The Spinozistic Ethics of Bertrand Russell

Kenneth Blackwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135107116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Logic in Philosophy

Bertrand Russell's professional philosophical reputation rests mainly on his mathematical logic and theory of knowledge. In this study, first published in 1985, however, Kenneth Blackwell considers Russell's writings on ethics and metaethics and uncovers the conceptual unity in Russell's normative ethic. He traces that unity to the influence of Spinoza's central ethical concept, the 'intellectual love of God', and then evaluates the ethic which he terms 'impersonal self-enlargement'.

The introduction discusses the metaethical background to Russell's ethic and the difficulties inherent in Russell's view that ethical knowledge is not possible. The first section then examines Russell's writings on Spinoza from 1894 to 1964, dividing them into three periods, the second part analyzes Russell's two interpretations of the main concept, traces 'impersonal self-enlargement' in Russell's own ethical writings, and evaluates the ethic in relation to other ethical theories and on its own merits as a 'way of living'.

This book provides a foundation for a positive re-evaluation of Russell's status in the major philosophical field of ethics and will be welcomed by students of moral philosophy as well as those interested in Bertrand Russell's works.

PART B

Russell’s Spinozistic Ethic

CHAPTER V

Amor Dei Intellectualis

33 Introduction to Part B

In examining Russell’s writings on Spinoza in Part A, the focus was on Russell’s view of Spinoza’s importance for normative ethics. Metaphysics, theory of knowledge, and metaethics were included only to convey the scope of Russell’s interest in Spinoza. We shall now examine the primary concept involved in Spinoza’s ethical influence on Russell, the “intellectual love of God”. Part A makes it clear that Russell thought he had found something of ethical importance to him in Spinoza, and Part B is devoted to analyzing just what that was and the exact influence it had on Russell’s ethic. At this point it will be well to assess Russell’s reading of Spinoza and to sum up our historical and interpretative data with respect to the “intellectual love of God”. I contend that Russell’s own normative ethic has an underlying conceptual unity through the notion of self-enlargement through impersonality. For Russell, this notion has its origin in his appreciation of Spinoza’s Ethics.

To sum up Part A, Russell had a lifelong interest in Spinoza. Moreover, as Russell’s earliest surviving writings reflect an absorption in problems relating to the self, we are justified in seeing a relation between Spinoza’s attractiveness to Russell and some of Russell’s central concerns. The survey of his writings on Spinoza has shown the extent to which he was acquainted with Spinoza’s life and writings. After the full grounding provided by Pollock’s Spinoza, Russell’s knowledge of Spinoza’s life stood fairly static. Russell took Spinoza the man as a moral model, despite his intellectual disagreements with him. As for Spinoza’s writings, Russell’s effective acquaintance with them—by which I mean his use of them in his own writings—can be stated with greater certainty. The survey shows Russell acquainted with the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus only when he came to write the Spinoza chapter in A History of Western Philosophy. In this work Russell also refers to the Tractatus Politicus. There is no evidence of acquaintance with Spinoza’s minor works. But the survey did show Russell very closely acquainted indeed with the Ethics. He probably read it first early in 1894, in conjunction with Pollock’s book. He definitely read the Ethics in March 1899, when he was researching his Leibniz. It is not known whether he read the Ethics in its original Latin, but it seems probable.¹ At this time Russell read other books on Spinoza, including (in 1901) Joachim’s Study, which he annotated. By 1910 Russell is clear that the import of the Ethics is ethical, not metaphysical. But the absolute idealist tradition in which Russell was taught philosophy and in which Joachim was ensconced had a permanent influence on Russell. The idealist conception of the moral self is a wider one than the self that is usually the subject of self-realization (which I call the “narrow self”). The idealists’ striving for harmony with society and even the universe requires a “self” that can expand beyond the boundaries of the individual as traditionally conceived.

Russell’s writings on Spinoza are various in nature, ranging from student essays through book reviews to correspondence and making Spinoza a character in a work of fiction. The best-known writing is the chapter in A History of Western Philosophy, but it is not, to my mind, the most satisfactory. The reason is that Russell allotted space to the classical philosophers on the basis of their influence, and not their interest to him. Spinoza, we found, is the sort of philosopher whom Russell mentions repeatedly in writings not specifically devoted to topics in Spinoza’s philosophy—e.g. metaphysics and especially normative ethics. Russell did not publish a theoretical or systematic treatise on his own normative ethic. There are hints that he believed the very abstruseness of such an enterprise would render it ineffective in harmonizing people’s values—he complains several times of the inaccessibility of Spinoza’s ethical writings. Russell also did not think normative ethics capable of being successfully argued for in treatise-like fashion.

