Why Should We Read Spinoza?

SUSAN JAMES
Abstract
Historians of philosophy are well aware of the limitations of what Butterfield called
‘Whig history’: narratives of historical progress that culminate in an enlightened
present. Yet many recent studies retain a somewhat teleological outlook. Why
should this be so? To explain it, I propose, we need to take account of the emotional
investments that guide our interest in the philosophical past, and the role they play in
shaping what we understand as the history of philosophy. As far as I know, this
problem is not currently much addressed. However, it is illuminatingly explored
in the work of Spinoza (1632–77). Spinoza aspires to explain the psychological
basis of our attachment to histories with a teleological flavour. At the same time,
he insists that such histories are epistemologically flawed. To study the history of
philosophy in a properly philosophical fashion we must overcome our Whiggish
leanings.

The history of philosophy is like a city. Epochs of frenetic activity are

followed by periods of stagnation; philosophical movements, like
neighbourhoods, come in and out of fashion; and within them indi-
vidual philosophers rise and fall. During the last few years, accom-
panied by a little restoration and town planning, Spinoza has
become a more prominent feature of the philosophical cityscape.
He appears in the equivalents of tourist guides, archival publications,
architectural monographs and local fiction, and there is even a move-
ment to make him a heritage site.
This change of sensibility is reflected in a great range of philosophical
studies, which examine Spinoza and his work from many angles, inter-
preting him, for example, as a Cartesian, a contributor to the Jewish
philosophical tradition, an Epicurean, a Stoic, or a Machiavellian. But
alongside attempts to situate him within the longue durée of the
history of philosophy, there is also a growing interest in bringing
Spinoza’s ideas to bear on contemporary philosophical concerns. His
work is increasingly used to help illuminate and defend a range of posi-
tions, whether panpsychism, naturalism, toleration or democracy.
Appealing to the work of a historical figure to lend lustre to a contem-
porary debate, and simultaneously enhancing the status of the figure
by according them contemporary relevance, is of course a standard
strategy within the history of philosophy, and it is easy to see how
such a dynamic can strengthen or undermine an approach or viewpoint.
But its status as a way of doing philosophy is harder to discern. What

doi:10.1017/S1358246116000266 © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 78 2016 109

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

gains do we make by bringing historical figures to bear on our own pre-

occupations, and what philosophical motivations do we have for taking
up this approach, which, in some of its manifestations, has been the
object of stringent criticism? These questions can be addressed at
many levels of generality. Rather than attempting a full exploration,
my aim is a narrower one: I shall focus on a currently popular version
of the approach I have mentioned, and consider how Spinoza himself
might explain the fact that this approach continues to occupy a
central place in contemporary history of philosophy.
Spinoza is therefore both the subject and the object of this enquiry,
the object insofar as it reflects on one of the ways in which his philoso-
phy is currently used, and the subject insofar as it offers an interpret-
ation of an aspect of his own philosophical position. Merging these
perspectives, I shall try to reconstruct what Spinoza would say
about some of our attempts to use his work to illuminate our own pro-
blems, and about the approach to the history of philosophy that these
attempts exemplify

1.

Even in its most analytical reaches, philosophy is a historical subject.

It usually proceeds by criticising or embracing earlier philosophical
claims, whether they are drawn from the last decade or the last millen-
nium, and to this extent feeds upon its own past. Philosophers some-
times scan their history for the utterly alien or stimulatingly strange,
but they more often turn to it for insight into positions to which they
are already drawn. Those who adopt this approach look to their pre-
decessors for anticipations of themselves, and their attention to the
past is guided by their own preoccupations. In studies of Spinoza,
for example, a renewed commitment to naturalism has prompted
contemporary scholars to explore Spinoza’s contribution to this
general outlook. He is now often interpreted, in Don Garrett’s
words, as an exponent of ‘the project of fully integrating the study
and understanding of human beings, including the human mind,
into the study and understanding of nature, so that human beings
are not contrasted with nature but are instead understood as entities
ultimately governed by the same general principles that govern all
other things’.1
1
Don Garrett, ‘Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s
Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination’ in C. Huenemann ed.,
Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

