SOURCE: “Human Freedom,” in Spinoza, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 169-89.

[In this essay, Donagan interprets Spinoza's philosophy of freedom in terms of his metaphysics.]

9.1. LIVING BY THE DICTATES OF REASON

To the extent that human beings are guided by reason, Spinoza has argued, there must be a ‘convergence of their conatus’.¹ It ‘follows from the necessity of [their] own nature’ that, outside civil society, human beings not only judge by their own wits (ex suo ingenio) what is good and evil, that is, what is advantageous to them and what is not, but also strive to return evil for what they imagine to be evil done to them from hatred (by E [Ethica, Ordine Geometrico demonstrata] 3p40c2), to conserve what they love, and to destroy what they hate (by E3p28). It is therefore by ‘the highest right of nature’ (‘summum jus naturae’) that they do so (E4p37s2—G II, 237/20-2). Yet the more adequately they think, the more clearly they perceive that what is generally useful for others of their kind is also generally useful to themselves. That others should love what they love is hateful to them only when what they love is not a good common to all; but love for a good not common to all always springs from some affect, and not from reason (E4p37s1—G II, 236/8-15).

If all human beings lived according to the guidance of reason, nobody would harm anybody else; for nobody would either cause sadness to anybody else, of imagine anybody else to cause sadness to him. Unfortunately, it is beyond most human beings to live so: they are ‘contrary to one another, even while they need one another's aid’ (E4p37s2—G II, 237/29-32), because they are subject to affects whose power far surpasses theirs. Yet the conceivable human being who of himself would always follow the guidance of reason is the model of rational conduct for all of them. Spinoza therefore proceeds to delineate that model; for anybody who of himself follows the guidance of reason must be free from servitude to affects (E4p70,72).

The affect of joy, although directly good, can be indirectly evil when it is pleasure, that is, when it is the idea of an increase in power of acting localized in some parts of the body; for it can be excessive, that is, it can be the idea of an increase that in fact prevents the power of acting of other parts of the body from being increased. By the same reasoning, sadness, although directly evil, can be indirectly good; for it can restrain excessive pleasure (E4p41-3). Cheerfulness (hilaritas), an idea of an increase in which all parts of the body share, is the only variety of joy that cannot be excessive; but cheerfulness ‘is more easily conceived than observed” (E4p44,s). Like joy, love and the desire it generates can also be excessive and so evil (E4p44); and if hate towards non-human things restrains such love and desire it is good. Hate directed towards human beings, however, cannot be good; for it is directed to the destruction of what is good for us, another human being. Nor can affects that are varieties of hate of other human beings—‘Envy, Mockery, Disdain, Anger, Vengeance, and the rest’—be good either (E4p45,c1).

Affects involving intellectual error, such as overestimation (existimatio), or ‘thinking more highly of someone than is just, out of love’ (E4AD21), and scorn (despectus), or ‘thinking less highly of someone than is just, out of hate’ (E4AD22), are obviously evil. Even worse are very great pride, that is, ‘thinking more highly of oneself than is just, out of love of oneself’ (E3AD28), and very great despondency, that is, ‘thinking less highly of oneself that is just, out of Sadness’ (E3AD29). For since the foundation of virtue is conserving one's being by the guidance of reason, you cannot be ignorant of yourself without being ‘extremely weak-minded’, and ‘highly liable to affects’ (E4p56d,c). Those who live according to reason will also strive to be independent of affects that arise from defects of cognition and lack of power in the mind, even when they involve no specific errors. Hope and fear are such affects. Others are confidence and despair, gladness and remorse (see 8.3), which arise in part from hope or fear (E4p47,s).

Another kind of affect from which the wise strive to free themselves is sadness about what cannot be helped. It too takes many forms. For example, pity, or ‘Sadness, accompanied by the idea of an evil that has happened to another whom we imagine to be like us’ (E3AD18), is both ‘evil of itself’, as involving sadness, and ‘in a man who lives according to the dictate of reason, useless’, because he will be moved to give what aid he can without it (E4p50d). Anticipating misunderstanding, Spinoza warns readers that he is speaking only of those who live according to reason: those who do not would ‘rightly be called inhuman’ if they were not affected by pity (E4p50s). Other forms of sadness about what cannot be helped (E4p53,54) are humility (E3AD26), and repentance (E3AD27); and these too are affects to which it is well that those not guided by reason are subject. Civil peace demands that most people be humble and repentant; for ‘the mob is terrifying, if unafraid’ (E4p54s—G II, 250/16).

Love is not evil as such, as hate is. Spinoza recognizes three forms of it as never contrary to reason except when they arise from error (E4p51,52,58): favour (favor), or ‘Love towards someone who has benefited another’ (E3AD19); self-esteem (acquiescentia in se ipso), or ‘Joy born from the fact that a man considers himself and his own power of acting’ (E3AD25); and love of esteem (gloria), or ‘Joy accompanied by the idea of some action of ours which we imagine that others praise’ (E3AD30). Unfortunately, all three can arise from error; and when they do, they are evil. Thus it is evil to favour an actor because you falsely believe that he has done heroic deeds of the sort his films depict him as having done; and radically evil to love the esteem of those whose praise you falsely believe is worth having. Since the esteem of the multitude is fickle, and usually gained by undermining the good name of rivals, love of it readily becomes a ‘monstrous lust’ (‘ingens libido’) (E4p58s).

