A Strategy for Happiness, in the Wake of Spinoza

1 A Strategy for Happiness, in the Wake of Spinoza

The first, long sentence of Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect can be read as an introduction to his Ethics and his entire system, the starting point, and program for his philosophy:^[1]

After experience had taught me that all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile, and I saw that all the things which were the cause or object of my fear had nothing of good or bad in themselves, except insofar as [my] mind was moved by them, I resolved at last to try to find out whether there was anything which would be the true good, capable of communicating itself, […] whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy, to eternity.^[2]

It is remarkable that someone generally known as the philosopher of reason begins this sentence by appealing to experience and advances “me” as the recipient of the experience’s teaching. Spinoza speaks from his own experience of life which is characterized by alienation and that is the beginning of a search for improvement. In his experience, one is often confronted in ordinary life with feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness, if not anxiety, and always subject to the fluctuations of chance. But he also discovered that what he feared is not in itself good or bad; these are relative concepts. We consider things good or bad according to whether or not they stir the soul and whether they bring us joy or make us sad. An improvement in our lives is directly related not only to the desire to sustain ourselves and keep us alive but also to the idea and the knowledge of what favors this striving. It is related to a surplus that consists in the joy generated by the increase of our life force and power to act in a self-affirming movement, keeping at bay as much as possible the sadness or the idea that decreases our vitality and power to act. Spinoza wants to counter the alienation of everyday life, the impoverished meaninglessness and emptiness, and therefore, he chooses to live a full life; that is, he chooses to live a life as a philosopher. In keeping with his view of human nature and the inner economy of affects, the path of philosophy does not simply mean opting for reason far removed from practice, but the very opposite – that is, unless reason is understood differently than one is accustomed to.

“Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it demands that everyone love himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him” and will lead him to greater perfection.^[3] Since

virtue is nothing but acting from the laws of one’s own nature, and no one strives to preserve his being except from the laws of his own nature, it follows …that the foundation of virtue is this very striving to preserve one’s own being, and that happiness consists in man’s being able to preserve his being”^[4]. “For a clearer understanding of these things, we must note here that we live in continuous change, and that as we change for the better or worse, we are called happy or unhappy.^[5]

In this article, I will focus on Spinoza’s anthropology, which can be read as a strategy for happiness, political as well as individual. At first glance, it may seem strange that, in a special issue dedicated to happiness in contemporary continental philosophy, I will discuss the ideas of an author who died centuries ago. Along with some current authors, however, I assume that Spinoza is our contemporary; throughout this text, I will try to make clear what I mean by that. Although Spinoza himself stated several times that his philosophy aimed to serve practice and the common good, for a long time, the Spinozist landscape was characterized by a neglect of his political thought. This changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Alexandre Matheron applied Gueroult’s method to the affects, politics, and history, when Louis Althusser connected Spinoza with Marx and Machiavelli, and Gilles Deleuze focused on the connection between immanence and the productive and transindividual power of the affect and the body.^[6] After that, first Antonio Negri and then Étienne Balibar in turn took an important step by emphasizing the importance of the concepts of multitude and the transindividual.^[7] In what follows, I will dwell with Matheron/Spinoza on the question of anthropology and the structure of thought, with Deleuze/Spinoza on the kinds of knowledge in relation to the human mind and body, and with Balibar/Spinoza on the transindividual, productive, active, and thus strategic nature of our thinking.