34 Spinoza’s Concept of the Intellectual Love of God: Russell’s First Interpretation

Spinoza writes that the man guided by reason strives “to conceive things as they are in themselves, and to remove the hindrances to true knowledge, such as hatred, anger, envy, derision, pride …” (E4P73S). This statement appears to be no more than a plea for impartial judgment through removal of the ordinary obstacles of personal bias. Russell, of course, would heartily agree with the statement. If this plea were all there was to Spinoza, Russell would not have returned to him again and again. It was something more than this plea that caught Russell’s ethical imagination, even though he could not accept Spinoza’s demonstration of the doctrine involved. Russell’s ethic of impersonal self-enlargement is derived, in the main, from Spinoza’s concept of the intellectual love of God. We have seen, especially in Chapters III and IV, that Russell often used this term, even when Spinoza is incidental to the discussion at hand, over a period of at least half a century. We should not, however, assume that he always used the term in the same way. Indeed, I shall distinguish a general and a special use or interpretation by Russell. Nor should we assume that, when he uses the term, he understands it precisely in the way Spinoza understood it, or the ways in which commentators understand it. In 1911 Russell told Lady Ottoline that commentators quarrel over what Spinoza meant by the term, but that he felt that he knew what Spinoza meant by it (for the exact quotation, see 24). To understand these “quarrels” and to evaluate Russell’s understanding of the concept are the chief aims of this chapter.

I shall examine first what Spinoza says about the “intellectual love of God” to assess whether Russell’s interpretations are even possible ones. In preparation, we should be acquainted with at least three ideas used throughout the Ethics: “intuitive knowledge”, “love”, and “God”. Spinoza holds in the Ethics that there are three kinds of knowing. There is knowledge through sense-perception and imagination—these are the sources of all “inadequate and confused” ideas (E2P41D). There is rational, or deductive, knowledge, mediated by universal concepts, whose conclusions are necessarily true or necessarily false. And there is intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), which penetrates at once to the essence of things and thereby avoids the steps of ratiocination. Intuitive knowledge is therefore the direct, or unmediated, apprehension of adequate and clear ideas.² Spinoza defines “love” as “joy accompanied with the idea of an external cause” (E3P13S, E3Df.Aff.6), “joy” or “pleasure” (laetitia) itself being defined as “the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection” (E3P11S). “God” is a much more difficult concept to understand than “love”. As Savan has remarked, “The very center of Spinoza’s philosophy is his conception of God and the complete dependence of human well-being upon God.”³ The importance of God in Spinoza’s ethic would appear to rule out the possibility of non-believers doing anything positive with the ethic. Fortunately, however, Spinoza’s concept of God as a non-personal being that is not fundamentally distinct from the world is something that Russell can appreciate without committing himself to a theology and a metaphysic inconsistent with his own. Russell’s characterization of Spinoza’s God as “somewhat abstract” (Autobiography, vol. II, p. 38), while vague, is not erroneous. Spinoza’s definition of “God” is the following: “By God, I understand Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence” (E1Df.6). Thus God is substance, and the only substance. We are never directly acquainted with God, though in the sense of natura naturans (E1P29D) we are acquainted with what belongs to either of the two knowable attributes of God or substance, namely thought and extension. We can, however, have some understanding of God. On an interpretation using the attribute of extension, “the more we understand individual objects, the more we understand God” (E5P24). But Spinoza’s emphasis is on God under the attribute of thought. “Objects” in the previous quotation might have to be understood as thought-objects, and God seems at times even to be equated with the body of eternal truths (E5P30).⁴

The term the “intellectual love of God” occurs only in Part V of the Ethics, in propositions 32 to 37. In E5P38 “love of God” occurs and is probably to be understood as the intellectual love of God. These propositions are preceded by several on the relationship of eternity and intuitive knowledge (E5P22–31). Two of these propositions are especially important for the intellectual love of God. According to E5P23S, there is an aspect or part of the mind⁵ that “cannot be limited by time nor manifested through duration.” This aspect of the mind is that which apprehends the truths of the third kind of knowledge. The second proposition is E5P27: “From this third kind of knowledge arises the highest possible peace of mind.” The connection between the third kind of knowledge and the “eternal” part of the mind is essential to understanding the concept of the intellectual love of God. There are nine steps comprising the connection between intuitive knowledge and the eternal part of the mind and leading to the intellectual love of God:

(1) Spinoza takes mind for his example of the power of knowledge of the third kind. He wants to “show, by this example, what that knowledge of individual objects which I have called intuitive or of the third kind (Note 2, Prop. 40, pt. 2) is able to do, and how much more potent it is than the universal knowledge which I have called knowledge of the second kind” (E5P36S). For “the essence of our mind consists in knowledge alone …” (ibid.).

(2) The parts of mind that serve to individuate us as distinct personalities—imagination and memory (E5P34S)—are not eternal and hence are accidental to the mind’s essence. The impersonality of the mind is thus half-way established, i.e. that what is personal is not essential. It remains to establish that what is impersonal is essential.

(3) Spinoza is now ready to show that the pursuit of intuitive knowledge leads, as he puts it, to “our salvation, or blessedness, or freedom” (E5P36S). Whatever we understand by means of the third kind of knowledge, we delight in and think of God as the cause of our delight (E5P32).

(4) “From the third kind of knowledge necessarily springs the intellectual love of God” (E5P32C)—in so far as He is eternal, Spinoza adds. Here the definition of “love” as “joy accompanied with the idea of an external cause” (E3Df.Aff.6) is essential to the proof.

