The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza [1 ed.] 9780429489006, 9781138594180, 9781138594197

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface: The Philosophy of Hope
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beatitude and Philosophy
Notes
Chapter 1: Life as Death
Notes
Chapter 2: Metaphysical Desire
Notes
Chapter 3: Ambition and the Fall
Notes
Chapter 4: Empty Glory
Notes
Chapter 5: The Repose of the Soul
Notes
Chapter 6: Escaping Death
Notes
Chapter 7: Escaping Sin
Notes
Chapter 8: Glory and Love
Notes
Chapter 9: God in Everyone
Notes
Conclusion: The Hope of Philosophy
Notes
Bibliography
Spinoza’s Works:
Other Works:
Index

Citation preview

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HOPE

Can philosophy be a source of hope? Today it is common to believe that the answer is no – that providing hope, if it is possible at all, belongs either to the predictive sciences or to religion. In this exciting and stimulating book, however, Alexander Douglas argues that the philosophy of Spinoza can offer something akin to religious hope. Douglas shows how Spinoza is able, without appealing to belief in any traditional afterlife or supernatural grace, to develop a profound and original theory of how humans can escape from the conditions of death and sin. Douglas argues that this theory of escape, which Spinoza calls beatitude, is the centrepiece of his entire philosophy, though scholars have often downplayed or ignored it. One reason for this scholarly neglect might be the difficulty of understanding Spinoza’s theory, which departs from the standard doctrines and methods of Western philosophy. Douglas’s interpretation therefore seeks inspiration beyond the Western tradition, drawing especially on the classical Daoist text Zhuangzi and its commentaries. Here, Douglas argues, surprising resonances with Spinoza’s core ideas can be found, leading to a new way of understanding his strange yet compelling theory of beatitude. Alexander Douglas is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of St  Andrews, Scotland, UK. He is the author of Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology and The Philosophy of Debt. He is currently working on a study of the critique of identity in Zhuangzi, Spinoza, and René Girard.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HOPE Beatitude in Spinoza

Alexander Douglas

Cover image: © Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Alexander Douglas The right of Alexander Douglas to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-138-59418-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-59419-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-48900-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For my dad, James John Douglas (1946–2022) – always thinking, always hopeful

CONTENTS

Preface: The Philosophy of Hope ix Acknowledgements xiv Introduction: Beatitude and Philosophy

1

1 Life as Death

5

2

Metaphysical Desire

18

3 Ambition and the Fall

34

4

47

Empty Glory

5 The Repose of the Soul

61

6

Escaping Death

73

7

Escaping Sin

89

8 Glory and Love

100

9 God in Everyone

111

viii  Contents

Conclusion: The Hope of Philosophy

126

Bibliography 129 Index 142

PREFACE: THE PHILOSOPHY OF HOPE

Immanuel Kant suggested that the three big questions for philosophy are what can I know?, what ought I to do?, and what may I hope?.1 Contemporary philosophers continue to pursue the first two – knowledge and guidance. But they seem to have lost their taste for hope. A few years ago, I participated in a workshop, run by the Scots Philosophical Association, to discuss the theme ‘philosophers and the philosophical life’. One after another, academics got up to discuss what role philosophy played in their lives beyond their academic work. Many discussed how philosophical reflection had disciplined and advanced their pursuit of knowledge. Others discussed how moral philosophy had guided them through ethical dilemmas. But all agreed that philosophy did not provide them with consolation or hope.2 Kant was, in their view, wrong to include this in the philosopher’s job description. They meant, of course, that philosophy as such is not in the business of consoling or giving hope. Philosophy often crosses over with the social and natural sciences, and certainly a scientist can give us hope by, for example, giving evidence that the end of poverty, the cure for cancer, or cold fusion is only a few decades away. But the philosopher qua philosopher is not qualified to help here. If anything, her role is to pour sceptical cold water on these hopes, reminding us that people have always been certain about predicted triumphs that never came. Mara van der Lugt’s major study of philosophical pessimism reveals that the optimistic philosophers of eighteenth-century Europe were, almost exclusively, committed to religious notions that would be sneered out of the venue at most academic conferences today.3 She ends the book by arguing that we should keep a space for pessimism. To insist too bullishly that all is right with the world is, she argues, to risk dismissing or trivialising the suffering of those in dire or genuinely hopeless situations. This makes sense from an atheistic perspective, but it begs the question against the religious optimists who feature in her narrative. In Robert Browning’s

x  Preface: The Philosophy of Hope

poem, Pippa Passes, the line: ‘all’s right with the world’ follows the line: ‘God’s in his heaven’. The reference to heaven is indispensable here. There are no hopeless situations if even somebody whose mortal life is pure misery can look forward to an immortal life of bliss. If that is true, things might in fact be unimaginably wonderful: a finitude of suffering diminishes to nothing against a blessed immortality. If we rule out the heavenly afterlife, however, then Van der Lugt’s point might appear to stand. A hard-headed, atheistic, naturalistic answer to the question ‘what may I hope?’ must be largely an exercise in what corporate consultants call managing expectations. Technological advancements have yielded a world of material comfort beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors, though they brought their share of injustice as well.4 We can reasonably hope to build a brighter future, but surely not a perfect one. And how will that help those who have already suffered? The main character of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark says: ‘No kindly future will ever repair a past as vile as ours’.5 If this life is all we get, then some people really are dealt lemons, and there is no hope for them – especially if they’re already dead. As for how good the lives of future people might be, the philosopher is not specially qualified to pronounce on that. Philosophers who turn to this question today sometimes follow the current intellectual fashion for erring on the side of doom. Why, then, should hope be a topic for philosophy? One reason is that our wilder hopes go beyond the scientific evidence on which philosophers have no expertise, and philosophers do have useful things to say about these.6 Kant, for his part, proposes that our ultimate hope is for happiness, which he defines with characteristic uncompromisingness as ‘the satisfaction of all our desires’.7 Of all our desires! That’s quite a hope. Kant could imagine this only in ‘a world invisible to us now but hoped for’.8 In the Christian tradition the name for this sort of total satisfaction is beatitude, though that notion has an ancestry reaching far beyond Christianity. It is, however, a notion that our mortal minds struggle to grasp. For that reason alone it is a topic for philosophers. There are deep questions around whether such a thing as beatitude is even conceivable, never mind possible. Most people’s desires are too inconsistent and incomplete for full satisfaction to be even a logical possibility. I desire peace on Earth and to be near all the people I love. But for how long? Not so long as to get bored. But then the end always seems to come too soon. And I want others to get what they want also. But what happens when their desires conflict? Do I want their desires to be different, to avoid this? But different how? And now that I’m considering that, should I want my own desires to be different? Human desires need a lot of cleaning up before they can even conceivably be fully satisfied. And then what would complete satisfaction be like? Would it feel the same as not having any desires at all? Then why not pursue the elimination of desire directly? Or would that be a sort of emptiness, whereas beatitude is sometimes characterised as a sort of fullness of being? Intuitively, drinking water when you’re thirsty doesn’t seem the same as not being thirsty to begin with. Some people tell us that a cycle of constantly satisfied and renewed desire is a miserable condition, but I’m not so sure. The ghosts in some old stories I read as a child are always hungry and always eating.9

Preface: The Philosophy of Hope  xi

In some ways that’s enviable. Have you ever come to the end of an excellent meal and wished you could be hungry again? Could beatitude be, somehow, like that? No wonder so many, including Kant, consign beatitude to a world or a life beyond this one. The notion is so abstract and alien that hoping for it must involve expecting to learn what it really is only when it arrives, in the new life and the world beyond. I once heard the novelist Marilynne Robinson being asked how she envisaged the blissful afterlife. She replied only: ‘I expect to be impressed’.10 This book studies the theory of beatitude presented by Spinoza. Unlike Kant and most Christian thinkers, Spinoza believed that beatitude can be achieved in this life.11 Naturally this must involve a very significant transformation of desire, but not its total elimination. This dimension of Spinoza’s philosophy has, to my knowledge, been strangely overlooked. There are countless books on Spinoza’s epistemology and metaphysics – his answers to the question what can I know? There are many, also, on his moral philosophy – his answers to what ought I to do? But to me the most striking and original contribution made by Spinoza is his answer to what may I hope? His answer is beatitude – not in some other life, in a world beyond, but here and now. This idea would be a striking heresy among my secular, naturalist colleagues. It is not, they would say, the business of philosophy to show us the way to beatitude. The notion of perfect satisfaction is a religious idol, of dubious logical coherence, with no place in the disenchanted universe revealed to us by the natural sciences. My colleagues more committed to Abrahamic faiths would agree with most of this, only holding on to the glimmer of hope for perfect satisfaction in a world unlike this one – a world in which a notion like beatitude could stand a chance of making sense. But that other world is the object of revelation and faith, not philosophy. Spinoza, however, is well known as a heretic, though there has always been a puzzle around what precisely his heresy was.12 I propose that his greatest heresy was the claim that beatitude can exist in this life and this world, and the path to it can be shown by philosophy. I am not aware of any other book-length works dedicated specially to the topic of beatitude in Spinoza.13 This is strange to me, since showing the way to beatitude is, as far as I can tell, his main philosophical purpose. His theory of beatitude also strikes me as unique in his historical context. It is not, I will argue, Stoic, Platonic, or Aristotelian, since Spinoza is entirely detached from any notion of a teleological natural order, which can’t be said of those schools of philosophy.14 The term ‘beatitude’ has a Christian flavour to it, and I will argue that Spinoza’s thinking follows the general pattern of the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall and salvation. But his theory of beatitude isn’t ultimately Judeo-Christian either – again, this is not least because it is detached from any ultimate teleological picture. It has some resonances with Sufism and even more, surprisingly, with Daoism – at least with the ideas in the Zhuangzi and some commentaries on it. Could this be a case of convergent evolution? Here it seems important that there also seems to be no strong notion of a teleological natural order in the Zhuangzi. Perhaps Zhuangzi and Spinoza – both intellectual outsiders in their own worlds – meet in the realms beyond conventional wisdom.

xii  Preface: The Philosophy of Hope

I have drawn out the parallel here for the purposes of exposition, although my relation to the Zhuangzi text is that of an interested amateur. I have only a beginner knowledge of Classical Chinese, or 文言文,15 and my understanding of the Zhuangzi depends heavily on comparing translations and secondary sources. But I am not trying to contribute to Zhuangzi scholarship or engage in ‘comparative philosophy’; I am only using the ideas in the Zhuangzi – or what I think they are – for the purposes of Spinoza exegesis. It is typical of scholars to draw upon other thinkers when trying to explain Spinoza’s thought. Edwin Curley writes, for instance: ‘Just as Joachim saw Spinoza through lenses ground by Hegel and Bradley, so I have seen him through those ground by Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein’.16 I suppose I see Spinoza through lenses ground by Zhuangzi, or at least by Zhuangzi’s commentators and scholars. After years of struggling to understand what Spinoza meant by beatitude, I read in Hao Wang about the comparison with the Zhuangzi made by several Chinese scholars.17 Following this up, I began to feel that through the Zhuangzi I could understand Spinoza in a new way. I aim to convey how I now understand Spinoza by sharing some of the experience of coming to understanding through the Zhuangzi, even if this takes me out of my scholarly comfort zone. Still, I must make it clear that my intended topic here is Spinoza’s theory of beatitude, not Spinoza’s proximity to the Zhuangzi or Daoism. This book is an essay in the history of philosophy, but this doesn’t rule out its also being an essay in philosophy. Writing of the great Zhuangzi commentator Guo Xiang, Fung Yu-Lan writes: ‘commentators of this kind were really philosophers; commentaries of this kind were really philosophical works having intrinsic value in themselves’.18 I hope that the same might be said of my commentary on Spinoza’s thoughts concerning beatitude. Spinoza uses his extraordinary philosophical vision to ground a hope for perfect satisfaction, complete acquiescence of the soul – beginning in this life and continuing into eternity. He offers a hope and a comfort far beyond what the scientist can offer. The scientist can offer at most a reasonable probability that life might be pretty good for most people someday. The philosopher can offer the hope that life can be perfect for the beatific person, and that it is possible – though perhaps exceedingly difficult – to become a beatific person. I will examine how Spinoza proposed to do this.

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), A805 / B833. 2 All except me: I outlined some thoughts that I later published as Alexander Douglas, ‘Philosophy and Hope’, The Philosopher 107 (December 2018). Subsequent to writing the draft of this introduction, I was pointed towards Tom Whyman, Infinitely Full of Hope: Fatherhood and the Future in an Age of Crisis and Disaster (London: Repeater, 2021). Whyman makes a very similar point to mine about Kant’s three questions, though he goes off in a very different direction after that.

Preface: The Philosophy of Hope  xiii

3 Mara van der Lugt, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 4 Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 5 Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2007), 295. 6 Many philosophers have considered the political power of hope; a far from representative sample is: Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999); Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge London: Harvard University Press, 2008); Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator – Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd and Paul Seaton (South Bend: St Augustine’s Press, 2010); Adrienne Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism (Bognor Regis: Yale University Press, 2019). 7 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A806 / A834. 8 A reference, perhaps, to Heb 11:1: ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of unseen realities’. 9 They were based on the preta of Buddhist tradition, or 餓鬼 in their Chinese version – though there is wide variation on the questions of whether, and what, such beings can eat. 10 Hope for something beyond our comprehension is not applied only to the afterlife: Lear, Radical Hope. 11 An anonymous reviewer pointed out to me that in Eastern Christianity the notion of theosis is regularly interpreted as a form of beatitude achievable within this life. 12 Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 13 The closest is perhaps Andrea Sangiacomo’s book on the supreme good in Spinoza Andrea Sangiacomo, Spinoza on Reason, Passions, and the Supreme Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Errol Harris has a book with ‘salvation’ in the title, though only the final chapter is devoted to beatitude as such Errol Harris, Salvation from Despair: A Reappraisal of Spinoza’s Philosophy (The Hague: Springer, 2012). 14 Whether it is Epicurean, in some sense, is a question I am less confident in answering. In what follows I will note various points of agreement with Dimitris Vardoulakis, Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Nevertheless, the parallels with the Zhuangzi – on the points I want to emphasise – seem stronger to me. 15 Gregory Lee warns against the uncritical use of terms like ‘Chinese’ to refer to a language that predates the idea of China by two millennia Gregory Lee, China Imagined: From European Fantasy to Spectacular Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Similarly, I have mostly tried to avoid phrases like ‘Chinese philosophy’ for material written before 1911. The attentive reader might notice some exceptions. Sometimes the misleading term is hard to avoid. 16 Edwin Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 78. 17 Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016), 109. 18 Zhuangzi and Yu-lan Fung, Chuang-Tzu: A New Selected Translation with an Exposition of the Philosophy of Kuo Hsiang (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 57.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was partly written during a semester of research leave granted by the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, made possible by hard work from my wonderful colleagues in the academic and support staff of the school. Francesco Toto read a chapter of the work and gave me invaluable feedback and guidance. The whole draft was read by Mara van der Lugt, Susan James, Dimitris Vardoulakis, and Lauren Slater, as well as the anonymous reviewers appointed by Routledge. All of these gave me brilliant and generous suggestions. Without a scholarly community like this, work would be impossible. I developed the ideas in continuous discussion with my colleagues and friends. I was handed so many ideas from others that it is hard for me to remember where they came from, though I have tried to give at least some clues in the citations. Still, I want to express my gratitude to more people than I can name here. I also felt a constant sense of encouragement and support from this community, through a project that was at times both intellectually and emotionally challenging. A representative but far-from-exhaustive list is (in addition to those named above): Antonio Salgado Borge, Christoph Schuringa, Nicholas Morrow Williams, Emanuele Costa, Kathrine Cuccuru, Steph Marston, John Heyderman, Maria Rosa Antognazza, Theo Verbeek, Yitzhak Melamed, Steven Nadler, Keith Green, Katherine Hawley, Jade Fletcher, Margaret Hampson, Hannah Laurens, David Harmon, Xiao Qi, Hedvig Moncrieff, James Harris, Mogens Laerke, Clare Carlisle, and Anthony Morgan. I must also thank Michael Della Rocca, Alan Nelson, Susan James, Dimitris Vardoulakis, and James Harris for supporting me in funding and other applications and for their interest in my work. The generosity that these great scholars have shown towards me suggests that the best researchers might be the most selfless, despite the ugly incentives of the current funding structures.

Acknowledgements  xv

The team at Routledge have been fantastic. I want to thank Tony Bruce and Adam Johnson for persevering with me through many twists and turns. I would also like to thank the production and editorial team for all that they do. Without my friends, past and present, nothing is possible. Of course my greatest debt will always be to my parents, in all the obvious ways and some less obvious. My mother’s courage and love inspire every word I write. Jasmin and Xavier have for so long been the vital centre of my beautiful life. And Lauren, my fiancée at the time of writing, shows me what beatitude might look like, and draws me nearer to it.

INTRODUCTION Beatitude and Philosophy

It would surprise many academic philosophers, who have sacrificed their happiness for truth, justice, and a track record of peer-reviewed publications, to learn that the search for happiness is the reason for philosophising. But there it is in Saint Augustine, who adds that what makes us happy is ‘the supreme good’, and that there is no ‘sect of philosophy which pursues no way of its own towards the supreme good’.1 In his youthful Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza confesses to this motive. He introduces his philosophy as the search for a ‘true good’, yielding ‘continuous joy to eternity’ (TIE, G 5.6).2 Later he comes to refer to the ultimate human good as beatitude (beatitudo). ‘Beatitude’ is a word with undoubtable Christian connotations, and these are amplified when Spinoza explains beatitude as a sort of eternal life. The person who achieves beatitude ‘never ceases to be but rather achieves true acquiescence of the soul forever’ (E 5p42s). Spinoza diverges from Christian tradition, however, in holding that beatitude is not the reward for a virtuous mortal life (E 5p42). Rather, he says, beatitude is virtue. This is mysterious. We can understand how somebody who practices virtue in her mortal life might be granted an eternal reward in some other life. But how can practicing virtue in a mortal life itself be the eternal reward? Much of this book will be devoted to explaining how this can be. Beyond its Christian connotations, Frédéric Manzini notes the affinity between Spinoza’s notion of beatitude and what Aristotle calls eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία), often translated as ‘happiness’, ‘flourishing’, or ‘wellbeing’.3 It is true that in the edition of Aristotle that Spinoza read ‘eudaimonia’ was generally translated by ‘felicitas’ (‘beatitudo’ was reserved for a different Greek word, ‘makariotēta’ – μακαριότητα).4 But Spinoza often equates felicitas with beatitudo,5 as many other Latin writers on Aristotle did, for example, Aquinas (SCG, 3.25.14).

DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-1

2  Introduction

Aristotle thought of eudaimonia as concerning life on earth rather than eternal life in heaven. This doesn’t mean, however, that Aristotelian eudaimonia is a good to be enjoyed during your mortal life. Aristotle couldn’t have thought so, since he followed the wisdom of Solon: nobody can be counted as eudaimon until he is dead.6 A twist of fate in the final hour could always tip the balance towards or away from eudaimonia. In this same sense Sophocles used the Solonic adage in the concluding lines to his Oedipus.7 Oedipus learned suddenly that what he thought had been a fairly blessed life had in fact been a cursed one. Inversely, somebody who seems so far to have missed out on eudaimonia altogether might grasp what Peter Geach calls ‘a chance between the saddle and the ground’.8 There is force in the argument, found in Christian authors but also in other religious traditions, that the ultimate human good is not something we can obtain during our life. There is force in the further argument, often accompanying the first, that seeking our good in things that can be obtained during our life – temporal goods – leads to both permanent angst and moral corruption. It is difficult to hear arguments like this without automatically adding what we are sure will come next: ‘therefore we must turn our eyes from this world and pursue an eternal life in Christ, or perfect submission to Allah, or the state of Nirvana, etc.’. But Spinoza doesn’t take the argument there. The eternal thing that we must pursue in place of temporal goods is not for him some transcendental thing beyond our familiar life. It is, rather, something that can be pursued in this life. We will see how Spinoza manages to remove the tension between the pursuit of eternity on one hand and the commitment to secular life (spanning the finite duration between birth and death) on the other. Philosophers have made much of this supposed tension.9 That the dichotomy between the two is false should be a welcome revelation, since we shall see that the traditional arguments against taking the side of secular life against eternity are powerful. There is another way that philosophers have tried to deny the possibility of eternal life while recognising that our ultimate good seems to lie beyond our own death. They suppose that our ultimate good resides, at least partly, in the legacy our lives leave to others. In Shakespeare’s Othello (2.4.262–4), Cassio calls his reputation ‘the immortal part of myself ’ and proclaims that ‘what remains is bestial’. Aquinas speaks disparagingly of ‘fame or glory … by which human beings achieve a certain sort of eternity’ (ST 1a2ae.q2.a3).10 This sort of immortality is what Hannah Arendt identifies as a primary preoccupation of the ancient Greeks in their heroic phase.11 Our lives will pass, but if we live in such a way as to be remembered in the future, we will have achieved the aim of the writer Parvulesco in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless: ‘to become immortal and then die’. The pursuit of immortality is, however, ultimately a doomed enterprise. In the first place it is not an eternal good, as David Benatar reminds us: All the great human achievements – the buildings, monuments, roads, machines, knowledge, arts – will crumble, erode, or vanish. Some remnants may remain, but only until the earth itself is destroyed. It will be as if we never were.12

Introduction  3

Nor should we want to make posterity the test of the true value of a life. In fact, the traditional warnings against the pursuit of temporary goods applies especially strongly to the pursuit of immortality in this sense, as we shall see. Certainly Cassio was not helped by his obsession with it. Arendt’s story continues with Plato, who challenged the Greek cult of immortality with a different and incompatible aim: eternity. Eternity is an end for human life achieved outside of time: not during your own lifetime, nor in a later time in which your glorious deeds are remembered. Spinoza’s beatitude is a version of this ideal. To seek it is to seek to live in such a way that our life is elevated into eternity. In Spinoza’s vision, the pursuit of eternal beatitude is almost the polar opposite of the pursuit of immortality in the Greek sense. The immortal has made herself into a character for the ages to remember. The beatified person, we shall see, has let go of trying to make herself into anything at all. Philosophers like Benatar give powerful arguments that the moral balance of the world – human life and also death – is inevitably on the side of the bad.13 Pleasure is brief; pain is often chronic and extreme. Joy is fragile and fleeting; grief is sturdy and consuming. These arguments have a history reaching back through time. ‘What flood of eloquence’, asked Augustine, ‘can suffice to detail the miseries of this life?’.14 Every human tragedy brings stories of heroism and solidarity that galvanise the spirit. But still the tragedies are so many. And it is hard to see how moral and social progress could ever solve the deeper problems of human life: the fleetingness of joy and the ubiquity of suffering. Even in the wealthiest, most peaceful countries on Earth, many human lives begin and end in profound suffering with little change along the way. More blessed lives still contain a great deal of pain and grief. Romantic, parental, and filial love – perhaps the most satisfying goods in our lives – end typically in heartbreaking loss. Before that they are too often blighted by the agony of unrequitedness, loss, or separation. ‘The human predicament’, writes Benatar, ‘is in fact an inhuman predicament, because it is so appalling’.15 He asks us to consider the losses we will inevitably face, then twists the knife by supplying clinical observations of burn victims, cancer patients, dementia sufferers, and the harrowing torments of locked-in syndrome. We all, he terrifyingly reminds us, run the risk of suffering some of these things. And we are almost certainly doomed to helplessly watch our loved ones suffer them, unless of course we have no loved ones, which is even sadder. Of course we need not judge the value of life by weighing up what contemporary moral psychologists, those electrical engineers of the soul, call ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ experiences. Perhaps we should consider, rather, the meaning of our life as a whole. But here too Benatar replies. He gives reasons to believe that: human life, as is the case with all life, has utterly no meaning from the cosmic perspective. It is not part of a grand design and serves no greater purpose, but is instead a product of blind evolution. There are explanations of how our species arose, but there are no reasons for our existence.16

4  Introduction

Spinoza appears to share much of this picture of reality. In the Appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics, he rejects belief in any cosmic purpose, let alone one based on human interests. ‘It seems’, as Steven Nadler comments, ‘on the face of it a rather bleak picture, one worthy of the most radical form of nihilism’.17 Spinoza’s picture on Nadler’s reading makes death inevitable for everyone.18 It is true that, for Spinoza, death means death, but for him death is not inevitable. His theory of beatitude is a theory of escape from death, into eternity and not mere immortality in the heroic or Parvulseco sense. There are powerful arguments that beatitude must involve escaping death, and Spinoza, I will argue in the next chapter, doesn’t dispute them.

Notes 1 Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 2000), 19.1, 672. 2 All translations of Spinoza are mine. 3 Frédéric Manzini, Spinoza: une lecture d’Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France – PUF, 2009), 236. 4 Vardoulakis proposes an alternative view, that ‘beatitudo’ is a translation for ‘ataraxia’ (αταραχια). He argues that Spinoza’s beatitudo lines up with an Epicurean understanding of ataraxia, where it means overcoming the fear of death (Vardoulakis, Spinoza, the Epicurean, 56). His account seems, at least to this extent, quite consistent with mine. 5 Manzini, Spinoza, 34–5, 239–40; Jon Miller, Spinoza and the Stoics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 179. 6 Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1920), 1.32.7; Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, ed. Ingram Bywater, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 1101a4–21. 7 Sophocles, Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 138. Though the term used by Sophocles is neither ‘eudaimon’ nor ‘makarios’ but ‘olbios’ (ὄλβῐος). 8 Peter Thomas Geach, The Virtues: The Stanton Lectures 1973–74 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 47. 9 A recent example is Martin Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (London: Profile Books, 2019). 10 Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae, quaestio 2, articulus 3. Edition used: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Rome: Forzani, 1894). 11 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), ch.3. 12 David Benatar, The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 200. 13 David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch.3; Benatar, The Human Predicament, ch.4. 14 Augustine, City of God, 19.4, 676. 15 Benatar, The Human Predicament, 203. 16 Benatar, 200. 17 Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 4–5. 18 Nadler, ch.10.

1 LIFE AS DEATH

In the City of God, Saint Augustine tells us that ‘the life of mortals […] is rather to be called death than life’.1 In the Confessions, he calls mortal life ‘a deathly life or a living death’.2 Our mortal life is really a death, not only because it is a gradual journey towards death but also, as Hannah Arendt puts it, ‘because it is continually threatened by the loss of what it is, and is even certain to lose it some day’.3 Thus the whole character of mortal life is defined by the haunting knowledge of its ultimate destruction. Life is ‘altogether determined by death’. Death pervades life and defines it. What applies to life, for Augustine, applies to all ‘temporal’ goods. We will inevitably lose them. Knowing this, we never properly have them. Fear of loss crowds in and claims its place alongside the enjoyment of possession. As Arendt summarises Augustine’s view: ‘The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake’.4 She describes this Augustinian theme as the destruction of the present by the future: Temporal goods originate and perish independently of man, who is tied to them by his desire. Constantly bound by craving and fear to a future full of uncertainties, we strip each present moment of its calm, its intrinsic import, which we are unable to enjoy. And so, the future destroys the present.5 Or, as Thomas Hobbes put it, we are like Prometheus, who had his liver fed upon every day: that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.6 DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-2

6  Life as Death

I mention Hobbes here partly because he, like Spinoza, finds this existential problem at the root of our social problems. But this point will need to wait for the moment. For now, our topic remains the existential problem, and the name that was given to the condition of being free of it: beatitude. Building upon the Augustinian theme, Thomas Aquinas concludes that our ultimate good – our beatitude – cannot reside in earthly life or temporal goods. It must be a state of repose in satiety. The anxious enjoyment of temporal goods can hardly be that. ‘Beatitude, as it is a perfect and sufficient good, excludes every evil and fulfils every desire’ (ST 1a2ae.q5.a3).7 But our earthly life, even if it is as fortunate as it can be, always contains evils, gnawing at the heart. It leaves unfulfilled desires: to hold on to what we are losing, to have back what we have lost, to escape the risk of losing what we still have. When we look back fondly to a time, a place, or a person now lost to us, we feel the pricking of a hopeless desire for return. As Proust wrote: ‘the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment’.8 To live with this regret, and in the perpetual fear of more of it, is to fall short of the perfect satisfaction of beatitude. Augustine concludes that a beatific life can only be an eternal life: ‘if it [life] is loved as it deserves to be […] then he who so loves it cannot but wish it to be eternal. Therefore it shall then only be blessed when it is eternal’.9 Elsewhere he gives a more formal argument that ‘beatitude cannot exist without immortality’. Supposing that our life ends, then: when it departs, without a doubt it departs someone either willing or unwilling or neither. If unwilling, how is it a blessed life, which is in one’s will but not in one’s power? […] But if it departs someone willing, then how was that a blessed life, when the one who had it wished to die? […] It remains to say that […] the blessed life departs someone […] neither unwilling nor willing, facing both with a resolved and level spirit. But nor is a life blessed, which fails to earn the love of the one it makes blessed. And in what way is something loved when its remaining or passing is indifferently accepted?10 To be in beatitude can only be to possess what we love enough to want never to lose it, and then never to lose it. Augustine locates this good beyond the duration of our mortal life. Within mortal life, Augustine believes, we can have only the hope of obtaining it. This hope is meant to provide salvation within our mortal lives. Thus Augustine quotes Paul’s Letter to the Romans (8:24): ‘in hope we have been saved’.11 For Augustine, as for Aquinas after him (ST 1a2ae.q5a3), hope of true happiness is the best we can achieve in our mortal life – ‘this life, which is miserably involved in the many and great evils of this world’. Through hope, this life can be as ‘happy as it is also safe’.12 It is important to remember that while Augustine writes about another life, he is giving advice in this one. The advice is to be hopeful of an eternal good. To hope for this good is to be as happy and safe as we can be in this life. In Pascal’s extreme formulation this will become: ‘the only good in this life

Life as Death  7

lies in the hope of another life’.13 This does not unchain Prometheus, but it allows him the small pleasure of dreaming of freedom. Against this argument, many have been tempted to reply that an eternal life is not worth hoping for. A central thesis of Martin Hägglund’s This Life is that ‘An eternal life is not only unattainable but also undesirable, since it would eliminate the care and passion that animate my life’.14 Bernard Williams argues similarly in a 1972 lecture, ‘The Macropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’.15 The title, Williams reports: Is drawn from a play by Karel Čapek which was made into an opera by Janaček and which tells of a woman called Elina Makropoulos […] on whom her father, the Court physician to a sixteenth-century Emperor, tried out an elixir of life. At the time of the action she is aged 342. Her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference, and coldness. Everything is joyless: ‘in the end it is the same,’ she says, ‘singing and silence’. She refuses to take the elixir again; she dies and the formula is deliberately destroyed by a young woman among the protests of some older men.16 The moral of the story is that: an endless life would be a meaningless one; and that we could have no reason for living eternally a human life. There is no desirable or significant property which life would have more of, or have more unqualifiedly, if we lasted for ever.17 Another demonstration comes in Madeleine’s Miller’s Circe, in which the goddess has a realisation: ‘I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands’.18 Such thoughts were not unknown in Spinoza’s time, of course; Michel de Montaigne has Nature speak to us: Chiron refused immortality, being informed of the conditions thereof, even by the God of time and of continuance, Saturn his father. Imagine truly how much an ever-during life would be less tolerable and more painful to man than is the life which I have given him. Had you not death, you would then incessantly curse and cry out against me that I had deprived you of it.19 But if it is true that indefinitely continued life becomes undesirable at some point, then there we take the second horn of Augustine’s trilemma. Life would at that point depart from somebody willing, as Elina Makropoulos was. And then we face Augustine’s question: how can a life be blessed, when somebody who has it is willing to lose it? We could reply that such a life might have been blessed until the ‘tedium of immortality’ set in. But then that portion of life – the age in which its freshness

8  Life as Death

and excitement were yet in flower – did not depart someone willing. Someone undergoing the transition from enjoying life into being bored of it would regret the transition and long to tarry in the earlier phase. Or if she didn’t – and here we can reiterate Augustine’s argument one level down – then she couldn’t have been feeling so excited about her life after all. A person who lives long enough to be bored of living does not escape the pain of loss. The loss just comes earlier than death, or rather it comes with a different sort of death – a death of joie de vivre. If we couldn’t possibly enjoy something eternal then we might conclude from this that the state of beatitude is impossible by definition. But this is not quite so. There are the other options listed by Augustine. We might either want to lose our life or feel indifferent about losing it. Either way, our satisfaction in life will be untroubled by its ultimate loss, and while we have it, we will be in a state of temporary beatitude. But Augustine is unable to see how we could have true satisfaction in something whose loss we either actively desire or don’t care about. For some philosophers, this attitude is where our real trouble lies. They say that we must learn to escape it. We must learn to be satisfied with things without worrying about losing them. The key to this line of reply is the Augustinian complaint that, as Arendt puts it, ‘the future destroys the present’. The angst of a future loss – the gnawing of the heart spoken of by Hobbes – steals from the enjoyment of a present good. But Hobbes observes that this condition afflicts the person ‘which looks too far before him, in the care of future time’, and in his mythological analogy he notes that ‘Prometheus’ means ‘the prudent man’.20 The philosopher and historian Catherine Macaulay believed that this ‘prudence’ – this habit of looking towards the future – is the real source of our woes. It is, she thought, a distortion of our natural tendency to simply live in the moment (as we might put it today). It might be too late for us to escape the habit of worrying about the future. But we can, Macaulay believed, end the intergenerational cycle of disappointment, by raising our children to develop a different psychological pattern: The mind naturally fastens on present objects, and it is only from being continually called off to interesting prospects of futurity, that she acquires a habit of absenting herself from every thing which is not adapted from its inviting qualities to command her attention. It ought to be the particular care of parents and tutors, to strengthen and confirm this natural propensity of the mind, so favourable to virtue and happiness.21 A child raised to focus only on the present could then perhaps achieve beatitude without any need for the eternal, simply enjoying the present moment at every instant.22 André Comte-Sponville explicitly advances this as a path to beatitude – he believes that we can train ourselves into the habit of living in the present and not merely educate our children into it. He is useful for my exposition because he explicitly uses the term ‘beatitude’. Moreover, he sees his theory of beatitude as

Life as Death  9

expressing ‘the spirit of Spinoza’.23 I will argue that it ultimately fails as an account of what Spinoza means, but it is worth looking at for a useful contrast. The first step to achieving beatitude, for Comte-Sponville, is to escape a certain psychological trap, triggered by the confusion of desire with hope. In a lecture whose title could be translated ‘Hopeless Happiness’, Comte-Sponville addresses a doctrine outlined by Plato in the Symposium (200e): ‘the thing that we don’t have, the thing that is missing, the thing that we lack – such are the objects of desire and love’.24 This notion – that all desire is for what we don’t have – makes happiness impossible: if desire is lack, we by definition desire only that which we don’t have. Now if we desire only that which we don’t have, we never have what we desire. Thus we are never happy. It is not that desire is never satisfied – life is not always difficult in this way. It is, rather, that as soon as desire is satisfied, there is no longer lack, and thus no longer desire. As soon as desire is satisfied, it is abolished as desire. ‘Pleasure’, writes Sartre, ‘is the death and the failure of desire’. And far from having what one desires, one in this way has what one had desired and no longer desires.25 Comte-Sponville supplies an evocative example to illustrate this point. A child has spent all year longing for a Christmas gift. Receiving it in the morning he is giddy with excitement. But by the afternoon he has lost interest and is already asking when the next Christmas will come. To his perplexed parents the child can give no explanation. But Comte-Sponville supplies one on his behalf: What I am beginning to understand, you see, is that it is very easy to desire the toy that we don’t have – the one that we lack – and to say that we would be happy if we had it […]. But it is much more difficult to desire the toy that we have – the one that we don’t lack! At its heart this is what Plato explains: desire is lack. The toy you have given me I don’t lack, for I have it, and so I no longer desire it […]. How could I be happy? I don’t have what I desire, but only what I had desired.26 The child, in other words, was not raised according to Macaulay’s advice. He can’t desire what he has, and he can only be happy by having what he desires. So happiness is impossible for him. The best thing for this child, it might appear, would be to try not to desire at all. Why waste effort pursuing what can’t make us happy? That is what ComteSponville elsewhere identifies as a ‘Buddhist’ answer.27 But his own diagnosis is that Plato’s great mistake was to ‘confuse desire with hope’.28 We can, in fact, desire what we already have, and we can enjoy the fulfilled desire of possessing it. What we can’t do is hope for what we already have. Here Comte-Sponville defines ‘hope’ as desire that is without enjoyment, without knowledge, and without power. It is this sort of desire that we must learn to do without.

10  Life as Death

First, hope is desire without enjoyment. One does not hope for what one has and enjoys. McTaggart once defended the idea that we can have a desire for something that is known to obtain.29 But we wouldn’t call this desire a hope. It makes no sense to hope for what we are already enjoying, though we might hope for it to continue. In addition, hope is desire without knowledge. As Béatrice Han-Pile puts it, ‘I cannot hope that two and two make four because I know that they do’.30 Hope is tied to uncertainty: ‘why hope for what one sees?’, as Saint Paul says (Romans 8:24). If I desire something that I don’t yet enjoy but know with certainty that I soon will, then I look forward to it rather than hoping for it. Moreover, we can only hope for something that is already the case when we don’t know that it is already the case – for instance, ‘I hope that you are well’. Finally, hope is desire without power. Han-Pile notes that: I may desire to move my arm to reach for a cup of tea but I cannot hope that I will because I know from long experience that (in standard circumstances) doing so is both up to me and within my own power alone.31 Likewise it is impudence for a teenager to reply ‘I hope so’, when his parents ask if he will tidy his room. The thing is in his power; hope does not come into it. Thus Comte-Sponville paraphrases and expounds a teaching of Seneca: ‘When you have unlearned hope I will teach you effort [Quand tu auras désappris à espérer, je t’apprendrai à vouloir]’ – or, put otherwise, action, since to try and to act are one and the same thing [vouloir et faire son une seule et même chose].32 To hope, then, is to desire without enjoyment, knowledge, or power. Comte-Sponville takes these conjunctively. But the structure seems slightly more complex. Perhaps, for instance, we can hope for what is within our power when we don’t know that it’s within our power, like Dorothy with the ruby slippers. Where we can agree with Comte-Sponville is that, for a desire to manifest as a hope, at least one of these three – enjoyment, knowledge, or power – must be lacking. What you know that you will certainly have, or certainly have the power to obtain, is not an object of hope for you. Comte-Sponville’s argument is that since enjoyment, knowledge, and power are three fundamental goods in a human life, hope is inimical to the human good. It cannot exist where these three exist (alongside desire). Hope and happiness can never unite. Against this, he endorses a philosophy of happy hopelessness, in a book called A Treatise on Hopelessness and Beatitude.33 This philosophy of happy hopelessness lies, he claims, at the heart of materialism and atheism. Hopelessness is the primary virtue of atheism, as hope is the primary virtue of religion.34 Comte-Sponville takes for his motto the inversion of Søren Kierkegaard’s doctrine, that ‘the opposite to being in despair is to have faith’.35

Life as Death  11

Being opposed to faith, which is after all ‘the substance of things hoped for’ (Heb. 11:1), Comte-Sponville recommends that we practice despair (désespoir), by which he means not lamentation but only ‘the degree zero of hope’.36 To show the way to this position, he first proposes two ways to think about desire: Either – first hypothesis – you think of desire as being the effect of its object, governed by that at which it aims and which attracts it. I love this woman because she is lovable. I love this painting because it is beautiful. I love God because he is good. And thus you submit to the law of its [desire’s] negative essence, which is of non-being, non-possession (‘that which we do not have, that which is missing, that which we lack – these are the objects of desire and love’, writes Plato), or of being only a lesser being and having nothing in itself besides the void of the object’s absence. In short, you think of desire in terms of lack: and this is religion, that is to say, idealism and finalism together. […] Or – second hypothesis – you think that desire is only governed by itself (by its positive essence), that it is not a lesser being but a power, that it is not a lack but a force – and that, consequently, the desirability of an object is the effect rather than the cause of the desire that strives for it. This woman is lovable because I love her. This painting is beautiful because it pleases me. God is good – if I like. Nothing summons us. Nothing attracts us. It is the desire in us that strives, the desire in us that compels.37 Comte-Sponville tells us that the ‘spirit of Spinoza’ infuses the second hypothesis – the belief that ‘pleasure, knowledge, and action have nothing to do with hope and even, in proportion to their reality, exclude it’.38 As he sees it: ‘Desire is, for Spinoza, entirely on the side of being, of life, of affirmation – and not at all, as Plato and so many others would like, on the side of lack or nothingness’.39 If we desire in this way, we do not desire objects that draw us along by psychological magnetism. Rather, desire is autonomous. We bestow desirability upon objects by desiring them. This means that, so long as we can control our desire, our desire need never be hope. We can select and render desirable only those objects that are present, known, and within our power. Comte-Sponville believes that if we follow the first hypothesis instead, taking objects to determine desire, then desire will always retain an element of hope. Even if I know and enjoy the thing I desire, I might lose it soon, and I will certainly lose it eventually. Any object whatsoever, even the well-harboured ‘inner goods’ of the Stoics – my reason, my mind – can fall out of my power, knowledge, or enjoyment, as Augustine argued.40 If the objects draw our desire then they can continue to do so even after drifting away. We cannot then help longing for them. So even in the full light of enjoyment there is the shadow of a parting. This shadow is a limit to our knowledge, our power, and our enjoyment – a negation, a lack, that infiltrates the presence of the object.

