Baruch Spinoza - The beginning of Enlightenment -Final

Introduction

In this last and final post on Spinoza we summarize parts 3,4 and 5 of Spinoza's Ethics.

Part III: The Origin and Nature of the Affects
Part IV: Human Bondage, or the Power of the Affects
Part V: The Power of the Intellect, or Human Freedom

I have two goals
1. Summarize Spinoza's views on 'passions of the mind' or Affects as he calls them.
2. My take on Spinoza's views without formal refutation.

Free will

Certainly, the mind makes decisions, but they are not free decisions.

our belief that we act intentionally is as ill founded as our belief in free will

Mind Body Dualism

Spinoza: Psychophysical Parallelism. Spinoza states that the causal orders found in the attributes of thought and extension are "one and the same." Hence the common description of Spinoza as endorsing psycho-physical parallelism, or the thesis that the mental and physical realms are isomorphic. 

Even reading, writing and discussing philosophy are physical activities with physical causes.The essence of a finite mode is to be a mode of God’s infinite power. And God helps us reason and lead a good life.

Pantheism

Spinoza endorses a doctrine which identifies God with the universe, or regards the universe as a manifestation of God/ the worship or tolerance of many gods.

Others

Affects are the feelings and desires that arise in us  as a result of our encounters and experiences: affects push and pull us in different directions, determining our actions and behavior. 

Basically Affects can be dubbed 'Passions of the mind'.(If it does ring a bell so be it.)

Part III is dedicated to looking at how we are determined by our experiences.I shall deal only with the power of the mind, i.e. of reason,and shall show above all how and how far it can restrain
and moderate the affects.
Spinoza tries to answer the question can we tame the beast ?(our mind that is)

Pineal Gland

Spinoza views it as the seat of the soul. It can be moved in various ways by the mind.Each of the mind’s acts of the will is united by nature to a certain fixed motion of this gland.
Every  motion is related to a particular animal spirit(passion)
By our will we can move our gland in any which way.This enables us to tame the mind.

Postulates and all

According to Spinoza affects are those states and actions for which we are partially responsible. He denies that 'body moves and stops

moving at the mind’s command...'. The body does a great many things the mind is surprised by, denying thereby that mind can control all affects. (If passions cannot be controlled what use Religion ?). He frightens by denying that we have the freedom to act as freedom is but an illusion. 'we judge something to be good because we try for it, will it, want it, and desire it.'

"pleasure, unpleasure, and desire—are the only primary affects that I acknowledge. For I shall show that the rest arise from these three"

Love is just pleasure with the accompanying idea of an external cause, and hate is just unpleasure with the accompanying idea of an external cause. We see, then, that someone who loves will be bound to try to be in the presence of and to preserve the thing he loves; and on the other hands omeone who hates will try to remove and destroy the thing he hates.

"16: We love or hate a thing x that we imagine to be LIKE an object y that usually affects the mind with pleasure or unpleasure, loving or hating it just because of that resemblance, even if the respect in which x resembles y has no part in y’s causing those affects"

In "17 he defines vacillation or doubt 18: A man gets the same affect of pleasure or unpleasure from the image of a past or future thing as from the image of a present thing."

However, people who have had much experience generally vacillate when they think about events as future or past, and are usually in doubt about event’s outcome  and for that reason the affects arising from similar images of things are not so constant, but are generally disturbed by the images of other things until the person becomes more certain of the event’s outcome.

"And by ‘unpleasure’ I shall mean the passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection. When the affect of pleasure is thought of in terms of the mind and body at once, I call it titillatio or cheerfulness’, and when unpleasure is thought of in that way I call it ‘pain’ or ‘sadness’."

For hope is just an inconstant pleasure that has arisen from the image of a future or past event whose outcome we doubt, whereas fear is an inconstant unpleasure that has arisen from the image of a doubtful event. If the doubt involved in these affects is removed, •hope becomes •confidence, and •fear becomes •despair—that is, a
pleasure or unpleasure arising from the image of a thing we
feared or hoped for. Finally, gladness is a pleasure that has arisen from the image of a past thing whose outcome we had doubted, while regret is the corresponding unpleasure

The passions had been discussed in philosophical discourse before,
usually as bodily phenomena that were contrary to reason and needed to be overcome. In The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes diagnoses the physical mechanics of feeling and argues that a strong will, guided by reason, can gain mastery over the passions.

"There are as many kinds of pleasure, unpleasure, and desire as there are kinds of objects by which we are affected. And so there are also just as many kinds of affect composed of these (like vacillation of mind) or derived from them (like love, hate, hope, fear, etc.)."