It is a fundamental principle of Spinoza that those who live according to reason will ‘follow the greater of two goods, and the lesser of two evils’ (E4p65). Indeed, since ‘good and evil … are said of things insofar as we compare them to one another’ (E4pref), a lesser good by which a greater is prevented is evil, and a lesser evil by which a greater is avoided is good (E4p65c). So far as human beings think rationally, the idea of a thing will affect their minds equally, whether they conceive it as existing in the past, in the present or in the future (E4p62). Therefore it follows, according to the principle of the greater good, that ‘from the guidance of reason we want a greater future good in preference to a lesser present one, and a lesser present evil in preference to a greater future one’ (E4p66); and hence that ‘we shall want a lesser present evil which is the cause of a greater future good, and pass over a lesser present good that is the cause of a greater future evil’ (E4p66c). It also follows that, when the best that can be done is to avoid an evil rather than to overcome it by destroying its cause, we shall avoid it rather than attempt to overcome it (E4p69c).

Of course we often do not conduct ourselves rationally. True cognition of good and evil, which derives from common notions, is ‘only abstract and universal’, whereas our conclusions about what is good or evil derive from our imaginative judgements of ‘the order of things and the connection of causes’, and hence are often erroneous. For example, we cognize the duration of things imaginatively and inadequately, and images of present things often leave no room for images of future ones. When an idea of a present good excludes the idea of the greater evil that good will cause, desire for that present good will restrain desire to avoid that future evil (E4p62s).

Spinoza's portrait of a free human being, that is, of one ‘who lives according to the dictate of reason alone’ (E4p67d), consists of seven propositions. In the first, that ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’ (E4p67), he rejects the doctrine attributed in Plato's Phaedo to Socrates, that the life of a philosopher is a preparation for death. Whatever may remain of a human mind after death, and Spinoza believes that something of it does remain, as we shall see, a free man thinks of nothing less than it. He ‘desires the good directly’, that is, he ‘acts, lives, and conserves his being from the foundation of seeking his own advantage’ (E4p67d)—his advantage as rational of course, not his advantage as a mere animal.

That implies a proposition almost universally considered to be paradoxical from Spinoza's own point of view: that ‘A free man never acts with bad faith (dolo malo), but always with good faith (cum fide)’ (E4p72).² At first sight, it appears both to be defectively argued for, and to contradict the eighth ‘head’ in the Appendix to Ethics IV, that it ‘is permissible for us to avert, in the way that seems safest, whatever there is in nature that we judge to be evil, or able to prevent us from being able to exist and enjoy a rational life’ (G II, 268/10-13).³ Since a free man always acts according to the dictates of reason, Spinoza argues, if he ever acts dolo malo it must be virtuous to do so, and everyone would be well advised to act as he does.

That is [he continues], men would be better advised to agree only in words, and be contrary to one another in fact. But this is absurd (by p31c). Therefore &c.

(E4p72d)

To this, both Bennett and Allison object that even though ‘reason is supposed to dictate in the same way to everyone, and to speak only in general terms with no reference to particulars', it may ‘address itself to special kinds of case’.⁴

Their objection would be well taken if Spinoza were upholding the eccentric position into which Kant sometimes fell, that good faith makes no provision for special kinds of emergency which are not explicitly provided for when a person gives his word. But why suppose that? It is more reasonable to interpret Spinoza as asserting that free men are such that their word can be relied on, in matters of great importance, even when they undertake to do something which may cost their lives; and that to deny this is absurd. It is advantageous to be trusted when you undertake to do something that may lead to your death, even though your good faith may result in your freely dying. This doctrine is not rigorist about promises generally: it is not rigorist, for example, about petty ones in which unexpected emergencies are not provided for, or forced ones, or ones foolishly or wrongly given.

9.2. WHY FREE HUMAN BEINGS NEED TO LIVE IN STATU CIVILI

Human beings can live outside society (societas) with common laws—that is, they can live otherwise than in a state (status) they and their fellows have artificially brought into existence. Although they would ‘live harmoniously and be of assistance to one another’ in that non-artificial or natural (naturalis) state if they were free and guided by reason, they cannot, owing to their servitude to their passions. Hence they form political societies that, through a variety of arrangements, decide on, promulgate and enforce laws, and provide for the common defence against foreign attack. Spinoza described such societies as ‘civitates’ or ‘States’, and membership of them as the ‘civil state’ (‘status civilis’).⁵ Like most people, he believed that only in the civil state, that is, only as members of States, or citizens (cives), can human beings live prosperously and in harmony with their fellows (E4p37s2—G II, 237/26-238/17).

In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he set out the rudiments of a theory of what a State is, how it can contribute to human blessedness, and what can hinder it from doing so; and drew out its implications for the place of religion in the State, especially with regard to what its citizens are free to inquire into, and to publish. In Ethics IV, 37 schol. 2, he sketched the same ideas, but more abstractly and compactly. And finally, in the Tractatus Politicus, which was incomplete when he died, he set out to lay down the principles of politics, and by reference to them to show how the three possible forms of State, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, must be organized if they are to endure and serve the ends for which they were instituted.