12  Life as Death

Augustine proposes, as we saw, that when our life is haunted by death and loss we can only hope for beatitude – for pure happiness. Comte-Sponville reverses this: it is because we hope that we are separated from beatitude. If our desire isn’t hope then we can desire only those objects that fall within our knowledge, power, and possession, and only to the extent that they thus fall. If we desire in this way, then we live without hope. We never desire what we do not fully have, and so we always fully have what we desire. There is one final string to pull and then Comte-Sponville’s argument falls into place. We can choose which hypothesis of desire to validate. We can choose to allow objects to determine our desire, as per the first hypothesis. Or, as per the second – the ‘Spinozist’ theory as Comte-Sponville sees it – we can choose to have our desire reign over its objects. If we choose the first, our joy will always be blighted by loss, uncertainty, fear, and sadness. Our desires will always involve hope. If we choose the second, our joy will always be entirely under our control. It will be as full and perfect as we want it to be. Hope, for Comte-Sponville, is therefore not simply a species of desire. It is a pathology of desire. To be hopeful is desire what is absent or at least is not grasped without the threat of loss. And hopefulness, he argues, is what produces religion. ‘God is right to love hope so much; it is what makes him live’.41 To hope is to be inevitably troubled by unfulfilled desires and the pangs of loss. It makes us long for the eternal – the unlosable – and to conjure it out of the air by wishful thinking. And yet hoping for an eternal good that we have conjured in our imagination, while encountering only the temporal goods of earthly life, means always being a bit sad about what we have. ‘To live by hope’, Comte-Sponville continues, ‘is to live by illusions – whence religion, whence sadness’.42 The illusions and the sadness are unnecessary if it is possible, as Comte-Sponville so keenly urges, to desire in a different way, one that is immune to hope: If the sage desires nothing besides what depends upon him (his volitions) or what he knows (the real), what need has he of hope? This is the spirit of Stoicism. It is the spirit of Spinoza. It is the spirit of Epicurus. Pleasure, knowledge, and action have nothing to do with hope, and even, in proportion to their reality, exclude it.43 These beliefs are common enough, and they do reach back to the Stoics. And there is indeed a clear link with Spinoza. Spinoza proclaims that wherever there is hope there is also fear, since whoever merely hopes for something allows the possibility that it won’t obtain, and must fear that possibility (E 3p50s, def.aff.12–13.exp). Hope is therefore haunted by anxiety and is not a perfect state of happiness. This much would also be admitted by Augustine. His claim is not that perfect happiness in this mortal life is found in hope. It is that the closest we can come to perfect happiness in this life is to hope for it in eternity. Comte-Sponville’s reply is that we can achieve perfect happiness in this life by renouncing the hope for eternal happiness.

Life as Death  13

For Spinoza to agree with this, he would have to share Comte-Sponville’s conviction that such a renunciation is possible. There are perhaps creatures who never suffer the pangs of loss because they don’t notice it. They enjoy consuming what is front of them, and by the time it has gone they have forgotten all about it. But human philosophies must be liveable by human beings. When Augustine makes the argument we examined earlier, he assumes as a premise that only somebody who didn’t love or enjoy her life could be accepting or indifferent towards its passing, somebody like the ‘Genuine Human Beings of old’ in the Zhuangzi (6:9) who, we are told: understood nothing about delighting in being alive or hating death. They emerged without delight, submerged again without resistance. Swooping in they came and swooping out they went, that and no more. Receiving it, they delighted in it. Forgetting about it, they gave it back.44 But it is axiomatic for Augustine that we, who value our lives, are not like this. Likewise Aquinas asserts: life itself passes away, as much as we naturally desire it and wish for it to remain permanently, because a human being naturally flees from death. (ST 1a2ae.5.3) a human being naturally desires to retain the good that she has and to obtain security of possession, otherwise she is necessarily afflicted by the fear of loss, or grief at the certainty of loss. (ST 1a2ae.5.4) And Spinoza? He agrees with Augustine and Aquinas on this point. For him, striving to persevere in one’s being is the very essence of humanity (E 3p6), and he states unequivocally that this striving ‘involves an indefinite, not a finite time’ (E 3p8). We have no choice about this. We strive to go on indefinitely. This striving is the foundation of desire, for Spinoza. It is how he defines desire (E 3p9s). Later we will see how Spinoza derives more specific desires from this foundation. The important point here is that, if we know that our life must end, then this desire to go on indefinitely must be mixed with fear and sadness. Comte-Sponville’s path of renunciation is simply not an option for us. It goes against our very essence. As the hero of Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession puts it: ‘to inhabit the present only, without the power which may recall the dear scenes of old, is to die as a prisoner in the cell of the securest prison of the loneliest island. No, as a beast’.45 And with longing for the past comes concern for the future. This is not, as Macaulay proposes, a distortion of our nature. It is our nature. If we can achieve perfect happiness in this life, therefore, we can’t do it by renouncing all desire to hold onto goods indefinitely. Our essential desire is to hold

14  Life as Death

onto being indefinitely. Spinoza is unambiguous on this point: ‘a person affected by joy wants nothing other than to preserve it, and wants this more the greater the joy is’ (E 3p37d). This is precisely the same point that Augustine uses as a premise, to argue that perfect beatitude – utterly fulfilled desire – can’t be achieved in this life. And yet Spinoza disagrees with Augustine’s conclusion. He believes that beatitude is possible in this life. What allows him to do so? Comte-Sponville gives the wrong answer, but he says one thing that guides us towards the right answer, namely that hope is desire without knowledge. If we know that we both have what we desire and will never lose it, then we can rejoice in this knowledge. Our desire to have our joy preserved indefinitely will be fulfilled. Spinoza points out that when doubt is removed, hope is transformed into either ‘security’ (securitas) or ‘despair’ (desperatio), depending on which way the doubt is removed (E 3p18s2). Comte-Sponville takes the path of despair: proposing to renounce the desire for doubtful things. But for Spinoza we can’t change our fundamental desire. The only possible path is the other: that of security. We must secure the object of our desire from all possibility of loss and be in in no doubt about this. Then we can be in a state of beatitude rather than merely hoping for it. Spinoza believes this to be possible. Beatitude can be certainly achieved within mortal life.46 Augustine does not allow this, because of his belief that each of us is stained by sin, which cuts us off from assured beatitude. For any of us, the weight of sin might be too great to allow eternal blessedness.47 Spinoza does not share this view of sin. But his position is less distant from Augustine’s than it might at first appear.48 One distracting point is that Spinoza uses ‘sin’ (peccatum) in a non-theological sense, to mean disobeying the civil authority (E 4p37s2; TTP ch.16, O3.506).49 But if we look past the specific word, we can see that Spinoza recognises the condition that, according to Augustine, cuts us off from beatitude, beginning with the Fall of Adam. Spinoza also makes reference to this Fall, proposing that through it humanity enters into a condition of fearing death rather than desiring life, or fearing evil rather than desiring good (E 4p68s; TTP 4.11, O3.200).50 A life of constant fear is not a beatific life. Thus the condition of the Fall cuts us off from beatitude, for Spinoza just as for Augustine. But Spinoza believes that we can overcome the condition of the Fall in this life, rather than merely hoping we have done enough for God to lead us beyond it in the next. Augustine warns against this sort of presumption. To those who claim to have escaped the condition of the Fall, he quotes the First Letter of John: ‘If we say we have no sin we lead ourselves astray and the truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8). Explaining a similar point, Geach notes that hope is a Christian virtue precisely because it ‘preserves a mean between despair and presumption’.51 Along very similar lines, Spinoza’s contemporary Mary Astell proposed that fear poises our Christian hope and thus keeps it ‘from Presumption and Security’.52 ‘Security’ is the word Spinoza uses for what becomes of hope when doubt is removed (E 3def.aff.14). For Christians it is a dangerous presumption, and there is something to their warning. The world is of course full of people who believe themselves to have transcended their sinful nature, at least more so than the others whose failings and offenses they

Life as Death  15

eagerly expose, condemn, and ridicule. Such people forge their self-esteem on the teeth of invidious moral comparisons and boast of their righteous anger.53 In other words, their presumption of sinlessness – their presumptuous security – leads them towards sin: towards envy and wrath, all traced to pride, which Augustine quotes the Book of Ecclesiasticus (10:13) in calling ‘the beginning of sin’.54 About these people the Letter of John is right: they lead themselves astray by saying they have no sin. But Spinoza is no proponent of this sort of presumption. While he believes humility and penitence to be defective states, falling short of beatitude, he notes that ‘when there must be sin, it is better to sin in that direction’, rather than in the direction of excessive self-esteem (E 4p54s). He is careful to distinguish prideful presumption from the true security of beatitude. And he notes, in the same passage, that those moved by humility and penitence have a better chance of eventually ‘enjoying the life of the blessed’. But how can somebody actually enjoying such a life ever be sure that she isn’t mistaking prideful presumption for true beatitude? Spinoza, no less than Augustine, acknowledges the delusive power of the pride that rages inside each one of us. He calls it a species of madness (E 3p26s), and notes that we are all motivated by ambition and the thirst for glory (E 3def.aff.44; 4p52s; TP 7.27). This pride leads us to delusions about ourselves, including the delusion that we are beyond sin. To defend his theory of beatitude, Spinoza must show that we can recognise and overcome this pride. To see how, we must understand his philosophical anthropology and his account of the Fall. This begins with his theory of desire.

Notes 1 Augustine, City of God, 13.10. 2 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Sarah Ruden (New York: Random House, 2018), 1.7. 3 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10. 4 Arendt, 10. 5 Arendt, 9. 6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 12.5. 7 ‘ST’ throughout refers to: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Rome: Forzani, 1894). 8 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 579–80. 9 Augustine, City of God, 14.25, 474. 10 Augustine, De Trinitate, ed. W. J. Mountain and F. Glorie (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), 13.8. 11 Augustine, City of God, 19.4, 680. 12 Augustine, 19.4, 680. 13 Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, ed. Anthony Levi, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), §681, 160. 14 Hägglund, This Life, 4. 15 Bernard Williams, ed., ‘The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’, in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 82–100. 16 Williams, 82.

16  Life as Death

17 Williams, 89. 18 Madeline Miller, Circe (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 333. 19 ‘To Philosophise is to Learn How to Die’, in Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 107. 20 Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, 12.5. 21 Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 81. 22 Of course the child would suffer painful episodes, but could forget them immediately afterwards; with a bit of luck, life could be mostly pleasant. 23 André Comte-Sponville, Le bonheur, désespérément (Paris: Librio, 2003), 40. 24 Comte-Sponville, 22. This is my translation of Comte-Sponville’s translation of Plato. 25 Comte-Sponville, 23. 26 Comte-Sponville, 25. 27 André Comte-Sponville, Traité du désespoir et de la béatitude (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016), Intro.1, 1.2, etc. 28 Comte-Sponville, Le bonheur, désespérément, 33. 29 John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, ed. Charlie Dunbar Broad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), §448. 30 Béatrice Han-Pile, ‘Hope, Powerlessness, and Agency’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41, no. 1 (1 September 2017): 179, https://doi.org/10.1111/misp.12069 31 Han-Pile, 179. 32 Comte-Sponville, Le bonheur, désespérément, 41. I translate ‘vouloir’ as ‘effort’ and ‘to try’ because of Comte-Sponville’s claim that vouloir and faire are the same thing. I assume he is making the same point that Geach makes in saying that ‘to try to do something is always actually to do something else: e.g. to try to write with numbed fingers is actually to seize and move the pen’, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Peter Thomas Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1973), 108. 33 Comte-Sponville, Traité du désespoir et de la béatitude. 34 Comte-Sponville, 20. 35 Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. Alastair Hannay, First Printing edition (London: Penguin, 1989), 79. 36 Comte-Sponville, Traité du désespoir et de la béatitude, 19. 37 Comte-Sponville, 242–3. 38 Comte-Sponville, Le bonheur, désespérément, 40. 39 Comte-Sponville, Traité du désespoir et de la béatitude, 72. 40 Augustine, City of God, 19.4. 41 Comte-Sponville, Traité du désespoir et de la béatitude, 29. 42 Comte-Sponville, 30. 43 Comte-Sponville, Le bonheur, désespérément, 40. 44 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009), 40. There is also a theory of eternal life in the Zhuangzi that is, in my view, the same as Spinoza’s, but this will be discussed in detail in a later chapter. 45 Timothy Mo, An Insular Possession (London: Paddleless Press, 2002), 731. 46 Han van Ruler notes that a version of this doctrine had already appeared in Erasmus Han van Ruler, ‘La Sage et l’Amour de Dieu. Conceptions Philosophiques de La Béatitude d’Érasme à Spinoza’, in Spinoza et La Renaissance, ed. Saverio Ansaldi (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 58. 47 Augustine, City of God, 14.9, 455. 48 Clare Carlisle makes the case for maintaining a strong parallel between Spinoza’s thought and that of St Paul, despite his rejecting the traditional concept of sin, Clare Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion: A New Reading of the Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 156. Augustine’s position draws heavily on St Paul, so I believe I can recruit Carlisle’s arguments to my own purpose here.

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49 Pierre-François Moreau and Piet Steenbakkers argue that Spinoza is using a broader, non-theological sense of ‘peccatum’ in their notes to their edition of the Ethics. Thus Moreau justifies his use of ‘faute’ rather than ‘péché’ in the parallel translation (O.2, 524n.66). 50 Carlise gives a useful comparative analysis of Spinoza’s interpretation of the Fall and some Christian teachings: Clare Carlisle, ‘Spinoza on Eternal Life’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 89, no. 1 (1 February 2015): 14; Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 156–61. 51 Geach, The Virtues, 47. 52 Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, ed. Jacqueline Broad (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), §254. 53 Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call this ‘grandstanding’, and argue that we are all guilty of it – again Spinoza must disagree in the case of the blessed. Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 54 Augustine, City of God, 460. The Book of Ecclesiasticus, also known as Sirach or the Book of Ben Sira, is part of the Scriptural Canon for Catholics and some other groups but not for many others (e.g. it is not part of the Jewish Canon). The manuscripts and some information can be viewed at: https://bensira.org/. The Solonic adage quoted in my Introduction – that no one is to be called happy before death – also appears in that book (11:28).

2 METAPHYSICAL DESIRE

René Girard is known for his thesis of mimetic desire: we desire whatever we think others desire.1 While it is commonplace to observe that humans are generally imitative,2 the theory that we imitate desires is rarer. It is a confronting theory, because we tend to define ourselves by our desires. Our tastes, our preferences, our dreams and longings – do these not make us who we are? Spinoza certainly believed so, claiming that ‘desire is the very essence of a human being’ (E 3.Def.Aff.1). We like to think that our desires, defining who we are, arise from deep within us. But Girard dismisses this as vanity – the ‘romantic lie’: The romantic vaniteux always wants to convince himself that his desire is written into the nature of things, or, which amounts to the same thing, that it is the emanation of a serene subjectivity, the creation ex nihilo of a quasi-divine ego.3 If we want to look for a myth that defines our modern culture, this romantic notion – the ‘quasi-divine ego’ – is well worth considering. Pankaj Mishra suggests that: the autonomous self-directed individual […] who chooses and pursues his own desires, and thereby comes to possess his individuality [is] the hypothesis which lies even now, in an age where mass manipulation is a respectable industry, at the basis of modern civilisation.4 Comte-Sponville draws upon this hypothesis of the ‘autonomous self-directed individual’ when he promotes the theory that the subject chooses the object of desire over the theory that the object determines itself as desirable. But both of his theories understand desire as what Girard calls ‘a straight line which joins subject and object’.5 By contrast, Girard’s theory of mimetic desire sees it as a triangular DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-3

Metaphysical Desire  19

relationship: ‘The mediator is there, above that line, radiating toward both the subject and the object’.6 This mediator – the model from whom the subject’s desires are copied – is a figure that appears in neither of Comte-Sponville’s theories. It is, according to Girard, what the mythology of the ‘romantic lie’ occludes. Although not all his readers have noticed this, Girard’s mimetic theory is grounded in a more fundamental theory of desire. This is the theory of metaphysical desire – the theory that, as he puts it, ‘all desire is a desire for being’.7 What we desire, most fundamentally, is not an object distinct from ourselves. We fundamentally desire to be something or someone, though we do not always reflect on this, nor can we often securely say what or who we desire to be. Our desires for objects are only instrumental towards this fundamental metaphysical desire. If I desire to consume a certain food, or wear a certain item of clothing, or marry somebody, it is because I believe that doing these things will help to make me the person I desire to be.8 This thesis of metaphysical desire also lies at the heart of Spinoza’s psychological theory.9 He asserts, as we saw, that the essence of each person is to strive after her own being (E 3p6–7).10 This striving is defined as appetite (E 3p9s) and, when combined with consciousness, as desire. More specific desires derive from this ultimate pursuit of being. They are, as Alexandre Matheron puts it, ‘reduced to fragmentary aspects and partial consequences of a more fundamental desire, which is simply for a self ’.11 Ferdinand Alquié finds a strange paradox in Spinoza’s theory of desire, that ‘while it has rejected all subordination of desire to ends, it remains attached to the search for the sovereign good’.12 The resolution of the paradox is that desire isn’t subordinated to the striving for any end external to the subject, because the sovereign good it searches for is the subject herself, being in the way she desires to be. This theory of metaphysical desire is the foundation of a psychological and ethical theory in Spinoza, which leads all the way up to his theory of beatitude as the state of perfect satisfaction: the ultimate achievement of the being we pursue. But a theory of mimetic desire is also present in Spinoza’s philosophy and plays an indispensable role. It is the bridge between Spinoza’s personal ethics of beatitude and his social and political philosophy. Before coming to this mimetic theory, we must ask: what does it mean to strive after one’s own being? There is a striking passage in a lecture by Jean-Paul Sartre, in which he tries to explain the first principle of his existentialist philosophy: man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.13 To exist and yet ‘be nothing’ must mean, here, to fall under no particular description while still being present. This is the condition into which humans are thrown, according to Sartre.

20  Metaphysical Desire

But that condition is a logical impossibility. Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out that recognising this is a key philosophical contribution of Aristotle’s.14 We can’t meaningfully speak of a thing existing through time without bringing it under some description. To exist through time is to remain the same object from moment to moment, and we can’t speak ‘as if there were such a thing as being the same without being the same such-and-such’.15 For example, if I blow out a candle and then ask whether it is still there, the question has no determinate answer until I specify whether by ‘it’ I mean a candle, a lit candle, or a certain quantum of energy. To speak of an existent object under no description, Anscombe argues in a more technical context, ‘suggests a phantasmic notion of the individual as a “bare particular” with no properties, because it supposes a continued identity independent of what is true of the object’.16 Such a principle was endorsed by Spinoza’s contemporary, Johannes Clauberg, who worked alongside him.17 In his logic textbook, which Spinoza owned,18 Clauberg proposes that the essence or nature of a thing is that ‘by which the thing both is and is-what-it-is: thus humanity is the essence of a human being and divinity is the essence of God’. Most importantly, Clauberg states that a thing’s essence answers the question ‘what is it?’, which is prior to the question of its existence – the question ‘is it?’.19 In other words, it is Clauberg’s view that Sartre directly contradicts in claiming that existence precedes essence. On the contrary, for Clauberg essence must precede existence (speaking of logical rather than temporal precedence). A thing must be something specific in order to be at all.20 Françoise Dastur criticises Sartre’s ethical project on this point. He fails, according to Dastur, to recognise the need for accepting that we always already are something, which we did not choose. This – what she calls ‘the assumption of [our] being assigned to something already given’ – is vital to the sort of freedom Sartre promotes, she holds.21 But wherever the matter lies ethically, it seems a metaphysical necessity that anything that exists for any period of time must be something, in the sense of falling under some description.22 In fact any existent is indefinitely many ‘somethings’: all the descriptions under which it falls. Through time it will continue to fall under some while ceasing to fall under others, as we continue to fall under the description ‘human being’ while ceasing to fall under the description ‘baby’. We shed descriptions as a snake sheds skins. The ethical question is which should be the deepest layer – which we would we like to keep until the end. When Spinoza speaks of our striving after being, he uses the term ‘esse’ for being. This is distinct from another term for being, ‘ens’, which, he claims, expresses a merely confused concept (E 2p40s1, O4.216). When I think of many things at once, and fail to distinguish them, I end up with a confused idea, which applies indifferently to all of them: this is ‘ens’. ‘Esse’, by contrast, connotes being of a certain definite kind. As Aquinas put it: ‘every esse exists according to some form’ (ST 1a. q5. a5. ad 3um). Spinoza is clear that when he discusses esse he is talking about continued existence. Specifically, he says that each thing strives ‘ad perseverare in suo esse’ – to persevere in its being (E 3p6). Persevering as a human being involves, at some point in time, no longer remaining a baby. Since retaining a given esse always

Metaphysical Desire  21

involves change, Spinoza cannot mean that each thing strives to remain in exactly the state it is in, as various scholars have shown.23 Indeed, we might seek to persevere in an esse that we don’t yet possess: the first step towards persevering in being X will then be beginning to be X. But there is no sense in denying, as Sartre appears to do, that a person is always already something, though it might not be what she ultimately strives to be. It could be that Sartre exaggerates for effect. His claim that the human being ‘to begin with is nothing’ might just be a dramatic way of saying what he says later: ‘there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it’.24 This suggests that there is no particular way of being that inherently pertains to us, as if by divine ordination. That is, it is entirely up to us to decide what sort of being we strive to attain. Repeatedly Sartre tells us that there is nothing to guide us in this choice; we: cannot find anything to rely on – neither within nor without [;] we have neither behind us, nor before us, in the luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse [;] man [cannot] find refuge in some given sign that will guide him on earth; […] man interprets the sign as he pleases and […] is therefore without any support or help, condemned at all times to invent man.25 Sartre offers no ultimate explanation of why, if this is true, we shouldn’t make things as easy as possible for ourselves and ‘invent’ the easiest possible goal. Why not, indeed, decide to be what you already are? Then your goal is achieved de facto and you can relax. Sartre’s existentialism would then collapse into the cheapest ethics of self-acceptance – a notion that many in the self-help industry have used to their financial advantage. Worse than this, Sartre seems to turn human life into the pursuit of a void. According to the theory of metaphysical desire, what we wish for is, as Spinoza puts it, ‘to form an idea of a human being, as an exemplar of human nature we can look towards’ (E 4pref, O4.344): an idea of the sort of being we would like to become. Certainly we can simply fabricate some such exemplary idea for ourselves. But we know that at a whim we could always smash that idol and replace it with another of our choosing.26 How then can we find any meaning in pursuing it? As Kierkegaard put it: The self wants […] to savour to the full the satisfaction of making itself into itself […]. And yet what it understands itself to be is in the final instance a riddle; just when it seems on the point of having the building finished, at a whim it can dissolve the whole thing into nothing.27 Spinoza tells us that ‘all luminous things are as difficult as they are rare’ (E 5p42s). If answering to metaphysical desire were a matter of pursuing an ideal we had arbitrarily fabricated, and could entirely replace whenever we liked, it would be as easy as it is empty.

22  Metaphysical Desire

Spinoza’s position is distinguished from Sartre’s by his claim that the being that each person (indeed each thing) seeks to preserve is her own being – ‘suo esse’. Matheron argues that we can think of Spinoza’s ‘striving to persevere in being’ as a kind of life-drive or desire to live, but only if we concede that ‘life is not reducible to the circulation of the blood, nor to other biological functions’. Rather, ‘to live is to live according to my individual essence’.28 To consciously pursue your being is to have an image of what it would look like to express your true essence and to follow this image as your exemplar.29 Moreover, your essence defines your good and indeed your beatitude: ‘the desire to live well or blessedly [beate] is the human essence itself, that is, the striving of each one to persevere in her being’ (E 4p21d). Thus, rather like the contemporary moral theorist Linda Zagzebski,30 Spinoza proposes to give content to the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ by way of the idea of an exemplar: By ‘good’, in what follows, I will understand what we certainly know to be a means to conform more and more to an exemplar of human nature that we propose. And by ‘bad’ I will understand that which we certainly know to impede us in matching to that exemplar. (E4.Pref., O2.344) The ideas of good, evil, virtuous action, etc. all orbit around the idea of essential being, represented in the exemplar. It is here that the theory of metaphysical desire begins to lead into the theory of mimetic desire.31 Before explaining this transition, it is worth noting that the theory of metaphysical desire is quite unorthodox. The dominant tendency in philosophy and social science is to begin the analysis of desire at the level of objects. Human choices are modelled as the outcome of preferences, which are taken to range over objects or activities. Some theorists treat these objects as instrumental towards a further good, such as pleasure or utility. But not many will go on to present them as fundamentally instrumental towards a norm of essential or ideal being.32 Of course there are exceptions. R.G. Collingwood, for instance, analyses human appetite into two basic forms, hunger and love.33 He understands both of these as striving for a transition from an ‘actual self’ into an ‘ideal self’. Thus a hungry person wants ‘to be strong’; the ‘ideal self of hunger is a strengthened self ’.34 Hunger is a desire for sustenance only instrumentally, insofar as sustenance serves the higher end of being a strengthened self. Likewise love ‘is wanting to be attached’. Its ideal self is ‘a self which has achieved a relation with something other than itself ’.35 The beloved is an indirect object of love but not the direct object. Having someone to be attached to is instrumental to being attached, but what is fundamentally sought is the type of being itself. Some lovers are even happy to substitute one beloved for another, in order to sustain the fundamentally desired condition of being attached to somebody. As for hunger, Collingwood goes on to propose that: ‘The ideal self which is the object of a hungry man’s appetite is a god’.36 The god is ‘the notion of what a hungry man is pursuing: the infinitely magnified image of himself ’.37 Notice how rapidly

Metaphysical Desire  23

we then slide from metaphysical to mimetic desire. From the metaphysical theory of desire (hunger) as a desire for being (an ideal self), Collingwood arrives almost instantaneously at the idea of an external model – what Spinoza calls an exemplar – for one’s desire: a god. To desire being is to be taken up with the image of a god. It is to desire according to a notion of an ideal self: the archetype of the essence you wish to express. And a natural form for this notion to take is that of a model to be emulated. Precisely the same transition, from metaphysical to mimetic desire, occurs in Girard. Girard is sometimes misread as claiming that there is no desire that isn’t imitated from someone else.38 This runs to a regress: how did anyone come to desire in the first place? But Girard’s story of the origin of mimetic desire in fact points to a primordial metaphysical desire: Once his basic needs are satisfied (indeed, sometimes even before), man is subject to intense desires, though he may not know precisely for what. The reason is that he desires being, something he himself lacks and which some other person seems to possess. The subject thus looks to that other person to inform him of what he should desire in order to acquire that being. If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, the object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plenitude of being.39 In other words, humans look to others as models for their desires because they already have a fundamental desire for being. This fundamental metaphysical desire explains why other desires are imitated. We want to be like our model, and this involves wanting what the model wants. But the desire for being can’t be itself imitated, since it is what drove us to seek a model in the first place.40 It is hardly surprising that mimetic desire should be a by-product of metaphysical desire. One natural way of thinking is in terms of images or at least symbols – representations of real or imagined external objects. Thus it is natural for our metaphysical desire, which must involve some notion of the being – the esse – that we desire to obtain, to coalesce around the concrete image of some ideal person. Collingwood calls this a god. So does Girard: a chapter of his first book is entitled ‘Men Become Gods in the Eyes of Each Other’.41 And so does Spinoza, when in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect he points out that it is natural that ‘a human being conceives some human nature stronger than its own’ (TIE §11, O1.70). Sometimes the god is unreal, as when Don Quixote took Amadis of Gaul – the highly fictionalised, if not entirely imaginary, hero of chivalric novels – for his model. Other times, however, the model is a real person, though seen through an idealised image, as Sancho Panza took Don Quixote for his model. It is natural to find our models in our friends, who are like mirrors to us, as the Magna Moralia of Aristotle states: when we wish to see our own face, we do so by looking into the mirror, in the same way when we wish to know ourselves we can obtain that knowledge by looking at our friend. For the friend is, as we assert, a second self.42 (1213a20–6)

24  Metaphysical Desire

Whether the model is real and present or not, however, metaphysical and mimetic desire blur into one: ‘Don Quixote and Sancho borrow their desires from the Other in a movement which is so fundamental and primitive that they completely confuse it with the will to be Oneself’.43 The subject of metaphysical desire seeks being – seeks it but does not feel that she possesses it. This feeling of lack results from a consciousness of freedom – Sartre was right about that much. Because we have a great deal of choice about how to act and be (even while we are ‘heirs’, as Dastur puts it, to much that has been chosen for us), we encounter our own being as a question to be answered or a puzzle to be solved. ‘In my own eyes’, Saint Augustine wrote, ‘I’ve become a puzzle’ – quaestio mihi factus sum.44 And a natural, though not inevitable, response to one’s own perceived lack of being is to look for guidance to others who seem to possess it. Lacking access to the internal insecurities of others, we easily fall for the illusion that they know just who they are and how to be that person: ‘the subject does not recognize in the Other the void gnawing at himself ’.45 Spinoza also has a theory of mimetic desire, which he calls emulation: ‘the desire for a thing which is generated in us from the fact that we imagine others like us to have the same desire’ (E 3p27s).46 Yves Citton explains how this is the same ‘triangular’ theory of desire we find in Girard: Since classic moralists such as Hegel, Lacan, René Girard, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and André Orléan, the mimetic structure of desire, which describes the Spinozist affect of emulation, has produced the most powerful models ever devised to explain the restless erraticism of human values. […] To understand and explain human desires (‘preferences’) we must examine not so much the relation between the individual and the (‘real’) object that eludes him, but his ‘imaginary’ relation to ‘others similar to himself ’, who have fixed his attention on this object.47 Spinoza’s theory of mimetic desire occurs in the context of his general theory of the imitation of the affects. When we perceive another person like ourselves being struck by a certain affect, we ourselves are struck by the same affect (E 3p27). When we have worked through Spinoza’s reasons for adhering to this doctrine we will find that they ultimately rest upon the theory of metaphysical desire. Spinoza admittedly does not refer to metaphysical desire in explaining his theory of the imitation of the affects. But, as Michael Della Rocca points out, ‘Spinoza’s official proof of 3p27 is hard to make work’. Della Rocca goes on: In it, Spinoza seems to claim that when we perceive an object to be affected in a certain way, we thereby come to have a similar affect. But why should this be so? It is not the case that by perceiving your red hair – a way in which you are affected – I thereby have a tendency to have red hair.48 Matheron construes Spinoza’s explanation of the imitation of the affects as the one Della Rocca criticises: ‘when we imagine the feelings of any being, corresponding

Metaphysical Desire  25

movements, as is the case with any image, take shape or form in our body’.49 But here Della Rocca’s objection applies. I can imagine an object with a certain quality without any tendency to take on that quality. Why, then, should I become sad when I imagine a person affected with sadness? As the cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier has pointed out, the theory of the imitation of the affects is not very plausible on its own: ‘contagion makes no sense whatsoever for some emotions’ – anger, for instance, would not be as powerful as it is if it only provoked anger in response, rather than, for example, fear.50 It would be all the worse for Spinoza if he were committed to a crude theory of ‘like begets like’ with respect to the emotions. But his theory is much less crude than this. Laurent Bove notes how, although the contagion of affects sometimes seems to be ‘quasi-osmotic’ in Spinoza’s theory, in fact it is far less indirect and immediate.51 But then what explains it? Della Rocca proposes that Spinoza’s implicit explanation draws upon his psychology of associations. Spinoza believes that when we repeatedly feel a certain affect in conjunction with perceiving a certain sort of object, a psychological association develops, and the perception of that sort of object comes to cause us to feel the affect (E 2p18, 3p12–24). Della Rocca thus imagines the following: Let’s say that Mary comes to feel sad. Seeing that, I come to feel sadness too. I become aware of Mary’s sadness by observing her behaviour – her crying, moping around, etc. Now in the past when I was sad I may have behaved similarly and I may have been aware of such behavior on my part. Thus my own experience has established an association between an idea of a certain kind of behavior and a feeling of sadness. When I perceive such behavior in Mary, the general principle of the association of mental states determines that I will also experience sadness. In this way, I come to imitate Mary’s affect of sadness.52 There are several problems with Della Rocca’s proposal. It is true that Spinoza subscribes to a sort of associationist psychology.53 But he doesn’t refer to it in explaining the imitation of the affects. Pierre-François Moreau notes how there are no ‘associations, such as those treated in Propositions 14ff [of Part Two of the Ethics]’ in Spinoza’s account of the imitation of the affects.54 Moreover, Della Rocca’s explanation on Spinoza’s behalf isn’t immediately satisfying. True, my feeling of sadness has, in past experience, been correlated with my own mopey behaviour. But I must also have observed such behaviour in others without experiencing sadness myself – unless we assume the very imitation of affects we are seeking to explain. Thus the observed correlation between the observed behaviour and the feeling shouldn’t start out as particularly strong. Moreover, whereas Della Rocca explains the imitation of the affects as something that develops over time, through psychological associations, Spinoza claims that it occurs in ‘the first years of our life’. He observes that ‘children […] laugh or cry only because they see others laughing or crying and desire to imitate whatever others are doing’ (E 3p32s, OP 2.121).55 If Della Rocca’s explanation were correct, it would suggest that the imitation of the affects entails simply that we feel what we perceive others to feel. But, as I have

26  Metaphysical Desire

said, this seems simply implausible; in many cases we don’t seem to feel what we observe somebody else feeling. We can see that this can’t be all there is to Spinoza’s story from his discussion of envy. He claims that when we see somebody enjoying some possession, we strive to deprive her of it (E 3p32). This is because we imitate her love for the possession and thus come to covetously desire it for ourselves. But if a crude theory of emotional contagion held – if we simply imitated the emotions we saw – then we would simply feel enjoyment upon observing her enjoyment. To explain Spinoza’s actual view, the first thing to note is that, as others have argued, for him all affects are modifications of desire – of our fundamental striving.56 As Debray puts it: ‘If desire is the affect par excellence, the fundamental affect for Spinoza, then all the other affects are merely possible modulations of it and are thus not separable from it’.57 Or, to use Steinberg’s image, our striving is like the air blown through a trumpet, while the affects are like the depression of various valves: they redirect the striving in certain ways.58 He explains with an example: when, for instance, I am enjoying lazing around in bed in the morning, this joy does not generate a distinct mental state, which is the desire to stay in bed. The desire to stay in bed just is the motivational side of the joy itself; it is the form that my striving takes when I am affected with this particular kind of joy.59 We can apply this to the case of envy. When we observe somebody enjoying her possession, her affect of joy on the motivational side is just her striving to retain this possession. More fundamentally, since desire is metaphysical, the joy is her striving to continue to be a person with such a possession. This felt striving is the affect we imitate when we observe her: we likewise wish to be a person with such a possession, and so, far from merely taking on her enjoyment, we develop an envious wish to wreck it. What we copy is not her superficial affect but her revealed desire: the desire to be the person with the prized possession. As Jean-Michel Oughourlian puts it, ‘appropriating somebody else’s belonging [i.e., possession] is always transitive to acquiring his being’.60 This drives us towards an explanation of the imitation of the affects in terms of mimetic desire. We take on the affects we observe in others only insofar as we strive to be what we imagine they are striving to be. Margaret Hampson calls this ‘emulative imitation’ – the imitation of an agent rather than simply of the agent’s actions or passions. She notes that ‘the emulative imitation of an agent requires an imitator to “get inside” that agent’ – to take on her perspective.61 Sometimes this will mean simply taking on the exemplar’s affect. But other times it might involve developing affects the exemplar would have in our own situation. Interestingly, Mercier points out that the clinical evidence some have used to substantiate the theory of emotional contagion shows that the strength of this phenomenon depends heavily on the relationship between the model and the emulator, suggesting again that it is the person, not simply the emotion, that is emulated.62 We have seen that Spinoza holds to a doctrine of metaphysical desire. And we have seen that this doctrine leads naturally to the theory of mimetic desire: since we

Metaphysical Desire  27

don’t begin by knowing precisely what we want to be, it is natural to find exemplars in others around us. This would provide a superior explanation for emulation to either Spinoza’s own account or Della Rocca’s proposed amendment. Does Spinoza have something like it in the back of his mind? I believe that he does, and we can see this most clearly in his treatment of ambition – the striving by each person ‘that everyone should love what he loves, and hate what he hates’ (E 3p31c). Spinoza gives two reasons that we should feel such ambition (E 3p31d). Because of the imitation of the affects, our loves and hatreds are strengthened when shared by others. And we desire to do whatever leads to joy. Again, this explicit explanation is unsatisfying. Why should the fact that our loves and hatreds are strengthened by being shared entail that we want them to be shared? This makes sense only on the assumption that we want our loves and hatreds to be strengthened, and Spinoza gives no reason for that. Nor does the fact that we want to bring about whatever leads to joy explain why we should want others to share in our loves and hatreds. Hatred is sadness accompanied by an external cause, according to Spinoza (E 3p13s). If I want you to share in my hatred that would mean I want to bring about what leads to sadness, not joy. Likewise, presumably, if I get you to share in an unrequited love – I mean unrequited to both of us. Here is an apparent hole in Spinoza’s argument. But it can be easily repaired by adding the link between metaphysical and mimetic desire. Spinoza leaves a revealing hint towards this by quoting, in his explanation of ambition, some lines from a poem in Ovid’s Amores. In the poem a lover speaks to his rival, enjoining him to continue loving the girl for whom they are rivals, in order to fuel his own love for her: You fool, if it does not serve you to jealously guard the girl, Do it for my sake – it makes me want her more! What is permitted is undesirable; what is not is more keenly desired, Whoever loves what another contemns must be made of iron, As lovers let us love and hope together.63 Spinoza quotes the last two lines and reverses their order – this has led some editors to suppose that Spinoza misunderstood the poem.64 But its original meaning explains emulation precisely in terms of mimetic desire. If the lovers’ rivalry were simply a chance convergence of two desires on one object, the speaker in the poem would prefer for his rival to find a different girl, leaving him to pursue his beloved uncontested. But he knows that the convergence is not simply a matter of bad luck. His love depends on being shared with the rival. As Girard puts it: ‘Our desires are not really convincing until they are mirrored by the desires of others’.65 Citton explains Spinoza’s theory in these terms: With Proposition 31 Spinoza signals that the imitation of the affects is not only the cause of the harmonisation of desires among individuals. It is just as much the cause of the consolidation within the individual of the affects he

28  Metaphysical Desire

experiences. […] I cannot affirm “my” desire except to the extent that it is affirmed in me: confirmed by the desires I imagine in others.66 Spinoza’s use of Ovid gives us reason to agree with Citton’s reading. And this reading makes perfect sense in terms of the now-familiar story of metaphysical desire leading to mimetic desire. Fundamentally, we strive after our being. But to strive after this consciously we need a sense of what our being is. Spinoza points out that we are conscious of our striving insofar as we are conscious of our own mind (E 3p9d). And, importantly, we are not conscious of our own mind directly, but only through the effects that other things have upon our body (E 2p23, which is directly referenced in E 3p9d). In other words, Spinoza makes it clear that it is only by perceiving other things that we become conscious of our own striving. Lia Levy expresses Spinoza’s view clearly: we are conscious of our appetites insofar as the whole of our ideas succeeds in integrating – as far as possible – new determinations/modifications that affect their constitution into the unity and identity of our being.67 But what is the unity and identity of our being? As Lisa Shapiro notes, we can be right or wrong about this: ‘we can be wrong about ourselves, that is wrong about what we are as individuals’.68 Here, however, others provide a library of exemplars and a source of confirmation for our self-conception. This is what drives us to imitate the desires and affects of others, and also to feel insecure when our desires and affects diverge from theirs. It is significant that Descartes, one of Spinoza’s key influences, views emulation as a form of courage (Passions of the Soul §171, AT 11.460).69 Emulation buoys us up in our sense of self. Thus, rather than appearing out of nowhere and resting on dubious ad hoc assumptions, the theory of emulation is, for Spinoza, grounded deeply upon the theory of metaphysical desire. We want what others want, because we want being, and others appear to possess and exemplify being. But the ultimate effect of this structure is to paradoxically turn desire against itself. In proving the proposition that we feel the same affects that we perceive similar others feeling, Spinoza switches curiously to arguing that the opposite holds in one sort of case: ‘but if we have hatred towards someone similar to us, then to that extent we will feel an affect that is contrary to his rather than the same’ (E 3p27d). And yet it is our very striving to feel the same affects as others that leads us to feel hatred towards them (E 3p31s). We thus end up being driven to feel both the same affects as others and contrary affects, falling into what Spinoza calls fluctuation of the spirit (E 3p17s).70 With respect to desire, the Spinozist subject falls into what Girard calls a ‘double bind – a contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory imperatives’, both to imitate the desires of others and to form contrary desires.71

Metaphysical Desire  29

Therefore the subject, who originally turned to others as a way out of metaphysical insecurity, finds her insecurity increased instead. Rather than an external model to solve the riddle within, guiding her towards definite being, she finds a new riddle: a contradictory imperative. We end up, as Spinoza describes it, ‘like the waves of the sea, driven about by opposing winds’ (E 3p59s, O4.318). The next chapter will explore the development of this pathology. It is, I propose, Spinoza’s theory of the Fall of humanity. Beatitude is the way out of this fallen state. But the way is extremely difficult.

