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The Ethics in Spinoza’s Ethics
Spinoza is a transitional figure in the history of ethics. Important elements in his view come from the Aristotelian tradition. There are important original elements as well. The original elements have largely to do with developments in the new science and in philosophical theology.
1. A Cognitive Highest Good
Let me begin by considering Spinoza’s relation to the Aristotelian tradition. There is a general issue that arises in connection with the Nicomachean Ethics that is helpful for raising a question about Spinoza’s Ethics. In the middle books of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle paints a picture of human flourishing that involves the exercise of various individual-regarding and other-regarding abilities or powers (‘virtues’): self-control, justice, and friendship. In Book X, however, the discussion takes a new direction. There, Aristotle seems to suggest that contemplation is the best thing of all. It is unclear how to fit the emphasis on contemplation in Book X with the discussion of the various practically oriented virtues in the middle books.[1]
Modern interpreters, it seems to me, are more sympathetic to the middle book account of a good human life: a life of contemplation divorced from engagement with others (and with one’s state) strikes many as impoverished. A prominent strand of medieval Aristotelian thought runs in the opposite direction: it gives pride of place to a conception of human felicity or blessedness as the visio dei—a vision of God. This conception shares many of the features of the ideal of contemplation presented in Nicomachean Ethics, Book X. It is, for many medieval scholastics, a picture of how we might come to share in God’s life. Aquinas, for example, takes the visio dei to have been anticipated, but only imperfectly, by philosophers. He writes, I assume with Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics in mind:
And so, the philosophers who were not able to get full knowledge of this ultimate happiness [felicitate ultima, sc. contemplation] identified man’s ultimate happiness with the contemplation which is possible in this life. [SCG III, ch. 63][2]
Aquinas thinks the philosophers ‘were not able to get full knowledge of this ultimate happiness’ because they did not realize that the contemplation available in this life is a precursor to something better in the next life. He continues, ‘In fact, the contemplation of truth begins in this life, but reaches the climax in the future’.[3]
Spinoza’s Ethics contains both elements reminiscent of the middle books of the Nicomachean Ethics and elements reminiscent of Book X. There’s a treatment of the affects (the underlying Latin is affectus—I’ll use both English ‘affects’ and ‘emotions’ for the Latin affectus)and their destructive potential and what we can do to manage them. In Part 4 of the Ethics, Spinoza says, for example, that he’s going to show ‘what is good and what is bad in the affects/emotions’.[4] Part 3 of the Ethics concerns important facts on the ground—the emotions/affects and how they get going—that must be negotiated in any human life; Part 4 concerns what is, as far as is possible, to be cultivated in and rooted out from the emotions, in order for us to reach the best thing we are capable of. Even though the alignment is not perfect, there isa recognizable affinity between what Spinoza is doing in Parts 3 and 4 of the Ethics and what Aristotle is doing in the middle books of the Nicomachean Ethics.[5]
But along side this ‘mundane’ or ‘naturalistic’ project (to use Lilli Alanen’s terms),[6] there is also what we might think of as a Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, project, a visio dei project. In Part 4, Spinoza starts his theory of what is good or bad for us in the emotions/affects. (Roughly, something is good for us if it advances our ‘perfection,’ which Spinoza equates with our ‘reality’ (2d6) and is closely bound up with what he calls our ‘power of acting’;and something is bad for us if it checks or impedes our perfection/reality or ‘power of acting’.) This account is framed by his claim that the ‘The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s highest virtue is to know God’ (4p28),[7] which is amplified in the Appendix to Part Four:
it is of supreme benefit [apprime utile] in life to perfect the intellect, or reason, as far as we can, and the highest felicity [felicitas] or beatitude [beatitudo] for mankind consists in this alone [in hoc uno]. For beatitude [beatitudo] is nothing other than that self-contentment [animi acquiescentia] that arises from the intuitive cognition of God [Dei intuitivacognitione]. Now to perfect the intellect is also nothing other than to understand God and the attributes and the actions of God that follow from the necessity of his nature. [Heading 4]
Clearly there is a significant continuity between Spinoza’s view of human felicity as consisting in intuitive cognition of God and a medieval conception of beatitude as consisting in the visio dei(and, through that, a continuity with Aristotle’s conception of the most perfect life as being that of divine contemplation).
As with Aristotle, Spinoza’s modern commentators have tended to be more comfortable with the parts of his Ethics having to do with managing the affects than with his emphasis on intuitive cognition of God. After all, Spinoza’s treatment of the affects or emotions seems down to earth and ‘naturalistic’; intuitive cognition of God, by way of contrast, appears spooky—otherworldly in some unwanted way. (There is an issue, of course, about just how otherworldly intuitive cognition of God is, for Spinoza. As a matter of fact, Spinoza seems to think we all have it (2p47), at least to some extent, which suggests that he thinks it is already in some way familiar to us.)
