The Politics of Spinoza’s Vanishing Dichotomies

Abstract

Spinoza’s project of showing how the mind can be freed from its passive affects and the State from its divisive factions (E IV.Appendix and V.Preface) ultimately coincides with the aims announced in the subtitle of the Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus (TTP) “to demonstrate that [the] freedom to philosophize does not endanger the piety and obedience required for civic peace.”¹ Both projects rest on a set of provisional isomorphic distinctions—between adequate and inadequate ideas, between reason and the imagination, between active and passive affects—that Spinoza proceeds to blur, and indeed to renounce. In using these distinctions while also moving to overcome them, Spinoza is not confused or indecisive. Every philosopher, every wise Sovereign, every free man who attempts to incorporate adequate ideas in inadequately framed, perspectivally limited contexts must use these distinctions and also see how deeply misleading they are. I want to offer a friendly amendment to Hasana Sharpe’s essay “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza” arguing that Spinoza refuses her distinction between the force of an idea and its truth.²

Keywords

Spinoza politics truth imagination

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References

The quotation is the subtitle of Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); I shall combine translations from Michael Silverstone and Jonathan Israel with those by Samuel Shirley, Spinoza: The Complete Works (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002) and by Edwin Curley, Spinoza , The Collected Works of Spinoza ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985) as well as his unpublished translation of TTP. Although the Ethics was published in 1677, seven years after TTP, Spinoza evidently worked on the two books during the same period. With caution, we can use the two works to illuminate one another.

Hasana Sharp , "The Force of Ideas in Spinoza," Political Theory 35 (2007): 732-54. Page references to Sharp’s article are placed in parentheses.

See Justin Steinberg , The Concept of Freedom in Spinoza’s Political Writings (PhD diss., Boston University, 2007).

See Amelie Rorty , "The Two Faces of Spinoza," Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XLI. (December 1987): 299-316 and "Spinoza’s Ironies: From Anger to the Intellectual Love of God," History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 17 (July 2000): 361-276.

Tacitus , Histories, 1.1.

Spinoza warns against a teleological interpretation of perfection: "By ‘perfection’ I understand only reality, or being. The greater the necessity of a being, the greater its reality or perfection." On Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, 7n2.

See Aaron Garrett , Meaning in Spinoza’s Method (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

See Genevieve Lloyd and Moira Gatens , Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (New York : Routledge, 1999).