Notes 1 Girard’s other famous thesis, concerning the scapegoating mechanism, will not be discussed here. 2 Aristotle, De Arte Poetica, ed. Rudolph Kassel, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1448b5–7. 3 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 15. 4 Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (London: Picador, 2011), 331. 5 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 2. 6 Girard, 2. 7 René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer, trans. Trevor Cribben Merrill (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 12. I thus disagree with Eva Debray, who believes that Spinoza’s theory of metaphysical desire distinguishes his account from that of Girard, though I agree with a great deal of her analysis, as will be seen further on: Eva Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’, in Spinoza et les passions du social, ed. Eva Debray, Frédéric Lordon, and Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2019), 149. 8 Naturally desires serve the ultimate goal of being at different levels: I need to eat some food to be any sort of person, to eat fancy food to be a fancy person, to eat high tea at Browns Hotel to be a more specific sort of fancy person. At different times we may be more or less particular about what we are striving to be, but desire, according to this theory, will always be attached to persevering in being at some level. 9 Various scholars have noted the presence of Girard’s idea in Spinoza’s psychological theory Yves Citton, ‘Les lois de l’imitation des affects’, in Spinoza et les sciences sociales: De la puissance de la multitude à l’économie des affects, ed. Yves Citton and Frédéric Lordon (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2010), 123; Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 100–02; Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Mimetic Brain (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016), 17–19; Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’. 10 Indeed Spinoza says that this is the essence of each thing [unaquaeque res], but his focus is on the human case. 11 Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), 89. Lisa Shapiro observes how puzzling it is for Spinoza to, on one hand, define desire as appetite plus consciousness and on the other hand imply that appetite is itself conscious. She explains this by pointing to a subtle distinction in Spinoza’s terminology: whereas appetites are conscious [conscius], only desires include consciousness [conscientia]. She interprets this distinction as implying that appetite involves being conscious of the object of one’s appetite, whereas desire involves a further consciousness, of one’s own awareness of the object: Lisa Shapiro, ‘Self-Consciousness and Consciousness of Self: Spinoza on Desire and Pride’, in Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes

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and Spinoza, ed. Martina Reuter and Frans Svensson (London: Routledge, 2019), 146. More generally, ‘with desire, we have self-consciousness’ (Shapiro, 147.) I agree in outline with Shapiro, but the account presented here would interpret the distinction slightly differently: appetite is conscious of the specific objects that our fundamental striving for being leads us to want, whereas desire is conscious of that fundamental striving itself. 12 Ferdinand Alquié, Leçons sur Spinoza (Paris: La Table ronde, 2017), 313. 13 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 22. 14 Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers. 15 Anscombe and Geach, 8. 16 Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe and Stephan Körner, ‘Symposium: Substance’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary 38 (1964): 70. 17 Theo Verbeek, ed., Johannes Clauberg (1622–1665): And Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives Internationales d’histoire Des Idées (Dodrecht: Springer, 1999); Massimiliano Savini, Johannes Clauberg, Methodus cartesiana et ontologie (Paris: Vrin, 2011); Alexander Douglas, Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Tad M. Schmaltz, ‘Spinoza and Descartes’, in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, ed. Michael Della Rocca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 64–83. 18 Information about the works in Spinoza’s library is drawn from Freudenthal: Jacob Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s in Quellenschriften (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit, 1899), 160–4. 19 Johann Clauberg, Opera Omnia Philosophica (Amsterdam: Olms, 1968), 2.790. 20 Simone de Beauvoir appears to accept the strong annihilating consequence of the existentialist doctrine; after stating that ‘essence does not precede existence’ she infers that ‘in his pure subjectivity, the human being is nothing’: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 319. 21 Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewellyn (London: The Athlone Press, 1996), 72. In this passage Dastur is discussing the views of Martin Heidegger, but I assume here that she is endorsing rather than merely expounding the position. 22 This is not meant to assert a dramatic metaphysical claim that language is necessary for the structure of the world; all I mean by saying that a thing ‘falls under a description’ here is that it is in such a way that it would be correct to apply some description to it. 23 Daniel Garber, ‘Descartes and Spinoza on Persistance and Conatus’, Studia Spinozana: An International and Interdisciplinary Series 10 (1994); Martin Lin, ‘Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Desire’, Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 86, no. 1 (2004): 21–55; Valtteri Viljanen, Spinoza’s Geometry of Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 112–25. Matheron points out that Spinoza’s doctrine seems to have evolved; in his earlier works he does suggest that we strive to remain in the same state, but in mature works such as the Ethics and the Political Treatise, he suggests that things strive to ‘produce the effects that follow from our nature’: Alexandre Matheron, ‘Le Problème de l’évolution de Spinoza Du Traité Theologico-Politique Au Traité Politique’, in Spinoza: Issues and Directions, ed. Edwin Curley and Pierre-François Moreau (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 267; Alexandre Matheron, ‘The Problem of Spinoza’s Evolution: From the Theologico-Political Treatise to the Political Treatise’, in Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza, ed. Filippo Del Lucchese, Filippo Del Lucchese, and Gil Morejón, trans. Maruzella and Gil Morejón (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 176. 24 Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 22. 25 Sartre, 29.

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26 For Moira Gatens, awareness of this contingent and fictitious character distinguishes a properly philosophical exemplar from a theological one – the latter doesn’t include awareness ‘that the ideal is a fictional device, a mode of thought, that is put to work in the service of the human endeavour to persevere in being’: Moira Gatens, ‘Spinoza’s Disturbing Thesis: Power, Norms and Fiction in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’, History of Political Thought 30, no. 3 (1 January 2009): 467–8. 27 Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition of Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Classics, 1989), 101. 28 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 89. 29 Some examples of discussions of the role of the exemplar in Spinoza: Gatens, ‘Spinoza’s Disturbing Thesis: Power, Norms and Fiction in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’; Michael Rosenthal, ‘Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary Function of Prophecy in the Theological-Political Treatise’, History of Political Thought 18, no. 2 (1 February 1997): 207–41; Lee C. Rice, ‘Tanquam Naturae Humanae Exemplar: Spinoza on Human Nature’, The Modern Schoolman 68, no. 4 (1 November 1991): 291–303. 30 Linda Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Linda Zagzebski, ‘Exemplarist Virtue Theory’, Metaphilosophy 41, no. 1/2 (2010): 41–57; Linda Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 31 Margaret Hampson argues that Aristotle’s account of how virtue is learned centres on a type of imitation (mimēsis): Margaret Hampson, ‘Imitating Virtue’, Phronesis 64, no. 3 (4 June 2019): 292–320. However, Aristotle’s theory of virtue, at least as Hampson reads it, is not ‘exemplarist’ in Zagzebski’s sense. Virtue is not defined in terms of moral exemplars for Aristotle. Rather, what makes actions virtuous is their ‘fineness’ (rather vaguely defined), while imitation comes into the story only because ‘by imitating the virtuous agent and adopting her perspective, the learner gains a fuller appreciation of the fineness of virtuous action’ (Hampson, 315). 32 An exception, and perhaps the beginning of a new trend, is George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton, Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 33 Robin George Collingwood, The New Leviathan; Or, Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), ch.8. 34 Collingwood, 8.15. 35 Collingwood, 8.16. 36 Collingwood, 8.26. 37 Collingwood, 8.28. 38 E.g. Joshua Landy, ‘Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist’, Republics of Letters 1, no. 3 (2012). Available at https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/ deceit-desire-and-literature-professor-why-girardians-exist 39 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 164. 40 Is there another regress problem here? If non-fundamental desires – desires for things other than being – are all imitated, how does anyone come to have those? But here desires might begin from behaviours that were mistaken for indications of desire, as André Orlean and Jean-Pierre Dupuy have discussed: André Orlean, ‘Mimétisme et Anticipations Rationnelles: Une Perspective Keynésienne’, Recherches Économiques de Louvain / Louvain Economic Review 52, no. 1 (1986): 45–66; Jean-Pierre Dupuy, ‘Convention et Common Knowledge’, Revue économique 40, no. 2 (1989): 361–400. I have applied this idea to Spinoza elsewhere: Alexander Douglas, ‘Spinoza and Social Science’, in Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, ed. Dana Jalobeanu and Charles T. Wolfe (Springer International Publishing, 2021). 41 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, ch.2.

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42 Translation from the Revised Oxford Edition Aristotle, Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 43 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 4, my emphasis. 44 Augustine, Confessions, 10.50. In other editions this passage occurs at the end of Chapter 33 of Book 10. 45 Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 73. 46 Aristotle (Rhetoric 2.11) describes emulation (zēlos) in somewhat similar terms, though he speaks of a distress at lacking what others ‘like us by nature’ (homious tē phusei) possess rather than of a desire for what they possess Hampson, ‘Imitating Virtue’, 305. 47 Citton, ‘Les lois de l’imitation’, 123. 48 Michael Della Rocca, Spinoza (London: Routledge, 2008), 166. In fact Della Rocca assumes this too hastily: if we perceive and then take for our model somebody with red hair, we might well end up striving and thus (if we are successful) tending to have red hair ourselves. 49 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 154. 50 Hugo Mercier, Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe (Princeton University Press, 2020), 102. 51 Laurent Bove, La stratégie du conatus: affirmation et résistance chez Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 77–8. 52 Della Rocca, Spinoza, 167. 53 A very useful discussion and interpretation of Spinoza’s associationist doctrine is given by Shapiro: Lisa Shapiro, ‘Spinoza on the Association of Affects and the Workings of the Human Mind’, in Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Melamed, Cambridge Critical Guides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 205–23. 54 Pierre-François Moreau, ‘Imitation of the Affects and Interhuman Relations’, in Spinoza’s Ethics: A Collective Commentary, ed. Michael Hampe, Ursula Renz, and Robert Schnepf (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 169. 55 On the other hand, Spinoza might not be referring to babies and toddlers here, since he uses the word ‘pueros’, and perhaps we shouldn’t read ‘the first years of our life’ (priores nostrae aetatis annos) too literally. 56 Justin Steinberg, ‘Affect, Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza’s Account of Motivation’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (2 January 2016): 67–87; Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’, 150. 57 Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’, 150. 58 Steinberg, ‘Affect, Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza’s Account of Motivation’, 75. 59 Steinberg, 76. 60 Oughourlian, The Mimetic Brain, 44. 61 Hampson, ‘Imitating Virtue’, 308. 62 Mercier, Not Born Yesterday, 107. 63 Ovid, Heroides, Amores, trans. Granny Showerman and George Patrick Goold (Cambridge: Loeb, 1989), Amores, 2.19: my translation. 64 Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, ed. Matthew Kisner, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Matthew Kisner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 119n.50; Benedict Spinoza, Oeuvres, ed. Fokke Akkerman and Piet Steenbakkers, trans. Pierre-François Moreau, vol. 4 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2020), 546n.173. 65 René Girard, A Theatre of Envy (Leominster: Gracewing Publishing, 2000), 14. 66 Citton, ‘Les lois de l’imitation’, 127, original emphasis. 67 Lia Levy, ‘“Causa Conscientiae” in Spinoza’s Ethics’, in Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Melamed, Cambridge Critical Guides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 201. 68 Shapiro, ‘Self-Consciousness and Consciousness of Self ’, 149.

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69 “AT” refers here and throughout to: René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Cerf, 1897). 70 At E 4def5 Spinoza defines contrary affects as those that pull people in different directions, while being of the same kind. Thus, for instance, a desire to swim and a desire not to enter the water might be contrary affects – or, more to the point here, a desire for your goods and a desire not to have them taken from you. 71 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 166.

3 AMBITION AND THE FALL

What prevents us from sustaining beatitude in mortal life, according to Augustine, is our inability to expel the fear of loss – ultimately of death, the most complete loss. Our enjoyment of anything we love and desire is haunted by the fear of its loss. Nor can we simply choose to desire only the things we securely possess, and only so long as we securely possess them (the view we critically examined via Comte-Sponville). All we can do is despair of being ultimately fulfilled, or hope to be blessed with a secure and eternal good (as Augustine proposes), or know that we are so blessed (as Spinoza proposes). For Augustine, as we saw, our fallen condition cuts us off from knowing this with certainty. The same is true for Spinoza, at least as he reads the allegory of the Fall. But for Spinoza we can escape the Fall. First, however, we must understand it. Spinoza interprets the Biblical story of the Fall of humanity in two different works. The two quite different passages are as follows: 1. It is told that God instructed Adam not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which seems to signify that God instructed Adam to do and seek the good for the sake of the good, and not insofar as it is contrary to evil – that is, to seek the good from love of good rather than from fear of evil. For whoever, as we have shown, does good from true knowledge and love of the good is free and acts from a constant soul, whereas whoever does it from fear of evil is compelled by evil, acts in bondage, and lives under the rule of another (TTP ch.4, O3.200). 2. It is recorded that God prohibited the freedom of humanity to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that as soon as one ate of it one would immediately fear death rather than desiring to live (E 4p68s).

DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-4

Ambition and the Fall  35

Despite some differences, these readings are remarkably consistent. In both cases, the Fall involves us coming to act out of fear of a negative rather than love of a positive. Spinoza adds something else important to his second interpretation of the Fall: Then [it is told] that a man, finding a wife who agreed completely with his nature, knew that there could be nothing else in nature more useful to him. But after coming to believe the beasts to be similar to him, he immediately began to imitate their affects (see 3p27) and lost his liberty, which the Patriarchs later recovered, guided by the spirit of Christ – that is, the idea of God, upon whom it entirely depends that humans can be free, and that what they want for themselves they also want for everyone else. (E 4p68s) I argue that this passage shows how the imitation of the affects is fundamental to Spinoza’s interpretation of the Fall. Its importance will appear as we examine some criticisms of the interpretation. One of Spinoza’s earliest critics, Christoph Wittich,1 objected to the interpretation on various grounds. Similar criticisms will occur to many readers: 1. It is impossible to understand how God could have forbidden the knowledge of Good and Evil to humanity, which was made in his image, and upon whose hearts he inscribed his law: how could he forbid what he himself had given, and which in consequence humanity could not fail to have? 2. How is fearing death opposed to desiring life, so that one could be said to do the first rather than the second? Is it not the same thing to desire life and fear death? 3. How does knowledge of good and evil connect with fear of death rather than desire for life? 4. Moses does not say that man knew the beasts to be similar to him. He even says the opposite when he reports that no helper for man is found among the beasts (Genesis 2:20). Nor does he say ‘man began to imitate the affects of the beasts’ – of this we read not a word in Moses.2 We shall work carefully through these criticisms, trying to illuminate what was obscure to Wittich. To take the last point first, it is true that Moses (assumed by both Spinoza and Wittich to be the speaker of the narrative) makes no direct mention of Adam imitating the affects of the beasts.3 Spinoza very likely developed this idea under the influence of Maimonides, who ends his own interpretation of the story by noting that, following his Fall, Adam: was now with respect to food and many other requirements brought to the level of the lower animals; comp. ‘Thou shalt eat the grass of the field’

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(Genesis 3:18). Reflecting on his condition, the Psalmist says, ‘Adam unable to dwell in dignity, was brought to the level of the dumb beast’.4 (Psalms 49:13) Maimonides points this out in reply to a ‘learned man’, who proposed his own reading of the Garden of Eden story. In this reading, humanity gains from the Fall: ‘It would at first sight’, said the objector, ‘appear from Scripture that man was originally intended to be perfectly equal to the rest of the animal creation, which is not endowed with intellect, reason, or power of distinguishing between good and evil: but that Adam’s disobedience to the command of God procured him that great perfection which is the peculiarity of man, viz., the power of distinguishing between good and evil – the noblest of all the faculties of our nature, the essential characteristic of the human race […]’.5 Since the objector proposes that the Fall elevated humankind above the animals, Maimonides is motivated to argue, with some Scriptural support, that it is quite the contrary: the Fall brought humanity down to the level of the animals. Maimonides doesn’t mention any imitation of affects, but Spinoza’s account is a development of the Maimonidean account insofar as it associates the Fall with the reduction to a bestial level, as Heidi Ravven has argued.6 Reading it in this way can also help us with Wittich’s question [3] about how humanity could have lacked knowledge of good and evil before the Fall. Wittich argues that, on the contrary, before the Fall humans knew perfectly well what good and evil were, at least relative to God’s law: before the Fall, humanity knew that good consisted of subjection to its Creator, that obedience to him was commanded, that evil consisted of refusing this command, and that this knowledge led to eternal life, and expels all fear of death, whenever one subjected oneself to the will of the Creator.7 Here it is important to see that Spinoza, following Maimonides, does not see the prelapsarian condition as one in which genuine knowledge was lacking. As Ravven puts it: for both, the biblical text was invoked to lend authority to the view that moral consciousness, in contrast with the intellectual, marked a decline in the human condition.8 Maimonides, as Ravven reads him, sees Adam’s intellectual decline through the Fall as a transition from a condition of acting from genuine ethical understanding to one of following moral rules for fear of punishment, without understanding their divine purpose.9 What Wittich takes as a piece of moral knowledge – that good and evil

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consist of obedience and disobedience to God’s law – is in fact a degraded understanding, to which Adam fell from a superior intellectual position. For Maimonides, what Adam acquires from eating the fruit can’t be knowledge, since that would make the objector correct in interpreting the Fall as an improvement in Adam’s condition. Rather, he sees the Fall as a pure intellectual loss: ‘the loss of part of that intellectual faculty which he had previously possessed’.10 Ravven explains that Adam acquires ‘moral conventions as punishment for the Fall’, in contrast to his ‘full reliance on intellectual virtue for both science and ethics both before the Fall’.11 The convention that nudity is shameful, for instance, strikes Adam and Eve immediately after eating the fruit. This, on Maimonides’s reading, is not a new insight into a truth, but a new conventional stipulation. It is important for Maimonides that what the serpent promises to Adam and Eve, if they eat the fruit, is that they will be ‘like Elohim’, knowing good and evil. While some read ‘Elohim’ to refer to God, Maimonides reads it as meaning ‘princes’.12 God deals only in truth, but princes establish arbitrary rules and conventions. This is the only ‘knowledge’ that the fruit of the tree provides. Such ‘knowledge’ is only needed by those who lack proper ethical understanding. Humans who can’t depend on their intellect to know what is good for them must act according to conventions instead. These conventions might be arbitrary or even harmful, but at least they allow humans to live together according to an agreed social order. Thus Adam, through the Fall, acquired ‘a new faculty whereby he found things wrong which previously he had not regarded as wrong’.13 Clearly Maimonides reads the story in a highly allegorical way, as an account of the genealogy of conventional morality.14 For Spinoza also the fruit of the tree does not bring Adam any knowledge. What it brings him is a new fear of evil and death. Ravven sees this as an extension of Maimonides’s reading: the newly acquired fear is one of deadly punishment. Thus: According to Spinoza, conventional morals, those deriving from the imagination and not from reason, arise because the human condition – Adam’s condition after the Fall – is one of fear. Moral conventions are an institutionalized regime of external social rewards and punishments whose inducement is the fear of death and pain (and the hope of their avoidance).15 This is one way to read Spinoza’s interpretation. Indeed, on this reading his interpretation is not worlds away from that of Augustine, who, in discussing the Fall, notes that ‘this already is sin, to desire those things which the law of God forbids, and to abstain from them through fear of punishment, not through love of righteousness’.16 But another way to read it – the one followed here – is to look at Spinoza’s interpretation of the allegory in terms of beatitude. It is a story to illustrate how we find ourselves cut off from beatitude in the way that Augustine describes: our desire

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is never unaccompanied by fear and so perfect satisfaction is impossible. This is the condition from which ‘the Patriarchs […] guided by the spirit of Christ’ revealed the means of escape, according to Spinoza. As Warren Montag puts it: Spinoza emphasizes the affective consequences of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Desire, which Spinoza has defined as consciousness of one’s own conatus, will be replaced by fear, the present by the future, and being by nothingness.17 The allegory, as we shall read it, explains the corruption of desire: a transition from desiring to persevere in our being to fearing to lose our being – or perhaps to never gain it. To understand this, we must understand how we can go from being secure in our being to being insecure in it. But to understand this properly, we must consider the other of Wittich’s questions above [2]: how is desiring life to be distinguished from fearing death? According to Descartes, ‘it is always one and the same movement which gives rise to the pursuit of a good and at the same time the avoidance of the opposite evil’ (Passions of the Soul §87, AT 11.393; CSM 1.359).18 Perhaps this is what Wittich has in mind when he asks, rhetorically: ‘Are not life and death opposites? And does not whoever loves the one fear the other, at least to the extent that she desires everything that is opposed to it?’19 On this basis Wittich could criticise Spinoza’s first interpretation of the Garden of Eden story, in which Adam is said to fall by failing ‘to seek the good from love of good rather than from fear of evil’. But Descartes adds something important to his own discussion: I note only this difference, that the desire we have when we are led towards some good is accompanied by love, and then by hope and joy, whereas when we are led to get away from the evil opposed to this good, the same desire is accompanied by hatred, anxiety and sadness (which causes us to judge the evil inimical to ourselves). (AT 11.393; CSM 1.359) Descartes clearly recognises an affective difference between desiring through love of some good and desiring through fear of some evil. Perhaps Wittich believes that, at least in this life, fear and love are always both involved in our desires. To reiterate the Augustinian point from Chapter 1, it seems psychologically impossible to never think of the potential or eventual loss of what we love, and thus to be entirely free of anxiety or sadness – unless, that is, we learn that there is no potential or eventual loss to think of. Spinoza’s account must depend on the possibility of knowing that our fundamental good – our being – is beyond loss. Adam fell for lack of this knowledge. As Hasana Sharp puts it: ‘Adam loses freedom (power) because he does not know what kind of being he is’.20 In both readings, Spinoza connects two things:

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the way that fear creeps into desire, and our susceptibility to external influences. In the Theologico-Political Treatise, ‘whoever [acts] from fear of evil is compelled by evil […] lives under the rule of another’ (TTP ch.4, O3.200, emphasis added). In the Ethics, Adam falls by coming to imitate the beasts. Susceptibility to external influence is in turn connected with ignorance. That connection is perfectly intelligible in light of the progression we established in Chapter 2, from metaphysical to mimetic desire. What drives us to fall under the influence of external exemplars is uncertainty about our own being. ‘Whoever is ignorant of himself ’, Spinoza declares, ‘is ignorant of the foundation of virtue and thus of all virtues’ (E 4p56d). None of the interpreters we have examined – Ravven, Sharp, Montag – read the imitation of the affects of the beasts in Spinoza as signalling a mere decline to a bestial nature in Adam. Rather, they all stress the symbolism of Adam coming to fall under external influences. That these are beasts seems to carry little symbolic weight.21 They are just the only available sources external to Adam. The only available human influence was Eve, but she agreed with Adam’s nature so perfectly as not to constitute a true external influence at all. Therefore she could not be the source of the Fall, and the beasts were the only others there. Eve, in the story, falls victim to the influence of the serpent, and Adam falls victim to her influence, which was really just the serpent’s influence transmitted through Eve. Eve only becomes an exemplar to Adam when she herself has taken something non-human as an exemplar. Like Maimonides, Spinoza sees the eating of the fruit as a new sort of susceptibility to external influence. But for Spinoza this comes not through conventions but through direct emulation. Adam falls by coming to take his moral knowledge from an external source: the fruit, the serpent, the beasts – something outside of him and not entirely like him, though near enough to serve as an exemplar. Knowledge of good and evil, we have seen, is based upon an exemplar (E 4pref, OP 2.164). Spinoza rejects the reading in which the Fall occurs through Satan deceiving Adam (TP, ch.2, §6). Rather, Adam begins with an inadequate knowledge of himself. This allows him to mistake the beasts for external exemplars. Spinoza’s account follows Maimonides to this extent: what is important is not that Adam ‘learns’ good and evil, but that he ‘learns’ it from the outside. But how is this connected with the fear of death or evil? To answer this, we need to understand the social consequences of emulation for Spinoza. Some scholars have noted that the imitation of the affects is, as Ericka Tucker puts it, ‘the foundation of all social life’ for Spinoza.22 But, as we have seen, the imitation of desire in particular – emulation – ends up undermining itself. The sociability it founds is what Matheron calls an ‘unsocial sociability’: this affective imitation, to the extent that imitated affects are themselves passional, necessarily becomes conflictual. It becomes ambition for ideological domination (or intolerance), economic envy. It also engenders an ambition and an envy having as its specific object the power over others – which, in civil society, means political power.23

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The very same force that binds us makes us enemies and exploiters towards each other, or, as Spinoza puts it, ‘the very property of human nature, from which it follows that human beings are compassionate, also leads them to be envious and ambitious’ (E 3p32s). The last quotation is from the scholium to a proposition that explains why sociability is unsocial for Spinoza: ‘If we imagine somebody enjoying [gaudere] some thing, which only one can possess, we strive to deprive her of it’ (E 3p32). First, we emulate her desire for the object. Then, seeing that we can’t have the object without depriving her of it, we strive to deprive her. As an obstacle to our satisfaction, she becomes a cause of sadness to us, which is, by definition, an object of our hatred (E 3p13s; def.aff.7). And since, as we saw, we are affected by contrary affects to those we imagine in people we hate, we will come to simultaneously desire and not desire our rival’s possession, falling into fluctuation of the spirit (E 3p17s). If our rival perceives our affects, she will end up in a similar position. First, our desire to acquire her possession will, through emulation, strengthen her own desire to retain it. Then we will cause her fear, as a rival seeking to expropriate her. Fear is a type of sadness (3p18s2, def.aff.13), so as a cause of it we will become an object of her hatred. And then she too will simultaneously emulate and recoil from our desire for her possession, wanting and not wanting what she has at the same time, falling also into fluctuation of the spirit. This state of confusion will make us both fall prey to paranoia and superstition, becoming irrational in the face of our passions, volatile, and prone to violent conflict – a process that Spinoza describes in the Preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise. The irony is that our exemplar has come to undermine the purpose for which we sought an exemplar in the first place. The exemplar was meant to tell us how to be. Now, as an object of both emulation and hatred, it gives us contradictory instructions, to be both like it and contrary to it. We end up more confused about our being. The situation is well described by James Baldwin in his essay ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’: Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are now hidden. From this void – ourselves – it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us – ‘from the evil that is in the world.’ With the same motion, at the same time, it is this toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we struggle to escape.24 This is, in my view, Spinoza’s picture of our fallen state: the existential anxiety created by an unstable emulation, to which we are driven by ignorance of ourselves. Two points confirm this reading for me. First, it explains why Spinoza should propose that ‘the Patriarchs’ liberated us from the Fall, and that they were ‘guided by the spirit of Christ – that is, the idea of God, upon whom it entirely depends that humans can be free, and that what

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they want for themselves they also want for everyone else’ (E 4p68s). If we want for others what we want for ourselves, then we can’t fall into rivalry, and then we can’t be led into the tortured and conflicted condition it creates. Second, it explains why, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza should draw a contrast between the constancy of the soul that knows the good and the bondage of the soul that does not: whoever, as we have shown, does good from true knowledge and love of the good is free and acts from a constant soul, whereas whoever does it from fear of evil is compelled by evil, acts in bondage, and lives under the rule of another. (TTP ch.4, O3.200) Elsewhere in the Treatise, Spinoza makes a similar contrast, between the ‘sound and constant [integro et constante] soul’ with which one truly knows and loves God and the ‘bondage to the flesh, or inconstant and fluctuating [inconstantem et flutuantem] soul’ (TTP ch.4, O3.190). The association of bondage to the flesh with disquiet (as well as sin and death) is implicit in Paul’s Letter to the Romans: ‘the mental inclination of the flesh is death; but the mental inclination of the spirit is life and peace’ (Romans 8:6, my emphasis). But on the surface it is surprising for Spinoza to distinguish the fleshly from the spiritual life, in light of his mature doctrine, that the soul and the body are one and the same thing (E 2p7s, p21s). It might indicate that Spinoza was, when writing that passage, still committed to an earlier dualistic theory, according to which knowledge of God can make us ‘released from the body’ (KV 2.19, O1.360). Before jumping to that conclusion, however, it is worth noting that ‘the flesh’ in its Pauline sense is often used to mean something other than the physical body. As Augustine points out, many of the vices commonly ascribed to ‘bondage to the flesh’ are not purely physical: ‘idolatries, witchcrafts, hatreds, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, heresies, envyings’.25 He argues that ‘flesh’ is often used to mean ‘man himself ’.26 To live ‘according to the flesh’ is then to live according to humanity – to a merely human nature – rather than according to God – to God’s law written in one’s own heart. We can see how this would apply to Spinoza. ‘Bondage to the flesh’ consists of emulating others, to end up not only hating, envying, and striving against them (and now we’ve covered at least three items on Augustine’s list of vices), but also being conflicted against ourselves: falling into fluctuation of spirit as we strive both to emulate our model and to recoil from her. Thus we can explain why Spinoza always connects bondage to external causes with inconstancy of spirit. As Descartes points out in his own theory of emulation, one sort of external cause is an example (Passions of the Soul 2.172, AT 11.461). The only way for emulation not to lead to conflict is for us to want for others whatever we want for ourselves. This is the lesson that the Patriarchs drew from the spirit of Christ. Then the perfect symmetry of emulation prevents conflict from arising, so long as the object of desire is infinitely shareable (as the knowledge of God is).

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An initial reaction to Spinoza’s doctrine so far might be that it seems too cynical. Wittich found it to be so, asking rhetorically: If there is anything that only one can possess, a wife would be it. How often do people imagine husbands enjoying their wives! Is it human nature to try to separate husbands from their wives?27 Spinoza could perhaps reply that desire for their neighbour’s wives (as well as slaves, oxen, asses, etc.) must have been common enough among the ancient Hebrews for a prohibition on it to appear on the Decalogue as God’s final commandment (Exodus 20:14; Deuteronomy 5:18). But in any case the situation is more complex than Wittich suggests. First, the tragedy in Spinoza’s account is that the shared affect – the shared desire – is in itself a force that bonds humans. Spinoza argues that insofar as someone agrees with our nature, they are good for us (E 4p31). Somebody who desires the same object as we do agrees, to that extent, with our nature. We are thus inclined at first to love those in whose desires we share. Conflict arises not from the similarity but from the difference between the agents. One possesses the object of the imitated desire. The other does not. Spinoza explains: Suppose that Peter has the idea of a beloved object that he currently possesses, while Paul on the contrary has the idea of a beloved thing he lacks. From this it follows that one is affected with sadness and the other with joy, and to that extent they are contrary to one another. In this way we could easily show that all the other causes of hatred depend on this one: that humans disagree in nature, not that they agree. (E 4p34s) This difference will always arise where desires converge on an object that can’t be shared, and emulation drives such a convergence. ‘Imitation cannot’, as Debray notes, ‘be a source of conflict in itself ’.28 It causes conflict only alongside an invidious distinction between a possessor and a coveter. But this is inevitable where the objects of emulated desires cannot be jointly enjoyed. Moreover, whenever we love or desire an object we will strive, on account of our ambition, to make others love or desire it (E 3p31). When the object is rivalrous we will then create envy and hatred, and ultimately throw ourselves into confusion. It is for this reason, as Moreau puts it, that: Far from being able to found a spontaneous sociability and harmonious concord among men, the feeling of similarity and the imitatio affectuum is rather a source of jealousy, rivalry, intolerance and fanaticism.29 This isn’t to deny that it is also a source of sociability, as the sources we previously listed argue. To Wittich’s rhetorical question – why we don’t perceive only theft and covetousness around us – a few answers are available within Spinoza’s theory. First,

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some objects can be enjoyed by one without leaving any less for others. Second, there are the prohibitions society has evolved to prevent such feelings at least from being expressed, such as the Tenth Commandment, although this process of evolution also requires some explanation.30 Finally, emulation of desire for a rivalrous good leads not to pure hatred but rather to a confused state – a fluctuation of the spirit, between the highest adoration and the hardest condemnation. Accordingly, they produce, as Debray observes, ‘an oscillation between cooperation and conflict, both due to the principle of imitation’.31 It is no wonder that, as Spinoza says, we should ‘both adore our kings as gods and execrate them as a hateful pestilence upon humankind’ (TTP Pref, O3.60). This is merely the interpersonal dynamic of our fallen condition operating in the political sphere: we love our kings as exemplars and execrate them as successful rivals. Spinoza’s account suggests that our interpersonal relations should be varied, ambivalent, and fluctuating – just as we find them. Our most important question remains: what connects this social condition with the fear of death? But we should pause to note that we have answered many of Wittich’s concerns. We can at least partly understand, with reference to Maimonides, why Spinoza should associate Adam’s Fall with emulation of the beasts. We can explain, again by comparison with Maimonides, the highly idiosyncratic sense in which Adam can be said to have ‘gained knowledge of good and evil’. We have the beginning of an answer to Wittich’s question: how can we desire to live without fearing to die, or desire good without fearing evil? The answer must come in some assurance that we shall have the good we desire and never lose it, or live and never die – that is, in beatitude. But the means to this remain obscure. And, again, we still haven’t explained how this ‘knowledge of good and evil’, meaning the susceptibility to emulation, is connected with the fear of death. We should dispense with a certain superficial answer. We have seen that emulation leads readily to conflict, though it is also fundamental to our social bond. Is it not obvious, then, that somebody in the grip of emulation has much evil to fear, including even death, since rivalries can turn deadly? But this superficial answer is highly inadequate. We have much more to fear in this life than rivalry. Why should freeing us from emulation free us from the fear of diseases, accidents, natural disasters, and everything else besides rivalry that can bring us death and destruction? If he had traced the fear of evil or death to emulation, it seems, Spinoza would have traced it to a false, or at best a partial, cause. We must dig deeper, returning to the question of metaphysical desire and the condition of Adam as Sharp reads it: ‘he does not know what kind of being he is’.32 Our fundamental desire is for our being, but we don’t know what that is. Spinoza points out that the mind knows itself only through the affections of the body – that is, for the most part, through what it observes by the senses (E 2p23). This turns out to mean especially observations of the reactions of others, since the proposition is invoked in demonstrating the following two: If somebody does something that, she imagines, affects others with joy, then he will be affected with joy along with the idea of himself as its cause. In other words, he will contemplate himself with joy. If, on the contrary,

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he does something that, he imagines, affects others with sadness, then she will contemplate himself with sadness. (E 3p30) When the mind contemplates its own power of acting, it rejoices, and the more the so the more distinctly it imagines that power. (E 3p53) The latter is in turn invoked to demonstrate the proposition that ‘self-acquiescence’ is greatly strengthened by praise (4p52s). The concept of ‘self-acquiescence’ [acquiescentia in se ipso] is of fundamental importance to Spinoza’s theory of beatitude and will be discussed further in the next chapter. For now, it is relevant that it refers to a state of contentedness in our own being. As Shapiro points out, ‘Acquiescientia in se ipso is often translated as self-esteem but quite literally it means to become or to rest in oneself ’.33 It is thus our highest good (E 4p52), since it is nothing other than a feeling of satisfaction of our fundamental metaphysical desire for our being. To feel that we are satisfied in our being, we must have some concept of what our being is. The prior chain of propositions tells a story of how, since we know ourselves only through what we observe, we feel assured that we are sustaining the right sort of being when we observe positive reactions in others. This is the ‘consolidation’ we saw Citton discussing in the previous chapter. The striving for such consolidation is the source, for Spinoza, of ambition, pride, and abjection, which we will explore in the next chapter. What is important here is that the sense of our own being that comes from the praise of others is profoundly uncertain, depending on the fickle approval of the crowd. Spinoza calls it vainglory, or ‘empty glory’ (gloria vana): What is called empty glory is self-acquiescence that is nurtured only by public opinion. When that ceases, acquiescence itself – that is, (by p52) the highest good that each one loves – ceases. Whence it happens that whoever glories in the opinion of the crowd every day struggles, acts, and strives in anxious concern, in order to preserve a reputation. For the crowd is various and inconstant, and thus a reputation, unless protected, quickly fades away. (E 4p58s) Somebody whose sense of his being depends on public opinion is in constant danger of losing it. He acts from the fear of losing it more than from the desire to retain it. He is in a fallen condition. By contrast, somebody whose knowledge and sense of self comes from a more stable source need have no fear of losing it. She will act only from the desire to sustain her being – we might say to express her being. But what is this more stable source? And would she not still fear to lose it in the final annihilation of death? These questions must wait. For now, we have an answer to Wittich’s question of

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how knowledge of good and evil, via emulation, connects with the fear of evil and death. To truly be secure in your being is to be in no danger of losing it. You might suffer, but you will suffer as yourself. By contrast, if you find your good and evil only in reference to the approval of the crowd then you chase a fickle and perilous sort of being: a being you might lose and never be able to get back, no matter what you do. It is to face, every day, the terrible prospect of a living death – the death of a courtier fallen from favour or a washed-up celebrity. It is to fear the loss of your being, through the loss of its external supports. We can now better understand why Montag describes Spinoza’s version of the Fall as replacing ‘desire […] by fear, the present by the future, and being by nothingness’.34 Emulation turns our desire for being into a fear of losing the crowd’s approval. Anxiety about the future prevents us from really enjoying the present. As Arendt puts it (quoted in Chapter 1): ‘the future destroys the present’.35 Finally, the sort of being we anxiously and precariously achieve through external approval, according to Spinoza, ‘is really empty, for it is nothing’ (E 4p58s). To be separated from beatitude by anxiety about the future is the result of the Fall, which is to say, of emulation and imitation. It is only when we find our being in others that we are condemned to live in fear of losing it. For then our being is outside ourselves, and what is external to us can be lost to us. Yet how can this be avoided? This will be the topic of the next two chapters.

Notes 1 Some sources on Wittich: Georg Pape, ‘Christoph Wittichs Anti-Spinoza’ (InauguralDissertation, Universität Rostock, 1910); Christiane Hubert, Les Premières Réfutations de Spinoza: Aubert de Versé, Wittich, Lamy (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris Sorbonne, 1994); Massimiliano Savini, ‘Notes au sujet de la publication de l’anti-Spinoza De Christoph Wittich’, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, no. 2 (2000): 79–96; Roberto Bordoli, ‘Wittichius, Christophorus (1625–87)’, in The Dictionary of Seventeenth and EighteenthCentury Dutch Philosophers, ed. Wiep van Bunge et al., 1st ed. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003), 1083–6; Mark Aalderink, ‘Spinoza en Wittichius over Essentiae en Existentie’, in Spinoza en het Nederlands cartesianisme, ed. Gunther Coppens (Louvain: Acco, 2004), 79–94; Theo Verbeek, ‘Wittich’s Critique of Spinoza’, in Receptions of Descartes: Cartesianism and Anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tad M. Schmaltz (London: Routledge, 2005), 103–16; Alexander Douglas, ‘Christoph Wittich’s Anti-Spinoza’, Intellectual History Review 24, no. 2 (3 April 2014): 153–66; Wiep van Bunge et al., eds., The Bloomsbury Companion to Spinoza (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 129–40; Mark Aalderink, ‘Christoph Wittich, Anti-Spinoza (1690)’, in The Bloomsbury Companion to Spinoza, ed. Wiep van Bunge et al. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 129–40; Kai-Ole Eberhardt, Christoph Wittich (1625–1687): Reformierte Theologie unter dem Einfluss von René Descartes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018); Kai-Ole Eberhardt, Vernunft und Offenbarung in der Theologie Christoph Wittichs (1625–1687): Prolegomena und Hermeneutik der reformierten Orthodoxie unter dem Einfluss des Cartesianismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019); Yoshi Kato and Kuni Sakamoto, ‘Between Cartesianism and Orthodoxy: God and the Problem of Indifference in Christoph Wittich’s Anti-Spinoza’, Intellectual History Review 32, no. 2 (10 December 2020): 1–19. 2 Christoph Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, Sive Examen Ethices Benedicti de Spinoza, et Commentarius de Deo et Eius Attributis (Amsterdam: Wolters, 1690), 285–7. 3 Spinoza challenges the authorship of the Pentateuch in TTP, ch.8, but in the passages quoted he ascribes the narrative of the Fall to Moses.

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4 Moses Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed, ed. Paul Boer, trans. Michael Friedlaender (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1904), 103. 5 Maimonides, 101. 6 Heidi M. Ravven, ‘The Garden of Eden’, Philosophy and Theology 13, no. 1 (2001): 3–51. 7 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 286. 8 Ravven, ‘The Garden of Eden’, 4. 9 This is precisely how Spinoza characterised the vulgar religion of Lambertus van Velthuysen, as he saw it: ‘He finds nothing in virtue that delights him, and would prefer to live from the impulse of his affects, did not one thing thwart him: he fears punishment’ (Letter 43, G 4.221b). Carlisle discusses this point in relation to the Fall in Spinoza Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, ch.7. 10 Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed, 102. 11 Ravven, ‘The Garden of Eden’, 23. 12 Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed, 100. 13 Maimonides, 102. 14 Lawrence Berman, ‘Maimonides on the Fall of Man’, AJS Review 5 (1980): 1–15. 15 Ravven, ‘The Garden of Eden’, 28. 16 Augustine, City of God, 14.10, 456. 17 Warren Montag, ‘Imitating the Affects of Beasts: Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza’, Differences 20, no. 2–3 (1 December 2009): 67. 18 “CSM” refers here and henceforth to: René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 19 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 286. 20 Hasana Sharp, ‘Animal Affects: Spinoza and the Frontiers of the Human’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies 9, no. 1–2 (2011): 61. 21 In fact, one of Spinoza’s favourite authors, Seneca, draws a contrast between the beasts, who do not fear future evils, and humans, who do: Seneca, Epistulae Morales: Letters I–LXV, trans. Richard Gummere (Cambridge: Loeb, 1989), Letter 5, §9. 22 Ericka Tucker, ‘Spinoza’s Social Sage: Emotion and the Power of Reason in Spinoza’s Social Theory’, Revista Conatus 9, no. 18 (21 September 2016): 32 and §4; Matheron, Individu et communauté, 150–67; Michael Rosenthal, ‘Two Collective Action Problems in Spinoza’s Social Contract Theory’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 15, no. 4 (1998): 401; Justin Steinberg, ‘Imitation, Representation, and Humanity in Spinoza’s Ethics’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 51, no. 3 (2013): §3.2; Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’; Dan Taylor, Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 237–9. Steinberg holds that the imitation of the affects is only crucial for sociability for those not guided by reason. 23 Alexandre Matheron, Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza, ed. Filippo Del Lucchese, David Maruzella, and Gil Morejón, trans. David Maruzella and Gil Morejón (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 119–20. 24 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (London: Penguin, 2017), 20–1. 25 Augustine, City of God, 14.2, 443. 26 Augustine, 14.3, 442. 27 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 195. 28 Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’, 147. 29 Moreau, ‘Imitation of the Affects and Interhuman Relations’, 172. 30 Matheron, Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza, chs.9, 10, 11. 31 Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’, 148–9. 32 Sharp, ‘Animal Affects: Spinoza and the Frontiers of the Human’, 61. 33 Shapiro, ‘Self-Consciousness and Consciousness of Self ’, 151. Clare Carlisle has more to say about the translation of this term Clare Carlisle, ‘Spinoza’s Acquiescentia’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 2 (2017): §2.3; Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 113 and ff. 34 Montag, ‘Imitating the Affects of Beasts’, 67. 35 Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, 9.