The body is determined in its activity by other bodies, and the mind is determined in its thinking activity by their ideas. Spinoza reminds us here that the body cannot determine the mind and that the mind cannot determine the body

Spinoza looks at it as a riposte to Descartes, who believes that the body causes the passions of the mind, and that the mind is capable of determining the body to be less affected by passions.


Spinoza’s most enduring metaphor:
‘From what has been said it is clear that we are driven about
in many ways by external causes, and that, like waves on the sea,
driven by contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome
and our fate’ (P59S). A finite mode is a wave on the sea: it rises from the infinite continuum

"I shall apply •‘good’ to anything that we know for sure to be a means to getting ever nearer to the model of human nature that we set before ourselves. And I shall call •‘bad’ anything that we know
for sure prevents us from becoming like that model."

"thing’s perfection is just its essence as something that exists and acts"

"The only things we know for sure to be good (or to be bad) are things that really lead to understanding (or that can prevent us from understanding)." ????????Good / bad depends on how it effects our well being(understanding is only a part-not so important)

"35: Only to the extent that men live by the guidance of reason are they sure always to agree in nature."

"68: If men were born free, they would form no concept of good and evil so long as they remained free."

appendix scattered right way of living

Spinoza’s ethics surprising, both in its denial of universal moral values and in its affirmation of rational knowledge as the key to living and acting well.

pulled by feelings based on images: we strive to fulfill what
we imagine we desire, to benefit those we imagine bring us joy and
to harm those we imagine bring us sadness.


She does things that are bad for her, because she is less
capable of doing what her own nature determines her to do and she

will be increasingly determined by external forces.--Are there inborn criminal tendencies (her own nature) if s it seems the thery fails. Assumption all humans are essentially good / pure
The Power of the Affects

"part v I shall deal with reason’s power, showing what reason can do against the affects, and what freedom of mind = happiness is. Descartes was inclined to this opinion ·that the affects can be completely controlled by the will."

what in detail goes on at the interface between mind and body--pineal gland??-is there such an interface??For ·after reading everything Descartes has to say about this·, I ·still· don’t know whether the gland is driven about more slowly by the mind than by
the animal spirits, or more quickly; nor do I know whether,
after our ‘firm judgments’ have been ‘joined’ to ‘the motions
of the passions’, they can be unjoined again by bodily causes

"23: A human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with
the ·corresponding· body, but something of it remains which is eternal."-sneaks in dualism??

"42: (i) Happiness is not •the reward of virtue; it •is virtue. (ii) And it is not the case that we are happy because we restrain our lusts; on the contrary, we are able to restrain our lusts because we are happy."

Part IV of the Ethics is where Spinoza sets out his ethics: his theory
of how to live well.Does Spinoza’s denial of intentions and free will mean that he denies moral responsibility? If all value judgments are subjective, can there be an objective ethics? Ultimately, can we live our lives according to Spinoza’s ethical program
denial of universal moral values affirmation of rational knowledge as the key to living and acting well.

Enslavement
But ‘the force by which a man perseveres in existing is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes’ (P3). Bondage is ‘man’s lack of power to moderate and restrain the affects’
People who are powerfully affected by sadness, hatred, anger and fear are easily influenced and manipulated by other forces: they are highly vulnerable to gangs,religious cults and extreme political parties, for instance.
In the Appendix to Part I, he argued that value terms such as ‘good, evil, order, confusion, beauty, ugliness’are based on what is useful to human beings.-partly true at best

Nothing in nature is in itself good or evil, because everything in nature is a mode of God. From God’s perspective, things are neither good nor evil; they simply are what they are. Finite modes, however, judge things to be good or evil because they are good or evil to them. 

active,= adequate cause of his actions Living virtuously,then, depends on freeing ourselves from enslavement to the affects.
virtue = free from enslavement=active

True knowledge as such has no power to overcome these affects; only insofar as that true knowledge is felt as an essential desire that is more powerful than other affects will it be able to overcome them (P14).

Striving for self-preservation is the foundation of virtue.

we certainly know that what leads to true understanding is good for us and that what impedes true understanding is evil.

The next set of propositions, P29–36, is a template for how we can
build true understanding and virtue through cooperation with other
individuals. It sets out an ethics of interpersonal relations that builds up to Spinoza’s theory of politics in P37.

"When people live according to the guidance of reason, they agree
in nature and then they are good for one another"--If reasons could reduce conflict , it would be great but both limitations of reason and track record belie such hopes

A community has more physical capabilities and therefore more mental capabilities too. which community majority?

