Between Philosophy and Religion, Vol. II: Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity

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BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION: SPINOZA, THE BIBLE, AND MODERNITY

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BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION: SPINOZA, THE BIBLE, AND MODERNITY Volume II: Politics and Ethics

Brayton Polka

LEXINGTON B OOKS A division of ROWMAN & LIT TLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2007 by Lexington Books First paperback edition 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows: Polka, Brayton. Between philosophy and religion : Spinoza, the Bible, and modernity / Brayton Polka. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. 2. Religion—Philosophy. I. Title. B3999.R4P65 2007 199’.492—dc22 2006013872 ISBN: 978-0-7391-1603-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-7391-1604-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-7391-5233-1 (electronic) Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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Contents

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1 Consciousness, Desire, and the Duality of Existence 2 Between Politics and Ethics: The Relationship between Democratic Freedom and Eternal Freedom 3 Conclusion: Modernity in Light of Spinoza

143 289

Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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HIS BOOK ON SPINOZA’S POLITICS AND ETHICS

is part of a two-volume study, the general title of which is Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity. I intend by the overall heading Between Philosophy and Religion to signal the guiding spirit of my study. The companion volume in my two-book study is entitled Hermeneutics and Ontology. Each of the two volumes is an independent book and can be read separate from the other. Still, each is to be understood, within the limits of its own particular thematic, to engage Spinoza as a thinker who is at once biblical and modern. Indeed, the argument of both volumes is that, when we place Spinoza between philosophy and religion, when we come to understand what it means for this philosopher to make the God of the Bible the subject of knowledge that is at once sufficient and necessary for human beings, we shall be in a position to see the Bible and modernity, not as fundamentally opposed to but as profoundly related to each other. Just as Spinoza has been essentially misunderstood when what is modern (philosophical or secular) in his thought has been opposed to what is biblical (theological or religious) in his thought, so it is equally the case that modernity cannot be truly comprehended when it is opposed to the Bible (faith) and that the Bible cannot be truly comprehended when it is not grasped as fundamentally, as essentially, modern (rational and secular). As we understand Spinoza, so we understand both the Bible and modernity. As we understand both the Bible and modernity, so we understand Spinoza. Just as we cannot truly comprehend Spinoza without seeing him as at once biblical and modern, so he helps us realize that we cannot have a true understanding of either the Bible or modernity without grasping the fact that the Bible is no less modern than modernity

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is biblical. To place ourselves with Spinoza between philosophy and religion is to be in the position of overcoming the paralyzing dualisms between modernity and the Bible and so between reason and faith, between the secular and the religious, and, ultimately, between the human and the divine. It is also the case that, because the Bible is not to be understood as “ancient” (premodern), compared with what is modern, modern thought, when truly comprehended as biblical, will (have to) be sharply distinguished from “ancient” thought, the thought of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Spinoza is enormously fruitful in helping us see that the thought of the ancients— whether that of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics (including the protean amalgam of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism that we know as Neoplatonism), the skeptics, or the Epicureans—is neither philosophical nor theological. In other words, the concepts of both the human and the divine in ancient thought are totally other than those found in Spinoza and the thinkers who, together with him, constitute the canon of modernity (including Montaigne, Caravaggio, Shakespeare, Descartes, Vermeer, Kant, Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Corot, Nietzsche, Buber, Wallace Stevens, Shostakovich, and Chagall—to name but a few). The famous ban cutting Spinoza off from the Amsterdam Jewish community was issued in 1656, his having been born in 1632. While he always remained a Jew, Spinoza lived his adults years apart from organized Jewish life with his main intellectual followers and supporters being unorthodox Christians. In my two-volume study of Spinoza, the Bible, and modernity, I focus on the three major (mature) works of this Dutch thinker: the TheologicoPolitical Treatise (which was published anonymously in Latin in 1670), Ethics, and (the uncompleted) Political Treatise (the second and third of which were published anonymously both in Latin and in Dutch translation in 1677, shortly after Spinoza’s death that same year). I do not consider here the earlier, immature works of Spinoza. Instead of treating the Theologico-Political Treatise, together with the Political Treatise, separate from the Ethics, that is, instead of treating his politics (together with his biblical hermeneutics) in one book and his ethics in another book, I divide my two-volume study between hermeneutics and ontology, on the one hand, and politics and ethics, on the other. I make this unorthodox division for two principal reasons: 1. Whatever the apparent differences in style and mode of demonstration between the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Ethics, Spinoza’s two greatest works are not to be isolated from each other in the traditional manner of philosophers writing in English, who typically treat the Ethics without reference to the Theologico-Political Treatise. Nor is the TheologicoPolitical Treatise to be subordinated to the Ethics in the tradition of Leo

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Strauss’ approach to Spinoza, with the result that the Bible is put in opposition to, by making it ancillary to, philosophy, in flagrant disregard of Spinoza’s explicitly articulated aims in the Theologico-Political Treatise and in contradiction of the primacy of the God of the Bible in the Ethics. 2. Another way of putting this same point is to indicate the importance of considering the interrelation of hermeneutics and ontology in the thought of Spinoza. It is equally important not to isolate the politics of Spinoza from his ethics. Only then are we able to see that the freedom of the democratic civil state (together with what Spinoza calls the multitudo [the people] in the Political Treatise) both presupposes and is presupposed by the concept of freedom that he attributes to the eternity of the mind in part V of the Ethics. Just as Spinoza shows in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise that God is not found outside of (without) sovereign political authority (the authority of the political sovereign), so it is important to see that, for Spinoza, the eternity of the mind, understood as involving and expressing the intellectual love of God, does not constitute an ethical domain that is located outside of (without) the civil state. But this conclusion is hardly surprising, given the fact that, as I show, Spinoza makes the golden rule of loving your neighbor as yourself—which expresses what he calls the principles of charity and justice—the rational basis not only of biblical hermeneutics but also of both political life and ethical practice in the democratic civil state. In demonstrating that the theology of the Bible is fundamentally democratic and that its principles of charity and justice for all constitute true sovereign authority, which is at once political and ethical, both individual and communal, Spinoza shows us that we cannot conceive of modernity outside of (without) the Bible and that we cannot conceive of the Bible outside of (without) modernity. The texts that are central to showing the interrelationship of politics and ethics in the thought of Spinoza, here in this present volume, are the following: chapters 16–20 of the Theologico-Political Treatise; the (incomplete) Political Treatise; and parts III–V of the Ethics, together with the appendix of part I. (In my companion volume I show how intimately related hermeneutics and ontology are in the thought of Spinoza by examining the major passages of chapters 1–15, plus the preface, of the Theologico-Political Treatise and parts I and II of the Ethics.) The great concept that Spinoza makes central both to his politics and his ethics is that of conatus: effort, endeavor, work (striving). Conatus bespeaks the fundamental desire that constitutes the core of every natural being, including every human being. The nature of every existing

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thing is the conatus of persevering in its being insofar as it can by its own natural power. Indeed, Spinoza holds that the conatus by which each natural thing endeavors to persevere in its being constitutes the actual essence of the thing. What something is, actually and essentially, is the power (or effort) by which it perseveres in existence. Indeed, the right of every natural being, the natural right of every being, is simply its actual conatus in persevering in existence. Because conatus is co-existent with the power of persevering in existence and thus with desire, it follows that right, or the good, is defined by desire, not desire by right or the good. We do not desire something because we judge it to be the good. Rather, we judge something to be the good because (or insofar as) we desire it. The awesome challenge that Spinoza then sets before himself is to demonstrate—and consequently the awesome challenge that he sets before his readers is to grasp—how conatus, as the right of every human being to persevere in existence, ultimately and thus in principle (in the beginning), constitutes both political freedom (as democratic sovereignty) and ethical freedom (as the eternity of the mind). His singular achievement is to show how conatus, when truly grasped, constitutes—and is constituted by—not only the freedom (or sovereignty) of the multitudo as the democratic civil state, outside of whose political authority, Spinoza holds, God cannot be thought to exist, but also the freedom (or eternity) of the mind as the intellectual love of God. Spinoza arrives at these political and ethical ends (principles) by means of an absolutely critical distinction that he makes within conatus itself. For conatus, it turns out, is “natural” in two opposed senses. On the one hand, human beings belong to the common order of nature, where, as subject to their passive affects, they are determined, or contradicted, by finite (external) causes, which themselves are the effects of yet further causes ad infinitum. On the other hand, human beings actively constitute the non-contradictory (that is, the paradoxical) order of freedom in which they live from themselves alone (they determine themselves as their own self-cause). Spinoza formulates his critical distinction between these two opposed concepts of nature in a number of different ways: between passive affects and active affects; between passion (passivity) and action (activity); between inadequate ideas (falsity) and adequate ideas (truth); between the natural state (in which human beings, in being led by their passions, are the enemies of each other) and the civil state (the social pactum, where, according to the proverb that Spinoza says is on the lips of nearly everyone, “man is God to man”). In both his politics and his ethics Spinoza formulates the self-conscious awareness on the part of human beings that they make the “transition” from passion to action, from inadequate ideas to adequate ideas, and from the natural state of lupine contradiction to the civil state of divine paradox as the dictates of reason. The dictates

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of reason express the self-conscious recognition on the part of human beings that they can overcome (without in any sense abrogating or eliminating) the contradictions of the natural state (of the inimically opposed passions) solely in and through the golden rule of actively—charitably and justly—doing unto others what they want others to do unto them. That Spinoza explicitly grounds the dictates of reason in love of neighbor, the common good of all whose other name is God, knowledge of whom is the sole good of human beings, shows us how intimately he binds together his politics and his ethics. Since, for Spinoza, God is not known (or loved) by human beings in the state of nature, since, in other words, knowledge and love of God on the part of human beings express the standard of what constitutes their action, their adequate ideas, and their freedom, the dictates of reason are expressed both politically, through the sovereign multitudo in constituting love of neighbor as the civil state of democracy, and ethically, through the eternity of the mind in its intellectual love of God. Neither the civil state of democracy nor the eternity of the mind, which Spinoza identifies with beatitude and salvation in the tradition of biblical theology, is found outside of (without) the natural state (of the contradictory passions). But he makes it no less clear that freedom, as founded in and through the democratic civil state and the eternity of the mind, does not arise from or begin with the natural or unfree state (of the contradictory passions). The principles of politics and ethics are not found in the natural state. In applying the theological concept of eternity, as known in the biblical tradition, in seemingly untraditional fashion to the human mind (while avoiding use of the concept of the immortality of the soul, as traditionally associated with Greek metaphysics), Spinoza signals to us that the eternity of the mind represents the conatus of persevering, not naturally but freely in existence on the part of human beings. While human beings are and remain subject to the vicissitudes of natural time as mere duration (passing away)—they naturally die—the time of human relations, both political and ethical, is not natural but civil, in others words, eternal. Just as the intellectual love of God involves the civil relations, at once political and ethical, of loving your neighbor as yourself, so the eternity of the mind expresses the active fulfillment of time on the part of human beings in their political and ethical relations. Such is the Miltonic “highth” of the “great argument” of this volume. I show how fruitful it is to read chapters 16–20 of the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise in light of parts III–V of the Ethics (and vice versa). Conatus, in expressing the actual essence of human beings to persevere in existence, involves and expresses the eternal “transition” on the part of the mind, not only to but also from (through) the intellectual love of God, the freedom of whose ethical end (principle) coincides with the eternal transition to but also

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from (through) the freedom of the democratic civil state, whose end (principle) is the golden rule of loving your neighbor as yourself. That conatus, in expressing the dictates of reason, is revealed as at once the intellectual love of God and the golden rule of charity and justice testifies to the fact that Spinoza can be understood as modern only insofar as he is biblical and as biblical only insofar as he is modern. But to read Spinoza as at once biblical and modern is but to acknowledge that the Bible is modern from the beginning and that modernity is biblical unto the end. While my study of the relationship of politics and ethics in Spinoza is complete in itself and my analysis of the relationship of chapters 16–20 of the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise and of parts III–V of the Ethics constitutes a complete study, what they also demonstrate is that politics and ethics are founded on relationships that are at once ontological and hermeneutical. Consequently, they also point to the fact that hermeneutics and ontology are constituted by relationships that are no less political than they are ethical. Such a conclusion, however, is not unexpected. In chapters 1–15 of the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza shows that the hermeneutics of biblical interpretation is based on the golden rule of doing unto others what you would have others do unto you, which he summarizes as the doctrines of charity and justice for all. The consequence of acknowledging—of embracing— love of neighbor as the standard or criterion of biblical interpretation is to see that the authority of the Bible—of the prophets and their revelation of God (of the revelation of God in the prophets); and of Christ and his revelation of God (of the revelation of God in Christ)—is not found outside of (without) the authority of its readers (i.e., its faithful adherents). It is no less the case, also, that the authority of the readers of the Bible is not found outside of (without) the authority of the Bible. On the one hand, the Bible establishes the criterion by which both the content of its faith and the content of the lives of its readers, that is, their faithfulness, are to be judged—the criterion of love of neighbor. On the other hand, the readers of the Bible establish the criterion by which both the rational content of their lives, their rationality, and the rationality of biblical faith is to be judged—the criterion of love of neighbor. The fact that Spinoza founds biblical hermeneutics on the mutual relationship of self and other, of reader and text, and of faith and reason—the fact that loving faith is rational and that loving reason is faithful—is profoundly connected to the ontological argument for the existence of God that he makes central to parts I and II of the Ethics, as I show in volume I of my study. In holding that there is one thing that cannot be thought—by loving human beings, insofar as they are at once rational and faithful—without existing necessarily, which is God, Spinoza demonstrates that God does not and cannot exist outside of (without) human thought. He equally shows that human beings do

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not and cannot think outside of (without) the existence of God. (These formulations are equally reversible.) The mutual, that is, the necessary or free (liberating) relationship of thought and existence, of self and other, which are at once divine and human, Spinoza articulates in his three major works as hermeneutical, ontological, political, and ethical. Thus, in volume I of this study, on Spinoza’s hermeneutics and ontology, I show that politics and ethics are founded on, as the true end of, hermeneutics and ontology, just as hermeneutics and ontology point to, as they presuppose, politics and ethics, as I show in this volume. I divide this volume on the politics and ethics of Spinoza into three chapters. I devote chapter 1 to an analysis of how conatus, in parts III and IV of the Ethics (plus the appendix of part I), is transformed into, by embodying, the dictates of reason. We thus see that conatus itself represents the “transition” from desire conscious of its affects but ignorant of their causes to desire conscious of the fact that its good freely expresses love of neighbor and knowledge of God. Spinoza demonstrates with extraordinary poise and verve the intimate relationship between desire (conatus, affectus) and the good. We do not desire something because it is (or is said by others to be) the good (in itself). Rather, what we desire, whatever we desire, is the good (for us). It is in the context of the relationship between desire and the good, or freedom, that Spinoza, in part IV of the Ethics, comments on what he calls the story of the first man, that is, of the “fall” of Adam and Eve. Both here, and also in his two political treatises, he shows that Adam is “like us” in being, in the beginning, conscious of his affects yet ignorant of their causes and so unfree, because enslaved to his passions. Just as Adam (together with Eve) falls from the unfree state of the natural garden into the freedom of the covenant, whose principle and basis are the love of God and neighbor, so for all human beings conatus is the principle and basis by which they effect the transition from passion to action, from inadequate ideas to adequate ideas, from slavery to freedom. They pass from the state of nature, in which their passions divide them against both themselves and each other, to the civil state, where they freely unite with each other (and with themselves) in their mutual acts of charity and justice. Consequently, we see that Spinoza belongs to the tradition of great thinkers— from Milton to Nietzsche—who articulate the modern story of freedom in and through (as) the biblical story of Adam and Eve. In demonstrating that desire (conatus) leads to the love and knowledge of neighbor and God, as their principle, that is, in demonstrating that love and knowledge, at once human and divine, are the principle of desire, Spinoza indicates to us no less that the Bible is modern from the beginning. In chapter 2 I show that freedom, when understood as constituting not only the civil state of the democratic multitudo (in chapters 16–20 of the Theologico-

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Political Treatise and in the Political Treatise) but also the eternity of the mind in its intellectual love of God (in part V of the Ethics), is at once political and ethical. For Spinoza, both politics and ethics involve and express the transitio, on the part of conatus, from the passions dominating human beings in the natural state to the free actions of human being constituting the dictates of reason in the civil state, whose basis and principle are love of neighbor and knowledge of God. Consequently, we come to see that the eternity of the mind is not found outside of (without) the civil state and that freedom, both political and ethical, involves and expresses a concept of temporality that is not durational (natural) but eternal (liberating). It is breathtaking to see Spinoza argue that God (together with religion and the Bible) is not found outside of (without) sovereign political authority: God does not exist in himself but only in relationship to human beings, to his creation. (I show in volume I of my study that Spinoza demonstrates, in the terms that we call the ontological argument for the existence of God, that God does not exist outside of [without] human thought and that human beings do not think outside of [without] the existence of God [and vice versa].) While Spinoza argues that God, since he is found, not in the natural state but only in the civil (state), does not exist outside of (without) sovereign (human) political authority, he in no sense is to be understood as subordinating either religion to politics or God to human beings. Indeed, he conceives of the relationship between religion and politics, between the divine and the human, in a way wholly consistent with the separation of philosophy from theology that he makes central to the Theologico-Political Treatise and that I discuss in detail in volume I of this study. Just as Spinoza undertakes to separate philosophy from religion in order to eliminate any hierarchical opposition between them, so he identifies religion and politics, divine being and human being, in order, equally, to eliminate any hierarchical opposition between them. Consequently, he indicates that, just as the God of theology does not exist outside of (without) sovereign political authority, so the God of philosophy, of ethics, does not exist in the eternity of the mind of one individual outside of (without) the minds of all individuals. The God of neither philosophy (ethics) nor theology (politics) is natural. Because God is not found in the natural state (of the opposed passions), it is clear that philosophy (or ethics) is no less civil, or political, than theology. For it is precisely conatus that, in embodying the dictates of reason, effects the transition from the natural affects (the passions) to the active affects, whose principle, the love and knowledge of neighbor and God, is at once political and ethical. In my concluding chapter 3 I draw together Spinoza’s rich and enriching reflections to show that politics and ethics, which are equally effected in and through (as) conatus, together constitute the union of desire and knowledge

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of God, when it is understood that God is not found outside of (without) the civil love of neighbor. In holding together, within a powerfully dynamic nexus of relationships, desire and knowledge, man and God, ethics and politics, and thus the secular (the rational) and the religious (the faithful), Spinoza becomes critically important in helping us grasp the modernity of the Bible and the biblical character of modernity. Just as the Bible is no less human than it is divine, so modernity is no less divine than it is human. Indeed, Spinoza shows us that how we conceive of man is how we conceive of God and that how we conceive of God is how we conceive of man. To understand that the highest good for human beings, both political and ethical, constitutes knowledge of God and love of neighbor and that the highest divine good embodies human thought and existence is to understand modernity as biblical and the Bible as modern. Spinoza evinces his adherence to the great canon of modern thinkers by arguing that the principle of human (secular) knowledge is God and that the principle of divine knowledge, of divine faith, is love of neighbor. To find ourselves, with Spinoza, existing and thinking between philosophy and theology, and so at once philosophically and theologically, is to acknowledge that, as Wallace Stevens writes in the passage cited at the head of chapter 3, “Adam / in Eden was the father of Descartes.” I want to add that neither in this volume nor in volume I of my study do I generally comment either extensively or systematically upon works of scholarship or philosophical analysis that contain points of view that differ significantly from my own. I felt that it would be more productive for readers if I gathered my comments on such scholarly and philosophical studies in two appendices. In appendix 1, I provide a critical commentary on studies relating to Spinoza, the Bible, and modernity. In appendix 2, I discuss the approach that Leo Strauss takes to the Bible, philosophy, and modernity. The two Appendices are found at the end of volume I of my study. I also want to note here that my acknowledgments are found at the end of the preface of volume I.

Note 1. In writing two structurally identical but substantially different prefaces, one for each of my two Spinoza volumes, I am pleased to acknowledge the precedent of The Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, A Race against Time—A True Story about Birdwatching by Sam Dooley. Dooley wrote two forewords for his single-volume account of birding in Australia, one for birders and one for non-birders.

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1 Consciousness, Desire, and the Duality of Existence Ethics, Part I, Appendix; Parts III–IV

One thing is sure. God should no longer be a refuge for ignorance. Spinoza to Leibniz; cited in Theun de Vries, “Conversation on the Borderline: Leibniz at Spinoza’s [Deathbed]” [1971] (227)1 Is it possible he [Parolles] should know what he is, and be that he is? Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well (4.1.39–40)

Introduction: The Affects and Knowledge of God III AND IV of the Ethics of what Spinoza calls the affectus: the affects—all the multifarious desires, appetites, emotions, and passions that human beings suffer or, in other words, by which they are necessarily and inescapably affected—is highly dramatic and fraught with rich tension.2 Parts III and IV are entitled, respectively, “Concerning the Origin and the Nature of the Affects” and “Concerning Human Bondage (Servitute) or Concerning the Strengths (Viribus) of the Affects.” The primary reason that the affects involve human beings in tense drama is that their presentation marks a new or second beginning of the Ethics. Having initiated part I (on God) with the cause of itself—necessary existence—and concluded part II (on the human mind) with the claim that all human beings know God’s infinite essence and eternity (as the cause of itself), Spinoza dramatically denies, in parts III and IV on the affects, that human beings are born (or begin) with

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true knowledge of God. They begin existence, in other words, in bondage to their affects, contrary to or in contradiction of their own very nature or essence. I include the appendix of part I in my analysis of parts III and IV of the Ethics because there, in laying out an utterly devastating critique of teleology—of the idea that nature and God, in imitation of human beings, act for a finite end—Spinoza shows, to cite definition 7 of part IV: “through end, by whose cause we do something, I understand appetite.” That there are no natural ends, final causes, or, in other words, finite goods in nature separate from human appetite (desire)—the good is what we desire (we do not desire what is the good)—renders dramatically tense how human beings, according to Spinoza, arrive at knowledge of God as their true and only good. In light of his resolute rejection of all finite teleology or final causes—and thus ultimately of all Platonism and Aristotelianism, both ancient (pagan) and medieval (idolatrous)—how, we ask, does Spinoza propose to relate human appetite and knowledge of God? We know—although doubtlessly we do not yet fully or truly grasp—that for Spinoza human affects themselves would be incomprehensible (unknowable) outside of (knowledge of) the cause of itself, since nothing can be or be conceived without God (I.15) and since all ideas, insofar as they are referred to God, are true (II.32).3 Is it now, consequently, Spinoza’s purpose, in parts III and IV of the Ethics, plus the appendix of part I, to show that the cause of itself—necessary existence—has no meaning outside of its embodiment in (or its appropriation of) human affects? We can anticipate that the relationship between the affects and knowledge of God is homologous with that of the relationship between the first kind of knowledge (imagination) and the third kind of knowledge (intuitive knowledge of God involving and expressing the actual essence of things) that Spinoza outlines near the end of part II of the Ethics. What we shall discover, in fact, is that knowledge of God, as the supreme and sole good of human beings, is the fulfillment, the embodiment, the appropriation of their affects, not their denial or elimination. Central to the tense drama played out in and through the affects are yet two additional elements that Spinoza makes fundamental to them: consciousness and transition (with transitio involving a notion of temporality that is not reducible to finite duration). Consistent with the fact that, for Spinoza, desire is not lack (i.e., ignorance of the good of existence)—as it is in Greek ontology— but the conatus (work, effort, endeavor) to persist in existence,4 he makes consciousness central to desire (and so to existence). Indeed, the very pathos of and thus ultimately the acquiescentia in (the active acceptance of) the affects is that, while we begin in ignorance of God as our supreme and sole good, we do not begin in ignorance of ourselves. Rather, desire is appetite conscious of it-

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self as appetite. But the paradox that Spinoza presupposes here, yet elucidates only indirectly, is that there can be no human consciousness outside of knowledge of God. The concept of consciousness—that demands, on the part of human beings, their active cultivation of the affects—is closely related to the paradox of “perfection” that Spinoza presents, a concept of perfection from which he strips all of its finite or teleological (Platonist and Aristotelian) elements. Perfection for Spinoza is desire, conatus, existence, power, action, love: the very essence in and through which something exists. At the same time, however, perfection is the transition to a greater (when not to a lesser) perfection. Spinoza directly confronts the issue of how transitio to a greater (when not to a lesser) perfection involves not a change in the actual essence of a particular being but rather its enhanced (or diminished) power of action (freedom). It becomes clear, therefore, that the essence (or definition) of what something is is profoundly related to its own action (as the cause of itself). The essence (necessary existence) of what a being is is not given outside of (beyond or besides) desire, conatus, or existence. Rather, essence is affirmative human action—the conscious transition to yet always more (when not to less) comprehensive (“common”) human relationships—at once ethical and political. Still another element central to the drama of the affects is how conatus (desire), by which each individual (human being) endeavors, through its very nature (essence or definition), to maximize (to realize: to make real) its own advantage (utile), involves and expresses the transition to (as it presupposes) the golden rule: that the supreme and only good that human beings can truly desire is that which they desire for all human beings, equally. Again, Spinoza demonstrates with rare aplomb that human beings can be truly virtuous (free, loving . . .) only insofar as they seek their own utile. We readers watch in bewonderment how it is that the golden rule of the Bible, already explicated in the Theologico-Political Treatise, presupposes (upbuilds) individual conatus (desire): individual self-advantage (utile). But it turns out that it is desire, as centered on existence, which leads to a concept of mutuality and which, in part IV, Spinoza will show to be the very basis of the civil state (as distinct from the natural state, where human beings are divided, both in themselves and against each other, by their contrary passions or passive affects). Before concluding these introductory remarks on parts III and IV of the Ethics (plus the appendix of part I), I want to make four additional, preliminary comments. First, as doubtlessly reflecting the fact that ultimately (from the beginning) the human affects are unknowable outside of the cause of itself (God), parts III and IV actually include rich discussions of not only bondage to the affects but also freedom, not from but through and by means of the affects, especially at the very end of part III and in major sections of part IV.

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Second, in this chapter I shall undertake to comment on Spinoza’s claim to demonstrate the human affects geometrically—as if “it were a question of lines, planes, or bodies,” he famously writes at the end of the preface of part III—in light of his claim in the appendix of part I that it is mathematics that has provided human beings with another (properly true) standard of truth. For human beings would have remained in eternal ignorance of truth, he writes there, had they continued to believe that divine judgment surpassed their grasp. Spinoza appeals several times in parts III and IV to geometrical demonstration of the truth, although it is precisely in these two parts that he also explicitly states that he presents his conclusions in what he calls nongeometrical fashion so that readers can grasp them more easily! How are we to understand Spinoza’s claim to demonstrate truth geometrically? In light of the distinction that he makes central to the Theologico-Political Treatise, is geometrical (or mathematical) demonstration fundamentally different from moral demonstration? I suggest in volume I of this study that this distinction would appear to be rhetorical, not ontological (ethical). It is dramatically ironic that, while Spinoza entitles his great philosophical work Ethica, he claims that its principal (although not only) mode of demonstration is mathematical (geometrical)! Still, Spinoza insists in letter 21 (1665), in response to his correspondent Blyenbergh, that truth is not contrary to truth. He observes, consistent with the Theologico-Political Treatise, that, while he does not ascribe to Scripture the kind of (philosophical) truth that his correspondent does, he does ascribe to it as much if not more authority and is far more cautious than others in not assigning to it foolish doctrines (which require the support of either philosophy or revelation). In Scripture, he points out, the prophets use means (those of accommodation), which are not enjoined by God, to lead people to the truth of revelation, which is enjoined by God: to love God above all things and their neighbor as themselves. But then Spinoza adds: “I have not and could not have learned any of God’s eternal attributes from Sacred Scripture.” Nevertheless, since truth is not contrary to truth but also since I cannot prove mathematically that Scripture is the revealed word of God, “I firmly believe, [but] I do not truly know mathematically, that the prophets were the intimate counselors and the faithful messengers of God.” As I show in volume I of this study, we see that for Spinoza the revealed (ethical) truth of Scripture and the mathematically demonstrated (ethical) truth of philosophy must be the same truth, yet they presuppose different methods, moral (involving accommodation) and mathematical (which is universal). But how can methods ultimately differ if the truth demonstrated by them is not contrary to but is rather congruent with each other? Theology (revelation, prophecy, Scripture, faith) is separate from but is not opposed to, rather, is in the highest concord with the

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truth of philosophy, Spinoza insists in the Theologico-Political Treatise. Where, then, would Spinoza have learned of God’s eternal attributes, if not from Scripture? He clearly believes that God’s truth is, as universal and natural, implanted in the human mind. Still, the very burden of his discussion of the human affects in parts III and IV, plus the appendix of part I, of the Ethics is to show that human beings are not born with the knowledge of God but that this knowledge is the product of the transitio, the passage, the history of moving from passive to active affects. Equally, Spinoza shows in proposition 68 of part IV, which is the fourth point that I shall introduce below, that this position is consistent with the story of Adam and Eve who, in the beginning (in the garden), did not possess perfect knowledge of God.5 We thus continue to ask the question that Spinoza, under pressure from the insistent interrogation of Blyenbergh, faces scrupulously, yet clearly not altogether successfully. Given the separation of philosophy from theology, what is their historical relationship, since truth is not contrary to truth? Reason is universal; but there is one thing that reason cannot explain, which is that Scripture, as revelation, contains the same universal truth as philosophy. What, then, is the relationship, at once historical and ontological, between belief (faith or revelation) and reason, between morality (ethics) and mathematics? Is it possible for truth to have two separate methods of demonstration, when we recall Hegel’s incisive comment that the method is the content? Method is not a formal procedure abstracted from or imposed from the outside on “content.” Rather, the rational is (it presupposes, embodies, appropriates, upbuilds) the actual (the affects), and the actual (the affects) is (it presupposes, embodies, appropriates, upbuilds) the rational. Hegel, following Kant (and ultimately Descartes6 and so also St. Anselm), systematically rejects any idea— in the tradition of Platonism (whether pagan or idolatrous)—that mathematics serves as the model for demonstration of the truth. What is lacking in mathematics, as Descartes had already incisively shown, is the demonstration that existence is necessary and that necessity adheres to existence. The very structure of proof, Hegel shows, is the ontological argument, demonstrating the necessary (because free) relationship between thought and existence, at once human and divine. It is not mathematics but the individual existing thinker who, in following methodological doubt (interrogation)—What do I know? What do I desire?—makes the extraordinary discovery that there is more (the whole of) truth to be found in doubting the truth than in the entirety of deductive logic (when based on the law of contradiction). Surely, it is the content of ethics—conatus (desire conscious of itself as appetite): what Spinoza observes to be the marked duality between our consciousness of the affects and our ignorance of their causes—that is the engine driving the affects to their knowledge of the cause of itself. The cause of itself, it is clear,

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then, is not a mathematical truth but the very basis of ethics (and of politics) because it is fundamentally theological (biblical). Why, then, does Spinoza appeal to the (new) mathematics (to which he made no original contributions, as did Descartes and Leibniz), as involving knowledge of God, against the old theology (and philosophy), in which human beings take refuge in their ignorance of God? Here is my brief answer, whose fuller explication is this study’s very engagement with the Bible (and Spinoza) as modern and with modernity (and Spinoza) as biblical. The old theology (and philosophy)—based on the hypocritically pious claim that human beings are ignorant of God (and so of themselves)—is, like Maimonides’, irretrievably flawed by its teleological conception of reason taken over from Plato and Aristotle (and also the Stoics, etc.). The (rhetorical) paradox here is that, while the old theology (and philosophy) is not fundamentally biblical but Aristotelian (Neoplatonic), the new mathematical philosophy (and theology) is, having been stripped of its Greek finitism and teleology, fundamentally biblical and so modern. Central to this distinction is the ontological argument, which, based on the infinity of thought and existence, at once divine and human, is essentially biblical, both ontologically and historically.7 The ontological argument, as I show in volume I of this study and shall continue to explicate in this study and to which, as we shall see in this chapter, the affects are central, is fundamentally ethical (not “mathematical”). Knowledge of God as necessary existence, as the cause of itself, is that without which humans cannot exist or think. But the issue, again, is how human beings make the ethical transition from conatus (desire) conscious of itself yet ignorant of its causes to conatus conscious that it is the necessary (free) cause of itself. The adequate (true) response to the question—What do I know? What do I desire?—is that my existence is necessary as the cause of itself, that necessity adheres in nature (i.e., freedom) as the actual essence of individual existing human beings conscious that they are determined to act from themselves alone. It is precisely the concept of necessary existence that is not found in what Spinoza calls the common order of nature where (human) beings are not the subject of their own determination (as causa sui) but are subject to determination through others. Closely related to the “mathematical” truth of the ethics of the ontological argument is my third preliminary comment. I include the term “the duality of existence” in the title of this chapter to signal the fact that ethics involves the transition from passive affects to active affects, from conatus conscious of its appetite yet ignorant of the causes of its appetite to conatus in possession of knowledge of the cause of itself.8 Spinoza claims to demonstrate geometrically the truth of the affects as if they were properties of nature. But the very distinction that he makes between two concepts of nature—infinite and finite, in

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itself and in another, active (free) and passive (in bondage), in accord with itself (together with others) and in contradiction with itself (together with others), etc.—has nothing to do with mathematics (or the new seventeenthcentury science of nature) and everything to do with the ethical concept of transition to greater (when not to lesser) perfection (power of action). That what is perfect in itself—conatus—has to endeavor (work) to make itself more perfect, yet without changing in essence, is the ethical paradox of ethical and political action (which is clearly to be distinguished from the physics of motion, together with its mathematical representation, as developed by Galileo, Newton, and others). In point 1 of the appendix of part IV of the Ethics, in which Spinoza recapitulates (in outline form) the contents of his preceding demonstrations, he succinctly articulates the two concepts of nature that are central to his (modern: biblical) conception of ethics. This duality of existence has, to repeat, nothing whatsoever to do with mathematics (except in the sense, as implied by Spinoza and demonstrated magisterially by Kant, that our empiricomathematical concept of nature presupposes and cannot be thought or exist outside of the ethical concept of necessary existence, i.e., what Kant calls practical reason). “All our endeavors (efforts: conatûs) or desires (cupiditates),” Spinoza writes in point 1, “thus follow from the necessity of our nature, such that they may be understood either through itself alone, as if through its proximate [own] cause, or insofar as we are part of nature, which cannot be adequately conceived through itself [alone] without other individuals.” Thus nature divides between freedom as necessary existence (our conatus is explained on the basis of itself alone as the cause of itself, consistent with the infinite and eternal essence of God) and nature whose existence cannot be explained as necessary (free) and whose necessity cannot be explained in the terms of (free) existence (for we human beings also belong to the common order of nature and, like all natural beings, are subject to its empirico-mathematical laws). So, to repeat yet again, the distinction between nature as infinitely free and nature as finitely determined is ethical, not mathematical.9 But it is important to make two further observations about Spinoza’s concept of what I am calling the duality of existence: 1. That we are part of nature—and not born free (of nature)—bespeaks our glory, and not our bondage, insofar as we distinguish between two concepts of necessity (active freedom and passive dependence) and two concepts of existence (necessary and dependent). Ethics as the transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection presupposes (upbuilds) the affects. We must remember, always, as Spinoza shows in part II of the Ethics, that the mind is, first and last, the idea of the body. Freedom (to

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exist from the necessity of our nature or essence alone) involves and expresses independence (of mind) not from (or in spite of) but through (because of) the body (and its affects). There is a fundamental sense in which parts III and IV of the Ethics are but a commentary on or an exposition of definition 7 of part I, which, by the end of Spinoza’s presentation of the affects, we shall have understood to apply no less to human beings than to God: “That thing is called free, which exists from the necessity alone of its nature and is determined to act by itself alone [it is the cause of itself or, in Kantian language, self-determining]. However, that thing is called necessary, or rather compelled, which is determined to exist by another and to operate (operandum) according to a certain and determinate [finite] reason.” The distinction between freedom as (infinitely) necessary existence— to exist and to act from one’s own nature alone—and necessity as (finitely) compelled existence—how something exists or operates can be understood only through (and so as the effect of) others—in other words, the distinction between causa sui and cause through another brings us to our second observation. 2. When Spinoza indicates in point 1 of the appendix of part IV that things follow from the necessity of our nature in two different ways: either freely—through itself alone—or not freely—as involving the nature of “other individuals”—it is critically important to understand what he means here by “other individuals.” Just as Spinoza has two different concepts of necessity—free (independent) and compelled (dependent)—so he also has two different notions of individual. This distinction is fundamental not only ethically but also politically, because it characterizes, as we shall see, the very distinction between the civil state, where individual human beings act in common agreement with each other as (if) a single (i.e., a collective) individual, and the natural state, where individual human beings, having nothing in common with each other, act contrary (opposed) no less to each other than to themselves. When individuals act collectively (communally, commonly) in concert with each other such that they treat all other individuals as they want to be treated by all other individuals, then “individuals” are understood solely from their own nature (which is at once individual and collective). When individuals act in opposition to each other (and to themselves), then they are passively dependent on (or compelled by) others (and themselves). Thus, we can understand that what I am calling here the duality of existence involves a transition not only to ethical but also to political freedom. It involves a transition from the natural state, where each individual, in being the enemy of all other individuals, is no less opposed to or

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contradictory of his own individuality, to the civil state, where individuals live and enact the paradox of individuality: that individuals can be individuals only insofar as they treat others as they want to be treated by others, that is, as individuals. Spinoza’s name for this paradox, as we shall see in chapter 2, is imperium or sovereignty, according to which individuals live collectively from their own (common) right. In other words, imperium or sovereignty describes the status no less of the individual than of the civil regime, since individuals can be sovereign only insofar as they treat all individuals as sovereign (free). My fourth and final preliminary remark is that I shall undertake to examine in detail proposition 68 of part IV, in which Spinoza, for the first and only time in the Ethics, discusses a passage of Scripture, in this unique case what he calls Moses’ story of the first man,10 Adam. We shall discover that, in his discussion of Adam, not only here but also in each of his two political treatises, Spinoza shows us (without, I think, full consciousness of the fact) that his own conception of the dramatic relationship between affects and knowledge of God, or, in other words, of the transitio from the first to the second (and, in a sense, from the second to the first) is consistent with, as it presupposes, the founding story of modernity: the biblical story of Adam and Eve. In his discussion of Adam in letter 19 (1665) Spinoza presupposes the question traditionally asked by theologians: why did God not create Adam and Eve perfect (in their knowledge of God) from the beginning? How, in other words, are we to understand the relationship between God and “man,” between divine creation (good) and human “sin” (evil)? Spinoza denies that the first man and woman would (or could) have “fallen” if they had had perfect knowledge of God. That is, he denies (in the Political Treatise) that they were in fact “free” to fall, since freedom does not negatively involve impotence or lack (of thought and existence) but rather affirmatively expresses existence, knowledge, action, and power. The story of Adam and Eve is dramatically paradoxical and hardly comprehensible as the founding story of modernity until it is shown by Milton in Paradise Lost to represent, in fact, paradise regained and then is used by Spinoza’s great philosophical successors—Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and even Nietzsche11—to embody the structure of their own thinking: the phenomenology of spirit as the story of liberty. What Milton (consistent with St. Augustine) actually shows us in his great poem is that Adam and Eve “fall” into the “happy sin” of “paradise within.” Their “fall” is the story, not of losing but rather of gaining paradise in the mutuality of their loving, faithful relationship both with God and with each other. It is Satan for whom paradise is lost eternally, for whom there is to be no “transition” from sin to knowledge, from time lost to time redeemed.

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The paradox that is central to the biblical story of Adam and Eve and that Spinoza makes central to his modern conception of the affects in parts III and IV of the Ethics is that perfection is not given separate from the transition to perfection, separate from knowledge of good and evil. If man and woman had been born free and perfect in their knowledge of God, then they would have been utterly without consciousness because indistinguishable from God. Before human beings, like Adam and Eve, fall into history with the knowledge of good and evil, Spinoza holds, they begin conscious of their appetites while ignorant of that by which their appetites are caused (as they project their appetites into the final causes of nature that are alien to their own selves: in other words they worship their own alienated affects as finite idols). Consequently, the task before human beings is to effect the transition from knowledge of the affects as desire conscious of itself to knowledge of the affects as their own cause. There is no knowledge of God—as the supreme human good—without (outside of) the self-conscious appropriation (embodiment) of the affects. God is not the final good that has always existed outside of (or prior to) human thought and existence. For, to recall Kierkegaard, if God has always existed (as the final good: thought thinking itself), then God has never existed (as the unmoved mover).12 The grand drama of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, as re-staged by Spinoza in parts III and IV of the Ethics, tells how human beings make the transition to knowledge of God as their supreme and sole good, when good is understood as the creation (the enactment, the embodiment, the appropriation) of desire. We do not desire something because it is (the) good. Rather, something is (the) good because we desire it. In the spirit of Montaigne, Spinoza asks: What do I desire?13 It is inconceivable, Spinoza argues, that we (humans) do not desire something. It is inconceivable that we are not, without surcease, expressing our conatus. It is inconceivable that we (can) desire to suspend our desire, that we can desire not to desire (whence Spinoza’s critique of free will as suspended desire or conatus). The question is not whether or why I desire (something). The question is: What do I desire? I do desire something. Is, then, my desire adequate (or inadequate) to my actual essence? Is my conatus paradoxical (and so consistent with both myself and others) or contradictory (of both myself and others)? Central to the great power of Spinoza’s conception of ethics is the duality of his vocabulary, which is at once intellectualistic (rational) and affective. Reason and desire—mind and conatus (the affectus)—involve and express the same, actual essence of human beings, both individual and collective. Reason without (outside of) desire is empty. Desire without (outside of) reason is blind. We can well anticipate, therefore, how it is that the crowning moment of the Ethics, in part V, is what Spinoza famously calls the intellectual love of God—as it expresses and involves the transition of appetite conscious of itself

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as desire to . . . what? To perfection as the transition to perfection. For, once again, the paradox is that, if human beings (finally or finitely) arrived at and became identical with their end, they would be indistinguishable from God, with the result that they would be without knowledge of the existence either of themselves or of God. Thus Spinoza, in doubling his vocabulary, in making the affects absolutely central to his conception of God and mind, is no more seduced by the Platonic contradiction than Montaigne, who sidesteps it from the very beginning of “The Apology for Raimond Sebond,” as I show in volume I of this study. To know the good is not to be the good. The good, rather, is our desire. The good is what we desire; and desire and the good are adequate to each other when, in loving the good, we desire to share it equally, freely, and in solidarity with all others, to enact and to empower it insofar as it freely exists from the necessity alone of our own human nature as the cause of itself. Since, in modernity, to know the good is not to be the good (for good as desire is always the transition to greater or to lesser perfection), Parolles, as indicated in the second quotation heading this chapter, represents a modern melancholy unknowable and unknown to Socrates (and to his fellow Greeks). Parolles knows that he is a coward and a scoundrel. He is not ignorant of his self, in the Socratic tradition. His melancholy reflects not ignorance but knowledge of the good. Yet, because the knowledge of his appetites that he possesses continues to reflect ignorance of their causes, his consciousness is and remains passively self-justifying and dependent on what Spinoza calls the common order of external nature and does not become (internally) critical and self-activating (towards meaningful transition or change).14 For Spinoza, human beings do not “know” the good (God) until and unless they enact the paradox that God is not a final end (beyond them, which they will never know) but that which they desire from the necessity—action, power, love, freedom—of their own nature (essence) alone. We see, therefore, that Spinoza’s doctrine of affects supports and is supported by the ontological argument that applies no less to human than to divine thought and existence. Human existence can no more be thought outside of divine existence than divine existence can be thought outside of human existence. Just as Parolles can find no refuge in not knowing (in not working through) the causes of his appetite, so, in the modern parable of what it is that Leibniz learns from Spinoza on his deathbed, as found in the first quotation heading this chapter, ignorance of God can no longer serve as a refuge of human beings. It is precisely ignorance of God that the self-consciously contradictory (that is, the paradoxical) story of Adam and Eve exposes. There is no true knowledge of God outside of (without) knowing (human) good and evil. Adam and Eve fall from innocence—from Socratic ignorance—into being like

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God himself in knowing good and evil; and thus they are said to be expelled from the garden lest they eat of the natural (finite) tree of immortal life. For, to recall Kierkegaard again, if life has always been eternal, then it has never been eternal. The only true or adequate idea of eternity is that which, through testing and being tested by the affects—including the fact that, since human beings are what Spinoza calls a part of nature, they are not naturally or finitely immortal and so, even when rewarded like Job with a doubly blessed or eternal life, they die, nevertheless—is enacted in the transition to eternity. The measure of the concept of temporality that is implied in and by transitio is not duration (finite or natural time) but conatus, which expresses the actual essence of human beings to persevere indefinitely (eternally or infinitely) in existence. The historical paradox associated with the parable of the shocking news that Leibniz learns from Spinoza on his deathbed—that God as the refuge of human ignorance is no longer (rather: never was) an option in modernity— is that it is identical with the ethical news that the prophets reveal, as Spinoza expounds it in the Theologico-Political Treatise, as I show in volume I of this study. It is precisely knowledge of God—obedience to God as love of neighbor—that Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles reveal to their people. Ignorance of God—in the tradition of Socrates and Pilate, who ask: what is truth?—expresses, not the truth but the falsification of the human condition. Spinoza, consistent with Montaigne, acknowledges the silence of Jesus, who comes bearing witness to the truth (of God), in asking, not the Socratic question, in ignorance—what is virtue? what is justice? what is truth?— but the biblical question, in accord with Adam and Eve: What do I know? What do I desire? I know, I desire, I can know nothing but, I can desire nothing but God himself—in and through loving my neighbor as myself. I cannot comprehend God’s command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil without confronting the contradiction (of paganism) by making the transition—historically—to the paradoxical perfection of knowing that the causes of my appetites are my own desire as the cause of itself. Now, in modernity, ignorance of God is not the refuge of human beings but rather their very engagement in sin, idolatry, and evil through what Spinoza calls the passive affects of inadequate ideas. The drama of parts III and IV of the Ethics, together with the appendix of part I, is so tensely exciting, as I shall now show in detail, precisely because it enacts the transition from the passive affects conscious of themselves as desire yet ignorant of themselves as their own cause to the active affects, whose conatus involves and expresses the cause of itself, which, we human beings are to discover, is no less human than it is divine.

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Conatus and the Dialectic of Consciousness and Ignorance: Ethics, Part I, Appendix; and Part III Having established, in the above, introductory section, the context for understanding the overall structure of Spinoza’s treatment of the affects in parts III and IV of the Ethics, plus the appendix of part I, here, in this section, I shall examine in textual detail how that structure actually emerges from, while at the same time it shapes, Spinoza’s “geometrical” demonstration of the affects. The dramatic challenge is, always, to see how, if human beings (including the readers of the Ethics) are not, in the beginning, born free and in possession of knowledge of God—the cause of itself as their supreme and only good—they actually begin, since there is no beginning outside of (without) God. To comprehend how the affects, as desire conscious of itself, overcome the ignorance of their causes, which human beings superstitiously project into nature as final ends, as they take refuge in the ignorance of God, is the task Spinoza sets before himself and his readers. Amazingly, this is the very task that the author(s) of the Bible set before his (their) readers from the very beginning. How do Adam and Eve begin—in knowing good and evil—when they are commanded not to begin—in knowing good and evil? How can they even comprehend the command not to know good and evil without (outside of) already knowing good and evil? Adam and Eve begin in contradiction (of God and of themselves). The issue, which was unknown and unknowable to the Greeks, while it is the defining moment of the Bible, and thus of modernity, is how human beings become conscious of contradiction such that God is conceived, not as the final (supernatural) cause, of which they are eternally ignorant, but as the cause of itself, whose good desire or conatus freely (paradoxically) determines from its own nature or essence as at once knowledge and love (the intellectual love of God). In the terms set by this study, we ask how conatus enacts the “transition” to yet greater (when not merely to lesser) perfection such that it demonstrates that the ontological argument, in constituting the nexus between necessity and existence as the cause of itself, applies no less to human than to divine thought and existence. What Spinoza, in reenacting the biblical drama of Adam and Eve, shows us is that modernity constitutes itself by becoming conscious of and so by overcoming the contradiction underlying the supernaturalism of finite teleology. To become conscious that God is not a final (supernatural, contradictory) cause outside of (without) human thought but the necessary existence through and by which conatus freely determines itself is, historically, to become conscious of the paradox that modernity is biblical from the beginning (and that the Bible is modern unto the end). The difference between the

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antiquity of paganism and the modernity of the Bible is precisely that between the finite, contradictory teleology of supernaturalism, of whose cause human beings, in the tradition of Socrates, remain eternally ignorant, and the ontological argument, according to which the necessary existence of God, as the cause of itself, cannot be known outside of (without) human thought (and existence). God as causa sui is the cause of all (human) thought and existence, not as first (finite) or final (last) cause but as the infinite exemplar of necessary existence in light of which human beings constitute existence as their sole necessity and attribute necessity first and last to existence. The difference between antiquity and modernity is precisely that between the opposition of thought and existence and their separation such that the difference between thought and existence is not the difference between truth and error. Error (sin) in modernity is committed not in ignorance but in knowledge of God. The paradox of modernity is that human thought is not given outside of (without) divine existence and that human existence is not given outside of (without) the thought (idea, knowledge) of God. (It is no less the paradox of modernity that God’s thought and existence are not given outside of human thought and existence.) The fact that desire is not ignorance lacking thought and existence, in the tradition of Socrates, but their affirmation indicates that, precisely because the good is our desire (as the cause of itself)—our desire is not the good (as the final cause given outside of our thought and existence)— there is no (supernatural) good (God) outside of our thought and existence. But it is no less the case that human thought and existence are not given (naturally) outside of God. The paradox of modernity (as of the Bible) is that without (outside of) knowledge of God (as necessary existence) human beings cannot know their existence as necessary and that without (outside of) human thought God cannot be known to exist necessarily. Yet another way of formulating this paradox, which brings us directly to Spinoza’s text, is that, while we begin the Ethics, in definition 1 of part I, with the cause of itself as the (human) thought of necessary existence, we begin Spinoza’s discussion of the affects in ignorance of necessary existence—at once divine and human. At the beginning of the appendix of part I of the Ethics, Spinoza summarizes his demonstrations de Deo under three broad headings: 1. God exists necessarily, is unique, is and acts from the necessity alone of his nature, and is the free cause of all things; 2. all things are in God and thus depend on him such that without him they cannot be or be conceived; and 3. all things have been predetermined by the absolute nature or the infinite power of God.

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While Spinoza next remarks that he has also undertaken in part I to remove the prejudices that prevent readers from understanding his demonstrations, he in fact devotes his lengthy appendix to dissecting in detail the one prejudice, he says, that underlies all the rest: “men commonly suppose that, like themselves (ut ipsos), all natural things act on account of an end. Rather, they hold as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain [finite] end; for they say that God made all things on account of man and man, however, so that he would worship God.” Before taking up consideration of Spinoza’s explanation of why human beings are subject to the prejudice underlying all prejudices (or superstitions), I want, first, to make two comments about it in anticipation of the larger aims of this study: 1. It is important to note that Spinoza does not deny that human beings “act on account of an end.” The issue for him, rather, is to show that human goals, ends, purposes, intentions, or aims can be truly accounted for solely as expressing conatus (affectus) within the infinite power of God as the necessary existence of the cause of itself. 2. The difference between the two conceptions of God presented by Spinoza in the opening section of the appendix of part I—that found in the summary of part I and that presupposed by the teleological prejudice of humankind—is the difference between, on the one hand, modernity (the Bible) and, on the other, antiquity (paganism) as distorted in high medieval scholasticism (idolatry). We shall see that there is a fundamental sense in which modernity, as the “transition” from passive affects (inadequate ideas) to active affects (adequate ideas), involves and expresses the historical critique of biblical religion such that it is liberated from the distortions of classical teleology as found in the traditions of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In other words, it is our task to show that the concept of God that Spinoza articulates in part I of the Ethics is inescapably modern because, in being radically (at root) biblical, it owes nothing whatsoever of substance to Greek (pagan) philosophy. In the terms of this study, our task is to see that the concept of God that is found in part I of the Ethics comprehends (and is comprehended by) the Seven Dogmas of Faith that Spinoza formulates in the Theologico-Political Treatise as summarizing biblical revelation and that I examine in volume I of this study. Historically and critically, the prime feature of the ontological argument is that it purges the thought and existence of human beings, no less than of God, of all finite teleology (final causes). It is

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no accident that Descartes and Spinoza, the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century, show the intellectual basis of the new science of nature, together with its unrelenting attack on the scholastic traditions of Aristotelian teleology, to be the ontological argument. They reprise the ontological argument of St. Anselm that high medieval scholastics such as Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas had rejected in the name of the first and final causes of Aristotle. Later medieval and early modern theology, philosophy, and science (not to mention literature and the fine arts15) are fundamentally concerned with— when they are not merely reactionary—the systematic elimination of finite teleology (first and final causes) from the concepts of human no less than of divine being. The paradox of the “Renaissance” is that it is the rebirth, not of antiquity but of the Bible.16 The paradox of modernity is that there is a fundamental sense in which the seventeenth century of the new science of nature, and not the thirteenth century of high scholasticism, is the (beginning of the) true age of faith.17 Without a biblical concept of God as necessary existence— causa sui—there will be no adequate concept of human being. This truth St. Anselm knew. This truth Maimonides and Aquinas, together with Dante and most of their scholastic contemporaries,18 sacrificed to Aristotelian teleology. This truth—together with the history of its recovery—is the very mark of modernity. When Spinoza undertakes to explain why human beings have a natural (sic!) propensity to embrace the prejudice that is the basis of all resistance to the truth of God, he remarks that this is not the place to deduce it from the nature of the human mind: It will suffice here [he declares] if I take for fundamental (pro fundamento) what everyone ought to acknowledge (quod apud omnes debet esse in confesso): namely this, that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things and that all [men] have the appetite, of which thing they are conscious, of seeking their [own] advantage (utile).

It is remarkable that, instead of demonstrating this most fundamental of all truths about human beings, Spinoza presupposes it as accepted by (as acceptable to) everyone. While the basis on which he makes this claim is not immediately clear (is what he says about human beings true and is it true that everyone agrees that it is true?), it is also not at all clear that (or how) those who are held in the grip of the teleological prejudice (superstition) would be able to acknowledge its foundation in the contradictory relationship between their consciousness and their ignorance. While all human beings are conscious of their appetite in seeking their advantage, they are ignorant of the causes of their appetite. They do not know the true basis of their appetite or, consequently, of their utile. Still, if the foundation presupposed by Spinoza is true,

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then it will have to apply equally to himself, that is, to the Ethics, and to readers of the Ethics. The hermeneutical principle that Spinoza here assumes as the foundation of teleological prejudice is that one cannot begin (to think and to exist) outside of (without) the ontological argument proving the necessary existence of the cause of itself and that this proof presupposes a radical critique of the prejudice, or superstition, underlying all notions of finite teleology. Having demonstrated the ontological argument in parts I and II of the Ethics—on God and the human mind—Spinoza provides the phenomenological basis of that demonstration in the appendix of part I and in parts III and IV on the affects. He undertakes to show how the affects—conatus, desire, appetite— begin conscious of themselves yet ignorant of what they are. In other words, the ontological argument presupposes and is presupposed by the transition from passive affects—where human beings account for their utile on the basis of final (finite) causes that they ignorantly (superstitiously) attribute to God—to active affects—where they account for their utile on the basis of the cause of itself whose necessary existence is desire or conatus. Ignorance of God reflects appetite conscious of itself yet ignorant of the very causes whereby it seeks its own utile. Knowledge of God embodies appetite conscious of the fact that it seeks its own utile solely in and through the cause of itself. What is so remarkable about the fundamental presupposition that, Spinoza says, all human beings must accept is that it combines appetite (desire), consciousness, and ignorance in an explosive (dynamic) manner. Because I begin conscious of my appetite in seeking its own advantage, yet ignorant of what it is that constitutes my advantage, I find that I am compelled to transform the contradiction of being conscious of what I do not know—the causes of my appetite—into the paradox of knowing that the true basis (cause) of my utile is other than myself—my relationship to God and neighbor. I cannot know what the causes of my appetite are outside of loving God above all others and my neighbor as myself. How desire—conatus—transforms conscious ignorance, as reflected in final causes, into the knowledge of the cause of itself constitutes the story of humankind that is at once ethical and political. Yet Spinoza contends in the appendix of part I that human beings, in their ignorance, would have continued to project their desires into the final causes of God and thus would have remained eternally ignorant of the truth, if, as I noted earlier, “mathematics, which is concerned not with ends but only with the essences and properties of figures, had not shown men another standard of truth; and, outside of mathematics, other causes can also be assigned, which it is superfluous to enumerate here, that enabled men to take notice of these common prejudices and to be led into the true knowledge of things.” I shall shortly take up Spinoza’s appeal to mathematics as the new standard of

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truth, in whose light final causes are revealed to reflect ignorance of God, in the context of discussing his claim to demonstrate the affects geometrically. But, first, I ask: what “other causes,” in addition to mathematics, does Spinoza believe also enabled human beings to see through the contradiction of teleological prejudice, namely, that, while they are conscious of their appetites in seeking their own advantage, they are ignorant of the true causes by which they are led to seek their own advantage? Further, why does Spinoza state that it is unnecessary to enumerate these other causes? Does he believe (once again) that they are common knowledge? If so, what would they be? While there are no direct (textual or biographical) answers to these questions known to me, it is perplexing that Spinoza, having stated that mathematics provides another—as if the only other—standard of truth revealing the contradiction of teleological ignorance, then significantly qualifies that claim in telling us that there are also other causes or standards of truth (although there is no need to enumerate them here). Still, since truth is its own standard (as the cause of itself), there cannot be more than one standard of truth, however many versions of it there may be. In whatever manner we construe the tension here between another (mathematical) standard and other (non-mathematical) standards of truth, at least we see that, according to Spinoza, “mathematics” (and so, I presume, geometrical demonstration) and “truth” are not commensurate. Truth is not reducible to mathematics; and mathematics is not the exclusive domain of truth. I suspect that once again what we have here is yet another instance of Spinoza’s incomparable, intellectual probity. He holds, as I show in volume I of this study, that biblical truth, while moral and not mathematical and so separate from philosophical truth, is not opposed to it. Indeed, they are in full accord with each other. While he is now prepared to demonstrate the ethical truth of philosophy geometrically, Spinoza is careful to acknowledge that truth is not exclusively mathematical (having already shown that it is equally and fully moral). As I asked in the introductory section of this chapter, can we actually conceive of demonstrating truth by more than one method (although we do talk meaningfully about different literary, artistic, moral, intellectual, emotional . . . versions of or approaches to truth[fulness])? Surely, Spinoza does not believe—or, in other words, the Ethics ultimately does not show us—that the transition from passive to active affects or that knowledge of (or participation in) God is a mathematical truth such as it is found in analytical geometry or differential calculus. (However, as I indicated before, it can certainly and, I would hold, must be argued that mathematics, together with the sciences of nature, presupposes the ethical truth of the ontological argument.19) Having shown—non-mathematically!—in the appendix of part I of the Ethics that human resistance to comprehending the ontological argument is

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grounded in the affects, of which we human beings are simultaneously conscious and ignorant, Spinoza then proceeds to devote parts III and IV to their analysis.20 I have already pointed out that, having initiated part I of the Ethics on God with the cause of itself as necessary existence and concluded part II on mind with the adequate knowledge of God on the part of all human beings, Spinoza now begins again, consistent with his critique of the ground of all prejudice in the appendix of part I. While human beings are born conscious of the appetite by which they seek their own advantage, they are, in the beginning, ignorant of the causes of their appetite. Human beings do not begin—ethics—with knowledge of God as the necessary existence of the cause of itself. We readers do not begin the Ethics able to comprehend its beginning with the definition of the cause itself. The challenge of parts III and IV, consequently, is to see how it is possible for the affects to begin, for there is no beginning, Spinoza has demonstrated in parts I and II, outside of (without) knowledge of God. What is there about conatus, which now emerges in part III as the very basis of the affects, that enables it to undertake, to effect the transition from false (superstitious) belief in final causes to true knowledge of the cause of itself; from passive affects to active affects; from inadequate ideas to adequate ideas; from suffering (pati) such that something in us or outside of us follows only partially from our nature (we are not its adequate cause) to acting (agere) such that something in us or outside of us follows from our own nature alone (we are its adequate cause)?21 The distinction between pati and agere, between passion and action, between inadequate cause (bondage) and adequate cause (freedom) that I articulate here is found in definition 2 of part III. In definition 3 Spinoza states that he understands “affect” as the “affections” of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished together with the ideas of these affections. “If, therefore, we can be the adequate cause of any of these affections,” Spinoza observes, “then by affect I understand action, otherwise [if we are not the adequate cause of any of these affections I understand] passion.” I cite these two definitions, which contain the structure of the affects, as the (paradoxical) answer to the question that I posed in the above paragraph. From the beginning, Spinoza shows (holds, presupposes) that action (freedom) is the standard both of itself and of what is not active but merely passive (unfree). The careful reader will have noted that passion (pati: suffering) describes the affects of which we are the inadequate, that is, the partial cause and not the adequate (or the impartial) cause. Spinoza, however, does not consider the case of the affects of which we are not even the partial (or the inadequate) cause; for such affects would be inconceivable or unknowable. (In that case passions would be reduced to ignorance: we would have no knowledge of them whatsoever. Ignorance of the passions would represent the suspension

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or the death of the passions consistent with Plato and the Stoics but also with Aristotle, for whom passions are indistinguishable from actions, since, as particulars, passions and actions cannot be known and so are merely relative to each other, not to mention Epicurus, for whom passions are also indistinguishable from actions, since both are simply sensations: whatever is, is.) The critical distinction that Spinoza makes here is between inadequate (as partial) cause and adequate (as impartial) cause. His distinction is not between no cause at all and what then could be a total cause known only in itself, which is precisely the opposition between Socratic ignorance (existence without thought) and Platonic knowledge (thought without existence). The distinction that Spinoza makes between inadequate (partial) cause and adequate cause represents another version of the foundation of prejudice on which, he says, all people agree: namely, that, while we are conscious of the appetite by which we seek our advantage, we are ignorant of the causes by (for) which we seek our advantage. The careful reader will also have noted that in definition 3, cited above, Spinoza indicates that he understands “affect” in terms of the increase or the decrease of the body’s action. Once again, we act—either adequately (our power of action is increased) or inadequately (our power of action is decreased). It is inconceivable that we do not act, at least, inadequately (or partially). It is inconceivable that we are merely passive, that is, that we depend totally on causes of which we have no knowledge whatsoever (which is precisely the finite, teleological role that fate plays in the Greek world). Thus, we see that the concept of inadequate action (passion) presupposes a concept of adequate action as its own standard. Conatus, we shall consequently see, begins in transition from inadequate to adequate action (or ideas). Conatus cannot begin in total ignorance. Conatus cannot be totally passive, for then it would have no concept of beginning. The paradox of conatus is that it begins with knowledge of the cause of itself, yet this knowledge is confused with final causes by which it passively, or inadequately, conceives of itself. Conatus, in Spinoza’s story of it, as we shall see, recapitulates (bears) the very history of modernity, the transition from final causes to the cause of itself. In initiating his discussion of the affects with definitions according to which he critically distinguishes between action and passion, between adequate cause and inadequate cause, and between increasing and decreasing our power of action—and so presupposing that action is its own standard, the standard both of itself and of its passions—Spinoza signals (indirectly) that his claim in the preface of part III to demonstrate the affects geometrically is no simple one. As I have already indicated, the distinction between action and passion is not mathematical or natural in any evident sense. Indeed, we shall see that what is at stake between Spinoza and the authors against whom he

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polemicizes is what is understood by “nature.” He begins by noting that most authors who have written about the affects and people’s plan of living (ratio vivendi) seem to treat, not natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but things that are outside of (beyond) nature. They seem, he states, to view man as an empire within an empire (imperium in imperio: a sovereign within a sovereign). They believe that man disturbs rather than follows the order of nature; that he has absolute power over his actions; and that he is determined only by himself. Indeed, they attribute the cause of human impotence and inconstancy, not to the common power of nature but to the vice of human nature, which they then bewail, ridicule, hold in contempt, or (more frequently) detest. Those who know how to attack the impotence of the human mind more eloquently and more shrewdly are held to be divine. Spinoza then acknowledges that there have been outstanding authors who have written many distinguished things about the right plan of living (ratio vivendi) and to whose work he owes much. Nonetheless, he declares, “no one that I know has truly determined the nature and strengths of the affects or, on the other hand, what the mind can do in moderating them.”22 Spinoza makes clear that he is critical above all of those who prefer to curse and to ridicule the affects of men rather than to understand them. Indeed, it will appear wondrous to them, he observes, to see him treat the vices and failures of men in geometric fashion (more geometrico) and to demonstrate by certain method “things that are opposed to reason” and that they claim to be empty, absurd, and horrible: But this is my reason [Spinoza remarks]. Nothing is done in nature that can be attributed to a vice in it. For nature is always the same, and its virtus and power of acting [are] everywhere one and the same. That is, the laws and rules of nature, according to which all things are done and changed from one form into another, are everywhere and always the same. And, therefore, the method (ratio) of understanding the nature of things of whatever kind ought also to be one and the same, namely, through the universal laws and rules of nature.

Because the affects “follow from the necessity and virtus of nature like the rest of singular things,” given that they, too, are subject to causes and have certain properties, “I shall, therefore,” Spinoza concludes, “treat the nature and strengths of the affects and the power of the mind over them by the same method (methodo) that I used in the preceding parts concerning God and the Mind, and, consequently, I shall consider human actions and appetites as if it were a question about lines, planes, or bodies.”23 I have summarized and cited the key sections of the preface of part III in order to be sure that the claim on the part of Spinoza to demonstrate the affects—ethics, generally—geometrically is properly comprehended. For what

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he shows us, surely, as I have already suggested, is that the distinction between the affects (their strengths) and the mind (its power to moderate the affects) is no more “natural” than the distinction between action and passion or between the cause of itself and final causes. In other words, the universal laws and rules of nature, as demonstrated by, say, Galileo and Newton, know no distinction between mind and the affects, between action and passion. While Spinoza, together with other major philosophers of his age like Descartes, joins the great scientists of the seventeenth century in rejecting final causes root and branch, scientists, qua scientists, in showing all natural things to be subject to universal causation, make no use of the paradoxical concept of the cause of itself, that is, that cause which is its own effect, that effect which can be understood through itself alone as its own cause. Indeed, as we proceed through part III and especially part IV of the Ethics, it becomes ever clearer that, for Spinoza, good and evil, virtue and vice, etc., are not natural—given in the nature of things (as final causes)—but are that which human beings determine, ethically and politically, to be to their own advantage (utile) or disadvantage. In exposing the contradictory stance of his moralizing opponents, Spinoza in fact reveals how paradoxical his own position is. He points out that moralists have traditionally treated the affects as if they were outside of nature and viewed human beings as an empire within an empire and so not subject to nature. Yet he also observes that these same moralists attribute the impotence of human beings (their lack of power to act) and their inconstancy (of mind), “not to the common power of nature but to the vice of human nature,” whose affects they thus condemn instead of trying to understand. Spinoza, for his part, however, denies that there is any vice in nature; for nature, in following universal laws and rules, is always one and the same. His reversal of his opponents’ position is dramatic, although subtle and not easily discernible. According to his opponents, the affects are not natural; and human beings are not subject to the common empire of nature. Still, while these moralists do not attribute human impotence and inconstancy to the common order of nature, they do attribute them to “the vice of human nature.” The position of Spinoza, however, is precisely the opposite. He holds that vice is not natural and that, therefore, although human impotence and inconstancy are not to be attributed to the vice of human nature, they are to be attributed (he implies) to the common order of nature. Spinoza’s opponents deny that human beings are subject to nature; yet they moralize, by attacking, the vice of human nature. Spinoza holds that human beings are subject to the universal rules of nature; yet he also holds that vice is not natural (vice is not found in nature: nature is not subject to vice). It is not that Spinoza disagrees with his opponents in attributing vice— impotence and inconstancy—to human beings. Spinoza does not show him-

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self to be a “naturalist” in the sense that he denies impotency and inconstancy (and so also the power to act and constancy of mind) to human beings as he would deny them to the finite things of nature, whether organic or inorganic. For we know that he distinguishes between action and passion, which is not a “natural” (or a finite) distinction. The strange paradox here is that human beings can be known to be subject to the order of common nature—in their impotency and inconstancy they are subject to causes that do not follow from their own nature or essence—because, ultimately, first and last, they are subject to causes that follow from their own nature alone. They are their own standard (as the cause of themselves). Nature—as impotence and inconstancy— is not its own standard. The standard of nature is the power of human beings to act and thus their constancy of mind. What is dramatically paradoxical here is that, while appealing to nature, Spinoza indicates—and will argue throughout parts III and IV, as we shall see—that vice is not natural but the reflection of human inadequacy. His opponents, in contrast, deny that human beings are subject to nature; yet, because they do not deny human vice (human impotency and inconstancy) any more (or less) than Spinoza, they attribute it to human nature. The paradox here is, consequently, the following. Spinoza’s opponents, in denying that human beings are natural—they are not subject to nature—conclude that vice is natural. Spinoza, in holding that human beings are natural—they are subject to nature—concludes that vice is not natural (but human). We have seen Spinoza appeal to nature, to its unchanging, universal laws and rules. But what definitions 2 and 3 of part III show us is that his real standard is the nature (essence) of human beings to have the power (freedom) to act and thus the constancy of mind to moderate their natural affects. What we shall see in parts III and IV is that Spinoza appeals to the capacity of human beings to change, to undertake, in expressing their conatus, the transitio to ever greater perfection (if not simply to suffer the transition to lesser perfection). When human beings “suffer”—impotently and inconstantly—they are subject to causes (in the common order of nature) that follow only partially from their own nature. In contrast, Spinoza’s opponents, although they exempt human beings from nature, attribute their vices—their impotency and inconstancy—to human nature. But then, because they have no explanation of how vice can be natural or nature vicious, they can only wring their hands and moralize against human nature by heaping indignant attacks on it. For Spinoza’s opponents, human beings are perfect (in not being subject to the indignities of nature). Yet, then, they have no alternative to bemoaning human imperfection, the vices of human nature, which nobody, as such, can deny, but of which they have no understanding or explanation whatsoever. For Spinoza, in contrast, human beings are not perfect, for they, too, are part of nature (and

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suffer its vicissitudes, including death). But their task—their conatus—is to appropriate their natural affects such that they are explained, not inadequately, by the common order of nature, but adequately, from their own nature (freedom) alone. Their task, in other words, is to effect transition to ever greater perfection of the affects. Before pursuing these matters further, that is, before taking up Spinoza’s “geometrical demonstration” of the affects in parts III and IV of the Ethics, it is important, first, to pose two questions concerning the content of the preface of part III:

1. Who are the authors whom Spinoza criticizes but leaves unnamed?24 Further, who are the authors to whose work, he says, he is greatly indebted, while he claims at the same time that he is the first to determine the nature and the strengths of the affects, together with the power of the mind to moderate them? Is Spinoza correct in his (historical) judgment? Does it matter? 2. How, finally, are we to understand Spinoza’s claim to demonstrate the affects geometrically? He holds, as we have seen, that, since all things are subject to the same rules and laws of nature, there can be only one method of understanding the nature of anything, namely, “through the universal laws and rules of nature . . . as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies”? What does he mean by this claim, when we have also seen that nature divides (from the beginning) into fundamentally different (although profoundly related) concepts—action (freedom) and passion (bondage), adequate cause and inadequate (partial) cause— with the first providing the standard of judging (evaluating) the second? Spinoza’s paradoxical position is that we cannot understand our affects without knowing that they (we) are part of nature (that our knowledge of our nature is inadequate or partial). Yet, as I indicated earlier, if our affects were not only a part of nature, that is, if they were totally subject to nature (as to final causes of which we had no knowledge)—if we were not merely partially ignorant but rather totally ignorant of our passive affects, if our affects were totally passive (enslaved)—then we would not even know that we were part of nature. In order to know, to account for the fact, that we are (only) partially subject to nature, we must also know that we are free (of nature), that is, subject solely to what follows freely from and can be explained by our own nature or essence as its own adequate cause (the cause of itself). Why, then, does Spinoza appeal to geometrical demonstration when he himself shows us that it has nothing as such to do with either mathematics or the science of nature?

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We shall find, not surprisingly, that the first (historical) question, as posed above, is profoundly related to the second (ontological/methodological) question. Regarding the first question, there is, once again, no direct (textual or biographical) answer to it. Spinoza’s scorn for moralizers—whether Jewish or Christian (of whatever sect), one supposes—is consistent with his systematic critique, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, of philosophers and theologians who pervert the authority of both reason and faith, of both philosophy and the Bible (prophecy, revelation), in their failure to develop a method of distinguishing truth from error. In the Ethics he sharpens this critique by focusing it on final causes as the basis of the principal prejudice (superstition) preventing people from understanding the ontological argument (as the necessary relationship between thought and existence, at once human and divine). While Spinoza makes no direct reference in the preface of part III to his unremitting exposure of the contradictory nature of teleological thinking in the appendix of part I, we can easily make a philosophical connection between them and so suppose that he intends one. In projecting my own affects into nature and then in contending that they are the end that God intends for me—in holding that God acts for the end of human beings—I confuse human nature and divine nature by reducing the one to the other (the ultimate idolatry). Thus, in Spinoza’s critique in the preface of part III, these pseudomoralists hold that human beings are not subject to nature (for they act in terms of the end of God who acts in terms of the end of human beings); that humans disturb rather than follow nature; that they have absolute power over their actions (in identifying their affects with the end of God); and that they are determined only by themselves (for, to repeat, their affects are masked as the end that God intends for human beings). Yet Spinoza also points out, as we have seen, that these same moralists bemoan the vices of human nature, for which, of course, they have no explanation, since human beings, in their ignorance of God, and so in ignorance of themselves, project their affects on God as their true end. I repeat, yet again, that both Spinoza and his opponents acknowledge human vice (error, sin). As always, the question is how to account for it—truthfully, lovingly, justly, freely. Spinoza’s opponents cannot account for error, for the final causes by which both God and human beings are determined are unknowable. Final causes are completely contradictory— being at once beyond (separate from) the nature of human affects and identical with (inseparable from) the nature of human affects. The fundamental basis of Spinoza’s critique of final causes is that human beings hypocritically take refuge in them as in the refuge of their ignorance of God. As for those to whom Spinoza acknowledges an intellectual debt, we can surmise that he has in mind all the authors writing (and all the artists creating)

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in the biblical tradition—including the major figures (authors) of the Bible— who have rich insight into the dynamics (dialectics) of human sin and knowledge (love). But he would not intend to include the ancient moralists— whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, skeptic, or Epicurean—among those authors from whom, he says, he has learned much. For, as I have already indicated, the ancient moralists, unlike the biblical moralizers whom Spinoza condemns so sharply in the appendix of part I and in the preface of part III, have no knowledge of vice (all evil is done in ignorance of the good). The contradiction to which the ancient moralists are subject—they are ignorant of their passions (to know the good is to be the good)—is a direct reflection of their passive, blind (fatal) dependence on final causes, of which human beings have no knowledge (until and unless they are dead).25 The contradiction to which the biblical moralists, whom Spinoza so sharply reprimands, are subject is that they know that human beings are subject to their affects, that they are subject to vice. But, then, in thrall to final causes, they project that knowledge into ignorance of God as acting for an end that is outside of both God and human beings and so unknown to both. Paradoxically, the very moralists whom Spinoza condemns occupy the same position that, he says, all human beings must acknowledge as the basis of that most fundamental prejudice: superstitious belief in final causes. They are conscious of their appetite in seeking their own utile but ignorant of the causes by which they seek their utile (as they blindly project their affects into the final causes that they identify with the end of God). The question is always: How do human beings effect the transition from the bondage involved in final causes (in ignorance of their affects) to the freedom involved in the cause of itself (in knowing their affects as following solely from their own nature), from inadequate to adequate knowledge? Is Spinoza correct, then, in claiming to be the first thinker to show that ethics involves the transition from final causes (the confusion of Greek with biblical thinking) to the cause of itself (as expressing the necessary existence of the sovereign God of the Bible)? Well, yes, in the philosophical sense. But, no, if one thinks of Montaigne, Shakespeare, Caravaggio, Pascal. . . . I suggest that Spinoza entitles his magisterial work—on the relationship between the ontological argument (God and mind) and the affects—“Ethics” for three historical reasons: 1. He intends to indicate that Aristotle’s great Ethics,26 the (largely) unchallenged carrier of that title up to his time, bears no relationship to ethics when understood as embodying (appropriating, upbuilding) the ontological argument—knowledge of God as involving and expressing the necessary relationship between thought and existence. The contradic-

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tion central to Aristotle, of which he remains ignorant, is that neither the final causes of nature nor the in-finite particulars of nature, including human beings in their ethical and political roles, can be known, given that all existing things are moved (passively) by their final (finite) end, which is unmoved and consequently unthought and unknown by human beings: the unmoved mover, God, fate, thought thinking itself (thought identical with itself and thus outside of or without existence as its end).27 2. Spinoza also intends to indicate through the title “Ethics” that Descartes, his great (and, in a fundamental sense, only true) predecessor, while initiating the retrieval of the ontological argument, under whose aegis he provides a systematic critique of final causes, fails to see that the ontological argument is fundamentally ethical and political. Spinoza shows that the ontological argument engages the affects both ethically—in and as their transition from inadequate ideas to the intellectual love of God—and politically—in and as their transition from the natural state, where all human beings are enemies of each other (including themselves), to the civil state of democratic equality, freedom, and solidarity. 3. Spinoza thus also intends to indicate (unconsciously?) through the title “Ethics” that his work is a reprise of the Seven Dogmas of Faith, as articulated in the Theologico-Political Treatise, as I show in volume I of this study, whose basis is the moral teaching of the Bible: obedience to God as love of neighbor; that the ontological argument, in demonstrating the necessary existence of the cause of itself, is essentially biblical; and that the transition to ever greater (when not simply to lesser) perfection repeats the story of Adam and Eve. (We may recall that Spinoza points out in the appendix of part I that there are also other causes, besides mathematics, which, however, he says, it is not necessary to enumerate, which led men to know the truth of God and of things but which their superstitious belief in final causes had eternally hidden from them.) To the big themes summarized in the three points above I shall return in my concluding chapter. I shall now take up the second of the two questions that I posed above concerning the preface of part III of the Ethics. What does Spinoza mean (intend) by claiming to demonstrate the affects geometrically? Again, we have no significant biographical or historical information on which to draw, outside of the text of the Ethics (and of Spinoza’s other works)—except in the sense that it was typical of authors of the period (from Descartes in the second set of replies to the objections to the Meditations in the earlier seventeenth century to Vico in The New Science and Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature a century later28) to adopt this trendy style in order to share in

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the prestige of the progressive, new science of nature and thus to distance themselves from the “old science” of discredited ancients and scholastics whose works had fallen into disrepute. What Spinoza underlines, in claiming to demonstrate the affects geometrically is, as we have seen, that, since nature is everywhere the same, there can be only one method for understanding natural things, including the affects, namely, through the universal laws and rules of nature. But we have also seen that, for Spinoza, “nature” (the nature of the affects) divides, from the beginning, into freedom and bondage, into adequate knowledge and inadequate knowledge, into what can be known from itself alone—our nature as the free cause of itself—and what cannot be known from itself alone—our nature as “suffering” bondage to the causes common to the order of nature. I think Spinoza appeals to the one method of universal understanding, which he associates with geometric demonstration, in order to signal, above all, that the affects can and must be studied, known, comprehended—and ethically (and politically) transformed (perfected). They are to be stripped of their mystification in and through final causes, which themselves simply reflect the ignorance of God in which human beings take refuge. Another way of putting this point is that it is only in knowing that we are part of nature that we can comprehend our nature adequately through itself alone (as the cause of itself) and not simply as a part of nature. The paradox here, as I indicated above, is that it is freedom (the cause of itself)—action—which is the standard both of itself (as adequate knowledge) and of what is not free or in bondage (as caused by others, of which we have only inadequate knowledge)— passion. Paradoxically, while the science of nature properly claims to have adequate knowledge of natural things (within the nexus of universal causation), still, when something happens in us, or follows from our nature, of which we are only the partial cause, that is, insofar as it is subject to natural causation, then we have only inadequate knowledge of it. The one, universal method of understanding to which Spinoza appeals— together with its geometrical mode of demonstration—involves form, not content. For human subjects to have adequate knowledge of the things (or objects) of nature, including the natural affects, is very different from their having adequate knowledge of their affects as following freely from their own nature (power or essence) as the cause of itself. To repeat, the distinction between adequate and inadequate knowledge of the affects embodies the difference between action and passion, between freedom and bondage. Spinoza is right. There is only one method—that of the ontological argument as embodied in the ethical (and political) transition from passive to active affects, from bondage to freedom. This method is the basis of the critique of all final causes and so is also the basis of the natural sciences. But thus it turns out that

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what is adequate knowledge scientifically is inadequate knowledge ontologically, as individuals eternally effect—both ethically and politically—the transition to ever greater (when not simply to lesser) perfection of the affects, the transition to ever greater (again, when not simply to lesser) participation in what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God in part V of the Ethics. We have now seen that the fundamental concept on which, Spinoza says in the appendix of part I of the Ethics, all human beings must agree—that they are born conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile yet are ignorant of the causes of their appetite—underlies the most deeply-rooted of superstitions, belief in final causes. We have also seen that Spinoza, in claiming, in the preface of part III, to demonstrate the affects geometrically, consistent with the universal laws of nature, in fact presupposes (posits) a fundamental distinction between the cause of itself (the ontological argument demonstrates that the necessary relationship between thought and existence involves freedom) and final causes (the teleological argument perversely twists the necessity freely binding thought and existence into the bondage of each); between action and passion; between freedom and bondage; between human nature as its own adequate (effective) cause and the common order of nature where human beings are the effects of causes of which they have only inadequate knowledge. Still, if the concept underlying superstitious belief in final causes is the foundation on which all people must agree, it must also be the foundation supporting (creating) the distinction between the cause of itself and final causes, between human nature as existing from the necessity of its own nature (or essence) alone and the common order of nature where things are (inessentially and naturally) determined by others to exist. It is precisely the task of conatus in parts III and IV of the Ethics, as we shall now see, to demonstrate that, in beginning conscious yet ignorant of its appetite in seeking its own advantage, that is, in beginning self-consciously in contradiction of itself, is in fact to discover that it begins with the paradox that human nature (freedom) is its own standard, the standard both of itself and of the common order of nature (bondage). The paradox—one version of the paradox—is that to be conscious of seeking our utile is to know, and not to be ignorant of, the contradiction that erupts between the natural state, in which human beings are the enemies of each other (including themselves), and what may be called the free state, in which human beings exist from the necessity of their own nature and are determined, as causa sui, to act through themselves alone.29 To grasp how conatus effects the transition from the necessity of being determined to existence by another to the freedom of necessary existence is the dramatic challenge with which parts III and IV of the Ethics confront their readers. Extraordinarily, what Spinoza says about the universal laws and rules of nature he actually applies to human nature (as the cause of itself). What he

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says about the common order of nature, as expressive of human bondage, he in fact identifies with superstitious belief in final causes. In the Ethics he is not concerned (whatsoever!) with the science of nature.30 In dealing, in part III, with the origin and the nature of the affects, Spinoza largely—although not fundamentally!—describes the affects, whose foundation is conatus, as part of nature and thus in terms of passion, imagination, and inadequate ideas (as distinct from action, reason, and adequate ideas). The irony that the origin and the nature (essence) of conatus ultimately, however, involve and express freedom (the cause of itself) is doubled in part IV, where Spinoza takes up what he calls the strengths of the affects as the basis of human bondage. For, as I continue to anticipate, the strength or power of conatus is, ultimately, its capacity to effect the transition to ever greater perfection, the transition that is not simply the transition from bondage to freedom but the transition that is essentially free and so expressive of the power of conatus to enlarge and to enhance—unto eternity!—its capacity for action, for existence and thinking. It is no accident, therefore, that Spinoza devotes much of part IV, notwithstanding its title, to a discussion of freedom and includes within that discussion reflection on the story of the first (original, natural, essential, or free!) man. The “fall” of Adam expresses not freedom but bondage (Adam was not born free; he was not free to fall; his fall was not free). Yet, knowledge (not ignorance) of good and evil, in exemplifying God, presupposes by expressing, not the simple transition to freedom (from bondage) but transition itself as essentially the very story of freedom (salvation: eternal blessedness). We shall begin our consideration of part III with proposition 4, perhaps the most dramatic—paradoxical—of all the propositions of the Ethics: “No thing can be destroyed except by an external cause.” In his demonstration of the proposition Spinoza declares that it is self-evident (“clear through itself ”), since the definition of anything affirms, and does not negate, its essence, that is, since it posits, and does not take away, the essence of the thing. Thus, in attending only to the thing itself and not to external causes, we can find nothing in it that could destroy it. Q. E. D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum: Which Was the Thing to be Demonstrated). I say dramatic (and paradoxical) because here Spinoza articulates the concept of essence (definition, the thing itself) in terms of necessary existence. Whatever exists exists necessarily, not in the sense that it cannot be destroyed by external causes, but in the sense that, considered in itself, its existence is necessary since there is nothing in it that could destroy it. That the contrast here between affirmation (of existence) and negation (of existence) implies a contrast between life as essential (necessary) and death as inessential (but inevitable), or between eternity and duration (finite time), is supported by proposition 5: “Things are of a contrary nature, that is,

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they cannot be in the same subject, insofar as one can destroy the other.” Because things are contrary to my necessary existence insofar as they can destroy it, contrary (contradictory) things cannot exist in the same subject. For then there would be something in the subject that could destroy it, which, however, has been shown in proposition 4 to be impossible. Consequently, whatever is contrary to my existence, as its negation or destruction, is external to it; and, by implication, whatever is in agreement with my existence, as its affirmation, is essential and necessary to it. What we have here in nuce is the difference between the natural state—in which others (including my own self) are contrary to (contradictory of) each other—and the human (civil) state—in which others necessarily affirm my existence (and I theirs). With the distinction firmly established between (what we can discern to be) the essence of things to exist necessarily and their negation or destruction solely through external things, which are contrary to their existence, Spinoza is now ready to introduce his concept of conatus—as both noun and verb—in propositions 6–9. Proposition 6 states that each thing, to the degree that it is in itself, endeavors (conatur) to persevere in its being. Spinoza indicates in the demonstration of this proposition that it follows from propositions 4 and 5 (no thing has anything in itself by which it can be destroyed or which can take away its existence; and each thing is opposed to anything that can take away its existence). But he also connects the conatus of things to persevere in their being with God. Singular things are said to be modes that express God’s attributes in a certain, determinate mode (I.25C), that is, “they express the power of God, by which God is and acts, in a certain and determinate mode” (I.34). Proposition 34 of part I states that “God’s power is his essence itself.” Since from the necessity alone of God’s essence it follows that God is “the cause of himself (causa sui) and of all things,” it also follows that “the power of God, by which he himself and all things are and act, is his essence itself.” In what sense is God, as causa sui, the cause of all things? We know that God is not the cause of things insofar as they are merely natural effects; for (according to I.18) as causa sui he is an immanent, not a transient (external or supernatural), cause. We equally know that things express the power or essence of God by affirming their essence—at once human and divine!—as that which cannot be thought without existing, for they can be destroyed only by what is external or contrary to them. That conatus is going to provide us with the answer to our question of how to understand God as the cause of all things becomes evident in proposition 7: “Conatus, by which each thing endeavors (conatur) to persevere in its being, is nothing outside of the actual essence of the thing itself.” Conatus, by which each thing affirms its own existence as necessary, is the “actual essence” of each existing thing. What is universal in existence is precisely what exists as actual and individual in its self-affirmation.