4 EMPTY GLORY

The interpretation of Spinoza that we have arrived at so far holds that our moral self-understanding – the way we know ourselves and value ourselves – is built around the image of an exemplar. Inevitably, we are prone to finding exemplars in those we observe around us. Zagzebski describes some contemporary scientific studies that support a similar idea: A new series of studies by Laura E. R. Blackie et al. (forthcoming) […] propose[s] that people obtain their moral grounding and life guidance from paragons who exemplify how to be a good person. In their first study they identified cultural paragons in American society, which included inventors, actors, entrepreneurs, social activists, and fictional characters. In the second study they found that individuals felt virtuous and authentic when they acted like their personally chosen paragons. A third study supported their hypothesis that there was a causal relationship between paragon emulation and moral self-regard.1 But we have seen how conflict is nearly certain to arise when we live alongside a paragon – an exemplar – who possesses a good that only one person can possess. The identity felt between exemplar and emulator is then corrupted into a conflict between possessor and coveter. Coming to envy and hate the paragon who grounds our moral self-regard leads to a desperate confusion. The exemplar who was meant to answer our fundamental moral question – who should I be? – brings chaos and conflict instead of an answer. I argued in the previous chapter that this is what Spinoza takes to be the Fall of humanity: from a natural inclination towards emulation, symbolised by the first human’s imitation of the animals, we fall into rivalry and conflict. We might think DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-5

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that the cases in the study mentioned by Zagzebski are relatively safe. We are, after all, unlikely to compete for roles with the celebrity actors we admire, or on the market with our entrepreneur-heroes. But there is one quality that an exemplar, in the first instance, always possesses. It is the very quality of being an exemplar – being admired and emulated. This quality itself can become an exclusive and invidious prize – the prize of prestige, or what Spinoza calls ‘empty glory’. The process by which this prestige becomes a rivalrous good is described in a passage in the Ethics, some of which was quoted in the previous chapter. A longer quotation from it is as follows: What is called empty glory [gloria vana] is self-acquiescence that is supported only by public opinion. When that ceases, acquiescence itself – that is, (by p52) the highest good that each one loves – ceases. Whence it happens that whoever glories in the opinion of the crowd struggles every day – acts and strives in anxious concern to preserve a reputation. For the crowd is various and inconstant, and thus a reputation, unless protected, soon fades away. Indeed because everyone desires to capture the applause of the crowd, one person readily puts down the reputation of another. From this, seeing that the good contended for is judged to be supreme, an enormous lust arises to dominate the other in any possible way. And whoever turns out the victor glories more in having harmed the other than in having profited himself. And therefore this glory or acquiescence is really empty, for it is nothing. (E 4p58s) I have attempted elsewhere to explain what Spinoza means by saying that this sort of glory is nothing.2 We can strive to emulate a characteristic that happens to attract glory: the admiration of the crowd.3 But when we pursue empty glory the characteristic we strive after is just the admiration itself. It is the striving expressed by young people whose ambition is simply to be famous – not, that is, to be a great artist or athlete and famous as a consequence, but rather to be famous in and of itself: to be famous for being famous. Where glory is the quality of being admired, in empty glory, with a sort of hollow circularity, we are admired simply on account of our glory: admired for being admired. If we lose the admiration, we lose everything we were striving after. But the admiration rests upon nothing but itself and is desperately precarious. It is precarious because those who admire us for our empty glory, believing that we possess prestige, must emulate us and wish to possess the prestige themselves. They are therefore rivals as well as admirers. And their chance will soon come. The fickle dynamics of the crowd are unstable, and soon enough its attention will turn towards a rival and away from ourselves. After all, there is nothing for which the crowd admires us besides the status that its own attention bestows. Without realising it, what the crowd sees in us is simply the reflection of its own admiration. Thus our status rests only upon the crowd’s whimsical attentions.4 This is why those who pursue empty glory care mostly about depriving others of it.

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It is also why they live in constant fear of death. Spinoza is clear that dying does not require ‘being turned into a corpse’; to die is simply to lose one’s core identity – one’s essential being (E 4p39s).5 In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza proposes that the things that the crowd ordinarily pursue, including the esteem of others, ‘frequently ruin those who possess them, and always ruin those who are possessed by them’ (§7, O1.68). If our being is defined by empty glory, then to lose the crowd’s admiration to a rival is effectively to die. If all you are is famous, then losing fame is death. It amounts to losing your self-acquiescence – the highest good you can hope for (later we shall see how Spinoza can imagine a stabler form of acquiescence in the form of beatitude). Rivalries over empty glory can therefore be much more intense even than rivalries over concrete objects. Their object is being itself, and the stakes are deadly.6 Yet even when we have it, the sort of self-acquiescence that empty glory brings is a sham self-acquiescence. To explain this, we must look more closely at the term. Carlisle notes that the term ‘acquiescentia’ contains the Latin root ‘quies’, signifying ‘stillness, quiet, rest’, while ‘on the other hand, the verb acquiescere also carries the sense of acceptance, submission or obedience conveyed by the English “acquiesce”’.7 Later Spinoza uses the same word to define beatitude, as acquiescence of mind (E 4app.4). Here, again, it carries a strong connotation of peace or repose.8 What Spinoza calls ‘self-acquiescence’ thus involves a notion of inner peace. Yet the state of empty glory is far from peaceful. It is troubled by constant anxiety and the real threat of rivalry. Thus the sense of submission comes to the foreground instead: submission to the opinion of the crowd. Empty glory is really a type of servitude. Carlisle’s analysis points towards the interesting history behind the Latin word ‘acquiescentia’. Pina Totaro concludes that it is an early modern invention, not found in classical or medieval Latin. She follows Christian Wolff in tracing the first use of the phrase ‘acquiescentia in se ipso’ to Henri Desmarets’s Latin translation of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul.9 Moreau and Steenbakkers note a number of earlier uses of ‘acquiescentia’ on its own; all of these are theological uses referring to something like an acceptance of divine grace (O2.564n172). They also point out that the theologians using this term were regularly cited in a work by Spinoza’s friend Lodewijk Meyer,10 so that Spinoza might well have known of them. In addition, Totaro observes that ‘the expression acquiescentia in se ipso, constantly referred to in the third part, is replaced in the fifth part by the term acquiescentia animi or mentis’.11 This raises a puzzle insofar as these stand for different states. Spinoza seems, at different times, to demarcate both of them as the highest thing we can hope for. As Donald Rutherford puts it: Accepting a systematic semantic distinction between acquiescentia in se ipso and acquiescentia animi, we must conclude that Spinoza is speaking loosely in 4p52s, when he says that the former is ‘the highest thing we can hope for’. Part Five demonstrates, on the contrary, that ‘man’s highest happiness, or

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blessedness’ – indeed his salvation (5p36s) – is to be identified only with […] ‘contentment of mind’ […].12 (5p27) We shall have to come later to this apparently higher state of acquiescentia animi. For now our question must be how empty glory, a state so anxious and troubled, can be called a form of acquiescence at all. The term that Desmarets translates as ‘acquiescentia in se ipso’ is Descartes’s term ‘self-satisfaction’ (satisfaction de soy-mesme), which Descartes defines as: the fresh satisfaction we gain when we have just performed an action we think good […] – a kind of joy which I consider to be the sweetest of all joys, because its cause depends only on ourselves. (Passions §190: AT 11.471, CSM 1.396) Spinoza by contrast defines ‘acquiescentia in se ipso’ as ‘joy [laetitiam] along with the idea of an internal cause’. But his definition is, in his own terms, nearly equivalent to Descartes’s. He treats ‘good’ as meaning ‘every kind of joy and whatever leads to joy’ (E 3p39s), so that the idea of joy plus an internal cause – that is, the thought that it was you or something in you that caused the joy – is nearly the same as the thought that you performed a good action. Descartes, however, having defined self-acquiescence in his way, goes on to describe a deluded version of it: But when […] the actions from which we derive great satisfaction are not very important or are even vicious, the satisfaction is absurd and serves only to produce a kind of vanity and impertinent arrogance. (Passions §190: AT 11.471, CSM 1.396) Deluded though they are, people who fall into this sort of self-acquiescence may well be perfectly at peace. The term acquiescentia can apply to them in its full connotation. They still draw their joy from ‘a cause that depends only on themselves’, namely the actions that they wrongly deem virtuous. Spinoza, in contrast to this, identifies a sort of deluded self-acquiescence that involves the perceived judgements of others. He introduces the concept of self-­ acquiescence in the context of discussing glory, which is self-acquiescence arising from the belief that one is the object of praise or blame (E 3p30s).13 The delusional version of this is a type of false glory, based on a mistaken belief about the praise or admiration of others: It can happen that the joy somebody imagines himself bringing to others is merely imaginary. And, since each person strives to imagine himself in way that brings him joy, it easily happens that somebody subject to glory is prideful, and believes that he is pleasing everyone when in fact he is upsetting everyone. (E 3p30s)

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Can a person in this condition be completely at peace? We can answer this by deepening the comparison with Descartes. Wittich argues that what Spinoza claims ‘can be said much more clearly according to Descartes’s way of thinking’, as follows: It can happen that the actions by which people confirm their acquiescence are vicious rather than virtuous, and thus only serve to produce pride and absurd arrogance.14 But Wittich misses the point that Descartes and Spinoza are talking about different things. Descartes is talking about a deluded view of the moral quality of our actions. Spinoza is talking about a deluded view of the judgements of others. Descartes, as Wittich notices,15 also has a notion of glory, which he defines in roughly the same way as Spinoza: ‘a kind of joy based on the love we have for ourselves and resulting from the belief or hope we have of being praised by certain other persons’ (Passions §204: AT 11.482, CSM 1.401).16 It too is a type of ‘satisfaction de soy-mesme’ (ibid.). But Descartes introduces the concept of glory after self-acquiescence. When Spinoza first introduces these terms in the Ethics – at E 3p30s – he introduces them the other way around.17 This is because self-acquiescence for him is defined in terms of glory; the concepts are not independent. Moreover, whereas Descartes speaks of a delusional form of self-acquiescence – the vanity of believing that your vicious actions are in fact virtuous – Spinoza speaks only of a delusional form of glory – the belief that your actions please others, when in fact they repulse others. I believe that the key to these differences lies in a crucial proposition underpinning Spinoza’s discussion, which we have already examined. This is the proposition that the human mind only knows itself through the affections of its body, or, more informally, what we observe around us (E 2p23). Wittich regards this proposition as ‘most false’,18 but he admits that its falsity doesn’t damage Spinoza’s demonstration of his propositions about self-acquiescence. After all, it is at least true that the mind sometimes knows itself in that way.19 But this is wrong; Spinoza’s argument depends on the stronger claim that the mind only knows itself in this way. Descartes can speak about ‘an action we think good’ without elaborating on how we come to think the action good. But for Spinoza, I have argued, our moral self-understanding depends entirely on the idea of an exemplar. While, as we shall see, it is possible to derive an idea of an exemplar without looking to others, for most people the source of the idea will be imagination and experience – what Spinoza calls the first kind of cognition (Ep40s2). One thing that looms very large in most of our experience is the approval of others. This plays a major role, for most of us, in defining the exemplar by which we measure ourselves. Lilli Alanen points out that ‘as Spinoza had learnt from his own bitter experience, we are dependent on the approval from fellow-human beings to thrive’.20 The point was once put poignantly by Ford Maddox Ford: ‘We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness

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to exist’.21 The connection between self-acquiescence and glory is therefore much stronger in Spinoza than in Descartes, a point also made by Francesco Toto, who writes: ‘Unlike Descartes, Spinoza attributes a fundamental ethical role to recognition’.22 For Spinoza, our self-conception is usually intimately dependent on what we see in others, including how we see ourselves affecting others. Self-acquiescence in Spinoza’s sense is hardly likely to be a peaceful and self-sufficient condition. As Descartes points out, the qualities for which people are praised and admired: intelligence, beauty, riches, honours, etc., are commonly esteemed so highly because so few people have them, and for the most part their nature is such that they cannot be shared by many people. (Passions §158: AT 11.449, CSM 1.386) Esteem depends on the rarity of the quality esteemed, so the game of prestige is naturally competitive. Moreover, it depends on a fickle crowd whose attention we cannot be sure to retain. What we can be sure of is that there will always be others trying to steal away the crowd’s attention for themselves. And somebody whose self-acquiescence balances upon the opinion of the crowd risks dire consequences if the balance shifts. Keith Green explains how, when the crowd turns against us, we can easily be led towards abject self-hatred.23 Such are the perils of empty glory. And it is perilous regardless of how accurate the crowd’s view of us is. Shapiro distinguishes between the picture of ourselves that we form through accurate self-acquiescence and that formed through a delusional version, based on a merely imagined approval from others, calling only the former ‘self-acquiescence’ and identifying the latter as a species of what Spinoza calls pride (thinking more highly of oneself than is just: E 3.def.aff.28, O4.330). She explains: With pride, our consciousness of self derives from our affective relations to others and the ways in which they reflect back on us. […] While this sense of self can be a good thing, there are a litany of standard cases where it runs amok – the cliques that invariably take over high school social orders, the politician that surrounds himself with yes-men, and so on.24 We have seen one danger involved in the type of affective relationship described here: the mechanisms of emulation work tirelessly to convert those who affirm our sense of self – our clique of admirers or executive committee of yes-men – into a league of bitter and dangerous rivals. ‘A proud person’, Spinoza writes, ‘is necessarily envious’ (E 4p57s). But with self-acquiescence the situation is better: while we [still] derive our imagination of self from the affective response of others to us, those others stand at an affective remove. They might resemble us, but they (as yet) do not stand to benefit or harm us in our continued existence in any way.25

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Pride is based on a relationship with intimates. Self-acquiescence – at least the type Shapiro discusses – is based on a relationship with people at a remove from oneself.26 Nevertheless, the pursuit of self-acquiescence remains dangerous. To repeat: one quality that any model has, even a very distant one, is that of being admired. If we seek to emulate this quality then we will need admirers and thus become ambitious. Spinoza holds that a person bound by any desire is also bound by ambition, and quotes Cicero’s bon mot, that even treatises condemning public esteem are signed by their authors (E3.Def.Aff.44). Ambition is also inevitably rivalrous. When Spinoza first defines it, he writes: This striving to bring it about that everyone should approve his love and hate is really ambition. And so we see that each of us, by his nature, wants the others to live according to his temperament; when all alike want this, they are alike an obstacle to one another, and when all wish to be praised, or loved, by all, they hate one another. (E 3p31s) Later he defines ‘ambition’ as ‘excessive desire for glory’ (E3.Def.Aff.44). Far from the two definitions being contradictory, one entails the other, on Spinoza’s theory. This is because striving that others should share one’s loves and hates can only lead to a desire for glory and can only be excessive, since it enters into an amplifying feedback loop through rivalry. As Carlisle points out: As well as making themselves anxious, people who pursue this acquiescentia become aggressively competitive with others. Indeed, those who succeed in gaining it may be the worst of all.27 This is because in the fight over prestige ‘whoever turns out the victor glories more in having harmed the other than in having profited himself ’ (E 4p58s). Thus self-acquiescence, even if based on an accurate sounding of popular sentiment, is inherently set up to lead to rivalry. As Carlisle puts it elsewhere: ‘it makes people anxious within themselves, and troublesome to others’.28 Is it possible for any desire, founded on an exemplar, to escape this pathology? It is possible, of course, that you might seek to emulate an exemplar without seeking to emulate the quality of being emulated. Zagzebski points out that ‘it is not necessary that a person be imitable in every respect in order to be imitable in some respect’.29 That Spinoza regards this as unlikely, however, is suggested by the claim we already noted: ambition accompanies every other desire (E3.Def.Aff.44). Still, what if we simply constructed the idea of an exemplar as a model to aim at? This constructed model would, of course, have the quality of being emulated, insofar as we aim at conforming to it. But it would not have the sort of admiration, prestige, and social status that a real person can have – or even a character in a fiction (Achilles might be mythical, but he is certainly admired). An abstract construction can’t become a rival in the same sense.

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In the Preface to Part Four, Spinoza proposes such a construction and writes: By ‘good’, in what follows, I will understand what we certainly know to be a means to conform more and more to an exemplar of human nature that we propose. And by ‘bad’ I will understand that which we certainly know to impede us in matching to that exemplar. (E4.Pref., O2.344) The suggestion is that Part Four will build a moral theory around this proposed exemplar, whom I will call the Model Agent. References to the Model Agent by various names – ‘the free person’, ‘the person who is led by reason’, ‘the person led by virtue’ – recur throughout the text. Moira Gatens suggests that the advantage of this sort of exemplar, for Spinoza, is that the subject ‘knows that the ideal is a fictional device, a mode of thought, that is put to work in the service of the human endeavour to persevere in existence’.30 Moreover, we can build into this fictional exemplar traits that counter the tendency to rivalry we found so closely linked to emulation. Spinoza’s Model Agent, for instance, enjoys without restraint those goods that can be used ‘without any harm to others’ (E 4p45s). The user of such goods avoids the circles of emulation, ambition, and rivalry that we have explored previously. To emulate the Model Agent is to channel our impulse to emulation in a direction away from the Fall and conflict. The Model Agent is also fortified against rivalry in a deeper sense. He will inevitably strive that others love the good that he loves (E 4p37d2).31 But the good he loves ‘is common to all, and all can enjoy it [gaudere possunt]’, so that ‘he will therefore strive that everyone enjoys it [gaudeant], and all the more so the more he enjoys it [fruetur]’ (4p37d2). A striking thing about this passage is that, whereas Spinoza almost always uses ‘gaudeo’ for ‘enjoy’, at the very end of the passage he switches to ‘fruor’. This is his term for the type of enjoyment that the exemplar has, not only in the good itself but in perceiving the enjoyment of others. The switch to a different word could be significant. Augustine marks a similar distinction, though he opposes ‘fruor’ to ‘uti’ rather than ‘gaudeo’. Wolfgang Palaver explains: Only eternal goods, Augustine contends, are worthy of human aspiration, for this desire is humanity’s ultimate aim. Earthly goods should be utilized only to achieve the joy of eternal happiness. This differentiation with regard to the potential aim of human desire – in Augustine’s words, between eternal pleasure, frui, and earthly utility, uti – allows one to separate life-enhancing forms of mimesis from destructive forms. On the one hand, Augustine shows that worldly desire results in the disastrous consequences of mimetic desire, as it divides humans in rivalry over goods that cannot be shared. On the other hand, however, Augustine fashions a way out of this vicious cycle; the more humans direct their desire at eternal goods – such as the desire of God ( fruitio Dei) – the more fulfilling this desire becomes.32

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Spinoza also regards the highest good pursued by his exemplar to be God – at least the knowledge of God (E 4p36). Like Augustine, he stresses that the pursuit of this perfectly shareable good avoids any toxic mimetic dynamics. After the preceding passage, Spinoza makes a comparison with the person who ‘strives only from affect’. This person also ‘strives that the others love what he himself loves, and that the others live according to his character’, but since the highest good that people want from affect is often such that only one can be in command of it, what happens is that those who love it are not constant in mind, and while they enjoy praising the thing they love, they fear to be believed. (E 4p37s1) This is again the tortured fluctuation: our need to be confirmed in our desires drives us to set up our own rivals, and then to simultaneously crave and resent their rivalry, like the unhappy lover in Ovid’s poem we saw quoted by Spinoza in Chapter 2. This, at least, the Model Agent avoids, by remaining focussed on an eternal and completely non-rivalrous good. Such a good can deliver a higher sort of enjoyment – fruition, which is enhanced rather than hindered when others share in it. But how do we generate the idea of the Model Agent? Michael Rosenthal notes that a rationally constructed idea of an exemplar will have to be what Spinoza calls a ‘universal idea’, which is ‘always the product of a subjective experience of the external world’.33 Spinoza gives ‘human being’ [homo] as an example of a ‘universal notion’, which, he claims, we form when: so many images of human beings [hominum] are formed at the same time that they exceed the power of the imagination, not entirely, but so much that the mind cannot imagine the small differences among singular individuals (such as the colour of each, its size, etc.) nor their determinate number. And it distinctly imagines only that in which they all agree to the extent that the body is affected by them. For it is from this that the body has been most affected by each of these singulars, and this it expresses with the name human being [hominis] and predicates it of infinite singulars. (E 2p40s1) Rosenberg draws out a conclusion. Since this is how we form a universal notion of a human being, it follows that: although someone might think that the term ‘Man’ refers to a single universal genus, in fact, when the actual description of that genus is given, its extension will vary depending upon which features of bodies have most vigorously affected the knower. One person will understand by ‘Man’ ‘an animal of erect stature’, another, struck by another feature, will understand it as ‘an animal capable of laughter’, and so on. These definitions may be useful as an aid to

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memory, but as a means towards scientific truth or as a way to overcome the subjectivity of value judgments they are flawed.34 There has been some discussion of whether, despite this haphazard way in which universal notions seem to be formed, one can form an adequate idea of a true universal human essence. Various theories have been proposed of what that universal essence might be.35 If there is such a true essence, and we can form an adequate idea of it, then Part Four of the Ethics can provide an ethical theory grounded in an objective idea of human nature. This is a traditional view that cuts across cultures: it can be found, for instance, in both Aristotle and Mencius.36 Nadler optimistically proposes that ‘Spinoza’s “model of human nature” is independent of subjective particularities and, instead, metaphysically grounded in what it is to be a human being’.37 But Lee Rice argues compellingly that in Spinoza’s comments on the exemplar of human nature: ‘There is nothing […] to suggest that human nature, for normative purposes, is anything but a construct’.38 Thus I share Rosenthal’s doubts about the possibility of any really objective idea of human nature: Spinoza warns the reader against imagining that exemplars and the values attendant on them are found in, or products of, nature itself. They are just human constructs made in order to compare things, to judge relative value, and to emulate in one’s actions.39 The Model Agent is constructed, not to capture some objective essence, but to be suitable for emulation. What guides reason in constructing the Model Agent is consideration of the dangers of emulative psychology. We have seen ways in which it is designed to avoid these. For another example, since we are prone to want others to desire as we desire (ambition), the Model Agent avoids receiving gifts from others, lest he give offence by not valuing the gifts as they would have: Each person judges what is good from his own character. The ignorant person who has conferred a gift upon somebody will therefore value it from his own character. And if he sees that the one to whom he has given it esteems it less than he does, he will be sad […]. Therefore the free person, in order not to be hated by the ignorant, and obeying not their appetite but only reason, will strive to decline their gifts as far as he can. (E 4p70d) Moreover, in situations where the Model Agent can’t refuse gifts without causing offence, he will make sure to thank the givers according to their own customs and character (E 4p70s). Nobody is more sensitive to the insecurities of the crowd. In such ways, Spinoza’s Model Agent is carefully constructed to avoid much of the conflict associated with emulation. If we must emulate, the Model Agent is what

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we should emulate. Such a condition is vastly superior to the situation of ordinary ambition, which leads towards the poisoned chalice of empty glory. But can beatitude reside in the emulation of the Model Agent? As we have already seen, Spinoza proposes that the highest thing we can hope for is self-acquiescence (E 4p52s). This follows from his most general psychological theory. If our ultimate striving is to persevere in being, then our ultimate end must be the achievement of that being. John Ruskin once traced a great evil in modern life to the fact that we are only ever temporarily in our homes – either ‘always hoping to get larger and finer ones’ or ‘forced, in some way or other, to live where we do not choose, and in continual expectation of changing our place of abode’.40 Likewise with the striving after being; we are very often beckoned away from whatever being we have achieved, by ambition or insecurity. But in self-acquiescence the soul finds its forever home. It passes beyond the hope for improvement and the fear of transition. Since, however, we define our being in terms of an exemplar, it follows that the hope for self-acquiescence must be for permanent conformity to an exemplar. And that hope seems impossible. Conformity to any definite exemplar is always a temporary good, given the inevitable transformations in things. If nothing else stops us conforming to our exemplar, death will. We saw in Chapter 1 the problem with trying to identify beatitude with anything temporary, expressed in the argument from Aquinas. Beatitude is a highest good – a state that, by definition, leaves nothing more to be desired. But a temporary good leaves something more to be desired, namely the continuation of the temporary good for at least a little longer. The ‘continual expectation of changing our place of abode’ is not extinguished, and this leaves something unsatisfied. Is Spinoza, then, denying the orthodox view that beatitude is the object of our highest hope for total satisfaction? But why, then, write of beatitude at all? The answer to this will be the subject of the next chapter. But before moving towards it, we should note carefully what Spinoza has to say about death. Spinoza points out that death consists simply in ‘being changed into a completely different other’ (E 4p39s). This follows from what we noted near the start of Chapter 2: we cannot say whether a thing continues in being or not without identifying that thing under a specific description. The person continues when the baby does not; the matter continues when the living body does not; etc. And yet our own power to continue to instance a specific description, or to conform to a specific exemplar, is very limited. Spinoza tells us that this power is ‘infinitely surpassed’ by causes external to us (E 4p4). Inevitably, we will be transformed until we no longer exist under this description and no longer conform to this exemplar. If our being is defined by these, then the transformation means death. Spinoza, however, tells us that the Model Agent ‘thinks of death least of all, and his wisdom is not of death but of life’ (E 4p67). Yet, as we saw in Chapter 1, Augustine’s powerful arguments show that it is very hard to reconcile the striving after a particular sort of being, the correspondence to a particular model – a striving that, as we saw, aims at its goal for an indefinite time (E 3p8) – with an attitude of complete indifference towards the inevitability of death.

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It is a clever trick of Spinoza, no doubt, to build an unconcern with death into the construction of the Model Agent. This makes it logically impossible to conform to the exemplar while retaining any fear about one day not conforming to it. But the trick is too clever by half. If we don’t mind conforming to the exemplar up to a certain time and then failing to conform after that, then how can conformity to the exemplar be called our ultimate striving? It would seem rather that what we strive after in that case is conformity to the exemplar for some undefined period and then conformity to something else after that. As attractive as the idea has been to many philosophers, indifference towards death seems impossible to reconcile with the wholehearted pursuit of and attachment to life. There is something else apparently contradictory in this part of the Ethics. Although Spinoza declares self-acquiescence to be the greatest thing we can hope for, he also denotes cognition of God to be the mind’s highest good (E 4p28). Surely our highest good should be the greatest thing we can hope for. Yet cognition of God is not obviously the same thing as self-acquiescence. In Part Five, Spinoza refers to cognition of God as a sort of acquiescence: acquiescence of the soul – the acquiescentia animi mentioned earlier. Can this be a type of self-acquiescence? If so, it is a type that need not be troubled about the prospect of death, since Spinoza is clear that somebody who ‘attains true acquiescence of the soul’ is one who ‘never passes away’ (E 5p42s). But how can it be possible to never pass away, given Spinoza’s other views? Moreover, as Alanen points out, Spinoza’s description of acquiescence of the soul leaves little room for any self in which one might acquiesce.41 With this, I have set up our problems for the next chapter.

Notes 1 Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory, 133–4. 2 Alexander Douglas, ‘Spinoza’s Unquiet Acquiescentia’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 2020. 3 The identification of glory with the admiration of the crowd is well established in the philosophical tradition – particularly in the Roman literature to which Spinoza was partial: e.g., Cicero, Marcus Tullius, On Duties, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1913), 2.9. 4 Phenomena like this, in which people harbour certain affects or attitudes only because they perceive others to harbour those same affects or attitudes, are central to Spinoza’s non-reductionist social theory. In these cases individual psychology is not the ultimate ground of social explanation. I have argued and explained this point elsewhere: Douglas, ‘Spinoza and Social Science’. 5 See Carlisle on this: Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 27–8. 6 Girard discusses a very similar dynamic around the Homeric notion of kudos, which, he points out, is sometimes translated ‘glory’: Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 171; René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 292. 7 Carlisle, ‘Spinoza’s Acquiescentia’, 210. 8 Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 2.299, 325. 9 Giuseppina Totaro, ‘“Acquiescentia” Dans La Cinquième Partie de l’Ethique de Spinoza’, Revue Philosophique de La France et de l’Étranger 184, no. 1 (1994): 66; Giuseppina Totaro, ‘The Terminology of the Affects in Ethics Parts III through V’, in Spinoza’s Ethics:

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A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Melamed, Cambridge Critical Guides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 228; René Descartes, Passiones Animae, trans. Henri Desmarets (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1650), 88. 10 Lodewijk Meyer, Philosophy as the Interpreter of Holy Scripture, trans. Samuel Shirley (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2005). 11 Totaro, ‘The Terminology of the Affects in Ethics Parts III through V’, 229. 12 Donald Rutherford, ‘Salvation as a State of Mind: The Place of Acquiescentia in Spinoza’s Ethics’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7, no. 3 (1999): 459. See also Lilli Alanen, ‘Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge: The Case of Pride’, in Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 252–53. 13 At E 3p30 Spinoza seems to distinguish between glory and self-acquiescence. But in other passages, for instance E 4p58s, Spinoza treats glory as a type of self-acquiescence and at E 5p36s Spinoza states directly that they are not distinguished. The most consistent reading, I believe, treats glory as a species of self-acquiescence, though there is self-acquiescence that is not glory. 14 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 193. 15 Wittich, 193. 16 The translation cited uses the word ‘pride’. But the French word in the original is ‘gloire’, and Desmarets’s Latin translation uses ‘gloria’ Descartes, Passiones Animae, 94. 17 In the list of affects at the end of E 3, however, Spinoza lists self-acquiescence before glory; I thank Francesco Toto for pointing this out to me. 18 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 122. 19 Wittich, 192. 20 Alanen, ‘Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge’, 249. 21 Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (Richmond: Alma Classics, 2015), 85. It is put less poignantly by Jon Elster: ‘Other people perform the indispensable function of assessing, criticizing, and praising one’s performance; they provide the “reality control” without which self-actualization would be like a “private language”, a morass of subjectivity’ Jon Elster, ‘Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life’, Social Philosophy and Policy 3, no. 2 (ed 1986): 106. 22 Francesco Toto, ‘La Théorie de l’estime de Descartes et Spinoza Passions de l’âme et Éthique’, in Chemins Du Cartésianisme, ed. Antonella Del Prete and Raffaele Carbone (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017), 153. 23 Keith Green, ‘Spinoza on Self-Hatred’, Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly / ‫ןויע‬: ‫ יפוסוליפ ןועבר‬65 (2016): 73–95. 24 Shapiro, ‘Self-Consciousness and Consciousness of Self ’, 152. 25 Shapiro, 152. 26 Shapiro raises this to show that self-acquiescence is less likely to mislead us about ourselves, since we are less likely to be deceived about the opinions of those more distant from us. But it also follows that self-acquiescence involves less of a threat than pride, since those further away from us are less likely to become our rivals. 27 Carlisle, ‘Spinoza’s Acquiescentia’, 220. 28 Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 125. 29 Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory, 55. 30 Gatens, ‘Spinoza’s Disturbing Thesis: Power, Norms and Fiction in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’, 467–8. 31 The exemplar is given a masculine pronoun throughout this text. This is because I often quote Spinoza’s own discussions, which use masculine pronouns exclusively, and it would be confusing for the pronouns not to match. I could, of course, have translated Spinoza so as to match my own practice of alternating masculine and feminine pronouns when speaking of abstract characters. This option is, in my view, left open by the relative scarcity of pronouns in Latin. But my past attempts to do this have earned me scoldings from other scholars, for projecting 21st-century commitments onto 17th-century thinkers. 32 Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 91.

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33 Rosenthal, ‘Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary Function of Prophecy in the Theological-Political Treatise’, 214. Rosenthal refers here to E 2p17s. 34 Rosenthal, 215. 35 Francis Haserot, ‘Spinoza and the Status of Universals’, ed. Paul Kashap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 43–67; Alan Donagan, ‘Essence and the Distinction of Attributes in Spinoza’s Metaphysics’, in Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marjorie Glicksman Grene (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1973), 164–81; Martial Gueroult, Spinoza II. L’âme (Paris: Aubier, 1974), Appendix 3; Cesar Tejedor Campomanes, Una Antropología Del Conocimiento: Estudio Sobre Spinoza (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 1981), 111–22; Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1984), 39; Diana Burns Steinberg, ‘Spinoza’s Ethical Doctrine and the Unity of Human Nature’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 22, no. 3 (1984): 303–24; Lucia Lermond, The Form of Man: Human Essence in Spinoza’s Ethic (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 55–6. 36 Jiyuan Yu, The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle: Mirrors of Virtue (New York: Routledge, 2013), ch.2. It is noteworthy that Confucius, whose legacy Mencius claimed to represent, does not seem to have articulated any abstract model of human nature. Instead, as Amy Olberding has shown, he pointed to really-existing models: Amy Olberding, ‘Dreaming of the Duke of Zhou: Exemplarism and the Analects’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35, no. 4 (2008): 625–39; Amy Olberding, Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person Is That (New York: Routledge, 2011). This suggests that, like Spinoza as Rosenthal and I read him, Confucius believed that our abstract idea of human nature is at most a generalisation from our subjective experience of real examples. I follow a convention of convenience here in speaking of ‘Confucius’ and ‘Mencius’ as individual authors whose views are represented in extant texts. 37 Nadler, Think Least of Death, 17. 38 Rice, ‘Tanquam Naturae Humanae Exemplar’, 301. 39 Rosenthal, ‘Why Spinoza Chose the Hebrews: The Exemplary Function of Prophecy in the Theological-Political Treatise’, 224. 40 John Ruskin, Lectures On Architecture and Painting, Etc., The Works of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1904), 72. 41 Alanen, ‘Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge’, 254.

5 THE REPOSE OF THE SOUL

In describing the ultimate rest of the soul, Spinoza shifts restlessly. In some places, he proposes that our beatitude is found in the love of God (ST 19.1; O1.350; E 5p42d). Elsewhere, he finds it in the knowledge of God (E 2p49s, 5p31s). Sometimes it is in both (TTP ch.4; O3.186). But the oscillation generates harmony. In the fifth part of the Ethics we find a strong suggestion that the specific types of knowledge and love of God, which together constitute beatitude, are so intimately linked as to be nearly identical (E 5p32c, 5p42d). The love grows naturally from the knowledge, and only from it. And, as I will discuss, it is an unusual type of love – an intellectual love, which overlaps much more with knowledge than more familiar kinds of love. But what about our problem from the previous chapter? Spinoza identifies self-acquiescence as the highest human good. But beatitude is also marked as the highest human good (TTP ch.4; O3.186). Does this mean that beatitude and self-acquiescence are the same thing? In criticising Spinoza for elevating self-acquiescence as the highest good, the mystical theologian Pierre Poiret claimed that whoever aims at self-acquiescence ‘removes and denies God, his own aim [scopum] and archetype, principle and end, Alpha and Omega, from whom, by whom, and to whom all things are’.1 Scholars have defended Spinoza on this point, arguing that Poiret misses a great deal of importance in Spinoza’s theory.2 There is more to Poiret’s case than first appears, and we shall return to it later. But for now we should note that Spinoza’s defenders are right: Poiret overlooks the fact that, although Spinoza elevates self-acquiescence, he does not deny God as the ultimate human end. Rather, beatitude is for him a type of acquiescence that consists of the recognition of God. It is ‘nothing other than that acquiescence of the soul [animi acquiescentia], which arises from intuitive cognition of God’ (E 4app4, O4.432).

DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-6

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Some mystery remains, however. Spinoza speaks of beatitude as a type of acquiescence of the soul, but not of self-acquiescence. Many scholars have supposed that acquiescence of the soul is an elevated form of self-acquiescence.3 This is for a good textual reason: two of Spinoza’s propositions about acquiescence of the soul (E 5p27, 36s) refer in their demonstrations back to his definition of self-acquiescence (3def.aff25), suggesting that one term is substitutable for the other. Other scholars suggest that the two are distinct, though very closely related.4 Either way there is the fact of Spinoza’s language to explain. When turning to the subject of beatitude, the self drops out (acquiescentia in se ipso) and is replaced by the soul (acquiescentia animi). This shift in language, I believe, is of the utmost significance. By shifting his terminology, Spinoza is trying to tell us is that the soul at rest doesn’t have a self – at least not as we usually think of the self. It will take some time to elaborate what is meant by that. Carlisle proposes that acquiescence of the soul is the highest of three types of self-acquiescence, corresponding to Spinoza’s three types of cognition: the imagination, reason, and the highest form – intuitive cognition.5 I believe I can extend Carlisle’s reading by suggesting a crucial role for these three types of cognition to play in self-acquiescence: in each case, cognition supplies an exemplar. To cognise these exemplars is to be drawn to imitate them. The first kind of cognition, which involves our everyday experience as well as what we read and hear, supplies the exemplary characters whom we meet in life or in stories we hear, or read about in books. From these experiences arises the self-acquiescence of conforming to these heroic figures. The second kind of cognition, reason, is the faculty by which we construct an abstract exemplar like the one I discussed in the previous chapter: the Model Agent. This belongs with a second kind of self-acquiescence: that of living up to the Model Agent.6 But the third kind of cognition cognises God as the exemplar. Some scholars might find this reading difficult to accept. Gatens points to a passage in the Theologico-Political Treatise, which she presents as follows: Spinoza writes, ‘the intellectual knowledge of God which contemplates his nature as it really is in itself ’ understands also that this is ‘a nature which men cannot imitate by a set rule of conduct nor take as their example’.7 Here ‘intellectual’ is contrasted with ‘imaginative’, so this passage, as read by Gatens, seems to undermine my suggestion that intuitive cognition – the epitome of the intellect – can take an idea of God as an exemplar. On the other hand, at the other extreme, Charles Jarrett suggests that God can be the only true exemplar to a human agent with perfect understanding.8 It is worth looking in detail at what Spinoza says in the passage cited by Gatens. Since I translate it slightly differently, I include the Latin below: We conclude that the intellectual cognition of God, which considers his nature only as it is in itself, and which nature human beings cannot imitate by

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a certain rule of living, nor take up as an example to institute a true rule of living, does not pertain in any way to faith and revealed religion. concludimus intellectualem Dei cognitionem, quae ejus naturam, prout in se est, considerate, et quam naturam homines certa vivendi ratione imitari non possunt neque tanquam exemplum sumere ad veram vivendi rationem instituendam, ad fidem et religionem revelatum nullo modo pertinere. (TTP ch.13; O3.458) What is important here is that Spinoza doesn’t deny that an intellectual idea of God can be taken as an example in any way. He claims only that it can’t be taken as an example in order to institute a true rule of living. Spinoza’s purpose in the passage is to deny that the intellectual idea of God can be of any use to revealed religion, which he associates with prescriptions of particular ways of living – injunctions to act in certain ways and prohibitions against acting in other ways. In other words, the idea of God can’t serve as a model for a specific way of being that rules out other ways of being. In no way do I deny this when I read Spinoza’s doctrine of the acquiescence of the soul as involving the intuited idea of God as an exemplar. Rather, to take God as an exemplar in this way is precisely not to be constrained by any specific model or rule of living, as I shall now try to explain. I have suggested, following Carlisle, that Spinoza’s third kind of cognition comes with its own sort of acquiescence. But, unlike with the first two kinds of cognition, Spinoza no longer calls this self-acquiescence. There is a good reason for this: God does not count as a self in the way that an exemplary character or even the Model Agent does. Moreover, whereas in the other cases there is a great difference between cognising the models and conforming to them, a difference that takes a significant striving to overcome, in the third case, where God as exemplar is intuitively cognised, cognition and conformity are one and the same. Simply to know God in this way is to conform to God, and to acquiesce in this conformity. That is why the intuitive idea of God as an exemplar can’t be used as the basis for instituting a rule of living. These points require explaining in terms of Spinoza’s complex views concerning the relation of God to individual human beings. We move now into the most difficult terrain in Spinoza’s philosophical landscape. Acquiescence of the soul, Spinoza explains, is a joy accompanied by an idea of yourself (E 5p27d). Yet later he claims that a human mind’s thought of itself, by the third kind of cognition, is really God’s thought of himself (E 5p36d). Specifically, it is God’s thought of himself, ‘insofar as he can be explained through the human mind’. I propose to make sense of this by trying to grasp what Spinoza means when he writes of God being ‘explained through the human mind’. Spinoza at one point proposes that singular things, such as the human mind, express the attributes of God (E 1p25c), which in turn express the infinite essence of God (1def4). I propose that God ‘explained through the human mind’, for Spinoza, means God expressed through the human mind. But then what does that mean? For a more traditional theist, God could be said to be expressed or manifested in ordinary things insofar as those things reveal his divine purposes in creating them.