My intention is not to deal separately and exhaustively with these three contemporary authors and their interpretations of the themes I discuss here or the relevant texts from Spinoza, nor is that possible within the scope of this text. After all, the writings of each of these authors are themselves far-reaching, complex, and profound, and they and the themes broached here are subject to a significant body of scholarship.^[8] Rather, I opt for an alternative approach whose style matches the theoretical components (and texts) that are discussed synthetically from a particular perspective. I claim that the convergence and intersection of Matheron/Spinoza’s inclusive approach to the structure of “our” human thought, Deleuze/Spinoza’s tension-filled subdivision in “our” kinds of knowledge, and Balibar/Spinoza’s ontology of relations connected to the active, productive, and strategic nature of “our” thinking have significance for “happiness,” both as a theoretical theme and with respect to practical truth. The motivating starting point of all three contemporary philosophers converges with the motive expressed by Spinoza, and it is the same perspective I follow and aim at in this text. Spinoza begins his quest from the experience of emptiness and anxiety in the face of the mutability of “happiness” in everyday life – an emptiness and anxiety from which it is difficult to break free and which tends to paralyze people or induces them to make wrong choices and which makes their lives even worse instead of yielding improvement.^[9] This prompts Spinoza to embark on the enterprise of “philosophy,” which he repeatedly and explicitly motivates.^[10] He wants to find out what “our” experience of happiness and unhappiness consists of, whether and how we can perpetuate happiness, avert unhappiness, and thus improve our life. Happiness and unhappiness seem to be related to what “we” experience as good and bad. Spinoza’s motive for philosophizing is moreover supported by the observation that there is no such thing as “good” and “bad” in itself. He systematically links the experience of happiness to the increase in joy and the permanence of this positive affect. This means that the improvement of our lives is directly linked to the desire to sustain ourselves but also to the knowledge of what contributes to it. In Spinoza’s reasoning, the crucial pivot is a surplus that exists in the joy that comes from the increase of our life force, in which the individual and collective converge, and this is why his ethics of happiness cannot be separated from his political insights. The increase in our life force coincides with our power to produce and act.

2 On Human Nature, with Matheron/Spinoza

Matheron’s Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, first published in 1969, is the first study to consider Spinoza’s work as a fundamentally political philosophy.^[11] Following the same strictly synthetic logic that Spinoza applies in his Ethics, Matheron builds a progressive composition that starts from the simplest bodies of extended substance and ends in the transindividual eternal life of the happy community of sages.^[12] In his commentary, Matheron accomplishes the same task that Spinoza had set for himself and thereby necessarily surpasses him – it is the nature of a political and consequently topical reflection not just to dwell on a systematic, “objective” reconstruction of a historical text nor to write down the history of a thought that remains within the limits of its object, the past. Matheron/Spinoza both set out, the latter in his political treatises and the former in his study of those political treatises, to decipher the passions that drive human behavior, and in the Ethics or the study of the Ethics to analyze their genesis. They both seek to show that the key to understanding the passions lies in the social formations and political institutions whose nature they are subjecting to analysis.^[13] This dialectical approach means for both Spinoza and Matheron a focus on the external aspects of the inner life and on its connection with the natural and historical “lifeworld,” a focus on the expressions, that is, the texts, and on the social–political reality in which they find their expression, are produced, and are read. Past and present appear in the same plane of time, all expressions in an immanent compositional plan (as Deleuze calls it), and so Spinoza is our contemporary.^[14] Likewise characteristic in the work of both is the limitation in assumptions and theses to the external (i.e., material or physical) field of the texts, events, and facts and at the same time a focus on the apparent contradictions, aporias, difficulties, and tensions that occur in the texts and in their relation to the political and physical world. It is a historical-materialist approach that looks for “historical nature” and for “natural history,” concepts that ought not to surprise one in the case of Matheron (who is influenced by Althusser and Marx) but that we also believe to be applicable to Spinoza’s method. After the publication of his two monographs (1969; 1971), Matheron in numerous studies focused on human nature and on the passions of what we could call, with Marx, the “social individual” – the affects and the desires are in motion, they put into motion, they possess “a practical, strategic power of affirmation and constitutive resistance, without model or limitation.”^[15] The human condition is a fact, and yet, it lies open to the most diverse interpretations. Strictly theoretically, Spinoza does not know what man is and he can do very well without, so Matheron argues, and in fact, “this founded ignorance is liberating. It opens ethics and politics to history, that is, to the collective and constitutive practice of nature itself.”^[16]