Let’s look at the notion of thevisio dei (Aquinas) or the intuitive cognition of God (Spinoza) in a little more detail. What exactly was it? Why was it thought to hold the importance that it did?
According to Aquinas, the highest power in us is the intellect, that is, the power to understand (it is the power to which all our other powers are ordered). Our deepest, most fundamental desire is to understand. Now, understanding involves knowing why things are so, that is, involves knowing the causes of things. But the ultimate cause of things is God; so the final end of man is to know God.
To be clear, not just any knowledge of God satisfies our deepest desire. For example, knowing that God exists and caused everything else that exists does not, Aquinas thinks, take us very far down the path of understanding. Understanding involves grasping essences and seeing how things (or ‘properties’) flow from essences. For example, I understand why a triangle’s angles sum to two right angles, when I can see how that property flows from the triangle’s essence. Similarly, I understand why a human being is mortal when I see how this follows from its essence (e.g., according to many Aristotelians, because material elements tend to return to their natural places over time). So, if our cognition of God is going to satisfy our deepest desire, namely, our desire to understand the ultimate reason for things, we are going to need to cognize God’s essence, that is, know or understand what God is, as opposed to knowing merely that God is. As Aquinas puts it, ‘Final and perfect beatitude can consist in nothing else than the vision of the divine essence’.[8]
In fact, Aquinas thought that is relatively easy to know that God exists; he thinks this requires only a moderate amount of reflection. He thought it was much harder to know what God is, God’s essence. Indeed, he thought no creature could know God’s essence without special assistance from God. In our case, whether or not we get that assistance—whether or not we received the visio dei in which beatitude consists—is a delicate matter having to do with the economy of salvation: that is, with the Fall, faith, works, redemption, and God’s free bestowal of his grace.
Spinoza’s account of intuitive cognition of God is similar to Aquinas’s account of the visiodei. Intuitive cognition is a form of cognition that runs from essence to properties. So, intuitive cognition of God, in particular, is a form of cognition that runs from God’s essence to the things that follow from it. That is, it is the sort of knowledge that Aquinas took beatitude to consist in. At this level, Spinoza’s position is in line with the way medieval theologians understood the visiodei.
Now, Spinoza’s conception differs from Aquinas’s in other ways. One important difference is that Spinoza does not think the special cognition of God is reserved for an afterlife. This is a development that begins with Descartes. Descartes, as is perhaps implicit in his embracement of the ontological argument, holds that we already, in this life,have significant purchase on God’s essence. And, in the concluding paragraph of the Third Meditation, Descartes compares the joy that our idea of God gives us in this life to the joy we hope for in the next:
But before examining this point more carefully and investigating other truths which may be derived from it, I should like to pause here and spend some time in the contemplation of God; to reflect on his attributes and to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this immense light, so far as the eye of my darkened intellect can bear it. For just as we believe through faith that the supreme happiness of the next life consists solely in the contemplation of the divine majesty, so experience tells us that this same contemplation, albeit much less perfect, enables us to know thegreatest joy of which we are capable in this life. [AT 7:52; CSM 2:35–36]
Spinoza takes this development a step further. Whereas Descartes suggests a more perfect form of thespecial cognition of God awaits us in the next life, Spinoza disagrees. He does not think that a more perfect form of the scientiaintuitiva awaits us in an afterlife. While he holdsthat mind has an eternal aspect, he does not think of that aspect as coming after this life. Rather, he thinks the greater the extent of one’s scientiaintuitiva here and now, the greater the extent of the mind’s eternal aspect (cf. 5p39). For Spinoza, then, scientiaintuitivais more fully entrenched in our current existence then it is for Aquinas or than it is for even Descartes.
For all three thinkers, in varying degrees,the special cognition of God iscontinuous with natural science, but richer. That is, the path to this special cognition begins with the ‘why’ questions that naturally arise for human beings—questions thatwe first turn to natural science to order toanswer. But Aquinas, Descartes, and Spinoza think that as we trace out the ultimate answer to these‘why’ questions, we will, if successful, come to a deepappreciation the universe’s basic ordering principle. The sense that the universe has a basic ordering principle and that we are profoundly in touch with it, is, I think, what elicits the joy that Descartes expresses in that last paragraph of the Third Meditation.