110

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

To some extent, we are bound to read past philosophers in the light

of our own philosophical culture, which in turn makes some features
of their works apparent to us and others invisible. What we find is
shaped by who we are. However, there are many ways in which our
existing interests can guide interpretation, and a striking feature of
much current history of philosophy is what I shall call its teleological
flavour. Although it is rare for commentators to adopt a wholeheart-
edly teleological approach and explain particular historical events or
processes by citing an end to which they contribute, we can detect a
teleological flavour when the work of a past philosopher is assessed in
the light of contemporary values and praised for anticipating them.
We may, for instance, be invited to admire Spinoza for opening the
way to modern naturalism. What makes his work worthwhile, so
this interpretation implies, is that it was a step on the road towards
a superior modern outlook.
Some commentators adopt this attitude with gusto. For example,
Jonathan Bennett sets out, as he puts it, to ‘get Spinoza’s help in dis-
covering philosophical truth’,2 and assesses his doctrines for their
contribution to this goal. According to Bennett, some of Spinoza’s
positions, such as his adamant rejection of teleological explanation,
offer worthy challenges to existing philosophical orthodoxies, but
others do not. The final section of the Ethics, for instance, is ‘an
unmitigated and seemingly unmotivated disaster’ (page 357). Or to
take a more recent case, Jonathan Israel portrays Spinoza as the
founder of a process of radical enlightenment, which he describes
as issuing in ‘an abstract package of values – toleration, personal
freedom, democracy, equality racial and sexual, freedom of expres-
sion, sexual emancipations and the universal right to knowledge
and “enlightenment”.’3 For both these authors, the value of studying
Spinoza lies in his relevance to ‘our’ philosophy.
The tendency to focus on past doctrines or approaches because
they are of contemporary interest, and the teleological tendency to
assess them in the light of their contribution to the development of
our own beliefs, are logically distinct. In principle, one might be in-
terested in Spinoza’s naturalism because one was oneself a naturalist,
while denying that it played any significant role in the development of
the forms of naturalism that are widespread today. In practice,
however, the two often go together. Finding something of ourselves

2
Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge
University Press, 1984), para. 9, page 35.
3
Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested (Oxford University Press,
2006), 11.

111

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

in Spinoza’s philosophy slides easily into the teleologically-flavoured

project of arguing or implying that what makes this aspect of his work
significant is the fact that it anticipates our own philosophical com-
mitments, and played some role, however indirect, in their develop-
ment. Rather than merely noting resemblances, we tend to build
them into narratives tinged with grandeur, in which our own era is re-
presented as more insightful and better attuned to the truth than any
of its predecessors.
Nevertheless, as historians are well aware, teleologically-flavoured
interpretations are fraught with danger. Writing in 1931, Herbert
Butterfield coined the term ‘Whig history’ to describe narratives that
portray the past as marching towards the enlightened condition of
democratic liberalism, and criticised them on several grounds.4
Advocates of the Whig approach, he argued, assume that past figures
or traditions shared our own conceptions of what is true and interest-
ing, and therefore look to them for anticipations of their own philo-
sophical problems; but in doing so, they run the risk of suppressing
past attitudes or points of view that diverge from their own. Their ten-
dency to homogenise history is in turn liable to distort it by excluding
or overlooking unfamiliar ideas and constructing a factitious continu-
ity between past and present. Reinforcing a rhetorical conception of
philosophy as the study of age-old problems, it sounds a note of com-
forting steadiness, while at the same time introducing an overtone of
tedium. It produces a history that is already playing fragments of
our tune, waiting for us to harmonise them. Still worse, this approach
can turn into an indirect exercise in self-congratulation, in which some
of our ancestors are criticised for failing to get the point, while others
are patted on the back for anticipating our beliefs. Bertrand Russell, for
example, dismisses Spinoza’s metaphysics as ‘incompatible with
modern logic and with scientific method’ and consequently ‘impos-
sible to accept’.5 Spinoza’s failure to grasp what we know to be the
truth deprives his metaphysics of any philosophical value.
A further and closely-related objection to Whig history is that, in
cleaving to teleologically-flavoured interpretations, we assume that
philosophy is a single unified enterprise and become insensitive to
the ways it has changed over time. As well as inclining us to ignore
alien doctrines, the habit of assessing the past in the light of our own
convictions can blind us to unfamiliar conceptions of philosophy

4
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London:
G. Bell, 1931).
5
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1946), 601.