In the article “L’anthropologie spinoziste?” Matheron questions whether Spinoza’s system actually has a rigorously elaborated anthropology.^[17] Many propositions from the second part of the Ethics deal with “a being that is always the same” and that Spinoza calls “thing,” “soul,” “body,” “human,” “human soul,” or “human body,” interspersed with “we” in the first-person plural.^[18] The question of a definition of human nature is conspicuously relativized and approached intuitively or phenomenologically descriptive. Spinoza speaks of human nature in the first-person plural because every science is in fact anthropology, since we know everything we know insofar as we know our body, and our body is, among other things, a human body.^[19] Still, Matheron finds a passage with fairly precise details, particularly in the six postulates that follow the proposition that the body is the object of the idea that constitutes the human mind, “a certain mode of Extension which actually exists, and nothing else,” from which it moreover follows “that man consists of a Mind and a Body, and that the human Body exists, as we are aware of it.”^[20] The question of the specifically human is important for our question of happiness, all the more so because it is about the relationship between parts and the whole, between what always remains the same and what changes, between our body and our thoughts, and what these can bring about mutually and/or in opposition to each other. Matheron follows the Spinozian non-normative prescription that seeks to find happiness by understanding the properties of the typically human, that is, the properties of the human body, attempting to arrive at this insight by rigorous eidetic analysis. As he says explicitly in the scholium, Spinoza tries to grasp the properties of a body insofar as it is human, yet the outcome remains vague and ambiguous.^[21] Let us look at Matheron’s reasoned reading step by step.

A human body is composed of a great many different individuals; this is also true of the bodies of animals and plants. The individual parts of a human body are hard, soft, or fluid; this is still true of some animal species besides humans, such as monkeys or dogs. This assumption does allow for a distinction though, says Matheron, because the relationship between the individual parts of a human being and of a dog is not the same.^[22] In postulates 3 through 6, Spinoza talks about what follows from the first two postulates: the individual parts that compose the human body are affected in many different ways by external bodies and also vice versa, the human body can affect an external body in many different ways.^[23] Between them there is a correlation: the more varied our modes of reaction toward the external world are, the more numerous are the affections we can undergo without being destroyed, and the more we can be affected by the external world, the more we can affect the external world itself; this is so because any change we make to it first passes through a change in ourselves.

The human body is composed through its relation with external bodies. A composite individual, while retaining its nature, can be affected in many ways. For bodies differ from one another in terms of the motion and rest and velocity and slowness of their mutual parts. As long as each part of an individual retains the same ratio of motion and rest and communicates it to the others as before, the individual retains its nature, whether it moves as a whole, stands still, or moves in this or that direction.^[24] The individual human body is part of nature and the “whole of nature is one Individual, whose parts, i.e., all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole Individual.”^[25] This leads Spinoza to put forward the assumption that the human body can be affected in many ways that increase or diminish its power of acting, and also in others that do not render its power of acting greater or less.^[26]

So far, there is no criterion for distinguishing the specifically human being, but perhaps we will find it if we start looking at reason. Does reason bring us closer to a distinctive definition of human nature? And does Spinoza derive the rational faculty from the aforementioned six postulates – this would mean that animals also possess reason – or does he introduce an additional hypothesis? According to Matheron, he does both.^[27] In propositions 38 and 40 of Ethics II, Spinoza explains the foundations of the common concepts that form the basis of our reason.^[28] That the aspects that are common to all bodies and are equally in the part and the whole (aeque in parte, ac in toto) can only be known adequately, does not preclude animals from possessing reason. But that an idea that follows in the mind from ideas that are adequate in the mind is also adequate, contains the assumption that this is true only of humans. By this Spinoza shows that human beings and animals in principle possess reason or adequate knowledge equally, but that at the same time, it is only humans who are able to draw consequences from it.

