Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination

Eugene Garver

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226575568
• eBook ISBN: 9780226575735
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Spinoza's Ethics, and its project of proving ethical truths through the geometric method, have attracted and challenged readers for more than three hundred years. In Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination, Eugene Garver uses the imagination as a guiding thread to this work. Other readers have looked at the imagination to account for Spinoza's understanding of politics and religion, but this is the first inquiry to see it as central to the Ethics as a whole—imagination as a quality to be cultivated, and not simply overcome.

?Spinoza initially presents imagination as an inadequate and confused way of thinking, always inferior to ideas that adequately represent things as they are. It would seem to follow that one ought to purge the mind of imaginative ideas and replace them with rational ideas as soon as possible, but as Garver shows, the Ethics don't allow for this ultimate ethical act until one has cultivated a powerful imagination. This is, for Garver, "the cunning of imagination." The simple plot of progress becomes, because of the imagination, a complex journey full of reversals and discoveries. For Garver, the "cunning" of the imagination resides in our ability to use imagination to rise above it.

Second Part

The real drama of the Ethics begins in Part 4. The Ethics becomes normative and practical as Spinoza begins to put adequate and inadequate ideas, active and passive emotions, the infinite and the finite into a single world, instead of treating them as existing in parallel universes, as he does in the first three parts of the Ethics.

The drama of the Ethics comes from juxtaposing two things we already know from its first three parts. On the one hand, adequate ideas are better, more perfect and so more real, than inadequate ideas. On the other hand, there is no impetus that leads from inadequate ideas to adequate ones, no desire to know, and no mechanism for moving from inadequate to adequate ideas. Hence the cunning of imagination that I illustrated in chapter 3 as the human imagination blindly engenders increasingly complex relations between the human mind and body and the external world, and leads to a rationality it doesn’t aim at and cannot imagine.

The first three parts of the Ethics show us that the world and God are indifferent to human needs and aspirations, while “man” appears in the titles of Parts 4 and 5. Ethics will have to be an understanding of how people can live well in such an indifferent world. Part 2 can show that adequate ideas are better than inadequate ideas, but it doesn’t follow that they are better for me. The free man never lies (4p72), but I might be better off lying to protect the political prisoner in the attic. Knowing God and the world does not lead immediately to self-knowledge, let alone self-transformation. Because adequate ideas are better than inadequate ones, and because inadequate ideas do not aspire to become adequate, there is a hierarchy in nature between adequate and inadequate ideas, between reason and imagination, but there is no corresponding hierarchy in each of us. What is good and what is good for someone aren’t necessarily the same, not if people are part of nature. The task of ethics will be to align the internal workings of my mind and body with the structure of the world so that reason will rule over the passions.

The relation between the finite and the infinite in Part 1 became, as we saw, the more specific relation between adequate and inadequate ideas in Part 2. We can now be more specific still. The issue for Parts 4 and 5 is this: when a finite mind contains an adequate idea, is it the properties of the mind which govern, or the properties of the adequate idea? The final two parts of the Ethics are a drama because this question does not have a determinate and general answer, but instead sets the problem for ethics, for the human bondage of Part 4 and the freedom of Part 5.

Chapter 3 distinguished two ways to measure power, and that distinction reappears here. On the one side, as long as people are part of nature, the power of an idea is measured not by its truth or its adequacy but by the power of its cause. Since the mind is an inadequate idea, it is subject to being modified by passions caused by external forces more powerful than it can be. Therefore, akrasia—knowing the better, yet choosing the worse—is always possible, and indeed probable. The presence of adequate ideas in the mind does not guarantee that those ideas can become adequate causes, despite the assertion of 3p1 that adequate ideas and adequate causes are identical. This is human bondage.

On the other hand, adequate ideas can be more powerful than those external forces, as the infinite is more powerful than anything finite. The problem for ethics is how adequate ideas can become masters of the minds that think them. Ethics and human freedom are possible only if the mind’s adequate ideas are not alien presences in the mind—Socrates’s image of the body as a prison—but an integral part of the mind.

