The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (16 page)

What, then, counts as living well? Spinoza adopts a naturalistic and relativistic understanding of good and bad. He denies that these are anything ‘positive considered in themselves’ (IVPref). Rather, they are ways we have of thinking of things, according to our desires. Thus, in Spinoza’s view, we judge a thing to be good because we desire it; we do not desire it because we judge it to be good (IIIp9s). And this, of course, allows for the possibility that different people, with different desires, will accordingly and quite rightly judge different things to be good (IIIp39s and IVPref). Nevertheless, because he believes that there is a ‘model of human nature that we all set before ourselves’ (IVPref), Spinoza is able to cut through the relativization. Working from what he takes to be a shared human perspective, from which
this model is in view as the supreme object of desire, he defines ‘good’ as ‘that which we certainly know to be the means for our approaching nearer to the model’ or ‘that which we certainly know to be useful to us’, and he defines ‘bad’ as ‘that which we certainly know prevents us from reproducing the said model’ or ‘that which we certainly know to be an obstacle to our attainment of some good’ (IVPref,dd1,2).

The question now, therefore, is: what is this model of human nature? Here it helps to return to the general idea of a body. Drawing on some principles of Stoicism, Spinoza argues that each body, indeed each thing, has a conatus which constitutes its very essence and with which it ‘endeavours to persist in its own being’ (IIIpp6,7).
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This is as true of men as it is of anything else. Each man, by his very nature, is driven to preserve his own existence, and his happiness consists in his being able to do just that (IVp18s). But existence here is not ‘mere’ existence, existence of the sort that might be enjoyed by someone in a persistent vegetative state. The conatus is, in a way, a conatus towards
its own
preservation. Each man is driven to preserve his existence
as
a man who is driven to preserve his existence. In a sense, of course, that is a redundant qualification, since it is his very essence to be driven to preserve his existence (and falling into a persistent vegetative state may thus be tantamount to dying
³⁹
). The point, however, is that his drive is a drive to actualize that essence to the greatest possible degree. It is a drive to maximize his activity and to minimize his passivity, to achieve the highest possible preponderance in his life of acting over undergoing (IVpp20ff.). In Spinoza’s own terms, it is a drive to maximize, among the things that take place, those ‘of which he is the adequate cause’ or ‘which can be clearly and distinctly understood through his nature alone’ and to minimize those ‘which take place in him, or follow from his nature, of which he is only the partial cause’ (IIId2, subjects and verbs adapted). To have that drive is his very essence, his power, his virtue (IVp20+pf).
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And this answers our question about the model of human nature in terms of which good and bad are defined. It is a model of maximally active self-preservation. It is a model, we might also say, of
freedom
. For being free, as Spinoza understands it, is not to be confused with exercising free will, the notion that we have already seen him repudiate. A thing is free, on Spinoza’s definition, when it ‘exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone’ (Id7).

We can now see why the question of what a body can do has such particular ethical significance for Spinoza. It is what we, or our bodies, can do, and in particular what we can do actively, as opposed to undergo, that determines what counts as our living well. The more we do actively, the better we
live. We can also see the significance of the earlier discussion of cooperation. Cooperation increases what we can do actively. John can contribute to a group performance with Paul, George, and Ringo; he cannot do the same thing on his own. What is not yet clear is the connection that I heralded at the beginning of this section between our being active (our being free) and our making sense of things. It is to this connection that I now turn.

4. Making Sense of Things as an Ethical Achievement

The guiding idea, as we shall see, is familiar from Stoicism and was anticipated by Descartes (see §1).

First, we need to understand two terms of art that
Spinoza uses: ‘affection’ and ‘affect’.
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By an ‘affection’ of a man, Spinoza means anything that ‘takes place’ in the man.
⁴²
By an ‘affect’ of a man he means one of two things. Sometimes he means any bodily affection of the man whereby his power to act is increased or decreased, together with the corresponding idea in the man’s mind (IIId3).
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Sometimes he means just the corresponding idea (IIIGenDefEms and the sentence immediately preceding it). Either way, a man’s affects can be thought of as his felt transitions from one degree of power to another.

Now a man’s affections can be divided into
passive
and
active
. His passive affections are the ones with causes that lie outside him; his active affections are the ones with causes that lie wholly within him (IIId2). (In these terms, his life is better the more of his affections are active.) His affects can likewise be divided into passive and active. The distinction in their case is derivative. A man’s passive affects are the ones whose associated bodily affections are passive; his active affects are the ones whose associated bodily affections are active (IIId3). And among his passive affects, those that are felt increases in his power to act are said to be affects of
pleasure
or
joy
, while those that are felt decreases in his power to act are said to be affects of
pain
or
sadness
(IIIp11s,DefEms2,3).
⁴⁴
(In these terms, his life is better
the more of his affects are active, but also the more of his passive affects are joyful.)
⁴⁵