On the level of interindividual relations, Spinoza’s ethics is an ethics of likeness (similitude), Matheron says.^[29] It is abundantly clear: the more similar something is to us, the more useful it is, and nothing is more similar to us than other people. We must therefore make every effort to agree with them. On the face of it (and in contrast to his view of humans as animals, as part of nature wherein no hierarchy is found), Spinoza applies an all-or-nothing rule with regard to animals: with animals, we can do anything that suits us, without consideration. “The rational principle of seeking our own advantage teaches us the necessity of joining with men, but not with the lower animals, or with things whose nature is different from human nature.”^[30] So it is important to determine human nature and to know who our equal is. Is human nature determined by reason, that is, by what is useful for our self-preservation, or by something else? And again, Matheron’s answer is that Spinoza follows both options. Those who live under the guidance of reason seek knowledge not only for themselves but also for other people. People want to spread their knowledge, and most joy comes from the success they achieve in doing so.^[31]

So, which of the two is most likeable to us and, consequently, which is most useful: the “non-reasonable human” or the “reasonable non-human”?^[32] First, Spinoza/Matheron juxtaposes the two alternatives with their equally grim consequences. In the end, Spinoza opts for both options which he provisionally adopts at the same time, thereby maximizing the class of equals, sacrificing no one, and including both non-reasonable humans (people who do not follow reason, who possess lesser intellectual faculties, or lack them altogether) and reasonable non-humans (i.e., animals). It is perhaps for this reason, a strategic reason, that Spinoza did not define humans more specifically, so Matheron believes.^[33] If one theoretically accepts that the class of our equals transcends the limits of our species while accepting that there are fewer disadvantages to expanding this class too far than to delimiting it too sharply, the level of generality at which the Ethics situates itself becomes more pertinent than would be the case if the essence of man did become specifically and tightly defined.^[34] The ambiguity and the non-rigorously defined knowledge or “founded ignorance” about the nature or essence of human beings go hand in hand with the neutrality that Spinoza observes for the sake of practice, as evinced by his statements at the beginning of the Tractatus politicus in which he draws an explicit link to the content and purpose of his Ethics. ^[35] It is an inclusive structure of reasoning, a strategy that Spinoza constantly employs.

This is an important insight for our (and Spinoza/Matheron’s) ricercar for happiness. But before we come to any conclusions, I will first turn to another aspect that has been discussed extensively in Spinoza scholarship, namely the different kinds of knowledge he outlines. Spinoza’s classification is ambiguous and problematic, perhaps even pointing to an incoherence within his oeuvre. In different places, the classification is described differently with altered boundary lines and interactions. Sometimes there are four, and at other times three kinds of knowledge. The subdivision is a challenge to most Spinoza interpretations and in particular to the common rationalist reading.^[36] At first glance, the subdivision seems to suggest a hierarchy which contradicts other claims made by Spinoza as well as the conclusive openness regarding the questions raised by Matheron.^[37] What Spinoza understands by reason and how he sees knowledge is also marked by ambiguity. In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, reason is absent, and in the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, it is subsumed under faith.^[38] In the political treatises, the reference to faith disappears but at the same time skepticism and dogmatism, which approach the question of ethics and politics with or without reason, are both condemned as “insane.”^[39] In the Ethics, reason is identified with demonstrative discursive knowledge and limited to the second kind, although the third kind of knowledge, which is intuitive knowledge, finds its origin in reason but also transcends it and connects it with the affects and the imagination. Even though a comprehensive treatment of the questions that arise in a reading of Spinoza’s texts on the topic would be very useful for the present theme, I will limit myself here to a brief and partial discussion in the company of Deleuze.

