Affectivity and Philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche

Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect

Stuart Pethick

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137486066
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Pethick investigates a much neglected philosophical connection between two of the most controversial figures in the history of philosophy: Spinoza and Nietzsche. By examining the crucial role that affectivity plays in their philosophies, this book claims that the two philosophers share the common goal of making knowledge the most powerful affect.

1

Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do

For a supposed rationalist, there has probably never been a philosopher more interested and one who put more value in bodily experience than Spinoza. While his predecessor Descartes (and much of classical philosophy and theology) deems the body to be decidedly unreliable in its particularity and changeability, for Spinoza bodies are fascinating, ingenious and just as worthy of our attention as any of our most lofty ideas and concepts. As Spinoza famously puts it, ‘no one yet has determined what the body can do’.¹ This ‘yet-to-be-determined’ aspect of bodies is perhaps why they have been treated with such mistrust – bodies change and their senses and feelings are transient and instable, whereas our ideas and concepts are far more stable and truth as such is permanence itself. However, rather than this constant change and variability being considered as a weakness or a hindrance to life, Spinoza accepts it as the essential way in which we live and therefore something to be affirmed and appreciated: affectivity, the constant sense of transience and ‘inbetween-ness’ that relates each and every discernible experience of the world, is precisely that which allows us to build a knowledge that can compose our encounters in the world into ‘euphoric’ experiences; that is, experiences that are carried well and where the body can express itself.

This opening chapter will explore this crucial role that affectivity plays in the core elements of Spinoza’s philosophy, which will also set the stage for an examination of Nietzsche’s work and how affectivity connects the two thinkers, as well as paving the way for a discussion of how they gesture towards a different kind of philosophy that affirms the affective dimensions of knowledge. As the conclusion of this chapter will stress, the crucial move that Spinoza makes in this regard involves turning the question away from ‘what’ things are (bodies, ideas, values and so on) to ‘how’ they come about and how they affect and are affected. This is a very complex and often technical issue, but it should be borne in mind that at every stage it is a certain affective relationality that is at stake here and thus certain arrangements of ideas, images and bodily experiences. Spinoza’s philosophy is notoriously difficult to navigate however, so while some of the terminology in this chapter might seem a little opaque at times, as the book progresses these terms will be linked with broader themes that will help to shed further light on how Spinoza’s ideas ultimately lead to a new task for philosophy.

As discussed in the introduction, in order to begin to get to grips with the problems that Spinoza grapples with, it is important to understand the core of Descartes’ philosophy, and specifically his cogito, which will also help to understand the key role that affectivity plays in Spinoza’s work. This means that before getting to grips with Spinoza’s texts, it is important to outline the problems and attempted solutions that he inherited from the person who for many is the inaugurator of modern philosophy. By attempting to ground our understanding without presuming or appealing – at least in the first instance – to any kind of substantial entity, such as the human as a ‘rational animal’ or a theological notion of divine creation, and instead analysing the immanent processes of human thought via his method of radical doubt, Descartes opens up a space for analysing both the fragility and constitutive efficacy of ideas, a space that Spinoza exploits to the full.

After the discussion of Descartes, the focus will then switch to Spinoza and how he uses the imagination to emphasise the inescapably affective nature of living experience and thus ultimately the falsity of the Cartesian position of radical doubt. A closer inspection of Spinoza’s articulation of affectivity will then take place, followed by an examination of the relationship between affectivity and ideas to show how they are intimately linked for Spinoza. Due to this affective dimension of ideas, they can also be evaluated according to their adequacy insofar as they bear witness to thinking as a qualitatively distinct power of expression. This means that following the examination of affectivity and ideas, a critique of the interpretation of Spinoza as a proto ‘anomalous monist’ – someone who suggests that all of reality is essentially physical yet dualistically explainable – will take place in order to show how ideas are not reducible to physicality for Spinoza, because thinking is an irreducible power of expression (what he terms as an ‘attribute’). However, it will also be shown how this does not result in a dualism for Spinoza, because thought takes place within the immanent realm of affective experience – and it is here that we can test the adequacy of our ideas.

The attention will then switch to the important role that language plays in Spinoza’s philosophy – as it does in Nietzsche’s too – and how this links with affectivity. The crucial point here is how Spinoza distinguishes between words and ideas and how this must be borne in mind if we are to achieve something that is crucial in Spinoza’s philosophy, namely ‘common notions’. These notions allow us to progress from our inadequate or general ideas that we gather from random experience to common notions that understand the geneses of the affective relations of our experience and how these may be composed. This will be couched in terms of knowing ‘how’ things are rather than being stuck with inadequate ideas of ‘what’ things are. This discussion of the nature of language, ideas and knowledge will be crucial for the final chapter of the book on the task of philosophy after Spinoza and Nietzsche.