In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes imagines human life prior to the development of the civil state. He concludes that in this ‘state of nature’, each person had an equal right to seek his own advantage and was in constant conflict with others over resources, with the result that human life was ‘poor, nasty,brutish and short’ (Hobbes 1968: 186). To escape this situation, it was necessary for people to give their right over to a sovereign who prevented conflict through a system of laws, threats and incentives: this forms basis of the civil state.

For Spinoza, the state exists to manage the behavior of people who are prone to act on their affects.an action’s ethical status does not depend on what kind of action it is. Rather, it depends on how the action is caused.
Every action that we undertake is part of our nature, but these actions become highly confused and inadequate when they are determined through the passions

Spinoza appears to be saying that actions such as murder, rape and torture are not evil in themselves, but are evil because they are determined by the passions. Is Spinoza really saying that these actions could equally be determined by reason and be good?

Self-determination does not mean acting from free will; it means being determined by our true ‘self’, our essence.

Part V: Freedom and Eternity
I see no great mystery about Spinoza’s motivation for discussing the eternal existence of the mind and the third kind of knowledge.
How does rational understanding enable us to restrain and moderate
the affects? Spinoza explains this process in P1–10

Instead of acting according to what affects us (which Spinoza sometimes calls ‘the common order of nature’), we act according to the order of the infinite intellect. This is what Spinoza means by ‘following the laws of your own nature’, and this, for him, is freedom.

myTake

Some observations on Spinoza.

‘When each man most seeks his own advantage for himself, then men are most useful to one another.’

Expecting people to understand themselves will throw psycho-analysts and their ilk out of business.

The good news is that quite a lot of what Spinoza says is true.

Our love for God is not met by God’s love for us, for God experiences no affects . God therefore is not jealous, envious or angry;he does not love or hate anyone

It appears Spinoza packages commonsense morality and ethics into a grand theory.

Spinoza global - Any ethical theory based on axioms and reasoning is a house of cards. one axiom not applicable can cause collapse of the theory. Perhaps it holds only in one possible world. But the goal of great theory is that it hold in all possible worlds. The Buddhist solution with all  caveats in place is probably the best. In any case we ultimately refer to supreme court all matters impinging on law . Likewise all moral matters have to be resolved by a moral committee or court.

" be free, if it is determined by the ideas and actions that are part
of your own nature." Who is to tell what our nature is Shrinks? Gurus?Friends?...

Even if we have perfect reasoning emotions are body phenomena not amenable to reason. How can there be virtue?(anulling effects f passions)

"But whereas the bad person is necessitated by the flux of external things, the good person is necessitated by her nature alone".--arbitrary allocation of cause. No free will=somebody/something caused it good/bad--too many contradictions

"destroying another person is contrary to reason"-what reason?
murderer causes the victim’s death, but he is not  morally responsible for it – just as a tsunami causes, but is not morally responsible for, destroying a village.Absolve the murderer?

"Instead of futilely trying to explain mental intentions, we should seek better knowledge of the laws of motion and rest to give us better understanding of the causes of things."
Q?? at what level ? neuron group x is excited when Beethoven composed 'Silence' helps nobody to compose music or even  appreciate Beethoven.

If every individual has a different ethics, whither society? If God enables a uniform ethics then it is God's ethics not individuals

Spinoza and Nietzsche both believe that Christian morality has ethics backwards. It falsely associates virtue with affects of humility and repentance, such that people believe it is good to lack power.

Chicken and egg?
"From all this, he says, it is clear that we do not desire anything because we judge it to be good. On the contrary, we judge something to be good because we desire it (P9S)."

aside
Which theory of love/hatred is correct . How do we weed out n-1 of n. Perhaps they are true in particular case. That is also dubious . X may know he hates Y . But he may not know why?There is unfortunately no 'mindo-scope'


Do need the elaborate axioms and all ? To make the writing readable(easily) one has to minimize the number of special terms/vocabulary...

"45: Hate can never be good. except perhaps hatred of evil." Both love and hate are powerful motivators and denying the devil his due is incorrect. All our action heroes detest evil and that is what drives them. One hero wants to avenge the murder of his innocent mom. Is his hatred of the perpetrators of the crime bad?

good logic it appears can draw incomplete/partially correct theorems or propositions.

"46: Anyone who lives by the guidance of reason tries as hard as he can to repay any hate, anger, and disdain that others have toward him with love or nobility."
Definitely not the average person who is no pontiff or Dalai Lama



"‘Good’ and ‘evil’ mean what is good and bad for this individual’s flourishing at this time" How about  good and bad for society/animals/plants/ecology our part of universe?

God Bless Spinoza (What ???)