Of Freedom: Heidegger on Spinoza

Dialogue: Journal of Phi Sigma Tau, 2021

Juxtapositions between Benedict De Spinoza and Martin Heidegger have been generally sparse in contemporary literature. This is unfortunate because comparing them can help us understand both of them more comprehensively. This paper establishes that the ontology Heidegger presents in 'Being and Time' was anticipated by Spinoza in his 'Ethics'. In light of this anticipation, this paper understands Spinoza's ontology more thoroughly through the concepts that Heidegger presents in 'Being and Time'.

Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2016)

E-LOGOS – Electronic Journal for Philosophy, 2020

The aim of this study is to clarify Spinoza's concept of freedom and outline the meaning of this concept in Spinoza's philosophical system as a whole. First, I outline the position of the topic of freedom within the framework of Spinoza's philosophical teachings and its reception. Then I gradually turn to how Spinoza's topic of freedom appears in the context of ontology, ethics and political philosophy. Spinoza's philosophy is ontological-ethics and political philosophy are the application of his ontology. That is why I will start with the interpretation of its basic metaphysical notions-substance, attributes, and modes. In an ethical context, it is possible to speak of Spinozism of freedom with regard to the concept of so-called power of mind over affects, which will be the next center of interpretation. I will conclude with a summary of Spinoza's political-philosophical views on freedom.

This paper addresses the question of whether Spinoza's philosophy can coherently distinguish between living and non- living things. It begins by examining interpretations of Spinoza which focus on the question of consciousness, arguing that if such accounts were successful they might offer a productive starting point for thinking about the related question of life. It is shown that such attempts at explaining consciousness are unsatisfactory on their own terms: either they leave important questions unanswered, or they ultimately fail to differentiate between individuals that demonstrate consciousness from those that do not. The next part of the paper considers the possibility that modes are distinguished from one another solely by their capacity for being affected in different ways. I show that, while affective repertoire maps variety among modes, it is not sufficient to generate a criterion for differentiating either between living and non-living things, or among phenomenally distinct living things. Notwithstanding Spinoza’s rich descriptive account of human affects in Book 3 of the Ethics, the characterisation of affective phenomena as manifestations of fluctuations in power ultimately means that Spinoza’s account of affect is applicable in principle to all individual modes. Likewise, Spinoza’s account of conatus, or striving, applies to every individual and so does not in itself provide the basis for distinguishing life. The central thesis of the paper draws on Spinoza’s accounts of common notions, on the one hand, and inadequate ideas on the other, to provide the grounding for a more fruitful appreciation of what constitutes life in Spinoza’s philosophy. Specifically, individual modes make an impact on the world, that is, they bring about effects on other modes, in virtue of their constitution; the distinctiveness of the effects brought about by living things lies in the fact that they go beyond what can be characterised or explained through common notions alone. In short, living things are those which have transformational, rather than merely transitive, effects. This capacity for exceeding the limits of common notions and bringing about effects that reconfigure the world to some degree can properly be described, even on Spinoza's own criteria, as a power to act; paradoxically this very power is a function of, or arises from, the fact that to be a living thing is to be capable of experiencing an extensive repertoire of affects. I show that the consequence of my reading is that, whilst living things are in no way exempt from the determinism of Spinoza's system, their own inadequate ideas of their condition, coupled with their agency, bring it about that life is a domain of contingency and possibility. I argue that the reading of life as effect also shows how Spinoza’s system has the resources to distinguish among living things, by focusing on the extent to which their effects go beyond repetitive transformation to exhibit varying degrees of creativity. I develop this theme further to draw out some implications for Spinoza’s political philosophy.

In the Ethics, Spinoza argues that individual human emotions and imagination shape the social world. This world, he argues, can in turn be shaped by political institutions to be more or less hopeful, more or less rational, or more or less angry and indignant. In his political works, Spinoza offered suggestions for how to shape a political imaginary that is more guided by hope than by fear or anger. In this chapter, using the framework of Spinoza's theory of emotions, I will investigate how Barack Obama's promise of 'hope' was translated into Donald Trump's rhetoric of hate. Such a transition, from hope to fear is one that would be unsurprising to Spinoza. Spinoza worried about the political and personal effectiveness of hope. He argued that hope can easily be turned into what he called ‘indignatio’ or indignation – an emotion that he believed eroded trust in political institutions. Spinoza warned about the danger of governance that relies upon the emotions of anger and hatred. I will set out how the Trump administration's reliance on the motivational forces of hate and anger risk what Spinoza called indignation. Spinoza’s political works were written to show how to turn political indignation and anger into a chastened, and perhaps more rational, hope. Finally, I will propose that we may derive from Spinoza participatory, democratic institutions that can overcome this indignation.

This paper offers an interpretation of the role of freedom in Spinoza’s Ethics. Given that Spinoza is usually thought of as a thinker of determinism (or better: necessity), I explain how his thinking of freedom only makes sense in- sofar as one recognizes the importance of what he describes as the three kinds of knowing, in relation to the affects. The difference between freedom and slavery lies in how one receives and interprets the affects, i.e. the force of the external world. To affirm the necessity of your disposition and thrownness is to take part in the free necessity that Spinoza describes. Key words: freedom, Spinoza, Schelling.

