\"Natural Passions, Reason and Religious Emotion in Hobbes and Spinoza\"

transcript

Amy M. Schmitter Natural Passions

1 Claremont Conference

Natural Passions, Reason and Religious Emotion in Hobbes and Spinoza I. Some Stage-Setting

Passions were a hot topic in the seventeenth century. And part of what made them

hot was the hope of explaining them in fully naturalistic terms. Most important

seventeenth century philosophers1 adopted a naturalist stance towards the passions that

committed them to accounting for the passions in ways continuous with the best available

natural sciences. Above all, they treated them as amenable to the explanatory tools and

approaches, particularly causes, they recognized as applicable in the new “mechanical”

philosophy. This approach was furthered by Descartes’s pivotal decision to count the

passions as perceptions (rather than, e.g., appetitions). Although not all followed

Descartes’s example, subsequent early modern philosophers tended to understand the

passions as passive, receptive states2 that were either identical with, or based in bodily

states and events. As such body-based states, the passions are both caused and shaped in

ways susceptible to mechanical explanation. This naturalist approach may go some way

toward explaining why many of the same philosophers entertained great suspicions

towards supposedly special religious affects, particularly those that claimed their source

in some divine inspiration, often derided as “enthusiasm”.3 This suspicion was furthered

by the demand to submit any resulting knowledge-claims to the tribunal of natural reason.

1I particularly have in mind Descartes, Hobbes, Malebranche and Spinoza. There are exceptions, such as the Cambridge Platonists and perhaps Pascal. 2This is one of the central themes of S. James, Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 3For obvious historical reasons, mid-seventeenth-century British philosophers were particularly sensitive to the dangers of “enthusiasm”, with philosophers from Hobbes to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More rating it a form of mental illness, or plain hypocrisy. See R. Shaver, “Enthusiasm”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy On-Line, ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge Publishing, 1998), http://www.rep.routledge.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/article/DB027 (accessed December 16, 2008).

The emphasis on rational explicability goes hand in hand with the general naturalism,

whether because naturalism itself was taken to meet the demands of natural reason or

because both our rational and our affective dispositions were taken to belong to the

dominion of nature and thus must be as intelligible as nature itself.

The naturalist conception of passions as bodily-based receptive states was

exploited by both Descartes and Malebranche, who nonetheless maintained roughly

functionalist accounts,4 in which the passions serve various goods of the embodied

human. In this respect, Hobbes and Spinoza were even more uncompromisingly

naturalistic, refusing to countenance so much as a whisper of final causes and working

relentlessly to produce a thoroughly forward-driving picture of causation. One result is

the centrality of the notion of “endeavor”, “striving”, or in the Latin, conatus, which both

use to individuate “singular things” within the world. Conatus is the basis of all animal

motion, and in Spinoza’s hands, the basis for all motion in general, whereas “affects”5 of

various sorts are the fuel of volitional motion. For both Hobbes and Spinoza, such

passions and affects determine what counts as “good” and evil”, and so even fully

voluntary actions are more pushed by the affects than pulled by antecedent conceptions

4In Malebranche’s case, the functionalist approach is filtered through his Augustinian insistence on the pervasive corrupting effects of original sin; the Fall perverted our passionate dispositions from their functional course to hold us in their dysfunctional thrall. Nonetheless, Malebranche shares the view with Descartes that the passions and our other dispositions and faculties serve our good as embodied creatures. For an account of how Descartes’s functionalism could be reconciled with the rejection of final causation in physics, see A. Schmitter, “How to Engineer a Human Being: Passions and Functional Explanation in Descartes”, in A Companion to Descartes, ed. J. Broughton and J. Carriero (NY: Blackwell, 2007), esp. 427-8. For discussion of the relation between Malebranche’s neo-Augustinian commitments and his conception of the function of the passions, see P. Hoffman, “Three Dualist Theories of the Passions”, Philosophical Topics 19 (1991): 153-200, and S. Greenberg, “Malebranche on the Passions: Biology, Morality and the Fall”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy (forthcoming). 5Because of Spinoza’s important distinction between passion and affect (to be explained further below), I will use “affect” as the generic term, even though Hobbes makes no such distinction and does not use the term.

of the good. The passions and affects, then, are where large-scale physical explanation

meets the account of our behavior.

It is, I maintain, the explanatory constraints imposed by the commitment to

austere naturalism that motivate Hobbes and Spinoza to locate the affects within their

overall psychic economy as they do. These commitments also play a role in their

approach to the old canard opposing reason to emotion, for on the view they share,

operations of both are driven by a blind conative striving that defies description in

functionalist terms. What is true of the affects in general should also hold in particular

cases, and so both adopt a similarly naturalist attitude towards religious emotions. Yet,

curiously enough, they end up with opposing evaluations of the rationality, indeed the

very possibility, of distinctively religious affects directed toward God: Hobbes has no

truck with them, insisting that the only appropriate passions to feel for God are the same

in kind (if not in degree) as those directed at the Sovereign of one’s Commonwealth.

They follow in both cases from the recognition of power: “From internal honour,

consisting in the opinion of power and goodness, arise three passions: love (which hath

reference to goodness) and hope, and fear (that relate to power) [ . . . ]”.6 In contrast,

Spinoza devotes the closing sections of the Ethics to a discussion of how the third kind of

knowledge (a “scientia intuitiva”) simultaneously produces an “intellectual love of God”

(“amor Dei intellectualis”), “blessedness” (“beatitudo”) and supreme contentment

(“summa acquiscentia”), affects that are sui generis in Spinoza’s taxonomy.7 How could

6T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. E. Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 31.9: 238. All subsequent references will appear in the text, citing this edition as L, followed by chapter, paragraph and page. 7See Spinoza’s Ethics VP32c, VP33s, VP27, respectively. All translations used subsequently will come from B. Spinoza, Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. 1, trans. E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); they will be cited in the text as E, followed by Part, and when appropriate, component and sub-component, or section; in this scheme, “P” stands for proposition, “D” stands for definition, “d” for

a shared naturalism produce such contrasting conclusions about the very possibility of

theocentric affects?