Except with respect to its principles, Spinoza's political theory cannot be appraised simply as philosophy; for, as he acknowledged, all political theory must be tested by what he calls ‘experience’—that is, by history, recent or remote. That is why politici, those who have been engaged in public business, like Machiavelli, have written much better about politics than philosophers (TP [Tractatus Politicus], 1, 2—G III, 274/6-7). It is generally agreed that he intended what he wrote about the forms of State to bear upon the politics of his own time, especially in the Netherlands. I do not know how informed he was about the political situations to which he intended his theory to apply: about production and trade, internal and external; about colonization and struggles to control overseas markets; about how war was conducted, and how armies were recruited, trained and supplied; and about cultural and religious differences between and within States. Whatever he knew appears directly in his writings only in details: like Machiavelli, he preferred to take his illustrations from ancient literature, either the Jewish Bible or the writings of the Roman historians.⁶

While Spinoza's debt to the work of Hobbes is evident, and implicitly acknowledged in a letter to his friend Jarig Jelles (Ep [Epistulae] 50—G IV, 238/25-293/4),⁷ he radically criticizes Hobbes's theory of the nature of the contract by which States are instituted, and consequently takes a different view of what they both consider the fundamental political problem: the instability of free States.

Hobbes saw human politics as a predicament. On the one hand, we should all be better off if we acted according to what he called ‘the Lawes of Nature’ and Spinoza ‘the guidance of reason’, namely, ‘Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in Summe), doing to others as we would be done to’; but on the other, so acting is ‘contrary to [the] naturall Passions' that determine what most of us do.⁸ In our natural state, we cannot effectively agree or ‘convenant’ to observe the laws of nature; for ‘Covenants, without the Sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.’⁹ Hence, unless a power can be established that can and will enforce agreements to observe the laws of nature, ‘every man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art, for caution against all other men’.¹⁰ That power must be strong enough both to keep those subject to it permanently ‘in awe’, and to repel any interference from outside.¹¹ And it can be brought into existence only on the condition that virtually everybody subject to it in effect says to every other,

I authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.

‘This done’, Hobbes continues, ‘the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS’.¹² Commonwealths or States are either ‘instituted’ by common consent, or ‘acquired’ by natural force or war; but ‘the Rights, and Consequences of Sovereignty are the same in both’: namely, that sovereignty can neither be forfeited nor divided. No citizen or group of citizens has the right to judge the sovereign's discharge of his (or its) office. And that office itself, which is legislative, judicial and executive, is indivisible.¹³

Although Hobbes writes of this transfer of right to the sovereign as alienating it irrevocably, he restricts its scope. There are ‘some Rights which no man can be understood by any words or other signes, to have abandoned or transferred’, such as the right forcibly to resist those who assault him in order to kill or wound him, or to fetter or imprison him.¹⁴ However, as Spinoza understood him, Hobbes maintains that, even in statu naturali, contracts can bind you to do what you judge to be to your disadvantage. What he says about how contracts are voided and invalidated explains why. The right of nature possessed by all human beings, as Hobbes defines it, is their liberty to use their own power, as they themselves will, for the preservation of their own natures.¹⁵ Part of that liberty, as we have seen, cannot be alienated, namely, their liberty to defend themselves against death, wounds or imprisonment; but part of it can, namely, their liberty to use things or services in their power, providing that alienating it does not threaten death, wounds or imprisonment. Anybody may ‘convenant’ with others to alienate part of that liberty if those others convenant to do something from which he hopes to gain more than he loses. Such convenants are voided only by performance or forgiveness.¹⁶

Although Hobbes maintains that if you contract to perform your part first, you always have cause to fear that, having gained what he hoped for, the other will not perform his part, he also maintains that the other is obliged to, for he can no longer fear your non-performance.¹⁷ The most striking cases of this are contracts to do something in return for being liberated from duress: ‘if I be forced to redeem myselfe from a Theefe by promising him mony,’ Hobbes declares, ‘I am bound to pay it.’ True, he adds that ‘the Civill Law [may] discharge me’ from this obligation; but in statu naturali there is no civil law.¹⁸ Spinoza presumably accepted this as a well-considered part of Hobbes's theory, and not as a slip to be disregarded, because the liberty to make non-void contracts at will is treated by Hobbes as a fundamental part of everybody's right of nature.

There is a political application. Since you and your fellows, in binding one another to obey a sovereign who can and will enforce performance, do not bind yourselves to alienate your right to resist death, wounds or imprisonment, your contract is not void. Nor is it as a rule invalid; for you normally believe that the sovereign will enforce performance. Hobbes adds a further consideration. With respect to that part of their liberty social contractors can alienate, the contract that institutes a sovereign makes that sovereign their agent. ‘[E]very Subject is by this Institution [i.e. that of the State] Author of all the Actions, and Judgments of the Soveraigne instituted’; and therfore ‘he that complaineth of injury from his Soveraigne, complaineth of that whereof he himself is Author.’¹⁹

In Ethics IV Spinoza adopts two of Hobbes's doctrines: that it is a dictate of reason that human beings strive to be in statu civili, and not in statu naturali; and that they cannot put themselves in statu civili, as opposed to being coerced, unless they ‘give up their natural right’, that is, their right of nature as it is exercised in statu naturali, by agreeing to be members of a society that arrogates to itself the sole right to decide what rules of conduct may be upheld by force, and to employ that force (E4p37s2—G II, 237/35-238/1, 9-16). States are instituted if and only if their citizens agree (conveniunt) among themselves that each of them is to exercise his right of nature (just naturae) to seek his own advantage only in such a way that all his fellow-citizens can exercise their, that is, according to common laws (communia jura),²⁰ those who thus agree having together the common right (jus commune) to determine those laws (TP, 15-16, G III, 281/21-282/3).

