Susan James: Why Should We Read Spinoza? (Royal Institute of Philosophy)

I'll begin by setting out an interpretive approach that's widely used I think by historians of philosophy including those who write on Spinoza and I'll consider what makes it attractive why do historians of philosophy choose to interpret Spinoza in you can't hear us James what do we do let me try this one there we go it sounds as though this one's healthier sorry how is this is that any better yeah good so why do historians of philosophy choose to interpret Spinoza in this particular way rather than others I'll answer the question by offering a hypothesis and I'll then go on to ask whether we can find any support for this hypothesis in the work of Spinoza himself and whether he would have endorsed the interpretive approach in question now as I speak you may be wondering what the point of this exploration might be and my answer is that it's threefold first it's a way of deepening our understanding of Spinoza's work by sort of following out some implications of it that he doesn't explicitly discuss it gives us I think a richer sense of his position secondly it offers a preliminary account of Spinoza's attitude to the history of philosophy by indicating what value he attached to investigations of the philosophical past and how he thought they could be useful and thirdly it paves the way for a broader historical analysis of Spinoza's place in the history of the history of philosophy so let me begin by outlining the interpretive approach that I'm going to focus on which has two elements here's the first element historians of philosophy often concentrate on historical positions and arguments that they agree with or that resonate with contemporary debate this isn't always so we can and we sometimes do scan the philosophical past for the utterly alien or the stimulating Li strange but it's common nonetheless for historians of philosophy to concentrate on aspects of the past that are also features of our philosophical landscape so for example it's currently fashionable to draw attention to Spinoza's naturalism what does that mean well here's how Don Garrett puts it Spinoza he says is an exponent of the project of fully integrating the study and understanding of human beings including the human mind into the the study and understanding of nature so that human beings aren't contrasted with nature but are instead understood as entities ultimately governed by the same general principles that govern all other things and part of what makes this aspect of Spinoza's work interesting to Garrett and others is the fact that many contemporary philosophers share this commitment to naturalism or to take another case a number of excellent commentators including Stephen B Smith and Steven Adler presents Spinoza as a liberal what makes this a rewarding interpretive take again well partly the fact that the analysis and defense of liberalism is a major theme within contemporary political philosophy so that's the first aspect of our interpretive historical approach historians find in Spinoza something that they value something that matters to them or to the philosophical community to which they belong moving on to the second l some interpretations of Spinoza's work not only bring out a commonality between his philosophical views and ours but also have a teleological flavor I think it's rare nowadays to come across commentators who offer full-blown teleological explanations in which particular historical events or processes are explained by appealing to an end to which they contribute but we can nevertheless detect a teleological flavor when the work of past philosophers for example is assessed in the light of contemporary values or praised for anticipating them for example we may be invited to admire Spinoza for taking a step on the road towards the articulation and defensive liberal values what makes his work important it's implied is that it makes a contribution towards the development of our way of life since flavours can be strong or weak this approach comes in degrees it's not at all uncommon to come across a hint of it maybe like one of those labels which says there's a hint of ginger in this flowery wine but there are also cases where the flavour is pretty powerful Jonathan Bennett for example sets out as he says to get Spinoza's help in discovering philosophical truth and he assesses Spinoza's claims for their contribution to that goal equally in a series of extraordinarily learned studies Jonathan Israel has portrayed Spinoza as the founder of what he calls radical enlightenment this is the historical process that issued in modernity conceived Israel says as an abstract package of values toleration personal freedom democracy equality racial and sex or freedom of expression sexual emancipations and the universal right to knowledge and enlightenment so here Spinoza's importance and interests as a philosopher is said to lie in the fact that he initiated a movement of which we are the culmination obviously I'm using we in a sort of very loose sense which as you know is always a sort of danger light in philosophy but I'll leave that for the discussion now the two aspects that I've mentioned our tendency to focus on doctrines or approaches that we agree with and our tendency to value past philosophers for contributing to the development of our own outlooks a logically distinct one could for example be interested in Spinoza's naturalism because one was a naturalist while denying that it played any role in the development of the forms of naturalism that are widespread today but despite their logical distinctness the two often go together and it's easy to introduce a teleological flavor by sliding from agreeing with Spinoza about some aspect of his position to implying that what makes