SOURCE: “Spinoza on Self-Consciousness and Nationalism,” in History of European Ideas, Vol. XVI, No. 4-6, 1993, pp. 915-20.

[In the essay that follows, Freeman considers Spinoza's conception of self-consciousness and nationalism to be extensions of his “ontological-physical” model of humanity.]

I

In this essay I focus upon the concept of self-consciousness and nationalism as developed in Spinoza's physics, psychology of man, and extended into his treatment of political community. Spinoza is a seventeenth century thinker who advances a unique interpretation of man that is firmly grounded in the rich and varied modes of philosophical self-consciousness. This interpretation of the Dutch philosopher is essentially an ‘ontological-physical’ model of man, a logical extension from the Ethics to his political writings, which is rife with political and sociological consequences for nationalism itself.

I shall argue that Spinoza, following the principle of metaphysical concreteness, advances a view of self-consciousness and the nation that is necessarily grounded in the truth of human nature as it exists in the ‘order of things’. This truth consists of the logic of human nature as it is firmly rooted in the Idea Dei.

Also, Spinoza's willingness to follow the question of order lies not only at the heart of his understanding of man and self-consciousness, but it serves as a most interesting critique of nationalism as a political phenomenon. The essence of this critique takes the form of a bi-modal view of man. That is to say, Spinoza's ontological-physical doctrine suggests both a first and third-person account of man. It is within the formal and objective configurations of these respective accounts that we find Spinoza's understanding of self-consciousness and his insightful views regarding nationalism.

II

Throughout the world the multi-facited faces of nationalism are undergoing a metamorphosis that has, at least in modern times, no parallel. At the heart of this metamorphosis is ideological deconstruction and parallel restructuring; particularly in Eastern Europe. With the advent of these phenomena an examination of some of the most important implied and expressed relationships between self-consciousness and nationalism appears all the more important.

The French conception of popular sovereignty and German romantic anthropological nationalism constitute the ground upon which modern nationalist doctrine rests (Kohn, Hertz, Reiss, Achulhan). Within this dual grounding nationalism is found to have two particularly interesting faces—legal/political and philosophical/metaphysical.

In the tradition of John Locke and eighteenth century Enlightenment the legal/political face of nationalism connotes a multi-facited and varied ethos. The major attributes of this ethos include a cultural tradition, language, loyalty, a body of accepted symbols, membership, place of birth, and parentage. These attributes tend to transcend legal/political dynamics narrowly defined and take on the power and will of a political ideology (Germino, Youl Yoo). This type of socio-political structuring can best be described as individualist and atomistic where shared group phenomena constitute the point of reference.

Along with the tradition of Locke and eighteenth century Enlightenment the legal/political face of nationalism is laden with anthropological consideration. There is for instance the assumption that man is a social and political animal and as such is, in the spirit of Protagoras, the ‘measure of all things’. There is the supposition that man embraces a natural commitment to the nation, and nations are indigenous to the order of things. There is the postulation that each nation is entitled to a government of its own chosing and political legitimacy is predicated on the realization of national and state autonomy. Finally, there is the proposition that national identity and national unity derive from political organization and the latter is molded and shaped by an accepted political ideology.

Legal/political nationalism is enveloped by what Eric Voegelin has termed ‘metastatic faith’; a mind set where man is believed to be the center of the universe and the architect of all that can be termed real. Here self-consciousness is not an individual endeavor but a group phenomenon of the first-person account.

The philosophical/metaphysical face of nationalism reflects the somewhat mystical mind sets of Plato, Hegel and Schleiermacher. Here nationalism is seen as an expression of an idea or spirit. Idea and spirit connote an acute philosophical and metaphysical character where the idea itself is understood to be a reflection of the divine image. The substantial, the universal is taken as basic and constitutes the aim for the individual. The divine is necessarily pluralistic and is constitutive of an infinite number and type of nation-states. The diversity of nations, therefore, is not only a reflection of the diversity to be found in reality, but of the diversity to be found in the face of God. Hence, both political sovereignty and political pluralism are mandated by the divine image.

Along with this mandate is the supposition that man is capable of knowing at lest some of the faces of God. There is the acknowledgement that man's happiness is not defined in terms of sensual pleasure, wealth, nor honor. Man's principle endeavor is to ‘participate through his partial and finite reason in the divine reason’ (Germino, 19). This participation leads man to the conclusion that the state is his second nature. He acts for the state and the well-being of society. This postulation presupposes that man has a moral and ethical duty to preserve the nation-state. It mandates that man's desires and purposes are, at least in part, supplied by the state (Maldenhauer and Michael; Pekzynski).

