Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination

Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination

Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination

Eugene Garver

The University of Chicago Press  •  Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57556-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57573-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226575735.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garver, Eugene, author.

Title: Spinoza and the cunning of imagination / Eugene Garver.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012513 | ISBN 9780226575568 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226575735 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. | Imagination (Philosophy) | Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. Ethica.

Classification: LCC B3999.I3 G36 2018 | DDC 199/.492—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012513

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

FIRST PART

CHAPTER 1  Adequate Ideas Are Infinite Modes

CHAPTER 2  Our Knowledge of God and Its Place in Ethics

CHAPTER 3  Spinoza’s Will to Power: How Does the Conatus Become a Desire to Increase Power?

CHAPTER 4  False Pleasures and Romantic Love

SECOND PART

CHAPTER 5  Conflicts among Emotions, among Ideas, and among People

CHAPTER 6  Hilarity and the Goods of Mind and Body

CHAPTER 7  The Strength of the Emotions and the Power of the Intellect

CHAPTER 8  Ethics and the Ethics: How Does Reason Become Practical?

Notes

Index of Names

Index of Passages in Spinoza’s Works

Acknowledgments

Writing about philosophy is generally a solitary business, and for me, writing about Spinoza has been especially so. I’m pleased to be able to acknowledge publicly some of the people whose conversations and correspondence have helped me along with this project, including Michael Della Rocca, Lenn Goodman, Susan James, Michael LeBuffe, Amélie Rorty, Kenneth Seeskin, and Elhanan Yakira. I am doubly grateful to Della Rocca and Yakira, whose generous and useful readings for the University of Chicago Press improved the book a great deal. My colleague at Saint John’s University, Steve Wagner, and my colleagues now at the University of Texas, Katherine Dunlop and Tracie M. Matysik, helped by not telling me I was crazy.

I owe a great debt not only to folks whom I’ve met through thinking about Spinoza, but also to old friends and former students with whom I share a formative education at the University of Chicago. We share, to varying degrees, an interest in Spinoza as well as a common sense of how to read and write philosophy. My deepest thanks go to Emily Groszholz, Ed Halper, and David Reed.

As I wrote the book, I just picked up whatever translation and edition of Spinoza was handy, checking the Latin when I felt it necessary. I have tried, with help from Taylor Miller, a graduate student at the University of Texas, as well as the Press’s copyeditor, Kathryn Krug, to make all the translations in the final version those of Curley’s complete works, rarely and silently emended. Editorial help from Zach Martin reduced the length and increased the readability of the final product.

This is the fifth book I’ve published with the University of Chicago Press, and I thank my editor, Elizabeth Branch Dyson, for encouragement and shepherding. I had expected this to be the fifth and last book I did in partnership with Doug Mitchell as editor, but it was not to be. For years I had been looking forward to expressing publicly the most fulsome and profuse thanks to Doug for twenty-five years of wise editorial advice and more than fifty years of friendship and intellectual stimulation and support. The odd and complicated career I’ve had would have been much rockier and probably much less productive without his help. I am very grateful.

Introduction

A book called Ethics that starts with God creates certain expectations. It is plausible to think that we will learn that the best way to live consists in some sort of orientation toward the divine. Calling it ethics according to the geometric method (Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata) sets up further expectations. How to live is going to follow deductively from our knowledge of divine nature.

What couldn’t be predicted from its title, or from its table of contents, is the role of the imagination both in people’s lives and in forcing the geometric method to take many detours on the route from God to freedom. The simple plot of ascent becomes, because of the imagination, a complex plot full of reversals and discoveries; the development of the Ethics is at the same time inevitable and constantly surprising. One could not predict that a presentation of ethics in the geometric manner would be a drama with a complex plot: geometry and drama seem to be incompatible genres, as far apart as the Bible and Euclid are in the Theologico-Political Treatise,¹ and it is not usual to talk about works of philosophy as dramas, and to identify their central argument as a plot. In a parody of Hegel’s cunning of reason (List der Vernunft), I call this complex plot the cunning of imagination.