112

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

itself. For example, when Russell rejects Spinoza’s metaphysics, he

sets aside the possibility that metaphysics as Spinoza understood it is
not a primitive version of contemporary science and is consequently
not answerable to scientific standards of assessment. By assuming
that metaphysics is a proto-science, Russell closes off alternative con-
ceptions of it and thus alternative conceptions of philosophy in general.
These limitations of Whig history have often been rehearsed and
are widely acknowledged; so the fact that teleologically-flavoured in-
terpretations of the past continue to be popular suggests that not all
philosophers of our own era find the standard criticisms of
Whiggery conclusive. Some of them presumably think that it is pos-
sible to take a teleologically-flavoured approach to the past while
avoiding the abuses criticised by Butterfield and his successors. We
can mine the history of philosophy for antecedents of our own convic-
tions, and use past ideas productively, without assuming that the
figures whose work we appropriate shared our philosophical out-
looks, or that their ideas have come to fruition in our own. For
example, one can focus on and learn from those features of
Spinoza’s work that anticipate contemporary naturalism, while al-
lowing that certain aspects of his position are incompatible with
naturalism as we understand it, and that it is an open question
whether his position played a significant role in the emergence of
its modern counterpart. We can simply select and concentrate on his-
torical doctrines that we find relevant, and as long as we do not stray
any further into Whig territory, no harm is done. On the contrary,
philosophical thinking gains a depth and richness that takes it far
beyond the insights of a single era.
This view regularly resurfaces in the historiographical literature.6
If we avoid the explanatory errors identified by Butterfield, it
demands, what is wrong with borrowing from the past in order to
do philosophy in the present? Put like this, the answer seems to be
‘nothing’; yet there remains something troubling about this reply.
A sense of its incompleteness stems in part from the difficulty of
putting it into practice. Philosophers whose interest in history is
shaped by contemporary debates are liable to do more than merely
select historical doctrines they favour and run with them. They also
tend to assess these doctrines in the light of their own convictions,
and to this extent adopt a Whiggish stance. If one studies Spinoza
as a naturalist avant la lettre, for example, it is difficult to avoid
6
See for example Eric Schliesser, ‘Philosophic Prophecy’ in M. Laerke,
J. Smith and E. Schliesser eds, Philosophy and its History (Oxford, 2013),
pp. 209–35.

113

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

appealing to our own understanding of naturalism to elucidate his

position, and hard to refrain from congratulating or condemning
him sotto voce for the modernity or backwardness of his insights.
This worry may in turn generate debate about when a teleological
flavour becomes unpalatable. Is there anything wrong with assessing
Spinoza’s naturalism as, by our standards, wanting? Why should we
not applaud him for gesturing towards a disenchanted nature? The
boundary between acceptable and unacceptable teleological interpre-
tations continues to be contested, and in order to reach agreement
about it we would need a clearer sense of when a teleological approach
becomes flawed. What makes it admissible to include Spinoza in a
history of the development of naturalism, and in what circumstances
does this do violence to the integrity of his philosophical position?
One way to resolve this uncertainty would be to offer a clear
account of what counts as an unacceptably teleological analysis,
against which individual case studies could be tested. However, it is
hard to imagine a single set of criteria that would command general
assent. This is partly because philosophers turn to history to
achieve many goals, and no single way of separating the acceptable
from the unacceptable will answer to them all. But it is also for the
overlapping reason that philosophers tend to be torn between two
kinds of emotional investment in their past.
To understand the persistence of the debate between Whigs and
their opponents, it is not enough to focus on the intellectual strengths
and weaknesses of the stances we have been considering. Also at stake
are two contrasting pleasures. On the one hand, there is the anthropo-
logical pleasure that historians of philosophy take in the strangeness
of the philosophical past and its lack of relation to our own outlooks,
an excitement in the discovery of ideas suppressed and paths not
taken. On the other hand, there is the satisfaction of recognizing our-
selves in earlier traditions, thus sustaining our sense of philosophical
continuity and progress. These pleasures are not exclusive (we iden-
tify difference as a departure from continuity, and continuity as a
departure from difference) and philosophers who engage with the
past typically feel the pull of both. But while the anthropological
pleasure acts as a brake on teleological interpretation by focusing
our attention on rupture and untranslatability, the pleasure of recog-
nition inclines us to view the past in a broadly teleological spirit. To
satisfy it, we look to history for anticipations and affirmations of our-
selves; and from there it is a short step to explanations and evaluations
of the broadly teleological kind that we have so far been examining.
If this diagnosis is right, the debate between Whigs and their oppo-
nents has an emotional dimension that helps to keep it going. To
114