The philosophical/metaphysical face of nationalism embraces the third-person sense of self-consciousness. Man loves God above all things and his true happiness is found in the proposition that the love of God ‘must hold the chief place in the mind’ (Ethics, 255).

Both of these faces of nationalism necessitate radically different understandings regarding self-consciousness and nationalism and it is at this point that I turn my attention to Spinoza.

III

Spinoza's understanding of self-consciousness involves the claim that man is bi-modal—thought (cogitatio) and extension (extensio) (Elwes, Ethics, 86-87). This position is mandated by his psycho-physical doctrine and describes man as being both ‘a subsidiary system … made up of yet smaller systems’ (McShea, 1969: 133), and an integral part of the order of things. The bi-modal character of man is substantively grounded in the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. Natura naturans denotes ‘that which exists in itself and is conceived of itself, or, such attributes of substance as expresses an infinite and eternal essence; i.e. God, considered as libera causa (Martineau, 225; Ethics, 68). Natura naturata, on the other hand, denotes ‘all that follows from the necessity of the divine nature or of any one of the attributes of God; i.e. all modes of God's attributes considered as things which exist in God and without God can neither exist nor be conceived’ (Martineau, 225; Ethics, 68). Natura Naturans translates into a third-person account.

The first-person account of man is fundamentally Hobbesian. Man is assigned to the corporeal and in the tradition of Democratis is viewed as an atom subject to the mechanical laws of physics. The laws of physics are translated into a mechanistic psychology where the dominant forces are the desire for power and/or the fear of death, competition, diffidence and glory. Man is simply a collection of interests where these primary forces, acted upon by a metastatic faith, push and or pull man to and fro. These psychological forces, enveloped in the socio-political dynamics of metastatic structuring, are confronted with the same consequences as the random motion of atoms—collisions result. In terms of human interaction these collisions come to be known as para-military, military, religious and race wars.

Furthermore, one of the major consequences of man in the first-person is he is essentially isolated; the latter resulting from psychological and emotional factors. Man is constantly fearful of that which causes him pain and despondently seeking that which will give him pleasure. This is an existence that is guided by man's ‘fleshly instincts’ (Mark; Elwes, 1951: 73) and illuminated in Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. It is an existence where ‘Machiavelli's and Rousseau's founder—legislators’ and Hobbes' sovereign ‘become the sources of order. They establish the legal framework of the modern nation-state, and order is maintained by horizontal forces (Machiavelli's factional struggle in a republican regime, Hobbes's rational bargain to dispense with private violence),’ and ‘Rousseau's immanent consensus animating a well-ordered community …’ (Germino, 29).

In one sense it can be truly said that existence for man in the first-person is laden with the stuff of which nationalism is made. There is in the Weberian sense a conscious connection between the psychological and emotional malleability of mass man and the lust for power and position on the part of an aspiring minority elite. This symbiotic relationship fosters what Weber has termed ‘volksgeist’ or national spirit (Beetham). Here volksgeist guided by the principles of kultur and gemeinschaften move the isolated individual to a first-person account of political order where ‘knowledge and power are joined in ideology in such a way that the only knowledge deserving of the name is that which is instrumental to attaining power and dominion over the environment and, ultimately, over man himself in his innermost being’ (Germino, 46).

When we move from the first-person account of man to the third we encounter a radically different relationship between man and man and man and the nation-state. While man in the first-person is chiefly concerned with self-preservation vis-à-vis power and dominion, man in the third-person is principally interested in cultivating a personality and developing a character that understands the union between man's mind and the mind of God. This understanding then does not translate into an atomistic political machine where the primary concern is with conflict resolution, but rather the discovering of the principles of right order in social existence.

The third-person account of understanding presupposes that the knowledge of God, though only adquate, ‘must be regarded as innate in the human mind and, so to speak, engraved upon it’ (Wernham, 89). This postulation involves more than a claim to initiate ideas. It also involves a theory of knowledge.