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The great anatomist Jan Swammerdam, for instance, wrote: ‘I offer you the Omnipotent Finger of God in the anatomy of a louse’, to accompany one of his microscope drawings.9 The louse’s anatomy expresses God in the way that an artist’s work expresses the artist, by revealing her artistic intentions. But Spinoza’s God has no intentions to reveal. ‘If God acts for some end’, Spinoza argued, ‘he necessarily wants something, which he lacks’, but this doctrine, which ‘takes away the perfection of God’ can’t be accepted (E 1app, O4.154). The expression of God in singular things must mean something else for Spinoza.10 Let me approach it from an unusual starting point. In Toshihiku Izutsu’s comparative study of Sufism and Daoism, we find the following summary: The absolute and ultimate ground of Existence is in both Sufism and Taoism the Mystery of Mysteries. The latter is, as Ibn ‘Arabī says, the ankar al-nakirāt ‘the most indeterminate of all indeterminates’; that is to say, it is Something that transcends all qualifications and relations that are humanly conceivable.11 Spinoza may well have known Ibn ‘Arabī, who was not far from the medieval Jewish tradition in which he was raised.12 Some have argued that Sufi themes resonate with his thought.13 He almost certainly knew nothing of Daoism, as I will argue in the next chapter. But what Izutsu identifies as a point of contact between those two traditions also connects them with Spinozism. Spinoza’s God, who stands as something like the absolute and ultimate ground of existence (E 1p15, 18), seems also to be an indeterminate being. Harry Wolfson notes that this puts Spinoza in line with a traditional view in medieval Judeo-Christian thought, which takes God’s essential or absolute infinity to entail complete indeterminacy.14 But Sufism and Daoism, as read by Izutsu, are both forms of monism; they hold that there is only one true object in reality, as for Spinoza God is the only substance (E 1p14). They thus seem closer to Spinoza than the Judeo-Christian sources examined by Wolfson. Moreover, the way in which God is indeterminate aligns with Izutsu’s Sufi-Daoist notion rather than with the traditions cited by Wolfson, as I now argue. Where, first of all, does Spinoza suggest that God is an indeterminate being? In a letter to Jarig Jelles, he declares the following: As to this, that shape is negation and nothing positive, it is manifest that the whole of matter, considered indefinitely, can have no shape, and shape applies only to finite and determinate bodies. For whoever says that he conceives15 a shape indicates by this only that he conceives some determinate thing and the manner in which it is determinate. This determination therefore does not pertain to the thing per its being but rather it is its non-being. For shape is nothing other than a determination, and determination is negation. It cannot, as they say, be anything but a negation. (Ep.50, G3.240)

The Repose of the Soul  65

And yet, as Yitzhak Melamed notes: at the very opening of the Ethics […] Spinoza stresses that God is absolutely infinite, i.e., that ‘whatever expresses essence and involves no negation pertains to its essence’.16 (Ethics 1d6expl; my italics) This implies that God, per his essence, is not negated in any way. But if all determination is negation, then it follows that God is not determined in any way. This leads to a point that was strongly emphasised by Spinoza’s readers in and around the ‘Idealist’ tradition.17 If determination is negation, and God is not at all negated, then God must be utterly undetermined. Some who have striven to avoid this conclusion have supposed that when Spinoza speaks of determination in the letter to Jelles he means to refer only to a particular type of determination – namely, the geometrical determination of a shape. Robert Stern proposes this.18 Lewis Robinson goes further, suggesting that Spinoza does not even claim that determination is negation in the geometrical case; the statement in the letter to Jelles, he hypothesises, is an editor’s interpolation.19 Pierre Machery gives textual arguments that ‘Spinoza does not use the term determinatio only in the sense of a limitation, whose implications are negative’.20 But Melamed shows that there is yet stronger textual evidence to show that Spinoza agrees with the general principle that determination is negation. In another letter Spinoza writes: ‘determinatum nihil positivi; sed tantum privationem existentiae ejusdem naturae, quae determinata concipitur, denotat’, which Melamed translates as: ‘“determinate” denotes nothing positive, but only the privation of existence of that same nature which is conceived as determinate’.21 Moreover, Spinoza claims in the Ethics that ‘being finite is really, in part, a negation, and being infinite is an absolute affirmation of the existence of any nature’ (E 1p8s1). Here it is finitude rather than determination that is identified with negation. But since this is contrasted with ‘absolute affirmation’, we could read the passage as another reference to the principle that determination is negation. Most explicitly, in an earlier letter (Ep.36) Spinoza also writes that ‘the existence of an absolutely indeterminate22 and perfect being must be granted, which Being I shall call God’ (Ep.36, G4.185), and ‘the nature of God does not consist in one kind of being, but rather in Being, which is absolutely indeterminate’ (Ep.36, G4.185). Yet how can a perfectly indeterminate being exist at all? In Chapter 2 we examined the impeccable Aristotelian principle that anything that exists must exist as something – that is, under some certain description. Earlier thinkers who regarded God as indeterminate thus drew the conclusion that God does not exist as such; he is somehow above being; his nature is ‘nothing’ and ‘surpasses everything that is’, in the words of John Scotus Eriugena.23 But Spinoza clearly holds that God exists (E 1p11). So how could he think that God is undetermined? The key lies in the fact that there are two ways to avoid being determined, where determination means limitation. One is to be indeterminate: to fail to exist

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in any determinate way. This would be to have existence without essence, which Aristotle’s principle shows to be impossible. The other way is to exist in every determinate form. This is how Melamed explains Spinoza’s idea of God: God escapes limitation not by failing to be determined, but by being maximally determined. He writes: ‘the infinite is here conceived as maximally determined (as opposed to the absolute indeterminacy of the infinite […])’.24 A clue to this lies in part of the passage from Spinoza’s Ethics quoted earlier: ‘being infinite is an absolute affirmation of the existence of any nature [alicujus naturae]’ (E 1p8s1, my emphasis) – if we read ‘any’ here as meaning ‘every’, we get to the idea of maximal determinacy.25 Since there is no such thing as existence outside of determination, the only way an unlimited essence like that of God could exist would be as expressed in every possible determination. Rather than being indeterminate, let us say that such a being is superdeterminate: it is beyond any determinate nature, not because it has no determinate nature, but because it has every possible determinate nature. This must be sharply distinguished from what Leibniz calls the hypercategorematic infinite, which Maria Rosa Antognazza describes as pertaining to ‘a being beyond all determinations but eminently embracing all determinations’.26 Spinoza’s superdeterminate being does not eminently embrace all determinations while remaining beyond them; it simply is determined by them and not beyond them at all. Leibniz found this to be incoherent, since it implies that limitations are imposed upon an unlimited being.27 But Spinoza could reply, first, that it is hypercategorematic being that is incoherent, for the reasons we have given, and, second, that a superdeterminate being is not limited by its determinations. A determination is only a limitation insofar as it prevents a thing from existing in other determinate ways, inconsistent with the first. Being triangular, for instance, is a limitation insofar as it prevents the triangular thing from being square, or circular, or some other shape. But since God exists in every determinate way, his determinations do not limit him. God, in his absolute superdeterminacy, can be triangular and square and circular, and so on. Many will recoil at this, but let me to say a few more things about it. First, I note that the parallel with Izutsu’s Sufi-Daoist notion is striking. Izutsu describes how, in Ibn Arabī’s thought, the ultimate undetermined ground of Existence ‘eructates’, by the necessity of its own nature, into an infinity of determinate forms: ‘Existence, in compliance with its own necessary and natural internal demand, goes on inexhaustibly determining itself into an infinity of concrete things’.28 This might at first sound like the idea of Neoplatonic emanation described by Wolfson: ‘The theory of emanation maintains that the entire universe with all its manifold finite beings is the unfolding of the infinite divine nature, the product of its thinking’.29 But Wolfson’s Neoplatonic vision is of a hypercategorematic God creating determinate beings through a voluntary act of thinking. Spinoza’s vision is instead of a God who exists in every possible determination as a necessary consequence of his superdeterminate nature.30

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Spinoza puts the point at E 1p16: ‘From the necessity of the divine nature, an infinity of infinite modes (that is, everything that can fall under an infinite intellect) must follow’. In the demonstration of this proposition, Spinoza refers to the fact that the more reality the essence of a thing involves, the more properties must be inferred from its definition. The degree of reality corresponds to the degree of qualitative variety. Therefore, since God is an ens realissimum, his absolutely infinite essence demands expression in an infinite plurality of forms. Infinite reality means superdeterminacy. This superdeterminate nature is expressed in the infinite variety of God’s attributes. But, in order to adequately express this superdeterminate nature, each attribute must be superdeterminate in its own right: expressed in an infinite variety of modes. The modes, as expressions of superdeterminate attributes, must then also be superdeterminate – indeed, as Antonio Salgado Borge notes, expression is a transitive relation, so that the modes, as expressions of God’s attributes, are also expressions of God’s nature.31 Spinoza states this directly (E 1p25c, 2d1, 2p1d, 2p10c, 3p6d). But, as Salgado Borge goes on to observe,32 expressions need not give adequate knowledge of what they express; thus modes will be superdeterminate only to the extent that they adequately express God’s nature. This will be very important for understanding beatitude. It follows that Spinoza accepts a pantheistic consequence that Jewish and Christian Neoplatonists were keen to avoid.33 The myriad things of this world are determinations of God himself and thus in some sense identical with him. The early-twentieth-century scholar Hu Shih argued that this idea also comes through in the Zhuangzi: Zhuangzi’s34 ‘Way’ is contained in everything: ‘in the cricket, in the ant, in the smallest corn, in the bricks of the roof, in the excrements.’ In the same way Spinoza’s substance is omnipresent. All things are entirely a model presented by the ‘proper’ nature of the substance; all things are formed through God (natura naturans).35 In the Journey to the West, the great monkey king, Sun Wukong, learns the Dao so thoroughly that he is able to take a vast variety of forms: insects, birds, and myriad human beings.36 Not only that, he has the power to pluck out his hairs and change them into copies of himself – each with a form and apparently a mind of its own. But however impressive the powers of this ‘Great Sage Equal to Heaven’, Spinoza’s God is infinitely more powerful. At this moment God is taking simultaneously the form of me, of you, of this book, of every flower in every field, every stone in every brook, every brick in every building, every star in every galaxy, and every other singular thing in this vast and variegated universe. Each of these things is God existing under some mode – in some determinate way.37 This, I propose, is how we should understand the relation between God and things in Spinoza. As Étienne Balibar puts it, God ‘does not “precede” individuals: [he] is nothing other than their multiplicity’.38 Gilles Deleuze appears to suggest something similar, emphasising how Spinoza maintains this by rejecting the

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Indiscernibility of Identicals – the principle that ‘Real distinction […] brings with it a division of things’.39 Donald Baxter has recently argued against the same principle, suggesting that a thing can qualitatively differ from itself, existing in multiple determinations.40 This does not, importantly, amount to what Wolfson describes as ‘declaring the differences between modes a mere illusion’, something Wolfson finds to be a mistake, since Spinoza ‘was no mystic, no idealist of the kind to whom everything that kicks and knocks and resists is unreal’.41 The view presented here does not treat the differences between the modes that kick and knock as unreal or illusory. It treats the modes as real, and really distinct – but their real distinction is qualitative and not numerical. We must not be confused, on this view, into thinking of God as an aggregate, composed of all the singular, determinate things in the universe. Spinoza argues strenuously that God, a single infinite substance, has no parts in this sense (E 1p15s). An infinite whole could never, on his understanding, be composed of such parts.42 It would be similarly absurd to think that when Sun Wukong transforms his hairs into versions of himself, he becomes a tribe of monkeys. On the contrary, each monkey is a version or expression of Sun, not a component of Sun.43 Salgado Borge’s interpretation of expression as a type of signification in Spinoza is useful here.44 Each individual thing is a sign of God. A thing is not the aggregate of all the signs of it. Rather, each sign expresses the whole, in its own particular way. Here too Spinoza’s thinking seems in line with the Sufi notion explored by Izutsu, who explains it by saying that reality is ‘a grand-scale network of symbols’.45 But does this not make God into an utterly illogical being? Is God not therefore subject to infinitely many contradictory determinations: sitting in France, standing in Samarkand, animal, vegetable, and mineral, round and square, eating and being eaten? Was Pierre Bayle right to worry that Spinoza propounded ‘the most monstrous hypothesis imaginable, the most absurd, and the most diametrically opposed to the most evident notions in our mind’?46 The answer depends on whether we must say that God simpliciter is subject to all the predications made of him in his myriad determinations. I have given my own view on this elsewhere and will return to the issue in Chapter 9 here.47 But at this point the goal is not to answer all the metaphysical riddles around this idea of God. It is to see what we might learn, and what sort of acquiescence we might achieve, by taking this God as an exemplar. When we emulate a human model, we strive to come under a similar description or kind as that model: to have an essence that is like the model’s essence. When we emulate an abstract model like the Model Agent, we strive to have essential properties conforming to the specified abstraction: to have an essence that is like the Model Agent. But if we emulate a God with a superdeterminate essence, we strive to have a superdeterminate essence – to adequately express God’s superdeterminate nature by being superdeterminate ourselves. The full metaphysical theory behind this will have to emerge somewhat slowly. But I can give a sense of what is meant by drawing on a point from Ursula Renz. For Spinoza, we individuate ourselves by way of our bodies – or, as he puts it, the human mind is constituted by an idea of a body (E 2p13). Which mind am I?

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The mind that goes with this body. But which body is that? Renz points out that: ‘The concept of one’s own body […] depends upon that with which we identify ourselves’.48 Yet we can select bodies with which to identify in many different ways. Renz gives an example: Imagine an infant who cannot go for a single minute without his stuffed animal. What this infant will perceive as ‘his own body’ may be markedly different from an adult’s perception of his own body.49 Moreover, there is great flexibility around which bodily transformations should threaten our sense of identity. If we identify very strongly with the body of our youth, ageing might feel like a gradual erosion of ourselves. If we define ourselves more expansively, however, this need not be so: the old man is as much myself as the young man was – transformed rather than deteriorated. But is there any limit to how expansive our bodily self-identification might be? Could I identify myself just as strongly with a decaying corpse? Surely if God, with his infinitely expansive, superdeterminate essence can be identified with each and every item in the universe then we too might be identified with a much vaster range of material things than those with which we normally identify ourselves. And if we can identify ourselves more expansively, suppose that we take this to the limit. We could identify ourselves not simply with some particular guise of God, but with God in his very superdeterminate essence. We could identify ourselves, as God is identified, not with some particular esse or sort of being but rather with the power to be expressed in all manner of esse. To acquiesce in this being would be to acquiescence both in God, who is that very power, and in a newly expansive sense of self, which is really not a self at all, since it embraces all manner of selves. Here, I propose, is the explanation for why Spinoza avoids calling the sort of acquiescence achieved through the emulation of God self-acquiescence. Here also is the explanation of why this sort of acquiescence can issue in nothing like a ‘rationem vivendi’ or rule of living. A rule of living would prescribe certain ways of living and proscribe others. It would rule some transformations out and others in. It would thus violate the principle of superdeterminacy. And here, finally, is the explanation for why this is simultaneously an acquiescence in God and an acquiescence in your soul. The soul in which you acquiesce in is not a determinate self but the principle of superdeterminacy, expressed in all determinate modes and their transformations. This will be further explored in future chapters. We can hardly blame Poiret for failing to fully understand Spinoza. Poiret did not understand how a God like Spinoza’s, ‘the highest predicable genus with its subaltern species’, who ‘acts from no aim nor proposes any end to himself ’,50 could be proposed as an ultimate end for anyone. It is a wild thought that we should acquiescence, not in God’s will, nor even in his distinct being, but in his absolute transcendence of any distinct being – that is, in the way that his superdeterminate essence is expressed through an infinite diversity of different beings, which we perceive all striving and jostling against each other restlessly and towards no discernible

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end. That we could rest in perfect emulation of such a being, and further that this should be the path to beatitude and the escape from sin and death … that is perhaps too much even for a mystic like Poiret to fathom. It remains now to explain how it can be so.

Notes 1 Pierre Poiret, Cogitationes Rationales de Deo, Anima, et Malo (Amsterdam: Blaviana, 1685), 2.8.7n6, 161. 2 Julie Cooper, Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 94–102; Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 132–3. 3 Ursula Renz, The Explainability of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 167–8. 4 Rutherford, ‘Salvation as a State of Mind’, 459; Alanen, ‘Spinoza on Passions and SelfKnowledge’, 253. 5 Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 114. 6 This is to say that the idea of the exemplar is developed using the second kind of cognition, not that only the second kind of cognition is involved in following this exemplar. The latter would amount to practical knowledge, which, as Vardoulakis for instance has argued, cannot belong to the second kind of cognition alone: Vardoulakis, Spinoza, the Epicurean, 219–23. 7 Gatens, ‘Spinoza’s Disturbing Thesis: Power, Norms and Fiction in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’, 464–55. 8 Charles Jarrett, ‘Spinozistic Constructivism’, in Essays on Spinoza’s Ethical Theory, ed. Matthew Kisner and Andrew Youpa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 63. Susan James understands Spinoza’s highest ethical project as involving the emulation of God and connects this with the philosophical tradition Susan James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 184–5. Later we will examine a problem she finds with this project. 9 Eric Jorink, Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 235. 10 Deleuze’s study of ‘expression’ in Spinoza remains the classic treatment Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992). Antonio Salgado Borge has recently linked the notion to that of signification – the relation between language and the world, as understood by early modern philosophers Antonio Salgado Borge, ‘Spinozistic Expression as Signification’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2022): 24–47. 11 Toshihiko Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 486. 12 Steven Nadler, ed., Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 13 Ezgi Ulusoy Aranyosi, ‘An Enquiry into Sufi Metaphysics’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20, no. 1 (1 January 2012): 3–22; Muhammad Kamal, ‘Ibn ‘Arabi and Spinoza on God and the World’, Open Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 4 (15 September 2017): 409–21. For my own thoughts on the connections between Spinoza and Ibn ‘Arabī see: Alexander Douglas, ‘Spinoza’s Theophany: The Expression of God’s Nature by Particular Things’, Journal of Early Modern Studies 11, no. 2 (2022): 49–69. 14 Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 1.133–4. 15 On the translation of this term, see Benedictus de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 406n.70. 16 Yitzhak Melamed, ‘“Omnis Determinatio Est Negatio” – Determination, Negation and Self-Negation in Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel’, in Spinoza and German Idealism, ed. Eckart Forster and Yitzhak Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 195.

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17 John Caird, Spinoza (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888), 171; James Martineau, A Study of Spinoza (London: Macmillan, 1882), 175–6; Harold H. Joachim, A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza: Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 45–6. It also appears in the German Idealist tradition, though with less emphasis on Spinoza’s texts: Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Melamed, eds., Spinoza and German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 18 Robert Stern, ‘“Determination Is Negation”: The Adventures of a Doctrine from Spinoza to Hegel to the British Idealists’, Hegel Bulletin 37, no. 1 (May 2016): 45. 19 Lewis Robinson, Kommentar zu Spinozas Ethik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1928), 103. 20 Pierre Macherey, Hegel or Spinoza, trans. Susan M. Ruddick (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 144. 21 Melamed, ‘Omnis Determinatio’, 185. Curley, by contrast, translates ‘determinatum’ as ‘the limited’ (Spinoza 1985, 1:29). 22 Curley’s translation obscures this by rendering ‘indeterminatum’/‘oneindig’ as ‘unlimited’: Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, 2016, 2:29–30. 23 John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon: Division of Nature, trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams and John O’Meara (Montreal: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), 589B, 195. 24 Melamed, ‘Omnis Determinatio’, 182. 25 This also seems to fit with Spinoza’s definition of God as a being whose essence, rather than having a single determinate form, is expressed in an infinity of attributes (E 1def6). I thank David Harmon for pointing out this connection. Note, however, that there is enormous debate over the interpretation of this definition: Noa Shein, ‘Spinoza’s Theory of Attributes’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2018. Some illumination has recently been shed on this by Salgado Borge: Antonio Salgado Borge, ‘Spinoza on Essence Constitution’, Philosophia, 2022. 26 Maria Rosa Antognazza, ‘The Hypercategorematic Infinite’, The Leibniz Review 25 (1 July 2015): 20. 27 Antognazza, 12–16. 28 Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, 489. 29 Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 1.88. 30 The necessary existence of things, as God’s effects, appears to align Spinoza in the most general terms with Islamic tradition and against Judeo-Christian tradition, which I have discussed elsewhere: Douglas, Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism, 73ff. 31 Salgado Borge, ‘Expression as Signification’, 14. 32 Salgado Borge, 14. 33 On Eriugena, for instance, see Armand Maurer, Medieval Philosophy, ed. Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982), 70. 34 Here and elsewhere, for consistency, I convert Wade-Giles romanisations to Pinyin – thus ‘Chuang-tzu’ becomes ‘Zhuangzi’. 35 Hu Shih, ‘Spinoza and Chuang-Tzu’, in Speculum Spinozanum, 1677–1977 (London: Routledge, 1977), 330. 36 The translation I read is the one by Anthony Yu: Cheng’en Wu, The Journey to the West, trans. Anthony Yu, 2 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 37 Martin Lin provides a historical and technical account of how precisely this works in Spinoza’s system Martin Lin, Being and Reason: An Essay on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), ch.5. In E 2p11c Spinoza equates the statements ‘the human mind perceives this or that’ and ‘God, not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar as he is explained through the nature of the human mind, or insofar as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, has this or that idea’. Ursula Renz warns against inferring from this that God is the subject of our ideas: Renz, The Explainability of Experience, ch.10, b. This matter will be discussed further in Chapter 9. 38 Étienne Balibar, Spinoza, the Transindividual (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 43. 39 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 31, 34.

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40 Donald Baxter, ‘The Discernibility of Identicals’, Journal of Philosophical Research 24 (1999): 37–55; Donald Baxter, ‘Self-Differing, Aspects, and Leibniz’s Law’, Noûs, 2017, 1–21; Donald Baxter, ‘Oneness, Aspects, and the Neo-Confucians’, in The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundary of Self, ed. Philip Ivanhoe et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 90–105. 41 Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 1.74. 42 Ghislain Guigon, ‘Spinoza on Composition and Priority’, in Spinoza on Monism, ed. Philip Goff (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), 183–205; Yitzhak Melamed, Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47–8; Alison Peterman, ‘Spinoza on Extension’, Philosophers’ Imprint 15, no. 14 (2015). 43 In E 4p2 and 4, Spinoza speaks of human beings as parts of nature, and in the preface to the same part, he identifies nature with God, despite having at E 1p17s denied that an infinite substance can have any parts. To understand this, I would refer the reader to the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata made at 1p29s. The former refers to God’s essence – or his attributes – whereas the latter refers to what follows from that essence: the myriad things that are each God under a different guise. Spinoza uses ‘nature’ equivocally to mean either of these at different times. I suggest that when he speaks of human beings as part of nature, he means part of natura naturata – of the many things that are expressions of God. 44 Salgado Borge, ‘Expression as Signification’. 45 Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, 8. 46 Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique Et Critique (Amsterdam: Reinier Leers, 1740), 3.259; ‘Spinoza’, remark N. 47 Alexander Douglas, ‘Quatenus and Spinoza’s Monism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no. 2 (April 2018): 261–80. 48 Renz, The Explainability of Experience, 167. 49 Renz, 167–8. 50 Poiret, Cogitationes Rationales, 2.8.7n6, 161.

6 ESCAPING DEATH

We now have to explain why beatitude, the acquiescence of the soul, is the means of escape from both sin and death. Since death is the wages of sin, and since I believe in being paid in advance, let us begin with death. One traditional line of escape from death involves the immortality of the soul. An immortal soul can survive bodily death. This is where Augustine, like so many others, places the hope of beatitude, which we examined in Chapter 1. Did Spinoza believe that beatitude grants immortality to the soul? This apparently innocent question leads into a thicket of exegesis. Towards the end of the Ethics Spinoza makes an abrupt shift in his exposition: ‘And now I have finished with everything regarding this present life. […] Therefore it is now time for me to pass to what concerns the duration of the mind without relation to the body’ (E 5p20s, O4.474). To an innocent reader, it might seem like Spinoza is suggesting that the mind can survive beyond the death of the body. He also seems to carry through the suggestion at 5p23: ‘The human mind cannot be completely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal’. But scholars have ruined this easy exegetical victory. The range of positions they have arrived at in interpreting this material has a mighty span. Wolfson proposes that here Spinoza’s ‘main object was to affirm the immortality of the soul against those of his own time who denied it’.1 Yet precisely the same propositions are held by Nadler to ‘constitute the core of Spinoza’s assault on the belief in immortality (at least as this is traditionally understood in the Abrahamic religions)’.2 Chantal Jaquet contends that ‘Spinoza is an upholder neither of the immortality nor the mortality of the soul’.3 And these three positions are far from exhausting the field.4 I propose here to make sense of Spinoza’s words on this topic in light of the interpretation of beatitude I have given.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-7

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In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, perhaps his earliest surviving work (O1.28–44), Spinoza writes of seeking ‘something such that, once I discover and acquire it, I should enjoy [fruerer] continuing [continua] and supreme joy in eternity’ (TIE §1, O1.64). That passage has a striking similarity to one found right at the end of the Ethics, where Spinoza comes the closest to a traditional alignment of beatitude with immortality: The ignorant one, besides being agitated by external causes in many ways, never obtains any true acquiescence of the soul, but rather lives nearly unconscious of God, of himself, and of things. And the more he ceases to be acted on, the more he ceases to be. But the wise one, insofar as he is considered as such, is barely moved in his soul. Rather, conscious of God, of himself, and of things by some eternal necessity, he never ceases to be but obtains true acquiescence of the soul always [semper]. (E 5p42s, O4.496) I propose now to give an interpretation of this passage, then to explain how that interpretation might help solve some of the puzzles around Spinoza’s doctrine. I begin by noting that the soul’s rest is said by Spinoza, as we have seen, to be continuous [continua] and to go on always [semper]. If that condition were only fleeting, or in danger of ceasing, we would have the threat of unrest in the future and thus a source of unrest now. Thus, as we saw in Chapter 1, a soul truly at rest must believe that its rest will continue without end. Yet Frederick Pollock declares that ‘Spinoza’s eternal life is not a continuance of existence but a manner of existence’.5 This can’t be exactly right, since Spinoza writes directly of the wise person continuing to be, of something of the mind remaining after the destruction of the body, and of the duration of the mind without relation to the body. What Pollock does have right, however, is that Spinoza views the mind’s eternity as a transformation of attitude and not merely an extension of life expectancy. In E 5p42s we should note the statements that the ignorant person is ‘agitated by external causes’ and that ‘the more he ceases to be acted on, the more he ceases to be’. We have seen already that one type of external cause named by Descartes is an example (Passions of the Soul 2.172, AT 11.461). Supposing that this is what Spinoza means, we can then understand the plight of the ignorant person as follows: binding his own being to the image of an exemplar, he ceases to be when he ceases to conform to this exemplar. The wise person, by contrast, is conscious ‘of God, of himself, and of things by some eternal necessity’. We can read this as meaning that the wise person recognises, and the ignorant person does not, that she is one of many expressions of God, alongside all the other things in this world. To see yourself in this way is no longer to measure your being against an exemplar. God is no less expressed by a butterfly than by a bandicoot. You, an expression of God, also have a superdeterminate being, expressed in any number of forms, not tied to any single exemplar.

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Again, I believe a comparison with some Daoist literature to be useful here. As mentioned in the previous chapter, I don’t mean to suggest any direct Daoist influence on Spinoza. The comparison between Spinozism and Chinese thought in general was made by various figures in his day, such as Pierre Bayle.6 Lewis Maverick proposes a direct Chinese influence on Spinoza.7 Others dispute this,8 while still others remain neutral.9 But even if we suppose that Spinoza had some knowledge of Chinese thought, he almost certainly had no knowledge of the key Daoist texts, especially not the Zhuangzi, which will be a key focus here. Elizabeth Harper has shown how the Zhuangzi was overlooked by early modern Europeans in general.10 We can note the absence if we look at the source on Chinese philosophy, which according to Maverick might have influenced Spinoza: Bernhard Varen’s Descriptio Regni Iaponiae.11 Maverick translates a portion of the work, in which Confucian ideas with Spinozist resonances are presented.12 But following the passage that Maverick translates is a discussion of Daoism, revealing profound ignorance and containing nothing of philosophical interest. Varen identifies three Chinese sects that ‘the books of the world number’.13 These are: the sect ‘of the Literate’ [Literatorum], meaning the Confucians; the ‘Sciequia’, meaning Buddhists (from 釋迦某尼 Shijiamouni – a Chinese rendering of Shakyamuni); and the ‘Laucu’ – referring to Laozi and Daoism.14 The latter Daoist sect is treated as a type of vulgar paganism, involving ‘images of empty gods’ and sky-worship. No mention is made of Zhuangzi at all.15 Nevertheless, I find it a helpful way to read Spinoza’s theory of beatitude to compare it with some ideas in the Zhuangzi, at least as it has been read by some. For instance, the logician Hao Wang writes: Spinoza’s idea of an eternal life has some affinity with the views of Daoism, especially those of Zhuangzi,16 who would have endorsed the thought expressed by Spinoza in the next to the last paragraph of Ethics [5p42s, quoted previously].17 The philosopher and historian Fung Yu-Lan18 cites the same paragraph, noting that Spinoza and Zhuangzi propose the same remedy against the fear of death. He comments: Thus by his understanding of the nature of things, the sage is no longer affected by the changes of the world. In this way he is not dependent upon external things, and hence his happiness is not limited by them. He may be said to have achieved absolute happiness. Such is one line of Daoist thought, in which there is not a little atmosphere of pessimism and resignation.19 I disagree about the atmosphere of pessimism and resignation, however, because Fung’s Spinozist parallel can be extended to what he calls ‘another line of Daoist thought’, much less pessimistic and resigned.

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To explain this other line, Fung cites the first chapter of the Zhuangzi (which I quote in a more modern translation): suppose you were to chariot upon what is true both to Heaven and to earth, riding atop the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths, so that your wandering could nowhere be brought to a halt. You would be depending on – what? Thus, I say, the Consummate Person has no fixed identity, the Spirit Man has no particular merit, the Sage has no one name.20 Fung’s comment is: What is here said by Zhuangzi describes the man who has achieved absolute happiness. He is the perfect man, the spiritual man, and the true sage. He is absolutely happy, because he transcends the ordinary distinctions of things. He also transcends the distinction between the self and the world, the ‘me’ and the ‘non-me’. Therefore he has no self. He is one with the Dao.21 To achieve this condition is not simply to be unbothered by death; it is to escape it. As Angus Graham explains: The liberation from selfhood is seen above all as a triumph over death. Zhuangzi’s position is not that personal consciousness will survive death, rather that in grasping the Way one’s viewpoint shifts from ‘I shall no longer exist’ to something like ‘In losing selfhood I shall remain what at bottom I have always been, identical with all the endlessly transforming phenomena of the universe’.22 This seems an apt description of beatitude, as described in 5p42s of the Ethics. The beatific are ‘conscious of God, of themselves, and of things’. They no longer identify themselves with one determinate expression of God’s superdeterminate being. Rather, they identify themselves with that superdeterminate being itself and its expression in an infinite variety of determinations. Interpreting ‘the Dao’ as such a superdeterminate being, Brook Ziporyn explains how identification with it works in the Zhuangzi: The Dao has no fixed identity, and when I identify myself with the Dao, I have lost me – not thereby gaining another definite identity (i.e., that of ‘the Dao’), but rather adopting the identitylessness of the Dao, which is present only as identities other than its own, as non-Dao identities […].23 The person who adopts the identitylessness of superdeterminate being has triumphed over death because, while determinations come and go, superdeterminate being is forever being expressed in the variety of forms that appear: all the endlessly transforming phenomena of the universe. Such a person can’t die, because they have no self to lose in death.

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Fung notices how the connection between the escape from death and identification with all things appears both in Zhuangzi and in Spinoza: Spinoza has said that in a certain sense, the wise man ‘never ceases to be’. This is also what Zhuangzi means. The sage or perfect man is one with the Great One, that is, the universe. Since the universe never ceases to be, therefore the sage also never ceases to be.24 But in what sense is the wise person one with the universe? There is a key passage in one of the Outer Chapters of the Zhuangzi, where Zhuangzi explains his unconventionally joyful behaviour following his wife’s death: When this one [Zhuangzi’s wife] first died, how could I not feel grief just like anyone else? But then I considered closely how it had all begun: previously, before she was born, there was no life there. Not only no life: no physical form. Not only no physical form: not even energy. Then in the course of some heedless mingling mishmash a change occurred and there was energy, and then this energy changed and there was a physical form, and then this form changed and there was life. Now there has been another change and she is dead. This is how she participates in the making of the spring and the autumn, of the winter and the summer. For the moment a human lies stiffened here, slumbering in this enormous house. And yet there I was getting all weepy, even going on to wail over her. Even to myself I looked like someone without any understanding of fate. So I stopped.25 We can read this as part of a fatalistic strain in Daoist thought, but we can also read it in terms of the other strain mentioned by Fung – the one that stresses the ultimate flexibility of the self. What Zhuangzi realises with the death of his wife is that she is changed but not gone. She sleeps in the ‘enormous house’: jù shí [巨室] – a term that can mean both ‘mansion’ and ‘mausoleum’. Perhaps this enormous house is a metaphor for ‘that from which nothing ever escapes, where all things are maintained’ mentioned in the Inner Chapters: Now the human form during its time undergoes ten thousand transformations, never stopping for an instant – so the joys it brings must be beyond calculation! Hence the sage uses it to roam and play in that from which nothing ever escapes, where all things are maintained. Early death, old age, the beginning, the end – this allows him to see each of them as good.26 That is, by abandoning the fixed identity of the self, the sage can identify himself with anything. Elsewhere in the Inner Chapters we have: Life and death are a great matter, but they are unable to alter him. Even if heaven and earth were to topple over, he would not be lost with them. He discerns what is unborrowed, so he is not transferred away when all other

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things are. He looks on the alterations of all things as his own fate, and thus holds fast to their source.27 Guo Xiang’s commentary explains this passage as follows: ‘He alters together with every alteration, so life and death make no alteration in him’.28 This connects with another comment (on a later passage): ‘I take each transformation, both life and death, as “me”. Since all are me, how can I ever be lost?’.29 Similarly, Cheng Xuanying’s commentary states: ‘Whatever thousands of changes and ten thousands of transformations I may go through, not one of them fails to be myself ’.30 It is only narrowly identified things that die. If we identify ourselves so broadly as to be consistent with any transformation, we do not suffer death. As Hans-Georg Moeller puts it: ‘If one no longer identifies oneself with an “I”, one no longer cares about the mortality of this “I” and does not “mind” that this “I” is going to be replaced by another in time’.31 Thus Zhuangzi’s theory of identity, as Michael TzeSung Longenecker argues,32 is tied to a sort of ‘conventionalist’ theory of personal identity, according to which there is great flexibility around what we identify people (including ourselves) as being.33 If Zhuangzi identifies his wife with the myriad transformations of things, she is changed but not gone – sleeping in the enormous house, the source of the alterations of all things – or, as Spinoza would put it, contained in the attributes of God (5p23d). In the previous chapter I drew from Renz the idea that Spinoza also has a conventionalist understanding of identity: there is flexibility in what the mind can identify as its body, and thus itself under one attribute (by E 2p7s, 3p2s). Zhuangzi’s theory of immortality is therefore available to Spinoza. And if we understand Spinoza’s theory of immortality in this way, we can attack a few famous problems of interpretation. For one, Spinoza speaks of ‘the duration of the mind without relation to the body’, but what can he mean by this? He states at E 1def8, and repeats at 5p23s, that eternal existence can’t be explained or defined ‘by duration or time, even if the duration is conceived to lack a beginning and an end’. This means that the eternal existence ascribed to the mind beyond the body at 5p23 doesn’t after all seem to explain how the mind or soul could go on forever beyond the death of the body. As Daniel Garber explains: Spinoza would seem to distinguish rather sharply between the notion of eternity, and what has been called in the tradition ‘sempiternity’. Sempiternity is temporal existence without beginning or end; it is existence for all time. Eternity, on the other hand, is existence outside of time altogether.34 A sempiternal mind could be said to survive the death of the body, in the sense of having a duration extending beyond the body’s duration. Jaquet points out that a sempiternal thing could be called immortal in the sense that it has ‘an infinite life, without birth or death’.35 But, she goes on, ‘Spinozist eternity is free of any temporal dimension and can be conceived with neither an indefinite nor infinite duration’.36

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Therefore ‘the Ethics demonstrates the eternity and not the immortality’ of the mind, or something of the mind.37 However, 5p23 doesn’t only say that something of the mind is eternal; it says that this something remains after the death of the body. ‘The verb remanere’, as Martha Kneale points out, ‘certainly suggests duration’.38 Moreover, Kneale casts doubt on the meaningfulness of the notion of existence ‘outside of time’.39 Eternal existence might, she suggests, be meaningfully understood as equivalent to necessary existence. But then it entails sempiternal existence: if something must exist, then it exists now and in the future. All the same, Spinoza states that a thing’s eternal existence cannot be explained in terms of duration. Can we then understand something as both eternal and enduring (sempiternal)? Mogens Laerke follows a suggestion from Julie Klein,40 that Spinoza understands things as eternal and sempiternal under different aspects – a suggestion also made by Moreau and Deleuze, among others.41 Laerke explains as follows: What remains of the mind is indeed eternal. But Spinoza does not say that this eternal part of the mind is eternal in virtue of the fact that it remains. He simply states that it remains and that it happens to also be eternal, but not that thus remaining infinitely and being eternal amount to the same thing or that one can be explained by the other. Hence, the passages in Ethics 5 such as 5p32 that do suggest a sempiternity of the mind are not necessarily inconsistent with Spinoza’s claims about the eternity of the mind, since he may very well be speaking of two entirely unrelated properties, indeed really distinct properties.42 I propose that my reading can develop this interpretation. Spinoza defines eternity as ‘existence itself, insofar as it is conceived to follow only from the definition of an eternal thing’ (E 1def8). This suggests that a thing is eternal or not depending on whether or not it is conceived in a certain way. Klein draws on this to propose that ‘considering the mind without the body can involve only a […] perspectival change’.43 In other words, the mind is either durational or eternal, depending on the perspective from which it is seen – whether ‘under the species of duration’ or ‘under the species of eternity’, as Spinoza puts it (E 5p29d). Laerke disagrees with the subjectivism of this, denying that ‘eternity and duration are just ways of contemplating things, two perspectives, so that there is no real but only a conceptual distinction between them’.44 Rather: eternity and duration ‘are really distinct, but compatible aspects of the things contemplated’.45 Which aspect you notice depends on the perspective you take, but each thing really does have both aspects: duration and eternity. The crucial passage explaining these two aspects in the Ethics is as follows: Things are conceived by us as actual in two ways, insofar as we conceive them to exist either in relation to a certain time and place or contained within God and following from his divine nature. But the things conceived by this second

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mode as true or real, those we conceive under a species of eternity, and the ideas of them involve the eternal and infinite essence of God. (E 5p29s) Notice, first, that Spinoza specifies that these are two ways of thinking of things as actual. The move here is not to distinguish between the actual durational existence of a thing and its eternal possibility. Some, including Klein, have followed a suggestion from Matheron here.46 According to Matheron, a body has its physical existence and also the ‘corporeal equation’ that describes it: a mathematical object of some kind. We can think of the body as either the physical thing or the mathematical object. Things can in this sense be thought of as either of limited duration or eternal, and the same can then apply to the mind (whatever the mental equivalent of the ‘corporeal equation’ might be). But this reading seems forced. It is difficult to see why we should not regard the physical thing and the corporeal equation as distinct things, rather than distinct aspects of a single thing. It also makes Spinoza’s doctrine appear uninteresting, as Barbara Stock notes.47 To promise something like an immortal soul and then present something akin to a mathematical object looks like a bait-and-switch. Kneale proposes a similar reading, according to which our mind is eternal if we take as ‘the mind’ God’s knowledge of our body, since divine omnipotence entails that God always has all his knowledge.48 This reading has the same problems. God’s knowledge of our body seems to be an entirely distinct thing from our mind as we know it. And, again, Spinoza’s doctrine read this way is uninteresting. Kneale writes that if Spinoza could demonstrate it, this would be ‘an enormous triumph’, since ‘[h]e would have shown that a pure naturalism can offer the certainty of salvation in place of the hope put forward by revealed religion’.49 But most Jews and Christians already believe that God, being omnipotent, knows everything about them, before and after they are alive (see Jeremiah 1:5). Their hope of immortality is for something more than being thus known. On Kneale’s reading, Spinoza would not be replacing that hope with certainty; he would be removing the hope and leaving in place a certainty about something else. On the reading I have proposed, by contrast, we can say that we conceive of the mind under a species of eternity when we understand it to exist as part of the necessary expression of God’s superdeterminate nature. The expression of this superdeterminate nature goes on forever in time, through the endless transformations of things. The mind is constituted by the idea of the body, and once we think of the body as an expression of superdeterminate being, rather than as something with a specific form, we can trace its continuation through an endless sequence of transformations: from human body, to lifeless matter, to scattered particles. The same will then go for the mind, since this is constituted by an idea of the body, and – this is the point we took from Renz – such an idea can be more or less exclusive, ruling certain transformations in or out depending on its width of scope. This provides an explanation of why understanding the mind’s eternity also means understanding its immortality – its sempiternity. The mind is, fundamentally,

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the expression of God’s superdeterminate being, which is eternal. It expresses itself through an endless variety of forms in time, but in itself it is beyond all these temporal expressions. It is eternal in the sense of being beyond anything that appears in time. But to recognise that the mind is an expression of this eternal superdeterminate being is to see how it can survive endless transformations within time and thus be sempiternal. To think of it in that way is not to tie it to some determinate form, which it happens to take for a given period, but to recognise it through all manner of transformations, occurring all the time. I believe that Laerke gets close to this idea when he explains how a shift in perspective, towards understanding ourselves as expressions of God, can reveal our immortality. ‘Sometimes’, he writes, ‘our cognition of ourselves remains governed by the imagination, by our experience of our present selves or the recollection of our former selves’.50 I interpret this to refer to understanding ourselves in terms of a particular exemplar, which we learn through the imagination, and seeing ourselves as existing only to the extent that we conform to that exemplar. But Laerke goes on: ‘Sometimes, on the contrary, we manage to contemplate ourselves as what we necessarily are now, that is to say, the essential actuality of ourselves’.51 This I interpret to refer to a way of understanding ourselves that transcends any particular exemplar. What we necessarily are now is something we can’t cease to be, since what we necessarily are now is nothing determinate. I am not necessarily a human being, since by broadening my self-conception I can see myself, as Zhuangzi did, continuing on as dust and food for the parasites. Open your self-conception wide enough and it will swallow up sempiternity. You can go on as quanta of energy scattered to the edges of the cosmos, and then whatever comes after that. At this point you will recognise yourself, not as a determinate being, defined in terms of conformity to some exemplar or instantiation of some type, but as an expression of the same being of God that is expressed through each and every thing. Deleuze conveys this powerfully: The path of salvation is the path of expression itself: to become expressive – that is, to become active; to express God’s essence, to be oneself an idea through which the essence of God explicates itself.52 Deleuze’s idea of expression is different from the one I have endorsed from Salgado Borge.53 But the general sentiment, that salvation consists of becoming like God, in the sense of becoming superdeterminate, seems correct, although heeding Salgado Borge’s warning I wouldn’t call that ‘expressing’ God. Rather, to emulate God’s essence, through endless transformation, is to implicitly express all the other forms he takes. What you feel when you emulate superdeterminate being is, presumably (I don’t claim to have personally reached this), a profound sense of identity with all things, as conveyed in the Zhuangzi: ‘Heaven and earth are born together with me, and the ten thousand things and I are one’.54 This reading can also, I believe, bring us towards some understanding of Spinoza’s relation to more traditional ideas of immortality. Let us begin with the