To appreciate this puzzle, we should recognize that Spinoza does not merely

resemble Hobbes: he owes Hobbes an enormous intellectual debt. That debt stands

despite a sharp split between Spinoza’s “parallelism” about thinking and extension8 and

Hobbes’s reductionist materialism. Such ontological differences aside, Spinoza borrows

many tenets of his political philosophy from Hobbes.9 And what allows him to do so is

the shared methodological and explanatory approach exacted by their naturalist

commitments, particularly for their understanding of human rationality and its relation to

the passions. Within this context of common commitments and approaches, seemingly

slight differences in their conceptions of the relation between whole and part, and

between activity and passivity produce opposing views on the possibility of individual

rationality. I will argue that whether one can aspire to a robust and developed rationality

as an individual, and not simply as a member of a tightly organized collectivity, is the

difference that makes a difference for their divergent attitudes towards religious affects.

II. Passions contra Reason

Let us examine one bit of the terrain shared between Hobbes and Spinoza: each

philosopher opposes passion to “reason,” on the grounds that the passions interfere with

demonstration, “s” for scholium, “Pref” for Preface, “Def.Aff” for Definition of the Affects, and “App.” for Appendix. Citations to Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise will refer to B. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), cited in the text as TPT, followed by page. 8I describe Spinoza’s parallelism so, rather than glossing it as a matter of the mind-body relation, because its basic tenet is that “the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (E IIP7: 451). That claim derives from the fundamental identity of the infinite attributes of thinking and extension (and all other such attributes) as aspects of the single substance. Although parallelism also obtains between the minds and bodies of singular persons, establishing it requires several additional premises about the nature of finite modes. 9This is widely recognized; see, e.g., H. Gilden, “Spinoza and the Political Problem,” in Spinoza: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. Grene (NY: Doubleday Books, 1973), 377.

and degrade our reasoning processes. Hobbes expresses the view colorfully: “the

understanding is by the flame of the passions, never enlightened, but dazzled (L 19.5:

12010). But this is an odd position to find in either philosopher. Hobbes, for instance, is a

thoroughgoing materialist, who takes passions to be identical with specific motions in

matter. As the title of Chapter VI of Leviathan puts it, they are “the Interiour Beginnings

of Voluntary Motions [ . . . ]” (L 6: 27).11 Together with the imagination, the passions

arise at the point where the general motions that circulate throughout the world and in

animal bodies are channeled into voluntary animal motion; they anchor the interior chain

of motions that produce appetites and aversions, and eventually actions. For this reason,

they can largely be identified with the will. But thought itself is simply motion, more

specifically, animal motion. Reasoning is a form of thought, and understood as

“deliberation”, it issues volitions. As such, acts of reasoning are driven by passions, just

as all animal motions are; indeed, they may even be identified with passions. So

ultimately, it’s passions all the way down. For these reasons, Hobbes maintains an

analogy between the force and degree of passion and reason. The motion of “greater”

passions correlates with greater ambition and greater intelligence. Likewise, a “defect” of

passion produces “dulnesse”. “Wit” in general is driven by desires, which all reduce to

“desire of power” (L 8.13-15: 40-1). Moreover, our desires not only spur our thinking

into action, they hold it on course:

10 See also L. 26.21: 180; 27.4: 191; 27.18: 195, inter alia. 11Hobbes sometimes gives a slightly more restrictive sense to the passions, e.g., Elements of Law distinguishes between the motions in the brain that constitute sense and imagination and the continuation of those motions to the heart that are passions proper. For further discussion of these and related issues, see A. Schmitter, “Hobbes on the Emotions,” in “Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Theories of Emotions,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 edition), ed. E. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/emotions-17th18th/.

For the thoughts are to the desires as scouts and spies, to range abroad and

find the way to the things desired; all steadiness of the mind’s motion, and all

quickness of the same, proceeding from thence [ . . . ] (L 8.16: 41).

Thinking appears as a product of passionate drives and an expression of our basic

“endeavour”. So what sense is there in maintaining that the passions are opposed to

reason?

Even if we could make sense of this opposition, Hobbes seems to give us no way

to act on it, for a reason isolated from passion would seem utterly inert. Time and time

again, he insists that passions can only be restrained by other passions (see, e.g., L.

14.31: 87-88). This may simply reflect their status as motions, for within Hobbes’s

general mechanistic physics, only motions can affect other motions.12 Perhaps “reason”

could be identified with some distinct set of motions other than those constituting the

passions, but if so, Hobbes never mentions what those motions might be, or how they

could arise independently of the imagination-passion-volition-action cycle. We seem

faced with a dilemma: either reason cannot be opposed to the passions in toto, or it must

be utterly ineffectual.

Spinoza also supposes our thinking needs a moving force, although he locates it in

what he calls the “affects”. “Desire” (“cupiditas”13), in particular, is identified with the

conatus, or striving, that constitutes all our action, including our mental action.14 Because

12See, e.g., T. Hobbes, Elements of Law: Human Nature and de Corpore Politico with Three Lives (with selections from de Corpore, chapters I, VI and XXV), ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994), chapter 9.7. 13Spinoza notably does not use the term libido for the general type, but restricts it to a species of desire (translated by Curley as “lust”, e.g., E III P56d: 527). But Latin Stoics often used libido as one of the four basic perturbatione. This may indicate Spinoza’s rather different evaluation of desire as a whole, despite his close affiliations with various stripes of stoicism. 14See E IIIP9s: 500. Although Spinoza identifies “appetite” (“appetitus”) with the striving (“conatus”), holding that “desire can be defined as appetite together with consciousness of the appetite”, human beings will typically have some idea of the appetite clear and distinct enough to count as conscious. So Spinoza insists that “between appetite and desire there is no difference”, and in the “Definitions of the Affects” that

Spinoza uses the notion of “passion” more restrictively than does Hobbes, he does not

make our reasoning passion-driven. Nonetheless, he finds other grounds for insisting that

the passions are an inescapable part of the human condition. Because we are finite

creatures, we are always subject to being affected by external things, that is, those things

lying outside our boundaries as “singular things”, but still within the conditioned causal

chain of finite modes. And so, “we are acted on, insofar as we are a part of nature” (E

IVP2: 548). Moreover, “the force by which a man perseveres in existing is limited, and

infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes” (E IVP3: 548). That means that we

are always subject to passions, for passions constitute our reactions to what impinges on

us for better or worse: indeed, “the force and growth of any passion, and its perseverance

in existing, are not defined by the power by which we strive to persevere in existing, but

by the power of an external cause compared with our own” (E IVP5: 549).