Having recognized the common right of each to decide how to exercise his right of nature, those instituting a State may agree to vest that common right either in one person or in ‘a council (concilium)’, the council being composed either of ‘certain selected [persons] only’, or of ‘the common multitude’. So vested, this common right is customarily called ‘government’ (‘imperium’).²¹ In the first case the government is a monarchy, in the second an aristocracy, and in the third a democracy (TP, 2, 17). In any case, the government is empowered to regulate exercises of the individual right of nature that may prejudice peace or security: it must pass and enforce laws about property and personal security, and provide for the common defence against attack from outside. At this point, Spinoza took Hobbes to have wrongly inferred that, in so empowering government, citizens surrender their right to ‘do those things that follow from the necessity of their own nature’ if doing them is legally forbidden, saving only their inalienable right to resist death, wounds or imprisonment (E4p37s3—G II, 237/21-1): an inference he utterly rejected. As he wrote to Jelles,

the difference between Hobbes and me, about which you inquire, consists in this, that I always conserve natural Right intact (sartum tectum), and that I lay it down that the Supreme Magistrate in any City possesses no more right over subjects than is proportionate to the power by which he holds them in subjection, which is always the case in the Natural state.

(Ep50—G IV, 238/25-239/4)

Natural right must always be conserved intact. It is a law ‘so firmly written in human nature that it should be numbered among the eternal truths of which nobody can be ignorant’ that

no one forgoes anything he judges to be good, except from hope of a greater good, or fear of a greater loss: that is, everyone will choose what he judges to be the greater of two goods, or the lesser of two evils.

(TT-P [Tractatus Theologico-Politicus], 16—G III, 191/34-192/4, 6-7)

From this it follows at once that

no one will promise without deceit that he will yield his right to do everything, and absolutely no one will keep promises except from fear of a greater evil or hope of a greater good.

(G III, 192/8-10)

To Spinoza, as Wernham has observed, Hobbes's doctrine that contracts are invalidated only by fear of non-performance is ‘a flirtation with respectability’: something ‘more disreputable’ is called for (Wr, 29).

Given the right of nature, ‘an agreement can have no force except that of utility’ (G III, 192/25-6). ‘[I]n instituting a State’, therefore, the most important thing to remember is that ‘it is foolish for anyone to demand that another keep faith with him forever if he does not at the same time strive to bring it about that from breaking the contract it will follow that the breaker incurs more loss than gain’ (G III, 192/27-30; cf. TP, 2,3-12—G III, 276-80). Does it not also follow that those who institute a State covenant to alienate the inalienable? No, Spinoza replies, because, in contracting with others to give up the right to do part of what you do by the inalienable right of nature, in return for others' doing the same, both you and they expect that, as a result of contracting, it will not be advantageous to any of you to exercise that right as you did before. You believe that, by contracting, you will so change your condition that observing the contract and acting according to the right of nature will be the same: that the condition the contract brings about, your membership of a trustworthy group of free human beings, will be advantageous, even if situations may occur in which it requires you freely to give up your life. Yet, in contracting, you do not surrender the right of non-performance if you come to conclude that you have been deceived, and that the other members of your group are not free and so not trustworthy.

What then is the point of the contract? That all parties can co-ordinate what they do. Knowing that all agree to institute a State in itself gives each reason to predict that all or most will obey the State once instituted; and knowing that the State once instituted will have some power to coerce those who do not obey it gives them further reason. In other words: by contracting to institute a State, the parties change their situation from one in which they are in their natural state to one in which they are in a civil state, and they do so because they believe it will be to their advantage; but they surrender no part of their right to act, in either state, as they judge may be to their advantage.

The agreement by which a State is instituted binds those who make it, as all contracts do, solely because it is to their advantage to keep it. When citizens perceive that the State is weak, they withdraw their agreement to obey it; and they begin to suspect that it is weak when they find reason to think that their fellow citizens are withdrawing their agreement to obey it. Yet Spinoza derides Hobbes's attempt to break the circle by persuading the citizens of a weak State to support it; for it is contrary to their nature to do anything they judge to be disadvantageous, and it is disadvantageous for them to support a State that is perceived by their fellows to be weak. The circle can be broken only if those who govern a weak State can be persuaded to change their ways: to win the citizens’ support by governing in a way that is advantageous to them. It is a principle of Spinoza's politics that

sedition, wars, and contempt or violation of laws are to be imputed, not to the wickedness of subjects, but to the depraved condition of government (imperii). For citizens are not born, but made.

(TP, 5, 2—G III, 295/19-22)

States are instituted because human beings cannot live in peace and security in their natural state; but no agreement to institute a State becomes firm and habitual until life in that State has given its citizens confidence in its power to provide the peace and security they desire. Human beings become good citizens only because in good States they find that good citizenship is advantageous.

9.3. LIBERTY AND POLITICAL STABILITY

In political societies, or States, the power or right to govern is either freely instituted or acquired by right of war. Hobbes professed to have demonstrated that, whether instituted or acquired, the power to govern cannot be divided without destroying itself, and that the person or body exercising the power cannot retain it if subjects are permitted to judge for themselves either what its laws or decrees mean, or which are to be obeyed and which not. Spinoza accepted both demonstrations (TT-P, 16—G III, 193/30-4; TP, 3, 3-4). For him, as for Hobbes, it is a political triusm that a subject is bound, as a subject, to carry out lawful commands, even though he thinks them unjust (TP, 3, 5—G III, 286/10-11).

