Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

Hasana Sharp

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226750750
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

There have been many Spinozas over the centuries: atheist, romantic pantheist, great thinker of the multitude, advocate of the liberated individual, and rigorous rationalist. The common thread connecting all of these clashing perspectives is Spinoza's naturalism, the idea that humanity is part of nature, not above it. In this sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza's iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of "renaturalization, " showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts. Sharp's groundbreaking argument critically engages with important contemporary thinkers—including deep ecologists, feminists, and race and critical theorists—making Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization vital for a wide range of scholars.

PART I

Reconfiguring the Human

1

Lines, Planes, and Bodies: Redefining Human Action

In the preface to his study of affect in the Ethics, Spinoza famously remarks that he will “consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.” With its redefinition of humanas actiones, the perspective of lines, planes, and bodies is the fundamental basis for the politics of renaturalization. According to Spinoza,

Most of those who have written about the affects and men’s ways of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of Nature, but of things which are outside Nature. Indeed, they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion [imperium in imperio]. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. (E III pref)

It is only in this preface that Spinoza draws attention to the peculiarity of his geometrical method.¹ He remarks that those who “prefer to curse or laugh at the affects and actions of men” will find his approach both strange and futile, for what is irrational is not susceptible to rational demonstration. Yet he insists that everything operates according to the same rules, and “hate, envy, anger, and the like . . . follow with the same necessity and force of Nature as other singular things.” Notably, the justification for the geometrical method is not that it engenders a scientific perspective on external reality. Geometry is invoked not to measure the earth (ge), external nature, or physical as opposed to spiritual reality but to make possible a new measure of ourselves, a new measure of “man.” The lens of geometry exposes humanity as continuous with nature, operating according to the same norms and regularities.

Viewing humanity in terms of lines, planes, and bodies aims to correct the psychology that leads each to invent “from his own temperament different ways of worshipping God, so that God might love him above all the rest, and direct the whole of Nature according to the needs of [his] blind desire and insatiable greed” (E I app). Spinoza declares that a narcissistic understanding of reality might have imprisoned us forever if mathematics “had not shown men another standard [norma] of truth” (I app). Yet mathematics is not the sole measure of reality, the key that unlocks the mysteries of the universe. Math provides a distinctive standard of truth, an alternate angle that enables us to see ourselves and our place in nature in a different light. Unlike the imaginative perspective that sees everything as being “for or against us,” the geometrical perspective examines things in terms of their definitions, or self-relations. Among the most difficult things to aspire to know in terms of their self-relation rather than their relation-to-me are human action and passion. But Spinoza hopes the geometrical method will allow us to understand rather than “bewail” affects. Thus, beyond teaching us the properties of triangles, geometry paves the way for the politics of renaturalization, a new perspective on “hatred, anger, envy, and the like.”² Spinoza mobilizes mathematics to reinsert human action into nature, so that “man” is no longer understood to be an empire within an empire, operating according to uniquely human laws and norms.

Those who imagine man to be “determined only by himself” (E I app) misunderstand humanity as something opposed to nature. As a consequence, human viciousness is frequently blamed on affects and passions, understood to be the animal eruptions that stain spiritual and rational man, marking his this-worldly existence and lamentable distance from God. Freedom of the will, in other words, belongs to an anthropology in which humanity is both exceptionally free and defective. This is a recognizably Christian view of postlapsarian man, free to earn or to lose the grace of God. On this model, Spinoza contends that the task of moral and political thought is reduced to denunciation or approbation instead of understanding and action. This view of human nature persists in “scientific” attempts to grasp human passions and actions.³ Thus, perhaps even more effectively than his predecessors, “the celebrated Descartes” and his new natural science sever the spiritual from the natural, maintaining that even if our bodies are knowable machines, “the mind has absolute power over its own actions.” Spinoza’s study of the affects comprises a novel effort to reinsert human action and existence into nature. “So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must . . . be the same, namely, through the universal laws and rules of Nature.” A view of action as affect opposes the emerging scientific spiritualism by rejecting any implication that “men’s way of living” is unnatural, supernatural, or antinatural, exempt from the order of cause and effect.