This point follows directly from Spinoza’s official definitions of passions and

affects. Spinoza makes passions a species of affects. More precisely, he declares:

an affect that is called a Passion [“pathema”] of the mind is a confused idea

by which the mind affirms of its Body, or some part of it, a greater or lesser

power of existing [“existendi vis”] than before, which, when it is given

determines the Mind to think of this rather than that (E III Gen.Def.Aff.:

Affects in general are “affections of the Body by which the Body’s power of acting is

increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these

concludes Part III, reiterates that “I really recognize no difference between human appetite and Desire” (E III Def.Aff: 531).

affections” (E IIID3: 493). The mind itself is just the idea(s) of the body.15 As such, it is

largely constituted by its affects, since any idea that involves a change in conatus counts

as an affect. Now, Spinoza holds that ideas that require external causes – those for which

we are not “adequate”, or full and sufficient causes – count as confused, mutilated, and

“inadequate”. The upshot is that passions are simply passive affects.

Since we are always subject to being acted upon (and acted upon by forces greater

than we are), we will always be subject to passions, and the conceptual confusions they

involve. Spinoza does not leave us with quite the same conundrum as we found with

Hobbes in contrasting reason to the passions. But the outlook for achieving rationality

with such forces lined up in opposition does not look bright. Moreover, Spinoza – like

Hobbes – remains committed to the view that only an affect can combat another affect:

“an affect cannot be restrained or taken away except by an affect opposite to, and

stronger than, the affect to be restrained” (E IVP7: 550). Here again, Spinoza’s

distinction between “passion” and “affect” moderates his position greatly, for he can

allow that a particular (passive) passion may be restrained by a particular (active) affect,

although we have no hope of actively overcoming our susceptibility to passions in toto.

Still, while he maintains that only affective techniques for overcoming the “bondage” of

the passions are effective, the opposition between reason and passion strikes an odd note:

what role could be left to reason? At best, it would seem epiphenomenal, since “no affect

can be restrained by the true knowledge of good and evil insofar as it is true, but only

insofar as it is considered as an affect” (E IVP14: 553).

III. Passion-Driven Conflict

15 See E IIIP13: 502: “the object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body [ . . . ] and nothing else”.

In short, the general position embraced by both philosophers looks like a recipe

for despair. On the one hand, our passions are painted as exuberantly and violently

irrational; on the other, our very ability to reason depends on the driving force of affect.

And reason itself seems to have no power to constrain our emotions, no matter how

irrational they may be. As we will see, all is not lost, but it is important to realize how

dangerous the effects of unbridled passions appear to both Hobbes and Spinoza. For they

identify the causes of social conflict in general in the clash of individuals’ passions.

Hobbes famously sees the condition of war as “necessarily consequent [. . . ] to the

natural passions of men” (L 17.1: 106), particularly to glory. That they sow discord is one

of the main reasons for counting such passions as irrational. Reason is the same for all,

and ipso facto cannot generate conflict: “For all men by nature reason alike, and well,

when they have good principles” (L 5.16: 25).

What is true of social conflict in general is true of religious conflict: it is driven by

the passions of individuals, operating as a force of unreason. Indeed, some religious

conflict simply enacts the opposition pitting reason against passion. The sorts of religious

conflicts whose causes and nature most concern Hobbes are intra-societal religious

disagreements between established, conformist religion and dissenters, which he

understands as a conflict between established, rational forces and irrational schismatics.

The connection between established religion and reason is so strong that Hobbes makes it

a test for the truth of prophecy. For there can be “nothing contrary to” reason in God’s

word (L 32.2: 246), even if some aspects of God’s will may not be accessible to our

unassisted natural reason without pronouncements or positive laws enunciated by special

messengers. Still, we have only our natural reason to determine whom to trust. Reason

proposes two individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for trusting those

claims that reason cannot discover itself: the performance of miracles (which gives

evidence of power) and “the not teaching any other religion than that which is already

established” (L 32.7: 248). In contrast, religious conflict often arises from innovation,

motivated by the excessive and superstitious “opinion of inspiration, called “commonly

“private spirit, [ . . . by which a person styles himself] as being in the special grace of

God Almighty, who hath revealed the same to them supernaturally, by his Spirit” (L 8.22:

42). Such claims to “inspiration” or “enthusiasm” are rationally insupportable; they also

can spur social upheaval. Consider the following indictment:

[Although] the effect of folly in them that are possessed of an opinion of

being inspired be not visible always in one man by any very extravagant

action that proceedeth from such passion, yet when many of them conspire

together, the rage of the whole multitude is visible enough (L 8.21: 42).

The passage is somewhat opaque, but Hobbes clearly goes on to identify this “folly” as

“private spirit”. It’s notable that he is willing to consider it “private”, even though it may

be widespread through a multitude, and even though its appearance may be symptomatic

of large-scale social distress, such that the “singular passions [of a few] are parts of the

seditious roaring of a troubled nation”. Hobbes seems to evaluate the passions as

“singular” and the roaring as “seditious” because they depart from what is broadly

accepted and established in and by a commonwealth. They do not issue from the unified

whole, but from disparate individuals. And since “to have stronger and more vehement

passions for anything than is ordinarily seen in others is what men call MADNESS (L 8.16:

41), they constitute a madness on the part of individuals, of which “that very arrogating

such inspiration to themselves is argument enough” (L 8.21: 42). So, here we can see

several ways in which Hobbes attributes religious conflict to the passions: first,

inspiration itself counts as a passion; second, a (false) opinion of inspiration is proof of

madness, 16 which Hobbes identifies with the “passions that produce strange and unusual

behavior” (L 8.20: 41-2). All of these features combine in one of the most dangerous

characteristics of enthusiasts – their claim to religious exceptionalism, insofar as they

hold inspiration to be a source for religious and moral imperatives that depart from what

is available to natural reason and approved by the body and brains of the commonwealth.

