Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and The Ethics by Lloyd Genevieve

Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and The Ethics by Lloyd Genevieve

Author:Lloyd, Genevieve.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-134-84108-0
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd


Striving to persist: an ethic of joy

It may seem that there is little scope for ethical ideals in a philosophy which treats freedom as nothing but ignorance of the determining causes of action. Spinoza’s comparison of the belief in free will to the fantasy of the stone, thinking it flies through the air by its own choice, may seem to deny all content to human virtue, rendering otiose any articulation of an ethic. Yet out of this apparently unpromising material Spinoza constructs an ethic centred not on a dour fatalism but on joy.

In Part Three, imagination and affects draw together. In Part Four, both imagination and the affects come into relation with Spinoza’s treatment of the nature of reason and its power to take us from bondage into freedom. The mind’s transition to reason is by no means a shedding of affectivity. For Spinoza, as for the Stoics, as we have seen, the ideal is not to be free of emotion. Although the Stoic sage disdains passion, he tries to cultivate positive affects associated with reason. For Spinoza too the affects associated with reason must be good. But for him the passions are of themselves neither good nor bad. Like everything else, human passions are part of nature. The mind, being itself part of nature, cannot avoid them; it can, however, avoid being ‘determined to act’ by its passions. Let us now see what exactly the wise mind avoids.

Spinoza insists in the Preface to Part Four that human appetite is part of the chain of causes, although human beings are commonly ignorant of how it fits there. It is not something which could be prevented from having effects. Nor is it in any way unnatural. Nature—whether in general or in relation to specific kinds of thing—does not for Spinoza act as a norm. There is no ‘natural’ perfection or imperfection except what can be identified with a thing’s own power of acting. To pass from a lesser to a greater perfection is just to increase or diminish its power. A horse, Spinoza says, will be destroyed as much if it is changed into a man as if it is changed into an insect. There is no ascending hierarchy of perfection in natural forms—no natural order in relation to which things can be judged good or bad. Here we see the ethical implications of Spinoza’s treatment, in the appendix to Part One, of the dependence of ideas of order on the imagination. Good and evil indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves. One and the same thing, he says, can be, at the same time, good, bad and indifferent: music is good for one who is melancholy, bad for one who is mourning and neither good nor bad to one who is deaf. We can set before ourselves models of human nature, judging ourselves and others as perfect or imperfect according to how we approximate to them. But in none of this do we judge anything more than the powers of things to affect us to our advantage or disadvantage—to increase or diminish our own power.



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