Spinoza largely confines himself to the only politics of practical interest to free human beings: that of States instituted by the common consent of their peoples, like those of western Europe in the seventeenth century (TP, 5, 6). Even in States so instituted, government can be so badly organized or exercised that its subjects must seriously consider withdrawing their consent to obey it. If it would dissolve the State, it would never be rational for them to do so; for reason itself teaches that peace is advantageous, that it can be attained only in States whose laws are kept, and that the peace of even a bad State is more advantageous for its citizens that the natural pre-political state. Hobbes, writing as an Englishman during the English Civil War, assumed that any serious civil disobedience would ultimately dissolve the State. Writing over twenty-five years later as a citizen of the Netherlands, Spinoza did not. Selective disobedience, he observed, has relieved hostility to bad governments. And States (e.g. the English kingdom) have remained intact while not only governments (e.g. that of King James II, after Spinoza died), but even forms of government (e.g. the pre-1688 Stuart monarchy) have been overthrown. ‘From the discords and seditions that often arise in a State it never comes about that citizens dissolve the State (as often happens in non-political societies), but that they change its form to another’ (TP, 6, 2—G III, 297/23-5).

There is a theoretical distinction between an agreement to institute a State, and a subsidiary agreement to institute a particular form of government; and because both citizens and those engaged in the business of governing sometimes draw that distinction, they can recognize that the subsidiary agreement has lapsed even though the former has not, and so can change a form of government without reverting to the natural state. Although his expressed attitudes to bad government are largely conservative,²² Spinoza recognized that governments are likely to conduct themselves well in proportion as they have reason to fear the disaffection of their subjects. His rational citizen, although no rebel, remembers Seneca's lines,

violenta nemo imperia continuit diu,
moderata durant;(23)

and takes comfort that the passions of his fellows ensure that no individual or grou can last as a government if it is perceived to govern contrary to the common good, whether from folly or from wickedness (TT-P, 16—G III, 194/5-16).

The fundamental principle of Spinoza's practical politics is that no form of government is stable unless it is so organized that the bulk of citizens, doing as always ‘what they personally think to be in their best interests’,²⁴ will continue to accept it. A State's authority is jeopardized if it commands its citizens to do what no one can be coerced into doing either by rewards or threats: whether it is something impossible by its very nature, for example giving up one's power of thinking for oneself, believing contrary to what one perceives or concludes by reasoning, or loving what one hates; or something ‘human nature so abhors it that it considers it worse than any evil [that can be inflicted]’, for example ‘bearing witness against oneself, torturing oneself, killing one's own parents, making no attempt to avoid death, and things of that sort’ (TP, 3, 8). Even when coercion is possible, Spinoza adds, commands that make numerous citizens indignant ‘hardly fall within the right of the State’ (TP, 3, 9—G III, 288/7-8); for ‘the power and right of the State are diminished in proportion as it gives cause to many to conspire together’ (G III, 288/12-13). Conversely, the power and right of the State are increased in proportion as it gives cause to many to consent to what it does.

Spinoza's defence of free speech in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus is his most celebrated application of his fundamental principle. ‘In a free State (libera respublica),’ the title of its concluding chapter gives notice, ‘everyone is allowed to be of what opinion (sentire) he chooses, and to say what it is’ (TT-P, 20—G III, 239/2-3). Since governments, whether monarchical, aristocratic or democratic, are instituted ‘to enable human beings to exercise their mental and physical powers in safety, to use their reason freely, and to prevent them from fighting through hatred, anger or bad faith, and from maliciously quarrelling with one another’ (G III, 241/4-8), a government of any form that denies its citizens the right freely to form and express opinions thwarts one of the purposes for which it was instituted, and so undermines the agreement that was made to institute it. Yet liberty to express opinions, as Spinoza conceived it, confers no right to denounce the institution of the State, or to incite civil disobedience. Citizens may be prosecuted for accusing the magistrates of injustice in carrying out their duties, for making them hateful to the people, or for unlawfully trying to abrogate a law. Spinoza nevertheless firmly believed that, as long as it is done honestly and without malice or law-breaking, forming and expressing opinions about defects in the law or in the conduct of magistrates, far from harming the State, benefits it. Human nature being what it is, ‘laws which proscribe opinions do not affect the wicked but the straightforward; they are passed not to coerce the crooked but to harass the honourable, and they cannot be upheld without great peril to government’ (G III, 244/9-13).

Hubbeling draws attention to three principal devices Spinoza employs, for the most part more ingeniously than persuasively, in his political proposals.²⁵ Two are obvious and familiar. First, wherever possible, he advises that important and controversial tasks be done by large numbers of citizens. Secondly, he recommends that offices in government be held only for restricted periods. Although he never renounces Hobbes's doctrine that the powers of government cannot be divided without danger to the State, he finds it beneficial that they cannot in practice be exercised only by one person (monarchies, he remarks, are in fact aristocracies, but of the worst kind—covert ones). Thirdly, he advises that common interests be created among different interest-groups, and that divisive interests be removed. Here his specific proposals are least persuasive. For example, assuming that in aristocracies the ruling aristocrats profit from holding commands in war while the populace suffers, he suggests, on the one hand, that the ruling senators be assigned the proceeds of a duty on exports and imports, and, on the other, that both senators and ex-senators be prohibited from performing military duty. By these two measures, he explains, ‘the senators will always have more to gain from peace than from war, and so will never advise war unless the highest necessity of government compels it’ (TP, 8, 31—G III, 336/31-337/15).