The challenge of the Ethics is to see two sides of the imagination; it is just this ambivalence that drives Spinoza’s argument. As Kant says, the imagination is blind but indispensable.² Spinoza’s imagination comprises ideas of how we are affected, as opposed to the adequate ideas of the understanding which show how things really are. "To retain the customary words, the affections of the human Body, whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things. . . . And when the Mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines [imaginari]" (2p17s).³ Imagination is our original endowment; being guided by reason is an achievement. While imagination is always inferior to reason, there are better and worse ideas of the imagination. In the short run, some ideas are better than others because they are pleasant, and so increase our power to exist and to act, while painful ideas decrease it. In a longer run, some ideas of the imagination bring people together, while others create conflicts. And in the longest run, some ideas of the imagination lead to our being more rational, while others move us in the opposite direction.

The Ethics repeatedly shows how the imagination is inferior to reason and can be a barrier to reason’s development. And yet the imagination is not only indispensable for life, but the right development of the imagination leads to rationality. The imagination is indispensable even though it can lead us in all sorts of wrong directions. Even completely surrounded by a society of purely rational people, each of us would still have to live by our imaginations as well as reason. Being a philosopher or a sage does not exempt people from needing to lead lives of justice and charity. Consider these two remarks from the TTP, first from chapter 2 and then from chapter 4:

Those who have the most powerful imaginations are less able to grasp things by pure intellect. On the other hand, those who have more powerful intellects, and who cultivate them most, have a more moderate power of imagining, and have it more under their power. They rein in their imagination, as it were, lest it be confused with the intellect. (C 2:94, G 3:9)

We ought to define and explain things through their proximate causes. That universal consideration concerning fate and the connection of causes cannot help us to form and order our thoughts concerning particular things. (C 2:126, G 3:58)

Spinoza awards to the imagination many of the powers we normally ascribe to reason—the power to abstract from particulars and form general ideas, the power to make comparative judgments and formulate ideals and goals. Through the imagination, we can use material signs—language—to communicate ideas and emotions to each other. Although he sees all these as effects of the imagination, Spinoza does not see them as powers but weakness.

Those who have the most powerful imaginations are less able to grasp things by pure intellect. On the other hand, those who have more powerful intellects, and who cultivate them most, have a more moderate power of imagining. Those who live by imagination alone, whether it’s powerful or not, cannot know what they are missing. As I will emphasize repeatedly, Spinoza would deny Aristotle’s dictum that man by nature desires to know. On the other hand, those with a powerful imagination have a body that can be acted on and can act in many ways; the mind needs such a body if it is going to be rational, and so a powerful imagination and a powerful understanding go together. Those with a more powerful imagination participate in particularly human ways of going wrong. But only people, although we can go wrong in uniquely human ways, are capable of understanding.

For just one example of the power and poverty of a rich imagination, every person has a powerful enough imagination that he or she not only desires pleasure and tries to avoid pain—that is the universal law of the conatus—but also wants to get pleasure from specific sources. That is, people have loves and hates and not just pleasures and pains. We therefore construct, through the imagination and emotions, an objective world, a world with objects that cause our emotions and which we can in turn affect. Without this construction of objectivity within the imagination, people would never be able to construct a truly objective, mind-independent, world of adequate ideas and their objects.

The practical success of the Ethics depends on overcoming the following paradox. The imagination comprises inadequate ideas. It is part of the nature of inadequate ideas that they cannot recognize their own inadequacy. They can’t because the imagination is practically adequate. Thinking only in terms of inadequate ideas, that is, is sufficient to its tasks and so the imagination cannot realize that there is something better, namely adequate ideas. On this point the TTP is one with the Ethics:

We are completely ignorant of the order and connection of things itself, i.e., of how things are really ordered and connected. So for practical purposes it is better, indeed necessary, to consider things as possible. (C 2:126, G 3:58)

Intellectual knowledge of God, which considers his nature as it is in itself (a nature men cannot imitate by any particular way of life and cannot take as a model for instituting the true way of life) does not in any way pertain to faith or to revealed religion. So men can be completely mistaken about this without wickedness. (C 2:262, G 3:171)

The practical self-sufficiency of inadequate ideas makes the life of the imagination immune to philosophy. People have neither the resources nor any wish to escape from the self-contained cave of the imagination. The desire to know things adequately, by the second kind of knowledge, cannot arise from the first kind of knowledge. The cunning of imagination allows people to develop adequate ideas without ever aiming at them. Adequate ideas seem to be an alien presence in the mind, rather than a part of the mind, until the drama finally takes a happy turn in Ethics 4. The positive side of the imagination, that it is practically self-sufficient, is its negative side, that it doesn’t lead beyond itself to reason and adequate ideas. Not only do inadequate ideas not lead us to adequate ideas, but inadequate ideas and passive emotions will resist our attempts to convert them into adequate ideas and active emotions. Knowing that my anger is irrational rarely makes me want to give it up.