Instead, Hobbes tends to attribute such assertions of exceptionalism – whether a matter of

special contact with God, or of special kinds of religious emotion – to a rationally

insupportable presumption that constitutes either passion-driven madness, or mere cant.

And since chicanery might be driven by excessive vainglory, or an overweening desire

for some form of power, it too could count as impassioned madness. In no case does the

purported enthusiast experience any passions distinctive in kind, but at most pathological

excesses of run-of-the-mill passions.

As might be expected, Spinoza seems less distressed by the possibility of

dissidents’ inciting religious conflict. But in many respects, he is just as impatient of

supposed religious exceptionalism as Hobbes, attributing it to superstition – of which he

is perhaps even more impatient. Superstition is a form of unwarranted credulity and

unreason. It generates “inconsistency” and variability, and this inconsistency makes it

immensely difficult “to maintain in the same course men prone to every form of

credulity”. That means it is a source of social unrest: “the cause of many terrible wars and

revolutions” (TPT: 5). In its inconsistency, and unpredictability, Spinoza likens 16It is also often likened to intoxication of various sorts. See L 8.23-25: 42-3, as well as the discussion of the superstitious religions of the Gentiles and the insignificant speeches of “enthusiastic” madmen, L. 12.19: 68-9.

superstition to “mental hallucinations and emotional impulses”. Indeed, superstition in

general “springs, not from reason, but solely from the more powerful phases of emotion”.

And the passions it springs from are not only powerful, but particularly disruptive, for it

is “engendered, preserved and fostered by fear” and “can only be maintained by hope,

hatred, anger, and deceit” (TPT: 4-5). Such passions are commonplace, but nonetheless

divisive, representing particularly extreme ways in which “men disagree in nature”.

Spinoza explains: “men can disagree in nature insofar as they are torn by affects which

are passions; and to that extent also one and the same man is changeable and inconstant”

(E IVP33: 561); indeed, “insofar as men are torn by affects which are passions, they can

be contrary to one another” (E IVP34: 562), which is why “hate can never be good” (E

IVP45: 571). Spinoza adds: “he who is guided by Fear, and does good to avoid evil, is

not guided by reason” (E IVP63: 582). Here, as elsewhere, Spinoza contrasts the socially

divisive passions with reason and its effects, for “only insofar as men live according to

the guidance of reason, must they always agree in nature” (E IVP35: 563). Superstition,

however, incites a kind of passionate pathology, maintaining “that the good is what

brings Sadness, and the evil, what brings Joy [ . . . ]” (E IV, App. XXXI: 593). It is both

the result of, and an impetus to violently irrational passions.

It is true that Spinoza sometimes allows that peculiar religious rites and

ceremonies promote social solidarity, even though the injunctions of “ceremonial law”

have no intrinsic rational value. Unlike divine law, ceremonial law is not “intimately

deduced from human nature [so] that it must be esteemed innate, and, as it were,

ingrained in the human mind (TPT: 69). But Spinoza does not seem to consider

ceremonial law to constitute full-blown superstition: although not fully rational, neither is

it fully irrational. Without being based in the sound strictures of reason, “ceremonies are

no aid to blessedness”. Still, they do “have reference to the temporal prosperity of the

kingdom” (TPT: 70). That is, they do not perfect our health or liberty, but they promise

“security of rule, prosperity and temporal happiness” (TPT: 71). They do so through

“commands especially adapted to the understanding and character of [ . . . a] people”

(TPT: 70) at a particular time and in a particular context – commands that address their

characteristic passions to harness them for cooperative ends. Thus the extreme strictures

of the Mosaic law were suited to the condition of the Jews just released from slavery, for

which it was appropriate that they “should always act under external authority” (TPT: 75-

6); for similar reasons, Christian rites “were instituted as external signs of the universal

church [ . . . ] ordained for the preservation of a society” (TPT: 76).

Yet important as obedience and cooperation are, Spinoza insists that neither is

well-served by fear:

so long as men act simply from fear they act contrary to their inclinations,

taking no thought for the advantages or necessity of their actions, but simply

endeavouring to escape punishment or loss of life. They must needs rejoice in

any evil which befalls their ruler, [ . . . ] and must long for and bring about

such evil by every means in their power (TPT: 74).

In contrast to Hobbes, Spinoza insists that whatever social cooperation might be

promoted through threat of punishment and the resultant fear will by highly unstable.

Instead, he recommends instituting laws that work so “that people should be kept in

bounds by the hope of some greatly-desired good, rather than fear” (TPT: 74). Soldiers

are motivated more effectively by “a thirst for glory” than the terror of threats, and people

better urged to “do their duty from devotion rather than fear” (TPT: 75). Hope, the thirst

for glory and devotion are all passions, but they are passions by which other passions can

be harmonized and calibrated with each other, so as to work towards the same ends.

Ceremonies and other human laws that are socially beneficial will incite these passions.

In contrast, Spinoza insists that superstition is based primarily on fear, and that is at least

part of what makes it irrational.

For all its usefulness, though, the warrant of ceremonial law remains wholly

prudential and wholly relative to context. Thus, Christian rites are not binding on those

who live alone or in countries where they are forbidden; indeed, residents of such

countries are positively bound to abstain from them (TPT: 76). Nor are the Jews bound

by the Mosaic law after the destruction of their kingdom, any more than they “had been

before it had begun, while they were still living among other peoples [ . . . ] and were

subject to no special law beyond the natural law, and also doubtless, the law of the state

in which they were living [ . . . ] “ (TPT: 72). Spinoza takes enormous pains to show that

scriptural injunctions to ceremonial law are part of the primary appeal of scripture to the

“understanding of the masses”, “whose intellect is not capable of perceiving things

clearly and distinctly” (TPT: 77, 78). But anyone who knows God’s existence by natural

reason and thus “has a true plan of life” has all that is required for blessedness. Such a

truly “free man” has no intrinsic need of ceremonial law. He may act in conformity with

ceremonial laws to comply with his neighbors, but out of understanding the big-picture

reasons, and not because he is bound by passion to obey such laws. The actions may be

the same, but their basis is utterly different: “to every action to which we are determined

from an affect which is a passion, we can be determined by reason, without that affect”

(E IVP59: 579). A free person acts from reason, and ideally is not moved by passion at

all (see E VP3: 598).

