Collective Imaginings

Spinoza, Past and Present

Moira Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134708154
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Why would the work of the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza concern us today? How can Spinoza shed any light on contemporary thought?
In this intriguing book, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd show us that in spite of or rather because of Spinoza's apparent strangeness, his philosophy can be a rich resource for cultural self-understanding in the present.
Collective Imaginings draws on recent re-assessments of the philosophy of Spinoza to develop new ways of conceptualising issues of freedom and difference. This ground-breaking study will be invaluable reading to anyone wishing to gain a fresh perspective on Spinoza's thought.

Part I
Imagination, freedom and responsibility

1 Spinoza’s imagination

There is something especially elusive about the history of theories of the imagination. Although the imagination has been central to philosophical deliberation about human knowledge through the centuries, it remains, as Eva Brann puts it in her nonetheless voluminous and illuminating study, a ‘missing mystery’ in philosophical thought – always the crux, yet rarely the theme of inquiry (Brann 1991: 3). Contemporary theory of imagination reflects this historical elusiveness. Paul Ricoeur has described the contemporary theory of imagination as a shambles – a ‘knot of contradictions’. But we should see in its confusion, he suggests, not so much a challenge to produce at last a unified coherent theory, as an expression of a structural complexity in the phenomenon of imagination itself (Ricoeur 1994: 120). Different theories of imagination are then seen as responding to different aspects of a complex human capacity. Rather than attempting to rectify the supposed errors of past theory, it may be more fruitful to explore the different preoccupations reflected in philosophical theory at different times.

This chapter will consider some of the themes from earlier philosophy which come together in Spinoza’s version of imagination – the preoccupations to which it responded and the distinctive features of his philosophy which determine it. Later we will see ways in which Spinoza’s version of imagination can be appropriated in our contemporary context. Here, as often in the history of philosophy, what we see is not a shift in the answers to stable questions which Spinoza takes over from earlier thinkers. What we find is rather a re-figuration of the capacities of imagination in ways that open up new questions and make possible new relations between philosophical thought and political reality. Spinoza’s treatment of the imagination is integrated with his treatment of the nature of mind and its relations with body – with his distinctive account of the individuality of minds and bodies. The distinctive features of this version of imagination cluster around three interconnected themes: the materiality of the imagination; its connections with collectivities and hence with sociability; and its relations with emotion.

Imagination and bodies

Imagination is for Spinoza a form of bodily awareness. That is not novel in the history of philosophy. But bodily awareness here takes on a distinctive form and status as a consequence of Spinoza’s treatment of mind and matter as equally attributes of the one Substance – different ways in which the one reality is articulated or ‘expressed’. In associating imagination with body, Spinoza does not downgrade it in relation to mind. Mind’s immediate confrontation with body is here seen as immediate access to something no less important, no less privileged in relation to ultimate reality than mind itself. The deliverances of imagination are confused; but they connect with modifications of a real attribute of God as Substance.

Imagination thus has for Spinoza a powerful ontological dimension – a direct and strong contact with bodily reality. On the other hand, Spinoza’s version of imagination involves an equally strong emphasis on the reality of the mental. The modifications of the mind cannot in this philosophy be seen as an inferior shadowy kind of reality, in comparison with the solidity of the material world. The figments of the imagination are just as real – just as appropriate as objects of systematic investigation – as the modifications of matter. Imagination involves the coming together of mind and body in the most immediate way: mind is the idea of body. Spinoza himself acknowledges the initial strangeness of this way of thinking of the relations between mind and body: ‘Here, no doubt, my readers will come to a halt, and think of many things which will give them pause’ (EIIP11S). The human mind has for Spinoza the status of an ‘idea’; and the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the actually existing human body. It is through imagination that mind has body as its object in the most immediate way. Here minds are constituted as awareness of bodily modifications – modifications through which we are aware of other bodies as well as our own. ‘When the human mind regards external bodies through ideas of the affections of its own Body, then we say that it imagines … and the Mind cannot in any other way … imagine external bodies as actually existing’ (EIIP6D).