Spinoza’s Three Big Original Ideas

Like any great philosopher, Spinoza takes an existing philosophical vocabulary and modifies it to his own purposes. To take an obvious example, substance is defined as what exists in itself and can be conceived through itself (1def3)—nothing original here. But from it Spinoza draws a radical conclusion, that there is only one substance, God, and that everything else that exists is therefore a mode of that unique substance. Similarly, his definition of essence looks conventional enough: I say that to the essence of any thing belongs that which, being given, the thing is [NS: also] necessarily posited and which, being taken away, the thing is necessarily [NS: also] taken away; or that without which the thing can neither be nor be conceived, and which can neither be nor be conceived without the thing (2def2). Traditionally, only substances had essences. But while there is only one substance for Spinoza, anything—individual bodies and minds, but also particular passions and ideas—can have an essence. You, your hat, and your location are all modes of the single substance, God or nature, but you, your hat, and your location all have essences.

In addition to transformations like this, the Ethics contains three original ideas. Each is paradoxical, almost a contradiction in terms; each is central to his project, and there is a sense in which the three are identical. Each also receives little attention in the Ethics compared to the crucial role they play. They are the Infinite Modes, the Second Kind of Knowledge, and the Active Emotions. Since they involve Spinoza’s technical vocabulary, I can only introduce them schematically here.

The first two definitions of the Ethics are of causa sui and of the finite, and they look like an exhaustive distinction, but infinite modes fit neither. They are caused by something outside themselves, have an essence distinct from existence, making them modes, and yet are infinite. Everything that is either is in itself or in something else (1ax1); that is, everything is either a substance or a mode. Like God, infinite modes are permanent and indestructible. Like other modes, they are plural while God is unique.

The second kind of knowledge, next, is paradoxical because it represents a perfect sort of knowledge unique to finite minds, not shared by God. More paradoxical still, it is a set of ideas whose essence it is to be thought by finite minds, minds with imagination. The finite mind that thinks them somehow does not contaminate them with its finitude. We have the first kind of knowledge, imagination, because we are finite beings, and the connection between being finite and having imaginative and inadequate ideas is direct. But we have the second kind of knowledge because we are finite beings and have the first kind of knowledge. The connection between being finite and having adequate ideas is far from clear.

Active emotions, finally, are paradoxical because as affects, they are modes of being affected, yet as active, the individual, through its adequate ideas, is the complete cause of these affects. Without an external cause, or even the idea of an external cause, the active emotions can’t be individuated from each other, and the same holds for infinite modes and adequate ideas. Just as God is unique without being one in number, since number is an imaginative abstraction, so infinite modes, adequate ideas of the second kind, and active emotions are plural without being enumerated. They have no principle of individuation. But one can still have some adequate ideas without having them all.

All three of these original ideas, the infinite modes, the second kind of knowledge, and the active emotions, are ways of finding activity in a sea of passivity, of rising above the imagination, and so finding freedom in the power to be an adequate cause of one’s actions without usurping the power reserved for God, of being the adequate cause of one’s existence. The latter two original ideas, the second kind of knowledge and the active emotions, are ways of using the imagination to rise above the imagination. This is the cunning of imagination. In the absence of teleology, the cunning of imagination is the only way development and drama are possible.

Spinoza wrote at a time when infinity was beginning to receive a rigorous mathematical understanding. The interrelations between the finite and the infinite forms one of the chief themes of the Ethics. Nothing better illustrates the difference between reason and imagination than their competing conceptions of infinity: for the imagination, the infinite is the indefinite, something incomplete, while only the finite is actual; for reason, the infinite is self-limiting, complete and perfect, while the finite is a limitation of the infinite. The ethical project of the Ethics is to show how people can become immortal. Becoming immortal is a paradoxical enterprise because immortality seems to be one of those qualities—and the same holds for being finite or infinite—that something either necessarily has or necessarily cannot have. But people can become immortal. They have their beginnings in time but can escape time. Finite and infinite look incompatible and incommensurable. Yet the second kind of knowledge, the knowledge that is specifically human yet fully adequate, is an infinite idea thought by a finite mind. When a mind is dominated by its adequate and infinite ideas, we become immortal. This promise is sufficient reason to want to understand the Ethics.

