Freedom, Action, and Motivation in Spinoza's "Ethics"

Noa Naaman-Zauderer, Noa Naaman-Zauderer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000732467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Moderne Philosophie

The present volume posits the themes of freedom, action, and motivation as the central principles that drive Spinoza's Ethics from its first part to its last. It assembles essays by internationally leading scholars who provide different, sometimes opposing interpretations of these fundamental themes as they operate across the five parts of the Ethics and within its manifold domains. The diversity of issues, approaches, and perspectives within this volume, along with the chapters' common focus, open up new ways of understanding not only some of the key concepts and main objectives in the Ethics but also the threads unifying the entire work.

The sequence of essays in the book broadly follows the order of the Ethics, providing up-to-date perspectives of Spinoza's views on freedom, action, and motivation in their ontological, cognitive, physical, affective, and ethical facets. This enables readers to engage with a variety of new interpretations of these key themes of the Ethics and to reconsider their consequences both for other related issues in the Ethics and for the relevance of the Ethics to contemporary trends in philosophy of action and motivation. The essays will contribute to the growing interest in Spinoza's Ethics and spark further discussion and debate within and outside the vast body of scholarship on this important work.

Freedom, Action, and Motivation in Spinoza's Ethics will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Spinoza and early modern philosophy, as well as on philosophy of action and motivation.

1 Introduction

Noa Naaman-Zauderer

In volume 2 of his work The Great Philosophers, the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers introduces what he takes to be the crux of Spinoza’s philosophical project:

The crucial problem is freedom. The contradiction in Spinoza seems unbridgeable. He denies freedom and asserts it. His whole philosophy is based on freedom. In thought and work and practice, his ethos aims at the promotion of freedom. The solution lies in the different meaning of freedom.

(1974, 51)

Besides its emphasis on the pivotal role that freedom plays in Spinoza’s philosophical ethos “in thought and work and practice,” Jaspers’s comment points to a duality in Spinoza’s approach to freedom that may well be taken to bring to the surface a typical ambivalence in his attitude toward the new philosophical spirit of his day. Descartes – “the brightest star” of the intellectual heavens of the seventeenth century, to use Lodewijk Meyer’s phrasing (G I 128/25, C1 226) – was the first modern thinker who advanced the merit of freedom as the highest virtue and the highest good for which we should strive as an independent end in both the theoretical and the practical spheres (Naaman-Zauderer 2010). Spinoza rejects the new ideal of the early modern era by dismissing the very idea of free will or free choice, and the related Cartesian view of human beings in nature as if exempt from its necessary laws by their godlike freedom of choice. Yet at the same time and with equal rigor, Spinoza follows his Cartesian predecessor in promoting freedom in his own peculiar sense of the term, making it the ground for the whole edifice of his Ethics as well as its ultimate goal. The difference in Spinoza’s and Descartes’s respective conceptions of freedom is thus as evident as their common conviction that freedom or activity is the highest of all human ethical goals in both the theoretical and the practical realms. The presence of these two opposing trends in Spinoza’s approach to freedom resides in almost every work he has written but is most clearly and systematically manifest in the Ethics, his philosophical masterpiece demonstrated in geometric order (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata).

Spinoza’s Ethics is one of the boldest and most systematic attempts in the history of modern philosophy to confront the question of the encounter between the finite and the infinite. The account of freedom or activity that this work provides is perhaps the most prominent manifestation of this attempt. The present collection posits the themes of freedom, action, and motivation as the central principles that drive Spinoza’s Ethics from its first part to its last. The infinite freedom or causal power of God or Nature that Part 1 of the Ethics establishes, as well as the ways in which this power manifests itself through its infinitely many modes, form the staple and the guiding principle of the rest of the work. As the brief preface to Part 2 indicates, the highest form of freedom or activity available to human beings, which Spinoza equates with blessedness, is the ultimate end to which the entire Ethics is directed. God’s infinite activity or freedom is thus the sole and immanent ground not only of the necessity to which each singular thing is subject but also of the limited degree of freedom, activity, or causal power that constitutes each singular thing’s actual essence.