(5) By a dubious use of E1Ax.3, the intellectual love of God is eternal. Spinoza interprets E1Ax.3 scholastically to mean that an effect, love, must be in some essential respects like its cause, God, although the relevant part of E1Ax.3 says only that “From a definite cause an effect necessarily follows.…”

(6) Only intellectual love is eternal (E5P34C), since other kinds of love depend upon passions, and they exist only as long as the body does.

(7) “The intellectual love of the mind toward God is the very love with which He loves Himself … in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity…” (E5P36). Spinoza has now shown the connection between the essence of the mind and God. As long as we pursue the knowledge of “objects” in the third way, we share something fundamental with God. Moreover, this pursuit has the reward of reinforcing itself. E5P36, “In so far as the mind understands all things as necessary, so far has it greater power over the affects, or suffers from them” (a proposition Russell marked in his copy of the Ethic), shows how the power of the mind’s understanding of the emotions can increase the mind’s power over the emotions. Filling the mind with intuitive knowledge of eternal things constitutes the second half of the establishment of impersonality. Neither half alone would be sufficient for the task.

(8) Intellectual love is indomitable (E5P37), there being nothing that can “negate” it.

(9) The “highest possible peace” (E5P38S) arises from the third kind of knowledge, because “the more objects the mind understands by the second and third kinds of knowledge, the less it suffers from those emotions which are evil” (E5P38).

From these steps to the intellectual love of God it is possible to extract a conception of the self which Spinoza does not explicitly set out. With the exclusion of personality-individuating parts of mind such as imagination and memory, features coordinate with our bodily existence in an ordinary sense are dropped from view. What remains is mental power, which, though varying no doubt in degree from individual to individual, is essentially the same in all minds. The “objects” apprehended by the third kind of knowledge are also not those apparently dependent on the accidental circumstances of our bodies. They are therefore impersonal as well. The intellectual love of God seems to remain a phenomenon for individuals, however, as there is no suggestion, except possibly at E5P40S, that our minds coalesce in a single pool of thought. Man’s basic psychology of striving for self-preservation—the conatus—remains a background assumption of Part V of the Ethics.

How, then, does Russell understand the “intellectual love of God”, and what does he make of the concept in his ethic? He seems to have two interpretations. The general one is analyzed in the present section. The special one, the “moments of intellectual discovery” interpretation, is treated in the next. He first mentions the term in an 1894 letter to Alys (quoted in 14) and in a graduate paper (16). In the 1907 review Russell claims that Picton “in the main … successfully extracts his master’s teaching on the conduct of life and on the intellectual love of God” (21). I quoted the core of what Picton has to say, but on the basis of this brief remark of Russell’s we cannot probe further. In the 1910 review, however, Russell writes sufficiently on the concept for us to grasp his understanding of it. First, the concept is based on the knowledge of what is necessary, as in mathematical knowledge. But Russell applies the term “necessary” to more than analytic truths. I noted earlier that Russell is here going beyond what he allowed himself to say in his formal treatments of the concept of cause. Knowledge is the highest good, because knowledge—particularly of necessity—brings you closer to God. Knowledge develops “intellectual love”, which is, as Russell says, “coloured by emotion through and through”. He does not explain what Spinoza means by “God”, but from the remark that the first Part of the Ethics contains only pantheism, we may with reservations infer that he understands the key term to mean intellectual love of the world. At one point in the review Russell says that “though immortality in the ordinary sense is an error, the mind is nevertheless eternal in so far as it consists in the intellectual love of God.” Although it is difficult to be sure from the context, this seems to be an endorsement by Russell of Spinoza’s peculiar doctrine of immortality. When Spinoza characterizes something as immortal, he means that its existence is eternal, at least in the sense Alan Donagan has identified as “necessary omnitemporal existence”⁶—though Spinoza warns us not to confound eternity with any sort of duration (E5P34S).⁷ Russell talks about the “reconciliation of the individual with the whole”. This notion is probably connected, for him, with the intellectual love of God. We shall be able to see how this is so in the other writings of this period in Chapter VI.

Lady Ottoline was informed by Russell that he felt he knew what Spinoza meant by the “intellectual love of God”, despite the quarrels of commentators. Let us look again at what Russell told Lady Ottoline immediately after this remark:

He thinks men as individuals are not immortal, but in so far as they love God, their love of God is something deathless, but impersonal. He is filled full with an emotion towards the universe which is at once mystical and intellectual—it must have grown up in him through the feeling of god-like calm that comes when one passes from passionate strife to an impersonal reasoned view of the matter of strife. He thinks strife the fundamental evil, and reason informed by love the cure. His heart and mind are always great—he looks at each individual thing always in the light of the whole, (no. 82, p/24 May 1911)

The emphasis on impersonality is important, and it fits what Spinoza writes. The immortal or eternal part of the mind is the impersonal part, that which i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter I Introduction
• Part A. Russell's Writings on Spinoza
• Part B. Russell's Spinozistic Ethic
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Citations Russell's Works
• Spinoza's Works
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects