When that whose outcome was doubtful becomes certain, hope is changed into confidence, while fear is changed into despair. All of the human emotions, in so far as they are passions, are constantly directed outward, towards things and their capacities to affect us one way or another.
Aroused by our passions and desires, we seek or flee those things that we believe cause joy or sadness. But the objects of our passions, being external to us, are completely beyond our control. Thus, the more we allow ourselves to be controlled by them , the more we are subject to passions and the less active and free we are. The solution to this predicament is an ancient one.
Since we cannot control the objects that we tend to value and that we allow to influence our well-being, we ought instead to try to control our evaluations themselves and thereby minimize the sway that external objects and the passions have over us. We can never eliminate the passive affects entirely. We are essentially a part of nature, and can never fully remove ourselves from the causal series that link us to external things. But we can, ultimately, counteract the passions, control them, and achieve a certain degree of relief from their turmoil.
The path to restraining and moderating the affects is through virtue. Spinoza is a psychological and ethical egoist. All beings naturally seek their own advantage—to preserve their own being and increase their power—and it is right for them do so. This is what virtue consists in.
Since we are thinking beings, endowed with intelligence and reason, what is to our greatest advantage is knowledge. Our virtue, therefore, consists in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, of adequate ideas.
The best kind of knowledge is a purely intellectual intuition of the essences of things. They are apprehended, that is, in their conceptual and causal relationship to the universal essences thought and extension and the eternal laws of nature. But this is just to say that, ultimately, we strive for a knowledge of God. The concept of any body involves the concept of extension; and the concept of any idea or mind involves the concept of thought.
So the proper and adequate conception of any body or mind necessarily involves the concept or knowledge of God. What we see when we understand things through the third kind of knowledge, under the aspect of eternity and in relation to God, is the deterministic necessity of all things. We see that all bodies and their states follow necessarily from the essence of matter and the universal laws of physics; and we see that all ideas, including all the properties of minds, follow necessarily from the essence of thought and its universal laws.
This insight can only weaken the power that the passions have over us. We are no longer hopeful or fearful of what shall come to pass, and no longer anxious or despondent over our possessions. We regard all things with equanimity, and we are not inordinately and irrationally affected in different ways by past, present or future events.
The result is self-control and a calmness of mind. Our affects or emotions themselves can be understood in this way, which further diminishes their power over us. The third kind of knowledge generates a love for its object, and in this love consists not a passionate joy but an active one, even blessedness itself. He takes care for the well-being and virtuous flourishing of other human beings. He does what he can through rational benevolence as opposed to pity or some other passion to insure that they, too, achieve relief from the disturbances of the passions through understanding, and thus that they become more like him and therefore most useful to him.
He does this not from altruistic motives but egoistic ones: he sees that it is in his own best interest to be in communion with other rationally virtuous individuals. Moreover, the free person is not anxious about death. The free person neither hopes for any eternal, otherworldly rewards nor fears any eternal punishments. He knows that the soul is not immortal in any personal sense, but is endowed only with a certain kind of eternity.
This understanding of his place in the natural scheme of things brings to the free individual true peace of mind, even salvation. Free human beings will be mutually beneficial and useful, and will be tolerant of the opinions and even the errors of others. However, human beings do not generally live under the guidance of reason. The state or sovereign, therefore, is required in order to insure—not by reason, but by the threat of force—that individuals are protected from the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest on the part of other individuals.
He also defends, at least as a political ideal, the tolerant, secular, and democratic polity. A person guided by fear and hope, the main emotions in a life devoted to the pursuit of temporal advantages, turns, in the face of the vagaries of fortune, to behaviors calculated to secure the goods he desires. Thus, we pray, worship, make votive offerings, sacrifice and engage in all the various rituals of popular religion.
But the emotions are as fleeting as the objects that occasion them, and thus the superstitions grounded in those emotions subject to fluctuations. Ambitious and self-serving clergy do their best to stabilize this situation and give some permanence to those beliefs and behaviors. Only then will we be able to delimit exactly what we need to do to show proper respect for God and obtain blessedness. This will reduce the sway that religious authorities have over our emotional, intellectual and physical lives, and reinstate a proper and healthy relationship between the state and religion.