his philosophy significant is the fact that it helped to produce our outlook I think it's relatively common for historians to slide a little way down that slope and when they do we get what I'm going to call a teleological interpretive approach to the history of philosophy now viewed from one angle the persistence of teleological approaches might be thought surprising as long ago as 1931 but historian Herbert Butterfield coined the term Whig history to describe narratives that portray the past as marching towards the enlightened condition of Democratic liberalism and in addition he outlined a string problems with this approach which are still very widely discussed so we must assume that historians of philosophy whose work has a teleological flavor are aware that they're vulnerable to a range of standard criticisms and of these I think two are particularly central first when we take a teleological interpretive approach we look to past figures for anticipations of ourselves and in doing so we run the risk of suppressing or ignoring the ways in which past philosophical beliefs or approaches differed from our own this homogenizing of history may distort it by excluding unfamiliar traditions or lines of argument and in doing so it may make the history of philosophy seem more boring than it is and induce a kind of weary sense that there's nothing new Under the Sun everything is a footnote to Plato and so on still worse it can turn the history of philosophy into an exercise in self-control a ssin in which our philosophical forebears our patted on the back for contributing to our for contributing or failing to contribute to our piercing insights Bertrand Russell for example gives Spinoza nought out of 10 for metaphysics and 10 out of 10 for ethics a second and closely related worry is that in pursuing teleological interpretive strategies we tend to present the history of philosophy as a single continuous process and usually as a progressive one but this is liable to conceal the extent to which philosophy whatever that is has been a fractured and diverse set of studies that don't all fit neatly together into one smooth overarching narrative and it may also blunt our sensitivity to the ways in which conceptions of philosophy itself have changed over time there may be more than one thing to study when we study the history of philosophy for instance when Russell dismisses Spinoza's metaphysics on the grounds that it makes no contribution to 20th century science he sets aside the possibility of which he is of course perfectly well aware that there may have been and may still be other reasons than that for valuing metaphysics these are powerful objections to Whig history and any serious historian of philosophy clearly needs to bear them in mind but teleological interpretations nevertheless persist and as this indicates the objections to them along the lines that I've just rehearsed are not regarded as decisive defenders of teleological approaches usually respond that they can easily avoid the abuses of which they're accused they can be sufficiently sensitive to the works of past philosophers to avoid producing grossly distorted interpretations of them while at the same time welding them into a progressive narrative and they can be sufficiently sensitive to the existence of a variety of past philosophical projects to avoid narratives that pull the history of philosophy grossly out of shape furthermore as long as they satisfy those requirements their approach has clear advantages since our interests in the past are bound to be shaped by our current philosophical concerns we are bound to respond to aspects of the past that speak to us and while there are all sorts of aspects of the philosophical history that can excite our curiosity it often just is aroused by our own philosophical antecedents if those are our philosophical interests in the past well what's wrong with trying to satisfy them why shouldn't we adopt a moderately teleological approach to the history of philosophy now in the generation before ours this challenge was vigorously pressed by Jonathan Bennett whose lucid and stimulating reconstructions of early modern philosophy remind us that the challenge is not an empty one and we continue to find it surfacing in current historiographical debate in short the debate between the advocates of a moderately Rigas of Whiggish approach and their opponents is still going back and forth and it shows no signs of reaching a resolution so how should we explain this standoff in order to understand the persistence of this debate it's not enough I want to suggest to focus on the intellectual strengths of the two opposing camps also at stake in their disagreement and this is my hypothesis our two contrasting pleasures on the one hand there's the anthropological pleasure that historians of philosophy gain from encountering the strangeness and unexpected variety of the philosophical past an excitement in the discovery of ideas suppressed and paths not taken on the other hand there's the satisfaction of recognizing ourselves in earlier traditions and sustaining our sense of philosophical progress to varying degrees I think historians of philosophy feel the pull of both these pleasures so that even those who are officially hostile to Whig history may sometimes find themselves drawn to interpretations with a just slightly teleological flavor the habit of valuing past philosophers for their contributions to our own comparatively enlightened condition gives us a kind of satisfaction that it's very hard I think for us to completely forgo as far as I'm aware analytical historians of philosophy haven't paid much attention to this aspect of our philosophical practice many of them privately acknowledge that individual interpreters invest emotionally in the philosophers