The conception of the human mind as the idea of the human body that Part 2 of the Ethics provides sets the ground for a new understanding of the human affects and the nature of action in Part 3, in terms of the essential striving (conatus) of every singular thing to persevere in being. Spinoza’s theory of the affects is the main locus of his account of human action and motivation. It explains how changes in the body’s and the mind’s power of striving – changes that form our emotional apparatus – shape our judgments of things as valuable to us and determine us to action. While clearly adhering to the new mechanistic science of his age, Spinoza’s account of the affects breaks with the traditional passion-action dichotomy in various significant ways. The boundary separating active and passive affects does not overlap with the split between the mind and the body as in the Cartesian account of the passions. Given Spinoza’s parallelism and the mind-body union, this division hinges on whether the change in the mind’s and the body’s power of acting is internally determined (in which case, it is an active affect or an action) or externally caused (and in this case, it is a passion). This account paves the way for Spinoza’s ethical theory in Part 4, whose main focus is the analysis of the human bondage to passions – our lack of power to moderate and restrain the passions – and the relative degree of rational freedom we can attain by acting from the law of our own nature. Although human beings, as finite modes, can never be the causes of their own existence and are, as “part of nature,” always acted on by external forces (4p2–4), we can, to some extent, be active or free – to the extent to which we produce effects that follow from and are explainable through our own essential power or striving alone, which is precisely the extent to which we act from adequate knowledge. The ethical dimension of human freedom leads to its equality with virtue as they both consist in bringing about effects explainable through one’s own power or nature alone. Part 5 of the Ethics begins with various techniques and means to enhance our rational freedom from passions; it then proceeds, in its last section, to the account of the mind’s ultimate and highest form of freedom or blessedness – the culmination of the entire work.

On these grounds, it is surprising that the precise meaning of Spinoza’s notions of freedom, activity, or action, as well as the pivotal role these notions play in his Ethics, have not been until recently at the forefront of the vast scholarly literature dealing with this monumental work. The last decade has exposed a growing interest within Anglo-American scholarship in Spinoza’s conception of freedom and the human servitude to passions. Notably, the recent significant contributions of scholars such as Michael LeBuffe (2010), Matthew J. Kisner (2011), and Eugene Marshall (2013), among others, have enhanced our vision of Spinoza’s thinking on these matters. Yet the issue is still relatively understudied; fundamental questions concerning the precise nature of these notions are still waiting to be addressed, and others remain highly controversial.

The present volume aims to fill this need. It brings together ten original contributions by internationally distinguished scholars who provide different, sometimes opposing interpretations of Spinoza’s views of freedom, action, and motivation as they operate in each and every part of the Ethics, and within its manifold domains: ontology, epistemology, physics, action theory, moral psychology, ethics and meta-ethics, social philosophy, and finally the theory of the mind’s ultimate freedom in the third kind of knowledge. The sequence of the chapters in this volume broadly follows the order of the Ethics. Each chapter develops its own cluster of issues but is at the same time integral to the general theme of the entire book. The main objective is thus neither to offer a comprehensive survey of Spinoza’s view of freedom and activity in general, as operating in his entire corpus, nor to refer to all aspects of his Ethics. Rather, this volume provides a diverse array of up-to-date perspectives on the Ethics when read through the prism of Spinoza’s views of freedom, action, and motivation in their ontological, cognitive, physical, affective, and ethical facets.

The common focus of the chapters in this volume is intended to enable readers to be engaged with a wide variety of new interpretations of these fundamental themes and to reconsider their consequences for other related issues in the Ethics and the threads unifying the entire work. We hope this multiperspectival orientation will shed a plurality of fresh and new lights on the issues at stake and will encourage further reflections on various passages within the Ethics itself. Moreover, some of the chapters in this volume prove the relevance of Spinoza’s Ethics to contemporary trends in philosophy of action and motivation. Our aspiration is that this collection will contribute to the growing interest in Spinoza’s Ethics and spark further discussion and debate within and outside the vast body of scholarship on this important work.