A close analysis of the Bible is particularly important for any argument that the freedom of philosophizing—essentially, freedom of thought and speech—is not prejudicial to piety. Thus, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, inhabit two distinct and exclusive spheres, and neither should tread in the domain of the other.
The freedom to philosophize and speculate can therefore be granted without any harm to true religion. In fact, such freedom is essential to public peace and piety, since most civil disturbances arise from sectarian disputes. From a proper and informed reading of Scripture, a number of things become clear. First, the prophets were not men of exceptional intellectual talents—they were not, that is, naturally gifted philosophers—but simply very pious, even morally superior individuals endowed with vivid imaginations.
This is what allowed them to apprehend that which lies beyond the boundary of the intellect. Moreover, the content of a prophecy varied according to the physical temperament, imaginative powers, and particular opinions or prejudices of the prophet.
The prophets are not necessarily to be trusted when it comes to matters of the intellect, on questions of philosophy, history or science; and their pronouncements set no parameters on what should or should not be believed about the natural world on the basis of our rational faculties.
The ancient Hebrews, in fact, did not surpass other nations in their wisdom or in their proximity to God. They were neither intellectually nor morally superior to other peoples.
God or Nature gave them a set of laws through a wise lawgiver, Moses , which they obeyed, and made their surrounding enemies weaker than them. Their election was thus a temporal and conditional one, and their kingdom is now long gone. True piety and blessedness are universal in their scope and accessible to anyone, regardless of their confessional creed. The law of God commands only the knowledge and love of God and the actions required for attaining that condition.
Such love must arise not from fear of possible penalties or hope for any rewards, but solely from the goodness of its object. The divine law does not demand any particular rites or ceremonies such as sacrifices or dietary restrictions or festival observances.
The six hundred and thirteen precepts of the Torah have nothing to do with blessedness or virtue. They were directed only at the Hebrews so that they might govern themselves in an autonomous state.
The ceremonial laws helped preserve their kingdom and insure its prosperity, but were valid only as long as that political entity lasted. They are not binding on all Jews under all circumstances. They were, in fact, instituted by Moses for a purely practical reason: so that people might do their duty and not go their own way.
This is true not just of the rites and practices of Judaism, but of the outer ceremonies of all religions. None of these activities have anything to do with true happiness or piety.
A similar practical function is served by stories of miracles. Scripture speaks in a language suited to affect the imagination of ordinary people and compel their obedience. Rather than appealing to the natural and real causes of all events, its authors sometimes narrate things in a way calculated to move people—particularly uneducated people—to devotion.
Every event, no matter how extraordinary, has a natural cause and explanation. At the same time, he thereby reduces the fundamental doctrine of piety to a simple and universal formula, naturalistic in itself, involving love and knowledge. This process of naturalization achieves its stunning climax when Spinoza turns to consider the authorship and interpretation of the Bible itself. Others before Spinoza had suggested that Moses was not the author of the entire Pentateuch for example, Abraham ibn Ezra in the twelfth century and, in the seventeenth century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
But no one had taken that claim to the extreme limit that Spinoza did, arguing for it with such boldness and at such length. Nor had anyone before Spinoza been willing to draw from it the conclusions about the status, meaning and interpretation of Scripture that Spinoza drew.
Spinoza denied that Moses wrote all, or even most of the Torah. Moses did, to be sure, compose some books of history and of law; and remnants of those long lost books can be found in the Pentateuch. But the Torah as we have it, as well as as other books of the Hebrew Bible such as Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were written neither by the individuals whose names they bear nor by any person appearing in them.
Spinoza believes that these were, in fact, all composed by a single historian living many generations after the events narrated, and that this was most likely Ezra the Scribe.
It was the post-exilic leader who took the many writings that had come down to him and began weaving them into a single but not seamless narrative. Canonization into Scripture occurred only in the second century BCE, when the Pharisees selected a number of texts from a multitude of others. He was dismayed by the way in which Scripture itself was worshipped, by the reverence accorded to the words on the page rather than to the message they conveyed.
If the Bible is an historical i. Just as the knowledge of nature must be sought from nature alone, so must the knowledge of Scripture—an apprehension of its intended meaning—be sought from Scripture alone and through the appropriate exercise of rational and textual inquiry. This is the real word of God and the foundation of true piety, and it lies uncorrupted in a faulty, tampered and corrupt text. The lesson involves no metaphysical doctrines about God or nature, and requires no sophisticated training in philosophy.