they study that interpreters want their chosen figures to be admirable or nice and are frequently somewhat in love with them but they tend not to treat this emotional commitment as a theme that's worth studying perhaps that's because they regard it as a psychological phenomenon that lies outside the bounds of philosophical investigation but whatever the reason I think contemporary discussion of the history of philosophy is poorer for having lost touch with it epistemology is nowadays often remind us that we aren't rational creatures that we habitually reason badly and that we are more the playthings of our passions than we recognize but if that's so and if we want to get some critical distance on our practice as historians of philosophy we'll need to try to examine the pleasures the anxieties and the desires that attach to it so how can we reconnect with them I don't know how to give a fully satisfying answer to this question but I think that one way to begin to explore it is to turn to our philosophical past and specifically to philosophers for whom our effects lie at the heart of all our thinking and activity including of course the study of the history of philosophy here Spinoza's work offers an obvious starting point so what I'm going to do in the rest of this talk is to try to show how his analysis of the operations of our effects secretes an account of the desires and satisfactions that underlie teleological interpretive approaches and an assessment of their proper role within the history of philosophy so to get us started on this theme let me begin by outlining some general features of Spinoza's account of human effects this account is grounded on his view that human beings as he says strive to persevere in their being or as we can also put it strive to empower themselves at a very abstract level Spinoza thinks all our activities mental and physical can be described as efforts to empower ourselves however this striving is most personally manifested in our effects and above all in our desires which can again be summarized as at a very general level desires for states of affairs that we regard as empowering whether we're eating dinner with friends or struggling over a philosophical article whether we are walking down the street on autopilot or thinking through a delicate conundrum we are guided by desires that are ultimately for empowerment we take pleasure in the satisfactions that empowerment brings and we suffer when our power is diminished now as this suggests our overarching disposition to empower ourselves informs the way we understand ourselves it sensitizes us to our vulnerabilities and strengths and it Tunes us to the threats and opportunities that external things present so that our experience is fundamentally effective so for instance in the ordinary course of things we encounter not just people and objects but hateful enemies or exhilarating landscapes we feel not just we did this or that but we feel proud or a shame of what we have done and so on now this basic orientation Spinoza thinks does not have to be learned it is as it were already embedded in our natures in dispositions that shape particular areas of thought and action and incline us to behave in certain ways in Spinoza's detailed analysis of these dispositions we find I think the rudiments of an explanation of each of the two elements of tila the teleological interpretive approaches that I began by setting out the first of these you remember was our inclination to focus on past philosophical doctrines that we agree with and according to Spinoza we shouldn't be surprised by the hold that this has over us well why not in Spinoza's view individual human beings are not very powerful and they're surrounded by things that are much more powerful than they are so the way for us to increase our individual power is to join forces with other people and here Spinoza argues we're partly guided by a disposition to respond effectively to things that we take to be like us now in the first place this Orient's us towards other people as opposed say to paris to some degree we respond effectively to other human beings simply because we recognize them as like us for instance Spinoza says we pity people with whom we have no other connection or we desire things because other people want them we imitate their effects feeling sad at their sadness and wanting what they want but in addition our orientation towards people who are like us or a Spinoza also puts it who have something in common with us underlies some of our more narrowly focused effects for example it explains why we tend to compare to care more about our compatriots than about humanity at large and why in our search for friends and companions we tend to seek out people who share our tastes and ideals so that's the disposition we have according to Spinoza but now how do we go about satisfying it well in some cases our efforts are as you would expect a matter of exploration and discovery we try to find like-minded people with whose support we can increase our power and realize our aspirations but according to Spinoza that strategy is also crosscut by a much more impatient tendency to try to realize our desires not by as we're waiting until they can be satisfied but simply by imposing them on the world each of us he says strive so far as he can that everyone should love what he loves and hate what he hates each of us wants others to live according to his Ingenium or temperament so as well as being drawn to people with whom we already have things in common we try to bring it about that they are the kind of people we imagine them as the kind of people to whom we can be drawn how do we achieve that well we may of course use persuasion flattery coercion or force but in spinosus view we commonly resort to fantasy rather