Spinoza: Philosophy of Mind

With the proviso that Spinoza's concerns were philosophical, not medical, we examine the Ethics with a view to bringing out those aspects of it which are of import for mental health. We find that the Ethics surrounds the idea that man can be egoless in the Buddhist sense of that term. This concept provides a criterion of mental health. Further, according to Spinoza's theory of the Affections, those which are passive include some which are based on pain. These he 'enumerates (...) among the diseases'. And for them he provides, in Part V, specific 'remedies'. This in turn leads him to equate 'Mental Freedom or beatitude' with a 'healthy Mind'. We thus have in Part V additional possible criteria of mental health. Finally, there is the suggestion that philosophy for Spinoza was a kind of therapy.' There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies. — The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness. — A main cause of philosophical disease — a onesided diet . . . Wittgenstein This doctrine of knowledge first and action later is not a minor disease . . . My present advocacy of the unity of knowledge and action is precisely the medicine for that disease. Wang Yang-ming When asked by two disciples which of the views of each was correct, Wang replied: both are. Which is used depends on the kind of person you are trying to help. Some persons need this one, others that. (shrink)

La double question a la source de ce travail est la suivante: comment le mecanisme du progres dans la connaissance se deploie-t-il exactement chez Spinoza, et pourquoi ce processus cognitif, relie aux idees qu'on possede, est-il en meme temps un processus ethique, relie a la joie et au bonheur? On constate que le champ de l'ethique n'est pas, a proprement parler, celui de la connaissance, mais celui du progres dans la connaissance, qui s'acheve par une conscience superieure de soi, de (...) Dieu et des choses. Nous avons donc cherche a comprendre precisement ce que la notion de "conscience" recouvrait, savoir, une connaissance d'un etat de puissance du sujet, une "connaissance experientielle" ou affective, et quelle place elle avait dans l'economie du systeme: celle de moteur du progres quasi automatique de l'ame humaine. ;Chez l'homme, c'est la conscience de soi donnee dans les affects qui permet le progres ethique, sachant qu'a chaque stade de ce progres correspond simultanement un degre ontologique de puissance, un degre d'activite dans la connaissance, et un degre de joie. Ontologie, theorie de la connaissance et theorie des affects sont si inextricablement meles dans l'ethique de Spinoza qu'il est impossible de rendre compte proprement de celle-ci sans utiliser les trois, ce que nous avons tente de faire par le plan choisi. Un premier chapitre s'attache a comprendre la causalite a l'oeuvre dans la nature; un deuxieme presente la theorie spinoziste de l'ame; un troisieme trace les contours d'une ontologie des affects; et un quatrieme enfin unifie ces trois dimensions en montrant comment l'affectivite explique a chaque degre de la progression le passage a un degre superieur. ;Au terme de cette etude, nous pensons pouvoir comprendre avec une ampleur plus grande le sens meme de l'ethique en meme temps que ses bornes. Ni en deca du progres , ni au-dela : l'affectivite concerne l'homme, et c'est l'homme aussi qui est concerne par l'ethique. Car ce sont tres precisement les affects qui, a chaque etape de l'existence, guident l'ame jusqu'a la realisation de sa puissance propre, la faisant ainsi progresser vers la beatitude. (shrink)

Spinoza shared with his contemporaries the conviction that the passions are, on the whole, unruly and destructive. A life of virtue requires that the passions be controlled, if not entirely vanquished, and the preferred means of imposing this control over the passions is via the power of reason. But there was little agreement in the seventeenth century about just what gives reason its strength and how its power can be brought to bear upon the wayward passions.

This dissertation concerns the affects, defined as bodily intensities and as pre-personal productive or creative feelings. Here, the affects are not simply passions; they precede the distinction between activity and passivity. These definitions correspond to the intuition expressed in philosophies of time and experience, that something is always happening in or to bodies. According to this intuition, events and processes always pertain to bodies, and what happens to bodies is experienced as affects: corporeal intensities, blocks of lived timespace, which can (...) also be called duration-location . These definitions likewise interlace with the contentions of some recent continental philosophers according to whom our subjectivities are produced within relational networks of power and desire. The importance of these redefinitions is twofold: first, the affects are constitutive of subjectivity and not the inverse. Psychological or private personal emotions are derivative of a larger circulation of affects. Secondly, the constitution of subjectivity by the affects, here denominated a production of subjectivity, implies that social forms are inherently plastic and in process. Thus there is always an opening to other forms of individual and group subjectivity, and along with this conclusion comes the corollary: how to engage that opening most fruitfully? The ontological productivity of desiring intensities in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, presented with an exemplary mixture of philosophical and political concerns, serves as the starting point for this redefinition of the affects. Here the affects are seen in the context of extreme experiences, powerful hallucinations of our participation in history. In Spinoza's Ethics, especially Parts 2 and 3, a detailed analysis of the relation between affections and affects allows us to see the ramifications of a systematic philosophy which makes affective modification its primary logic. Guattari's later writings, especially Cartographies Schizoanalytiques and Chaosmosis, develop in a very different sense the possibility of a logic of intensities or of affects, using it as the basis for an examination of the production of subjectivity in determinate social and historical systems, and proposing the possibility of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm of enunciations beyond the current desingularization of subjectivity. The entire project rests under the sign of a double Spinozist affirmation: of speculative thinking , and of the power of the affects. (shrink)