Spinoza claims, in fact, that a familiarity with Scripture is not even necessary for piety and blessedness, since its message can be known by our rational faculties alone, although with great difficulty for most people. By reducing the central message of Scripture—and the essential content of piety—to a simple moral maxim, one that is free of any superfluous speculative doctrines or ceremonial practices; and by freeing Scripture of the burden of having to communicate specific philosophical truths or of prescribing or proscribing a multitude of required behaviors, he has demonstrated both that philosophy is independent from religion and that the liberty of each individual to interpret religion as he wishes can be upheld without any detriment to piety.
There had always been a quasi-political agenda behind his decision to write the TTP, since his attack was directed at political meddling by religious authorities. But he also took the opportunity to give a more detailed and thorough presentation of a general theory of the state that is only sketchily present in the Ethics.
Such an examination of the true nature of political society is particularly important to his argument for intellectual and religious freedom, since he must show that such freedom is not only compatible with political well-being, but essential to it. Naturally, this is a rather insecure and dangerous condition under which to live. As rational creatures, we soon realize that we would be better off, still from a thoroughly egoistic perspective, coming to an agreement among ourselves to restrain our opposing desires and the unbounded pursuit of self-interest—in sum, that it would be in our greater self-interest to live under the law of reason rather than the law of nature.
We thus agree to hand over to a sovereign our natural right and power to do whatever we can to satisfy our interests. That sovereign—whether it be an individual in which case the resulting state is a monarchy , a small group of individuals an oligarchy or the body-politic as a whole a democracy —will be absolute and unrestrained in the scope of its powers.
Obedience to the sovereign does not infringe upon our autonomy, since in following the commands of the sovereign we are following an authority whom we have freely authorized and whose commands have no other object than our own rational self- interest. The type of government most likely to respect and preserve that autonomy, issue laws based on sound reason and to serve the ends for which government is instituted is democracy.
Monarchy, on the other hand, is the least stable form of government and the one most likely to degenerate into tyranny. The sovereign should have complete dominion in all public matters secular and spiritual. There should be no church separate from the religion instituted and regulated by the state. This will prevent sectarianism and the multiplication of religious disputes.
All questions concerning external religious rites and ceremonies are in the hands of the sovereign. Justice and charity thereby acquire the force of civil law, backed by the power of the sovereign. For this reason, it is misleading to proclaim Spinoza as a proponent of the separation of church and state. This is a matter of inalienable, private right, and it cannot be legislated, not even by the sovereign. Nor can speech ever truly and effectively be controlled, since people will always say want they want, at least in private.
There must, Spinoza grants, be some limits to speech and teaching. Seditious discourse that encourages individuals to nullify the social contract should not be tolerated. But the best government will err on the side of leniency and allow the freedom of philosophical speculation and the freedom of religious belief. It is hard to imagine a more passionate and reasoned defense of freedom and toleration than that offered by Spinoza.
Note: There is an enormous body of literature on Spinoza in many languages, especially French, Italian, Dutch and German. There is also the irregularly published series Studia Spinozana , each volume of which contains essays by scholars devoted to a particular theme. Biography 2. Ethics 2. Theological-Political Treatise 3. Ethics The Ethics is an ambitious and multifaceted work. Proposition 1 : A substance is prior in nature to its affections. Proposition 6 : One substance cannot be produced by another substance.
Proposition 7 : It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist. Proposition 8 : Every substance is necessarily infinite. Proposition 14 : Except God, no substance can be or be conceived. Ip29 : In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way.
All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God. I, Appendix God is not some goal-oriented planner who then judges things by how well they conform to his purposes.
I, Appendix A judging God who has plans and acts purposively is a God to be obeyed and placated. For if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance for often many circumstances do concur at once? Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on—for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing?
And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, i. I, Appendix This is strong language, and Spinoza is clearly aware of the risks of his position.
As he explains, A circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing, which is explained through different attributes. Therefore, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of Extension, or under the attribute of Thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes, i.
Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.