Thus, a society of free persons would have absolutely no need of such laws and

the other devices that appeal to our passions to promote social harmony. Moreover, the

free person “desires [the good] for other men” (E IVP37: 564-5) – namely, that they

achieve freedom and the perfection of their reason found in knowledge of the Divine law.

That means that she strives to bring everybody to such a pitch of rational perfection and

knowledge that they have no need to keep their passions in check with particular

ceremonies and rites. Thus a society of such free individuals would have no need for

ceremonial law and the like “to keep the common laws of the state” (E IVP73dem: 587).

Indeed, there would be no need for any sort of partisan religion. On Spinoza’s view,

Divine Law is just what is “revealed” by our natural reason; it is “natural Divine Law”

and is “comprehended solely by the consideration of human nature”, so that it is

“universal or common to all men” (TPT: 61, my emphasis). And living according to

Divine law suffices for freedom, perfection and “blessedness;” it “does not demand the

performance of ceremonies, [ . . . ] [for] the natural light of reason does not demand

anything which it is itself unable to supply”. And that is because “the highest reward of

the Divine law is the law itself”, or as Spinoza puts it at the very end of the Ethics,

“blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself” (E VP42: 616). Much of

Spinoza’s scriptural exegesis is directed at making this point: whatever pertains to

morality, salvation or, blessedness is universally applicable, and whatever seems to

address a particular audience is only a device for negotiating partisan passions, so we can

live “in security and [ward] off the injuries of our fellow-men, and even of beasts” (TPT:

46).17

17Even prophecies reveal no truths unavailable to natural reason, but only choose forms of address that appeal vividly to the imagination; see, e.g., TPT: 24-9.

IV. Private Passions and the Rational Common Measure

We are now in a position to understand the important – but nonetheless superficial

– contrast between passion and reason that both philosophers make. What worries them is

not affectivity as such, but passions that are idiosyncratic, partisan, and thus divisive. For

all their different conceptions of “passion”, both Hobbes and Spinoza think that there is

something about the passion-driven actions of unorganized individuals that tends to put

them at cross-purposes. Left to their own devices, such passions motivate individuals to

engage in zero-sum conflicts and worse. It is this tendency towards partisan splintering

that Hobbes and Spinoza deem irrational, even though the force that so tends also fuels

our thinking and reasoning. For instance, we can find Hobbes declaring that when

humans judge good and evil “by their own passions”, this “private measure” is “not only

vain, but also pernicious to the public state” (L 46.32: 464). More generally, he contrasts

the “faculty of solid reasoning [ . . . ] grounded upon the principles of truth” with “the

passions and interests of men (which are different and mutable)” (L R&C.1: 489).

Spinoza is even more explicit: “Men can disagree in nature insofar as they are torn by

affects which are passions; and to that extent also one and the same man is changeable

and inconstant” (E IVP33: 561), and so they “can be contrary to one another” (E IVP34:

562). But “men [who] live according to the guidance of reason [ . . . ] agree in nature” (E

IVP35: 563). So, the opposition between reason and the passions is founded upon a

contrast between what is common, shared, public – and thus stable – and what is

idiosyncratic, partial, private – and thus mutable and inconstant.

This, then, is the conceptual difficulty we face: Hobbes and Spinoza hold

simultaneously 1. that individuals’ passions tend to drive them towards conflict; 2. that

all our actions (including thinking) are set into motion by affects (including passions); 3.

that conflict is eo ipso irrational; yet also 4. that rational action is possible. Indeed, both

philosophers remain hopeful that we can escape the worst excesses of individual passions

run amok. The trick is to find some way of resisting, blocking, or redirecting the tendency

of our private passions to drive us into conflict; doing so would constitute a “remedy for

the passions”, bringing our private passions into accord with the shared dictates of

reason. But Hobbes and Spinoza have rather different conceptions of what is involved in

achieving détente between private passions and public reason. Hobbes seeks techniques

for managing the passions, so that the individual actions they incite will not run at cross-

purposes. Spinoza takes over much of Hobbes’s machinery for this management of the

passions (E IVP37s2: 566-8). But such management is only an interim measure, for

Spinoza directs us ultimately towards transforming the passions – converting them into

active affects, of which we will be the adequate causes. Despite this considerable

difference, both take the view that only affective “remedies” will be effective in

restraining and retraining the passions. This is so even though both insist that we must

find some “common measure” to restrain and coordinate the passions. Again, that

common measure is identified with reason – producing the rather odd consequence that

reason both contrasts with and is fueled by the passions, so that it is simultaneously true

that reason restrains the passions, and that passions are only restrained by their own kind.

There is no affectless force of reason on an equal, but opposite footing with the passions.

Rather, the affects themselves are harnessed by other affects to produce an outcome that

is in accord with reason. And the common measure of reason appears as an effect of

properly aligning the affects.

Here again it is important to recall Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s shared naturalism and

restriction of explanation to efficient causation alone. It is, I maintain, their shared stance

about how the passions drive individual action from behind that frames their view of the

problem with the supposed “irrationality” of passion. Because the passions determine

their ends unilaterally, and hence somewhat blindly, individuals can come into conflicts

harmful to their well-being, even though what fuels their actions is simply the “relentless

striving after power” of each individual. That relentless striving works only as an

efficient cause (see E IVPref: 544-545), and so cannot be understood to possess any ends

intrinsically. Since there are no ends for our basic activity, how our actions conform to

rational norms cannot be understood in terms of such ends. Instead, Hobbes and Spinoza

propose understanding the rationality of our actions by the degree of their calibration to

the actions of others. Reason constitutes the “common measure”, the metric by which to

measure calibration, and in measuring it, provides another motive to calibration. As such,

affects that conform to and uphold the common measure count as “rational”. For Hobbes,

passions that support the common measure are simply coordinated ones. The situation

will be a bit more complicated for Spinoza, because of his distinction between passion

and active affects. But even he will count the coordination of our motives, and the affects

that constitute our motives, as an important effect and measure of rational action.