My question of who is in charge does not have a determinate answer, not because it is a matter of free choice, or because it is contingent, but because the answer is not decided by the nature of the individual itself, but by both the nature of the individual and the circumstances which surround it. Thus 5p10 asserts that “so long as we are not torn by affects contrary to our nature, we have the power of ordering and connecting the affections of the Body according to the order of the intellect” but whether or not we are so torn is not something we have power over. To 5p10 we should juxtapose these lines from chapter 3 of the TTP: “But the means which lead to living securely and preserving the body are chiefly placed in external things, and for that reason they are called gifts of fortune, because they depend for the most part on the governance of external causes of which we are ignorant. So in this matter, the wise man and the fool are almost equally happy or unhappy” (C 2:114, G 3:47).

The question of who is in charge does not have a single predetermined answer because of the paradoxical and hybrid nature of the second kind of knowledge, one of Spinoza’s three original ideas. The second kind of knowledge, as I’ve been arguing, consists in ideas that are adequate but thought by a mind that is itself a confused idea. Its cause of existence is the finite mode that thinks it. The cause of its essence is either other infinite modes, or, for the immediate infinite mode, the attribute it modifies. Because of its essence, an adequate idea cannot be removed from the mind. It is in that sense invulnerable to attacks from passive emotions. But because of its existence and its finite cause, any adequate idea can always be overcome by a passion or inadequate idea that has a more powerful cause. Asking who is in charge is then asking whether the cause of the essence or the existence of adequate ideas has more power. That will be the focus of the first half of chapter 5.

Not only have finite and infinite modes, inadequate and adequate ideas, passive and active emotions, developed along parallel and nonintersecting tracks in the first three parts of the Ethics. So too mind and body. “The Body cannot determine the Mind to thinking, and the Mind cannot determine the Body to motion, to rest or to anything else (if there is anything else)” (3p2). While mind and body never interact, we can arrange “affections of the Body according to the order of the intellect” (5p10). That is, the order of the intellect and the common order of nature (2p29c, 2p49s, 4p4c), associated with the body, do interact. This is the affinity between thought and the infinite modes, extension and the finite modes discussed in chapter 1. When the passive emotions are sufficiently powerful, adequate ideas are related to other ideas by the common order of nature rather than the order of the intellect: that is akrasia. When we are able to “arrange and associate affections of the body according to the order of the intellect,” then body as well as mind can be an adequate cause. In human bondage, the finite constrains the infinite. In human freedom, the infinite acts on the finite and the finite becomes infinite.

Akrasia is the first place in the Ethics where we see the finite and the infinite interacting, instead of running on parallel tracks. It is also the low point of the Ethics, human bondage. Prior to its appearance, people lived in a world of imagination and passive emotions, but were still able to increase their power and live together. Akrasia says that people can have adequate ideas without being able to climb out of the self-contained and self-sufficient world of imagination and passion. As in Ethics 3, so here in Part 4, the cunning of imagination leads people forward to increased power and increased rationality through social and political life. The conflict between inadequate and adequate ideas in akrasia allows us to consider, in the second half of chapter 5, that just as only someone with adequate ideas can be truly akratic, only someone with adequate ideas can subordinate their ideas to the inadequate but powerful commands of the sovereign that resolve the conflicts between people. Philosophers make the best citizens.

CHAPTER 5

Conflicts among Emotions, among Ideas, and among People

Akrasia, knowing the better yet choosing the worse, is part of the human condition. The lemon milkshake at Alamo Drafthouse, made with Prosecco, violates all the principles of my diet, yet it tastes too good to turn down. Socrates converted akrasia into a philosophical problem by denying its existence: someone who really knows something, he claims, can’t be overcome by temptation. Akrasia becomes a philosophical problem by combining the familiar phenomenon with a normative expectation that knowledge, not emotion, should lead to action, since the higher should rule the lower.1

Spinoza cannot share that problem. He never calls it by its Greek or Latin name, and never mentions Plato or Aristotle in connection with it, but only Ovid and Ecclesiastes.2 Spinoza agrees with the premise of Socrates’s argument against akrasia that good and pleasure are two names for the same thing (e.g., Protagoras 355b–c), but interprets it in the opposite direction so that pleasure defines what we call good (4Preface and 4p41). Ideas and emotions are not located in separate parts of the soul. The mind is a complex idea, and everything in the mind is either an idea or a modification of an idea (2ax3). There are better and worse ideas, more and less adequate and perfect ideas, but there are no distinct faculties.