Spinoza’s treatment of affect in the final three parts of the Ethics engages directly with Descartes’s Passions of the Soul, opposing its conclusions point by point. It remains relevant in our time as a challenge to mainstream approaches to both political theory and social constructivism, which persist in the view, however complicated, that the world in which we live is an artifact of human agency. Even if denaturalization upsets some understandings of autonomy through analyzing social institutions, it retrenches oppositions between humanity and animality, culture and nature. Spinoza’s analysis of action as a kind of affect grounds his effort to renaturalize humanity.⁴ I say that he “renaturalizes” rather than “naturalizes” humanity, since he is engaged in a strategic reversal of the particular form of spiritualization gaining momentum in his own time. Spiritualization is most evident in the postulate of a mind equipped with a radically free will, which operates in an entirely different way than its body. Although the notion of free will long precedes Descartes in the Christian tradition, the secular version of Cartesian dualism persists today, for example, such that most philosophers identify themselves as “compatibilists.”⁵ Most believe, like Descartes and Kant, that total determination in the realm of nature is compatible with radical human freedom in the realm of the mind. Although the term suggests a “compatibility” between mind and matter, spirit and nature, moral responsibility and causal determinism, it disguises an opposition between rational and natural life. This book aims to show why such an opposition, for Spinoza, yields self-hatred, misanthropy, and civil unrest, and to begin to think our way beyond it.

I proceed in this chapter to outline Spinoza’s understanding of action as affect and its place in his system. I thereby introduce the working vocabulary upon which the remainder of the book depends. The second section outlines how the perspective of affect displaces methodological individualism. To think in terms of affect is necessarily to think in terms of “transindividuality,” such that forms of individuality are necessarily incomplete and variable in response to other beings. The third section examines one major consequence of Spinoza’s revision of human action. I ascertain what becomes of verbal expression and mental decision in Spinoza’s thought when action becomes affect. For Aristotle and many following him, including Hobbes, what makes us human is a power to deliberate and use language. Spinoza, however, treats both decision and speech as radically natural phenomena, which do not make humans exceptional. This example highlights the political implications of the perspective of lines, planes, and bodies. Renaturalization prompts Spinoza to counsel governments to safeguard the freedom of expression, while insisting on the universal inability to control our tongues. While other Spinoza commentators emphasize the futility of the sovereign repression of free expression, the politics of renaturalization underscores the lack of control from the other side. The limitations that Spinoza recommends upon sovereign power emerge from the lack of sovereignty in each and every one of us. Understanding human expression in terms of natural forces and affective determination urges us to conceive of speech as something that emerges by virtue of a complex play of contact and contiguity with other beings, human and nonhuman. In what may seem to be a paradoxical gesture, I suggest that, precisely because we have so little power over our tongues, Spinoza advocates institutions that promote collective conversation. This chapter thus provides the basic schema for a politics of renaturalization, which begins to disrupt the voluntarist and anthropocentric bases of current ethical and political thought.

Action as Affect

When redefining human action, Spinoza’s target is most obviously Descartes. Many today also identify Descartes as their antagonist. André Gombay notes that there is something shocking and even abhorrent to most people about the Cartesian dictum “I think therefore I am.”⁶ Aren’t we also embodied, feeling beings who relish the experience of awe before natural beauty and artistic expression? The restriction of what is essentially and distinctively “me” to thought and thought alone continues to disturb readers of Descartes.⁷ Yet this has not prevented the vast majority of political and moral theorists from drawing lines around the human community with precisely such an understanding. Even animal rights theorists argue for including animals on the basis of their “relevant similarities” to human beings, all of which pertain to consciousness and thought.⁸ Thus, even as the narrow vision of humans as essentially and exclusively thinking beings raises so many objections, political and ethical theory often remains confined to this vision.

With Spinoza’s theory of affect, we have a comprehensive redefinition of human agency. More than an affirmation of our corporeality, Spinoza’s theory of affect gives rise to a notion of agency that is in no way exclusively human. The conception of the human that emerges is a being around whom lines cannot be definitively drawn and whose powers cannot be preemptively defined. As he insists on the inability of the mind to master its body, he declares that “no one has yet determined what the body can do” (E III p2s). Mind-body identity entails that, likewise, no one knows what the mind can do. These limitless possibilities ascribed to mind and body include not only those we call human but also the ideal and corporeal powers of beasts, computers, and collectivities. “Affect” names those changes in power that belong to finite existence by virtue of being connected necessarily to other beings, immersed in a field of powers and counterpowers that cannot be entirely inventoried, anticipated, or circumscribed by “human nature,” a term we will explore in depth in chapter 3. Let us carefully examine the term “affect” and its place in Spinoza’s system.