3 On the Kinds of Knowledge, with Deleuze/Spinoza

That there are different kinds of knowledge is an issue that occupied Spinoza throughout his life and work. In the second scholium to proposition 40 of Ethics II, he describes it this way: we human beings know many things and form general concepts in three different ways. The first kind of knowledge is formed on the basis of the individual things we experience in a disorderly way and on the basis of signs (such as from hearsay, from having read); both of these he calls “opinion” or “imagination,” and he sees them as inadequate. The second kind is adequate and consists of the formation of common concepts and adequate ideas of the properties of things. The third kind he calls intuitive is adequate and penetrates the essence of things.^[40] Opinions or imagination, on the one hand, do have something general – they belong to the human condition – yet they ultimately get stuck in the separate, individual, arbitrary, and, above all, in passivity. In the first kind of knowledge, we are guided by tradition, the sayings of others or our impulsive, uncontrolled, very changeable, and therefore shaky individual feelings. To overcome individualism and randomness, we need the critical filter of the second kind of knowledge. Our ideas become adequate when we test them and actively subject them to investigation, when they stand the test of time and can be shared with others. This kind of knowledge is necessary, but it is not sufficient for practice – that is reserved for the third kind of knowledge, which penetrates the universal essence of things. In the example given by Spinoza, intuitive knowledge is immediate, evident at a glance, and joins in a lively interaction with individual, singular, particular experience, affect, and imagination^[41].

The perspective of living experience, in which affect and imagination are expressed and to the extent they are expressed to ensure that there is experience, is crucial to our theme. Knowledge about the experience of ideas, affects, and imagination is inseparable from “expression,” which is the theme of Gilles Deleuze’s Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (1969). Expression is a systematic concept, both theoretical and practical. Insofar as Spinoza and, along with him, Deleuze speak of knowledge, affects, and imagination, the inner life, so to speak, they are looking for their externalities, for what appears on the surface, the physical expressions that can be captured in a geometrical/geographical drawing. Similarly, they look for the effects – also expressions – of this or that affect or knowledge on our existence (our life force) and our operation (our power to act), which are the same. In his lesson on Spinoza on January 24, 1978, Deleuze reflects on the place and role of affect and idea in the kinds of knowledge related to the corporeal, the power to act, and the life force.^[42] An idea, he argues, has “objective reality” insofar as it represents something to which it refers. An affect, on the other hand, is any thought that represents nothing. Spinoza is right that there is always a primacy of the idea over the affect for the simple reason that in order to love, for example, one must have an idea, however confused and indeterminate, of what one loves. For “love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause.”^[43] In Parts II and III of the Ethics, Spinoza gives us a convincing geometrical portrait of our life that consists in the description of ideas that constantly succeed one another, one idea chasing away another. Furthermore, we humans are a kind of mental automatons and we do not make these ideas entirely ourselves, rather they form and affirm themselves in us. Alongside the succession of ideas and distinct from yet intertwined with them and affirmed or not affirmed by them, there is a continuous variation in the power of existence and in the power to act. It is this melodic line of continuous change that defines affect in its correlation with ideas and its difference from them.

In the wake of Spinoza, Deleuze then dwells on the three kinds of ideas he calls “affection,” “concept,” and “essence.” Affection is the state of the body insofar as it undergoes an action of another body – any composition or mixture of bodies is affection. The first kind of idea is a mode of thought that represents the affection of the body. It knows things only by their effect, and insofar as I only have affection ideas, I live according to the chance of encounters. A body is defined by the set of relations that compose it, or, what amounts to the same thing, by its power to be affected or moved. As long as you do not know the power of your body to be affected, you do not know what you are capable of and you do not transcend the coincidence of encounters. We are completely enclosed in this world of idea-affections and the continuous affective variations of joy and sadness. I am not the cause of my affections, I do not own them, they are produced by something else, and I am passive. But there are also the concept-ideas and the essence-ideas. The concept-idea has nothing to do with the effect of another body on mine, it is an adequate way of thinking because it understands a cause, because it knows whether a certain composition or mixture has this or that effect, because it has a view of how the relation of one body composes itself with the relation of another body. Deleuze gives the example of arsenic. When I take it, it causes the parts of my body to come into a different relation than the relation that characterizes me, which is good for the arsenic but bad for me, it makes me sad because I am heading toward death. The concept-idea is not abstract but rather very concrete, and at the same time, we are close to an analytic geometry. Indeed, concepts are general, common, and collective; they refer to a multiplicity but are no less individual for it – Deleuze constantly underlines the interaction with the individual and/or subjective, even in the way he organizes his text from the first person singular or plural. The third kind of idea, essence, gives us access to the world of pure intensities. Further into his lesson, Deleuze returns to the initial question posed by Spinoza and also by himself, and which ultimately always faces us humans: how can we escape the arbitrariness of encounters or compositions/mixtures of bodies? This is the happiness-question. Let us also return to it again, this time together with Balibar and from yet another angle.