9.4. THE MIND'S POWER OVER THE AFFECTS

Spinoza wrote the earliest of his surviving writings in a Platonic mood: weary of the world and persuaded that ‘all the things that regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile’; and yet aspiring to find out ‘whether there [is] something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give [him] the greatest joy, to eternity’ (TdIE, [Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione] 1—G II, 5/8-9, 14-16). He was then not more than thirty. What he finally offers in the Ethics is subtly different: the unfolding (explicanda) of ‘those things that follow from the essence of God, or the infinite and eternal Being’, which ‘can lead us, by the hand, as it were, to cognition of the human mind and the highest blessedness’ (E2pref—G II, 84/8-9, 11-12). Although eternal, the highest blessedness the human mind can attain is not, as he unfolds it, a continuous state of the greatest joy. ‘It is impossible’, Spinoza argued, ‘that a human being should not be part of Nature, or that he should undergo no changes except those than can be understood through his own nature alone’ (E4p4); for ‘the force by which he perseveres in being is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes’ (E4p3). The best endowed human beings, even if whatever he does is done well, may die before he does much. Even so, it is an error, and a grave one, ‘to believe that Nature itself has failed or sinned, and left [that human being] imperfect’ when you ‘see something happen in nature which does not agree with the model [you] have conceived’ of a human being living according to the guidance of reason (E4pref—G II, 206/17-19). There is nothing imperfect in nature; for what is perfect is whatever is necessary in nature, and everything that happens in nature is necessary. The very concept of sin is social: in the state of nature it cannot be conceived (E4p37s2—G II, 238/23).

In setting out to describe ‘the means, or way, leading to Freedom’, by demonstrating ‘how great and of what kind’ is the ‘governing power (imperium)’ of reason over the affects, ‘for restraining and moderating them’ (E5pref—G II, 277/8-9, 17-18), Spinoza takes pains both to remind his readers that he has proved that reason does not have an absolute governing power over the affects (G II, 277/19-20) and to scoff at Descartes's doctrine that ‘there is no Soul so weak that is cannot—when it is well directed—acquire an absolute power of governing its Passions’ (G II, 279/4-5, 17-19). Since mind and body cannot interact, so far as affects are physical, the mind has no power over them whatever. Yet the body, like the mind, is active as well as passive (cf. 8.1). To the extent that the mind has power over affects as mental, the body has power over them as physical (E5p1d).

The body's remedy for disadvantageous affects is to seek situations in which its power of action will be increased and avoid those in which it will be decreased; and its power to do so is proportionate to its capacity to form physical images of itself and its environment. The ideas of those images will be the mental counterpart of the body's power: the power over affects as mental possessed by the mind, ‘considered only in itself’ (E5p20s—G II, 293/4-17). In Ethics V, 2-9, this power as familiarly exercised is shown to depend on three facts. In the scholium to Ethics V, 20, the three reappear, differently ordered, as the first four of five constituents of the mind's power over the affects, the third fact appearing twice, in relation to affects of two different kinds.

The first fact (it reappears as the second constituent) is that since most affects—all those directed to objects—are states of love and hate, and most states of love and hate involve the idea of an external cause conceived confusedly, they can be destroyed to the extent that they can be separated from the thought of an external cause (E5p2d,p20s—G II, 282/2-4, 293/8-9). The joy and sadness they involve remain; but joy and sadness, not being as such directed to objects, do not have the effects on conduct of love and hate. Suppose that you are consumed with hate for the toothache you have as you are driving to the dentist. With the help of Ethics III, you can form a clear and distinct idea of its kind, hatred of bodily pain. That enables you to proceed to other true thoughts, such as that, given the human condition, bodily pain is inevitable through life, that treatment is available and that you will receive it, and that there are other things about which you can more advantageously think; and that will detach your sadness from the idea of your decayed tooth as cause, and so reduce or even remove your hate. Most people learn to remedy their hate of moderate pain in this way.

Spinoza's claims for this power are modest. He pretends neither that by it you can remove (say) your hate of having a tooth drilled here and now without an anaesthetic, nor that reducing your hate of what you believe to be the cause of a pain will relieve your pain. Yet it is a real power. By it, you can often reduce, and sometimes remove, hate of the cause of a pain.

The second and third of the facts on which the mind's power over its affects depends form a pair, and at first sight an incompatible pair. The second is that ‘the more an affect is known (notior) to us, the more it is in our power, and the less the Mind is acted on by it’ (E5p3c), which is a corollary of the theorem that ‘an affect which is a passion ceases to be one as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it’ (E5p3). Since it has been proved in Ethics IV that ‘man is necessarily always subject to passions’ (E4p4c), we can also infer from this theorem that there are affects of which we cannot form a clear and distinct idea. At first sight that contradicts the third of Spinoza's facts, that ‘there is no affection of the Body of which we cannot form some (aliquem) clear and distinct concept’ (E5p4); but only at first sight. The proof of the third fact, which depends on the premise that things common to all can only be conceived adequately (G II, 282/23-4), shows that it is about what is common to all, that is, about affects as kinds, not as actually existing individuals. Hence the two facts, as a pair, come to this: while the mind has little or no power to form an adequate idea of an individual affect that is a passion, it has unlimited power to form adequate ideas of the various kinds of affect, and that gives it limited power over individual affects.