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of affect in Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole. The final three of the five parts of the Ethics focus on “affect.” Affectus is the first word of the Political Treatise and remains a protagonist throughout the text.⁹ The Theological-Political Treatise begins with a vivid portrait of the misery provoked by hope and fear, the affects that nourish the superstition and despotism that are the treatise’s objects of critique. Since my first concern in this chapter is how affect redefines human action, I will restrict myself here to describing its centrality to his ontology.

Recent scholarship on Spinoza often understands affect to be interchangeable with emotion.¹⁰ Even if he catalogues many affects that we identify as emotions,¹¹ affect is not reducible to our emotional lives. The term was translated into English by both Samuel Shirley and R. H. M. Elwes as “emotion,” but the term “emotion” misleadingly applies only to human beings and perhaps “higher” animals. Emotion likewise suggests irrationality and bondage, but Spinoza links affect to action, reason, and freedom as well. Most basically, affect refers to a universal power to affect and be affected, to the fact that finite beings enhance and diminish one another’s power necessarily, by virtue of their inescapable interdependency. An affect is an encounter between bodies that involves a change in one’s power, for better or for worse, together with an idea of that change (E III def3). Spinoza’s ontology views affects as pertaining to all bodies in nature, sentient or not. To make his unorthodox portrait of affect clearer, I will draw a brief sketch of his ontology.

Existence, according to Spinoza, consists of the infinitely complex, unbounded totality he names “Nature,” “substance,” or “God,” which is most basically all there is and all there could ever be. Nature is “expressed” in infinitely many “attributes,” or ways of being, of which we know two, thought and extension. Each way of being is articulated into infinitely many “modes.” Most of what we recognize as “things” at the level of phenomenal experience are finite “modes” (also called “affections” or “modifications”). Importantly, since there is nothing outside of the infinite system of relations (nature), all modes are bound to one another in relationships of cause and effect. Each and every finite thing is bound to every other finite thing (E I p28), as well as to the infinite force of nature (I p15). Substance, God, or nature does not exist apart from but exists in and as this inexhaustible system of horizontal, mutual causality among infinitely many beings (I p18).¹² Yet the doctrine of the attributes, to be discussed further below and explored in the following chapter, maintains a distinction between the causal community of bodies (modes of extension) and that of ideas (modes of thought). This has the very important result for the politics of renaturalization that each idea is situated within a network of ideas in which it exists and acts. An idea’s action and existence are restricted to its attribute (thought), such that it neither moves nor is moved by bodies. Likewise, each body exists and acts within a force field of bodies, affected by and affecting other bodies, but its actions and passions cannot be explained by virtue of the impact of ideas (I def2; II p7; III p2).

Each mode exists and acts because it has, concomitantly, the power to affect (E I p36) and to be affected by others (I p28). This is as true of rocks and surfboards as it is of squirrels and humans. The only difference is that “in proportion as a body is more capable than others of doing many things at once, or being acted on in many ways at once, so its mind is capable of perceiving many things at once” (II p13s). Insofar as human bodies can undergo more affections and are able to affect more bodies in nature, they exhibit greater powers of mind. Such powers reflect only a relative complexity of body and mind rather than a difference in kind from other natural beings. Nothing prevents some animals from exhibiting greater mental power than some humans, and perhaps even less prevents some collective bodies, like civil institutions or electronic networks, from exhibiting mental power superior to that of a particular human. All beings are “animate,” or minded, in precisely the same measure as their bodies “can be disposed in a great many ways” (II p14).

We must be cautious, however, in our understanding of this coveted spiritual power that we call “mind.” As mentioned above, in the order of being, “a body is not limited by a thought nor a thought by a body” (E I def2). Thus, the relationship between mind and body is not one of “psycho-physical interactionism.” In what has become known as his doctrine of “parallelism,” Spinoza contends that “[t]he order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (II p7). He reiterates this several times, sometimes altering his formulation to read that any thing in nature expresses “the same order and connection of causes” (II p7s; II p9d; my emphasis). The notion of parallelism, attributed to Spinoza by Leibniz, misleadingly suggests that for each material “thing” in the world, there is a representation, or idea, in the universal intellect, or mind of God. For the human being, parallelism implies that there are ideas in the human mind reflecting each body part. The imagery of parallelism, as others have pointed out,¹³ is thereby easily misconstrued, since it suggests that ideas exist in order to represent bodies and are valid insofar as they do so accurately. Since the attributes are metaphysically independent of one another, ideas and bodies do not express or explain one another but rather ...