Journal of the History of Philosophy

The Ethics of Joy offers reconstructive argument, careful engagement with select literature, and a big-picture presentation of Spinoza’s view of the well-lived human life. Not “convinced that Kantians in ethics are Kantians because of an argument that Kant or Korsgaard makes,” Andrew Youpa urges us to consider Spinoza’s view as “an alternative way of thinking about our lives—an alternative that is illuminating and insightful” (8). Since “the presentation of an illuminating alternative is arguably the best a philosopher can do” (9), this is no small task. Youpa argues that Spinozan virtue—human excellence—is defined by our power to care for ourselves and others, not by our accountability. On his reading, power, and particularly the process of increasing it, “empowerment,” explains Spinoza’s ethical vision. Human empowerment occurs in the acquisition of knowledge of ourselves, others, and God, and the affect of empowerment is joy. In moral terms, the empowered, joyful life is the well-lived life.

Spinoza’s views on affects and morals have sometimes taken second place to metaphysics and epistemology in mainstream Anglophone literature. Youpa argues that Spinoza’s metaphysics of power (e.g. E IP34, E IIIP6) organizes the parts of the Ethics devoted to human affects, ways of living, and, most important, values. Ethics IVD8 is the textual pivot: “By virtue and power I understand the same thing, i.e. (by IIIP7), virtue, insofar as it is related to man, is the very essence, or nature of man, insofar as he has the power of bringing about certain things, which can be understood through the laws of his nature alone.” To live well is to increase our power to act as an adequate cause, that is, to express and realize our nature optimally in our interactions with others. Joy attends increases in our power; sadness, decreases. Moral evaluation, Youpa argues, provides the affective evidence.

Chapters 1 and 2 argue that Spinozan affects, which Youpa glosses as “emotions,” are themselves distinctively representational, not merely qualitative or phenomenologically descriptive. Specifically, they bear “axiological information” (5). Emotions function like symptoms, pointing to an underlying reality. Precisely because emotions represent changes in power, they provide initial indications of value, which we subsequently articulate in evaluative judgments and moral knowledge. Youpa’s basic scheme is that emotional indications acquire a more propositional character. Reading Spinoza from the standpoint of power, our emotions and moral knowledge thus express metaphysical dynamics.

Youpa’s middle chapters elaborate the relationship of the moral and the metaphysical. Why should we think that increases in power are intrinsically good and that increases in power are fundamental, accounting for both emotions and moral valence? Youpa answers that moral categories are “part of the fabric of [Spinoza’s] universe” (53). He rejects prevailing interpretations of Spinozan moral values in terms of human desires and the related construal of values as conventional or artificial. Addressing his opponents’ major textual evidence, Youpa rereads key passages to show that increases and decreases of power define Spinoza’s moral language. Youpa’s point is not just that the centrality of power provides an objective or real standard. Important as the real character of moral discourse is, Youpa argues that Spinoza’s moral realism rests on the further claim that considerations of changes in power are not exclusively descriptive—fully captured by, for [End Page 162] instance, physics—but simultaneously evaluative and normative: “Central metaphysical properties are irreducibly axiological” (93). Thus, Youpa rejects the idea of reducing moral claims to power claims; axiology is intrinsic to nature, not eliminated; Spinoza thus emerges as a moral nonnaturalist. While “the notions of goodness and badness are empty apart from enhancements and impairments of power” (116), power is not a neutral category. Ultimately, then, enhancements in an individual’s power are intrinsic, nonderivative, and noninstrumental goods; impairments of an individual’s power are bad in the same ways.

Human beings’ paths through nature are of course marked by twists and turns, which...