Spinoza's theory of knowledge consists of four stages or levels. The first level includes ‘perception arising from hearsay or from some sign which everyone may name as he pleases’ (Elwes, 8). The second level is perception arising from mere experience not yet classified by the intellect. The third level is ‘perception arising where the essence of one thing is inferred from another thing, but not adequately’ (Elwes, 8). Finally, ‘there is the perception arising where a thing is perceived solely through its essence, or through the knowledge of its approximate cause’ (Elwes, 1955: 8; Floistad).

Fundamentally, what Spinoza is doing here is distinguishing between the reality of true thought, the formal (forma) essence or authentic nature of the thing known, and its objective essence or the true idea of the thing in the mind of the knower. He insists that the mind is capable of knowing the objective essence of things. He employs the noun ‘reflection’ in order to argue for an identity between the objective essence, objective certainty, and the true idea of the thing under consideration. Hence, a reflective act allows the mind to form an idea of the idea as a consequence of its ‘formal’ reality. The formal reality of the idea lies within the structures and organisation of particular subsystems, and this reality is discernable through reason.

Reflective knowledge presupposes that the knower directly knows something to begin with. The something that is known is predicated on the claim that ‘the human mind is in its essence, God's mind, in its infinite modifications under the attribute of thought; in short … the intellect is divine’ (Wartofsky, 465). A direct apprehension of the formal essence of the thing under consideration, a direct apprehension of the cause or causes for why a thing is as it is, constitutes knowledge.

The third-person account of knowing is a dialectical process, but not the Cartesian metaphor for ‘foundations of knowledge’. Rather, there is a logical movement, a progress, from the first-person account to the third. The movement presupposes that God comes to know himself through the individual's knowledge of both God and man. The logic of the movement involves both the formal and objective existence of object and idea.

Unlike the first-person sense of knowing where man knows what it is like to be an individual, to know what it is like to be a particular individual body, the third-person account involves the unity of human nature and our knowledge of this unity through reason.

Mankind as a whole, being a complex individual whose parts are individual human beings, embraces both the formal and objective levels of existence. The single individual, man in the first-person, exists formally and is considered under the attribute of extension. Man in the third-person exists objectively and is considered under the attribute of thought. The dialectical process is a conjoining of these two levels where the individual goes from a mere descriptive mode of the modifications of the body to knowing how things are.

When one translates the third person ontological-physical account of man into political terms the differences between a first and third-person nation-state become readily apparent. The expectation here is the establishment of a nation-state that is third-person grounded and the embodiment of the principles of liberal republicanism.

Spinoza's understanding of republicanism turns the Hamiltonian model upside down in the sense that the advocacy of an adequate understanding of the dignity of the mind confronts us with the true foundation of the dignity of man. In turn, the dignity of the mind and the dignity of man confront us with the true dignity of God.

Man's dignity, his endeavor toward reasoned self-preservation, and the duty of the state take the form of a challenge, a quest. We are, individually and collectively, confronted with the task of forming an idea of man, of constructing a theory of human nature; an idea, a theory, that is the ideal, that is reflective of God himself. This project is not an end imposed on man by nature (Bentham). Nor is it a consequence of liberal policies following the guidance of moral purposes (Spencer and Green). Rather, it is a project which reason demands.

The necessity of reason transports Spinoza's understanding of nationalism well beyond the somewhat limited expections of both English and American perspectives. Attention is not focused primarily on the principle that reasoned self-preservation, and hence freedom, means being left alone by the state. Nor is it focused on some economic doctrine of laissez-faire, or some Rousseausque based conception of human perfectibility. Spinoza's understanding of nationalism interprets self-preservation and freedom as ruling oneself through the various dynamics of the body-politic which one has made one's own. This requirement, therefore, necessitates that Spinoza's nationalistic ethos embraces such principles as freedom of thought, philosophical speculation, freedom of religious belief, a separation of powers, an equitable distribution of land, real economic security for each citizen, a philosophically minded leadership, justice and charity as public concerns, a system of checks and balances, a body-politic who understands authentic values and places desire under the guardianship of reason; and, a people's that are free from both external bondage and emotional tyranny.

These are the basic component parts of the third-person state. They are suggestive of the liberal expression that is found in the works of Emile Faguet, Jan de Grandvillers, Matthew Arnold, Alexis de Tocqueville and Hanna Arendt. This sense of nationalism sees the content of man's dignity and self-worth involving more than that which the mechanical and institutional arrangements of the state will allow. This sense of nationalism sees the essence of man in general Tocquevillian-Arendtian terms where the emphasis is placed on the philosophical-ethically mutual psycho-political ethos between the people and the state.

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