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youth of Spinoza, where he was accused of denying the immortality of the soul. As Jaquet recounts: I.S. Revah maintains in his work Spinoza et Jean de Prado that the young Spinoza joined Dr. Juan de Prado in his initial rejection of the immortality of the soul. This relies on the testimony of Fr. Tomàs Solano, who affirms in his deposition of the 8th of August 1659, in Madrid, that the medical doctor Juan de Prado and the Dutch philosopher Spinoza believed that souls die with the body.55 But, Jaquet argues, ‘this hypothesis of a Spinoza intimately convinced in his youth of the mortality of the spirit does not hold up to examination’.56 For one thing: The testimony of Fr. Tomàs Solano must be treated with caution, not only because it has the status of a denunciation by an Inquisitor, but also because it is not really confirmed by the deposition of Captain Miguel Pérez de Maltranilla of the 9th of August 1659.57 In any case, from his earliest works Spinoza endorses not only the idea of ‘something that, once discovered and acquired, I should enjoy [fruerer] continuing and supreme joy in eternity’ (TdIE §1, O1.64) but even what he, or at least his Dutch translator, calls ‘the immortality of the soul [des ziels onsterfelykheid]’ (ST 2.23, O1.382–4).58 Why, then, was Spinoza accused of denying the immortality of the soul?59 The problem might have been that Spinoza rejected a traditional idea of immortality. It is difficult to resist Edwin Curley’s verdict that ‘whatever [Spinoza’s] doctrine of the eternity of the mind does mean, it does not mean that I can entertain any hope of immortality’.60 On my reading, this is true to the extent that the idea of ‘I’ is restricted to some particular exemplar, trapped under a particular description – even one as general as ‘human being’. Spinoza is said by many scholars (though not all) to have rejected a doctrine of personal immortality.61 I agree in one sense: Spinoza, on my reading, does not believe that persons are immortal as persons. They will inevitably transform into things which we regard as nonpersons. Still, when we recognise their identity with the superdeterminate being of God, persons are immortal as, to use Graham’s phrase again, ‘identical with all the endlessly transforming phenomena of the universe’.62 Persons are immortal, as the logicians might say, de re though not de dicto. The problem Spinoza’s contemporaries had with him was perhaps more specific. What he certainly opposed was a notion of the afterlife as a domain of rewards and punishments. Carlisle points out that: Spinoza’s account of human eternity took shape within a milieu saturated by Christian teachings about the afterlife, in which, it was believed, people would either enjoy eternal bliss or suffer eternal damnation.63

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She explains how: As well as challenging these theoretical foundations of Christian belief in personal immortality, Spinoza criticised the affective and ethical consequences of this belief. Popular doctrines about the Last Judgement – whether these reflected Calvinist ideas of predestination, or the Catholics’ more meritocratic view of salvation – caused believers to fluctuate between hope for reward in heaven and dread of punishment in hell. The experience of anxiety which motivated and shaped Luther’s theological breakthrough bears witness to the emotional instability generated by the Christian doctrine of salvation. Protestant reformers did not solve this problem, but merely reconfigured it: Calvin, for example, argued that knowledge of God ought to ‘awaken and arouse us to the hope of a future life […] to which is reserved the vengeance due to iniquity, and the reward of righteousness’. This ‘arousal to hope’, inseparable from dread of divine vengeance, was for Spinoza the antithesis of the deep rest, acquiescentia in se ipso, which the Ethics recommends as the highest human good.64 This opposition to ideas of the afterlife as a place of reward and punishment is what prompts Nadler’s comment that: The propositions on the eternity of the mind in Part Five of the Ethics, in fact, constitute the core of Spinoza’s assault on the belief in immortality (at least as this is traditionally understood in the Abrahamic religions) and on the superstitious eschatological convictions that typically accompany it.65 With this I also thoroughly agree. The most virtuous human being is, as Nadler puts it, ‘not immune to changes brought about through external causes’.66 Her body is eventually transformed into inanimate matter like everyone else’s. In one sense I can even agree that ‘Spinoza denies that there is any such thing as an immortal self that persists beyond this life’.67 Something does persist beyond the human life, but, as discussed in the previous chapter, we can’t really call it a self. And certainly Nadler is right that the transformations beyond the death of a human being can in no way be seen as rewards or punishments. God does not direct nature towards moral ends in this way (E 1app). Why should we care about immortality, then? What good does it do me to know that I will go on past my death, so long as I define my conception of ‘I’ so broadly as to include lifeless matter and then perhaps the matter of new lives formed from it? In answering this, we must remember that Spinoza is not seeking to offer consolation about death as such. His Model Agent, as we saw, thinks least of death and meditates on life instead. Why then does Spinoza end his great work with a discussion of what happens after death? First, we should note something noticed also by Carlisle.68 While Spinoza rejects the idea of immortality as a system of rewards and punishments, he retains a connection between the escape from death and the escape from sin. Carlisle observes

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that ‘When Spinoza discusses eternal life in Part Five of the Ethics, he refers back to his reading of the Fall in Part Four’.69 The Fall, as I have read it in Chapter 3, begins with the imitation of an exemplar. This is what brings the fear of death. To die is not to be annihilated; it is to be transformed into something you no longer recognise as yourself. But if you see yourself in all the ten thousand transformations of things then the fear of death is gone, and so is death itself. This is beatitude. The key point is that Spinoza does not recommend it on account of its deathlessness. Rather, he recommends it as an escape from sin, which, we have seen, is the source of far more than the fear of death. It is also the source of envy, rivalry, ambition, and – it must be admitted – of feelings of human community, though Spinoza saw more clearly than most how feelings of community float precariously on a sea of those other vicious tendencies. He recommends beatitude, indeed, as the ultimate rest of the soul, the full achievement of the being that it is our essence to pursue. Deathlessness is a consequence of expanding beyond the limitations of a self that can die – of passing beyond self-acquiescence to the expansive acquiescence of the (superdeterminate) soul. But the reason to detach from any determinate self – from any defining exemplar – is that such attachment is the source of sin, not that it is the source of death. Although there is a sense in which I have disagreed with Pollock’s claim that ‘Spinoza’s eternal life is not a continuance of existence but a manner of existence’, I would note that he captures something correct and important when he says that this eternal life is ‘something which can be realized here and now as much as at any other time and place; not a future reward of the soul’s perfection but the soul’s perfection itself ’.70 The continuation of the passage is intriguing; Pollock states that Spinoza’s doctrine of eternal life: agrees with the higher and nobler interpretation of almost all the religious systems of the world. Whether it is called the life eternal, the kingdom of God, wisdom, liberation, or nirvana, the state of blessedness has been put forward by the great moral teachers of mankind as something not apart from and after this life, but entering into and transforming it. The after-coming generations of dull and backsliding disciples have degraded these glories of the free human mind into gross mechanical systems of future rewards and punishments.71 I am not expert enough to comment on Pollock’s sweeping statement of comparative religion. I notice his reference to the Buddhist notion of nirvana, which is sometimes, like the Daoist ideas I have referenced, explained in terms of detachment from any distinct self-conception, for example: The Buddha seemed to reject this notion of the individual self as a distinct substance with identity. […] [F]urthermore, its awareness of itself as separate from the world and other selves was false and the source of craving, pride, selfishness and delusion.72

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Although Spinozist beatitude is a type of immortality, Pollock is right to locate its importance in the effect it has upon one’s life right now. To repeat a point from Chapter 1: Spinoza would disagree with Augustine’s teaching that beatitude is something we can enjoy only after death, but he would agree with Augustine that sin is what prevents us from achieving it. For Spinoza, sin and death stem from a single cause, which is attachment to a particular notion of self, a particular exemplar. Beatitude is the opposite of this attachment. In the next chapter we will look at how this works as an escape from sin.

Notes 1 Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 2.323. 2 Nadler, Think Least of Death, 179, my emphasis. 3 Chantal Jaquet, Sub Specie Aeternitatis: Étude Des Concepts de Temps, Durée et Éternité Chez Spinoza (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), 94. 4 The following list perhaps conveys some sense of the range of literature on the topic: Harold Foster Hallett, Aeternitas. A Spinozistic Study. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, ch. 20; Errol Harris, ‘Spinoza’s Theory of Human Immortality’, The Monist 55, no. 4 (1971): 668–85; Alexandre Matheron, ‘Remarques Sur l’immortalité de l’ame Chez Spinoza’, Les Études Philosophiques, no. 3 (1972): 369– 78; Alan Donagan, ‘Spinoza’s Proof of Immortality’, in Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marjorie Glicksman Grene (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1973), 241–58; Diane Steinberg, ‘Spinoza’s Theory of the Eternity of the Mind’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11, no. 1 (1981): 35–68; Genevieve Lloyd, ‘Spinoza’s Version of the Eternity of the Mind’, in Spinoza and the Sciences, ed. Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1986), 211–33; Lee C. Rice, ‘Mind Eternity in Spinoza’, Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly / ‫ןויע‬: ‫ יפוסוליפ ןועבר‬41 (1992): 319–34; Barbara Stock, ‘Spinoza on the Immortality of the Mind’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 17, no. 4 (2000): 381–403; Edwin Curley, ‘The Immortality of the Soul in Descartes and Spinoza’, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75, no. 27–41 (2001): 27–41; Steven Nadler, ‘Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza’s Ethics’, Midwest Studies In Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2002): 224–44; Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy; Julie R. Klein, ‘“Something of It Remains”: Spinoza and Gersonides on Intellectual Eternity’, in Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 177–203; Jaquet, Sub Specie Aeternitatis; Carlisle, ‘Spinoza On Eternal Life’; Mogens Laerke, ‘Spinoza on the Eternity of the Mind’, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue Canadienne de Philosophie 55, no. 2 ( June 2016): 265–86; Nadler, Think Least of Death, ch.10; Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, ch.8. 5 Frederick Pollock, Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy (London: Kegan Paul, 1880), 291. 6 Pierre Bayle, Écrits sur Spinoza (Paris: Editeurs Berg International, 1992); Yuen Ting Lai, ‘The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 23, no. 2 (1985): 151–78; Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch.25; Thijs Weststeijn, ‘Spinoza Sinicus: An Asian Paragraph in the History of the Radical Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (2007): 537–61. 7 Lewis Maverick, ‘A Possible Chinese Source of Spinoza’s Doctrine’, Revue de Littérature Comparée 19 (1939): 417–28. 8 Lai, ‘The Linking of Spinoza to Chinese Thought by Bayle and Malebranche’. 9 Weststeijn, ‘Spinoza Sinicus’; Xiaosheng Chen, ‘A Neo-Confucian Approach to a Puzzle Concerning Spinoza’s Doctrine of the Intellectual Love of God’ (Doctor of Philosophy, Birmingham, University of Birmingham, 2018), §1.3.

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10 Elizabeth Harper, ‘The Early Modern (Non) Reception of the Zhuangzi Text’, The Journal of East West Thought 9, no. 4 (2019): 23–37. 11 Bernhardus Varenius, Descriptio Regni Iaponiae: Cum quibusdam affinis materiae (Leiden: Elzevir, 1649). 12 Maverick, ‘A Possible Chinese Source of Spinoza’s Doctrine’, 419–23. 13 Varenius, Descriptio Regni Iaponiae, 268. 14 In some Daoist texts from the second century AD, Laozi is elevated into a cosmic force – the Dao itself: ‘Laozi as the body of Dao, therefore, represents the creative, ordering power of the universe that transforms and creates the world’, Livia Kohn, Daoism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (London: Routledge, 2019), 17. 15 Varenius, Descriptio Regni Iaponiae, 283–7. 16 The convention Wang follows here is to refer to the authors of the text now known as the Zhuangzi, based on a compilation by Guo Xiang, as ‘Zhuangzi’ (莊子), or ‘Zhuang Zhou’ (莊周). I will also follow this, although the true authorship of the Zhuangzi is a complex matter: Angus Graham, Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), 283–321; Xiaogan Liu, Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 17 Wang, A Logical Journey, 109. 18 When naming a Chinese author, I follow the name-order and romanization by which that author is most commonly known. When deciding for myself, I use Pinyin romanization and place given names (名) before surnames (姓/時). I also use Pinyin transliterations of traditional characters when discussing ancient texts. I know that this creates the misleading impression that Zhuangzi and his contemporaries pronounced the characters (or rather their ancient equivalents) as they are pronounced in modern Mandarin. It is far from being my preference; in fact, the few characters I know, I know in Cantonese pronunciation, which I’m told is often closer to 文言文 pronunciation. But the convention is to use Pinyin. On the other hand, the common practice of using only Pinyin transliterations is inconvenient. Where this happens in the secondary sources I quote, I guess which characters the authors mean and add them in square brackets. 19 Yu-lan Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Derk Bodde (New York: Free Press, 1997), 109. 20 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings: The Complete Writings, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2020), 5. 21 Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 110. 22 Angus Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle: Open Court, 1999), 202. 23 Brook Ziporyn, Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 166. 24 Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 115. 25 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 145–6. 26 Zhuangzi, 56. 27 Zhuangzi, 45. 28 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2009, 178. 29 Zhuangzi, 202. 30 Zhuangzi, 129. 31 Hans-Georg Moeller, Daoism Explained: From the Dream of the Butterfly to the Fishnet Allegory (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 102–3. 32 Michael Longenecker, ‘On Becoming a Rooster: Zhuangzian Conventionalism and the Survival of Death’, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, forthcoming. 33 Eric Schwitzgebel interprets another of Zhuangzi’s death passages along the same lines: Eric Schwitzgebel, ‘Death, Self, and Oneness in the Incomprehensible Zhuangzi’, in The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundary of Self, ed. Philip Ivanhoe et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 334.

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34 Daniel Garber, ‘“A Free Man Thinks of Nothing Less Than of Death”: Spinoza on the Eternity of the Mind’, in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Christia Mercer and Eileen O’Neill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 105. 35 Jaquet, Sub Specie Aeternitatis, 97. 36 Jaquet, 97. 37 Jaquet, 94. 38 Martha Kneale, ‘Eternity and Sempiternity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69 (1968): 234. 39 Kneale, 227–8. 40 Klein, ‘Something of it Remains’. 41 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 314; Pierre-François Moreau, Experience and Eternity in Spinoza, trans. Robert Boncardo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 546. 42 Laerke, ‘Spinoza on the Eternity of the Mind’, 274. 43 Klein, ‘Something of It Remains’, 196. 44 Laerke, ‘Spinoza on the Eternity of the Mind’, 271. Others argue that conceptual distinctions are always matched by real distinctions for Spinoza Martial Gueroult, Spinoza I. Dieu (Paris: Aubier, 1968), 428–68; Yitzhak Melamed, ‘Why Spinoza Is Not an Eleatic Monist (Or Why Diversity Exists)’, in Spinoza on Monism, ed. Philip Goff (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), 206–22; Samuel Newlands, ‘Thinking, Conceiving, and Idealism in Spinoza’, Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 94, no. 1 (2012): 31–52. 45 Laerke, ‘Spinoza on the Eternity of the Mind’, 271. 46 Matheron, Individu et communauté, 48; Klein, ‘“Something of It Remains”’, 197. 47 Stock, ‘Spinoza on the Immortality of the Mind’, 385. 48 Kneale, ‘Eternity and Sempiternity’, 236. 49 Kneale, 236. 50 Laerke, ‘Spinoza on the Eternity of the Mind’, 283–4. 51 Laerke, 284. 52 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 320. 53 Salgado Borge, ‘Expression as Signification’, 30–1. 54 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 17. 55 Jaquet, Sub Specie Aeternitatis, 91. 56 Jaquet, 91. 57 Jaquet, 92. 58 In his Latin works, it must be however noted, Spinoza appears to scrupulously avoid the term ‘immortality of the soul’, as many scholars have stressed Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, ‘Questions Sur La Cinquième Partie de l’ «éthique»’, Revue Philosophique de La France Et de l’Etranger 176, no. 2 (1986): 207–21; Nadler, ‘Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza’s Ethics’, 227; Jaquet, Sub Specie Aeternitatis, 94; Moreau, Experience and Eternity in Spinoza, 546. 59 Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy. 60 Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 84. 61 Dissenters: Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 2.294–310; Harris, ‘Spinoza’s Theory of Human Immortality’; Donagan, ‘Spinoza’s Proof of Immortality’; Tamar Rudavsky, Time Matters Time, Creation, and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 181–6; Richard Mason, The God of Spinoza: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch.10. Against these, Nadler has given the most forceful and detailed argument for the thorough rejection of personal immortality by Spinoza: Nadler, ‘Eternity and Immortality in Spinoza’s Ethics’; Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy. 62 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 202. 63 Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 152. 64 Carlisle, 153. 65 Nadler, Think Least of Death, 179. 66 Nadler, 176.

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67 Nadler, 178. 68 Carlisle, ‘Spinoza on Eternal Life’; Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 154–63. 69 Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 158. 70 Pollock, Spinoza, 291. 71 Pollock, 291. 72 Mishra, An End to Suffering, 255. An accessible study of this Buddhist notion is found in: Jay Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

7 ESCAPING SIN

I first remind the reader that Spinoza ordinarily uses ‘sin’ (peccatum) in a restricted sense, where it means violation of the civil law (see the discussion at the end of Chapter 1). This is not my topic. But Spinoza points out that there is another notion of sin, which he describes as a type of bondage (TP, §20; G3.283). In Chapter 3 we saw how this idea relates to the story of the Fall and has much continuity with the Christian notion of sin found, for instance, in Augustine – or even, as Carlisle argues, in St Paul.1 This is the concept that I refer to here and henceforward as ‘sin’. Carlisle presents an attractive picture of Spinoza’s theory of sin in this second sense: On Spinoza’s interpretation, the Fall dramatised in Genesis 2, and repeated through all generations descended from Adam, is not from immortality to mortality, but from desire for life to fear of death. Its consequence is servitude, slavery – as in Paul’s analysis of the fall into sin. This Fall is a corruption of life itself: it is the mark of a life that has degenerated into fear of death, squandering its vitality in the weakest of passions.2 I have argued that the origin of this fallen condition, for Spinoza, lies in attachment to a determinate exemplar. Such attachment brings us into fear of death, because we cannot hope to emulate a specific exemplar forever. Very often it also brings us into a tortured fluctuation of spirit and a tendency towards conflict, for the reasons we examined in Chapters 3 and 4. By following a very carefully constructed exemplar – the Model Agent – we can avoid the slippery slope from emulation to rivalry, then fluctuation and violence. But, as I argued at the end of Chapter 5, the Model Agent is an ineffective remedy for the fear of death. It cannot then be the means of a total escape from the fallen condition. True acquiescence of DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-8

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spirit – beatitude – requires escape from attachment to any specific exemplar at all. If the beatified have any exemplar, it is God in his superdeterminate being. Many people are inclined to resist making their ultimate goal the escape from attachment to any determinate exemplar. I have already mentioned the theory that following a specific exemplar – or collection of exemplars – is the very foundation of virtue.3 This theory of virtue appears to exist in both Western and non-Western traditions.4 Virtue, the defenders of these traditions might say, is the striving to be a good person. This striving, if it is conscious, requires some determinate notion of what a good person is: a moral exemplar, whether real or ideal. If acquiescence of the soul means ignoring all exemplars then this is consistent with pure, licentious evil. How could Spinoza recommend such an ultimate aim? Begin the countdown to the first reductio ad Hitlerum …. Before responding to this, let me warm up with a less exhausting challenge. Acquiescence of the soul, I have argued, involves no ratio vivendi or essendi. It involves no determinate path of life to follow or type of being to pursue. But, says the challenger, does it not therefore collapse into total passivity? If there is nothing determinate that we are striving to be, or to avoid being, then why do anything at all? In Chapter 2 I ascribed to Spinoza the view that desire is metaphysical. Desires are always grounded in the desire to be something. To detach from any specific exemplar is therefore, it would seem, to detach from any specific desire. Freedom from all specific desires would certainly be a state of quiescence, but is it not also a state of total inertia? This is a challenge that comes up for any spiritual tradition that aims at the quieting of desire: Stoicism, Buddhism, etc. But in Spinoza I see the strongest parallel with the Zhuangzi (at least, again, as understood by certain scholars). So let us look at how Zhuangzi addresses the challenge. Zhuangzi is known to endorse a certain version of what is called wuwei (無為): non-action. Perhaps, then, inertia is his ethical ideal? But we must be careful about the language here. Graham explains wuwei as follows: This term, which goes back to Confucius, is often translated by such innocuous phrases as ‘non-action’ to avoid giving the impression that Daoists recommend idleness, but it seems better to keep the paradoxical force of the Chinese expression. Wei [為] is ordinary human action, deliberated for a purpose, in contrast with the spontaneous processes of nature which are ‘so of themselves’.5 Another important matter of language is noted by Brook Ziporyn: ‘Wei, which is what wuwei negates, can mean “to do”, “to be”, “to become”, “to make”, “to endeavour”’ – but also, importantly, ‘“to deem or regard [something] as having some particular identity”’.6 Ziporyn goes on: What is denied here is not motion or action per se, but the doing of deeds in the sense of consciously taking action ‘for’ (wei)7 some specific purpose, deliberate and intentional teleological action, such that one would deem oneself

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and other things as having, or make oneself and others have, specific definite identities relative to that purpose.8 Thus one way to read Zhuangzi’s doctrine of wuwei, suggested by the connotations of wei, is as a rejection, not of activity in general, but of all action guided by exemplars – all action based on ‘specific definite identities’ for oneself and others. This seems to be the reading made by the neo-Daoist Guo Xiang, who proposes an ultimate aim of escaping from the influence of ‘traces’ ( ji, 跡). Ji seems to refer, at least in part, to the examples set by others. He exhorts us, for instance: ‘Pursue no old traces. Keep oneself whole and don’t imitate others’.9 Likewise: ‘live according to oneself, not according to others. In this way the integrity of one’s nature will be preserved’.10 Yet the ‘integrity of one’s nature’ is not threatened only by external traces in Guo’s vision. It is also threatened by a determinate image of oneself. As Ziporyn puts it, ‘it is just as dangerous to try to be like yourself as to try to be like anyone else’.11 Livia Knaul (now Livia Kohn) notes that Guo takes ordinary terms for ‘self ’ – ji (己), wo (我), etc. – as referring to a false notion of self. He uses zi (自) to refer to the true self.12 Yet, Ziporyn points out, grammatically speaking: ‘zi is actually not a self at all, nor even a substance, or for that matter even a noun; it is merely an adverb, meaning “self-”, “spontaneously”’. Thus the upshot of Guo’s proposal is that: ‘“Spontaneously” is the true self. All other selves ( ji [己], wo [我], wu [吾], etc.), if they are nouns, actual or abiding entities, are merely traces’.13 That is why aiming to be yourself is as harmful to your inner spontaneity as aiming to be anyone else. We can only aim at a determinate target, but the true self is nothing determinate – not really a distinct self at all. Guo is loyal here to the Zhuangzi when it tells us: ‘the Utmost Person has no definite identity’,14 or, in a different translation: ‘the Perfect Man has no self ’.15 This explains in turn why, as Fung observes in relation to Guo’s theory, ‘to live according to oneself […] is also to practice the theory of non-action’.16 Why would living according to oneself count as non-action? The action rejected here is wei – action governed by specific exemplars or traces. This includes all action undertaken with the aim, at least partially conscious, of self-realisation or self-­actualisation. Such action requires some idea of the self to be realised or actualised, and this will stand as an exemplar. The self ji (己) will be an exemplar ji (跡). Such action is imitation, although what is imitated might be a constructed model of an aspirational self rather than a concrete figure encountered in the world. Either way, the person acting according to an exemplar is acted upon by an external cause – again remembering Descartes’s recognition of an example as a type of external cause. The opposite of action in this sense, therefore, is not pure inertness. Rather, it is spontaneous activity, free of guidance by any external cause. It is freedom in the sense defined by Wang Bo: ‘A person with absolute freedom has wugong [無功], or “no accomplishment”; he has wuming [無名], or “no reputation”, and wuji [無己], or “no self ”. Such a person remains aloof from the world and will not be hurt’.17 But then what is the force that drives this spontaneous activity if it isn’t driven by conscious purpose? In the outer chapters of the Zhuangzi we have a few

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descriptions of a sort of spontaneity that comes from allowing nature to operate ‘through’ oneself: ‘No, I have no Course’, said the old man. ‘It all starts out in the given, grows through the inborn nature, and comes to perfection in the fated. I enter into the navels of the whirlpools and emerge with the surging eddies. I just follow the Course of the water itself, without making any private one of my own’.18 The unipede said to the millipede, ‘Hopping around on my single leg, I manage to get from place to place, but it requires all my skill. And yet you are somehow able to manage ten thousand legs at the same time. How do you do it?’ The millipede said, ‘It’s not like that. Haven’t you ever seen a person spit? He gives a hock and all at once the big globules come flying forth like innumerable pearls and the little droplets go spreading out like mist, raining down in a tangle. In my case, all I do is set my Heavenly impulse into action – I have no idea how it’s done!’19 This idea of spontaneous ‘non-action’, not directed by conscious purpose, has been explained in various ways,20 for example in light of Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s research on ‘flow experiences’.21 I can find no clear equivalent notion in Spinoza. But if we look carefully at the imagery in the preceding two quotations from the Zhuangzi, they both hint at the metaphysical ideas presented in Chapters 5 and 6. In the first, we have water differentiating itself into whirlpools and eddies. In the second, we have the droplets of spit spreading out into tangles of mist. Both can be taken to suggest the expression of superdeterminate being in an endless plurality of forms, through endless transformations. The image here is like a fractal of superdeterminacy: each transformation in turn splinters into micro-transformations, and so on to an indefinitely complex world of transformation at every level. The real meaning of spontaneity in Guo’s theory seems to be this: spontaneity means freely allowing this flow of superdeterminate being through oneself – allowing oneself to be endlessly transformed through one’s encounters and natural responses to them. It is the opposite of trying to arrest the process of transformation by staying attached to any particular trace. Guo calls this condition of submerging fully into the flow of superdeterminacy ‘vanishing [ming (冥)] into things’. He writes: If one possesses a self (you ji 有己) and faces objects [with it], one cannot vanish (into) things. Thus the great man […] can thread one unity through the ten thousand things and obliquely unify (xuantong 玄同) other and self, obliteratingly (minran 珉然) becoming one with all under heaven and joining inner and outer into one felicity.22 Someone without a self can ‘thread one unity through the ten thousand things’ because she identifies herself, not with some particular expression of superdeterminate being, but rather with superdeterminacy itself. She is, to use Graham’s

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phrase quoted earlier, ‘identical with all the endlessly transforming phenomena of the universe’.23 Therefore, as Christine Tan explains: because one does not depend on or follow simply one thing, but everything, one is ultimately independent and fully self-sufficient. What counts as ‘me’ is at once both nothing and everything.24 If this is the meaning, or a meaning, of spontaneous non-action in Daoist thinking, can it be found in Spinoza? It is, I propose, a way to interpret the description of the body of the beatific individual in Part Five of the Ethics. Proposition 39 of that part reads: ‘Who has a body apt for many [things] [ad plurima aptum] has a mind whose greatest part is eternal’. In other words, the beatified mind corresponds to a body apt for many things. The demonstration states that someone with a body ‘apt for many acts [ad plurima agendum aptum]’ is less conflicted by bad affects contrary to its nature and ‘has the power of ordering and connecting the affections of the body according to the order of the intellect’. This might seem to suggest a model of regimented living, except that Spinoza goes on to say that the consequence of this ordering and connecting is ‘that all the affections of the body are referred back [referantur] to the idea of God’. On the interpretation we have been pursuing so far, this would mean understanding these affections as expressions of superdeterminate being. Moreau and Steenbakkers note how ‘affections’ are treated by Spinoza as equivalent to ‘modifications’ (O4.507n11). We can think of these as the various transformations the body undergoes throughout its existence. It is noteworthy that Spinoza in no way suggests that the body of the beatific individual is apt to certain types of acts. It is simply apt to many acts. Spinoza doesn’t even specify whether the ‘acts’ in question are those of the body or of other things acting upon the body. We could thus read E 5p39 as expressing the same ideal of spontaneity as we have found in Guo Xiang, who writes at one point: One changes from a nonhuman being to a human being, and in this change the old being is lost. To take joy in such a loss of the old is to take joy in what one encounters. Transformation goes on without end, and in the course of it what is not encountered? If one takes pleasure in whatever is encountered, how could one’s pleasure ever come to an end?25 The beatific individual permits the superdeterminate being of God to flow through the self, by being endlessly transformed, not trying to remain attached to a particular trace, form, or exemplar. This reading is, I believe, borne out by the explanation in the following scholium: But so that these things can be more clearly understood, it should be noted here that we live in continuous variation, and we say that we are lucky or unlucky as we change for the better or for the worse. Thus whoever is

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transformed from an infant into a cadaver is said to be unlucky. And conversely good luck is attributed to someone who was able to pass through his whole life in a sound mind and healthy body. And really whoever has a body, like that of an infant or child, apt for very few [things] and maximally dependent on external causes, has a mind that, considered in itself, is almost entirely unconscious of itself, of God, or of things. Conversely, whoever has a body apt for many [things], has a mind that, considered in itself, is very conscious of itself and God and things. In this life therefore we strive to the highest degree that the body of the infant is changed into another (as far as its nature can endure and is conducive to it), which is apt for many things and accordingly is related [referatur]26 to a mind that is conscious of itself and God and many things.

The infant is ignorant of superdeterminate being and remains dependent on external causes – many of which, I have suggested, are examples. A child’s life is characterised by strong attachments, and thus any transformation is painful. Those who live long and healthy lives, however, do not avoid transformations. Rather, they are ‘apt’ to the transformations. Instead of resisting them, they embrace and grow through them. The scholium points out that we each strive that our body is transformed into another ‘as far as its nature can endure and is conducive to it’, but this, we have seen, is a matter of how expansive our conception of our own body is. A narrowly defined body can endure very few transformations without ceasing to be as that body. At the other extreme, a superdeterminate body can endure every transformation and is immortal. And people who are aware of their body in that way are deeply conscious of the relation between God, themselves, and other things. The proposition and scholium quoted prior come right before another, which proposes that the more perfect a thing is, the more it acts and the less it is acted upon. Fully permitting the flow of transformations through being is passive in one sense, but it is active in Spinoza’s sense. According to Spinoza, we act whenever ‘something in us or outside of us follows from our nature’ (E 3def2). But if our nature is simply the superdeterminate nature of God, then everything in us or outside of us follows from it. We act by not trying to act, just as we make ourselves eternal by not trying to have a self at all. Now I am ready to begin to address the reductio ad Hitlerum, though the full reply will have to be developed over the next two chapters. The challenge is: what if the nature that ‘spontaneously’ flows through you, when you detach yourself from any exemplar, is villainous, destructive, or cruel? There are four important things to be said about this. In the first place, we shouldn’t worry that Spinozist beatitude will mean giving free rein to the wicked impulses that supposedly lurk in our hearts. The idea that we are moved by something dark and primordial, lodged deep within the individual psyche, is simply a version of what Girard calls ‘the romantic lie’, which we examined in Chapter 2. Spinoza’s view is, on the contrary, that our desires are at their

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very origin determined by others. We begin as infants under the powerful influence of exemplars. The idea of a dangerous, primal, pre-social impulse, I suspect, might be one of those nineteenth-century constructions that would baffle an early modern thinker. Even Hobbes, who claims that our ‘natural passions’ are opposed to ‘justice, equity, modesty, mercy’, lists as the natural passions: ‘partiality, pride, revenge, and the like’.27 Thus the passions that he calls ‘natural’ involve advanced notions of social status (pride) and retributive moralising (revenge); they are not primal drives emerging from the pre-social psyche. What happens when we detach ourselves from exemplars is not yet clear, but there is no reason to think it will mean a surrender to some rapacious urge in the bosom of humanity. Secondly – a related point – it is difficult to see where a motivation to act viciously would come from, if not from the image of an exemplar. I argued in Chapter 2 that Spinoza’s theory of desire is metaphysical, meaning that when we desire an object, what we really desire is to be a person in possession of that object. A person with a strong desire to commit harmful or antisocial acts is therefore moved by an idea of himself as a committer of such acts. He might simultaneously love and despise this idea of himself – a version of the fluctuation discussed in Chapter 3. If such a person turned away from his exemplar, he would turn away from his vicious desires, not towards them. This is perhaps why Spinoza writes that ‘nobody is glad for beatitude because he restrains the affects, but on the contrary the power to restrain the lusts arises from beatitude itself ’ (5p42d).28 Admittedly, Spinoza’s theory does allow for the existence of unconscious appetites, as opposed to conscious desires (E 3p9s). We can therefore worry that detaching from exemplars might give somebody over to vicious unconscious appetites. But this certainly doesn’t seem to match the description of the beatific individual, who escapes from determinate exemplars by becoming more not less conscious (of God, of himself, and of things). In any case, if a person is driven to cause harm by unconscious appetites, there doesn’t seem to be much that we can say besides that he should be restrained by others who, unlike him, have the power to control the situation. This seems to be the gist of what Spinoza writes in a letter to Henry Oldenburg (Letter 78, G4.327a). Thirdly, Spinoza would likely explain much of what we regard as evil in the world as arising from the pursuit of exemplars – or, more specifically, from the roots of ambition. The psychologist Roy Baumeister clinically examines causes of cruelty and violence and finds four main ‘roots of evil’: (i) the desire for material gain, (ii) threatened egotism, (iii) idealism, and (iv) sadistic pleasure.29 All of these can be seen to involve an attachment to exemplars. This is most obviously the case with the second root, (ii) threatened egotism. Baumeister uses his data to reject the common view that aggression results from low self-esteem.30 Nor, he argues, does it arise from high self-esteem – not as such. It arises, rather, from threatened self-esteem. Baumeister writes: ‘The roots of violence lie in the gap between a highly favourable self-appraisal and a bad appraisal by somebody else’.31 When others hold us in low esteem, we can either accept their judgment of our low value, or we can imagine that there is something wrong with

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them or they bear some hostility towards us. The second option can easily motivate aggression on our part. Spinoza, as we have seen, explains this source of hostility in terms of the longing for glory: ‘we are most led by glory, and can hardly bear a life of shame’ (E 4p52s). But that longing, we saw in Chapter 4, arises from our need to be confirmed in our idea of ourselves. Thus this source of aggression, which Baumeister calls ‘the most potent recipe for violence’,32 is very much a matter of being attached to a certain self-image – an idea of ourselves as conforming to a certain exemplar (or acting as an exemplar to others). Rather than give up that image, we would rather bully those who threaten it. Baumeister’s first ‘root of evil’, (i) the desire for material gain, also involves self-image, at least if we accept the theory of metaphysical desire. As we have seen, on that theory the pursuit of material gain is really the striving to be a certain sort of person. Corrupt politicians don’t just want the hedonistic pleasures of five-star living; they have big ideas of themselves as people on the A List. They can become aggressive towards anyone who threatens their position, not because they stand to lose their material comfort but because they might lose their very selves – the grand, high-status selves they imagine their way into. This is the terrific existential anxiety that Spinoza describes in the material explored in Chapter 4. Regarding avarice specifically, Spinoza ascribes it to those who ‘have learnt the lucrative arts, by which they raise themselves to splendour [in quibus se magnifice efferunt] (E 4app29).33 The ultimate end is not to have money; it is to be splendid. On the theory of metaphysical desire, a threat to material interests is really a threat to self-esteem, and so Baumeister’s (i) collapses into (ii). The third source, (iii) idealism, is the most dangerous according to Baumeister. When people are driven to cruelty in pursuit of a moral ideal: ‘The traits of inner conscience and strength of character operate to spur the perpetrator on to more severe and intense deeds’.34 Since the ideologue sees opponents as evil, cruelty towards them can feel acceptable, necessary for the greater good, perhaps even divine in a crusading sense. Here too glory and self-image are crucial. For instance, Baumeister writes: One of the core paradoxes in the recent social evolution in the United States is how the broad desire to overcome prejudice and ethnic antagonisms has resulted in a society that seems more fragmented and prejudiced than ever. Each group firmly believes that it holds positive, inclusive, desirable values, and so other groups are gradually assumed to be inimical to these positive values. And if the other group is opposed to the good, then by definition it must be evil.35 Why, you might ask, doesn’t each group take the opposition of the others as a reason to question its own convictions? Why don’t the members of each group suspect that their enemies might see something that they have missed? The Spinozist answer is that this, too, would threaten their self-esteem. If you are attached to an image of yourself as a voice of justice and compassion in a wilderness of meanness and vice, then you will fight to protect this image from anything that might damage

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it, especially scepticism about the precision of your own moral compass. And so (iii) also collapses into (ii). The fourth source, sadism, is the one that seems the least to involve self-image. Sadism can be understood as a mere appetite involving no conscious ideas. A sadist might be drawn to cruelty like a plant to the sun rather than consciously setting out to live up to any image of a cruel person. But this kind of pure sadistic impulse is rare, according to Baumeister, if it exists at all.36 Often what looks like cruelty for its own sake is a manifestation of one of the other sources. He recounts a story, for instance, of a professional torturer who got into an argument with somebody who cut in front of him in a newsstand queue: The torturer felt an immediate urge to beat him up. He said nothing, but he thought to himself, ‘if I had you for a few hours, my fine fellow, you wouldn’t look so clever afterwards’.37 This wasn’t mere sadism, Baumesteir explains. The torturer ‘wanted to change the other’s attitude toward him, to make the other realise that he was no one to be trifled with’.38 He too was driven by his elevated self-image. Thus (iv) also collapses into (ii), more often than we might think. The upshot is that the attempted reductio ad Hitlerum raised against the anti-­ exemplarist ethic can easily backfire. Recognisable patterns of cruelty and viciousness often seem to involve attachment to exemplars at some level. Certainly the evil of Hitler himself, whose example haunts so many seminar rooms, is easy to trace to the roots of idealism and threatened self-esteem. A man who called himself der Führer, underlined Nietzsche’s references to the Übermensch, and wrote a two-­volume account of ‘his struggle’ at the age of thirty-six was, to say the least, taken with a certain self-image. Exemplarism can also be virtuous, as in the case of Spinoza’s Model Agent. But it is vicious often enough to make the objection, if we give up on exemplars, what prevents us from wickedness? sound like: if I give up drinking, how will I cope with my hangovers? The fourth thing to mention is the feeling of identity with others that comes with beatitude. Anti-exemplarism certainly confronts our intuitive moral and social understanding. As mentioned in Chapter 3, patterns of emulation are ‘the foundation of all social life’, as Ericka Tucker puts it.39 Thinkers like Aristotle and Confucius argue that the emulation of ideal exemplars is the foundation of moral and political order.40 Chad Hansen calls the rejection of this tradition in the Zhuangzi a form of radical anarchy: ‘As anarchy it rebels not only against political authority, but all social authority’.41 To escape from the emulation of exemplars is to escape from one of the central ways in which we socially guide and control behaviour – and, more generally, our social bonds. Susan James gives some reasons for concern about the situation in which ‘the philosopher becomes more like God and ruptures his affective bonds with those he leaves behind’.42 The concerns are real. One might suppose some bonds to be preserved by what Spinoza proposes at E 4p37: the more we cognise God, the more we desire for others the good we

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desire for ourselves. But this tells us nothing about the beatific individual who, having obtained the highest good can no longer be said to desire it.43 There is, however, a deeper bond that the beatific individual achieves with others. As we saw, to experience beatitude is to feel an absolute unity with all things, each of which, like oneself, expresses the superdeterminate being of God in a certain determinate way. Beatitude destroys the fear of death, because the beatific person no longer privileges being this over being that. But for the same reason, she no longer privileges being herself over being another. This understanding leads to a sort of universal love and compassion that can’t be achieved any other way. Spinoza calls this love ‘glory’. It is a complete contrast with the empty glory examined in Chapter 4. Is it enough to replace the ordinary forms of sociability that it must replace in the beatific individual? This will be the topic for the next chapter.

Notes 1 Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 156–8. 2 Carlisle, 157. 3 Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory; Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory. 4 Olberding, Moral Exemplars in the Analects. 5 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 232. 6 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 287. 7 Here Ziporyn appears to play on the fact that wei can also be used as a preposition meaning ‘for’ and as a verb meaning ‘to stand for’, ‘to be about’. 8 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 287. 9 Brook Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 53. 10 Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 226–7. 11 Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound, 59. 12 Livia Knaul, ‘Kuo Hsiang and the Chuang Tzu’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 12, no. 4 (1985): 439. 13 Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound, 59. I have added the characters I believe Ziporyn to be thinking of here (he uses Pinyin only). 14 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 5. 15 Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 3. The original is ‘zhi ren wu ji (至人無己)’, from https://ctext. org/zhuangzi. Note that ‘self ’ is ‘己’. Ziporyn reasons that this notion of self ‘must have something to do with unchanging commitment to a particular recognizable social identity or mode of behavior valorized by some specific social or natural context, and to the view of the world and of alternate value-contexts that goes with it’ – Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, xxxii. 16 Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 227. 17 Wang Bo, ‘What Did the Ancient Chinese Philosophers Discuss?’, Contemporary Chinese Thought 30, no. 4 (1 July 1999): 37. Referencing the passage from Chapter 1 of the Zhuangzi examined above – Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 5. 18 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 154. 19 Zhuangzi, 139. 20 Philip Ivanhoe, ‘The Values of Spontaneity’, in Taking Confucian Ethics Seriously: Contemporary Theories and Applications, ed. Kam-por Yu, Julia Tao, and Philip Ivanhoe (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 183–207.

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21 Nathaniel Barrett, ‘“Wuwei” and Flow: Comparative Reflections on Spirituality, Transcendence, and Skill in the “Zhuangzi”’, Philosophy East and West 61, no. 4 (2011): 679–706. The reading of ‘non-action’ that fits best with my presentation is the one offered by Moeller and D’Ambrosio: Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio, Genuine Pretending: On the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 151–63. 22 Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound, 66. 23 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 202. 24 Christine Abigail Tan, ‘Guo Xiang’s Ontology of Zide’, Monumenta Serica 69, no. 1 (2 January 2021): 12. 25 Ziporyn, The Penumbra Unbound, 82. 26 While Spinoza’s Latin in this and similar passages literally states that the body is ‘referred to the mind’ (corpus […] ad mentem referatur), I suspect the meaning is that the body is referred to by the mind, since for Spinoza the mind is constituted by an idea of the body, as discussed in previous chapters. 27 Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, 17.2. 28 Sanem Soyarslan has written about this and related matters: Sanem Soyarslan, ‘From Ordinary Life to Blessedness: The Power of Intuitive Knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics’, in Essays on Spinoza’s Ethical Theory, ed. Matthew Kisner and Andrew Youpa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 29 Roy Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015), ch.12. 30 Baumeister, 135–40. 31 Baumeister, 141. 32 Baumeister, 141. 33 On this see: Matheron 2011; Lord 2016; 2017; Douglas 2018. 34 Baumeister, Evil, 170. 35 Baumeister, 182. 36 Baumeister, ch.7. 37 Baumeister, 244. 38 Baumeister, 244. 39 Tucker, ‘Spinoza’s Social Sage’, 32. 40 Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 60–71; Yu, Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle, ch.4. 41 Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, 229. 42 James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together, 196. 43 Whether we should say this depends on whether we agree with McTaggart’s claim, noted in Chapter 1, that we can desire what we certainly and eternally have: McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, §448.

