David Wollenberg bracht zijn PhD.-dissertatie over #Spinoza naar academia.edu

David Wollenberg [University of Chicago PhD, published works on Nietzsche and Spinoza. Supervisors: Robert Pippin, Yitzhak Melamed en Nathan Tarcov].

Naar zijn Nietzsche & Spinoza-studies verwees ik in div. blogs [cf., cf. en cf.].

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