Instead of a struggle between reason and emotion, Spinoza articulates a very complicated interrelation between reason and imagination, sometimes a struggle, and sometimes a cooperative relation. That interrelation provides the theme that lets me articulate three successively deeper problems of akrasia for Spinoza.

For purposes of action, true or adequate ideas are just like other ideas. “An emotion cannot be checked or destroyed except by a contrary emotion which is stronger than the emotion which is to be checked” (4p7). “Knowledge of good and evil is nothing other than the emotion of pleasure or pain insofar as we are conscious of it” (4p8). The phenomenon of akrasia is in front of us all the time:

Nothing is less in men’s power than to hold their tongues or control their appetites. (3p2s)

We are often compelled, though we see the better course, to pursue the worse. (4Preface)

The emotion whereby a man is so disposed as to refrain from what he wants to do or to choose to do what he does not want is called timidity [timor]. (3p39s)

Knowledge of good and evil, insofar as this knowledge has reference to the future, can be more readily checked by desire of things that are attractive in the present. (4p62)3

It is easy to explain why while knowing the better we can still do the worse: we are determined to act by our most powerful idea, not the best idea. Therefore, when Spinoza cites Ovid—actually Ovid’s Medea—saying that “I see the better course and approve it, but I pursue the worse course” (4p17s), the scholium illustrates the last of a series of three propositions proving the lack of inherent power in true ideas:

Desire which arises from a true knowledge of good and evil can be extinguished or restrained [coerceri] by many other Desires which arise from affects by which we are tormented. (4p15)

Desire that arises from the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as this knowledge has regard to the future can be the more easily restrained or extinguished by desire of things that are attractive in the present. (4p16)

Desire that arises from the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as this knowledge has regard to contingent things can be even more easily restrained by desire for things which are present. (4p17)

There is no mystery or anomaly here. These three propositions succeed 4p14: “No affect can be restrained by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only insofar as it is considered as an affect.”4 But akrasia does present problems for Spinoza’s analysis.

First, akrasia seems to indicate that Spinoza cannot make good on his promise to treat the emotions as points, lines, and bodies. If the psychology of emotions was a department of the dynamics of bodies, then the presence of conflicting desires in someone’s mind should result in a further, compound, desire, not the victory of one and the obliteration of the other.

In the second section, I turn to a second, harder, problem of akrasia, one specific to adequate ideas. Adequate ideas, completely caused by other adequate ideas, should be unaffected by anything outside themselves, and in particular by desires and ideas of the imagination. And yet the imagination seems to impede their power. The crucial problem here is how adequate and inadequate ideas—infinite and finite modes of thought—can interact, even though mind and body cannot (3p2).

In the third section, I look at what I regard as the deepest problem of akrasia, an adequate idea being unable, because of the power of passive affects in the same mind, to lead, not to action, but to further adequate ideas. In the fourth section I show the significance of my problems for the Ethics as a whole, and then move on to interpersonal conflict of ideas and emotions. Then I turn in the fifth section briefly to some special features of akrasia with regard to the third kind of knowledge, the intuitive knowledge of God. I’ll end by summing up where we are and how much further we need to go.

The three problems of akrasia I will explicate all turn on the power of the finite to affect the infinite. Instead of restricting the problem of akrasia to 4p17, I see the heart of the problem in the apparent falsity of 3p1: “Our mind is in some instances active and in other instances passive. Insofar as it has adequate ideas, it is necessarily active, and insofar as it has inadequate ideas, it is necessarily passive.” It would make life much too easy if, just because we have an adequate idea, we were therefore adequate causes of our actions. Freedom would come too cheap.