8 GLORY AND LOVE

Susan James calls the beatific person the ‘true philosopher’, who obtains ‘a kind of knowledge in which our ideas merge with those of God’. This knowledge ‘brings with it a supreme and indefeasible form of joyfulness, the so-called intellectual love of God’.1 But James is concerned that this ‘joy and resilience is bought at an unacknowledged cost’.2 To explain this cost, she first notes that Spinoza regards Jesus as ‘the philosopher who has so far achieved the greatest level of intuitive knowledge’.3 Jesus, however, was sad in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26). James provides a Spinozist interpretation of this sadness by turning to the first two novels of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus trilogy’: The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus.4 The Jesus figure here is a boy named David. He is not moved by the same passions as other people, and most of those who meet him ‘are not sure whether he is a damaged child who cannot develop ordinary attachments, or an exceptional one who is in the process of understanding a rare and elusive truth’.5 Similarly, James suggests: the philosopher’s sadness lies in knowing that he is unable to give ordinary people what they want by way of affective exchange and is almost bound to disappoint them; and in part it lies in knowing that they are unable to share the joy he derives from understanding. For ordinary people, the satisfactions that matter most to the philosopher are a closed book.6 The sadness of the true philosopher lies in a lack of affective community with ordinary people, those further back along the path to beatitude. The philosopher is no longer bound by the sorts of affects they are bound by – their ambitions, prides, shames, envies, hopes, fears, etc. He inhabits a type of understanding that they can’t

DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-9

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share. He can empathise with their struggles, but she isn’t part of them. He is on his own adventure. So he has left them behind. Is that not sad? A parallel with Aristotle might help to explain a further and related problem. In Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle appears to present a picture of a life of pure contemplation as an ethical ideal and the way to immortality. Yet, Anthony Kenny remarks, interpreters of Aristotle ‘find the contemplative who is the hero of NE 10 a strange and repellent human being’.7 This is because, as Yu puts it, ‘political and social involvement is not necessary, and can even be an obstacle’ to what the contemplative pursues.8 Yet a contemplative who feels in no way answerable to the demands of society – or only as answerable as is necessary to continue his life of contemplation – is not, to use a contemporary buzzword, socially responsible. If a conflict were to arise between the goal of pure contemplation and the demands of sociability and conventional morality, Aristotle’s contemplative would choose contemplation. Is this repellent? And is Spinozist beatitude then similarly repellent? The interpretation I have presented so far amplifies this concern. In Chapter 3 I gave a list of sources arguing that the imitation of the affects is the foundation of sociability for Spinoza. Spinoza believes that humans can be naturally sociable. But he is clear that some enforcement is necessary to maintain any significant human community: If human nature were so composed that humans maximally desired what was maximally useful, no art would be necessary for honesty and harmony. But because it is agreed that the constitution of human nature is a long way from that, it is therefore necessary to institute an authority so that everyone – those who rule as well as those who are ruled – acts towards the common good [communis salutis]. That is, everyone freely, or by force, or by necessity, is made to live by the prescript of a rule [ex rationis praescripto]. (TP 6.3; G3.297–8) Moreover, he claims that nobody can always conform freely, by pure self-discipline: nobody is so vigilant that he doesn’t sometimes sleep, and nobody is so powerful and vigorous of mind that he is not sometimes, especially when great strength of mind is needed, overcome and overwhelmed. (TP 6.3, G3.298)9 Thus conformity to common norms requires us all to be subject to social pressure. ‘Strength of mind’ is a collective achievement for Spinoza, as James explains.10 Since Spinoza claims that the source of external pressure binds the rulers as well as the ruled, he cannot mean to identify it with mere political authority. He appears, rather, to be referring to the power that society exercises spontaneously: the power of the crowd. Matheron presents a Spinozistic picture of how this power

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emerges through the imitation of the affects. It begins to form anywhere there is a public conflict between individuals: Each time that two individuals enter into conflict, each of them will call on the aid of all the others. And each of the others, responding to the call and imitating the affects of whichever of the adversaries is most similar to themselves, will be indignant and will fight against those who resemble them less: against those whose values most diverge from their own or who possess the most things that they do not possess. The one of the two adversaries that is the furthest from the majoritarian norm (the one who least resembles the others) will thus be crushed and dissuaded from beginning again. Under these conditions, after a certain number of repetitions, a consensus will finally be reached in order to impose common norms, in order to severely repress those who violate them, and in order to powerfully protect those who respect them. There will exist a collective power [puissance] of the multitude that will ensure the security of the conformists and neutralise the deviants. That is to say, there will exist, at least informally, an embryo of state sovereignty, since sovereignty is precisely ‘right defined by the power [potentia] of the multitude’.11 Debray argues, however, that the crowd can’t crush deviants from the ‘majoritarian norm’ simply by material punishments. Its power is also necessarily psychological. She explains: The fear of material consequences resulting from non-conformity to the injunctions of the group cannot on its own account for the power that a group can exercise over us: it is not just that the group arouses in us the fear of suffering the material consequences that its retribution brings (for example physical pain).12 What grounds the crowd’s true power over us is rather, Debray proposes, our own desire for glory. She points out that when he describes the founding of a republic in the Theologico-Political Treatise: Spinoza sustains the hypothesis of a social contract, but he affirms that what determines human beings to make such a contract is not the teachings of reason but rather a passion, the fear of being taken for a fool.13 He refers to a social pact that ‘nobody dares defy lest he should appear mindless [ne mente carere videatur]’ (TTP ch.16; O3.510). What we fear, in other words, is not just the group but the group’s bad opinion of us. Yet this depends fundamentally on our fear of shame, which Spinoza defines as ‘sadness concomitant with the idea of some action of ours, which we imagine others to disparage’ (E 3def.aff.31). We are sensitive to shame, because we desire the opposite – glory: ‘joy concomitant with the idea of some actions of ours, which we imagine others to praise’ (E 3def.aff.30).

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Thus Debray corrects Matheron’s account to place the desire for glory at the heart of Spinoza’s theory of sociability. In Chapters 3 and 4 we saw that the desire for glory is bound up with the search for a model or exemplar of being. At one point, when Matheron presents the mechanism by which the crowd’s power emerges, in a similar passage to the one quoted previously, he uses the term ‘current model’ in place of ‘majoritarian norm’.14 But the beatific individual, who emulates no model besides the superdeterminate being of God, is entirely impervious to the desire for glory. She doesn’t seek to do or be anything in particular, so there is nothing for which she can seek praise or fear shame from the crowd. Yet bondage to common norms, enforced by the power of the crowd, is the very glue that binds a social group together. To pursue beatitude, it seems, is to exit human society entirely. I agree with James that this suggestion is reinforced by Spinoza’s descriptions of Jesus. When Henry Oldenburg asks him to explain his views on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, Spinoza interprets it to mean that Jesus stood out – ‘surrexit’ – from ‘the dead’, who were only dead in a figurative sense – spiritually dead, which perhaps means far from beatitude (Ep 75; G4.314).15 In his unique understanding and virtue, Jesus stood apart from the rest of society. This created resentment, and Jesus paid with his life (not that death really applies to the beatified, as we saw). Is this an attractive ideal? The beatific individual neither shames others for transgression nor praises them for conformity. And she is impervious to shame and praise herself. She is a radical anarchist, in Hansen’s sense mentioned in the previous chapter. The moral force of the community holds no sway over her, and she in no way participates in any moral policing. She is amoral and outside the moral community. There is one easy response to any concerns about this, which is that it is the moral community that should trouble us, not those who stand outside it. Especially worrying are those who appoint themselves to conduct the stern chorus of crowd disapproval. ‘Schisms’, Spinoza wrote, ‘do not arise from a great enthusiasm for truth (which is a sure source of generosity and gentleness), but from a great lust for mastery’ (TTP ch.20, O3.650). In the Political Treatise (TP ch.3, G3.288; ch.6, G3.297) he proposes that the common affect that binds a community is either hope, fear, or a longing for vengeance, and Jaquet argues that the latter is the most stable of these bonds.16 Any feelings of moral repulsion and condemnation that the crowd feels towards the beatific individual, though seen by the crowd as intuitions of true justice, might really be expressions of unlovely affects. But this defence is only a counterattack. It doesn’t show beatitude to be an attractive human aim, even if it shows the ugliness of that from which beatitude escapes. A more satisfactory answer requires us to look into another obscure pronouncement from the Ethics. Spinoza tells us that the intellectual love of God, of which beatitude consists, ‘is called glory in the sacred texts, not undeservedly’ (E 5p36s). The stages by which he gets to this conclusion are as follows. The ‘third kind’ of cognition of God, intuitive cognition as defined in 2p40s2, ‘proceeds from an adequate idea of some of God’s attributes to adequate cognition of the essence of things’ (5p25d). Since intuitive cognition of God is the mind’s highest good, it

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brings joy (5p25). And, since love is defined as ‘joy concomitant with the idea of an external cause’ (3p13s, 3def.aff.6), intuitive cognition of God is a type of love, which Spinoza calls ‘intellectual love’ (5p32c). But the mind’s intellectual love for God is also ‘a part of the infinite love by which God loves himself ’ (5p36), a claim which Spinoza rests upon 1p25c, where individual things are said to be ‘modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way’. He draws the conclusion that ‘God, to the extent that he loves himself, loves human beings, and it follows therefore that the love of God for human beings and the intellectual love of God are one and the same thing’ (5p36c). To have the intellectual love of God is therefore to participate in God’s love for human beings, and it is this that Spinoza thinks is deservedly called ‘glory’ (5p36s). Warren Harvey argues that Spinoza here is ‘doubtless repeating a motif found often in medieval Jewish philosophy, according to which the divine glory is identified with intellect’.17 To work out which ‘sacred texts’ Spinoza refers to, he notes a reference in Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed to Isaiah 58:8,18 which promises to the one who unlocks the fetters of wickedness, shares bread with the hungry, and takes in the wretched poor: ‘The Presence of the Lord shall be your rear guard’ (New JPS translation).19 The Hebrew is ‘kavod adonai ya’asfekha’ (‫)ךפסאי הוהי דובכ‬. Spinoza quotes this passage in the Theologico-Political Treatise, and translates it: ‘gloria Dei te aggregabit’ – ‘the glory of God will gather you up’ (TTP, ch.5; O3.214). ‘Kavod’ thus becomes ‘glory’.20 He then reads ‘ya’asfekha’ as connoting death, since elsewhere in the Bible (Genesis 49:29, 33) ‘to be gathered up’ means to die. Thus he takes Isaiah 58:8 to imply that the righteous person dies into God’s glory. Curley suggests that this is based on a mistranslation, and ‘ya’asfekha’ more likely means what it is taken to mean in the NJPS translation quoted above.21 But Harvey points out that Maimonides construes the end of Isaiah 58:8 in the same way as Spinoza: As Maimonides understands it, the text means: if you are righteous, i.e. if you love God passionately, then upon your death the divine glory shall gather you up [ya’asfekha], i.e. your intellect will be united with the eternal active intellect.22 Spinoza, I propose, takes this Maimonidean idea in his own direction. When we grasp God through the third kind of cognition, we detach from any determinate self and identify only with God’s superdeterminate being. Our self dissolves into God. Maimonides likewise holds that for the highest sages – Moses, Aaron, and Miriam – this is achieved through a ‘kind of death, which in truth is deliverance from death’.23 The self disappears but is not annihilated; it vanishes into God. Here again I hope that my reading can help to clarify some well-known obscurities in Spinoza’s position. Yitzhak Melamed points out that ascribing love to God faces serious difficulties.24 For example, E 5p17c states that God, ‘properly speaking’ [proprie loquendo], loves nobody. Furthermore, it would seem that God, by definition, can’t love anything, since love is defined as ‘joy concomitant with the idea of an external cause’ (3p13s, def.aff.6), and God has no external causes, since everything

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that is, is in God (1p6d, 11). In fact, Melamed points out,25 God shouldn’t be able to experience joy at all. Joy is defined as a passage from a lesser to a greater perfection. Spinoza even clarifies that ‘joy is not perfection itself ’ (3def.aff.2, explication). But, Melamed points out: ‘God, being the most real and the most perfect being, seems to be incapable of “passing to a greater perfection” since there is no greater perfection than God’s current state’.26 Clearly when Spinoza speaks of the intellectual love of God in Part Five of the Ethics he must move to a different sense of ‘love’ than what he defines in Part Three. Melamed’s proposal is that the needed transformation consists, first of a move from joy to beatitude: Spinoza suggests that the definition of joy can be supplemented by an equivalent notion of Blessedness (beatitudo). If the mind’s advancement towards perfection is Joy, then the mind’s achieving and being in this state of perfection is to be called Blessedness. Thus, intellectual love replaces the component of Joy with Blessedness.27 Since Spinoza continues to use terms like ‘laetitia’ and ‘gaudeo’, however, let us use the term ‘beatific joy’ to refer to this joy of fulfilment as distinct from the joy of transition. Divine love can then be defined in terms of this beatific, fulfilled rather than transitional, joy. But what about the ‘external cause’ part of the definition? Melamed notes that ‘Spinoza has in his arsenal a notion which is quite close to intellectual love’, namely self-acquiescence.28 He notes how Spinoza proposes that ‘whether this love refers to God or to the mind, it can rightly be called acquiescence of the soul, which really is not distinguished from glory’ (5p36s). Spinoza refers here to his two definitions of self-acquiescence and glory given at the end of Part Three. But if we look to the passage in which he originally introduces these notions we find this: We call joy concomitant with the idea of an internal cause glory […], when the joy […] arises from this: that a person believes himself to be praised […]; otherwise I call joy concomitant with an internal cause self-acquiescence. (3p30s) Glory and self-acquiescence are both defined as joy concomitant with the idea of an internal cause. This is the opposite of love as Spinoza has defined it. So it is mysterious why he should now identify both glory and self-acquiescence with love. Melamed offers a few speculations on why Spinoza might have used the term ‘love’ here.29 But a further mystery is why self-acquiescence and glory are said to be ‘not distinguished’ at 5p36s. At 3p30s the notions are distinguished: glory involves imagining the praise of others, while self-acquiescence does not.30 We have seen, in Chapter 3, how in fact the two can run together for Spinoza: for an ordinary insecure individual, the affirmation of others is a necessary condition of even having a sense of self to contemplate. But occurring together is not the same

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as being ‘not distinguished’, and in any case the beatific individual, let alone God himself, is above the need for external affirmation. We might expect therefore that glory would simply drop out of the picture for the beatific person. But instead we have it assimilated to the acquiescence of the soul, which is the beatific form of self-acquiescence. We have, therefore, the following mysterious transformations of the affects in the beatific state: • •

•

The joy of transition, in terms of which love, self-acquiescence, and glory were originally defined, is replaced by the beatific joy of fulfilment. The distinction between external and internal causes disappears: joy concomitant with the idea of an external cause – love – becomes identical to joy concomitant with the idea of an internal cause – self-acquiescence/glory. Glory and self-acquiescence are no longer distinguished.

Can we explain all these transformations? I believe that their explanation must be along the lines suggested by Carlisle: the affects of acquiescentia and love [and glory] that are clearly distinct in Part Three converge to a single point in Part Five, when they are related to the third kind of cognition. Here, the idea of external causation is absorbed or dissolved into the singular truth of being-in-God.31 Again, I believe I can develop this in terms of my interpretation. If you reach beatitude, you experience beatific joy accompanied by the idea of yourself. But your self now has no determinate identity. You are identified only with the superdeterminate being of God. This being is expressed equally in all other things. Thus the distinction between internal and external causes no longer applies. Everything is internal to you, in a certain sense. Tan writes, describing what I believe to be the same idea in Guo Xiang: one takes everything that is encountered, every transformation that one experiences, as oneself, thereby blurring the lines between inner and outer, and ultimately, transforming everything to become inner, to become ‘me’.32 Taking joy in yourself as an expression of God – self-acquiescence – is then the same as taking joy in everything else as an expression of God. This is a form of universal love. And, since you are identical with everything else, you are both the subject and the object of this love. To believe that you are the object of love is glory. Thus, the collapse of distinctions among the affects of love, self-acquiescence, and glory, in the beatific state, reflects the dissolution of the self into the superdeterminate being of God. This is why Spinoza follows Maimonides in interpreting ‘kavod adonai ya’asfekha’ as referring to a state of being gathered up in God’s glory. In the beatific state, whether in death or in life, the soul experiences the vanishing of the self into God as a joy of fulfilment. Spinoza’s epigraph for the

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Theologico-Political Treatise comes from the First Letter of John: ‘By this we know that we abide in him and he in us: because he had donated to us from his Spirit’ (1 John 4:13, TTP O3.54). Just before this, the Letter reads: ‘if we should love one another, God abides in us and his love has been made perfect in us’ (1 John 4:12).33 In the next chapter, I will give a metaphysical analysis to provide more concrete content to these suggestive pronouncements. But for now let me return to the question of beatific withdrawal from the community. The concern was that, since the desire for glory is the foundation of social life, the beatific individual is no longer attached to this foundation. We can now see that this is true. The beatific individual has achieved glory and is in no danger of losing it. She feels no pressure from the opinions of the crowd and has no need to conform to conventional morality. She is a radical anarchist – rejecting the moral pressure that governs us far more rigorously than any threat of condign punishment. Yet there is also no need for the community to control her. She has escaped morality, not into selfish contemplation or some destructive primal appetite, but into a pure and universal love. Spinoza’s claim that ‘nobody is so powerful and vigorous of mind that he is not sometimes, especially when great strength of mind is needed, overcome and overwhelmed’ (TP 6.3, G3.298) must be restricted to the non-beatific. If beatitude – perfect love – were in any way vulnerable to lapse, it would not be beatitude. The beatific individual requires no moral pressure from the community because she poses no threat to the community and her virtue is perfect. Maimonides, in the passage quoted earlier, presents the dissolution of the self into God as an event that occurs after death, as a reward for the righteous. But Spinoza holds that beatitude is not the reward for virtue because it is virtue. This is the final proposition of the Ethics (5p42). There is no threat of any reductio ad Hitlerum here, unless we believe that Hitler was a man with no insecurities, calmly submerged into an oceanic feeling of universal love. In fact, as we saw in the previous chapter, by escaping the influence of social convention and the power of the crowd, the beatific person escapes influences that can often lead to cruelty and violence. Beatitude is not just a replacement for conventional morality; it is an improvement on it. It conforms perhaps to the vision of ‘postconventional’ ethics explored by Carol Gilligan in the context of feminist care-ethics. Gilligan traces the ways in which certain women she studies use moral language over time, progressing from a focus on self-care, through a self-effacing phase in which conventional obligations of care for others dominate, and arriving finally at a third perspective, which ‘dissipates the tension between selfishness and responsibility through a new understanding of the interconnection between other and self ’.34 The beatific person likewise travels beyond conventional morality, but into a new understanding of interconnectedness with others. Here again a parallel with Daoism emerges, though this time Daoism as interpreted by Raymond Smullyan: The Daoists […] appeared to feel that morality itself – ‘principles of morality’, that is – was a major cause of suffering, since it only weakened that natural goodness in us which would spontaneously manifest itself if not interfered

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with or commanded by moral principles or moral law. (In this respect, Daoism comes close to Pauline Christianity.) Indeed, one day Laozi chided Confucius for ‘bringing great confusion’ (should I say ‘confucian’?) to the human race by his moralistic teachings. He said ‘Stop going around advertising goodness and duty, and people will regain love of their fellows’.35 I don’t quote Smullyan here as an authority on Daoism.36 But this passage is useful because of the connection Smullyan makes with Pauline Christianity (given the connection Carlisle makes between this and Spinoza). Smullyan also quotes a powerful line from Walt Whitman: ‘I give nothing as duties, / What others give as duties, I give as living impulses’.37 Beatific persons renounce ordinary action and desire by detaching from determinate exemplars. Instead, they allow the superdeterminate being of God to flow spontaneously through them. This force is entirely benign. It manifests in the beatific person as universal love. We need not be concerned about their radical anarchism – their imperviousness to conventional morality. If we were all beatified, we would need no conventional morality; we would act out of love. And because we are fallen, conventional morality cannot stop us from hating and harming each other. Often it causes us to do so.38 But what about James’s concern? Is there something sad about beatitude? On the interpretation given here, she is right to say that when ‘the philosopher becomes more like God’ he ‘ruptures his affective bonds with those he leaves behind’.39 On the other hand, he builds the deeper affective bond of intellectual love. James is concerned, as we saw, that the philosopher ‘is unable to give ordinary people what they want by way of affective exchange’, and ‘they are unable to share the joy he derives from understanding’.40 But the joy in question is universal love, including love for ordinary people, and that perhaps is exactly what they need – even if it fails to satisfy their craving for team-building and the assault on common enemies. Spinoza claims that following his philosophy leads one ‘not to have hatred against anybody, nor to contemn or mock anybody, nor to be angry with or envy anybody’ (E 2p49s). Surely we could all benefit from having somebody like that around. Moreover, in Chapter 3 I proposed that the Fall of humanity, as Spinoza sees it, lies in our profound need for the approval of others. And nobody can grant us deeper approval than the beatific person, who follows the commandment W.H. Auden issued to poetry: ‘it must praise all it can for being and for happening’.41 One concern, however, lingers. The condition of beatitude, thus described, seems nearly inhuman. We might still worry that Spinoza’s beatific person is just as repellent as Aristotle’s pure contemplative. An indiscriminate love for each thing – every expression of God – is hardly a substitute for our ordinary human bonds of affection. It would seem to entail love for those who harm our friends and family no less than for our friends and family themselves. How could we imagine any sort of human companionship with somebody whose single affect was this sort of

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universal love? They would be as alien to us as Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’. They would meet the description Izutsu gives of how the ‘Perfect Man’ in Daoism initially strikes us: he may be said to lack ordinary human emotions and feeling. In fact, he is not a ‘man’, if one understands by the word an ordinary human being. He is, in reality, an infinitely large cosmic being.42 Izutsu goes on to correct this description of the Daoist ideal, and we will see how, likewise, Spinoza’s beatific person is not alien and inhuman in this way when properly understood. But we can see why such a figure at first sight might not attract us as an exemplar. To set up the reply for the next chapter, this concern seems to suppose that the beatific person apprehends and loves things from some universal ‘God’s-eye-view’. But, following Julia Borcherding, I argue that the ‘God’s-eye-view’ in Spinoza incorporates, rather than transcends, limited perspectives.43 To adequately understand yourself as an expression of God is therefore to appreciate how your perspective is one among many. While appreciating this, you can continue to inhabit your perspective rather than abandoning it for some neutral, universal perspective. To love universally is, then, to love partially – humanly – but in full recognition of your partiality. To explain this interpretation, I will need to delve further into Spinoza’s metaphysics in the next chapter.

Notes 1 James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together, 184. 2 James, 192. 3 James, 190. 4 John Maxwell Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013); John Maxwell Coetzee, The Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016). The third instalment further confirms James’s interpretation: John Maxwell Coetzee, The Death of Jesus (New York: Viking, 2020). 5 James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together, 195. 6 James, 195. 7 Anthony Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 89. 8 Yu, Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle, 215. 9 On Spinoza’s ‘strength of mind’ (fortitudo animi) and its social dimension see James 2020, ch.13. 10 James, 205. 11 TP 2.17. Matheron, Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza, 140. 12 Debray, ‘Imitation des affects et production de l’ordre social’, 163. 13 Debray, 163–4. 14 Matheron, Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza, 130. 15 I discuss this in more detail elsewhere: Douglas, ‘Spinoza’s Unquiet Acquiescentia’. 16 Chantal Jaquet, ‘Longing (Desiderium) for Vengeance as the Foundation of the Commonwealth’, in Spinoza’s Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, ed. Hasana Sharp and Yitzhak Melamed, trans. Émilie Filion-Donato, Cambridge Critical Guides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 78–92.

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17 Warren Zev Harvey, “Ishq, Ḥ esheq, Andamor Dei Intellectualis’, in Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 105. 18 Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed, 3.51, 520. 19 Wolfson has a different opinion on the relevant ‘sacred texts’: Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 2.311–7. 20 John Heyderman, in an unpublished conference paper, presents a learned analysis of this concept in Jewish thought and how it might have influenced Spinoza John Heyderman, ‘“The Whole Earth Is Full of His Glory”: Amor Dei Intellectualis as Gloria in Ethics V’ (London Spinoza Circle Graduate Workshop, Birkbeck College, London, 2019). 21 Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, 2016, 2:141n.8, n.11. 22 Harvey, “Ishq,Ḥ esheq, Andamor Dei Intellectualis’, 105. 23 Maimonides, A Guide for the Perplexed, 520. 24 Yitzhak Melamed, ‘The Enigma of Spinoza’s Amor Dei Intellectualis’, in Freedom, Action, and Motivation in Spinoza’s Ethics, ed. Noa Naaman-Zauderer (London: Routledge, 2019), 224. 25 Melamed, 230. 26 Melamed, 230. 27 Melamed, 230–1. 28 Melamed, 232. 29 Melamed, 233. 30 At least self-acquiescence in its most general sense – see Chapter 4, n.13. 31 Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 141. 32 Tan, ‘Guo Xiang’s Ontology of Zide’, 12. 33 Carlisle discusses Spinoza’s relation to these passages from John in illuminating detail: Carlisle, Spinoza’s Religion, 97–9. 34 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 74. Gilligan adapts her theory of the phases of moral development from Lawrence Kohlberg, but her version, stressing a growing awareness of interpersonal interconnectedness, is more relevant here. 35 Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 112. 36 I would note, however, that Smullyan is cited approvingly by a much more authoritative Daoism commentator on one point of interpretation: Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, 402n.20. I would also suggest that the idea presented here corresponds with the interpretation of Zhuangzi found in a recent study of moral and political philosophy in the Zhou-Qin period Tao Jiang, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2021), ch.5. 37 Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent, 110. 38 Hans-Georg Moeller, The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 39 James, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together, 196. 40 James, 195. 41 Wystan Hugh Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 47. 42 Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, 451. 43 Julia Borcherding, ‘A View from Nowhere? The Place of Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Rationalism’, in Subjectivity and Selfhood in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jari Kaukua and Tomas Ekenberg (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 235–61.

9 GOD IN EVERYONE

The beatific person, living in imitation of God, must strive to know the world as God knows it. But how is that? We ordinary people experience the world from a particular spatial, temporal, and personal perspective. As I write this, now is a particular afternoon in the year 2022, here is a particular place in Edinburgh, and I am the author of these words. You, the reader, will experience things differently. You will feel that now is some later date, here is some other place (unless you are reading this in my home), and I (you would say to yourself) am a reader of these words but not their author. One traditional theory of divine knowledge holds that God ‘views’ the world from no such perspective. Boethius, for example, explains that God is not in any particular place: When, indeed, one claims that ‘[God] is everywhere,’ it would seem that one does not claim that he is in every location (since it is impossible to be in every location), but that every location is present to him for him to occupy, though he himself is not contained in any location. And so he is never said to be in a location, since he is everywhere and yet not in any location.1 Likewise, God is not present at any particular time: he always is, since ‘always’ is in him in the present tense, and there is such a great difference between the present – that is the ‘now’ – for our realities and for divine realities that our ‘now,’ like a running time, constitutes sempiternity, whereas the divine ‘now,’ which is permanent, immobile, and stable, constitutes eternity.2

DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-10

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God views the world, in other words, from nowhere and nowhen: no time is more present to him than any other, and no place is nearer to him than any other. Hobbes complains about how the proponents of ‘Vain Philosophy’ in the universities conceive of eternity as ‘the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans’. They can no more understand this, he asserts, ‘than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatnesses of Place’.3 That is, however, precisely what Boethius asks us to understand: God’s eternity means existing in a ‘now’ outside of time’s succession, and his omnipresence means existing beyond all location. Perhaps what Hobbes has difficulty understanding is how the world would then appear to God. Kneale criticises one image that Boethius uses to explain God’s perspective on the events in time: God’s providence, he says, is the cognition of the lowly details of this world as from a high mountain. He does not elaborate the simile further but presumably what he means is that the man on the top of the mountain can see the bends and ups and downs of a road all at once whereas the traveller on the road sees only a limited stretch at a given time […]. But when we come to think it out, the simile does not help. The spectator on high sees the road all at once but he does not see the traveller in all positions at once. This would be a contradiction. His perceptions must be as successive as the positions themselves.4 The contradiction she means is that of a single traveller being in different positions while remaining one thing. Of course any object of positive size covers many positions, by having different parts in them, but Kneale is referring to the idea of a traveller being entirely at one location along the road and also entirely at many others. Multiple location of this sort is contradictory. Some metaphysicians would rather treat the traveller as a four-dimensional object composed of various temporal parts, each of which occupies a different location along the road. Kneale responds to this, though her response ventures into complexities that are beside the point here. Boethius appears to agree that an object can’t be multiply located. He foregoes suggesting that God is wholly located in every place – a suggestion made by a character in one of Malebranche’s dialogues.5 Instead, he is driven to claim that God is not in any place nor at any ‘now’ (at least not our type of ‘now’), thus falling into Kneale’s difficulty of explaining how God could view events in time from his citadel of eternity without this leading to contradiction. Perhaps the problem here is with the word ‘view’. Of course we can’t imagine the universe experienced from nowhere and nowhen, because experiencing involves the senses and the body, which is always somewhere and somewhen. Perhaps we should say only that God knows true propositions about everything that happens – including where and when everything happens – although there is no particular time or place at which he knows these. These will be propositions like ‘snow was general all over Ireland, on Christmas Day, 1913’ (imagine that was true), but never propositions like ‘it is snowing here, today’.

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But then there is the question of whether such knowledge could ever be complete. Borcherding follows Thomas Nagel in denying that it could.6 Nagel writes: An objective standpoint is created by leaving a mere subjective, individual, or even just human perspective behind; but there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be understood from a maximally objective standpoint, however much it may extend our understanding beyond the point from which we started. A great deal is essentially connected to a particular point of view, or type of point of view, and the attempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detached from these perspectives inevitably leads to false reductions or to outright denial that certain patently real phenomena exist at all.7 Borcherding worries that Spinoza, treating God’s eternal knowledge as complete, can be interpreted as eliminating ‘any role for our subjective experience’ in a complete description of reality. His position therefore ‘does indeed seem vulnerable to Nagel’s line of argument’.8 She argues that this is not in fact the right interpretation of Spinoza. But before exploring her reply further, we had better see how damning that argument really is. On the face of it, Nagel’s argument appears to doom to failure not only ‘the attempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detached from these perspectives’, but the attempt to give any complete account of the world at all. To explain why, note first that one example of what Nagel regards as a real phenomenon that ‘cannot be understood from a maximally objective standpoint’ is what he conveys by saying ‘I am Thomas Nagel’.9 Nagel proposes that the truth-conditions for this statement can be given purely objectively: it is true when Thomas Nagel says it, and we can give a perfectly objective description of Thomas Nagel. ‘But’, he goes on, ‘even when all that public information about the person TN has been included in an objective conception, the additional thought that TN is me seems clearly to have further content’.10 Of course, you or I couldn’t correctly have the additional thought that TN is me – only TN can. This is, according to Nagel, a piece of propositional content that is expressible and accessible only from Nagel’s subjective point of view. Nagel argues that content like this forms an indispensable part of a ‘complete account of the world’. This is why a complete account of the world can’t be given from a maximally objective standpoint, transcending all subjective perspectives. A complete account of the world must include the content that Nagel expresses in the thought ‘TN is me’. But it must also include the content I access in having the thought ‘AXD is me’. Having these both at once, however, would lead to contradiction. TN is not AXD, so an account that identifies both with me is contradictory and can’t be correct. Or take another of Nagel’s examples: the statement that ‘today is Tuesday’. From an objective standpoint, we can say that this statement is true when made on a Tuesday, but such an account ‘is fundamentally incomplete, because it cannot tell

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us which time is the present’.11 Again, however, no objective account of that can be given, since the present is relative to a point of view. For me right now the present is a certain day; for you as you read this, it is a later day. Some would argue that only one time is objectively the present, but then which one? It is imperious to privilege your own temporal point of view above all others, and anyway you’ll soon change your mind about when the present is. But, on the other hand, to include every point of view again leads to contradiction: we end up saying that each moment is past, present, and future all together (besides the first and last moments of time, if there are such). This is the most famous paradox of McTaggart.12 McTaggart proposed that the only consistent view, in light of this paradox, is that no moment is really present (nor past, nor future). Moments appear to us to have these properties, but the appearance is an illusion. He concluded that time is therefore unreal. Most contemporary philosophers prefer to say that time is real but consists only of moments forming a series from earliest to latest (what McTaggart called a ‘B series’), not a series running from past to present to future (an ‘A series’). Michael Dummett, however, observes that an alternative response to the paradox is available. We can deny that a complete description of reality can be given at all: McTaggart is taking it for granted that reality must be something of which there exists in principle a complete description. I can make drawings of a rock from various angles, but if I am asked to say what the real shape of the rock is, I can give a description of it as in three-dimensional space which is independent of the angle from which it is looked at. The description of what is really there, as it really is, must be independent of any particular point of view.13 If, on the other hand, we take the different temporal perspectives, according to which different moments are present, as correct descriptions of reality, then no unique, consistent, maximal description of reality can be given: There would be one, as it were, maximal description of reality in which the statement ‘The event M is happening’ figured, others which contained the statement ‘The event M happened,’ and yet others which contained ‘The event M is going to happen’.14 What prevents us from joining these ‘maximal’ descriptions together into one ultimate description is that the fusion would be full of contradictions, containing statements that the event M has happened, is happening, and has yet to happen. If this is right, it means that Nagel’s argument has a very strong conclusion, one that seems too strong for Spinoza. It rules out there being any unique, complete description of reality. This means that no subject, not even the infinite intellect or God, can know everything there is to know. Some scholars argue that God and the infinite intellect do in fact lack such knowledge.15 But Borcherding argues powerfully against them.16 There must be a unique, ultimate, maximal description of reality that is grasped in God’s knowledge.

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Most contemporary philosophers preserve such an ultimate description by simply expelling anything perspectival from it, in the manner described by Dummett: ‘The description of what is really there, as it really is, must be independent of any particular point of view’. Since the present is relative to a point of view, there can’t really be a present moment. Again, there are earlier and later moments – a B series – but no past, present, or future – no A series.17 Nor can there be truths like ‘I am Thomas Nagel’ that are accessible only from within one subjective point of view. Rather we should side with Ralph Perry: if one finds plausible reasons for believing in a universe that has, in addition to our common world, myriads of private perspectives, the idea of propositions of limited accessibility will fit right in. I have no knock-down argument against such propositions, or the metaphysical schemes that find room for them. But I believe only in a common actual world.18 Let’s call this type of objectivism, which seeks to deny reality to the perspectival, Neutral Objectivism. Borcherding sides with Nagel against it. According to Borcherding and Nagel, there are perspectival truths, and expelling them from our description of reality makes that description incomplete. Borcherding believes that Spinoza would say the same. I agree with her on both points. I refer the reader to Nagel’s book for the arguments against Neutral Objectivism and to Borcherding’s article for the argument that Spinoza rejects it. Here I will develop what Borcherding outlines as an alternative view and explore its implications with respect to beatitude. Borcherding proposes that we need not think of God’s objective knowledge as a neutral ‘view from nowhere’. Rather, God’s knowledge can involve precisely the fusion of perspectives that Dummett rules out as impossible. Spinoza’s God, she proposes, is like Leibniz’s God in that he ‘views all the faces of the world in all ways possible’ (Discourse on Metaphysics, §14).19 She explains: The Ethics does not simply conceive of God as a transcendent impartial observer standing outside of nature, but as an all-encompassing being that incorporates and unifies all perspectives […].20 Although she doesn’t say so explicitly, her position seems to simply embrace the contradictions that repel Dummett. She proposes, for instance, that we can ‘ultimately arrive at a third kind of knowledge, which unifies our finite, perspectival experience of the world with an objective view of that same reality, and incorporates them both’.21 Already this seems contradictory. In my subjective description of the world, I am Alexander Douglas and now is a particular moment. An objective description, by contrast, is what Nagel calls ‘centreless’: no person is me and no moment is now.22 In combining these two descriptions, then, we would appear to both assert and deny the claims that one person is the central subject and one moment is the present. Nagel perhaps manages to reconcile these without contradiction for a single finite subject, though I’m not sure I understand how this works.23 But the population of

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inconsistencies explodes if we try to add into our description of reality all the other subjective descriptions, identifying all their different central subjects and various present moments. We can, however, hold onto this ultimate description – this divine vision containing all the finite perspectives – if we simply embrace its inconsistency. Kit Fine develops this idea, which he calls ‘Fragmentalism’.24 He distinguishes between Fragmentalism and Relativism – the view that ‘Reality is relative to a standpoint; and for different standpoints there will be different realities’.25 A Relativist denies that there is a unique, maximally complete description of reality. There are only realities from different perspectives. That is the view proposed by Dummett in the preceding quotation as the only alternative to Neutral Objectivism. Fragmentalism, however, poses a third option. It retains a unique, maximally complete description of reality by giving up on the stricture that it must be internally consistent: One naturally assumes that in a correct account of reality all apparent contradictions will be ironed out. If something is both hot and cold, it must be because one part is hot the other cold, or because it is hot and cold at different times, or because being hot is somehow compatible with being cold. But on the present view, this fundamental assumption is given up. It is taken to lie in the character of reality that certain apparently contradictory aspects of it cannot be explained away. Reality may be irredeemably incoherent.26 The Relativist and the Fragmentalist ‘are both concerned, in their own ways, to deny the existence of a single coherent reality. But the relativist denies that it is single, while the fragmentalist denies that it is coherent’.27 The divine vision as Borcherding understands it is certainly single, so it must be incoherent. This wild and woolly implication of Borcherding’s interpretation is no disadvantage in my view. Rather, understanding it allows us to further understand beatitude. First, we can now begin to grasp how the beatific individual can understand the world, and how her cognition can imitate that of God. We can now say that God’s knowledge, like his being, is superdeterminate. God doesn’t cognise the world from one privileged standpoint, but nor does he grasp it only in some centreless, Neutrally Objective ‘view from nowhere’. Rather, he cognises it from every perspective, though the resulting understanding is irredeemably incoherent in certain ways. Just as his superdeterminacy allows him to exist in a variety of diverse and inconsistent forms, so it also allows him to cognise from a variety of diverse and inconsistent perspectives. Again there is a strong parallel with Ibn Arabī’s view as explained by Izutsu: ‘the world of Being cannot be grasped in its true form except as a synthesis of contradictions. Only by a simultaneous affirmation of contradictories can we understand the nature of the world’.28 Understanding this is a crucial component of beatitude. Fine points out that understanding reality as fragmental allows us to discard the idea of the self ‘either as a subject or as the locus of subjectivity’.29 And we have seen how discarding any

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idea of a determinate self is a central part of beatitude. How does Fragmentalism allow this? To explain it, Fine first notes that: it is a familiar point that the most basic forms of experience are ones in which there is no representation of the self. The world presents itself, to me, as being a certain way; it does not present itself as being that way to me. This suggests that a better account of the first-personal facts would be one in which they would be specified in an egocentric language of the sort considered by Prior.30 We should not say ‘I am in pain’ but ‘it is paining’, where such a statement is taken to hold ‘egocentrically’ or relative to a subject in much the same way in which a tensed statement holds tense-logically or relative to a time. The self will be an implicit rather than an explicit subject of the first-personal facts.31 So far we still have an implicit reference to selves – the subjects to which statements like ‘it is paining’ will be relative. In the Mozi, Wumazi says to Mozi: ‘If you hit me it hurts, if you hit someone else it doesn’t’.32 We are inclined to say that if that is true at all it is true only relative to Wumazi. We are then driven towards a Relativist position, according to which ‘we must take each subjective reality to be given to a metaphysical subject or self ’.33 But Fine’s next move is to point out that the Fragmentalist view requires no ‘metaphysical selves’ to which we relativise subjective facts. Rather: Über-reality will comprehend all the different subjective facts, both yours and mine, and there will be no more to the metaphysical self than the fragment of subjective reality to which it corresponds. The metaphysical self will dissolve, as it were, into the sea of facts of which it was previously regarded as the source. The sense in which the metaphysical self is an outlook is now especially clear since it will amount to no more than the facts by which the outlook is constituted.34 To understand this, consider how the purpose of making Wumazi’s statement relative to him is to avoid inconsistency with statements that others else would truthfully make, for instance: ‘when you hit Wumazi it doesn’t hurt, but when you hit someone else (me) it does’. If we aren’t worried about consistency – and the Fragmentalist is not – then we don’t need to relativise these inconsistent statements to distinct subjects. We can then do away with subjects altogether. There is only the whole of reality, singular but fragmented. In this reality there are subjective facts expressed without any explicit first-person indexing, such as ‘it is paining’. It pains when Wumazi is hit, but not when somebody else is hit. It pains when somebody else is hit, but not when Wumazi is hit. It is now paining, as Wumazi is hit. It is now no longer paining, as Wumazi was hit long ago. All this is together, absolutely and objectively true in a fragmented reality, and we can define a ‘subject’ of experience by drawing out a single consistent strand of

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these absolute and objective facts. Wumazi’s experience is the fragment of reality consisting of the fact that it pains when Wumazi is hit and other facts consistent with that. Any fragment drawn out to define a personal experience in this way won’t be entirely self-consistent, however, since no person’s experience is. For one thing, a person’s lifetime experience will be defined by many inconsistent facts about when is now and where is here. For another, human experience is hardly a model of consistency in general. We, like God, very often think opposing things under different guises. Again we have the fractal of being described in Chapter 5: determination is never complete, and superdeterminacy re-emerges within each determination. Some philosophers have even used this point to endorse Fragmentalism over Relativism.35 The Relativist must be comfortable with internal inconsistency within each subject’s version of reality, but if inconsistency is unavoidable anyway, why not get rid of the subjective versions altogether and posit an inconsistent single reality? Fragmentalism is, I propose, what Spinoza means to invoke when he downgrades us from distinct thinking substances, as per Descartes, to modes of a single thinking substance. Such a reading allows us to take quite literally some of Spinoza’s statements that imply that when a human mind thinks it is really God thinking. For instance E 2p11c: when we say that the human mind perceives this or that, we say nothing other than that God, not insofar as [quatenus]36 he is infinite, but insofar as he is explained by the nature of a human mind, or constitutes the essence of a human mind, has this or that idea. Renz argues that such passages should not drive us to understand God as ‘the true subject of our mental activities’.37 But Borcherding raises problems with her reading, as mentioned earlier.38 On the Fragmentalist understanding, we can assert without trouble that it is God who thinks all of our thoughts, though in fragmentary and incoherent ways. This is just another feature of God’s superdeterminacy. To understand this is to escape from one temptation to posit a certain idea of your self, which is an important step towards beatitude. But beatitude involves much more than this. It involves escaping attachment to any idea of self. But the escape is into an identification with, or emulation of, God’s superdeterminacy. The beatific person will therefore make no meaningful distinction between her perspective and the perspectives of others. If, however, this means seeing by everyone else’s eye and feeling everyone else’s pain, then beatitude seems to cross over from being difficult and rare to being impossible. Fortunately, there is something else that Spinoza might mean. To explain it I feel compelled to again reach for the Zhuangzi. Tan discusses what she calls Zhuangzi’s ‘perspectivism’, explaining a view that appears to be expressed in the second inner chapter of the Zhuangzi (the Qiwulun [齊物論]):

