Moira Gatens - Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present

Why read Spinoza now? Of what value today are the beliefs of a seventeenth-century philosopher who presented his ethical views in geometrical form, and combined his reflections on political practices and institutions with consideration of omens, prophecies and miracles? Underlying this book is the conviction that despite indeed, because of its apparent strangeness, the philosophy of Spinoza can be a rich resource for cultural self-understanding in the present. His philosophy is in some respects continuous with dominant assumptions of contemporary Western thought, in others strikingly and illuminatingly discontinuous with them. His philosophy is, in many ways, at odds with what became the philosophical mainstream which has helped form our own thought patterns. This dissonance can serve as the point of departure for articulating alternative ways of conceiving of minds and bodies, of individuals and collectives, and of human power, freedom and responsibility.

Spinozas philosophy of political life, presented especially in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Tractatus Politicus, is wholly grounded in his immanent metaphysics of Nature. And his Ethics is just as much a study of the metaphysics of bodies, their causal powers and vulnerability, as it is a treatise on human virtue and happiness. Politics, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind are interwoven in his works, and their interconnections raise possibilities of alternative and richer ways of conceptualising contemporary political and social issues. For Spinoza, minds and bodies are united not in causal interactions but in the relations of ideas to their objects. The theory transforms old Aristotelian doctrines of souls as the forms of living bodies, while also pointing the way to new and still undeveloped possibilities.

Spinozas novel ways of thinking of individual bodies and minds, of their affinities and antagonisms, their harmonies and conflicts, can yield new ways of thinking of individuality and of sociability. In particular, his philosophy allows the modern preoccupation with autonomous individual selfhood to re-connect with ideals of community, without thereby collapsing hard-won individuality into an all-encompassing, pre-existing collective identity. His conjunction of a strong affirmation of freedom with an equally strong repudiation of free will opens up possibilities for re-thinking the relations between individual and collective responsibility. This Spinozistic notion of responsibility moves beyond the common fixation in moral theory on feelings of guilt and the attribution of individual blame. His distinctive treatment of the mind as the idea of the body, rather than as a separate intellectual substance, can allow us to move beyond limitations in the conceptualisation of bodily differences which are the legacy of more influential dualist views. His philosophy points towards new formulations of egalitarian ideals, grounded in the recognition of differences between the powers of socialised bodies, rather than the transcendence of difference, or its assimilation into a universalised sameness.