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Spinoza introduces two additional, critical elements of conatus in propositions 8 and 9: time and consciousness. Proposition 8 states that the conatus by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its being involves, not the finite time of duration but indefinite (indefinitum) time. If the essence of a thing involved finite duration, Spinoza explains, then there would come a time when, according to its essence, it would be destroyed. But this would mean that a thing was essentially contrary (or external) to itself, the impossibility of which he has already demonstrated. “Therefore, the conatus, by which a thing exists, involves no definite (definitum) time. But, on the contrary, since (through the same proposition 4 of this part) it will always continue to exist by the same power by which it already exists, if it is not destroyed by an external cause, therefore, this conatus involves indefinite time. Q. E. D.” I want to make two comments on proposition 8 before introducing proposition 9. First, it is evident that the time of conatus, the temporality of existing necessarily on the part of an actual essence—“indefinite time”—is altogether different from the finite time of duration that is external and contrary to conatus and that clearly belongs to things insofar as they are part of the common order of nature and subject to destruction (death). Given the association of the essence of conatus with necessary existence that I have drawn, is it not to be anticipated that “indefinite time,” in expressing the affirmation of existence, will not prove to be substantially different from time understood as eternal or infinite? My second comment on proposition 8 involves Spinoza’s claim that the power by which a thing begins to exist (or already exists) and the power by which it always exists, if it is not destroyed by an external cause, are one and the same power. Yet this power is at once the power of God and the conatus of the individual thing, for it expresses the essence of each. From this it then evidently follows that external, contrary, and inessential causes, by which things are destroyed, do not express and involve the power (essence) of God, just as they do not express and involve the power (essence) of individual, existing things. But is this surprising, since God is the affirmation (the creation) of existence, not its (Satanic) negation (or destruction)? From this it also becomes evident that, notwithstanding standard scholarly commentary, Spinoza affirms (and does not deny) the biblical concept of creation (ex nihilo). What he opposes, rather, as I argue in volume I of this study, is the superstitious confusion of the creative, that is, the infinite and absolute power of God with notions of final (supernatural) causes as based on finite images of human purpose (of acting for an end). In proposition 9 Spinoza basically restates about the mind (mens) what he states about conatus in proposition 8—namely, that, whether the mind has adequate or inadequate ideas, it endeavors (conatur) to persevere in its being for an indefinite time31—while adding that it is conscious of its conatus. In the

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scholium of proposition 9 he points out that conatus, when it is referred only to the mind, is called will but that, when it is referred to both the mind and the body, it is called appetite. Appetite, he observes, “is nothing other than the essence itself of man, from whose nature those things necessarily follow that serve his preservation (conservationi). And, therefore, man is determined to do (agendum) those things [from himself alone, presumably].” Spinoza notes that between appetite and desire (cupiditas) there is no difference except that desire is generally referred to human beings insofar as they are conscious of their appetite. Therefore, desire can be defined as “appetite with consciousness of appetite.” It is striking that, among the propositions dealing with conatus, it is in proposition 9 that Spinoza, in the context of introducing the (human) mind as conscious of its conatus, first mentions human beings (homo/ homines). But it is evident that the very distinction between the affirmation of essence as necessary existence and its negation through external and contrary and so inessential causes, between indefinite time and finite duration, like the distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas or between action and passion, follows, not from the universal laws and rules of (finite) nature, as studied by the natural sciences, but from the absolute and infinite nature or essence of the cause of itself. Consequently, conatus, as appetite, involves and expresses both mind and body (another fundamental distinction unknown to the natural sciences) and, as desire, is appetite with the consciousness of appetite. It is important to take note of proposition 10 in the context of understanding conatus as expressing both mind and body and so as appetite conscious of itself: “the idea that excludes the existence of our body cannot be given in our mind but is contrary to it.” Spinoza recalls that he demonstrates in part II that what constitutes the essence of the mind is the idea of the actually existing body and then adds (with reference to III.7) that the principal and first endeavor (conatus) of our mind is to affirm the existence of the body. His conclusion, therefore, is that “the idea that denies the existence of our body is contrary to our mind.”32 It is critically important to see that, for Spinoza, the essence of human beings is conatus, appetite, and, ultimately, desire, which is conscious of itself as appetite, because human beings are not simply bodies (like other finite, external, and contrary things: big fish naturally eat little fish) or simply minds (supernatural abstraction). Paradoxically, the body and the idea of the body—mind—are one and the same thing; yet, while they are not given outside of each other, they are not reducible to each other. There would be no consciousness on the part of human beings if they were simply body or purely mind. That which is the foundation of human beings, on which they must all agree, can now be reformulated in terms of what Spinoza says about conatus and desire—namely: human beings are born conscious of the appetite

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of seeking their own advantage (they have a mind); but they are born ignorant of the causes of their appetite (their bodily affections are incessant in their demands). The task of conatus (desire) then, as we shall see, is to effect the (eternal) transition from passive affects or inadequate ideas (of the body) to active affects or adequate ideas (of the body) in which the mind truly affirms (appropriates, upbuilds) the essence of the body—which of course is itself—as necessary existence. Spinoza formulates the task of conatus, when understood as desire conscious of itself as appetite and so as involving both body and mind, with incomparable acuity in the final lines of the scholium of proposition 9: “we do not strive for (conari), will (velle), want (appetere), or desire (cupere) something because we judge it to be good. But, on the contrary, therefore, we judge something to be good because we strive for, will, want, and desire it.”33 In the most fundamental sense, the Ethics is a sustained commentary on the relationship between conatus (desire) and the good that Spinoza articulates here in III.9S. Historically, the difference between the good as given outside of (without) desire and desire as giving (constituting) the good, is, as I commented earlier, the difference between final causes (antiquity) and the cause of itself (the Bible/modernity).34 In Spinoza’s carefully crafted sentence judgment (mind, consciousness) is not separated from desire and made dependent on the good as an end for which we strive but of which we shall always be ignorant and where desire fatally expresses both lack of the good and lack of judgment (ignorance). Rather, Spinoza radically identifies judgment (consciousness), desire, and the good—whence that foundation on which all human beings must agree: that they are conscious of their appetite in seeking their own utile but (in the beginning) ignorant of the causes whereby they seek their own advantage. The good, that is, the end of human beings, is not given outside of (without) their affects or desire: conatus. Judgment (mind) is also not given outside of (without) the affects or desire. But it is also the case that the affects—desire—are not given outside of (without) the consciousness that we have (that we are driven by) the appetite of seeking our own advantage as the good. The paradox—one of the many paradoxes!—here is that, in contrast with the Greek world, where evil is done in ignorance of the good (which is always outside of desire, as the lack of the good), human beings are subject to sin. Sin (evil) is not committed in ignorance of the good or in absence of desire. Rather sin is (can be) committed solely because I am conscious that I judge something to be good only insofar as I desire it. Because whatever I desire is the good (for me/for others)—I do not desire something because it is judged (by others) to be the good—I am constantly confronted with Montaigne’s question: What do I desire? I do desire, I am always desiring something; for

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my desire is unceasing, inexorable, relentless, inescapable. There is no suspending my desire (and in that sense I do not possess free will as suspended or neutral desire or judgment), although I am often in suspense as to what my true desire is. So, in asking—what do I desire?—I am asking whether what I do actually and concretely desire is truly the good for me (and how it relates to the good that others judge to be the good for them insofar they desire it). I can and do pervert the good—I sin—only because I identify the good with my desire and consciousness (judgment). I can and do know (and love) the good—I can attain freedom, salvation, blessedness—only because of the identification of my desire and consciousness (judgment) with the good. The task, then, before conatus is, as we shall now see, precisely the biblical one of confronting idolatry—where either I reduce the good (God) to the (natural or finite) end of my desire or I reduce my desire to the good (God) as its (supernatural or finite) end—and thus of overcoming idolatry by transforming the contradictory opposition between desire and the good into their paradoxical union, as I effect the transitio to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection (freedom, salvation, blessedness). In more specific terms, the task before conatus is a double one. First, since I do not desire something because I judge it (but on what basis?) to be the good, but since, on the contrary, I judge something to be the good because (insofar as) I desire (or love) it, how is it that I arrive at the knowledge and the love of God as the supreme good not only for me but also for all human beings? How do I begin with the identity of the good with my desire (as self-conscious appetite) and arrive at—make the transitio to—the intellectual love of God as the supreme good for all human beings, especially given the fact that there is no beginning (or history) outside of the cause of itself as necessary existence? In other words, it is precisely because I reduce the good to my desire—I am conscious of the appetite of seeking my advantage but ignorant that the cause of itself is the “cause” of my appetite—that I superstitiously project my desire into the final causes to which I consequently reduce both God and myself. How, then, do I begin in ignorance of the causes of my appetite, of which I am conscious, in seeking my advantage—and so superstitiously believe in final causes—and yet discover (if I do discover!) that the true cause of my appetite is the cause of itself, that which cannot be thought (desired, loved) without existing necessarily? The second task facing conatus is closely related to the first. How is it that, in desiring (consciously) my own utile, I do not simply fall into the egoism (self-interest) of reducing the ends of others to my own finite end? In other words, do I not simply make myself the good or final cause to which I reduce others? (In the opposite, yet identical, version of this egoism I reduce my ego or self-interest to the ends of others as my good or final cause.) How is it that

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I effect the transition from ignorance of the true cause of my appetite, of which I am conscious, in seeking my own utile, to knowing that the true (and only) cause (basis) of my advantage (good) is in loving the neighbor as myself, in doing unto others as I desire them to do unto me? The paradox that Spinoza pushes hard, as we shall see, is that it is only if I (consciously) pursue my own self-interest, or utile—only if I am ruthlessly honest in stripping my desire of the hypocrisy (idolatry) of superstitiously projecting (in the pretense of selflessness) my affects into final causes, which I then worship as my good—that I shall be able, both ethically and politically, to constitute desire as the good of all and the good as the desire of all. There is no good or desire outside of (without) the ego (individual). The task, then, is to make the paradoxical discovery that there is no ego (individual), who is not (self-) contradictory, outside of (without) the good that is desired by all (individuals) or outside of (without) the desire that is the good of all individuals. We discover, in other words, that, just as our true beginning is with the cause of itself, as necessary existence, so there is no beginning outside of the necessary existence of the neighbor (the other) whom we love as ourselves. Another way of putting this paradox is that, just as the ontological argument is unknowable—it cannot be demonstrated—outside of (without) the necessary existence of the neighbor, so ethics and politics cannot be constituted outside of (without) the necessary existence of the cause of itself (God). Still, while all this is present in the formulation of conatus or desire as the good constituting (as constituting the good of) human (and divine) life, it waits to be seen how (or if?) Spinoza demonstrates the transition from the initial ignorance, on the part of human beings, of the causes of their desire in seeking their advantage to the knowledge and love of God and neighbor as the true causes of their desire in seeking it. While most of what is important in comprehending this transition lies in part IV, a few additional elements in part III that are central to understanding conatus still remain to be examined. Spinoza divides desire into the passions of happiness (laetitia) and sadness (tristitia).35 Happiness is the affect by which we imagine that we pass to a greater perfection (in enhancing our power of action), while sadness is the affect by which we imagine that we pass to a lesser perfection (in decreasing our power of action). While Spinoza provides a rich anatomy of the affective or passional life of human beings in part III, his discussion there remains confusing until and unless the reader grasps the fact that the real distinction that he has in mind is not the one between the passions of happiness and sadness but rather the one between action (reason) and passion (imagination). In proposition 57, with direct reference to III.9S, he indicates that “happiness and sadness are desire itself, or appetite, insofar as it is increased or diminished, aided or restrained by external causes.” Thus, we have the peculiar situation that, because

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happiness is a passion, we only imagine that we pass to greater perfection (or that we enhance our power of action), while remaining unfreely dependent on external causes. It is evident, then, that the passion of happiness is not fundamentally distinct from the passion of sadness. Indeed, Spinoza points out in the scholium of proposition 57 that the affects of individuals vary as much as do their essences. For example, the equine libido for procreating is not the same as the human libido for procreating. “Thus, also the libidos and appetites of insects, fish, and birds must be [i.e., must vary] according to the ones and the others.” What this means, consequently, is that “each individual” lives “content in his own nature” and takes joy in it. “And, therefore, the joy (gaudium) of the one is as discrepant from the joy of the other as the essence of the one differs from the essence of the other.” Still, Spinoza indicates, he wants here to caution the reader that what follows from this is that “there is also no small difference (interesse) between the joy by which, for example, a drunk is led and the joy that a Philosopher possesses.” He then concludes the scholium of proposition 57 with the comment that, having dealt heretofore in part III “with the affects that are referred to man insofar as he suffers [dependence on external causes], it remains to add a few things about those [affects] that are referred to him insofar as he acts.” It is patent that the difference between equine libido and human libido is not the same kind of difference as that between the joy of the drunk and the joy of the philosopher (at least for Spinoza). Central to the richness of the anatomy of the affects as passions, which reflect our dependence on imagination and external causes and which Spinoza develops in part III, is his emphasis on their vast range and variety. He notes in proposition 15 that “any thing can through accident be the cause of happiness, sadness, or desire.” In proposition 51 he demonstrates that “different (diversi) men can be affected differently (diversimodè) by one and the same object and that one and the same man can be affected differently at different times by one and the same object.” It follows, then, according to proposition 56, that “as many species of happiness, sadness, and desire and consequently of each affect that is composed from these . . . or derived from these . . . are given as there are species of objects by which we are affected.” Spinoza thus makes it clear that the nature (essence, species) of the affects as passions—those by which we suffer dependence on external causes through our images of them (i.e., according to the power of our imagination)—is not given in the nature of things according to a hierarchy of final causes. Still, the fact that any individual thing can be for any individual human being the (accidental or external) source (or principle!) of desire—of happiness and sadness and of all the affects like love and hate that we can imagine to derive from them—once again points to (by presupposing) the difference between natural

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beings and human beings. For human beings, the nature of action, or freedom, is fundamentally different from the nature of passion as expressing the bondage of suffering dependence on external things. It is clearly not the case (i.e., it would make no sense to claim) that (non-human) animals are subject to their imagination in suffering dependence on external causes (although human beings can train horses, for example, to do things that no horse would “naturally” do; but this reflects human, not equine imagination). The difference between animal desire and human desire is clearly due to the fact that, as Spinoza emphasizes, human desire is appetite conscious as appetite.36 This means that human beings have and exercise their capacity of imagination, that is, of desire, in turning any thing “natural” into what is the (unnatural) good of imagination and desire. There is nothing good in itself. For we do not desire something because we judge or imagine it to be the good (because it is given in nature as our final end). Rather, we judge or imagine something to be the good because (insofar as) we desire it. However, there is something that is the good in itself, and that is conatus, the self-conscious desire of persevering in existence. Consequently, as Spinoza demonstrates with profound insight, the reason that human existence is so very dynamic, contradictory, dramatic, and paradoxical is because it is the (unnatural!) essence (nature) of desire, or conatus, to divide, in the beginning (in principle), into the difference between imagination and reason, between passion and action, between bondage and freedom, between the natural state and the civil state. Because the good is the imaginative product (creation) of desire, we individuals can make any individual object into the good: we can imagine any individual object to be the good. Such is our curse and our blessing. The question is, always: what do we desire—as the good? What is the good of our desire? We begin existence imagining the appetite of seeking our advantage but ignorant of the causes of our appetite, insofar as we are and remain in bondage to imagining our good in terms of external things on which, in our ignorance, we depend. But the paradox here, as always, is that of selfreferentiality. I cannot even know that I (unlike non-human animals) am dependent on—or contradicted by—external objects without (outside of) already knowing that action (freedom) is the standard both of itself and of what involves and expresses, not action but bondage to the passions. Another way of putting the paradox of self-referentiality is that it is only because I am an embodied being—the mind is first and last the idea of the body—it is only because I can imagine any thing to be the good of my desire that I can raise, that I am driven to raise, the question: What do I desire? It is only because I— together with Adam and Eve—experience the contradiction that anything can be the good of my desire that I am forced to choose, not between good and evil but the good as the criterion of evil. Yet another version of this paradox is

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that, because any individual thing can be the good and thus also the evil for me, as an individual, I, an individual, find myself forced (obligated) to discern (to enact) a difference, the most fundamental difference of all, namely, the difference between good and evil, the difference between action and passion. But, once again, we broach the content of part IV, and Spinoza has yet additional points to make in part III. Because the good for human beings is whatever they desire (or imagine), it follows, Spinoza observes in the scholium of proposition 55, that “men are by nature envious or take joy in the weakness of their equals and, on the contrary, are saddened by their virtue.” In other words, individuals will have the greatest joy when they possess what others lack. “It is apparent, therefore,” Spinoza concludes, “that men by nature have a proclivity to hatred and envy, to which,” he adds, “education itself contributes. For parents are accustomed to incite their children to virtue solely with the incentive of honor and envy.” That human beings “by nature” hate and envy all other human beings37 means (indicates) that, because what I desire I imagine to be the good and because my desire is passively dependent on external causes of which I am ignorant, I conceive of the good as finite and so as utterly contradictory. I can possess the good only if you lack it—and so you hate and envy me. If, however, you possess the good, then I lack it—and so I hate and envy you. It is important to see that, when Spinoza states that human beings “by nature” hate and envy each other, what he actually shows us is that here “nature” is what is external to human beings: it is that on which they depend passively and the causes of which they are ignorant. Because “nature” here is that of which I am not the (free) cause, it can be taken away from me. This notion of nature as external, passive, comparative (finite), determined by others, and the product of the imagination is sharply to be distinguished from nature understood as the necessity (freedom) of existing and acting from oneself alone (the cause of itself). Paradoxically, when something—that is, God or human beings—exists and acts from the necessity of its nature alone, this nature (as the cause of itself) is absolute or infinite. When (as) this infinite nature is shared with others, it is not diminished but augmented. I cannot have more or less of it, even as I eternally make the transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection (reality). It is also the case, then, that human beings are by nature free—to love their neighbors as themselves— in the realms of both ethics and politics. But, again, Spinoza’s articulation of the nature of human beings as free, at once ethical and political, lies ahead of us in not only part IV but also part V. We have already noted that at the end of the scholium of proposition 57 Spinoza indicates that, having devoted part III to a discussion of the affects insofar as man suffers dependence on external things, the good of which he fears losing, he will now say a few words about the affects insofar as man acts. The

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main point that he makes in the last two propositions of part III, 58 and 59, is that, since all the affects involve desire, happiness, and sadness and since by sadness we understand that the mind’s power of acting is diminished or restrained, no affects of sadness but only the affects of happiness and desire can be referred to the mind insofar as it acts. But it is, therefore, rather confusing to grasp how the passive affect of happiness, which, we imagine, increases our power of acting but does not, since it is based on external causes of which we are ignorant, is not rather sadness. It would appear that in part III Spinoza wants to represent the point of view of the passive affects in themselves (but this is ultimately impossible, for the passive affects can be known only on the basis of the active affects as their standard, as I have already pointed out). In any case, Spinoza gives a simplified and clearer account of the affects of desire, happiness, and sadness in the first three of the forty-eight “definitions of the affects,” in which, following proposition 59, he summarizes the content of part III. But his presentation remains ambiguous in the sense that he does not make use of the distinction between passive and active affects, notwithstanding his introduction of the active affects in propositions 58 and 59 (and not to mention in definitions 2 and 3 at the beginning of part III, as we saw earlier). Desire, Spinoza now repeats, is the essence itself of man insofar as it is conceived to be determined [passively or actively?] to do something from any given affect of it. In other words, following the scholium of proposition 9, desire is appetite conscious of itself as appetite, since appetite is the essence itself of man insofar as he is determined [passively or actively?] to do those things that serve his preservation (conservationi inserviunt). Consequently, happiness is the transition of man from lesser to greater perfection, while sadness is the transition of man from greater to lesser perfection. “I say transition,” Spinoza writes. “ . . . For if man were born with the perfection to which he passes, he would possess it (ejusdem . . . compos esset) without the affect of happiness.” His point, he observes, is more clearly understood through sadness, which, as the opposite affect of happiness, “consists in the transition to lesser perfection but not, however, in lesser perfection itself, . . . since a man cannot be saddened insofar as he is the participant of some perfection.” Spinoza observes further that sadness cannot be said to consist in the privation of greater perfection. For, while privation is nothing, “the affect of sadness, however, is an act which, therefore, can be nothing other than the act of passing to lesser perfection, that is, the act by which man’s power of acting is diminished or restrained” (III.Def.Af.Explicatio). That desire is expressed in terms either of happiness (action), involving the transition to greater perfection (or power of acting), or of sadness (passion), involving the transition to lesser perfection (or power of acting), appears clear enough, given that for Spinoza sadness is a passion and not an action.38 But

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then it evidently does not follow that sadness is an act by which the human power of acting is reduced, that is, an act by which I do not act but suffer (dependence on external causes). This confusing lack of consistency in presentation persists in the “general definition of the affects” that follows the fortyeight “definitions of the affects.” Here Spinoza calls affect a passion, that is, a confused idea, “by which the mind affirms a greater or a lesser force of existing on the part of its body or of some part of its body than before.” But how, we ask, can passion affirm anything? Further, what would it mean to affirm a lesser force of existing, except in the sense that I imagine it to affirm a greater force of existing when it actually does the opposite? It is important not to allow the ambiguities in Spinoza’s presentation of the passive affects in part III to obfuscate its key elements, which are fundamental to comprehending how in part IV freedom (as the true expression of human nature) emerges in and through the affects. These key elements are five in number: 1. conatus (as desire conscious of itself as appetite); 2. the distinction between desiring something because we judge (imagine) it to be the good and judging (knowing) something to be the good because (insofar as) we desire it; 3. the distinction between passive affects and active affects, between passion and action; 4. the distinction between happiness as the transition to greater perfection and sadness as the transition to lesser perfection; and 5. perfection itself. Regarding perfection, we have seen Spinoza observe that, if human beings were born perfect, they would be without the affect of happiness. But what it would ultimately mean for human beings to be born perfect is that they would be without any affects, without conatus or desire, and so, in fact, would not exist. They would be back in the Garden of Eden prior to knowing good and evil, on whose contradictory state Spinoza will acutely comment in part IV, as I have already indicated. Perfection, it is evident, is not the end that we desire or for which we strive because we judge (imagine) it to be the good. On the contrary, perfection is profoundly related to both desire and transitio (temporality) precisely because, as Spinoza explains at the end of the “general definition of the affects,” it expresses the very essence of a thing. From this it follows, he writes, that the mind passes (transit) to greater or to lesser perfection when it happens to affirm something about its body or about some part of it that involves more or less

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reality (realitatis) than before. When, therefore, I said above that the mind’s power of thinking is increased or diminished, I wished to understand nothing but that the Mind has formed an idea of its body or of some part of it that expresses more or less reality than it had [previously] affirmed of its body.

Perfection, we see, is at one and the same time what a thing is—its essence— and what it essentially becomes in its transition (passage) to being more or less itself. Perfection as the essence of what a thing is—its conatus or desire—is its reality. Yet this reality is itself always the transition to greater (or lesser) perfection (reality). But Spinoza is careful to point out that this greater or lesser perfection (reality, essence, conatus) is not comparative (relative or finite). To say that the mind affirms of the body or of some part of it a greater or lesser force of existing than before does not mean, he observes, that “the mind compares the present constitution of the body with the past [constitution of the body]” but that it “affirms something about the body that truly involves more or less reality than before.” We begin to see, consequently, that what Spinoza means by “more or less” perfection (reality)—in the force of existing—is not comparative but absolute. Ultimately, the only real comparison of essence—in becoming (being) more or less perfect or real than itself—is with itself as the cause of itself. While, I repeat, Spinoza never directly identifies conatus with the cause of itself, he has already indicated, as we have seen, that the time of conatus is not durational (the quantitative time of external, natural things) but indefinite (he shies away from calling it infinite). Thus, as we now turn to part IV, we can anticipate that Spinoza will build on the dramatic, dynamic identification of essence, conatus (desire), transition, perfection, and reality—we judge (we know) something to be the good because (insofar as) we make it more or less perfect or real—that he establishes in part III.

Desire and the Good: Ethics, Part IV The Dictates of Reason Although the title of part IV appears to indicate that in it Spinoza will discuss the strengths of the affects insofar as they involve human bondage, what he actually articulates in it, as I indicated before, is an extraordinary vision of human freedom that is at once ethical and political. In part IV he resolves the apparent tensions and ambiguities of part III by making it clear that the ultimate strengths of the affects, as constituted in and through the desire or conatus—the actual essence—of individual human beings to persevere in existence, involve and express their freedom to enhance their force of existence, not their bondage to the affects as passions. The paradox here, as always, is

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that, if we were not subject to the strengths of our affects, which, as passions, reflect our natural dependence on external causes of which we are ignorant, then we would never be in the position to effect our transition to greater perfection or reality. (Nor could we regress to a lesser perfection or reality.) As Spinoza will now increasingly demonstrate, our affects are not in themselves either good or evil. There is nothing in nature that is good or evil. The task before us human beings is to determine what the true good of our desire—our conatus in persevering in existence—is. We are not born perfect (we are not born with knowledge of good or evil). Rather, we are born (naturally) ignorant of what it is that constitutes the true cause of our being conscious in persisting in existence, in seeking our advantage. The issue facing human beings, then, is not (how) to effect transitio from passive affects to active affects, from bondage to freedom. For the present reality to which they pass is not a (finite) comparison with the past as naturally given in itself. Rather, the task of human beings is to comprehend how they effect transitio to ever greater perfection or reality such that it (eternally, infinitely) involves and expresses their true essence, what they essentially are. While human beings are naturally bound to external causes, of which they are ignorant, that is, while human beings are naturally envious and hateful, their true nature or essence involves and expresses the freedom of acting from the necessity of their conatus alone. In the quite lengthy preface of part IV Spinoza sets out in comprehensive terms the agenda of what lies before the reader. He begins by noting that bondage, as human impotence (impotentia) to moderate and to control the affects, results when human beings are under the power (potestas), not of their own right (sui juris) but of fortune (which in part III he calls external causes, of which they are ignorant).39 But his main point is to show how deeply the affects are involved in our ideas of perfection and imperfection and also of good and evil. When people call natural things perfect or imperfect, that is, when they view them in terms of either final (finite or natural) ends or exemplars (exemplaria) for the sake of which human beings, nature, and God are said to act, Spinoza explains, then they express prejudice rather than knowledge: For we have shown in the appendix of part I [he declares] that nature does not act on account of an end. For that eternal and infinite being, which we call God or nature, acts by the same necessity by which it exists. For we have shown (in I.16) that he himself acts from the same necessity of nature from which he exists. Therefore, the reason or cause why God or nature acts and why he exists is one and the same. As he, therefore, exists by cause of [for the sake of] no end, he also acts by cause of no end. But as he has no principle (principium) or end of existing, thus he has none of acting. What is called a final cause is nothing outside of human appetite insofar as it is considered [to be] the principle or the primary cause of some thing.

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I have cited this passage at length in order to show how closely Spinoza ties his critique of final causes (finite ends) to his conception of the relationship between existence and action. God no more acts for an end—outside of himself—than he exists for an end—outside of himself. Rather, God (as the cause of himself) is the end for which (and by the necessity of which) he exists and for which he acts. It is fascinating to see Spinoza use the concept of existence (to exist) to temper (to deconstruct) our tendency to reduce action (to act) to a final cause or end that we imagine to be the good outside of (without) our desire for which we act. But it is also the case, as Spinoza will shortly indicate in the preface of part IV, that he has no intention of denying that action involves or expresses human purpose or intent, so long as we do not, in our ignorance and prejudice, sacrifice our existence to it as a final cause that lies outside of us (as an external cause on which we are blindly dependent). In other words, existence reminds action that to act expresses or involves conatus—as the actual essence of a thing to persist (indefinitely) in existence; and action reminds existence that to exist is not a neutral state but the transition, always, to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection. The fact that divine action expresses existence and that, to recall definition 7 of part IV, (human) appetite involves the end for the sake of which human beings act indicates that the relationship between existence and action is precisely the same in human beings as in God. When human beings are ignorant of the true causes of their appetite in seeking their own advantage, they project them blindly into final causes for which, they say, in their superstitious ignorance, God and nature act on their own (human) behalf. However, insofar as human beings effect transition to greater perfection (reality), they act from the necessity of their own existence, consistent with the conatus of seeking their own advantage. What his critique of final causes, as based on the reciprocal relationship of existence and action, shows about perfection and imperfection, Spinoza then proceeds to point out, is that they are simply notions that we human beings feign in comparing individuals (finitely) with each other. We traditionally refer all the individuals of nature to the one genus (or universal as final cause) that we consider to be the most general, compare them with each other, and so conclude that some are more or less perfect than others. We do the same thing with the ideas of good and evil. Because we compare them with each other, one and the same thing can at the same time be good, evil, or indifferent. It is important to note that Spinoza’s conclusion that the ideas of perfection and imperfection and of good and evil are simply relative to the external end, of which we are ignorant, exactly mirrors his presentation of the passions in part III, although he does not here make that connection explicit. However, what then is striking is that the demonstration that perfection and imperfection, together with good and evil, are merely relative to each

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other is not for Spinoza his final position, just as his presentation of the affects as passions in part III is not his final word on the affects. But this is hardly surprising, since his critique of perfection and imperfection (as of good and evil) flows from his critique of final causes. The reduction of perfection and imperfection to the relativity of the passions also flies in the face of his conception of human action as the transition to ever greater perfection, that is, to the ever greater power of acting from the necessity of our own nature alone. Indeed, what Spinoza has in fact demonstrated in his critique of perfection and imperfection, as of good and evil, is that we reduce them to merely comparative relativity insofar as we are ignorant of the true causes of the appetite of seeking our own utile and so project our affects into final causes. Consequently, Spinoza declares, we need to retain these words “because we wish to form an idea of man as an exemplar of human nature that we intuit (intueamur).” Good thus refers to what assists us in advancing more and more towards the exemplar of human nature, while evil refers to what impedes that advance. Still, Spinoza is careful once again to add that the transition from lesser to greater perfection, or its contrary, does not involve the transformation of one essence into another. A horse, for example, would be destroyed in essence whether it changed into a man or an insect. Rather, it is our power of acting, insofar as it is understood through its nature alone, that is increased or decreased. For perfection is the reality or the essence of some thing insofar as it exists and operates in a certain mode without regard to its duration as determinate time. Spinoza then concludes the preface of part IV with the ringing statement that “anything whatsoever, whether it is more or less perfect, will always be able to persevere in existing with the same force by which it begins to exist—with the result that all things are thus equal in this regard.” It is extremely important to see that the exemplar of human nature, to which Spinoza appeals as the true standard of perfection and imperfection, as of good and evil, is to be carefully (and absolutely) distinguished both from the exemplar that earlier in the preface he associates with final causes, as we saw, and from the universal (finite) genus of nature that implies a hierarchy of final causes. In each of these two later cases we imagine something to be perfect or good because we view it as independent of (or prior to) our desire and thus as the unchanging and unchanged, finite, objective, external, final, and natural end or standard (judge) of desire, to which imperfection or evil is comparatively relative. But in the case of the exemplar of human nature, our advance to or retreat from it is understood in terms of the increase or the decrease in our power of acting, that is, in the power of our desire or conatus itself. The paradox here is that the exemplar of human nature cannot be understood apart from my transition to (when it is not away from) it. The exemplar of human nature is not given apart from desire or conatus when understood as the actual essence of each individual to persevere in existence, in which all

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human beings are equal. Another version of this paradox is that, insofar as I claim (in the ignorance of my superstition) that human values like perfection and imperfection or good and evil are objective, natural ends for the sake of which human beings (like God and nature) act, they are rendered blindly finite, comparative, and relative. In contrast, insofar as I hold that human values are not given objectively in the nature of things but are subjective—that is, I judge things to be perfect and imperfect, good and evil because (insofar as) I desire them—then human values are rendered absolute; for they involve and express the freedom of human beings to act from the necessity alone of their own conatus (desire). It is fitting, then, that Spinoza devotes definitions 1 and 2 of part IV to good and evil and, concerning them, refers the reader to the end of the preface. He defines good as “what we certainly know to be useful (utile) to us.” He defines evil as “what we certainly know impedes our being possessors (compotes) of some good.” The challenge, then, of part IV of the Ethics is to see how what is “useful” to us, to us human beings as subjects, is not relative (finite) but absolute (infinite) in expressing human power and freedom. In other words, the paradox here is that, insofar as human beings seek their own subjective advantage, their own advantage as subjects, they effect the transition to the perfection of advancing as compotes (possessors or masters) of human nature. In contrast, insofar as human beings pretend that their values are final causes or ends that are given objectively in the nature of thing outside of (without) their desire, then they blindly make human values relative to their own, selfish ends. It is important to descry the emphasis that Spinoza places, in both definitions 1 and 2, on “what we certainly know”: quod certò scimus. Each of these four (three Latin) words is precious. What is to our advantage (or disadvantage)—in persisting in existing, in effecting our transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection, in advancing towards (when not retreating from) the exemplar of human nature—is not simply what is useful or not useful to us but what we certainly (absolutely) know enhances or impedes our power of existing. Spinoza, like Montaigne, does not ask if we know what is useful to us or why something is useful to us. Rather, there is (must be) something advantageous (when it is not disadvantageous) to us, and we must know what it is. Naturally, we may well be (indeed, we often are) confused about what is or is not to our advantage, as we fall prey in our prejudice to the superstition of final causes and thus to sin. Still, what is good or evil is what we certainly know to be to our advantage (or disadvantage). For what we know with certainty is not simply that truth is its own standard but also what the standard of truth is: our conatus or desire. Finally, who “we” is, that is, how “we” is embodied in and embodies the exemplar of human nature, will also be critically important to discern.

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In sum, it is evident, surely, that “what we certainly know” is that the essence of human being is the conatus, that is, desire conscious of itself as appetite, of persisting in existence. We know the difference between knowing something to be the good because we desire it and desiring something because we imagine it to be the good. What we certainly know, therefore, is that good and evil are not given in the nature (final ends) of things but only in relationship to—in the relationship of—human affects. To demonstrate with certainty that the relationship of the affects constitutes the absolute good of human beings: such is the task that Spinoza sets for himself in part IV of the Ethics (together with its sequel and culmination in part V), as we shall now undertake to see. The concept that Spinoza makes central to shaping the content of part IV of the Ethics and that renders it so dramatic is what he calls the “singular thing” (res singularis). I show in volume I of my study that singular (or individual) things, in constituting not only the first kind of knowledge (imagination) but also the third kind of knowledge (intuition), are the origin (principle) of both inadequate and adequate ideas. Thus, we can anticipate that the concept of “singular things”—ultimately, of individual human beings—that Spinoza makes pivotal to part IV will also be duplex, both contradictory and paradoxical. On the one hand, insofar as individual human beings are part of nature and so in bondage to their passions, they are external, contrary, opposed to, and in contradiction of all other individual human beings (including themselves). On the other hand, insofar as individual human beings exist from the necessity of their nature alone, they freely act in common agreement and thus in paradoxical union with all other individual human beings (including themselves). Consequently, what Spinoza proceeds to demonstrate is that human beings are opposed to each other insofar as they are subject to their passions and that they agree with each other insofar as they act in accord with what he calls the dictates of reason. I noted earlier that Spinoza, as if recalling the distinction that he makes in axiom 1 of part I of the Ethics between “in itself ” and “in another,” states in point 1 of the appendix of part IV that human beings are part of nature insofar as nature “cannot be adequately conceived through itself (per se) without other individuals.”40 Here the term “individuals” is opposed to what is per se (or in se), just as being part of nature is opposed to what is understood from its own nature alone. That individual or singular things are naturally opposed to each other Spinoza succinctly articulates in the single axiom of part IV: “No singular thing is given in the nature of things than which another more powerful and stronger [singular thing] is not [also] given. But whatever [singular thing] is given, another more powerful [singular thing] is given by which that given [singular thing] can be destroyed.”41 Here Spinoza dramatically characterizes the natural state in which all individuals are opposed to and contradict

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each other. The axiom describes, not the action whereby individual human beings freely exist from the necessity of their nature or essence alone but rather the passion whereby individual human beings are blindly dependent on the external, coercive force of other individuals who are more powerful than they are and by whom they are destroyed. Yet the contradiction inherent in this natural state, where individuals are the enemies of each other in the war of all against all, is that the more powerful individuals are also contradicted and consequently destroyed by individuals yet more powerful than they ad infinitum. Central to the effectiveness (but also to the initial ambiguity) with which Spinoza presents the contradictory nature of singular individuals in part IV of the Ethics is that, especially in the beginning, he leaves (purposively) uncertain (unclear) whether he understands by singular individuals all natural things or only human beings. But that ultimately is his point. We have to comprehend the paradox that the “nature” of human beings is contradictory. On the one hand, if human beings were not part of nature, if they were not born ignorant of the causes of their appetite in seeking their own utile, if they were not subject to their passions, if the mind was not first and last the idea of the body, if, consequently, human beings were born free and perfect, then, the affects of happiness and sadness would not exist, desire would not exist, conatus would not exist: human beings would not be known or could not be thought to exist. On the other hand, if human beings were not just a part of nature but were completely natural, if they were not conscious but totally ignorant of the appetite of seeking their own utile, if they did not know what they were ignorant of—the causes of their appetite in seeking their own utile—then, human beings would also not be known or could not be thought to exist.42 Ultimately, human beings have to comprehend the contradictory nature of singular things as the paradox that human nature is the singular standard both of itself and of the nature of singular things (the singular things of nature). What will, paradoxically, expose as contradictory the definition, in the single axiom of part IV, of singular individuals as naturally unequal in power is the concept of conatus or desire according to which individual human beings commonly (universally) persevere in their existence by seeking their own utile. How what is useful or advantageous to the singular individual—how what is in the self-interest of the singular individual—involves what is per se or in se and how what is per se or in se expresses the necessity (freedom) of singular individuals by which they exist and act from their nature alone: that, again, is what Spinoza undertakes to demonstrate in part IV of the Ethics. The task that he sets for himself, as for his readers, is to comprehend how the “singular individual” is both my natural (if uncommon because more powerful) enemy and my common (but unnatural because equal) neighbor.

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Indeed, we have already seen Spinoza indicate at the end of the preface of part IV that a singular thing is not more or less perfect because it perseveres in existence for a longer or a shorter quantity of time or duration. In other words, as Spinoza writes, all singular things are equal insofar as they possess the conatus of always being able to persevere in existing by the same force (power) by which they begin to exist. Consequently, just as one singular individual is not more or less perfect than another in terms of duration (quantitative or natural time), it must also follow that one singular individual is not more or less perfect than another in terms of natural or quantitative power. While every singular individual is naturally more powerful or less powerful than every other singular individual and while, therefore, every singular individual has the “natural right” of destroying or of being destroyed by every other singular individual, the conatus by which every singular individual equally and always perseveres in existence from beginning to end exposes the contradictory character of this natural right. As we have already seen Spinoza indicate in the preface of part IV, perfection and imperfection, together with good and evil, are to be understood, not as relative to each other in the natural state but as related to the exemplar of human nature, which is the absolute standard of all singular individuals. In sum, the singular individual is its own standard, the standard both of (paradoxical) human existence and of (contradictory) natural existence. In the first seventeen propositions of part IV Spinoza enlarges and clarifies his exposition in part III that human beings are part of nature and subject to their (contradictory) natural passions. In proposition 4 he demonstrates that “it cannot be done that man is not part of nature and cannot suffer any changes except those that can be understood through his nature alone and of which he is the adequate cause.” The basic point that Spinoza makes here is that, if human beings were not subject to any changes except those that could be understood through their nature alone, they would not perish and so would be eternal and infinite, which, he opines, is an utterly absurd conclusion. Spinoza’s demonstration of proposition 4 is complex and sophisticated.43 It implies that, just as human beings are not born infinite or eternal and so are subject, as part of nature, to death, we also have to realize that, because God, as infinite and eternal, does not exist outside of (without) the thought of existing human beings (who are subject to death)—God is the idea of the mind—he cannot be explained solely from himself alone (that is, the necessary existence of God is not self-evident). In the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza demonstrates, as I show in volume I of this study, that nothing in itself is either sacred or profane—including, therefore, “God”—except in relationship to the mind (of an existing human being), that is, in terms of human utile. (“Mind” here is clearly active and not passive.) It is by no means evident,

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therefore, that God can be thought to exist, necessarily, outside of (without) the transitio of human beings to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection. For, to recall the supreme paradox of Kierkegaard yet again, if God has always existed, eternally and infinitely—that is, if God were born (naturally) eternal and infinite—then he would never have existed (eternally and infinitely in the nature of things). How we are to understand the transitio to ever greater perfection, on the part of human beings, as the temporality involving and expressing infinity and eternity will be a major task of chapter 2 (in light of part V of the Ethics). In the corollary of proposition 4 Spinoza states that human beings are necessarily always subject to passions, follow and obey the common order of nature, and accommodate themselves to it as much as the nature of things demands. In proposition 5 he points out that the force and growth of any passion and its perseverance in existence are defined, not by the power by which we endeavor (conamur) to persevere in existence but by the power of an external cause compared with ours.44 Finally, in the scholium of proposition 17 Spinoza indicates that he does not emphasize the dependence of human beings on nature and on the natural passions in order to defend the ignorance of the fool. Rather, “it is necessary to know the power as well as the impotence of our nature so that we can determine what reason can do in moderating the affects and what it cannot do.” But then in proposition 18 we have one of those abrupt switches in perspective that are not infrequent in the Ethics and that, while true to Spinoza’s duplex logic of passive and active affects, does not explain the transition from one to the other. Yet, this is correct, for there is no transition from passive affects to active affects but only from active affects to their ever greater (when not to their lesser) perfection. Spinoza states in proposition 18 that “the desire that arises from happiness is, everything else being equal, stronger than the desire that arises from sadness.” Spinoza demonstrates this proposition by reference to the first of the definitions of the Affects and to proposition 7 of part III. “Desire is the essence itself of man, that is, the conatus by which man endeavors to persevere in his being.” In other words, active affects are the standard of passive affects. We cannot even know that we are subject to passive affects except in light of our desire or conatus. Still, it is also true that, because we are not born perfect, conatus expresses our transition to ever more perfect (when not to less perfect) conatus. Having demonstrated the strengths of the natural passions or passive affects in propositions 1–17 of part IV and then shown in proposition 18 that desire or conatus, in expressing the very essence of human beings in persevering in existence, is, as an active force or affect, stronger than the natural passions or passive affects, Spinoza suddenly, in the scholium of proposition 18, makes another abrupt switch, this time in vocabulary, by associating the active force of conatus (the active affects) with reason (ratio).45 He states that he will

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now show “what reason prescribes to us and which affects agree with the rules of human reason and which [affects], on the other hand, are contrary to them.”46 Before proceeding to examine what Spinoza calls “the dictates (dictamina) of reason,” it is important to note two things about his switch in vocabulary from affect to reason. First, he makes no attempt to explain (justify) why his term of choice is now reason and no longer desire, conatus, active affect, or action (and we can suppose that he here reflects conventional, philosophical bias in making reason the standard of the affects and not affect the standard of the reasons that human beings give for their actions). Still, as will become readily evident, Spinoza conceives of reason as affective practice (effective action). The affects that agree with reason are the active affects (those expressing the very essence of human beings to persist, always, in existing), while the affects that are opposed to reason are the passive affects. Second, Spinoza also does not tell us whether what he here understands by reason is to be viewed as consistent (identical) with the concept of reason that he associates with the second kind of knowledge in part II of the Ethics (as distinguished from both imagination as the first kind of knowledge and intuition as the third kind of knowledge). Still, as will, I think, become no less readily evident, the answer is no. Reason, in embodying conatus as the actual essence of individuals to persist in existence, does not deal with the scientific rules of common nature (as does reason when viewed in terms of the second kind of knowledge). Rather, reason here expresses the actual essence of individuals when comprehended in light of their transitio to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection in realizing the exemplar of human nature, which, as we shall see, is God. Reason, in other words, is here the intuition of individuals as essentially one (consistent with the third kind of knowledge). Spinoza also indicates that, before he undertakes to demonstrate the dictates of reason “in our thorough (prolixo),47 geometrical order,” he will provide an outline of them so that “they may be perceived more easily by everyone.” In thus acknowledging that his geometrical demonstration of ethics is, while a necessary burden to his readers, simply a way of expounding its complex logic, Spinoza devotes the rest of the scholium of proposition 18 to summarizing how reason embodies the conatus of seeking one’s own utile. In a fundamental sense this summary serves as a prolegomenon to the “geometrical” demonstration of the dictates of reason that follows by at once introducing it and stimulating the reader to look forward to its richer (more prolix) exposition. Spinoza summarizes the dictates of reason in dramatic fashion: Since reason demands (postulet) nothing against nature, it itself, therefore, demands that everyone love himself; seek his utile, which is truly utile; want (appetat) everything that truly leads man to greater perfection; and absolutely that

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everyone endeavor (conetur) to preserve his being as much as is in himself (quantum in se est). This, indeed, is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part. (See III.4)

Before attending to the elucidation of reason as conatus that Spinoza provides in the rest of the scholium of proposition 18 and then to his prolix demonstration of the identity of reason with conatus beginning with proposition 19, it is important to examine carefully the two claims that frame the above passage, each of which can easily be misunderstood. When Spinoza states that reason demands nothing against nature, it is important to keep two things in mind: 1. It is true that reason, in undertaking to moderate and to restrain the natural affects as passions, is concerned to appropriate and not to eradicate them. 2. Still, as has already become clear to us, Spinoza makes a fundamental distinction between passive affects as natural and active affects as natural, between the common order of nature—the natural state—in which singular things are destroyed by more powerful singular things, and the nature (essence or conatus) of individual human beings—the human state—from whose necessity alone can human beings as singular things truly exist and act together. Paradoxically, reason is not “against nature” because it demands that human beings comprehend their nature as rational, that is, that they live freely from their own nature alone and not be blindly determined by external, natural causes of which they are ignorant. The second claim framing the passage cited above is that with which it closes: the proposition that reason as conatus (whereby every individual endeavors to preserve his being to the highest degree possible, that is, to seek his own advantage) is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part. But this analogy with the whole that is naturally greater than its part is as ambiguous as the initial, framing claim that reason demands nothing against nature. We understand that reason demands nothing against nature insofar as nature is not partial (according to which singular things as finite parts are opposed to each other) but whole (according to which every individual is sovereign, infinitely, and not a finite part that is subject to final causes of which it is ignorant). In finite geometry the whole is greater than its part. But in ethics reason demands that individuals effect transition to ever greater perfection, to the exemplar, which is not a finite whole that is given as a final cause and of which all singular things are ignorant as impotent parts. The transition to ever greater perfection is not the movement from (finite) part to (finite) whole, as

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we have seen Spinoza already make clear in his dismissal of all comparative, finite models (as contradictory). Rather, the transition of individuals to ever greater perfection is their movement from whole to whole, their movement to the actual reality of ever enlarged capacity to exist and to act wholly (and not partially) from the necessity (freedom) of their nature (conatus) alone.48 Not only, therefore, does Spinoza’s appeal to an analogy with finite geometry show us that the geometrical order of demonstration in the Ethics bears no relation to (finite) geometry. But we also see that human nature (as wholly conatus) is the standard of the common order of partial, external nature. In other words, the nature of human being is not deduced and is not deducible from the common order of nature. The (infinite) nature of human being cannot be known by analogy with finite nature. At the end of the passage cited above, Spinoza refers the reader to proposition 4 of part III, which I discussed earlier: “no thing can be destroyed except by an external cause [in the common order of nature].” He states, as we know, that this proposition is “clear through itself ” since the definition of anything affirms, and does not negate, posits, and does not remove, its essence. When we attend only to the thing itself, and not to its external causes, we can find nothing in it that could destroy it. Q. E. D. Again, it is important to see that this proposition, in giving a version of the cause of itself, that is, of necessary existence as that which cannot be thought without existing necessarily, articulates conatus as the ontological argument. Not only, consequently, is there no analogy between this proposition and the finite geometrical theorem that a finite whole is (relatively) greater than a finite part, but it also articulates a concept of the singular thing that is completely different from that given in the single axiom of part IV, according to which singular things, as external (relative) to each other, destroy each other. Indeed, we see that the geometrical theorem is but a version of the axiom. When Spinoza proceeds to summarize the dictates of reason, consistent with the principle of conatus that he articulates in the passage cited above, he introduces yet another concept, virtus (strength, power: virtue), while recalling definition 8 of part IV: “Through virtue and power (potentiam) I understand the same thing, that is, (through III.7) virtue, insofar as it refers to man, is the essence itself or nature of man, insofar as he has the power (potestatem) of effecting those things that can be understood through the laws of his nature alone.” Therefore, Spinoza continues, since virtue is to act from the laws of one’s own nature and since no one endeavors to preserve his being except from the laws of his own nature, three things follow: 1. The foundation of virtue is the very endeavor (conatus) of preserving one’s own being; and contentment (felicitas) consists in the fact that man is able to preserve his being.

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2. Virtue is to be sought on account of itself (not on account of something else that is viewed as more excellent or useful). 3. Those who kill themselves are impotent in mind (animo) and completely conquered by external causes that are inimical (repugnantibus) to their nature.49 Having now identified conatus (desire), reason, nature, and virtue (power)—as the essence of human beings in preserving their own being— Spinoza proceeds to clarify what it means for human beings to exist and to act from the necessity of their nature alone. It is not the case, he points out, that human beings need nothing outside themselves to preserve their being or that they could live without commercium with things that are outside of them. Furthermore, their mind would be more imperfect if it were alone and did not understand anything outside of itself. “Many things, therefore, are given outside of us,” Spinoza declares, “that are useful (utilia) to us and that, consequently, are to be sought (appetenda) [by us].” He then makes clear, however, that by things “outside of ” us he does not here understand things that are external (contrary or inimical) to our nature. Indeed, of the things outside of us, Spinoza remarks, none is more excellent than that which entirely agrees with our own nature. For example, if two individuals of entirely the same nature are joined together, they compose an individual (individuum) twice as powerful as the singular individual. Therefore, nothing is more useful to man than man. Men can wish for nothing more excellent for preserving their being, I say, than that all [men] would so agree in all things that the minds and bodies of all [men] would compose, as it were, one mind and one body and that all at the same time, insofar as they can, would endeavor (conentur) to preserve their being and that all at the same time would seek for themselves the common utile of all. From these things it follows that men who are governed by reason, that is, men who seek their utile from the guidance of reason (ex ductu rationis), want (appetere) nothing for themselves that they do not desire (cupiant) for other men. And, therefore, they are just, faithful (fidos), and honest.

In this extraordinary passage Spinoza makes it clear that the singular individual can endeavor to preserve his own being by seeking his own self-advantage only if, in following the golden rule, he desires nothing for himself that he does not desire for all other individuals. The singular thing as the human individuum escapes from the natural state (as described in the single axiom of part IV), in which every singular thing is destroyed by another (more powerful) singular thing, when he grasps the fact that he can preserve his own being and seek his own advantage only when he seeks for himself what is the com-

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mon utile of all, that is, when the power (virtue) of one is (infinitely multiplied as) the power (virtue) of all. The above passage is especially important in helping us to see that Spinoza has two concepts of the singular individual: external (contrary and inimical) and other (common and in agreement); two concepts of external: contrary (inimical) and what is other to and so common to and in agreement with the individual; and two concepts of “alone”: part—in alio, as involving the isolation of the individual (who is then dependent on the common order of nature)— and whole—per se, in se, as freely determined to act and to exist from the necessity of its nature alone. But that Spinoza has two concepts of the individual and so on is hardly a surprise, as I observed earlier, given his distinction between the nature of human being and the common order of nature, between action and passion, between active affects and passive affects, etc. The paradox here is that one is free to act and to exist from the necessity of one’s nature alone solely when that nature—essence, conatus, desire—is understood to comprehend all individuals who desire for themselves only what they desire for all other human beings: that they be free to act and to exist from the necessity of their nature alone. It is also important to observe that, in outlining the basis of both the ethical and the political condition of human beings, Spinoza is careful not to say that it involves a transition from bondage (to the passive affects) to freedom (in and through the active affects). For the only transition, Spinoza maintains, is to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection. Yet he also makes clear that to live by the dictates of reason—of conatus—is to possess a comprehensive understanding of the role that the (passive) affects play in human life. Human beings are not born free but in transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) freedom. Spinoza concludes the scholium of proposition 18 with the observation that he has now completed the outline of the dictates of reason that he undertook to give before beginning to demonstrate them “in more prolix [geometrical] order.” He notes that he provided this outline “so as to gain, if possible, the attention of those who believe that this principle—of course, that everyone is held to seek his utile—is the foundation of impiety and not of virtue and piety.” In the next twenty or so propositions, consequently, Spinoza demonstrates “more prolixly” the principle that to seek our utile is the sole foundation of morality (pietas). While I shall generally summarize his basic points without reference to specific propositions, I shall cite and discuss in some detail those individual propositions whose ideas and insights significantly amplify the outline that he provides in the scholium of proposition 18. Spinoza begins by observing that all individuals, from the laws of their own nature, necessarily desire or are repelled by what they judge to be good and evil. Another way of putting this same point is that, insofar as individuals

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endeavor and are able to seek their own utile, that is, to preserve their being, the more virtus (power) they possess and that, insofar as individuals neglect their own utile, that is, neglect to preserve their being, the less virtus (in their impotence) they possess. Then in proposition 21 Spinoza formulates the relationship among existence, desire (conatus), and the good with such elementary insight that it allows us, once again, to see how fundamentally different his modern (biblical) conception of existence is from that of the ancients. “No one,” he writes, “can desire to be blessed, to act well, and to live well who does not at the same time desire to be, to act, and to live, that is, actually to exist (actu existere).” Spinoza’s fundamental point here is that we do not exist for the sake of the good. The good is not the end of (our) existence. Rather, the good is given only in and through (our) existence. The good is not known outside of or without (our) existence. Only if we exist do we desire the good. Indeed, the very desire to exist, the desire of existence, the existence of desire is the good. It is precisely because conatus, as the desire to persist in existence, defines the good that human beings are eternally faced with the question: What do I desire? In and through what do I exist? The good for us moderns, for human beings existing in the biblical tradition of modernity, is eternally paradoxical. For the good is not given to me as the contradictory, final cause outside of (without) my existence such that I am forever ignorant of it as my end. Rather, the good is given to me as my existence. I actually exist and desire to exist, and thus I eternally have to ask: What do I desire in existing? To exist is the good. I cannot even conceive of—know (enact or effect)—the good outside of (without) existing. But that is the reason that the good is eternally paradoxical (or problematic). For it is only because I know the good (which Spinoza ultimately identifies with God) that I can become confused about it, dishonor it, and so turn it into an idol by projecting it into a final cause that, in my superstitious ignorance, I then claim to be my end. Paradoxically, it is only because I know the good—that is, only in existing—that I can pervert it. If I did not know existence as my good, if I were ignorant of my existence as the good, then, while I could never err—for it would follow that all error (sin) was done in ignorance of the good—I also could not be blessed (in possessing the supreme good of humankind). Another way of putting this paradox is that knowledge of the good—of existence—is never given outside of (without) error or sin, involving what Spinoza calls the passions and their dependence on the body as a part of nature. That the good flows from existence, that existence is the good, that the good of desire and conatus is (not finite but “indefinite”) persistence in existing— all of this is simply (profound) commentary on the story of the creation of existence as found in Genesis 1. God creates the things of nature—from nothing, from nothing that does not involve and express the blessed necessity of

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divine existence—and lo! they are good. God creates man and woman, and lo! they are very good. God does not create things for the sake of some end (which would belie the principle of creation from nothing). God creates— existing things and, above all, man and woman—and they are good. As we have already seen Spinoza indicate, the infinite and eternal power by which God acts is the same infinite and eternal power by which he exists. God does not act for a (finite) end. Rather, his action is the very expression of creative existence. That we argue from existence to the good and not from the good (as a final cause) to existence, that we judge something to be the good because we desire it and do not desire something because we judge it to be the good (as a final cause) not only presupposes the doctrine of creation ex nihilo but also embodies the ontological argument, whose simple point is that existence is not given separate from my consciousness (thought, idea, desire) of it and that thought (desire) is not given separate from its existence. Existence does not depend on the good that is known outside of (without) it (as existing); and thought (knowledge) does not depend on the good that exists outside of (without) it (as thought or known). The principle of creation, along with the ontological argument that the good is that which cannot be thought without existing and cannot exist without being thought, eliminates, forever, all concepts of final cause (as known, for example, in and through Greek thought). But the paradox here is that final causes reemerge in biblical (modern) thought—inexorably—as the product of the contradictory fact that human beings, created so very good, are not born (merely) good but rather ignorant of the causes of their appetite in seeking their utile as the good of existence (as the existence of the good). The good is not the unknowable and unknown (finite) end of human beings but their (infinitely) known trial, their burden and their task. Human beings are faced with the task of making (their) existence the good—for all human beings— with the task of eternally effecting the transitio to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection in embodying the exemplar of human nature in their existence. Since the good is given not as an external, final cause but as the conatus of persisting in existence, the good of existence (the existence of the good) is yet always to be determined by human beings from their own necessary existence alone. Thus, we understand why Spinoza binds so tightly together the concepts of existence, desire (conatus), the good, and temporality (the transitio to ever greater when not to lesser existence). The (unknowable and unthinkable) opposite of the biblical world of modernity is that found in the world of the ancient Greeks, for whom existence depends upon the (ignorance of the) good as final cause or end, which is exemplified in Socrates, as I show in volume I of my study. If I exist, my desire expresses lack (ignorance) of the good. If the good exists (say, as Plato’s

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forms or Aristotle’s unmoved mover), it exists outside of (without) any consciousness, thought, or knowledge of it on the part of human beings. For to know the good is to be the good (thought thinking itself). If I am conscious, then I know that I am ignorant (of the good). But I do not know what I am ignorant of (I do not know the good of which I am ignorant). The Greeks do not pose and cannot answer the question posed by Montaigne: What do I know? For all they know is that they are ignorant of the good. If they ask, with Spinoza—What do I desire?—all they know is that, insofar as they desire something, they lack (or are ignorant of) it as their final cause (or end) that exists outside of (without) their knowledge, thought, or idea of it. I shall give here two simple (textual) examples of the precedence of the good over existence in Greek thought. In the Crito, in which Socrates opposes the one (who knows) to the many (the majority, who do not know), knowledge to opinion, the ruler to the ruled, he tells his eponymous interlocutor that “the most important thing is not life, but the good life” (48b). Near the end of the dialogue he represents the laws, in whose name he was condemned to death in the Apology, as his master and father before whom he, their slave and child, has no rights, as telling him: “‘Be persuaded by us who have brought you up, Socrates. [The laws, we see, make no effort to demonstrate their claims to Socrates!] Do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that when you arrive [dead] in Hades you may have all this as your defence before the rulers there’” (54b). In other words, existence is given for the sake of the good, and life is given for the sake of death. (In the Phaedo Socrates indicates that, since there is no pure knowledge within the life of the body and since philosophy, as love or desire of wisdom, cannot be realized in this life, knowledge can be attained only after death. Consequently, knowledge of the good and existence are eternally opposed to each other.) The subordination of existence to the good is also reflected in the statement that Socrates, in light of his observation that few people understand that it is better to suffer wrong (done to you by others) than to do wrong (to others), makes to Crito: “I know that only a few people hold this view or will hold it, and there is no common ground between those who hold this view and those who do not, but they inevitably despise each other’s views” (49cd). (The members of the Athenian jury who condemned Socrates to death would exemplify the many who do not hold Socrates’ contradictory position that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. Still, in condemning him to death, they support his view that it is better for him to suffer wrong from others than for him to do wrong to others.) It is important to observe that Socrates, in contrast with Spinoza, cannot conceive of the situation that would be better than either suffering wrong (from others) or doing wrong (to others), which would

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be to do the good to the other—to all others, all individuals—as yourself: to do unto others (all individuals) as you would have others (all individuals) do unto you. Thus, it follows that Socrates cannot conceive of a common point of view that would bind all human beings into what we saw Spinoza call one individual—one mind and one body—and that, in modernity, we call the body politic (democracy). My second example of the dependence of existence on the good in the Greek world is found in the Politics of Aristotle. In book III Aristotle raises the question of the relationship between the good citizen and the good man, between the relative, multiple, changing good of the citizen and the finite, one, unchanging good of man (qua man). The “good” of the citizen is relative to his place (role) within one or another of the six states or political regimes that Aristotle recognizes (the rule of one or monarchy; the rule of some or oligarchy; and the rule of many or democracy—and their three respective perversions50) and whose contradictory stasis is that they revolve (metamorphose) unceasingly into each other. The problem that Aristotle faces is the opposition between political life and the good (and this problem is not fundamentally different in the Nichomachean Ethics). Man is by nature a political animal; yet, since the political (like the ethical) good is relative (in-finite) and not one (finite), it is constantly changing and so unknowable and unknown in itself. The citizen is eternally ignorant of what the good is in itself. Thus, the dilemma that Aristotle faces is that the good man has no political (or ethical) existence—he cannot be found in any one of the six existing political regimes—and that the existence of the good citizen is not good—the good cannot exist in any one of the six existing political regimes. The contradictory opposition between existence and the good is unceasing (and insoluble) within the Greek world. It would be inconceivable for Aristotle (as for Plato) that all human beings, as constituted (politically and ethically) in and through conatus or desire, would equally effect the transitio to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection in embodying the exemplar of human nature, which is common to all human beings, in their existence. Aristotle has no concept of what, as we shall see, Spinoza calls sovereignty: the democratic rule of all over all, in which every singular individual exists and acts from the necessity of his nature alone (as essentially conatus or desire), from the necessity of his own right: sui juris.51 Having shown that actual existence constitutes the good of conatus or desire, Spinoza proceeds to drive home his point that the foundation of virtue is to seek one’s utile. No virtue, he observes, can be conceived prior to the conatus of preserving oneself. No one endeavors to preserve his being by cause of (for the sake of) something else. It follows, consequently, that the conatus of preserving oneself is the sole foundation of virtue. But then, as if recalling that

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he is demonstrating the dictates of reason, Spinoza switches again from the vocabulary of desire and conatus to that of understanding (intellectus). He points out that we can be said to act from virtue insofar as we are determined to do something on the basis of adequate, not inadequate, ideas. To act from virtue is nothing else than to act, to live, and to preserve our being—these three signify the same thing—from the guidance of reason, that is, from the foundation of seeking our own utile. Thus, Spinoza writes in proposition 26, “whatever we endeavor [to do] from reason is nothing else than to understand (intelligere); nor does the mind, insofar as it uses reason, judge anything useful (utile) to itself except what is conducive (leads) to understanding (intelligendum).” Consequently, good and evil can be nothing other than what leads to or impedes understanding. The suite of propositions in which Spinoza demonstrates how tightly bound together are the conatus of seeking our own utile, virtue, reason, and understanding attains its apogee in proposition 28: “The highest good (summum bonum) of the mind is knowledge of God, and the highest virtue of the mind is to know God.” The basic point that Spinoza makes in the demonstration is that, since to know God is to know the absolutely infinite being outside of (without) which nothing can be or be conceived, there can be no greater utile, or good, for the mind than knowledge of God. Once again, it is breathtaking not only that, according to Spinoza, human beings possess adequate knowledge of God as absolutely infinite but also that, in beginning with the conatus of (indefinitely) persisting in existence as their utile, they do not simply arrive at but actually begin with the knowledge of God—the cause of himself—as necessary existence. For God is the one thing that cannot be thought—by human beings—without existing and that cannot exist without being thought—by human beings. The very priority of conatus, desire, and the utile of persisting in actual existence, we see, involves and expresses the absolutely infinite (and creative) power of God. Spinoza does not here directly recall his foundational principle, on which, he says, all human beings agree—namely, that they are not born with knowledge of God, for they begin ignorant of the causes of their appetite in seeking their utile, in persevering in existence. Still, he has made clear to his readers that what the demonstration of the dictates of reason shows is that human beings can seek their utile of persevering indefinitely in existence only in common with their fellow human beings. Indeed, it is striking that, after having demonstrated that the supreme advantage or good of human beings is knowledge of God as absolutely infinite, Spinoza devotes the next suite of propositions to analyzing what it is that is common to (in agreement with) human nature and what it is that is contrary to (as contradictory of) human nature. The framework for this distinction is the fundamental difference between the infinite and the fi-

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nite. The infinite is the supreme good that is common to all human beings, without exception—insofar as they are true to their conatus. The finite (as final, external cause) is that which divides human beings against themselves. All singular individuals can equally share in (knowledge of) the infinite. But when human beings project their affects into finite ends as final causes, then they become locked in a deadly struggle with each other, consistent with the single axiom of part IV, according to which every singular thing is more powerful than every other singular thing and is destroyed by it. Spinoza initiates his discussion of what is common and of what is contrary to human nature by carefully distinguishing the contrary from the different. Since a singular thing that is absolutely different from our nature can neither aid nor constrain our power of acting, something can be good or evil for us only when it has something in common with us. But it is also the case that something can be evil for us, not through what it has in common with our nature but only insofar as it is contrary to our nature.52 Insofar as something agrees with our nature, however, it is necessarily good. The critical (paradoxical) point to be grasped here is that the common is its own standard, the standard both of what is common (as good for our nature) and of what is contrary (as evil for our nature). There is nothing good or evil in the nature of things but only in relation to our human nature, to our mind—depending on whether it agrees with or opposes our conatus or desire. Once he establishes his general framework of the common, the contrary, and the different, Spinoza then observes in proposition 32 that human beings do not agree with, that is, they are contrary (evil) to each other in nature insofar as they are subject to the passions. In the demonstration he notes that to agree in nature means to agree in power (potentia), not in impotence (impotentia) or negation and, consequently, also not in passion.53 In the scholium of proposition 32 Spinoza remarks that the issue is patent through itself. Things cannot be said to agree in nature on the basis either of their differences or of their negations (of what they do not have). He gives two examples to illustrate his point. First, to say that black and white agree only in not being red is to affirm that they agree in no thing (nothing). Second, to say that a stone and a man agree only in being finite (finitus) and impotent, in not existing from the necessity of their own nature, and, finally, in being indefinitely surpassed by the power of external causes is altogether to affirm that they agree in no thing (nothing). Therefore, not only do we see that what is common or in agreement with our human nature affirms its existence as act and power, but also it is evident (through itself!) that what is finitus reflects our impotent, passive dependence on external causes of which we are ignorant. Human beings “agree” in common (in the commonwealth, where they take action in common!) with each other insofar as they exist from the necessity of their infinite

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nature alone, of their causa sui, not insofar as they are finite and impotent and, in their ignorance, dependent on finite, external causes. Still, as we know, Spinoza does not directly attribute the concepts of infinity and causa sui to human beings, although he uses his key definition of freedom—to act and to exist from the necessity of nature alone—for both God and human beings. Rather, Spinoza says that human beings possess knowledge of God as absolutely infinite. But then it is clear (per se!) that it is not finite things—in their passive, impotent dependence on external causes—that possess infinite knowledge but only infinite beings. “Infinity,” we shall increasingly see, is a concept that characterizes, not the common order of nature but human (and divine) nature as embodied in ethical and political relationships. After indicating further that human beings, insofar as they are subject to their passions, are in conflict with and contrary to not only each other but also themselves, Spinoza concludes in proposition 35 that, insofar as human beings live by the guidance of reason, “they necessarily always agree only in nature.” When human beings live by the guidance of reason, he explains further, “they necessarily do only those things that are good for human nature and consequently for each man, that is, those things that agree with the nature of each man.” In each of the two corollaries of proposition 35 Spinoza expounds further on what it means for human beings to live by the guidance of human reason. In Corollary 1 he observes that “nothing singular is given in nature that is more useful (utilius) than the man who lives by the guidance of reason. For what is most useful (utilissimum) to man is what most of all agrees with his nature, that is (as known through itself) man.” Spinoza observes further in Corollary 2 that “when every man maximally seeks what is useful to himself (suum sibi utile), then maximally are men useful to one another.” He recalls his earlier demonstrations that the more individuals seek their own utile and endeavor to preserve themselves the more virtue they possess, that is, the greater is their power to act from the laws of their nature alone or, in other words, from the guidance of reason. In the scholium of Corollary 2 Spinoza points out that quotidian experience vividly confirms his demonstration that when individuals seek their own utile they are most useful to each other with the proverbial saying that he finds in the mouth of almost everyone: “man is God to man” (hominem homini Deum esse).54 It is interesting to note that Spinoza then goes on in the scholium to point out that, in reality, human beings for the most part play the devil (I interpolate!) to each other, for they seldom live by the guidance of reason or their own nature. Still, he observes, people can scarcely lead a solitary life. Besides, many more advantages (commoda) than disadvantages (damna) arise from the common society of men. May satirists and theologians attack life as evil and melancholics praise the uncultivated and savage (agrestis) life and show contempt for

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human beings and admire the animals (bruta)! Spinoza exclaims. Still, people know from experience (experientur) that with mutual aid they can much more easily obtain for themselves the things of which they are in need and that only by joining forces can they avoid the dangers that ubiquitously threaten them— not to mention that it is far more excellent and more worthy of our knowledge to contemplate the doings (facta) of men than of brutes. I have summarized these atypically informal comments of Spinoza in order to highlight the paradox that, precisely because human beings are God to one another insofar as they exist and act from their common nature alone, they are also contrary and opposed to each other—as enemies—insofar as they live in the natural state and follow their natural passions, of whose causes they are ignorant. Like Rousseau, Spinoza knows that the alternative to shouldering the burdens of social life is not to escape into the forest and to live the solitary life with the bears in the natural state.55 Rather, the paradox is that when human beings do not live by the social dictates of reason, by the dictates of their conatus in seeking their utile as the good common to all human beings, they have, by that very fact, relapsed into the natural state. Instead of effecting transitio to greater perfection, they have effected transition (they have regressed) to lesser perfection. But the paradox remains. For, as Spinoza has shown, evil, like good, presupposes what is common to all human beings as their standard. The evil is not what, as absolutely different from us, has no bearing on our lives. The natural passions, as reflecting the natural state, are a part of us (human beings are a part of nature). The challenge for human beings is to comprehend (live) that part wholly—to exist and to act from the necessity of their common nature alone—and not to reduce the whole of their human nature to the part. The very transition to ever greater perfection is the constant transformation of our partial existence into a yet greater whole that is more adequate to the absolute infinity of God, as it is to the exemplar of our own (infinitely) human nature. It is hardly surprising, then, that in proposition 36 Spinoza demonstrates yet another feature of the summum bonum: “the highest good of those who follow virtue is common to all, and all can equally take joy in (gaudere) it.” Because the highest good is to know God, this good is common to all and can be equally possessed by all human beings “insofar as they are of the same nature.” In the scholium of proposition 36 Spinoza dismisses the idea that the highest good might not be common to all human beings on the grounds that, since the very essence of man is defined by reason, “man could not be or be conceived if he did not have the power of enjoying this highest good.” Spinoza recalls that, according to proposition 47 of part II, “it pertains to the essence of the human mind to have adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God.”

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However, it is surprising, surely, to see Spinoza proceed to state in proposition 37 that the desire according to which we wish for others the good that we wish for ourselves increases as our knowledge of God increases. Desire increases, not just the good as the “object” of our desire! In other words, we see that the good—knowledge of God—is the creation itself of our desire. The good is not separate from desire as its end but is its very content. Desire is the very action of knowing (and loving) God. Spinoza’s demonstration of this proposition involves two basic steps: 1. The good (as virtue) that we desire for ourselves we desire for all other human beings. 2. Desire is the essence of the mind, which consists of knowledge of God. “Therefore, as the essence of the mind involves greater knowledge of God, so will the desire, by which the one who seeks virtue desires for another the good that he wants for himself, also be greater.” Spinoza then provides what he calls an alternative demonstration of proposition 37: The good, which man wants for himself and loves, he will love more constantly if he sees others love the same thing; and, therefore, he will endeavor to have others love the same thing; and because this good is common to all and all are able to take joy in it, therefore (by the same reason), he will endeavor (conabitur) to have all take joy in it, and this [conatus] will be the greater the more he enjoys (fruetur) this good. Q. E. D.56

The more I enjoy the good the more I want others to enjoy it. The more others enjoy the good the more I enjoy it (or the more they want me to enjoy it). It is striking how, in these two demonstrations that desire (conatus) grows as knowledge of God (the good common to all human beings) grows, Spinoza brings together the good, knowledge, love, God, mind, human beings, desire, conatus, and fruition into a dynamic whole. While both demonstrations feature desire (conatus) as the very essence of the golden rule—of loving God above all others and your neighbor as yourself (without directly mentioning it)—the first emphasizes desire as mind and knowledge of God and the second conatus as the common fruition of the good on the part of all human beings. The first, we might say, is more distinctly ontological (and ethical) and the second more distinctly political (emphasizing human relations). Still, what is most important to see about proposition 37 overall is that, in demonstrating that desire (conatus) grows as our fruition of the good, which is common to all human beings, grows, it is simply another version of Spinoza’s concept of desire as the transitio to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection.

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Conatus involves and expresses the (eternal) enlargement of our very conception of what it is that constitutes the (infinite) exemplar of human nature. It is then fitting that Spinoza, in the two lengthy scholia of proposition 37, in the first of which he indicates that he has now completed what he promised in the scholium of proposition 18 to demonstrate regarding the dictates of reason, takes care to point out that there is also a malign side of desire in wanting others to love what I love. In scholium 1 he observes that, if, instead of desiring for others what I desire for myself, I merely desire that others love what I love, we arrive at a concept of one as excluding others (and so hateful) and not as including others (and so loving). In other words, for an individual to reduce the desire of others to his own one desire is not to express true virtue or power but rather to suffer the impotence of being “led by things that are outside of him” and being “determined by them to do those things that the common constitution of external things [demands], not, however, those things that his own nature, considered in itself, demands.” Thus we see that, when the one excludes others, it is passively determined by others as external to the one. However, when the one includes others, it is actively determined from the nature of one alone as common to others. Then, without any preparation at all, Spinoza proceeds in scholium 1 to offer definitions of religio and pietas (morality). He states that he attributes to religion “whatever we desire and do, of which we are the cause, insofar as we have the idea of God or insofar as we know God” and that he calls morality the desire of doing the good that is generated in us by our living by the guidance of reason. But these definitions of religion and of morality are strangely perplexing. For, in addition to the fact that Spinoza provides no explanation of why he offers them here, without further discussion, they patently do not follow from and are not consistent with the propositions of the Ethics. Since Spinoza has demonstrated that to live by the guidance of reason is to know God as the supreme good that is enjoyed commonly by all human beings, religion cannot be distinguished from morality on the basis of the distinction between knowing God and following the dictates of reason. It is even more confusing to determine what Spinoza has in mind when his definition of religion is identical with the conception of philosophy that he articulates in the Ethics. Indeed, since it is precisely knowledge of God—as enacted in and through the golden rule—that constitutes the basis of the common life for human beings, it is also hard to understand how he could make any meaningful distinction between, on the one hand, religion or morality (not to mention philosophy and ethics) and, on the other hand, politics, to which, in fact, Spinoza proceeds to devote scholium 2 of proposition 37. When Spinoza indicates at the beginning of scholium 2 that he will discuss the difference between the natural state and the civil state of human beings, the reader anticipates, surely, that this difference will reflect the distinctions

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that Spinoza makes central to parts III and IV of the Ethics: between the passive affects (passions) and the active affects (actions); between the common order of nature and human nature (essence, conatus, desire) by whose necessity all human beings are freely and commonly determined. Will not the civil state be characterized by the dictates of reason according to which individuals desire for others what they desire for themselves? Do not all human beings commonly enjoy the highest good of knowing God? What, however, is confounding about the discussion of the natural and the civil states of human beings to which Spinoza devotes scholium 2 is that he does not place it in the context of his discussion of the dictates of reason on the basis of which human beings forge a common life together. Instead, he opposes the civil state to the dictates of reason, as we shall see. This is why I indicated earlier that in both scholia of proposition 37 there is a sense in which Spinoza takes care to show the malign side of desire or conatus, according to whose enormous power individuals (or groups of individuals or the whole of society itself) can undertake to bend others to their own advantage as the good for all (i.e., to tyrannize over others). Spinoza initiates his discussion of the difference between the natural state and the civil state with the dramatic claim that “everyone exists by the highest right of nature and [that], consequently, everyone by the highest right of nature does those things that follow from the necessity of his nature.” What ensues from this initial proposition, then, is that everyone, by the highest right of nature, determines what is good and what is evil according to his own advantage (utilitas). Spinoza indicates that there would be no problem if all human beings sought their own advantage according to the guidance of reason, for then each person would possess his own right without injury to others. Human beings, however, do not live according to the guidance of reason, he observes. Rather, in being subject to their affects, they live contrary to and in conflict with each other. Nevertheless, because human beings require one another’s aid and thus need to live in common, “it is necessary for them to give up their natural right (jure suo naturali cedant) and to make each other secure that they will do nothing that could harm another.” But the only way in which people who are subject to their contrary and conflicting affects can come to trust each other is when they are subjected to and constrained by an even more powerful and opposite affect: the fear of greater harm. It follows, then, that it is not individuals in the natural state but only civil societas that determines what is good and what is evil. It is solely society that has the power of prescribing a common way of life (communem vivendi rationem) to people and of making and enforcing laws, “not with reason, which cannot constrain the affects, but with threats.”57 It is easily understood, therefore, Spinoza continues, that “nothing is given in the natural state that from the consent of all is good or evil.” Indeed, be-

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cause each individual in the natural state determines what is good and what is evil solely on the basis of his own utilitas, “he is not held by any law to obey anyone except himself alone. And, therefore, in the natural state sin cannot be conceived.” Furthermore, since it is the civil state that determines what is good and what is evil and since everyone is held to obey the state, sin is nothing but disobedience. It is equally the case that justice and injustice are not found in the natural state. For in the natural state no one is master of anything from common consent, and nothing can be said to be this man’s and not that man’s; “but all things are all men’s (sed omnia omnium sunt: but all [things] are of all [men]).” It follows, therefore, that it is only in the civil state that it is decided from common consent what belongs to one individual and what to another. Then, having distinguished between the natural state and the civil state and shown that good and evil, like justice and injustice, are not natural but civil, Spinoza abruptly concludes scholium 2 and thus proposition 37 with the statement that just and unjust, etc., “are extrinsic notions, not, however, attributes that explain the nature of the mind.” What is confounding, yet ultimately instructive, I think, about the way in which Spinoza distinguishes between the natural state and the civil state in scholium 2 of proposition 37 is that he underlines (indirectly) how protean his concept of “nature” or “natural right” is and thus how important it is to pin it down (by introducing a critical distinction between right and nature). In beginning with the principle that everyone by the highest right of nature exists and does solely those things that follow from the necessity of his nature, he raises (implicitly) the fundamental issue of how this supreme right of nature is to be understood (or realized). He compounds the issue yet further in pointing out that, when individuals exist and act by the highest right of nature, they determine what is good and what is evil according to their own utilitas (advantage or self-interest). But the problem, he observes, is that human beings do not live by the dictates of reason. Rather, in living by the highest right of naturally determining what is good and what is evil according to their own self-advantage, they are subject to their conflicting (contradictory) affects. Therefore, since the natural right of pursuing their own individual advantage makes it impossible for human beings to live in common accord with each other, they must cede their natural right to exist to society, which alone has the power of imposing a common life on them. In making and enforcing laws, “not with reason, which cannot constrain the affects, but with threats,” the civil state is, consequently, the sole judge (principle) of what is good and what is evil, of the just and the unjust. It is important to discern why and how the distinction that Spinoza makes here between the natural state and the civil state is deeply perplexing, for only then will it also be instructive for us. His claim that good and evil, like justice

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and injustice, are civil but not natural, that is, that they are found in the civil state and not in the natural state, is consistent with what we have seen him argue in the Ethics (and also consistent with his two political treatises, as we shall see). But what is so peculiar about the concepts of justice and injustice that we find in scholium 2 is that they are completely arbitrary.58 They are said by Spinoza to be based on the threat of a greater harm, that is, on ceding the natural right to exist as a lesser harm, not on reason or common agreement (notwithstanding his observation that consent characterizes the civil state, not the natural state). Further, he sharply opposes society (the civil state) to the highest right of nature by which the individual exists. Indeed, once he has shown that the highest right of nature to exist coincides with the self-interest of individuals in determining for themselves what is good and what is evil, Spinoza opposes the highest right of nature to the dictates of reason and identifies it with the contrary affects whose conflicts prevent human beings from forging a common life together. Human beings, therefore, must cede their natural right—the highest right of nature by which they exist and do those things that follow from the necessity of their nature—in order to live in society, which alone has the power of opposing (suppressing) the contrary affects of individuals by an even greater threat of harm. What is so peculiar, then, in Spinoza’s description of the natural state and the civil state in scholium 2 is that they would appear to have switched positions. In describing the civil state as the power that threatens citizens with greater harm than if they remained in the natural state, one natural affect has simply replaced another. On the other hand, the highest natural right, in being identified with the highest right to exist on the part of human beings, would seem to be the very basis of any consistent concept of the civil state as the common life of human kind. But, as I have already noted, Spinoza here distinguishes the highest right from reason and assimilates it to the contrary affects that put human beings into conflict with each other. Ultimately, what is so strange about Spinoza’s description of both the natural and the civil states in scholium 2 is that reason is absent from each of them. Yet it is the dictates of reason, according to Spinoza’s presentation of them in part IV, of which proposition 37 is itself their culmination, that embody conatus as the basis of the common life of human beings, whose highest good is knowing and loving God and neighbor. Why, then, is there such disparity between Spinoza’s two presentations? Does he simply contradict himself? Why is reason absent from both the natural state and the civil state in the description that Spinoza gives of them in scholium 2 of proposition 37? How is this possible? What can we learn from his description? The answers to these questions are to be found in what are, I think, the two critical elements in the description that Spinoza gives of the natural and the

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civil states in scholium 2. First, in beginning with the principle that all individuals exist by the highest right of nature and consequently act with the highest right of nature from the necessity of their nature, he articulates the very basis of the distinction between the common order of nature and human nature, between the passive affects and the active affects, that constitutes the structuring principle of the Ethics. Equally, when Spinoza proceeds to state that everyone, by the highest right of nature, determines what is good and what is evil according to his own advantage (utilitas), he formulates the principle of conatus that constitutes the very basis of the dictates of reason. Second, Spinoza then proceeds to distinguish these two principles, which provide the very basis of the distinction that he has earlier made between the dictates of reason and the passive affects, from reason and to identify them with the affects, which, although not so named, are clearly passive (as the basis of the natural conflicts that make it impossible for human beings to forge a common consensus). It is particularly ironic that Spinoza, having indicated earlier in part IV that he hopes to overcome the prejudice of those who view the pursuit of individual self-interest as the basis, not of virtue, but of immorality, here provides the rationale for the very position which he so strongly opposes. When human beings exist and act from the necessity of their nature alone and so embody conatus in the pursuit of their utile, they oppose reason and thus live and act in opposition to their fellow human beings. The only means of exit from the natural state of the conflictual affects is, consequently, to disavow the natural right of existing and acting, which Spinoza heretofore in the Ethics calls conatus, and to cede to society the even more powerful, natural affect of using fear of greater harm to establish common norms of justice and injustice. As I indicated earlier, it is clear from Spinoza’s description of both the natural state and the civil state in scholium 2 that reason exists in neither of them. Indeed, the second is but the first magnified into greater fear of retribution and thus subject, one assumes, to the contradiction of finite power that Spinoza describes in the single axiom of part IV: that every singular individual in nature is subject to another more powerful, singular individual that destroys it. The description that Spinoza gives of the natural and civil states in scholium 2 patently contradicts, it is now clear, everything that he writes in the Ethics59 (and also in his political treatises, as we shall see), while it is no less selfcontradictory. We have found that it is not consistent with his concept of the dictates of reason. We shall equally discover that it is not consistent with the concept of freedom about which Spinoza writes, in eloquent, moving terms, in the final propositions of part IV. Why, then, is this description here? I do not know. But it is clear that it does not represent Spinoza’s own position. Still, Spinoza is too great a thinker for the passage to be uncritically ignored (as

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simply inconsistent), or to be uncritically dismissed (as simply contradictory), or, finally, to be uncritically accepted (as simply true). Is there something that we can learn from it? I think the answer is yes, in two ways, the first minor and more obvious, the second major and less obvious. The first way, minor and more obvious, in which we can learn from the contradictory account of the natural and the civil states in scholium 2 is to recall that through the very title of part IV Spinoza emphasizes that the strengths of the affects constitute human bondage (servitus). We have seen Spinoza insist in parts III and IV of the Ethics that human beings are and remain, always, a part of nature (nature is a part of human beings). The strengths—vires—of the affects are not only virile but also virulent. Spinoza makes it evident that it is only on the basis of a clear, sober (and geometrical!) assessment of the enormous strengths of our natural affects that we can learn how reason can effectively constrain and moderate them by showing them to constitute the virtus (power) of humankind. (It is important to see that for Spinoza “reason” is not an external power exercising control over the natural affects as objects outside of itself, notwithstanding his formulation. Rather, reason expresses the very essence of conatus, desire, and active affect—of nature itself. The mind, we remember, is, as the idea of the body, the same thing as the body, while expressing the eternal and infinite attribute of thought. Reason is the consciousness of desire that we can overcome, surmount, and appropriate the contradictions of the natural, finite, external, and passive affects solely in and through knowing the infinite and eternal essence of God as the highest good of human beings and loving our neighbor as the absolute standard of ourselves.) The second, major, and less obvious way in which we can learn from Spinoza’s contradictory description of the natural and civil states in scholium 2 is closely related to the first. As Spinoza himself makes clear and as I have emphasized, we can recognize that we are a part of the common order of nature only if we view this part within the whole of human nature. If we were wholly natural, wholly dependent on the passions as reflecting the external causes of nature of which we are totally ignorant, we would, in our ignorance, have no knowledge of our nature. We would not be conscious of the appetite of seeking our utile while being contradicted by the causes of our appetite, of which we are ignorant. What we learn, then, from Spinoza’s contradictory account of the natural and the civil states in scholium 2 is that, while the claim that we exist from the highest right of nature is constantly subject to being turned into its opposite—reflecting the natural state as the war of all (affects) against all (affects)—I cannot even have a concept of the natural state without (outside of) the concept of the civil state dictating reason as its own standard.

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Before concluding our discussion of scholium 2, it is also important to examine the (unsupported) claim of Spinoza that ideas of good and evil, together with those of justice and injustice, etc., are extrinsic to and do not explain the (intrinsic) nature of the mind, with which he brings the scholium to an abrupt close. Are these ideas extrinsic to the mind because they are civil and not natural? But we have already seen that the difference between the natural and the civil states, as formulated in scholium 2, not only is selfcontradictory but also contradicts the essential elements of the Ethics that we have considered up to now. Indeed, those elements also indicate that ethical values can in no meaningful sense be understood as extrinsic to the nature of the mind. All we need do is to recall that Spinoza shows in part IV that conatus, as the appetite of seeking our own utile, constitutes the very basis of virtus and thus of the dictates of reason. Further, we saw Spinoza indicate in the preface to part IV that, while he eschews comparative or finite (extrinsic!) notions of good and evil, as of perfection and imperfection, he nevertheless retains these words “because we desire to form an [intrinsic!] idea of man as the exemplar of human nature.” We judge something to be (intrinsically!) good or evil, perfect or imperfect, he writes, insofar as we more and more approach or recede from “the exemplar of human nature that we [intrinsically!] propose to ourselves.” We may also recall that in the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza shows that there is nothing (intrinsic) in itself that is sacred or profane but only in relation to the mind—that is, in terms of how we use (or abuse) words and things, of how we conduct our lives. We see, therefore, that, just as we have found that the intrinsic difference between the natural state and the civil state is not that described by Spinoza in scholium 2, so the distinction between what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to the mind is not that between ideas of good and evil, etc., and the mind itself. For, as Spinoza makes clear in part IV of the Ethics, the fundamental (and only) distinction to consider is that between active affects and passive affects; between human nature and the common order of nature; between, on the one hand, existing and acting from the necessity of one’s nature alone and, on the other hand, being determined to exist and to act by external causes, the nature of which we are ignorant. To claim that the ideas of good and evil, etc., are extrinsic to the human mind suggests that the mind is natural and not civil. But we have already seen that it is precisely this distinction that leads Spinoza into the contradictory morass of scholium 2. For then both the natural state and the civil state turn into bondage to the strengths of the affects, the first represented by the arbitrary power of the individual, the second by the arbitrary power of society (which could, with logical consistency, be held by a singular individual in opposition to all others). What is intrinsic to the mind, surely it

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is now clear, is the fact that, as the idea of the body, as conatus or desire, it forges the dictates of reason as constituting the common life, at once ethical and political, of human beings. In other words, the mind will remain extrinsic to itself insofar as it fails to account for the ideas of good and evil, together with those of justice and injustice, etc., as intrinsic to its conatus of existing and acting from the necessity of its nature alone. One of the salutary consequences arising from the contradictory account that Spinoza gives of the difference between the natural and the civil states in scholium 2 is the recognition that it forces upon the (self-conscious) reader, that, willy-nilly, human beings are intrinsically involved with the ethics of determining good and evil, along with justice and injustice. Either they do so extrinsically, in remaining enslaved to their affects as passions. Or they do so intrinsically, in constituting, from the necessity of their nature alone, the affects as the dictates of reason. The contradiction into which the mind, for which the ideas of good and evil, as of justice and injustice, are extrinsic, falls is that it is then unable to distinguish between what is natural and what is just. It is unable to account for natural right—the right of nature—which, in its ignorance, it cedes to yet another arbitrary power. One wonders, indeed, if this fall is essentially different from that of Adam and Eve, who are (apparently, contradictorily) informed by God that knowledge of good and evil is extrinsic to their mind. We may recall that, according to Spinoza (whose account of Adam and Eve in proposition 68 of part IV we shall shortly encounter), the foundation on which all humans must agree is that the human mind is not born with knowledge of God: it is not born with knowledge of good and evil. On the contrary, while the mind begins conscious of the appetite of seeking its utile, it also begins ignorant of the causes by which it seeks its advantage. What Spinoza then proceeds in the Ethics to demonstrate, as ethics, is that for the mind to comprehend the causes of its appetite, for the mind as desire or conatus to be appetite truly conscious of itself, is to know God as the highest good of human beings. That the mind comprehends God as the infinite and eternal good is what all human beings share in common insofar as they desire for their neighbor what they desire for themselves. It follows, then, that good and evil, along with justice and injustice, etc., constitute the intrinsic nature, the very essence, of the human mind. Q. E. D. I can now indicate, in summary, that there are two reasons that the contradictory description that Spinoza gives, in IV.37S2, of the natural and the civil states and of the mind as (naturally) extrinsic to the (intrinsically civil) ideas of good and evil, together with those of justice and injustice, etc., is salutary. First, he reminds us that the power of conatus, of desire, of the affects is enormous and constantly subject to perversion (which occurs when the affects are projected into nature as final causes whose ends human beings then worship

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as created in their own image). Second, we learn that “nature” or “natural right” is a meaningful (powerful or virtuous) concept only when understood in terms of the critical difference, to keep to Spinoza’s distinctions, between active and passive affects; between adequate and inadequate ideas; between, on the one hand, acting and existing from the necessity of one’s nature alone, as that which is common to all human beings, and, on the other hand, being determined by external causes, of which human beings are ignorant (and which, in fact, are simply other finite, human beings, our singular enemies). Spinoza’s account of the natural and civil states in scholium 2 is blatantly contradictory for the simple reason, as I indicated before, that the civil state, as he describes it, is based on the passive, contrary affects no less than is the natural state, while the foundation that he imputes to the natural state—that human beings exist and act from the necessity of their nature alone—is identical not only with the concept of freedom that he gives in definition 6 of part I but also with the concepts of desire, conatus, reason, God, and thus the dictates of reason that are central to part IV. Outside of scholium 2, that is, in the mature work, generally, of Spinoza, the power of his analysis rests on the fact that, in presupposing a concept of desire (reason) as appetite conscious of itself, he demonstrates, constantly, that truth is its own standard, the standard both of itself as paradox and of falsehood as contradictory. (Falsehood as contradiction cannot be understood from itself alone.) Scholium 2, in contrast, has the distinctive and unique power of compelling the reader to supply the consciousness of contradiction that is absent from the text, the consciousness that contradiction cannot be its own standard, the consciousness that, when consciousness of contradiction is absent—on the part of both text and reader—the result is likely to be disastrous. In the case of scholium 2 the failure on the part of readers to account for textual contradiction can easily lead them to identify the contradictory teaching of scholium 2 with the overall position of Spinoza and thus to misconceive the whole of his thought. We, indeed, learn from scholium 2 what it means to engage, to know the power of the (passive, external, finite, natural, and contradictory) affects. We also learn what it means to learn that lesson, what it means to know, to comprehend the power of the affects. For we cannot account for the affects, we cannot distinguish between the natural and the civil states of humankind except on the basis of the standard that Spinoza, in the Ethics, calls desire, conatus, reason— ultimately, that is, from the beginning, both God, knowledge of whom constitutes the highest good of all human beings, and neighbor, who constitutes for all individuals the exemplar of human nature: man is God to man. In the suite of propositions that follow proposition 37, Spinoza examines desire in terms of the fundamental contrast between the active affect of happiness and the passive affect of sadness and their related affects such as love

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and hate. He shows that the active affects, in affirming existence and enlarging our power of action, are always good, while the passive affects, in devaluing existence and diminishing our power of action, are always evil. Thus he writes in the scholium of Corollary 2 of proposition 45 that “the greater the happiness with which we are affected, the more we pass to greater perfection, that is, the more it is necessary for us to participate [in life] with regard to the divine nature (de natura divina).” In the succeeding proposition Spinoza observes that, when we live by the guidance of reason, we endeavor as much as possible to repay (compensare) the hate, anger, contempt, etc., of others towards us with love or generosity. Although hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred, it can be extinguished by love. Indeed, he notes in the scholium of proposition 46 that to avenge wrongs with reciprocal hatred is to live altogether miserably. “But, in contrast, he who [like the ardent paladin!] is eager to challenge (expugnare) hate with love is truly happy, fights confidently, resists many men as easily as one, and requires the least help of fortune. Those whom he truly conquers yield happily, not, indeed, from a lack (defectu) but from an increase of [their] strengths (virium).” That love enlarges our capacity for existence and action leads Spinoza to state in proposition 52 that what he calls “active acceptance of self ”— acquiescentia in se ipso60—arises from reason insofar as “man contemplates himself and his power of acting” and to declare in the scholium that “active acceptance of self is truly the highest thing (summum) that we can hope for.”61 Two more propositions round out Spinoza’s affirmation of the active affects as the embodiment of reason and acquiescence in self. In proposition 59 he writes that “to all actions62 to which we are determined from an affect that is a passion we can be determined by reason without it.” This proposition contrasts sharply with proposition 7 of part IV, in which Spinoza states that an affect can be constrained and removed only by a contrary, stronger affect. He uses proposition 7, as we saw, as the basis of his argument in scholium 2 of proposition 37 that it is not reason but only a greater threat of harm that can constrain the conflicting affects by which human beings are beset. But now Spinoza argues that the only truly effective, “contrary and stronger” affect is, for example, love in overcoming hate.63 In proposition 61 he writes that “desire that arises from reason can have no excess,” given that “desire, absolutely considered, is itself the essence of man insofar as it is conceived to be determined in whatever manner to doing something.”64 Since the desire that arises from reason “is generated in us insofar as we act, it is the essence itself or nature of man insofar as it is conceived as determined to do those things that are adequately conceived through the essence alone of man.” Therefore, if reason could be excessive, then human nature (“the essence of man”) would exceed itself. This, however, is a manifest contradiction. So desire can have no excess. Q. E. D.