Of the constituents of the mind's power over the affects on Spinoza's final list, the first, third and fourth depend on this pair of facts. About the first, ‘cognition of the affects’ (E5p20s—G II, 293/7), little need be said. Simply being aware of what kind of affect is rejoicing or saddening you reduces its power to harm you by inducing a false idea of itself.

The third constituent, ‘the time by which the affections related to things we understand surpass those related to things we conceive confusedly’ (G II, 293/10-12), applies only to affects arising from things regarded as absent: for example, hate of those who have done you harm, or whom you fear may do you harm. Many affects that poison life are of this sort. To the extent that you are able to form adequate ideas of permanent conditions of life that enable you to escape the harms you fear, those ideas can be kept longer before your kind than the ideas of absent hateful things that will arise in it unless excluded. Keeping those ideas before your mind will affects you with a confidence (cf. E3AD14) which will exclude the existence of the hateful objects, and to which your hate ‘will have to accommodate [itself] … more and more, until [it] is no longer contrary to it’ (E4p7d—G II, 285/31-286/1). Thus, if you are troubled by images of cruelties you have suffered in the past from tormentors who have lost the power to harm you, a remedy is to train yourself to keep that fact in mind.

Here Bennett misrepresents Spinoza as ‘say[ing] in effect that in a conflict between a reasoned affect and an unreasoned one, the former is an immovable object, because it must ‘always’ be present—while the latter is a resistable force’.²⁶ No such thing. Spinoza does not imply that your unreasoned hate for the highway patrolman who is now presenting you with a summons for exceeding the speed limit can be overcome by reflecting on the rationality of the speed limit, and the justice of the patrolman's action. He has not forgotten his doctrine that

the true cognition we have of good and evil is only abstract or universal, and the judgement which we make about the order of things and the connection of causes, in order that we may be able to determine what in the present is good and evil for us, is imaginary rather than real.

(E4p62s—G II, 257/28-32)

In most human beings, imaginative ideas of real things present to them and causing sadness will exclude abstract reasoned ideas of the harmfulness of the excessive pleasure that sadness will restrict.

The fourth of Spinoza's constituents, ‘the multiplicity of the causes which foster affections that are referred to common properties or to God (GII, 13-14)’²⁷ enables you not to control the affects, but to endure them. Adequate ideas of general conditions of human life that cause you sadness are not contrary to affects referred to objects of inadequate ideas, and so do not exclude them; yet they can inhibit futile rage. Going further, and referring all your sadness to the course of nature, that is, to God, opens a further possibility, beyond the ‘remedies for the affects’ of which ‘everyone in fact has experience, though they neither observe them accurately nor see them distinctly’ (E5pref—G II, 280/22-4). It depends on the mind's power to ‘order its affects and connect them to one another’ (G II, 293/15-7). ‘[I]llnesses of mind and misfortunes originate above all in too much Love towards a thing which is liable to many variations and which we can never fully possess’ (G II, 293/35-294/3). Such excessive love changes like its object, and is not possessed but possesses. The mind, however, has the power to form an adequate idea of an object, God, that is immutable and can be fully possessed, and that elicits an intellectual love that is stronger than other loves. While not excluded by this intellectual love, other loves pale by comparison with it, and have less power.

Notes

1. Both phrase and thought are Matheron's (Matheron (1969), p. 274).

2. E4p72 is translated by Curley freely, as ‘A free man always acts honestly, not deceptively’ (C,586). What I have to say about it is influenced by Diane Steinberg's related but different interpretation (Steinberg (1984), pp. 321-4).

3. As Curley points out (C, 587 n. 37).

4. Cf. Bennett (1984), pp. 317-8; Allison (1987), pp. 158-9.

5. Unfortunately, the English word ‘state’ must be used both (i) for the Latin ‘status’ (Dutch ‘stand’), when it means something more specific than ‘condition’ but less specific than ‘status’; and (ii) for ‘Civitas’ (in Dutch usually ‘staat’, rarely ‘burgerschap’), when it means a political society (cf. C, 657, 667, 698). To reduce confusion, I render ‘status’ by ‘state’, and ‘civitas’ by ‘State’.

6. Much has been published in the last twenty-five years on Spinoza's political philosophy. Étienne Balibar, Spinoza et la Politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985) is an up-to-date introduction, with a well-chosen briefly annotated bibliography. Studia Spinozana 1 (1985), co-edited by Emilia Giancotti, Alexandre Matheron and Manfred Walther, admirably presents the present state of research on its ‘central theme’, Spinoza's Philosophy of Society. Books in French of special importance are: Matheron (1969) and (1971); Sylvain Zac, Philosophie, Theologie, Politique dans l’Oeuvre de Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1979); and André Tosel, Spinoza ou le Crepuscule de la Servitude (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1984). In English, there are McShea (1968) and D. J. den Uyl, Power, State and Freedom: an Interpretation of Spinoza's Political Philosophy (Assen: van Gorcum, 1983).

7. The writings of Hobbes that presumably influenced Spinoza were De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651).

