Abstract
In this essay I discuss a passage from William Styron’s memoir of his long struggle with chronic severe depression, from the standpoint of a Spinozian understanding of agency and self-worth. In this passage Styron relates how in hearing a piece of music he was abruptly struck by a recollection of “all the joys [his] house had known” and how this brought a realization that it would be wrong for him to kill himself: wrong because it would be an abandonment of those who had shared in those joys and a “desecration” of himself. He tells how this realization led him to admit himself to hospital for treatment and thereby to a slow and difficult recovery. This, I propose, illustrates the Spinozian idea that the value of an individual life is properly understood in terms of that individual’s participation in the actualization of a shared value and that individual agency is empowered by the knowledge of such value.
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Notes
On this point Spinoza’s metaphysics is in agreement with Kant’s: “Freedom itself thus becomes in this indirect way capable of being enjoyed. This cannot be called happiness, since it does not depend upon a positive participation of feeling; nor can it be called bliss, because it does not include complete independence from inclinations and desires. It does nevertheless resemble the latter so far at least as the determination of the will which it involves can be held to be free from their influence, and thus, at least in its origin, it is analogous to the self-sufficiency which can be ascribed only to the Supreme Being” (Kant 1993, 125).
Christine Korsgaard describes this self-understanding as a “practical identity”: “a description under which you value yourself, a description under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking” (Korsgaard 1996, 101). There are certain important differences between this Spinozian account of personal integrity and Korsgaard’s. For Spinoza the agent’s concern with building and maintaining integrity (in forming her life “as a whole”) is based primarily on her concern with actualizing her nature and sustaining or increasing her power, rather than a need to ensure that her reasons and self-conception are mutually coherent (which is, in my view, the explanatory bedrock of Korsgaard’s theory).
Korsgaard (1996) arrives at the same conclusion from a different approach in her discussion of the public nature of reasons. Note that this is a normative rather than a casual necessity, and hence people are capable of resisting or avoiding the relevant inferences (through self-deception, specious distinctions, or however else). Needless to say people do not always value others as they value themselves; the point is that they ought to.
This conclusion reflects my interpretation of part five of the Ethics, in which Spinoza describes the relationship of the human mind to eternity. There Spinoza makes the difficult claim that the self as referred to God is eternal and that “we feel and know by experience that we are eternal” (1994, proposition 23). Korsgaard argues for a similar conclusion in Self Constitution (2009, 212). For a clinically informed discussion of the link between belonging and self-worth, see Mount, Boston, and Cohen (2007).
Cassell discusses the link between restoring function and healing (Hutchinson 2011).
Hutchinson, Mount, and Kearney say that healing engages the “natural potential of whole persons” (Hutchinson 2011, 23). They note that this is a subjective process that seems in many cases to depend the patient’s ability to accept the reality of her circumstances and then “move in a positive direction.”
In The Source of Normativity Korsgaard distinguishes two forms of suicide: one in which the decision to commit suicide rationally follows from a person’s practical identity (she notes that suicide to escape unavoidable pain might fall into this category) and another that reflects a kind of “betrayal” of the basic value of humanity—a decision that involves somehow “giving up” (1996, 162).
Further discussion would be required to explain the different operations of the mind and body referred to here. A starting point could be Spinoza’s distinction between appetite and desire. He describes an appetite as an idea of one’s striving to act, while desire is the idea of such an idea (Spinoza 1994, P III, proposition 9).
For the purpose of comparison, consider how difficult it is to make sense of Styron’s situation if we to conceive the body as a bounded entity over which the person (or mind) occupying that body has absolute dominion; especially if that person’s dominion is thought to be exercised through her private rational evaluations. Spinoza’s ontology provides an alternative to such thinking.
This thought that a body may be desecrated of course implies some notion of holiness or divinity in our individual being, a notion that Spinoza affirms in his characterization of eternal being as Divine (“God-or-Nature”). Allowing that there are various interpretations of this particular terminology and explanations of why Spinoza used it, I think it reasonable to say his philosophy supports the view that a human life and a human body, as a unique determination of the infinite indeterminate potency, multiply interactive with other such determinations, is “sacred.”
References
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Spinoza, B. 1994. A Spinoza reader: The Ethics and other works. Trans. and ed. E.M. Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Styron, W. 2004. Darkness visible: A memoir of madness. London: Vintage.
Styron, A. 2011. Reading my father: A memoir. New York: Scribner.