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

commit firmly to one side or the other is to forego (or attempt to forego)
a powerful intellectual pleasure. Historians who are convinced of the
value of Whiggish interpretations may still suffer anthropological
yearnings, just as those who are officially hostile to Whig approaches
may find themselves drawn to interpretations with a teleological
flavour. The pleasures that we seek in studying the past do not always
line up with our explicit philosophical beliefs about the methods we
ought to employ, and are not completely stilled by argument.
As far as I am aware, analytical historians of philosophy have not
paid much attention to this aspect of philosophical practice. While
many acknowledge that individual interpreters invest emotionally
in the philosophers they study, wanting them, for example, to be
morally or metaphysically admirable, the affective dimension of our
relation to the past is not on the whole discussed. Perhaps this is
because it is seen as a psychological phenomenon that lies beyond the
bounds of properly philosophical investigation; but whatever the
reason, explorations of this dimension of philosophising are largely
absent from current debate. One may find this is a little surprising,
the more so since there has recently been an increased recognition
within analytical epistemology that humans are not very good at rea-
soning, and more the playthings of their passions than they know.7 If
this is view is right, should we not bring it to bear on our own practice
as philosophers? Should we not try to get some critical distance on our
researches by supplementing the back and forth of argument with an
examination of the pleasures, anxieties and desires that are intertwined
with our explicitly intellectual convictions?
There are many ways to reconnect with the emotional aspect of
studying the history of philosophy, but an attractively reflexive route
turns back to the history of philosophy itself, and specifically to past
philosophers for whom affects lie at the heart of our thinking and activ-
ity. Here Spinoza’s work offers an obvious starting point since, for
him, all thinking is a manifestation of our striving for a satisfying
and empowering way of life, and philosophising, like the rest of our
thinking, expresses this orientation. Philosophy, we can say, is identi-
fied as an activity that gives us a certain kind of emotional satisfaction.
Together with Spinoza’s analysis of the operations of our affects, I shall
suggest, this conception secretes an account of the desires and pleasures
underlying teleological interpretative approaches to the history of phil-
osophy, and an assessment of their role within philosophical enquiry.
7
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Allen Lane, 2011);
Quassim Cassam, Self Knowledge for Humans (Oxford University Press,
2014).

115

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

It offers a hypothesis about the character and causes of our attachment

to Whiggery, and opens up a fresh way to think about it.

2.

Spinoza’s account of human affects is grounded on his view that, as

long as an individual thing exists, it is exercising a power to maintain
itself in existence. Things strive to persevere in their being by exercis-
ing their own power as opposed to being passively acted on by exter-
nal things. Moreover, since this is as true of human beings as of
anything else, all our activities, mental and physical, can be described
at a highly abstract level as exercises of our power to maintain our-
selves in existence in the face of our encounters with external
things. In the human case, our disposition to preserve ourselves is
manifested in our affects. Our experience of our fundamental striving
takes the form of desires and appetites, and increases or decreases in
our power present themselves as forms of joy and sadness. Whether
we are walking down the street on autopilot or thinking through a
logical proof, we are motivated by desires that are ultimately for
empowerment, and are experiencing the emotional satisfactions and
dissatisfactions that constitute our current power to actively maintain
ourselves. This overarching disposition, which is constitutive of our
human nature and does not have to be learned, shapes our sense both
of ourselves and of other things. It sensitises us to our own vulnerabil-
ities and strengths, for example through the experience pride or fear,
and attunes us to the threats and opportunities that external things
present, so that instead of perceiving the world in a neutral fashion,
our basic orientation towards it is affective. We encounter frightening
enemies rather than men with weapons, welcoming friends rather
than people with open arms, and these affects in turn shape our con-
scious and unconscious desires. In all our relationships with external
things, and all our reasoning and reflection, we use our existing
power to find ways of engaging with the world that are emotionally sat-
isfying and strengthen our capacity to take delight in our lives.
Since these general features of human nature are at work in every-
thing we do, they underlie both our successful and our less successful
efforts to empower ourselves. Much of the time, Spinoza argues, we
strive to persevere in our being on the basis of a partial and confused
understanding of ourselves and external things, with correspondingly
limited effects. For example, we pursue short-term ends to our long-
term detriment, or develop attachments to objects that make us more
sad than joyful. But although this mode of striving is always with us
116