Within critical realist circles, the development of knowledge in the natural and social domains has thus far been much stronger by comparison with its respective development within the personal domain. What I want to explore here is how knowledge can be positively used to have emancipatory effects at the level of the individual. The way in which we are able to achieve this is by coming to have what Spinoza calls more adequate ideas of ourselves, other beings, and our place (...) in nature through strengthening the explanatory power and minimizing the fallibility of the knowledge we use in our judgements and progressive articulations of personal situations by making use of explanatory critique and cause-object matching techniques. This article explains what an explanatory critique actually is and does before turning to explain why it interests us in relation to Spinoza’s thought and then how it is specifically useful in connection with emotional revision and control. (shrink)

The question of the weakness of the will, traditionally named akrasia after Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Book III), is tackled in part 4 of Spinoza’s Ethics. After a brief presentation of this problematic in the Ethics, the author shows how the geometrical order chosen by Spinoza to write his book constitutes a great part of the strategy put in place to concretely resolve this question.

The Spinozistic essence is the factor of individuation of a particular or individual thing. Affects or emotions are properties of an essence, which, under the attribute of thought, is an idea, i.e., cognition. Such essence is the human mind, which is the idea of a particular actual body. Since our emotions are properties of our cognitions, whether adequate or not, concerning the state of our body, which reflects nature as a whole in a particular way, I entitle Spinoza’s theory of (...) emotions "cognitivism." In light of Spinoza’s cognitivism, I attempt to explain what is precisely the significance of the intellectual love of God and how cognitive means serves Spinoza’s philosophical psychotherapy or theory of salvation. (edited). (shrink)

Laetitia in Spinoza has a twofold meaning: on the one hand is a passion, then is a product of inadecuates ideas and is associated with the first kind of knowledge (Imaginatio); on the other hand is expression of the Conatus and is an active affect (Fortitudo) connected with the third kind of knowledge (Scientia intuitiva). This second meaning confront us to a happines no human, frozen, abyssal which prefigure thinkers as Nietzsche, Bataille or lanchot.

Book synopsis: The thoroughly contemporary question of the relationship between emotion and reason was debated with such complexity by the philosophers of the 17th century that their concepts remain a source of inspiration for today’s research about the emotionality of the mind. The analyses of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and many other thinkers collected in this volume offer new insights into the diversity and significance of philosophical reflections about emotions during the early modern era. A focus is placed (...) on affective components in learning processes and the boundaries between emotions and reason. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Since its publication in 1677, Spinoza’s Ethics has fascinated philosophers, novelists, and scientists alike. It is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and contested works of Western philosophy. Written in an austere, geometrical fashion, the work teaches us how we should live, ending with an ethics in which the only thing good in itself is understanding. Spinoza argues that only that which hinders us from understanding is bad and shows that those endowed with a human mind should devote (...) themselves, as much as they can, to a contemplative life. This Companion volume provides a detailed, accessible exposition of the Ethics. Written by an internationally known team of scholars, it is the first anthology to treat the whole of the Ethics and is written in an accessible style. (shrink)

Book synopsis: This volume brings together international scholars working at the intersection of Spinoza studies and critical and feminist philosophy. It is the first book-length study dedicated to the re-reading of Spinoza’s ethical and theologico-political works from a feminist perspective. The twelve outstanding chapters range over the entire field of Spinoza’s writings—metaphysical, political, theological, ethical, and psychological—drawing out the ways in which his philosophy presents a rich resource for the reconceptualization of friendship, sexuality, politics, and ethics in contemporary life. The (...) clear and accessible Introduction offers a historical sketch of Spinoza’s life and intellectual context and indicates how Spinoza’s philosophy might be seen as a rich cultural resource today. Topics treated here include the mind-body problem and its relation to the sex-gender distinction; relational autonomy; the nature of love and friendship; sexuality and normative morality; free will and determinism and their relation to Christian theology; imagination and recognition between the sexes; emotion and the body; and power, imagination, and political sovereignty. The essays engage in a rich and challenging conversation that opens new paths for feminist research. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 1, Page 195-198, January 2012.