The special relevance of Spinoza’s Ethics to present-day debates in philosophy of action is acutely manifested in Michael Della Rocca’s “Steps toward Eleaticism in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Action,” the opening chapter of this volume. Della Rocca powerfully shows how Spinoza’s philosophy of action undermines and eventually transcends the contemporary debate over the nature of action by rejecting its core and taken-for-granted presuppositions. Della Rocca’s key insight, which he establishes throughout the chapter by a close reading of the relevant passages in the Ethics, is that Spinoza’s treatment of action leads to what he calls “the Parmenidean Ascent,” according to which “there are no differentiated actions and there is at most one action, the action that is – and is of – the whole.” Della Rocca opens his chapter by articulating in the form of two main questions the explanatory demand that drives recent and contemporary debates over action: the first question concerns how actions are to be differentiated from non-actions, and the second concerns how actions are to be differentiated from other actions. Della Rocca identifies and considers two different types of answer given to these questions by current and recent philosophy of action, whose leading representatives are, respectively, Donald Davidson and G. E. M. Anscombe. Della Rocca then compellingly shows how both types of answer ultimately fail to address the explanatory demand they themselves posit. It is at this point that Spinoza’s philosophy takes on its full relevance. In showing us how to challenge the presuppositions of the debate, Della Rocca argues, Spinoza opens the way for progress in the philosophy of action. Spinoza’s account of action rejects the first guiding question – that of how actions are to be differentiated from non-actions – by denying one of its presuppositions, namely, that there are non-actions and that there is a distinction between actions and non-actions, whose basis is to be articulated. Della Rocca offers strong textual evidence suggesting that, for Spinoza, action is pervasive. Given that to be active or to act – even to act for a reason or with an intention, as Della Rocca argues – is simply to exert causal power, and given that a thing’s causal power is identical with its actual essence, activity and being emerge as one and the same thing. God or substance itself is nothing but God’s activity taken as a whole, and so everything – both God and its modes (inasmuch as they express God’s power) – is an action, that is, an exhibition of some causal power. The pervasiveness of action in and of nature, Della Rocca argues, entails that non-action has no place in the world. He then goes on to explain how Spinoza rejects the second question as well – that of how actions are to be differentiated from other actions – by denying distinctions among actions as unintelligible and non-real. On his reading, regardless of whether an action is a complete (adequate) or partial (inadequate) cause of its effect, limited, differentiated actions cannot inhere in God and are therefore neither intelligible nor real. Della Rocca concludes that in rejecting both these questions, Spinoza makes a “Parmenidean Ascent” that rules out distinctions between differentiated actions and between actions and mere events. Della Rocca closes his chapter with some reflections on interpretive controversies and methods of interpretation in the face of conflicting textual evidence and a diversity of strands within a single corpus or philosophical work.

In sharp contrast to Della Rocca’s Parmenidean reading of action, though with a few surprising points of agreement, Matthew J. Kisner, in his “Spinoza’s Activities: Freedom without Independence,” offers an original interpretation of the nature of activity in Spinoza’s Ethics when applied to human beings. Most scholars tend to assume that Spinoza defines human action and activity in terms of adequate causation, that is, as consisting in causal and conceptual independence. For Kisner, by contrast, Spinoza employs two distinct yet closely connected notions of human activity, of which only the first consists in adequate causation. Activity in the first sense, which forms Spinoza’s definition of action (3D2), consists in being an adequate cause and thus in being the sole causal and conceptual source of a certain effect. Yet, according to Kisner, Spinoza’s conatus theory allows for another notion of activity, which consists in one’s essential striving to persevere in being (3p6, 3p7). In equating our striving with our actual “power of acting” (potentia agendi), Kisner contends, Spinoza recognizes that striving necessarily involves activity. Yet on Kisner’s reading, Spinoza does not equate a thing’s degree of striving or power with the extent to which this striving is productive or efficacious in bringing about effects on its own. Rather, a thing is active in the second, broader sense to the extent to which it exercises causal power, irrespective of whether this striving is causally and conceptually sufficient for the production of a certain effect and regardless of whether one’s endeavor to produce the effect is successful. This leads Kisner to argue that, though being an adequate cause is itself a kind of striving, things can strive (and thus be active in the second sense) without being adequate causes when they are only partial causes of effects. Drawing on these two basic kinds of activity, Kisner goes on to show how Spinoza’s other notions of activity, such as freedom, virtue, and perfection, are also bifurcated into two groups: those requiring activity of adequacy and those requiring only activity of striving. Whereas the common view regards a person’s degree of freedom, virtue, and perfection as equivalent to this person’s degree of causal and conceptual independence with regard to some effects, Kisner claims that these notions of activity all consist in striving and are therefore not restricted to such independence. For, besides activity of adequacy, human freedom, virtue, and perfection include other instances of striving to persevere and to increase one’s power, which do not involve causal independence. This enables Kisner to show how activity in the broader sense includes cases of passivity and is therefore not identical with acting and with forming adequate ideas. Whereas acting and knowing consists exclusively in adequate causation, activity of striving includes cases of passivity and allows for things to be passively active. Such passive activity occurs when a thing cooperates with other forces in bringing about effects or when it undergoes exogenous effects (as in passive joy and its variants). Kisner concludes by explaining the significant bearings of his reading on how we should view Spinoza’s main ethical goals. Rather than independence per se, he says, it is activity of striving that Spinoza counts as intrinsically valuable, which includes instances of causal dependence.

