Euclidean Morality
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mtvesselJuly 2014
Ethics - Benedictus de Spinoza, tr. Andrew Boyle - Heron Books, 1971
* * *
At the age of twenty-three, Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, ostensibly for heresy. I think it was because he was annoying. The Ethics is full of bold propositions about God, mind and the emotions, expressed as Euclidean-style proofs with a smug little Q.e.d. at the end of each one. He must have been infuriating to argue with, so certain of his own correctness and reason, refusing to listen to arguments based on anything else. I imagine him as an unholy combination of Richard Dawkins and Jeremy Clarkson.
Which is not to say that I don't admire him and the intellectual edifice that is the Ethics. There are some very interesting and thought-provoking ideas and I like the logical way in which it is set out. Some of his arguments are in my view specious or dependent on unstated assumptions, but one has to admire his ambition.
In the first section on the nature of God, he starts from a definition of God as a "substance of infinite attributes" where a substance is something that is conceived through itself (i.e. the idea of it cannot not be derived from the idea of another thing), and an attribute is something that the intellect perceives as being the essence of a substance. From these definitions and a few axioms, Spinoza asserts that a substance, being its own cause, must have the attribute of existence, and that therefore God, as a substance of infinite attributes, must exist. Since substances cannot share attributes (because this would mean that the essence of a substance can be defined in terms of another substance, which contradicts the definition of a substance), it also follows that there can be only one substance, i.e. God. This means that nothing can exist or be conceived of without God. He is also totally free in his actions (unstated assumption: a substance can act) and his attributes are eternal and immutable. Human will, however, can only be a necessary cause of action, not a free one (as it derives from the godly attribute of eternal thought and cannot therefore be its own (free) cause).
What's interesting about this is that Spinoza's notion of God essentially maps onto the notion of "everything conceivable". Morality doesn't get a look in anywhere, and indeed in the appendix to the first section, Spinoza takes to task those people who think that God (or gods) created the world for the benefit of humans - "But while they have sought to show that nature does nothing in vain (that is, nothing which is not of use to man), they appear to have shown that nothing else than [that] nature, the Gods and men are all mad."
In the second section, on the nature of the mind, Spinoza takes the concept of an infinite God and uses it to propose that there is a one-to-one mapping between ideas and the things that they represent. From this he asserts that the human body "is the object of the idea constituting the human mind" (an elegant sidestep around Cartesian dualism) and hence that anything happening to the body must necessarily be perceived by the mind. However, this perception will not be "adequate" (complete in itself) because it is merely one idea in the infinite intellect of God. In similar fashion, he proposes, inter alia, that any idea relating to God must be true; that knowledge obtained from casual or second-hand experience can be false but knowledge from reason and intuition cannot; that there is no absolute or free will; and that will and intellect are the same thing.
In part three, on the origin and nature of the emotions, one gets an increasing sense that Spinoza's argument, though supposedly based on pure reason and cold logic, is in fact polemical. He makes a distinction between adequate causes (where the effect can clearly be seen to be due to the cause) and inadequate ones (where it can't), and then rather dubiously applies it to ideas in a human mind, associating adequate ideas with the mind's actions and inadequate ideas with the mind's passions (he makes the interesting point that "passion" and "passive" - or at least their latin equivalents - come from the same root). There are three core passions: pleasure and pain are associated respectively with ideas that help or hinder the power of thinking (or "perfection of the mind" as Spinoza subsequently calls it) and desire is the conscious awareness of appetite, which is the endeavour of the body and mind to persist forever.
There follow about fifty propositions where he defines the emotions in terms of pleasure, pain or desire in particular circumstances. Love and hate, for example, are respectively pleasure and pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. He proposes that anything can accidentally be the cause of one of these emotions which explains why we can love or hate something without any obvious reason. Hope and fear are uncertain pleasure or pain arising from the idea of something in the past or future that might or might not materialise. And so forth.
Having reduced the emotions to three basic elements, Spinoza does much the same thing with morality. He defines good as "that which we certainly know to be useful to us" (i.e. for our preservation) and evil as its opposite. He then links them with the emotions by proposing that knowledge of good and evil is nothing more than the emotion of pleasure or pain in as much as we are conscious of them. Virtue, defined as the power to act according to one's own nature, is similarly linked to desire, leading to the somewhat outrageous claim that the basis of virtue is to "preserve one's own being" and that happiness consists purely in being able to do so. This is a somewhat unfortunate phrase in that it implies that happiness is linked to selfish solipsism, but Spinoza does not mean that; we need things outside ourselves for our preservation, and there is "nothing more useful to man than man". Thus someone guided by reason will "desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind, and therefore they are just, faithful, and honourable." He ties this back to God by saying that the nature of the mind acting under reason is to understand, and that therefore the greatest good of the mind is the understanding of everything conceivable, i.e. God. The remainder of the section is largely devoted to sorting the emotions into good or bad depending on whether they align with or oppose reason.