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Having now shown that we can grasp the dynamic union of reason, desire, action, and human nature (“the essence of man”)—together with love and the “active acceptance of self ”—solely in terms of a fundamental distinction between the active affects and the passive affects, Spinoza concludes part IV of the Ethics with an eloquent account of freedom as the expression of active affect. Still, as if to remind us that in part IV he is committed to demonstrating the strengths of the affects as human bondage, Spinoza also makes it clear that man is not born free. It is in this context, then, that, in proposition 68, he takes up the story of Adam and Eve who, he indicates in the Political Treatise, were not “free” to fall since their ignorance of good and evil expressed their impotence, not their power of action. In the scholium of proposition 66 Spinoza notes that, if what he has now written is compared with his demonstration of the strengths of the affects prior to proposition 18,65 it will easily be seen how different is “the man who is led by [passive] affect alone, or by opinion, from the man who is led by reason.”66 He continues: While the former [the man who is led by passive affect alone] does willy nilly the things of which he is most of all (maximè) ignorant, the latter [the man who is led by reason], however, enacts the will (morem gerit) of no one except himself and does only those things that he knows are first in life (in vitâ prima) and that, therefore, he most of all desires; and, therefore, I call the former a slave (servum) and the later, however, a free man (liberum).

Spinoza’s statement that the free man, in following solely his own will (mos/moris also means custom, habit, and character), desires above all else those things that he knows are life’s priorities raises yet again the issue of the relationship between my will (or desire) and (what I know to be) the prima of life. However, since the distinction between the free man and the enslaved man is constituted by the difference between living in the freedom that knowledge of the active affects brings and living in the bondage that ignorance of the passive affects brings, it follows that the free man can enact the will of no one except himself solely insofar as he desires above all else the things that are first in life—for all human beings (ultimately, knowledge of God and love of neighbor). Otherwise, to equate one’s will with life’s priorities would mean that the free man was indistinguishable from the slave, whose bondage to the passive affects represents the natural state in which every singular individual is dependent on and destroyed by every other singular individual who is yet more powerful. It is precisely because the free man desires above all else, that is, from his very essence and nature (conatus), the prima of life that Spinoza declares in proposition 67 that “the free man thinks about nothing less than about death and [that] his wisdom is a meditation, not of death but of life.”

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The demonstration of this proposition is a summary of the whole of the content of parts III and IV of the Ethics: “The free man, that is, he who lives from the dictate of reason alone, is not led by fear of death but directly desires the good (bonum directè cupit), that is, to act, to live, and to preserve his being from the foundation of seeking his own utile.” I understand Spinoza to mean by his concise and again highly concentrated phrase—the free man “directly desires the good”—that desire is directly the good, that we actively judge something to be the good insofar as we desire it. But this extraordinary identification of desire and the good also means that both are directly (fundamentally) identified with existence: to act, to live, to endeavor (conar) to preserve one’s own utile. The radical identification of desire and the good provides the context for comprehending the foundation of human nature, which, as we know, Spinoza formulates in the appendix of part I and which, he declares there (without argument), all people acknowledge as true. That foundation, we saw, is composed of two elements: appetite conscious of seeking its own utile and ignorance of its own causes. Human beings are born conscious of their appetite in seeking their own utile. Yet they are also born ignorant of the causes of their appetite. They do not know in the beginning that their appetite as desire or conatus, through which they endeavor to persevere in their own existence, is the actual essence of their individual human being (I paraphrase III.7). In other words, all human beings are born in desire. They are born as desire, as desiring the good (as their utile). But, to begin with, they do not know the good as (their) desire. They are ignorant that desire, as their actual essence, is the(ir) good. Subject in their ignorance to the passions, they project the good of their desire (their desire of the good) into final causes, to whose ends, in their superstitious ignorance, they subject themselves, together with God. In making the radical identification of desire and the good the summation of the whole of his teaching on the affects, Spinoza shows us that the foundation of human nature, as articulated in the appendix of part I, can be understood only in terms of the fundamental distinction between freedom and bondage. It is the free man who knows that the end, by whose cause (that is, for the sake of which) we do something, is appetite itself (I paraphrase IV.D7). Appetite—desire or conatus—is its own end (its own cause). The free man is distinguished from the man in bondage to his passive affects by the fact that he knows directè that desire as its own cause is the good itself. The paradox, as always, is that, were human beings not conscious in the beginning, from the beginning, of the appetite of seeking their utile as their end, as their good, they would never be able to know in the end that their good is desire, that their desire is the good (which is the very basis of the knowledge of God and love of neighbor and hence of eternal blessedness and salvation). Still, it is also the

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case that human beings, while born in and as desire, are born ignorant of the good of their desire—they are ignorant of the fact that, in desiring the good directly, they are free—are subject to their passions and live (we can say) in the natural state, where singular individuals are destroyed by yet more powerful, singular individuals. It is the very identity of the good and the desire that is the basis of all idolatry and evil, as of all salvation and good. It is little wonder, then, that Spinoza, in celebrating the freedom of the singular individual who knows that to desire the good directly is to enact the prima of life that are good for all human beings (love of God and of neighbor), insists, continually, upon the fact that human beings remain subject to their passions, that they are part of nature, that they are constantly tempted to pervert the identity of the good and desire by reducing the good to their own (finite) desire and their own desire to the (finite) good. We also understand why, then, Spinoza makes transitio (the temporality of action, the action of temporality)—as distinct from mere duration—central to desire and the good. Desire is always transition to ever more (when it is not to less) perfect desire—as the good. The identity of good and desire is not given in itself but only in and through the creation of my appetite in seeking its own utile. This identity is dynamic, dialectical, dramatic, divine—and diabolical. It involves, continuously (eternally), my transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection as the realization (the enactment) of the exemplar of human nature, of which Spinoza writes in the preface to part IV, as we saw. Because I am not born free, because the identity of desire and the good is given, not in itself but only in the conatus of persevering in my very essence as an actually existing individual, the task of freely understanding that I am my own end, that my desire is the good, is an eternal one. Thus, we see that the knowledge possessed by the free man, according to which he founds the prima of life in and through the identity of desire and the good, embodies the paradox that he is not born free, the paradox that the identity of the good and desire is not given in itself but only in the transitio from conatus to ever greater conatus, from desire to ever greater desire, from freedom to ever greater freedom (when the transition is not to their opposite). Again, it is important to see that there is no (direct) transition from bondage to freedom (from the natural state to the civil state). For it is solely the free man who, conscious of his bondage to the passions, learns, in following the dictates of reason, that is, in desiring the good directly, that he must continuously account for the fact that his mind is first and last the idea of his body as subject to the external (and eternal) laws of nature. What do I know? I know that I am a part of nature. The question, then, is: How do I live when I know that I, as a part of nature, am not simply subject to nature, that is, to final causes of which I am ignorant? What are my desire and the good in light of

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the fact that singular individuals, when subject to their natural passions, are opposed to each other and thus destructive of each other, that is, when they are conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile but ignorant of the causes of their appetite? It is only because human beings are not born free—yet conscious of their appetite—that they face the paradoxical task of discovering that, in order to make the transition to freedom (from bondage to the passions), they must know that their desire is the good. Freedom and the Story of the First Man It is striking, then, that in the following proposition 68 Spinoza entertains the possibility that human beings are born free. In presenting us with yet another one of those unexpected shifts in perspective, this is perhaps the most dramatic moment in the whole of the Ethics. Up to now Spinoza has erected his concept of the affects on the foundation that, while human beings are conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile, they are born ignorant of the causes of their appetite. He has shown that what the free man, in contrast to the servus in bondage to his passions, knows is that, because he is not born free, he has the task of founding the prima of life on freedom as the good of desire (conatus). Proposition 68 is the sole proposition in the Ethics in which Spinoza demonstrates a position whose hypothesis he then rejects in the scholium as false. It is also the sole proposition in the Ethics, as I indicated earlier, in which he discusses a passage from the Bible, to which otherwise he makes only the most fleeting references. The passage on which he comments is the story of Adam and Eve, and he uses it to exemplify the falsity of the proposition that human beings are born free. However, when Spinoza then proceeds in the scholium to indicate that the heirs of Adam and Eve do effect the transition to freedom—blessedness and salvation—he shows that appetite conscious of itself, that is, desire, plays a strikingly similar role in both the Bible’s and his own accounts of the foundation of humanity. In the beginning are not Adam and Eve conscious of their appetite (as whetted by the serpent) of seeking their utile but ignorant of the true causes of their appetite? Can Adam and Eve, in the beginning, know God without possessing knowledge of good and evil? Can Adam and Eve, in the end, have knowledge of good and evil without knowing God? Do not the Bible’s account of the first man and woman and Spinoza’s account of the initial position of humankind both posit—self-consciously—a contradiction, which, in order to be known as a contradiction, presupposes that the beginning, the origin, the principle of humankind has to be rethought—to be lived—as paradox? How can Adam and Eve disobey God’s command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, if, in lacking that

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knowledge, the command could only represent a final cause the end of which they are ignorant? How, in terms of Spinoza’s account of the origin and nature of the affects, can human beings begin in ignorance of the causes of their appetite in seeking their utile of which they are conscious? The accounts of both the Bible and Spinoza begin with the contradiction that human beings are conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile but ignorant of the fact that to seek their utile is absolutely contradictory until and unless they know that the origin or principle of good is desire. In other words, they cannot know that prelapsarian ignorance of good and evil is sin itself, that is, they cannot know that the projection of their desire into final causes is the basis of superstition without already knowing good and evil, without already knowing that both sin and salvation, both bondage and freedom arise from the same identity of desire and the good. Otherwise, they would simply replicate the Socratic condition, in which ignorance of desire as the good reflects the contradictory opposition between desire and the good. Solely insofar as human beings know themselves to be sinners, know that they are in bondage to their passions, know that they are part of nature, or, in other words, know that they are not born free are they free to determine that they do not desire what they judge to be the good but, rather, that they judge the good to be what they desire. The paradox, one version of the infinite paradox, is the fact that one is not born free but, instead, is enslaved to the passions, ignorant of good and evil, and so ignorant that the causes of one’s desire can be known and comprehended as contradictory solely from the position of directly desiring the good—ultimately, of knowing God and loving your neighbor. Outside of showing—in the scholium of Proposition 68 and also in both the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Political Treatise, as we shall see—that the standard accounts of the story of Adam and Eve are inadequate or contradictory, Spinoza does not indicate, explicitly, why he comments in all three of his major works on what has perhaps in modernity become the most significant of biblical stories. But I shall propose two elementary reasons to explain his abiding interest in the story in order to provide orientation for the detailed analysis of his commentary that follows. The first reason that Spinoza engages the story of Adam and Eve is to show that the contradiction involved in obeying the command of God, who is the principle of good and evil, not to know good and evil is unthinkable (incomprehensible)—until and unless it is thought from a position that encompasses it. In other words, it has to be understood that the story is self-consciously contradictory, that is, paradoxical, and that the lesson that it intends to impart is precisely the impossibility of taking the story literally (i.e., in a non-paradoxical way). There is no knowledge of God outside of (without) knowing good and evil; and knowledge of good and evil is not given outside of (without) knowledge of God. (Another

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way of putting the paradox of making the contradiction in the story of Adam and Eve transparently paradoxical is that their story could not have been written in the prelapsarian garden. Adam and Eve could not have been its original readers, for their story presupposes knowledge of good and evil, that is, knowledge of or life in the covenant.) Spinoza is percipient in understanding that how theologians (and philosophers!) read the story of Adam and Eve bears directly on how they conceive of God, human beings, and their relationships. Contradictory, literal, superstitious or idolatrous readings of the story of Adam and Eve distort the whole of theology (and of philosophy). The second reason that Spinoza takes up the story of Adam and Eve is that he recognizes that, only when it is accurately interpreted, does it embody his own foundational version of origins. He seizes upon the element of appetite conscious of itself in seeking its own utile or good as the critical moment in the story—when combined with the fact that human beings are not born free in knowing good and evil (they are ignorant of the causes of their appetite). Philosophically (ethically) one has to confront the same contradiction that is found in the biblical story. If one were literally in bondage to the contradictory passions and so without knowledge of good and evil, then there could be no transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection. As I have already stressed, the transition to greater perfection or to more perfect emulation of the exemplar of human nature is not a transition from bondage to freedom, from the passive affects to the active affects, just as Adam and Eve do not effect a transition from ignorance of God (innocence) to knowledge of good and evil. In both cases the consciousness of having the appetite of seeking one’s utile or good disturbs the innocent garden party. The contradiction that is central to the story of Adam and Eve is that they “sin” only insofar as they obey God’s contradictory command not to know good and evil. They do not sin insofar as they recognize that to know God is to know good and evil (which is patently the teaching of the prophets). Yet knowledge of God—knowledge of good and evil—is always dangerous, and we can well understand that Adam and Eve, like Job later, are humbled, even abashed by compelling God to reveal himself as the principle of good and evil. The paradox is always that it is only within knowledge of good and evil, within knowledge of God—within the covenant—that human beings sin. (Spinoza’s version of this paradox is, as we have already seen and will be exploring more fully in the next chapter, that there is no sin in the natural state but only in the civil state.) Only the individual who knows God, who knows good and evil— who is responsible before God for his knowledge of good and evil—can fail in that responsibility. Sin involves not ignorance but knowledge of God as the principle of good and evil. It is Abraham, the father of faith, not the faithless individual, who is tested yet again in his faith. It is Jesus who is tempted by

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Satan to perform miracles that would suspend or abolish the laws of nature. Because miracles, when understood speculatively, as Spinoza demonstrates in the Theologico-Political Treatise, as I show in volume I of this study, manifest superstition, they reflect ignorance, not knowledge of God, and so lead to atheism (belief in final causes). The three friends of Job, plus Elihu, are scandalized by Job’s rejection (refutation) of God as a final cause.67 Job refuses to read his suffering as reflecting a final cause—divine punishment—of which he is ignorant. Just as God makes clear to Satan, in his initial bargain with him, that he presupposes—proves—Job’s existence as necessary in order to test him, so Job, in the depths of his incomprehension and anguish, presupposes— proves: tests—the necessary existence of God (while his scandalized friends reduce the suffering of Job to his ignorance of God as an end outside of or without human thought and existence). To prove—in being tested by— necessary existence is, indeed, an awesome experience. The contradiction that is central to Spinoza’s version of foundational man is that he “sins” by projecting his desire into final causes whose end, God, he judges, in his superstitious (or miraculous) ignorance, to be the good of his desire. The foundational accounts of both the Bible and Spinoza are intentionally (or self-reflexively) contradictory. How can Adam and Eve knowingly obey a command of God not to know good and evil when to know God is to know good and evil? The prelapsarian God, it is evident, is a final cause of which Adam and Eve are ignorant, a final end that is represented by a command, which, because it is incomprehensible (contradictory), is utterly external to them and arbitrary. There is equally no explanation, in Spinoza’s account, of how one would (could) escape bondage to superstitious belief in final causes—how one could make a transition from bondage to freedom— unless one (always) already knows the distinction between passive affects and active affects. Just as the initial position of Adam and Eve already presupposes knowledge of good and evil, so the initial position of Spinoza’s foundational man presupposes the fundamental distinction between freedom and slavery, between active affects and passive affects. Although one is not born free, although one does not begin with knowledge of good and evil, this lack of freedom or knowledge involves, not Socratic ignorance but biblical desire, appetite conscious of itself as appetite. The paradox, as always, is that all men and women, in repeating the story of Adam and Eve, must learn to see that, in the beginning, they directly desire the good. They must learn to see that what they desire is the good—the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—as their own utile (advantage). Both the Bible’s and Spinoza’s foundational human beings “disobey” God—the God of whom they have made an idol by viewing him as their final cause or end of which they have no knowledge. In both cases their real “sin” is not

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knowledge of good or evil; it is not knowledge of the causes of their appetite in seeking their utile. Their sin, rather, is in not knowing God as the principle of good and evil. Their sin is in believing that they can obey a command of God not to know him as the principle of good and evil or that they can be determined by God as the final cause of whose end they have no knowledge. To worship God as the final cause of whose end or command one is ignorant is sheer idolatry. The whole point of the foundational accounts in both Genesis and Spinoza is to posit a contradiction, which appetite conscious of itself in seeking its own utile must expose as contradictory in order to effect the paradoxical identity of desire and the good. In each case original man must disobey God or, in other words, comprehend the idolatry of final causes, in order to constitute desire as the good—of all human beings. In the accounts given by both the Bible and Spinoza the withdrawal on the part of human beings of their desire from God as the final cause of whose end they are ignorant and consequently their direct identification of the good with their desire “saves” both God and human beings from idolatry. Just as the prelapsarian position of Adam and Eve is pure idolatry, so Spinoza makes it clear that what he calls the foundational position is the basis of the superstitious belief on the part of human beings that God is a final cause of which they are ignorant. It is fascinating to see that, just as Spinoza protests against those (philosophers) who hold that the conatus of seeking one’s utile is the basis of immorality, not of morality, so he equally protests against those (theologians) who hold that the appetite of seeking knowledge of good and evil is sinful and not truly rational (faithful). The paradoxical position that Spinoza advances in contrast to the contradictory opposition between appetite conscious of seeking its utile and ignorance of God is that human beings directly desire the good. He holds that it is only in the radical identification of the good with their desire that human beings can undertake the transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection such that they attain the freedom (blessedness or salvation) of knowing that the good (utile) that they desire is the good that they desire for all human beings, the good that all human beings desire: knowledge of God and love of neighbor. Surely, then, it is not to be believed that the heirs of Adam and Eve, including Spinoza and his readers, in effecting the eternal transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection, insofar as they identify the good with their desire, go further than Abraham in directly desiring the good.68 But, surely, they also would not want to be viewed as standing still in getting at least as far. There is one more element in the story of Adam and Eve that I think it is important to introduce before taking up Spinoza’s commentary on it in the scholium of proposition 68 and in his two political treatises. I refer to the con-

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ditions that Adam and Eve must face once they have been expelled from the garden. I have been arguing that Spinoza is true to the Genesis account of Adam and Eve and consequently to the whole of the Bible (and this would also mean that his commentary on the Genesis story is central to modernity) in indicating that the sinful lapse on the part of Adam and Eve into knowing God as the principle of good and evil in fact constitutes the beginning, the principle, the origin, the creation of freedom (blessedness and salvation), as both Kant and Hegel also argue in their profoundly insightful commentaries on the story. How, then, are we to understand the burdens (travails) of conception (giving birth), labor, and death, to which, in the story’s denouement, Adam and Eve are condemned (as their return to the mythical garden of natural immortality is forever barred by the fiery cherubim)? Are not conception—giving birth to yet more progeny, at once natural and ideational, that will in turn be subject to and thus tested by the vicissitudes of life—labor, and death to be understood as punishments for human sin, as found in conventional readings of the story of Adam and Eve, both theological and philosophical?69 The answer, patently, is no. For the paradox is that, just as man and woman are not in the beginning born free (they are not born with knowledge of God)—their putative, prelapsarian position is utterly contradictory—so in the end they do not die free—they do not die with knowledge of God—and so attain a contradictory, postlapsarian position (traditionally called heaven). Conception, labor, and death are not sinful; and they are not the punishment for sin. Yet sin would be inconceivable outside of (without) them. Human beings remain, always, embodied beings, subject to the natural passions, and part of nature. Without (outside of) conception, labor, and death human beings would not exist. There would be no conatus, no desire as their good. Yet it is not nature but spirit (our free agency, our responsibility as human beings) that is the “cause” of sin—when and as we fail to abide by the standard that what we desire—our desire—is the good. Human beings can effect transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection of desire only insofar as they are mortal creatures, subject to conception, labor, and death. But the rub is that these elements, while the condition of sin, are not the cause of sin. Unlike Socratic man, who neither sins nor knows freedom as the blessedness of acquiescentia in se, biblical man, as Pascal puts it, is both above and below the natural animals. He is that paradoxical creature who is at once divinely blessed with grace and satanically cursed with damnation.70 Thus, Pascal writes that while (what he calls the transmission of) sin is “the mystery farthest removed from our knowledge,” it is, nevertheless, “a thing without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves. . . . Certainly, nothing shocks us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. . . . Man is more inconceivable without

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this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man” (#246). That human beings can have knowledge of themselves only as sinners—solely because, while subject to conception, labor, and death, they are the standard of nature—is a definitive repudiation of any natural state, whether prelapsarian or postlapsarian, whether before sin (in the garden of paradise) or after sin (in paradise as the garden), as the true state of human beings. Freedom, blessedness, salvation, or eternity of mind do not exist and cannot be known to exist outside of (without) sin. Freedom (together with blessedness and salvation) is the unique heritage of lapsarian man, of fallen, sinful human beings.71 We shall now see that, while Spinoza does not use the language of sin, his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve is consistent with Pascal’s conception of sin. Although human beings would never be free if they were born free, that is, if they were simply natural or naturally free, they would also be unable to enjoy freedom and its blessings if they were simply imperium in imperio, as we saw Spinoza write, that is, if they were simply disembodied figures who did not have to account for their place in the common order of nature, for their bondage to the natural passions. It is only because human beings do not begin (eternally) free (in a heavenly garden) and do not end (eternally) free (in a garden of heaven) that they can constitute their desire as the first things in life (prima in vitâ) and, thus, as an eternal meditation on life, not on death. Having distinguished between the free man and the man enslaved to his passions, Spinoza undertakes to demonstrate in proposition 68 the hypothesis that, if men were born free, they would form no concepts of good and evil, insofar as they were free. Assuming the hypothesis to be true, he shows that the consequence logically follows. Because that man is said to be free who is led by reason alone, he who is born free and remains free has only adequate ideas and thus no concept of either evil or good. In the scholium, however, Spinoza immediately declares that “it is clear from proposition 4 of this part that the hypothesis of this proposition is false and cannot be conceived except insofar as we attend to human nature alone.”72 Proposition 4, we may recall, states that “it cannot be done that man is not part of nature and cannot suffer changes except those that can be understood through his nature alone and of which he is the adequate cause.” Once Spinoza has dismissed the hypothesis that men are born free—without being subject to the common order of nature, to the natural passions, to, ultimately, death—he invokes the story of Adam and Eve: “This, and other things, which we have now demonstrated, seem to be signified (significari) by Moses in that story (historiâ) of the first man.” For in it, Spinoza observes, no other power of God is conceived than that by which he created man, that is, the power by which he consulted only the advantage (utilitas) of man. It is

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narrated in the story, he continues, that God prohibited “free man” from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and that, as soon as he ate from it, he would immediately fear death rather than desire to live. Although the first man found that nothing was more useful to him than a wife who completely agreed with his nature, he later began to compare himself with the animals (bruta) and to imitate their affects. Consequently, he began “to lose his freedom, which the Patriarchs afterwards recovered (recuperaverunt) led by the spirit of Christ, that is, by the idea of God, on which alone it depends that man is free and desires for other men the good that he desires for himself, as we have demonstrated above.” The digest that Spinoza provides of the Mosaic story, history, or narration of the first man (and woman) is sparse, as is clear from the preceding paragraph. It contains, we can say, three key moments. First, man begins free, in the garden, his creation by God (as good) serving solely his own utility and his union with his wife involving his recognition that no being could be more useful to himself than one who agrees completely with his own nature. Second, man loses his freedom when he replaces the (active affect of) love of his wife with the (passive) affects of brutes. Third, he recovers his freedom in the covenant (of the Patriarchs) guided by the spirit of Christ as the idea of God that human freedom involves and expresses the golden rule: that man desires the good for others that he desires for himself. It is important to note that Spinoza frames his digest of the story of the first man within similar statements about what he has demonstrated and what he finds in the story. Initially, he indicates that what he has demonstrated— namely, the idea that man is not born free, for otherwise he would have no concept of good and evil, and other things—seems to be what Moses signifies in his story of the first man. In conclusion, he indicates that this freedom was recovered, in the covenant, as the idea of God that man is free in desiring the good for others that he desires for himself, “as we demonstrated above.” The spare digest that Spinoza provides of the Mosaic history of the first man contains several key features, whose relationship his seemingly merely chronological account tends to obscure: first, man was free; next, man lost his freedom; finally, man regained his freedom. Spinoza does not here directly point out (as he will observe in the Political Treatise, as I have indicated earlier) that it would have been impossible for original man, if truly free (and thus possessing the idea of God), to have lost his freedom. Nevertheless, he explicitly states that the falsity of the hypothesis that man was born free—and consequently in possession solely of adequate ideas (and so without knowledge of good and evil and not a part of nature)—is what Moses signifies in his story of the first man. Yet Spinoza also explicitly states that God created “free man” with the power alone of enjoying his utile. So either Spinoza contradicts

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himself, or he challenges his readers not to contradict themselves by ascribing contradictory demonstration to him, contradictory narration to Moses, or, finally, contradictory thought and existence to Adam (together with his progeny, i.e., his readers). Spinoza does note that God prohibited man, as free, from knowing good and evil. While he does not subsequently indicate, directly, that unfree (fallen) man knows good and evil, he does state explicitly, in conclusion, that the recuperation of freedom on the part of man in the covenant involves and expresses the idea of God of desiring for others the good that you desire for yourself, “as we demonstrated above.” But what he demonstrates prior to proposition 68, as we saw, is that human beings, in desiring the good directly as the prima in vitâ—knowledge of God and love of neighbor—are not born free, possess knowledge of good and evil (regarding their transitio to the realization of the exemplar of human nature), are a part of nature, do not have only adequate but also possess inadequate ideas, and so, in that sense, remain subject to the natural passions. It is evident, then, that Spinoza, consistent with Moses himself (and so also with modernity?), intends, in his digest of the story of Adam and Eve, to expose the contradiction that man is born free (beyond knowledge of good and evil, inadequate ideas, the common order of nature, or the passions). Either we readers simply repeat, in our bewildered ignorance and superstition, the literal chronology of the narration—the first man is free, then unfree, and finally free. Or we allow the contradiction that is implicit in the literal narrative to confront us explicitly with the necessity of rethinking the relationship between God and human beings and so between freedom and knowledge of good and evil. For the problem that we have to face is that, if human beings are born free, then they do not possess knowledge of good and evil. If, however, they possess knowledge of good and evil, then they are not born free. Consequently, what Spinoza, following Moses, shows us is that, if man is born free, then he has no knowledge of good and evil. That is what the Mosaic story says. But the story also says that man comes (falls) into knowledge of good and evil (although Spinoza only implies and does not directly state this). But that would mean that man was not born free. For where there is knowledge of good and evil there is no freedom. But how could one lose what is natural, inborn, or innate? The answer is the covenant, which transforms and so overcomes the contradictory opposition between freedom and knowledge of good and evil in and through the paradox of their relationship. In the covenant— of the golden rule—human beings are both free and (therefore) possess knowledge of good and evil. Or (it can also be said that) they possess knowledge of good and evil and are (therefore) free. The contradictory, either/or opposition between freedom and knowledge of good and evil has become the paradoxical union of both/and: both freedom and knowledge of good and

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evil. Thus, what Spinoza, together with the Mosaic story, shows us is that, just as Adam and Eve are not born free without knowledge of good and evil, so also the knowledge of good and evil into which they “fall” demonstrates, not their lack but their possession of freedom. There are three additional features in Spinoza’s digest of the story of Adam and Eve that further help us to see within its contradictory account the paradoxical nature of the relationship between human beings and God, between freedom and knowledge of good and evil. (I indicated earlier that knowledge of good and evil is unthinkable outside of or without knowledge of God, i.e., outside of or without the golden rule of desiring for others the good that I desire for myself.) First, what, we ask, is the relationship between the original (precovenantal), creative power of God, by which he consults only the utilitas (utile) of man—yet God forbids Adam and Eve knowledge of good and evil— and the subsequent, covenantal idea of God by which alone is man free to desire for others the good that he desires for himself? Still, as I have already pointed out, the fact that this freedom was recovered, in the covenant, as the idea of God that man is free in desiring the good for others that he desires for himself, “as we demonstrated above,” indicates that freedom involves and expresses knowledge of good and evil, for this is precisely what Spinoza has demonstrated above, as he shows that human beings remain subject to inadequate ideas, to the common order of nature, and to the passions. Thus, we arrive at the second feature in Spinoza’s digest that gives us further insight into the intentionally contradictory structure of both his philosophical commentary and Moses’ narrative. In what I earlier called his initial framing statement, Spinoza indicates that the Mosaic narrative signifies not only that man is not born free but also “other things” (alia) that he has demonstrated. What “other things”? Spinoza does not tell us. Nevertheless, in his concluding, framing statement he points out that the Mosaic narrative reaches its apogee when men and women recover their freedom through the idea of God as the golden rule, “as we demonstrated above.” Since, however, the idea of God as the freedom of loving your neighbor as yourself summarizes the whole of the prior demonstration and, indeed, the whole of the Ethics, Spinoza can be understood to refer (relate) the whole of his prior demonstration to the Mosaic narrative of Adam and Eve. This, in turn, suggests that the “other things,” which, as he says in his initial framing statement, he demonstrated in addition to the fact that man was not born free, although left unnamed, and which are signified by Moses in his history of the first man, are also simply his concept of freedom, “as we demonstrated above,” as he writes in his concluding, framing statement. That the first two ideas—God’s original, creative power and man’s original conatus in seeking his utile—cannot be fundamentally different from the idea

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of God that expresses and involves human freedom (love of neighbor) take us directly to the third feature that helps us comprehend the contradictory presentation of the story of Adam and Eve on the part of both Spinoza and Moses as intentionally paradoxical. This is a feature that must have palpably struck the reader. What, indeed, we ask, is the temporal framework of the Mosaic story of the first man as envisaged by Spinoza (and also by its original author[s])? When does the story take place? In what time does it take place? What is noteworthy about the digest that Spinoza gives of the story of Adam and Eve is that he extends it to include, to comprehend, the covenant (of the patriarchs and Christ) as the idea of God that contains the human freedom of the golden rule.73 It is clear, then, that he does not provide his readers with a literal reading of Moses’ story of the first man. Rather, Spinoza signals—characteristically, with an indirection that simply highlights the intentionally contradictory nature of his digest—the paradoxical temporality of the story of the first man. But this temporality bespeaks the paradoxical nature of the relationship between God and human beings, between freedom and knowledge of good and evil. Human beings are not born free—outside of (without) or prior to the covenant. Knowledge of good and evil is not given outside of (without) God, who is not known or knowable outside of (without) the covenant. There is no creation outside of (without) the covenant, no creation outside of (without) sin as knowledge of good and evil. Freedom—as desiring for others the good that I desire for myself—is not given outside of (without) the God of the covenant. We may conclude, therefore, that in the brief digest of the story of Adam and Eve that Spinoza gives in the scholium of proposition 68 he shows us—indirectly, until we are forced, through self-contradiction, to rethink the significance of the Mosaic narrative—that the story of Adam and Eve (like the story of creation in Genesis 1) is a creation of the covenant, that is, that it is comprehended and encompassed solely by covenantal theology. (We can equally say that covenantal theology is comprehended and encompassed solely by creational theology.) It is striking how closely Spinoza, in identifying the whole of his ethical philosophy with the Mosaic narrative and the Mosaic narrative with the whole of the covenant (with the whole of the Bible), binds his conception of ethics to the covenant. But this is hardly surprising when both are founded on knowledge of God as the freedom on the part of human beings to desire directly their utile as the good of all human beings. Just as Spinoza takes up the story of the first man in the Ethics in the context of discussing freedom—holding that Moses, in his narrative, signifies what he has demonstrated: namely, that man is not born free without knowledge of good and evil—so also in his two political works he briefly discusses Adam in contexts set by more general concerns.74 Consequently, Spinoza

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never makes the story of Adam and Eve the primary focus of his analysis. Furthermore, he does not provide any direct indication as to how he (or we his readers) might view his several treatments of the story, which are not only extremely brief but also context-specific and so varied, in light of each other. Still, by showing in his digest of the story of Adam and Eve in proposition 68 of part IV of the Ethics that man is not born free—that there is no freedom outside of (without) knowledge of good and evil and no knowledge of good and evil outside of (without) freedom—Spinoza provides us with the orientation that we need to understand how, in his three additional treatments of the story, two in the Theologico-Political Treatise and one in the Political Treatise (overtly), contradictory elements of the story (covertly) demand paradoxical resolution. Spinoza discusses Adam in two passages in chapter 4 of the TheologicoPolitical Treatise, once he has established what he calls “the nature of divine natural law.” When, however, prior to those two passages, he draws out the implications of the divine natural law in four general points, he also cryptically mentions Adam in one sentence. After indicating, first, that the divine natural law is universal and common to all human beings—since he deduced it from universal human nature—Spinoza states, second, that it does not rely upon historical narratives (“the faith of histories”). For “it is certain,” he writes, “that we can equally conceive of it in Adam and in any other man and equally in the man who lives among men and in the man who lives a solitary life” (52). But who is Adam? That is the question; and the answer to it, we know, does not turn for Spinoza (or for us) on a tendentious distinction between social man and solitary man, since the very concept of the solitary is a version of the social. (No human being can be solitary except insofar as he is social, that is, in possession of culture, including language, which he can learn only in and through others. If one lacked culture and language, one would not exist as a human being. One can choose to be solitary, or not solitary, only as a social being. Solitude can be true, and not merely escapist or pathological, solely as a critique, that is, as an affirmation and not merely a negation of the social.) The reason that the story of Adam as the first man is foundational, as Spinoza acknowledges in his discussion of it in the Ethics, is that it renders problematic (contradictory) the very issue of what is divine, natural, universal, common, human, and historical. Spinoza, we know, makes freedom central to his concept of human nature (“the essence of man”). That is, he distinguishes free man from enslaved man (as he does the active affects from the passive affects, etc.). Thus, the Adam to whom he appeals cannot be, to recall the terms that I introduced earlier, either prelapsarian (free in birth, prior to the lapsus) or postlapsarian (free in death, posterior to the lapsus). Adam can only be lapsarian: living the lapsus, the paradox, that freedom, as knowledge of God and

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love of neighbor, expressly involves knowing good and evil. The concept of human nature is the standard both of itself and of common nature (in which singular individuals, as merely solitary, negate the truly social and so are common enemies both of each other and of themselves). Adam is everyman—all human beings—but only insofar as he, and we, conceive of freedom, not as given naturally (either in birth or in death) but rather as the transitio to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection of conatus or desire, of what it means to exist as a human being. Spinoza acknowledges that his concept of freedom, of ethics, of human nature does not exist outside of (without) the covenant. He knows that the covenant involves a concept of freedom that is inseparable from a concept of transition or temporality, which is not that of duration (quantifiable or natural time). Still, as we have seen before, he denies that his concept of human nature involves history. Yet, his very engagement with Adam, with the story of the first man, involves him in history, since he knows that man is not born free. In other words, freedom emerges in and through the temporality of transition, in and through history (as the story of freedom). After Spinoza, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, has drawn out the implications of the divine natural law in four general points,75 he raises four questions. It is in his responses to each of the first two questions that he discusses the story of Adam. The first question involves the issue of whether we can truly conceive of God as a legislator (law-bringer) or prince who prescribes laws to human beings (in arbitrary, contradictory fashion). The answer that Spinoza gives is a resolute no, since he holds that the affirmations and negations of God involve the truth of eternal necessity. But then the issue emerges of how we are to understand God’s command to Adam (and Eve) not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Since the divine decree could only have been eternal, necessary, and true, it would have been utterly contradictory (impossible) for Adam to disobey it. But Scripture is clear: Adam did disobey God’s command. It follows, therefore, Spinoza concludes, that “this revelation was law in respect of Adam alone and on account of the defect alone of his knowledge—that God was [to him] as if a legislator or a prince” (54). While the discussion of Adam on the part of Spinoza in this first passage from chapter 4 of the Theologico-Political Treatise is terse, his basic point, I think, is clear, especially in light of the fit between his own demonstration that man is not born free and the Mosaic narrative of the first man, for which he argues, as we saw, in the scholium of proposition 68 of part IV of the Ethics. But it is also important to see that his present treatment of the story of Adam itself contains a hermeneutic or is itself hermeneutical. Spinoza acknowledges the fact that, since divine decrees cannot be reduced to the arbitrary will of legislators and princes that lack the necessity of eternal truth, he is faced with

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a contradiction at the heart of the story of Adam. It is not unusual for readers of the story of the first man to detect a contradiction between the divine command and the abrogation of that command on the part of Adam and Eve (although many try to evade or to deny it). The hermeneutical challenge, rather, is to formulate the contradiction in such a way that, in the first place, it permits a resolution of the contradiction (as paradox) and, in the second place, the resolution has both textual and conceptual integrity.76 Since it is impossible for Adam to disobey God, that is, to contradict the truth of the necessary, eternal decree of God, and since, however, Scripture clearly narrates that he does disobey or contradict God, the only possible resolution of this contradiction, Spinoza indicates, is to distinguish between the divine and the human perspectives. The divine decree forbidding Adam and Eve to eat of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil reflects, not upon God but upon man. It reveals a defect in the knowledge of Adam. We learn, in other words, that Adam does not begin with adequate knowledge of God. He is not born with adequate knowledge of truth as eternal and necessary. This is clearly why Spinoza emphasizes, as we saw, that “this revelation was law in respect of Adam alone and on account of the defect alone of his knowledge.” In other words, Spinoza wants to be sure that the divine command to prelapsarian man and woman is not viewed as representing a necessary, eternal decree of God. He also wants to be sure that the knowledge of God that men and women originally possess is not viewed as adequate. Yet we do know that Spinoza writes in the Ethics that human beings do possess “adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God” (II.47). So we see that the elemental point that Spinoza makes in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise about the first man is at once substantive and hermeneutical. Adam does not begin with adequate knowledge of God precisely because (and this is also the hermeneutical point) he contradicts God, which is impossible, yet this is what the text says. Consequently, what we readers have to see is that life in the garden is itself impossible and contradictory. It is arbitrary, as if lived under a tyrant. The sin of man and woman, it follows, is not to “fall” into knowledge of good and evil, which is not found outside of adequate knowledge of God. The sin, rather, for Adam and Eve is to live in or to remain in the garden. Hermeneutically, the sin for readers is to think that life in the Garden of Eden is paradise and that, consequently, paradise is an ideal from which man falls and/or an ideal to which man is to return. Thus, we see that the command not to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is intended by the Mosaic author and understood by Spinoza to be patently contradictory and impossible. Adam and Eve cannot be truly human without “falling” from the garden, that is, without possessing knowledge of good and evil and so being like God himself; without showing themselves to be responsible before

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God and neighbor for knowledge of good and evil; and, finally, without testifying that knowledge of God and love of neighbor are the standard of good and evil. While this first account of the story of Adam in the Theologico-Political Treatise is extremely brief, it bears the same content, we see, as the scholium of proposition 68 in part IV of the Ethics, in which Spinoza shows that human beings, not having been born free, “regain” (that is, constitute) their freedom in and through the covenant. In other words, human beings possess no freedom, no (non-contradictory or actual) knowledge of God or love of neighbor77 in the garden prior to their lapsus or fall into knowing good and evil. Their knowledge of God, in the garden, is contradictory and impossible. The God of whom they have knowledge (their idea of God) is contradictory, impossible, and arbitrary. Consequently, what Spinoza shows us is that the scriptural account of the story of Adam and Eve is, through its very contradictions and impossibilities, paradoxically consistent both with what God must become—for (before) human beings—and with what human beings must become—for (before) God and so also the neighbor.78 Thus, we see that Spinoza, in discussing the story of Adam and Eve in the first of the two passages from the Theologico-Political Treatise, indicates that its prelapsarian ideas of both God and man are contradictory and impossible. The consequence that readers would draw from this discussion, as consistent with proposition 68 of part IV of the Ethics, would be that these are ideas that both Adam and Eve, on the one hand, and their successors (readers), on the other hand, must relinquish as idolatrous if they are to discover that there is no knowledge of God or of human beings outside of (without) knowledge of good and evil. Yet, as we shall now see, Spinoza is strangely prepared in the second passage to reverse his reading of the story of the first man, until he draws back in reticence. The context in which he now discusses the story of Adam is set by the second question concerning the divine natural law in which he asks what Scripture teaches about it and the natural light. While Spinoza is generally disposed to draw a sharp line between revelation and the natural light, between theology and philosophy, or between the Bible and natural knowledge, here he is prepared to locate passages in the Bible that, he holds, contain the philosophical teaching of the divine natural law. Indeed, he observes, the first passage holding this teaching that we encounter in the Bible is the history of the first man, where it is narrated that God ordered Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. “This seems to signify,” Spinoza writes, “that God ordered Adam to do the good and to seek on account of the good (sub ratione boni) and not insofar as it is contrary to evil, that is, to seek the good from the love of the good, not, however, from fear of evil” (56). He recalls that he has already shown that “he who does the good

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from true knowledge and love of the good acts freely and with constant mind” (56–57). In contrast is the one who, in acting from fear of evil, is driven by evil, acts slavishly, and lives under the imperium of another. “And therefore,” Spinoza declares, “this unique command that God ordered to Adam comprehends the whole, divine, natural law and absolutely agrees with the dictate of natural light, nor would it be difficult to explain the entire history itself or parable of the first man on this basis” (57). Spinoza immediately indicates, however, that there are two reasons why he will omit interpreting the rest of the story of the first man in terms of the divine natural light. First, he cannot be certain that his explanation agrees with the mind of the author. Second, many view the history (story) of the first man, not as a parable but as a simple narration. He will be on firmer ground, he observes, if he puts Adam aside and instead relies on Solomon who speaks from the strength of the natural light. Spinoza then cites a number of passages from Proverbs, and also Paul, whose doctrine of God, he says, agrees with natural knowledge and its teaching of true ethics and politics. It is surprising, perhaps, to see Spinoza argue that Scripture teaches knowledge of God and man on the basis of the divine natural light, independent of the revealed light of faith. Still, since this claim is consistent with the Seven Dogmas of Faith, which he formulates later in the Theologico-Political Treatise, it is by no means obvious how we are to distinguish the natural light from the revealed light or philosophy from theology (prophecy), since both are concerned with works as ethics and politics, that is, with knowledge of God and love of neighbor, unless the revealed light is simply relegated to miracles. But this is a topic to which I shall return. Surely, what is surprising, however, is to see Spinoza argue that the divine command to Adam (and Eve) not to know good and evil can be understood as the divine natural law of acting freely and with constant mind from true knowledge and love of the good, not from fear of evil. It is no less surprising to see that Spinoza is prepared to read the entire story of Adam and Eve in these terms, until he draws back. There are two particularly startling elements in Spinoza’s discussion of Adam in this passage. First, he does not mention the story’s most salient feature: the fact that Adam (together with Eve) does not obey (he contradicts) God. Second, Spinoza gives no indication whatsoever of how he would explain the complete disparity between this account and the two previous accounts that we have already taken up: the earlier passage from the Theologico-Political Treatise and the scholium of proposition 68 of part IV of the Ethics (with which, as we shall shortly see, his discussion of the story of Adam and Eve in the Political Treatise is also fully consonant). It is important to note that the distinction that Spinoza makes between acting from true knowledge and love of the good and acting from fear of evil is

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consistent with his fundamental principles. But this distinction presupposes knowledge of good and evil (i.e., the difference between the active affects and the passive affects or between love [the golden rule] and sin). Yet it is precisely the divine command against knowing good and evil that Spinoza now views as compatible with the divine natural law and consequently with true ethical action. Furthermore, the two reasons that Spinoza gives for retreating from extending his interpretation to the whole of the story of the first man, while saying that it would not be difficult to do so, are obscure, to say the least. First, he does not tell us why he cannot be certain that his explanation agrees with the mind or intention of the author. While we have no way of directly knowing what elements in the story lead him to draw back, it is not hard to imagine that they are precisely those that are central to the two precious accounts that we have examined (and with which his account in the Political Treatise is also consistent, as I continue to note). His second reason, the distinction between parable and simple narration, is vague and ambiguous. It does not illuminate the difference between the opposed interpretations that Spinoza himself gives of the story (not to mention the fact that all of his interpretations would stand in opposition to taking the story of Adam literally). In sum, I believe that we have two choices, both unhappy, in deciding how to respond to the second passage of the Theologico-Political Treatise in which Spinoza discusses the story of Adam (and Eve). First, we can read it as explicitly (i.e., as intended to be) contradictory; but there is no sound warrant (or merit) in doing so. It is possible that Spinoza intends us to assume the perspective of God, not of man, that is, to view God’s command, not as the arbitrary (contradictory) command of a human ruler but as a divine precept whose necessary, eternal truth it would be impossible for Adam and Eve to contradict. But the exegetical problem remains. Scripture is clear. Adam and Eve do disobey (contradict) the divine command. Spinoza’s silence here is inexplicable. Second, we can view the passage as one of those strangely opaque instances in which what one of our greatest authors writes is simply incomprehensible and inaccessible to interpretation. While both choices lead to an impasse, I felt that it was incumbent upon me to discuss this passage, given what I view to be the significance, generally, of the story of Adam and Eve in evaluating Spinoza’s thought as at once biblical and modern. But I shall not consider it further. The final passage in which Spinoza discusses the story of the first man is found in the Political Treatise. Again, he takes it up in a particular context, in this case both to combat the views of others and to advance his own position. Spinoza introduces Adam in section 6 of chapter 2, and the main point that he emphasizes in the preceding sections of this chapter is that, because the natural right of individuals extends as far as their power, everything that they

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do is by natural right. Indeed, human beings are more led by blind desire than by reason, Spinoza contends. Therefore, he continues, “the natural power or right of men ought to be defined, not by reason but by whatever appetite they are determined to act and by which they endeavor (conantur) to preserve themselves.” While Spinoza then acknowledges the difference between desires (as actions) based on reason and desires based on passions, the point that he wants presently to emphasize, he observes, is that both are “effects of nature and explain the natural strength by which man endeavors (conatur) to persevere in his being.” Whether human beings are led by reason or solely by (what Spinoza here calls) desire, they act “according to the laws and rules of nature, that is, from the right of nature” (2.5). We are back in the familiar territory of the Ethics. The foundation of man is appetite conscious of seeking its utile but ignorant of the causes of that appetite. Spinoza makes it clear that we can have a sound conception of human reason, freedom, morality, ethics, and politics only insofar as we account for the “natural” power of the affects, appetite, desire, conatus—for the incessant endeavor on the part of all beings, including human beings, to persevere in their existence. Consequently, human beings are not born into freedom; they are not born with adequate knowledge of God, with knowledge of good and evil. Rather, these are hard-won achievements that are attained, not once and for all but rather continuously (hit and miss), in eternal progress towards (when it is not regress away from) the exemplar of human nature. They are attained, not in opposition to or in spite of the enormous power that the natural passions exercise over our lives but in and through the realization that this power is liberating, and not merely destructive, only when we directly desire the good, when we judge something to be the good because we desire it and thus give up desiring something because we judge it to be the good. The issue, for Spinoza, always, is not to deny or to suppress the natural passions but to comprehend and to live them as ultimately expressing knowledge of God and love of neighbor. He is clear, we know, that the fact that the natural right of the singular individual extends as far as his power—in the natural state—presupposes the distinction, that he acknowledges above, between the dictates of reason and the passions, between active affects and passive affects, and so between the civil state and the natural state. But he is relentless in insisting that we human beings acknowledge the unrelenting power of the affects in our lives. (Ultimately what this means, as we shall see, is that, while there is no right outside of or without power, there is also no power outside of or without right.) We can well anticipate that it is precisely in this context—the fact that human beings are conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile but ignorant of the causes of that appetite—that Adam will again emerge in Spinoza’s

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discourse. At the beginning of section 6 of chapter 2 Spinoza points out that most people do not agree with him that whether human beings live by reason or by appetite they live by the right of nature. They believe, rather, that the uncultured (ignori) disturb rather than follow nature; and they conceive of the human being in nature as imperium in imperio. They think that the human mind is not produced by any natural causes at all but is immediately created by God as independent of all other things and that, consequently, it possesses the absolute power of determining itself and using its reason correctly. Not only does experience belie this rationalism, Spinoza declares; but, if it were in the power of human beings to live by the guidance of reason, they would do so; yet they clearly do not. Nor do theologians remove this difficulty, Spinoza continues, when “they maintain that the cause of this impotence is the vice or sin of human nature, which has its origin in the fall (lapsu) of the first parent. For, even if it were as much in the power of the first man to stand as to fall (labi) and if he were of sound mind (mentis compos) and of whole [uncorrupted] nature (natura integra), how could it happen that, in being knowing and prudent (sciens prudensque), he would have fallen?” When the theologians answer that the first man was deceived by the devil, then I ask them: Who deceived the devil? Who could have rendered the foremost of all intelligent creatures [we may remember that Satan was first among the angels] mindless in wishing to be greater than God? For if the devil had possessed a sound mind, he would have endeavored (conabatur) to preserve himself and his being as far as it was in his power (quantum in se est) to do so: Further [Spinoza asks], how could it happen that the first man himself, who was [according to the theologians] of sound mind and the master of his will, was seduced and open to being tricked? For, if he had the power of correctly using his reason, he was not able to be seduced. For he would have necessarily endeavored (conatus est), as far as it was in his power, to preserve his being and his sound mind. And it is supposed [by my opponents] that he did have this [correct use of reason] in [his] power: therefore, [they must conclude that] he necessarily would have preserved his sound mind and could not have been deceived. But this is shown to be false from his story; and, therefore, it is to be admitted that it was not in the power of the first man to use his reason correctly but that, just like us (sicuti nos), he was subject to his affects. (2.6)

That the fall, lapsus, or sin of the first man is the result of his impotence (impotentia) or lack of power (potentia), according to Spinoza, and not the cause of his impotence or lack of power, as his theological opponents hold, explains why Adam is “just like us.” This rich passage, in which Spinoza concludes section 6 of chapter 2 of the Political Treatise and thus his explicit dis-

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cussion of the story of Adam (and Eve), it is patent, is wholly consistent with the prior two passages on that story that I have discussed.79 Adam does not begin mentis compos and then lose his power of reason in the fall. Rather, the fall expresses his original lack of reason, his impotence, his subjection to the affects—sicuti nos: like ourselves. Before commenting further on this passage, it is important to see, first, that in the following sections of chapter 2 Spinoza shows that freedom expresses power, not impotentia. The first man was not “free” to fall. The fall expresses, not his freedom but his lack of freedom. Had Adam (together with Eve) been born free in the garden, had he enjoyed the power of freedom, then he would not have “fallen” into the knowledge of good and evil. For, as we have already seen Spinoza argue in proposition 68 of part IV of the Ethics, if man had been born free, he would have been without the concepts of good and evil (and so without the affects, and so without desire or conatus, and so without existence! It is little wonder, then, that Spinoza declares this hypothesis to be patently false.) Spinoza points out in section 7 that the more we conceive of human beings as free the more we are driven to hold that they must necessarily preserve themselves and be mentis compos. “For freedom is virtue or perfection. Whatever, therefore, shows man to be impotent cannot be referred to his freedom. Therefore, a man cannot at all be called free because he is able not to exist or able not to use reason but only insofar as he has the power of existing and of managing his life (operandi) according to the laws of human nature. Therefore, the freer we consider a man to be the less we can say that he is able not to use reason and to choose the bad over the good.”80 In section 11 Spinoza reiterates his fundamental point that human beings are free insofar as they are led by reason, for only then can it be seen that they are determined to act from causes that can be adequately understood through their nature alone. “Freedom,” he concludes, “does not remove but posits the necessity of acting.” The portrayal of Adam that Spinoza gives in section 6 of chapter 2 of the Political Treatise, in the context of discussing the passive affects as reflecting human impotence, on the one hand, and freedom as expressing human power (the freedom to exist is virtue and perfection, he says), on the other, while brief, is cogent and dramatically illuminating. In arguing, consistent with his discussion of the story of the first man in the Ethics (and in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise), that man was not born in full command of his reason, that he was not born free, Spinoza shows us both what is at stake and how much is at stake in comprehending the contradictory nature of the story of Adam and Eve as paradoxical. It is nothing less than seeing that how we interpret the foundational story of the Bible has enormous consequences for how we interpret Spinoza, as (a) modern—and thus modernity, generally. It is also nothing less than seeing that how we interpret Spinoza, as biblical—and thus the Bible,

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generally—has enormous consequences for how we interpret modernity. In brief, how we interpret the story of Adam and Eve involves nothing less than how we interpret the relationship between the Bible and modernity. While in section 6 of chapter 2 of the Political Treatise Spinoza does not project the story of Adam (and Eve) forward into the covenant, as he does in the scholium of proposition 68 of part IV of the Ethics, he does enhance our understanding of the prelapsarian condition of Adam by sharply distinguishing his interpretation of it from that of (unnamed) theologians. It is also true, additionally, that, in going on to discuss freedom subsequent to section 6 in chapter 2, he shows us what it means for the heirs of Adam and Eve to “regain” their freedom (with which they were not born and which, therefore, they did not possess in the garden and did not lose in their fall into the knowledge of good and evil) in the covenant of the patriarchs, as he explains in the scholium. Once again it is striking to see Spinoza appeal to the contradictory stance (fall!) of Adam in order to support, to exemplify, his own concept of what I am calling his foundational account of human nature. The fall of Adam, he shows, is to be explained, consistent with the biblical story, by the fact that— like us!—he was not born mentis compos. (It is interesting to note that Spinoza says that Adam is “like us,” not that we are “like him.”) His fall reflects impotence, lack of power, bondage to the passive affects, not the power of reason or freedom on his part to act from the necessity of his nature alone. Adam is like us because, while born with the appetite, of which he is conscious, of seeking his own utile, he is born ignorant of the causes of that appetite. He begins, in other words, in bondage to the passive affects, and thus his fall, we see yet again, is a fall from idolatry—superstitious belief in final causes—into knowledge of good and evil, which, as we have noted already, cannot be possessed outside of (without) knowledge of God, just as knowledge of God cannot be possessed outside of (without) knowledge of good and evil. Thus, the issue, as I have indicated before, is to see how the enormous power that the affects have over our lives in fact becomes—is transformed into—the power of freedom. The sole way of explaining the transformation of passive affect into active affects; of bondage (to the passive affects) into freedom (of the active affects); of the natural state into the civil state; of consciousness that we are ignorant of the causes of our appetite, of, that is, contradiction into paradox, is, as I have already indicated, to see that the fact that we are part of nature already itself presupposes a fundamental distinction between human nature (freedom) and the common order of nature (bondage). In emphasizing, in the beginning, and thus unto the end, the power of the affects—that whatever human beings do they do by natural right—Spinoza does not for a moment deny the absolute centrality of freedom in the lives of human beings. He knows that, ultimately—foundationally—we begin in free-

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dom. But he also knows that this knowledge is jejune and, indeed, impotent when it is not tempered by a true appreciation of the role that the affects play in our lives. Thus, it is fascinating to see that, in helping us moderns obtain a perspective on the story of Adam and Eve that is true at once to the text and to philosophy, Spinoza shows us not only that Adam is like us but also that we are like Adam. Just as the foundational account of Moses is like Spinoza’s, so Spinoza’s foundational account is no less like that of Moses. What the analysis of the first man that Spinoza gives in the Political Treatise adds, then, to our understanding of how the contradiction in the account of prelapsarian man is “like” his own foundational account—with both accounts demanding a paradoxical resolution—is the sharpness with which he distinguishes his account, together with the account of both Adam and Moses (and God!), from that of his theological opponents. Whereas biblical authors and Spinoza have to explain how lack of power—the fact that in the beginning human beings are not mentis compos—involves (represents) the fall into knowing good and evil (and so into true knowledge of God), Spinoza’s theological opponents have to explain how human beings fall when they are endowed with the power of free action, have full control of their reason, and are not subject to the affects. When theologians then try to explain the fall of Adam (together with Eve) by appealing to a prior cause—Adam and Eve were seduced by the devil—Spinoza points out that they simply continue to evade the issue of the relationship between power, freedom, reason, and action, on the one hand, and impotence, bondage, the affects, and passion, on the other hand. The contradiction here—one version of the contradiction—is how human beings could originally be free and rational and yet not possess knowledge of good and evil. Yes, it is true, as Spinoza piquantly explains in proposition 68 of part IV of the Ethics, that, if human beings were born free, then they would then have no concepts of good and evil. But since they do have knowledge of good and evil—as foundational to knowledge of God and love of neighbor—then it follows that they could not have been born free and rational. It is an evident consequence of the account that Spinoza gives of foundations, as found in both his own philosophy and his commentary on the story of Adam and Eve, that sin represents (is caused by) not power but impotence, not reason but ignorance of the causes of our appetite in seeking our own utile, and not freedom but bondage. In contrast to theologians who, in blindly embracing in their superstitious ignorance the contradiction that Adam and Eve are free to sin, equate power, freedom, reason, and action with sin, Spinoza shows that—and that, like him, the Mosaic author of the story of the first man also shows that—sin involves and expresses the impotence of not knowing good and evil (and thus of not knowing God). Sin is not knowledge of good and evil and hence not knowledge of God and man. But the paradox, as

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always, is that there is no sin outside of (without) the knowledge of good and evil, outside of (without) knowledge of God and love of neighbor. For sin, in violating our responsibility to God and neighbor, upholds knowledge of God and love of neighbor as the standard of ethics for all human beings. In showing that the Mosaic account of the first man is like his own, in showing that both accounts expose the contradiction that man is not free to fall, Spinoza dramatically demonstrates that his own account is profoundly biblical and that the biblical account is no less profoundly modern. To see that man falls because he is not free (he does not possess perfect knowledge of God and self), to understand that the “fall” or lapsus of man represents or expresses the fact that, because he is not born free, he possesses knowledge of good and evil is to grasp the paradoxical resolution of the contradiction that the foundational accounts of man given by both Spinoza and Moses express. It is highly ironic that Spinoza’s theological opponents, in holding that man is free to fall, cannot then explain either freedom or the fall. In contrast, Spinoza, in indicating that the Mosaic account is like his own in showing that man is not free to fall, can and does explain both freedom and the fall. Spinoza’s theological opponents locate the cause or origin of human impotence, not in man himself but in the fall (lapsus)—in the seduction of Satan—in the inexplicable, contradictory freedom to fall. Spinoza, in contrast, shows that it is precisely freedom that expresses human power, not sin (corruption, wickedness, or malice). He shows that the contradiction between the divine command to Adam (and to Eve) not to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and his abrogation of that command can be resolved (by him, by us) solely in and as the paradox that it is not freedom, but rather lack of freedom, not reason, but rather bondage to the passive affects that expresses the fall into—the freedom, the responsibility of knowing good and evil and, ultimately, of possessing knowledge of God and love of neighbor. If we fail to see through the contradictions in the story of the first man to its paradoxical core, if we fail to see that the fall represents the story of freedom (salvation), then we shall be compelled to reduce the Bible’s paradoxical story of freedom, the story of salvation (in whatever version, whether that of the patriarchs, the prophets, Job, Solomon, Jesus, or the apostles) to contradiction. Spinoza’s version of freedom, of salvation, consistent with the account of Adam and Eve and of Jesus, involves and expresses the eternal transitio on the part of human beings to ever more (when not simply to less) substantial knowledge of God and love of neighbor. While Spinoza shows that without (outside of) knowledge of good and evil (knowledge of God and love of neighbor) there is no sin, his theological opponents are forced, in their superstitious ignorance, to equate knowledge of good and evil with sin. Consequently, just as the theologians locate the fall of

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Adam and Eve in an origin (principle) that is external to their being—in the miraculous figure of Satan—so they also (when Christian) typically locate the salvation of Adam and Eve’s heirs in an origin (principle) that is external to their being—in the miraculous figure of Christ. It is not that Christ, as the apostles describe him, is not miraculous. For, as I show in volume I of this study, Spinoza has no difficulty in invoking the spirit of Christ as the very truth of God and in citing key New Testament passages in support of his arguments, while also indicating at the same time that he leaves aside as incomprehensible the Christian dogmas of the incarnate and resurrected Christ. The fundamental difference that Spinoza delineates between his account of Adam and Eve and that of theologians, between the seemingly simple but absolutely fundamental difference between not being free to fall and being free to fall, is the difference between judging absolutely and absolutely not judging, as Montaigne formulates it. Judging absolutely—judging such that how you judge others is how you want others to judge you—presupposes knowledge of good and evil, knowledge of God and love of neighbor. Absolutely not judging—not being able to judge—reflects the contradiction of reducing knowledge of good and evil to sin. The paradox here, as we have seen, is that Spinoza shows that sin (the impotence of absolutely not judging) rests with prelapsarian man in his lack of power and freedom, in his bondage to the passive affects. It is from this contradictory (impotent, sinful) state that man and woman paradoxically “fall” into the freedom, into the responsibility of knowing good and evil. Spinoza’s theological opponents, in contrast, blindly embrace the contradiction that the fall expresses the freedom to fall and, with it, the contradiction that knowledge of good and evil is sinful. There are, I think, two basic reasons why Spinoza pays close attention to the story of Adam and Eve and thus why it is important for us, his readers, to pay the same close attention to his account of that story and, consequently, to the story itself. First, historically, he shows us (directly) that there are two basic versions of the story: man is free to fall; man is not free to fall. Further, he shows us (indirectly) that these two opposed versions constitute the two basic interpretations of the Bible and thus of the history of the theology and the philosophy of the west—of the world—from the Bible down to the present. Either, on the one hand, we reduce the story of Adam and Eve, and thus our own story, to contradiction and consequently have no way of understanding either the relationship between the Bible and modernity or Spinoza’s relationship to either the Bible or modernity. Or, on the other hand, in comprehending the story of prelapsarian man as intentionally contradictory, we embrace the story of freedom as the paradox that the Bible is modern from the beginning and that modernity is biblical unto the end. The consequence of the second version is that we liberate Spinoza from the contradictory readings to

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which he has typically been subjected and properly view him as at once biblical and modern. The second reason that the story of Adam and Eve is important—for understanding not only Spinoza but also, ultimately, ourselves—is ontological. Spinoza, consistent with the biblical account, shows that it is only when we truly take the measure of human impotence—when we properly acknowledge that human beings, in bondage to their passions, do not naturally follow the dictates of reason, that is, that they are sinful—that we can properly account for the enormity of human power, for good and for evil. That human desire is the good—that we absolutely judge something to be good because we desire it, whereas to desire something because it is good is absolutely not to judge— is the explosive identity that Spinoza makes central to ethics and in light of which he finds that Adam is “just like us.” Adam is like us in being conscious (in the beginning) of his appetite in seeking his own utile as the good, while being ignorant of the fact that the true cause of this appetite in seeking his own utile involves and expresses knowledge of good and evil, in other words, knowledge of God and love of neighbor. History and ontology thus meet hermeneutically. How we read the story of Adam and Eve and consequently the entire biblical story (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, modern . . .) involves and expresses our ontology—in showing that the identity of good and desire is found solely in the historical transitio to a more (when not to a less) perfect fit with the exemplar of human nature. To elaborate our ontology in and through history (narrative: story) is to demonstrate that the difference between judging absolutely and absolutely not judging is the difference between the paradoxical concept of necessary existence, of the relationship between thought and existence, on the one hand, and the contradictory opposition between necessity and existence, between thought and existence (whether in the pagan or in the idolatrous mode), on the other. The stakes in reading, with Spinoza, the story of Adam and Eve—in having a proper sense of the hermeneutical relationship, at once historical and ontological, between paradox and contradiction, between judging absolutely and absolutely not judging—are, I repeat, enormous.81 The entire history of the world turns on how we read the story of Adam and Eve, on how we understand our forebears to be “just like us” (and so understand ourselves to be like them), as the very author(s), human and divine, of the story was (were) so acutely, so providently, so provisionally conscious.82

Conclusion: Desire and Knowledge of God As if to demonstrate further that freedom is not what we lose in “falling” from contradictory paradise but what we enact paradoxically in the covenant of our

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common human life, Spinoza brings part IV of the Ethics to a close by emphasizing the social dimensions of ethical life (much as he ends part II, as I show in volume I of this study) in five concluding propositions, followed by an appendix in which he summarizes the content of part IV in thirty-two points. He argues in proposition 73 that “the man who is led by reason is more free in a civil state, where he lives by common decree, than in solitude where he obeys only himself.” It is instructive that the comparison that Spinoza actually makes in the demonstration is not between social life and solitude but between living by reason and living by fear. To endeavor to preserve one’s being from the dictate of reason, that is, to live freely, is, he says, to desire to maintain “the reason (plan) of common life and utility” (by IV.37) and consequently “to live from the common decree of the civil state” (by IV.37S2). Not only does Spinoza not mention solitude in the demonstration, but it is also perplexing that he refers to scholium 2 of proposition 37. For in that scholium, as we saw, Spinoza does not indicate that social life involves a common life of utility based on the dictates of reason as he does here. In general, while the commitment to freedom as involving the common life lived by the dictates of reason is clear in proposition 73, consistent with the whole of part IV, except for the second scholium of proposition 37, it is important to note that Spinoza spells out solely the ethical but not the political or the constitutional dimensions of what it means “to live from the common decree of the civil state.” In the scholium of proposition 73 Spinoza notes that the true freedom of man involves what he calls fortitude (fortitudo) and which, as he earlier indicated (in III.59S), he divides into strength of spirit (animositas)—as the desire by which each individual endeavors from the dictate alone of reason to preserve his own being—and generosity (generositas)—as the desire by which each individual endeavors to aid others and to join them to himself in friendship. Spinoza remarks that he need not demonstrate here all the separate properties of fortitude, much less to indicate that the “strong man” (vir fortis) hates no one; is angry with no one; is envious of, indignant with, and despises no one; and least of all is proud. For he has already demonstrated these things and also what pertains to the true life and to religion, “namely, that hate is to be conquered by opposing love and that everyone who is led by reason desires that the good that he wants for himself also be for others.” In point 7 of the appendix Spinoza notes that, while it is impossible for man not to be part of and to follow the common order of nature, his power of acting will be aided and supported when he lives with individuals who agree with his nature. If, however, he lives among those who do not in the least agree with his nature, it will be very difficult for him not to have to change himself when accommodating himself to them. Thus, he notes in an earlier proposition that, although it is not easy to live among the uncultivated (ignori), nevertheless, they are men who can bring human aid, than which there is none more

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excellent (IV.70S). It is in this context, then, that Spinoza observes that it is solely free men who, because they are most useful to each other, are also most grateful to each other (IV.71). He typically repeats, however, that, because good and evil are the product of our desire, “it is absolutely permitted to everyone by the highest right of nature to do whatever he judges will contribute to his utility” (IV.Ap8). However, he then no less typically and absolutely qualifies that claim by stating further that it can be true solely in terms of the dictates of reason (otherwise, we can add, human beings would be back in the contradictory state of nature, not to mention of paradise). For “nothing is given that is more useful to man in preserving his being and in enjoying a rational life than a man who is led by reason,” Spinoza declares (IV.Ap9). It is in this context that Spinoza also writes that “a free man never acts with deceit (dolo malo) but always with [good] faith (fidu)” (IV.72). Then, having noted earlier that the free man can express strength of spirit just as well by fleeing as by fighting, depending on the context of the situation (IV.69C), he raises the famously difficult question, in the scholium of proposition 72, whether reason would not counsel an individual to be perfidious (perfidus) in his action, that is, to act in bad faith, in order to preserve himself from the danger of present death. But Spinoza’s resolute answer is no. For otherwise, he observes, the only basis on which human beings could establish common laws would be perfidy (bad faith), the result of which would be that “in reality they would have no common laws, which is absurd.” Before he concludes part IV, Spinoza observes that he will collect his scattered demonstrations under headings so that they can be seen “from one aspect (uno aspecto).” But the fact that, as in part III, he summarizes part IV in an appendix of thirty-two points indicates once again that the method of geometrical demonstration that he uses in the Ethics has no special truth value but is simply a rhetorical strategy that possesses both strength and weakness. Its strength is a certain analytical rigor (which, however, is not very systematic and is constantly interrupted by the explanatory scholia or notes, some of which are quite lengthy, as we have seen, not to mention appendices and prefaces). Its weakness, as we saw Spinoza himself remark earlier in the Ethics, is its prolixity, the fact that its main points are so “disposed” (i.e., dispersed) that it is difficult to grasp them as a whole. Indeed, just as Spinoza in the first several definitions of the Affects, in which he summarizes the content of part III, gives us new insight into the affects by showing that they involve the transition to greater (when not to lesser) perfection, so it is also within the first several points of the appendix to part IV that he provides us with an articulation of the very structure of the affects that throws light on the whole of the Ethics. Indeed, I have already cited point 1:

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All of our endeavors (conatûs) or desires so follow from the necessity of our nature that they can be understood either through itself alone, as through its proximate [i.e., its own] cause, or insofar as we are a part of nature, which cannot be adequately conceived through itself without other individuals.

That our nature is necessary in two senses—free (as wholly its own determining cause) and determined (partially by other causes)—expresses the absolute difference between human nature and the common order of nature. (“Absolute” here does not mean unrelated or unconnected. It means, rather, that human nature is to be explained from itself alone—given that we are, in fact, a part of nature.) This structuring dialectic is consonant with the foundational principle of the appendix of part I according to which human beings are conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile but ignorant of the causes of their appetite. As I have explained before, the fact that human beings are (and know themselves to be only) a part of nature is reflected in their consciousness that, paradoxically, they know what they are ignorant of, which is that they are responsible for knowing that the true cause of their appetite, as desire or conatus, is the good that they directly desire. They must face the fact that, notwithstanding the falsely comforting seductions of final causes (one of whose many visages is the Satan of Paradise!), in which, in their superstitious ignorance, they project (alienate) their desire, they do not desire what they judge to be the good. Rather, they judge to be the good what they desire. In other words, it is only when human beings experience the contradiction between desire and the good, the fact that I cannot desire as good what I deny to others—without contradicting both myself and them—and that others cannot desire as good what they deny to me—without contradicting themselves and me—that they can undertake the transitio to greater perfection of desire. Human desire (as love) actually grows and develops in and through this transition. (The opposite is also true, as Spinoza is so vividly aware, although he also holds, as we have seen, that, while hatred, which is generated by love, is much stronger than mere aversion, love finally is the unconquerable power that enhances and enlarges life for all.) The contradiction between desire and the good is embodied in the unstable condition of the natural passions, of the natural state, and so also of the prelapsarian status of Adam and Eve. The status of Adam and Eve, it turns out, is not that of the citizens of the revolutionary and so perfectly circular, unchanging stasis of the six Aristotelian states, in which the good man, the good of man, is unknown. As the six Aristotelian states revolve blindly into each other, their citizens, in their ignorance of the good (as the contradiction of desire), desire no change and so find no exit to their blindness and ignorance by

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falling into the knowledge of good and evil. The status of Adam and Eve, however, is, as Spinoza sees, inherently unstable, because contradictory. Adam and Eve do not understand themselves through their nature alone, given that, while they are conscious of the appetite in seeking their own utile as the good, they are ignorant of the causes of that appetite. They are ignorant of their desire as the good (of the good as their desire). They are ignorant of good and evil. Their “fall” embodies the recognition—on the part of the author(s) of the story—that there is no true knowledge of God outside of (without) good and evil. The God who would command human beings not to know God as the eternal principle of necessary truth is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the God, rather, of final causes, the God of arbitrary, even tyrannical ends, whose rule has to be given up as a contradictory idol if human beings, who are not born free and mentis compos, are to undertake the eternal transition, in the covenant of the patriarchs, to ever greater (when not to lesser) comprehension of the paradoxical relationship between desire and the good. Given the critical difference between human nature and the common order of nature, it is fitting that in points 2 and 3 of the appendix of part IV Spinoza distinguishes between desires as actions and desires as passions and between adequate ideas and inadequate ideas. The former are those that follow from our nature in such a way that they can be understood through it alone, that is, by human power, whereas the latter are defined by the power of things that are outside of us. “For the former always indicate our [human] power, and the latter, in contrast, our impotence and mutilated knowledge,” Spinoza observes (IV.Ap2). It follows, then, that “our actions, that is, those desires that are defined by the power or the reason of man, are always good and [that] the rest [of the desires] can, however, be good as well as evil” (IV.Ap3).83 Having established the identity of human action, desire, power, reason, and the good, Spinoza then proceeds in point 4 to remark that the prime utile in life for human beings, that is, their highest contentment (felicitas) and blessedness (beatitudo), is to perfect their understanding (intellectum) or reason as much as they can. Given the close relationship that Spinoza has characteristically established between desire and reason and between utile and beatitudo, we can anticipate that he will next indicate that human power and desire involve and express knowledge of God. Indeed, he proceeds to state that beatitude is nothing other than the active acceptance (acquiescentia) of mind that arises from the intuitive knowledge of God. But to perfect the understanding is also nothing else than to understand (intelligere) God and the attributes and actions of God that follow from [are consequent on] the necessity of his na-

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ture. Wherefore, the ultimate end of man who is led by reason, that is, the highest desire by which he is eager (studet) to moderate all the rest [of his desires], is that by which he is led to conceive adequately himself and all things that can fall under his understanding (intelligentiam). (IV.Ap4)

Because there is no rational life without intelligentia, Spinoza observes in point 5, things are good insofar as they aid man in enjoying the life of the mind, while things are evil insofar as they hinder man from perfecting his reason and from being able to enjoy the rational life. He provides an alternative formulation of the difference between good and evil in point 6. Here he notes that, since all things of which man is the efficient cause (i.e., all things that can be understood from his nature alone) must be good, evil things happen to man solely from external causes, that is, insofar as he is a part of nature, whose laws he is compelled to obey and to which he is compelled to accommodate himself in nearly infinite ways. It is at this point that, having summarized his conception of desire as human (and thus no less as divine) good, Spinoza rejoins the discussion that nothing so agrees with human nature as human nature, that is, as other human beings who also live by the dictates of reason84 and so are not “external” to human nature as merely “other individuals.”85 While hate divides people and makes them contrary to each other—with the result that human beings are more to be feared than any other individuals in nature—“minds, nevertheless, are conquered not by arms but by love and generosity” (IV.Ap11). It follows, therefore, that it is first of all utile for human beings to establish customs (communities) and to bind themselves with those chains with which they may more aptly make themselves one from all and absolutely do those things that serve to strengthen friendships (IV.Ap12).86 After showing that his concept of freedom as social solidarity has implications for thinking through such practical matters as marriage, the care of the poor, and money,87 Spinoza summarizes his ethical perspective in point 32 and thus concludes part IV of the Ethics as he anticipates part V. I shall cite point 32 in full. While Spinoza here sums up his philosophy, readers can easily be misled by both the apparently bland balance (of what is sometimes called his mysticism) in which he characterizes it and also by the preeminence of what he names as “our better part.” They need to keep in mind that what he calls acquiescentia (active acceptance) emerges (eternally) from the dialectic of desire (conatus) and the good and thus from the unceasing transition of desire to a more (when not to a less) perfect determination of the good. Spinoza writes in point 32 as follows: But human power is extremely limited, and it is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes. And, therefore, we do not have the absolute power of adapting

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things that are outside of us to our use. At least we shall bear with equal mind those things that happen to us against what the principle (ratio) of our advantage (utilitatis) demands if we are conscious that we have done our duty (nostro officio), that we could not have extended the power that we have to the point that we could have avoided those things, and that we are a part of the whole of nature whose order we follow. If we clearly and distinctly understand this, that part of us, which is defined by understanding, that is, our better part, will fully and actively accept (acquiescet) that and will endeavor (conabitur) to persevere in that active acceptance (acquiescentiâ). For, insofar as we understand, we can desire nothing except what is necessary, nor can we actively accept (acquiescere) anything absolutely except what is true. And, therefore, insofar as we understand these things correctly, to that degree the conatus of our better part agrees with the order of the whole of nature.