Some of a man’s affections are bodily, some of them are mental. But even the former, as we have seen, have mental affections corresponding to them, the same things differently expressed. Hence, given that the distinction between the passive and the active is independent of mode of expression, we do no real violence to the scope of that distinction if we concentrate just on a man’s mental affections. And what the distinction comes to in their case is this. His passive mental affections are occurrences in his mind for which he sees no reason. It is as if he has unwittingly taken some hallucinogenic drug or, less extravagantly, as if he has been told the conclusion of some piece of reasoning but not the premises (IIp28pf). By contrast, his active mental affections are occurrences in his mind for which he does see a reason and which are sustained precisely
because
he sees this reason. The paradigm is the case in which, through his own initiative, he draws a conclusion from premises that he already knows to be true. When he has a passive mental affection, there is an idea in his mind that is ‘fragmentary and confused’ (IIIp1pf). It does not fully make sense to him. When he has an active mental affection, there is an idea in his mind that does fully make sense to him. An idea of the former kind Spinoza calls ‘
inadequate
’, and an idea of the latter kind he calls ‘
adequate
’ (IIId4,p1 and IVp23+pf).
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An adequate idea, we might say,
expresses
its own reason for being true.
⁴⁷

But now we begin to discern the familiar Stoic picture. For a man to be passive is for him to be subject to occurrences in the mind, including affects, which he cannot fully understand. These occurrences need not be disagreeable. Nor indeed need they be a threat to his overall activity. They may even enhance it. They may be affects of joy. But still they are passive. Or, as the etymology appropriately invites us to say, they are ‘passions’. And these passions do not themselves involve his acting. For him to act, or for him to be active, or again for him to be
free
, is for him to understand what is going on within him – and what is going on around him, insofar as this too impinges on him. It is for him to make sense of things.

We must beware, however, of seeing in this some kind of Manichean struggle between passion and reason. Something of the sort may be a feature of certain forms of Stoicism. But it is not a feature of Spinozism. For Spinoza, reason is not pitted against passion. The free man is not the man whose reason has fought against his passions and destroyed them. For
one thing, that would suggest that his passions, which is to say his passive affects, were themselves agents of some sort with a corresponding power of their own.
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It is rather that a man is free to the extent that (it is important to appreciate that freedom is a matter of degree) he understands his affects and begets them rather than suffers them; they are active rather than passive. Some of his affects may be active because he has come to understand what were previously passive affects. But even if that is so, his reason has not thereby destroyed any of his passive affects: it has not thereby destroyed any of his passions. It has transformed them from
being
passions. He is like someone who has assimilated some piece of reasoning, premises and all, whose conclusion he in any case already accepted, albeit originally without reason (Vp3; cf. IVp66s).
⁴⁹
As for what it is for him to understand anything, that, given Spinoza’s conception of substance, is for him to see it as necessary. It is for him to see both
that
the thing must be and
why
it must be. It is for him to see the thing in relation to substance itself (see IVApp, esp. ¶¶1–5 and 32; cf. also IIp44).

We now have an indication of why it is that, for Spinoza, making sense of things is an ethical achievement. But it remains to be seen what the implications of this are for metaphysics, which is our ultimate concern. This will require consideration of Spinoza’s account of knowledge.

5. The Three Kinds of Knowledge

Spinoza recognizes three kinds of knowledge (IIp40s2
⁵⁰
).

Knowledge of the first kind is knowledge that is (in the terminology introduced in the previous section) inadequate. To have such knowledge is to have a passive mental affection. Knowledge of this kind is acquired whenever something impinges on somebody from without, as for instance when a man enjoys an ordinary sensory perception or is given a piece of information by somebody else (IIp29c; see also IIp18+s). Such knowledge, though unimpeachable in its own right, can easily lead to error. Thus consider the following example, due to Robert Brandom (Brandom (
2002b
),
pp. 126–127). A man catches a ball. As a result the surface of his hand is modified, with various neural consequences (see IIp13Posts). This is a passive bodily affection, to which there corresponds a passive mental affection: he feels the ball. This in turn constitutes knowledge of the first kind. But this knowledge does not strictly extend further than his hand, whose indentation is compatible with his catching indefinitely many things other than the ball, for instance a hemisphere identical in shape to the half of the ball that actually makes contact with his hand (IIp16c2).
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Error occurs if, in ignorance of what lies beyond his hand, he proceeds as if he had caught one of these other things instead (IIp17pf,s,p35+acc).

This example also illustrates an ambiguity that arises if we talk about an idea of a mode of extension. An idea is a mode of thought. As such it has its own corresponding mode of extension, the same thing differently expressed. In one sense it is an idea of that very mode of extension. Thus the man’s sensation when he catches the ball is an idea of his passive bodily affection (the indentation in his hand and its various neural effects). But in another sense an idea can be an idea of whatever it is that explains, in some suitable sense of explanation,
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the corresponding bodily affection. In this second sense – which makes the ‘idea of’ relation a relation of representation – the man’s sensation is an idea of, or represents, the impact of the ball itself on his hand. As we might naturally say, he has a sensation of catching the ball. Again, adapting a famous example due to Spinoza himself (IIp17s), when Ringo hears something that reminds him of John, he has an idea which is in one sense an idea of some neurophysiological feature of his own body, but which is in another sense an idea, simply, of John. It is precisely because there are these two things competing for the title of that which his idea is an idea of, or more strictly it is precisely because there are these two senses in which his idea can be said to be an idea of something, that the idea counts as inadequate (IIp25). In the case of an adequate idea, which expresses its own explanation, no such distinction arises.

This is a good cue to turn to knowledge of the second and third kinds. Knowledge of each of these kinds, unlike knowledge of the first kind, is adequate. This means that it is grounded solely in the subject (IIp31), not just in the sense that it lacks a cause external to the subject but also in the sense that it is not
answerable to
anything external to the subject. We could also say: it carries with it its own credentials; it expresses its own reason for being true; it is not in any sense representative of anything else (IIa4+exp).
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