All this is leading to part 5, on the Power of the Intellect, which can reasonably be called the apotheosis of reason. Spinoza starts by being very rude about Descartes' theory that mind and body are joined at the pineal gland and that this is the way in which reason can affect the emotions and vice versa. Instead, he develops his model of adequate ideas, stating that reason, by increasing understanding, can strengthen positive emotions and weaken negative ones. He also thinks that self-knowledge leads to God, which is (presumably) a good thing - "he who understands himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so he understands himself and his emotions". This does lead to some rather startling assertions - that no-one can hate God; that understanding the causes of pain means that it ceases to be a passion (and is no longer painful); that the human mind cannot be completely destroyed with the body and is at least partly eternal; that God loves himself with infinite intellectual love (unstated assumption: a substance is capable of loving); and that the more the mind understands (and hence loves God), the less it will fear death.
As can be seen, some of Spinoza's propositions are pretty absurd which implies that there is something amiss with his basic model. I am not a philosopher and so cannot say precisely where the problem is, but I would guess that it arises from his failure to define certain of his terms (such as reason itself) and an overly reductive interpretation of other words (I am pretty certain that there is much more to the notion of evil than the mere awareness of pain). Nonetheless there is plenty here to appeal to a twenty-first century liberal intellectual. His attack on Cartesian mind-body dualism, with its mystical overtones, is welcome (even if he muddies the waters with his suggestion that the mind is partly eternal while the body is not, implying that the mind can to some extent exist without the body, albeit without any capacity to feel or remember) and his emphasis on the primacy of reason will appeal to anyone who thinks that law-making should be rational and evidence-based. And there is something very pleasing in a book about the supremacy of logic and reason making its argument through mathematical-style propositions and proofs, a fine marriage of theme and form.
I can see why the religious would not like his conception of God. It is fundamentally inhuman and Spinoza makes clear that worshipping it would be a waste of time ("he who loves God cannot endeavour to bring it about that God should love him in return"). So perhaps the elders of Amsterdam were right to excommunicate him. But they would have done better to argue with him. However annoying he was.
Ethics - Benedictus de Spinoza, tr. Andrew Boyle - Heron Books, 1971
* * *
At the age of twenty-three, Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam, ostensibly for heresy. I think it was because he was annoying. The Ethics is full of bold propositions about God, mind and the emotions, expressed as Euclidean-style proofs with a smug little Q.e.d. at the end of each one. He must have been infuriating to argue with, so certain of his own correctness and reason, refusing to listen to arguments based on anything else. I imagine him as an unholy combination of Richard Dawkins and Jeremy Clarkson.
Which is not to say that I don't admire him and the intellectual edifice that is the Ethics. There are some very interesting and thought-provoking ideas and I like the logical way in which it is set out. Some of his arguments are in my view specious or dependent on unstated assumptions, but one has to admire his ambition.
In the first section on the nature of God, he starts from a definition of God as a "substance of infinite attributes" where a substance is something that is conceived through itself (i.e. the idea of it cannot not be derived from the idea of another thing), and an attribute is something that the intellect perceives as being the essence of a substance. From these definitions and a few axioms, Spinoza asserts that a substance, being its own cause, must have the attribute of existence, and that therefore God, as a substance of infinite attributes, must exist. Since substances cannot share attributes (because this would mean that the essence of a substance can be defined in terms of another substance, which contradicts the definition of a substance), it also follows that there can be only one substance, i.e. God. This means that nothing can exist or be conceived of without God. He is also totally free in his actions (unstated assumption: a substance can act) and his attributes are eternal and immutable. Human will, however, can only be a necessary cause of action, not a free one (as it derives from the godly attribute of eternal thought and cannot therefore be its own (free) cause).
What's interesting about this is that Spinoza's notion of God essentially maps onto the notion of "everything conceivable". Morality doesn't get a look in anywhere, and indeed in the appendix to the first section, Spinoza takes to task those people who think that God (or gods) created the world for the benefit of humans - "But while they have sought to show that nature does nothing in vain (that is, nothing which is not of use to man), they appear to have shown that nothing else than [that] nature, the Gods and men are all mad."