than finding out what people are like we project our own desires onto them representing them to ourselves as we want them to be so the desire to empower ourselves can easily implicate us in omnipotent relationships with other people in which we strive to empower ourselves through an imagined commonality that may or may not exist and of course when we all do that the consequences may be disastrous as Spinoza says we end up hating and envying each other nobody is satisfied what though can this analysis tell us about the practice of the history of philosophy well in the first place it suggests that our disposition to unite with things that are like us will be at work in the relations between historians each of whom will at some level try to combine with people they regard as like them the Telia logically inclined for instance may try to empower themselves by uniting with the teleologically inclined however because individual historians are also liable to try to impose their desires on their fellow scholars we should expect their relationships to be marked by conflict we should expect unresolved disagreements like the one between wigs and their opponents at the same time this disposition will presumably shape the relations between historians and the philosophers they study historians will try to satisfy their desires perhaps for prestige knowledge integrity or self-respect by joining forces as it were with past philosophers who seemed to them to share something of their own outlook more than this however the past will prove a fertile field onto which historians can project their desires since dead philosophers can't answer back there's plenty of scope for compiling histories that enable us to find ourselves in the past by creating it in our own image ample scope we might say to relieve what Novalis describes as a very distinct a philosophical sense of lack a homesickness that is a desire to be at home everywhere so the disposition that Spinoza identifies sustains one of the abuses of which teleological historians are accused the tendency to homogenized the past and unless we learn to offset it we can expect this kind of distortion to continue now the habit of trying to unite with people who are like us is however just one example of a broader tendency to interpret the world in the light of our own experience which also bears on what I identified as the second element of the teleological approach that's to say our disposition to explain past philosophical positions as steps on the road to our philosophical values now here Spinoza claims the root of the problem lies in our experience of ourselves as purposive creatures who act for ends which in turn has a profound effect on the way that we understand other aspects of the world knowing as we do that we formulate and pursue both short and long term ends and assess states of affairs in relation to them we unselfconsciously attribute this mode of operation to other things a key instance of this phenomenon and a very familiar one is theological by modeling our ideas of God on our ideas of ourselves Spinoza argues we conceive him in anthropomorphic terms as a being whose ends resemble those of some kind of a human being a king or a judge or to take a connected case we tend to impute purposes like our own to nature when we encounter individual things that serve our ends as our teeth or the land on which we grow food we are inclined to think of them as designed to satisfy our purposes pushing this line of thought a bit further we come to believe as Spinoza puts it that there is someone else who has prepared those means for our use and that the God's direct all things for the use of men now interpretations like these may well be to some degree empowering for example as Spinoza points out the belief that the course of history is controlled by an attentive deity and adapted to human ends may breed a sense of stability direction and comfort that is itself empowering equally the belief that God has designed our environment with us in mind may make us confident and hopeful and so on but cannon analysis along these lines also help to explain the pleasures that attach to teleological interpretations of the history of philosophy well I think Spinoza's view is that they can the effective mechanisms on which I've been focusing and not as he sees them superficial or easily overcome nor are they confined to people who are uneducated or foolish on the contrary we're all subject to them so historians of philosophy are as likely as anyone to project their experience of their own purposiveness onto history and to seek for comfort complacency or a sense of direction by attributing the particular ends that they hold dear onto the philosophical past in doing so they're simply enacting a strategy that is deeply rooted in our natures and as long as it retains its hold we can expect teleological interpretations of the history of the history of philosophy to persist now in the last few minutes I've been tracing something that Spinoza describes as a novel feature of his own work his insistence that philosophy must attempt to explain our affective dispositions our passions through which we strive to empower ourselves rather than merely complaining about them railing against them as he says his predecessors have all done I think that's a bit hard on his predecessors but never mind I've sketched the resources that he provides for identifying and explaining the satisfaction that attaches to teleological interpretation and I've indicated how this explanatory schema applies to the case in hand the upshot should be Spinoza suggests to remove any sense of surprise that the persistence of teleological interpretive approaches which are just a predictable outcome of our nature but you may also want to know what Spinoza thinks