III, Preface Descartes, for example, believed that if the freedom of the human being is to be preserved, the soul must be exempt from the kind of deterministic laws that rule over the material universe. Our capacity for evil is then but a genetic trait that has been recreated and passed down to us all the way since the fall from Edenic grace. This argument — that God preferred endowing us with freedom rather than making us slaves to fate — is still spectacularly prominent among Christian theologians.
What of moral responsibility, which we, as heirs to Immanuel Kant, believe to be intrinsically associated with the power to discern, through a free act of the will, the right course of action?
What would happen to criminal law if one of the, if not the central philosophical presupposition of that practice— that we act with a certain extent of willingness and can be judged on our freedom to act— were to be eroded? Everywhere accountability is sought, it is usually the instinct for punishing and judging which seeks it… the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty.
This is one of many passages where Nietzsche expresses the idea that free will is but a human, all-too-human invention. In particular, he adopts the psychological view that the concept was reproduced so as to reinforce those who were in positions of power, including theologians.
In other words, free will finds itself as an instrumental doctrine for the discharge of cruel instincts to punish and the ensuing feeling of power. Nietzsche is but one stroke in the free will-denying painting that has tinted Western thought in the past few centuries, and perhaps no discipline has lent more epistemic force to the idea that free will is an illusion than physics.
With the success of Newtonian physics in the 17th century, the mechanistic picture of the world which we know from the likes of Spinoza and Hobbes became deeply entrenched in Western thought.
The idea is that all things are contingent on something which has caused it, and that these things themselves will be causes to new effects. It would violate both the laws of physics and logic to remove, say, my choosing a Moscow Mule over a Negroni from the endless chain of events that compose existence. With the exception of quantum physics, which has identified events at the atomic and subatomic level that are, like the atoms of Lucretius, truly random rather than necessary — events so miniscule that they have no bearing in practical life and the concept of free will — physicalist accounts of the world and scientific inquiry are forced to deny free will in the face of evidence and the logical rules set out by philosophers and logicians of past ages.
Contemporary scientists of all fields also seem to point in the same direction. One may respond that such accounts are only valid if we accept their ontological exclusion of the experience of freedom which necessarily follows from a reductionist, physicalist account of things these also tend to emphatically relegate the existence of the subjective theatre of consciousness to a mere illusion.
But the physicalist may retort that the burden of proof rests on non-physicalists to be able to demonstrate how free will exists beyond experience, or even how its experience may actually amount to something like its reality. Such examples show just how marred in logical and linguistic controversy the whole discussion can be, and the view that the whole problem is but an intellectual confusion is in fact another, rather underrepresented voice of contemporary philosophy, perhaps even behind that of philosophers following the Christian classical tradition relying mostly on Aristotelian metaphysics.
It is perhaps from this assumption — that discussions of free will tend to verge on confusion — that two thinkers already mentioned above, Spinoza and Nietzsche, may help us reconsider the problem as a whole. There are important divergences in these two thinkers, and yet they construe a consistent picture of freedom that is actually understood as power , as power of acting.
I argue in section 3 that despite some important differences, there are many ways in which Spinoza's views, so far from being anti-Cartesian, can be seen as a natural development of those of Descartes.
I then go on to argue in Section 4 that Spinoza's general critique of the Cartesian theory of the will does not take sufficient account of what Descartes actually claimed, and that if the Cartesian concept of freedom is properly understood, Spinoza is closer to it than he himself recognized. Finally in Section 5 I say a brief word about the relation between the will and the passions, and suggest that here again Spinoza tended to misinterpret Descartes' true position, and as a result exaggerated the difference between his own views and those of Descartes.
I hope that it will emerge by the end of the paper that for all Spinoza's anti-Cartesian flourishes, his views on the will are much closer to those of Descartes than is often supposed. This distinction is important for many reasons.
Descartes sees the problem of error as a theological problem, rather like the traditional problem of evil. Instead of having to explain away moral or metaphysical evil, Descartes feels himself called upon to explain away intellectual error; but the reasons why an explanation seems called for are closely parallel. Just as, if God is good and the omnipotent creator of all, it seems odd that there should be evil in the world, similarly, if God is good and the source of all truth, it seems odd that there should be error.
More specifically, if God created me and gave me a mind which is, in principle, a reliable instrument for the perception of truth,, how does it happen that I often go astray in my judgments?
0コメント