Abstract
What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind.
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Notes
Since for Spinoza mind and consciousness are not identical, I will use the term ‘mind’ when referring to their views together. But the reader must remember that for Sartre mind just is consciousness.
There is much that Sartre accepts from Descartes’ philosophy and in a 1975 interview, Sartre described himself as a Cartesian philosopher at least in Being and Nothingness (Gruenheck et al. 1981, p. 8). I’ve explored many of these Cartesian elements in Being and Nothingness in Wider (1997). There are Cartesian elements in Spinoza as well.
In Sect. 5, I discuss the controversy over whether Spinoza had a theory of consciousness or not. For now I’ll leave that question aside.
I am not claiming that Sartre would agree with Spinoza’s definition of ‘substance’ in the Ethics. Their agreement lies in their rejection of the Cartesian view that the mind is an entity and an entity distinct from the body.
Sartre (1956, p. lxi).
Sartre (1956, p. lxi and p. lx).
Sartre (1956, p. li). Sartre maintained this position throughout his life. In a 1975 interview, he reiterated his earlier view. “Consciousness is outside; there is no ‘within’ of consciousness. … Subjectivity is not in consciousness; it is consciousness” (Gruenheck et al. 1981, p. 11; emphasis in the original).
To examine the arguments he gives to support his one substance doctrine and the identification of that one substance with God/Nature would take us too far afield for the purposes of this paper.
Spinoza (1992, 2p10). I will use a standard notation for the Ethics employing the following abbreviations: p = proposition, pr = proof, c = corollary, s = scholium, d = definition, a = axiom. Hence 2p10 refers to Part Two, proposition 10. All Spinoza references are to the Ethics unless otherwise noted.
Spinoza (1992, 2p13).
See Spinoza (1992, 2p11 and 2p11pr).
Spinoza (1992, 2p12). We’ll see why this must be the case in a discussion below of what’s come to be called Spinoza’s parallelism.
Spinoza (1992, 2p15).
Spinoza (1992, explication of 2d3).
Spinoza does make a distinction between active and passive states of mind (3p1). The distinction rests on the cause of the idea or ideas that constitute a particular state of mind (3p1pr). But even passive states of the mind, which depend on inadequate ideas alone (3p3), involve the activity of conception which all ideas involve. For Aristotle’s view on the human mind as activity, see De Anima, Book 3, sections 4 and 5. Aquila (1978, p. 288, n. 35) makes this same point about Sartre and Spinoza. Wolfson (1965) reads Spinoza’s view of mind in an Aristotelian light although he notes that Spinoza would reject Aristotle’s notion of a potential intellect. For Spinoza the mind is always actual (Wolfson 1965, vol. II, p. 45).
For Spinoza the object is always the body (its changing modifications) while for Sartre the object can be the body, but more often it is something in the world. Consciousness throws us out into the world, for Sartre. I’ll return to this difference in Sect. 7 and argue it’s not as stark as it might at first appear.
Sartre (1956, pp. li–lii).
Aquila (1978, p. 288).
Aquila (1978, p. 286).
Sartre (1956, p. lxi).
Sartre (1956, p. 82).
Barnes, in the glossary she provides at the end of her English translation of Being and Nothingness, explains that Sartre invented this word (néantir) and she takes it to mean “to encase with a shell of non-being” (1956, p. 631).
Sartre explains why this must be the case in Chapter One of Part One of Being and Nothingness: The Origin of Negation. It is a long and detailed argument in which he distinguishes the for-itself and the in-itself. The entire work is an exploration of the relationship between these two. An explanation of this same relationship of consciousness with itself I leave for Sect. 2 in which I examine Sartre’s and Spinoza’s views on the nature of self-consciousness.
Spinoza (1992, 2p7s; emphasis mine).
Della Rocca (1996, chapter 7) refers to this identity relation as numerical identity.
Descartes (1996, p. 54).
Spinoza (1992, 2p7). This doctrine is called parallelism by many commentators on Spinoza’s philosophy.
Spinoza (1992, 2p7s).
I discuss these views of Sartre at length in Wider (1997, chapter two).
Sartre (1956, p. lxvii).
Sartre (1956, p. 305).
Sartre (1956, p. 442).
Sartre’s position differs from Spinoza in one very important aspect and that is that for Sartre there are no causes whatsoever for consciousness as a choice of action. For Spinoza there is a causal chain for ideas. All ideas are determined by preceding ideas just as all physical states are determined by preceding physical states.
This puts them both in the position of explaining why it is important to understand the nature of the body in order to have an adequate understanding of consciousness or the mind if indeed the two are distinct conceptually from each other and have no causal effect on each other.
He actually examines two types of self-consciousness in Being and Nothingness. In one the for-itself attempts, always unsuccessfully, to apprehend itself as an object. In the other the for-itself attempts to grasp itself as consciousness and because consciousness just is, on Sartre’s view, presence to the world, it is consciousness’ attempt to be conscious of itself as consciousness of the world. It is only this latter type of self-consciousness that he’s discussing in the Introduction to Being and Nothingness and it is only this latter type that I wish to compare with Spinoza’s view on self-consciousness.
Sartre (1956, p. lii).
Descartes’ view has more subtlety to it than the standard interpretation implies. I review arguments for a more subtle reading of Descartes on self-consciousness in Wider (1997, pp. 8–14).