What Spinoza calls acquiescentia, Montaigne calls repentance (as he acknowledges that there is nothing so easy to counterfeit as piety). I may regret that I do not have a different nature or that God has not completely reformed me, Montaigne observes in “Of Repentance.” But such regret, he states, is no more to be considered repentance than my regret that I am not an angel or Cato. “My actions are in order and in conformity with what I am and with my condition,” he writes further. “I can do no better. And repentance does not properly apply to the things that are not in our power; rather does regret” (617). We regret, foolishly, the things that are not in our power (I regret, for example, that I am not a star—whether a basketball player or the Queen of Canada). We repent truly—we take responsibility for—the things that are in our power. So Spinoza, in the above passage, makes clear that, while we can desire only what is necessary, we acquiesce absolutely only in what is true. But what do we desire, as necessary? What things are truly in our power (and consequently what things are not in our power)? It is not in my power that I was born at a certain time and place; of certain parents; of a certain gender, class, or race, etc. But, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author observes in Philosophical Fragments, while my past (both cultural and biological) is unchanging (I cannot change, for example, the place and date of my birth), it is not necessary.88 For the past, too, has come into existence (from nothing—from nothing from which it could be necessarily deduced, as from a priori principles). What is in my human power is that I be responsible for my cultural and biological inheritance—what it means for me to be, for example, a man or a woman, a white person or a black person, a young person or an old person (or whatever possible combination of the binary opposites that I may choose). So the future also, we can say, is unchanging but not necessary (determined). For my acquiescence in or repentance for the things that are in my power—my absolute commitment to the truth—is unchanging (insofar as I am a responsi-

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ble human being). But it is not necessary (it is not determined by external causes); for I must always, eternally, bring this absolute commitment to the truth into existence: I must constantly effect a transitio to an ever more adequate conception of the truth. It is in light of the distinction between repentance and regret, between things that are in our power and so necessary (liberating), which we actively accept, and things that are not in our power and so unchanging but not necessary (determined) that we can pose the question of where Spinoza would stand on the question of death. Surely, it is death, above all, that is reflected in the infinitely unsurpassed power of the external causes of nature. What is Spinoza’s concept of death? Death is natural, necessary, and unavoidable. Yet, as we know, Spinoza absolutely distinguishes between living by the dictates of reason, expressing knowledge of God and love of neighbor, and living by fear—the fear of death. So, once again, while it is unchanging that all human beings, like all natural beings, die, the death of human beings is not necessary in the sense that they unfreely live their lives as necessitated by what is not in their power, that is, that they view their life as (but) a preparation for or a prelude to death. Spinoza writes, as we have seen, that the free man thinks about nothing less than about death and that his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death. So Montaigne equally writes in “Of Repentance” that “it is living happily, not as Antisthenes [sophist, disciple of Socrates, and founder of the Cynics] said, dying happily, that constitutes human felicity.” Consequently, Montaigne shows no regret for his life, but rather true repentance, when he goes on to say that, “if I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived. I have neither tears for the past nor fears for the future.” (620) Repentance involves living happily, not dying happily. Acquiescentia expresses active acceptance of life, not passive bondage to death. I intend this discussion of IV.Ap32 to serve both directly as a conclusion to this chapter, on the affects, and indirectly as an introduction to my discussion in the next chapter of part V of the Ethics, in which Spinoza famously presents his concept of the eternity of the mind as the better part of us and separate from the body, which, mortal and finite, vanishes into death. It is true that human power is infinitely surpassed by the power of nature, that human beings are a part of nature, or, in the words of Scripture, that there is no flesh born of woman that does not die. But what is truth? What does Spinoza mean when he writes that we can acquiesce absolutely in nothing else except what is true? It is true that I (shall) die. But what is the truth of my death? What do I know? What do I desire? Pascal observes in the Pensées that, while man is simply a reed, the weakest in nature, yet “he is a thinking reed.” Infinitely more powerful than man, the universe need not arm itself to crush him. A drop of water is enough to kill him. “But even though the universe should crush him,”

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Pascal remarks, “man would still be nobler than what kills him since he knows that he dies and the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of it.” It is on this basis, then, that Pascal, consistent with Spinoza, declares that “all our [human and also our divine?] dignity consists, therefore, in thought. It is upon thought that we must raise ourselves up and not on space and time (durée) that we would not be able to fill” (#391). He additionally observes that “by space [and time], the universe comprehends (comprend) me and swallows me up like a point. By thought, I comprehend it” (#217). It is clear—and doubtless this is the most profound theme of all literature, art, philosophy, and theology in the biblical tradition—that the consciousness that I die is either liberating or enslaving, either life-giving or life-denying. The paradox here, perhaps the absolute paradox, is that it is only because our human power is infinitely surpassed by the power of nature, only because we die, that we can be liberated from what I earlier called, in discussing Spinoza’s interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve, both prelapsarian and postlapsarian idolatry. The paradox is that it is death that gives (us) life. Death—like the “nothing” out of which creation emerges—is the condition, yet not the cause of life. It is only because we are confronted with the contradiction that we die, because we are conscious that, to be born (to life) is to die, that we are empowered to conceive of our lives as the paradox that they are not based on death (on the eternal cycle of the common order of nature or of what Pascal, anticipating Kant, calls finite space and time). We may recall that Edgar’s anguished expression of freedom in King Lear is a meditation of life, of human dignity, not of death: so long as we can say this is the worst, then it is not the worst.89 Whether the consciousness that I die is life-giving or life-denying, whether liberating or enslaving is but another version of Spinoza’s concept of desire as the supreme good of life. We do not desire something because we judge it to be the good. Rather, we judge something to be the good because we desire it. We are not to understand this formulation of the relationship between desire and the good to mean that people do not constantly distort it by projecting their desire into the good (as a final cause) that is determined, naturally, outside themselves and to which, then, in their ignorance and superstition, they passively bind themselves. What Spinoza’s formulation of the relationship between desire and the good signifies, on the contrary, is that the projections of desire into the good as a final cause to which desire then blindly conforms are done in fear (bad faith). They are covers by which we either reduce the good (of others) to our finite desire or reduce our desire to the finite good (of others). The standard names of the resultant self-deception and deception of others are hypocrisy and idolatry. For, as we saw Montaigne wryly observe, there

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is nothing so easy to counterfeit as piety. We see, therefore, that, although the consciousness that I die is life-giving—meaning that I directly desire life as the good—it is constantly distorted by us human beings and so changed into its idolatrous opposite: the worship of death as the source of life (generally called nihilism). It is in the context of anticipating our discussion in the next chapter of how Spinoza conceives of the eternity of the mind in part V of the Ethics—and, consequently, of raising the question of how, in light of the passage of Pascal on the dignity of thought as our consciousness that we die, he may understand the relationship between the infinite power of nature and our human consciousness of that power and thus the relationship between (eternal) life and death—that it is important to ask how we are to understand Spinoza’s reference to “our better part” in IV.Ap32. In appealing to intelligentia—understanding—or, in other words, to the mind as “our better part,” Spinoza indulges in careless, comparative language that obscures (and, if taken literally, distorts, if it does not belie) the fundamental structure of his thought, that involving the difference between human nature and the common order of nature, between freedom and bondage, between active and passive affects, etc. It also plays into the very tradition of philosophy and theology to which he is so resolutely and absolutely opposed, that which makes the mind (or soul) of human beings imperium in imperio. Understanding, or what Pascal calls thought, is not to be conceived of as better than the body or the natural passions or as partial, that is, as a part that is superior to some other part (the body or the natural passions). Such language is untrue to any idea of human (and also divine) wholeness, integrity, dignity, freedom, or sovereignty, to the idea that human beings are free insofar as they are determined from their own nature (or essence) alone and not from the external causes of the common order of nature. I want to be clear that I do not believe that Spinoza has committed a philosophical error here. For the context in which he uses the conventional term “better part” is firmly controlled by the absolute distinction that he makes between desiring nothing except what is necessary and actively accepting only what is true, between the common order of nature and human nature. However, since it is evident that Spinoza is anticipating his discussion of the eternity of the mind in part V, it is important for us not to be mystified by any false distinction between better and lesser parts and thus to lose a firm grasp on the dialectic structuring his thought. The distinction that counts, and the only distinction that counts, for Spinoza is, as we have seen, that between actively desiring the good for others that we desire for ourselves and distorting the relationship between good and desire such that each is made partial, comparative, and relative. The distinction that counts absolutely is not that

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between better and lesser parts, between mind and body, but between adequate ideas (of the mind) and inadequate ideas (of the mind). Insofar as the mind is in bondage to its natural passions, to the external causes of nature, it is partial and contains what Spinoza calls mutilated ideas. Our “better part” is simply to comprehend God as the supreme good of loving our neighbor as ourselves. It is important to see that, when desire and the good are made partial and comparative and so relative to each other, they are rendered not only dualistic opposites but also indistinguishably finite unities in which the good vanishes into my desire as my desire vanishes into the good. Consequently, they reflect the contradictions of both prelapsarian paradise (in the garden man is free to fall: he is one with God) and postlapsarian paradise (in heaven man is free to fall: he is one with God). Thus we see that to desire the good directly is not to identify myself directly with the good, for the good is always other than myself—as God and neighbor. The good that I directly desire I can desire, paradoxically, for myself only insofar as I desire it for all other human beings. When, on the other hand, desire and the good are directly (finitely) identified, we are back in the contradictions of paradise, whether prelapsarian or postlapsarian, just as when they are directly opposed to each other we are back in the contradictory world of Socrates or of Antisthenes as invoked by Montaigne. In light of the issues that are involved here, it will be instructive, I think, to look at what is, surely, the foundational text in Christianity for comprehending the relationship between life and death, between (limited) human powers and the (infinite) power of nature. For human beings to realize, to be conscious of the fact that, the power of nature over them is infinite is for them to possess the paradoxical insight that the infinite, in fact, expresses the power of human (and divine) life over death, not the power of nature and so of death over (human and divine) life. In the finite terms of space and time, the universe swallows us human beings up in death, as Pascal says. But in the terms of the infinite dignity of our thought, we human beings envelop (comprehend: create) the universe. The foundational text, then, that I undertake to consider, in light of Spinoza’s distinction between human nature (life) and the common order of nature (death), is Paul’s perfervid defense of the resurrection of the dead—of Christ and of all believers in him as the Christ—in I Corinthians 15. A scrupulous reading of this brilliant chapter shows how delicate is the issue of understanding the relationship of life and death. Is the feature that uniquely distinguishes human beings from all other living beings, the fact that they are conscious that they die, life-giving or life-denying? Is not the distinction between spirit and flesh, between spirit and letter, and between life and death that Paul makes in I and II Corinthians and in his two other major letters, Romans and Galatians, consistent with the fundamental dis-

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tinction that Spinoza makes between the (infinite) power of man and the finite power of nature, that Pascal makes between the dignity of thought and finite space and time, and that Montaigne makes between judging absolutely and absolutely not judging? (“Absolutely not judging” would mean here to be subject to or in bondage to the external power of nature, that is, to death.) The question, then, is whether the concept of life and death that Paul articulates in I Corinthians 15 in terms of resurrection is consistent with his distinction between spirit and flesh.90 Is the distinction that he makes between Christ as life-giving and Adam as death-giving, between spirit and dust and between heaven and earth true to and consistent with the distinction that he makes between spirit and flesh? That Paul makes the figure of Adam central to his concept of the resurrection indicates yet again that how we read the story of the first man is how we read the Bible; and there is no greater test of how we read the Bible than how we read I Corinthians 15. We shall find, I submit, that, just as we have to be careful not to read Spinoza’s “better part of us” dualistically—making the mind or soul superior to the body—so we have to be careful not to view the distinctions that Paul makes between the first Adam (as dust) and the second Adam or Christ (as spirit), between the perishable and the imperishable, between the mortal and the immortal as contradictory opposites. I wholeheartedly agree with Paul, while, in the spirit of Spinoza, I wholeheartedly oppose the reduction of Paul’s doctrine of resurrection to supernatural dogma. What Paul says is true. The question is: what does he say?91 Paul makes it clear from the beginning of chapter 15 of I Corinthians that, in opposing those who deny the resurrection of the dead, the gospel that he preaches rests on the belief that Christ, after he died and was buried, was resurrected on the third day—in accordance with (Hebrew) Scripture—and that he appeared seriatim to the disciples, to other followers, and, finally, to Paul himself. While first-person witness is always impressive and must be taken seriously, it must also be subjected to the most careful interrogation as to its methodology. It must be doubted until and unless it turns out that it can be doubted solely because it is true (because its existence is necessary). Paul appears to intuit this problem by moving beyond bearing witness to the resurrected Christ to the claim that all human beings, who believe in Christ, will be resurrected. In a sense his approach is like that of Spinoza (and not like that of Descartes). For, having begun with the truth of God, he moves on to human beings (while Descartes begins with the individual human being and from there moves on to the proof of God’s existence). However, as readers who are familiar with I Corinthians 15 will doubtless have anticipated, the fact that Paul presents human beings in the guise of the heirs of Adam indicates that what is at stake here is precisely how he conceives of the first man and his fall. “For as by a man [Adam] came death,” Paul writes, “by a man [Christ] has

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come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (I Cor. 15.21–22). The first man, Adam, was a living being. The last man, Christ, is a life-giving spirit. The first man was from the dust of the earth. The second man is from heaven. As Paul distinguishes between Adam and Christ so he also then distinguishes between the seed sown as perishable and what is raised as imperishable, between the mortal and the immortal, and between the physical body and the spiritual body. He writes, then, in conclusion: When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality [i.e., when death puts on life, when flesh is lived as spirit?], then shall come to pass the saying that is written [in Isaiah 25.8]: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (I Cor. 15.54–57)

The issue with which Paul confronts us here is how he intends us (or how we intend) to understand his interpretation of the story of the first man in light of the sharp distinction that he draws between Adam and Christ, between dust and heaven, between death and life, between the mortal and the immortal, and between the physical body and the spiritual body. If he intends his presentation to be taken literally, or if we take it literally, then the same insoluble contradiction emerges in his concept of Adam as the contradiction that Spinoza discerns in the story of the first man. Although Paul does not mention the “fall” of Adam directly, everything he writes implies that Adam was free to fall, that is, that, in disobeying God, he lost his freedom. But this interpretation, we have learned from Spinoza, runs into the problem of what it would (then) mean for Adam and Eve to have (fallen into possession of) knowledge of good and evil. How could knowledge of good and evil embody lack of freedom on the part of Adam and Eve? Indeed, how could they have freely disobeyed God without knowing good and evil (or how could they have known God outside of or without knowing good or evil)? Further, such an interpretation would equally mean that all the heirs of Adam and Eve, that is, all the members of the covenant, as known in Scripture, would equally have been without freedom. The conclusion, however, that Adam fell from freedom into lack of freedom, from power into impotence is absurd for three elemental reasons (not to mention others), consistent with what we have seen to be Spinoza’s demonstration of the impossible contradictions in which theologians become entan-

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gled when they hold that Adam was free to fall. First, while it is true that in Romans Paul articulates a tense, richly complex, paradoxical, and at times contradictory conception of the relation between law and grace (Christ), between works and faith, between Jew and Greek (or the Gentile believer in Christ), etc., a careful reading of his letter indicates, however, that he also has an exalted understanding of the law as holy, of the law as the law of God. Here I shall mention just two passages. In Romans 8 Paul distinguishes between the law of the flesh and the law of the spirit in terms of the distinction between living without God (death) and living with God (life): “But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God really dwells in you” (Rom. 8.9). In Romans 13 Paul writes that “he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. The commandments [several of which he mentions] . . . are summed up in this sentence [as found in Lev. 19.18], ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13.8–10). Thus, we see that Paul makes it clear that he assumes no simple opposition between law (as faithfully lived by the Hebrew heirs of Adam and Eve) and grace (Christ). The distinction between flesh and spirit (letter and spirit) or between death and life is not that between law and grace or, consequently, between Adam and Christ. The second reason that it would be utterly contradictory on the part of Paul to reduce Adam and Eve and their heirs in the Hebrew covenant to bondage is that he could then not cite the prophet Isaiah as “proof ” that “Death is swallowed up in [the] victory”—of the resurrection. (It should also be kept in mind, by the way, that the Pharisees, among whom Paul was proud to include himself, believed in the resurrection of the body, unlike the Sadducees.) The third reason that the distinction between Adam (dust) and Christ (life) is, if taken literally, contradictory and untrue is that, as we have already seen, it violates the most basic of Paul’s own versions of dialectic, that between flesh and spirit. Clearly, those covenantal heirs of Adam and Eve who fulfill the law by loving their neighbors as themselves live by the spirit, not by the flesh. They live freely in the covenant, as sinners. They do not live in bondage to sin. Paul’s distinction between spirit and flesh, as between life and death, is precisely the same distinction that Spinoza makes between active affects and passive affects, etc., which is consistent with the fact that he frequently cites Paul in the Theologico-Political Treatise as a covenantal authority. We see, consequently, that we face the same problem in interpreting Paul’s concept of Adam as we face in interpreting the story of the first man, as we learn from Spinoza. Adam (together with Eve) was not born free with perfect knowledge of God. The first man was not free to fall. The command of God to Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was contradictory and impossible. Yet Adam fell, the story patently says, as Paul

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clearly presupposes. Indeed, Spinoza shows that it is prelapsarian Adam who is “like us”—in his lack of freedom and in his impotence, in the contradictory and impossible knowledge of God that he possesses. It is precisely from this impossibly contradictory position that Adam falls into knowledge of good and evil, which is the knowledge that is presupposed in the covenant and which entails knowledge of God (as knowledge of God presupposes knowledge of good and evil). Yet Paul, in appearing to hold that it is lapsarian Adam who is unfree and so like us, would then agree with the theologians whose interpretation of Adam—that he is free to fall into the lack of freedom and impotence—is shown by Spinoza to be a contradictory impossibility. But what in fact does Paul write? What does his story convey to us? He tells us that it is the unfree, the fallen, the sinful heirs of Adam who believe in Christ as the resurrected lord whom he, through his resurrection, liberates from death. They, too, will be resurrected from death and will live. Indeed, Paul follows up his citation from Isaiah that death is swallowed up in the victory of the God of life by stating: “the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” Did not Jesus himself say that he comes to save not the righteous but the sinners? The issues here are subtle and complex. Paul is right that there is no sin outside of (without) death and that sin would be impotent (it would not exist) outside of (without) the law. But we do not sin because we die. The power of sin is not the law; or, in other words, the power of the law is not sin, as Paul clearly acknowledges in Romans 7.7: “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin.”92 Death is the condition but not the cause of sin. The law is the condition but not the cause of sin. Sin is in not knowing God, in not knowing good and evil, in not living the knowledge and the law of God by obeying his commandments, whose very summation is, Paul says, in citing Leviticus: to love your neighbor as yourself. The issue, then, that we face in grasping Paul’s concept of Adam and so of his concept of the resurrection itself—of both Christ and the fallen heirs of Adam—is that, if taken literally, it is contradictory. It is contradictory in itself, contradictory of the story of Adam and Eve, contradictory of covenantal law, contradictory of the basic teaching about the law that we find in Romans, and contradictory of Paul’s own fundamental distinction between flesh and spirit as the difference between death and life. To live by the flesh is life-denying. To live by the spirit is life-affirming. To live by the spirit is the affirmation of the flesh, the very resurrection of the flesh: the flesh made holy (in conforming to the love of neighbor). If we take the sharp dichotomies between the dust of Adam and the spirit of Jesus, between mortality and immortality, between the perishable and the imperishable literally, that is, as dualistic or contradictory opposites, then we are forced to reject either Paul’s teaching on resurrection as

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contradicting his own basic teaching or his own basic teaching as contradicting his doctrine of resurrection. The alternative, however, to embracing (either) contradiction—that is, superstition or idolatry—in our ignorance of contradiction is to view these contradictory opposites as themselves expressing the sting of sin and the power of sin. In other words, it is to find ourselves compelled to think through the contradiction that Adam and Eve were free to fall, the contradictory command to them not to know good and evil. Just as we (can) resolve the contradictory stance of prelapsarian Adam and Eve solely as the paradox that their fall into the knowledge of good and evil expresses their freedom, not their lack of freedom, so we (can) resolve the contradictory opposites that Paul manipulates with such dexterity in I Corinthians 15 solely by understanding that they bear the dialectic of spirit and flesh. It is not that Adam is (merely) dust (which would dishonor the covenant) or that Christ is (merely) spirit (which would falsify the incarnation). Adam is not mortal and Christ is not immortal, as if they were Greek opposites. Rather, all members of the covenant from Adam and Eve on—in knowing good and evil, in knowing that they will die—bear, like Job, the stigmata of the spirit in their flesh: they are marked as God’s own. How do they come to terms with their existence as necessary, with their freedom as determined from their own human nature alone, in light of suffering and death (which, as Spinoza might say, are no less absolutely true as expressing the infinite, eternal, and necessary decree of God than that the whole is greater than its part)? That the wisdom of the free man—lapsarian Adam and Eve, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Isaiah, Job, Jesus, Paul . . . Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza . . . —is a meditation of life, not of death, embodies the paradoxical consciousness that, if human beings did not die, they would not be born into the life of the spirit, into what Spinoza, together with Pascal, calls the dignity of thought. The resurrection of the flesh, in other words, befits free human beings, not those lost in the contradictions of life-denying theologians who, in the (self-) contradictory spirit of Job’s friends, hold that, because Adam and Eve were free to fall, their fall into the knowledge of good and evil, into the covenantal knowledge of God and love of neighbor, reduces life to the contradictions of death (to the death of contradictions). As I now undertake to conclude this chapter on the affects, in which I have discussed parts III and IV of the Ethics, plus the appendix of part I, it is striking, surely, to have seen how fitting it is that Spinoza shows that Adam (together with Eve) is—prior to his fall—“just like us” in being subject to the affects. The foundational position that Adam shares with us is that, while he begins conscious of his appetite in seeking his own self-advantage (utile), he is born ignorant of the causes of his appetite. In bondage to his affects, he is not free to fall. He is not born with knowledge of God as the cause of his

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existence, as that in, through, and by which he exists. Spinoza shows us that the command of God to Adam and Eve not to eat of the knowledge of the fruit of the tree of good and evil is impossibly contradictory. It would be absolutely impossible for human beings not to live by or to conform to the eternal and necessary decree of God. Yet, according to the biblical story, Adam and Eve do fall. They disobey God and eat of the life-bestowing fruit that blesses them with the knowledge that good and evil—life in the covenant—are not given outside of (without) death. The paradox here, one of the many versions of the paradox, is that to begin in bondage to the affects, yet conscious of the appetite of seeking one’s utile, is to discover that to know that one is in bondage to the affects, to know that one is unfree to fall and lacks the power to fall, is in fact to have fallen already into the knowledge of good and evil. It is important to see that the state or condition of prelapsarian Adam does not occur (temporally) before his fall into knowing good and evil. Indeed, the paradox is that, while knowledge of good and evil presupposes the transition from bondage to the affects to the free enactment of affective knowledge as love of neighbor, this transition can be known solely from the point of view of the knowledge of good and evil. The transition exists, in others words, only in and through—as—the covenant. The fall from bondage to the affects into freely knowing good and evil is the transition to ever greater perfection. But there is no transition (as such) from passive affects to active affects, from bondage to freedom, from the natural state to the civil state, from flesh to spirit, from death to life. The very concept of transition presupposes the existence of human beings in the covenant or, in other words, their possession of the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of God and love of neighbor. Another version of this paradox is that Adam (together with Eve) does not fall into sin. Rather, in falling into the knowledge of good and evil, Adam reveals his prelapsarian condition to be one of sin or idolatry, one that involves bondage to the affects, the impotence of the lack of freedom, and ignorance of God. Precisely because Adam is not free to fall he falls. His fall reflects his impotence and lack of freedom. He does not fall because he is free—to fall. Indeed, if he were born free, in perfect knowledge of God, then he would not fall, as Spinoza points out. That Adam’s fall is utterly contradictory is what readers must grasp if they are to be able to resolve the contradictory story into the paradox that Adam’s fall from idolatry into the knowledge of good and evil presupposes knowledge of God (as knowledge of God presupposes knowledge of good and evil). But surely it is no less striking to have realized that, precisely as Adam is just like us, so Spinoza’s account of the affects is just like the story of Adam and Eve. Human beings begin in bondage to the affects. They are not born free with adequate knowledge of God. They begin conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile, yet ignorant of the causes of their appetite. Yet they “fall”

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into the knowledge of good and evil, into knowledge of God as love of neighbor. How do they discover that—given the fact they do not desire something because they judge it to be good but rather they judge something to be good because they desire it—they can overcome the contradictory relationship of desire and good only if they desire as the good what they desire to be the good equally for all other human beings? How is it that only if they persevere in seeking their own utile can they discover that they possess that utile solely when it is shared with and by all human beings as their supreme good? The answer to these questions is consonant with Spinoza’s description of the impossible contradiction in which Adam and Eve find themselves. It is only because I am conscious of my appetite in seeking my utile, conscious of the fact that as a singular individual my power is infinitely surpassed by other external, singular individuals, that I (am able to) discover that I utterly contradict myself (and others) and so am rendered (I remain) unfree and impotent. I make, then, the miraculous discovery that, as creation from nothing presupposes the prior condition of contradictory unfreedom and impotence but cannot be derived from it, so I, too, enact the paradox, that is, the miracle of desire (conatus), that I can directly desire the good only insofar as it is the good desired by all other human beings. Once again, the paradox is that my fall into the knowledge of good and evil, into the golden rule—from nothing—is inexplicably contradictory. However, from the perspective (stance) of knowing good and evil as the love of neighbor, I can recognize the state of unfreedom, of sin, of impotence, of ignorance of God and neighbor to be one of contradictory impossibility. The state of unfreedom is, in fact, a terrible (contradictory) reality that is revealed and made explicable to me solely from the perspective of knowing good and evil. It is uncanny to realize that, just as the foundational story of the Bible is modern in being just like us, so Spinoza, it turns out, is profoundly biblical in showing that his foundational account of human beings is just like the story of Adam and Eve. This is a huge theme, which I shall also be taking up in chapter 2. Here, I want to introduce two additional topics before concluding my summary of Spinoza’s extraordinary demonstration that the affects as desire (conatus) make the transition to knowledge of God and love of neighbor by presupposing the paradoxical structure of the story of the first man, whose fall into knowledge of good and evil is impossibly contradictory. While I have previously cited passages from part IV of the Ethics in which each topic appears, I have not discussed them as such. Each bears upon the relation of Spinoza to the Bible and thus of the Bible to modernity. The first topic is the intuitive knowledge of God. The second topic is religion. Spinoza invokes the intuitive knowledge of God, we may recall, in point 4 of the appendix to part IV of the Ethics. (I cite the key passage earlier on pages 106–7.) The intuitive knowledge of God represents the culmination of his

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summary of his concept of conatus or desire as that which follows from the necessity of our nature such that it is understood either through it alone or through the common order of nature. He then proceeds to distinguish between adequate ideas and inadequate ideas, between actions and passions, and between human power and external power. I shall summarize his suite of ideas as follows. Actions, that is, desires that are defined by the power of human beings, that is, by their reason, are always good (while the rest can be good or evil). In perfecting their reason or understanding as their highest happiness and blessedness, human beings attain that acquiescentia of mind that follows from “the intuitive knowledge of God,” which, Spinoza writes, is “to understand God, his attributes, and his actions, which follow from the necessity of his nature.” He then concludes with the statement that the ultimate end of man who is led by reason, that is, by his highest desire, “is that by which he is led to conceive adequately himself and all things that can fall under his understanding.” What are we to understand by the intuitive knowledge of God? Spinoza’s answer is not really forthcoming until part V, and I shall not directly anticipate what he says there. But it is important to recall two things already signaled previously. First, the intuitive knowledge of God involves the third kind of knowledge as outlined in part II of the Ethics. Second, I raised the question earlier in this chapter whether reason, which Spinoza connects with the second kind of knowledge in part II, is not rather to be seen as related to the third kind of knowledge, given its close association with desire and conatus and thus with knowledge of the good in parts III and IV. The summary that Spinoza gives of his concept of the affects in point 4 of the appendix of part IV confirms this. For there, as we have now seen, reason is identified with understanding, action, desire, conatus, human power, and, finally, the intuitive knowledge of God itself, by which human beings, Spinoza writes, possess an adequate concept of themselves and of all things that fall under their understanding. Let the following indication of how the intuitive knowledge of God is to be understood as reason (which is also desire or conatus) suffice for the moment. In appealing to the intuitive knowledge of God, Spinoza means to signal that, just as we know that God is that being that cannot be thought (by us) without existing and that cannot exist without being thought (by us), that is, the being whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence, so we intuit, that is, we comprehend, all singular things—ultimately, our fellow human beings— as those beings whose existence is necessary and whose necessity is their existence. To understand the third kind of knowledge as the intuitive knowledge of God—the knowledge of things as existing necessarily (freely)—is to see how it is not only fundamentally different from the first kind of knowledge

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but, indeed, the very appropriation (transformation) of the first kind of knowledge. In the first kind of knowledge, our knowledge of singular individuals (in their natural state!) is inadequate, partial, mutilated, and merely imaginary insofar as it is dependent on immediate images. For, indeed, we are passively dependent on these images of natural things as external to us in the common order of nature. In the third kind of knowledge, however, we intuit (comprehend) the essence of singular individuals as involving necessary existence. Thus, we see that the difference between the first kind of knowledge and the third kind of knowledge is yet another version of the distinction between passive affects and active affects, between the external power of the common order of nature (of which the second kind of knowledge gives us scientific knowledge involving cause and effect, but not the intuitive knowledge of necessary existence) and human power. We can, then, usefully distinguish among the three kinds of knowledge in terms of the three different kinds of “causes” that they involve: • first kind of knowledge: final cause (inadequate knowledge of singular individuals); • second kind of knowledge: external cause (scientific knowledge of individuals as belonging to the common order of nature); • third kind of knowledge: cause of itself (intuitive knowledge of the essence of singular individuals as existing necessarily). It is extraordinary to see that it is the affects of singular individuals, whose knowledge, to begin with, is partial and mutilated, that become, as conatus or desire, the very content of the intuitive knowledge of God. I shall return to this point shortly. That to possess intuitive knowledge of God is to comprehend singular individuals as those things whose essence necessarily involves existence is closely related to the second topic of religion, which I shall discuss briefly before returning to the larger thematic of Spinoza’s concept of the affects. In three different passages in part IV of the Ethics Spinoza refers to religio, each time extremely briefly and without any evident purpose in doing so: in 37S1, 73S, and Ap15. In the first passage he distinguishes religion from morality (pietas), while in the second passage he identifies religion with “true life” and in the third passage with morality. In none of these three passages does he explain why he introduces religion at this point in the Ethics or what he might understand the larger implications of his definition of religion to be. While he does not directly connect “religion” with biblical religion, the content that he associates with “religion” is distinctly biblical. However, as I pointed out earlier, this content patently reveals “religion” to be indistinguishable from the very

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concept of ethics as philosophy that Spinoza articulates in the Ethics. In other words, the differentia by which we are to distinguish religion (from what it is by no means evident) only serve to indicate to his readers that he has no way in which, meaningfully, to distinguish between religion and philosophy or between religion and philosophy, on the one hand, and morality (or ethics), on the other. It is also patently clear from his brief references to religion in part IV that, in his view, it has nothing to do with superstition or with accommodation to the inadequate ideas of either prophets (in Scripture) or the people (whether biblical or modern). Indeed, in volume I of my study I show that it is the concept of accommodation that enables Spinoza to distinguish the truth of Scripture from the “errors” of its historical manifestations. In light of Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge, we may say that truth is always embodied in historical circumstances whose images—confused, mutilated, incomplete, and partial—must be resurrected in light of the truth of necessary (free) existence. I shall briefly review the content that Spinoza associates with religion in each of the three passages in part IV so that it is evident that what he says about it comprehends the basic content of the Ethics. In the first passage he writes, as we have already seen, that “whatever we desire and do, of which we are the cause, insofar as we have the idea of God or know God, I refer to religion. However, I call piety [morality] the desire of doing well, which is so generated in us that we live by the guidance of reason” (IV.37S1). Not only is this definition of religion indistinguishable from what Spinoza has called, as we have seen, the intuitive knowledge of God, but it is equally clear that the intuitive knowledge of God comprehends the dictates of reason. Thus religion, morality, and philosophy all possess the same content. In the second passage, Spinoza defines religion in the context of showing that the true freedom of human beings involves what he calls fortitude as divided into its two sub-categories of strength of mind and generosity. He states that all these look “to the true life (veram vitam) and to religion, . . . namely, that hate is conquered by opposing love and that everyone who is led by reason desires that the good that he wants for himself also be for all others” (IV.73S). Again, it is patent that, since religion is identified with the true life of freedom, it is, for Spinoza, indistinguishable from his own philosophy as the intuitive knowledge of God. In the third passage, in the context of affirming the benefits of “common society,” Spinoza writes that, in order to bring about loving relations among human beings, “those things are primarily necessary that look to religion and morality” (IV.Ap15). Again, since Spinoza has made it clear that there is nothing so useful to human beings as their fellow human beings—as follows from his very concepts of conatus, desire, and the dictates of reason—it is once again evident that the content of what here he calls reli-

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gion and morality is indistinguishable from his own concept of reason as the intuitive knowledge of God. Whatever was Spinoza’s intention in commenting in three different passages in part IV of the Ethics on what it is that distinguishes religion—each time extremely briefly yet succinctly and, when the three passages are considered together, also inconsistently—he consistently shows us that the content of religio is indistinguishable from the content of philosophy (ethics). This is hardly surprising in light of my examination of the Theologico-Political Treatise in volume I of this study. But it provides striking evidence of the fact that, as I indicate there, the Seven Dogmas of Faith constitute both the minimal and the maximal limits of what Spinoza calls “the true life.” Not only, then, does philosophy not exceed religion, but it also presupposes the minimal content of religion, which is precisely what Spinoza has shown us here in his brief comments on religion in part IV of the Ethics. It may well be that Spinoza comments succinctly and so very affirmatively on religion in three different passages in part IV in order to defend it, once again, from reduction to superstitious error (belief in final or supernatural causes). At the same time, however, he shows us that it is indistinguishable from his own philosophy. In the same way that Spinoza points out that the story of the first man shows that Adam is “just like us,” so he can also be said to show that religion is “just like” our philosophy. In both cases, however, he also demonstrates the opposite. Not only are we modern human beings “just like” Adam, but our modern philosophy is also “just like” biblical religion. I indicated at the beginning of this chapter that in parts III and IV of the Ethics, in which Spinoza discusses the affects, he makes a second beginning, consistent with the foundation of human nature that he articulates in the appendix of part I. Human beings are born conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile, yet they are born ignorant that the cause of their appetite is God as the cause of itself. Throughout his discussion of the affects Spinoza emphasizes their power, the fact that we human beings are in bondage to the affects, that we are part of nature, as he forcefully restates in the final point 32 of the appendix of part IV, as we saw. I interpreted this passage to mean, readers will remember, that there is no escape from death on the part of human beings. Thus, human beings begin in that contradictory position in which they know that their desire is the good, that the good is their desire. Yet they do not in the beginning know what it means to desire the good directly, so that, in seeking their own utile, they do not project it into final ends by which they are then passively determined by external causes with which they identify God as a supernatural cause who acts for the good of their own end. Spinoza inaugurates the Ethics a second time, as it were, in the sense that readers, in the beginning, surely find themselves in the same position as

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foundational man described in the appendix of part I when they encounter God, at the beginning of part I of the Ethics, as the cause of itself, as that being that cannot be thought without existing, as that being whose essence necessarily involves existence. For, as Spinoza indicates in the appendix of part I, not only has he formulated the basic principles of God in part I, but he has also undertaken to combat the prejudices, or the superstitions, that prevent human beings from understanding God, foremost among them being their projection of desire, appetite, or affect into final causes. So, in beginning a second time, the human being, in finding himself in bondage to the affects, also holds a concept of God in bondage to final causes. The whole thrust, then, of Spinoza’s presentation of the affects is to show that to comprehend the affects is no less than to comprehend God. God is no longer to be taken as a refuge for ignorance, as Spinoza, on his deathbed, informs the eternally inquisitive Leibniz, as indicated in the citation from the modern parable that is found at the head of this chapter. To comprehend the affects is also to understand how very modern it is for a figure like Shakespeare’s Parolles to know what he is, a coward and a scoundrel, while, at the same time, in merely repeating or mouthing that truth in words, he simply reinforces his own self-condemnation without undertaking the effort to effect the transition that would mark what Montaigne calls repentance and Spinoza the active acceptance of (acquiescence in) self. Parolles is like us in the beginning. He is acutely conscious of his appetite in seeking his own advantage. He is shown in All’s Well That Ends Well, like Thirsites in Troilus and Cressida, to appreciate the fact that, outside of his existence, that is, without existing, there is no good for him. He is acutely conscious of the contradictions in which he finds himself. But he remains ignorant of the true cause of his appetite, which Spinoza associates with the cause of itself: the “true life” of freedom whereby we exist and act from the necessity of our nature alone. So foundational man, in his bondage to the affects, is also like prelapsarian Adam and Eve. To be in bondage to the affects is to be ignorant of the true relationship of good and desire. In other words, to be in bondage to the affects is also to have an inadequate idea of God. To fall from bondage to the affects into freedom is, in knowing good and evil, to comprehend God as the truth that I can desire the good directly for myself only insofar as I also desire it for all other human beings. Although Spinoza continually stresses the enormous role that the affects play in our lives, he never loses sight of the fact that we can comprehend the power of the affects over us only from the point of view of our “fall” into freedom. As I have emphasized, while we are a part of nature, ever subject to external causes on which we are dependent, we are not solely a part of nature. In other words, if our dependence on the external causes of nature were total, if we were completely passive, then we would be back in the

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Socratic world of ignorance in which there is no exit from the contradictory opposition between desire and the good. It is due to the fact that, because from the beginning we are in the impossibly contradictory position of seeking our appetite, consciously, while at the same time being ignorant of why we do so, we “fall” into the freedom of knowing good and evil. The fact that the relationship between desire and the good is contradictory is known by Socrates as his impenetrably contradictory ignorance. Biblical man, however, experiences at one and the same time the anguish and the blessing of knowing what the contradiction between desire and the good is. It is knowledge of what that contradiction is—that I can possess the good only as the good that I desire equally for all other human beings—that constitutes the paradox of the story of the fall as it does of Spinoza’s account of the affects in parts III and IV of the Ethics. We discover in parts III and IV that to comprehend the affects—to seek our own utile, to desire the good directly—is to comprehend God. Consequently, we also discover that to begin the Ethics in part I with the definition of God as the cause of itself is to comprehend the affects as the dialectic of desire and the good. Spinoza is profoundly adroit in showing that the good of our desire— desire as the good—is at once divine and human, for it is always other than the self. For the moment that the self identifies its desire with the good or identifies the good with its desire the individual is back in the contradictory position of Parolles or of the friends of Job. The paradox, of which Spinoza is so supreme an expositor, is that, in desiring the good directly, I, in fact, make it indirect. I can possess the good—as knowledge of God and love of neighbor—solely as the good that is equally possessed by all other human beings. I can love myself only as I love my neighbor. I can love my neighbor only as I love myself. I can desire as the good only that good which I also desire for all persons, or otherwise I find myself back in the contradictory position of prelapsarian Adam and Eve (if not in the idolatrous position of lapsarian theologians and philosophers, who reduce biblical teaching to superstitious belief in supernatural ends, in the ignorance of which they take refuge). But the paradox is doubled when I also realize that I can love my neighbor as myself only if I desire the good directly, if I exercise my conatus so much as is in my power to seek my own utile. If I do not make the self the absolute good of my desire and my desire the absolute good of my self, then I become lost in the contradictory oppositions between the good of my desire and my desire of the good. I fail to ask (myself) in self-transparency: What do I know—as the good of my desire? What do I desire—as the good? Solely when I face these questions head-on am I able to generate the contradictions between the good and desire through and by which the paradox is then revealed to me. I learn, consequently, that I can desire the good directly only insofar as I desire that all

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other human beings also desire the good directly. Only, then, paradoxically, do neither they nor I, in seeking our utile directly, do so at the expense of the other but rather, indeed, in loving solidarity with each other. Central to the insight that Spinoza has into the paradoxical relationship of desire and the good is his understanding that it always involves what he calls transitio—transition to greater (when not to lesser) perfection. But since he defines perfection as virtue and (since virtue is power) thus as power—indicating, ultimately, the essence of the individual whose existence is necessary— Spinoza knows that his concept of perfection bears no relationship to the tradition of finite teleology (as found in Neoplatonism, that unstable, ever-changing amalgam of ideas emanating from the traditions of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics). Jesus commands his hearers to be perfect as their father in heaven is perfect (Mat. 5.48). But how is God perfect? In Spinoza’s version, which is wholly consonant with the biblical tradition, God, as causa sui, is that being whose existence involves and expresses necessity, the one being that cannot be thought—by human beings—without (outside of) existence. It seems so simple, the “ontological argument” proving the necessary existence of God (and of human being). Yet it has baffled and continues to baffle philosophers, while it has been embraced (for there is nothing else to embrace which is not one of the idols described by Francis Bacon) by all profound thinkers, both ratiocinative and artistic. We may remember Spinoza’s simple statement, in proposition 21 of part IV, that no one can desire to be blessed, no one can desire the good directly unless he desires to be, that is, unless he desires actually to exist. Again, this is so simple. This is the ontological argument. “But where is the proof?” the philosopher asks. “The proof?” Spinoza, together with those who are moved by his concept of existence, responds. “Why, in your very question!” For your question presupposes that which it asks, that you are an existing being the necessity of which is presupposed by your action. Such argument, however, only repeats the proof of Descartes, from which Spinoza never deviates, even as he makes it ever so much more profound by showing how it involves and expresses the affects: the relationship between desire and the good. To desire the good directly—both God and neighbor—is actually to exist, to embrace one’s existence as necessary; and to embrace one’s existence as necessary, to exist and to act from the necessity of one’s nature or essence alone, as a singular individual, is the ultimate expression of freedom. To be perfect as God in heaven is perfect—and, consequently, not as a supernatural, final cause—is to desire the good as the necessity of existence, to recognize that it is to the existence of human beings and of God that necessity—freedom—is solely to be ascribed. We are, perhaps, more used to the formulation of Kant that freedom is selfdetermination, whereas Spinoza typically speaks of being determined from

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the necessity of one’s nature alone, of being determined to act from oneself alone. But their meanings are identical. (This explains why Kant, having shown in the Critique of Pure Reason, consistent with Spinoza, that the ontological argument, in claiming to prove God as an object of knowledge, is a pseudo-proof, which he rejects, embraces, silently, the ontological argument as practical reason: to desire the good directly as the necessary existence, the dignity, of all human beings without exception.) The transition to greater (when not to lesser) perfection is an infinite task: it does not take place within a closed system of final causes. This is why Spinoza emphasizes that it begins with existence—that I actually exist as a singular individual—and passes to ever greater and greater or to more perfect and more perfect existence (when it is not a regress to their opposites). But the essence of the individual—that he exists necessarily—never changes, while the individual undergoes immense transformation (for good or for ill). The time in which this transition takes place—its temporality—is not the time (and space) of nature that Pascal, like Spinoza, recognizes as finitely (and not, in truth, as infinitely!) greater than human beings. The temporality of the transition is that of history (story). But Spinoza, as I show in volume I of my study, does not yet have a working concept of history, as do Hegel and Kierkegaard. So, appositely, what we call “history,” when we do not reduce it, with Spinoza, to the finite space and time of the common order of nature, he calls eternity (an eternity stripped of all notions of supernatural teleology). Eternity—traditionally ascribed to God—gives the concept of transition a proper sense of awesome (infinite) grandeur. Consequently, eternity is not simply (or even just) “then”—what will happen in the future (in a mythically postlapsarian, finite time). Eternity is but another (grand) appellation for necessary existence, the recognition that existence is not measured by and is not a measure of natural, finite, external, quantifiable time as duration. Nor is eternity some mythical past, some Edenic time. For if God were simply eternal (as fixed in past space and time), if God has always existed, then the ontology of existence would, as Spinoza puts it, still lie hidden in human ignorance, superstition, and idolatry. For what the ontological argument demonstrates is the necessary relationship between thought and existence. It determines the existence that is worthy of thought—the existence of God and neighbor—and the thought that is worthy of existence—the idea of God, we could say (recognizing that the idea Dei is at once my idea of God and God’s idea of himself). So, just as human beings cannot exist outside of (without) thinking God, for there is one thing that they cannot think without existing—God—so it is also the case that God does not exist outside of (without) human thought. For human beings to think—to desire the good directly—is, they discover, to bring God into existence (although Spinoza does not explicitly tell us that this is what necessary

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existence entails). For human beings to exist—to be conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile—is to confront the contradictions that then erupt between desire and the good and consequently to overcome them as the paradox of knowing good and evil in and through God and neighbor. It is important to see that Spinoza’s idea of transition, from the relationship of desire and the good to an ever deeper (when not to a less deep) understanding—living—of that relationship, always takes place within the acute understanding that, while necessary existence, like creation itself, does not derive from finite time and space, yet it is always conditioned by the common order of nature. Human beings die. The issue, as I posed it earlier in this chapter, is how we conceive of death, whether we view it as life-giving or as life-denying, whether our desire of the good involves a meditation of life or whether it is dictated by fear—of death. Although death is the sting of sin, as Paul says, that is, the sting of life, indicating that eternity, or necessary existence, is a precious gift whose creative giver—God and the neighbor— swallows up death, death is not sin. Still, we die either sinfully or freely, either in superstitious denial of the necessity of existence or in what Spinoza aptly calls the active acceptance of existence as necessary: acquiescentia. Paul is right. There is no sin outside of (without) death, which explains why for Socrates sin is ignorance. Sin for biblical men and women is, however, knowledge—knowledge of good and evil. Once again, the task before them is to work out in their transition to a more (when not to a less) perfect understanding of their existence as necessary a relationship of the good and desire that affirms life and does not negate it. It is also important to see that Spinoza profoundly understands that in the transition to more (when not to less) perfect desire, our desire and thus our good, too, increase, not comparatively (not compared to a finite point in either the past or the future) but absolutely—infinitely. Thus, he says that, when the intrepid paladin conquers others by opposing love to hate, those whom he conquers are themselves enlarged in their capacity for love, for loving the good directly. They are upbuilt by the paladin’s supposing them to exist necessarily in love (to use Kierkegaard’s less martial and truly biblical word). “Love Conquers All” is, appropriately, one of the most traditional and yet, at the same time, one of the most delightful—because insouciant, erotic, saucy, and nervy—of Caravaggio’s paintings! The dualities of existence that Spinoza exposes in his presentation of the affects and whose contradictions he then resolves in what I call the paradox of desiring the good directly as the first things of life—the necessary existence of God and neighbor—are legion, as we have seen: passive affect and active affects, inadequate ideas and adequate ideas, bondage and freedom, the common order of nature and human nature, the (finite) power of nature and (in-

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finite) human power, determination by others and determination from one’s own nature alone, the singular things of the first kind of knowledge and the essence of singular things understood as existing necessarily in the third kind of knowledge. What is especially creative and dynamic in Spinoza’s determination of these dualities is that he systematically eliminates all of the conventional opposites in the traditions of theology and philosophy that distort the teaching of the Bible: reason and desire, mind and body, idea and affect, eternity and existence, perfection and power, virtue and utile,93 thought and existence, and, most significantly, divine being and human being. While it is true that Spinoza continues to use rhetoric favoring God over human beings—and so never directly ascribes the cause of itself or necessary existence to human being—still, at the same time, he eliminates root and branch all elements of Neoplatonism from biblical thought that favor the hierarchy of the divine over the human, of mind over desire, etc. He boldly claims, yet his position is fully consistent with the prophets and with what he calls the mind of Christ in the Theologico-Political Treatise, that human beings have—indeed, must have, are compelled to have—adequate knowledge of God’s eternal and infinite essence, which is to know that the essence of God, as the cause of itself, necessarily involves existence. While Spinoza does not say so directly, it is clear that, in order for human beings to possess knowledge of God as absolutely necessary, eternal, and infinite—such that he exists and acts from his own nature alone, that is, such that he creates from nothing that does not involve and express himself as causa sui—they cannot themselves be merely finite modes that are subject to external causation or, worse, lost in the hierarchy of final, supernatural causes. Rather, it is precisely as beings who must confront the contradictions of their affects and fall from the idolatry of taking refuge in the ignorance of God as impossible contradiction that men and women can, like God himself, determine themselves freely from their own nature alone, that is, view their existence as necessary and understand that necessity is to be ascribed, not to finite, external nature but solely to infinite, human (and divine) nature. The proverb that Spinoza finds, he tells us, in the mouths of nearly everyone is that hominem homini Deum esse: man is God to man. It is striking that “God” is the mediator between human beings, the transition or passage from one human being to another (or, indeed, from one human being to himself), the absolute, supreme, infinite, eternal, and necessary good that, the more that it is loved, that is, the more that it is desired by more human beings, the greater and the more infinitely perfect it becomes. It is humbling, yes, for human beings to realize that it would be presumptuous of them to undertake to know God from God’s point of view. Indeed, it is negative theology in the tradition of Neoplatonism—according to which God exists in himself, beyond

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all human thought and existence or, indeed, as the very negation of human thought and existence—that Spinoza eliminates for all time (as he also recognizes that the struggles against its hydra-like superstitions are unceasing). It suffices for human beings to know that God is man to man, that human beings cannot exist or be conceived to exist outside of love of neighbor as the one whose existence is necessary—which is but another implication of the proverb in common circulation. It is in light of understanding that to desire the good directly is the revelation that man is God to man that we shall be taking up in the next chapter Spinoza’s concept of the eternity of the mind as consonant with his concept of democracy as the only fit constitution for human beings who exist and act from their own power and nature alone, who, in other words, understand their existence to be necessary. Notes 1. For information on works cited in this study, consult the bibliography. 2. There is no sound alternative to the translation of affectus as affect(s). (The noun “affect” has not made it into modern, standard English, unlike the verb “to affect” and the noun “affection.”) Since Spinoza also makes critical use of the terms “desire” (cupiditas), “appetite” (appetitus), and “passion” (meaning to suffer passively: pati), it is important to be able to distinguish “affect(s)” from them. As for using “emotion” to translate affectus, it has other connotations that could be misleading. 3. I use the following citation conventions in my study: • Ethics—for example, I.4 part I, proposition 4 I.Ap part I, appendix II.17C part II, proposition 17, corollary III.31S part III, proposition 31, scholium (note) IV.D3 part IV, definition 3 V.A2 part V, axiom 2 • TPT Theologico-Political Treatise • PT Political Treatise I provide my own translations of the passages that I cite from Spinoza. In the case of TPT, I refer by page number to the translation of Shirley for ease of availability. References to Ethics are self-explanatory. References to PT are by chapter and section (e.g., 2.3). References to Spinoza’s letters are by letter number. When, within a single paragraph of my study, two or more consecutive passages are cited from the same page or from the same section of a particular text, their location (consistent with the above) is indicated at the end of the last passage cited. Let me also note that in all citations in this study emphasis has been added, unless otherwise indicated.

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4. Conatus, together with its related terms, also, like affectus, has not made it into modern, standard English. Although conatus is often translated as “striving” (trying), when possible I avoid “striving” with its connotations of unachieved (unrealized) accomplishment. I think it is more effectively rendered by such terms as endeavor, effort, and work. 5. In TPT, as I indicate in volume I of this study, Spinoza does ascribe (some of) God’s eternal attributes to the Bible (although it is true that there he says they remain accommodated to what he calls the prejudices of the prophets and the people). 6. Descartes shows (in The Discourse on Method, The Meditations, and The Search for Truth) that mathematical (geometrical) truths lack the certitude that only methodological doubt proving the necessary relationship between thought and existence can attain. 7. Hegel is the first modern thinker to make it systematically clear that, if ontology does not comprehend (upbuild) history and if history does not comprehend (upbuild) ontology, then both will be falsified. 8. I shall later qualify this notion of transition. In the strict sense, there is never a transition from passive affects to active affects, from bondage to freedom, etc. For the transition is always effected from the position of, or on the basis of, the principle of action or freedom. Thus, the transition, as we shall see, is from action and freedom to more (when not to less) comprehensive action and freedom, etc. 9. Badiou discusses Spinoza in chapters 1 and 7 of Theoretical Writings, which is dedicated to the demonstration that “mathematics is ontology.” However his claim is to be understood, I do not find that it illuminates Spinoza’s concept of the infinitely one substance whose absolutely eternal essence, as causa sui, can be thought (by human beings) solely as necessarily (freely) existing. Still, Badiou makes it clear that for him, as for Spinoza (and also Descartes, Kant, and Hegel), truth involves and expresses the infinity of thinking (existence)—the infinity of existing (thoughtfully)— not anything called mathematical proof. Consequently, I think Badiou is wrong in holding, whether historically or ontologically, that infinity is mathematical. Rather, infinity properly describes (following the ontological argument) the relationship of thought and existence, of man and God, of human beings in relationship. Indeed, Badiou (a self-declared atheist) writes as follows: “As long as finitude remains the ultimate determination of existence, God abides” (26). But what he describes here is not God but rather what is, in the biblical tradition of critique, an idol. For Spinoza, it is patent that it is not the finite one (in the natural state) but rather the infinite One (in the civil state) which embraces what Badiou calls universal singularity or the multiple, whose (human) thought determines (liberates) existence. In holding that to think is to exist infinitely Badiou presupposes the ontological argument, which necessarily (i.e., freely) links thought and existence, not mathematics and ontology. 10. I use “man” (“men”) in the ungendered sense of the Latin homo (homines), which Spinoza constantly uses, and not in the gendered sense of the Latin vir (and its cognates virtue, virility, etc.). It would, in my judgment, be artificial to avoid the language of “man” in explicating the thought of Spinoza (i.e., when paying close attention to his language).

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11. See Kant, “Conjectures”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic (61–63), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Vol. III (104–8, 207–11, 300–304), Philosophy of History (321–22); Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety (especially 25–51); and Nietzsche, The AntiChrist (#48). Edgar, in the guise of Tom o’ Bedlam, stages, in King Lear, the “fall” of his despairing and suicidal father, the Duke of Gloucester, from the cliffs of Dover into the paradise regained of acquiescentia, having already noted in an aside: “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (4.1.27–28). Edgar tells his father that, while he has fallen more than the equivalent of ten masts, he remains in one piece: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Gloucester responds to his (still to him unknown) son that “Henceforth I’ll bear / Affliction till it do cry out itself / ‘Enough, enough,’ and die.” Edgar’s final words to his father are, then: “Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.55, 75–77, 80). 12. In volume I of my study I extend to God the statement that we find in Fear and Trembling: if faith has always existed in the world, then it has never existed (55 and 81). 13. I show in volume I of my study that the question Montaigne poses in refutation of the skeptics—What do I know?—embodies the ontological argument. His point is that I do know something. I cannot not know something. To doubt (something) is to affirm (it). In other words, there is a necessary relationship between my thought and my existence. The question, then, is whether what I know is adequate to my thought and existence. 14. Still, Parolles, like Shakespeare’s other scurrilous, non-heroic figures (one thinks of Falstaff in Henry IV, parts I and II, and of Thyrsites in Troilus and Cressida), also possesses a (base) commitment to existence, to his own utile (self-advantage), in contrast with figures like Hotspur (in Henry IV, part I) whose inhuman(e) ideas of heroic honor falsify human existence. These “comic” figures do not fall into the murderous, Satanic depths of Claudius (in Hamlet), Edmund (in King Lear), or Angelo (in Measure for Measure). Nor do they express a commitment to existence in the deeper sense of providential grace that we find in Prince Hal (Henry IV, part I), Hamlet, or Edgar (King Lear). 15. E.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Caravaggio. 16. Lorenzo Valla, the most distinguished of the fifteenth-century Italian humanists, made it clear that the reason one read (with pleasure and enlightenment) ancient (pagan) texts was because they were not Christian. He rejected as faithless, uncritical, and unhistorical the reading of classical texts as if they were potentially (in spirit) Christian, together with the consequent reduction of Christian faith to paganism (which was typical of Aquinas, Dante, etc.). 17. In For the Glory of God Stark makes the following observation in a caption under a picture of Chartres Cathedral: “Grand Illusion . . . Chartres Cathedral and the many similar medieval structures give false testimony that this was an Age of Faith and of Catholic unity. In truth, the average medieval European seldom attended mass, and the Church itself was bitterly divided between those wanting a more intense faith [the reformers] and those content that the tithes kept coming [the ecclesiastical hierarchy]” (14). In One True God Stark writes that, “although the Middle Ages were long known as the Age of Faith, . . . historians now recognize that the average medieval European was, at most, lukewarm about religion. . . . There is every reason to think that the same was true of the Muslims” (83). In other words, an age can be faithful (to the content

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of divine revelation) and thus modern only to the degree that it is both truly religious (and so committed to pluralism and democracy) and truly scientific (rational). Indeed, the basic point made by Stark in his two books is that there is no inherent (or fundamental) conflict between biblical religion and science (or, I would say, between the religious and the secular or between faith and reason). The conflicts that do arise between religion and science are then to be understood as generated equally by religious dogmatists (who subject reason to a monopoly of faith) and by secular dogmatists (who subject faith to a monopoly of reason). Not to understand with Spinoza that the separation of philosophy from theology means that each is at once secular and religious is to have no true understanding of either reason or revelation. 18. Still, the authors of the Condemnation of 1277, in vigorously criticizing contemporary philosophers for reducing the creative (infinite) power of God to the finite ends of Aristotelian reason and teleology—that is, in defending the rationality of biblical theology against the faithless use of Aristotelian philosophy on the part of Christian thinkers—anticipate future developments. 19. While Descartes shows that mathematical truth (together with the laws of classical logic) presuppose the ontological argument proving the necessary existence of God, he does not yet see that the demonstration proving the necessary relationship between thought and existence is fundamentally ethical. 20. Spinoza polemicizes against the foolish, indeed pernicious ignorance arising from belief in final causes as the product of imagination (passive affects) at length in the appendix of part I. However, since the critique of teleology that he advances in parts III and IV is central to his analysis of the affects and is more comprehensive and sophisticated, I shall omit further discussion of the appendix. 21. Curley translates pati (to suffer), for which there is no easy English equivalent, as “to be acted upon.” 22. Spinoza curtly (and rightly) dismisses as insubstantial Descartes’ ethical philosophy (as found in The Passions of the Soul). 23. Spinoza repeats these claims, with reference to the preface of Part III, at the end of IV.57S, while at the same time noting that he distinguishes affects in terms of whether they bring human beings utilitas or harm. 24. Again, I omit Descartes. 25. I point out in volume I of my study that, while Epicurus rejects final causes (as fate), he simply embraces their immediate opposite, chance: whatever is (in perception) is real. Consistent with other Greek thinkers, he allows (i.e., he can think) no separation (relationship) between thought and existence. Either they are finitely opposed to each other, or they are finitely identified with each other. In both cases, existence cannot be thought, and thought cannot exist. 26. The Nichomachean Ethics. 27. That thinkers today continue to find “thinking” in Aristotle surely demonstrates Spinoza’s point that the prejudice of all prejudices (the superstition of all superstitions) is that human beings and God act for a finite end (which, as contradictory, can never be thought or known by human beings). 28. The full title of Hume’s work is A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. The extreme of

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this contradictory position is found in La Mettrie’s Man, the Machine (1748). I may note here that Leibniz, notwithstanding his original contributions to mathematics and his extraordinary learning, fatally undermines his philosophy by basing it on final causes, of which the Theodicy (1710) is so egregious an example. 29. See I.D7&1. 30. It is true that following II.13S Spinoza adds a short section on “the nature of bodies.” 31. Spinoza inconsistently uses “duration” here. 32. I have dealt here only with the second half of the demonstration of proposition 10. I shall cite the elegant first half (while omitting the references to earlier propositions) followed by only a brief comment: “Whatever can destroy our body cannot be given in it; nor, therefore, can the idea of this thing be given in God insofar as he has the idea of our body, that is, the idea of this thing cannot be given in our mind.” It is clear that God, in affirming (in creating and conserving) the actual essence of human beings as necessary existence, is not involved in the external and contrary causes by which finite nature is generated and destroyed. In other words, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of Jesus (and of Muhammad), is not the God of nature (natural causation). 33. Spinoza refers back to this key passage, as found in III.9S, in III.39S, 55C, and 57. 34. It is the distinction, as I show in volume I of my study, that Montaigne makes between absolutely not judging and judging absolutely. 35. There is no simple translation of laetitia (delight). I do not use “joy” to translate it (as Curley does), because Spinoza also uses the term gaudium (traditionally translated as joy). 36. Spinoza states in III.49 that love and hate will be greater for a thing that we imagine to be free than for a thing that we imagine to be necessary. “From this it follows,” he writes in the scholium, “that, because men judge themselves to be free, they have greater love or hatred for each other than for other things.” He adds in the last lines of III.51S (in reference to III.49) that the affects that he discusses here “are the most violent (vehementissimi) because men believe themselves to be free.” 37. Their equals but not their superiors or their inferiors. See Ethics III.55C. 38. Still, Spinoza states in III.58 that joy and desire are both passions and actions. 39. It is noteworthy that Spinoza uses the concept of sui juris here to signify, in contrast with bondage to the affects, the power of acting freely from the necessity of one’s conatus or desire. For not only does he make significant use of the concept of sui juris in his discussion of divine law in TPT, as I indicate in volume I of this study, but he also uses it to characterize the sovereignty of a free people, as opposed to the bondage of an unfree people, as I shall show when I examine his political thought in the next chapter. 40. In IV.2 Spinoza states that “we suffer insofar as we are part of nature, which is not able to be conceived per se without others.” 41. In IV.D3 Spinoza states that “singular things” are contingent insofar as their essence cannot be said to exist necessarily. In IV.3 he demonstrates, with reference to IV.A, that “the force by which man perseveres in existing is limited and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes.”

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42. The fact that existence is not given outside of (without) thinking (it) and that thinking is not given outside of (without) existing (in or as it) testifies to the extraordinary relationship between the ontological argument and the affects, a relationship that I shall take up later. 43. I omit the details of the demonstration. 44. Again, we have evidence that the natural passions cannot be known in themselves but only by reference to our active nature as their standard. 45. Spinoza does indicate at the end of IV.17S that he is going to deal “with the power of reason over the affects (de Rationis in affectûs potentiâ).” It is important to keep in mind, however, that, since the power of reason is itself the power of desire or conatus, that is, the power of the active affects, reason represents (embodies) the power of the active affects over the passive affects, that is, of the (active) affects over themselves (as passive). 46. This formulation of the relationship between reason and the affects is more balanced than that found at the end of the IV.17S. See note 45. 47. Curley translates prolixus as “cumbersome.” (See his note on 555.) But “thorough” (detailed, full) is closer in spirit to the use of prolixius (more thoroughly or more fully) in IV.35S. 48. In his first two (mathematical) antinomies, Kant shows the impasse (the insurmountable contradiction) that occurs when we attempt to explain the origins (beginnings) and the composition of material nature in terms of what is finite part and what is finite whole. In other words, we presuppose the distinction between nature and freedom, between natural cause and the cause of itself, which Kant shows to be central to the second pair of (dynamical) antinomies. Kant’s demonstration that the finite (part and whole) is contradictory is consistent with Pascal’s demonstration in Pensée 390 that the infinitely large is the infinitely small, that is, that the infinite is a category, not of quantitative science but of thinking and existence (as found in morality and theology). 49. In IV.20S Spinoza again discusses suicide as reflecting impotence of mind and dependence on external causes that are repugnant to one’s own nature. He declares that “it is as impossible that man from the necessity [freedom] of his own nature would endeavor not to exist or to be changed into another form [essence] as that something were made (fiat) from nothing.” Once again, we see that, while the concept of necessary (free) existence that Spinoza articulates is profound (true), the analogy that he makes between it and a concept of finite nature—something is not made from nothing—is profoundly misleading (false). Spinoza does not recognize here that the concept of creation from nothing is a concept, not of physics but of metaphysics. It is a concept, not of the common order of nature but of the nature of human beings, whose freedom can be explained or accounted for on the basis, not of external causes but only of existing necessarily from itself alone. Spinoza does not acknowledge that the concept of the cause of itself, in representing necessary existence—that which can be understood through the laws of its nature alone—is a reprise of the concept of creation ex nihilo. Indeed, if the concept of necessary existence—creation from nothing—were reducible to the concept of finite nature (of nature external to itself) that nothing is made from nothing, then Spinoza would have embraced the concept that is central to Greek thought and that is cited, for example, by Aristotle in his works on

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both nature and metaphysics and by Lucretius in Book I of On the Nature of Things as the very basis of nature: nothing is made from nothing. Yet this most venerable concept of the nature of things is, in fact, indistinguishable from its contradictory opposite: everything is made from everything, which is precisely what Ovid demonstrates in the Metamorphoses and which is presupposed by Er in the mythos of divine punishment that he relates at the end of the Republic of Plato, including the metamorphosis of human beings into animals and plants, etc. 50. I simplify and compress Aristotle’s anatomy of the six political regimes. 51. Aristotle’s concept of democracy—the rule of many (over others)—bears no relationship, except nominally, to Spinoza’s concept of democracy as embodying (in principle) the sovereignty of all human beings: the rule of all over all. Aristotle cannot conceive of a situation in which there is not a natural hierarchy of rulers and ruled (reflecting the hierarchy of soul and body, knowledge and opinion, the one and the many, etc.). 52. I have paraphrased IV.29–30. Spinoza summarizes the distinction between the different and the contrary in IV.31C. 53. In his demonstration Spinoza refers to two key, earlier propositions. To agree in nature is to agree in power (III.7) and not in passion (III.3S). In III.3S he notes that the passions are referred to the mind only insofar as the mind involves negation or is considered a part of nature, “which cannot be clearly and distinctly perceived through itself without others (per se absque aliis).” Once again we see that something can be contrary to or the negation of our nature—and so evil for us—only insofar as it has something in common with, and is not entirely different from, our nature. 54. This proverb can also be translated: “God is man to man.” But it cannot be translated: “man is man to God.” The point is that God is the relationship of human beings, that is, that through which they relate actively and rationally (and not passively or superstitiously) and what Kierkegaard in Works of Love calls the third position of love in addition to the self and the neighbor. 55. Rousseau, Discourse, note i. 56. I have omitted the several references that Spinoza makes to other propositions. 57. Note IV.63: “He who is guided by fear and does good in order to avoid evil is not guided by reason.” 58. Matheron notes that scholium 2 “can receive two opposed interpretations” (316). While he favors its assimilation to the PT, it is important to note that he does not see any fundamental difference either between the two political treatises or between them and the Ethics. 59. The reader is invited to ponder IV.7, to which Spinoza appeals—that an affect can be restrained or removed only through a contrary and stronger affect—and then to consider IV.59: “To all actions to which we are determined by an affect that is a passion we can be determined without that [affect] by reason.” It is always possible to suppose that the anomalies of IV.37S2 could be accounted for on the basis of external factors. For example, one might suppose that the friends of Spinoza, in rushing the Ethics into print after his death, failed to omit a passage that he intended to suppress as reflecting earlier, immature ideas. Still, in the absence of precise, textual evidence to support such a supposition and given what I call Spinoza’s intellectual probity, it is in-

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cumbent upon readers to determine if they can find scholium 2 instructive, not in spite of but because of its contradictions. 60. Translated by Curley as “self-esteem” and by White as “self-satisfaction.” 61. In this section of Part IV Spinoza is famously critical of the conventional (passive) conceptions of religious virtues like hope, humility, and repentance. But his own use of “hope” in the context of acquiescentia indicates his acknowledgement of their active (true) sense. 62. Spinoza is often inconsistent in his use of terms. 63. Spinoza writes powerfully about the dynamic relationship between love and hate in part III of the Ethics. In III.38 he argues that, when someone hates a thing that he previously loved such that he utterly abolishes his love for it, then he will have more hate for it than if he had never loved it in the first place; and his hate will be the greater as his prior love was greater. In III.44 Spinoza states that “hate, which is completely conquered by love, passes into love; and the love is therefore greater than if the hate had not preceded [it].” But he is careful to point out in III.44S (consistent with Paul in Romans!) that this does not mean that somebody will endeavor to increase his sadness in order to increase his joy, e.g., to become sick in order to improve his health. “If it could be conceived that a man could desire to hate someone so that he would have greater love for him afterwards, then he would always desire to hate him.” In the example of illness, someone would always endeavor to become more ill in order afterwards to enjoy greater health! 64. Again, IV.61 stands in sharp contrast with IV.44—“Love and desire can have excess”—although Spinoza indicates in the demonstration of IV.44 that there he views love as “happiness accompanied by the idea of an external cause,” as in titillatio. In IV.Ap30 Spinoza writes that, “unless reason and vigilance are present, generally the affects of happiness, and consequently also the desires that are generated from them, therefore, have excess.” 65. Spinoza does not mention IV.37S2 here! 66. Once again I note that only when readers are scrupulous in attending to Spinoza’s often less than scrupulous use of terms can they account for his meaning. In the case at hand, to be led by “affect alone” is to be led by passive affect(s), while to be led “by reason” is nothing other than to be led by the active affect(s) of desire. 67. It is extraordinary to see Maimonides, in Guide, III.23, identify the point of view of the story of Job (and so also of Job’s God), not with its eponymous paladin but with Eliphaz. In attributing to Job, his three friends, and also Elihu various concepts of providence, he says that, while Job represents the opinion of Aristotle [the master, we can say, of those who know that they are ignorant of God as final cause], “the opinion of Eliphaz is in keeping with the opinion of our Law” (494; emphasis in the original). Maimonides is then hard-pressed, however, to explain the denouement of the story in which God explicitly states that it was Eliphaz and his friends who did not speak truly of him, unlike his servant Job (not to mention the redoubled blessings of the good life that God subsequently bestows upon Job). See Eisen for a lucid summary of scholarly opinion according to which it is Elihu who (esoterically) represents Maimonides’ Aristotelian teaching, not Job.

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68. I make the critique of the claim of “modern” philosophers to go beyond Abraham, to go beyond being a faithful human being, as found in Fear and Trembling, central to volume I of my study. 69. As before, I shall not consider Eve’s subjection to Adam. Because this condition of the expulsion from Eden is sociological (reflecting, uncritically, contemporary attitudes) and not ontological (embodying fundamental values as the standard of critique), it is subject to deconstruction (e.g., in Paradise Lost, not to mention in the writings of modern feminists). Spinoza, by the way, never mentions Eve by name in his commentaries on the Genesis story (although, as we shall see, he does state in IV.68S that nothing was more useful to the first man than a wife who completely agreed with his own nature). While his occasional comments about women are mixed, both respectful and unreflective, surely he would have been appalled by the banality (perversity) of the conventional claim—both learned and popular—that it was Eve who caused Adam to sin. 70. On occasion, Pascal writes that human beings are at once raised above nature— like God—and fallen into the state of corruption—like beasts. Yet he knows that human beings, when bestial, are utterly unlike the beasts. He writes, more accurately, when he indicates that human beings are at once above and below nature, that is, both the glory and the rubbish of the universe, both blessed and wretched, in having the double capacity for grace and for sin. Thus, he acknowledges that “it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his wretchedness [this is a repudiation of both prelapsarian and postlapsarian man!] and to know his wretchedness without knowing God” (#317). 71. St. Augustine acknowledges that without (outside of) sin there would be no Christ, who came to save, not the righteous but the sinners. (Jesus is the justification of sin.) In Paradise Lost Adam and Eve come to recognize that it is their “happy sin” that constitutes their freedom (it portends their salvation). In the Roman Catholic Mass the sinner reminds his sweet Jesus: “I am the cause of [the reason for] your way.” 72. “Or rather,” Spinoza continues, “to God, not insofar as he is infinite but insofar only as he is the cause of why man exists.” 73. It is evident that the discovery made by Adam that his wife is most “useful” to him as the being that is completely in agreement with his own nature is covenantal and not prior to the fall or sin. Indeed, the notion that human beings are, of all creatures, the most useful to each other because free and most in agreement with each other is one of the basic ideas that Spinoza articulates earlier in Part IV, as we saw, through the proverb: “man is God to man.” 74. It is equally the case, as I indicated in the introductory section of this chapter, that Spinoza discusses Adam in letter 19 (1665) in response to issues raised by Blyenbergh (in letter 18) on the relationship between God, evil, and human beings (Adam). 75. The third and fourth implications that Spinoza draws from the divine natural law are that it does not demand ceremonies and that it is its own reward, that is, to know and to love God. 76. Spinoza shows in TPT, as I indicate in volume I of my study, that the hermeneutical soundness of biblical exegesis depends on whether it is true to the mind of both text and reader.

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77. I observe again that the love of Eve that is said by Spinoza in IV.68S to be what is most useful to Adam—because she is most like himself—is a projection from the covenant back into the pre-covenantal garden. See note 73. 78. Spinoza does not repeat here what he writes in letter 19 (1665) about the story of the first man. In his letter he states that Scripture is accommodated to the people and speaks in human fashion, since “the people are incapable of understanding sublime things,” unlike philosophers. This is why, he writes further, that the prophets “made up whole parables depicting God as a king and lawgiver, because he had revealed the means of salvation and perdition, of which he was the cause. . . . And they ordered all their words to this parable rather than to the truth.” Spinoza’s concept of accommodation in the TPT is not reducible to this crude dualism between people and philosopher, as I show in volume I of my study. Furthermore, Spinoza fails in his letter to provide a dynamic understanding of the story of Adam and Eve, as he does in the three works that are the focus of this study. 79. The reader will remember that I omit any further consideration of the second passage of the TPT, since it ends in a contradictory, uninterpretable impasse, as we saw. Thus, I shall consider only three passages dealing with the story of Adam and Eve, one from each of Spinoza’s three major works. 80. Spinoza continues this sentence by saying that this is “because God, who exists, understands, and operates [as] absolutely free, also exists, understands, and operates necessarily, namely, from the necessity of his nature.” 81. While Spinoza leaves unnamed the theologians whose explanation of the “fall” of Adam (and Eve) he shows to be contradictory, their explanation would not differ fundamentally from that given by Maimonides in The Guide of the Perplexed. It is hardly surprising, however, that the account that Spinoza gives of Adam would be fundamentally opposed to that of Maimonides. I show in volume I of this study that Spinoza resolutely rejects Maimonides’ concept of hermeneutics as blatantly contradictory, that is, as untrue to both reason and the Bible (faith). Indeed, we can say that, just as our interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve tests the adequacy of our hermeneutical theory, so our theory of hermeneutics tests the adequacy of our interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. Maimonides holds that Adam possessed perfect intellect before he disobeyed God in following his desire and imagination. But, precisely like the theologians criticized by Spinoza, Maimonides has, then, no explanation either of how Adam originally failed in intellect or of how he subsequently gained (adequate, if not complete) knowledge of God, as Spinoza indicates in Ethics IV.68. Indeed, Maimonides concludes his discussion of Adam in Guide, I.2, as follows: “Praise be to the Master of the will [God] whose aims and wisdom cannot be apprended!” (26). Such agnosticism (i.e., negative theology) on the part of Maimonides—the roots of which are Aristotelian (or, more broadly, Neoplatonic)—is radically different from Spinoza’s commitment to the ontological argument. In bringing together thought and existence, both divine and human, Spinoza demonstrates that to know God is to know man and that to know man is to know God. In other words, ignorance of God on the part of human beings simply reflects (and excuses) their own self-ignorance. It is this critical difference between Spinoza and Maimonides for which, in my judgment, Ravven fails to account.

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82. Providence is provision as provisional. 83. Spinoza writes in IV.Ap31 that the greater our happiness (laetitia), as distinct from superstition, sadness, and fear, “the more we pass (transimus) to greater perfection and consequently the more we participate in the divine nature; nor can happiness, which true reason directs (moderatur) for our utility, ever be evil.” 84. In IV.Ap26 Spinoza writes that “outside of men we know nothing singular in nature whose mind we can enjoy and can join to ourselves in friendship or in some kind of custom [community].” 85. In IV.Ap27 Spinoza observes that we obtain great utility from things outside of us—in addition to our experience and knowledge of them—concerning the preservation of the body. “For the more apt the body is in being able to be affected in a great number of ways and to affect external bodies in a great number of ways the more apt the mind is to thinking.” 86. In IV.Ap14 Spinoza observes that, while men mostly follow their lust in conducting their lives, “nevertheless, many more advantages (commoda) than disadvantages (damna) follow from their common society.” 87. In IV.Ap17 Spinoza writes that “the care of the poor is incumbent upon the whole of society and regards only the common utility.” He indicates in IV.Ap19–20 that the true basis of love (sex) is not mere appearance (forma) and that the true basis of marriage is not only the procreation and education of children but rather in both cases chiefly “freedom of mind.” It is interesting to see that in IV.Ap28–29 Spinoza acknowledges that money is a social instrument, that is, that money has an important social role to play in human relations. But he remains vague about the nature of this role, as he falls back into traditional moralizing. The powers of individual human beings would hardly be sufficient for securing the necessities of life, Spinoza states, unless they “engaged in mutual works (operas mutuas traderent). In fact, money has brought [human beings] a compendium of all things,” with the result that people (vulgus) can scarcely imagine any kind of happiness apart from the idea of money. But money is a vice, Spinoza continues, only when it does not serve our needs. Those who know the true use of money measure wealth by need and “live content with little.” While Spinoza is obviously correct, is not the real challenge facing those of us who live in capitalist society (whether in seventeenth-century Amsterdam or in twenty-firstcentury Toronto) how to live content with much? In other words, since money, as the compendium of everything, can replace all things in value, is not the challenge not to become content with, not to acquiescence in, money as the true compendium of all things? 88. See the following sections of the interlude in Philosophical Fragments: 2. The Historical; 3. The Past; and 4. The Apprehension of the Past. 89. See note 11. 90. Badiou (in Saint Paul) has an engaging discussion of Paul’s conception of the resurrection as consistent with the power of love (of loving the other as oneself) and thus with the distinction between the spirit that brings life and the letter that kills. Still, in viewing Paul as antiphilosophical and antidialectical, Badiou fails to see that the very standard (criterion) of truth that he invokes—one that is both (historically) singular and (historically) universal (the One can be one for me only insofar as it is

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one for all)—is the standard upheld by and for all true philosophy (dialectic). The reason that Spinoza’s concept of causa sui underlies the civil state of democratic sovereignty, as we shall see, is that the sovereign as the cause of itself—that is, as absolute, as infinitely and indivisibly one—is (paradoxically), at one and the same time, singular and universal. The individual and the community are both substantially, essentially, necessarily, and freely one and sovereign. 91. Cooper devotes the final pages of God Is a Verb to a discussion of resurrection. In recalling that Maimonides made resurrection one of the thirteen principles of Judaism, Cooper writes: “Although resurrection is a principle of faith in Judaism, we find a wide variety of conflicting viewpoints on what it means. There is general agreement on only one issue: the source of life cannot be thwarted by death. However, when resurrection occurs, how it happens, and to whom are all points of contention” (294). 92. Paul continues: “So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. . . . We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” 93. It is particularly striking that, for all his use of the language of utile, utilus, and utilitas, Spinoza is not a utilitarian. His philosophy of ethics, like that of Kant, is founded on the golden rule, not on the calculus of pleasure and pain, in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans, on the one hand, and of Bentham, on the other.

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2 Between Politics and Ethics: The Relationship between Democratic Freedom and Eternal Freedom Theologico-Political Treatise, Chapters 16–20; Political Treatise; Ethics, Part V

All men hate each other naturally. . . . In a word, the “I” has two qualities: it is unjust in itself, in that it makes itself the center of everything; it is offensive to others, in that it wants to enslave them. For each “I” is the enemy and would want to be the tyrant of all others. Pascal, Pensées [1670] (#404 and #141)

Introduction: Democracy, Multitudo, and the Eternity of the Mind AVING LEARNED IN CHAPTER 1 that freedom, by enacting the dictates of reason, emerges from the natural affects, so in this chapter we shall see that in precisely the same way Spinoza demonstrates that democracy, as the most naturally free civil state, arises from the natural state of human beings. He thus indicates that the basis of not only ethics but also politics is the conatus of seeking one’s utile, of persevering in existence insofar as one can. It is for this reason that, before taking up the fifth and last part of the Ethics, entitled “Concerning the Power of Understanding (Intellectûs), or Concerning Human Freedom,” I shall discuss the concept of politics that Spinoza presents in the last five chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise and in the Political Treatise (the second of which he did not live to complete). Because the political freedom that he associates with the ends of human nature and the “human freedom” that he associates with the eternity of the mind have a common basis in the affects and their transformation into the dictates of reason, we shall see that politics and ethics are intimately related in Spinoza. What, in other words,

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we shall ask, is the relationship between the democratic freedom of all individuals, which Spinoza conceives in terms of what he calls the sovereign multitudo in the Political Treatise, and the eternity of the mind of the free human being, as found in the culminating part of the Ethics? However, to discover the intimate relationship between politics and ethics will also lead us to appreciate anew, as I show in volume I of my study, that Spinoza, in separating philosophy from religion, does not intend to oppose them to each other or to eliminate one of them in favor of the other. He indicates at the beginning of chapter 16 of the Theologico-Political Treatise, as we shall see, that, since the separation of philosophy from theology allows for the freedom of philosophizing, he will now proceed to examine how far the freedom of thinking what you desire and of saying what you think extends “in the best republic.” Indeed, he will reiterate the position that, since there is no sin, no good and evil, in nature but only in the civil state, it is the supreme political power that exercises all religious authority. In other words, the kingdom of God does not exist outside of (without) sovereign political authority. Would, then, the fact that the freedom of thinking appears to be coincident with the freedom of philosophizing indicate that philosophy itself would not exist outside of (without) sovereign political authority? Surely, there could not be one philosophical truth and another political truth; for, according to Spinoza, as we have seen, truth is not at odds with truth. Ethics, politics, and philosophy would thus appear to make common cause against religion. Still, we already know that the dictates of reason, which constitute the foundation not only of ethics (as philosophy) but also, as we shall see, of the democratic polity of the multitudo, are based on the golden rule, that is, on charity and justice. But thereby we have returned to the foundation of what Spinoza calls the Seven Dogmas of Faith in the Theologico-Political Treatise. Furthermore, he will connect the concept of the eternity of the mind with the classically supreme, religious values of freedom, blessedness, and salvation. Is ethics, then, religious, but not philosophical or political? Although the answer to that question is a simple no, what counts is that we are invited by the issues raised by such a line of questioning to think through what the eternity of the mind can mean in light of the fundamental commitment that Spinoza makes to the values of democracy and what the freedom of the democratic state can mean in light of his concept of the eternity of the mind. Additionally, I shall simply note here that we shall see that he identifies the end of the civil state with what he calls the salus populi, the salvation or welfare of the people. Politics and ethics, we shall discover, in being at once philosophical and theological, bear the same, complex relationship to each other as do—and as they do to—philosophy and theology. It is fascinating to see how the two axioms of part V of the Ethics embody— by summarizing—the whole of Spinoza’s work, both ethical and political, and

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that they are, consequently, no less theological than they are philosophical.1 Axiom 1 states that, “if two contrary actions are excited in the same subject, a change will necessarily have to take place either in each action or in one of them alone until they cease to be contrary.” Spinoza does not directly inform us that this axiom is opposed to (i.e., that it “contradicts” or speaks contrary to) the single axiom of part IV, according to which, as we know, there is no singular thing in nature than which there is not another singular individual that is more powerful and by which the first is destroyed . . . ad infinitum. Whereas, according to the single axiom of part IV, singular things, as contraries or contradictories, destroy each other, according to axiom 1 of part V, contrary or contradictory actions cannot remain contrary to or contradictory of each other and have to be resolved into a non-conflictual relationship. The difference, then, between the single axiom of part IV and axiom 1 of part V is the difference between the natural state and the civil state. The difference between these two axioms is equally the difference between the Greek world and the biblical world. But axiom 1 of part V would appear to leave open the question of the kind of relationship or unity that is attained and the means by which it is attained. Is the relationship that of the free or of the enslaved human being? Is it democratic or tyrannical? The answer to this question is given, ethically, in axiom 2 of part V: “The power (potentia) of the effect is defined by the power of its cause, insofar as its essence is explained or defined through the essence of the cause itself.” Spinoza goes on to tell us that “this [second] axiom is clear from proposition 7 of part III.” But we remember that III.7 is the central proposition of the four propositions in which Spinoza exposes his concept of conatus. Since conatus, he states there, is that by which each thing endeavors (conatur) to persevere in its being, it is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing itself. But surely, then, not only is axiom 2 of part V clear from III.7, but so is axiom 1. For conatus, we have already learned, involves the conscious and so the paradoxical recognition of the contradictory contrast or difference between two kinds of causes. Consequently, the difference between axiom 1 of part V and the single axiom of part IV is the difference that Spinoza articulates in axiom 1 of part I: whatever is is either in itself (as cause of itself) or in another (as final cause). This distinction, we now recognize, is the difference between the civil state (of democracy) and the natural state, between paradox and contradiction. The point that I am making here in these introductory comments is that the difference between the two axioms of part V, on the one hand, and the single axiom of part IV, on the other, is the fundamental distinction that structures the whole of Spinoza’s thought, both ethical and political. It also signals the difference, not between philosophy and religion but between religion and superstition. The singular individual, we see, can exist “as the actual essence” of the singular individual, not in contrast to—not in contradiction of—other

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singular individuals but only in paradoxical union with other singular individuals. In other words, “one” is either naturally contradictory or ethically and politically—essentially—paradoxical. Thus, we shall see that the distinction between the natural (contradictory) state of human beings and the civil (paradoxical) state of human beings is central not only to politics and ethics but equally to philosophy and theology. Ethics, politics, philosophy, and theology all involve and express—in their distinctive ways—the appropriation of the (contradictory) natural affects in and through the dictates of reason whose basis is the golden rule of desiring for others the good that I desire for myself. We can well understand why, then, Spinoza comments on the story of Adam (and Eve) in all three of his mature, major works—in his Ethics and his two political treatises. Adam is born ignorant of self and God, yet he is conscious of his appetite in seeking the knowledge of good and evil. In disobeying the impossibly contradictory command that he not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he expresses, not freedom but lack of freedom and of the power to act. Yet, in knowing good and evil Adam is like God in assuming the obligation to love his neighbor as himself. We have here the very foundation of modernity that is at once political, ethical, philosophical, and theological. Will it be surprising, then, to find, in part V of the Ethics, that the intellectual love of God, in combining intuitive knowledge and the eternity of mind, embodies the golden rule, which, as the foundation of the Seven Dogmas of Faith, provides the basis of both ethics and politics? We have seen Spinoza declare—in his discussion of the dictates of reason in Ethics IV.18S—that reason demands nothing contrary to nature, consistent, we now see, with axiom 1 of part V. For it is reason that overcomes the contradictory opposition between singular individuals as finite, natural things (within a structure of final causes) by conceiving of them within the cause of itself as the infinite relationship of paradox. One can be one only insofar as one loves the other (one) as oneself. One can be one only insofar as one does unto the other what one desires the other as one to do unto one as the other (the singular individual). We shall see Spinoza reiterate in the Political Treatise that reason is not contrary or opposed to nature and argue in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise that democracy is the most natural state for human beings. But the paradox here is that, while reason is not contrary to nature, it is not natural. Although democracy is the most natural civil state conceivable for human beings, it is not their natural state. While conatus as desire is natural, it cannot escape contradictory opposition—the natural enmity of which Pascal speaks in the Pensées as cited at the head of this chapter—unless, as we have already seen and shall continue to see, it distinguishes human nature from the common order of nature. As I have indicated before, whereas in the natural state right is defined as power and so is utterly contradictory—according to the single axiom of

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part IV—so in the civil state power is defined by right and so is utterly paradoxical—according to axioms 1 and 2 of part V. The contrary power of singular individuals must be transformed such that the power of one expresses the right of all and the power of all involves the right of one. The power of one (as finite and natural) is contradictory and, in fact, impotent because ultimately it is always destroyed by yet another singular power that is more powerful . . . until and unless I exercise my power in and through a loving and just relationship to you as I desire you to exercise your power in and through a loving and just relationship to me, until and unless, in other words, I empower (upbuild) you as I desire you to empower (upbuild) me. Finite (natural) power as singular and one is utterly contradictory. Infinite (political and ethical and philosophical and religious) power as singular and one is absolutely paradoxical. It is little wonder, then, that Spinoza constantly invokes the absolute, infinite, and eternal power of God as the very exemplar of the supreme good of humankind. In the chapter that follows I shall analyze the political works of Spinoza in section 2 and part V of the Ethics in section 3. Before concluding this introductory, first section, however, I want to indicate my general understanding of the relationship between his two political treatises. Spinoza indicates in the last five chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise that, because he holds democracy, as the sovereignty of all, to be the most natural civil state, he will not discuss those civil regimes in which the sovereign power is held by either one ruler (monarchy) or some rulers (aristocracy). In the Political Treatise, however, he describes at length both monarchical and aristocratic sovereignty, while the section on democratic sovereignty is left almost entirely incomplete (due to his death). Consequently, we do not know what Spinoza would have written about democracy in the Political Treatise and how he might have compared the democratic imperium with the imperia of either one ruler or several rulers. Still, he gives no indication in this work, in his several references to the Ethics and to the Theologico-Political Treatise, that he sees any discrepancies between and among his three major works. More important, however, is the fact that the principles of conatus and reason provide the foundation of the civil state in the Political Treatise as they do in the Ethics and in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise. It is further to be noted that in the Political Treatise Spinoza associates the end of the civil state with the common good or welfare (salus) of the sovereign multitudo not only in his general political analysis, as found in the earlier chapters of the treatise, but also in his detailed description of monarchy and aristocracy, as found in the later chapters of the treatise. It is also important to note that his concept of the sovereign rule of all (democracy), of some, and of one bears no relationship to Aristotle’s six states involving the rule of many (democracy), some, and one (the three proper states and their three contradictory perversions).2

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What we shall discover, therefore, is that in the Political Treatise Spinoza connects both the foundations and the ends of the civil state with the sovereignty of the multitudo. Any state, whether monarchical or aristocratic, which is not compatible with the common welfare of the people is, he shows, not only inherently unstable and contradictory (and in that sense it lacks power and authority) but also contrary to reason and thus to nature. The Political Treatise, in other words, is strongly supportive of democracy in everything but name. The paradox is, as we shall see, that the only escape from the natural state of enmity among singular individuals is a concept of the civil state in which one is the multitudo (the singular individual is one as universal) and the multitudo is one (the universal is one as the singular individual). The singular individuals whose (naturally) finite, contrary, and contradictory actions show them to be at war with each other must be infinitely transformed into the unity of being other than themselves as one and of being one as other than themselves. Finally, in section 4 of this chapter I shall summarize what we learn about the multiple interrelations and connections between and among politics, ethics, philosophy and religion in light of the relationship between the freedom of democracy (in the two political treatises) and human freedom (in the Ethics). We shall see that the politically free multitudo, whose salus is love of neighbor, and the ethically free human being, who, in being conscious by a certain eternal necessity of self, God and things, never ceases to be, presuppose not only each other but also the separation of philosophy from religion. But the separation of philosophy from religion means precisely that, in not being opposed to each other, they do not involve contrary actions (by axiom 1 of part V of the Ethics). Rather, they constitute a unity. Consequently, while religion supports and fosters freedom of thinking and speech solely because its sovereign authority is democratic, the only political authority that truly supports and fosters freedom of thinking and speech is democracy whose foundation is the most elemental of theological concepts—God, whose supreme good constitutes charity and justice for all.

Democracy and the Freedom of the Multitudo: Theologico-Political Treatise, Chapters 16–20; and Political Treatise Spinoza makes freedom central to his concept of both ethics and politics. “Human freedom” is featured in the title of part V of the Ethics and will be shown to embody the eternity of the mind of sapiens, the wise individual, as distinct from ignarus, the ignorant individual who remains in bondage to external causes and so does not exist, live, and act from the necessity (freedom)

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of his own nature alone. But what is the place of sapiens, who is eternally conscious of self, God, and things, in the civil state? Since sapiens exists, lives, and acts from the eternal necessity (freedom) of his nature alone, he must live in the civil state and not in the natural state. For we have seen Spinoza demonstrate in the earlier parts of the Ethics that the very difference between the active affects and the passive affects, between human nature and the common order of nature, or between the civil state and the natural state is the difference between living by the freedom of one’s nature alone and being subject, in the ignorance of passive dependence, to the external causes of common nature. What, then, is the relationship between ethics and politics, between the singular individual—sapiens, but also ignarus—and the people or community: multitudo, populus, vulgus, plebs (as distinct from the patricians), cives (citizens), and subditi (subjects)? Is the concept of the eternity of the mind, as ethical and philosophical, also political? Since sapiens but also ignarus or servus (the individual enslaved to his affects) live in the civil state and not in the natural state—for the very difference between the wise individual and the ignorant individual and between the free human being and the enslaved human being is not natural but civil—what is the relationship of sapiens, together with ignarus, to the whole of humankind? Who, in fact, is sapiens? Indeed, who is ignarus? Is sapiens a rare, exceptional, unique (unheard of) individual? Or is he not, rather, simply ignarus or servus who, in being subject to his affects, endeavors, insofar as he can, to realize his utile, that is, to perfect his mind or reason in unity with his fellow human beings? Is sapiens not the true citizen or subject of democracy as the civil state in which the freedom to think what you desire and to say what you think is, Spinoza will argue, maximal? What does it mean to realize that one’s mind is eternal? What does Spinoza mean when he says that sapiens, in being conscious by a certain eternal necessity of self, God, and things, never ceases to be, unlike ignarus, who, as soon as he ceases to suffer dependence on external things, ceases to be? Since both sapiens and ignarus live in the civil and not in the natural state, what is the political significance of the eternity of the mind? While I shall be exploring these questions directly only in the next section on part V of the Ethics, I pose them here so as to sharpen our inquiry into the concept of freedom that Spinoza advances in his two political works and that he says can be fully realized solely in democracy as the most natural civil state. In more classical terms, what is his conception of the relationship between the singular individual—whether sapiens or ignarus—and the community, what he calls the multitudo in the Political Treatise? What is the relationship between politics and ethics, in light of the fact that, as I have already indicated, while religion (like sin or good and evil) does not exist outside of (without) sovereign political authority, the very basis of that authority, love of neighbor,

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is the true foundation of the Seven Dogmas of Faith as articulated in an earlier chapter of the Theologico-Political Treatise? Although Spinoza does not directly pose these questions—and so offers us no explicit answers to them in his texts—they invite, insistently, his readers to ponder them. For, surely, Spinoza would say, consistent with axiom 1 of part V of the Ethics, that there is not one political truth and another ethical truth (one that is not merely separate from but opposed to the other). We shall find, consequently, that it will be profoundly instructive to think through political freedom in terms of what Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God in part V of the Ethics. It will be no less fruitful to think through Spinoza’s concept of sapiens and his eternity of mind—together with ignarus, whose mind ceases to be—in light of the democratic multitudo. As I indicated earlier, it is striking that Spinoza roots both politics and ethics (and so also religion and philosophy) in the affects, in conatus, in desire—in nature, in the body. All human beings are equal—in the beginning. All human beings—both sapiens and ignarus—begin conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile and ignorant of the true causes of their appetite. All human beings begin equally—without regard to class, gender, race. . . . But do not all human beings also end equally? Are they not, in the end, equal? One way of thinking about this issue is in light of Montaigne’s question: What do I know? What do I desire? In the end—what is the end? Is it the eternity of the mind? Is what I know or is what I desire true to the person I am? Am I equal to myself? Or have I failed myself (and thus all other human beings)? Is this what Spinoza intends us to understand by the final division that he makes, at the end of the Ethics, between sapiens and ignarus, as he repeats, it is patent, the classical, theological difference, in the end, between the saved and the damned, between heaven and hell? We could ask if this final separation between sapiens and ignarus is intended by Spinoza—and by his readers—to be one of terminal opposition. But how would that be possible? For, surely, it is sapiens who, above all others, loves ignarus as himself. Does not sapiens looks upon ignarus as his neighbor? Would not sapiens be the very individual in whom the work of charity and justice is maximal? Not only, therefore, are all human beings equal, in the beginning, in being subject, consciously, yet in ignorance, to their affects. But they are also equal— in the beginning? in the end?—in knowing God. For Spinoza states dramatically in the Ethics, as we know, that, because “the human mind has adequate knowledge of the eternal and the infinite essence of God,” it follows that “the infinite essence of God and his eternity are known by all [human beings]” (II.47&S). All human beings are in principle—in the beginning?—equal in their knowledge of God, although not in the natural state but only in the civil state; for religion (the kingdom of God), Spinoza will show us, is not found

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outside of (without) sovereign political authority. But in the end what do human beings know and desire—in terms of the supreme good that is God, whose political and ethical expression is charity and justice? Surely, such is the accounting that each individual must make in the end. To come to know the true cause of one’s appetite in seeking one’s utile is to know that it is the cause of itself: God as the supreme good that includes all and excludes none—except ignarus and servus? We begin ignorant that God—knowledge of whom constitutes the work of charity and justice—is the cause of our appetite in seeking our utile—and we end knowing that our utile is charity and justice. But, as we are now going to see, such is no less the itinerary that Spinoza describes in his two political masterpieces. All human beings begin equally—in dependence on their affects—in the natural state. But the paradox is, then, that democracy is the most natural state because it is the most free civil state. For equality characterizes not the common order of nature—because in nature singular things are destroyed by yet more powerful singular things—but human nature. However, since all human beings are equal in the beginning, in being subject to their affects, will they not in the end, in the democratic civil state, also be equal, as they learn, following what Spinoza calls the dictates or the guidance of reason in all three of his major works, that they can be truly equal and thus also truly free solely in solidarity with, and not in opposition to, their fellow human beings? What, then, is the political difference between sapiens and ignarus? Does the democratic work of charity and justice involve and express the eternity of the mind? As I now undertake to examine the concept of politics that Spinoza advances in the last five chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise and in the Political Treatise, it is important to keep in mind that while, as I have indicated, the two works share a common framework, they differ in orientation (in part, because, as I continue to note, the section on democracy in the later work is almost entirely missing except for four brief sections). Spinoza has a specific program in the Theologico-Political Treatise: to show that, because the separation of philosophy from theology allows for the freedom of philosophizing, he will then undertake to inquire, beginning in chapter 16, how far this freedom of thinking (sentiendi: feeling) and of saying what each individual thinks (sentit) extends itself in the best civil state.3 His answer will be that the civil state that is most compatible with the freedom of thinking is democracy. Democracy, we can say, then, is the most philosophical of all political regimes, in a sense that is utterly opposed to any Platonic conception of philosopher-king. In other words, because in democracy every citizen (and ultimately every human being) is sovereign and therefore is his own king, he must also be his own philosopher (he has “the supreme right of thinking freely,” Spinoza writes at the end of chapter 7 of the Theologico-Political

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Treatise). Although, to repeat yet again, Spinoza concludes the Ethics with the separation between the wise individual and the ignorant individual, we have already noted that this separation cannot be intended to signal an opposition between them. For then we would be back in the natural state of the contrary, opposed passions, where, as he remarks several times in the Political Treatise, consistent with Pascal, human beings are by nature enemies of each other. Yet the paradox is that, because all human beings begin equal, in being commonly subject to the affects in the natural state—something that is utterly unthinkable not only to Plato but also to Aristotle and the Stoics—all human beings also end equal, in being commonly subject to the dictates of reason in the civil state of democracy, to the sovereign law of charity and justice: both sapiens and ignarus. The fact that Spinoza has a specific program in the Theologico-Political Treatise gives that work a coherence and a purpose that appear to be lacking in the Political Treatise (compounded, I again note, by the fact that a major section, perhaps the most important section, of the work is missing). Indeed, it is by no means easy to discern the purpose that Spinoza has in the Political Treatise or what the shape of the work’s argument is. Still, as I have already indicated, not only does Spinoza make it clear in this work that he views it to be consistent with both the Ethics and the Theologico-Political Treatise but, further, it also becomes evident to the reader that its basic premises and claims fundamentally support democracy. However, Spinoza does not explicitly state in the Political Treatise that he writes in favor of democracy. Indeed, we shall see that in this work he characteristically makes claims that, taken in themselves, would distort the larger framework of the treatise, given that they are indirectly (silently) modified (shaped) by later claims, in light of which they must be interpreted. Still, this is a fundamental characteristic of the Ethics with which we are already familiar (as also of the Theologico-Political Treatise, as I show in volume I of this study). A prime example of the non-explicit, indirect approach (method) of which Spinoza makes use in, and thus of the deeply ironic structure of, the Political Treatise is found in chapter 1, where he outlines his purpose in writing the work. The tension between what he writes there and what he means (what readers can understand him to mean)—in light of what he writes in subsequent chapters (and in his other two major works)—is dramatic. He begins by lamenting the fact that philosophers, instead of taking human beings as they are, revile their passions and so merely create fantastical utopias that have no application in practice. On the other hand, political leaders (policiti) are reviled for being more concerned with seeking the harm rather than the welfare of their people. But this simply means, Spinoza observes, that long experience has taught politicians to use craft, which is based more on fear than on reason, to

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deal with human vices that will never disappear. However, politicians are then viewed as opponents of religion, especially by theologians, who believe that the governing authorities ought to deal with public affairs according to the moral rules that the “private man” follows. “Nevertheless, it cannot be doubted,” Spinoza declares, “that politicians have written about political matters much more effectively than philosophers. For, since they have had experience as their teacher, they have taught nothing that was remote from use” (1.2). Spinoza proceeds to note that he is persuaded that experience has revealed all of the conceivable kinds of civil regimes in which human beings live concorditer and all the means by which the multitudo is to be directed and to be contained within certain limits. He also indicates that (speculative) “cogitation” in this area will not lead to anything that is not abhorrent to experience or practice and that has not already been discovered and tried. For human beings are such, he observes, that they cannot live outside of (without) some common law (jus). Consequently, he proposes himself not to introduce anything within politics (politica) that is new or unheard of “but only to demonstrate with certain and indubitable reason and to deduce from the condition itself of human nature those things that best agree with practice”4 (1.4). He takes this approach, he declares, since he has already proved in the Ethics that human beings are necessarily subject to the affects and so often act contrary to both religion and reason. It follows, therefore, that the welfare (salus) of the civil regime cannot depend on the (good) “faith” of rulers. Rather, a state must be so organized that, whether its rulers are led by reason or by (passive) affect, they cannot be induced to act in bad faith or wickedly. Indeed, it makes no difference to the security of a state “by what spirit (amino) men are led to administer affairs correctly, only that they are administrated correctly; for freedom or strength (fortitudo) of mind (animi) is a private virtue; but the strength (virtus) of the state is security” (1.6). Spinoza then concludes chapter 1 of the Political Treatise with the statement that, since all human beings, whether barbarian or civilized, join associations (consuetudines) and form a “civil state,” it must be understood that “the causes and natural foundations of the civil state are not to be sought in the precepts of reason but are to be deduced from the common nature or condition of men, which is what I propose to do in the following chapter” (1.7). What, however, we may ask, is the common nature of human beings or the common human condition—according to the Ethics, which Spinoza invokes as his authority? Is it not the fact that, as we have learned from our examination of parts III and IV on the affects, because human beings are part of nature, they are subject to the natural passions and dependent on and determined by external causes of which they are ignorant? It is the consciousness of their appetite in seeking its utile and their ignorance of the causes of their

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appetite. It is their conatus in persevering in their being and, consequently, their recognition that the natural state is utterly contradictory and that they can overcome its contradictions—that they can resolve what Spinoza in axiom 1 of part V calls “contrary actions”—solely insofar as they fall from the absolutely impossible and contradictory condition of ignorance (the natural state), in which they are without freedom or the power of action, into the civil state of knowing that the only good that is secure for them and that they can maintain in good “faith” is the good that they desire not for themselves alone but also and equally for all other human beings. Thus we see that Spinoza’s statement that the foundations of the civil state are not to be sought in the precepts of reason but are to be deduced from the common human nature can be easily misunderstood if it is not viewed as ironic.5 As a protest against Greek philosophy and any contamination of philosophy in the biblical tradition with the Greek conception of teleological reason, he is right. Reason must be understood to arise from the passive affects, from nature, from the body, and, thus, to be, always, a transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection. Reason is action (practice), not being; it is the work of charity and justice. As in the Ethics, so no less in the Political Treatise Spinoza stresses the enormity of the power of the passive affects on human life. But, as we shall see shortly, he equally invokes reason—the dictates of reason—as the very constitution of what is common in our human condition. The paradox of the contradictory condition of the natural state is that, while all human beings are commonly dependent on the passive affects, there is nothing common to them in the natural state but only what is contradictory, contrary, and opposed in their actions. As singular individuals who are subject to the external causes of nature, of which they are ignorant, human beings are inexorably destroyed by yet more powerful, singular individuals. Consequently, we see how ironic Spinoza is (or must be taken by the reader to be) when—I summarize the claims that he makes as outlined in the above paragraph— 1. he castigates philosophers for failing to account adequately for the role that the affects and so human vice play in politics; 2. he praises politicians for acknowledging that role by using craft and hence fear to control their subjects and subsequently mocks theologians for attacking politicians as anti-religious and for holding up private virtue as the standard of public action; 3. he claims that there is nothing new under the political sun in human experience; and, finally, 4. he declares that he will not introduce anything new or unheard of into politics but will only “demonstrate with certain and indubitable reason” and “deduce from the condition itself of human nature those things that best agree with practice.”