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

and determines many features of our lives, we are to some extent able
to offset its limitations by cultivating a fuller knowledge of the world,
and a wiser practical sense of how to live in an empowering fashion.
As Spinoza puts it, we can compensate for the deficiencies of what
he calls imagining by developing what he describes as the capacity
to reason or understand. Moreover, as we do so we exercise our
own power and become increasingly active.
Empowering ourselves thus consists in cultivating ways of life that
do justice to our existing knowledge of ourselves and our environment,
and leave room for us to enhance both our knowledge and our capacity
to live in the light of it. However, in the account of this unending
project that Spinoza offers in his Ethics, he focuses on the importance
of understanding ourselves. While our capacity to live in an empower-
ing fashion is often blocked by our ignorance of the world around us,
our greatest problems stem from lack of self-knowledge, which is in
turn partly due to our own imaginative dispositions. Since our efforts
to empower ourselves are habitually limited by psychological disposi-
tions that beckon us down paths leading to sadness, one of our first
tasks is to learn to compensate for them.
Among the most pervasive of these tendencies is a disposition to
exaggerate our individual power and overestimate what we can
achieve. To offset it, we need to acknowledge the extent to which
we are individually dependent on external things for our wellbeing,
and learn how to put this insight to work in our ways of life. Rather
than struggling on our own, we need to strengthen our power to per-
severe in our being by joining forces with other people. However, as
Spinoza goes on to argue, this project is attended by its own difficul-
ties. To manage it successfully, we have to deal with a further ambiva-
lent aspect of our psychology, deriving from the fact that our affects
are primarily focused on those of other human beings. We experience
other people as like us in the sense that they share our repertoire of
affects. Just as we can respond to their emotions so they can
respond to ours, and this mutual recognition is in turn reflected in
our individual and collective efforts to enhance our power.
To some extent, Spinoza argues, the mere fact that we recognise
other human beings as sharing our emotional constitution is
enough to make us imitate their affects. Whereas we do not envy
trees their height or lions their strength, we pity humans with
whom we have no other connection and may desire things simply
because other people want them.8 Moreover, these affective
8
Spinoza, Ethics in E. Curley ed., The Collected Works of Spinoza
(Princeton University Press, 1985), E3p27.

117

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

dispositions tend to operate more strongly among collectivities whose

members perceive themselves as having more than their mere human-
ity in common. In all its manifestations, however, the imitation of the
affects is a two-edged sword. As the examples of pity and competi-
tiveness indicate, it can move us to cooperate with one another, as
when pitying someone motivates us to ameliorate their suffering;
but can also lead us to compete, as when the imitation of desire pro-
duces excessive demand for a scarce good that many individuals try to
get for themselves.
In Spinoza’s analysis, the negative aspects of the imitation of the
affects are uppermost; although ‘men … are so constituted by
nature that they pity the unfortunate but envy the fortunate’, they
are nevertheless more prone to vengeance than to compassion.9 The
main reason is that our efforts to empower ourselves by developing
co-operative and mutually beneficial ways of life are cross pressured
by an impatient tendency to try to realise our desires by imposing
them on others. ‘Each of us’, Spinoza claims, ‘strives so far as he can
that everyone should love what he loves and hate what he hates’ …
‘Each of us wants the others to live according to his ingenium or tem-
perament’.10 In addition to being drawn to people with whom we
already have things in common, we try to make other individuals
into the kind of people to whom we can be drawn. This goal can be
achieved by various means, including force, coercive threats and
offers, flattery or persuasion; but Spinoza is particularly interested in
the fact that our efforts to empower ourselves by these routes are
often tinged with fantasy. We tend to project our desires onto others,
representing them to ourselves as people who already share our inge-
nium or temperament and are already as we want them to be. Short-
circuiting the difficulties of generating a co-operative ethos, we
behave as though our own affects are already shared, and view other
people through the lens of our own yearnings and aspirations.
Imagining therefore shapes our conception of the people around us
and the opportunities for empowerment that they afford; but our
tendency to make the world in our image can also lead us to a more
ambitious form of anthropomorphising, in which we imagine quasi-
human agents who mirror our desires. The most striking example of
this phenomenon, in Spinoza’s view, is our imaginative construction
of powerful, anthropomorphic deities, whose affects are analogous to
our own and who have our interests at heart. Here, our disposition
to respond affectively to things that are like us, and thus to other
9
Ethics, IIIp32s.
10
Ethics 3p31c; 4p37s.

118

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

human beings, extends into fictional territory. We imagine that we

have affective relationships with deities who are somewhat like us,
and imbue non-human natural things with providential powers to
respond to our needs. We come to think, as Spinoza puts it, ‘that
there is someone else who has prepared those means for our use’ and
that ‘the gods direct all things for the use of men’.11
Fantasies of this kind may play a role in helping a community to
live harmoniously. In some circumstances, for example, a shared
belief in the existence of an anthropomorphic god may produce con-
vergent desires that bind a group of individuals together, encouraging
the positive aspects of affective imitation and restraining the negative
ones. However, while Spinoza by no means underestimates the power
of this phenomenon, and discusses it at length in his Tractatus
Politicus, he remains convinced that the most effective basis of co-
operation lies in understanding.12 To create lasting and stable ways
of life, we need to discover what we really have in common with
those around us, and, on the basis of this knowledge, work out how
to sustain mutually empowering ways of life. Moreover, this is a
philosophical as well as a political project – a matter of extending
our rational knowledge of ourselves and our environment and
finding ways to live as this knowledge dictates. Taking account of
our tendency to imitate one another’s affects, and of the consequences
of this disposition, our task is to use it to live together, not on the
shaky basis of fantasy, but in ways that reflect our understanding
and nurture the development of our active power.
In setting out this programme, Spinoza sometimes seems to invoke
an idealised conception of philosophy as the preserve of wise indivi-
duals, who view the project of increasing our active power from on
high. Since they have already achieved an exceptional level of
insight into human nature, their problems lie not so much in extend-
ing their understanding as in exercising it while living amongst a less
enlightened majority, bringing their knowledge to bear on the con-
flict and disorder of everyday politics and promoting a philosophic-
ally grounded way of life. In fact, however, Spinoza’s view is more
nuanced. In any individual, understanding is mixed with imagin-
ation, and the power to live as one’s understanding dictates will be
stronger and more resilient in some circumstances than in others.
Although we may imitate other people’s affects to better or worse
effect, the disposition to project our desires is always with us and,
11
Ethics, I App. [1].
12
Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus in A.G. Wenham ed., The Political
Works (Clarendon Press Oxford, 1958).