Sartre (1956, p. lii).
Sartre (1956, p. liii).
Sartre distinguishes pure from impure reflection, but it is only pure reflection that is consciousness’ apprehension of itself as consciousness. In impure reflection consciousness attempts to grasp itself as an objectified self or ego. Since I’m only interested in the former type of self-consciousness in this paper, my use of reflection throughout refers to pure reflection alone.
He also uses the terms thetic and non-thetic consciousness for this distinction.
Sartre (1956, p. liii).
Sartre (1956, p. 151).
Sartre (1956, p. 161).
See Wider (1997, pp. 78–85).
Commentators’ evaluations of Spinoza on consciousness run the gamut from Nadler’s belief that although Spinoza has no “explicit or perfectly consistent account of consciousness … [he] does indeed have an explanation of consciousness” (2008, 575) to Bennett (1984) who denies Spinoza has any theory of consciousness at all. In between are those who thought Spinoza tried but failed to develop a coherent theory in which the distinction could be drawn between conscious and non-conscious beings and between conscious and non-conscious ideas (Wilson (1999), Della Rocca (1996), LeBuffe (2010)). See also Jon Miller (2007, p. 203) for a discussion on Spinoza and consciousness.
Spinoza (1992, 2p21s).
Spinoza (1992, 2p21s).
Spinoza (1992, Treatise, p. 241).
Wolfson’s (1965, vol. II, pp. 33–64) reads Spinoza’s account of the mind and the body, i.e., the relationship between an idea and its object, as akin to Aristotle’s discussion of the relationship between matter and form.
He adheres to the Cartesian position about the mind’s awareness of itself.
My contention is not that Spinoza thought in terms of consciousness consistently throughout the Ethics. His comments are most often in terms of the mind and its idea of itself as well as in terms of ‘perceiving’ rather than ‘being conscious of.’ But I think the text supports that there’s good reason to believe that when Spinoza is discussing the relationship between an idea and its object, he was talking about a relation very close to the Sartrean one between consciousness and its objects.
I think this reading of Spinoza on the idea of an idea would also fit well with his distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas and between knowledge by imagination and knowledge by reason.
Bennett (1984, pp. 184–88) points out a problem in Spinoza that is similar to Sartre’s problem of maintaining that consciousness is identical to its object and at the same time distinguishing between different occurrences of self-consciousness in such a way that the occurrences don’t all collapse into one. Given that for Spinoza an idea and its object are always identical, Bennett asks how Spinoza is to distinguish an idea of x [which he symbolizes as I(x)] from I(I(x)) and I(I(x)) from I(I(I(x))) and so on? One way Spinoza might try to distinguish each idea of an idea from any other is by the difference between each idea’s representational features. However Bennett thinks this solution fails since it runs counter to the causal parallelism articulated in 2p7. I’m offering Sartre a similar solution. I think that because Sartre maintains that consciousness is and is not its object at the ontological level that his use of this solution is not open to the same criticism Bennett raises against Spinoza.
To even begin to address it fully would require at least an article in itself.
Wolfson (1965, vol. II, pp. 33–70) offered an interpretation of this doctrine that he also said did not commit Spinoza to the view that everything has consciousness.
Curley (1969, p. 128).
Wilson (1999, p. 135).
Wilson (1999, pp. 133–138). She finds evidence of Spinoza’s desire to draw such a distinction at 3p9 and 5p39s.
Curley (1988, pp. 71–72).
Bennett (1984, p. 188).
Of course I am begging all sorts of questions about sense and reference.
See Damasio (1999) and Ravven (2003). See also Wider (2006) for a review of this literature. William James (1884, p. 192) argued that every change in one’s bodily state produced by an emotion inducer “is felt acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs.” Of course debates still rage about whether he was right or not.
I believe one can use Spinoza’s distinctions between consciousness and knowledge and between types of knowledge and degrees of adequacy of ideas to make plausible, at least to some degree, the possibility that we are aware of all the changes in our bodies. He doesn’t need the distinction between conscious and unconscious ideas to do so. If this is correct, it vitiates Wilson’s criticism that he wants to but can’t make that distinction. This could also address Garrett’s (2008) and Nadler’s (2007) worry that the ideas of ideas account of consciousness can’t be made consistent with Spinoza’s talk of degrees of consciousness in 2p13 s and 5p39 s. I think the distinction between degrees of adequacy of ideas can be used to make that distinction without abandoning the reading of Spinoza on consciousness I’m using in this paper. To explain how this can be done would take another paper.
Sartre (1956, p. 329).
It is only the body as it exists for-itself that is always part and parcel of consciousness’ presence to the world.
Sartre (1956, p. 330).
Once again Sartre makes the point that consciousness both is and is not its object.
Sartre (1956, p. 454).
Spinoza (1992, 2p17s of 2p17c).
Sartre (Gruenheck et al. 1981, p. 40). Sartre has been criticized by many commentators for his failure to examine “the complex foundations of our own physical, biological, or psychological nature” (Caws 1979, pp. 96–97). Caws thinks Sartre would dismiss this criticism because his use of the phenomenological method allows him to bracket such concerns.
The question of which end to start with is still debated in contemporary philosophy of mind.
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Wider, K. Sartre and Spinoza on the nature of mind. Cont Philos Rev 46, 555–575 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9280-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-013-9280-y