Emotional Conflict and Physical Collisions

My first problem is not why knowledge should be overcome by more powerful emotions—that is no mystery—but why, in a conflict of emotions, we act on the stronger and not some combination of them, in the way distinct movements result in a further motion that is the effect of both conflicting motions as causes.5 The presence of conflicting emotions should produce in us a new, composite emotion that would then be the basis for action. Axiom 1 of Part 5 seems to dictate this operation: “If two contrary actions are instigated in the same subject a change must necessarily take place in both or in the one of them until they cease to be contrary” (5p7d makes clear that “actions” here includes emotions). Sometimes this happens. When I chose to eat fat instead of following a regimen I know is good for me, I also feel regret or guilt. Or maybe I’ll compromise and only eat half as much fat, or follow the fat with something healthy: a double cheeseburger accompanied by a “Lite” beer. The virtuous person can bear calmly those misfortunes we cannot escape: that calm is a composite of the painful experience of misfortune and the idea that this loss is unavoidable (4app32). But these are exceptions. Generally, one emotion simply disappears at the approach of the other. In the most important example, we should weigh the advantages and disadvantages of obeying the law and the rulers, but then to obey wholeheartedly, with no residue of the desires that point the other way.

Two more ways in which emotions seem to violate the laws of motion occur, one in 4p15, two propositions before the mention of Ovid and the other in that scholium itself. In the words I already quoted, “a Desire which arises from a true knowledge of good and evil can be extinguished or restrained [restingui vel coerceri] by many other Desires.” And the same language occurs in the next proposition: 4p16 too speaks of a desire being “restrained or extinguished” (coerceri vel restingui). Restraint could follow the laws of motion, with one motion being held back by a contrary motion, but the odd word here is extinguished. One desire can obliterate another; one force never erases another.

The peculiarity of conflict and contrariety for ideas and emotions shows that my first problem of akrasia goes very deep in Spinoza’s system. Colliding forces are external to the body but competing desires are within the mind. Experience seems constantly to refute 3p5: “Things are of a contrary nature, i.e., cannot be in the same subject, insofar as one can destroy the other.” The mind has two contradictory ideas of our distance to the sun. We can’t affirm both, but one idea does not destroy the other; when we learn how far away the sun really is, we don’t start seeing it that way. The two contradictory ideas coexist in the mind. We certainly don’t compound them to get a compromise idea of distance. We see the sun as near and learn that it is far away. Once we know that it is far, we don’t we see it as both far and near, or as pretty far but not very far.6 Instead we remove the contradiction by declaring that the one idea is of the real distance and the other of the apparent distance.

The predicament for emotions is even worse than for ideas because, as I showed in chapter 4, the appearance/reality distinction doesn’t apply to the emotions. Knowing that obsessive love is bad for me, I continue to love Lisa. Once I know that the sun is far away, I can no longer affirm that it is near. But knowing that animal fats are bad for me, I continue to find them attractive.

It ought to work the other way around. I have no stake in the size of the sun. It costs me nothing to continue to believe that it’s small. But I have every reason to get the passions right. The conatus, and so my continued existence, depends on it. But I am more passive to the passions than to ideas. I am not able to stabilize the appearance/reality distinction for the passions.

The second emotional violation of the laws of motion occurs in that scholium concerning akrasia. There Spinoza says that “the true knowledge of good and evil causes commotions [commotiones] in the mind and often yields to lust of every kind.” The second part of that sentence concerns akrasia, but the first is odder. The true knowledge of good and evil is not marked as empowering but as disturbing. Presumably such commotion is painful, and therefore the true knowledge of good and evil can cause a loss of power, as the quotation from Ecclesiastes says: “He who increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”7

I now have enough material to solve this first problem of akrasia, where the geometric method seems to lose contact with the phenomena. The human mind has resources to allow diverse ideas to coexist within the mind with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• first part
• second part
• Notes
• Index of Names
• Index of Passages in Spinoza’s Works