Becoming Immortal and the Geometric Method

The first three parts of the Ethics contain those three original ideas. The last two parts constitute the real drama of the Ethics. The first three parts show that there are finite and infinite modes, inadequate and adequate ideas, passive and active emotions, but do nothing to interrelate those opposed ideas. In the last two parts, we see how finite and infinite are interrelated, how the finite can constrain the infinite and how the finite can become infinite. These are the possibilities Spinoza calls human bondage and human freedom. While he denies that mind and body can interact, finite and infinite do interact, and that interaction creates the possibility of ethics in the last two parts of Spinoza’s argument.

Judging from the first three parts of the Ethics, infinite and finite are simply incommensurable. Each finite thing is caused by another finite thing (1p28), with no interventions by anything infinite. The mind contains both inadequate and adequate ideas, but Part 2 develops inadequate and adequate ideas along parallel tracks. In the same way, active emotions appear as a surprise ending to Part 3, and we know nothing about how, if at all, they are related to passive emotions.

Starting in Part 4, though, finite and infinite are commensurable because people have adequate ideas in spite of the fact that their minds are themselves inadequate ideas. Both bondage and freedom are permanent human possibilities, and so a system, even a system without contingency, has to account for both. When an adequate idea is thought by a mind that is itself an inadequate idea, the issue is which of them, the thinker or the idea, has its nature dominate the result.

Human bondage comes from the fact that, regardless of any adequate ideas we might have, it is impossible that a man should not be a part of Nature, and that he should be able to undergo no changes except those which can be understood through his own nature alone, and of which he is the adequate cause (4p4). It follows that no affect can be restrained by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered as an affect (4p14) and a Desire which arises from a true knowledge of good and evil can be extinguished or restrained by many other Desires which arise from affects by which we are tormented (4p15). The finite can be more powerful than the infinite, as passive emotions can bound—make finite—adequate ideas. Human freedom, on the other hand, consists in the infinite ruling the finite, liberating the finite from its limitations by converting passive emotions into adequate ideas (5p2–4). And so I juxtapose those passages I just quoted from Part 4 with this, which is the focus of my chapter 7, from later in Part 4: To every action to which we are determined from an affect which is a passion, we can be determined by reason, without that affect (4p59). The first passages assert that passive emotions, aided by their powerful external causes, can always overpower our adequate ideas; the end of Part 4 and the beginning of Part 5 show that our intellect, constituted by adequate ideas, can conquer the passions. We gradually learn how adequate ideas lead to virtuous action, freedom, and salvation.

While the Ethics has a complex plot, it proceeds by the geometric manner and order (ordine geometrico). The geometric method does not move from God to human freedom and the immortality of the soul as quickly as possible. Instead, the Ethics does justice to the complexity of human experience, the human mind and body, and the complexity of the ethical project of living a life guided by reason. If the purpose of the Ethics was to get from God to human freedom as efficiently as possible, it would do all it could to purge the mind of the imagination and the passions, since they are only a hindrance to the final achievement of the human good. Instead, human complexity consists in the richness of the imagination and the passions both as a condition to be overcome and as a set of resources by which people can fully realize their rational essence.

The geometric method, or manner, makes the Ethics unusual in three ways. First, in how the book begins. Aristotle tells us to start with what is better known to us and move to what is most knowable in nature. Plato begins with conversations about some practical problem and from there ascends to the highest objects and most fundamental principles. Descartes starts from his own predicament as a knower in the Meditations and the Discourse on the Method, and from specific problems in the Geometry. None of this for Spinoza. His beginning, "By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing (1def1) is almost as sublime as Euclid’s opening, A point is that which has no part" (1def1). It is Euclid’s Elements, not Descartes’s Géometrie, that supplies Spinoza’s model.

Second, in Spinoza, as in Euclid, there is no privileged position, no God’s-eye view, no absolute space and time. God has no perspective. Euclidean space does not distinguish between up and down, right and left. Spinozan adequate ideas do not have what Leibniz will call a point of view.

Third, geometry is the paradigm of the cooperation of imagination and reason. The second kind of knowledge comprises ideas that are adequate but thought by a finite individual, that is, by an individual whose mind is itself an idea of the imagination. The second kind of knowledge embodies that cooperation of imagination and reason. Geometry is the paradigm of the subordination of imagination to reason, showing how the imagination is empowered by such subordination. The Ethics begins where imagination cannot go, the existence and nature of God. It ends where the geometric method cannot go, self-knowledge.

