Responding Emotionally to Fiction

Contemporary analytical philosophers ask why we respond emotionally to characters we believe to be fictional. Why, for example, do we grieve for Anna Karenina? To understand this problem it is helpful to turn to Spinoza, who argues that the ability to keep our emotions in line with our beliefs is a complex skill. Rather than asking why we depart from it in the case of fictions, we need to begin by considering how we acquire it in the first place. Spinoza also considers the value of this skill. In his account, fictions function rather like Winnicott’s transitional objects. They enable us to negotiate the boundary between the real and the imaginary in a way that contributes to our philosophical understanding and increases our capacity to live together.

Spinoza on Superstition

One of the strengths of Spinoza’s philosophy is his recognition that what we can achieve politically depends in part on our affective capacities, an insight illustrated in his account of the distinction between ‘true religion’ and superstition. I argue that superstition, as Spinoza sees it, is an affective state. To be superstitious is to be subject to a pervasive and damaging kind of fear. False prophets, for example, harness the resources of imagination to encourage political division and superstitious anxiety. By contrast, defenders of true religion appeal to existing imaginative resources to foster devotion to God and promote cooperation. However, the boundary between these two strategies is far from distinct. Superstition may play a role in a harmonious way of life.

When does Truth Matter?

How is our imaginative grasp of what it takes to live together related to our rational understanding of the same issue? Spinoza argues that, while theology draws on imagination to clarify the content of the divine law—‘love your neighbour’—the same recommendation is independently echoed in our philosophical understanding of the value of a cooperative way of life. Some commentators have argued that philosophy, thus conceived, is the preserve of an elite, whereas theology is aimed at the masses. Drawing on Cicero’s analysis of honestum, and Spinoza’s use of it, I challenge this view. A theologically grounded way of life, as Spinoza presents it, creates the political and epistemological conditions for a gradual transition to philosophical understanding, so that theology and philosophy, like imagining and reasoning, are in practice inseparable.

Natural Rights as Powers to Act

Spinoza grounds his political philosophy on a highly counter-intuitive conception of natural right as the right to do anything in your power. Just as big fish eat little fish by the right of nature, so humans act by natural right, regardless of what they do. In this essay I explain what leads Spinoza to hold this view and show how, in doing so, he contentiously rejects some of the most central assumptions of the natural law tradition. Finally, I consider whether Spinoza’s view can contribute anything of value to current discussions of natural right. I argue that he draws our attention to prerequisites of a cooperative way of life that contemporary theorists frequently neglect.

Law and Sovereignty in Spinoza’s Politics

Recent commentators, feminists among them, have emphasized the consensual aspects of Spinoza’s politics. But Spinoza also insists that the powers of a sovereign are non-negotiable: sovereigns must have sole authority to make and enforce civil law. To see why he defends on this latter claim, I turn to his radical analysis of law. Following Hobbes’s lead, Spinoza undermines a traditional image of sovereign power backed up by a divinely ordained law of nature. In its place he offers an image of a fragile sovereign whose precarious power only extends as far as its subjects allow. For such a sovereign, the capacity to limit negotiation is a condition of its own survival, just as recognizing this fact is a condition of its subjects’ capacity to maintain a cooperative way of life.

Creating Rational Understanding

In the Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes two ways of thinking, imagining and reasoning. Both, he claims, give us knowledge or cognitio; but only reasoning yields truths. Drawing on the Theological-Political Treatise, this essay explores the differences between the epistemological norms guiding reasoning and those at work in imaginative practices such as history or prophecy, and asks how philosophers make the transition from one to the other. The norms of reasoning and of imagining are embodied in particular sets of social capacities and ways of life. Becoming more rational or learning to philosophise is a process of learning to live cooperatively.

Fortitude

Philosophical understanding, as Spinoza conceives of it, enhances our capacity to live together by generating what Spinoza calls fortitude, the power to act as our understanding dictates. The essay examines Spinoza’s distinctive account of fortitude as a combination of animositas and generositas that can only be effectively cultivated within the state. Fortitude, as Spinoza presents it, is expressed in its fullest form by people who use their rational understanding to resolve conflict and keep cooperative political exchange alive. Turning to our own political lives, the essay asks what fortitude might be for us, how it might help us to live together, and how contemporary citizens might nurture it.

The Affective Cost of Philosophical Self-Transformation

Some early-modern philosophers portray a perfectly philosophical way of life as a condition approaching the divine. The philosopher becomes as like God as a human being can, and in doing so experiences unparalleled and unalloyed joy. Spinoza advocates a version of this view and defends it with impressive consistency. To suggest that the process of philosophical enlightenment involves any affective cost, he argues, is simply to display a lack of understanding, and thus to fall short of the insight and joy that understanding ultimately yields. Nevertheless, something seems to be missing. I turn to a pair of novels by J. M. Coetzee to elucidate a significant though suppressed form of emotional loss that is integral to Spinoza’s image of the philosophical life.

Freedom of Conscience and Civic Peace

Positioning himself within a series of early-modern debates, Spinoza argues that civil sovereigns must have control over religion, and that—in matters of religion as in everything else—subjects must obey the civil law. He defends this view by appealing to two antecedents: a conception of the original Jewish commonwealth as a theocracy in which there was no distinction between civil and religious law; and a classical conception of piety that encompasses devotion to one’s country as well as to God. Drawing on these resources, Spinoza contends that obedience to the law trumps the promptings of individual conscience, so that living under law may carry significant individual costs. Despite the fact that Spinoza is often heralded as an early defender of religious toleration, his view of freedom of conscience is at odds with modern liberal orthodoxy.

Freedom, Slavery, and the Passions

In his Ethics, Spinoza uses a republican conception of political liberty as a model for a broader theory of philosophical freedom. According to the republican view, we only live freely when we are not subject to the arbitrary power of other agents. But if we consider our metaphysical position as individuals surrounded by things more powerful than ourselves, it seems that freedom is beyond our reach. We cannot but be subject to the arbitrary power of external things. Spinoza responds to this problem by arguing that, when we reason, we are not acted on by external things and are thus not subject to their arbitrary power. Extending the republican view beyond politics allows him to conclude that philosophizing liberates us.