Abstract
I argue that Spinoza turns to the body in order to show the path towards empowerment and liberation. Firstly, I highlight the importance of the turn to the body for Spinoza’s epistemology: we have inadequate knowledge because we misunderstand our body; adequate knowledge must begin with adequate understanding of our body. The focus on the body provides important strategic advantages in allowing us to avoid various moral and metaphysical illusions. Secondly, I submit that there are three ways Spinoza talks about the body. While all three give us important clues about how we should understand it, the first method of knowing the body is inadequate, whereas the third does not do enough to illuminate the dynamic nature of Spinoza’s notion of ‘power’.
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Notes
- 1.
For an account of how Spinoza changed his views on truth in the works preceding the Ethics, see Curley (1994).
- 2.
- 3.
These terms are inadequate, and contrasted with the adequate common notions.
- 4.
An image, according to EIIp17s is not a mental or psychological terms, but a physiological concept, referring to a thing under the attribute of extension. It is an affection of the human body. Spinoza’s use of the term is not subject to the same ambiguity that Hobbes’ use of “phantasm” is guilty of.
- 5.
Imagination does not always necessarily contain false ideas. If, as Spinoza argues in the EIIp17s, the mind imagines a non-existent thing and at the same time is conscious of the fact that the thing does not exist, then this is not a proof of the weakness of the mind but of the efficacy of its nature. As several commentators have argued, imagination is not a defect, but a virtue. Imagination only affirms an idea and error appears when we correlate this affirmation with reality, i.e. we assume that the idea we have affirmed stands for an objective essence of a thing (Allison 1987, p. 109; Sévérac 2011, pp. 398–406).
- 6.
The body is a mode expressing God’s essence under the attribute of extension (EIID1).
- 7.
Spinoza is not forthcoming in providing examples of common notions, but they are presumably things like: possessing shape (no matter the specific shape), size, divisibility, mobility (Nadler 2006, p. 175). To use Wilson’s example, when I perceive a stain on the carpet, I may not understand the cause of the stain, I may not know its nature nor the composition of the carpet, but I am certain that the stain is an extended thing and so falls under the attribute of extension (Wilson 1999, p. 148). Notably, this example follows Spinoza’s cue in focusing on extended bodies.
- 8.
The third kind of knowledge has given risen to numerous responses, ranging from Novalis’ description of Spinoza as a “God-intoxicated man” to Bennett’s claims that this doctrine is “an unmitigated and seemingly unmotivated disaster” (Bennett 1984, p. 357) and that “Spinoza is talking nonsense and that there is no reason for us to put up with it” (Bennett 1984, p. 373).
- 9.
The term intuitive refers to (a) an inferential demonstration that could be grasped at once rather than a protracted demonstration whose conclusion we do not immediately see and (b) knowledge of particulars as opposed to knowledge of universals. Spinoza understands intuition to be knowledge of the complete nature of a thing (Bennett 1984, pp. 364–7).
- 10.
Yovel is critical of this example because it makes the third kind of knowledge appear banal and easily accessible to everyone (Yovel 1989, p. 154): this cannot be Spinoza’s point.
- 11.
Gueroult argues that there is no contradiction between the intuitive, i.e. immediate, nature of the third kind of knowledge and the fact that it is the result of a deduction from Gods essence (Gueroult 1974, pp. 448–50).
- 12.
Spinoza does not fully explain why exactly the mind is affected more by knowledge of essences than by universal cognition embodied in knowledge of common notions (Bennett 1984, p. 369).
- 13.
Spinoza writes that “we feel and know by experience that we are eternal” (EVp23s).
- 14.
Curley claims that Spinoza tells us more about extension and less about thought (Curley 1969, p. 144).
- 15.
The same move is present in Spinoza’s analysis of affects: one must first understand the physical aspect of an affect (Jaquet 2004, p. 146).
- 16.
- 17.
Curley’s translation implies that “it” refers to the union of mind and body. However, the French translation by Pautrat makes “it” refer to the mind. Given the rest of the scholium, it is this second option that seems the most plausible (Beyssade 1999, note 25).
- 18.
According to letter 83 to Tschirnhaus from 15 July 1676 (one of his last surviving letters), Spinoza never managed to put definitive order into his thoughts on physics.
- 19.
What Spinoza says about the human body could, in principle, also apply to very complex animals (Jaquet 2005, p. 217).
- 20.
There are many discussions of the difficulties in distinguishing between the simplest bodies on the basis of their ratio of motion and rest alone, as well as of possible solutions to this problem, see Garrett (1994), Gueroult (1974, pp. 155–65), Klever (1988), Manning (2016, sect. 5) or Viljanen (2007). This paper focuses on the human body, so will have to leave this issue aside.
- 21.
Everything contained in the first section, and that applies to the simplest bodies, also applies to the composite bodies of sections 2 and 2 (Gueroult 1974, pp. 153–4). Spinoza never defines motion (and extension; cf. Peterman 2014, p. 219), but we may wonder whether he actually needs to here. He is interested in the ratio of motion and rest in order to explain the nature of individuals and their path to blessedness (EIIPref.), not in physics per se.
- 22.
Bodies can be distinguished by size, shape or other properties but the basis for these distinctions is the specific ratio of movement and rest (Gueroult 1974, p. 164).
- 23.
All bodies are animated to different degrees (Gueroult 1974, p. 143), but not all qualify as organisms and have a metabolism. Animated means only that they have a corresponding idea under the attribute of thought.