To adapt Kant’s terminology, we have to read the Ethics first mathematically, that is, separating the knower from the known. The Ethics is first a work of the imagination—Spinoza’s ideas, not mine. Reason becomes practical as we come to read the Ethics dynamically, as truths about ourselves. In the language of Republic V (458d), the challenge is to convert geometric necessities into erotic ones. The Ethics models that transition for us. For example, no individual can contain anything that is contrary to its essence (3p4). But individuals in fact contain such things; they are passions, and individuals have to exert themselves to expel them (3p6). That is the difference between reading the Ethics mathematically and dynamically, abstractly vs. personally. This is the interrelation between the plot of self-development and the geometric method.

Seeing the geometric method as an ethical project sounds deeply paradoxical. To soften the shock—and Spinoza is never interested in softening the shock of the Ethics—we could recall Socrates’s riposte to Callicles:

Wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order [cosmos], and not an undisciplined world-disorder. I believe that you don’t pay attention to these facts, even though you’re a wise man in these matters. You’ve failed to notice that proportionate equality has great power among both gods and men, and you suppose that you ought to practice getting the greater share. That’s because you neglect geometry. (Gorgias 508a)⁴

Compare those lines of Plato’s with these from the appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics:

The truth might have lain hidden from the human race through all eternity, had not mathematics, which deals not in the final causes, but the essence and properties of things, offered to men another standard of truth.

Two Critical Theses of the Ethics

I’ve identified Spinoza’s three original ideas. Part of the plot of the Ethics comes from Spinoza constantly coming close to affirming two ideas that he emphatically denies. I call these critical theses because they are not only crucial to his argument, but because much of the forward movement of the Ethics comes from places where Spinoza finds himself asserting things that are at least in tension with these two ideas.

First, the Ethics often asserts propositions that come into conflict with the thesis that The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things (2p7). Here is a series of examples, all of which, and several more, I consider in detail in what follows.

•  The first proposition he proves after 2p7, which is obvious from the preceding one, is that the ideas of nonexisting individuals are in the infinite idea of God in the same way as the ideas of existing things: the idea of something nonexistent is not itself nonexistent.

•  The mind cannot act on the body, nor the body on the mind (3p2). But politics depends on a distinction between minds and bodies: bodies can be coerced, but minds, he tells us, cannot.

•  Within the mind there are ideas of ideas, and it’s hard to see what could correspond in the body to such reflexivity.

•  Spinoza interrupts the argument of Part 2 to present what is often called the physical interlude. To determine what is the difference between the human Mind and the others, and how it surpasses them, it is necessary for us, as we have said, to know the nature of its object, i.e., of the human Body (2p13s). We learn, that is, differences between minds by looking at differences among bodies.

•  If reason extends further than the imagination, and the imagination consists in ideas of how the body is affected, then the mind has ideas without bodily counterparts: my understanding of Euclid I.47 is as much, or as little, about your body as mine.

•  Proposition 1 of Part 3 and 3p3 identify the mind being active with its having adequate ideas, and if the body is active, it seems to be so only derivatively, when the mind has adequate ideas.

•  The preface to Part 5 begins by distinguishing the project of the Ethics from medicine and logic, which respectively display the science of tending the body so that it may correctly perform its functions and the manner or way in which the intellect should be perfected. Logic and medicine are distinct, which seems clearly to imply that so too mind and body are distinct.

•  Finally, if he proves that the mind, or part of it, is immortal, the same cannot be said for the body.

All these are far from minor points in Spinoza’s argument, and each threatens mind/body identity. That identity is threatened not only when it looks like there are causal relations between mind and body, violating 3p2, but when one seems to act independently of the other, when a predicate applies to one without obvious counterpart for the other, as with adequate ideas being adequate causes, or ideas of ideas without a corporeal counterpart to that reflexivity.