Imagination is thus central to the very nature of the mind. But to see the full ethical and political dimensions of Spinoza’s version of imagination, we must see imagination also in the context of his treatment of individuality. Each singular finite thing is in this philosophy a particular determination of the power of God as Substance; each mediates the power of Substance and is itself acted upon and changed by the power mediated through other finite things. To be an individual is to be determined to act through the mediation of other finite modes, and to likewise determine others – to act and be acted upon through the totality of finite modes of Substance. All this involves imagination. Spinozistic imagination has a dynamic character which reflects the underlying physics of bodies outlined briefly between Propositions 13 and 14 of Part II of the Ethics. Bodies, Spinoza says there, communicate motion to one another; and their synchronisation – the union of bodies – is what constitutes individuality. The simplest bodies are distinguished from one another by motion and rest, speed and slowness. These simple bodies come together as synchronised centres of the communication of motion; and the nested orderings of these composite individuals reach up to the ‘whole of nature’, conceived as one individual whose parts may vary in infinite ways without any change in the whole (L7S, between EIIP13 and P14). The human body is one such composite individual – a union of parts acting as a centre of communicating and communicated motion. Each individual body exerts a causal force on others, and each is in turn constantly impinged on by others.

The dynamic character of Spinoza’s version of individuality is reinforced in later sections of the Ethics by his identification of the ‘actual essence’ of a thing with its conatus – the ‘striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being’ (EIIIP7). The complexity which results from this account of bodies has its correlate under the attribute of thought – a multiplicity which both enriches the possibilities of human knowing and creates an unavoidable confusion at its very core. ‘The human mind is capable of perceiving a great many things, and is the more capable, the more its body can be disposed in a great many ways’ (EIIP14). But the source of this enhanced perceptual capacity is the body’s dependence on the mediating force of all the other finite bodies which impinge on it. ‘[T]he human Body requires a great many bodies, by which it is, as it were, continually regenerated’ (EIIP19D). The consequences of this dynamic interdependence of bodily modifications are profound.

Spinoza’s treatment of the relations between minds and bodies is framed by his treatment of the relations between Substance and attributes, and of the relations between ideas and their objects. Spinoza invites us to consider minds and bodies as it were from two directions. First, on a vertical axis, we can consider minds and bodies as modes of thought and extension respectively, inserted into totalities which completely express the being of God or Substance. Second, there is a horizontal axis – the relations between minds and bodies which hold across the difference between the two attributes. Minds and bodies are united not in causal relations but through the relations of ideas to their objects. Causal relations for Spinoza hold only between modes under some one attribute; there is no possibility of causal relations across the difference between attributes.

The body, of which mind is the ‘idea’, is not insulated from the rest of nature; it is not a self-contained whole within the totality of the material world. In being aware of its body, the mind is aware not just of one material thing but of other bodies impinging on that body. It is aware, that is, of its own body together with other bodies and of other bodies together with its own. The mind, as idea of the body, incorporates ideas of other bodies; and those ideas can involve awareness of transitions to greater and less states of activity under the influence of congenial and rival forces. This experience of other bodies together with our own is the basis of imagination. But it is also the basis of Spinoza’s account of the emotions or ‘affects’. Where those bodies are like our own – human bodies which undergo similar modifications – this experience of other bodies can intensify our awareness of our own desires, joys and pains. Already, Spinoza’s treatment of minds and bodies evokes a basic sociability which is inseparable from the understanding of human individuality. To see what is distinctive about it it is helpful to have some understanding of how Spinoza draws on and transforms themes which were familiar from older treatments of imagination.

Spinoza’s historical sources

Spinoza’s treatment of minds and bodies echoes, both in its content and in its rationale, some of the concerns of ancient philosophy. Like Aristotle, Spinoza emphasises the cognitive role of imagination. But his version of imagination echoes also Epicurean and Stoic philosophy, which had a broader agenda than Aristotle’s preoccupation with affirming against the Platonists the understanding of individual material things as genuine objects of knowledge. Spinoza’s physics of bodies echoes themes from ancient Epicurean atomism; and his philosophy resonates also with the rich and strange Epicurean treatment of images which that atomism grounded. Spinoza’s talk of the ‘simplest bodies’ evokes older Epicurean talk of primordia – the imperceptible elements out of which perceptible objects are composed. For the Epicureans, mind, soul and spirit, no less than bodies, were composed of such primordia. The Roman poet Lucretius, in his Epicurean poetic work The Nature of Things, describes them as wandering through the void, carried either by their own weight, ‘like raindrops through the profound void’ or by a chance blow from other atoms, arising from unpredictable ‘swervings’ which disrupt the steady downward motion of the atoms falling under their own weight.¹