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While Spinoza is unsparing, in both the Political Treatise and the Ethics, in his critique of philosophers (Greco-Roman and medieval/modern) for failing to account for the role of the passive affects in the lives of human beings, although his silence on Hobbes6 in this regard is not easy to assess, he himself writes as a philosopher and not as a politicus! More significantly, he does not acquire his own philosophical principles from political writers like Machiavelli.7 Indeed, together with the accounts of Hobbes and Locke, the account that Spinoza gives of human right as embodying “the condition itself of human nature” and thus as providing a critique of the natural state, in which human beings as singular are destroyed by yet more powerful, singular human beings, is revolutionary, while at the same time consistent with the covenantal philosophy of the biblical tradition. Consequently, Ecclesiastes is right that there is nothing new under, not the Sun but the Sun’s God, knowledge and love of whom for Spinoza constitutes the supreme good of all human beings, which is hardly conducive to Machiavellian practice! But the real issue is to understand how Spinoza intends (us) to conceive of human practice, at once political and ethical. We know from the Ethics that practice, like the necessity of nature itself, divides into the difference between passive (contrary) affects and active (unifying) affects, the difference between bondage and freedom. While all human beings seek to live securely under laws, security and laws can support not only freedom but also slavery. We shall now see that Spinoza in the Political Treatise in no sense writes in support of the practice of human bondage. Indeed, at the very beginning of chapter 2 of the Political Treatise he states that, although he has dealt in the Theologico-Political Treatise and in the Ethics with the difference between natural right and civil right and so with such concepts as sin, justice and injustice, freedom, etc., he will explain his view on these topics again here. However, since what he writes in the Political Treatise about natural right as the right of doing whatever is in your natural power is consonant with his treatment of this topic in the Theologico-Political Treatise but is more diffusely presented, I shall include the main points that he makes in the former work on the difference between the natural state and the civil state in my discussion of the latter work. Still, in order to be able to call upon the Political Treatise in my treatment of the Theologico-Political Treatise, it is important to show, first, that the overall outlook of the political treatise is fundamentally compatible with that of the theologico-political treatise. For the problem in dealing with the two treatises together, as I have already indicated, is that, while the goal that Spinoza has in the latter is to show that democracy is the best civil state (because most supportive of the freedom to think what you desire and to say what you think), he articulates no such goal in the former. In fact, we have already noted that the overall purpose that Spinoza has in writing the Political Treatise is not easily to discern. Therefore, before turning to the more systematic

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treatment of democracy in the Theologico-Political Treatise, it is important to see that the principles that Spinoza articulates in his political treatise fundamentally support the commitment to democracy that he explicates in his theologico-political treatise. Spinoza summarizes the general methodology of the Political Treatise in 3.18 with the claim that he demonstrates all things about human nature “from the universal conatus of all men to preserve themselves.” In 2.15 he points out that “in vain (frustra) does one [human being] alone [in the natural state] endeavor to protect himself against all [other ones]. Hence, it follows that so long as human natural right is determined by the power of one . . . it is null.” In 3.6 he remarks that, “since reason teaches nothing against nature, sound reason cannot dictate that each person maintain his own right so long as men are subject to [passive] affects, that is, reason denies that this can be done.” Indeed, because reason altogether teaches that human beings are to seek (civil) peace (as distinct from the natural state of war), it follows that the more human beings are guided by reason the more free they are and the more steadfastly they observe the laws of the state. Since the civil state is naturally instituted to remove both common fear and common miseries, Spinoza remarks, “it maximally intends, therefore, what every one who is guided by reason strives for (conaretur) in the natural state, but in vain (by 2.15).” Thus we see that, consistent with the Ethics, the conatus of preserving one’s utile cannot be achieved in the passive, natural, finite state in which every one is contrary to every one. It can be attained only in the civil state where one constitutes the sovereign unity of all human beings as one. Spinoza is eloquent in his articulation of the principle that, while reason is frustrated and so operates in vain in the natural state, it is the very basis of the civil state. He states that the mind is altogether [in possession] of its [own] right (sui juris) insofar as it is able to use reason rightly. Indeed, since human power (potentia) is to be judged not so much by the strength of the body as by the fortitude of the mind, it follows, therefore, that those [men] are maximally [in possession] of their right who are maximally powerful (pollent) in reason and who are maximally guided by it. And therefore I call the man altogether free insofar as he is guided by reason because he is determined to act from causes that can be adequately understood through his nature alone. (2.11)

Thus, we see that what Spinoza intends by “common human nature” in chapter 1 of the Political Treatise turns out to involve at once reason, freedom, possession of one’s own right (sui juris), and free determination from one’s own nature alone. It follows from 2.11, Spinoza states in the next chapter, “that that state that is founded on and guided by reason will be maximally powerful

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(potens) and maximally [in possession] of its right. For the right of the civil state is determined by the power (potentia) of the multitude (multitudinis), which is led as if by one mind. But this union of minds cannot be rationally conceived unless the civil state has the maximal intention [of achieving] what sound reason teaches to be useful (utile) to all men” (3.7). In the first section of chapter 5 Spinoza recalls that he showed in 2.11 and in 3.7 that both the individual and the civil state are most fully in possession of their own right (sui juris) when they are guided by reason. “It follows, therefore,” he concludes, “that, since the best plan of living (vivendi ratio) for preserving oneself as far as possible is that which is instituted from the precept of reason, what is altogether best is that a man or a civil state acts insofar as it maximally possesses its own right.” On the basis, then, of the above statements in the Political Treatise, in which Spinoza explicitly founds both individual and collective right on the guidance of reason—as distinct from divisive (passive) affect—it is clear that he cannot be understood, except ironically, to hold that the civil state is not properly and truly constituted by the precepts of reason, consistent with what he calls the dictates of reason in the Ethics. Indeed, in deducing the civil state from the universal conatus of human nature, Spinoza demonstrates that conatus, because it operates in vain—in frustrated contradiction of itself—in the natural state, can only be (paradoxically) realized as reason in the civil state. The steps that Spinoza takes in constituting reason as the basis of the civil state are rigorously logical. First, he identifies reason with both individual and social (collective) right. In being guided by reason the individual human being and the civil state are each in possession of their own right (sui juris). That is, they are not dependent on or determined by causes that are external to their own nature, to their own natural right. Next, he identifies the right of the state with the power of what he calls the multitudo, the whole of the people. Finally, he claims that there can be no true union of minds—no true multitudo—unless the civil state constitutes what reason teaches as utile for all human beings. We know from the Ethics that utile, as the true end of conatus, is nothing other than the golden rule of charity and justice: the paradox that I cannot possess my utile, or good, except insofar as I do unto others what I will them to do unto me. What we find, therefore, in the Political Treatise is that Spinoza, on the basis of his deductions from what he calls common human nature, has demonstrated the foundation of the democratic civil state without saying so explicitly. The paradox, as always, is that Spinoza starts with what is common, the ignorant yet conscious dependence of all human beings on their contradictory affects, on their appetite or conatus as completely frustrated by its vain attempts to attain its utile in the natural state. But what he demonstrates in the

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end is that the affects can be constituted as truly one and common to all only when they are understood to be determined from themselves alone (as active affects), when they are shown to be in possession of their own right (sui juris), and so, when, under the guidance of reason, they constitute their utile as the supreme good of all human beings. What could be more ironic, then, than the fact that, having founded the democratic right of the multitudo on the basis, not of past political experience (like Machiavelli) but of, rather, true human practice whose principles are natural right, freedom, the common utile, and reason, Spinoza will thence proceed in the Political Treatise to describe monarchy as the rule of one and aristocracy as the rule of some while leaving absolutely truncated his account of democracy (as the rule of all, the multitudo, presumably)? Step A: The Civil State and the Natural State I now turn to the Theologico-Political Treatise to examine the argument of Spinoza that democracy is the civil state that optimally serves the freedom of philosophizing. I shall analyze his argument in terms of its three basic steps. In Step A he critically distinguishes the civil state from the natural state. In Step B he demonstrates that religion or, in other words, the Kingdom of God is not found outside of (without) the civil state. In Step C he shows that democracy not only sustains but also is sustained by the freedom to think what you desire and to say what you think. I shall also continue to call upon key ideas of the Political Treatise in my discussion as we proceed. We shall continue to savor the irony that democracy, as the civil state that is most (or truly) natural, is, politically, the common human condition in which freedom optimally flourishes. Like the oxymoron natural right, freedom is natural in the precise sense that in the natural state freedom does not exist any more than does “human nature” or “natural right.” But we shall also see that Spinoza will proceed to argue in the Political Treatise that the civil state, whether aristocratic or monarchical, is (ironically) founded on the power of the multitudo and that its sole end or purpose is the common salus (welfare) of the people when understood in terms of what is truly and properly human, and so consistent with the democratic freedom, reason, right, and utile that are common to all. As I have already indicated, Spinoza introduces the second, the political part of his theologico-political treatise in the first paragraph of chapter 16. He states that, having shown in the first fifteen chapters that the separation of philosophy from theology results in “the freedom of philosophizing,” he will now inquire as to how far “this freedom of thinking” what you desire and of saying what you think extends in the “best civil state.” He does not tell us

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whether the freedom of thinking and speaking will also include religion or whether (or how) he will distinguish thinking (including desire) and speaking from action and whether such a distinction will imply a division between the private and the public realms. What Spinoza does tell us, however, is that, in order to undertake this inquiry, it will be necessary to discuss the foundations of the civil state but, before that, “the natural right of every individual” (de jure naturali uniuscujusque) without regard to (that is, prior to) the civil state and religion (and, we wonder, whether also without regard to or prior to philosophy or thinking) (179). In other words, he will take up the natural state (as) prior to the civil state. To distinguish the civil state from the natural state is to take Step A in demonstrating that democracy is the civil state that optimally supports the freedom to think what you desire and to say what you think. The itinerary that Spinoza outlines here is absolutely amazing. We go from religion to philosophy to thinking to the best state to the foundations of the state to the natural right of individuals—and so to the natural state of the affects or conatus—without regard to (the existence of) religion (and philosophy and thinking?) and the civil state! Religion takes us to the natural state prior to religion! How is this itinerary possible? Why is it necessary? What does it mean? Still, in undertaking to make the natural state the basis of the civil state Spinoza is simply repeating the fundamental teaching of the Ethics that human beings, insofar as they are part of nature, are dependent on and determined by external causes of which they are ignorant. They begin conscious of their appetite in seeking their utile but ignorant of the causes of their appetite. Indeed, we have just seen Spinoza state in the Political Treatise that he deduces everything from the necessity of human nature, that is, from the universal (or natural) conatus of all human beings to preserve themselves (in the natural state). It is also in that same work, we recall, that Spinoza shows us that Adam, in beginning subject to his (passive) affects and without the use of his reason, is just like us. He is not free to fall. His fall—his abrogation of the impossibly, contradictory command of God not to know good and evil—expresses not his power to act but his utter impotence, his ignorance of the causes of his appetite, in other words, his ignorance of God, his ignorance of good and evil, which are not found in the natural state. Thus, Spinoza protests against the conventional wisdom of theologians that the sin of the first man was the reason for or the cause of his fall. He shows against the theologians that, had Adam been in possession of his reason, had he been mentis compos, then he would not have fallen. The paradox here is that in the garden (as in the state of nature) there is no sin, because there is no civil state (which rests upon knowledge of good and evil, upon knowledge of God as man’s supreme good). Adam is born ignorant of the causes of his appetite, yet he is conscious of his appetite—of his conatus—in seeking his utile. Adam is originally in ex-

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actly the same contradictory position as those in the state of nature, as we shall now see. It is instructive to be more precise about the exact context in which Spinoza introduces the story of the first man in the Political Treatise. It is found in section 6 of chapter 2; and it is in chapter 2 that Spinoza advances his concept of the natural state and the “transition” to the civil state, which is the precise topic of chapter 16 of the Theologico-Political Treatise, to the discussion of which I shall return shortly. I also recall that at the end of chapter 1 of his political treatise Spinoza indicates that the causes and natural foundations of the civil state are to be deduced, not from the precepts of reason but from the common nature or condition of human beings, as he will show in chapter 2. It is at the beginning of chapter 2, then, that he states that, while he has already dealt with these topics in the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Ethics, he will again discuss them here so that his readers will not have to consult his other works. The point of all this for us readers is to grasp two things: 1. Spinoza makes the story of Adam central to his presentation of the natural state; and 2. he views his three major works as sharing a common perspective and framework on the relationship between the natural state (the passive affects) and the civil state (the active affects or reason). I shall summarize the salient elements of the treatment that Spinoza gives of the natural state in chapter 2 of the Political Treatise before examining in more detail his treatment of it in the Theologico-Political Treatise. This is one of the most amazing moments in the history of human thought, as I indicated above, and also one of those that is most confusing to modern commentators and one by which they are most confused. It is important to take the time to sort out carefully the issues that are involved here, and there is no more significant author for this topic than Spinoza. At stake are my interrelated claims that Spinoza is biblical, that the Bible is modern, and that Spinoza and the Bible are altogether different from Greek and Roman paganism. The formal difference here, as I have shown earlier, is that between paradox and contradiction, between judging absolutely and absolutely not judging. Paradoxically, contradiction ignorant of itself (such as we find in Socrates) cannot recognize itself as contradiction. The recognition—the overcoming (die Aufhebung)—of contradiction, on the part of all those who are subject to conatus, that is, on the part of all human beings, including Adam (who is “just like us”), constitutes paradox. It is important to do all we can to plumb the paradoxical depths of the contradictory natural state in which all human beings, as singular individuals, are opposed to each other. Spinoza writes in section 14 of chapter 2

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of the Political Treatise that, insofar as human beings are conflicted by the various affects of hatred, they are divided and contrary to each other. In other words, “because men are subject in the highest degree (ut plurimum) to these affects, men therefore are enemies from nature (ex natura).” It is striking that what is common to the nature or condition of human beings is that, in being commonly determined by their natural affects, by conatus in seeking their own utile, they have nothing in common with each other (or with themselves) and, in being natural enemies, they are utterly contradictory. But the paradox here is that the realization that human beings are enemies from nature, that is, that they are contradictory, is not itself an expression of enmity or of contradiction. Is it not, rather, this paradox of self-referentiality that allows us to understand what is, perhaps, the most surprising feature in Spinoza’s treatment of the natural state (of the human passions, of conatus), one that is perhaps even more prominent in his political than in his theologico-political treatise? I refer to the primary role that Spinoza gives to God in his account of the natural state. But how is it possible for God to play a role, let alone the key role in the natural state, when, as we shall see, Spinoza demonstrates with utmost consistency that the natural state is prior to (without) religion (reason, thinking and so also, we must conclude, prior to the true subject of human knowledge: God)? Still, is the role that God plays in the natural state not like the role of absolutely impossible contradiction that he plays in the garden of Eden? Is his command not to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil consistent with the ignorance of sin, with the ignorance of good and evil on the part of human beings in the natural state? Spinoza explains in section 2 of chapter 2 that, since it is not of the essence of natural things to exist necessarily, both their beginning to exist and their persistence in existing, that is, “the power of natural things by which they exist and consequently by which they operate can be nothing other than the eternal power itself of God.” Precisely because the power by which natural things exist and operate is the very power itself (ipsissima potentia) of God, he continues, we easily understand what the right of nature (jus naturae) is. For, since God has the right to [do] everything (jus ad omnia) and since the right of God is nothing other than the power itself of God insofar as this power is considered to be absolutely free, hence it follows that every natural thing has as much right from nature as it has power to exist and to operate—indeed, since the power of every natural thing by which it exists and operates is nothing other than the power of God, which is absolutely free. (2.3)

The natural right of all things is their power to exist and to operate (to act, to flourish . . .), since this power involves and expresses the absolutely free

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power of God. Nature and right, we see, are defined by the absolutely free power—of God and of all natural things—to exist and to operate. The absolute (sovereign) power of freely existing and operating—on the part of God and of all natural things—is not defined by nature and right. Before dealing directly with the paradox of how it is that human beings, in the natural state, indeed, comprehend the absolutely free power of God as (the basis of) their own right of nature—that is, before dealing with the paradox of the ontological argument directly—it is important, first, to see what Spinoza deduces from the fact that the power to exist and to operate on the part of human beings constitutes their right and their nature. For what is clear, I think, is that, within the highly concentrated sections 2 and 3 of chapter 2 of the Political Treatise, we have the general shape of the Ethics and of the whole of Spinoza’s thought. We begin with God—with the necessary existence of God as absolutely free power. Yet, paradoxically, we begin with the natural state of the affects, in which human beings by nature are enemies of both others and themselves: they are utterly contradictory. For, indeed, Spinoza proceeds in subsequent sections of chapter 2 of the Political Treatise to explain that by right of nature he means the power itself of nature, according to which the natural right of the whole of nature and consequently of every individual thing extends as far as its power. Thus it follows, he remarks, that “whatever any man does from the laws of his nature he does from the supreme right of nature” since he has as much natural right as he does power (2.4). It is important to note that it is only at this point in chapter 2 that “man” appears. What Spinoza is showing us indirectly, consequently, and with great subtlety is that the natural state presupposes not only God but also human beings and the consciousness on their part of their appetite in seeking their utile, yet also their ignorance of God. It is in section 5 of chapter 2 that Spinoza attains his goal of showing that natural right depends upon power (to exist and to persist in existence). If human beings lived solely by reason, he points out, the right of nature would be determined solely by the power of reason. Since human beings, however, are led more by blind desire than by reason, their natural power or right must be defined not by reason but by all the appetites by which they are determined to act and by which they endeavor (conantur) to preserve themselves. Spinoza acknowledges that the desires that do not arise from reason are not so much human actions as passions. Still, since he is here concerned with the universal power or right of nature, he does not recognize any difference between the desires that are engendered in us from reason and those from other causes. They are all, he declares, “effects of nature and explicate the natural force by which man endeavors (conatur) to persevere in his being.” All human beings (both sapiens and ignarus, we could say) are part of nature; and thus, whether they are led by reason or by (passive) desire alone, they act by the right of nature.

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It is then in section 6 of chapter 2 that Spinoza introduces Adam as being “just like us” in his contradictory dependence on the affects. Adam falls, not because he is free and mentis compos but because he is blindly dependent on the power of his natural affects. His power—the power of his natural right—is precisely his impotence. Sin—that is, responsibility (before God and neighbor) for knowledge of good and evil—is no more to be found in the natural state than in the original state of Eden. Yet it is striking that the story of Adam and Eve, in demonstrating their ignorance of God, their ignorance of good and evil, is subsequent to the biblical story of the absolute power of God according to which he creates (empowers) the natural right of existing things as good and of man and woman as supremely good. It is no less striking to discover that we (readers) can descry the ignorance of human beings in the natural state, their impotent dependence on the power of their natural affects, only in light of the absolutely free (creative) power of God. We have now seen that in the Political Treatise Spinoza insists upon the power of the affects as the natural right of all existing things, including human beings, in light of the absolutely free power of God. We are thus forewarned, as we now take up the more systematic discussion of the natural state in the Theologico-Political Treatise, to watch for its contradictory depiction. Not only is it the common dependence of human beings on their natural affects that makes their actions contrary to each other as natural enemies, but the power of their natural affects, as we learn from the story of Adam and Eve, actually represents their impotence. There is yet a further contradiction. The fact that in the natural state the natural right of human beings extends as far as their power, as far as their conatus in persevering in their existence, reflects the ipsissima potentia of God, of whom, however, they are ignorant. In his depiction of the natural state in the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza begins directly with the statement that by the right of nature he simply means that all things are “naturally determined to exist and to operate in a certain mode.”8 For example, fish are determined by nature to swim; and big fish have the supreme, natural right to eat smaller fish. The fact that nature has the absolute and supreme right to do everything that it can, that is, that the right of nature extends as far as its power, expresses the fact, Spinoza observes, that “the power itself of nature is the power of God, who has the supreme right to [do] all things.” He explains further that, because the universal power of the whole of nature is simply the power of all individuals taken together, it follows that each individual has the supreme right to do everything that it can. That is, Spinoza continues, the right of each thing extends itself as far as its determinate power extends itself. And because the supreme law of nature is that each thing endeavors (conetur) to persevere in its state as much as it can—taking into account no other

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thing than itself—hence it follows that each individual has the supreme right to [do] this, that is (as I said), to exist and to operate as it is naturally determined. (179)

It is important to note that Spinoza is more precise in his depiction of natural right here in his theologico-political treatise than in his political treatise. He indicates that the natural right of the individual involves both “determinate” power (and so not indeterminate or infinite power) and his own individual power (and so not the power of other individuals). Spinoza additionally goes on to indicate that, just as he does not recognize a difference between human beings endowed with reason and those lacking in reason, so he also recognizes no difference either between human beings and other natural things or among human beings who are foolish, mad, and sane. “For whatever each thing does from the laws of its nature,” he states, “it does that with supreme right, precisely because it acts according as it is determined from nature, nor can it [do] otherwise” (179). It follows, therefore, Spinoza continues, that, insofar as human beings are viewed as living in the state (imperio) of nature alone, the individual “who does not yet know reason” lives by supreme right as much from the laws alone of appetite as he who directs his life by the laws of reason (179–80). Because “all men are born ignorant of all things,” their natural right “is determined [originally or naturally] not by sane reason but by desire and power.” Spinoza concludes, then, with the observation that “this is the same as the teaching of Paul, who recognizes no sin before the law, that is, so long as men are considered to live from the state (imperio) of nature” (180). Before proceeding to consider how and why Spinoza makes the contradictory condition of the natural state fundamental to his concept of the civil state, we can get a sense of the paradox involved—how the natural state, as sinless or without good and evil, reflects the sinful subordination of right to power in the civil state of humankind—when, with Pericles, we overhear the conversation of the fishermen in the play of Shakespeare bearing his name. Emerging on shore wet from the wild sea, after he has shipwrecked in a storm, Pericles calls upon the angry elements of nature to cease their ire: [R]emember earthly man Is but a substance that must yield to you, And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.

Three fishermen, who have witnessed the shipwreck and heard the pitiful cries of those whom they could not help, enter, not yet observing Pericles. In response to the comment of one that he marvels how the fishes live in the sea, another answers: “Why, as men do a-land—the great ones eat up the little

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ones.” He then compares “our rich misers” to a whale that devours a whole parish—church, steeple, bells, and all. Pericles comments in an aside: “A pretty moral.” One of the fishermen then indicates that, if their good king were of his mind, “we would purge the land of these drones that rob the bee of her honey.” Pericles comments again in an aside: How from the finny subject of the sea These fishers tell the infirmities of men, And from their wat’ry empire recollect All that may men approve [commend] or men detect [expose]!— Peace be at your labor, honest fishermen. (scene 5 [2.1], 41f)

That big fish eat little fish by the sovereign right and power of nature becomes “a pretty moral” whereby we “tell the infirmities of men.” So Spinoza also continues in chapter 16 of the Theologico-Political Treatise to observe that it is “much more useful (utilius) for men to live according to the laws and certain dictates of our reason, which . . . aim (intendunt) only at the true utile of men.” To live without mutual assistance and the cultivation of reason is to live miserably. In order, then, for human beings to live securely and optimally [Spinoza continues], they had necessarily to join in one (in unum conspirare). Therefore, they arranged that the right, which each one by nature had regarding all things, they would have collectively and that it would no longer be determined from the strength and appetite of each one but from the power and will of all together. . . . [Each one, in following the dictates of reason, undertakes] to do to no one what he does not want done to himself and, finally, to defend the right of another as his own. (181)

Precisely because it is in accord with the utile of human beings to live communally—while always recognizing that their right extends as far as their power and that their power extends as far as their right—a societas can be formed without a detriment to natural right and a pactum always preserved cum fide (with faith). But this means, Spinoza explains, that everyone transfers all the power that he has to society (in societatem), which, therefore, will alone retain the supreme right of nature over all things, that is, the supreme sovereignty (imperium), which everyone will be held to obey either from free mind (ex libero animo) or from fear of the highest punishment (metu summi suplicii). The right of such a society is called democracy, which, therefore, is defined as a universal body (coetus) of men, which collegially has the supreme right to everything that it can. From which it follows that the supreme power is bound by no law, but all must obey it in all things. For this is that to which all men must have tacitly or expressly agreed (pacifici), since they transferred to it all their power of defending themselves, that is, all their right. (183)

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Spinoza observes that, since the civil state and the people alike must follow the guidance of reason in order to avoid both tyranny and anarchy, democracy is the civil state best suited to avoid these extremes. He notes further that obedience to others, depending on the context, is either free or tyrannical. Thus, it follows that, in the civil state “where the welfare (salus) of the whole people (populi), not of the ruler, is the supreme law, he who obeys the supreme power in all things is said to be, not a slave useless to himself but a subject; and, therefore, that civil state is maximally free whose laws are founded on sane reason; for there everyone can be free where he desires, that is, to live in the wholeness of mind (integro animo) from the guidance of reason” (184). Spinoza points out that children, in obeying their parents, are not slaves. For the commands of parents are concerned, above all, with the “utility” of the children. It is important, then, he continues, to distinguish among a slave, a son, and a subject. A slave obeys his master’s commands in the interest of the master. A son obeys his father’s commands in his own interest. A subject obeys the commands of the supreme power in following the common and consequently also his own utile. Spinoza declares that, having clearly demonstrated the foundations of the democratic state, he will not discuss others types of states, since democracy seemed “the most natural and to come closest to the freedom (maxime naturale . . . and maxime ad libertatem) that nature grants to everyone. For in it no one thus transfers his natural right to another such that afterwards there would be no consultation with him but [rather he transfers it] to the major part of the whole society, of which he makes one [part]. For this reason all men remain equal as before in the natural state” (185). Spinoza repeats that he discusses only democracy since his concern is with the “utility” of freedom in the civil state. Indeed, he notes at the beginning of chapter 17 of the Theologico-Political Treatise that “no one could ever transfer his power and consequently his right to another such that he ceased to be a man; nor will there ever be given a supreme power that could do all that it thus wants.” Consequently, it would be vain for rulers to order their subjects to hate those from whom they have received good, to love those who have brought harm to them, or not to want to be freed from fear, and “a great many other things of this kind, which follow necessarily from the laws of human nature.” For experience itself shows, Spinoza points out, that people have never so transferred their right and power to sovereign powers that the sovereign powers did not see in their subjects a greater source of danger than in foreign enemies. “It must therefore be granted,” he concludes, “that everyone reserves to himself much of his right, which, consequently, depends on the decree of no one but on his own alone” (191).9 We have already seen Spinoza indicate in the Political Treatise that it is precisely reason that allows human beings to overcome (to escape from) the con-

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tradictions of their affects in the natural state and to form the true basis of the civil state. Indeed, he writes there, as we have seen, that, “so long as human natural right is determined [in the natural state] by the [contradictory] power of one . . . , it is null. Rather, it exists more in opinion than in reality, for there is no security in obtaining it” (2.15). Therefore, before continuing my discussion of his theologico-political treatise, I shall first review what Spinoza understands not only by the multitudo (the people) in his political treatise, a term that he does not use in the Theologico-Political Treatise, but also by the end of the state. What we shall discover is that, although he does not directly advocate democracy in the Political Treatise as the best because the most natural and the freest type of civil state, as I have already indicated, it is patent, nevertheless, that the values that he associates with the multitudo and their common salus (welfare) as the end of the civil state are democratic, even within so-called monarchical and aristocratic states. In the context of observing in the Political Treatise that “the more men are thus united the more right they all have at the same time” (2.15), Spinoza declares that the “right, which is defined by the power of the multitudo, is accustomed to be called imperium (sovereignty)”—whether the civil state is ruled by one (monarchy), some (aristocracy), or all (democracy) (2.17). In chapter 3 he declares that “it is clear that the right of the civil state or of the supreme powers is nothing but the right itself of nature, which is determined by the power, not indeed of any single one but of the multitudo that is led as if by one mind” (3.2). He repeats a few sections later that “just as in the natural state the man is most powerful and most of all possesses his own right who is led by reason, thus also the civil state will be maximally powerful and maximally in possession of its own right that is founded on and directed by reason. For the right of the civil state is determined by the power of the multitudo that is led as if by one mind. But this union of minds can be conceived by no reason unless the civil state maximally aims at (intendat) what sound reason teaches to be useful (utile) to all men” (3.7). Spinoza never fundamentally deviates in the Political Treatise from viewing the multitudo (understood as the union of minds), reason, and the utile of all human beings (understood as the end of the imperium—the state or sovereign power) as intimately related to each other, even when, in later chapters, he describes monarchy and aristocracy, as we shall see. Thus, he declares in simple terms that “the right of the civil state is defined by the common power of the multitudo” (3.9). Consequently, when Spinoza takes up the issue of what peace means in the civil state, he relates it to the multitudo. He begins by noting that, when subjects are restrained from revolting simply by fear, the civil state can be said to be free from war. But it cannot be said to enjoy peace, which is not, he remarks, the absence of war but rather virtue, “which arises from strength (fortitudine) of mind; for obedience is the constant will to do what ought to be

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done according to the common decree of the civil state” (5.4). If peace, Spinoza continues, merely depends on the inertia of its subjects, then they will be more like sheep and the civil state more like a solitudo than a true union of minds. He goes on to say that, when he discusses “the best civil state” in which human beings live concorditer, he understands their “human life” to be defined, not by the physical qualities that are common to all animals, like the circulation of the blood, but “above all by reason, [that is,] by the true virtue and life of the mind” (5.5). He reiterates that, when he says that this is the end of the civil state, he refers to the civil state that the “free multitude” establishes, not to the civil state that is acquired over a people by right of war. Whereas a free multitudo is led by hope and is eager to cultivate life, a conquered people is led by fear and seeks only to avoid death. A free multitudo is eager to live for itself (sibi vivere), while a conquered people is compelled to belong to its victor. The first is free, the second enslaved. “And although no essential difference is given between the civil state that is created by a free multitudo and the civil state that is acquired by right of war, if we attend in merely generic terms (in genere) to the right of either, nevertheless,” Spinoza declares, “they have a completely different end, as we have just shown, and, moreover, completely different means with which any one of them ought to be preserved” (5.6). While Spinoza thus indicates that formally—in genere—it makes no difference whether civil states are established freely (peacefully) or by conquest (militarily), he leaves no doubt that the ends of free and of conquered civil states are completely different and thus also the means by which they are preserved.10 With this distinction between formal description and evaluative analysis in hand, Spinoza articulates the deceptively double methodology of the Political Treatise. The overall structure of the work reflects his apparently neutral approach to sovereign right, whether it be monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic, or even whether it be free or tyrannical. Still, according to the actual content of the work Spinoza leaves no doubt that he evaluates the civil state in light of the free multitudo and thus of the means—even when monarchical or aristocratic—that are consistent with the human and the rational ends of the life of the multitudo in the civil state. Consequently, even when Spinoza discusses the monarchical imperium in detail, he makes it clear that the multitudo remains supreme. He notes that experience seems to show that, in the interest of peace and concord, all power should be conferred on one man. But this is true, he comments caustically, only if slavery, barbarism, and solitude are called peace. “Therefore, it is in the interest of slavery, not of peace, to transfer all power to one; for peace, as we have already said, consists, not in the privation of war but in the union or concord of minds” (6.4). It is also wrong to hold, Spinoza continues, that one individual alone can obtain the supreme right of the state. For right is deter-

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mined by power, and one man is much weaker than the multitudo. Therefore, if a king is to rule securely and if a multitudo is to live at peace, we see that “a monarch is maximally [in possession] of his own right when he pays maximum attention to the welfare (salus) of the multitudo” (6.8).11 Indeed, Spinoza points out, since kings are not gods but men and thus, like Ulysses, subject to the seductions of the sirens, there would be no political stability if everything depended on the inconstant will of one man. It follows, therefore, that things must be so arranged in a monarchical state that, while everything is done according to the king’s will, not everything that the king wills is law (7.1). Spinoza observes further that, although it is common for people to turn to a king to lead them in times of war, it is foolish for them to embrace slavery in the name of peace. Furthermore, he notes, it is democracy that is distinguished by the fact that its strength is much greater in peace than in war (7.5). Finally, Spinoza reminds the reader that in his treatise “he conceives of a monarchical state that is instituted by a free multitudo, to which alone can what he has written be of use” (7.26). In light of the supremacy of the free multitude, there are yet additional features of Spinoza’s treatment of sovereign rule in both monarchy and aristocracy that are consistent with it. While the king, as elected by the people, is to serve permanently, he does not have the right to pass the state on to whatever successor he pleases. There is no royal heredity. When the king dies, the imperium naturally reverts to the multitudo. Consequently, Spinoza declares, we can deduce “that the sword or right of the king is in truth the will of the multitude itself or of its stronger part” and that “men endowed with reason never thus cede their right so as to cease to be men and to be treated as sheep” (7.26). He acknowledges that it is commonly held that the people lack moderation and judgment, etc., and that the common vices, although they belong to all human beings, are found in the people (plebs) alone. “But the nature of all men is one and common,” Spinoza declares. Human beings differ not in nature—“nature is the same in all men” —but only in power and culture (potentia et cultu) (7.27).12 Consistent with the commonality of nature in all human beings, who differ, consequently, only in power and culture, not in reason, is the fact that, while aristocracy depends upon the election of patricians (by and from the people), democracy is hereditary. In democracy, all citizens enjoy the natural (hereditary or innate) right of membership in the supreme council, of holding office, etc. (8.1).13 That Spinoza dramatically reverses political tradition by removing hereditary right from both kings and aristocrats and by ascribing it to the democratic multitudo is consonant with the opening sentence of chapter 11 where he initiates his analysis of democracy. (Again, we note that chapter 11 breaks off unfinished after just four brief sections.) Here he states that he finally

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arrives at “the third and altogether absolute civil state (sovereignty: imperium), which we call democratic” (11.1). In the Political Treatise it is solely democracy to which Spinoza ascribes “absolute sovereignty.” He does not associate “the altogether absolute civil state” with either monarchy or aristocracy. We can remember that when he discusses monarchy he ascribes its sovereignty to the multitudo. When he analyzes the aristocratic state in chapter 8, it is important to see that his (apparent) ascription of absolute sovereignty to it is, finally, qualified, limited, and ambiguous. Of the various features of aristocracy that Spinoza discusses, the following three are particularly relevant in helping us grasp what he understands by the sovereignty of the aristocratic state: 1. The governing councils of aristocracies (whose membership is held exclusively by non-hereditary patricians) do not, like kings, require counselors. 2. While kings are mortal, aristocratic councils last forever; and thus aristocratic sovereignty never reverts back to the multitudo. 3. Unlike monarchical rule, which is often precarious because of the vicissitudes surrounding the rule of one man, such is not the case with the large, permanent, governing council of patricians. “And therefore we conclude,” Spinoza declares, “that the imperium, which is transferred [by the multitudo] to a council of sufficient size, is absolute or maximally approaches being absolute. For if what is imperium is given as absolute, that is truly what the whole multitudo holds” (8.3).14 While the elements that Spinoza views as central to the aristocratic civil state would appear to lead him, logically, to ascribe absolute sovereignty to it, that, however, is not the conclusion at which he arrives, as we see in the quotation that terminates the preceding paragraph. In each of the three points that I outline in the above paragraph, Spinoza establishes a contrast between aristocracy and monarchy as if to show that aristocratic sovereignty is more absolute than monarchical sovereignty (or that it is absolute in the sense the monarchical sovereignty is not). The implication of this contrast would appear to be that aristocratic sovereignty enjoys an exclusivity, a continuity, and a permanence that would make it absolute. It permanently excludes nonpatricians (the people) and never reverts back to the multitudo. Thus, Spinoza seems poised to conclude with the simple ascription of absolute sovereignty to the aristocratic civil state. His conclusion, however, is unexpectedly not simple but triplex, as it transforms the direction of his logic. Aristocratic sovereignty is absolute. No, aristocratic sovereignty maximally approaches being absolute. No, if there is sovereignty that is given as absolute—in other words:

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if absolute sovereignty actually exists—then that absolute sovereignty is what the whole multitudo holds. It is not the sovereignty held by the patrician rulers of the aristocratic state. Thus, in ending with the “whole multitude” and its absolute sovereignty, which is unqualified, Spinoza’s final conclusion is surprising. For, although he has been discussing the aristocratic imperium, he suddenly and unexpectedly concludes with the absolute sovereignty of the multitudo. Why is this? Why does discussion of the aristocratic state lead Spinoza to the absolute sovereignty of the multitudo, consistent with the opening sentence on democracy, in chapter 11, that he has now arrived at “the third and altogether absolute civil state, which we call democratic”? It could well be the case that, just as aristocracy is “more” absolute than monarchy, so Spinoza is prepared to argue, in the missing portion of his political treatise, that the democratic civil state is “most” or properly (truly) absolute. This approach would be consistent with the style of presentation that we have seen to characterize Spinoza’s argumentation, one of ever-advancing qualification (through amplification) of his earlier analysis. Still, such is simply speculation. What is clear, however, is that the logic of his argument compels Spinoza to identify the multitudo with absolute imperium (sovereignty) and so (we must assume) with democracy. It is almost as if he does not require the term multitudo in his theologico-political treatise, since there he undertakes to examine democracy as the civil state that is most compatible with freedom—with the freedom of thought and speech. In his political treatise, however, since he does not have the enabling accommodation of theology to support freedom, it is the concept of the multitudo that would appear to lead him to hold that democratic sovereignty alone is absolute. We have already seen Spinoza make clear in the Political Treatise that the contradictions of the natural state—the fact that natural right, the power of right, is unequal because based on quantitative criteria—can only be overcome through the dictates of reason. Again, the paradox is that all human beings share the same reason because it is based on affect (on desire or conatus). Thus, Spinoza associates the multitudo not only with absolute sovereign power but also with reason. Reason is not hierarchical—the hereditary right of one or few—but hereditary and non-hierarchical: it belongs to all people, by right of nature. Consequently, Spinoza consistently argues in his political treatise, as we noted previously, that the ends of the state must be compatible with “human nature,” that is, with free individuals, and not with slaves. The state must serve the salus, the welfare (or salvation), of the multitudo. Thus, he also indicates in chapter 3 that the civil state “does not remove the faculty of judging that belongs to each individual,” who, whatever his situation and motives, judges his security and utility in light of his own understanding (3.3). In

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section 8 he indicates that subjects give up their right to the civil state only in terms of what they either fear or love. It follows, consequently, that all the actions that cannot be “induced” by either rewards or threats “do not pertain to the rights of the civil state. For example, no one can give up his faculty of judging.” Who, Spinoza asks, can be induced by either rewards or threats to believe that the whole is not greater than its part, that God does not exist, or that a finite body is infinite “and absolutely to believe something contrary to what he perceives or thinks?” Who can be induced by either rewards or threats to love someone whom he hates or to hate someone whom he loves? Included, then, among the things that “human nature” would view as more abhorrent than any evil (retribution or punishment), would, for example, Spinoza observes, be the following: bearing witness against oneself, torturing oneself, killing one’s own parents, and not trying to avoid death. If anyone claimed that a state had the right or the power to command such actions, he remarks, that would only mean that somebody had the right to insanity and delirium (insanire et delirare). “For what else but delirium would such a right be to which no one can be bound?” (3.8). Spinoza pursues the issue of the relationship between the sovereign right and power of human nature and the sovereign right and power of the civil state when he notes that it is often asked whether the supreme power [of the civil state] is bound by laws and consequently whether it can sin. Truly, since the words law and sin customarily regard not only the rights of the civil state but also the common rules of all natural things and especially of reason, we cannot absolutely say that the civil state is not bound by laws or that it cannot sin. For if the civil state were bound by no laws or rules, without which a civil state would not be a civil state, then the civil state would be regarded, not as a natural [sic!] thing but as a chimera. Therefore, a civil state sins when it does things, or allows things to be done, which can be the cause of its own ruin. And then we say that it sins in the same sense in which philosophers or doctors say that nature sins; and in this sense we can say that a civil state sins when it does something against the dictate of reason. For a civil state is maximally [in possession] of its right when it acts from the dictate of reason. Therefore, insofar as it acts against reason it undoes itself (sibi deficit) or sins. (4.4)

Spinoza remarks that we can discern still more clearly the relationship between human nature and the civil state if we consider the relationship between agent and object. My power as an agent over an object involves not only what I can do to it (by nature) but also what the object can suffer or undergo (by nature). For example, if I say that I have the right to do anything that I want with my table, I certainly do not mean that I have the right to make my

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table eat grass. “Thus, also, even if we say that men exist, not by their own right but by the right of the civil state, we do not mean that men lose their human nature and put on another and that, therefore, the civil state has the right of making men fly or, which is equally impossible, of making men view with honor things that cause ridicule or disgust.” Since there are circumstances that induce fear of and reverence for the civil state on the part of its subjects, Spinoza continues, if these circumstances are removed, then fear, reverence, and with them the civil state as one will be removed. “Thus, a civil state, in order to possess its own right, is bound to preserve the causes of fear and reverence. Otherwise, it ceases to be a civil state.” Consequently, he remarks, it is as impossible for rulers to run drunk or naked with harlots through the streets, to act on the stage, or openly to violate or to hold in contempt the laws that they have passed and at the same time to preserve their majesty as it is impossible to be and not to be at the same time. “Finally, to slaughter subjects, to despoil them, to abduct virgins, and similar things turn fear into indignation and consequently the civil state into a [natural] state of hostility” (4.4). However, when, on the other hand, we understand by law the civil right that is enforceable by civil right and by sin what is prohibited by civil right, then it is impossible to say that a civil state is bound by laws (other than itself) or that it can sin (against itself). It is critically important to grasp the significance of Spinoza’s understanding that a state does not have the power to do all that it wants. Power and desire (or conatus) constitute a relationship, we can say, that is either contradictory— and so reflecting the natural state—or paradoxical—and so embodying the civil state. If the civil state is not bound by laws that respect human nature, reason, and the right of judging that is possessed by all human beings, then it undoes itself—it contradicts itself—and turns back into the natural state of hostility where all individuals are enemies of each other. Although the sovereign civil state, like the sovereign individual, is the principle—both source and criterion—of authority, it is also bound by that authority. Since the civil state at once depends on and serves (to protect) the judgment, the humanity, the reason, and in that sense the authority or sovereignty of the multitudo, if it violates the sovereign authority of the people’s judgment, human nature, and reason, it violates itself and so destroys itself. Since a civil state possesses maximal right—it is sui juris—only when it maximally follows the dictates of reason, it is clear that it is the multitudo, whose salus is the right and thus the end of the civil state, which constitutes the principle of the sovereign authority of reason. While Spinoza does not specifically identify the multitudo with absolute, democratic sovereignty in the unfinished Political Treatise, as we have it, it is clear that the entire argumentation of the work both presupposes that identity and anticipates it as its outcome.

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What we have now seen is that Spinoza conceives of the relationship between the natural state and the civil state in the same paradoxical fashion in the Political Treatise as in the Theologico-Political Treatise. He conceives of human beings on the basis of what he calls their universal conatus—their affects, their appetite, their desire—to attain their utile. His concept of human “nature” is one of ceaseless energy, drive, power, desire, affect, will, action, passion—intently conscious of itself. Mind, reason, spirit, judgment, knowledge, thinking are present, always, to human beings. But the question is how they are present, just as how the affects are present to them is the question, indeed, the same question. What is unique about this question—as it itself embodies the ontological argument!—is that, while I summarize what I understand to be Spinoza’s position and so also analyze (evaluate) it, I am at the same time deeply implicated in it. For I can ask about how it is that the affects and reason are present to human beings, in Spinoza’s conception of them, only in the context of posing (to myself, to my readers, to my god . . . ) how I am present in those questions and how they are present in me. The paradox, one version of the paradox, is that I can know (analyze) the contradictory state of the natural passions or affects solely from the point of view of reason, from the point of view of their rational appropriation, that is, insofar as I transform them into the justice and charity that constitute, Spinoza holds, the civil state, the democratic civil state, indeed, the absolute sovereignty of democracy or what he also calls in his political treatise the multitudo. The paradox, as Spinoza articulates it in his theologico-political treatise, is that democracy is the most natural and thus the freest of the civil states precisely because it is at one and the same time the most natural and the least natural. For, as we shall now examine further, he insists that there is no freedom— no good or evil, no sin—in the natural state but only compulsion, necessity, enmity, hostility, and destruction: the natural fate of singular individuals who, in their ignorance and blindness, know themselves only as finite ones who are determined to be destroyed by other singular individuals, who are external to each other, ad infinitum. In the natural state individuals are one against one, each the enemy of the other, as they are determined by their passive affects. The freedom that is fundamental to conatus is available to individuals only in and through the recognition—called the pactum in the Theologico-Political Treatise—that I can be one, that I can be freely one and singular, solely insofar as I recognize you as one and singular. My utile will escape—that is, appropriate—the contradictory affects solely insofar as I do unto you as I will that you do unto me. The ones of the pactum—of the civil state, of the multitudo—are the same ones as in the natural state. Yet, in their lack of freedom, in their impotence, they have fallen, at the same time, into knowing good and evil, into knowing God as the supreme good of loving your neighbor as yourself.

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In both his treatises Spinoza associates the charity and justice of the golden rule with what he calls the dictates of reason (as he also does in the Ethics, as we have seen). But it is always critically important to remember that reason is simply natural affect, desire, conatus, or passion yet conscious of itself as contradictory and so appropriated self-consciously as the paradox that I can possess my reason only in and through the works of charity and justice within the civil state of the democratic multitudo. Spinoza reminds us continually that he is under no illusions about the enormous role that the affects play in human life: they form the very basis of human nature. At the same time, however, his aim in the Theologico-Political Treatise is to show that it is the civil state of democracy that (most) truly constitutes the natural freedom of the individual. Not only can freedom not be suppressed in the civil state—without endangering the very security of the state—but also the civil state can be true to its end of fostering what is properly human only in and through what he calls the freedom to think what you desire and to say what you think. Because the affects of conatus, which human beings universally share, are the origin of reason—yet reason is the principle or standard (the end) of the affects—all human beings are equal in their natural right (sui juris); equal in their possession of mind, reason, and judgment; equal in their human nature; and so equal in their very humanity. Thus, while human beings, as singular individuals, are equally enemies in the natural state—for there is not one there than whom another one is not also stronger and by whom the first one is not destroyed by the second one, ad infinitum—yet they are equal as ones—they are equally one—in the civil state of democracy. As Spinoza states simply in the Political Treatise, as we have seen: “nature is the same in all men” (7.27). He also writes there that the reason that rebellions, wars, and contempt for and violation of laws are to be imputed not so much to the wickedness of subjects as to the depraved condition (status) of the civil state is that “men are not born but made civil.15 Moreover, the natural affects of men are everywhere the same” (5.2). Once Spinoza has distinguished the civil state from the natural state, with the result that it is solely democracy that is true to the equality and freedom of all human beings, he has taken the first step towards his goal of showing that it is the civil state of democracy that best of all supports the freedom of thought and speech. Two further steps then directly follow. The second step is to show that religion (the kingdom of God) is found, not in the natural state but only in the civil state (of democracy). The third and last step is to show that the democratic civil state, consistent with (its) religious authority, not only (negatively) permits but also (positively) fosters the freedom on the part of its citizens to think what they desire and to say and to teach what they think—in all areas of civil life, including the arts and the sciences. It is to the second step that I now turn.

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Step B: The Civil State and Religion In undertaking to demonstrate that, given the separation of the civil state from the natural state, it follows that religion itself is not natural but civil— human beings, we may say, are not born (naturally) religious but are made (civilly) religious—it is the aim of Spinoza to show that religious authority does not exist outside of (without) civil authority. In other words, religion receives its authority from the sovereign (political) powers. It is for this very reason that he devotes a very considerable part of the “political” section of his theologico-political treatise—chapters 16–20—in showing that the ancient covenant of the Hebrews (as we know it in the Bible) is no less political (social) than theological. Religious authority is not found outside of (without) the political authority—of Moses and subsequent leaders (including the people itself). We can say that, just as earlier in his treatise Spinoza undertakes to separate philosophy from religion—such that all hierarchical opposition between them is eliminated—so now he undertakes to show that religion is not separable from politics. Still, he has the same aim. For, while it is conceivable that a tyrannical civil state might well suppress religion and oppress its various adherents or, indeed, favor one religion over another, etc., in a democracy the inseparability of religion from the civil state cannot mean opposition between them. For opposition, we recall, is the condition of the natural state, not the civil state. How can the inseparability (indivisibility) of sovereignty—the fact that the sovereignty of religious authority is not separate from the sovereignty of political authority—not fall back into hierarchical opposition? While Spinoza does not pose this question directly, it is always present in his discussion and will help guide us through what is, in fact, a rather complex, sometimes tendentious, and (in that sense) inaccurate (that is, not fully consistent) account of the relation between religion and the civil state. What Spinoza fails to acknowledge—consistent, generally, with his discussion of the separation of philosophy from religion—is that the inseparability of religion from the civil state can and will benefit not only the state (politics) but also religion. In other words, while Spinoza argues (and shows incontestably) that there is no religious authority separate from—or outside of (without)—political authority, he fails (refuses?) to see the implications of the fact that this inseparability of religion from the state is not hierarchical. He does not advocate the subordination of church to state in the sense of opposing state to church. He does not argue that the state is superior to religion. While sovereignty is one, infinite, and indivisible—there cannot be one religious truth and one (i.e., another) political truth—it is precisely that concept of one, not as natural, finite, and contradictory but as civil, infinite, and paradoxical, that supports democracy. The “ones” (the individuals) of the democratic civil state constitute a union (a pactum, a multitudo) such that their dif-

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ferences are not simply tolerated but also fostered (insofar as one difference is not held or advanced at the expense of one, i.e., another difference). What Spinoza does not (directly?) acknowledge, in other words, is that, insofar as religious authority is political, so political authority is also religious. But the fact that the inseparability of religion from the civil state also means that the civil state is inseparable from religion is hardly surprising, given the fact that the civil state, like the ancient Hebrew covenant, is founded on the principles of knowledge of God and love of neighbor: the works of charity and justice. Since what I am calling here the inseparability of religion from the state has the same ontological status as the separation of philosophy from religion, the relation between religion and the civil state is as fraught with tension as the relation between philosophy and theology—precisely because Spinoza has the intellectual integrity and candor to eschew all concepts of opposition and hierarchy as inconsistent with human nature, with human reason, with human conatus, or, finally, with the democratic imperium of freedom, which is at once religious and civil (secular). I have already noted the extraordinary fact that the basis of Spinoza’s argument that the natural right of all things extends as far as their natural power— big fish naturally eat little fish—is theological. The natural right of all things to maximize their conatus embodies the absolute, infinite, and eternal power of God to exist and to act freely from his own necessity. Yet Spinoza now argues that God is subject to sovereign political power, that God is, we might say, a political and not (only) a theological concept. Or is God a philosophical concept? Indeed, we know that for Spinoza God is the supreme concept of philosophy, of ethics, of knowledge, of thinking. So, we arrive, yet again, at the question that is foremost in this chapter: the relationship between religion and ethics, between politics and ethics, between the freedom of the multitudo and the eternity of the mind (as found in part V of the Ethics). Since religion is not found outside of (without) political sovereignty, is it also true that philosophy is not found outside of (without) politics? While Spinoza separates philosophy from religion, reason from faith, surely philosophy and reason are not found in the state of nature, where human beings are ignorant of the causes of their appetite as they project them into external, final causes (that would be indistinguishable from supernatural miracles). Still, we have seen Spinoza cite Paul as an authority in support of his claim that sin and so also religion (God) are not found in the state of nature. Yet Spinoza also cites Romans 1.20f in which Paul holds people responsible since the creation of the world—forever—for knowing God in their lives as love of neighbor. When, however, did—or does—creation take place? Does it precede the covenant? Does God and do human beings with their commitment to charity and justice, that is, with their ethical (and political!) responsibilities to God and to

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each other, precede the covenant? Surely not. Surely, Spinoza is right that religion and religion’s God are not found outside of (without) the human practice of charity and justice. But then, as I intimate, once the sovereign (democratic) civil state is shown to embody the infinite power and oneness of God, not as natural contradiction, but as civil paradox, the fact that civil sovereignty and theological sovereignty are inseparable has explosive implications for our conception not only of religion but also of the civil state and so, too, of modernity as at once inseparably religious and civil (secular). Spinoza argues that religion is found, not in the natural but only in the civil state in a key passage in chapter 16, to which he attaches note 34, and at length in chapter 19 (in addition to the ample pages that he devotes to the history of the ancient Jews in order to show that their covenant with God was not given separate from civil authority). He states in chapter 16 that the natural state is prior to religion both in nature and in time. For no one knows from nature [here Spinoza inserts note 34] that he is bound by any obedience to God. Indeed, someone cannot attain this by any reason, but he can have it only from revelation confirmed by signs. Consequently, before revelation no one can be bound by divine right of which he is not able not to be ignorant. And, therefore, the natural state is not at all to be confused with the state of religion, but it is to be conceived without religion and law and consequently without sin and injury, as we have already done and have confirmed with the authority of Paul. (188)

I have already pointed out that to appeal to the authority of Paul is to raise the ontologically thorny issue of the temporal relationship between creation and covenant. Is one prior to the other? Does one have priority over the other? So I also raise the question, in light of the above passage, what it is that would characterize natural time prior to religion and whether, then, the character of religious time, subsequent to the natural state, would be fundamentally different from that of natural time (as passive affect is different from active affect or reason). We know that the time of nature, in which big fish naturally eat little fish, in which human beings are natural enemies, is the time of the common order of nature, the time of destruction (and of generation, we could add), the time of the cycle of nature in which all human beings are determined by external, singular causes of which they are ignorant. If, however, the time of revelation is different from the time of nature, will revealed time, then, be different from rational time, from the time of reason? Yet, in the above passage, if we attend to the three phrases that I have highlighted, it would seem that Spinoza aligns nature and reason against revelation. But how would that be possible? For, surely, reason is absent from the natural state in precisely the same sense that revelation (or religion) is absent from the natural state.

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Is Spinoza going to acknowledge that the separation of reason (philosophy) from revelation (religion)—such that the relationship between them is not oppositional or hierarchical—is identical with the inseparability of religion from the state—such that the relationship between them is also not oppositional or hierarchical? For, surely, the fundamental dialectic shaping the thought of Spinoza—as it shapes, I argue, both biblical thought and the thought of modernity—is that, to keep to his own distinctions, between the natural state and the civil state, between the passive affects and the active affects, when the latter are understood as reason, as the dictates of reason. For how is reason to be understood (as) separate from religion if, with religion, it is inseparable from the civil state understood as the sovereignty of democracy (the multitudo)? Spinoza argues in the earlier chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, as I show in volume I of my study, that we cannot know from reason that the Bible teaches (reveals) obedience to God as love of neighbor. In that sense, he makes clear, revelation is necessary, for it cannot be deduced from universal reason. But he also, consequently, makes clear, without so indicating, that reason is not universal; for there is at least one thing that it cannot explain, which is the historical necessity of revelation. At the same time, however, Spinoza insists that the content of both reason and revelation—as summarized in the Seven Dogmas of Faith—is identical. In the passage cited above, Spinoza argues that human beings do not know “from nature” that they are bound to obey God. Religion is not found outside of (without) the civil state. Obedience to God is covenantal—at once theological and political. But why, then, does Spinoza add that there is also no reason that gives us obedience to God? We know (according to Spinoza) that the civil state, as democracy, is based on the dictates of reason and that religion is inseparable from the civil state. Does it not, then, follow that it is precisely reason that teaches obedience to God as love of neighbor? Does not reason teach the principles of charity and justice? Indeed, is not the very basis of the dictates of reason the golden rule of doing unto others what I want them to do unto me? Still, Spinoza would appear to argue otherwise in note 34, which he attaches to the passage cited above—that “no one knows from nature” that he owes obedience to God. We shall see that in note 34 he appears to align reason with nature against religion! He begins the note cryptically with the comment that, when Paul says (in Romans 1.20f) that human beings are without escape, he speaks according to human custom. For in chapter 9 (verses 18–21) of the same epistle, Spinoza continues, Paul expressly teaches that God has mercy upon whomever he wills and hardens (the hearts of) whomever he wills. He teaches that human beings are inexcusable, not because God has forewarned them but because they are in the power of God as clay is in the power of the

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potter, who from the same lump makes vessels, one to honor, another to dishonor. While Spinoza will now apply the difference that he appears to have established between the human and the divine (the natural?), it is by no means obvious that Paul can be interpreted in this fashion. But, first, it is worth remarking that the notion that human beings are in the hands of God as clay in the potter’s hands is a hoary biblical topos. Isaiah makes use of this same image when he brings together, as it were, the two passages of Paul in pointing out that human beings cannot escape divine enlightenment: Woe to those who hide deep from the Lord their counsel, Whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, “Who sees us? Who knows us?” You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay; That the thing made should say of its maker, “He did not make me”; Or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”? (Is. 29.15–1616)

Surely, Paul, like the prophet, is concerned to show that human beings are without excuse precisely because their lives are not directly in their own hands but in the hands of those who make them, speaking, not according to human custom but in the spirit of what Paul calls (in Romans 13.8f), as we have seen, the fulfillment of the law: love of neighbor. The neighbor is the one thing that we cannot think without existing. There is no possible excuse for not loving the neighbor as oneself, which does not for a moment mean, as Isaiah indicates, that human beings do not often desperately (and vainly) try to hide deep in the dark of their own counsel from their obedience to both God and neighbor. After indicating that human beings are inexcusable, not because, speaking humanly, God forewarned them but because they are in God’s power like clay in the hands of the potter, Spinoza observes further in note 34 that, when he spoke of the divine natural law, whose supreme precept is to love God, he called it law in the sense that philosophers speak of the common rules of nature, according to which all things are done: For love of God [he writes] is not obedience but virtue, which is necessarily in the man who rightly knows God. But obedience looks to the will of the one who commands (imperantis), not to the necessity and to the truth of the matter. Since, however, we are ignorant of the nature of the will of God, and in contrast we certainly know that whatever is done is done by the power alone of God, we are never able to know except from revelation whether God wishes to be worshipped as a prince with some honor by men. . . . [Furthermore, Spinoza con-

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tinues, we have shown that divine laws appear to us as laws or as things that are instituted so long as we are ignorant of their causes.] Once, however, this is known, they cease to be laws and we embrace them as eternal truths, not as laws. That is, obedience passes from this into love, which arises as necessarily from true knowledge as light from the sun. Therefore, we are indeed able to love God from the guidance of reason but not to obey him, since by reason we can neither embrace divine laws as divine, so long as we are ignorant of their cause, nor conceive of God as constituting laws as a prince. (248–49)

The logic of note 34, in addition to that of the passage in chapter 16 to which it is attached, is perplexing. What are its purpose and import? In the passage to which it is attached Spinoza is concerned to show that human beings are not bound by nature to obey God. The natural state is without religion or law, without sin or wrong. Religion, together with law and sin, that is, all knowledge of good and evil, belongs to the civil state, not to the natural state. Spinoza’s larger purpose here is to argue that religion is not found outside of (without) political authority. So, when he says in note 34 that we are bound to obey God, not from nature but from revelation, it appears that he is maintaining his fundamental distinction between the natural state and the civil state, in the second of which alone is religion to be found. Is revelation, then, not a civil or a political concept? Does not Spinoza intend us to understand the difference between the natural state and revelation in the same terms as the difference between the natural state and the civil state? Is there no revelation outside of (without) the civil state, outside of (without) the covenant or pactum? While the answer to that question is, surely, yes, the fact that the question is jarring reflects the contrast that Spinoza then proceeds to make between revelation and reason, which does not appear to support the distinction between the natural state and the civil state or between the natural state and the religious state. He asserts that the fact that human beings are bound to obey God is known neither by nature nor by reason but solely by revelation. The way in which Spinoza sets up this contrast appears, as I indicated earlier, to place reason, in its contrast with revelation, on the side of nature. Why does Spinoza introduce reason into his argument that religion is not natural but civil and revealed? Is reason, since it is not revealed, also, therefore, not civil but natural, as I asked earlier? It is clear that in note 34 Spinoza undertakes to supply the answer to this question. For in the note we see that he is not concerned to address the difference between the natural state and the civil state, that is, the difference between the natural state and religious state, which, he insists, must not be confused with each other. Rather, he now distinguishes between obedience to God and knowledge and love of God, between laws (as commanded by a prince) and both virtue and eternal truths, between revelation (involving ignorance of God) and reason. But this set of

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new distinctions raises three perplexing issues. First, there is the issue that I have already mentioned. Is it conceivable—would Spinoza find it conceivable— to posit a distinction outside of (without) or in addition to that between passive affects and active affects, between inadequate knowledge and adequate knowledge, between the natural state and the civil state? Since (as I think is patent) the answer is, assuredly, no, then reason and revelation must both be civil and not natural. We know from all three of the mature works of Spinoza that are the focus of this study that, insofar as human beings are subject to their passive affects, they are subject to the common order of nature. In other words, they do not follow the dictates of reason. This takes us to the second issue, to reason itself. It would appear that the problem with which Spinoza is faced but which he tries to avoid is how he can maintain the separation of reason from revelation (religion), of philosophy from theology, when, given the distinction between the natural state and civil state, reason and revelation are shown to be equally (if, properly, differently) civil. He does not appear to want to acknowledge that reason, like revelation, is civil. Yet we know that he makes reason central to the very constitution of the civil pactum (the multitudo) in and through what he calls the dictates of reason. The third issue that is raised by the contrast between revelation and reason involves what Spinoza understands by obedience. The concept of obedience, although more particular, is also more concretely revealing of the fact that Spinoza obscures—carelessly? intentionally?—his meaning. It is highly tendentious on his part to define obedience in note 34 in terms of serving the one who commands and consequently to place obedience in stark opposition to what he calls necessity and truth. He writes, we saw: “But obedience looks to the will of the one who commands, not to the necessity and to the truth of the matter.” This statement appears to be a model of clarity, yet it is riddled with ambiguity, which obscures (for Spinoza, as for the reader) how the two sets of distinctions operating in this note and in the passage to which it is attached are to be understood in their relationship to each other: the distinction between natural law and civil law and between natural law and religion, on the one hand; and the distinction between reason (necessity and truth) and revelation (obedience), on the other. Spinoza’s simple statement on obedience is ambiguous and in that sense profoundly misleading for three fundamental reasons. First, it is critically important to remember that in a democratically sovereign state the will of the one who commands is every human being. In obeying the dictates of the state I follow the dictates of reason whereby the good that I do to others is the good that I will that they do to me. This is why Spinoza argues that democracy is the most natural and the freest civil regime, for it is only in a democratic state

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that all individuals freely and rationally attain their utile as that which serves one and all within the inclusivity of the multitudo. We saw Spinoza earlier in chapter 16 of the Theologico-Political Treatise specifically distinguish between the obedience of the slave, where obedience looks only to the will of his master as the one who commands the slave, and the obedience of both the child and the citizen, where obedience serves their utile no less than that of the parent or the state. “Obedience” is a loaded term, always. For, like Kant’s concept of duty, it can be either liberating or hierarchical (oppositional), depending on whether the conceptual (social) framework in which it is located is democratic (free) or hierarchical (enslaving). In failing to indicate in note 34 whether by obedience he means freedom or bondage, the sharp contrast (opposition) that Spinoza then draws between obedience, on the one hand, and virtue, truth, and necessity, on the other, is tendentious because obscure. He obscures the very distinction that is fundamental to the stated goal of his theologico-political treatise and thus to the very structure of its ideas, which is the distinction between democracy and other civil states, between freedom and bondage. When obedience is understood as freely dictated by reason, as necessitated by the dictates of reason, it is not set in opposition to virtue, truth, and necessity but is, rather, their very embodiment and expression. The second reason that what Spinoza writes about obedience in note 34 is ambiguous and misleading involves the sharp opposition that he effects between obedience (involving ignorance of God) and reason (involving virtue and the love and knowledge of God). As we have already seen, Spinoza fails to take into consideration, in note 34, the fact that, in all three of his major works, he associates reason—in contrast to the passive affects—with the dictates of reason that reveal universal conatus to involve and express the knowledge and love of God as the democratic practice of the golden rule. He argues in the Ethics, as we saw in the last chapter, that the dictates of reason embody the intuitive knowledge of God, than which there is no higher truth or necessity. It is in this sense that the distinction that Spinoza advances between obedience and reason in note 34 is simply bogus. It does not do justice either to his own logic or to his own texts. It is also important to recall the purpose for which Spinoza writes his theologico-political treatise. Since, he argues, the separation of philosophy from theology allows for the freedom of philosophizing, he undertakes to show that democracy is the most natural and the freest civil state because it optimally supports the right of thinking what you desire and of saying what you think. Again, the two basic points at stake here must be kept in mind. Since the separation of philosophy from theology involves not their hierarchical opposition but their equal independence and right—and thus raises the question of how we (can) actually decide between what is philosophy and

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what is theology—it follows not only that democracy will equally support freedom of theologizing but also that thinking—whether philosophical or theological (or artistic or erotic . . .)—will not be found outside of (without) sovereign political authority. In note 34 Spinoza studiously avoids indicating how knowledge and love of God, when understood not as revealed but as eternal, necessary truth, relate to the “thinking” (philosophizing, but also theologizing) that democracy not only secures but also actively fosters. The third reason that what Spinoza writes about obedience in note 34 is ambiguous and misleading is that it is not consistent with what he earlier writes in the Theologico-Political Treatise, once the separation of philosophy from theology is properly understood, as I show in volume I of my study. At the end of chapter 14 Spinoza contrasts philosophy with faith in terms that are close to those of note 34. In this passage he states that there is no “commerce or affinity” between faith (or theology) and philosophy since they each have separate aims and separate foundations. While the aim of philosophy is truth, as founded on common notions, which are to be sought “from nature alone,” the aim of faith is obedience and piety, as founded on history and language, which are to be sought “from Scripture and revelation alone”: Therefore [Spinoza continues], faith grants to every one the supreme freedom to philosophize so that he can think whatever he wants about whatever things without [being held to be] evil. Faith condemns as heretical and schismatic only those who teach opinions that promote obstinacy, hatred, strife, and anger; and, on the other hand, it holds as faithful (fideles) only those who promote (suadent) justice and charity—following the [greatest] strengths and capacities of their reason (pro viribus suae rationis, & facultatibus). (169)

Having begun with the demonstration that faith and philosophy have no business or affinity with each other, given that they have different aims— obedience (piety) and truth, respectively—and different foundations— history (language) and nature, respectively—Spinoza concludes, however, with the statement that faith views as fideles (believers) only those who, with the utmost power of their reason, promote justice and charity. Indeed, Spinoza proceeds to declare in chapter 15 of the Theologico-Political Treatise that in its teaching and precepts theology “agrees with reason” and that in its intent and end it is in no respect opposed to reason and therefore is “universal to all men” (174). That theology or faith agrees with reason in its content, intent, and end and is, therefore, also universal is no less Spinoza’s conclusion at the end of the passage from chapter 14 cited above. For faith views as the faithful those who promote justice and charity with the full strength and capacity of their reason. As always, we see that we must be wary of the oppositional language that Spinoza uses, especially when he is so careful to argue for the

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separation of theology from philosophy, as distinct from their opposition, which would entail the hierarchical subordination of one to the other. It is clear that, in the passage from the end of chapter 14 cited above, both obedience and reason support charity and justice. But this is hardly surprising, given that the very basis of the dictates of reason, as we learn from all three of Spinoza’s major works, is, I repeat once again, the golden rule. It is also important, in light of the above distinction that Spinoza makes between history (together with language) and nature, to ask, yet again, what he means by nature. While he claims to distinguish nature from history and language, nature here cannot be understood as the common order of nature, in which the contradictory, passive affects are not (yet) rendered self-consciously paradoxical as rational by the multitudo in the democratic pactum. Since it is precisely the nature or essence of human beings that their conatus expresses and since conatus overcomes the contradictions of the natural state by formulating the dictates of reason in the terms of the universal utile of the golden rule, it turns out that nature can represent, not the natural state of opposition but solely the essence of the civil state in which singular individuals, in their separation, in their difference, are universally united in a common whole (in one union, pactum, or multitudo). It is evident, as I have commented previously, that Spinoza, like so many early modern thinkers up to and including Rousseau and Kant, is not yet able to work out systematically how the “nature” (or essence) of human beings is historical. But there is no excuse for his commentators not to see that, below the surface of his, at times, ambiguous usage and polemic, there exists a conceptual framework that is absolutely dictated by the fundamental distinction between human nature (the civil state) and the common order of nature (the natural state), between freedom (democracy) and slavery (hierarchical opposition), etc. Nature, it thus turns out, is on the side of history. For human beings, we could say, are not born natural: their nature is made naturally historical (or historically natural). The above discussion has been intended to show that the opposition that Spinoza establishes in note 34 between obedience to God and love and knowledge of God, between obedience and virtue, and between obedience as dictated by laws (as if God were a prince) and eternal truths does not, if taken literally, properly represent his teaching in the Theologico-Political Treatise on the separation of faith (theology, revelation) from reason (nature, truth) or, consequently, on the inseparability of religion (together with philosophy or thinking) from the civil state. For his fundamental teaching is—we may say— that it is precisely the separation of theology from philosophy that allows us to see that each of them is wholly committed, with the fullness of its rational resources, to teaching charity and justice. Surely, what the fact that faith and philosophy have the same universal intent, end, and content as centering on

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the doctrine of justice and charity shows us is that their separate foundations— in revelation (Scripture and history) and in nature (reason)—are both found in the civil state (i.e., neither is known in the natural state). The separation of faith from philosophy will allow each to be true to the other, such that neither claims hierarchical domination over the other, only insofar as they both serve and are served by the civil state that is maximally free and natural and so democratic. Another way of putting this same point is that the separation of philosophy from theology entails the inseparability of not only theology but also philosophy from the democratic civil state. Whatever the distinctions or differences between philosophy and theology, they both belong to the essence of human nature, not to the common order of nature. As I shall continue to emphasize, the separation of theology from philosophy ultimately reflects the truth and independence not only of philosophy but also of theology (faith). Indeed, it is interesting to recall that in his two political works Spinoza regularly emphasizes how important it is for the healthy flourishing of a civil state that its citizens act together in fide—in good faith. I have examined note 34 and the passage from chapter 16 to which it is attached in detail to be sure that we do not allow the studied obscurity with which Spinoza there articulates the relationship between revelation and reason and thus the relationship between obedience and the knowledge and love of God to obfuscate our understanding that for him the distinction between the natural state and the civil state is completely different from the separation of theology from philosophy. Both distinctions are fundamental to Spinoza’s thought—theological, philosophical, political, and ethical. But they are not homologous, as we have seen. Indeed, to help us maintain a proper distinction between these two sets of distinctions, I have formulated the relationship between theology (together with philosophy) and the civil state as one of their inseparability. It is to be observed that, when Spinoza in note 34 invokes the knowledge and the love of God as eternal truths, in opposition to obedience as revealed to human beings in their ignorance of God, he foreshadows the concepts of the eternity of the mind and the intellectual love of God that crown the Ethics in part V. The reader will recall that I have indicated that the fundamental question to be considered in this chapter is that involving the relationship between the freedom of human beings in the democratic civil state and the eternity of the mind on the part of the free individual, who is conscious of self, God, and things, and so the relationship between politics and ethics and ultimately, therefore, between philosophy and theology. The common origin of both the mind (reason) and the civil state is the passive affects whose contradictory oppositions are overcome in and through—as—the dictates of reason whose fundamental teaching is charity and justice. The lesson, therefore, that we learn from a careful, patient reading of note 34 is that the

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separation of philosophy from theology depends upon, as it supports, the fundamental distinction between the natural state and the civil state and thus the inseparability of not only religion but also philosophy from the civil state. It will be remembered that our discussion of obedience, in note 34, arose in the context of the demonstration by Spinoza in chapter 16 of the TheologicoPolitical Treatise that religion (faith, revelation) and so also sin are found, not in the natural state but solely in the civil state. This demonstration serves, then, to provide the basis of his argument in chapter 19, to cite its title, “that the right regarding sacred matters is entirely vested in the supreme [civil] powers (penes summas potestates) and that the external cult of religion ought to be accommodated to the peace of the civil state, if we want to obey God rightly.” Spinoza argues that, since the supreme authorities who hold the imperium (the power of the sovereign civil state) are supreme in law—as both its source and its interpreter—and since there is no law outside of (without) the civil state, it follows that those who are sovereign in the civil state are also the source and interpreter of all sacred laws and rites: Religion receives the force of law [he continues] from the sole decree of those who have the right of commanding (ius imperandi); and God has no singular kingdom over men except through those who hold sovereignty (imperium); and, moreover, the practice (cultus) of religion and the exercise of piety must (debet) be accommodated to the peace and utility of the civil state and, consequently, must be determined solely by the supreme powers, who must also, therefore, be its interpreters.

Since sacred or religious law is inseparable from civil law, it is clear that for Spinoza to obey the civil authority (imperium) rightly is to obey God rightly and to obey God rightly is to obey the civil authority rightly. While what he writes here about the civil state would apparently pertain to any type of sovereign, civil authority, it is important to keep in mind that he essentially presupposes democracy as the optimal civil state. In a democracy the supreme powers constituting the imperium are the multitudo itself. Since, within a democracy, to obey the supreme authorities means to obey oneself—to be not merely a subject under the law but also a legislator (a bringer of the law), as Kant puts it—does not “to obey God rightly” also mean to obey oneself rightly? In other words, to obey the law—both civil and divine—can surely mean nothing else than to do unto others what you would have others do unto you. Indeed, Spinoza points out that he has already shown what he means by “the kingdom of God” in chapter 14 (regarding the Seven Dogmas of Faith). For there he indicates, he recalls, that “he who fulfills the law of God cultivates (colit) justice and charity from the command of God. Whence it follows that the kingdom of God is where justice and charity have the force of

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law and command” (219). Would it not, then, equally follow that the civil state is where justice and charity have the force of law and command? Indeed, such is for Spinoza, as we know, the precise definition of the democratic imperium. Spinoza acknowledges that the implications that logically and necessarily flow from the concept of the undivided and indivisible imperium (the sovereignty of the civil state) are shockingly radical when he indicates that there are many religious authorities who strongly deny that the civil state exclusively possesses the right to determine and to interpret divine law. However, in dividing sovereignty, the intention of religious authorities, he observes, is actually “to affect the way to their own sovereignty (viam ad imperium affectare)” (219). Interestingly, Spinoza does not consider the possibility that a wily theological opponent might point out that in an undivided and indivisible imperium, because the church (ecclesiastical power) is inseparable from the state, the state is also inseparable from the church! But would Spinoza then respond—or can we moderns respond on his behalf—that, while religious authority or sovereignty is irreparably splintered into sects, the sovereign, civil state today represents true religious authority in that, based on justice and charity, it recognizes, tolerates, and fosters all religious differences (so long as these differences acknowledge the laws constituting and constituted by the democratic civil state)? Perhaps the proper question for us ontologists is how we, in fact, can or would undertake to distinguish between what is secular and what is religious, between the rational and the revealed—given that, as Spinoza shows (and I argue), both are rooted in the Bible. For central to the “political” chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, as we shall see, is his demonstration that the covenant of the ancient Jews with God was inseparably civil and religious. In light of the inseparability of religion from the civil state—for the sovereign authority of the pactum or the multitudo is undivided and indivisible— it is significant that Spinoza is careful to remark that he distinguishes between the public and the private spheres, that is, between what he calls the external and the internal, in regard to religion. He writes, he declares, expressly about the exercise of piety and the external worship (cultu) of religion, not, however, about piety itself and the internal worship of God or about the means by which the mind (mens) is internally disposed to worship God with wholeness of spirit (integritate animi); for the internal worship of God and piety itself are the right of each individual (as we showed at the end of chapter 7), which cannot be transferred to another. (219)

We may note that not only in modern, democratic, constitutional theory but also in religious (spiritual) theorizing the distinction between the public (the external) and the private (the internal) is fraught with complexities, not to

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mention with very considerable confusion and muddle. I want here to say just a few things about the relationship between the public and the private spheres so that, in clearly understanding what it involves in the thought of Spinoza, we can anticipate gaining a clearer idea of its significance for modernity. I note, first of all, that Spinoza refers to his discussion at the end of chapter 7, where he also distinguishes between the public and the private spheres in religion (and in religious interpretation). Second, it is important to note that the distinction between public and private is not (simply) the difference between practice (cultus) and mind, as Enlightenment thinkers (like Kant) were wont to hold. “Public” (external) must not be reduced to what is emptily formalistic and conventional; and “private” (or internal) must not be elevated to what is uniquely substantive and creative. The (private) mind can turn itself into a cult; and public, religious practice can enact, support, and foster true (inward) spirituality. Whether I practice meditation at home (or deep in the woods on a retreat) or whether I take part in a communal (“church”), religious ceremony, that is, whether my activity is external or internal, public or private does not in itself make it true or false (authentic or inauthentic). My third observation is that Spinoza does not in principle fall into the false position of subordinating the public (external) to the private (internal), notwithstanding the deep bias of both his and our language in favoring integrity, the intrinsic, and interiority over what is external, extrinsic, and exterior. Indeed, what he actually accomplishes, we could say, is to separate the private from the public in precisely the same way in which he separates the religious from the philosophical. In other words, the relationship between the public and the private is not one of hierarchical opposition. Rather, in order for one to exist both must equally exist. Consequently, we understand that in democratic imperia the borderline(s) between the private and the public has (have) to be constantly explored, debated, and negotiated anew—with the understanding that to argue on behalf of the public realm is to defend the private realm and to argue on behalf of the private realm is to defend the public realm. To defend one in opposition to the other is to lose both. We can thus equally say, on behalf of Spinoza, that, just as the religious is inseparably civil (and the civil inseparably religious), so the relationship between the public (the external) and the private (the internal) is one of their inseparability. Perhaps the most telling index for helping us see that Spinoza, in separating the internal (the private) from the external (the public), does not oppose them to each other is simply God. Is God—for Spinoza, for the reader, for the Bible, for modernity—private or public, internal or external? Patently, God is both—for Spinoza—just as he is inseparably religious and civil. It is here that we find ourselves engaging once more the issue of the relationship between the politics of the democratic multitudo, as found in the two treatises, and the

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ethics of the individual, together with the eternity of the mind in the Ethics. Still, we have seen that Spinoza directly deals with the “public” or external realm of the civil state in the Ethics, as now in his theologico-political treatise he identifies a space for private or internal activity (mind). While in the very title of chapter 19 he invokes the significance of obeying God rightly— publicly and externally—yet earlier in the work he sharply condemns the worship of mere externals (the paper and words of the biblical text) in light of the fact that God writes his eternal word upon the heart of the individual who is truly sincere, faithful, and pious. Still, this is the very distinction that the prophets make (as Spinoza knows and celebrates) as they condemn the idolatry of their fellow believers and thus their failure to know God truly and to walk lovingly in his way—both publicly and privately (both collectively and individually). Another index pointing to the fact that the separation of the private from the public does not bespeak their opposition is that of the doctrine of charity (caritas: love) and justice. It is worth noting that in standard English we tend to relegate charity to the public realm (social welfare) and love to the private (familial) realm. Still, we have the proverbial saying that charity begins at home, while, on the other hand, we speak of love of country. As for justice, we traditionally view it as a public (civil or social) virtue. Still, we demand fairness in not only the public but also the private sphere (as, for example, a child makes clear to its parents that it is not fair for them to give a piece of candy to one sibling only and not to all siblings). Consequently, it is not at all obvious how, on the basis of God or of God’s charity and justice, we (can) determine what is public and what is private or how we (can) distinguish between the external and the internal. For, surely, the golden rule of doing unto others what we want them to do unto us is at once public and private. Indeed, when we sense a split between the private and the public spheres, we immediately dub it hypocritical or self-serving. Private thought or action, no less than public thought or action, lacks sincerity if it does not obey the principles of charity and justice. It is, consequently, also important to see that the distinction between thought and action, between speech and action, which, we anticipate, Spinoza will make in chapter 20 of the Theologico-Political Treatise and which is the third general step that we shall be examining shortly, does not imply a difference between public (external) and private (internal). Action is not external, and thought is not internal. The distinction between thought (speech) and action is also not a moral distinction; for each can be loving and just, just as each can be hateful and unjust. One cannot simply think anything—uncharitable or unjust (which is not to say that human beings are not full of hateful thoughts and feelings). It is equally the case that one cannot simply say any-

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thing, although words are cheap. Just as one can “think” anything by putting any words (ideas and images) together, so one can “say” anything (nonsensical or untrue). Still, Spinoza would remind us, the difference between the first kind of knowledge and the second and third kinds of knowledge is precisely the difference between speaking and thinking (and acting) falsely and speaking and thinking (and acting) truly, whether the speech and thought (and action) in question be public (external) or private (internal). Thus reason, whether scientific (and so representing the second kind of knowledge) or intuitive (and so representing the third kind of knowledge), is itself an important index in showing us that the separation of the private from the public realm does not bespeak their opposition. While, as we have seen, Spinoza not infrequently appears to favor reason over faith, still we know that he demonstrates not only that they contain the same content but also that their content is fundamentally biblical and so at one and the same time theological and civil: the doctrine (once again!) of charity and justice. The issue, then, is not whether reason is public or private, external or internal, but rather whether our rational knowledge is adequate or inadequate. Still, notwithstanding my argument that, like the separation of philosophy from theology, the separation of the internal from the external bespeaks their paradoxical inseparability and that, therefore, there is no index available to render the separation of the private from the public clear and distinct, Spinoza evidently designates such a clear and distinct index in the passage cited above. He states that the right that each individual has—in his integrity of spirit—to the internal worship of God and to piety itself he cannot transfer to another. But what does Spinoza mean here by the transfer of a right to another? Does not the concept of “transferring a right to another” possess the same ambiguity that we found earlier in note 34 regarding the concept of owing obedience to another? In the democratic pactum all individuals transfer their right to another, that is, to the sovereign or supreme power, which is themselves as the multitudo. In the same sense, people obey the laws of the democratic imperium rightly (and they obey the laws of God rightly) as their own laws—those founded on the salus, the salvation or well being, of the multitudo. In a non-democratic, civil state, however, the transfer of right to another, like giving obedience to another, means precisely the opposite. It signifies the loss of power and hence of right, not the gaining of right and hence of power. The difference, then, between the two kinds of transfer, as between the two kinds of obedience, is the difference, not between public and private or between external and internal but between the free civil state (freedom) and the tyrannical civil state (slavery). To repeat, in distinguishing freedom from slavery we do not distinguish between the public (external) and the private (internal) spheres.