4 On Transindividuality, with Balibar/Spinoza

Can adequate knowledge of the nature and essence of things accommodate the fluctuations of chance and bring us closer to happiness? The structure of the Ethics suggests so: from an exposition of the categories of thought and concepts in Part I (what is called substance, essence, necessity, freedom, etc.), the text moves on to an analysis of the human mind and thoughts in Part II, from there to a description of the nature and kinds of affects in Part III, to what the power of affects means for the formation of a political state, power, and powerlessness in Part IV, ending in Part V with the power that humans can find in themselves to persevere in existence and in working, again and again. As we saw, lasting well-being and happiness is the motif of Spinoza’s knowledge project. We also learned that the metaphysical notion of human essence, identified with conatus and hence desire, draws a radical break with tradition (both classical and modern) and undergoes an important switch. Spinoza refers in his phenomenological physics and geometrical portraits not to species or general class but to the singularity of individuals. His ethics is not based on an ontological dualism and is not a reductionist philosophy of nature that ignores the subjectivity of the individual and its being situated in the historical-social lifeworld. Spinoza’s search for the essence of man is a principle of “determination and differentiation,” as Balibar underlines in his essay Spinoza: From Individuality to transindividuality (1997).^[44] The classic antinomy of metaphysics and ethics is resolved in the definition of individual as res singularis or finite modes of substance. A corollary, according to Balibar/Spinoza, is that “substance” and “individuality” are reciprocal concepts in the sense that substance (or God, or nature) is an infinite process of production of many individuals while many different individuals, that is, those causally independent of one another, constitute the necessary existence of substance. It means that each individual is a unit and thus it is always composed of parts: an individual is an effect or moment in a process of individuation. And since individuals are not given, whether, by nature, God, or substance, they are formed or constructed, and since they are never perfect and never finished in a final definitive sense (which also means they are not tightly definable), they are productive and/or active. Determinism, natural necessity, historical–geographical conditions, dependence of the body, and unfreedom of the will form the basis and motive for freedom, to shape oneself, one’s life, and community. Balibar focuses on what underlies this gigantic reversal, the ontology of relations in Spinoza’s Ethics, and he elaborates the thesis that individuality is understood as transindividuality.^[45]

He follows the steps Spinoza takes as in a contrapuntal ricercar.^[46] In Parts I and II of the Ethics, transindividuality posits itself as a specific conception of causality that includes reciprocity; in Part II with outliers in Parts III and IV, transindividuality is an integrative concept and key to the construction of successive orders of individuality going from the simplest to more complex individuals. In Parts III and IV, transindividuality is a mediation articulated between reason and imagination. According to the nature of the case, these three aspects of transindividuality corroborate one another and the causality scheme has its effect on the inclusive structure of Spinoza’s conceptual system and rests on the psychological laws of imagination arising from the fundamental ambivalence of desire on the one hand and from the rational rule of mutual utility that creates the possibility for relatively stable communities on the other.

First, regarding Spinoza’s view of causality, the identification of God and nature prescribes a topological relation between causes and effects in which interaction and complexity are not a derivative but come first and underlie it. It is a non-linear scheme of causality that establishes an order of connection and contiguity between singular things or individuals. Essentially, Spinoza sees the existence and production of effect as synonyms.^[47] The connection takes the form of an infinite network of singular modes, a dynamic unity of modulating and modulated activities, and at the same time, those singular modes are individuals because it is only of individuals that one can say that they must be changed in order to change, and that they must be affected in order to affect and thus act. Balibar sees a similarity between the definition of causality and the definition of desire as the essence of man.^[48] This means that the essence of causality is the unity of activity and passivity within one individual, a unity that defines the individual singular conatus and connects it to an infinite multitude of other individuals. Spinoza’s scheme is not intended to set the physical/causal order against the ethical/practical order but rather to identify them with each other, where practice is a modulation in the same way as any individual causality is and therefore means freedom. In short, freedom is not opposed to the natural order but is the necessary expression of its active nature.