- 24.
The existence of a machine implies an intelligent maker that designs it.
- 25.
The organism preserves itself and its unity due to, and not in spite of, metabolic changes (Allison 1987, p. 99).
- 26.
Presumably this is the mediated infinite mode of the attribute of extension, the facies totius universi.
- 27.
Postulates are, according to EIIP17s, only empirical observations. This means that Spinoza’s theory of the human body is established by “experience which we cannot doubt” (EIIP17s), see Gueroult (1974, p. 170).
- 28.
They constitute the second kind of knowledge, which is always adequate (EIIp40s2).
- 29.
- 30.
This resonates with Bennett’s claim that the ratio of motion and rest is a formula serving as placeholder for a detailed analysis which Spinoza had not worked out (Bennett 1984, p. 232).
- 31.
According to Lewis and Short (1958).
- 32.
Curley argues that we can, according to Spinoza, deduce the laws of motion of bodies from the nature of the attribute of extension. He nevertheless stops short of writing that we could know bodies adequately if we only know these general laws of motion (Curley 1969, p. 60) He writes that knowing that bodies are either in motion or in rest does not mean we know anything about bodies (Curley 1969, p. 108). In other words, the problem is in getting from general laws (of motion) to the definition of particulars, of singular things (Schliesser 2014, p. 7).
- 33.
All humans strive to persevere in their being and to act, the difference lies in the way they understand to do so (EIIIp9).
- 34.
Bennett agrees that pleasure and unpleasure are the movements themselves, but mentions that in EIVp59 Spinoza seems to imply that they are the causes of movements. Given that this is an isolated occurrence he does not dwell on this point and neither shall I (Bennett 1984, p. 254).
- 35.
The word power is not found in the Latin, as Garrett points out (Garrett 2002, p. 135). Nevertheless, there are very good reasons to believe that conatus must be understood as a manifestation of a thing’s power, as will be argued later.
- 36.
The seemingly effortless transition from a logical concept (subject) to a physical notion (thing) has not escaped the attention of various commentators. This move can only be justified in virtue of the “ontological transposition of the cognitive” (Matheron 1988, p. 16) in Spinoza. For the contrast between Spinoza’s position and Kant’s distinction between logical and real opposition in the Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy see Viljanen (2007, p. 98).
- 37.
The broader context is that Bennett believes Spinoza to be an anti-teleological thinker and argues that the instances where he does offer teleological explanations are inconsistencies that should be interpreted in light of his overall project (Bennett 1984, p. 219). While Spinoza’s commitment to the claim that God as a whole does not act teleologically is clear, a number of commentators have pointed out that this does not exclude thoughtful or unthoughtful teleology in the case of finite modes (Garrett 1999, p. 314; Lin 2006, p. 319).
- 38.
Bennett does not mention the essential element of power or force in Spinoza’s discussion of conatus, and he refers to cognitions where Spinoza makes no reference to consciousness (Schrijvers 1999, p. 71).
- 39.
Gueroult, in an interesting analysis, has shown how in EIp34, 35 and 36, God’s potestas, the capacity to produce things, is identified with potentia, the force to actually produce them (Gueroult 1968, pp. 387–9). This eliminates the concept of possibility and forms the basis for Spinoza’s rejection of a God imagined as king or as a law-giver acting arbitrarily (Balibar 1998, p. 14; Negri 1991, pp. 191–2).
- 40.
- 41.
Negri argues that there is an ascetic tendency (abstraction from affects, from things and from time) in book V of the Ethics, but that it is tempered by constant references to the body (Negri 1991, p. 172).
- 42.
In Evp40s Spinoza writes that he has considered things “without relation to the body’s existence”. The essence of the body outside duration is clearly part of his arguments. This goes against the claim that the doctrine of eternal essences is a remnant of what seems to be Spinoza’s early inclination to follow the Stoic path and make reason self-sufficient and detachable from the body (Huenemann 2008, p. 104).
- 43.
The following objection can be raised: knowledge of evil is always inadequate because it depends on inadequate ideas, i.e. passions (EIVp64). Therefore, also under the second kind of knowledge it is only natural that we would not know evil and disempowerment since this kind of knowledge is correlated only with empowerment. We must, however, remember that this argument is presented in the context of Spinoza’s discussion of the hypothetical model of a “free man”. This hypothetical situation is contrasted by Spinoza with the reality of finite modes, which are always subject to passions, and which calls for knowledge of “both out nature’s power and its lack of power, so that we can determine what reason can do in moderating the affects and what it cannot do” (EIVp17s).
- 44.
The issue is particularly vexing since Spinoza, while using both joy/love and beatitude in order to describe the third kind of knowledge, argues in EVp35 that God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love. It is very difficult to see how God could pass from a smaller to a greater perfection.
- 45.
This privileged knowledge of individuals, which goes beyond what the second type can offer us, has special connections with love that go beyond the general ones between reason and affectivity. It therefore opens up a new dimension for self-knowledge (Lloyd 1994, p. 108). We must also notice that to understand conatus as a singular thing expressing the power of God is to present indivisibility as a mark of the conatus (Lloyd 1994, p. 128).
- 46.
The way we should understand the connection between the eternal essence and the corresponding mode has been subject to much debate, but the solution put forward by Viljanen (2011) seems especially promising.
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Ioan, R. (2019). Spinoza’s Turn to the Body. In: The Body in Spinoza and Nietzsche. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20987-2_2
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