David
Wollenberg [University of Chicago PhD, published works on Nietzsche and
Spinoza. Supervisors: Robert Pippin, Yitzhak Melamed en Nathan Tarcov].
Hij bracht onlangs zijn dissertatie naar academia.edu, waarvan ik hier graag melding maak.
David L.
Wollenberg, Desire & Democracy:
Spinoza and the Politics of Affect. Ph.D-Dissertation, Univ. of Chicago,
June 2012 cf. academia.edu
Abstract: Rational actors are all alike, but every passionate subject is enslaved
in his own way; with apologies to Tolstoy, such is how human life can appear in
Spinoza’s philosophy. Man as a rational being has a highest good, the
intellectual love of God, which as the ultimate achievement of thinking
expresses our innate being with apparent universality. In this sense, Spinoza
is the quintessential rationalist: only reason expresses our true nature and
the power of our minds, and only insofar as we are reasonable do we truly agree
with one another. But in reducing the
essence of the human mind to reason alone, Spinoza comes to explain the
passions—the element of humanity that is, though not the highest, nonetheless
the most frequently manifest—as the result of external causes. And so our affective make up, our actual
constitution, becomes in practice largely a product of those foreign forces
that batter, mold, and shape us. We become, in one commentator’s choice phrase,
the “Spielball der ihn umgebende Kräfte.”
This second nature, as it were, hardly expresses our own true nature at
all.
And so, unexpectedly, Spinoza's thorough-going naturalism
results in an anthropology wherein political psychology is largely the product
of historical and contingent influences.
While the Ethics may culminate by promising the “human freedom” of
understanding nature sub specie aeternitatis, the bulk of human life is spent
inevitably concerned with the world durationis, prisoners in a condition
Spinoza calls “human bondage,” wherein “like waves on the sea, driven by
contrary winds, we toss about, not knowing our outcome and fate.” Insofar as we thus founder, insofar as
external forces cause us to suffer passions, we become determined by myriad
desires, weaknesses, and imaginations so diverse as to deny any attempt at
homogeneous description. As his
political writings make clear, flesh-and-blood human relations resemble far
more closely a desultory madness than they do the elegant formality of the
Ethic’s geometric order. As such, his
political writings warn us of the dangers that the passions pose to human
life—but also of their inevitability and inescapability.
In order to better understand the purport of Spinoza’s
political thought, this dissertation focuses on a less-explored side of the
Spinozistic philosophy, namely his account of imagination, madness, and the
affects more generally speaking, for it is my belief that only by turning over
these stones can we understand how he laid the foundations for the first modern
theory of democracy. It would come as no surprise to Spinoza that today, more
than three centuries after the inauguration of the Enlightenment era,
superstition and dogma would continue to rear their heads and pose a threat to
rational society. Spinoza was a rationalist but also a realist about political
life; he saw reason as our essence but could also see in a mob of men the
ultimi barbarorum. Passions are coeval
with political life, and a successful politics must assess men as they are, and
not by how we wish them to be. In our contemporary era, with democracy
expanding its presence around the world—often in places where religion holds an
even greater grip than it did in Spinoza’s own Netherlands—his reflections on
the interrelationship of civil laws, religious beliefs, social passions, and
human nature remain as vital as ever. Even a properly constructed democracy
cannot solve the problems of political life, which are ultimately the problems
of human life simply, but it can temper their most extreme excesses—assuming we
understand their inception correctly.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
.....................................................................................................................................................
V
GUIDE TO ABBREVIATIONS
..........................................................................................................................................
VII
INTRODUCTION. “MEN ARE NOT BORN
CIVIL, THEY ARE MADE THAT WAY” ..................................... 1
CHAPTER 1. THE 'MORTALL GOD'
AND THE DEUS SIVE NATURA: SPINOZA CONTRA HOBBES . 39
CHAPTER 2. THE NATURE AND
ORIGIN OF SOCIABILITY ...............................................................................
80
CHAPTER 3: THE ORIGIN AND
NATURE OF SPINOZAN DEMOCRACY .....................................................
122
CHAPTER 4: ON HUMAN BONDAGE, OR
LAETITIA AND LAÏCITÉ .............................................................
168
CHAPTER 5. ON HUMAN FREEDOM
...........................................................................................................................
246
BIBLIOGRAPHY
...................................................................................................................................................
296
Rational actors are all alike, but every passionate subject is enslaved in his own way; with apologies to Tolstoy, such is how human life can appear in Spinoza’s philosophy.
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