The next two chapters concern Spinoza’s account of the primary affects in Part 3 of the Ethics, with a special emphasis on the ways in which this account deepens our understanding of his philosophy of mind. In “Descartes and Spinoza on the Primitive Passions: Why So Different?,” Lisa Shapiro situates Spinoza’s account of the primary affects in its historical context in order to undertake the broader task of showing how taxonomies of primitive or primary passions highlight structural features of a philosopher’s account of cognition or thought and how shifts in these taxonomies reflect substantial differences in a philosopher’s conception of mind from that of his predecessors. Central to her discussion, specifically, is a puzzle in Spinoza’s account of the primary affects – his shift from adopting Descartes’s list of six primitive passions in the Short Treatise to the three primary affects he marks in the Ethics: joy (laetitia), sadness (tristitia), and desire (cupiditas). To explore the philosophical motivation behind this shift, Shapiro explores Spinoza’s later account of the primary affects vis-à-vis Descartes’s taxonomy of the primitive passions in the Passions of the Soul, which she, in turn, analyzes against the background of Descartes’s diversion from the taxonomy of Aquinas. After having carefully examined the Cartesian and the Thomist taxonomies, Shapiro shows how the differences between the two treatments of the primitive passions reflect substantial differences between these philosophers’ respective conceptions of cognition. According to Shapiro, whereas Aquinas’s taxonomy indicates his conception of how cognition conforms to essential features of the objects in the world, the primitive passions within Descartes’s taxonomy highlight essential structural features of our representations of the world, which are essential features of experience. Drawing on Denis Kambouchner’s (1995) emphasis on how Descartes’s enumeration of the passions follows our experience of them as actions of the mind (that is, as representations taken formally), Shapiro proceeds to inquire into the precise ways in which each primitive passion functions within Descartes’s account of representation and thought, and how Descartes’s shift from Aquinas’s taxonomy reflects the change in his own conception of thought from that of Aquinas. Shapiro’s careful analysis allows her to propose a new account of Spinoza’s shift from the Short Treatise to his taxonomy in the Ethics in light of his critique of Descartes’s conception of cognition. Here, she points to an essential difference between Descartes’s and Spinoza’s approaches to consciousness within their respective notions of thought. While Descartes considers consciousness an intrinsic feature of thought, for Spinoza, thinking is intrinsically representational but is not intrinsically conscious. Shapiro’s discussion sheds considerable new light on how this and other fundamental differences between the two conceptions of thought underlie Spinoza’s dismissal of wonder as an affect and his denial of the primacy of love and hatred, and how each of the three affects he considers primary has a distinctive function and role within his own account of mind.

Whereas Lisa Shapiro focuses on how Spinoza’s theory of the primary affects illuminates his view of the basic structure of thought, John Carriero, in his “Spinoza on the Primary Affects,” concentrates on the way in which Spinoza’s theory of the primary affects enriches our understanding of the mind’s relation to the body. Carriero begins with an in-depth account of the conatus of the mind: what the mind’s basic drive exactly is, what would count as a conflict among ideas or minds that would diminish or thwart each other’s striving to persevere, and how the content and the quality of the mind’s cognition is related to the body’s power of acting. According to Carriero, a singular thing’s conatus – whether a tree, a hurricane, or a human mind – is not simply an endeavor to remain in existence, as many have assumed (at least with regard to non-human beings), but instead a striving to maximize its own reality or power. This enables Carriero to explain Spinoza’s transition from a characterization of the mind’s conatus as a striving whose first and principal tendency is to affirm the existence of the body (3p10d) to its characterization as an endeavor to increase its own power of thinking. Carriero argues that through “affirming” the existence of the body, the mind acquires the subject matter for its thought and its unique perspective on the world. Carriero then proceeds to show how the body’s passage to a greater causal power – which he further articulates in terms of the strength and flow of its ratio (and, in the case of human beings, in terms of the flow of motion in the brain) – is related to the mind’s passage to a greater understanding of itself and the world that it cognizes through that body. On this basis, Carriero develops an original treatment of the nature and working of the three primary affects and of how they are embedded in the architecture of the human being. In particular,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Steps toward Eleaticism in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Action
• 3 Spinoza’s Activities: Freedom without Independence
• 4 Descartes and Spinoza on the Primitive Passions: Why so Different?
• 5 Spinoza on the Primary Affects
• 6 Affectivity and Cognitive Perfection
• 7 Deciding What to Do: The Relation of Affect and Reason in Spinoza’s Ethics
• 8 Materializing Spinoza’s Account of Human Freedom
• 9 Spinoza’s Values: Joy, Desire, and Good in the Ethics
• 10 Spinoza on Human Freedoms and the Eternity of the Mind
• 11 The Enigma of Spinoza’s Amor Dei Intellectualis
• Notes on Contributors
• Index of References to the Ethics
• General Index