V. Fear and Coordination

One of the places where Spinoza borrows most heavily from Hobbes is in the

vision of how sovereign power coordinates our passions. Instituting a sovereign power

alters the conditions under which we each seek “to preserve our own life” while

reckoning for our future felicity (as Hobbes puts it), or to “pursue our own advantage” (as

Spinoza would have it) so that our strivings do not jointly result in prisoners’ dilemma-

like conflicts. But although the results are the same as those that would occur if we

surveyed possible outcomes and chose the actions with the biggest payoff, the technique

works by bearing on our passions: altering the conditions to which we respond generates

different passions, which themselves incite actions congruent with the actions of others,

rather than at cross purposes. This much is shared territory between Hobbes and Spinoza,

even though they recommend rather different forms for instantiating sovereign power,

and even though they recommend inciting rather different passions in order to push the

other passions in line.

Hobbes – notoriously – relies on the passion of fear to force our other passions

into line in ways that reason can approve. Not only is fear for one’s life an important and

sufficient motive to enter into a commonwealth by submitting to its sovereign power, fear

oils all the workings of commonwealth. Hobbes does take it that persons are duty-bound

by the natural law to “perform their covenants made”. Doing so conforms to the third

Law of Nature, which enjoins justice (L 15.1: 89). But he also deems “the bonds of words

[ . . . ] too weak to bridle men’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the

fear of some coercive power” (L.14.18: 84). That coercive power resides in the

sovereign, which wields threats both civil and ecclesiastical, to incite the fear that will

push subjects into cooperative behavior. Its deployment of fear is, in fact, a condition for

the very possibility of covenants (especially those that are not immediately beneficial to

both parties), and hence of justice itself (L 15.4: 89). The sovereign is, in turn, itself

subject to those natural laws that enjoin justice, equity, perspicuity, mercy, prudence,

publicity, the promotion of education, and the like (see L. 15, 30: 89-100, 219-33). Those

natural laws, like all natural laws, are discoverable by reason, and thus binding on anyone

who finds herself in the appropriate conditions where they apply. But even the sovereign

power is moved to obey them by the passion of fear – although not fear of any human, or

artificial power. There is no earthly power to which the sovereign is subject; nor can the

sovereign power be subject to any law other than the natural law. Rather, the sovereign

power is motivated as we all are – by fear of God, and even more, fear of the

consequences for breaking natural laws that God has ordained. Those consequences are

consequences inimical to preserving one’s own lives. Fear, then, inspires prudential

behavior, and constitutes the most widespread motive to lawful behavior (L 27.19: 196).

It’s true that Hobbes admits several variants of fear, of which some, e.g.,

superstition or panic terror, are unlikely to serve the proper management of the passions

(L 6.36-37: 31). But the kind of fear that does most of the work for Hobbes is of another

flavor, and might better be understood as respect, for it is typically directed at an object

with regard to its power. That object can equally be the object of fear and love, for both

being loved and feared are “arguments of power” (L 10.37-38). As such, love and fear are

essentially connected to honoring and valuing (L 10.24: 52); fear, in particular, involves

“confession of power” (L 31.33: 241), while to honor is to acknowledge power,

consisting “in the inward thought and opinion of the power and goodness of another” (L

31.8: 237). For these reasons, the passions appropriate to direct at God are “love (which

hath reference to goodness), and hope and fear (that relate to power)” (L 31.9: 238).

These passions do honor to their object, and when outwardly expressed, constitute

worship. They are also fitting passions in the face of the sovereign power; that is, they

express the honor due to the sovereign’s power, and are part of the obedience due the

sovereign by virtue of its power. What’s more, power is just the grounds for God’s

dominion over us: “the right of nature whereby God reigneth over men, and punisheth

those that break his laws, is to be derived, not from his creating them [ . . . ], but from his

irresistible power (L 31.5: 235). Hobbes makes the analogy between Divine power and

political power explicit in declaring the Commonwealth, of which the Sovereign power is

the “soul” (L. Intro.1: 3), “that Mortal God [ . . . ] under the Immortal God” (L 17.13:

109), the object of “civil worship” comparable to “divine worship” (L 45.13: 443). This

analogy holds even though “there is nothing to be compared to God in power”, and we

must grant God infinite value (L 45.12: 443). The degree of value, honor and worship we

grant to God and to the sovereign may be incommensurable in degree, but are founded on

passions the same in kind.

As we have already seen, Spinoza does not share this evaluation of fear.18 In

particular, he rejects Hobbes’s views of the effectiveness of threat. Although the

sovereign may use fear of punishment to coordinate our passions and actions, the

cooperation it engenders is unstable, for fear motivates not just cooperation, but actions

to remove the source of the fear. And even if fear may occasionally be useful, it is not

advisable for the long run: “fear is an inconstant Sadness, born of the idea of a future or

past thing whose outcome we to some extent doubt, (E III Def.Aff. xiii: 534). Sadness

always indicates a transition to a lesser degree of power, a weakening of conatus. But

Spinoza makes an even stronger case against the appropriateness of fear of God, for he

18In part, this may be because he does not share Hobbes’s conception of fear; Spinoza typically uses the term “metus”, or more rarely, “timor” to express fear. Hobbes’s notion of fear might be captured as well by “cautio”, which some Latin Stoics permitted to a sage. At the 30th Annual Claremont Philosophy of Religion Conference, Thandeka suggested that the differences between Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s evaluations of fear reflected their Christian and Jewish backgrounds (Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA, 13 February 2009). Her suggestion is intriguing, but the most obvious source for the difference, I think, lies in their very different commitments to neo-Stoicism.

argues it is impossible. Proposition 18 of Part V of the Ethics explicitly rules out feeling

hate towards God, and much the same reasoning applies to fear. As a species of sadness,

fear expresses a reduction in power, and as such always requires an external cause. To

feel fear in the face of God would require that God be a (partial) cause of a decrease in

perfection, which is metaphysically impossible: “there can be no Sadness accompanied

by the idea of God” because “insofar as we consider God, we act” (E VP18: 604). In

short, the very act of considering God is performatively incompatible with passions such

as fear or hate. Instead, Spinoza insists that the understanding of God can only inspire

love. The love that it inspires, however, is distinctive both in degree and in kind: it is

amor Dei intellectualis.