The other idea that Spinoza constantly evades, albeit barely, is that of human uniqueness. People are a part of nature, not a kingdom within a kingdom. The only difference between people and other animals, indeed other individuals, is that we have a more complex body, and so a more complex imagination. And yet the Ethics narrows its subject, sometimes explicitly and often not, from finite individuals in general to human beings. What makes people unique, and what lets Spinoza narrow the Ethics to people without assuming some human nature, is that people relate to each other in unique ways. It isn’t human nature that is unique; it is human society that is unique. Among other things, only people have politics and religion, forms of the imagination that let people become rational as they live together. People form a species in ways that other beings do not. Marx’s formula that man is a species being, or Aristotle’s dictum that man is a political animal, get a new and profound meaning in Spinoza. Nothing is as useful to man as man (4p18s), while many things are more useful to a dog than other dogs, and the same for other nonhuman animals. The preface to Part 4 says that we form a model of human nature; I don’t think that pigs and bears form models of porcine or ursine nature. Ethics, at least until the last section of Part 5, is about how to live a life fully engaged in a community.

A clear example of his tacit limitation of a proposition to human beings without giving any reason for the limitation is 4p19: From the laws of his own nature, everyone necessarily wants, or is repelled by, what he judges to be good or evil. Its proof says nothing about people in particular. In addition, Spinoza just as often limits the objects of the emotions to other people as well. Hatred, he says, can never be good (4p45), and in the scholium he clarifies the meaning of the thesis by saying, Note that here and in what follows I understand by Hate only Hate toward men. If hate is pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and I necessarily try to remove the cause of pain, then in that sense I cannot live without hate. A mosquito causes pain, and I therefore must try to remove or disable it. It is only other people that I should not try to destroy. Sometimes it looks like the narrowing from individuals in general to human beings is not only silent but unfounded.

Our relations with other people are a principal cause of both bondage and freedom. Our emotional relations with other people construct an objective world out of the way things affect us, objective in the sense that it is composed of objects, other people, whom we see as causes of our pleasures and pains, but also as objects on which we can act to increase our power. Human interactions are a great source of increased activity and rationality in the world. The total amount of power in the universe is a constant. But people can act in such a way that action and passion are not contraries. One person can become more powerful not at another’s expense, but as the other person becomes powerful as well. That is the reason that human rationality is of cosmic significance.

The Drama of the Ethics

The Ethics has a plot which moves toward the ultimate happy ending in Part 5 of people becoming immortal although the mind is a confused idea in Part 2, although Part 3 displays the pathologies of human emotions, and although Part 4 makes human bondage look insuperable. Becoming immortal is a paradox: immortality almost by definition is a predicate that must always apply to a subject if it applies at all. Yet he who has a Body capable of a great many things has a Mind whose greatest part is eternal (5p39). To become infinite is to become immortal, and to become immortal without becoming God.

The Ethics is an odd drama. There shouldn’t be any suspense in a fully determinate world. There shouldn’t be reversals and discoveries in this story presented geometrically. Not only is it hard to see how freedom is possible without a will to be free and in a world without contingency, but it is equally hard to see how the narrative of the Ethics could have suspense. But it has development. One theme of that development is the narrowing, starting with Part 3, sometimes explicit but more often tacit, of the subject from all individuals to human beings to people guided by reason and finally to truly rational people whose lives are dominated by the intellectual love of God. A second dramatic development is the interpenetration between finite and infinite. That finite minds can have adequate ideas, as Part 2 asserts, is exactly as surprising as that those adequate ideas, as Part 4 shows, do not necessarily make the individual active. There is then tension, and an unpredictable outcome, in a battle between the finite and the infinite, between imagination and reason, a battle between human bondage and freedom.

I read the Ethics as a drama with a complex plot, complete with reversals and discoveries. But one of the most surprising discoveries is that the Ethics is a drama at all. Spinoza’s model, Euclid’s Elements, may have discoveries, but it is not a drama. The point of a geometric method is that everything unfolds with necessity. Just as it seems that Spinoza goes out of his way to make ethics impossible—everything happens by necessity; free will is an illusion; the mind cannot act on the body; neither people nor God nor nature acts for an end—his geometric exposition seems to make drama impossible: there are no characters except for God, and things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order than they have been produced (1p33). There is substance and there are modes, and they are distinct. There are infinite things, God and the infinite modes, and there are finite things, individual things, and there is no interaction between them. There are minds and bodies, and certainly no interaction between them. The mind is a confused idea of a body, and the unity of the body is simply that some smaller bodies are thrown together and act and are acted upon together, maintaining a proportion of motion and rest (Definition after Lemma 3 following 2p13).

