar of human nature a book like the Ethics would be unnecessary, but for the less-than-perfect readers who actually exist, it might actually prove useful.

Spinoza's purpose was to liberate the mind from bondage to the passions and to encourage certain traits of character that he believes will increase the stock of human happiness. Among the virtues he recommends are the qualities of animositas and generositas-tenacity and nobility-both of which are described as aspects of the comprehensive virtue of fortitudo or strength of character (IIIp59). This is the highest of the moral virtues to which the book aspires. The point or purpose of the Ethics as a whole is clearly a pedagogic one, that is, to foster an ideal state of human character. Its goal is precisely to lessen emotional distress, or what Spinoza calls fluctuatio animi, vacillation of mind, which is the principal cause of so much misery and human conflict. The Ethics is intended as a work of moral therapy in which the reader is simultaneously analyst and patient.

In More Geometrico

Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to entering the world of the Ethics is cracking the style of the book. The work is presented in the form of a moral geometry. This has led many readers to wonder what is the purpose of the geometrical form and what is its relation to the content of the work as a whole. Is the axiomatic method in some sense required by Spinoza's philosophy or is it a matter of choice or convenience, much like a poet's decision to write in iambic pentameter? There were certainly many styles of philosophical communication open to him-the dialogue (Plato), the treatise (Aristotle), the autobiography (Augustine), the disputed question (Aquinas), or the essay (Montaigne). Why, then, present oneself in the manner of a geometer? There has been a variety of answers to this question.

The standard view of Spinoza, the textbook image of him passed down in countless introductory courses of philosophy, is that of a relentless rationalist who sought to prescribe how the human mind could achieve clear and distinct ideas by means of the unaided intellect. The mathematical method of reasoning seemed best suited to this pursuit of truth unencumbered by reference to revelation, history, or imaginative experience. Spinoza was among the first to present his philosophy as a "system" in which all problems-moral, metaphysical, political-could be deduced from the axioms and premises of pure reason alone. The Ethics gives classic expression to the view of philosophy as an activity carried out sub specie aeternitatis, from the aspect of eternity. It consists of taking a God's-eye view of the human condition, a position sometimes diminished by its detractors as the "view from nowhere."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Spinoza's Book of Life by Steven B. Smith Copyright © 2003 by Steven B. Smith. Excerpted by permission.
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