VI. Instantiating Reason:

Now as we saw before, both Hobbes and Spinoza took reason to be the “common

measure”, in which people “agree in nature”, in contrast to the idiosyncratic and divisive

passions. But for all these similarities, Hobbes and Spinoza diverge in their understanding

of how this common measure can be instantiated. Hobbes’s view is particularly

demanding, for he requires that any robust form of reason worthy of governing our

actions be instantiated in a public entity – namely, in the sovereign power – which

determines what constitutes right reason, as well as enforcing it. In the absence of such an

entity to provide the common measure, we may be proto-rational, and even capable of

various kinds of reckoning, but we will not be, I maintain, fully rational.

That the “common measure” must be set by a public entity may not be obvious at

first blush because of the importance Hobbes gives to means-end calculations, of which

both humans and animals are capable to some degree. Desire and passions play an

indispensable role in such thinking, driving the “regulated” “mental discourse” whereby

we seek the means to produce some effect (L 3.4-5: 13), and for which we can exercise

the virtue of prudence (see L 3.7,9: 14). But whereas such instrumental trains of thought

are within the natural abilities of individuals, others require art and “proceed all from the

invention of words and speech” (L 3.11: 15). This is true of everything Hobbes dubs

“reason”, which he first introduces by declaring that “REASON, in this sense, is nothing

but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names

agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts” (L 5.2: 22-23). Nonetheless,

Hobbes allows that such marking (rather than signifying) of consequences is something

we do when “we reckon by ourselves”. So, there does seem a weak sense of reason as an

instrumental “reckoning”, which is accessible to us individually, at least if we already

possess language.

But along with this reckoning, Hobbes interjects another, seemingly substantive

kind of reason. For there must be some way for “good” and “evil” to be determined

publicly, and thus provide a common measure that is shared and stable. Without such

public determination of the common measure, good and evil are measured simply by

private passions. In order to settle the controversies that arise when individuals rely only

on the yardsticks of their own passions, Hobbes proposes that the parties must “set up for

right reason the reason of some arbitrator or judge to whose sentence they will both

stand” (L 5.3: 23, my emphasis). Although it is unclear how it can be reconciled with the

official account of reckoning,19 “right reason” occupies an important place in Hobbes’s

19For a lively debate about the nature and number of Hobbes’s notions of reason, see, e.g., J. Deigh, "Reason and Ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan," Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (1996): 33-60; M. Murphy, "Desire and Ethics in Hobbes's Leviathan: A Response to Professor Deigh," Journal of the History of Philosophy38 (2000): 259-68; K. Hoekstra, “Hobbes on Nature, Law and Reason,” Journal of the

thought. For one, he invokes it in treating how reason discovers the dictates established

by God (L 31.3: 235) as natural law (L 14.3: 79). Then too, he makes it central to the

stability of our thinking: we must submit to the common measure of right reason, since

indulging “every of [our] passions as it comes to bear sway” would be “as intolerable in

the society of men as it is in play, after trump is turned, to use for trump on every

occasion that suit whereof [we] have most in [our] hand” (L 5.3: 23).20 These roles merge

if we take right reason to settle “good” and “evil” not only for ends, but also for means.

Indeed, when Hobbes turns to how the sovereign power functions as a public

reason, he stresses that it determines good and evils of all kinds. The sovereign power is

established by receiving the “right of nature”, wielded by every person “in the condition

of mere Nature” as “the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself

for the preservation of his own nature, [ . . . ] and consequently of doing anything which,

in his own judgment and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto” (L

14.1: 79, my emphasis). Although people can transfer their right, they cannot simply

exempt themselves from the laws of nature, and so Hobbes does not suppose the state of

nature to be utterly irrational. But only the first and second laws of nature get any real

purchase in the absence of a sovereign power; they instruct us on the value and means for

instituting a commonwealth, or if that should prove impossible, command us to defend

ourselves by any means possible. Without a common measure, all judgments about such

means are left to the liberty of the individual. And those judgments will be driven by History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 111-20. What I am arguing here is not really captured by any of these accounts, but my argument does not depend on deciding what Hobbes’s ultimate account of reason is, as long as we acknowledge the role of the sovereign in determining “right reason” in the case of conflicts. See also B. Gert, “Hobbes on Reason,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001): 243-57. 20Michael Ridge, following David Gauthier, makes a similar point, although I do not agree with the rest of his account, see M. Ridge, “Hobbesian Public Reason,” Ethics 108 (1998): 544-6, but also cf., D. Gauthier, “Public Reason,” Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1992): 24-32. For a particularly strong view of the extent of public reason, see also A. Baier, “Commodious Living” Synthese 72 (1987): 163-6.

passions without any requirement of consistency even with other passions of the same

individual across time. But in establishing a commonwealth, individuals transfer the right

of nature to the sovereign, and thereby make themselves subject to its determinations of

the means apt to preserving our lives. The standard and measure then lie outside of

private individuals, where it is capable of imposing normative demands on both their

passions and their reckonings. And so, individuals become fully rational only by

submitting to the determinations of a public reason instantiated in the sovereign power.

This is why the remedy for the irrationality of the passions must come from the top down,

and no moral philosophy can be a science without recognition of the role of political

authority. The downfall of Aristotle and other practitioners of “darknesse from vain

philosophy” lies in their failure to see that there is no internal guide – not even passions

moderated by reason – that will provide an appropriate common measure in the absence

of a sovereign authority (L 46.32: 464)

In contrast, Spinoza allows each individual a share of the common measure of

reason. On his view, not only are the norms of reason common to all humans, the object

and content of reason is what is common in the nature of things: “common notions”,

necessary truths, and aspects of the “eternal and infinite essence of God” that are in each

thing (E II P40s2, P44, P45: 478, 480-2). This is a robust vision of reason, but one that

Spinoza thinks in the grasp of every individual, for each of us “has common notions and

adequate ideas of the properties of things” (E IIP40s2: 478). What makes it universally

available is its universal instantiation: reason deals in the common nature of things, and

what is common to all is “equally in the whole and in the part”. We are parts of nature,

and so these genuinely common aspects of nature are in us as much as in anything else.