of this kind of interpretation how does he rate it does he think it can contribute anything valuable to the history of philosophy I'm now going to move on to discuss these questions but here we have to tread extremely cautiously it's clear from what we've said about the first element of teleological interpretation that it is from an epistemological point of view extremely dodgy in our search for things that are like us Spinoza insists we are not primarily responsive to the truth instead we're out to empower ourselves by satisfying our desires and are liable to distort the truth in order to be able to do so if we now turn to the second element of teleological interpretation our disposition to model nature on our experience of our own purposive behavior then we find ourselves in the same dubious epistemological territory Spinoza is adamant that attempts to interpret events by appealing to their ends always embody a level of misunderstanding because they fail to answer to the way that nature actually operates to fully understand how natural events come about and thus how the course of history develops we need to identify the antecedent causes of events so for example while it's perfectly acceptable to cite an individual's goal in order to explain their subsequent desire to attain its means it's not acceptable to cite the day of judgment to explain why in Spinoza's example a tile fell on a man's head so putting these points together we see that both elements of teleological interpretation suffer from the same broad epistemological flaw in both we impose ourselves on history rather than patiently working out how one event led to another that being so that being Spinoza's estimation of the status of the dispositions i've described we might expect him to reject teleological interpretations out of hand but that isn't in fact how he responds despite the fact that teleological interpretations are epistemological II messed up he argues they can still serve some useful purposes and can to some extent and in some circumstances be empowering so to take a case that he discusses at length the Jews of the Old Testament were wrong to think that the course of their history was the working out of God's promise to reward them above all other peoples but that teleological interpretation nevertheless served a social and political function it gave the Jews a confident sense of their place in the scheme of things that helped to sustain them through many trials made them a more cohesive community and strengthened their commitment to the law and there seems no reason in principle why a teleologically organised account of the history of philosophy shouldn't serve the same sorts of social and political purposes however and here we come to an absolutely crucial qualification although these interpretations can serve some ends they can't advance the end of philosophy and they have no place within it so why is that well as Spinoza conceives of it philosophy is a purpose of activity which aims to show us enable us to live as powerfully and contentedly as human beings can but as it also enables us to appreciate the only way to approach that goal is by extending our understanding of ourselves and the rest of nature and using that knowledge to develop ways of life that are more stable empowering than the ones we're familiar with in part then philosophy is a matter of finding out how nature is structured and how it impinges on us but it is equally a matter of investigating ourselves it shows us what psychological dispositions we possess how they can undermine or support our efforts to become more stable powerful and how we can counter their destructive effects sorry they're destructive facts I should say now this business of trying to understand ourselves isn't of course a purely epistle purely philosophical project we engage in it all the time for instance by learning from experience but philosophy carries the project to a different level by working solely with the highest epistemological standards available and by that means it aims to expose the disempowering effects of our everyday misunderstandings and show us how to empower ourselves most effectively so what does philosophy have to say about the limitations of teleological interpretation in the case of our disposition to join ourselves to things that are like us our problem is to see how we can exercise that disposition without undermining our efforts to empower ourselves by running into the kind of conflicts that arise when we impose our desires on others and they impose their desires on us the only way to avoid this Spinoza argues is to create a situation where everyone can satisfy their desires without imposing on anyone else and the only desire that answers to that requirement is I desire for understanding unlike the other empowering things that we pursue such as wealth or love or fame understanding isn't a scarce good and we don't have to compete for it so when we strive to satisfy our desire for it by uniting ourselves with people who share it our aspirations don't conflict and each of us is able to empower themselves to their own satisfaction now when Spinoza sets out this argument as he does in the ethics I think it's liable to sound extremely glib as though philosophical understanding can somehow magically coordinate our desires and dispose of disagreement and conflict but I think we can come up with a somewhat more charitable reading philosophers a Spinoza conceives them and not just people who have a certain kind of knowledge but also people with a certain Ingenium or temperament or character they are people who possess Anamosa toss a determination to live as their understanding dictates and generosity is a disposition to join forces with others who are philosophically minded philosopher Spinoza says