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what we see and what we understand is always only a limited view, shaped by the circumstance we are caught in, but this limit, this singularity, is precisely how we are aware of the multiplicity of perspectives, where the One is many, and where many is One.39 Similarly Ziporyn writes that ‘Any perspective necessarily posits an alternate perspective’.40 Both are attempting to explain a passage in the Qiwulun, for which Ziporyn offers alternative translations, one of which runs as follows: There is no thing that is not a ‘that’. There is no thing that is not a ‘this’. But one cannot be seeing from the perspective of an other. It is from one’s own understanding, from knowing oneself, that one knows this [i.e., that every ‘this’, including oneself, is also a ‘that’, an ‘other’].41 The idea is that when you properly understand your own perspective, you see that its very existence implies the possibility of other perspectives. When you understand that calling something ‘this’ is relative to your perspective, you recognise that there are other perspectives from which it will be called ‘that’. But with this recognition you touch what Zhuangzi calls the ‘axis of dao’ (dao shu 道樞), which is like the hub at the centre of a wheel. The different perspectives are the spokes of this wheel. This, Ziporyn explains, ‘is a means of interaction and “responding” that relates different perspectives to one another, “opening them up” into one another’.42 Hansen proposes that ‘The view from the axis of dao is not where nothing can be said. It is rather the point from which anything can be said with equal warrant. Once we say something, we step off the axis onto a particular dao’.43 The idea is expressed in the Zhuangzi as follows: A state where ‘this’ and ‘not-this’ – right and wrong – are no longer coupled as opposites is called Course as axis, the axis of all courses. When this axis finds its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none. For it has an endless supply of ‘rights’ and an endless supply of ‘wrongs’.44 Somebody who had clear access to this centre of perspectives could shift among them freely, seeing the world in every possible way. But Zhuangzi need not be proposing this as a real possibility for us. Rather, as Tan proposes in the preceding quotation, we touch this ‘axis of dao’ and gather it into our own perspective when we realise the limitation and arbitrariness of our own perspective. Think again of Wumazi. If he were to touch the axis of dao, he could still say: ‘if you hit me it hurts, if you hit someone else it doesn’t’, but he would say it knowing that under a different guise the reverse is true. If he achieved beatitude, he would also identify himself with all the other guises – with God’s superdeterminate being. He would thus take it as equally true for him that it hurts if you hit Mozi but not if you hit somebody else, that it hurts if you hit Douglas but not if you hit somebody

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else, that if hurts if you hit Nagel but not somebody else, and so on. These appear inconsistent, but the beatific individual understands the fragmental nature of reality, which is really the same thing as the superdeterminate nature of God. We can now see how knowledge of the beatific individual imitates that of God without being identical with it. God is genuinely superdeterminate, knowing and experiencing from every perspective. The beatific person strives to imitate God’s superdeterminacy, but still inhabits her own limited perspective. She recognises intellectually the total contingency of this perspective and can suppose how things are different from other perspectives. She also, as much as she can, identifies with these other perspectives and draws them into her own. As Ziporyn puts it in his exposition of Zhuangzi: The recommendation then seems to be: have the ability to have emotions, to feel your way into various positions and perspectives as expressed by others or even yourself, to live and die; on the other hand, maintain a central point that is still, uninvolved, not fully absorbed into or committed to this perspective, which means, as the image of the pivot or hinge suggests especially, the ability to jump back out of it when the situation changes (通, tong), to identify yourself equally with the opposite when the time comes, to know even now that it too will equally be a ‘this’, and hence will be self, right and life, since This includes That, and That includes This.45 A difficult and rare injunction! But not impossible. In fact, we all can do it to some extent. You probably try, for instance, not to set too much store by the perceived fact that it only hurts when you are hit, not when others are hit. You recognise that this perceived fact is contingent on your own perspective, and there is no reason to privilege that perspective above others. We have more difficulty, however, drawing the same conclusion about our temporal perspective. We are pained by the perceived fact that some joy or beloved person is departed. If we could be truly convinced that they are also very much present to us, from some different but equally valid perspective – right there on the other side of the axis of dao – then we would no longer be pained with nostalgia. We might bear with more equanimity some ordeal if we could be truly convinced that not only will it be a funny story one day,46 but that it already is, from some other perspective. As Moeller explains the point from the Zhuangzi: A Daoist sage identifies him/herself not with the turning spokes of a wheel but with its unmoving hub. To be the pivot or centre of change means to be identified with the whole process of change. […] As opposed to the small awakened who totally identifies him/herself with the present segment of change, with life or death, the sage identifies him/herself with neither of the specific segments, but with the whole process as such.47 The extent to which we can truly appreciate this, and take the present more lightly as a result, measures the strength of our third kind of cognition and our

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beatitude – the level of our contact with the centre of the wheel. I personally find the idea that those events we feel nostalgic about are still present in a very real sense to be a greater consolation than that offered by Neutral Objectivism, which creates a feeling that those events were never really present. Most important, however, is the change in our moral understanding. Spinoza is clear that moral qualities are akin to the pastness, presence, and futurity of moments in time. That is, they belong to fragmental descriptions of reality. They therefore aren’t akin to earliness and lateness, that is, belonging to the neutral description. He writes: As for good and bad, they indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves. They are nothing other than modes of thinking, or notions that we form in virtue of the fact that we compare things among themselves, since one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is good to a melancholic, bad to a mourner, and neither good nor bad to a deaf person. (E 4pref., O4.344) It is clear from the context that Spinoza assimilates aesthetic values to moral ones, speaking of good and bad music in the same register as good and bad actions. He could just as well have used an example like: the execution of a criminal is good to a stern retributivist and bad to a compassionate humanitarian, or: military action on humanitarian grounds is good to a ‘just war’ advocate and bad to a pacifist. What shapes these differing perspectives, with their different evaluations, is a different set of experiences. Different objects have been included in the purview, appearing in different relations and subject to different comparisons. The pacifist and the just war advocate, perhaps, both know of two victims of violence: one killed as ‘collateral damage’ in a humanitarian intervention and another killed by a regime that could have been stopped by such an intervention. But the pacifist is the sibling of one, and the just war advocate the spouse of the other. There is a difference of proximity, which is to say, of perspective, and this leads to the cases being compared very differently. The example is much cruder than real life, but the general point is, I hope, clear. Spinoza goes on to devise what I have called the ‘Model Agent’ to serve as a reasonable standard for moral judgments. But we saw reasons in Chapter 4 to doubt that any standard devised in this way could be regarded as genuinely objective – pace Colin Marshall, among others.48 What is good and bad for the Model Agent is not more objectively good and bad than what is good and bad for somebody else. The Model Agent’s position is recommended, not as the absolute truth, but as the one least likely to lead to conflict and strife. But the beatific person can avoid strife in a different way: by fully recognising that evaluative qualities like good and bad belong to reality in its various fragments – under its various guises. There is no ultimate, unique, and consistent moral description of reality. The beatific individual, recognising the fragmental character of reality, recognises the impossibility of a consistent, unique, and ultimate moral truth. She therefore doesn’t fight with others over such a chimera.

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Many worry that moral perspectivism of this sort can be exploited to justify moral license. Undeniably it can, but we need not fear the beatified. I have tried in the previous two chapters to give reassurances that Spinoza’s beatific person is at no risk of being licentious in any destructive way. On the contrary, she is devoid of the cruel and bullying spirit that so easily inhabits those who believe their own moral perspective to be ultimate, or to count more than others. Thus we can answer the concern that motivated this chapter. The beatific person is not detached and impartial to the point of being inhuman. She continues to inhabit her human, individual, partial perspective. She can love those who are nearest to her, pursue what seems good to her, and avoid what seems bad to her. She has not lost herself to the extent of inhabiting no perspective.49 She has, nevertheless, lost any determinate idea of herself – this is the whole point of beatitude as I have interpreted it. What this means is that when she runs against a different perspective, her response is never to attempt to override it. Identifying with the superdeterminate being of God, she identifies with all perspectives equally – the one she inhabits no more than the ones that seem most alien to her. Action – even the spontaneous, wuwei-type action of the beatified – requires consistency, and so she will generally act on the basis of the perspective she inhabits. But when she runs up against other perspectives she will not enter into conflict. Rather, she will recognise God in everyone and herself in God.50 Beatitude therefore makes her more, not less, connected with others. Others can feel community and solidarity with those who share their perspective and their values, and even some degree of empathy with those who do not. But the beatific person can feel genuine identity with anyone. Beatitude is the secret that can unlock what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls ‘an identity that should bind us all’ – the one expressed in a line by Terence: ‘I think nothing human alien to me’.51 Such an identity can ‘bind us all’, I submit, because it is superdeterminate rather than determinate. To identify with everything human – or even beyond the human – is to identify even with positions that fail to fit consistently with the perspective you happen to inhabit. We must stress that the beatific person is not supernaturally capable of seeing things from other perspectives. This is impossible, since part of what it means to see from one perspective is not to see from others. Rather, the beatific person recognises that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in her perspective. She gives room to other perspectives, including those she doesn’t agree with or understand. This is the attitude Spinoza appears to convey in this letter to Oldenburg, on the topic of the burgeoning Anglo-Dutch War: I do not think it right to laugh at nature, still less to deplore it, when I consider that men, like other things, are only parts of nature, and I am ignorant of how each part of nature conforms to the whole and coheres with the others. And I find that some things used to appear to me empty, unordered, and absurd only from this defect of knowledge: I perceive some things in nature only partially and distortedly, agreeing only minimally with our philosophical

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mind. But now I allow each one to live by his own temper and as he wishes. Indeed they can die for their good while I can live for the true one. (Ep.30, G4.166)52 Our age is no less crusading than Spinoza’s, so I have no doubt that this live-andlet-live attitude will elicit scolding from the mobilisers agitating among us. They will sound the alarm with the slogan misattributed to Edmund Burke: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing’. But let’s be philosophical about that. The stirring slogan is a plain untruth. Even from a single perspective whence ‘good’ and ‘evil’ can be defined, the inactivity of the good can’t be the only thing necessary for evil to triumph.53 The activity of the evil is also needed, though from their point of view this will likely appear as the activity of the good, perhaps motivated by the same slogan. The beatified, however, strive neither against nor for the triumph of anything. They recognise the limitations of their own perspective. They act from spontaneous and unselfconscious love (this I think is the ‘true’ good Spinoza mentions at the end of the passage just quoted), not to march their fragmentary notion of good through the world. This is an ethic appropriate for a blind and fallen humanity. I have argued throughout that Spinoza’s notion of beatitude is cast against the background of a doctrine of the Fall. We are not in a position to be assured of our virtue – or the virtue of our cause. Moral paragons, rising on the cheers of an approving crowd, have not escaped the Fall; they are deep in the mire of it, puffed by the bellows of empty glory. Spinoza, pursuing his notion of beatitude, had no more interest in opposing them than in joining them. Some will no doubt remain unconvinced by this attitude. They will demand moral commitment and enlistment to the fight for great causes. For them the beatified will always be complacent fellow travellers, enablers, perhaps even collaborators with evil: the ‘sciaurati’ who haunt the entrance to Dante’s Hell.54 The beatified do not believe in Hell, but they can happily accept the truth of this stern moral judgement, within its own perspective – that is, along that spoke of the wheel. But their eyes are on the hub.

Notes 1 Boethius, ‘On the Holy Trinity’, in The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), §4, 355. 2 Boethius, §4, 355. 3 Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, ch.46, 1084. Elsewhere Hobbes ascribes this view to Aquinas: Thomas Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, vol. 4 (London: John Bohn, 1840), 271. He does not mention that Aquinas draws it from Boethius, as explained in Kneale, ‘Eternity and Sempiternity’, 230–1. 4 Kneale, ‘Eternity and Sempiternity’, 231. 5 Nicolas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, ed. Nicholas Jolley and David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.4, 132. 6 Borcherding, ‘A View from Nowhere? The Place of Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Rationalism’, 237.

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7 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7. 8 Borcherding, ‘A View from Nowhere? The Place of Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Rationalism’, 239. 9 Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 59–60. 10 Nagel, 60. 11 Nagel, 59. 12 John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, Mind 17, no. 68 (1908): 457–74. 13 Michael Dummett, ‘A Defense of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time’, The Philosophical Review 69, no. 4 (1960): 503. 14 Dummett, 503. 15 Wolfgang Bartuschat, ‘The Infinite Intellect and Human Knowledge’, in Spinoza on Knowledge and the Human Mind, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Renz, The Explainability of Experience. 16 Borcherding, ‘A View from Nowhere? The Place of Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Rationalism’, 253–6. 17 Simon Prosser, Experiencing Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 18 John Perry, ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’, Noûs 13, no. 1 (1979): 16. 19 Freiherr von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 46. 20 Borcherding, ‘A View from Nowhere? The Place of Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Rationalism’, 258. This interpretation of Spinoza was popular in the early twentieth century and was proposed, e.g., by A.E. Taylor: Alfred Edward Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 2.2.8, 101–3. 21 Borcherding, ‘A View from Nowhere? The Place of Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Rationalism’, 256. 22 Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 60. 23 Nagel, 64. 24 Kit Fine, Modality and Tense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch.8. 25 Fine, 262. 26 Fine, 280–1. 27 Fine, 281. 28 Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, 74. 29 Fine, ‘Tense and Reality’, 311. 30 Arthur N. Prior, ‘Egocentric Logic’, Noûs 2, no. 3 (1968): 191–207. 31 Fine, ‘Tense and Reality’, 311. 32 Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 61. 33 Fine, ‘Tense and Reality’, 314. 34 Fine, 314. 35 Alfred Edward Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 2.2.2; Donald Baxter, ‘Self-Differing, Aspects, and Leibniz’s Law’, Noûs, 2017, 1–21; Donald Baxter, ‘Oneness, Aspects, and the Neo-Confucians’, in The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundary of Self, ed. Philip Ivanhoe et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 90–105. 36 Again, I have given an interpretation of this word as used by Spinoza in: Alexander Douglas, ‘Quatenus and Spinoza’s Monism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 56, no. 2 (April 2018): 261–80. 37 Renz, The Explainability of Experience, 150. 38 Borcherding, ‘A View from Nowhere? The Place of Subjectivity in Spinoza’s Rationalism’, 253–6. 39 Christine Abigail Tan, ‘The Butterfly Dream and Zhuangzi’s Perspectivism: An Exploration of Differing Interpretations of the Butterfly Dream against the Backdrop of Dao as Pluralistic Monism’, Kritike 10, no. 2 (2016): 119. 40 Ziporyn, Ironies of Oneness and Difference, 170.

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41 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 14. I have incorporated the alternative translation Ziporyn offers at n.14 to this page. 42 Ziporyn, Ironies of Oneness and Difference, 175. 43 Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought, 283. 44 Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi, 2020, 14–15. 45 Ziporyn, Ironies of Oneness and Difference, 178. Izutsu’s revised description of the ‘Perfect Man’ describes something similar: Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism, 453. 46 ‘forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’: Virgil, Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid Bks.1–6, ed. George Patrick Goold, trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Loeb, 1999), Aeneid, 203. 47 Moeller, Daoism Explained, 88. 48 Colin Marshall, ‘Moral Realism in Spinoza’s Ethics’, in Spinoza’s Ethics: A Critical Guide, ed. Yitzhak Melamed, Cambridge Critical Guides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 248–65. 49 Having recognised the same perspectival character of moral judgements, Collingwood goes on to criticise those who use it ‘to imply that, since every evil is relative to some situation, a perfectly free man who had no particular prejudices and no merely parochial interests would be superior to the distinction between good and bad’. He replies: ‘This is of course absurd; for every man must be an individual and stand in some definite relation to other individuals; and these relations will determine what is – and really is – right and wrong for him’: Robin George Collingwood, Religion and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1916), 133. 50 Here perhaps is a hint of some influence running between Spinoza and Quaker theology. Spinoza’s relation to Quakerism has been documented by Richard Popkin: Richard H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza’s Relations with the Quakers in Amsterdam’, Quaker History 73, no. 1 (1984): 14–28. 51 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity (London: Profile Books, 2018), 219. 52 Spinoza’s gesture of allowing others their good while calling his own the ‘true’ one is a good demonstration of how you can simultaneously inhabit your own perspective while permitting others. 53 I assume here that Burke means by ‘evil’ a class of intentional human actions, not what is sometimes called ‘natural’ evil and can include all sorts of non-intentional actions causing suffering. That sort of evil will most likely be with us no matter what we do, though we can try to prevent it when we can. 54 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: I. Inferno, trans. John Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), Canto 3.

CONCLUSION The Hope of Philosophy

We began with the philosophical question of hope, hope for something so wildly extreme that only a philosopher could consider it: the hope for perfect happiness, full satisfaction, or beatitude. There are conceptual difficulties in the way of understanding what it could mean to be perfectly satisfied. But what consigns beatitude to a world beyond, in the Christian tradition, is the fact that perfect satisfaction – unless it were certain and eternal – could not expel the fear of its own possible loss. And how could certain and eternal satisfaction be enjoyed by transient creatures in an unpredictable and imperfect world like ours? Christianity retains the hope that beatitude, in a world or a life beyond, can be secured in this one. In this life, however, we are blocked from achieving it because of the condition known as the Fall. Sometimes the hope appears as a memory of a state we enjoyed before the Fall. Indeed, feeling that the hope for beatitude is more than just a hope – that it is also a dim, atavistic memory of a condition from which we have fallen – can save it from appearing to be a mere dream.1 Spinoza’s theory of beatitude, I have argued, retains a good deal of this structure. He too believes that we are kept from beatitude by our fallen condition. But instead of the Christian (or, more precisely, Augustinian) thought, that if we escape the Fall in this life then we are rewarded with beatitude in another, Spinoza identifies beatitude and the escape. Beatitude – his version – is the escape from sin and death, and it occurs in this life. To achieve it is not only to stop fearing death; it is never to die. The key to understanding how this can be possible is breathtakingly simple, though in my case it took an encounter with the Zhuangzi to see it clearly. To die is not to become nothing. It is to stop being what you are. But if you are defined expansively – if there is nothing that you are not – then you can’t die. This state is beatitude, because it also means that you can’t be unsatisfied. We are born with raging desires – not only to have and consume but, more fundamentally, to be. Our desires open like petals around the pistil of our being – of what we think DOI: 10.4324/9780429489006-11

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is our being. Since we desire to grow and change, the driving idea of our being must be of an aspirational being, not our current being. That is to say, it must be an idea of an exemplar. Since we typically draw our exemplars from the first kind of cognition – experience and imagination – our social interactions drive us into fluctuation of spirit. We end up wanting to be like our exemplars and different from them at the same time, craving and loathing the approval of the crowd, envying and shunning the same individuals. These conflicted dynamics of ‘empty glory’, though they lead to a spiritual hollowness, underpin our social systems. Without the hopeless craving for approval, there would be no shame, and without shame – the fear of being thought foolish – there would be no chance of maintaining conformity to norms by social pressure and moral judgment. And yet to be subject to all this is the very condition of the Fall, from which beatitude is the ultimate escape. The beatific person pursues no determinate being. Her being emulates the superdeterminate being of God, expressed in any and every form it might take. What guides her movements through the world is a kind of spontaneity so difficult to describe that Daoist philosophers resort to calling it ‘non-action’, wuwei 無為. The beatified person sees others neither as rivals to defeat nor as exemplars to emulate, but only as differentiated expressions of the same superdeterminate being as herself. This is a condition of perfected love and glory. Although normally love points outward and glory points inward, in their perfected, beatific versions they converge. ‘Outer’ and ‘inner’ – self and non-self – become identified in the superdeterminate being of the beatified. This glory-love escapes morality as well, not into some brutal antinomianism but into a fragmental union of moral perspectives: the axis of the way, or dao shu 道樞. I have tried to show that this is something worth hoping for. We are all, it seems to me, very taken up with ideas of ourselves, even when we don’t want to admit it. We always want to be certain ways – the exemplary ways. Never sure we are on the right track, we always need others to affirm us in this, though in the end they never truly can. Sartre’s Joseph Garcin was wrong. Hell is not the others. T.S. Eliot’s Edward Chamberlayne was right. Hell is yourself. More precisely, it is the self you always pursue but never quite reach. Heaven is what you could have if you simply stopped trying to have a self – or any self more specific than God in his superdeterminacy. Could beatitude really be so easy? Easy to say, I think Spinoza would reply. Ultimately, the hope that philosophy can give is only conceptual. It allows us to know what can be thought. To know what can be done, we have to try. In the Preface I mentioned a workshop in which all the participants disowned the cultivation of hope as a goal of philosophy. I meant all the participants besides me. I offered a commentary on the following passage from McTaggart: the use of philosophy lies not in being deeper than science, but in being truer than theology – not in its bearing on action, but in its bearing on religion. It does not give us guidance. It gives us hope.2 This book has been an explanation of how Spinoza used philosophy in precisely this way: to give content to an extraordinary hope – the hope for beatitude. His beatitude

128  Conclusion

doesn’t come from a world or life beyond the visible. It comes from a different relationship with the life and the world we know. The idea that philosophy aims at hope is unpopular in academic philosophy – that is, unpopular philosophy. But it remains popular in popular philosophy. Luc Ferry, for example, presents philosophy as being primarily the non-religious quest for salvation from death. ‘Death’, he hastens to add, does not mean only the end of life; it means: everything that is unrepeatable. Death is, in the midst of life, that which will not return; that which belongs irreversibly to time past, which we have no hope of ever recovering. It can mean childhood holidays with friends, the divorce of parents, or the houses or schools we have to leave, or a thousand other examples; even if it does not always mean the disappearance of a loved one, everything that comes under the heading of ‘Nevermore’ belongs in death’s ledger.3 Death in this sense is the greatest source of sadness and tragedy in most of our lives. Spinoza’s beatitude is offered as a complete remedy. Were you to achieve Spinozistic beatitude, you would perceive no death or loss (though, as mentioned, this is not the sole purpose for pursuing beatitude). You would not identify yourself with a present subject of grieving and nostalgia any more than with a past subject of warmth and closeness. You would be both here and now and there and then, impervious to the ragged run of time. What you currently feel as loss would appear to you, once beatified, as part of the endless continuation-through-transformation of an eternal, superdeterminate being. Death would be replaced by mere sleep in the enormous house – containment in the attributes of God. Intellectual love would connect you with everything. And you would lose nothing. I am personally very far from this condition. Like most others, I wonder about who I am and pursue ideas of myself. I am inclined to emulate enticing exemplars, and, though I’m often too embarrassed to let myself see it, I dream of the admiration of others. I can’t seem to help it. By this habit, if Spinoza’s analysis is right, I am trapped in the world sub specie durationis and condemned to feel its transformations as pangs of past loss and fears of future loss. I must live under the shadow of death and sin – attachment to a narrow self and the permanent risk of conflict with others. What Spinoza offers is a possible escape from this. The actuality is left up to us. But the possibility is a start. In this book, we began by finding it difficult to see how beatitude could even be conceivable. We have ended with a concrete possibility. Things are looking hopeful.

Notes 1 Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, 1.10.148. 2 John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 196. 3 Luc Ferry, A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 5.

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INDEX

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. Aalderink, Mark 45 Aaron 104 Achilles 53 acquiescence of mind/soul (acquiescentia animi) xii, 1, 49–50, 58, 61, 62, 73–4, 78, 84, 90, 105–6 Adam 14, 34–9, 43, 89 admiration 48–50, 53, 58n3, 128 affect 24–6, 28, 42, 55, 103, 108 afterlife x–xi, xiiin10, 82–3 Akerlof, George 31n32 Akkerman, Fokke 32n64 Alanen, Lilli 51, 58, 59n12, 59n20, 60n41, 70n4 Alquié, Ferdinand 19, 30n12 ambition 39–40, 42, 44, 48, 53–4, 56–7, 84, 95, 100 Amores (Ovid) 27 Anscombe, Elizabeth 20, 30n14–6 Antognazza, Maria Rosa 66, 71n26 anxiety 5–6, 12, 38, 40, 44–5, 48–50, 53, 83, 96 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 122, 125n51 Aquinas, Thomas 1–2, 6, 13, 20, 57, 123n3 Aranyosi, Ezgi Ulusoy 70n13 Arendt, Hannah 2, 4n11, 5, 8, 15n3–5, 45 Aristotle 1–2, 20, 23, 31n31, 32n46, 56, 66, 97, 101, 108 atheism ix–x, 10 Auden, Wystan Hugh 108

Augustine 1, 3, 5–8, 11–5, 24, 34, 37, 41, 54–5, 57, 73, 85, 89 avarice 96 axis of dao / dao shu 道樞 119, 127 Baldwin, James 40 Balibar, Étienne 67 Barret, Nathaniel 99n21 Bartuschat, Wolfgang 124n15 Baumeister, Roy 95–7 Baxter, Donald 68, 124n35 Bayle, Pierre 68, 75 beasts 35, 39, 43, 46n21 beatific joy 105–6 beatitude/beatific/beatified x–xii, xv, 1, 3–4, 6, 8–10, 12, 14–5, 19, 22, 29, 34, 37, 43–5, 49, 57, 61–2, 67, 70, 73–6, 84–5, 90, 93–111, 115–23, 126–8 Benatar, David 2–3 Bennett, Jonathan 60n35 Berman, Lawrence 46n14 blessed/blessedness x, 3, 6–7, 14–5, 22, 34, 50, 84, 105 body 25, 28, 41, 43, 51, 55, 57, 68–9, 73–4, 78–83, 93–4, 99n26, 112 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 111–12 Borcherding, Julia 109, 113–18 Bordoli, Roberto 45n1 Bove, Laurent 25 Browning, Robert ix

Index  143

Buddhism xiiin9, 9, 75, 84, 90 Burke, Edmund 123 Carlisle, Clare 16n48, 17n50, 46n9, 46n33, 49, 53, 58n5, 62–3, 82–3, 89, 106, 108, 110n33 Chen Xiaosheng 85n9 Christ 2, 35, 38, 40–1 Christianity x–xi, 1–2, 14, 17n50, 64, 67, 80, 82–3, 89, 108, 126 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 53, 58n3 Circe (Madeleine Miller) 7 Citton, Yves 24, 27–8, 29n9, 44 Clauberg, Johannes 20 Coetzee, John Maxwell 100, 109 cognition 51–2, 58, 61–3, 81, 103–4, 106, 112, 116, 120, 127 Collingwood, Robin George 22–3, 125n49 Comte-Sponville, André 8–14, 18–9, 34 Confucius/Confucianism 60n36, 75, 90, 97, 108 contagion, of emotions 25–6 crowd, the 44–5, 48–9, 52, 56, 58n3, 101–3, 107, 123, 127 Csikzentmihalyi, Mihaly 92 Curley, Edwin xii, 70n15, 71n21–2, 82, 85n4, 104 D’Ambrosio, Paul 99n21 Dante Alighieri 123 dao 67, 76, 86n14, 119–20, 127 Daoism xi–xii, 64, 66, 75–7, 84, 90–1, 93, 107–9, 120, 127 Dastur, Françoise 20, 24 death 2–4, 5–9, 12–4, 17n54, 34–9, 41, 43–5, 49, 57–8, 70, 73, 75–8, 83–5, 89, 98, 103–4, 106–7, 120, 126, 128 Debray, Eva 26, 29n7, 29n9, 42–3, 102–3 Decalogue / Ten Commandments 42–3 Deleuze, Gilles 67, 70n10, 79, 81 Della Rocca, Michael xiv, 24–5, 27 Descartes, René 28, 38, 41, 50–2, 74, 118 Descriptio Regni Iaponiae (Bernhard Varen) 75 desire 11–5, 34–5, 37, 89–90, 97–8, 99n43, 102–3, 107–8, 127; metaphysical 21–4, 26–9, 39, 43–4, 90, 95–6; mimetic 18–9, 22–4, 26–8, 37–44, 54–5 Desmarets, Henri 50 despair 10–1, 14, 34 determinate 20, 55, 64–8, 71n25, 76, 81, 84, 89–95, 98, 104, 106, 108, 117, 122, 127 Don Quixote 23–4

Donagan, Alan 60n35, 85n4, 87n61 Douglas, Alexander 45n1, 58n2, 58n4, 70n13, 71n30, 99n33, 109n15, 124n36 Dummett, Michael 114–6 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 24, 31n40 egotism 18, 95 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 127 Elster, Jon 59n21 emulation 39–43, 45, 47–8, 52–4, 56–7, 68–70, 81, 89, 97, 103, 118, 127–8 envy 15, 26, 39, 41–2, 47, 84, 108, 127 Eriugena, John Scotus 65 esse 20–3, 69 essence 11, 13, 18–20, 22–3, 29n10, 30n20, 56, 63, 71n37, 84, 103, 118; of God 63, 65–9, 71n25, 72n43, 80–1 esteem 49, 52–3, 95 eternity xii, 1–4, 12, 74, 78–80, 82–3, 85n4, 111–2 Eve 37, 39 evil 6, 14, 22, 34–41, 43, 45, 57, 90, 95–7, 123, 125n49, 125n53 exemplar 21–3, 26, 31n26, 31n29, 39–40, 47–8, 51, 53–8, 59n31, 62–3, 68, 70n6, 74, 81–2, 84–5, 89–96, 103, 109, 127 existentialism 19, 21, 30n20 expression 49, 64, 67–8, 70n10, 72n43, 74, 76, 80–1, 92–3, 106, 108–9, 127 Fall, the 14–5, 17n50, 29, 34–40, 43–5, 45n3, 46n9, 47, 54, 84, 89, 108, 123, 126–7 fame/famous 2, 48–9 Ferry, Luc 128 Fine, Kit 116–7 finite/finitude x, 2, 13, 64–6, 115–6 First Letter (John) 14, 107 fluctuation of the spirit 28, 40, 41, 43, 55, 95, 127 Ford, Ford Maddox 51 fractal 92, 118 Fragmentalism 116–8, 120–1, 123, 127 Fung Yu-Lan xii, 75–7, 91 Garber, Daniel 30n23, 78 Garden of Eden 36, 38 Gatens, Moira 31n26, 31n29, 54, 62 Geach, Peter 1, 14, 16n32 Genesis 35–6, 89, 104 gifts 9, 56 Gilligan, Carol 107 Girard, René 18–9, 23–4, 27–8, 29n7, 58n6, 94

144  Index

glory 2, 15, 48, 50–3, 58n3, 58n6, 59n13, 59n17, 96, 98, 102–7, 127; empty (gloria vana) 44–5, 48–50, 52, 57, 98, 123, 127 god 7, 22–3, 43, 75 God x, 11–2, 14, 20–1, 34–7, 40–1, 54–5, 58, 61–9, 70n8, 71n25, 71n37, 72n43, 74, 76, 78–84, 90, 93–5, 97–8, 100, 103–9, 111–22, 127–8 Godard, Jean-Luc 2 Graham, Angus 76, 82, 86n16, 90, 92 Gray, Alasdair x Green, Keith xiv, 52 Gueroult, Martial 60n35, 87n44 Guigon, Ghislain 72n42 Guo Xiang xii, 78, 86n16, 91–3, 106 Hallett, Harold Foster 85n4 Hampson, Margaret xiv, 26, 31n31, 32n46 Han-Pile, Béatrice 10 Hansen, Chad 97, 103, 110n36, 119 Harper, Elizabeth 75 Harris, Errol xiiin13, 85n4, 87n61 Harvey, Warren 104 Haserot, Francis 60n35 hatred 27–8, 38, 40–3, 47, 52–3, 108 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 24 Heyderman, John xiv, 110n20 Hitler, Adolph 90, 94, 97, 107 Hobbes, Thomas 5–6, 8, 95, 112 hope ix–xii, xiin2, xiiin6, xiiin10, 6–7, 9–14, 27, 34, 37–8, 49, 51, 57–8, 73, 80, 82–3, 89, 103–4, 126–8 hopelessness ix–x, 6, 9–10, 127 Hu Shih 67 Hubert, Christiane 45n1 human being 2, 13, 18, 20–1, 23, 30n20, 40, 51, 55–6, 62–3, 67, 72n43, 81–3, 93, 101–2, 104, 109 hunger x, 22–3 hypercategorematic 66 Ibn ‘Arabī 64, 66, 70n13, 116 idealism: moral 11, 95–7; philosophical 65, 68, 71n17 identity 20, 28, 31n32, 47, 49, 69, 76–8, 81–2, 84, 90–1, 97, 98n15, 106, 122 imitation 18, 23–8, 29n7, 29n9, 30n21, 31n40, 32n46, 35–6, 39, 42–3, 45, 47, 62, 65–6, 84, 91, 101–2, 111, 116, 120 immortality x, 2–4, 6–7, 73–4, 78–83, 85, 85n4, 87n58, 87n61, 89, 94, 101 Indiscernibility of Identicals 68 infinite 63–9, 71n25, 71n37, 72n43, 78–80, 109, 112, 114, 118

Israel, Jonathan 85n6 Ivanhoe, Philip 98n20 Izutsu, Toshihiku 64, 66, 68, 109, 116, 125n45 James, Susan xiv, 70n8, 97, 100–1, 103, 108, 109n4, 109n9 Jaquet, Chantal 73, 78, 82, 85n4, 87n58, 103 Jarrett, Charles 62 Jelles, Jarig 64–5 Joachim, Harold xii, 71n17 Jorkink, Eric 70n9 Journey to the West / xiyouji 西遊記 (Wu Cheng’en) 67 joy 1, 3, 7, 12, 14, 26–7, 38, 42–3, 50–1, 54, 63, 74, 77, 82, 93, 100, 102, 104–6, 108, 120 Judaism/Jewish xi, 64, 67, 71n30, 80, 104, 110n20 Kamal, Muhammad 70n13 Kato, Yoshi 45n1 Kenny, Anthony 101 Kierkegaard, Søren 21 Kisner, Matthew 32n64 Klein, Julie 79–80, 85n4 Kneale, Martha 79–80, 112, 123n3 Kohlberg, Lawrence 110n34 Kohn (Knaul), Livia 86n13, 91 Kranton, Rachel 31n32 kudos 58n6 Lacan, Jacques 24 Laerke, Mogens xiv, 79, 81, 85n4 Lai Yuen Ting 85n6 Lanark (Alasdair Gray) x Landy, Joshua 31n38 Laozi 75, 86n14, 108 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 66, 115 Lermond, Lucia 60n35 Letter to the Romans (Paul) 6, 10, 41 Letter to the Hebrews (Paul) xiiin8, 11 Levy, Lia 28 Lin, Martin 30n23, 71n37 Lloyd, Genevieve 85n4 Longenecker, Michael Tze-Sung 78 love x, xv, 3, 6, 9, 11–3, 22, 26–7, 34–5, 37–8, 41–3, 51, 53–5, 61, 95, 98, 100, 103–9, 122–3, 127–8 Macaulay, Catherine 8–9, 13 Machery, Pierre 71n20 Maimonides, Moses 35–9, 43, 104, 106–7

Index  145

Makropoulos, Elina 7 Malebranche, Nicholas 112 Marshall, Colin 121 Mason, Richard 87n61 Matheron, Alexandre 19, 22, 24, 29n11, 30n23, 39, 46n22, 80, 85n4, 99n33, 101, 103 Maurer, Armand 71n33 Maverick, Lewis 75 McTaggart, John 10, 99n43, 114, 127 Melamed, Yitzhak xiv, 32n53, 65–6, 72n42, 87n44, 104–5 Mercier, Hugo 25–6 Meyer, Lodewijk 49 mind 8, 11, 28, 43–4, 51, 55, 63, 67, 68–9, 71n37, 73–4, 79–84, 93–4, 99n26, 103–5, 107, 109n9, 118, 123 Miriam 104 Mishra, Pankaj 18, 84 Mo, Timothy 13 Model Agent 54–8, 62–3, 68, 83, 89, 97, 121 Moeller, Hans-Georg 78, 99n21, 110n38, 120 monism 64 Montag, Warren 38–9, 45 Montaigne, Michel de 7 Moore, George Edward xii Moreau, Pierre-François 17n49, 25, 42, 49, 79, 87n58, 93 Moses 35, 45n3, 104 Mozi 模子 117, 119 Nadler, Steven xiiin12, xiv, 4, 56, 70n12, 73, 83, 85n4, 87n58, 87n61 Nagel, Thomas 113–5, 120 negation 11, 64–5 Neutral Objectivism 115–6, 121 obedience 36–7, 49 Oedipus 2 Olberding, Amy 60n36, 98n4 Oldenburg, Henry 95, 103, 122 Orléan, André 24, 31 Othello (Shakespeare) 2 Oughourlian, Jean-Michel 26, 29n9 Palaver, Wolfgang 29n9, 54 pantheism 67 Pape, Georg 45n1 Pascal, Blaise 6 Patriarchs 35, 38, 40–1 Paul (Saint) 6, 10, 16n48, 41, 89 peace x, 3, 41, 49–52

Perry, Ralph 115 Peterman, Alison 72n42 Plato/Platonism/Neoplatonism xi, 3, 9, 11, 16, 66–7 Poiret, Pierre 61, 69–70 Pollock, Frederick 74, 84–5 prestige 48, 52–3 pride 15, 44, 50–3, 59n26, 84, 95, 100 Prior, Arthur 117 Prometheus 5, 7–8 Prosser, Simon 124n17 Proust, Marcel 6 Ravven, Heidi 36–7, 39 Relativism 116, 118 Renz, Ursula 68–71, 78, 80, 118, 124n15 Révah, Israel Salvator 82 Rice, Lee 31n29, 56, 85n4 rivalry 27, 40–3, 47–9, 52–5, 59, 84, 89, 127 Robinson, Lewis 65 Robinson, Marilynne xi Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève 87n58 romantic lie 18–9, 94 Rosenthal, Michael 31n29, 46n22, 55–6 Rudavsky, Tamar 87n61 Ruskin, John 57 Russell, Bertrand xii Rutherford, Donald 49, 70n4 sadism 95–7 Sakamoto, Kuni 45n1 Salgado Borge, Antonio xiv, 67–8, 70–1, 81 salvation xi, xiii, 6, 50, 80–1, 83, 128 Sangiacomo, Andrea xiiin13 Sartre, Jean-Paul 9, 19–22, 24, 127 Satan 39 Savini, Massimiliano 30n17, 45n1 Schmaltz, Tad 30n17, 45n1 Schwitzgebel, Eric 86n33 security/insecurity 13–5, 29, 57, 102 self xiv, 18–9, 21–3, 28, 30n11, 47, 76–7, 81, 83–5, 91–8, 104–7, 116–8, 120, 127–8 self-acquiescence (acquiescentia in se ipso) 44, 49–53, 57–9, 59n13, 61–3, 69, 110n30 self-esteem 15, 95 self-image 22, 23, 47, 74, 91, 95–7 sempiternity 78–81, 111 Seneca 10, 46n21 serpent 37, 39 Shapiro, Lisa 28–30, 44, 52–3, 59n26 Sharp, Hasana 38–9, 43 Silverthone, Michael 32n54

146  Index

sin 14–6, 37, 41, 70, 73, 83–5, 89, 126, 128 Smullyan, Raymond 107–8 sociability 39, 42, 46, 98, 101, 103 soul xii, 1, 3, 34, 41, 57–8, 61–3, 73–4, 78, 80, 82, 84, 87n58, 90, 105–6 Soyarslan, Sanem 99n28 Steenbakkers, Piet 17n49, 49, 93 Steinberg, Diana 60n35 Steinberg, Diane 85n4 Steinberg, Justin 26 Stern, Robert 65 Stock, Barbara 80, 85n4 Stoicism xi, 11–2, 90 striving/conatus 11, 13, 19–22, 26–8, 29n8, 29n11, 32n48, 38, 40–2, 44, 48, 50, 53–8, 63, 65, 68–9, 90, 94, 96, 111, 120, 123 Sufism xi, 64, 125n45 Sun Wukong 孫梧空 67–8 superdeterminate 66–9, 74, 76, 80–2, 84, 90, 92–4, 98, 103–4, 106, 108, 116, 118–20, 122, 127–8 Swammerdam, Jan 64 Tan, Christine 93, 106, 118–9 Taylor, Alfred Edward 124n20 Taylor, Dan 46n22 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 122

theosis xiiin11 Totaro, Giuseppina 49 Tucker, Ericka 39, 97 van Bunge, Wiep 45n1 van der Lugt, Mara ix–x, xiv Vardoulakis, Dimitris xiiin14, xiv, 4n4, 70n6 Verbeek, Theo xiv, 30n17, 45n1 Wang Bo 91 Wang Hao xii, 75 Weststeijn, Thijs 85n6, 85n9 Whitman, Walt 108 Williams, Bernard 7 Wittich, Christoph 35–6, 38, 42–5, 51 Wolfson, Harry Austryn 58n8, 64, 66, 68, 73, 85n4, 87n61, 110n19 Wumazi 巫馬子 117–9 wuwei 無為 90–1, 99, 122, 127 Yu Jiyuan 60n36, 101 Zagzebski, Linda 22, 47–8, 53, 98n3 Zhuangzi 莊子 xi–xiii, 13, 16, 67, 71n34, 75–8, 81, 86n16, 90–2, 97, 110n36, 118–20, 126 Ziporyn, Brook 76, 90–1, 119–20