What Does Spinoza Prescribe?

In our sixth lecture on Spinoza's Ethics, we'll be covering Part IV of the Ethics, titled 'Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions'. In Part IV, Spinoza carries on from Part III, giving an overview of the way emotions relate to human freedom through his account of goodness and evil, adequate ideas, and parallel causation. Instead of the detailed work through Spinoza's arguments, this lecture will instead focus on the psychological dimensions of Spinoza's conclusions and draw some real-world connections from his system. We will explore Spinoza's account of the emotions in light of his view of goodness and badness, and then explore the power of the emotions to influence us despite our rational powers. The lecture concludes with Spinoza's account of virtues and with an eye towards the power to maximize freedom through virtue.

2017

2017

I will suggest a reading trajectory of the Ethics that illuminates some important and frequently debated questions about Spinoza's work; notably what the good is. I call the gist of this trajectory, which you can see on your handout, "the power of affectivity." Since we can understand what the good is through it, I say that this power is "the ground of the good." In showing how the power of affectivity is the ground of the good I will discuss the much debated issue that the good, as well as its ground, seems to have two different senses in Spinoza's Ethics: the first is a critical sense that calls into question the ground for the values of good and evil and shows that these values are empty and arbitrary constructs (e.g. E1App, E3P9S); yet, the second sense is constructive in that it establishes such a ground. The question that remains to be answered is: how is it that these two senses have the same definitionutility? The answer that I propose is that the seemingly different senses of the good can both be defined as utility because utility is in turn defined in terms of the power of affectivity. I will argue that the real difference between the critical and the constructive senses of the good and its ground is a difference between the kinds of knowledge by which we know the good; and the kinds of knowledge-or rather, our capacity to move between them-is in turn understood in terms of the power of affectivity. Ceding centrality to this power in our reading of the Ethics sheds new light not only on the question of the good, but also some other long-standing debates concerning Spinoza's work, including the question about parallelism, about freedom, about knowledge, about the model of human nature and about Spinoza's conatus doctrine. I will touch upon all of these in this paper, giving the conatus a short section of its own and discussing the model of human nature toward the end of the paper, but focus primarily on how the power of affectivity grounds of the good. This rather wide scope of the reading means that I will sometimes be painting with broad strokes, sacrificing detail for the sake of the central 2 idea: the good in the Ethics has its ground in the power of affectivity, which is formulated in different ways along a trajectory in this work. Without further ado, I will now turn to outline this trajectory.

In the final lecture on Spinoza's Ethics, we will make a brief overview of Part V of Spinoza's Ethics, which is titled, 'Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom'. In Part V, Spinoza ties up all of the threads from the previous four parts in order to create an account of freedom in terms of his second and third kinds of knowledge. As we have seen in Spinoza's account of the emotions, there are emotions which are based on adequate ideas and others which are based on inadequate ideas. Of the latter, they may be said to be the experience of our determination by external and not internal causes. According to Spinoza, a transcendent understanding of the world provides one with deep and sublime emotions capable of overcoming these externally conditioned affections, and it is by this understanding that we find our freedom. Thus, we will survey Spinoza's accounts of emotions, concepts , knowledge, and the power of knowledge over the emotions as it is presented in Part V, with specific attention to propositions 4, 6, 10, 25, and 39.

Annals of the University of Bucharest, Philosophy Series, 2021

In this paper, I argue that Spinoza's theory of emotions as developed in his Ethics provides a theory of becoming. In particular, I argue that adequate knowledge of the emotions attained through reason provides human beings with a twofold insight; on the one hand, adequate knowledge of affectus provides metaphysical insight while, on the other hand, it provides ethical insight. The metaphysical insight stems from an adequate understanding of the directionality of individual desires which knowledge of the emotions provides in terms of self-knowledge. At the same time, the ethical insight consists in the adequate understanding of what counts with certainty as increasing an individual's power of acting as deriving from the metaphysical understanding of the affection of one's conatus. Overall, I argue that the adequate knowledge of emotions provided by reason lies at the core of Spinoza's project of formulating guidelines for the attainment of human flourishing, that is, freedom.

In the fourth and fifth of seven lectures on Spinoza, we will cover Part III of his Ethics and explore Spinoza's a priori doctrine of human emotions. As in the previous lectures, we will do a survey and overview of the key points of the given section. Unlike our previous lectures, we will be starting from the end of the chapter rather than the beginning, because the most insightful summaries of Spinoza's doctrine of the emotions lay there. The pace and attention to detail on Spinoza's arguments will also be relaxed in order to draw attention to the historical significance of Part III. We will begin with the definition of the conatus and discuss this in detail, and then go to Spinoza's end-of-chapter section defining the emotions. We will also draw attention to a definite albeit coincidental connection between Spinoza's doctrine of emotions and Nietzsche's doctrine of the Will to Power. We will look at emotions as affects, the definition of emotions, and then examine Spinoza's system of atomic and compound emotions. The basic compound emotions will be covered briefly and the general principles guiding the combinations of atomic emotions will be discussed, along with a brief overview of some miscellaneous psychological topics that come up in Part III.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2019

Spinoza's moral philosopher represents his most concerted attempt to come to terms with the great philosophical questions of the existence and identity of God, the nature and origin of the human mind concerning God, the origin and nature of emotions, the power of emotions as they restrict freedom of choice. His ethics is derived from his metaphysics and psychology. His belief that everything emanates from a perfect and infinite God made him conclude that evil does not exist. Further, he argues that anything that happens could have happened otherwise since it emanated from the unchangeable laws of nature. The surest part of happiness according to Spinoza is the study of philosophy and meditation. Arising from the foregoing, this discourse views Spinoza's doctrine as running contrary to human nature. For maintaining that everything is fated and determined including human disposition implies that all human actions can, therefore, be said to be amoral. The corollary o f the above is that institutions such as law court, police, prisons, and judiciary, Christianity and Islam are superfluous, irrational and serving no purpose. Consequently, his postulates smack of a moral lacuna.

An accessible short introduction to Spinoza's Ethics

The new translation has been commissioned by Cambridge and is based on the new critical edition forthcoming from PUF. Translators are Michael Silverthorne and myself. The paper is an introduction to the text intended to be accessible to new readers.