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Still, what we save from Spinoza’s separation of the internal from the external, of the private from the public, is that it is central to the democratic imperium insofar as we understand it to possess the same logic as the separation of philosophy from theology and thus the same logic as the inseparability of religion (together with philosophy) from the civil state. In their very separation the public and the private spheres are inseparable. The paradox here is that, while the borderline between the public (external) and the private (internal) is imprecise, slippery, and always open to renegotiation, the distinction, difference, or separation between them is absolute. In their very inseparability from each other the public and the private spheres remain absolutely distinct from and independent of each other. To eliminate one in the name of the other, or to reduce one to the other, is to lose both. Regarding, then, the external and the internal, we face an either/or choice when we advocate the one or the other. Either we maintain both, in asserting their separation; or we relinquish both, in asserting their opposition. Within the first page of chapter 19 of the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza has shown us that the difference between the natural state and the civil state entails the inseparability of religion from the civil state, together with the separation of the internal from the external spheres (and, I argue, no less their inseparability). In the rest of the chapter he is brilliantly relentless in driving home his singular message that the law of the sovereign, the sovereign law, is absolute and indivisible whether understood as civil or as religious. But, surprisingly, he does not argue for the supremacy of civil sovereignty in divine law solely on the basis of the difference between the natural state, in which religion and sin (and God?) are unknown, and the civil state, in which they are solely found. Rather, he appeals, characteristically, directly to God. Spinoza declares that he acknowledges no difference “whether God teaches and commands the true practice (cultum) of justice and charity by the natural light or by revelation; for it matters not how that practice is revealed, only that it obtains the supreme right (jus) and is the supreme law (lex) for men.” He reformulates this claim a little further on when he states that it makes no difference whether “we conceive of religion as revealed by the natural light or prophetically” (220). Still later he declares that the divine teachings (documenta), [whether] revealed by the natural light or prophetically, do not receive the force of command immediately from God but necessarily [solely] from those or by the mediation of those (mediantibus) who hold the right of commanding and decreeing; and, therefore, only by these same mediators (mediantibus iisdem) can we conceive of God as reigning over men and directing human affairs according to justice and equity. (222)

In these three striking formulations—God teaches and commands by the natural light [of reason] or by revelation; religion is revealed by the natural light

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or by prophecy; and the divine teachings are revealed by the natural light or by prophecy—we have yet further indication that for Spinoza the separation of philosophy from religion does not signify their opposition. Indeed, we see that their separation signifies their inseparability. For the God of reason and the God of revelation are the same God who is known not naturally, or immediately, but solely humanly or by means of human mediation, whose very foundation, Spinoza holds, is the doctrine of charity and justice. It is also worthy of note that in all three of these slightly varied formulations of the same position—whether divinity is revealed by reason or by prophecy—both the natural light (of reason) and revelation (whether as noun or past participle) are found in each of them. We are invited, thereby, I submit, to take account of two things, one overt, the other more covert. The first thing that we notice overtly, I suspect, is that the “natural” light is not natural but human. The “natural” light of reason is not found—immediately or directly—in the natural state, where human beings are determined by external17 causes as belonging to the common order of nature, of which they are ignorant. Rather, the natural light of reason is not natural but human, at once mediated and revealed. The second thing that we then notice, rather more covertly, I think, is that “revelation”—whether rational (philosophical) or prophetic (religious)—is also not immediate or direct but human and mediated. Both reason and revelation, both philosophy and religion presuppose human mediators who are at once legislators—bringers of the law—and interpreters of the law, which is precisely Spinoza’s concept of democratic, civil sovereignty. Two additional things are also to be noted in light of the fact that the divine law, as human law teaching the supremacy of charity and justice in the democratic civil state, is inseparable from human mediation and interpretation. First, the difference between reason and revelation, their separation, must not be construed as if the difference between the public (external) and the private (internal) implied their opposition. Reason is not merely public (or external), and revelation is not simply private (internal)—or vice versa. For each involves human mediation and interpretation, both public and private, in the give and take of democratic debate and negotiation. There is, in fact, infinite commercium between reason and revelation! In other words, each is the mediator and the interpreter of the other and so also the source of discipline for the other. The moment that reason opposes revelation it collapses into empty externality (dogmatism). The moment that revelation opposes reason it falls into blind internality (skepticism). The second thing that we notice in light of the fact that both reason (the natural light) and revelation entail human mediation and interpretation is that we have here another version of the ontological argument. As I show in volume I of my study, Spinoza demonstrates that divine existence cannot be

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known outside of (without) human thought and that human existence cannot be known outside of (without) the thought (idea) of God. (It is equally the case that the thought [idea] of God cannot be found outside of— without—human existence and that human thought cannot be found outside of—without—divine existence.) The ontological argument and its God— together with the concepts of the cause of itself and of necessary existence— presuppose the difference between the natural state and the civil state. The ontological argument is not only uniquely civil—it is not natural—but also universally democratic. For it demands mediation between thought and existence and the interpretation of one by the other on the part of the multitudo: all human beings. We can begin, then, to understand, I think, how and why the Ethics opens with the ontological argument and yet seems to leave it behind as Spinoza takes up the story of the human affects, together with the story of the civil state in the two treatises that he devotes to religion and politics. But now we see that the cause of itself as necessary existence is not natural but human— civil (both political and ethical), religious, and philosophical. It is only when human beings appropriate their contradictory, natural passions as the paradoxically active affects of reason that they make the transition to conceiving of—that they fall into the conception of—their existence as necessary, as knowable solely in and through God as causa sui. The cause of itself as necessary existence is identical in meaning with the concept of sui juris. In leaving the natural state of contradiction human beings are (in possession of) their own law. They are also (in possession of) their own necessary cause. Their human nature is not subject to the external (or to the internal) laws of nature of which they are ignorant. We can now see, therefore, that what characterizes the natural state, as distinct from the civil state, is precisely the opposition between existence and necessity. Necessity, as the natural order of final causes, represents human existence as the fatal condition in which singular individuals are always—eternally and necessarily—destroyed by yet more powerful, singular individuals as their enemies . . . ad infinitum. To bring necessity and existence into civil relationship is to constitute the democratic pactum whose sovereignty is infinite and indivisible, because it necessarily—freely—belongs to all human beings. The multitudo, as sui juris, is causa sui. It is precisely God’s command that human beings practice charity and justice in and as the civil state that constitutes the existence of every human being as necessary and that constitutes necessity as solely human. As Spinoza would say, the existence of human beings is not naturally born necessary but civilly made necessary. We also see that the other name of the necessity to which existence is bound is freedom (salvation)—existence liberated from blind determination by external causes and revealed to be the free, independent cause of itself: sui juris. The names that Spinoza gives

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to necessary existence in the Ethics are, as we have seen, acquiescentia (the active acceptance of human existence as freely bound to necessity and of necessity as freely bound to human existence) and beatitudo (blessedness). That God exists necessarily, or freely, that God is the unique being whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence explains why God is the necessary, the liberating exemplar of human existence. To accept my existence, to accept the existence of all human beings as necessary, as freely determined from their human nature alone, is to constitute the free civil state that cannot be thought outside of (without) existing necessarily as democracy and cannot exist outside of (without) the thought (idea) of democracy as necessary. There is, we can consequently say, one thing that cannot be thought without necessarily existing, and that is the civil pactum or multitudo of democracy. That it is religion and reason together that for Spinoza constitute the civil state he powerfully reformulates when he writes that in order for the teachings (documenta) of true reason, that is (as we showed in chapter 4 on divine law), the divine teachings themselves, to have absolutely the force of law, it was necessary for each individual to cede his natural right and for all men (omnes) to transfer that right to all (in omnes), to some, or to one; and then it first became known to us what justice and injustice, what right and wrong were. Therefore, justice and absolutely all the teachings of true reason, and consequently love of neighbor receive the force of law and command from the right alone of the sovereign, that is . . . from the decree alone of those who have the right of commanding (jus imperandi); and because (as I have already shown) the kingdom of God consists in the right alone of justice and charity or of true religion, it follows, as we argued, that God has no kingdom over men except through those who hold the imperium. (220)

After repeating that it makes no difference whether human beings received the revelation of religion from reason or from prophecy, Spinoza points out that, even in order for prophetically revealed religion to have the force of law among the ancient Hebrews, it was necessary, first, for each one of them to cede his natural right. For only then did “all from common consent” agree to obey solely those things that were revealed to them prophetically by God.18 “This is exactly the same way,” he remarks, “as we showed what was done in the democratic civil state (imperio democratico), where all men by common consent resolve (deliberant) to live from the dictate alone of reason” (221). Two Questions Involving the Hebrew Civil State I shall not review in detail the comprehensive analysis that Spinoza gives of the ancient Hebrew covenant as the model of the democratic civil state. Let it suffice here to indicate that he has two broad concerns in discussing the

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history of the ancient Jews (as found in the Bible). One, as indicated above, is to use the covenant that the ancient Hebrews made directly with God (and subsequently through Moses) as proof that religion does not have the force of law outside of (without) the constitution of the civil state. The second is to show, therefore, that today it is illegitimate for Christians to use the ancient Hebrew covenant as a model for founding a religious state controlled by priests as the second Jerusalem. It is fascinating, as always, to see that (and how) Spinoza’s brilliant argument cuts both ways. While prophetic religion is originally democratic, as the people, in ceding their natural right, commonly consented to obey God as their sovereign Lord, so democracy today is originally prophetic, as it is founded on the dictates of reason whose very basis is the prophetic teaching of charity and justice. The fact that religious life is civil and that civil life is religious leads Spinoza to declare that “devotion to country (pietas erga patriam) is the highest that anyone can profess” (222). Indeed, he points out that, if the civil state is destroyed, then the very basis of what constitutes the good of human beings will be lost; and they will return to the natural state of enmity and fear. It follows, therefore, he holds, that even a personal act of piety is impious if it endangers the security of the civil state, for “the welfare of the people (salus populi) is the highest law, to which all [laws], both human and divine, must be accommodated” (222–23). But Spinoza adds that it belongs to the office (duty) of the supreme civil power to determine the way in which each individual is bound to obey God. From these things [he concludes] we clearly understand the reason that the supreme powers are the interpreters of religion and, furthermore, that no one can rightly obey God if the practice of piety (cultum pietatis), by which everyone is bound, does not accommodate public utility and, consequently, if he does not obey the decrees of the supreme power in all things. . . . Therefore, no one can rightly cultivate piety or obey God unless he obeys the decrees of the supreme power in all things. (223)

In light of Spinoza’s determined insistence on the totality of sovereign power, we can appreciate the fact that the ancient Hebrew covenant is at once absolutely theocratic and absolutely democratic and that the history of modernity is that of the continuing struggle between “totalizing” democracy and totalitarian regimes (with the second claiming to rule in the name of the people, when not also in the name of God). To put this same problematic less dramatically, in modernity we continue to struggle with how to determine the role of religion in the civil state and the role of the civil state in religion. Spinoza formulates the problematic involved here in terms of two questions, which do not appear, to begin with, to be directly linked with each other. He asks, first: What happens if there is a conflict between civil authority and di-

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vine authority? Whom, then, do the people follow as their true sovereign, the civil ruler or God? (We shall be concerned to understand how this question can arise, given that the kingdom of God is not found outside of [without] the civil state. This question does not and cannot arise in Greek or Roman antiquity, where, too, civil authority and divine authority are identical, and thus where, for example, the emperor possesses divine status.) Related to this question is the unsettling position in the civil state of the prophet who speaks in the name of the divine sovereign yet does not possess civil sovereignty. Spinoza is vividly aware that the ancient Hebrew prophets challenged the sovereignty of kings. Can (or do) prophets still appear today? Spinoza asks, second: how are we to understand the rise and spread of Christianity in the ancient Roman world? Here the problem that Spinoza has to face is how Christianity can begin as a “private” religion without civil authority or authorization and yet end up challenging and, indeed, subverting the sovereign authority of the Roman emperor. Can anyone today, in claiming the divine authority of Christ—say, the Roman pontiff—challenge the sovereignty of civil rulers? Spinoza articulates and analyzes the issues involved in these two questions both forthrightly and lucidly, yet also with very considerable ambiguity. He is simultaneously wary of both people (the mob) and princes (in the arrogance of their self-interest and the vain-gloriousness of their militarism). He is also acutely suspicious of priestly rule and extremely fearful of religious intolerance. He never directly advocates the revolutionary right of the democratic multitudo to rise up against a tyrant in the name of the common good. Still, since he specifically connects the salus populi with the sovereignty of the civil state and civil sovereignty with the sovereign authority (truth) of God, his ambiguity, we shall see, is at once radically biblical and radically modern. His favored formulation is, as we know, that the kingdom of God is never found outside of (without) the medium, the mediation of civil authorities, who are, ultimately, the people. Yet, his ambiguity reflects the fact, I think, that he recognizes (indirectly?) that it is equally true that the civil state is never found outside of (without) the medium of the authoritative, sovereign, and divine word of God. The word of God, together with, we presume, the word of the people, is always a matter of interpretation. But whose interpretation? Who speaks in the name of God? Who speaks in the name of the people? Question I: The Conflict between the Civil State and Religion. Spinoza raises the first of our two questions near the end of chapter 16 of the Theologico-Political Treatise when he indicates that someone may ask: What occurs if the supreme power orders something against the religion and the obedience that we have promised God by “express pact”? Do we obey the divine or the human imperium? While indicating that he will discuss this question more fully (prolixius) later (in chapter 19), his brief answer is that “we are to obey

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God above all others when we have a certain and indubitable revelation” (189). Still, Spinoza observes, since people, as experience amply testifies, are, above all, accustomed to err in religion and, thanks to the diversity of their characters, to feign many things with great conflict, it is certain that, if no one was obliged to obey the supreme power in matters of religion, then the “right of the civil state” would depend on the diverse affect and judgment of each individual. Because the result would be the end of the civil state, the supreme civil power must have the right to make all decisions about religion. But what, then, are we to do if those who hold the supreme imperium are infidels? The response that Spinoza gives to his first question in this revised form is that we must be prepared either to suffer the consequences of not transferring our right to infidel rulers or, if we do transfer it to them, to obey them—“except for him to whom God by certain revelation promised singular aid against the tyrant or willed by name as excepted” (189–90). In this context he mentions the three young men (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) in Daniel 3 who, in not doubting God’s aid, were the only Jews who refused to serve the gods or worship the idols introduced by Nebuchadnezzar. He also mentions the contrary example of Eleazar who, while his people stood still, provided them with an example of enduring everything rather than suffering the transfer of their right and power to the Greeks. (Eleazar was martyred in 163 BCE during the revolt of the Jews against Antiochus Epiphanes in his attempt to hellenize them.) What does Spinoza mean by a “certain revelation” that would authorize obedience to God over obedience to the ruling civil power? He invokes it twice, while not actually discussing it, although, in the second instance, he does give examples from biblical and ancient Jewish history of resistance to civil authority when it utterly subverted the word of God. Regarding the first instance, he does not, in fact, consider what would happen if the ruler(s) subverted the word of God, that is, we assume, did not make the salus populi the principle of government and so did not govern in light of justice and charity. Rather, he indicates the civil chaos that would ensue if all individuals were allowed to interpret religion in terms of their diverse whims. Is certa revelatio for Spinoza, then, merely a formal category without real content? Does he invoke it ironically with the intention simply of indicating that it would lack practical efficacy? Or does he intend to show that, if someone claimed to judge the civil authority on the basis of a certain revelation, the collapse of the civil state would surely follow? While I think all of the above have validity, still, it is noteworthy that Spinoza invokes “certain revelation” twice, does not undertake to refute (or to repudiate) it directly, and cites venerable examples of individuals who acted on the basis of their certain divine revelation to resist civil powers that subverted the word of God.

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Do we not suspect that the reason that “certain revelation” emerges here in the Theologico-Political Treatise is that, while Spinoza insists that revelation (God) is not and cannot be found outside of (without) the civil or human condition, he never argues that revelation or its God is reducible to or identical with the civil state or the human condition—as in Greek and Roman antiquity. (It is equally the case for Spinoza that the civil or human law is not reducible to the divine law.) Is not divine revelation—to invoke Derridean discourse—the supplement, the trace, the différance of the civil and the human (while the civil and the human supplement the divine with the trace of their différance)? Do we not have here yet again the separation of equal powers, in this case, the separation of the divine from the civil such that their relationship is one, not of hierarchical opposition but of reciprocal equality? For one to be true both must be true. If only one, in opposition to the other, is true, then both are false. Spinoza takes up our first question again in chapter 19 when he asks, as he had anticipated: Who will defend the rights of piety if the sovereign rulers are impious? Will the rulers, in this case, remain the interpreters of piety? He responds with a counter-question: What will happen if ecclesiastics (who, he observes, are merely human) are impious? Will they remain interpreters of piety? He acknowledges the fact that, if civil rulers subvert piety, all things, sacred as well as profane, will deteriorate. But this will happen much more rapidly, he observes, “if private men seditiously wish to defend (vindicare) divine law” (226). It follows, therefore, he insists, that, if the right of interpreting piety is denied to sovereign rulers (even when impious?), nothing is gained, while much is lost. He concludes, consequently, that, “whether, therefore, we consider the truth of the matter, the security of the state, or, finally, the increase of piety, we are driven to hold that even divine right or the right regarding sacred matters absolutely depends on the decree of the supreme powers and that they are the interpreters and defenders of it” (226–7). Once again, we see that Spinoza avoids addressing directly the question of whether or not the sovereign powers of the civil state that were impious would lose their right, that is, whether they could be challenged in their right, to interpret piety or, in other words, religion or the divine law, although he does acknowledge that the results of their impiety would have negative consequences. Rather, on the basis of what he views as the much greater evils that would flow from “private” (priestly) challenge to the public interpretation of religion on the part of the civil rulers, he reasserts the right of the sovereign powers to interpret and to protect the divine law. It is important to note, however, that the criteria that he invokes—the truth of the matter, the security of the state, and the increase of piety—are vague (ambiguous). Things would change radically if, in vindicating the right of piety or religion in the name of

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these standards, those who challenged the authority of the sovereign powers would accuse them of operating privately and claimed for themselves, instead, the public right of interpretation! While Spinoza does not consider in any real detail the possible subversion on the part of a tyrant of not only the divine right of God but also the salus populi19—or does he consider them to be ultimately indistinguishable?—still, we have already seen him indicate that absolute power, when understood as doing whatever you wish, is, in principle, contradictory (as a return to the natural state) and, in practice, self-defeating. He will repeat this position in chapter 20, as we shall see, with the implication that sovereign powers would not be so stupid as to engage in contradictory actions that would result in their loss of civil authority. We have also seen him indicate in the Political Treatise that rulers cannot—without exposing themselves to self-defeating contradiction— commit acts or compel others to commit acts that are against human nature. Yet he never directly acknowledges that the people could challenge the sovereignty of the supreme ruling powers on the basis of this revolutionary concept of humanity. It is also important to note that there are at least two senses in which the discussion of these issues on the part of Spinoza remains artificial and abstract. First, he fails to give us any specific indication that to make the multitudo or people the democratic sovereign radically transforms our concept of political or civil authority. Second, he also does not make politically and constitutionally operative the principle of salus populi, although he does invoke it as the true and proper end of the civil state in the Political Treatise. Spinoza is acutely aware that the biblical tradition, to which he pays such sedulous attention, bears within it a deeply subversive principle, that of Hebrew prophecy, to which Jesus is also heir. Is the prophet who challenges the impiety of kings—but also of the people—private or public? On the one hand, he is private, for he does not claim sovereign civil power. His authority, his revelation, is personal. On the other hand, in vindicating the divine right of the Lord, his authority is absolute and public and brooks no opposition (even if, like Jeremiah, he is imprisoned by royal dictate or, like Jesus, is executed with the approval of imperial dictate). Spinoza is aware that the prophets especially gained prominence in the troubled times of the rule of kings, and he is unhappy with both prophets and kings. He holds that, in former times, after the Israelites had escaped from their bondage to Pharaoh’s rule and had consequently returned to the natural state, they transferred their natural right first to God and then to Moses. But in both cases Spinoza views the resulting pactum as a theocracy. He makes clear that Moses did not pass on his absolute power, at once civil and religious, to any successors but that it was divided between judges (as captains of the people) and priests. Indeed, he points out that prophets emerged as a check on the power of the captains. “If

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somebody of approved life showed himself with the accepted signs to be a prophet,” he observes, “he would by that very fact have the supreme right of commanding, that is, just like Moses, in the name of God revealed to him alone and not only like the captains through consultation with a priest.” There is no doubt, Spinoza points out, that, if the people were oppressed by the captains, the prophets could gain great power with them. On the other hand, if the captains of the people ruled effectively, they would then be in a position to examine the prophets to see if they lived piously, if they had certain and indubitable signs for their mission, and if their messages on behalf of God agreed with accepted teachings and the common laws of the patria. Whether they did or did not would depend on “the sole authority and testimony of the captain” (203). It is the view of Spinoza that the Israelite pactum began to fall into religious discord and civil unrest when the rebellious people changed their allegiance from the divine Lord to kings, whose power was then divided with priests and frequently challenged by prophets. He points out that, while the prophets could unseat kings, they were not in a position to eradicate the sources of tyranny: Consequently [Spinoza continues], the prophets did nothing else except buy a new tyrant with much blood of citizens. Thus, there was no end to the discords and civil wars. However, the causes of violating the divine law were always the same, which could not even be removed except together at the same time with the entire civil state. With these matters [he then concludes] we have seen how religion was introduced into the civil state of the Hebrews and for what reason the imperium could have been eternal if the just anger of the [divine] legislator had allowed it to persist in the same manner.

Spinoza then dismisses the civil state of the post-exilic Hebrews as one in which “the priests usurped the right of government and thereby gained absolute sovereignty” (210). What does Spinoza mean when he claims, with apparent ambiguity, that the civil state—pactum or covenant—of the ancient Israelites could have been eternal if the divine legislator, notwithstanding his just anger, had so consented? Since he repeats in the first sentence of chapter 19 the observation that, while the civil state of the Hebrews could have been eternal, today it is neither possible nor advisable to imitate it, perhaps, once again, he is simply being either formally polite or purely ironic in his appeal to the divine legislator. Or is Spinoza himself genuinely perplexed by how it was possible for what was and could have remained eternal to have suffered the vicissitudes of historical change and so vanished, at least in the immediate sense? When, however, he then goes on to remark that the ancient Hebrew imperium, while it cannot be revived today, although it was and could have remained eternal,

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possessed a number of features that still retain contemporary relevance, is he struggling with the difficult problem—which is at once ontological and historical—of how it is possible to learn from history, from the biblical history of the ancient Hebrews? How could what was—could have been—eternal vanish yet remain historically (eternally) relevant today? I shall pursue this issue in light of the second question with which I shall be dealing shortly— Spinoza’s assessment of the history of ancient Christianity. But we can presently note that the main lesson that Spinoza derives from his prolix review of the ancient Hebrew imperium is the importance of maintaining undivided sovereignty. It is essential, from his point of view, for the supreme powers of the civil state to retain absolute authority over both civil and divine law. Otherwise, sectarian divisions create irreconcilable conflicts that endanger the very existence of the civil state. He notes that the prophets were unimportant so long as the people were sovereign and thus before the appearance of kings, after which they themselves became a source of division. Indeed, he observes, “during the reign of the people the laws remained uncorrupted and were more constantly observed.” He also notes “how dangerous it is to introduce merely speculative matters into the divine law and to establish laws concerning opinions about which men are accustomed to or can dispute. For rule is most violent [tyrannical],” he points out, “where opinions that belong to the right of each individual (uniuscujusque juris sunt), which no one can cede, are regarded as criminal” (215). Spinoza repeats that it is of utmost importance for the supreme civil powers to have the right to decide what is right and wrong. “For if this right of deciding about actions could not be granted to the divine prophets themselves, except with great injury to the civil state and religion, how much less will it be conceded to those who do not know how to predict future things and are not able to perform miracles” (216). While we have seen that Spinoza is extremely ambivalent about the role of the prophets in the civil state of the ancient Israelites, it is also evident from additional passages in chapters 16 and 19 that he does not directly dispute their authority. In chapter 16 he notes that the exception to the exercise of sovereignty over divine law on the part of the supreme powers is the “prophet, who is expressly sent by God and who shows it by indubitable signs” (189). But even then, Spinoza remarks, the supreme powers are compelled to acknowledge, not a human judge but solely God. Furthermore, if they do not obey God as revealed in his law, they do not violate civil right, although they may bring harm to themselves.20 In chapter 19 he observes that, while the Israelite kings did not possess the same right as Moses to appoint the high priest, to consult God immediately, or to condemn prophets, this was simply due to the fact that prophets had the authority to appoint a new king and to pardon regicide (although not to initiate proceedings against kings who broke

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the law). “Therefore,” Spinoza declares, “if there had been no prophets, who by singular revelation were able without question to grant pardon for regicide, the kings would altogether have had absolute right over all matters, sacred as well as civil” (228–29). Although Spinoza apparently does not intend this statement to be taken ironically—for it could be understood to support the authority of the prophets as much as if not more than the authority of the Israelite kings (of whom he is also critical, as we have seen)—his point is to apply his conclusion to the contemporary situation. Since the supreme powers today, he observes, do not have prophets and are not held by right to recognize them—for they are not bound by the laws of the Hebrews—they possess absolute, sovereign right over both civil and divine law. However, although the conclusion at which Spinoza arrives yet again—that sovereign power in civil states is absolute and indivisible—is true (I agree with him), does it follow, therefore, that there are no prophets today or that the supreme sovereign powers are not bound by right to recognize them? We may remember that Spinoza acknowledges the legitimacy of appeal to “certain revelation” in opposition to civil authority (even as he points out that there is no greater source of division in the state than self-interested religious opinion, that is, private revelation). We have also seen him indicate that it makes no difference whether divine law is revealed by reason or prophetically: what counts is its truth. It is also the case that in the earlier chapters of the TheologicoPolitical Treatise Spinoza makes it clear that the true mark of a prophet is neither a vivid imagination nor a sign but chiefly his commitment to the true and the good, in other words, his teaching of charity and justice. Consequently, do not prophets and does not prophecy live (on) today? Spinoza also views what he calls the mind of Christ as representing the summation of the prophetic tradition. With the introduction of Christ we arrive at the second broad question that Spinoza raises in his engagement with the ancient Hebrew covenant and the history of the Jews in the last five chapters of his theologico-political treatise—that of the emergence of Christianity on the political scene. However, prior to taking up this second question, it is important to examine two issues that bear significantly on the first question (and that will also be important for our consideration of the second question). The two issues are the conception that Spinoza has of the Roman civil state in the centuries BCE (as he articulates it at the end of chapter 18) and his conception of the relationship between natural knowledge and prophetic knowledge (as he formulates it at the beginning of chapter 1). To examine Spinoza’s conception of Rome, the discussion of which will be relatively brief, will allow us to ask if the absence of a historical tradition that legitimates an appeal against tyranny on behalf of the word of God, as found in revelation and prophecy, is significant (for Spinoza). With regard to the second issue, which will entail a longer dis-

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cussion, Spinoza (we know) radically identifies natural knowledge with prophetic knowledge, that is, the natural light of reason with revelation or prophecy. He makes a distinction between natural knowledge and prophetic knowledge, to be sure, but it is the significance or adequacy of this distinction that we shall now have to examine carefully. Are we going to find that there is a fundamental difference—both historical and ontological—between the civil state in which the appeal to revelation and to prophecy is absent and the civil state in which it is present? Does Spinoza acknowledge this (historical and ontological) difference? Does what he calls natural knowledge itself represent the continuation of the prophetic tradition in modernity? ◆ Issue A: The Roman Civil State. In the context of arguing how dangerous and difficult (and so practicably impossible) it is for a people to eliminate tyranny, Spinoza introduces our first issue: the Roman civil state. He indicates (at the end of chapter 18) that someone may raise the objection that the example of the Romans shows that a people can easily remove a tyrant. But his riposte is that the Roman example simply serves to confirm his own judgment. He acknowledges that it was easier for the Roman people than for other peoples to remove tyrants and to change the form of their civil state. Not only did the Roman people have the right of electing the king and his successor, but they also killed three of their original six kings. Still, what the people did was simply to replace one tyrant with several tyrants who kept the civil state eternally embroiled in the miserable conflict of external and internal warfare until, finally, it passed again to a monarch (the emperor), with the result that it changed, not in substance but only in name—as happened, he adds, in England (where, after the execution of Charles I, Cromwell assumed the title of Protector). Spinoza’s breathtakingly brief history of the Roman civil state, which I summarize in the above paragraph and which, in my judgment, is cannily accurate,21 is significant for three, closely related reasons. First, it is striking that Spinoza reaches a judgment on the Roman civil state that is the very opposite of Machiavelli’s in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (the Roman historian of the late BCE and the early CE period). The irony here is both complex and telling. Not only does Spinoza praise Machiavelli in the Political Treatise, although he is perplexed as to why so wise a statesman would argue on behalf of a tyrant.22 But now here in the Theologico-Political Treatise he summarizes in two or three sentences the unending civil conflict between the plebs, as represented by the tribunes, and the optimates (the senatorial class), as represented by the consuls, which Machiavelli describes in detail for hundreds of pages and which finally leads to the emperorship of the Caesars. However, while Spinoza sees that the empire of the Caesars (and their successors) is the historical consequence of the earlier “republican” conflict—involving both ex-

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ternal, imperial conquest and internal, civil war—Machiavelli remains baffled as to why this conflict knows no solution. He fails to grasp the importance of the fact that there is no concept in Livy, or in any other Roman author, of the imperium as the civil state in which all people rule as the democratic multitudo. Even the imperial solution, instead of resolving the external and internal conflicts of the Roman republic, simply extends (and for a while masks) them by further conquest, until the civil state of the Romans meets not only the armed might of the Germanic “barbarians” (many of whom have become fervent converts to Christianity) but also, above all, the demands of Christianity that it conform to the City of God, to the demands of justice and charity. It is supremely ironic that Machiavelli (the apt pupil of Dante in holding up the Romans as the model of rational, secular human beings) dismisses Christianity as the religion of the weak in the Discourses. In contrast to Machiavelli, Spinoza knows and champions the infinite strength, power, authority, and sovereignty of the Word of God (while also greatly fearing its abuses), as he realizes that it is precisely the God of the Bible who brings down the Caesars. Yet, we shall see that Spinoza remains puzzled how it was possible for Christianity to be preached universally as a private religion without authorization by the civil state (of the Romans). Still, when the civil state of the Romans confronts Christianity, the empire is revealed as built on the shifting sands of an inherently contradictory hierarchy composed of social and intellectual opposites. Lacking a constitutional (and an ontological) foundation in the democratic principle of the sovereign multitudo, the Roman Empire collapses (in the west). Thus, we see that, while Spinoza looks the facts of Roman history straight in the face, Machiavelli continues to idolize antiquity in the medieval tradition of Dante, for whom Virgil represents human (secular) reason. Yet Spinoza, too, is not very clear about the relationship between history and ontology, as I have noted before. The second reason that it is significant that Spinoza does not find in the Roman republic any basis for ending the strife, which is at once imperial and civil, can be simply stated. Unlike Machiavelli, he does not view the Roman republic, whether “republican” or imperial, as a model for imitation today. The history of the Romans is a history from which we can only learn that we cannot learn anything that affirms the freedom of human existence, unlike the history of the ancient Jews and their Christian heirs. I note once again that Machiavelli remains bewildered, in his Discourses, as to why and how there is no resolution to the imperial and civil conflict of the republic that ultimately results in its demise at the hands of the Caesars and their successors. He does not see that the reason that the imperial and civil strife that he chronicles (following Livy) leads to empire is simply because the imperium of the Roman civil state is not infinite and undivided but finite and divided. Spinoza, on the

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other hand, acknowledges, as we saw, that it was easier for the Romans than for other peoples to replace their tyrannical leaders. However, he then points out that the reason that Rome does not serve as an example of a civil state that easily removed its tyrants is that it simply replaced one tyrant with another.23 Consequently, what Spinoza actually demonstrates is that the Romans did not (and could not) change the form of their civil state—from the early period of the kings, through the several centuries of never-ending conflict in the republic between the plebs and the optimates, to the empire (and its eventual defeat at the hands of Christianity). Unlike Machiavelli, Spinoza recognizes that the Roman civil state cannot be a model for the free republic. We cannot appeal to the history of Rome in support of freedom. What Roman history fatally displays, rather, is an imperium, which, because it is not founded on the principle that all people possess the natural right of sovereign power, is subject to irresolvable, contradictory opposition and hence to inevitable destruction. Roman history thus serves as a cautionary tale of the civil state, which, riven by civil conflict feeding imperial lust, is fatally destroyed by the irreconcilable contradictions of both internal dissention and external conquest. The third reason that the assessment that Spinoza gives of the history of the Roman civil state is so interesting is that in this case he does not indicate that it would have been possible to invoke the authority of revelation or of prophecy to resist tyrannical rule. The fact that he is silent about the possibility of appealing to divine law in a state that does not know biblical revelation or prophecy suggests that such an appeal is possible solely in a civil state in which the authority of the divine word is and remains central to its constitution, even as (or notwithstanding the fact that) the civil state itself possesses total authority over both human law and divine law. The paradox here is that, precisely because revelation and prophecy are incorporated into the very constitution of the civil state, the divine law remains the authority or the standard for judging the adequacy of the human law (just as the human law of the salus populi remains the authority or the standard for judging the adequacy of the divine law). It is solely from the historical tradition in which revelation and prophecy are central to the constitution of the civil state, Spinoza shows us indirectly, that we moderns can continue to learn. In other words, because it is the biblical tradition of revelation and prophecy that constitutes modern history, it is solely from this history that we can learn about modernity and the central place within it of the democratic civil state. Rome has nothing to teach us about the imperium of modern democracy. What consideration of the Roman civil state shows us, paradoxically, is that, in having no basis in revelation or prophecy for an appeal to divine law against tyranny, it also has no truly human law that would serve as a basis for resisting tyranny. Strangely, the unending conflict and dissention, which, as Spinoza recognizes, constitute the history of the Roman civil state, reflect the fact

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that it does not know (it is not comprehended by) the “separation” of the human law from the divine law, in the biblical tradition, such that they are not opposed to (or identified with) each other. It is thus striking to see, as we take up our second issue, that Spinoza initiates the Theologico-Political Treatise by articulating the relationship between natural knowledge and prophetic knowledge, between the human law and the divine law, in terms of their separation, not their opposition. We thus discover here, at the very beginning of his treatise, the basis in prophecy or revelation of constituting the authority for contesting tyranny. (It is important to keep in mind, as I have already noted, that, while Spinoza makes the salus populi or the multitudo itself the true and proper end of the civil state, he never acknowledges that an appeal to the human law as found in the sovereign “people” could serve as the basis for authorizing or legitimizing the right to resist or to overthrow a tyrant. Still, it is clear that this appeal is implicit in all that he writes.) ◆ Issue B: Natural Knowledge and Prophetic Knowledge. At the beginning of chapter 1 of the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza defines prophecy or revelation as the certain knowledge of some matter (sic!) that is revealed by God to men (i.e., to prophets), who then communicate it to those who embrace it with “mere faith” (i.e., without themselves receiving the revelation). It follows, therefore, he observes, that natural knowledge is prophecy, for the natural light of reason also receives its knowledge directly from God. However, the knowledge that is then communicated by the natural light is and depends on foundations that are common to all human beings. Spinoza’s conclusion, consequently, is that natural knowledge, as regards both its certitude and its source, is equal in authority to prophetic knowledge. Still, although natural knowledge is divine, its “propagators cannot be called prophets,” for the rest of humankind acknowledges its truth with the same authority as those who teach it (10). In note 2, which Spinoza attaches to the phrase “its propagators cannot be called prophets,” he explains that prophets are those who interpret the decrees that God reveals to them to those who do not receive the revelation themselves from God and thus who accept it solely on the basis of the authority and the trustworthiness of the prophets: If [he continues in note 2] men who heard prophets were to be made prophets, just as those are made philosophers who hear philosophers, then the prophet would not be the interpreter of divine decrees, since his auditors would rely, not on the testimony and authority of the prophet himself but on divine revelation itself and internal testimony, like [the prophet] himself. Thus, the supreme [civil] powers are the interpreters of the right of their sovereignty (sui imperii juris) because the laws established by them are defended by the sole authority of their supreme powers and are supported by their testimony alone. (239)

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This remarkable passage contains two extraordinary features, both of which go to the heart of how we are to understand Spinoza’s conception of the relationship between prophecy (revelation, religion, faith) and philosophy (reason, natural knowledge) and between imperium (sovereignty, the civil state) and prophecy and thus between politics and philosophy and, finally, among all three: the democratic civil state, philosophy, and religion. The first feature is the distinction between philosophy and prophecy, and the second feature is the identity between prophecy and the sovereign powers of the civil state. What links these two features, it is clear, is that, as distinct from philosophy, whose auditors are said by Spinoza to be equal in authority to the philosopher whose word they hear, in both prophecy and politics the recipients of the divine or the civil decrees are said to be dependent on the sole authority of the prophet or of the supreme powers from whom they receive the revealed truth. Those who hear the philosophical word are made philosophers, for they have to be made (to become) philosophers in order to judge the truth of the communication that they receive philosophically. They have to be able to judge the communication that they receive as truly philosophical. However, those who hear the prophetic or the civil revelations are not made (they do not become) prophets or civil powers. They are not in a position to judge whether the decrees that they receive are truly prophetic or truly civil. For, as believers or subjects, they have to accept what they hear on the basis of “mere faith” in the authority of those—the prophets or the supreme powers—from whom they receive the revealed decrees. It is interesting to see that just a few lines after note 2 in chapter 1 Spinoza explains that he will undertake to examine prophecy solely on the basis of Scripture “because today we have no prophets, that I know of ” (10). Not only does Spinoza show himself in this dismissive remark to be rather circumspect (coy?) in denying that prophets any longer exist today, but in note 2 we see that he dramatically identifies the supreme powers of the civil state with prophets, as distinct from philosophers. It is clear, then, that prophets continue to exist today in and through the supreme powers of the civil state. Still, it is by no means evident how prophecy (faith) and philosophy (reason) can agree in certitude and in source—both involve sure knowledge of God—yet differ significantly because of their audience (and also because of their medium: particular history and language—textuality—on the one hand; universal nature, on the other). For once Spinoza has ascribed the exalted divinity, which is traditionally associated with prophetic knowledge, to natural knowledge, it is not at all clear how he will then be able to distinguish natural (rational) knowledge from prophetic (revealed) knowledge. Thus, it is noteworthy that, just as he exalts the standing of natural knowledge by raising it to the status of divine (revealed) knowledge, so, in note 2, he exalts the standing

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of the supreme civil powers by making an analogy between their authority and the authority of prophets to receive and to interpret divine revelation. Has Spinoza finally tamed the radical (unpredictable) tradition of biblical prophecy, about which he is so obviously uneasy, as we saw earlier? Has he simply assimilated prophecy into civil power? Or, on the contrary, has he introduced the Trojan horse enclosing the critical prophetic tradition into the very citadel of the sovereign civil state? It does appear quite bizarre that the first time that Spinoza introduces his key idea of the supreme powers of the imperium (the sovereign civil state) in the Theologico-Political Treatise is, without any preparation for or explanation of it, in note 2, whose purpose is to distinguish philosophy from prophecy in terms of their different audiences. I would also suspect that the reader would be wary about what Spinoza means in referring to the “internal testimony” of the prophetic and the civil interpreters in light of our earlier analysis of the unstable or paradoxical (aporetic) relationship between the external (public) and the internal (private) realms. Surely, if any discourse is to be understood as public (external), it is both prophetic discourse and civil discourse. We arrive, therefore, at the critical issue of the audiences of both. That two simple elements are absent from note 2 is striking in light of our knowledge, now, not only of Spinoza’s two treatises but also of the Ethics. These two elements are, first, love (or charity and justice), and so also hermeneutics, and, second, reason, and so also democracy. But we know, too, that these two elements are the same element in terms of what Spinoza calls (in all three works) the dictates of reason whose action (conatus) is constituted by and constitutes charity and justice, the recognition on my part as an individual that what is the good for me must also be viewed by all other individuals as what is the good for them. As I remarked above, Spinoza will also make clear, in his subsequent discussion of prophecy in the Theologico-Political Treatise, that its chief mark is what is right and good, that is, the golden rule of charity and justice. But charity and justice are not something that I receive with “mere faith.” Rather, I must enact them with my whole being, at once publicly (externally) and privately (internally), we could say. The hermeneutical index of love (or faith), as Spinoza makes clear, as I show in volume I of this study, is the fact that the readers of Scripture do not simply accept the revealed word of prophecy uncritically, on the basis of mera fides (in the tradition of Alfakhar). Rather, they possess the supreme right of thinking and judging freely what they read, consistent with the very spirit of charity and justice. They use their reason to judge what they read in Scripture, to judge revelation (and so, we could say, to distinguish between true and false prophecy). But it is here that prophecy and its hermeneutical demands on its recipients (believers and readers) intersect with reason and democracy. Spinoza, we know,

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identifies the imperium of democracy with the multitudo, with the salus populi, with the rational capacity of each individual to cede his natural right, as passive affect, and, consequently, to gain it back as the active affect of charity and justice, as the dictates of reason. The supreme powers of the democratic imperium are the people, who, as the interpreters of what Spinoza calls the kingdom of God, which, he shows, is not found outside of (without) the civil state, are, paradoxically, at one and the same time, the source and the audience of the revealed truth of God. It becomes clear, then, that the readers of Scripture (the receivers of the prophetic or revealed word of God) are made—they become—prophets and that the subjects of the democratic civil state (the citizens who receive the civil word of truth) are made—they become—the supreme powers. But, then, because Spinoza has established a direct analogy between civil rulers and prophets, it also follows that the supreme powers of the democratic imperium are made—they become—prophets, those who demand, in the name of the kingdom of God, charity and justice for all, both sovereign and subject, who are now identical in democracy. Surely, however, this conclusion is not surprising, given that Spinoza’s explicitly stated goal in the Theologico-Political Treatise is to show that democracy, of all civil states, is the most natural and most compatible with freedom precisely because it optimally supports the freedom of thinking what you desire and of saying what you think. What is truly extraordinary to discover is that this goal is attainable only after Spinoza has demonstrated that both natural knowledge—philosophy (reason)—and the supreme civil authority—the democratic multitudo—adhere to the radical tradition of the prophets in teaching the revealed word of God as charity and justice for all. He actually anticipates the revolutionary identity of democracy with the prophetic tradition in note 2 and so within the second page of chapter 1 of his theologico-political treatise. But we readers can discern this relationship only after we return to this remarkable passage with ample knowledge of his conception of love and hermeneutics, on the one hand, and of reason and democracy, on the other, and, consequently, with the sure understanding that religion (prophecy, faith, revelation), philosophy (the natural light of reason), and the democratic civil state (politics) all possess the same certitude of knowledge, the same source, and the same audience. It is useful to remember that the two questions around which I have organized my consideration of Spinoza’s research into the contemporary relevance of the history of the ancient Jews and their covenant—involving God, Moses, judges, and kings (until the Babylonian Captivity), not to mention prophets—in chapters 16–19 of the Theologico-Political Treatise belong to the second step of the three steps that he takes to demonstrate that democracy is the optimal civil state for supporting the freedom of philosophizing (of thinking what you desire and of saying what you think). To recap, the first step in-

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volves the distinction between the natural state and the civil state. The second step involves the demonstration that religion, like the imperium itself, is not natural but civil. It is precisely because both human law and divine law belong to the civil state that conflict between them can and does erupt. Thus, the first question that Spinoza poses in terms of his review of the history of the ancient Jews is what happens if the civil authority is in conflict with the word of God (and, we assume, this question could be asked in reverse). Spinoza argues, without surcease, that the sovereign civil state is absolute and indivisible. But since the imperium is at once human and divine, it follows that what is absolute and what is indivisible—what is infinite—is split between the human and the divine, between reason and faith (love), between politics and theology, between politics and philosophy. Or we could equally say that the civil state is constituted in and through each of these pairs of concepts. (Ethics will enter into this volatile mix later in the chapter, as we know.) Not only are these pairs of concepts not directly homologous, and so uncannily unstable, but it also makes all the difference in the world, as we have seen, whether or not the civil state that constitutes and is constituted by both human law and divine law is democratic. What we have now learned from note 2 is that it is democracy that resolves, in principle, the conflict between the human law and the divine law. (In other words, democracy makes the conflict constitutional because founded on the dictates of reason.) Democracy is, in its commitment to charity and justice, heir to the prophetic tradition. Since, as Spinoza indicates, the supreme civil power possesses the interpretive authority of the prophets and since (as we learn in chapter 16 of his theologico-political treatise) the supreme power is the democratic people—multitudo—it is the people who are made—who become—prophets. The hermeneutical parallel to the position of the people as prophetic is that of the readers of Scripture, who possess the absolute right of freely interpreting religion, of freely judging the civil state (which is themselves). Faithful and loving readers of Scripture are made (they become) prophets by entering into the relation of charity and justice, which are the chief (and, in fact, the only significant) mark of the prophetic vocation. We also know that the sovereign people, as heir to the prophetic tradition, espouse the dictates of reason. Thus, as we anticipated, the fact that Spinoza indicates that philosophy has a vocation that is no less divine than that of prophecy leads us to see that the people are also made—they become—philosophers in constituting the democratic imperium on the basis of the dictates of reason. It is little wonder, then, that the civil state that optimally (solely) serves and fosters the freedom of philosophizing is democracy. Although Spinoza does not directly draw out the profound implications of his thinking, as I have done in the previous paragraphs, we can understand why he does not and cannot dismiss the appearance of the prophet or the

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appeal to revelation in challenging the adequacy of civil rule, within the biblical tradition, although he is deeply aware of the enormous dangers that they pose to the security, welfare, and freedom of the civil state. While he insists upon the absolute indivisibility of the imperium, he recognizes, fundamentally, that the civil state comprehends—and is comprehended by—prophecy and revelation, just as philosophy, like prophecy, possesses sure knowledge of God. It is not surprising, therefore, that he states, as we saw, that it makes no difference whether the religious doctrine of charity and justice is revealed by the natural light or by prophecy. What counts is that people know and live by it. While Spinoza argues that the lesson to be learned from the history of the ancient Jews is that the kingdom of God is not found outside of (without) the civil state and that, therefore, the supreme civil powers have absolute authority over not only human law but also divine law, it thus turns out, we see, that this is true only insofar as the civil state is based on the democratic principles of prophecy (and revelation): charity and justice. The irony is that prophecy is not the adversary but rather the advocate of the unity of human law and divine law in the civil state. It is the prophets who, in holding up the civil state to the standards of divine law, demonstrate that the kingdom of God is not found outside of (without) the civil state. We shall now see that, just as Spinoza is deeply perplexed by the role of the prophet (and his appeal to divine revelation) in the civil state, so he is also no less perplexed by how it is that Christianity represents the absolute refutation of his principle that religion does not exist outside of (without) the civil state. Question II: Christianity. We thus arrive at our second question concerning what it is that Spinoza believes is to be learned from the history of the early Christians, which he contrasts with the history of the ancient Jews. His premise is that, unlike the ancient Hebrew religion, which comes into existence with and is not found outside of (without) the civil state—the supreme Hebrew powers rule over both human and divine law—(western) Christianity emerges historically as a private religion and yet ends up dictating the principles of civil authority to the supreme rulers of the Roman Empire (which it then leaves behind in the dust of history, we can add). The result, then as now, Spinoza laments, is the unending conflict between church and state, between revelation and reason, between priest and king, between theology and philosophy—to the great harm of the freedom of philosophizing. But, we may ask, are the history of the Jews and the history of the Christians really so different, at least in the sense that we cannot understand the emergence and development of the democratic civil state of modernity outside of (without) the history of both? We have seen that Spinoza fails, at least directly, to account for the role of prophecy in the creation of the modern democratic state (although he is sure in his knowledge that the basis of the civil state, the

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dictates of reason, is constituted by the prophetic teaching of charity and justice). Is it true that Christianity, in its commitment to the absolute God revealed in Scripture and identified with Jesus as the Christ, although not attached to a particular civil state as it emerges and spreads in the Roman Empire and beyond, is not civil (political) in its principles? Indeed, does not Spinoza indicate that the covenant that the Hebrew people make with their God is a theocracy, which, although a true civil state, has no place in the standard, ancient division of civil states as ruled by one, few, or some? (Do we not suspect that the fact that in the Political Treatise Spinoza views the multitudo as the true sovereign authority in all civil states, whether they are monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic, reflects the history whereby the democratic civil state in modernity is the true heir of the original, Hebrew civil state as prophetically theocratic?) While Spinoza does not provide a concrete analysis (theologicophilosophical or political) of the relationship between the sovereignty of the ancient Jews—multitudo—and their God, he does show real insight into the socio-psychological (characterlogical) unity that emerges. He generally holds, as we have seen, that the Jewish people maintain their imperium until, being a stiff-necked people, they cede it to the kings, which, for him, represents the beginning of the disastrous decline of the civil state of the ancient Hebrews, which is both civil and religious, that eventually culminates in the priestly control of the post-exilic, civil state, together with its religion. (We can add that the final result of the loss of their sovereign power on the part of the ancient Hebrews is the destruction of their civil state by the Roman Empire and the great diaspora of the first century CE, although, as we know today, significant groups of Jews not only had remained in Babylon and lived in Alexandria but also had spread throughout the Empire and beyond.) The point that I am making is that Spinoza views the covenant that the ancient Jews make with their God as the foundation of their history. (We could say that, in light of the Exodus story, the bondage of the Jews to Pharaoh represents pagan prehistory. The natural state, to which the Jews, in departing Egypt, consequently revert, Spinoza holds, would then represent that paradoxical moment of original transition to or creation of freedom that comes into existence solely in light of the “subsequent” pactum or covenant, which is made in and through the dictates of reason when revealed by the prophets as the divine word of charity and justice.) What constitutes the uniqueness— and the universality—of the ancient Jews, Spinoza shows us, is that the covenant, which they make with their God, is at once divine and human, revealed and civil, prophetic and rational. Spinoza is right (I hold, as demonstrated by him) that both human law and divine law inhere in the civil state, not in the natural state. The history of the civil state, Spinoza indicates (indirectly) to us, begins with the covenant that

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the people of the law, both civil and divine, make with the God of the law, both civil and divine. Is the history of Christianity, I ask again, really so very different, fundamentally? We saw that Spinoza is perplexed as to how the original covenant between the Hebrew people and God, since it represents the true union of human law and divine law and since it was, therefore, eternal and could have remained eternal, could have vanished. But it is perplexing for us to see that Spinoza does not then pose the question as to how the Jews and their religion survive for more than 1500 years (up to his day) without forging a direct identity between civil law and divine law. (Indeed, he is at pains to argue that such an identity cannot be and must not be revived today!) In other words, if religion cannot and does not exist, originally, outside of (without) the civil state, how, then, can it continue to exist outside of (without) the civil state? We know, of course, that Judaism (in its diverse formations and manifestations) does exist historically solely within various civil states (or regimes), just as Christianity (in its diverse formations and manifestations) also exists historically, in the beginning, solely within the (mainly) Roman civil state. Spinoza is equally perplexed as to how Christianity, which in the beginning violates his principle that religion does not exist outside of (without) the civil state, could in the end triumph, as it were, over the civil state. Still, is the covenant that early Christians make with their God, privately, fundamentally different from the original covenant that the Jews, in Exodus from Egypt, make with their God, publicly (while acknowledging the different political and cultural situations)? Each is a theocratic relationship. But surely each is no less a civil and a political relationship. Although the original Hebrew theocracy is also a civil state, the civil state subsequently vanishes, yet the religion, with its commitment to charity and justice, survives. Christianity emerges precisely at the time when the relationship between religion and the civil state in Judaism is first deeply shaken and then destroyed. In other words, just as the Jews of the first century CE (like their co-religionists in Babylon and Alexandria) now adapt to the world (or do they adapt the world to themselves?), so Christians, in beginning without (outside of) the civil state, adapt to the world (or do they adapt the world to themselves?). Spinoza is thus equally perplexed as to how the Jewish civil state vanishes (yet the religion survives) and how the Christian religion begins outside of (without) the civil state (yet ends up triumphing over the Roman Empire). Still, is Jewish “survival” in principle different from Christian “triumph?” For the Jewish religion would never have survived had its adherents simply adapted to and consequently been absorbed into the Roman Empire, as was true of the other identifiable groups of the time, except for those that were Christian. As for Christians, had they directly identified the City of God with the City of Earth (whether as church or state), which was a constant risk (as

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Spinoza is vividly aware), then they would have lost both their religion and their principles of the civil state: justice and charity. For St. Augustine, the citizen of the City of God is the Christian pilgrim who makes his eternal transitio in (not from) the earthly city to the heavenly imperium. Is the Christian pilgrim really so different from the wandering Jew, whose true home is the civil state which eternally embraces the prophetic principles of justice and charity? How, in other words, are we to understand the covenant that the people— Jewish and Christian—make with their God and thus the history of the democratic civil state, which is nothing less than the City of God? Let us now see how and why Spinoza deals with the history of early Christianity and contrasts it with the history of the early Hebrews. We begin with Spinoza’s observation in chapter 19 of the TheologicoPolitical Treatise that Christ, having realized that his followers would be dispersed throughout the world (is this obvious from the Gospels?), “taught them all to practice piety absolutely,” which shows that “religion was always accommodated to the utility of the civil state” (224). Do we not suspect, rather, that Christians (like Jews) showed that the civil state was to be accommodated to their “utility,” that is, to the demands of piety, to the demands of charity and justice, with the result that they increasingly challenged the imperial (hierarchical) values of the Roman state? In response to the question by what right Christ’s disciples, as private individuals, were able to preach religion (since Christianity was not authorized by the civil state), Spinoza answers that “they did it, I say, by the right of the power that they received from Christ against unclean spirits (see Mat. 10.1).” Spinoza recalls that at the end of chapter 16 he had expressly warned (as we saw) that all men are bound to keep faith even with a tyrant except him to whom God by certain revelation has promised singular [i.e., exceptional] aid against a tyrant. Wherefore, it is permitted to no one to take this as an example unless he also has the power to perform miracles. . . . And, therefore, it must necessarily be accepted that the authority, which Christ gave to his disciples, was only given to them singularly [i.e., exceptionally] and cannot, therefore, be taken by others as an example [to follow]. (224)

Thus, we see that, in addition to the appeal to revelation and to the appearance of a prophet, Spinoza makes the power to perform miracles (which we already saw him mention in chapter 18 [216]) a source of legitimate resistance to a tyrant. Once again, then, we ask whether Spinoza invokes miracles here simply as a formal (or a cynical?) gesture in order to indicate that it is substantially futile to oppose tyranny. Or does he intend us, on the contrary, to view the performance of miracles as representing an order of reality, both divine and human, that is opposed to tyranny (that tyranny would be unable to

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control)? It is particularly ironic that Spinoza would state that the power to perform miracles would authorize resistance to tyranny, since, in chapter 6 of the Theologico-Political Treatise, he resolutely rejects the concept of miracle as supernatural, the concept that a miracle represents an action on the part of a God who suspends or opposes nature. In other words, he rejects the concept of miracle as representing supernatural action on the part of God that exceeds human knowledge. What Spinoza opposes in miracles, above all, therefore, is that they represent human ignorance. In appealing to miracles people reduce their knowledge of God to ignorance. Since anything contradictory or arbitrary, of which, consequently, we do not know the cause, could be considered miraculous—“supernatural” or above our human understanding—Spinoza argues that miracles, instead of supporting or demonstrating faith, involve, rather, ignorance of God and lead, therefore, to atheism. Is it not striking, then, that the concept of miracles that Spinoza rejects is precisely one that is consistent with tyranny? Is it not the tyrant who rules, not with the knowledge (and consent) of the people but supernaturally, such that his actions are contradictory and arbitrary and so simply miracles of which the people are ignorant? It is important to recognize, however, that, just as Spinoza does not reject revelation or prophecy (which are essentially identical), insofar as they represent not ignorance but knowledge of God, so also Spinoza does not reject miracles (in chapter 6 of his theologico-political treatise) insofar as they are viewed as signs (images, metaphors) whose narrative and rhetorical purpose is to enhance and to enlarge our sense of the awesomeness of divine action (our awe before the miraculous power and glory of God). He makes it clear that miracles depend on faith, not faith on miracles. Miracles are true insofar as faith is true. Miracles are false (idolatrous) insofar as faith is false (idolatrous). Miracles cannot and must not be used to demonstrate faith. Where, however, there is faith—knowledge of God—there miracles abound (so in King Lear, as we saw, Edgar tells his father Gloucester, after his fall into acquiescentia, into active acceptance of life, that his life’s a miracle). But there’s the rub. For where there is false faith, that is, ignorance of God or idolatry, there miracles—as idols reflecting ignorance of God—also flourish. Indeed, the challenge of miracles is identical with that of prophecy or revelation. As we have to distinguish between true and false prophets and between true and false revelations (as between Christ and anti-Christ)—for in appearance they are often identical—so we also have to judge between true and false miracles. The only basis for judging whether miracles are true or idolatrous is faith, that is, whether or not they support and foster the documenta of charity and justice. It is important to recall that Spinoza was appalled by the use of (above all, Platonic and Aristotelian) speculations (in the tradition of what he calls the dogmatism of Maimonides) to explain miracles as supernatural acts of God

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surpassing human knowledge or, in other words, to make the faith of human beings depend on their ignorance of God. Indeed, he terminates chapter 19 of the Theologico-Political Treatise with the statement that the sovereign powers of our time will retain absolute right over both sacred and civil matters only if “the dogmas of religion are not increased in great number and are not confused with the [philosophical] sciences” (229). The reason that we can be sure that in the above passage Spinoza associates miracles, not with the tyrannical ignorance of God but rather with the liberating (salvific) knowledge of God is that he relates them directly to Christ. Without exception in the Theologico-Political Treatise Christ, for Spinoza, represents true knowledge of God. He concludes his presentation of the Seven Dogmas of Faith (in chapter 14) with the observation that the one who firmly believes that God forgives the sins of men with the very mercy and grace by which he directs all things “truly knows Christ according to the spirit, and Christ is in him.” Indeed, Spinoza indicates that the right that the disciples of Christ had, as private men, to preach religion came from “the power that they received from Christ against unclean spirits,” not from the power of the supreme civil authorities. Spinoza now finds himself, however, in a peculiar bind. He holds that religion does not exist outside of (without) civil authority, yet he also wants to distinguish what he considers to be the universalism of Christianity from the particularity of the laws binding Jews (while holding at the same time that the teaching of charity and justice is the foundation, equally, of Jewish and Christian Scripture). It appears that Judaism has to begin civilly in order, when it becomes non-civil, to give birth to Christianity, which has to begin non-civilly, in order to become (in and through Judaism) the very principle of the democratic civil state. Does the father have to become the son in order to be the father? Is the son the father of humankind? (Feminist reformulations of these interrogative aperçus would increase their piquancy.) What for Spinoza is the spirit or the power of Christ? To address that question is to discover that he puts himself in yet another bind. He makes the right to constitute (the Christian) religion depend directly and uniquely on the power that the disciples receive privately from Christ—to oppose unclean spirits (which surely includes all of us mortal sinners, whether king or subject!)—as distinct from or even in opposition to the right of public religion that is received from the supreme civil powers. Yet he then immediately claims to delimit the right that flows from the power of Christ to those alone who can perform miracles. The power that Christ granted to his disciples was singular and is not (today) to be followed by others as an example. At the same time, however, when Spinoza states that to believe that God directs everything with mercy and grace is to know Christ according to the spirit and to have

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Christ within, it is evident that everyone is (can be) the disciple of Christ, that everyone can follow his universal, public, biblical (that is, Hebrew) teaching of charity and justice. Can one, consequently, not claim that the right to resist tyrannical authority flows from the power received from Christ (through the apostles) to preach throughout the world against those unclean spirits who subvert the universal teaching of justice and charity? Indeed, how would one distinguish the right of freely philosophizing, which embraces the dictates of reason as teaching the golden rule, from revelation, prophecy, or the power of Christ to perform miracles? But the idea that Christ teaches the dictates of reason indicates that the right based on the power of Christ is identical with the right based on the sovereign powers of the civil state, for they both flow uniquely from the dictates of reason, as we know. One suspects that Spinoza would say that there are no miracles today—that he knows of. But, surely, what he has shown is that, just as the people are made—they become— prophets by constituting the democratic civil state as the divine law, so the people are made—they become—the apostles of Christ by enacting the miraculously democratic union of the divine law with the civil law. The miracle of modernity is that the people, while born in ignorance, sin, and slavery, are made—they become—free in and through their knowledge of God. The profound ambiguity with which Spinoza approaches Christ here—he is universal (ethically) yet is not an example to be followed (politically)!— reflects the general concept of Christ that he presents in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise, especially in two key passages as found in chapters 1 and 4. Since the two passages are broadly similar, I shall examine only the passage in chapter 1. Here Spinoza discusses Christ in the context of examining the means that God uses to communicate with human beings (and thus raises, indirectly, how he also understands prophecy, revelation, and miracles, including their relationship to Christ). He initiates his discussion, universally, by stating that “we clearly understand that God can communicate himself immediately to men, for, without using corporeal means, he communicates his essence to our mind” (14). In other words, we know (according to the ontological argument) that God exists necessarily as substance, as the cause of itself. But, uncannily, as in the Ethics, Spinoza then immediately appears to limit this universality, as if to remind us that, as finite modes, we human beings are born into the natural state, with the result that we are subject to the passive affects, the external causes of which we are ignorant. If, therefore, Spinoza continues, someone were to perceive “by mind alone” things that were not contained in the first foundations of our knowledge or that could not be deduced from them, “his mind would necessarily have to be more outstanding and far more excellent than the human mind.” Such perfection above others, he declares, is not found “outside of Christ, to whom the ordinances of God, which

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lead men to salvation, are revealed without words or visions [as in prophecy] but immediately.” It is in this sense, Spinoza observes, that “we can say that the wisdom of God, that is, wisdom that is supra-human (supra humanam), assumed human nature in Christ and [that] Christ was the way of salvation (viam salutis).” Spinoza adds that he is patently neither discussing nor denying the things [i.e., the dogmas of, for example, incarnation and resurrection] that some churches claim about Christ, “for I freely confess that I do not grasp them” (14). He affirms, he declares, solely what he finds in Scripture, which is not that God appeared to or spoke to Christ but that God was revealed through Christ to the Apostles, that Christ is the way of salvation, etc. Thus, while Moses spoke with God face to face, as a man speaks with his comrade, that is, by way of their mediating bodies, Christ communicated with God mind to mind. It follows, consequently, that the prophets received their revelations from God through words and images by way of a more vivid imagination, not, like Christ, without words and images, by way of a more perfect mind. In this extraordinary passage from chapter 1, which I summarize in the above paragraph, Spinoza formulates two sets of distinctions regarding Christ that are critically important to grasp. But it takes careful analysis to sort them out. For, in making these distinctions, it is not clear how they are to be understood in relationship to each other, especially in light of the fact that the basic structure shaping Spinoza’s thought involves, as we well know, the dialectic between, for example, the natural state and the civil state, between passive affects and active affects (the dictates of reason), and between slavery and freedom. It is also important to keep in mind that the sharp distinction that Spinoza draws here in chapter 1 between Christ and Moses (and the prophets, generally) he later problematizes (contests) by showing that they teach the same doctrine of charity and justice (which we also learn subsequently to be the dictates of reason). The two sets of distinctions that Spinoza formulates regarding Christ are as follows. First, while God communicates his essence directly to human beings through their minds, without corporeal means (that is, without their bodies), he communicates with Christ immediately in a way that shows the mind of Christ to be far superior to the human mind, yet this way is also said to be mind to mind. Christ possesses a supra-human (divine) wisdom that assumes human nature in him, although Spinoza is quick to add that he neither affirms nor denies Christian dogmas (like the incarnation or the resurrection). The knowledge that Christ possesses, we consequently see, is not human, and it is evidently also not philosophical. For Spinoza would surely view the human and the philosophical as indistinguishable from each other, since he shows in the Ethics, as we know, that all human beings possess adequate knowledge of

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the absolutely infinite essence of God, which he associates with the third kind of knowledge, than which there is none higher. In holding that the knowledge that Christ possesses is supra-human, does not Spinoza thus open himself to severe (irrefutable?) theological challenge? Since the knowledge that Christ possesses is clearly not accessible to human beings, given that his mind is far superior to the human mind, how can he be knowable to other human beings except through faith? How, in fact, does Spinoza himself know this suprahuman wisdom of Christ? If it is not by human knowledge or the human mind, is it then by supra-human faith? This impasse take us to the second distinction that Spinoza makes, this time between Christ and Moses (together with the prophets, generally). This distinction we are familiar with. While God communicates with Christ immediately, mind to mind, he communicates his revelations to Moses and to the prophets by means of their imagination and through the media of visions, words, and images (together with history). But this distinction is open to severe (irrefutable?) challenge on the basis of a number of considerations, which include the following: 1. We have already seen Spinoza initiate his discussion of prophecy, at the beginning of chapter 1, by indicating that natural knowledge (philosophy, reason) is no less exalted and true than prophetic knowledge in terms of both its source (God) and its certitude. While both there and in note 2 he then claims to distinguish natural knowledge from prophetic knowledge in terms of audience (and of the media of communication), we have now seen that such a distinction becomes meaningless. Or is Spinoza’s point now that Christ is superior to both philosophical (human) knowledge of God and to prophetic knowledge of God? Is he superior to both (human) reason and (divine) faith? 2. In articulating this second distinction between Christ and Moses, Spinoza uses criteria that are indistinguishable from those that he uses to distinguish between natural knowledge and prophetic knowledge, although here he puts the emphasis on the media, not the audience. Because he uses the media (the bodily means of imagination, vision, and words) to distinguish between natural knowledge and prophetic knowledge, they do not then allow him to maintain his distinction between Christ’s supra-human knowledge and the knowledge that is possessed by human beings (who are also philosophers). While Spinoza holds that God speaks to Moses body to body, as between friends, he also holds that God communicates with both human beings (as philosophers) and Christ mind to mind, although their minds are said by him to be essentially different. But this distinction between corporeal and incorporeal communication is patently absurd, in light of two simple considerations.

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a. Since all communication—like all community—presupposes that human relations are based on charity and justice, clearly the distinction between true and false communication is not a matter of distinguishing between body and mind. b. How, or in what sense, are Moses and the prophets and all the people of the Bible not (also) human beings (and so, too, philosophers)? 3. Later in the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza acknowledges that the audiences to which Christ and the apostles preached were no different from the audiences of the prophets. For they involved those to whose inadequate ideas (or imagination) the revealed truth of charity and justice had to be accommodated. 4. Spinoza’s claim that God communicates his essence immediately to the mind of human beings (as philosophers) and to the supra-human mind of Christ—yet to each in essentially different ways—without corporeal means (bodies) and without corporeal media (images and language and later, as we know, he will add history) is naïve and in itself patently untrue. Furthermore, it evidently contradicts the properly sophisticated claim that we have seen him make that religion is not found outside of (without) the mediation of and the mediators within the civil state, that is, the supreme powers, who are the people themselves in the democratic civil state. The paradox here—one of so many paradoxes!—is that the people, in living at once communally and personally by the natural right of the dictates of reason, live by the teaching of Christ, which is the teaching of the prophets, which is summarized in the Seven Dogmas of Faith as founded on the doctrine of charity and justice. Spinoza is much too great a thinker and his three major texts are much too precious for us not to take what he writes with utmost seriousness, even in those cases when it is clear that the distinctions that he elaborates fail to articulate the differences that he claims to make. Our challenge, our responsibility as readers of his texts, as thinkers, is, as he would himself say, not to mock and to deride his effort but to understand why and how this muddle (I would not say confusion!) of distinctions occurs so that we ourselves can learn from Spinoza himself to clear it up. Christ has defeated most thinkers in modernity, as Nietzsche testifies so plangently in The Anti-Christ! Are Hegel and Kierkegaard (and perhaps also Kant, in a more limited way) the only philosophers—I do not consider here those thinkers whose media of communication are theological, literary, visual, or musical—who take the measure of Christ and survive the measure to which they consequently subject themselves? I want to be clear that I do not consider Spinoza to be defeated by Christ. What is important is that we readers not be defeated by the muddle of distinctions that occurs when Spinoza undertakes to comprehend Christ.

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I have already indicated that, just as Spinoza would have no explanation of how the religion of the ancient Hebrews, which did not exist outside of (without) the civil state, then survives when their civil state vanishes, so he is perplexed as to how Christianity, in not adhering to his principle that religion is not found outside of (without) the civil state, begins universally without civil authorization. The right by which the disciples of Christ preach religion flows from the power that they receive from him privately, including the power to perform miracles. Yet Spinoza denies that others have the right to claim empowerment from Christ, even as his doctrine of charity and justice, which is also the doctrine of the prophets, becomes the basis of the dictates of reason and thus of the very power and authority of the democratic state. I think the same “muddle” exists in chapter 1 where, as we have now seen, Spinoza claims to distinguish the supra-human or divine mind of Christ from both the human (and philosophical) mind and the prophetic “imagination,” yet all three—human being (as philosopher), prophet, and Christ—are indistinguishable from each other in terms of both the certitude of their knowledge, which is (of) God, and the source from which this knowledge flows, which is God. The problem that Spinoza here faces is that, on the one hand, as he distinguishes the mind of Christ, as supra-human or divine, from the mind of human beings (as philosophers), the knowledge of Christ becomes indistinguishable from prophetic knowledge in the sense that neither is accessible to the natural light (notwithstanding the very different terminology that Spinoza uses in his attempt to mask the essential similarity between them). On the other hand, as he distinguishes the mind of Christ from the mind (as “imagination”) of the prophets, the criteria that he uses to effect this distinction render the mind of Christ indistinguishable from the mind of human beings (as philosophers). The result is what I call a muddle of distinctions that prevents Spinoza from attaining his goal. The resultant muddle, however, is salutary for two essential reasons. First, we see that Spinoza does not violate the essentially dialectical structure of his thought, which rests on his concept of truth as its own standard. This concept holds that the fundamental distinction to be made is between truth and falsehood, between adequate and inadequate ideas, between the civil state and the natural state, not between human beings (as philosophers) and Christ, on the one hand, or between the prophets and Christ, on the other. Indeed, the very fact that the “minds” of all three bear witness to the truth of the doctrine of charity and justice, as the dictates of reason, testifies eloquently to the concept of truth as its own standard, the standard both of itself and of what is false. The second reason why this muddle is salutary can be put in the terms of a question. Why does Spinoza undertake to multiply distinctions beyond necessity in the scholastic tradition, of which he was so critical, and consequently arrive at a muddle and not simply adhere to the basic distinctions

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structuring his thought? While an adequate response to this (genre of) question is complex, the simple answer is that, in arguing for the separation of philosophy from theology (faith, revelation, prophecy), Spinoza, as I have been indicating throughout this study, does not yet (fully) possess the modern understanding of the relationship between truth and history or also consequently between truth and textuality, although his hermeneutical insight is profound. He finds it difficult to acknowledge that philosophy (the human) is indistinguishable from both prophecy and Christ. Yet he is fearlessly bold in holding—in demonstrating!—that all human beings possess adequate knowledge of the absolute, infinite, and eternal essence of God, which is consistent with the unconditional demands of both the prophets and Christ. God, as both source and truth (certitude), no more belongs to prophecy than to natural (that is, to human) reason, he holds. For God is his own standard, just as human reason and the teaching of both prophets and Christ—charity and justice—are equally their own standard. Consistent with the fact that Spinoza does not directly see that Christianity universalizes the civil state of the ancient Hebrews and thus holds up all civil states to the same prophetic standard of truth is the fact that he also does not directly see that Christ, consistent with his prophetic forebears, is the philosopher of the civil state, par excellence. To know that the divine law is not found outside of (without) the civil state, to know that God directs all things by the mercy and the grace by which he forgives human sins, to know that he is the standard of charity and justice is to know the spirit of Christ and to possess Christ within—the community. It thus turns out that yet another distinction that Spinoza makes collapses into a muddle. The right of preaching religion universally, the right of holding up justice and charity as the absolute standard to which the supremely civil powers must conform, is said, by Spinoza, to flow uniquely from the power received from Christ. But such power, as we have now seen, is simply that of the democratically constituted civil state whose sovereign people, in undertaking to live by the dictates of reason, make charity and justice the standard for all. Miracles, then, surely continue to occur today, accommodated, appropriately (historically), to the mind of the people (to the spirit of the times). We learn from Spinoza’s brilliant critique of biblical miracles that they are not to be understood as representing ignorance of God on the part of human beings and so as expressing their impotent, unfree dependence on supernatural events, the causes of which they are ignorant. The miracle, rather, is the paradox that human existence is created from nothing, from nothing natural, and so is freely necessary. Consequently, Spinoza’s claim that God communicates his essence—that his essence involves and expresses necessary existence— directly to human minds can only mean that necessary existence is the miracle without precedence in nature. The miracle is that Adam and Eve are not

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free to disobey the absolutely contradictory and impossible dictate of God that they not know good and evil, that they not know him as the power constituting their natural right to love their neighbor as themselves. The miracle is that human freedom and empowerment come only through knowledge of good and evil, through responsibility for good and evil before the other in the sovereign, civil state of the covenant. The freedom of Adam and Eve does not come with the idyll of naming the animals in the natural state of the garden. On the contrary, their freedom comes with, in Hegel’s words, the stern labor of the spirit, which includes receiving with acquiescentia the good news—the blessed, saving, and eternal news—that death is natural, that human beings, while living in the natural state, live of the civil state and its sovereign principle of charity and justice. Miracles express the freedom and power of human beings to make the eternal transition from the natural state to the civil state. It follows, then, that miracles, as they occur today, as they occurred in the times of Moses and Jesus, are not to be confused with the idols to which people (including theologians and philosophers) in their ignorance reduce their knowledge of God. Like revelation, prophecy, and the power of Christ, miracles, in their infinite variety (and with the infinite risk of becoming life-denying idols), are the eternal reminder that there is more to be found in the necessary existence of the civil state, outside of (without) which the kingdom of God does not exist, than is to be thought in the philosophy that fails to account for its separation from (and thus for its concord with) theology. Spinoza’s own texts, like all great texts, are liberating miracles. Notwithstanding the muddle into which their occasionally over-wrought distinctions collapse, they point to the fact that it is only insofar as we have faith in them—that we read them as we want to be read by them; that they hold up for us, as they hold up for themselves, the concept that truth is its own necessary standard—that we can be empowered and liberated by them. It is now time to summarize our prolix discussion of the second step that Spinoza takes in support of his goal of showing that democracy is the civil state that optimally supports freedom of thought and speech. Having demonstrated in Step A the paradox that democracy is the freest and the most natural civil state precisely because in it alone do people—as both (private) individuals and (public) community—transform naturally contradictory opposition into the miracle of reciprocally civil relationship, so in Step B he demonstrates that religion, or the kingdom of God, is not found outside of (without) the civil state. But the paradox here is that Spinoza in no sense subordinates religion to the civil state or the divine to the human. He does not identify right with might. While the supreme civil powers (the sovereign people) have authority over not only human but also divine law, it is also the case

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that the standard of what constitutes human law includes and expresses the divine law. It is for this reason that Spinoza does not (and cannot) deny that revelation, prophecy, miracles, and what he calls the power of Christ remain the basis of challenging tyrannical or inhuman rule (within those civil states in which the union of the human and the divine presupposes their separation, as distinct from their immediate identity in the Roman civil state, which is then played out in interminably contradictory, civil conflict, both “republican” and imperial). What I have called the inseparability of divine law (the kingdom of God) from the civil state means that, historically and ontologically, the civil state is truly human solely insofar as it abides by the standard of divine law. It is no less the case, however, that the divine law is truly holy only insofar as it serves truly human(e) ends (and not the merely arbitrary or miraculous ends of, say, a priestly caste, which denies freedom of thought and speech to all). We discovered how extraordinary it is that, in drawing an analogy between the authority of the supreme civil powers and the authority of the prophets, what Spinoza actually shows us is that the multitudo, as the whole of the democratic people, wears the mantle of prophetic or divine authority. We see, then, that the true heir of ancient, biblical theocracy is modern democracy, in which the whole of the people, in transferring their natural power to the supreme power (imperium), in fact retain their power as the paradox of acting in accordance with the golden rule—that they have the right of enjoying power in relationship to others only insofar as others have the right of enjoying power in relationship to them. The other paradoxical formulation of power as the free, equal, and reciprocal right of all human beings is the inalienable right of human power (or the inalienable power of human right). While the multitudo—as both individual and collective (private and public)— cedes its natural right (of doing everything in its power) and so retains it in and through the recognition (the pactum) that there is no power outside of (without) the right of others and no right outside of (without) the power of others, so no human being has the power to cede his right or the right to cede his power. The fact that the people transfer or cede their power in the name of the pactum or of the right of all and the fact that no individual has the right to cede or to transfer his power (or the power to cede or to transfer his right) to another together constitute the paradox of the sovereign, democratic civil state. Because the sovereign people are not born but made (created) democratic by constituting the right to power and the power of right, they eschew (cede) the identification and thus the opposition of power (might) and right as the natural state of domination (at once civil and theological). It is precisely because philosophy, in its separation from theology, is not identical with and so

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opposed to theology, that human law, in its separation from divine law, is not identical with and so opposed to divine law. It equally follows, then, that, as theology, in its separation from philosophy, is not opposed to (or identical with) philosophy, so divine law, in its separation from human law, is not opposed to (or identical with) human law. The fact that the supreme civil powers have absolute authority over both human law and divine law does not mean, consequently, that power (might) is right but rather that human law is true only insofar as it is not opposed to but embraces (yet is not reducible to) divine law and that divine law is true only insofar as it is not opposed to but embraces (yet is not reducible to) human law. The moment that one is advanced as true in opposition to (or in identity with) the other then both are revealed to be equally false (as bearing false prophecy). The relationship between divine law and human law is embodied, then, it is evident, in the relationship of democratic citizens to each other. Their separation from each other as singular individuals bespeaks (reveals) their reciprocal inseparability (or what Spinoza calls the union of one mind). In showing us that the people, in receiving the decrees of the supreme civil powers—who are themselves—thus are made (they become) the sovereign authorities themselves, Spinoza also shows us how very paradoxical, because democratic, the concept of revelation itself is. He claims to distinguish between natural (or human) knowledge and prophetic (or divine) knowledge, on the basis, however, not of the divine source and the divine certitude that they commonly share, but solely of what he considers to be their diverse, human audiences. But we have seen that it is precisely democracy that shows this distinction to have no basis in either religion (as truly civil and human) or the civil state (as truly religious and divine). For the recipients of prophetic revelation cannot receive the word of God—the documenta of charity and justice—on the basis of what Spinoza calls “mere faith” or, in other words, merely passively (i.e., blindly and ignorantly). The prophets cannot teach— charity and justice—arbitrarily or tyrannically, that is, uncharitably or unjustly. The prophets cannot reveal the Word of God as a contradictory teaching that is to be accepted by its listeners simply as a miracle reflecting their ignorance of God. For it is precisely prophetic revelation that is to be judged by itself alone, by its content, by charity and justice, by truth as its own standard. In other words, prophetic revelation, insofar as it abides by its own standard of truth, empowers its listeners to live by the standard of charity and justice and to demand that others—prophets, kings, people, outsiders—equally abide by this standard. For how we learn (how we receive the word of God) is surely how we live. Not only does Spinoza hold (in the Ethics) that God is known by all human beings as their highest good, but he also shows hermeneutically (in the Theologico-Political Treatise) that readers of the Bible,

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as recipients of the Word of God, must always be in a position to judge the truth of what they read (and not merely be dependent on the miraculous interpretations of others). The biblical text, like all texts, is subject to human error; for its authors are sinful, and God is not found outside of (without) human mediators, who err. Furthermore, because readers of the Bible are warned to beware of false prophets (and anti-Christs), they must always have the responsibility of judging between true and false prophecy. Just as individual citizens have the right to judge and the responsibility of judging the truth of the decrees of the supreme civil powers, so readers of the Bible (as of every text) have the right to judge and the responsibility of judging the truth of prophetic revelation. But the paradox here, one of infinite paradoxes, is that, just as the Bible is divine and unerring, so the civil state, in which the Bible and its God are found (and outside of which they do not exist), is unerring. This explains why, when Spinoza examines the issue whether the imperium itself is subject to error (whether it can sin), he distinguishes between the standard to which the imperium is subject and that standard itself (which is the imperium). There is nothing true or false—nothing good or evil—found outside of (without) the civil state, outside of (without) the democratic imperium. There is no appeal outside of (without) the civil state, for example, to the Bible, God, or conscience. There is nothing outside of (without) the imperium. But within the imperium there is appeal, always, to, say, the Bible, God, or conscience. Thus Spinoza is careful to observe that the imperium itself is not outside of (without) the law. It is not lawless (except insofar as it becomes tyrannical and falls into contradiction, etc.). To paraphrase what Spinoza says about monarchy, while the will of the imperium is law, not everything that the imperium wills is law. Or we can say that, while the Bible is divine and does not err, not everything that the Bible says (not everything that we read in the Bible) is true. We see, therefore, that democracy is the sole, non-contradictory imperium, the sole imperium that does not fall into selfcontradiction. The democratic imperium is, consequently, precisely like the biblical text. It is divine (unerring) but human and so sinful. It is the revealed word of God, yet it demands interpretation on the part of those who live within it (its citizens). Truth is not found outside of (without) the Bible or the imperium (as democratic). Yet, as Spinoza says, truth is interpretive practice, the eternal work of living charitably and justly. Thus, it turns out that democratic citizenship is no less a hermeneutical enterprise than reading the Bible. There is no truth, whether religious or civil, that is found outside of (without) human mediators and mediation. Interpretation constitutes the right and responsibility of all citizens, as of all readers, who are at one and the same time civil and religious.

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Step C: The Civil State and Freedom That the civil state is not natural and that, as truly civil or human and thus democratic, the state is inseparably divine brings us to the third step that Spinoza takes in the final chapter of the Theologico-Political Treatise. The title of chapter 20 aptly characterizes Step C: “It is shown that in the free civil state (in libera republica) everyone is permitted to think what he desires and to say what he thinks.” Spinoza argues that the democratic civil state not only constitutes but also is constituted by freedom of thought and speech. In other words, just as democracy not only requires but also fosters freedom of thought and speech, so freedom of thought and speech both requires and fosters democracy. Or we can say that, just as democracy creates (the very conditions of) free thought and speech, so freedom of thought and speech creates democracy (as the conditions of its own civility). Consistent with his dynamic conception of reality as the eternal transition to perfection and of the transition to perfection as constituting reality is the fact that, while not directly saying so, Spinoza does not view either democracy or freedom of thought and speech in the formal terms of a determinate stasis. Rather, what he shows us is that the more democratic the civil state is the greater the freedom of thought and speech of its citizens is and that the greater the freedom of thought and speech of its citizens is the more democratic the civil state is. The dynamic relationship between the democratic civil state and freedom of thought and speech also characterizes the appeal on the part of Spinoza to power, to natural power, as that which essentially constitutes human right. Since human beings have the power to think what they desire and to say what they think, not only is it foolish or, rather, contradictory, he holds, to attempt to suppress it, but also the flourishing of this power is what constitutes the glory of human being and thus of the civil state that fosters it. This power, however, is equally a right, for it is the right of human beings to endeavor to maximize their utile to the utmost of their power. What then transforms my natural right to power from being merely contradictory power over others (and so from being merely contradictory dependence on those whose power is always greater than my own) into civil right is my recognition (in and through the pactum) that power is freedom (empowerment). That I have the right to desire, to think, to say, and to do everything that is in my power is rendered impotent and contradictory in the natural state. It is only in the democratic civil state that I (can and must) recognize that I have a right to my power, that my power is a right, solely insofar as I recognize equally that you have a right to your power and that your power is a right—not only for you but also for me. The other name of the right to power as mutually recognized or reciprocally shared empowerment is freedom.

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The right to power, we see, then, is power that is liberated from contradiction and rendered the empowering paradox of right relationship. Right is power made legitimate (legislative). In the natural state the right to power (power as my right) is contradictory and destructive (mutually). In the civil state of democracy—in the “free republic”—power is the right of all human beings to think what they desire and to say what they think. In the natural state might is right and so mutually contradictory (and destructive). In the civil state—of democracy—power and right are not contradictory and thus mutually destructive opposites but paradoxical and thus mutually empowering differences such that their separation from each other is their union in and through each other. Right is meaningful only when it is united (but not identified) with power; and power is meaningful only when it is united (but not identified) with right. Yet the risk always remains, in the democratic civil state, that power and right will be identified with each other such that they become hierarchically opposed to each other. The consequence of the dynamic relationship between power and right is that we see once again that democracy is, in the most fundamental sense, the civil state in which desire is rendered rational or in which reason is rendered the desire of all (although it is interesting to note that in chapter 20 Spinoza does not invoke the concept of the dictates of reason). Just as desire in the natural state is irrational—because contradictory and thus impotent—so desire in the civil state is rational. In the pactum or as the multitudo desire empowers individuals to realize their conatus as the essence of their existence to the very highest degree possible. Thus we see that it is only in the democratic civil state that human beings are empowered to recognize their desire as the good. It is truly of the essence of democracy that the good is what its citizens desire. They do not desire something because they judge it—because it is judged (by others)—to be the good. Rather, they judge something to be the good because they desire it. In the democratic civil state reason, then, is appetite rendered self-conscious of itself. Reason involves the conscious recognition on part of individuals that their desire (like power) is not arbitrary and contradictory (and so destructive and unrealizable) only insofar as they desire others to do unto them as they do unto others. Whereas in the natural state reason and desire are at once identical with and hierarchically opposed to each other, in the democratic civil state the reciprocal union of desire and reason, their inseparability, bespeaks their separation from each other. Spinoza presupposes the dynamic relationship between power and right and between desire and reason when he initiates chapter 20 with the observation that rulers cannot so easily “command” minds as tongues. Nondemocratic rule would be easy, he observes, if sovereigns could compel their

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subjects to accept their decrees about what is true or false, good or evil, and fair or unfair. Still, as he recalls that he noted at the beginning of chapter 17, it cannot be brought about that the mind [of an individual] be absolutely [at the command] of the right of another (alterius juris). Indeed, no one can transfer to another his natural right or his faculty of freely reasoning and judging about whatever matters or be compelled to do so. Hence, it happens, therefore, that a civil state is held to be violent [tyrannical] that oppresses minds (in animos est); and that its high majesty is seen to do injury to its subjects and to usurp their right when it wants to prescribe to everyone what to embrace as true and to reject as false and furthermore [to dictate] the opinions by which the mind of everyone ought to be moved in devotion regarding God. For these matters are [at the command] of the right of each individual (uniuscujusque juris), which no one, even if he wished, can cede [alienate]. (230)

It is important to note that it is precisely what might appear to be private or internal—mind—that public (or external) authority does not have the power or, consequently, the right to “command” or to control. It is clear, therefore, that the “mind” of individuals has enormous public (or external) implications. Indeed, not even individuals have the (private) right to cede (to alienate) their (“public”) right to thinking what they desire, especially regarding principles of truth and falsehood, good and evil, or fairness and unfairness, all of which fundamentally bear on the public utile of the civil state. Just as Spinoza holds that human beings are subject to their (passive) affects, so he proceeds to acknowledge that their minds can be influenced in innumerable ways. Still, because it is impossible for rulers to control the thoughts of their subjects, that is, they cannot think for them, they oppose reason and so lack the power and thus the “absolute right” in attempting to do so. “For we have shown,” he recalls, “that the right of the supreme powers is determined by their power” (231). He also recalls that he has already shown that the ultimate end of the civil state is not to dominate men, or to restrain them by fear, or to make them do the right of another (alterius juris) but, on the contrary, to liberate each individual from fear so that he may live as securely as possible, that is, so that he may optimally retain his natural right of existing and operating without harm to himself and to others (alterius). The end of the civil state, I say, is not to turn men from rational beings into beasts or automatons but, on the contrary, [to allow them] to exercise their mind and body safely in [all] their functions; to use their free reason; to avoid strife due to hatred, anger, or deceit; and not with evil mind to be opposed to each other. Therefore, the end of the civil state is truly freedom. (231–32)

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Spinoza points out that, in forming the civil state, “each individual, therefore, cedes the right only of acting from the decree alone of his mind, not, however, of reasoning and judging” (232). While one cannot (without being seditious) act in opposition to the decrees of the supreme powers, one can think, judge, and say what one desires, provided that one speaks or teaches from reason alone and not in deceit, anger, or hatred and does not defend the introduction of something new into the civil state on the basis only of his own decree. Spinoza had, in fact, already noted earlier in chapter 20 that, while freedom of speech cannot be removed from subjects, this freedom must operate within the constraints of the common good (231). So now he points out that, if a citizen shows that a law is against sound reason and should be repealed, while at the same time submitting his opinion to the judgment of the supreme power and not acting in opposition to it, “he deserves well of the civil state as an optimal citizen” (232). It follows, therefore, he argues, consistent with the right and the authority of the supreme powers to decide what is to be done, that is, with the peace of the civil state, that citizens have the right to say and to teach what they think. Indeed, this right is consistent with both piety and justice, which must serve the common good of the civil state. It is on this same basis, Spinoza continues, that one can easily see that seditious opinions in the civil state are “those that at the very moment that they are posited annul the pactum by which every individual ceded the right to act from his own will.” For example, it would be seditious for someone to think that the supreme civil power was not in possession of its right (sui juris), that one was not obligated to keep promises, that it was opportune for each individual to live by his own will, or to hold any other opinion that was directly inimical to the pactum. Why the individual would be seditious in holding such opinions, Spinoza observes, is “indeed not so much because of the judgment or opinion as because of the deed (factum) that such judgments involve, of course, because simply by thinking in such a way he breaks faith, as given tacitly or explicitly, with the supreme power” (233). However, he then points out that all other opinions, which do not directly threaten the existence of the pactum, cannot be considered seditious. Spinoza proceeds to recall that the faith of an individual regarding the civil state, just as with regard to God, can be known from works alone, namely, from love of neighbor. It follows, therefore, he observes, that the optimal civil state grants the same freedom of philosophizing to every individual that religion does. He acknowledges that from time to time disadvantages (incommoda) may arise from such freedom, yet asks whether even the wisest institutions do not at times give rise to disadvantages. “He who wants to determine everything with laws will rather aggravate vices than correct them,” he remarks. “What cannot be prohibited must necessarily be conceded, even if

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harm often follows from it.” He points out, for example, that, while evils follow from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, we bear them because they cannot be proscribed by laws. “Therefore, how much more freedom of judgment, which is assuredly a virtue and cannot be suppressed, ought to be granted.” Freedom of thought and judgment, he continues, has no disadvantages that the authority of the civil state cannot handle, not to mention the fact that “this freedom is of the first necessity in promoting the sciences and the arts; for these are cultivated with happy success only by those who have their free judgment minimally preoccupied (qui judicium liberum, and minime praeoccupatum habent)” (234). Spinoza observes that, if freedom of judgment and speech is suppressed, then, because human beings will never stop thinking what they desire, they will think one thing and say another, with the result that good faith, which is a prime necessity in the civil state, will be corrupted and abominable sycophancy and deceitfulness encouraged. Such, then, he states, is the basis of deception and the corruption of all the good arts. Indeed, since human beings cannot be made to speak in predefined fashion, suppression of speech will only result in generating opposition to the civil authorities. What especially worries Spinoza is that the suppression of free judgment and speech will be used against individuals of liberal education and good character. Consequently, not only are laws that are enacted against beliefs and opinions ineffective and so dangerous to the civil state, but they also encourage sectarian strife. His conclusion, then, is as follows: If [good] faith, therefore, is to be prized above servility so that the supreme powers optimally retain sovereignty (imperium) and are not driven to cede [authority] to the seditious, freedom of judgment is necessarily to be granted and men thus to be ruled (regendi sunt) so that, although they openly think diverse and contrary things, they, nevertheless, live [together] concordantly. Nor can we doubt that this rationale for ruling (ratio imperandi) is the best and suffers the fewest disadvantages, indeed, since it maximally agrees with the nature of men. For in the democratic civil state (which comes closest to the natural state) we have shown that all [men] have made a pact (pacifci) to act, but not to judge and to reason, from common decree. That is, because all men cannot think the same thing, they have made a pact that that [proposal], which has the most votes, will have the force of decree, while in the meanwhile retaining the authority of repealing the same where they see better. Therefore, where freedom of judging is less conceded to men, there they recede further from the maximal natural state, with the consequence that the rule is more tyrannical (violentius regnatur). . . . It stands clearer than noonday that schismatics are rather those who condemn the writings of others and seditiously incite the petulant people (vulgum petulantem) against writers, than writers themselves, who for the most part write only for the learned and call reason alone to their aid. Finally, the agitators (perturbatores) are

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really those who, nevertheless, want to remove freedom of judgment in the free civil state, which cannot be suppressed. (237)

Spinoza then summarizes his argument in chapter 20 in six points: 1. It is impossible to stamp out the freedom of men to say what they think. 2. This freedom can be conceded to everyone (uniquique), saving (salvo) the right and the authority of the supreme civil powers, so long as the individual does not on his own assume the license to introduce something as right (jus) into the civil state or to do something against the received laws (leges). 3. Everyone can have this freedom, consistent with the peace of the civil state, while whatever disadvantages there are that may arise from it can easily be handled. 4. Everyone can have this freedom, consistent with piety. 5. Laws that are enacted about speculative matters are altogether useless. 6. This freedom not only can but also must be conceded (to everyone) in order to preserve the peace of the civil state, piety, and the right of the supreme powers. In concluding the Theologico-Political Treatise with the argument that freedom of thought and speech both can and must be conceded to everyone in the democratic civil state, Spinoza attains his third step in showing that human beings are free to think what they desire and to say what they think. Just as the separation of philosophy from theology means that the latter grants the freedom to philosophize to every individual, so democracy is the civil state that both can grant and must grant the freedom of thought and speech to every individual. Indeed, democracy is the freest civil state because it is the most natural state. But thus we see how tightly bound together are the three steps that Spinoza takes in demonstrating that, because human beings have the natural power to think what they desire and to say what they think, they can and must possess that power as a right. Still, there is no direct step from the natural state to the civil state, from nature to freedom, from the natural enmity of singular individuals to their separate existence yet inseparable unity in and through the democratic pactum (or multitudo), from power to right, from “is” to “must” (ought), or from desire to reason. For, in the paradoxical second step, since the separation of the human law from the divine law entails the inseparability of the divine law from the human law (the kingdom of God does not exist outside of or without civil state), the civil state does not exist outside of (without) the divine law. Indeed, the fact that it is the paradoxical relationship of the human law and the divine law that constitutes the civil state is hardly surprising, given that it is in its separation from theology that the freedom to philosophize is conceded (created).