Spinoza deals with the individual as a certain level of integration of other individuals, a second-order complexity. I skip some steps and go straight to Balibar’s account of Spinoza’s view of causation which can be formulated as the conatus of everything.^[49] Any preservation or stability and thus identity of an individual must be compatible with a continuous regeneration of its constituent parts. There is a material exchange with other individuals, and its mental counterpart is the fact that any (self)consciousness of the body mixes or confuses its propositions with the ideas of other things, in the same way, that the perception of external objects is always mixed with a representation of the body itself. Balibar/Spinoza is not talking here about a subjective illusion but about the true nature of the human mind which reflects the actual existence of the body. Hence, each individual needs other individuals to maintain its existence and form. What is exchanged are parts of individuals. Regeneration means that a given individual continuously leaves behind certain parts of himself while incorporating some parts of others whereby this substitution leaves a certain “relation/ratio” (which is the essence) intact.^[50] In Ethics IV, Spinoza then sets forth a social doctrine that starts from the axiom that there is no individual thing that is not surpassed in power by another. The more complex an individual, the more relations it will have with the external world, and thus, the more intensely it will exchange its own parts with other individuals, and the more it will need these exchanges to persist in its existence, and at the same time, the more its preservation will be threatened by the greater power of other things. Balibar understands Spinoza this way: The multitude of other singular things is necessarily stronger (more powerful, with greater destructive power) than me.^[51] And, conversely, the combined unity, convergence of forces or convenientia of which I myself am a formative part, is stronger than a given finite multiplicity of external things.^[52] Relationships between individuals are based on their common nature and built on a collective that increases the individuals’ capacity to act (and thus to think and know) and their capacity to exist (which, in the vocabulary of affections, means that for each individual thing, relationships increase joy and decrease sadness). Finally, Balibar states that the complete concept of the individual is that of a dynamic, non-fixed, metastable equilibrium that is destroyed if not continuously recreated.^[53] Such an equilibrium implies a virtual decomposition or deconstruction assuming that a process of reconstruction is always in progress. This reconstruction expresses the singular essence of the individual but is itself determined by collective processes, by a constant ratio of movement and rest, or the convenientia that allows individuals to form a collective.

Spinoza does not deny individual identity but tries rather to make a phenomenological reconstruction of it. He introduces consciousness as an idea of itself, as body and mind, which affirms the existence of its object. To understand this abstract principle, Balibar raises the question of the transindividual formation of imagination and then reason. It is a theme on which much can be said, but I will leave it at this and, by way of conclusion, return briefly to happiness.

5 Happiness (conclusion)

In the preface to what is commonly regarded as his earliest work, the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza indicates how his philosophical program was motivated by his life experience. In everyday life, he was often confronted with feelings of alienation, emptiness, meaninglessness, and anxiety caused by the mutability and randomness of chance. The question is whether you can do anything about this chance. Negative affects take you away from yourself, make your life seem empty and unreal, and place you in front of the abyss of nothingness. Consequently, Spinoza seeks happiness in the opposite affects, in the held experience of joy and in a life that feels real, that is, an active and full life. It is not so much the finiteness of our life that makes us unhappy – as long as our life lasts and we consequently experience it, it is infinite.^[54] The moment it ends, we no longer are, we no longer think, and we no longer experience. But while we are alive and experience life, we can think about the finiteness of our lives, and that makes us sad.^[55] With the experience of sad affects, we confirm sadness – we get caught up in a downward spiral of negative ideas with which we harm ourselves. The recipe for a good life is thus obvious: avoiding these unproductive ideas and focusing on productive ones. Happiness is opposed to having negative affects which alienate us from ourselves, paralyze us, and make us anxious. In order to avoid them, then, we need to know what negative affects are and how the economy of affects can be controlled. Spinoza talks about living a full life, a life as a philosopher. Negative affects obviously also come with setbacks and misfortune that prevent us from living our life the way we want to. Yet happiness is more than avoiding misfortune; mere survival is not a full life. Moreover, misfortunes come without our doing; knowing whether we can or cannot do something about them turns out to be part of what can bring us happiness. Happiness, therefore, has a lot to do with productive affects which we experience ourselves and which are at the same time mediated by knowledge. Happiness involves a perspective (of hope), the movement of one’s own form of life, and according to Spinoza, a knowledge: reason. It is a self-conscious realization, an undubbed idea that makes the feeling of joy last and prompts us to go outside ourselves and do things. The effective feeling of joy consists of feeling love for life and the power to act, aspects that come together, mutually affirm each other, and make each other last. This means that just the full joy of life can keep sad, crippling feelings and destabilizing alienating randomness at bay.