Tópicos, 2024

My aim in this paper is to examine some of the distinctive facets of human action in Spinoza’s philosophy and show their intrinsic connection with each other. By analyzing in detail how Spinoza addresses different aspects of human action in his main work, the Ethics, it is possible to notice that for him free human agency implies two interrelated features: on the one hand, the adequate knowledge of the causes that determine it, and, on the other hand, a growing capacity to impact with greater power the scenarios in which it takes place. Thus, in contrast with quietist and passive readings, I show in the following that the two aforementioned characteristics are part of the Spinozian philosophical conception of agency as such. By pursuing this line of thought, it is also possible to establish a link—not always noticed in the secondary literature—with some of the central lines of thought contained in the Theological-Political Treatise. In discussing these theses, I advance the idea that the Spinozian conception of human agency involves a serious readjustment of the metaphysical vision of the agent, a change in her conduct and ethical practices, and an altogether different conception of politics and religion. Keywords: Spinoza; human agency; metaphysical psychology; ethics; politics; activity; passivity.

2023

A central theme of Spinoza’s Ethica is the description of the individual’s exposition to the emergence of passions: the individual’s mind is constitutively liable to being passive in relation to the influences exercised on the mind by reality since the mind is a part of nature. As regards the individual’s condition, being passive means having passions: passions bring the individual to a condition of mental enslavement due to the influence coming from the external reality. Spinoza tries to find a way out of the passions: through the analysis of the structure of reality and of the individual’s mind, Spinoza shows that the development of knowledge of reality in the mind is the solution for the process of liberation of the mind. The power of the individual’s mind consists in the knowledge of reality: therefore, the possibility, for the individual, to reach an authentic power of mind consists in the acquisition of the knowledge of reality. This acquisition comes about exclusively through the appropriate education. Through the knowledge, the individual becomes able to counteract his being acted on by the external reality: he can lead his life instead of being steadily led by the influences coming from outside. We base our inquiry on Spinoza’s Ethica.

Theory, Culture and Society, 2025

A salient tradition in contemporary affect theory heavily relies on distinguishing between emotions and affects. The former refers to structured categories of socially coded affective states, while the latter denotes the pre-social libidinal flow underlying emotions. This distinction is commonly attributed to Spinoza and is thought to have been further developed by Deleuze. In this article, I argue that this overall historical picture is misleading and inaccurate. Deleuze radically transforms Spinoza's theory of affect for the ends of his own ethical-political philosophy. Moreover, I argue that Deleuzian and similar conceptualizations of affect fail to fulfill their political and ethical promises due to two critical problems. In the last section, I show that a unified notion of emotion inspired by Spinoza, which does not create a sharp rift between emotions and affect, can perform the same explanatory function intended by the emotion-affect distinction while allowing us to circumvent these problems.

2012

Rational actors are all alike, but every passionate subject is enslaved in his own way; with apologies to Tolstoy, such is how human life can appear in Spinoza’s philosophy. Man as a rational being has a highest good, the intellectual love of God, which as the ultimate achievement of thinking expresses our innate being with apparent universality. In this sense, Spinoza is the quintessential rationalist: only reason expresses our true nature and the power of our minds, and only insofar as we are reasonable do we truly agree with one another. But in reducing the essence of the human mind to reason alone, Spinoza comes to explain the passions—the element of humanity that is, though not the highest, nonetheless the most frequently manifest—as the result of external causes. And so our affective make up, our actual constitution, becomes in practice largely a product of those foreign forces that batter, mold, and shape us. We become, in one commentator’s choice phrase, the “Spielball der ihn umgebende Kräfte.” This second nature, as it were, hardly expresses our own true nature at all. And so, unexpectedly, Spinoza's thorough-going naturalism results in an anthropology wherein political psychology is largely the product of historical and contingent influences. While the Ethics may culminate by promising the “human freedom” of understanding nature sub specie aeternitatis, the bulk of human life is spent inevitably concerned with the world durationis, prisoners in a condition Spinoza calls “human bondage,” wherein “like waves on the sea, driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate.” Insofar as we thus founder, insofar as external forces cause us to suffer passions, we become determined by myriad desires, weaknesses, and imaginations so diverse as to deny any attempt at homogeneous description. As his political writings make clear, flesh-and-blood human relations resemble far more closely a desultory madness than they do the elegant formality of the Ethic’s geometric order. As such, his political writings warn us of the dangers that the passions pose to human life—but also of their inevitability and inescapability. In order to better understand the purport of Spinoza’s political thought, this dissertation focuses on a less-explored side of the Spinozistic philosophy, namely his account of imagination, madness, and the affects more generally speaking, for it is my belief that only by turning over these stones can we understand how he laid the foundations for the first modern theory of democracy. It would come as no surprise to Spinoza that today, more than three centuries after the inauguration of the Enlightenment era, superstition and dogma would continue to rear their heads and pose a threat to rational society. Spinoza was a rationalist but also a realist about political life; he saw reason as our essence but could also see in a mob of men the ultimi barbarorum. Passions are coeval with political life, and a successful politics must assess men as they are, and not by how we wish them to be. In our contemporary era, with democracy expanding its presence around the world—often in places where religion holds an even greater grip than it did in Spinoza’s own Netherlands—his reflections on the interrelationship of civil laws, religious beliefs, social passions, and human nature remain as vital as ever. Even a properly constructed democracy cannot solve the problems of political life, which are ultimately the problems of human life simply, but it can temper their most extreme excesses—assuming we understand their inception correctly.