Political Theory on Death and Dying by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000451757
Goodreads: 57632841
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Some Unanswered Questions

Spinoza, as noted in the opening, has been regarded as both an atheist and (posthumously) a pantheistic mystic—someone who saw divinity everywhere and regarded all things as being literally “in God.” The Ethics is replete with religious language and imagery, and it repeatedly suggests that those who know God, and who thus comprehend what is necessary and unchangeable, somehow join what is eternal. In his famous phrase, those understanding the permanent and inevitable do so “sub specie aeternitatis.”71

Perhaps nowhere is the cultivation of such thinking more apparent than in Spinoza’s teaching, at the end of Ethics V, that “something of” the mind “is eternal” and endures after death. The arguments Spinoza employs to support this extraordinary (but nonetheless carefully worded) claim are complex, but they do not purport to demonstrate—though they will leave many with the impression—that consciousness continues after the body’s demise.72 Indeed, as Spinoza writes a few propositions later, most people misunderstand the nature of the mind’s eternity because “they confuse it with duration, and attribute to it the imagination, or memory, which they [falsely] believe remains after death.”73

So what, then, are we to make of Spinoza’s ultimate return to a reliance on superstition—albeit one that will admire and take its bearings from the insights of reason—in giving the impression that he has proven the mind’s immortality? As previously mentioned, the possibility that some superstition will need to remain even in an advanced scientific society calls into question whether Spinoza believed human beings could be entirely liberated from the fear of death. But, we must also ask, has Spinoza himself been able to vindicate his own claims about the character of the summum bonum and the superiority of the philosophic life against religious alternatives? Consider the following: Spinoza may not believe (because he cannot demonstrate) that consciousness endures after death, but can he provide an adequate explanation of how consciousness arises in the first place? At the opening of Ethics V, Spinoza notes that René Descartes failed to explain the nature of the mind and its union with the body and so had ultimate recourse to God.74 But since Spinoza limits his own account only to the proximate causes of which we do have some knowledge, can he provide a satisfactory alternative explanation? In a notable scholium, Spinoza refuses to deny that “the human body can be changed into another nature entirely different from its own.” He claims to have heard stories of a poet, who, after an illness, lost all memory of his former self. From this example, Spinoza concludes that death does not necessarily require a corpse, but he then hastily breaks off his analysis: “rather than provide the superstitious with material for raising new questions,” he says, “I prefer to leave this discussion unfinished.”75

The question the superstitious individual would ask Spinoza, of course, is not just how his scientific perspective could account for such an experience—surely modern neuroscience would have much to say about it—but, more fundamentally, whether it could prove that this explanation has actually uncovered the phenomenon’s first cause.

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