Spinoza suggests this complex motif in the aforementioned preface to his first work; he also repeated it again and again, over the course of his life, throughout his letters and his entire oeuvre – in the Short Treatise, the Theological-Political Treatise, the Ethics, and the Political Treatise. We find the most detailed elaboration in the Ethics, which we can read in its entirety as a strategy for happiness. I have tried to demonstrate this in the present text. In doing so, I was aided by Matheron’s interpretation of the inclusive and strategic nature of human thought and of Spinoza’s analyses. I was also assisted by Deleuze who, in his specific interpretation of the kinds of knowledge, focuses on the convergence of theory and practice and of desire and criticism. Deleuze makes a materialist, contemporary translation of Spinoza’s conceptual frame in which body, affect, and imagination play the leading roles. Science, art, and philosophy are brought into the same plan – there is nothing outside this immanent plan in which our lives take place, and consequently, for all existential questions and all questions of knowledge, it is appropriate to face them within this perspective. In doing so, Deleuze in particular expresses what it is in which Spinoza’s ethics of happiness consists. Finally, Balibar sees transindividuality as the central and organizing principle of Spinoza’s ontology and anthropology. Transindividuality implies a view on causality based on reciprocity. It is an integrative concept that sees individuals as composite and complex, and it expresses the mediation between reason and imagination. In this way, Balibar underlines the mixed status, plurality, and activating power of human reason, characteristics that all go back to the historical-materialist situatedness, the multitude, and the strategic nature of human desire and thought. In other words, he leads us back to the question of this text and what underpins Spinoza’s edifice.

Essential to the question of happiness is Spinoza’s distinction between two kinds of affects, the joyful affects which are active and the sad affects which are passive. The active affects cannot be but feelings of joy and love, but there is more; they not only increase our perfection (i.e., our actual existence or effective reality) and our power to action but also fully possess this perfection and power.^[56] And this is what Spinoza reserves the term “beatitude” for. As Deleuze puts it, the active affects “seem to be conquered and extended in time, like passive joys, but, in fact, they are eternal and can no longer be explained by time; they no longer imply transitions and passages, but all express each other in a mode of eternity, with the adequate ideas from which they proceed.”^[57] We have thus arrived at Part V of the Ethics and at the place Spinoza wanted to go to as he announced in the first sentence of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect.

“A desire that arises from Joy is stronger, other things equal, than one that arises from Sadness.”^[58] From this, repeating a quote from the beginning of this essay, it follows “that the foundation of virtue is this …striving to preserve one’s own being, and that happiness consists in man’s being able to preserve his being.”^[59] It also follows that virtue is pursued for its own sake, and thus for the sake of its own being, its actual existence. But this is to say, in Spinoza’s terms, for the sake of a full, active, and free life, in which one follows the desire that arises from reason and cannot be excessive.^[60] The craving that arises from reason can only arise from joy and it cannot have an excess. It is a life in which one is guided by reason, not by fear, and does good, not merely to avoid evil, but because one wants the good directly, for its own pleasure.^[61]