119

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

however wise we may become, continues to shape our relations with

other people and things.
This being the case, historians of philosophy will remain liable to
imitate one another’s affects, and will be subject to the disposition to
project their desires on to others. By acknowledging the part that this
process plays in their study of their subject, we may be able to uncover
some of the underlying pleasures and desires that draw them to spe-
cific modes of interpretation, and particularly to those with a teleo-
logical flavour. What, then, can Spinoza’s discussion of our
affective relations with things that we regard as like us reveal about
the practice of the history of philosophy? In the first place, it suggests
that this disposition will be at work in the relations between living
historians, each of whom will try to achieve the satisfactions that
empowerment brings by forming bonds with other whom they
regard as like themselves. Those who are already teleologically in-
clined may, for example, try to empower themselves by joining
forces, thus promoting a kind of factionalism that is a familiar
feature of intellectual life. However, because individuals will also
be liable to try to impose their desires on their colleagues, we
should expect the relations between historians to be marked by
dissent, and to give rise to conflicts that may become significantly dis-
empowering. If Spinoza is right, competition will outweigh co-
operation.
So far, we have a rather banal and pessimistic image of historical
practice; but Spinoza’s analysis also suggests that we should expect
to find imitations of affect in the relations between living historians
and the dead philosophers they study. Historians will try to satisfy
their aspirations, whether for prestige, integrity or self-respect, by
identifying with past philosophers who seem to them to share some-
thing of their outlook, adding lustre to their philosophical convic-
tions by allying themselves, for example, with Plato, Confucius or
Kant. More than this, however, the fact that dead philosophers
cannot respond affectively to the living makes the past a particularly
fertile field for projection. It provides historians with an arena, we
might say, in which they can relieve the distinctively philosophical
sense of lack that Novalis describes as a desire to be at home every-
where, by finding themselves in their predecessors and aligning
themselves with this or that tradition. Here, then, Spinoza’s
account of our imaginative disposition to project our desires onto
other people and things illuminates the first of the two elements
that characterise teleologically-flavoured approaches to the history
of philosophy, namely the pleasure we take in focusing on aspects
of the past with which we can identify, and the connected tendency
120

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

to imaginatively obliterate the differences between past and present.

Much as we may try to proceed in a cool, investigative spirit, imagin-
ation is liable to sweep us along, creating empowering similarities
where none exist and heightening them wherever they are to be
found. In short, when we study the history of philosophy, we try to
consolidate our power and satisfaction by imagining the world as an-
swering to our desire that others should be like us.
It remains to consider whether Spinoza’s psychology can also
account for the second element of teleologically-flavoured interpreta-
tions of the past – the fact that such interpretations construe historical
processes as steps on the road to our own superior outlooks and
values. Here again our disposition to make the world answer to our
affects plays a crucial role. It is, Spinoza tells us, a deep fact about
human beings that we think of ourselves as purposive creatures
who formulate short- and long-term ends and assess states of affairs
in relation to these goals. Furthermore, we unselfconsciously attri-
bute this mode of operating to other kinds of things, taking it, for
example, that other animals are designed to serve our purposes.
Pressing this line of interpretation a stage further, we may conceive
of them as created by an anthropomorphic deity who made them
for our use. Thus represented, the world is our oyster, a domain in
which our desires are legitimated by nature and by God, and in
which we can confidently strive to empower ourselves.
Our disposition to impose our human ends on nature therefore
plays a role in satisfying our affective needs, and our attachment to
teleologically-flavoured interpretations of the past forms part of
this broader pattern. As Spinoza implicitly acknowledges when he
criticises philosophers who dream of a long-gone golden age, dwell-
ing on the glories of a past way of life that we can no longer realise, and
that puts our own in a bad light, is liable to be dispiriting. By contrast,
we gain confidence and energy from interpretations of the past that
harness it to the creation of our own power, by representing our
achievements as rooted in a steady process of historical growth. On
the one hand, past events are construed as conducive to our values;
on the other hand, they do not rival or threaten our achievements,
but instead reflect back our desire for supremacy.