The Epicurean world arises from these imperceptible whirlings and swervings of atoms. In Lucretius’s illustrations, just as the movement of sheep or of an army on a distant hill is blurred in our perception, so that we perceive only whiteness or brightness at rest on a plain, so too the mind cannot discern the motion of the primordia involved in its perception of objects close by. On the Epicurean theory, the perceiving mind is itself composed of such primordia – in this case especially small particles lying deep within us. Mind and spirit are made up of ‘very minute seeds’ which cling together during life with the coarser particles which make up the body. The spirit seeds give rise to sensation, which thus involves conjoint motions of body and spirit particles – both equally material – though of different size.² At death, these smaller seeds separate out from the coarser, bodily particles.

The unexplained conjoint motion of particles provides the frame for the Epicurean account of imagination. Lucretius talks of images as simulacra – thin films of atoms drawn from the outermost surfaces of things to ‘flit about hither and thither through the air’. These fixed outlines have a shape or look similar to the things which have thrown them off. These images can ‘assail’ the mind, terrifying it – especially when it is helpless in sleep – with ‘wonderful shapes and images of the dead’.³ They may be ‘loosely diffused abroad’, as wood throws off smoke and fire heat, or they may be more ‘close-knit and condensed’, like the neat coat dropped by the cicada in summer, the caul shed by the new-born calf, or the skin shed by the slippery serpent.⁴

There are important differences between Spinoza’s materialist version of imagination and the ancient Epicurean version. In assimilating images to material simulacra, the Epicureans make perception and imagination passive conditions, in which the mind is invaded or assailed. Spinoza’s version of the motion of simple bodies emphasises in contrast the dynamic momentum of the simple bodies, whose very definition is in terms of motion and rest. These bodies, rather than assailing the mind, are its proper objects. Minds, rather than being composed of minute bodies, are ‘ideas’ of bodies – corresponding modes of substance under the attribute of thought. The materiality of sensation and imagination comes not from an intermingling of differently sized particles, but from the relations between ideas and the bodies which are their object.

There are undoubtedly problems in the Epicurean treatment of imagination, if we look at it as an exercise in epistemological theory. It remains unexplained how sensation arises from the ‘conjoint motion’ of the primordia that make up the mind, with the alien but intermingling primordia that assail it. Brann comments dismissively that the theory ‘simply bypasses in its violent purity whatever is perplexing in the experience of having images’ (Brann 1991: 48). But the agenda of the Epicurean concern with imagination is wider than the clarification of the cognitive operations of the mind. The Epicureans were concerned to allay the superstitious dread that the soul might continue to exist in a tormented afterlife – a fear that could intrude on the enjoyment of life before death. They sought therefore to explain the haunting appearances of the dead to the living in ways that would allay the fear that they were visitations from the realm of the dead. Spinoza’s treatment of imagination, as we shall see, is similarly integrated with a concern with understanding and responding to the emotional dimensions of human life. But, within the frame of his view of the mind as idea of the body, these connections between imagination and emotion resonate with some of the themes of ancient Stoicism no less than with Epicurean materialism.

Stoics and Epicureans alike brought together cognitive theory with more practical and ethical concerns. Whereas the Epicureans stress the ontological givenness – the materiality – of imagination, the Stoic concern is rather to emphasise the reality of the mental in order to allow a detachment from what lies beyond the mind’s control. The Stoics, too, believed in material elements. But where the Epicurean model conjures up a mind assailed by external whirling particles, the Stoic treatment of imagination stresses the mind’s own activity. Spinoza’s philosophy allows for both passivity of mind under the onslaught of ‘external’ causes and for its activity, exerted in the understanding of those causes. The transitions between these states of passivity and activity are central, as we will see, to Spinoza’s treatment of freedom. There we see him integrate ethical and cognitive dimensions of mental activity and passivity – an integration which centres on the role of imagination. The mind’s capacity to gain freedom from the vicissitudes of passion is bound up with its capacity to represent to itself, and hence to gain understanding of, what is not actually presented to it in immediate bodily modification – of what is absent or no longer existent.