Throughout the discussion of Spinoza in this chapter, the orientating role that affectivity plays in his philosophy will remain in focus. As mentioned above, however, it is important to begin with a look at Descartes before turning to Spinoza.

1.1 Descartes’ cogito and the power of ideas

That the great French philosopher Rene Descartes was a huge influence on Spinoza is abundantly clear from his correspondence, the study groups he belonged to and his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. In the preface to this largely expositive work, he describes Descartes as ‘the brightest star of our age’ who had ‘laid the unshakeable foundations of philosophy’.² Descartes’ focus on the immanent processes of thought divorced from the prejudices of inherited dogma provided the foundations upon which to begin rethinking the productive power of the mind, as well as its fragility at the mercy of our random encounters in the world. However, whilst Spinoza is doubtlessly influenced by the Cartesian resolve to face up to the challenges posed by a modern world without the comforts of theological dogma, Spinoza’s turn to the affective nature of experience means that he moves away decisively from Descartes’ solution, which famously involves a dualistic approach to understanding the world and maintaining a strict separation between mind and body.

Briefly stated, Descartes’ deceptively simple solution to dispense with medieval dogma and uncertainty is to bracket all preconceived ideas of the world and try to find a certain thought from which to base his knowledge. He discovers that while the physical world is changeable and untrustworthy, the fact that he is thinking about this world is genuinely real, and by discovering one idea within his thought that has more reality than any other, namely the idea of God, he thereby finds a foundation for knowledge. This is not to turn away from the growing body of scientific knowledge that surrounds Descartes at the beginning of modernity – he is, in fact, far too scientific for that – but rather to argue that we cannot really understand anything by merely studying mechanistic laws (as useful as they are) unless we understand their condition of possibility, which just happens to be God. However, even though Descartes reintroduces God here, the interesting point is that God is only knowable for Descartes through an idea and not through any external authority or by merely pointing at things in the world and believing that there must be a God who created all this. Rather, Descartes analyses the processes of thought and the nature of ideas contained therein to see how they interact with and affect our experience of the world.

Crucially, as important as God remains in Descartes’ philosophy, it is only known through an idea, and for Descartes ideas are clear and distinct; that is, ideas are both discernible (an idea of x, an idea of y and so on) and have a certain vivacity or force that affects us, and it is this vivacity of ideas that paves the way for Spinoza’s closer inspection of the relationship between affectivity, ideas and experience. In order to flesh this out a little further, it is necessary to take a closer look at Descartes’ idea of God and the importance of clarity and distinction, which means starting with the fundamental principle of Descartes’ philosophy, namely the cogito.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes sets out with a procedure of radical doubt to place everything that he knows under suspicion. In a deliriously paranoid opening that includes visions of the mad and the seeming indistinguishability of dreams and reality, Descartes comes to the conclusion that bodily senses can be deceptive and are thus untrustworthy. Indeed, the whole of waking, living experience is dubious:

As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep ... Suppose then that I am dreaming, and that these particulars – that my eyes are open, that I am moving my head and stretching out my hands – are not true. Perhaps, indeed, I do not even have such hands or such a body at all.³

Descartes thus tries to find some firm ground to set out on the road to certain knowledge. He finds this with his famous formulation cogito ergo sum, with which he offers the frighteningly solipsistic claim that while he cannot claim to know what he is or whether or not any ‘thing’ really exists, he can at least be certain that he exists through his thought processes. That is to say, while he might be in error about the results of his thought (the nature of what exists), he can at least be certain that he is thinking and thus can be certain that he exists. The body is thus totally bracketed by Descartes in this fundamental first step to knowledge: the fact that he can sense that he has a body that is being affected by other bodies means very little because he could be mistaken, for it is only the first-hand experience of thinking that he has a body that allows him to affirm his existence. However, this thought alone only provides him with the surely intolerable reality of merely being aware of his bare existence and nothing else, so ‘something else’ is needed. The cogito is, nonetheless, a crucial orientating principle in terms of modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Spinoza: Discovering What the Body Can Do
• 2  Nietzsche and the Sign Language of the Affects
• 3  Will-to-Power: Redeeming the Body from the Ascetic Ideal
• 4  Making Knowledge the Most Powerful Affect
• Bibliography
• Index