In the second section, on the nature of the mind, Spinoza takes the concept of an infinite God and uses it to propose that there is a one-to-one mapping between ideas and the things that they represent. From this he asserts that the human body "is the object of the idea constituting the human mind" (an elegant sidestep around Cartesian dualism) and hence that anything happening to the body must necessarily be perceived by the mind. However, this perception will not be "adequate" (complete in itself) because it is merely one idea in the infinite intellect of God. In similar fashion, he proposes, inter alia, that any idea relating to God must be true; that knowledge obtained from casual or second-hand experience can be false but knowledge from reason and intuition cannot; that there is no absolute or free will; and that will and intellect are the same thing.
In part three, on the origin and nature of the emotions, one gets an increasing sense that Spinoza's argument, though supposedly based on pure reason and cold logic, is in fact polemical. He makes a distinction between adequate causes (where the effect can clearly be seen to be due to the cause) and inadequate ones (where it can't), and then rather dubiously applies it to ideas in a human mind, associating adequate ideas with the mind's actions and inadequate ideas with the mind's passions (he makes the interesting point that "passion" and "passive" - or at least their latin equivalents - come from the same root). There are three core passions: pleasure and pain are associated respectively with ideas that help or hinder the power of thinking (or "perfection of the mind" as Spinoza subsequently calls it) and desire is the conscious awareness of appetite, which is the endeavour of the body and mind to persist forever.
There follow about fifty propositions where he defines the emotions in terms of pleasure, pain or desire in particular circumstances. Love and hate, for example, are respectively pleasure and pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. He proposes that anything can accidentally be the cause of one of these emotions which explains why we can love or hate something without any obvious reason. Hope and fear are uncertain pleasure or pain arising from the idea of something in the past or future that might or might not materialise. And so forth.
Having reduced the emotions to three basic elements, Spinoza does much the same thing with morality. He defines good as "that which we certainly know to be useful to us" (i.e. for our preservation) and evil as its opposite. He then links them with the emotions by proposing that knowledge of good and evil is nothing more than the emotion of pleasure or pain in as much as we are conscious of them. Virtue, defined as the power to act according to one's own nature, is similarly linked to desire, leading to the somewhat outrageous claim that the basis of virtue is to "preserve one's own being" and that happiness consists purely in being able to do so. This is a somewhat unfortunate phrase in that it implies that happiness is linked to selfish solipsism, but Spinoza does not mean that; we need things outside ourselves for our preservation, and there is "nothing more useful to man than man". Thus someone guided by reason will "desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind, and therefore they are just, faithful, and honourable." He ties this back to God by saying that the nature of the mind acting under reason is to understand, and that therefore the greatest good of the mind is the understanding of everything conceivable, i.e. God. The remainder of the section is largely devoted to sorting the emotions into good or bad depending on whether they align with or oppose reason.
All this is leading to part 5, on the Power of the Intellect, which can reasonably be called the apotheosis of reason. Spinoza starts by being very rude about Descartes' theory that mind and body are joined at the pineal gland and that this is the way in which reason can affect the emotions and vice versa. Instead, he develops his model of adequate ideas, stating that reason, by increasing understanding, can strengthen positive emotions and weaken negative ones. He also thinks that self-knowledge leads to God, which is (presumably) a good thing - "he who understands himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so he understands himself and his emotions". This does lead to some rather startling assertions - that no-one can hate God; that understanding the causes of pain means that it ceases to be a passion (and is no longer painful); that the human mind cannot be completely destroyed with the body and is at least partly eternal; that God loves himself with infinite intellectual love (unstated assumption: a substance is capable of loving); and that the more the mind understands (and hence loves God), the less it will fear death.
As can be seen, some of Spinoza's propositions are pretty absurd which implies that there is something amiss with his basic model. I am not a philosopher and so cannot say precisely where the problem is, but I would guess that it arises from his failure to define certain of his terms (such as reason itself) and an overly reductive interpretation of other words (I am pretty certain that there is much more to the notion of evil than the mere awareness of pain). Nonetheless there is plenty here to appeal to a twenty-first century liberal intellectual. His attack on Cartesian mind-body dualism, with its mystical overtones, is welcome (even if he muddies the waters with his suggestion that the mind is partly eternal while the body is not, implying that the mind can to some extent exist without the body, albeit without any capacity to feel or remember) and his emphasis on the primacy of reason will appeal to anyone who thinks that law-making should be rational and evidence-based. And there is something very pleasing in a book about the supremacy of logic and reason making its argument through mathematical-style propositions and proofs, a fine marriage of theme and form.
I can see why the religious would not like his conception of God. It is fundamentally inhuman and Spinoza makes clear that worshipping it would be a waste of time ("he who loves God cannot endeavour to bring it about that God should love him in return"). So perhaps the elders of Amsterdam were right to excommunicate him. But they would have done better to argue with him. However annoying he was.