Building interconnected readings of Spinoza's accounts of imagination, error, and desire, Michael LeBuffe defends a comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza's ...

: Perhaps the central problem which preoccupies Spinoza as a moral philosopher is the conflict between reason and passion. He belongs to a long tradition that sees the key to happiness and virtue as mastery and control by reason over the passions. This mastery, however, is hard won, as the passions often overwhelm its power and subvert its rule. When reason succumbs to passion, we act against our better judgment. Such action is often termed 'akratic'. Many commentators have complained that (...) the psychological principles that Spinoza appeals to in his account of akrasia are mere ad hoc modifications to his philosophical psychology. I show, on the contrary, that these principles follow from some of the most important and interesting aspects of Spinoza's philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In a short piece written most likely in the 1690s and given the title by Loemker of “On Wisdom,” Leibniz says the following: “...we see that happiness, pleasure, love, perfection, being, power, freedom, harmony, order, and beauty are all tied to each other, a truth which is rightly perceived by few.”1 Why is this? That is, why or how are these concepts tied to each other? And, why have so few understood this relation? Historians of philosophy are familiar with the (...) fact that both Spinoza and Leibniz place strong emphasis on the notion of power in giving their accounts of the human passions. But, while many scholars have explicated the relation between power and the passions (especially in Spinoza’s philosophy), there has been considerably less attention given to the nature of perfection and its relation to both power and the passions.2 Consider the following passages from Spinoza and Leibniz in which these two thinkers seem to bring together the issue of perfection and passion. In Ethics IIIp11s, Spinoza says the following: We see, then, that the Mind can undergo great changes, and pass now to a greater, now to a lesser perfection. These passions, indeed, explain to us the affects of Joy and Sadness. By Joy, therefore, I shall understand in what follows that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection. And by Sadness, that passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection. The affect of Joy which is related to the Mind and Body at once I call Pleasure or Cheerfulness, and that of Sadness, Pain or Melancholy.3 And, in the Monadology §49, Leibniz says this: “The creature is said to act externally insofar as it is perfect, and to be acted upon [patir] by another, insofar as it is imperfect.”4 In other words, for Spinoza, the primitive passions of joy and sadness are cases in which a being’s perfection is increasing or decreasing, while, for Leibniz, any passion, it would.. (shrink)

Spinoza claims we can control any passion by forming a more clear and distinct idea of it. The interpretive consensus is that Spinoza is either wrong or over-stating his view. I argue that Spinoza’s view is plausible and insightful. After breaking down Spinoza’s characterization of the relevant act, I consider four existing interpretations and conclude that each is unsatisfactory. I then consider a further problem for Spinoza: how his definitions of ‘action’ and ‘passion’ make room for passions becoming action. I (...) propose two solutions to this problem, both of which yield a hint regarding what act Spinoza has in mind. Using that hint, I propose that we can appreciate Spinoza’s insight by considering how philosophizing about a feeling can 'kill the mood.' The act of grasping how a passion exemplifies certain general truths, I hold, is a distinctly rational activity that has all the features Spinoza describes. I conclude by showing how this interpretation fits with Spinoza’s larger views on rational knowledge, rational joy, the comprehensibility of passions, and the relation between second- and first-order ideas. (shrink)

Eugene Marshall presents an original, systematic account of Spinoza's philosophy of mind, in which the mind is presented as an affective mechanism that, when rational, behaves as a spiritual automaton. He explores key themes in Spinoza's thought, and illuminates his philosophical and ethical project in a striking new way.

: Two common ways of explaining akrasia will be presented, one which focuses on strength of desire and the other which focuses on action issuing from practical judgment. Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza 's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza 's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because Spinoza (...) 's account explains action asissuing from modes of mind that are both cognitive and affective, it captures the intuitions that motivate the two traditional views while avoiding the pitfalls that result from their one‐sided approaches. This project will allow us a fuller understanding of Spinozist moral psychology. In addition to this historical value, the Spinozist theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of certain hard cases of akrasia while avoiding the problems be set by other theories. For this reason, the Spinozist account could also be seen as a useful contribution to our philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of akrasia. (shrink)