8. Hobbes (1981), 17, 223/85.

9. Hobbes (1981), 17, 223/85.

10. Hobbes (1981), 17, 224/85.

11. Hobbes (1981), 17, 224-5/85-6.

12. Hobbes (1981), 17, 227/87.

13. Hobbes (1981), 17, 228/88; 20, 252-3/102.

14. Hobbes (1981), 14, 192/66.

15. Hobbes (1981), 14, 189/64.

16. Hobbes (1981), 14, 196/69.

17. Hobbes (1981), 14, 198/69.

18. Hobbes (1981), 14, 198/69.

19. Hobbes (1981), 18, 232/90.

20. Wernham translates ‘jura habent communia’ here and in the next section (G III, 281/32) as ‘hold rights as a body’ (Wr, 277). The plural ‘jura’, however, usually means ‘laws’: cf. Wernham's own translations of ‘jura statuendi’ (G III, 282/6—Wr, 279), of ‘decreta seu iura’ (GIII, 285/33—Wr, 287), and of ‘communia Civitatis jura’ (G III, 286/21-2—Wr, 298); and it is by exercising their inalienable jus naturae according to common laws that citizens live in peace. An example in which ‘jura’ means ‘rights’ rather than ‘laws’ is ‘imperii jura’ (TP, 7, 2—GIII, 308/12), which I take to mean ‘the rights of government’, and not ‘civil right’ (Wernham) or ‘the constitution’ (Hampshire)—cf. McShea (1968), p. 110.

21. In its political sense, ‘imperium’ stands, in classical Latin, for the power of a major magistrate; and, in Spinoza's writings, for the power of the magistracy. I translate it as ‘government’, because one sense of ‘government’ in English is ‘power of governing’. Curley's ‘Dominion’ is more exotic than ‘imperium’ (C, 681).

22. On Spinoza's political conservatism see Hubbeling (1964), pp. 120-1.

23. ‘No one long retains powers of governing violently used; those used moderately endure’ (Troades, 258-9). I owe the reference to Wernham, who points out that Spinoza also quotes the passage at TT-P, 5—G III, 74/4-5 (Wr, 94-5, 134-5).

24. Wr, 39. My debt to Wernham's discussion of the principle of Spinoza's model constitutions (Wr, 38-40) should be evident.

25. Hubbeling (1964), pp. 113-6; cf. Wr, 41.

26. Bennett (1984), p. 333.

27. My translation deserts the Latin passive ‘a quibus … foventur’ for the English active ‘that foster …’. Curley's ‘are encouraged’ for ‘foventur’ is unhappy.

Abbreviations

(A) Publications

C Curley, Edwin (ed. and tr.) The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1

G Carl Gebhardt (ed.). Spinoza Opera. 4 vols.

Every reference to a passage in Spinoza's works gives: (1) the title of the work in which the passage is found, together with (2) the number(s) of the division and, where appropriate, the subdivision(s), all as given in G, and (3) the volume, page(s) and line(s) of G. Except for the first, in consecutive references to the same division or subdivision of the same work, only the volume, page(s), and line(s) of G are given.

Wr Wernham, A.G. (ed. and tr.). Spinoza: The Political Works. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in Part and the Tractatus Politicus in Full.

(B) Titles of Spinoza's Writings

E Ethica, Ordine Geometrico demonstrata.

Ep Epistulae.

TdIE Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, et de via, qua optime in veram rerum cognitionem dirigitur. [C.H. Bruder divided TdIE into sections in his edition (1843-6); the numbers of those in which passages referred to occur are given as in C.]

TP Tractatus Politicus.

TT-P Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

(C) Subdivisions of DPP and E

a Axiom.

c Corollary.

d (not following a reference to a proposition) Definition.

d (following a reference to a proposition) Demonstration.

p Proposition.

s Scholium.

add Addendum—whether labelled as such or (as with E2p13add) not.

ap Appendix.

exp Explication.

AD Definition of an Affect (in E3add).

AGD General Definition of the Affects (in E3add).

L Lemma.

P Postulate.

Thus, ‘E2p13addL2’ abbreviates ‘Ethics Part II, Lemma 2 in the addendum to Proposition 13’.

Commas are used to indicate that the subdivisions signified by the abbreviations on both sides of the comma are referred to. Thus ‘E4p37,d,s2’ refers to proposition 37 in E4, and to its demonstration, and to its second scholium.

Bibliography

(1) Spinoza's Writings

Gebhardt, Carl (ed.) (N.D.), Spinoza Opera (Heidelberg: Carl Winter). 4 vols.

Wernham, A. G. (ed. and tr.) (1958), Spinoza: The Political Works. The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in Part and the Tractatus Politicus in Full (Oxford: Clarendon Press). …

(3) Philosophical Writings before 1850

Hobbes, Thomas (1981), Leviathan. Ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books [Pelican English Library]). A critical edition based on the ‘Head’ edition (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651). Page references are both to the Penguin edition (left of the stroke) and to the original (right of it).

(4) Philosophical Writings After 1850

[References to articles recorded as reprinted in collections are to the pages of those collections.]

Allison, Henry (1987), Benedict de Spinoza: an Introduction, Rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Bennett, Jonathan (1984), A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Hubbeling, H. G. (1964), Spinoza's Methodology (Assen: van Gorcum).

Matheron, Alexandre (1969), Individu et Communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions de Minuit).

———(1971), Le Christ et le Salut des Ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne).

McShea, Robert J. (1968), The Political Philosophy of Spinoza (New York: Columbia University Press).

Steinberg, Diane (1984), ‘Spinoza's ethical doctrine and the unity of human nature’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 22: 303-24.