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Yet, miraculously, the sole content of thinking for philosophy is God, whose absolute and infinite essence is (naturally!) known to all human beings. Surely, however, it is these very human beings who are empowered by the democratic civil state—who are themselves inseparably separate!—to think what they desire and to say what they think. Still, the paradox is that human beings in the civil state cannot, as Spinoza points out, just think anything. They cannot think anything that implies breaking faith with the pactum, the pact of the golden rule, whereby all individuals cede any merely “natural” or “singular” desire or thought that would violate the freedom, equality, and solidarity of their fellow human beings in the civil state. It is surely also the case for Spinoza that one cannot just think anything philosophical. One cannot, for example, think that God does not exist. One cannot think that one’s mind does not exist. One cannot cede one’s mind or power of judgment to another just as one cannot cede one’s power to exist to another. One no more has the right to do harm to the neighbor than one has the right to cede love for oneself, to give up one’s power of conatus, to another. The right to persevere in existence is not found outside of (without) its power, and the power to persevere in existence is not found outside of (without) its right. That the civil state can be truly natural only insofar as its citizens have fallen from the impossibly contradictory, natural state of ignorance into the democratic imperium of freely knowing good and evil—in Step A; that the civil state can have authority over both human law and divine law only insofar as the human law embodies the divine law as love of neighbor and insofar as the divine law is known in the human law as love of neighbor—in Step B; that democracy is the sole civil state in which human beings are free to think what they desire and to say what they think—in Step C: these three steps together show that it is precisely the prophetic revelation of charity and justice that constitutes democracy as the civil state, whose citizens are the receivers of the divine word who become—they are made (they are not born)—the prophets, the interpreters, the mediators, the thinkers, the philosophers, the doers, the sovereigns, the creators . . . of the divine word of the democratic civil state. Just as God does not exist outside of (without) the democratic civil state, outside of (without) the mediating citizens of democracy—except in the partial and mutilated images of ignorance: miracle and idol—so the democratic civil state does not exist outside of (without) God. But this relationship of inseparable separability is always one of democratic mediation and interpretation, what Spinoza in the Ethics calls the transition to ever more perfect realization of the exemplar of human life. It is moving to grasp how profoundly Spinoza understands the mutual interdependence of mind and imperium as together constituting the civil state of democracy. All human beings possess the inalienable right to their mind as

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the power of judgment, the right of thinking what they desire and of saying what they think. The mind is absolute—as the dialectic of power and right. Neither one individual, nor another individual, nor the civil state (as the unity of all individuals in exercising their power in relationship to each other) has the right to violate (to tyrannize over) the mind of any individual. If anyone undertakes to violate the mind (of another, which can be oneself), then right is reduced to power and one has returned to the natural state of contradiction, in which the violator of mind is no more secure than the one whose mind is violated, since in the natural state every individual is surpassed by and destroyed by a yet more violent individual ad infinitum. But to hold that the mind is absolute (infinite) does not mean that it is without error. Rather, it is precisely because the mind is the standard of itself that it is free to err (unlike the mind of Adam and Eve before their fall into the knowledge of good and evil). The mind, it is clear, is like the biblical text. Indeed, as I show in volume I of this study, Spinoza makes the mind the very criterion, standard, or exemplar of the truth of the biblical text, as the mind is itself subject to the revealed teaching of the Bible, the doctrine of charity and justice. The mind, in being made in the image of God, is the cause of itself. The mind is perfect, but perfection, we recall, is the reality of making the transition to ever greater perfection (consistent with the third kind of knowledge). That every human being is equal in possessing the power of mind as his right and that mind, therefore, is the sovereign authority, which is empowered (created) by, as it empowers (creates), the democratic civil state, brings us, once again, to the issue of how we are to understand the relationship between politics and ethics in Spinoza. Just as the mind, in the civil state that is democratic, is absolute, so the imperium, in which all human beings as citizens of democracy enjoy freedom of mind, is also absolute. There is nothing human or divine that exists outside of (without) the democratic civil state. But we can also say that there is nothing human or divine that exists outside of (without) the mind of the democratic citizen. Indeed, we may recall that, according to the ontological argument, because God is the one thing that cannot be thought without necessarily existing, God does not exist outside of (without) the mind (and so also the existence) of human beings. But to say that the democratic imperium is absolute does not mean, as we saw Spinoza was careful to indicate, that power and right, state and mind, the human law and the divine law are so identified with each other that one is reduced to (and so put in hierarchical opposition to) the other. Indeed, it is precisely because there is no human law or divine law outside of (without) the imperium, because God has no existence outside of (without) the civil state (God is not found in the natural state), that the civil state itself does not exist outside of (without) the divine law but is subject to it. Both the imperium and the mind, like the biblical text (and the Bible’s

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God), are divine; yet their divinity is known only in and through their human mediators whose right of interpretation embodies the divine law of charity and justice. It is little wonder, then, that, because imperium and mind, like the biblical text (and its divine exemplar, God), are absolute (true) yet subject to error, a hermeneutical method, called the democratic pactum, is required to ensure that the citizens of the democratic civil state do not reduce the truth of imperium and mind to their all too human errors. What we have now seen regarding mind and imperium is that they are inseparable from, yet not reducible to, each other insofar as they together constitute democracy. The mind is not found outside of (without) the democratic imperium; and the imperium is not found outside of (without) the mind as expressing the freedom of all human beings to think what they desire and to say what they think. It must equally follow, consequently, that there is no freedom of philosophizing outside of (without) both mind and imperium in their mutual constitution of each other as democratically free and equal. But, then, the question arises as to how we are to understand the freedom of mind or judgment that Spinoza makes central to the democratic imperium in light of the concept of freedom that he associates with the eternity of the mind in part V of the Ethics. If God does not exist outside of (without) the civil state, what then is the state (status) of the eternity of the mind? Is the ethics of the eternity of mind a democratic concept? Is the eternity of the mind accessible to all human beings, given that all human beings are equal in possessing the freedom of thought and speech and that all human beings are said by Spinoza to have adequate knowledge of the infinite and absolute essence of God? In asking, then, about the relationship between politics and ethics, between Spinoza’s two political treatises and the Ethics, we are also asking about the relationship between theology and philosophy and so also about the complex relationship among politics (the salus or salvation of the people within the democratic civil state), ethics (the eternity of the mind), theology, and, philosophy. We have already seen Spinoza indicate in the Theologico-Political Treatise that those who receive the (common, natural, universal, and divine) truth of philosophy become (are made) philosophers. We also saw that his attempt to distinguish natural knowledge from prophetic knowledge, on the basis of their distinctive audiences, collapses when he argues that natural knowledge, in having God as its content, is equal to (indistinguishable from) prophetic knowledge in both its source and its certitude. Those to whom the prophets reveal the divine teaching of charity and justice—the people (vulgus)—cannot receive this teaching merely passively or simply in terms of what Spinoza calls “mere faith” in its propagators. For individuals to receive or to know this divine teaching or, in other words, to demonstrate faith in God is actively to do the works of charity and justice, to enact the love of neighbor

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within their civil life. It is also the case that Spinoza’s hermeneutics is based upon the reciprocal relationship of text and reader (of the propagator of faith and the recipient of faith). Indeed, he holds that the ultimate standard of biblical truth, whereby human beings are empowered to distinguish between the errors of Scripture and its divine truth, is the “mind” of the reader, that is, the mind that is not found outside of (without) the democratic imperium. Furthermore, Spinoza establishes an analogy between the supreme civil powers and the prophets as if to indicate that their respective recipients—the citizens and the faithful—receive their laws, whether human or divine, on the basis of having “mere faith” in their respective political and theological authorities (sovereigns). But it is clear that, just as the recipients of the divine word must be active in interpreting, in living, the divine law—of charity and justice—as we have just recalled, so it is also the case that the recipients of democratic law are no less active interpreters of the human law—of charity and justice. Indeed, these democratic recipients of the law, in possessing the freedom of mind to interpret Scripture for themselves, constitute the supreme powers of the democratic civil state (as themselves). Thus, it follows that, as the receivers of the prophetic word (of the divine law) are made prophets and as the receivers of the civil word (of the human law) are made citizens, so citizens, in possessing the freedom of philosophizing, are made philosophers. We see, consequently, that it is only within the democratic civil state that those who receive what Spinoza calls the natural knowledge of God from philosophers become—are made—philosophers. They are not born philosophers according to what Socrates, in the Republic, calls the deceptive teaching of the myth of the four metals. They are not naturally philosophers. But does it follow, then, that all citizens, in possessing equally the power of mind and thus the right to think what they desire and to say what they think, are philosophers? Further, since we have already seen that the citizens who constitute the democratic civil state are made—they become—prophets, what is the difference between the democratic citizen as prophet and the democratic citizen as philosopher? For, as we have discovered, not only is the knowledge of God, which prophet and philosopher equally possess, common in both source and certitude. But also prophecy and philosophy cannot be distinguished in terms of audience, for their audiences possess equal powers of mind (or, as Spinoza puts it in the Political Treatise, all human nature is the same, both in the contradictory natural state and in the paradoxical civil state). But how, then, are we to understand the distinction between the wise individual—sapiens—and the ignorant individual—ignarus—with which Spinoza brings the Ethics to an end? He writes that sapiens, in being conscious of self, God, and things by some eternal necessity, never ceases to be but always possesses acquiescentia of mind. In contrast, the ignorant individual, in

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being as if unconscious of self, God, and things, ceases to be as soon as he ceases to suffer dependence on external things. As I indicated earlier, surely both sapiens and ignarus exist solely within the civil state, yet what is the meaning of the final division between them that is so clearly modeled on the last judgment by which the saved are distinguished from the damned? Since religion does not exist outside of (without) the civil state, are eternity and the cessation of existence and consequently both heaven and hell civil conditions? Still, since it is also the case that the civil state does not exist outside of (without) the divine law (the existence of God), are we to judge the civil state on the basis of the distinction between wisdom and ignorance, freedom and slavery, consciousness and unconsciousness, necessary existence and contingent (or passing) existence, and, finally, eternity and the cessation of existence (death)? Or will the dialectic between absolute mind and absolute imperium, which Spinoza has shown to constitute the democratic pactum of the civil state, help us to understand what he means by the eternity of the mind in part V of the Ethics? What then, we ask, is the relationship between the democratic citizen, whose freedom of philosophizing is central to the salus (the salvation) of the people as constituting the civil state, and sapiens, who, in possessing eternity of the mind, enjoys the highest blessedness and freedom? I turn, then, to part V of the Ethics, the discussion of which will culminate in my final consideration of how we are to understand the relationship among Spinoza’s three major texts: theologico-political, political, and ethical (philosophical). Since we now know that natural knowledge and prophetic knowledge have in God a commonly shared source and certitude, it follows that the distinction between sapiens and ignarus is not one between philosophy and religion. Since it is also evident that sapiens, notwithstanding the fact that Spinoza calls his knowledge of God natural, is not found outside of (without) the civil state, it equally follows that philosophical knowledge is not natural but civil (and divine and so also theological). The philosopher, we recall, is not born but becomes (is made) philosophical in receiving philosophical truth. From the text of the Ethics? From God? Furthermore, since every human being, in possessing adequate knowledge of the absolute and infinite essence of God, is surely a philosopher, we are ultimately required to think through the relationship between the beginning of the Ethics in the ontological argument and its culmination in the eternity of the mind, which, evidently, is not found outside of (without) the democratic civil state. What, then, I ask, is the relationship between the ontological argument and both ethics and the democratic civil life? What, in the terms posed by this study, is the relationship between the Bible and modernity? These are the questions to which I turn in the next section of this chapter and then systematically address in the final, concluding chapter of my study.

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Ethics and the Eternity of the Mind: Ethics, Part V The issue of how we are to understand the relationship between Spinoza’s two political treatises and the Ethics and thus the relationship between freedom as the “salvation” of the people in the democratic civil state and freedom as the eternity of the mind is profoundly related to grasping accurately the very shape of the Ethics and the structure of its argumentation. The “prolix” rhetoric adopted by Spinoza, that of geometrical demonstration, whereby it appears that each step in the argument involves a logical progression towards a culminating point, is deceptive if the reader does not keep firmly in mind the two key elements of his philosophy. (This logical form is not ultimately distinguishable from the very content of the philosophy, whose core I would summarize, for the moment, in terms of conatus as involving and expressing the eternity of the mind in its love and knowledge of God.) These two key elements are 1. the critical distinction that fundamentally shapes Spinoza’s thought, that between action and passion, between adequate ideas and inadequate ideas, between, ultimately, what is in itself and what is in another, and so between the cause of itself and external causation; and 2. the transition to ever greater perfection or reality (and thus the transition from passive affects to active affects, etc.). Spinoza’s conception of philosophy is profoundly dynamic, built as it is on the concepts of affect, passion, appetite, desire, and conatus and thus on the transition from passive to active affects, from the state of nature to the civil state, in which mind or reason as conscious of itself is central. The paradoxical condition of human being, as conatus conscious of its appetite in seeking its utile but ignorant of the causes of that appetite, is that it is at one and the same time passive and active, dependent on external causes and freely determined to act and to exist from its own essence or (human) nature alone. Spinoza ultimately identifies the strong, dynamic movement or progression to ever greater self-consciousness and thus to ever greater perfection and reality with both knowledge of God and the eternity of the human mind. But it is also the case that this development or progress is not linear (let alone circular) but dialectical and historical, two concepts that we do not find as such in Spinoza. For, true to the Bible, we have to ask towards what it is that we progress, given that no movement or self-consciousness is possible without beginning, according to Spinoza, with God as the cause of itself, of which, we know, he already shows by the end of part II of the Ethics all human beings possess adequate knowledge. We cannot begin (in existence) without desire or

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love, and desire or love would simply be passive affect if it were not what Spinoza calls compos (like the mind itself): fully in our possession, without our fear of losing it. But this is why there is a fundamental sense in which the “progress” in Spinoza’s thought—as in biblical and in modern thought, generally—is what I (inadequately) call ampliative. For, to recall the Kierkegaardian motif that I make central to volume I of my study, surely no loving or faithful human being would believe that he had gone further than Abraham; but, in not standing still, he can understand himself to have gotten at least as far as Abraham. This motif is closely related to the second Kierkegaardian motif to which I referred earlier. If God has always been eternal, then he has never been eternal—for me. In that case, in simply being a Socratic occasion for recollecting what I have always known from eternity, God would wipe out any possibility of (historical) transition to ever greater perfection (reality or power: empowerment), of making temporal experience momentous (meaningful). We shall find, consequently, that the eternity of the mind has been implicit (presupposed) from the beginning of the Ethics and that it is profoundly related to the two ideas that I identify as fundamental in shaping Spinoza’s thought: the dialectic of passive and active affects and the transition from one to the other. Consequently, while it is true that we arrive at the eternity of the mind only in the second half of part V of the Ethics, as the very culmination of the work, it is also true that the eternity of the mind is but an amplification, a spelling out, of the profound implications of the cause of itself (God) and of conatus (human being) and thus of what I call the double(d) beginnings of the Ethics—ontological, with regard to the cause of itself, and phenomenological, with regard to the affects and, above all, conatus. There is a sense, then, that part V, in bringing together God and desire (conatus) as the intellectual love of God, both crowns the work yet reveals its true beginning or ethical way. For, in fulfilling the mandate of the Bible, truth is neither the end nor the beginning of life but rather the way of life and the life of the way. We cannot seek the truth, we cannot bear witness to the truth, we cannot live the truth except insofar as we begin with the truth, except insofar as we begin truthfully. It is interesting to see that the ethical way, the ethical way as transition to ever greater perfection and reality—as it involves the dialectic between “in itself ” and “in another,” between active affects and passive affects—has no name itself, except, perhaps, in what Spinoza calls the third kind of knowledge where singular things are understood in and through God as the cause of themselves. But, as we shall now discover, in part V Spinoza appears to oppose, in the sharpest possible terms, eternity and time (this present life), mind and body, and so the wise man (sapiens) and the ignorant man (ignarus). At the same time, however, he makes critical distinctions—between, for instance, two dif-

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ferent notions of “actual” (or real), the one involving time as duration and the other time as eternal—which allow us to see through or beyond the simple terms of the dichotomy between eternity and time that have traditionally defeated commentators on the Ethics. While part V of the Ethics represents the culmination of the four previous parts, what Spinoza actually shows us, then, is that it is fundamentally an amplification of the work’s initial or original principles. Still, we have to deal with the fact that he appears to distinguish sharply between the two halves of part V. In discussing what he calls the remedies of the affects in the first half, he holds that they apply only to “the present life.” However, when he discusses the eternity of the mind in the second half, he claims to consider the mind “without relation to the body.” What a careful examination of the text will show us, however, is that the distinction between the two halves of part V, like the difference between part V and the four earlier parts of the work, is rhetorical and not substantial. For, surely, the fundamental implication, or entailment, of the ontological argument, involving the cause of itself as necessary existence, is that I cannot grasp, understand, or finally live the truth of the necessary existence of God except insofar as I eternally effect a transition to it. I have to come to the realization that the existence of God is not found outside of (without) the thought of human beings and that the existence of human beings is not found outside of (without) the thought (idea) of God. Indeed, as we shall have ample reason to see, eternity is existence conceived as necessary, according to definition 8 of part I. The paradoxical structure and the dynamic, ampliative movement of the Ethics is nicely caught by the two axioms of part V, which I earlier discussed in my introductory comments to this chapter. Who would think (looking forward or prospectively) or who would have thought (looking backward or retrospectively) that the eternity of the mind and thus its highest beatitude is implicit in or is the amplification of these two apparently simple axioms? Axiom 1 states that, if two contrary actions are excited in the same subject, a change will have to be brought about (in one or both of the contrary actions) until they cease to be contrary. Axiom 2 states that the power or essence of an effect is defined by (or is known through) the power or essence of its cause, together with the additional brief comment that “this axiom is clear from III.7,” which, as we know, is the central proposition on conatus. Curiously, Spinoza invokes axioms 1 and 2 (in his “demonstrations” in part V) only once each (in V.7 and V.8S). More important, we see that the rhetorical method (of geometrical demonstration) used by Spinoza in the Ethics is epitomized in axioms 1 and 2. The movement of his thought remains implicit. He does not tell us (directly) why he places these two axioms at the head of part V. Equally, he does not tell us how they relate either to each other, to the rest of part V (and so

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involve the eternity of the mind), or, finally, to the whole of the Ethics (and so involve God). I make these comments, not in criticism of Spinoza but of us readers insofar as we fail to account for these axioms and thus to see how they represent in nuce the larger, interpretive challenge with which the Ethics presents us. I shall indicate briefly (prospectively) what, I believe, we shall come to appreciate (retrospectively) about these two axioms. Axiom 1 embodies the dynamism of Spinoza’s conception of ethics (and politics). Where there are (two or more) contrary actions in one “subject,” “change will be brought about” (mutatio fieri) until they cease to be contrary. Spinoza is silent about what constitutes “contrary actions.” He equally does not inform us about the “origin” of the change (although we shall presently suppose it to be conatus, given his invocation of III.7 in the context of axiom 2), or specify what is involved in the elimination of contrary actions. But we remember that the desire central to the conatus of seeking our utile is contradictory and passively dependent on external causes, of which we are ignorant, until or unless it becomes (is made) the dictates of reason, according to which we overcome contrary actions (as represented by the passive affects) in and through the love of neighbor (in our recognition that the sole good that we desire for ourselves is the good that is not contrary to the good that all other human beings desire for themselves). We also remember that Adam and Eve, in being like us, are unfree, until and unless they overcome the contradictory impossibility of the divine command of remaining ignorant of and so fall into the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve begin contrary to God. In their ignorance of God, their actions are contrary to God, until and unless they change.24 But they have to change, because in their (biblical and modern) world there is something about contrary actions that “excites” them to change, unlike the world of Socrates, where contrary or contradictory actions are not made conscious and so continue to reflect ignorance (of self, God, and things) on the part of those who live in that world. We further remember, as I pointed out in my introductory comments to this chapter, that axiom 1 stands in utter contrast to the single axiom of part IV according to which singular individuals are contrary to each other in the natural state and so subject to being destroyed by yet more powerful singular (and contrary) individuals. In the natural state there is no “change” whereby the contrary actions—of singular individuals—are brought to cessation. Rather, the contrary actions continue in their naturally destructive and contradictory path, as Spinoza says, ad infinitum. It is evident, consequently, that the change bringing about the cessation of contrary actions, according to axiom 1 of part V, is that of the civil state. It is equally the change involved in transforming desire as passive affects into active affects (and so expressing the

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dictates of reason). Just as there is a fundamental difference between the singular individuals of the single axiom of part IV and those of axiom 1 of part V, so there is also a fundamental difference between the individuals of the first kind and of the third kind of knowledge. In the first kind of knowledge we have imaginary, partial, mutilated, or, in other words, inadequate knowledge of singular individuals. In contrast, according to the third kind of knowledge, we possess knowledge, consistent with conatus, of singular individuals in terms of their essence, that is, of their necessary existence. (As I indicated earlier, this knowledge of individuals also distinguishes the third kind of knowledge from the second kind of knowledge.25) It is precisely the third kind of knowledge, as we shall learn in part V of the Ethics, that is central to the eternity of the mind and its intellectual love of God. There is ultimately nothing contrary, that is, there are no singular or human individuals who are contrary to God, Spinoza claims. For God, we could then say, is that in and through which contrary actions cease. Not only will Spinoza declare that no one can hate God, but he will also hold that the more individuals we know the more we know God. Do we not find here the dynamic change whereby the more singular individuals we know—essentially, as necessarily existing—the more of God there is to know? The above considerations provide, then, ample indication that the eternity of the mind is neither the end at which we arrive, separate from our beginning, nor the beginning from which we depart, separate from our end. Rather, the eternity of the mind represents the way in which we live. It expresses our way of life as one constantly involved in the “change” of contrary actions. As for axiom 2, I shall simply indicate, for the present, that to know that, in persevering in existence through our conatus, we express our actual essence is to know our existence as necessary, as eternal, as the cause of itself. It is hardly surprising, then, that in part V conatus is revealed by Spinoza as the intellectual love of God, in and through which the power and the essence of the effect are defined by the power and the essence of the cause—of itself. It is now time, therefore, to examine part V and to see that (and how) the mind, in its eternity, amplifies conatus in its self-conscious recognition of necessary existence as the cause of itself. At the beginning of the preface of part V Spinoza indicates that the two topics with which he will be concerned in what follows are the power (potentia) of reason over the affects—or what he also calls the remedies of the affects— and the freedom or beatitude of the mind, “according to which we shall see how much more powerful (potior) the wise man is than the ignorant man.” He is careful to point out, however, that, while the mind has great power over the affects, it does not possess the absolute imperium over them that the Stoics and also Descartes claim. At the end of the preface Spinoza states that he will

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determine the remedies of the affects, which, he says, all people know through experience yet do not accurately observe or distinctly see, from the knowledge alone of the mind, “from which he will also deduce all the things that pertain to its beatitude.” It is important to remember that, while Spinoza appears to distinguish the mind (or reason) sharply from the affects, they are fundamentally identical. Not only is the mind the idea of the body, as we know; but also, as Spinoza recalls in the scholium of proposition 4, the appetite by which we act and the appetite by which we suffer are the same appetite and so equally, therefore, we can add, are actions and passions, not to mention adequate ideas and inadequate ideas, the same appetites. As Spinoza puts it, all desires, insofar as they arise from adequate ideas, are virtues (and involve the dictates of reason); and all desires, insofar as they arise from inadequate ideas, are passions. We could say, therefore, that desire is either in itself (free) or in another (enslaved or in bondage). The issue, then, confronting singular individuals is for them to comprehend, to render intelligible or self-conscious, where they stand, in terms not simply of their desires but more concretely of being desiring individuals who, in endeavoring to persevere in their existence, express their actual essence in and through their conatus. We thus see how important it is not to forget that the mind (or reason) is substantially appetite or desire (conatus), that is, the body rendered conscious of itself. For only, then, shall we not be misled by the sharp distinction that Spinoza claims to make between the two halves of part V—on the remedies of the affects and on the beatitude (blessedness) of the mind as eternal. Indeed, we have already seen him indicate in the preface how closely these two topics are related to each other when he declares that he will determine the remedies of the affects on the basis of what he calls “the knowledge of the mind,” from which, he also states, he will “deduce all the things that pertain to its beatitude” (or to its eternity, a term which he still is holding back). It is critically important, therefore, to keep clearly in view the fact that the eternity of the mind is simply desire (appetite, conatus, or body) that is self-consciously active and not ignorantly passive. Which, then, will be more shocking to discover—that the human mind is eternal (like God) or that eternity (as it applies no less to the human mind than to God) is indistinguishable from existence rendered necessary and so from action, freedom, adequate knowledge, and thus also from the civil state, in contrast with dependent existence, passion, slavery, inadequate knowledge, and so also the natural state? Is not the eternity of the mind the “change” that brings contrary actions to an end such that we realize that the power and the essence of the effect is explained by the power and the essence of the cause, according to axioms 1 and 2 of part V? Do we not suspect that, insofar as the cause is not contrary or external to its effect, the cause is itself its own effect as the causa sui that eternally brings about the change whereby contrary actions cease?

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Spinoza embodies his understanding of axioms 1 and 2 in the scholium of proposition 20 when he writes that “no one is troubled or anxious about anything except what he loves, nor do wrongs, suspicions, or enmities, etc., arise except from love towards things which no one can truly possess (esse compos).” He observes further that, from what he has written about the remedies of the affects, it is evident what clear and distinct knowledge and, above all, the third kind of knowledge, whose foundation is knowledge itself of God, can accomplish regarding the affects: namely, insofar as they are passions, if it [knowledge of God] does not absolutely remove them (see V.3 and V.4S), at least it brings it about that they constitute a minimum part of the mind (see V.14). Then, it begets love towards the immutable and eternal thing (see V.15) of which we are truly possessors (compotes: see II.45) and which, moreover, can be vitiated by none of the vices that are found in common love; but it can always be greater and greater (by V.15) and can occupy the maximal part of the mind (by V.16) and extensively affect it.

Spinoza is at once banal and profound in his understanding that it is love that divides all and that it is love that conquers all. There are no contrary actions that are not due to love (to the fact that the very essence of human beings is their appetite, desire, or conatus). The contrary actions of inadequate love towards things of which we cannot be true possessors can be overcome solely by love that we can truly possess and by which we can be truly possessed, which, we know, is love that is mutually shared and reciprocated by all: love of God and neighbor. Since the only “remedy” of possessive love (i.e., love that is passive and in bondage) is eternal love (i.e., active, liberating love), will we be surprised to find that Spinoza’s explication of the mind as eternal in the second half of part V of the Ethics is at once conventional and revolutionary? But is this not always the case? Is not love both the oldest story in the world and the newest? If love has always been eternal, then it has never been eternal. Still, if love has never been eternal, then it has always been eternal. Surely, it follows that, if the eternal love of God occupies a part of the mind, then that part of the mind is eternal, and if it occupies a maximal part of the mind, then a maximal part of the mind is eternal. Spinoza’s comparative terminology, while awkward in appearance, is extremely important. Insofar as we are possessors (in the full and absolute sense) of the eternal love of God, “it can always be greater and greater and can occupy the maximal part of the mind.” We are reminded, then, that eternal love is dynamic, active, and liberating. It is the cause of itself, not the final (unmoved) cause of which we have no knowledge. The eternal love of God, on the part of human beings, is always the transitio to yet greater love. But is it not precisely the paradox of the eternal, of eternal love, that it is at once absolute and comparative, both complete and yet ever to be completed?

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Before taking up directly the eternity of the mind in the second half of part V, I shall first review the main contents of the first half (again to show that there is no fundamental difference between the two halves, although the eternity of the mind is formally introduced only in the second half). Spinoza notes in proposition 3 that an affect that is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it, that is, as soon as we make it active. This means, he says, that “the more an affect is known to us the more, therefore, the affect is in our power and the less the mind suffers from it” (V.3C). In the next proposition he points out that there are no affects of which we cannot form a clear and distinct idea. “Hence it follows,” he observes, “that everyone has the power of understanding himself and his affects, if not absolutely, at least, in part, clearly and distinctly and, consequently, of bringing it about that he suffers less from them” (V.4S). Spinoza then observes that the mind has greater power over and suffers less from its affects insofar as it understands them as necessary or, we could say, insofar as it understands them in terms of the essence and the power of their causes (according to axiom 2). He adds that “the more this knowledge that things are necessary is concerned with singular things, which we imagine more distinctly and vividly, the greater is this power of the mind over the affects, to which experience itself also testifies” (V.6S). It is important to note that the knowledge of singular things as necessary (eternal) already broaches the third kind of knowledge, which Spinoza takes up formally only in the second half of part V. Indeed, he goes on to observe that to act “from the love of freedom alone” is to overcome hate with love and so to live by true utile and thus according to “the right plan of living,” which involves both “mutual friendship” and “common society,” together with “the highest acquiescence of mind” (V.10S). The last seven propositions of the first half of part V all deal with God. I shall summarize them briefly. The mind can relate all of its affects and images to God (V.14). “He who understands himself and his affects clearly and distinctly loves God; and the more [he loves God] the more he understands himself and his affects” (V.15). “This love towards God ought to occupy the mind maximally” (V.16). Because God is without passions and does not effect transition to a greater or to a lesser perfection and thus is not affected by either gladness or sadness, “God, properly speaking, loves no one and hates no one” (V.17C). Spinoza goes on to state that “no one can hate God” (V.18). His proof of this proposition is exquisitely succinct. Because the idea of God, which is in human beings, is adequate and perfect (by II.46–47), it follows that, insofar as human beings contemplate God, they act (i.e., they are not passively determined by their affects). Therefore, because the idea of God in human beings is not accompanied by the affect of sadness, no one can hate God. Q. E. D. Spinoza then states in the corollary that “the love toward God cannot be turned into hate” (V.18C).

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In order to penetrate the density and compactness of proposition 18, which is characteristic of the style of argumentation that Spinoza uses, it is necessary to amplify the basic idea of the proposition with related ideas. I shall here make three brief comments on proposition 18: 1. The notion that human beings possess a perfect and adequate idea of God can be restated in terms of their having a perfect or adequate idea of self (human beings cannot hate themselves) or that truth is its own standard. It is only on the basis of a perfect or adequate idea of God, self, or truth that we have inadequate ideas of them. 2. It is important to see that Spinoza is careful to say that human beings cannot hate God or cannot turn the love of God into hate. He does not say that human beings do not have inadequate ideas of God (or of the self and truth) or that they do not hate God or do not use their inadequate ideas of God to oppress others (including themselves), and so to hate others. But his point is that we could not even have an inadequate idea of God (or hate God) without an adequate idea of God. (One suspects that the enormous hatred that the Marquis de Sade expresses for God—in both word and deed—is generated by the fact that he knows that he cannot give up [on] God, that he cannot rid himself of his idea of God.) We are in the presence here, yet again, of the profound paradox of self-referentiality, that is, of the ontological argument. There is one thing that cannot be thought without existing necessarily—and that is God (or the self or truth). 3. Closely related to points 1 and 2 is the paradoxical alignment of two elements in Spinoza’s demonstration that human beings cannot hate God: the possession on the part of human beings of a “perfect and adequate” idea of God, together with their knowing God solely insofar as they make progress in knowing God. Our knowledge of God (as of the self and of truth) is at once perfect (adequate) yet eternally the very transitio to perfection (adequacy) whereby it is “more and more” perfect and “greater and greater” in perfection. The idea (or knowledge or contemplation) of God is always the transition from knowledge of God to (greater or to lesser) knowledge of God. It is thus important to remember that by perfection and reality Spinoza understands the same thing (II.D6) and that he views reality as involving desire (conatus) and singular things (as will become ever more patent in the second half of part V). In proposition 20 Spinoza states that love toward God cannot be defiled by envy or jealousy; for the more we foster this love toward God the more human beings we imagine to be joined with God by the same bond of love. In the scholium he points out that there is no affect that is directly contrary to this

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love or by which this love can be destroyed. Then, at the end of the scholium to proposition 20 he observes that, having shown how the power of mind provides us with the remedies of the affects, “I have delivered myself of all the things that look to this present life. . . . It is now time, therefore, to pass on to those things that pertain to the duration of the mind without relation to the body.” The two phrases that I have highlighted, implying a sharp (or even a complete) break between the present life of the body and the eternity of the mind (here strangely called “duration”), have always perplexed readers of the Ethics. However we finally interpret these phrases, what we shall discover, as I indicated earlier, is that Spinoza, in revealing the mind to be eternal, does not abandon the fundamental dialectic of his thought. He continues to focus on God and conatus and thus to distinguish between necessary existence (eternity, freedom, action, etc.) and dependent existence (duration, bondage, passion, etc.). In dealing with propositions 21–42, which constitute the second half of part V of the Ethics, I shall begin with what I shall call two introductory propositions (24 and 40); then examine the propositions that involve conceiving of the body under what Spinoza calls the form of eternity (22–23, 29–30, 34, and 39); and, finally, take up the propositions that deal with the third kind of knowledge (24–28, 31–33, 36–38). Then we shall be in a position to consider proposition 41 (on what follows if we do not know that the mind is eternal) and final proposition 42 (on the distinction between singular individuals as wise and ignorant). Needless to say, not all of these propositions (together with their scholia, etc.) fall neatly into this arrangement. It is also the case that often individual propositions will be not fully pellucid until related to other propositions. But I do think that the order proposed here will allow us to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of what Spinoza means by the eternity of the mind.26 In proposition 24 Spinoza simply states that “the more we understand singular things the more we understand God [the more God we understand].” The demonstration is as follows: “It is clear from I.25C.” Thus, without further explanation on Spinoza’s part, we are plunged back into part I, according to proposition 25 of which God is said to be the cause of both the existence and the essence of things.27 In the scholium Spinoza writes that “in the sense in which God is called the cause of himself he is also said to be the cause of all things,” which, he adds, is clarified in the subsequent corollary, where we read that “particular things” are modes in which the attributes of God are expressed in a certain and determinate manner, which is said to be evident from I.15 (“whatever is is in God and nothing can be or be conceived without God”) and from I.D5 (on modes). The key to comprehending proposition 24 of part V, connecting singular things with God, is, I believe, to see that to un-

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derstand singular things is to understand that God is their cause as he is the cause of himself. Indeed, we shall see that to understand God as the cause of himself is to understand individual things (and vice versa). To understand God as the cause of himself is to invoke the ontological argument that it is God whose essence involves necessary existence or, in other words, that it is God whose essence cannot be conceived (thought) without necessarily existing (to recall I.D1). To understand singular things, in the terms of axioms 1 and 2 of part V and not of the single axiom of part IV, is to understand that their existence is necessary (and thus also, as we shall see, free, eternal, and absolute) in and through God as the cause of himself. Indeed, God is “the exemplar of true life” (to recall Dogma 1 from the Theologico-Political Treatise) because to understand (God as) causa sui is to understand ourselves and thus all individuals whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence. Just as God does not exist outside of (without) the thought (conception or idea) of human beings (singular things), so our understanding of individuals does not exist outside of (without) the necessary existence of God, of causa sui. In what I am calling the second introductory proposition 40 of part V, Spinoza states that “the more perfection anything has the more it acts and the less it suffers [being acted on] and, conversely, the more it acts the more perfect it is [and the less it suffers passive dependence on causes of which it is ignorant].” He recalls II.D6 when he goes on to indicate that for a thing to be more perfect is for it to have “more reality.” In the corollary he connects action, perfection, and reality with mind (intellect) and states that “the part of the mind that remains,” whatever its size, is more perfect than the rest. “For the eternal part of the mind is intellect, through which alone are we said to act. However, that [part], which we have shown to perish, is imagination itself, through which alone we are said to suffer.” I find two things striking about proposition 40. First, we know that the distinction between perfection, reality, action (to act), and mind (or intellect), in their intimate interrelationship, on the one hand, and imagination and suffering (pati: to suffer dependence on external causes), on the other hand, is central to part III and especially part IV of the Ethics, as we saw in the previous chapter. Second, Spinoza now articulates this distinction, according to the new terms of part V, between the more perfect part of the mind (intellect), which remains and is eternal, on the one hand, and “the rest” of the mind as belonging to the imagination, which perishes, on the other. A pressing question, consequently, emerges. How does the (second or new) distinction between the eternal (what remains) and that which perishes (as the rest) relate to the (first or earlier) distinction between action (mind or intellect) and passion (imagination), between what is more perfect (or more real) and what is less perfect (or less real)? Does the second distinction modify, either relatively or absolutely, the first distinction? Or does it simply restate

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the first distinction, perhaps in terms that amplify or deepen our understanding of it? Another way of putting this question is to ask whether Spinoza is providing a (profound) critique of the traditional notion of the immortality of the soul. (Indeed, we shall ultimately be interested in asking whether the idea of immortality—of the soul—has anything to do either with Spinoza’s concept of the eternity of the mind or, more generally, with the Bible’s concept of eternal life. In other words, is not the immortality of the soul one more instance of the enormous role that Neoplatonism, involving elements of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, has played in biblical thought—Jewish, Christian, and also Muslim?)28 Before proceeding to examine these questions in light of the key propositions of the second half of part V, I want, first, to propose four reasons why I believe that Spinoza intends the distinction between eternity and perishing to amplify our understanding of the difference between action and suffering but not fundamentally to modify it. (I would add that I believe that Spinoza provides a radical critique of eternity by showing that, consistent with the Bible, eternal life involves and expresses action and thus a transition to ever greater perfection or reality, not a final, static end, which would violate his dynamic conception of conatus and his resolute rejection of final causes.) I shall briefly state these four reasons here in order, at this point in our discussion, to provide guidance to the analysis of the propositions that follow. First, while Spinoza constantly uses the (apparently awkward or even inconsistent) language of comparison—of more (or less) and of greater (or lesser) part—it would seem bizarre if we had to decide literally what “part” of the mind (intellect), in being more perfect but perhaps not greater in size than the rest of the mind (the imagination), was eternal (and then what part was not eternal). Second, in associating perfection, reality, the mind (intellect), and eternity with action, Spinoza gives us every indication that this activity continues eternally or unto eternity, that is, that it continues precisely insofar as it is eternal. One sentence in proposition 40, cited above, is particularly striking in light of his notion that eternity is action (that to act is to be eternal): “For the eternal part of the mind is intellect, through which alone are we said to act.” Third, it strikes me as highly unlikely (for reasons both formal and substantive) that Spinoza would (let alone could) modify (absolutely, or even relatively) the fundamental dialectic of his thought based on the critical distinction between what is in itself and what is in another, between active affects and passive affects, between human nature (the civil state) and the common order of nature (the natural state), or between the cause of itself and final causes, etc. The fourth reason that I think the distinction between eternity and perishing supports (and does not fundamentally modify) the difference between action (mind or intellect) and passion (imagination) is that the idea of eternity

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as active and of action as eternal is consistent with the dynamic concept of conatus that is central to Spinoza’s thought. Again, it is important to remember that mind or intellect is conatus: desire as self-conscious appetite and so active affect. Action always (eternally) involves the transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection (reality). Do we not suspect, as I indicated earlier, that it is action that eternally expresses the change (invoked in axiom 1) whereby contrary or passive “actions” cease to be contrary (or passive)? Surely, however, the resolution of contrary actions represents not a final terminus but the eternal activity of demonstrating that the more individuals we know— whose actions are not contrary (or passive and destructive)—the more we know God as the cause of itself. Ultimately, what is at stake here is the concept of temporality that is involved in the ideas of transition to greater perfection, of action, and of the eternity of the mind (of intellect) and thus also of existence and of singular individuals, together with the third kind of knowledge. Does not the eternity of the mind—as action (loving neighbor and God)—involve and express time redeemed as the blessedness of freedom and salvation, at once ethical and political? Having posed the question of how it is that the more singular individuals we know the more we know God (according to proposition 24) would illuminate (or be illuminated by) the distinction between the eternal and the perishable “parts” of the mind (according to proposition 40), I shall now take up the suite of propositions that involve conceiving of the body under the form of eternity (22–23, 29–30, 34, and 39). It is important to recall that at the end of the scholium of proposition 20 Spinoza states he has now concluded his discussion of matters relating to “this present life” (the remedies of the affects) and that he will now take up the things “that pertain to the duration of the mind without relation to the body.” That Spinoza does not intend to be (or cannot be) understood as drawing a substantial distinction between the remedies of the affects (in this present life of the body) and the “duration” of the mind without relation to the body (notwithstanding his rhetoric) is strikingly evident in the fact that he continues to discuss the body—under the form of eternity. While he observes in proposition 21 that the mind does not express the “actual existence” of its body or conceive of its affections as “actual” except insofar as the body continues in duration, he states in proposition 22 that “in God, nevertheless, the idea that expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity is given necessarily.” The demonstration of this proposition is based on the venerable claim of I.25 that God is the cause not only of the existence but also of the essence of this or that human body. Let me indicate provisionally that the elemental point of this claim is that, in and through God, we understand that something existing possesses not only temporal duration (and so perishes as belonging to the common order of

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nature, for it is destroyed by yet more powerful, singular individuals) but also necessary (or eternal) existence. To know the essence (or nature) of a singular individual is to know that it is in itself, that it involves and expresses the cause of itself, that its existence is necessary (eternal), and that it freely exists from the necessity alone of its nature and is determined to act by itself alone (according to I.D6). In proposition 23 Spinoza states dramatically that “the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body; but something of it remains, which is eternal.” Still, in the demonstration he simply points out that for God to have the idea of the essence of the human body means that it is also in the human mind (by II.13, where we learn that the mind is the idea of the body [see II.21] and that “the human body exists as we sense [sentimus] it.”). In other words, while the mind involves duration, insofar as it expresses the “actual existence” of the body, nevertheless, because there is in God and so in our mind an idea expressing the essence of the human body “with some eternal necessity,” it follows that the mind is (in part) eternal. In the scholium of proposition 23 Spinoza observes that, while the idea expressing the essence of the body under the form of eternity pertains to the essence of the mind as necessarily eternal, we cannot remember that we existed before the body. The body possesses no such traces of eternity, and eternity cannot be defined by or have any relationship to time. “But, nonetheless,” he continues, “we sense (sentimus) and we experience (experimur) that we are eternal. For the mind no less senses those things that it conceives [in] understanding than those things that it has in memory [as belonging to the perishable imagination].”29 Spinoza then reiterates his observation that, while we cannot remember that we existed before the body, “nevertheless we sense that our mind, insofar as it involves the essence of the body under the form of eternity, is eternal and that this its existence (hanc eius existentiam) cannot be defined by time or explicated through duration.” However, insofar as our mind is said to continue only in duration (durare), its existence can be defined by a certain time and involves the actual existence of its body. Three points that Spinoza makes in explicating the eternity of the mind in the scholium of proposition 23 are arresting. First, he indicates clearly that the eternity of the mind has nothing whatsoever to do with any notion of the mind existing prior to the body (while he also remains silent about any possibility that the mind would continue in duration posterior to the body). Second, while maintaining a sharp distinction between eternity and durational time (neither can be explained by or through the other), he claims, nonetheless, that we human beings sense (feel, perceive), experience, and conceive of our eternity (of mind)—in this present life, evidently. Third, he indicates that the existence of the mind, “insofar as it involves the essence of the body under

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the form of eternity,” cannot be defined or explained by durational time and so, rather, expresses eternity, as distinct from the mind’s existence insofar as it involves duration and consequently the certain time and the actual existence of the body. Not only does Spinoza here use the term existentia to express both eternity and durational time (recalling II.45S: “Here by existence I do not understand duration”—to which I shall return shortly). But he also keeps the mind, in its eternal existence, closely related to the body: 1. The mind does not exist prior to the body. 2. The “existence” of the mind that cannot be defined or explained by durational time involves the essence of the body conceived under the form of eternity. 3. There is no mention of the mind as possessing duration posterior to the body (notwithstanding the dramatic rhetoric of the initial proposition). In proposition 29 Spinoza simply reiterates the difference—in mind—between conceiving of the body’s “present, actual existence” in durational terms and conceiving of the body’s essence under the form of eternity. Then, he points out in the scholium that things are conceived by us as actual in two ways, either insofar as they exist with relation to a certain time and place or insofar as we conceive them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of the divine nature. Those, however, which are conceived in this second way as true or real we conceive under the form of eternity, and their ideas involve the eternal and infinite essence of God, as we have shown in II.45, whose scholium also see.

In II.45 Spinoza states that “every idea of any body or of any singular thing actually existing necessarily involves the eternal and the infinite essence of God”—since nothing can be or be conceived without God. But, just as he now distinguishes between two notions of the actual in V.29S—eternal and durational—so in II.45S he makes the same distinction regarding two notions of existence. There, Spinoza says, he does not understand existentia in terms of duration, abstraction, or quantity. Rather, he speaks of the nature (or essence) of existence itself that is attributed to singular things because infinite things follow from the eternal necessity of God. He speaks, he repeats, “about the existence itself of singular things insofar as they are in God.” While singular things are determined to exist in a certain way (in the common order of nature) by other singular things, “nevertheless, the force, by which each one perseveres in existence, follows from the eternal necessity of the nature of God.” The “force” that Spinoza invokes at the end of II.45S we now know as conatus from part III of the Ethics. We may recall that according to III.7 the conatus

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by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its existence is said to be nothing else than the “actual essence of the thing itself.” We thus see that, in light of the two notions of existence (in II.45S) and of the two notions of the actual (in V.29S), the actual essence by which a thing endeavors to persevere in existence itself involves necessary existence and not durational existence, human nature and not the common order of nature. Indeed, Spinoza proceeds to remark in proposition 30 of part V that “eternity is the essence itself of God, insofar as this [essence] involves necessary existence (by I.D8).” In definition 8 of part I he writes that “by eternity I understand existence itself, insofar as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the definition [essence or nature] of the eternal thing.” In the explanation of definition 8 Spinoza states that “such existence, as the essence of the thing, is conceived as an eternal truth and, moreover, cannot be explained through duration or time.” Eternity, we thus see, expresses necessary existence. Eternity involves the comprehension on the part of human beings of their nature or essence, of their conatus, desire, or reason, as necessary existence, not as durational existence. The conatus or force by which human beings endeavor to persevere in existence turns out, we know from part IV of the Ethics, to embody the dictates of reason according to which human beings freely exist from the necessity of their essence (or conatus) alone and are freely determined to act from themselves alone. In light of Spinoza’s political treatises we would say that human beings, in constituting their existence as necessary through the pactum (or as the multitudo), are not determined—in the common order of nature, that is, in the natural state, as singular individuals—by other singular individuals to exist (consistent with I.D6). With the understanding that eternity describes human existence as necessary and not as durational, Spinoza recalls in proposition 34 of part V that “the mind is not subject to affects, which are referred to the passions, except while the body continues in duration (nisi durante corpore).” But it is important to remember that he has already established in the propositions relating to the remedies of the affects that there are no affects that cannot be related to God and that cannot, therefore, following the terms of the propositions of the second half of part V, be understood under the form of eternity. We can then see why Spinoza proceeds in the scholium of proposition 34 to remark that, “if we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are, indeed, conscious of the eternity of their mind; but they confuse it with duration, and they attribute it to imagination or memory, which they believe remains after death.” As in V.23S, Spinoza once again invokes what he here calls “the common opinion of men” that human beings in this life are conscious of their eternity of mind, yet they confuse it with durational time and so with images of memory, which they project into an afterlife. Two things Spinoza again

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makes clear here. First, the eternity of the mind is found in this present life, when this present life is understood in terms of our viewing our existence as necessary (since the force of conatus follows from the eternal nature, that is, from the necessary existence of God as causa sui). Putting this same point more dramatically and in counterpoint with proposition 34, we can say that we are eternal only insofar as we are subject to the passive affects. For eternity itself involves conatus as the transition to ever greater perfection, whereby the more singular individuals we know, as necessary, the more we understand God as causa sui, as that whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence. Second, while human beings commonly experience and understand their mind to be eternal—that is, they adhere to an order of existence which is necessary and which is not simply the natural state of singular individuals for whom temporal existence is destructive—they confuse the temporality of necessary existence with the temporality of duration and thus with the images (idols) of an afterlife. In other words, as Spinoza mounts a critique of eternity (or of the immortality of the soul) as involving spatial and temporal images of duration, it is clear that for him the eternity of the mind involves and expresses existence in the present life so long as we are careful to distinguish between eternal (necessary) existence and durational (determined) existence. Striking confirmation that eternity involves the consciousness on the part of human beings that they are not merely subject to durational (destructive) time, to death, but that they also adhere to a temporality of freedom, and of what we shall see Spinoza additionally calls salvation and blessedness, is found in proposition 39. Here he writes that “he who possesses a body fit (aptum) for a great many things (plurima) possesses a mind whose maximal part is eternal.” To have a body fit for plurality means, Spinoza argues in the demonstration, that the individual is minimally disturbed by affects that are contrary to his nature (or essence) or that, in other words, he can order them in terms of his intellect and the idea of God (as causa sui). What follows from this, Spinoza points out, is “that (by V.15) he is affected by love toward God, which (by V.16) must occupy or constitute the maximal part of the mind, and, therefore (by V.33), he has a mind whose maximal part is eternal.” It is noteworthy that here, near the end of part V, as Spinoza makes it clear that the body remains central to the eternity of the mind, he cites two key propositions (15 and 16) from the first half of part V, both of which are dramatic and worth repeating. Proposition 15 states that “he who understands himself and his affects clearly and distinctly loves God and the more he loves God the more he understands himself and his affects.” It is surely also the case that the more he understands himself and his affects the more he loves God. Indeed, in proposition 16 Spinoza states simply that “this love toward God must (debet) maximally occupy the mind.” The paradox of eternity here, then, is that without

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affects, without existing as conatus, we would not love God and would not possess—we would not feel and experience—our eternity of mind. But then the risk constantly arises that we shall confuse the images of the passive affects with the necessary existence of eternity and so project them as idols into an afterlife (consistent with final causation). In the scholium of proposition 39 Spinoza repeats that a body apt for plural experience can be related to the mind, which means, he observes, that human beings, in possessing great knowledge of themselves and of God, possess a mind whose chief part is eternal and scarcely fear death. Once again, Spinoza makes it clear that we could not understand ourselves and God except in and through our body, our affects, and our relations in this present world. Indeed, he goes on to say that, in order to understand these matters more clearly, it is to be animadverted that “we live in continuous change (in continua variatione) and [that], as we change (mutamur) into the better or into the worse, we are said to be happy or unhappy.” He points out that, when human beings die as children, they die unhappy and that, when they live a long life in healthy mind and body, they die happy. Because children have a body that is apt for the fewest things and that is maximally dependent on external causes, they have a mind, considered only in itself, which is conscious of almost nothing of itself, God, or things. On the other hand, however, Spinoza continues, he who has a body apt ad plurima possesses a mind, which, considered in itself alone, is very much conscious of itself, of God, and of things. In this life, therefore, we primarily endeavor (conamur) to change the body of infancy into another [body], as much as its nature allows (patitur) and is conducive thereto, that is apt ad plurima and that is referred to the mind, which is plurimùm conscious of itself, of God, and of things. And thus [we endeavor to bring it about] that everything that is referred to its memory or imagination be, in respect of the intellect, of scarcely any moment.

In this life, which is one of continuous change, we endeavor to change into the better, which Spinoza understands as having a body apt ad plurima. For it is clear that the mind is eternal only insofar as it conceives of its body and thus its affects under the form of eternity, that is, as embodying the cause of itself as freely existing and acting from the necessity alone of its own nature and essence. But the paradox here is that, while Spinoza indicates that everything belonging to the imagination is, compared with that of which the mind is conscious, insignificant, still it is precisely the body, together with its affects and images, that provide conatus with its endeavor, its work, its effort. Since, as we have already seen, there are no affects of the body that the mind cannot make momentous—by viewing them within the necessity (freedom) of its

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existence—surely the fact that something is scarcely of any moment to us can only mean that we have yet more work to do, more conatus to explore. That it is precisely within the context of this present life, of the life of conatus, of the body and its affects, that Spinoza invokes human consciousness— of self, God, and things—as representing the eternity of the mind prepares us for the suite of propositions involving the third kind of knowledge and thus the intellectual love of God (24–28, 31–33, 36–38). The more we understand and love God as our consciousness of self and things the more we understand and love singular things as those whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence. In proposition 25 Spinoza dramatically states that “the supreme conatus and the supreme virtue of the mind is [sic] to understand things by the third kind of knowledge.” That, in the demonstration, he then identifies the virtue of the mind with its power, nature, and conatus indicates why in proposition 26 he proceeds to observe that the more apt the mind is to understand things by the third kind of knowledge the more it desires this understanding. Spinoza’s simple comment in the demonstration is Patet: “It is clear (from I.25C).” The mind, we recall, is fundamentally power (potentia and virtus), conatus, action, and desire—and (self)consciousness. It is a dynamic, active process of relationship. The more we understand individuals in and through God as those whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence—eternity—the more we understand God. From the third kind of knowledge there arises, according to proposition 27, the supreme acquiescentia mentis—the active acceptance (on the part) of the mind as involving and expressing the eternity of necessary existence. In the demonstration Spinoza writes that, “therefore, he who knows things by this [third] kind of knowledge passes (transit) to supreme human perfection and consequently is affected by supreme gladness (laetitiâ) concomitant with the idea of itself and its virtue.” It is striking that here Spinoza brings together acquiescence, the transitio to supreme perfection, conatus (desire), and self-consciousness (the idea of itself: idea sui). The transitio to supreme perfection as the acquiescentia mentis is the ultimate expression of conatus, whose endeavor to persevere in existence involves and expresses its actual (necessary) essence. When Spinoza proceeds to indicate in proposition 28 that “conatus or the desire to know things by the third kind of knowledge cannot arise from the first but indeed from the second kind of knowledge,” I think we have to be careful not to misunderstand him. It is true that the third kind of knowledge does not arise directly from the mutilated, partial, and confused images that Spinoza associates with the first kind of knowledge and imagination. Still, it is evident that, were it not for the affects of the body, of which the mind is (first and last) the idea, there would be no desire, conatus, transition, perfection, or eternity of the mind. It is precisely because the mind can conceive of its body

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and its affects under the form of eternity—as existing necessarily—that it can and does possess knowledge of individuals. Indeed, in the scholium of proposition 36 Spinoza writes that he has shown “how powerful (quantum . . . polleat) is the knowledge of singular things, which I have called intuitive or of the third kind, and how much more powerful (potior) it is than the universal knowledge, which I have said to be of the second kind.” While he indicates that he has shown that all things, including the mind, depend on God—in both essence and existence—still that demonstration “does not so affect our mind as when the conclusion arises from the essence itself of any singular thing, which we say depends on God.” In proposition 31 Spinoza directly brings together the mind, the third kind of knowledge, and God in stating that the mind, insofar as it is eternal, is the adequate (he also calls it the “formal”) cause of the third kind of knowledge. From this it is clear, he writes in the scholium, that the more powerful (plùs pollet) anyone is in this kind of knowledge the more conscious of self and of God he is, that is, the more perfect and blessed he is. But it is clearer, he continues, if we note that “even if we are already certain that the mind is eternal, insofar as it conceives things under the form of eternity, nevertheless, so that the things that we have wanted to show are more easily explained and better understood, we shall consider the mind, as we have done up to here, as if it has just begun to be and has just begun to understand things under the form of eternity.” The distinction between being eternal and beginning to be eternal and why the latter is said by Spinoza to be easier to grasp than the former he does not directly explain as he proceeds in proposition 32 to state that we delight in the third kind of knowledge as it involves both the idea of oneself and the idea of God as its cause. Again, it is important to remember that we know that God is the cause of things as he is causa sui. Surely, to hold that the mind delights in the third kind of knowledge as involving itself and God means that it knows itself—in and through God—as the cause of itself, as eternal, as existing necessarily. In the corollary of proposition 32 Spinoza states that what the third kind of knowledge necessarily gives rise to is the intellectual love of God. For the delight that arises from the third kind of knowledge, with its concomitant idea of God as cause, he remarks, is the love of God, “not insofar as we imagine God to be present but insofar as we understand him to be eternal.” It follows, then, according to proposition 33, that “the intellectual love of God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge, is eternal.” But in the scholium Spinoza returns to the issue of how love begins yet is eternal, which he raised in V.31S. But here his reference is to the corollary of proposition 32, in which he does not mention this issue explicitly: Although this [intellectual] love toward God does not have a beginning [he writes], it nevertheless possesses all the perfections of love, just as if it had arisen,

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as we pretended (finximus) in V.32C. Nor is there here any difference, except that the mind has had these same, eternal perfections, which we have pretended as coming to it, together with the concomitant idea of God as eternal cause. If delight consists in the transition to greater perfection, blessedness (beatitudo) must of course consist in the fact that the mind is endowed with perfection itself. (V.33S)

It is surely not patent why Spinoza states in V.31S, 32C, and 33S that, in order to understand more clearly his claim that the more powerful anyone is in the third kind of knowledge the more conscious of self and God he is, that is, the more perfect and blessed he is, he will pretend that the mind has just begun to be eternal, even though we are already certain that the mind is eternal. But I do think that we can grasp the issue that he is addressing as follows. While God is eternal and so without beginning, human beings, who are not God, are not in the beginning eternal. Yet, they, too, are eternal, which means that (at some point?) they begin to become eternal. Spinoza presupposes, but does not articulate in pellucid terms, that in the transition to perfection we are already perfect. Precisely because perfection is reality and because it is conatus (as desire) that determines perfection or reality as the good, perfection (as virtue and reality), together with existence itself and the concomitant idea of self and of God, is “progressive.” Perfection is always in transition to greater (when not to lesser) perfection. We human beings could not make the transition to God without beginning with God, without beginning with the notion that in the beginning there is no beginning but the cause of itself, that whose essence expresses and involves necessary existence. What Spinoza does not clearly signal here is that the “eternity of mind,” of which humans are conscious and which they experience in this life, expresses concepts of the actual and of existence as they involve, not durational time but necessary time, time that is conceived under the form of eternity. But it is striking that he does present eternity in the terms of beginning, conatus (desire), consciousness of self, transitio, perfection understood as reality, and singular things. In the scholium of proposition 37 Spinoza points out that he believes that “no one doubts that the [single] axiom of part IV concerns singular things insofar as they are considered with relation to a certain time and place.” For we now know that singular things, whose actual essence expresses necessary existence according to the third kind of knowledge, properly involve the intellectual love of God. In proposition 36 Spinoza states that the intellectual love of the mind is part of the infinite love by which God loves himself. It follows, therefore, that, insofar as God loves himself, he loves human beings, with the result that God’s love toward human beings and the mind’s intellectual love toward God are one and the same. “From these things,” Spinoza writes in the scholium, “we

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clearly understand in what thing our salvation, or blessedness, or freedom consists, namely, in the constant and eternal love toward God or in the love of God toward men.” Then in propositions 37 and 38 Spinoza once again gives his typically opposed formulations of the affects in light of the intellectual love of God as arising from knowing singular individuals according to the third kind of knowledge. In proposition 37 he states that there is nothing “in nature” that is contrary to or can take away intellectual love.30 In proposition 38 he indicates that the more the mind knows singular things according to the third kind of knowledge31 the less it suffers dependence on “affects that are evil” and the less it fears death. Since the essence of the mind consists in knowledge, Spinoza explains, the more the mind truly knows things “the greater [is] its part [that] remains and consequently the more its part is not touched by affects that are contrary to our nature, that is (by IV.30) are evil.” But how, we ask, can things be contrary to our nature if, as Spinoza has already explained, the mind can relate all of its affects or images to the idea of God, if there is nothing contrary to God, and if love conquers all? In IV.30, which Spinoza cites in V.38, evil is said to involve what is contrary to our nature. In subsequent propositions of part IV, as we saw in the previous chapter, he argues that human beings are contrary to each other in nature insofar as they are subject to their passions and that they agree with each other in nature insofar as they share a common life based on the dictates of reason. Thus Spinoza states in IV.35C1 that “nothing singular is given in the nature of things that is more useful to man than the man who lives from the guidance of reason.” He cites in support of this claim, as we have seen, what he calls the widely repeated proverb: “man is god to man” (IV.35S). The issues raised by the juxtaposition of propositions 37 and 38 in part V are fascinating. There is nothing contrary in nature to intellectual love—to God or to human beings. Yet the more the mind knows singular things according to the third kind of knowledge the less it suffers evil affects, which are contrary to it. In other words, the part of the mind that is larger remains and the part of the mind that is smaller (in being touched by affects that are contrary to its nature and hence evil) perishes as of no moment. Is death, then, for Spinoza contrary to human nature, contrary to the essence of human beings as that which—in and through God as causa sui—involves and expresses the eternity of their existence as necessary? As I posed the question earlier, what would occur if human beings did not die? Would they then live? (There is no evidence, I think, that indicates that Spinoza ever relinquishes his claim that human beings remain subject to the passive affects, to the common order of nature, or, in other words, to death.) How can the passive affects be evil (in themselves), how can the body be evil, when it is only in light of our affects and the body that we human beings can make the transition to ever greater

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(when not to lesser) perfection (reality)? Is not conatus (or desire) inconceivable except insofar as it perseveres in existence and so, in showing that its essence necessarily involves actual existence, transforms its passive affects into the dictates of reason, into the intellectual love of God? I do not think that Spinoza is inconsistent (let alone self-contradictory) in holding (in V.37) that there is nothing contrary in nature to intellectual love and in holding (in V.38) that the affects that are contrary to our nature are evil, in holding, we could say, that love conquers all yet hatred is alive and well in the world. The fact that in nature there are no affects contrary to the intellectual love of God and that the affects that are contrary to our human nature are evil is one more articulation on the part of Spinoza of his basic distinction between human nature (the civil state) and the common order of nature (the natural state in which human beings, in being dependent on their contrary, passive affects, are enemies of each other). If human beings did not die but lived forever (or were immortal), what would be the meaning of Spinoza’s characteristic language of “more” or “less” knowledge and of “greater” (eternal) or “smaller” (durational and perishing) parts of the mind? Would not the measure of these “relative” or “comparative” states itself then be relative or comparative (finite or durational) and not absolute (infinite, eternal)? I think that one of the challenges we readers face in adequately grasping how Spinoza understands the “difference” between the fact that there is nothing contrary to God or to human love and the fact that the transition to perfection involves the language of more or less and greater and smaller is that, in addition to having two opposed concepts of singular things—those belonging to the first and to the third kinds of knowledge—he also distinguishes between singular things as natural and singular things as human beings. This is why his reference in V.38 to IV.30 is critically important. While we can have universal (scientific) knowledge of the common properties of things according to the second kind of knowledge, what truly produces acquiescentia mentis for human beings is to come to know the essence of individuals according to the third kind of knowledge. But surely the sole individuals of whom human beings know that their essence involves and expresses actual existence as necessary or eternal are their fellow human beings, with whom they constitute their common life together in and through the civil state, in which they are “god” one to the other. Indeed, we have already learned from Spinoza’s political treatises that the kingdom of God—the eternal realm of necessary existence—does not exist outside of (without) the civil state. Surely, it follows, then, that the singular things whose essence we know involves and expresses necessary existence can only be and so must be our neighbors whom we are commanded by the dictates of reason—of human and divine law—to love as ourselves.

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Before pursuing further our analysis of how it is that the eternity of the mind involves and expresses knowledge of singular individuals within the civil state, and thus of the relationship between Spinoza’s ethics and his politics, it is important, first, to complete our consideration of part V by examining its two final propositions. They involve the surprising claim that apparently we do not need to know the eternity of the mind and the challenging issue of how in the end we are to understand the distinction or, indeed, the division between sapiens, who (in being conscious of self, God, and things) never ceases to be, and ignarus, who (in being as if unconscious of self, God, and things) ceases to be as soon as he ceases to suffer (dependence on passive affects). Do we have here another instance of the interplay between proposition 37 (there is nothing contrary in nature to divine and human love) and proposition 38 (affects that are contrary to our nature are evil)? Spinoza states in proposition 41 that, even if we did not know that our mind was eternal, everything that he wrote about morality and religion and thus about strength of mind (animositas) and generosity in part IV would stand. For the first and sole foundation of virtue or of the plan of living rightly, he states, “is to seek one’s utile. However, in determining [in part IV] what reason dictates as useful, we did not take into account the eternity of the mind, which we have known only in this fifth part.” In other words, since we were ignorant of the eternity of the mind when we discussed animositas and generositas in part IV, we would still hold the dictates of reason to be of prime importance if we continued to be ignorant of the eternity of the mind. But Spinoza then goes on in the scholium to indicate that people (vulgus) seem to be commonly persuaded otherwise. They identify freedom with following their own lust and the loss of their own right with following the divine law. Furthermore, they view morality and religion as burdens that they hope to put aside after death, just as they also hope to receive a divine reward for their bondage to morality and religion: But also and chiefly [Spinoza continues] they are induced to live by the command of divine law, as far as their feebleness and impotent mind (animus) allows, from fear of being punished after death—of course, with harsh penalties. And if this hope and fear were not in men but if, on the contrary, they believed that the mind died with the body and that to live longer did not remain with miserable men confected with the burden of morality, they would return to their natural disposition (ad ingenium) and would wish to govern everything from their lust and to obey fortune rather than themselves.

Such absurdity, Spinoza observes, is no different either from consuming poisons and other deadly things now, if you did not think that you would dine on good food for all eternity, or from living without mind or reason now, if you did not see that the mind was eternal or immortal.

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The dual perspective that Spinoza articulates in proposition 41 and its scholium is arresting. On the one hand, true morality, or virtue, is based on seeking your own utile and thus on the dictates of reason. It does not rest on knowledge of (or belief in) the eternity of the mind. On the other hand, pseudo-morality, which Spinoza here associates with the common persuasion of the people, is based on belief in a life (prolonged) after death. It rests— miserably—on the hope of reward and on the fear of punishment after death. Thus, we see that, while true morality is not based on knowledge that the mind is eternal, pseudo-morality rests on a false conception of eternity or immortality as the hope of reward and the fear of punishment in living longer after death. In light of this distinction, several questions come to mind. Why does Spinoza insist that, because morality rests on seeking one’s own utile, it does not require knowledge that the mind is eternal? Why, then, does he introduce the eternity of the mind in the second half of part V? Is it true that “we” (readers) have come to know the eternity of the mind only in part V? Do we not read part V in light of the earlier four parts? As I posed the question earlier, in what sense is part V, with its doctrine of the eternity of the mind and the intellectual love of God, the culmination of parts I–IV? Are we not to view it as the amplification of, or as the final articulation of the amplitude to be found in, the earlier parts? What is the relationship between the eternity of the mind and morality as based on seeking our own utile, between the eternity of mind and conatus? Is the eternity of the mind implicit in—is the eternity of the mind the explication of—Spinoza’s claim that we do not desire something insofar as we judge it to be the good but that, on the contrary, we judge something to be the good insofar as we desire it? Does not the vulgar conception of religion that Spinoza attributes to the people rest on a false conception not only of eternity (immortality)—as life after death (as death after life)—but also of desire, of what it means to seek one’s utile, of conatus? Reflection on proposition 41, in light of the questions that I have posed, suggests, I think, that the reason Spinoza suddenly reminds the reader that morality does not have its foundation in the eternity of the mind—that we do not need to know that the mind is eternal in order to live by the dictates of reason—is that he does not want his concept of the eternity of the mind to be immediately absorbed into what he views as the common opinion on the relationship between morality, together with religion, and the eternity of the mind (the immortality of the soul). Still, it is odd that, while he equates false morality (and religion) with the popular conception of eternity as the hope of reward and the fear of punishment after death—that is, after life—he does not equate true morality (and religion), as based on the dictates of reason, with the true conception of the eternity of the mind. Does Spinoza, then, view the eternity of the mind as the crown of ethics or as an ornamental addition to ethics without fundamental importance? It is possible that Spinoza believed

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that his concept of morality would be more acceptable (and accessible) to his (mainly Christian) readers than his concept of eternity, which had conventionally been attributed solely to God. Nevertheless, in founding morality (and religion) on appetite, desire, or conatus—on seeking your utile—Spinoza provides a comprehensive, no holds-barred critique of the teleological structure of religion insofar as it is based on the supernatural projection of the final causes of life into death—after life. Indeed, many of his readers found his (apparent) separation of morality from religion (from belief in the eternity of the mind or the immortality of the soul) deeply disturbing, if not truly offensive. What is becoming increasingly evident, I think, is that the concept of the eternity of the mind, which Spinoza advances, amplifies—by explicating the amplitude of—his concepts of desire and thus of the good. Desire involves the eternity of the mind; and the eternity of the mind expresses desire. With his concept of the eternity of the mind Spinoza describes the temporality of the actual existence of the singular individual who, in knowing that what he desires is the good, conceives of his essence as involving and expressing necessary existence. What is difficult for most readers to grasp is that Spinoza’s concept of the eternity of the mind—as actual and existing—is temporal in the sense neither of durational time (of the common order of nature) nor of supernatural time (of durational time prolonged after death, that is, after life). The paradox here is that this concept of eternity, as expressing the time, not of the duration but of the freedom (salvation and beatitude) of the human mind, is not subject to death. Yet, if human beings did not die, their minds would not be eternal. That desire involves and expresses the eternity of necessary existence and that eternity involves and expresses the necessary existence of desire Spinoza articulates in proposition 42, although he does not mention the eternity of the mind in it. Rather, he articulates a concept of beatitudo, which had traditionally been associated with the City of God or salvation, as the very substance of conatus. “Beatitude,” he writes, “is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself. Nor do we take joy in it because we restrain our lusts; but, on the contrary, because we take joy in it, therefore, we are able to restrain our lusts.” It is important yet again to recall, from our discussion of part IV, that virtue, for Spinoza, is the conatus of seeking our own utile and thus the desire to live by the dictates of reason, whose basis is the golden rule of doing unto others what we would have others do unto us. We do not desire something because we judge it to be the good, because we are rewarded for it. Rather, we judge something to be the good because we desire it, because, in endeavoring to persist in our existence, we constitute existence as the good, as that whose essence expresses and involves existence as necessary. We can say that there is nothing outside of (without) existence whose necessity expresses blessedness as the

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eternity of our mind. In the demonstration of proposition 42 Spinoza writes that beatitude consists in the love toward God that arises from the third kind of knowledge, which, we remember, involves knowing the essence of singular things as those whose existence involves necessity. The more individuals we know—the more we know individuals—the more we know God. Because this love toward God, he continues, is to be referred to the mind insofar as it acts, it is, therefore, virtue itself. Furthermore, the more joy the mind takes in this divine love or beatitude the more it understands, that is, the more power it has over its affects and the less it suffers from the affects that are evil. It follows, consequently, that, insofar as the mind takes joy in this divine love or beatitude, it has the power to constrain its lusts. Spinoza concludes, then, that, “because the human power to restrain the lusts consists in the intellect alone, therefore, no one takes joy in beatitude because he restrains the lusts; but, on the contrary, the power of restraining the lusts arises from beatitude itself. Q. E. D.” Like all great thinkers, Spinoza is at once simple and profound. What he shows us about beatitudo is that it simply expresses and involves love of God. At the same time, however, he also shows us that, because beatitude arises from and consists in the third kind of knowledge, it is virtue, action, and power. Beatitude is not the end for which we act. It is not the reward of virtue. Rather, beatitude expresses the very fact that the more we know individuals as those whose essence expresses necessary existence the more we know God. The more we know God the more we desire to know God (to recall V.26) and thus the more we desire to know and to love individuals. It is important to note that in proposition 42 Spinoza provides a summary not only of the second half of part V, on the intellectual love of God, but also of the first half, on the power of the mind “over” the affects or on the remedies of the affects. Our beatitude—freedom, salvation—is not the result of virtue. Beatitude is not our reward for restraining our lusts or affects. Rather, beatitude expresses our joy in restraining our lusts, in having power over our affects, in loving our neighbor as ourselves. Once again, we see that there is no fundamental difference between the two halves of part V. There is no transition from “this present life” to the eternity of the mind. Beatitude (or the eternity of the mind) characterizes the virtue of effecting transition to ever greater perfection. Only those who are blessed can be more (when not less) blessed. Although Spinoza associates beatitude with mind or intellect and distinguishes it from the passive affects, beatitude is in fact nothing other than the transitio to yet more complete and joyful beatitude, just as love is the transitio to yet more profound love and perfection is the transitio to yet greater perfection. We do not love God—in order, say, to gain entrance into heaven. We do not love God—in order to restrain our lusts or in order to become better persons. On the contrary, in loving God we take joy in our enhanced power to

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know and to love individuals. Beatitude is the very expression of human virtue, power, and action; for the more individuals we love and know the more we are liberated from our passive affects, that is, the greater is our freedom, the greater are our virtue, power, and action. The profundity of Spinoza’s concept of beatitudo lies in the fact, consequently, that, like conatus, like desire, like love, it is the supreme expression of our understanding that human existence, when grasped as necessary and so free, is without end—and without beginning—in terms of durational time. It is now—because actual and existing—and necessary and so eternal. Beatitude cannot be measured by temporal sequence as found in the common order of nature. Eternity, we thus see, is the time of human nature; for what constitutes the nature or essence of human beings is that, when viewed under the form of eternity, it involves necessary, that is, eternal existence. Does it not, therefore, seem likely that the eternity of the mind, precisely because it involves virtue, power, and action, is not to be found outside of (without) the civil state (of democracy)? For we remember that virtue, as conatus, involves the dictates of reason, which provide the foundation of both the civil state and the eternity of the mind. These are issues to be pursued further in our concluding summary. It is important, first, however, to see how, finally, we are to understand the distinction between the two types of individuals—those who are conscious and those who are (as if) unconscious of self, God, and things—with whom Spinoza terminates the Ethics in the scholium of proposition 42. Having now shown the power of the mind over the affects and the freedom of the mind in part V, it is apparent, he remarks, of how much the wise man is capable and how much more powerful he is than the ignorant man who is driven solely by lust. Because the ignorant man is troubled by external causes of many kinds and does not possess true acquiescentia of mind, “he lives as if unconscious of himself, God, and things and, as soon as he ceases to suffer [dependence on external causes], he also ceases to be.” In contrast to ignarus is sapiens who is scarcely moved in spirit “but, conscious of himself, of God, and of things by a certain, eternal necessity, never ceases to be but always possesses true acquiescentia of mind.” In light of our prior analysis, there are two interrelated questions to ask in terms of the distinction that Spinoza makes here between wise and ignorant individuals. First, are we to understand the distinction between sapiens and ignarus as representing a fundamental difference between two distinct individuals—one superior and the other inferior—or as representing fundamentally different yet related tendencies (affections) that are present in every individual and so between what is more and what is less perfect in all individuals? Second, how are we to understand the distinction between “never ceasing to be” and “ceasing to be”? How does Spinoza conceive of the time and

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place in which sapiens is eternal and in which ignarus perishes? Is the separation that he makes here between this world and another world (to come, the kingdom of God—after death and so after life)? Or is the separation that he makes here to be found in this present life between active affects, or action and freedom, on the one hand, and passive affects, or passion and bondage, on the other hand? Another way of posing these questions is to ask how Spinoza understands consciousness and thus the difference between sapiens, who is “conscious of self, God, and things,” and ignarus, who is “as if unconscious of self, God and things.” What is the difference between conscius and what Spinoza is careful to call, not inscius but quasi inscius, between “conscious” and “as if [or quasi] unconscious”? The fact that the ignorant individual is not totally unconscious but only quasi unconscious indicates to us that ignarus is not ignorant as Socrates is ignorant. He does not belong to the natural state. He is not completely bound by the common order of nature. Further, we are surely to remember that, for Spinoza, no individual is ever totally exempt from the common order of nature. Clearly, it would be precisely sapiens who would be supremely ignorant if he believed (with the Stoics and Descartes, in Spinoza’s view of them) that he could live exempt from bondage to the affects or from what Spinoza calls the external causes of the common order of nature. He holds not only that all human beings are subject to the passive affects but also that all human nature is, consequently, the same. Surely, the paradox of modern life, as of human life portrayed in the Bible, is the fact that, while our human nature is the same— human beings are equal before God and neighbor—“sameness” (equality) does not eliminate (or suppress) difference but rather provides the very basis for understanding “distinction,” not in hierarchical (relative) terms but in absolute (incomparable, relational) terms. Following Spinoza’s usage, individuals (or groups of individuals) are distinguished insofar as they effect transitio to ever greater perfection (of self-understanding), to ever greater realization of the exemplar of human nature. Individuals, then, are “better” than or superior to other human beings, not in relative or finite (comparative) terms but in absolute (infinite) terms, in the absolute terms of what distinguishes or constitutes our human nature. Because ignarus cannot be totally ignorant (in the Socratic sense of Adam and Eve before they unconsciously “fall” from ignorance into consciously knowing good and evil), he cannot be so ignorant as not to know that he is ignorant. He cannot be unconscious of the fact that he is unconscious. By indicating that ignarus is “quasi unconscious” and thus not completely unconscious, Spinoza shows us that no human being can be so totally submerged in the natural state (and so totally dependent on external causes, of which he is ignorant) that he does not even know that he is ignorant or unconscious. For,

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indeed, knowledge or consciousness of the natural state is itself a product of the civil state of human nature, just as the first kind of knowledge can be known as mutilated, confused, and inadequate solely in light of the third kind of knowledge or of truth as its own standard. The ontological basis for understanding the distinction between sapiens and ignarus as absolute (or infinite), and so based on a concept of human equality (the civil state of neighborliness), and not as relative (or finite), and so based on a concept of human hierarchy (the natural state of enmity), is conatus, whose force to persist in existence is the actual essence of all individuals as conceived under the form of eternal necessity. All human beings are absolutely equal in possessing, in being constituted by, conatus. It is inconceivable that there would be human beings who did not endeavor to attain their own utile (however impoverished or pathological their conception of utile might be). Indeed, we know that Spinoza holds that all human beings are in possession of their right—sui juris—to endeavor to attain their utile. They cannot cede or alienate this “natural right” (although they are impotent to possess it in the natural state). All human beings—whatever they may say or believe—judge something to be the good because they desire it. They do not desire something because they judge it to be the good. The paradox here, as always, is that the good of our desire is thus dependent precisely on what Spinoza calls our power or action. For the more individuals we know—the more we know individuals—that more we know God as that in and through which our actual essence involves and expresses our existence as free, necessary, and eternal. Another version of this paradox is that it is solely the democratic civil state that supports and fosters a concept of distinction that is not based on the hierarchical differences of class, race, gender, caste, etc. Yes, this idea or this book or this garden or this leader or this apple pie or this teacher . . . is superior to another, but “superior” here means judged absolutely in terms of the good that is accessible to and can be equally shared by all human beings. We are relative to, related to, the absolute standard, to which all of us human beings are subject without distinction. The only distinctions that count are those that articulate, advance, and embody the absoluteness of distinction. There are no (finite) comparisons between individuals. The only comparison that counts is that between the individual and the exemplar of true life. In substantive terms, the absolute good, the standard true for all human beings, is existence or, in other words, love of God and neighbor. No individuals can be ignorant or unconscious of persisting in existence. But how individuals effect their transition to ever more perfect existence, in increasingly understanding their existence within the terms of the intellectual love of God, involves and expresses a distinction, always, between, in Spinoza’s terms, sapiens and ignarus, between being conscious and being as if (quasi) unconscious.

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That we are to understand the difference between sapiens and ignarus to be absolute (infinite) and not comparative, relative, or hierarchical (finite) helps us to see that the difference between “never ceasing to be” and “ceasing to be,” between the human time of eternity and the natural time of duration, is also absolute and not relative. For, as Spinoza constantly insists, eternity is not relative to or to be compared with duration. The time of the common order of nature does not give us a measure of the time that he calls the eternity of the mind. But he is also supremely conscious of the fact that people commonly confuse the two orders of time—eternal, free, and active, on the one hand; and natural, determined, and passive, on the other. They project their affects into the final causes of supernatural nature, on the basis of which they then believe that their existence continues in duration after death, that is, after life. It is striking in this context to remember that the common order of nature, the natural state in which all human beings are born and die, is, paradoxically, the creation of the civil state. We cannot know that we are subject to the common order of nature—subject to the passions, to the passive affects, to inadequate ideas—without, first, knowing, consciously, that truth is its own standard, that there is nothing (eternal) outside of (without) the civil state of loving your neighbor as yourself. A provocative way of articulating the paradoxical relationship between the natural and the civil states is that we can “know” that we are born and die (in the natural state) only from the eternal perspective of the mind (in the civil state). Death is natural. To die is natural. Yet to comprehend, consciously, what natural death is, what death in the natural state is presupposes what Spinoza calls the eternity of the mind (and the civil state in his political treatises). We do not “pass” from the natural state to the civil state, from the passive affects to the active affects, or from nature (passion) to freedom (action). Rather, as free and active human beings conscious that we exist in the natural state, we realize, with the consciousness of sapiens, that, in effecting transition to greater (when not to lesser) perfection, we increasingly conceive of individuals (as perceived under the first kind of knowledge) under the form of eternal necessity following the third kind of knowledge. We see them to be individuals whose actual essence eternally involves and expresses necessary existence. Thus, it would appear that, just as the natural state does not precede but is the creation of the civil state, that of human consciousness, so the eternal nature of the mind does not succeed the civil state (after death) but constitutes the very spirit (animus, animositas) with which we effect transitio to ever greater (when not simply to lesser) perfection. In elemental terms, the eternity of the mind, with its knowledge of individuals as involving and expressing the intellectual love of God, is found, not after death (that is, after life) but in and through the temporality of the common society of individuals whose existence is understood, not as durational and finite but as eternal and infinite.

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It is striking to see that, while the temporality of human existence is eternal and so (what I am here calling) absolute, it is also dynamic and “progressive.” It is in this context that we are to understand Spinoza’s use of the terms that are only apparently comparative or relative: more or less (perfection) and greater or smaller (parts of the mind). These terms do not constitute a comparison between sapiens and ignarus. Sapiens does not effect transition to more perfection than does ignarus. Sapiens does not attain a mind the eternal part of which is greater than that of ignarus. On the contrary, the only standard worthy of sapiens is that of the exemplar of human nature or of what Spinoza calls in part V the intellectual love of God. In effecting transition to more perfection, in knowing more individuals by the third kind of knowledge, in having a mind the greater part of which is eternal, sapiens is precisely the individual who eschews finite comparisons (involving durational time) between individuals; for he knows that the sole standard that counts is that by which all human beings are measured, the love of God and neighbor. Paradoxically, the only comparison of sapiens is with himself, that is, with God as the exemplar of human nature. The more individuals sapiens knows the more he knows God. But surely it is also the case, then, that the more sapiens knows (loves) himself as an individual—without comparison with others—the greater is his intellectual love of God (and vice versa). The intellectual love of God, comprehended as beatitudo, salus (salvation), and what in the title of part V of the Ethics is called libertas humana, is dynamic and active. It is the supreme expression of conatus, which, in empowering individuals to attain their utile, constitutes virtue as the dictates of reason whose foundation is the love of God and neighbor. It is not simply the fact that conatus leads to the beatitude of the intellectual love of God. Rather, because humans beings are constituted by conatus, by affect, appetite, and desire, their beatitude consists in persisting in existence as their actual essence, whose necessity (freedom) attains its highest expression in what Spinoza calls beatitude or the intellectual love of God. Just as the mind is not found outside of (without) conatus or desire, so there is no true conatus or desire that does not involve the consciousness of effecting change, of effecting transitio to ever more (when not to less) perfection, love, virtue, and freedom. It is equally the case that, just as conatus, when comprehended as the mind conscious of itself, God, and things, is not found outside of (without) God, so God is not found outside of (without) singular individuals—human beings who are conscious that in and through the love of God and neighbor their actual essence involves and expresses necessary existence, whose other names are human freedom, salvation, beatitude, the intellectual love of God, the eternity of the mind, and also, consequently, power, action, and perfection. We thus see that God, like beatitude, is not the end—the final cause—of human existence. Rather God is

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the way in and by which human beings consciously gain ever and ever greater knowledge of individuals as those whose actual existence is eternally necessary. Indeed, in holding that the individual whose body is “apt for many things” possesses a mind whose maximal part is eternal (according to V.39) and that the more perfection one has the more one acts and that the more one acts the more perfection one has (according to V.40), Spinoza indicates that the intellectual love of God explicates conatus as self-conscious desire. We can then understand why Spinoza points out that he represents the mind as “beginning” to be eternal, although its love of God is compos (i.e., fully possessed) from the beginning. We are always on the way, always beginning, yet the beginning is the eternal affirmation of existence, not the transition to existence (from some unknown and unknowable time and place). The transition is always, paradoxically, from God to God, from eternity to eternity, from the singular individual to the singular individual, from the civil state to the civil state. At the same time we can say that, so long as we consciously eschew the finite images of the first kind of knowledge and thus incorporate yet more individuals into our love of God and neighbor, we actively and eternally effect a transition from passive to affect affects, from inadequate to adequate ideas. When Spinoza addresses what he calls the remedies of the affects—the power of the mind over the affects—in the first half of part V of the Ethics, we see that what he really shows us is the way in which the affects are made selfconscious of themselves as active and dynamic. The relationship between the mind and the affects is not one in which one finite thing exercises finite or mechanical (causal) power over another finite thing. Rather, the relationship between the mind and its affects is that expressed in axioms 1 and 2 of part V. Following axiom 1, the mind has the power at one and the same time to excite contrary actions among its affects and to effect the change whereby their actions (like those of singular individuals in the natural state) cease to be contrary (as singular individuals constitute the pactum of the dictates of reason in the civil state). Following axiom 2, the mind shows that, as the cause or agent of change, the power of the effect (which is the affect!) is defined by the power or the essence itself of the cause, consistent with conatus. Yet conatus, we know, is at once cause and effect, both mind and affect, whose other name is causa sui, the cause of itself. What Spinoza consequently makes clear in the first half of part V is that the power of the mind over the affects involves the recognition on the part of the mind that there are no affects that it cannot render loving and so not contrary to God. No one can hate God—unto eternity, not even ignarus. The relationship between the mind and its affects, we see, is simply the relation that conatus has with itself in endeavoring to persevere in existence. As conatus, in seeking its own utile, generates passive or contrary affects, it also constitutes the

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change (called the dictates of reason, whose basis is love of neighbor) whereby the contrary actions of the affects cease to be contrary and are revealed to exist freely from the sole necessity of the actual essence of conatus and to be determined to act from itself alone (according to I.D7). Although, as Spinoza observes, we learn of the eternity of the mind only in the second half of part V of the Ethics, it is clear that it is present in and as conatus from the beginning, while conatus itself involves and expresses the cause of itself, which takes us back to the very beginning of the Ethics. Consequently, just as there is no radical break between the two halves of part V, so, when Spinoza, in the second half, refers to key propositions in part IV, he also shows us that there is no radical break between part V, with its concept of the eternity of the mind, and the earlier parts of the Ethics. In the context of showing that the third kind of knowledge involves and expresses the eternity of the mind, Spinoza refers to propositions of part IV to remind us that the singular things that are most “useful” to us are our fellow human beings. Here, the paradox is that, while, in the terms of Pascal, all human beings naturally hate one another or, in other words, all human beings are like ignarus in being quasi unconscious (yet not actually unconscious or ignorant) of self, God, and things, human beings, nevertheless, have no actual existence outside of (without) the civil state, which they, as sapientes, conscious of being ignari, constitute in and through the intellectual love of God. We have now seen that the eternity of the mind constitutes and is constituted by knowledge of singular individuals, whose essence expresses existence as following from the necessity, that is, from the freedom of their own nature. It is now time, therefore, to conclude this chapter with reflections on how we may fruitfully understand the relationship in Spinoza’s thought between the ethical or human freedom of the intellectual love of God and the democratic freedom of the civil state that exercises sovereign power over both human and divine law. What, in other words, is the relationship between the freedom of the multitudo and the eternity of the mind? It will hardly be surprising to find that, in reflecting on the relationship between politics and ethics in Spinoza, we shall, once again, be taking into consideration the separation of philosophy from religion.