Moreover, “those things which are common to all, and which are equally in the part and

in the whole, can only be conceived adequately” (E IIP38: 474). An adequate conception

is one that is not partial or mutilated. Thus, any common notion, or idea of those things

equally in the whole or in the part, can only be conceived completely and adequately. In a

sense, then, the reason Spinoza proposes is every bit as commonly available as that

sketched by Hobbes, perhaps even more so. But that is not because it is embodied only in

a public entity; rather, it is because this reason permeates the fabric of the universe.

VII. Activity and Affectivity in Spinozistic Love of God:

The difference that makes a difference to this conception of a universally

distributed measure of reason lies in Spinoza’s basic metaphysics of activity and

passivity. Spinoza takes it that we have adequate ideas – and only adequate ideas – of

common notions. We are capable of acting as adequate causes for those ideas that are

adequate in us. Such ideas can exist in us whole and complete because their objects are

instantiated in us. That means that we have all the resources sufficient to act as the causes

of those ideas within us, which is to say, that we can be their adequate causes, and thus

fully active agents. Now, Spinoza does not think that we play no causal role when we are

acted on, only that we are merely a partial cause of the state we find ourselves in then. By

parallelism, such passive states are both states of the body and ideas of the mind. Passive

ideas, i.e., passions, are responses to what impacts us from outside, but because they

involve external forces, we have only a partial idea of the causes of our perceptions. And

so passions are characteristically confused. In contrast, when we reason, we have

adequate ideas, for which we can be adequate causes. This entails that insofar as we

reason, we are capable of experiencing only active affects, without being torn by the

passions. Reasoning for Spinoza thus exhibits our capacity to be genuinely active, by

which we deploy what is common to us and the universe: to act is, in a sense, to act

universally.

This sort of genuine activity on our part is not something Hobbes thinks is

possible. Hobbes’s most general account of a passion, or passive faculty, is “power

limited by somewhat else” (L 31.25: 240). We are always passive in this sense, for what

we are is endeavor, and a restless seeking after power. But our endeavor is always limited

by other things, and so our agency, is both bounded by and dependent on what lies

outside it. On Hobbes’s conception, we appear as nodes of motion that can be

individuated from the rest of the matter in motion constituting the universe by our

endeavor. But we are also immersed in the whole universe, and ultimately set in motion

by it. The only thing that can be accounted fully active is God; for this reason, Hobbes

insists that it would be a sign of dishonour to attribute a passion of any kind to God (L

31.25: 240). But Hobbes is equally adamant that we have no real conception of God: that

God is the “divine and incomprehensible nature” (L 46.23: 462). In the face of God’s

incomprehensibility, we can only do honor to Its infinite power, and offer signs of the

passions of love, hope and fear evoked by such incomprehensible power.

Here too is a stark contrast with Spinoza, who allows not only that we can be

active when we reason, but points to yet another, “third kind of knowledge” that goes

beyond reasoning by means of common notions. This is the scientia intuitiva, which is

simultaneously an intellectual love of God, blessedness or beatitude, and supreme

contentment. It is also a hard nut to crack, and I will not attempt any sort of

comprehensive explanation of this baffling scientia. But a few points relevant to the

issues under discussion seem clear enough. First, it seems possible to arrive at this

scientia intuitiva by working our way through the rationally discovered, necessary

connections between the properties of things, the task of the second kind of knowledge,

until we achieve a vision of the whole, the third kind of knowledge. Doing so means that

we gain a maximally large set of adequate ideas, since the holistic nature of this vision,

removes the partiality and mutilation of ideas received piecemeal from outside. As such,

the process of working our way towards this intuitive knowledge involves converting our

passions to active affects, a process that increases our power and is therefore joyful. Now,

the third kind of knowledge is holistic in nature, but Spinoza thinks God just is the whole

(conceived as active), so “the more we understand things in this way, the more we

understand God” (E VP25d: 608). This combination of joy in coming to understand, and

taking God as the object of our understanding and cause of our joy means that scientia

intuitiva entails love of God (E VP15, P32: 603, 611). But this is a special and especially

active affect, “the intellectual love of God”. As such, it generates the “greatest

satisfaction of Mind”, in which the mind is affected with the greatest Joy as it passes to

the greatest human perfection (E VP27: 609). The mind thereby also achieves

“blessedness”, which “consists in Love of God [ . . . ] a Love which arises from the third

kind of knowledge [ . . . ] [and] must be related to the mind insofar as it acts” (E VP42d:

616). This is a distinctive and impressive package of affects, arising out of the “remedy”

of transforming our passions into active affects and thereby gaining insight into the

necessary, eternal, interconnected and unified nature of Deus sive Natura. Although

many of the affects that accompany this package are recognizable ones, such as joy, and

love, the entire set must be considered completely distinctive in kind, only related to

ordinary love and joy by a kind of loose analogy. For Spinoza also tells us: “The Mind’s

intellectual Love of God is the very Love of God by which God loves himself, [ . . . ] i.e.,

the Mind’s intellectual Love of God is part of the infinite Love by which God loves

himself” (E VP36: 612). For this reason, such love cannot be a passion. Ultimately, it

may not even qualify as an affect in Spinoza’s sense, for an affect signals a change in our

conatus, an increase or decrease in our power of acting.21 If the mind’s love is part of

God’s infinite love, then it should already be complete, perfect and immutable. So, it

seems neither affect, nor passion, but once again something utterly distinctive in kind.22

21For a discussion of this point, and for the nature of the mind that can engage in such love, see D. Rutherford, “Salvation as a State of Mind: the Place of Acquiescentia in Spinoza’s Ethics,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (1999): 463-5. 22I’d like to thank the audience at the 30th Annual Claremont Philosophy of Religion Conference (Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA, 13-14 February 2009), for a lively and fruitful discussion; I am particularly grateful to Ingolf Dalferth and Michael Rodgers for organizing and hosting a very successful meeting.

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