In the background to Spinoza’s treatment of the cognitive capacities of the imagination is the Aristotelian concept of phantasma – the mental representations through which the mind exercises its capacity to know individual material things. In the thought of the Stoics the operations of the imagination were articulated in terms of a set of related notions, centred on a notion of ‘impression’ – phantasia – derived from ideals of light and illumination. The Stoic distinctions serve to emphasise the dual role of imagination. On the one hand, it gives the mind access to material particulars presented to it for knowledge; on the other, it allows the mind to think of what is not presented to it. The crucial distinctions here are attributed to Chrysippus. The early Greek doxogropher, Aetius, speaks of him as drawing a fourfold distinction. The ‘impression’ (phantaston) is an ‘affection’ occurring in the soul, which ‘reveals itself and its cause’, just as light reveals both itself and whatever is included in its range. The cause of the impression is the ‘impressor’ (phantasticon) which ‘activates’ the soul, as something white or cold activates perception. Then there is ‘imagination’ (phantastikon), which is described as an ‘empty attraction’ – an ‘affection in the soul which arises from no impressor, as when someone shadow-boxes or strike his hands against thin air’; and the ‘figment’ (phantasma) – ‘that to which we are attracted in the empty attraction of imagination’, which occurs in people who are ‘melancholic and mad’ (Long and Sedley 1987: 237).

‘mad’ What is important for our purposes here is the notion of ‘empty attractions’ – the ‘impressions’ for which there are no ‘impressors’, the ‘shadow boxing’ of the mind. To see the implications of this metaphor we have to resist reading back into Stoic thought more familiar modern ideas of causal interaction between inner mental life and external bodily world. The Stoics did think of the relations between ‘impressors’ and ‘impressions’ as a causal one. But the causal relation is not here aligned with the distinction between bodies and minds as we now understand it. ‘Bodily’ things are whatever is capable of standing in a causal relation to mind; but this is a much broader class of things than those we would now think of as bodies. ‘Bodily’ things for the Stoics included things which are not in our modern understanding physical – virtue and the gods, for example. Nor is the Stoic notion of ‘impression’ aligned with what is the effect of a cause; there is a category of ‘incorporeals’ in relation to which the soul can be ‘impressed’ in a relation that is not causal. What the Stoics called the ‘sayables’ are a sub-class of ‘impressors’ which are non-causally related to ‘impressions’: the mind is ‘impressed’ in relation to them, but not by them, as in a causal relation.⁵

The mind’s imaginative power to think of what is not there – to be ‘impressed’ without being activated by an ‘impressor’ is for the Stoics manifested both as madness and as reason – as the vulnerability to illusion and as the capacity to understand universal concepts. Not all ‘figments’ are illusory. Universal concepts such as ‘man’, for example, are called ‘figments’ because they have no corresponding ‘impressor’: there is no generic ‘man’ which activates the mind when it grasps a universal concept. Spinoza’s philosophy emphasises the nexus between these two aspects of the imagination; and his treatment of this dual role of the imagination resonates with themes of activity and passivity from Epicurean and Stoic sources. In his version of the mind’s capacity to think what is not there the awareness of bodily complexity is fundamental. In sensation, Spinoza stresses, our minds perceive the nature of a great many bodies together with the nature of our own. In other words, our perceptions are confused, and the confusion carries over into imagination and memory. The human body is of a higher degree of complexity than other bodies, incorporating a greater number of subordinate unities; and this greater complexity makes it capable of acting and being acted upon in many ways at once.

Spinoza’s treatment of sensation, memory and imagination is grounded in this bodily complexity. Our bodies retain traces of the changes brought about in them by the impinging of other bodies. So the mind will again regard external bodies as present even when they no longer exist (EIIP17D and C). These ideas of affections of the body which present external bodies as present to us are Spinoza’s version of images; and the mind’s regarding bodies in this way is his version of imagining. Paul’s mind will continue to regard Peter as present to it, even after Peter’s death, when the idea of Peter which constitutes Peter’s mind no longer exists. There is no question here of the idea of Peter flitting around the world independently of Peter, to find its way into the mind of Paul. Spinoza’s images are not Epicurean simu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Imagination, freedom and responsibility
• Part II Communities, difference and the present past
• Bibliography
• Index