3.

We have been tracing Spinoza’s use of a strategy that he describes

(implausibly) as a completely novel feature of his work: the attempt
to explain the workings of the affects. Once we take account of the
121

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

constellation of emotional habits that constitute the imitation of the

affects, the persistence of teleologically-flavoured approaches to un-
derstanding the past should not in his view surprise us. We should
recognise them as manifestations of a set of psychological dispositions
that shapes much of our everyday grasp of the world. However, the
fact that such approaches are to be expected does not mean that
they are philosophically defensible, and we may also be curious to
know what he thinks of them. Do they make a valuable contribution
to the history of philosophy or should we eschew them as far as we
can?
It is clear that Spinoza regards each of the two elements of a teleo-
logically flavoured approach that we have distinguished – the ten-
dency to focus on aspects of the past with which we can identify,
and the tendency to regard these aspects as forming a process that cul-
minates in our own outlook and way of life – as epistemologically
flawed. Insofar as our explorations of the past are shaped by our dis-
position to imagine and heighten empowering affective relationships
between ourselves and other things, they are not primarily responsive
to the way things are. Striving to satisfy our desires, we are liable to
arrive at distorted conceptions of historical events and processes.
However, the disposition to misconstrue the past in this fashion is
not ineluctable; we can learn to offset it by understanding the opera-
tions of our affects and learning how to identify our projections for
what they are. We are not condemned to error by the very fact that
we discern similarities and differences between ourselves and our his-
torical predecessors, but rather by the way we do so, and part of the
art of philosophising consists in training ourselves to be more cau-
tious than we naturally are.
By contrast, the second element of teleologically-flavoured explana-
tions goes with a deeper epistemological limitation. As we have seen,
our affective dispositions incline us to view the past as adapted to
our ends, and manifest themselves in a tendency to construct historical
narratives in which our way of life provides the happy ending. But
Spinoza is adamant that all teleologically-flavoured explanations are
wanting. Since nature has no end, the way to understand natural
events is not to posit goals to which they contribute, but to identify
their antecedent causes. It is true that it can be helpful, in everyday
contexts, to account for an event by appealing to its end, as when
you tell me that you are turning on the tap because you want a
drink; but shortcuts of this kind do not do justice to the complex
pattern of causes from which particular events flow and in which
their full explanation lies. Teleologically- flavoured explanation there-
fore rests on and perpetuates a radically misconceived view of the
122

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

operations of natural things, including ourselves, and has no place in

philosophy. In order to understand nature adequately, we must
eschew such explanations, and if our histories of philosophy are to
live up to the epistemological standard that philosophy sets, we must
learn to do without them. Comforting as they may be, we must seek
our pleasures elsewhere.
Thus conceived, philosophy is an extraordinarily demanding
undertaking. The surest way to empower ourselves is to concentrate
on finding out how nature is structured, how it impinges on us and
how we respond to it, and in using this knowledge to build stably sat-
isfying ways of life. We must learn to avoid the conflicts that arise
from affective competition by discovering what we really have in
common with other people and finding ways to satisfy our common
needs. We must learn to recognise teleologically-flavoured explana-
tions as partial and epistemologically misleading reconstructions of
past events, and avoid them as far as possible. In part, then, philoso-
phy is a matter acquiring knowledge, and requires a range of intellec-
tual virtues such as ingenuity and dedication. But it also consists in
developing the capacity to put this knowledge into practice and live
as it dictates. Here a further range of epistemological virtues comes
into play, of which the two most prominent are animositas, the deter-
mination to live as understanding dictates, and generositas, the dis-
position to do so by joining forces with others. Philosophers, as
Spinoza conceives them, need to develop a particular ingenium or
character; they must be willing to learn rather than rigidly committed
to a particular outlook, and be gentle rather than aggressive, inclusive
rather than exclusive, in their pursuit of understanding.
Being human, philosophers strive to empower themselves by imi-
tating the affects of people they perceive as like them; but in doing so,
they exercise their virtues. Rather than imposing their desires on
others or competing with them for scarce goods, they are on the
lookout for individuals who share their commitment to a philosoph-
ically-informed way of life. They employ the imitation of the affects
to unite with people who share something of their temperament, and
to encourage others to develop it. Moreover, once their understand-
ing alerts them to the overarching limitations of teleological explan-
ation, they will try to avoid interpreting their own philosophical
past in a teleological fashion, and will search instead for the ante-
cedent causes of historical events. Rather than viewing history as a
prelude to their own achievements, Spinozist philosophers will
study the past for insight into the continuing philosophical project
of living in the light of our understanding.