But starting in Part 3, there are not only minds and bodies but individuals, and in particular human beings.⁵ Instead of minds and bodies, these individuals qualify as dramatic characters because their essence is something dynamic, the endeavor to persist as they are. These individuals have imaginative and emotional lives. There were motions in Part 2, but action enters the Ethics starting with the first two definitions in Part 3. The plot of the Ethics is the cunning of imagination, the way the imagination, without aiming at anything more than survival, becomes, for some people, something other than imagination, namely understanding or intellect.

The characters in the drama of the Ethics only appear in Part 3, and in Part 3 we see the variety of lives that people can lead, all rooted in the conatus. The characters who populate Part 3 are blind and ignorant; that is what it means be led by imagination. They are passively pushed forward, sometimes to dead ends such as jealousy or ambition, and sometimes to the pleasures that come from having adequate ideas and being the complete cause of one’s thoughts and action. This is the cunning of imagination. The finite nature of our minds does not prevent us from having adequate ideas, ideas that are not limited by any other ideas (Spinoza’s definition of finite). At the same time, we discover in Part 4, the finite nature of our minds can prevent those adequate ideas from fully living up to their nature: we can know what is best and, because of more powerful passions, do something worse. The first interaction between finite and infinite, unfortunately, is the interference of finite passive emotions that prevent our adequate ideas from being fully active. The more complex, specifically human imagination, makes people capable of the mistakes and pathologies cataloged in Parts 3 and 5 that wouldn’t fool simpler animals, superstitions and beliefs in free will, in an anthropomorphic God, and in final causes. Yet, eventually, Spinoza leads us to discover within ourselves the power of the intellect over the emotions, that is, as he has it, the power to be free. The drama of the Ethics consists in making finite and infinite commensurable so that, as Part 5 has it, the intellect can rule the passions, and people can thereby be free and immortal.

The plot contains a discovery: that its readers can progress, move from being the subjects of the geometric method to being its practitioners. Within the narrative, this discovery is the gradual emergence of a self, an agent. It is only gradually that this story has a main character. That process begins with the conatus, as the individual becomes a dynamic force, endeavoring to preserve itself. But the characters have farther to go. Part 5 is titled Of the Power of the Intellect, or On Human Freedom; the power of the intellect is power over the emotions, so by that point reason and passion have become distinct enough for the intellect to be an agent which knows itself by knowing the passions. It is only when virtue is identified with knowledge, and the intellect identified with the self, that the people in this drama become agents. Looking back, we can then see that the self and self-knowledge began to emerge late in Part 3, where we can reliably increase our power by reflecting on the power of the mind: When the Mind considers itself and its power of acting, it rejoices, and does so the more, the more distinctly it imagines itself and its power of acting (3p53), and in Part 4 where we know nothing to be certainly good or evil, except what really leads to understanding or what can prevent us from understanding (4p27). The development of freedom is the development of agency and an agent, when the mind is finally divided into the intellect and the emotions in Part 5.

The plot contains reversals, the most important of which is the movement (1) from mind/body identity, in which the mind is the idea of the body, but is so identical with the body that it lacks any critical distance that could allow it to be a true idea, to (2) the second kind of knowledge, which makes progress by being impersonal and detached from the perspective of the knower, to (3) a return to knowledge as necessarily first-person, but now self-knowledge, through the third kind of knowledge, of reason having power over the passions and so in union with God. The emotions that modify the first kind of ideas are as tied up with the ideas they modify as the mind is united to the body. The ideas of the second kind of knowledge do not have emotions necessarily attached to them, so that we can do geometry and know the passions dispassionately. But the obverse side of that detachment is that without motives attached to adequate ideas, they cannot play a central role in the life of the individual. In the third kind of knowledge, as with the first, idea and emotion are inseparable: knowledge of God is identical with the intellectual love of God.

There are other reversals and discoveries along the way. The imagination leads to specifically human pathologies, ways in which people act against the conatus or self-interest straightforwardly defined, but the imagination leads us astray only to make possible the ascent to rationality. For example, in romantic love the lover not only desires pleasure, but wants that increase in power to come from a specific source. Whenever that source is anything other than God, fixing on an object leads to obsession, vacillation, and disappointment. Yet the imagination also begins to construct an emotionally objective world. In another example, the imagination leads us to construct a model of human nature. With such a model in mind, we make comparative judgments, and so value our accomplishments not because they enhance our ability to preserve ourselves, but because they surpass the achievements of others, which helps not at all in self-maintenance. But the model of human nature also leads to aspirations to greater rationality, much as the universal creed does in the TTP. For a final example, people have a