Spinoza modifies this traditional picture or felicity or beatitude in a number of quite original ways. Much of Spinoza’s innovation has to do with the picture of manthat emerges from his interpretation of the new science. This leads him, for example, to reject the immanent teleology found in medieval Aristotelianism, the idea that my nature is determined by an end which says how I ‘ought’ be.[9]
In this paper, I want to focus a different innovation, Spinoza’s denial of free will—at least as he takes free will to be customarily understood: I want to consider what exactly Spinoza is denying and why, and how this denial hooks up with the rest of his ethical view. To understand Spinoza’s thought on this topic, it will help to begin with a sketch of his conception of the human being.
2. A Detour through the New Science
Spinoza’s picture of man and the physical world grows out of his reflection Descartes’s picture, so let’s start there.
Descartes presents a conception of body as a geometrical-kinetic structure—a pattern of motion in a fluid-like spatial extension. For our purposes, it will do to think of bodies as structures akin to the jet stream, the Gulf Stream or the global conveyer belt. Of course, the patterns of motion making up the human body are fantastically more complicated than these systems, but these systems give a rough idea of the sort of thing that a body is for Descartes. Such systems inhabit an extended plenum. There are deep geometric-kinetic constancies—the laws of geometry and the laws of motion—running throughout that plenum. Everything that happens to and within, say, the jet steam, is a function of these constancies and the surrounding systems. Spinoza emphasizes that these surrounding systems are integrated with the systems surrounding them and they with the systems surrounding them, and so on, until finally we get to the system of entire extended order as a whole, what he calls the ‘face of the universe’.
The human body, as I mentioned, is one of these structures—fantastically complex, but integrated into a single global order along with all the other systems and characterized by the same constancies that run through the rest of nature. Well, perhaps not quite, in Descartes’s case. The texts are not clear on the point,[10] refer to but Descartes may have held that sometimes the direction (but not the magnitude) of the motions in brain are changed by a non-physical ‘will’. Thus, he may have allowed for extra-physical intrusions into the physical order. Both Spinoza and Leibniz read Descartes this way.[11] Both thought he was cheating in this regard.
There is a more general issue here. This geometrical-kinetic human body is a new player on the scene. Nothing quite corresponds to it in old Aristotelian view.[12] For Aristotelians, being corporeal(that is being or having a body) is an essential constituent, alongside other essential constituents, of certain things—an essential constituent of, e.g., an elm, or some earth, or a cat, alongside their other essential constituents. For the new scientists, the corporeal as such takes on a life of its own.[13]Body is now something in its own right, with its own principles of operation. The human body is but a fragment of this new corporeal order. And the question now arises, how to position this fragment vis-à-vis the rest of the human being.[14]
Descartes held that a human being is a combination—the word he uses is ‘union’—of a geometrical-kinetic structure (the body) and a rational structure (the mind). It difficult, however, to see how a being governed by geometrical-kinetic principles could be united with a being governed by a rational principle; it is hard to see how such a union could leave us with a coherent human nature. In what sense, is the human being, governed by two very different kinds of principles, one thing for Descartes?[15]
Spinoza’s treatment of this problem is at once direct and bold. His view is that is that on a global level the universe’s corporeal structure is same as the universe’s cognitive structure: The complex pattern of motion and rest we find in ‘extension’ (the physical world) is the same as the pattern of ideas within the universe’s cognition (what Spinoza calls ‘the infinite intellect’ or ‘the idea of God’):[16]
2p7: The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
Schol. . . . Consequently, thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, comprehended now under this attribute, now under that. So, too, a mode of Extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing. . . . For example, a circle existing in Nature and the idea of the existing circle—which is also in God—are one and the same thing, explicated through different attributes. [2p7s]
A more exact interpretation of this passage involves a number of delicate questions about Spinoza’s metaphysics that I must put to the side; the important point for our purpose is that the attribute thought or cognition mirrors extension.[17] The order found in within extension is the same as the order found within cognition.
Thisis a global claim about the relation of the universe’s corporeal (geometrical-kinetic) order to its cognitive order. Spinoza holds, further, that my mind is the fragment of the universe’s cognition that mirrors the fragment of extension which is my body:
. . . the mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension. Hence it comes about that the order of thinking is one, whether Nature be conceived under this or that attribute, and consequently the order of the actions [actionum] and passions [passionum] of our body is simultaneous in Nature with the order of the actions [actionum] and passions [passionum] of the mind. [3p2s]
Let’s call this Spinoza’s cognitive isomorphism thesis: it is the idea that there is a structural identity between extension (or body) and thought or cognition. Some consequences of this of thesis: the level of perfection (or power of acting) of mind corresponds with the level of perfection (or power of acting) or body (2p13s),[18] whatever assists or impedes the mind’s power of acting, assists or impedes the body’s power of acting and vice versa (3p11), and my mind is active or passive according as my body is active or passive.