our open rather than obstinate their gentle rather than aggressive so when philosophers strive to unite themselves with people who are like them they're not simply looking out for people who know how to how to extend their understanding or who want to extend their understanding they're also looking out for people whose character fits them for the cooperative way of life devoted to the pursuit of understanding that philosophy consists in we could say putting the matter differently that they're looking out for people who have a range of epistemological virtues so suppose then that philosophers can learn how to effectively empower themselves by uniting with other people who have a philosophical character or temperament how might that transform a historians disposition to empower themselves by turning to past philosophers with whom they take themselves to have something in common a philosophically minded historian will surely be on the look out for past philosophers of good character who can contribute to a community of the wise individuals whose insights can help the members of this community to extend its understanding and live in an empowering fashion an individuals whose character offers a model for the limbing living to emulate in this project one of the tasks of historians were the philosophical outlook is therefore to release us from the present by extending the philosophical community into the past and uniting the forces of the dead as well as the living so that's as much as I'm going to say about the way that philosophy might transform the first of the two elements I discussed the first disposition and now let me turn as usual in where you'll be getting familiar with to the second element can philosophical understanding similarly transform our inclination to impose our own purposiveness on the past and interpret it as directed towards an end well here Spinoza draws a fine distinction one of the means by which philosophers make progress is to imagine an empowering way of life that goes beyond anything they can actually achieve and try to imitate it setting a model or exemplar before them as a goal he says they try to make their own way of life progress towards that end now at first glance we seem to have here an instance of the very kind of teleological interpretation that Spinoza rejects we seem to be interpreting the historical past and present as steps towards a predetermined goal but there's a difference philosophers who understand the deficiencies of teleological explanation will continue to cultivate an image an exemplary way of life they'll use this image of an intensely pleasurable and satisfying way of life to stimulate their desire for further understanding and guide them in their pursuit of it but they will not project that image onto nature or confuse the workings of their own imagination with those of the external world so part of the discipline that philosophy imposes on us is to learn to forgo the pleasures that arise from teleological interpretation for the pleasures of pursuing an exemplary way of life and that discipline will extend to a properly philosophical use of the history of philosophy which may provide us with exemplars but to which we may not appeal to explain the past so let me now conclude I've argued that the kind of history that Spinoza licenses as an aspect of philosophy itself looks to the Past for inspiration by studying and emulating past figures who were engrossed by the project of philosophy living philosophers can enhance their understanding and thus their path however Spinoza doesn't believe that the kind of Whig history that Butterfield criticized whether it's teleological flavor is strong or weak has any place within philosophy it may serve other ends but it can't serve philosophical ones all historical events are in his view fully determined by their causal antecedents and historians of philosophy who are also philosophers will embrace this fact and try to live by it doing so is difficult because our imaginative disposition to impose our experiences and desires on the world and enjoy the satisfactions that that brings is always with us cultivating a philosophical Ingenium is a struggle and we need all the resources to develop and sustain the epistemological virtues that constitute it but when we stray into the arena of teleological interpretation we fall prey to an ultimately disempowering disposition to interpret nature in the light of our own purpose of operations which is itself a manifestation of the incompleteness of our understanding it's not a subject for blame but it's not philosophy thank you very much

Channel: RoyIntPhilosophy

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Keywords: Baruch Spinoza (Author), Susan James, Philosophy (Field Of Study), spinoza lecture, philosophy lecture, philosophy, royal institute of philosophy

Id: G5cAxJCz1Xk

Length: 47min 20sec (2840 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 08 2014

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During the twentieth century, Spinoza was allotted a minor role in Anglophone histories of philosophy. Dwarfed by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and Leibniz, he was widely regarded as an eccentric loner. Recently, however, he has come to be seen as a philosopher of broad contemporary relevance. He has been read as a religious pluralist, a radical democrat, an early defender of dual aspect monism, a metaphysical holist whose ideas anticipate the concerns of contemporary ecologists, and as nothing less than the founder of the Enlightenment.

In this lecture I shall ask what this interpretative turnaround tells us about the way we do the history of philosophy. What are we looking for when we study philosophy’s past? And why should we read Spinoza?

Previously, on Spinoza.