123

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Susan James

There seem, then, to be two ways in which the study of the history
of philosophy can further the philosophical project as Spinoza con-
ceives of it. First and most straightforwardly, dead philosophers
may teach us how nature operates. Spinoza, for example, is interested
in the natural philosophy of his era, particularly the work of Bacon
and Descartes, and is alert to earlier theories of the affects including
those of the Stoics. These figures belong to a philosophical commu-
nity that encompasses the dead as well as the living and is relatively
indifferent to chronology. In addition, past philosophers may help
their descendants to live in the light of the philosophical knowledge
they possess by offering them models or images of empowering
ways of life that they can use as guides. In some cases, these will be
models of the good life; for example, images of the virtuous man as
discussed by Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca are all present in
Spinoza’s work. As well as these forms of theoretical guidance,
however, Spinoza is if anything more interested in seeking historical
advice about the practical aspects of philosophy. His supreme exem-
plar of a philosophical life is that of Jesus Christ; and he clearly thinks
that there are many other accounts of the lives of rulers and statesman
from which we can draw lessons about the art of good government.
The philosophical community, as he now begins to portray it, in-
cludes historians such as Tacitus, Livy and Josephus, statesmen
such as Machiavelli, and rulers such as Alexander and Moses,
whose actions or writings can inform our efforts to live in the light
of our understanding.
Assessing the strategies and decisions of past legislators and sover-
eigns can therefore help us to learn to live together; but we also need
to see how their actions contributed or failed to contribute to the
security and longevity of political communities. One of Spinoza’s
most comprehensive historical investigations consequently focuses
on the history of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth. By studying
its laws and the decisions of its leaders, he contends, Dutch philoso-
phers such as himself can identify the flaws that led to its downfall
and, thereby enabling the Dutch Republic to avoid the same
mistakes.
The view that Spinoza endorses therefore looks to the history of
philosophy not as a source of self-congratulation or reassurance,
but rather of inspiration. Living philosophers are committed to pro-
moting a way of life in which they pool their insights and help one
another to live as their shared understanding dictates; but part of
this project involves drawing on the theoretical and practical insights
that have come down to us in the works of philosophers, historians,
prophets and rulers. Some of these figures were themselves
124

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press

 Why Should We Read Spinoza?

engaged in the very practice of philosophy that Spinoza is advocating;

they were philosophers in his sense of the term, and can help philo-
sophers like him understand the demands of a philosophical life.
Others were not. (Spinoza is emphatic, for example, that Moses
was a prophet rather than a philosopher, and distinguishes the roles
of philosophers and statesmen.) But the insights of these individuals
can nevertheless contribute to philosophical understanding. For
example, genuine prophecy can, in Spinoza’s view, reveals moral
truths. Equally, the political skills of rulers and statesmen can teach
us how to live in the light of our knowledge, and until this knowledge
is put into practice, the work of philosophy is only half done.
Spinoza’s conception of the community of the wise to which philoso-
phers can turn for inspiration therefore extends more widely than we
might nowadays expect. Where we tend to conceive of philosophy as a
theoretical undertaking and view its history accordingly, he sees it as
the collective project of learning to live as powerfully as possible in
the light of a true understanding of nature. Philosophers should con-
sequently turn to history for both theoretical and practical insight,
and make what they can of the models that have come down to them.
Returning to one of the commentators from whom we began, we
can now see that Spinoza would not have objected to Jonathan
Bennett’s efforts to mine the Ethics for philosophical insights,
though he would have found Bennett’s conception of philosophy rad-
ically incomplete. Where Bennett treats philosophy as a theoretical
undertaking, Spinoza regards it as a practical one. Furthermore,
Spinoza would have rejected the teleological flavour that characterises
Bennett’s work, and indeed much contemporary history of philoso-
phy. As Spinoza’s theory of the affects suggests, overcoming the ten-
dency to think teleologically about the past is not easy. Nevertheless,
in resisting it, we prevent ourselves from falling prey to an ultimately
disempowering disposition to interpret nature in the light of our own
purposive operations that is itself a manifestation of the incomplete-
ness of our understanding. Interpreting the past in a teleological
fashion is not blameworthy. It is an aspect of our striving to
empower ourselves and answers to our affective needs. But it is not
philosophy.

Birkbeck College, London

[email protected]

125

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1358246116000266 Published online by Cambridge University Press