Conclusion: Democratic Freedom, Human Freedom, and the Relationship between Politics and Ethics In articulating the eternity of the mind as the comprehension, within the third kind of knowledge, of the essence of singular individuals as those whose existence is necessary, Spinoza not only adheres to but also both advances the rig-

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orous dialectic of his thought and deepens its fundamental dynamism. In distinguishing absolutely between the eternity of the mind and its temporal (quantifiable) duration in specific times (and places), Spinoza shows that the more individuals we know—under the third kind of knowledge—the more we know God, that is, the more perfect is our knowledge and the greater is the part of our mind that is eternal. Indeed, in light of definition 8 of part I, as the eternity of our mind increases (when it does not decrease), we experience the ever greater beatitude of understanding yet more deeply the relationship between necessity and existence. The other names for necessary existence are eternity, freedom, salvation (salus), beatitudo, not to mention causa sui. That the eternity of the mind describes the temporality of human freedom, to recall the title of part V of the Ethics, and not the temporality of the common order of nature, shows how extraordinary is the relationship that Spinoza ultimately establishes between conatus and God, between desire (as selfconscious appetite) and the intellectual love of God, and between the affects and the dictates of reason, whose basis is love of God and neighbor. Whereas necessity and existence in the natural state or in the common order of nature are opposed to each other and so mutually contradictory, from the perspective of the eternity of the mind—which is that of God—the paradoxical relationship of necessity and existence constitutes the very essence of human freedom. We recall that, according to the single axiom of part IV, singular individuals are naturally opposed to and so contradictory and destructive of each other. Their existence is not necessary. In other words, necessity is not natural. There is no singular individual in the natural state the non-existence of which, as Hume would say, is contradictory. Rather, the fact that singular individuals, when conceived of within the temporal order of nature, are contradictory is not at all contradictory but natural (since their existence is not necessary). We cannot conceive of singular individuals, within the common order of nature, as those whose essence expresses and involves necessary existence. Their existence is not eternal (or free). We thus see how rigorous and consequently how extraordinary is the consistency with which Spinoza makes consciousness (or self-consciousness) on the part of human beings central to his ontology and so to his ethics and also his politics. He opens the Ethics, as I emphasize in volume I of my study, with what I understand by the cause of itself and as that which cannot be conceived (by me) without existing. He closes the Ethics, as we have now seen, with sapiens who, in being conscious of self, God, and things, possesses a mind whose eternity is without durational beginning or end (in contrast to the quasi unconscious ignarus). There is a sense in which the entire Ethics is a study or exploration of what it is that I understand by the cause of itself and what it means that God’s existence is not found outside of (without) human conception

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(thought, knowledge, mind, reason, intellect, understanding, or idea). What Spinoza constantly demonstrates is that nothing exists or can be conceived outside of (without) God—as causa sui, as the very concept of necessary existence, as that which does not exist or cannot be conceived outside of (without) human thought and existence. Indeed, what distinguishes the natural state from the civil state, or the first kind of knowledge from the third kind of knowledge, is human self-consciousness, as it is embodied in what I call the fundamental dialectic of Spinoza’s thought, that between passive affects and active affects, between inadequate ideas and adequate ideas, etc. The very distinction between the natural state and the civil state or between what is in another (the common order of nature) and what is in itself (human nature understood to be and to be conceived in and through God) presupposes consciousness: my understanding that I could not even be subject to the common order of nature except from a perspective that Spinoza associates with the eternity of the mind, the civil state, human nature, or the freedom of existing and acting from my own nature (or essence) alone, that is, in recognizing myself and other human beings as those whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence. We cannot even have a concept of the first kind of knowledge—of inadequate knowledge of singular individuals—except from the perspective of the third kind of knowledge or on the basis of what Spinoza calls truth as its own standard. While I shall defer comment on the relationship between Spinoza’s political and ethical thought and the ontological argument to my concluding chapter, we see from the beginning unto the end that consciousness (conception, knowledge) is central to the very constitution of that relationship. Indeed, the relationship between necessity and existence is precisely that between consciousness (thought) and existence. Neither is given outside of (without) the other. The paradox here, as always, is that we do not begin with thought and arrive at existence (we do not deduce existence from thought). Equally, we do not begin with existence and arrive at thought (we do not deduce thought from existence). The relationship between God and human being and the relationship between (and among) human beings bears exactly the same dialectic. God is not prior (in time and space) to human beings. God is not the first cause or the final cause of human beings (in the tradition of scholastic thought imbued with Neoplatonism). Rather, God is the cause of all things as he is the cause of himself. But how is God the cause of himself? Having posed that question from the beginning of the Ethics, Spinoza’s final articulation of it is in and through the eternity of the mind as the intellectual love of God. To comprehend God as causa sui—to comprehend that God is the cause of all things as he is the cause of himself—is to comprehend singular individuals as those whose essence involves and expresses necessary exis-

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tence. In other words, the cause of itself involves and expresses the necessary (free) relationship between thought and existence, between God and human being, and between (among) human beings. The very concept of the cause of itself demands self-consciousness—or self-referentiality (the referentiality of self)—on the part of those who truly comprehend what it means that God is the cause of all things as he is causa sui. That necessary existence expresses the freedom or beatitude of comprehending God as causa sui, of viewing singular individuals under the third kind of knowledge, that necessary existence involves the self-consciousness on the part of individuals that the order of temporality to which they belong is that of eternity, and not of duration, Spinoza articulates no less in his concept of the civil state of democracy. Either singular individuals, in the natural state, are enemies by nature. Or singular individuals constitute the pactum of the civil state, that is, the multitudo, in which they cede their natural right and regain it as the dictates of reason. There is no passage or transition from the natural state to the civil state. Rather, Spinoza shows (to those who have eyes to see) that what is involved in the creation of the pactum or the multitudo is the “miracle” of knowledge or self-consciousness. Individuals recognize that their right to the power of attaining their utile is impotent and contradictory until and unless all individuals equally (freely and in solidarity with each other) enjoy the right (sui juris) of exercising their power in the democratic civil state. Just as necessity and existence are opposed to each other and mutually contradictory and destructive of each other in the natural state, so power and right are opposed to each other and mutually contradictory and destructive of each other in the natural state. It is only within the civil state—of democracy— that power and right enter into a necessary (paradoxical) and so mutually reciprocal relationship such that power involves right and right expresses power. I have a right to my power (I enjoy the power of exercising my right) only insofar as I recognize (and foster) the right on the part of all human beings to exercise their power (the power that all human beings possess in exercising their right). Just as it becomes evident that the only singular individuals whose essence we know to involve necessary existence are our fellow human beings, so it also becomes evident that the only civil state in which we acknowledge that the existence of all human individuals is necessary (free) is democracy. There is no single individual, in democracy, whose existence is not necessary. No human being in the democratic civil state possesses more or less necessity than another. Another term for necessity here is human dignity (worth). The relationship that Spinoza establishes between “human freedom” and the eternity of the mind in his ethics is precisely the same relationship that he establishes between “democratic freedom” and the civil pactum (or the multitudo) in his

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politics. It is wonderfully paradoxical, of course, that he demonstrates that the sovereign political powers of the democratic civil state have absolute authority over both human law and divine law. Not only, however, are the sovereign political powers the people (multitudo), but also the civil power that they rightfully (justly) exercise is at once human and divine. That the civil is not reducible to the human (as opposed to the divine) explains how and why God remains so central a concept for Spinoza in both his political and his ethical thought. Indeed, how it is that the ontological argument is central to ethics is illuminated by the fact that God does not exist and that the necessary existence of God cannot be conceived outside of (without) the civil state. In the natural state—of the passions—in which human individuals are enemies by nature and where one singular individual is destroyed by yet a more powerful, singular individual ad infinitum, there is neither true necessity (but only external determination) nor true existence (but only bondage). Paradoxically, necessity and existence come into being together in and through what Spinoza calls the dictates of reason (in all three of his works that are under consideration in this study). The paradox of the dictates of reason—as of necessary existence, the cause of itself, and the eternity of the mind—is that, while they are not found outside of (without) the natural passions or the natural state, they are not reducible to the natural passions. For the natural state comes into existence only with the miraculous (incomprehensible) “fall” of human beings into knowledge of good and evil. I say “incomprehensible” in Spinoza’s exact sense of the term. We can understand the fall of Adam and Eve—who are like us—only from the position of the knowledge of good and evil, from the position of ethical knowledge and the civil state. Their prelapsarian position is incomprehensible to them—they do not even know that it is incomprehensible—as we democratic citizens (and readers) equally have to come to the recognition that the whole point of the story of Adam and Eve is to demonstrate to us that they are not free to fall (they are impotent to fall). They have no self-consciousness because they lack knowledge of God as causa sui whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence. The story of the first man and woman teaches us that there is no transition from the natural state of ignorance to the knowledge of good and evil, to self-consciousness, to freedom, to necessary existence. Rather, the natural state (of Adam and Eve, of ignarus, of Socrates) comes into existence with our understanding that the cause of itself, like the eternity of the mind, involves the constant transitio to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection. The mind is not known outside of (without) the body, its affects, its passions, its desires and appetites. There is no escape from the body, if by escape we mean denial (or repression). But the paradoxical position of the mind with

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regard to its body is that, as the idea of the body, the mind also knows that it can know the body—that it can be responsible to and take responsibility for its body, for its affects—only insofar as it is not reducible to but, in its very inseparability from the body, is distinct from the body. The relationship of the mind to its body is precisely that, once again, of the relationship of the civil state (of adequate ideas) to the natural state (of inadequate ideas). The mind is not found outside of (without) the body. But the mind is not reducible to the body (and the body is not reducible to the mind). The paradoxical (the non-contradictory) relationship of mind and body Spinoza articulates in part V of the Ethics with his notion of viewing the body under the form of eternity, of coming to the realization that the more apt the body is for more things the more eternal the mind is. By this apparently awkward language Spinoza simply means that the more the mind (or the human being) actively engages its body and its affects—the more individuals it comes to know under the third kind of knowledge—the more it knows itself as “caused” by God as causa sui. But, again, to know that God is the cause of all things as he is causa sui simply means that I understand my existence—the existence of all human beings— to be necessary; and the more I know singular individuals as those whose essence involves necessary existence the more I know God (and vice versa). It is highly paradoxical that God, whose absolute power is the explicit basis for demonstrating that all natural beings have the right to do everything that is in their power in the natural state—their right extends as far as their power—is shown to be a civil (political and ethical) concept and not a concept of nature. But it is no less paradoxical to discover that human nature is a concept that is not natural but civil. Indeed, the only reason that there can and will (always) be conflict between human law and divine law, between reason and faith, between philosophy and religion is because both are civil. It is the aim of Spinoza to show that democracy, in being truly natural, is the freest (the only free) civil state. But this also means that the God of the Hebrews, and of their heirs, the Christians, is also the God of democracy. For, just as God’s absolute power is utterly arbitrary and contradictory—in the natural state— so the attempt on the part of human beings to do whatever is in their power— in the natural state—ends in absolute contradiction. Spinoza shows that, precisely because right depends on power in the natural state, so power depends on right in the civil state. I cannot realize my power—outside of (without) contradiction—except insofar as I recognize your power; and this mutual recognition of power is precisely what we call right. Right is always power, involving and expressing what Spinoza calls conatus. But the paradox of conatus, as he shows us in his two political treatises and then demonstrates in his Ethics, is that I can undertake to maximize my conatus only insofar as I recognize that you have the same power and thus the same right to maximize your

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conatus. Thus, while it is the case that religion (the kingdom of God) is not found outside of (without) the civil state, it is also the case that the civil state is not found outside of (without) religion or the kingdom of God. But just as the only civil state that is consistent with God is democracy, so we also see that the only God that is consistent with the civil state is one whose revelation—as found in the prophets and Christ—involves charity and justice. It follows, then, that, while the separation of philosophy from theology grounds the freedom of philosophizing, this is so because the very basis of theology, as found in the Bible, is what Spinoza calls freedom. The fact that religion is not found outside of (without) the civil state in no sense involves the reduction of religion to the civil state. Rather, it is the recognition that the civil state can be true to (or consistent with) itself only insofar as it embodies the essence of God. Just as God does not enjoy immediate power over human beings—if he is not to be a tyrant—but only in and through human beings, what Spinoza calls mediating powers, so the civil state does not enjoy immediate power over human beings—if it is not to be tyrannical—but only in and through human beings as mediating powers. It is evident, then, that the civil state, like individual citizens, involves and expresses the cause of itself. Consequently, we begin to realize how tightly bound together in the thought of Spinoza are the civil state of democracy, the eternity of the mind, and knowledge of individuals as those whose essence is to exist necessarily. Just as God does not exist and cannot be thought to exist necessarily outside of (without) the democratic civil state, so God is not known—as existing necessarily—outside of (without) human thought (and existence). The ontological argument—that God is the cause of things as he is causa sui—is equally central to Spinoza’s politics and ethics. The only conceivable time and place in which the eternity of the mind is meaningful is the civil state of democracy in which all individuals are seen under the form of eternity as those whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence. Sapiens and ignarus characterize the challenge posed to individuals—both personally and collectively— within the democratic civil state to make the transition to ever greater perfection in understanding the relationship between necessity and existence and so also the relationship between power and right whose alternative name is (among infinite others) freedom. It is extraordinary to see how the dialectic that Spinoza makes central to his thought—the dialectic of body and mind, power and right, desire and reason, natural determination and necessary existence, the natural state and the civil state, the common order of nature and human nature, final causes and the cause of itself, etc.—involves the self-conscious recognition on the part of individuals of their responsibility, which is at once political and ethical, of effecting the eternal transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection.

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The ultimate challenge, following the terms of Spinoza’s discourse, is to bring together conatus and God, desire and the intellectual love of God, and the individual and the cause of itself such that, in knowing singular individuals as the neighbor whose essence expresses necessary existence, we love our neighbors as ourselves. The fact that, as Spinoza demonstrates, we do not desire something insofar as we judge it to be the good but rather we judge something to be the good insofar as we desire it is at once political and ethical. The relationship between desire and the good is precisely that between body and mind and thus between the natural state and the civil state. This relationship is dynamic and dramatic. It involves the eternal transition to ever greater perfection—of both civil freedom (democracy) and human freedom (the eternity of the mind)—when it does not involve idolatry (the reduction of the good or of God to my desire or the reduction of my desire to the good or to God). Spinoza is powerfully insightful in demonstrating that God—the God of the Bible—is not a supernatural good or a final cause that precedes or takes priority (in space or time) over human consciousness and existence. Indeed, just as beatitudo is not the result (or product) of virtue but is virtue itself— the power of action, the power of making the eternal transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection—so God is not an external (or an internal) first or final cause but the cause of things as he is the cause of himself. But how God is the cause of himself involves the recognition on the part of human beings that, in and through the eternity of their mind, their desire is the cause of itself—in both their political and their ethical relationships. That God is the cause of himself is not given outside of (without) human thought and existence, the supreme good of which Spinoza calls democratic freedom in the Theologico-Political Treatise (and also, as I argued above, in the Political Treatise, if only indirectly) and human freedom in the Ethics. It is equally the case that human individuals cannot constitute their desire, or conatus, as the cause of itself, as that whose essence involves and expresses necessary existence, outside of (without) the eternity of mind whose political representation is the civil state of democracy. Just as the God of ethics is not found outside of (without) the civil state of democracy, whose supremely sovereign powers have absolute authority over both divine and human law, so it follows that philosophy, whose supreme good (desire) is knowledge of God, is no less political than it is ethical. Spinoza undertakes to separate philosophy from religion (together with prophecy, revelation, and faith) in order to demonstrate their inseparability, that is, to eliminate any possible hierarchical opposition between them (such that one would claim to rule over the other). Indeed, the separation of philosophy from religion, like the separation of human beings from God, like the very separation of individuals (both from themselves and

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from each other), Spinoza knows, is the only true and viable basis of a concept of unity as indivisible and infinite, that is, of a concept of one that utterly eschews all notions of hierarchy and domination. That the God of the Ethics is not found outside of (without) the democratic civil state shows that (and how) the ontological argument is no less political than it is ethical, no less theological than it is philosophical. We can equally say that the fact that the conatus of the Ethics is not found outside of (without) the democratic civil state shows that (and how) the eternity of the mind is no less political than it is ethical, no less theological than it is philosophical. Spinoza’s extraordinary achievement is to demonstrate how the relationship between God and conatus, in constituting the ontological argument for the necessary existence (and thought) of not only God but also human beings, is at once political and ethical. Not only does Spinoza formulate this relationship, in all three of his works under consideration in this study, as the dictates of reason, whose basis is love of neighbor. But he also demonstrates that this relationship involves the eternal transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection in knowing individuals as those whose essence expresses necessary existence. The ethical, or philosophical, articulation of the individual as the one whose essence is to exist necessarily is expressed politically in and by the fact that in the democratic civil state all human individuals are, in the solidarity of their unity, equally and freely necessary. No human being is essentially—in his very necessity—superior (or inferior) to others. Sapiens is not superior to ignarus. Indeed, sapiens expresses his eternity of mind, the fact that he never ceases to exist (by the standard of natural or durational time), in loving his neighbor, all individuals, as himself. It is clearly ignarus who fails in his ethical and democratic obligations to understand that the more he loves individuals the more he loves God (and vice versa). Thus, we see that what is political, ethical, and philosophical is no less theological. That the eternity of the mind, in expressing human freedom, is not found outside of (without) the civil state of democracy, that democracy constitutes and is constituted by the ontological argument, articulates, Spinoza shows us, the very structure of modernity. In my concluding chapter, then, I shall undertake to draw together the findings of my studies in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise, the Political Treatise, and the Ethics by showing that Spinoza delineates the fundamental structure of modernity by articulating values that are essentially biblical. In demonstrating how the dialectic of conatus and God, in and through the ontological argument, involves the eternal transition to ever greater perfection in comprehending (constituting) individuals as those whose essence is necessary existence, Spinoza shows us that, just as the Bible is fundamentally modern, so modernity is fundamentally biblical. Indeed, in effecting a transition to an ever more perfect understanding of the

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Bible, we gain deeper insight into the modernity of both Spinoza and the Bible. Equally, in effecting a transition to ever greater understanding of Spinoza, we achieve greater understanding of the Bible as modern and of modernity as biblical. It is Spinoza’s extraordinary achievement to show that the two fundamental elements of modernity, as it is shaped by the dialectic of conatus and God, are the ontological argument and democracy. That each is inconceivable and does not exist outside of (without) the other will be the thread guiding my reflections in the concluding chapter, to which I now turn. Notes 1. Part V has two axioms only and no definitions. 2. What fundamentally distinguishes the political philosophy of Spinoza from that of the ancients is that he has a concept of totality, that is, a concept of the unity of the state, which is itself founded on the fact that human beings, in the natural state, are equal and possess the same affective nature, that of conatus in seeking their own utile. The paradox, as always, is that it is only the democratic imperium of the multitudo that is absolute, for only there are the natural freedom and equality of human beings attainable. 3. Spinoza uses a variety of terms for the “civil state” (as distinct from the “natural state”): respublica (republic: public thing), civitas (city), imperium (sovereignty, rule, authority), and also status civil. I shall generally use “civil state” to translate these various terms in order to help keep in mind the paradoxical relationship that the civil state (like the ethical state) bears to the natural state of the affects. 4. As in the Ethics Spinoza proceeds to say that he will examine the passions mathematically like properties having certain causes. 5. In his note on this passage Wernham states that “in denying that the state is a product of reason Spinoza abandons his original belief in an historical social contract” (265). I shall not consider here whether it is meaningful to claim that Spinoza in the Ethics and the TPT holds that the civil pact (or state) is historical. What is important to grasp, however, is that, in PT, as we shall see, Spinoza makes the same distinction between the natural state and the civil state and between the passive affects and reason (the active affects) that he makes in his other two works. It is this distinction that counts, not whether he believes in a historical pactum (although he has the biblical covenant as precedent). 6. Spinoza briefly (and not very helpfully!) distinguishes his position from that of Hobbes in letter 50 (1674). 7. It is important to note that the two comments that Spinoza devotes to Machiavelli in PT are strangely ironic. In 5.7 he writes that “the most acute Machiavelli showed at length (prolixe) the means that a prince, who is driven by the sole lust of dominating, must use in order to strengthen and to preserve his imperium. To what end, however, [he wrote] it does not appear to be sufficiently evident.” Still, Spinoza goes on to observe that, because a wise man must have had a good end in mind,

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Machiavelli must have been concerned to show the imprudence of attempting to remove a tyrant without removing the causes of tyranny. Furthermore, Spinoza suggests, perhaps Machiavelli wanted to show that a “free multitudo” must not put its faith in just one ruler, who, fearing plots, would look after himself instead of consulting the multitudo. “I am led more to believing this about this most wise (prudentissimo) man because it is evident that he supported freedom, to the protection of which he also gave the soundest counsels.” Spinoza also cites the Discourses (about the need to bring the corrupted body politic back to its original state) in 10.1. The irony in both of these passages is that Spinoza fails to observe that what makes Machiavellianism so disturbing is its very lack of philosophical (theological) principle. If Machiavelli was not a politician, at least he was an experienced civil servant and also an uncritical admirer of the ancients (in the tradition, not of the Renaissance differentiation of biblical faith from pagan reason but of the medieval conflation between them). But he was not a philosopher. He had no concepts of nature, desire, right, reason, sovereignty, or freedom, etc., no concept of the difference between the natural state (in which human beings are enemies of each other) and the civil state (as founded by and founding the democratic right of the multitudo). In citing the Discourses Spinoza fails to note that the Roman republic (which was no less imperialist prior than subsequent to the Caesars) could not provide Machiavelli with any constitutional principles of natural right, sovereignty, freedom, multitudo, etc. In short, the irony here is that this “most acute” and “most wise” of political operatives, in giving us Machiavellianism, presupposes the principles of ethics and politics yet has no concept of common human nature and consequently no concepts of either the “free multitudo” or freedom. What makes both the Prince and the Discourses so haunting is that Machiavelli, in describing the role of the passions (human vices) in politics and in eschewing the application of conventional moralism and religiosity to politics, depicts a world that is utterly contradictory and in that precise sense indistinguishable from what Spinoza calls the natural state. Spinoza is typically candid. He clearly sees that Machiavelli wrote in support of political tyranny. But he is taken in by Machiavelli in thinking that a most prudent man must always have a good end in mind! In praising Machiavelli he does not see that it is precisely the lack, on the part of a politicus, of a philosophical (and a theological) concept of practice as the (democratic) civil state that spawns Machiavellianism. Is it not ironic that Spinoza fails to see that the absence of true concepts of practice and of the civil state in Machiavelli reflects the absence in his works of the concept of God as the supreme good of humankind? 8. I shall cite here the entire passage: “Through the right and institute of nature I understand nothing else but the rules of nature of each individual, according to which we conceive of each one to be naturally determined to exist and to operate (operandum) in a certain mode. For example, fish are determined by nature to swim and big ones to eat smaller ones, and therefore fish by supreme natural right inhabit (potiuntur) water, and big ones eat smaller ones. For it is certain that nature, considered absolutely, has the supreme right to [do] all the things that it can (jus summum habere ad omnia, quae potest), that is, the right of nature extends itself as far as its power (potentia) extends itself; for the power itself of nature is the power of God, who has the supreme right to [do] all things (summum jus ad omnia habet). But because the uni-

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versal power of the whole of nature is nothing other than the power of all individuals taken together, hence it follows that each individual has the supreme right to [do] all the things that it can. That is, the right of each thing extends itself as far as its determinate power extends itself. And because the supreme law of nature is that each thing endeavors (conetur) to persevere in its state as much as it can (quantum in se est)—taking into account no other thing than itself—hence it follows that each individual has the supreme right to [do] this, that is (as I said) to exist and to operate as it is naturally determined. Here we do not recognize any difference between men and the rest of the individuals of nature; or between men endowed with reason and others who are ignorant of true reason; or among fools, madmen, and the sane. For whatever each thing does from the laws of its nature that it does with supreme right, precisely (nimirum) because it acts according as it is determined from nature, nor can it [do] otherwise. Wherefore, among men, so long as they are considered to live under the sovereignty of nature alone, he who does not yet know reason, that is, he who does not yet have the habit of virtue lives as much by supreme right from the laws alone of appetite as he who directs his life from the laws of reason. That is, just as the wise man (sapiens) has the supreme right [to] do all the things that reason dictates, that is, to live from the laws of reason, thus also the ignorant man (ignarus), who is impotent in mind, has the supreme right to [do] all the things to which appetite persuades him, that is, to live from the laws of appetite. And this is the same as the teaching of Paul, who acknowledges no sin before the law, that is, so long as men are considered to live from the sovereignty of nature” (179–80). 9. Spinoza observes with penetrating insight that the power and right of a state depend not merely on its coercive power over its subjects but in fact on all the means that it can use in securing the obedience of its subjects—whether fear of punishment, hope of reward, love of patria, etc. Just because people make their own decisions does not mean, he points out, that they act on the basis of their own right and not on the basis of the right of the civil state. In other words, the states that are most successful are those that win over the minds of their subjects. Yet Spinoza repeats that, while the power and right of states are extensive, no state has the power to do absolutely whatever it wants. He also points out that, while both reason and experience clearly show that the preservation of the state depends chiefly on the faith, virtue, and constancy of mind of its subjects in following commands, how this is achieved is not so easy to see. He notes, further, that in the TPT he is not concerned to discuss the means that states should adopt in order achieve stability, although, he adds, the history of the Jews under Moses and later on, which he discusses at length, does indicate the concessions that are to be made by the supreme powers to subjects for the greater security and prosperity (incrementum) of the state. 10. This statement, in which Spinoza distinguishes between common (generic) description and fundamentally different ends and means, is followed immediately by the opening sentence of 5.7, in which he observes, as we saw in note 7, that the end that Machiavelli had in mind in describing the means to be used by a prince in support of his lust for domination in securing and preserving his state is not evident. 11. Also see 7.3. In 7.5 Spinoza states that “the welfare of the people is the supreme law or the supreme right of the king.”

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12. Spinoza indicates that, when the people are left in the dark about government business that is kept secret, they have little opportunity for the cultivation of their political acumen. He also indicates that when public business is conducted secretly it supports tyranny. He observes further, when discussing aristocracy, that freedom and the common good perish when the few decide everything on the basis of their own affect (as distinct from what happens in large, aristocratic councils). “For human wits are too dull to be able to penetrate everything at once. But in consulting, listening, and disputing they are sharpened; and, while they try all means, they finally find those that they want, those of which all approve and of which no one had thought before” (9.14). 13. Also see 8.14 and 11.1. 14. Ac proinde concludimus imperium quod in concilium satis magnum transfertur absolutum esse, vel ad absolutum maxime accedere. Nam si quod imperium absolutum datur, illud revera est quod integra multitudo tenet (8.3). Spinoza observes in section 4 that, since the will of the aristocratic council is law, aristocracy is absolute. Still, it is not absolute in practice since rulers fear the multitudo “which thereby obtains some freedom for itself, which, if not by express law, nevertheless it tacitly obtains and maintains (vindicat) for itself.” In section 5 Spinoza indicates that aristocratic rule will “maximally approach absolute” sovereignty when the multitudo is feared as little as possible and when it obtains no freedom except what is allowed to it by the constitution of the state itself and which, therefore, is the right not so much of the multitudo as of the entire state. 15. Homines enim civiles non nascuntur, sed fiunt. “For civil men [i.e., men as citizens] are not born but made.” 16. Also see Is. 45.9. 17. It is worth noting that, while Spinoza, as we have seen, typically uses “external” in this context in the sense of finite, unfree, conditioned, dependent, or determined by others (as distinct from determined in and with others), he does not formulate the opposite of “external” as “internal.” Rather, he formulates his concept of freedom by using such phrases as “determined to exist and to act from one’s nature alone” or sui juris (to live by one’s own law). 18. Spinoza argues in chapter 17 of the TPT that when the Hebrews left Egypt they withdrew their consent from the Egyptian sovereign and returned to the natural state. They were thus in a position to cede their natural right yet again and to enter into the covenant of the civil state with God as their sole sovereign. 19. Spinoza does indicate, however, that it is equally dangerous for a people (like the ancient Israelites), who are unaccustomed to the rule of kings, to set up a monarchy and for a people who live under a tyrant to remove him. In other words, it is one thing to change those who hold the imperium while it is another thing entirely to change the form of the civil state. To exemplify his position Spinoza refers to the English political scene in the mid-seventeenth century: regicide and restoration (216–18). 20. Or natural right, Spinoza adds. He then proceeds to pose the question that I discussed previously: what happens if the sovereign powers contravene the divine law? 21. Wernham comments that, assuming that it is Octavian (Caesar Augustus), who adopted the title of Princeps, whom Spinoza has in mind in indicating that the Roman civil state returns to monarchy, then “the ‘several tyrants’ would include men like Mar-

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ius and Sulla; Pompey, Crassus, and [Julius] Caesar; Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian. But the ease with which Spinoza dismisses the Roman Republic is astonishing” (203). Shirley comments that “this seems a very odd account of the period of the Roman Republic” (218). What I find astonishing and odd, however, is that modern commentators continue to fail to distinguish between Roman history and biblical history, as Spinoza clearly does, as we shall now see. It is important to note, however, that Moreau does recognize that the ingenium (character) of the Roman people was viewed by Spinoza as founded on violence—“Violence interne, violence externe.”—from the (violent) beginning of their republic through to the (violent) end of their empire. “Under the pen of Spinoza, the references to Roman history are almost always pejorative. While he praises the peace that the Hebrews knew at certain times . . . , he characterizes the Roman peace by repeating (reprenant) the formula of the German rebels: ‘where they make a solitude (solitudinem), they call it peace (pacem)’” (435, 439). Still, Moreau does not comment on how different, then, are Spinoza’s conceptions of the Roman and the Hebrew states. In other words, he does not comment on the fact that the Romans knew no distinction between the natural state and the civil state, that is that their civil state, because it was one of unending, contradictory, and irreconcilable violence, was simply the natural state. 22. See note 7. 23. Spinoza’s main argument against the difficulty or impossibility of eliminating well-rooted or long-standing tyranny is that, while it is one thing to remove a particular tyrant from the civil state, it is entirely another thing to attempt to change the form of a civil state and so to eliminate the very basis of tyranny. For it is extremely difficult and consequently extremely dangerous to undertake to eliminate a tyrannical state whose imperium is divided by hierarchically opposed social (and religious) groups (classes). It is precisely the infinitely indivisible imperium of the multitudo that is lacking in a tyrannical civil state. 24. That Adam and Eve do not begin contrary to one another (but are united in their love for each other) indicates that from the beginning they (we) are subject to axiom 1 of part V! 25. It is important to note that the second kind of knowledge as scientific, concerning the general characteristics of all things within a system of natural causation, presupposes the third kind of “intuitive” knowledge of the essence of singular individuals (human beings), concerning necessary existence. Without the third kind of knowledge, the second kind of knowledge becomes indistinguishable from the first kind of knowledge whose basis is the idolatry of final causes. In other words, Spinoza’s distinction between the second and the third kinds of knowledge is congruent with the distinction that Kant makes between real possibility (contingent necessity) and absolute possibility (necessary existence), between knowledge of possible experience and thinking or willing (practical reason), or between nature and freedom. 26. For an excellent discussion of eternal life (both individuelle and interhumaine), together with the intellectual love of God and the third kind of knowledge, see Matheron, chapter 14. Also see Moreau, who magisterially shows that the concept of eternity, as central to what he calls Spinoza’s “absolute rationalism,” is not opposed to but rather embodies experientia as found in, for example, linguistic usage and history.

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However, while Moreau recognizes that for Spinoza eternity “is a certain conjunction of existence and necessity,” it is not clear that he understands that this conjunction embodies the necessary relationship of thought and existence as found in the ontological argument and that, consequently, eternity, as the intellectual love of God (and so expressing the third kind of knowledge), entails both political freedom (love of neighbor) and ethical freedom (beatitude) (510). 27. Actually, Spinoza writes that God is the “efficient cause.” However, since, in the demonstration, he speaks of God only as “cause” (without reference to “efficient”) and since in the scholium he refers to God as causa sui (again, without reference to “efficient” cause), I omit “efficient” as unimportant. 28. In his classic essay contrasting the Greek immortality of the soul with the biblical resurrection of the dead, Cullmann writes: “The Greek doctrine of immortality [of the soul] and the Christian hope in the resurrection differ so radically because Greek thought has such an entirely different interpretation of creation. The Jewish and Christian interpretation of creation excludes the whole Greek dualism of body and soul. For indeed the visible, the corporeal, is just as truly God’s creation as the invisible. God is the maker of the body. The body is not the soul’s prison [as we find in the Phaedo of Plato], but rather a temple, as Paul says (I Cor. 6.19): the temple of the Holy Spirit!” (21–2). Cullmann writes further: “The teaching of the great philosophers Socrates and Plato can in no way be brought into consonance with that of the New Testament” (47). The claim of Badiou (in Ethics) that man, in thinking, is immortal and infinite (and is not merely a mortal, finite, predatory animal in the Heideggerian tradition) is arresting in its bold simplicity. In viewing human beings as immortal in this present life, Badiou shows us that he is not calling upon the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions of the immortality of the soul. Indeed, since his idea that man is immortal is patently related to the idea of resurrection that he discusses in Saint Paul, we see that he articulates the very distinction that Cullmann makes between the immortality of the soul (in the Greeks) and the resurrection of the dead (in the Bible). Furthermore, the distinction that Badiou makes between immortal and mortal is precisely that which Spinoza articulates in distinguishing between the eternity of the mind (which also bears no relation to the Greek notion of the immortality of the soul) and natural (mortal) time. For Spinoza, the conatus by which all human beings endeavor to persevere in their being can be truthful (loving) and not delusive (destructive) only insofar as they think, i.e., insofar as they recognize that they can possess the eternal good that is singular for them only insofar as it is also the eternal good that is universally accessible to and attainable by all singular individuals. The one can be the eternal good for me (the good can be eternally one for me) only insofar as it is the one that is the eternal Good for all individuals. Badiou writes as follows: “[Man is] something other than a mortal being. An immortal: this is what the worst situations [e.g., the Holocaust death camps] that can be inflicted upon Man show him to be, in so far as he distinguishes himself within the varied and rapacious flux of life. In order to think any aspect of Man, we must begin from this principle. . . . The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man’s identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an animal [as mor-

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tal and predatory] to which circumstances may expose him. And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal—unpredictably, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important or secondary. In each case, subjectivation is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species. . . . [This point] can be summarized, very simply, as the assertion that Man thinks, that Man is a tissue of truths” (12; emphasis in the original). 29. Spinoza continues: “For the eyes of the mind, with which it sees and observes things, are themselves demonstrations” (V.23S). 30. It is in V.37S that Spinoza indicates that he now understands singular individuals from the point of view of the third kind of knowledge (involving salvation and human nature), as distinct from the point of view of the first kind of knowledge as found in IV.A (involving death and the common order of nature). 31. Spinoza actually states in V.38 that the more the mind knows things by both the second and the third kinds of knowledge the greater is its part that remains. Still, he indicates in the scholium that acquiescentia arises from the third kind of knowledge and that, therefore, the part that perishes is of no import in relation to the part that remains. He then adds: “But more amply (prolixius) about these matters soon.” But this forward reference is obscure, given that part V contains only four more propositions.

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3 Conclusion: Modernity in Light of Spinoza

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. . . . How did this change come about? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I believe I can resolve this question. Rousseau, Social Contract [1762] (I.1, paragraph 1) Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation. The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes. . . . There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” [1947] (331) A mythology reflects its region. Here In Connecticut, we never lived in a time When mythology was possible—But if we had— That raises the question of the image’s truth. The image must be of the nature of the creator. It is the nature of its creator increased. . . . Wallace Stevens, “A Mythology Reflects its Region” [1950–1955] (476)

in this study has been to show that the thought of Spinoza is at once biblical and modern. I am not, however, directly or primarily concerned with the question of historical influences—of

T

HE BURDEN OF MY ARGUMENT

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the Bible on Spinoza, of Spinoza on modern thought, or even of the Bible “on” modernity. Rather, my interest is fundamentally ontological and hermeneutical, and so also political and ethical, although I do hold, as will have become clear, I trust, that a concept of temporality, which is neither supernatural nor natural but rather historical, is central to both ontology and hermeneutics, and so also to politics and ethics, in their profound interrelationships. I have undertaken to show that the thought of Spinoza and thus of modernity cannot be understood outside of (without) the Bible. But I have also intended to reveal the paradox that the Bible cannot be understood outside of (without) Spinoza and modernity. I do not claim that one has to read Spinoza in order to be an adequate reader of the Bible. I do not hold (or believe) that the three major texts of Spinoza, which are the focus of my study here, are more important than other great texts of religion, philosophy, literature, and the arts of comparable stature in engaging us in the dialectic of the Bible and modernity. But I do hold, and hope to have demonstrated, that to read Spinoza with the deepest concentration, that is, with both hermeneutical exactness and ontological attentiveness, is to find that, as readers, we have to think through, yet again, what we understand by both the Bible and modernity, no less politically than ethically. As we read the Bible, so we also read Spinoza. As we read Spinoza, so we also read the Bible. As we read both the Bible and Spinoza, so we also read modernity. As we read modernity, so we read not only Spinoza but also the Bible. These truisms—both clichés and truths whose profundity is rarely appreciated in modernity—provide the context for acknowledging the woeful lack of understanding, at once methodological and substantive, of the thought of Spinoza on the part of the vast majority of scholars and thinkers. In their very lack of comprehending both modernity and the Bible, they impose on Spinoza the dualisms between philosophy and theology, between reason and faith, and between the secular and the religious that, in their ignorance of the Bible and its traditions, they view as truly modern and that a properly critical grasp of his thought allows us to deconstruct. Not only is God, together with the ontological argument, an embarrassment to modern thinkers, but they also fail to see, as I have shown, that Spinoza separates philosophy from theology, or reason from faith, in order to overcome the hierarchical opposition between them that was typical of the High Middle Ages (posterior to Anselm and prior to William of Ockham and Nicholas of Cusa). That God for Spinoza is both philosophical and theological and, at one and the same time, the cause of all things as he is the cause of himself, yet not found outside of (without) sovereign political and so also ethical authority, is and will remain incomprehensible to all those who fail to see that modernity is fundamentally biblical and that the Bible is fundamentally modern. To conceive of the Bible, with its

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prophetic revelation of charity and justice, as supernatural and to conceive of modernity, with its commitment to the dignity of all human beings, as natural is to misconceive both the Bible and modernity in the most fundamental sense. In separating reason from faith Spinoza shows us that reason and faith do not differ from each other as truth differs from error, superstition, falsehood, sin, or idolatry. In separating philosophy from theology Spinoza demonstrates that the difference between them is completely different from the difference that separates truth from error. That truth is its own standard, the standard both of itself and of the false, is no more philosophical than it is theological. It is little wonder, then, that Spinoza argues with utter honesty, although, as I show in volume I of this study, not yet, I think, with full perspicuity, that historical revelation (faith, religion, prophecy) is necessary. In other words, “historical” revelation cannot be deduced from “universal” (or natural) reason, whose “universality” is, thereby, limited or contextualized. Indeed, what Spinoza shows us is that the dictates of reason, like the Seven Dogmas of Faith, articulate the political, and the ethical, vision of the Bible, of its prophets and Jesus: that we are to treat others as we wish to be treated by them. Reason, precisely like faith, is the comprehension of the golden rule of the Bible. It embodies the practice of charity and justice. Indeed, the alternative to subordinating Spinoza to a false conception of modernity and of the Bible, in the tradition of modern commentary, is to read—interpret—the ontology of modernity in light of Spinoza and his profound understanding of God as at once philosophical and theological, both rational and faithful. In other words, Spinoza shows us that God is a concept equally of reason and of faith, of philosophy and of theology, and thus one that is no less secular than it is religious and so at once political and ethical. To discover that through the concept of God we overcome the dualistic opposition between philosophy and theology is to find that the concept of human being is equally philosophical and theological, rational and faithful, and secular and religious, both political and ethical. The dialectic that is common to both God and human being allows us to see that, for Spinoza, just as God is not a concept of the supernatural (when understood in terms of the teleology of first and final causes) so the human being is not a concept of the natural (when understood as that which is explained in and through the laws of common nature). Indeed, what precisely characterizes superstition, or idolatry, for both the Bible and Spinoza, is the conflation of God with the supernatural and the conflation of human being with the natural. To make God supernatural is to understand God by analogy with nature and thus to make him finite. To make God finite is to make God a refuge of, or an excuse for, human ignorance, which, for Spinoza, is the error than which no greater exists or can be conceived. For it falsifies (perverts) our understanding of human being.

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Equally, to make human beings natural is to make them finite and thus a refuge of, or an excuse for, human ignorance, for it robs them of the sole content of their knowledge: infinite substance or God. It is clear that the natural (the finite) cannot know what is supernatural as finite and that the supernatural (the finite) cannot know human beings as finite. Indeed, the paradox here is that the finite—what is the final end or cause—cannot be known (it can be neither thought nor practiced) insofar as it is finite. Not to know the finite or, in other words, to be reduced by the finite to contradiction is to find ourselves in the Greek world of Socratic ignorance. The finite is contradictory; but the fact that the finite is contradictory—our knowledge that the finite is contradictory—is not itself finite or contradictory. Socrates, together with his fellow Greeks, knows that he is ignorant. He knows that he is contradicted—by everything in existence that is thought and by everything in thought that exists. But he does not know that by which he is contradicted. He does not know what contradiction is. He knows that he is not (the) finite; for he is in-finite, lacking his end. But he does not know what the finite is. The finite cannot be thought to exist, and the finite cannot exist as thought. Yet the Greek world is dominated by the finite, the only “explanation” of which is that of the unending opposition or oscillation between infinite thought lacking existence (chance) and finite existence lacking thought (fate). Thus, Aristotle knows that the finite is thought thinking itself: the unmoved mover, that which, in moving all, is moved by none, precisely like the relationship that Socrates has to Alcibiades, as I show in volume I of my study. But Aristotle does not know what thought thinking itself is; for he cannot think, beyond contradiction, that which, in thinking itself, he cannot think as existing. In contrast to the finite contradiction and the contradiction of the finite in the Greek world—which at one and the same time reflect and are the reflection of human ignorance—Spinoza shows us with both resolve and subtlety that it is solely the infinite that can be known—in both thought and existence. The infinite—that is, what Montaigne calls the affirmation of thought and existence in response to the question: What do I know?—is neither supernatural nor natural. The infinite is a category, not of quantity (like temporal duration) but of relationship, the relationship of thought and existence, of God and human being, of human beings (in their political and ethical relationships), of reader and text (hermeneutically). The infinite is not the opposite or the negation of the finite. The infinite is the recognition, the acknowledgement on the part of human beings that the finite as contradictory cannot be understood, or appropriated, as finite contradiction. The infinite is the paradox that, in order to be truly finite (natural), that is, self-consciously finite, one must at the same time be other than what is finite (natural). Weirdly, won-

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derfully, it is the finite or the natural that never dies. For, as the ancients, from the pre-Socratics to Lucretius in On the Nature of Things, repeat sans surcease, nothing can come from nothing (for everything can come from everything). Everything natural is (Parmenides says) everything (Heraclitus says). What is linear and so, as naturally mortal, is subject to generation and corruption is, at one and the same time, indistinguishable from, in its very opposition to, what is circular and so naturally no less immortal. It is the contradiction of the finite—the finite contradiction that is unknown and unknowable as either finite or contradictory—that the finite never dies, because it never lives: it cannot be thought as existing and it cannot exist as thought. In contrast to finite contradiction is the paradox of the infinite, the infinite paradox that is known and knowable as both infinite and paradoxical. The infinite naturally dies (death is real) because it always lives: it enjoys eternal life. The infinite is that which is thought as existing and exists as thought. It is the infinite that encompasses (explains, comprehends, imagines) death—in the terms that Spinoza calls acquiescentia mentis, the active acceptance, on the part of our (infinite) mind, that, without (outside of) death, we would be reduced to finite contradiction (to the contradiction of the finite). As I noted earlier, Pascal observes that the fact that our human dignity consists in (infinite) thought rests on the paradox that, unlike the (finite) universe, which easily kills us, we know that we die and the advantage that the universe has over us, of which the universe knows nothing. It is upon (infinite) thought (and existence) that we must raise ourselves up, not upon finite space and time. While the universe of finite space and time envelops and swallows us up like a finite point, by infinitely relating thought and existence, according to the ontological argument, we envelop the universe. Thus, the prophet Isaiah, whom Paul cites in I Corinthians 15, as we saw in chapter 1, writes: On this mountain [Jerusalem] the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things. . . . And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” (Is. 25.6–9)

The time and place in which God, in swallowing up death forever, will save his people, while Jerusalem, are not the time and space of finite nature. For, as Pascal writes in another pensée, “Nature always keeps restarting (recommence) the same things . . . in succession one after the other. Thus is made a kind of infinite and eternal. It is not that there is in all that anything that is infinite

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and eternal but [rather that] these finite things (êtres terminés) are multiplied infinitely [and eternally]” (#347). The time and place of salvation express what is truly infinite and eternal; and eternity, we may recall, is also what Spinoza calls necessary existence: that which cannot be thought without existing and cannot exist without being thought. The time and space of salvation—of eternity and infinity—are not “after” death or “beyond” (i.e., outside of or without) the body. For the very moment that such seemingly innocent propositions are taken literally, they simply repeat the finite infinitely and so become idols that falsify the very meaning of eternal and infinite salvation. It is solely human beings, who, in knowing that they are subject to nature, die, unlike eternally recurring and infinitely repeating nature. The paradox, as Isaiah articulates it, is that, in knowing that we die, naturally, in not confusing finite time and space with the infinity and eternity of necessary existence, we encompass and swallow up death. It is very important to see that Spinoza holds with the entire biblical tradition that to know God (as to know one’s fellow human beings and to know oneself) does not mean that one is God (or one’s fellow human beings or even oneself!). To know the good does not mean to be the good, as in the Platonic tradition. To know myself does not mean that I am identical with my (finite) self in the tradition of the Delphic oracle, whose contradictory dictum— know thyself—is simply another version of the position of Seneca that Montaigne exposes as contradictory at the end of “The Apology of Raimond Sebond,” following what I show in volume I of my study. As Seneca writes, to be identical with myself is to be other than who I am. It is to raise myself above humanity (above the humanity of both human and divine being) and so to be identical with the finite, with God, with thought thinking itself, outside of (without) human consciousness. Oracular knowledge, which structures Greek and Roman (pagan) thinking from beginning to end—as Montaigne so clearly demonstrates in the “Apology”—is precisely that according to which existence cannot be thought and thought cannot exist. It is for this reason that the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the very center (or omphalos) of Greek life (ontology),1 is traditionally viewed by the Greeks as speaking no less deceptively than truly. The Delphic oracle speaks out of both sides of its mouth, simultaneously. At one and the same time the oracle speaks truly and deceptively, but which it speaks nobody knows. It is true that the oracle speaks deceptively; and it is deceptive that the oracle speaks truly. Both of these statements are true. Yet, because each statement contradicts or cancels out the truth—and the deception—of the other, both statements are also deceptive. No one ever knows what the oracle demands. It is little wonder that, according to the account that Socrates gives (in the Apology) of the dictum that he received from the Delphic oracle, he is

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supremely wise in being supremely ignorant, consistent with the maxims of Heraclitus that wisdom is (it appears as the contradiction of) ignorance and of the Cretan liar that it is a lie that he tells the truth and that it is true that he lies. It is not the case that the Delphic oracle requires interpretation on the part of its recipients. Its dicta cannot be interpreted—as either deceptive or truthful. They are always contradictory. They leave their recipients in the contradictory state of ignorance according to which the oracle is deceptive in speaking truthfully and truthful in speaking deceptively. While the unexamined life is not worth living, according to the Delphic maxim reported by Socrates in the Apology, to examine life with the tragic poets or with the philosophers, not to mention with the historian Thucydides,2 is to discover that the gods, who are wise, are not philosophers and that the philosophers, in loving wisdom, in desiring wisdom, in seeking wisdom are, like Socrates and Oedipus, shown to be ignorant and blind. In loving or seeking wisdom philosophers demonstrate that they are ignorant of and so are contradicted and destroyed by that which they love, desire, and seek to examine. It is not surprising, then, that, as I noted in chapter 1, Pilate, the imperial representative of oracular, Socratic wisdom, asks Jesus: What is truth? For he knows, consistent with Plutarch (whom Montaigne cites at the end of his “Apology,” as I show in volume I) that there is no communication with divine being. All truth known to human beings is deceptive and contradictory, confirming them in their ignorance. For one to claim that he comes bearing witness to the truth can simply be, for Pilate, to invoke one more god in the infinitely repetitive parade of finite gods that, beyond number, fill the Roman pantheon. Little does Pilate know that the divine authority of truth, to which Jesus bears witness, that of the law and the prophets, will reveal Roman imperial authority to be deceptive, contradictory, and without knowledge of the truth. He would have found utterly incomprehensible the response that Jesus gives to his fellow Jews who pose him the loaded question whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus answers: “‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’” (Mat. 22.21).3 The distinction between Caesar and God, indicating that Caesar is subject to the truth of God as its own standard, as interpreted by mere mortals, when Caesar is himself (a) god, would have left Pilate uncomprehending. But the fact that all human beings, including the emperor of Rome, are subject to the truth, that they are, indeed, the subjects of truth (and not merely the masters or slaves of other human beings) shows us that the distinction that Jesus makes between Caesar and God, consistent with Scripture, embodies a structure of hermeneutics that is at once political and ethical. To determine what is Caesar’s and what is God’s demands interpretation. Or we can equally say that to determine the relationship between the human and the divine, between the

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secular and religious requires a concept of communication or community, in other words, a constitution according to which all human beings have the power and thus the right of thinking what they desire and of saying what they think, to recall Spinoza’s stirring advocacy of democracy as the most natural and thus the freest of all civil states. We can well understand, then, that Spinoza, in recognizing (correctly, unlike Machiavelli) that internal dissension and external conquest characterize the very essence of Roman civil state, holds that Rome provides us with an unedifying story of interminable and irresolvable (because finite and natural) conflict. As we saw in chapter 2, Spinoza gives us no indication that he discerns, within the history of the Roman civil state, any possibility whatsoever of protest against tyranny in the name of the authoritative and truthful standard of prophecy, revelation, or miracle. The distinction that Spinoza implicitly makes here between the Roman and the Hebrew civil states is consistent with the fact that, notwithstanding his claim in the Theologico-Political Treatise that not only the ancient Hebrews but indeed all ancient peoples had prophets, he is, however, scrupulously careful, as I show in volume I of my study, not to provide any evidence for this claim from ancient sources (because there is none). While Spinoza does not fully resolve the tension between his universalistic (“natural”!) ontology and his biblical (and thus historical) hermeneutics, he does not sacrifice the second to the first. Indeed, in upholding the integrity of the Bible, he indicates, indirectly, that ultimately ontology will be truthful solely insofar as it is historical and that history will be meaningful solely insofar as it is truthful. It is precisely because the history of the ancient Jews bears the truth, while the history of the ancient Romans does not, that the distinction between Caesar and God, as the very foundation of the covenant, becomes the basis of the modern, democratic constitution. The wonderful irony here—is this irony divine or human?—is the paradox that, precisely because Caesar is subject to the truth of God, he is subject to human interpretation. As Spinoza shows us with paradoxical brilliance, the kingdom of God is not found outside of the civil state, outside of human judgment and interpretation, outside of human thought and existence. But, as distinct from the Roman (pagan) tradition, in which the human is reduced to the divine and the divine is reduced to the human—for contradictory opposites are ultimately indistinguishable from each other—human being and divine being are not reducible to each other in the biblical tradition of ontology. That God and his kingdom—religion—are not found outside of (without) the civil state also means that the civil state (philosophy) is not found outside of (without) the kingdom of God. In distinguishing Caesar from God and thus the human from the divine, Jesus indicates that what belongs to Caesar is nothing at all

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and that what belongs to God is everything. It is only because nothing belongs to one human being, as distinct from another, that is, because everything belongs to God, that all human beings can share equally in the divine gift of creation, in divine grace. Pilate would not have divined that the distinction between Caesar and God is the basis not only of hermeneutics—that everything human is subject to divine judgment—but also of the democratic civil state. Thus, we see that oracular dicta do not engender a democratic concept of hermeneutics such that they interpret (do unto) others as they would have others interpret (do unto) them. For the basis of interpretation is the freedom and equality of all human beings before God and, consequently, no less before each other. The other term for this hermeneutical principle, Spinoza shows us, is love of neighbor, which serves as the standard of truth for all. That Spinoza serves as our measure for understanding the Bible as modern and modernity as biblical—that we can properly understand Spinoza solely insofar as we see that he is at once biblical and modern—becomes especially evident when we take into account the fact that the three central features of his thinking are those that are also central both to modernity and to the Bible (together with the Bible’s place in the history of Judaism and Christianity). I refer to the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy. It is true that the modernity of the ontological argument has gone almost completely unrecognized, not to mention fact that, as St. Anselm and his monks showed, it embodies the rationality of the Bible.4 But once the ontological argument is shown to be modern, its rootedness in biblical values emerges with startling clarity, just as, once the ontological argument is shown to be biblical, the fact that it articulates the values of modernity becomes astonishingly clear. Not to see that the ontological argument is either modern or biblical is to miss seeing both. But to see one is to see both. As for hermeneutics, the second feature central to the thought of Spinoza, it is generally recognized that he made a major contribution to modern biblical criticism, while hermeneutics is as old as the Bible and its interpretations, both Jewish and Christian.5 But what is not generally recognized is that Spinoza shows that hermeneutics is biblical in its principles (in both origin and values) and that the Bible is hermeneutical, that hermeneutics is not found outside of the Bible, that is, outside of (without) the fundamental ontology of the Bible, and that biblical ontology is not found outside of (without) hermeneutics. That ontology is hermeneutical (or interpretive) and that hermeneutics is ontological—presupposing a fundamental distinction between truth, on the one hand, and superstition, error, idolatry, or sin, on the other, or between what Spinoza calls the third and first kinds of knowledge— is unthinkable and does not exist in the Greek and Roman pagan worlds. In chapters 1 and 2 of this study I gave a number of instances of this distinction

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between truth and superstition both directly and also by way of Montaigne and of Spinoza’s own comments on the Roman state. As I indicated above, oracular knowledge cannot be interpreted, for there is no hermeneutical basis in contradictory ignorance or deception. Another way of articulating the distinction between oracular ignorance and hermeneutical insight is that, while the Greeks know that they are deceived by the Delphic oracle—they know that they are ignorant of its dicta as true—they have no concept of superstition, error, idolatry, or sin. Because truth for the Greeks is simply contradictory appearance, Plato and Aristotle identify it with right opinion, with the opinion of those whose right it is to rule over others. Like Pilate, they would have found it inconceivable to distinguish between Caesar as ruler and God as ruler. We may remember that in the Republic Socrates, in his ignorance of the good, undertakes to effect the one contradictory change that will unite philosophy and politics, philosopher and king, right and might, the unchanging one of Parmenides and the changing many (the flux) of Heraclitus.6 The identity of the one (which is defined in opposition to the many) with the many (which is defined in opposition to the one) can be attained only in words whose contradictory logos can neither be thought to exist nor exist in thought. One can say or think—desire—anything in oracular knowledge so long as it is consistent with the formal rules of grammar and syntax and so long as it does not contradict those in power. Concerning democracy, it is generally acknowledged that this third feature central to the thought of Spinoza is a fundamental constituent of modernity. However, since democracy (in the so-called western tradition) is conventionally viewed as Greek in origin, it is not commonly acknowledged that democracy is biblical, let alone that it is the political articulation no less of the ontological argument than of biblical hermeneutics. But it is striking, surely, that it is in a theologico-political treatise that Spinoza articulates for the first time in world history a systematic theory of democracy. In the (more extensive) theological section of his treatise he formulates his concept of biblical hermeneutics in order, he says, to separate philosophy from theology (and thus from faith, prophecy, and revelation). In the (shorter) political section, he shows that the separation of philosophy from theology supports the freedom of philosophizing, of thinking what you desire and of saying what you think, and that democracy, of all civil states, is the most compatible with the freedom of philosophizing because it is the most natural and the freest. I have shown that, in separating philosophy from theology, reason from faith, Spinoza intends to overcome (to deconstruct or to appropriate) the hierarchical opposition between them, such that neither is ancillary to (or the handmaiden of) the other in the tradition of Maimonides and his medieval opponents. It is important to ask what is involved in separating philosophy from theology.7 Is the separation of philosophy from theology philosophical or theologi-

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cal? Their separation, however, cannot be either philosophical in opposition to theology or theological in opposition to philosophy. For then we would simply have returned either to the rational dogmatism or to the skeptical fideism of those philosophers and theologians whose concepts of biblical interpretation Spinoza shows to be utterly contradictory. In other words, Spinoza shows that, in failing to see that Scripture is to be interpreted from itself alone, they reflect lack of faith in the integrity and truth of Scripture. It follows, consequently, that the separation of philosophy from theology (and of theology from philosophy) must be at one and the same time philosophical and theological, that is, it must represent a position that is (undecidably, paradoxically, freely, and necessarily) both at the same time (and not simply one in opposition to the other). It thus turns out that the separation of philosophy from theology is an extremely subtle concept in and through which Spinoza overcomes the traditional opposition between reason and faith by demonstrating that for either to be true both must be true. Indeed, I have shown that the critical distinction that Spinoza makes between theology (including faith, prophecy, and revelation) and superstition (including sin, error, idolatry, and falsehood) is completely different from his distinction between theology and philosophy. Both theology and philosophy embody (the revelation of) truth, as distinct from error. That the separation of philosophy from theology is at once philosophical and theological—both rational and faithful—is further evident from the fact that, while Spinoza claims that reason and faith are totally separate from each other, he is also careful to show that they contain the same content, which he associates with knowledge of God and love of neighbor (charity and justice). Indeed, we may recall that he initiates the Theologico-Political Treatise by averring that natural knowledge—reason—is no less exalted than prophetic knowledge—faith—since God, too, constitutes both its certitude and its origin. Still, Spinoza claims to distinguish natural knowledge from prophetic faith, if not on the basis of their common certitude and origin, at least on the basis of their different audiences, as he also proceeds (in note 2 of chapter 1) to correlate prophetic authority and civil authority regarding their respective audiences (biblical readers and political subjects). We discovered, however, that it is precisely the hermeneutical authority of readers and the democratic authority of citizens (which he articulates only later in his treatise) that undermines this distinction. Spinoza argues that, in contrast to those who, in receiving philosophical discourse, are made—they become—philosophers (in order to judge the adequacy of the philosophical discourse that they receive), those who receive prophetic discourse are not made—they do not become— prophets. The faithful, he states, rely on the authority of the prophets for the truth of revelation, just as subjects, in receiving civil discourse from civil authorities, rely on the authority of their rulers for the truth of civil rule and are not made—they do not become—civil authorities themselves.

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But it is precisely the distinction between the philosophical audience— whose members are made or become philosophers—and prophetic and civil audiences—who are not made or become prophets or civil rulers, respectively— that Spinoza subsequently eliminates in the Theologico-Political Treatise with his theories of hermeneutics and of democracy, whose profound interrelationship he then also demonstrates. He makes it clear that, while we must establish the sensus of the biblical text from itself alone and not conflate its lacunae, aporias, inconsistencies, contradictions, and errors, not to mention the antiquated and untrue (philosophical) opinions of its all too human authors, with its revealed truth—of God and neighbor—we must also exercise the natural light (of our reason) in judging the truth of Scripture. Thus, we learn that for readers to read Scripture from itself alone is also to read Scripture from themselves alone. It is equally the case that, when readers read Scripture from themselves alone, they read themselves from Scripture alone. The relationship between reader and Scripture is precisely that between philosophy and theology (revelation, prophecy, faith). To separate the reader from Scripture—such that we (who is “we”?) respect the integrity, the truth, the good faith, and the rationality of each—is to demonstrate their mutual interdependence and interrelationship. I can have faith in Scripture only insofar as I have faith—not blind faith!—in my own powers of reason. I can have faith in my own powers of reason only insofar as I have faith—not blind faith!—in the integrity of Scripture. Indeed, just as Spinoza shows that the Bible is replete with errors, so he also shows (in each of his three major works under consideration in this study) that all human beings, including, therefore, readers of Scripture (not to mention philosophers!), are subject to their passive affects, that is, they are sinners. It is hardly surprising that, just as the prophets expose the sin of their people by means of the light of divine revelation, so the readers of Scripture— those who believe in its good faith—find that their lives, too, are revealed as sinful in light of the prophetic demands of charity and justice. Further, just as the Bible is a human document—although its revealed truth is divine!—so it is also replete with errors. But Spinoza shows us with subtle understanding that it is only if we account for error—in Scripture, in the lives of those who wrote and read Scripture, and in the lives of those who read Scripture today— that we shall not, consequently, accommodate truth to error. Indeed, it is his concept of accommodation—God accommodates his revealed truth to the antiquated (i.e., to the false, philosophical) opinions of the prophets (i.e., opinions that reflect their own age and not the truth of God)—that allows us to distinguish truth from error such that we can separate Scripture from its readers and faith from reason. That truth is its own standard, the standard both of the true and of the false, is the truth, at once faithful and rational, which Scripture brings to (its)

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readers and which readers bring to (their) Scripture. In other words, the concept of reason that faithful readers bring to Scripture has precisely the same content as prophetic revelation: that faith in or knowledge of God is to be lived in and as the law of loving your neighbor as yourselves—through charity and justice. We may also recall Spinoza’s demonstration that nothing is sacred or profane—true or false (not religious or secular)—in itself but only with regard to our use or abuse of it, with regard to what he calls, in all profound simplicity, the “mind.” But this demonstration is but the biblical demand that in our covenantal relationships—with God, neighbor, and self—we perform the works of charity and justice. The Bible itself becomes the greatest source of idolatry, indeed, the Bible itself becomes the greatest idol (the great Satan) when we conflate its errors—whether formal (e.g., those of vocabulary and grammar) or substantive (e.g., the content of its narratives and its images)—with its truth, that is, if we either reduce the Bible to the external authority of the reader (in the tradition of Maimonides) or reduce the reader to the internal authority of the Bible (in the tradition of Maimonides’ opponents like Alfakhar). It is also the case that God, the supreme truth, also becomes the supreme idol when we fail to keep firmly in mind the separation of philosophy from theology and thus the critical role that reason plays in disciplining faith and that faith plays in disciplining reason. Paul writes that he is a Greek to the Greeks and a Jew to the Jews. Spinoza shows us how important it is to be a theologian to philosophers and a philosopher to theologians! Given that the standard of truth for the Bible is the mind—the mind of the text, the mind of God, the mind of the reader, the mind of the community (at once hermeneutical and ethical/political)—it becomes evident that in reading, in listening faithfully to, the prophetic word of Scripture we are made prophets. We are made—we become—responsible to and for the Word of God before our neighbor. The authority of the prophet is found in and through— as—the revealed word, the mind of God. But the authority of the reader is no less found in and through—as—the revealed word and mind of God. The authority of the biblical prophet is not oracular but hermeneutical: it invites, it demands, it necessitates interpretation on the part of the reader. Otherwise, the reader, if he blindly accepts what he hears or reads, in bad faith, will absolutely undermine and subvert the true authority of the Bible. For then he will be unable to distinguish between true and false prophets, between true images and false idols, between God and Caesar, between religion and superstition, between prophecy and oracle. Indeed, what could be more in keeping with the Bible than that, in attending mindfully to its word, we are moved, touched, transformed, made new and whole by it? Not only, therefore, are the readers of Scripture made—they become—prophets (yet not oracles), but also the prophets in Scripture are shown to be made—they become—readers,

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or interpreters, of the Word of God. It is important to see that every prophecy is a reading, an interpretation, of the Word of God. Every word is sacred or profane, true or false, not in itself but only relation to the mind. There is no divine Word that is true or false in itself. Indeed, there is no human word that is not mediated in and through the civil authorities (an idea to which I shall return shortly). Every prophet, therefore, is a hermeneut. In truth, prophecy is itself hermeneutics, as it entails, necessarily, a relationship between God and human being, between text and reader, between speaker and listener . . . , in which each is the interpreter of the other. That the word of God is hermeneutical or relational is hardly surprising, however, given the fact, as Spinoza himself emphasizes, its content expresses, above all else, the love of God and neighbor. The Word of God is not found outside of (without) the love of neighbor. It is equally the case that the love of neighbor is not found outside of (without) the Word of God (the covenant). Just as the distinction between philosophic audience and prophetic audience vanishes in light of the profound understanding that Spinoza has of the biblical word as hermeneutical, so the analogy that he then makes between prophetic authority and civil authority demonstrates, against him, that those who constitute the audience of civil discourse (civil law) are also made—they become—its authority. In other words, once we see that, as the recipients of philosophical discourse are made—they become—philosophers, so the recipients of prophetic discourse are made—they become—prophets (hermeneuts, in “modern” discourse), the analogy between prophetic and civil authority supports, not the hierarchical difference between but rather the reciprocal equality (separation) of rulers and ruled. In the democratic civil state rulers and ruled, legislators (law-bringers) and subjects, are one and the same. Not only, therefore, is the hermeneutical word and the civil word the same word, demanding interpretation of it on the part of all, but it is also no longer obvious how we would distinguish the philosophical word from the prophetic and thus from the civil word. For, we recall, Spinoza argues that natural knowledge (universal philosophy) enjoys the same certitude and origin—in God—as does prophetic knowledge (historical revelation). Still, he claims to hold that they differ in audience; for, whereas the recipients of philosophy are made— they become—philosophers, the recipients of prophecy are not made and do not become prophets. But we have now seen that, in light of Spinoza’s concept of hermeneutics and thus of the Bible itself as hermeneutical in its very structure of discourse, the distinction between philosophic audience and prophetic audience vanishes. What separates philosophy from prophecy, reason from faith, is that in and by which they are both related in truth: love of God and neighbor. It would also follow that, since philosophic discourse is not distinguishable in

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authority from prophetic discourse, so philosophic discourse is consequently not distinguishable in authority from political discourse in the democratic civil state—given the fact that prophetic discourse and civil discourse also bear the same authority. But it is, clearly, profoundly democratic to hold that the recipients of the philosophic word are made—they become—philosophers. That the recipients of the philosophic word are no less philosophers than the speakers of the philosophic word can only mean that those who receive the word of philosophy are the judge of whether or not it is truly and adequately philosophical, just as the recipients of the prophetic word are responsible for judging whether it is true or false prophecy and the recipients of the civil word are responsible for judging whether or not it is democratically charitable and just. It is not surprising, then, that it is actually Pilate who remains silent in the presence of the truth to which, Jesus tells him, he comes bearing witness. Were Pilate, however, to acknowledge the truth, he would have to recognize, consequently, not only the authority of the prophetic (and the messianic) word of Jesus but also his own authority in judging its adequacy or inadequacy. He would be confronted with distinguishing between the emperor (whom he serves) and God (with whom the emperor identifies himself), before whom, Jesus indicates, both servant and master, both the ruled (not only Pilate but also Jesus and his fellow Jews) and the ruler are equal in truth. Thus, we see that central to the biblical tradition is the paradox, which is not only civil (democratic) but also ontological and hermeneutical, that it is precisely in separating human beings from God (reason from faith) that all hierarchical opposition between them is eliminated. But this separation presupposes the distinction that Spinoza makes (consistent with his fellow contract theorists of the early modern period) between the civil state (of love) and the natural state (of enmity). Whereas the civil (democratic) state is founded on the infinitely loving (reciprocal or mutual) relationship between the thought and the existence of all human beings, each of whom is no less divine than human, the natural state is founded on the finite and thus the hierarchical opposition between the thought and existence of all beings, whether divine or human. What is paradoxical (for readers of the gospels) is Jesus’ exposition (exposure) of the contradiction in which Caesar, together with his servant Pilate, finds himself. In identifying himself, as a god, with the divine, Caesar claims to separate himself from (all) other human beings—for example, from Pilate and Jesus—by making himself their natural superior. As a singular individual, who is naturally divine, he claims to be superior to all other singular individuals, who are not, from his point of view, naturally divine, who are not divine by nature. But when Jesus comes bearing witness to the truth, to the truth of God that all human beings are made, not in the (finite) image of nature but

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in the (infinite) image of God, who is not natural (or supernatural), who is not the supernatural end of nature, then, suddenly, all of the hierarchical distinctions based on finite nature, on natural teleology, collapse. Now, all human beings, who are not natural but created in the infinite image of God, are equal, before God. The paradox here is that it is only on the basis of an infinite standard (God as the exemplar of true life) that human beings are equal, that they can themselves enjoy relationships that are not naturally (finitely) hierarchical but rather (infinitely) loving and equal. The good, which is mutually shared by all human beings, cannot be superior to them such that it can be claimed by any singular individual to be the natural telos according to which one individual is superior to other individuals. We can say, consequently, that the civil state in the Greek and Roman traditions is indistinguishable from what Spinoza calls the natural state, in which (according to Ethics, IV.A) there are no singular individuals who are not contradicted and destroyed by yet more powerful, singular individuals ad infinitum. But it is critically important to see that in itself the natural state (like the passive affects) is unknowable as the natural state. The natural state is contradictory (contrary to itself), yet in itself the natural state cannot be known as contradictory. The Greeks and the Romans know that they live in the natural state of contradiction, that contradiction is their natural state (as any perspicuous reading of Aristotle’s Politics, for example, demonstrates, as I showed earlier, not to mention Livy’s histories, together with Machiavelli’s Discourses on them). But they do not know what their contradictory state is. They do not know the state of their contradiction. They do not know the nature of contradiction. The only way in which the state of their contradiction and their contradictory state can be known—and so be shown to be in contradiction and thus in error—is from the point of view of what Spinoza (consistent with the prophets and Jesus) calls the civil state and, ultimately, the democratic civil state. It is solely the perspective of the (democratic) civil state that allows us to see that if, according to Ethics V.A1, two contrary or contradictory actions are excited in the same subject (or state), there will necessarily have to be (debebit necessariò) a change (mutatio) either in both of them or in one of them until the contrary actions cease to be contradictory. This change, as we have seen, is precisely the appropriation of the passive (contradictory) affects by the active affects of the dictates of reason whose basis, we know, is the golden rule of our doing unto others as we would have others do unto us. It is the dictates of reason that Spinoza associates with the democratic pactum in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise and with the multitudo as constituting the absolute sovereignty (imperium) of the democratic civil state in the Political Treatise. The difference between the democratic civil state and the natural state, between the active affects of reason and the passive (irrational) affects is pre-

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cisely that between paradox (truth as its own standard) and contradiction (the truth of oracular deception/the deception of oracular truth). Paradox is, as we have seen, the recognition not only that I am contradictory but also, more significantly, what my contradiction is. What my contradiction is—what that is by which I am contradicted and by which I contradict (or am contrary to) others—is that I evade making love of God and neighbor the standard of truth for all human beings, including myself. God and neighbor are my contradiction. It is God and neighbor who contradict me. It is God and neighbor who reveal my contradictions. It is in the light of the revelation of God and neighbor that I am shown to be contradictory—that is, to be in error or sin— precisely as the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles indicate. To sin is to contradict—to speak against, to act against—God and neighbor. The change that brings contradictory or contrary actions both to light and to an end is the love of God and neighbor. The paradox, then, is that I can overcome the contradictions of singular individuals, who are naturally contrary and opposed to each other, who naturally hate each other, who are natural enemies—in the natural state (of the Greeks and Romans)—solely by loving singular others as myself. Paradox is the hermeneutical perspective such that one (singular individual) can be true only insofar as the other (singular individual) is true; and this relationship of singular individuals, multiplied infinitely, constitutes the multitudo of the democratic pactum. That one can be one (singular individual) only in and through the other (singular individual) is precisely the prophetic, the paradoxical revelation of the love of God and neighbor that Spinoza makes the basis of the Seven Dogmas of Faith: charity and justice— for all. We thus see that it is only when we discern, or constitute, the fundamental difference between the natural state of the passive affects (the body) and the civil state of the dictates of reason (the idea of the body) that we can possess the paradoxical (civil) concept of the contradictory natural state. Central to the paradox, then, is the fact that, while contradiction (the natural state) is knowable, not in itself but only in and through the paradoxical civil state (of democracy), paradox (the civil state) cannot and must not dispense with the contradictory, natural state (of the passive affects, of the body). For paradox is what Spinoza calls the transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection—of the exemplar of true life, which is at one and the same time (undecidably, freely) human and divine. Paradox is not the end of the way but the truth of the way, the truthful way in and through which I confront my contradictions—the contradictions, the injustices, the evils—of my thought and existence. Were it not for the body—its images, its passions, its contradictions, including death itself—there would be no paradox, no truth, no love of God and neighbor, no democratic civil state. Truth cannot and must not

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dispense with contradiction, with sin or evil, with the body, with death—as if utopia (heaven) could be realized outside of (without) the eternal transition from passion to action, from the natural state of contradiction to the civil state of paradox. Yet the paradox of love—the love of paradox—is (that it is) not derived from or based on bodily (or finite) contradictions, which is but another feature of paradox itself. It is in this sense, then, that nobody can desire, in good faith, to go beyond Abraham, to go beyond Abraham’s absolutely paradoxical commitment to loving relationship—with both his son and his God—in the face of the most heart-rending contradiction. But each of us, surely, can hope, as we continue to wrest paradox out of contradiction in our lives, to get at least as far as Abraham. The difference between the civil state and the natural state, between truth as its own standard and oracular truth, between paradox and contradiction is what Montaigne calls the difference between judging absolutely and absolutely not judging. To judge absolutely is not to render a complete or final (finite) judgment that would bring a finite end to contradiction, an end to the finite body and its passions. To judge absolutely is, in all simplicity, to acknowledge that truth is its own standard, that the difference between truth and error (or sin) is absolute, not relative, that all human beings are to be absolutely judged by the standard of the love of God and neighbor. But thus absolute judgment also entails what Spinoza calls divine mercy and the forgiveness of sins in the seventh dogma of faith. Love conquers all. No one can hate, contradict, oppose, or be contrary to God. For, in hating or contradicting God, all that you prove or reveal is your own self-hatred and selfcontradiction, your own sin and inadequacy. That God is all-merciful and allforgiving means that love is its own absolute standard, the standard both of love and of hate (revenge). Forgiveness of my sin (on the part of God and neighbor) does not mean that the evil that I do does not count or no longer counts. What it means, rather, is that I can account for the contradiction of my sin, for my sin of contradicting both God and neighbor, solely on the basis of the absolute (paradoxical) standard of love and mercy. Paradoxically, if God were not all-merciful, if the democratic civil state, in constituting the authority of both the human and the divine law, were not, thereby, subject to the absolute standard of charity and justice, then, as Spinoza explicates Dogma 7, all human beings would despair of their salvation: salus. For we remember that for Spinoza the end (or purpose) of the democratic civil state is the salus (well-being) of the multitudo. In the natural state of contradiction, as found in antiquity, there is absolutely no judging but solely oracular judgment, which is absolutely not binding on one as on the other, on one as (on) all. Because what is natural or contradictory (finite) in itself cannot be known as natural or contradictory (finite), the distinction between judging absolutely

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and absolutely not judging is unknown and unknowable outside of (without) the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy and their mutual critique of dualism and hierarchy as based on natural teleology. Before proceeding to conclude this chapter and thus my study with a final consideration of the interrelationships among the philosophic, the prophetic, and the civil words of Spinoza—that is, among the three central features of his thought: the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy—as at once biblical and modern, it is important, first, to return to the failure on the part of scholars and thinkers to see that democracy, in its modernity, is based, not on Greek (and Roman) but on biblical ontology. Outside of the surely conclusive evidence that I have provided above and that I shall continue to provide below, it is patent that Greek “democracy,” as the rule of some, shares with the rule of few (aristocracy) and the rule of one (kingship), consistent with the history of the Roman res publica, the natural opposition between ruler and ruled (as between the one and the many). Rule (authority) in the ancient civil state always involves the “natural” rule of some, few, or one over others (even as one people is freed and another people enslaved and as a slave is freed and a free man enslaved).8 The Greeks (together with the Romans) have no concept of the (democratic, modern, and biblical) rule of all over all. They have no concept of the sovereign authority (of the freedom and equality) of all. It is important to see that the absence of the sovereignty—the equality and freedom—of all human beings in the ancients is reflected in their concept of nature. Since ancient thinkers, including the Stoics, do not distinguish between the natural state (nature) and the civil state (freedom), between the common order of nature and human nature, their concept of nature is fatally contradictory. Nature is at one and the same time many and one, mortal and immortal, human and divine. Nature is both immediate appearance (chance) and quintessential cosmos (fate). The dictate to follow nature—on the part of both the Stoics (nature is virtue: virtue is natural) and the Epicureans (nature is pleasure: pleasure is natural) in their unending opposition to each other— indicates that whatever the singular individual does (and thinks) is natural. Nature “is,” but what “is” is eternally contrary to itself as the contradictory opposition between appearance and reality (consistent with the divided line in Plato’s republic). As Plutarch says, there is no communication with nature, with being, with “is” (from which all communication, all consciousness or thought, is absent). Rather, there is only suspended judgment on the part of human beings, consistent with oracular knowledge, which, as contradictory, leaves the recipient suspended in his ignorance. Indeed, we can say, following Spinoza, that the recipients of oracular knowledge are made—they become— oracles themselves, with the result that their pronouncements, in reflecting

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ignorance of that which they say, desire, or seek, are utterly contradictory. Socrates is the true disciple of the Delphic oracle both in the sense that his dicta contradict all those who (like Alcibiades) come to him seeking wisdom and in the sense that all those who receive his dicta are made—they become— oracular in their ignorance of the good (it is false that they speak truly and it is true that they speak falsely). We can also say, more generally, that the concept of nature, as found in the Greek and Roman worlds, is itself oracular; for nature is subject to final causes (i.e., fate) of which human beings are eternally ignorant and by which, in the apparent guise of chance, they are eternally deceived. The notion that nothing (natural) is made from nothing (natural)—that is, that everything (natural) “is” (unknowable in itself)—inexorably turns into its opposite. Everything (natural) is made from everything (natural), that is, everything (natural) appears (unknowable in others). The biblical idea that everything is made (created) from nothing, that everything natural is created from nothing natural, that creation is from nothing that in itself is not creative—such an idea would have been inconceivable to the Greeks and the Romans. They could not have imagined that this fundamentally biblical concept underlies both our modern notion of nature (in the scientific sense) and our modern notion of freedom (in the ontological, hermeneutical, and political/ethical sense).9 As we have seen, it is only when we distinguish between two concepts of nature, between the common order of nature and human nature or between the natural state and the civil state, following Spinoza, or, more generally, between nature and freedom (necessary existence), to include Rousseau and Kant, that we can be liberated or “saved” from the contradictory teleology of final causes (from blind dependence on causes of which we are ignorant). Only with the distinction between truth and falsehood (error, sin, superstition, idolatry, and what Kant calls transcendental illusion) can we conceive of nature—stripped of all gods, ends, intentions, thoughts, and feelings, of all human projections— as a certain, scientific object of quantifiable observation, experimentation, and analysis. The ancients were superb observers of nature—within the range of their limited interests (and technology). The question (for us) is not what they saw but how they saw it. In looking upon nature (including themselves) with the eyes of final causation, they made no fundamental distinction between the subject and the object of observation. In asking “why” something occurred, they did not distinguish between subjective intention and objective occurrence. All natural beings, including themselves, were naturally moved, but the (finite) end of this motion was not in themselves but in their “stars,” that is, in incommunicable being (what “is”), which, in moving them, was not moved by them. Needless to say, whether this finite, natural end was Plato’s soul, Aristotle’s god (the unmoved mover), Democritus’ atoms (which were

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unchanging and unchangeable as ends in themselves), the Stoics’ cosmic nature, or Plutarch’s incommunicable being, it was unknown and unknowable.10 The strange contradiction here (for us moderns) is that what for the ancients is in itself unknown and unknowable they at the same time imbue with (human and divine) thoughts, feelings, intentions, desires, and ends. In projecting their human thought and existence onto the ends of divine (finite) nature, the ancients remain in absolute ignorance both of themselves and of divinity. It is only when human beings strip nature of thought and existence, both divine and human, that is, when, in light of the ontological argument, they recognize that thought and existence are at one and the same time human and divine, but neither natural nor supernatural, can they become absolutely subject to—can they be made the absolute subjects of—the truth. When we moderns remove final causes from the nature of things as objects of scientific inquiry, it becomes, then, a delicate matter of conceiving of human purposes, intentions, and ends, which Spinoza associates with conatus (desire) and thus ultimately with what he calls the dictates of reason, as distinct from final causes. The very strength of Spinoza as a thinker is that, with his concept of action as the cause of itself, he locates freedom, power, necessity, existence, and thought in human nature. The point that I am making here is simply that the distinction between the objects of nature and the subjects of human nature (the second indicating those who live in the civil state, as distinct from the natural state) is biblical and not Greek. We have now seen that the distinction between the natural state and the civil state, which is fundamental to our concept of modern democracy, together with the distinction between the teleological science of the ancients and the objective science of the moderns, is biblical (and modern) and not ancient. With this distinction in mind, I shall now proceed to conclude this chapter and thus my study by considering modernity in light of the profound and multiple interrelationships that Spinoza forges among the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy. We have already seen that the recipients of what I have called the three words of philosophy (the ontological argument), of prophecy (hermeneutics), and of civil authority (democracy) are made—they become—the cause of itself, we can say. They become philosophers, prophets (hermeneuts), and democratic civil authorities. It is striking how each of these features central to Spinoza’s thought entails and presupposes the other two. The reciprocal relationship of thought and existence in the ontological argument—that (the) existence (of God) is not found outside of (human) thought and that (human) thought is not found outside of (the) existence (of God)—is precisely the hermeneutical relationship of reader and Bible, whose concept of love of neighbor is embodied by the dictates of reason in the pactum, the multitudo of which constitutes the democratic civil

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state. That God cannot be thought by human beings without existing necessarily—one cannot exist without thinking something as necessarily existing—and that God cannot exist without being thought by human beings as necessary—one cannot think something without existing necessarily— involves and expresses necessary existence. What makes existence necessary is that it must be thought in order to exist and what makes thought necessary is that it must exist in order to be thought.11 As I have shown, the ontological argument is fundamentally political and ethical. It describes the practice of loving the neighbor as oneself. It proves that there is one thing that I cannot think without existing, which is the neighbor, and that there is one thing in and through which I cannot exist without being thought, which is the neighbor. Again, it is precisely love of neighbor— as the sole good that I necessarily desire beyond contradiction to be shared by all human beings—that the dictates of reason constitute as the basis of the democratic civil state. We thus see that the ontological argument, in establishing the necessary existence of the neighbor, whom I am commanded to love as I should wish to be loved, is both hermeneutical and democratic, just as hermeneutics is at once ontological and democratic and democracy is the articulation of the ontological argument as hermeneutical. The other version of the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy, what I called the second or phenomenological beginning of the Ethics, is that centered on conatus and the dialectic between desire and the good and so involving the singular individual of what Spinoza calls the third kind of knowledge. What makes his argumentation in each of his three texts that are the subject of this study so intensely dramatic, dynamic, dialogical, and dialectical is that he founds knowledge of God and love of neighbor on conatus as the relationship between desire and the good. Conatus involves and expresses the cause of itself, in other words, the necessary existence of the neighbor who is the central concept of the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and the democratic civil state. Conatus would not express the cause of itself— and desire conscious of itself as appetite would not involve necessary existence— if, with the Greeks and the Romans, I desired something because I judged it to be the good, separate from, other than, and opposed to my desire. Rather, consistent with the Bible and so central to modernity, I judge something to be good insofar as I desire it. Either/or. Either desire depends on the good. Or the good depends on desire.12 Either desire is blindly and ignorantly dependent on a notion of the good as the final cause by which it is oracularly moved and by which it is fatally contradicted. Or what I desire is the good: the good is what I desire. In this second case I ask with Montaigne: What do I desire? According to the ontological argument, I do desire (think) something; and what I desire—whatever its adequacy or inadequacy to my thought and existence—

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is my good, my God. I have no existence outside of (without) my desire; and I desire nothing outside of (without) my existence. But there’s the rub. Because desire and the good (God) are so intimately related to each other, because the good is dependent on desire, because what I desire is the good, I constantly run the risk of what the Bible calls idolatry, the idolatry of conflating desire and the good. This is why Spinoza states in the appendix of part I of the Ethics, as we know, that it is the very nature of human beings to be conscious of having the appetite of seeking their utile—their advantage, their good (what for them is God)—while they are born ignorant of the causes of their appetite. Thus arises the superstitious prejudice, which, above all others, prevents human beings from comprehending the ontological argument as proving the existence of what they truly and solely desire: God. They do not see that there is one thing that they cannot think—desire— without existing, which is their desire (God) as the good. Instead, they project the good of their desire into God as the final cause or end of which they are ignorant and yet by which they claim, in their superstitious belief, to be moved. Such ignorance, Spinoza shows us, serves as the very basis of miracles, of the whole structure of superstitious religion as supernatural: that God is beyond human desire and existence and so unknowable. The result, ultimately, of not knowing God, he holds, is atheism (the death of God, in the famous phrase of Nietzsche). As human beings are conscious of their appetite yet ignorant of its causes, so they are conscious of God yet ignorant that God is the necessary existence of the cause of itself, that God is the cause of all things as he is causa sui. The very story of conatus is that whereby desire, because it begins conscious of itself yet ignorant of itself as the good, comes to recognize itself as its own good precisely as God is causa sui. But the story (history) of conatus is thus one of comprehending (constituting) the truth of the ontological argument— that there is one thing that cannot be desired without existing, which is God. We can thus understand how and why Spinoza shows that all human beings have adequate knowledge of the absolutely eternal and necessary existence of God. In other words, Spinoza demonstrates, as it were, the truth of conatus by the end of part II of the Ethics, before he introduces the concept of conatus early in part III. But what he also shows us, consequently, is that the ontological argument—in demonstrating the necessary relationship between thought and existence, both human and divine—is presupposed by as it presupposes conatus, whose story (history) tells how singular individuals discover that what they desire is the good. God does not exist and is not to be thought outside of (without) the dialectic of human thought and existence, which is conatus. It is equally true that human beings do not think or exist outside of (without) the thought and existence of God. Knowledge of God, we see, is (it

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constitutes and is constituted by) desire conscious of itself as its own good: conatus as the cause of itself. It is important to descry the fundamental difference between the contradiction in which human beings, who are at once biblical and modern, find themselves and the contradiction in which Socrates (together with his fellow Greeks and Romans) finds himself. Unlike Socrates, who knows that he is ignorant but does not know what he is ignorant of—he does not know what (his) contradiction is—human beings who are constituted by conatus as the contradiction between desire and the good know, paradoxically, what (their) contradiction is. When Socrates asks—What is wisdom? What is virtue? What is the good?—he discovers, and confronts his interlocutors with discovering, that he, and they, are ignorant of that which they desire (seek). The fundamental presupposition of the Greek (and Roman) world is the opposition between thought (consciousness: desire) and existence. To think, to desire, to seek the good is to be contradicted by that which exists (say, the form of the good) but which cannot be thought (desired) as existing. The opposite position is no less true (and deceptive!). To exist (say, in the body of Socrates) is to be contradicted by that which, in itself (say, the soul of Socrates), cannot exist as thought. When, however, we ask, with Montaigne—What do I know? What do I desire? What do I think?—we are confronted with the necessary relationship between my thought (desire, knowledge) and my existence: I desire something. I cannot not desire something (even though I may evade or repress that which I truly desire . . .). Because there is a necessary relationship between my thought and my existence—thought is not found outside of (without) my existence, and existence is not found outside of (without) my thought—I must constantly confront the contradiction between my desire and my existence, between my desire and the good. It is this contradiction that, for Spinoza, constitutes the engine, the drive, the unceasing energy of conatus: that it eternally seeks, endeavors, works . . . to persevere in its existence—consciously, thoughtfully, lovingly, justly; and this conatus, Spinoza holds (in Ethics III.7), is nothing but the “actual essence of the thing itself.” The either/or, then, for modern human beings in the biblical tradition is between, not the ignorance of contradiction (where, contradictorily, the law of contradiction is the law of life!) and the contradiction of ignorance, but rather between contradictory ignorance (called idolatry) and paradox as the recognition that I can and must overcome the contradiction between my desire and my good in and through the love of God and neighbor—both politically and ethically. The good of my desire and the desire of my good render me contradictory (and so riven with fear, anxiety, hatred, urges for revenge . . .)—until and unless I recognize that, when guided by the dictates of reason, whose content is, we know, the love of

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neighbor as charity and justice, I can realize and acquiesce in (actively accept) the good solely insofar as the good that I desire is the good that I desire for all human beings. Thus, we understand why and how the ontological argument is fundamentally political and ethical: there is one thing that I cannot think (desire) without existing—and that is the neighbor, whom I am commanded (necessitated) to love as myself. The either/or for human beings in the biblical tradition of modernity is either contradiction—between desire and the good, between thought and existence—or paradox—such that the one thing that I can truly, or necessarily, think (love) is the existence of the neighbor and that the one thing in and through which I can truly, or necessarily, exist is the thought (love) of the neighbor. In other words, modern (biblical) human beings live between contradiction and paradox, between, as Spinoza says, passive affects and active affects, between superstition and truth, between inadequate ideas and adequate ideas. But the paradox that we begin consciously in the contradiction between desire and the good and that, therefore, the story, the history of humankind is constituted by what Spinoza calls the eternal transition to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection as the exemplar of human life (which is God) holds yet further surprises. While conatus is eternally the transition to a fuller, more adequate response to the question—What do I desire, in the fullness of my life, both personal and communal?—it does not begin in ignorance of desire as the good (love of God and neighbor). For, as I have emphasized, there is no transition from the Socratic world of contradictory ignorance, in which thought and existence are eternally opposed to each other, to the biblical/modern world of paradoxical relationship in which thought and existence (desire and the good) are each the truth of the other. There is no transition, as such, from ignorance of God to knowledge of God, from contradiction to paradox, from passive affects to active affects, from the natural state (in which singular individuals, as natural enemies, are destroyed by yet more powerful singular individuals) to the civil state of democracy (in which human beings live by the dictates of reason, whose basis is charity and justice). That the beginning of the transition to the active affects as the dictates of reason in the civil state of democracy can only begin actively, rationally, freely, lovingly and justly doubtlessly explains why Spinoza, as I put it, begins the Ethics twice. He (originally) begins (in the initial definition of part I) with the cause of itself as that whose essence necessarily involves existence: the ontological argument proving the existence of God. There is no beginning (principle, origin) outside of (without) God. Yet (in part III) he begins again with (original) conatus, outside of (without) whose desire no good (God) can exist or be conceived. While we begin with the love and the knowledge of God as the principle of our thought and existence, Spinoza also emphasizes that we

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must fully account for our contradictory ignorance, for the fact that we are subject to the passive affects, to being a part of nature, to, finally, death. Consequently, while there is no beginning outside of (without) God, the ontological argument also demonstrates that, because there is one thing that human beings cannot think without existing—which is God—God does not exist outside of (without) human thought, which Spinoza explicates as conatus (desire). Thus, we have to account fully for human thought and existence as conatus, as the human effort, struggle, endeavor, and work to “prove” not only the existence of God in our human thought (desire) but also the thought (idea) of God in our human existence (practice). While we begin with the cause of itself as necessary existence, our whole life must be its demonstration, its proof, in our eternal transition from God to yet more perfect knowledge of God. As Spinoza indicates in part V of the Ethics, the more individuals we know the more we know God (the more we know God the more of God there is to know). It is equally true, then, that the more we know God—as the principle of our life, of our thought and existence—the more we know individuals. The more individuals we know the more we recognize the place of our life as individuals and the place of the life of all individuals in and through God, who is the cause of all things as he is the cause of himself. I suspect that it is because of the profound insight that Spinoza has into the paradox of beginning, of principles, and thus into the dynamic relationship between desire and the good, that he is careful to indicate that we begin, not with the contradictory question of Socratic Pilate—What is truth?—but with the demonstration of the necessary existence of the truth. In other words, he rejects Descartes’ claim that in the search for truth we begin in doubt. It is important, however, not to misconstrue either Spinoza’s critique of Descartes or, consequently, what Descartes understands by beginning in doubt. Spinoza is right that we do not begin in doubt, if thereby we mean that we begin Socratically ignorant of, say, the truth. We can only begin truthfully. If we do not begin with—in and through—the truth, then, we shall not begin at all. We make no beginning (and so return to the world of Pilate and Socrates). For, as Spinoza demonstrates, our sole beginning is in and through the truth of the necessary (i.e., the free or actual) relationship of thought and existence. Descartes, however, is in full agreement with Spinoza. To begin in doubt— in doubting everything13—is to discover that there is one thing that I do not doubt, that is, one thing that my doubt presupposes, which is the existence both of the one doubting and of what it is that one doubts. When Descartes writes, famously—I think, therefore, I am—he is keenly aware that the “therefore” represents, not logical deduction but the necessity (freedom) of the relationship between his thought and existence. I cannot think outside of (without) existing. I cannot exist outside of (without) thinking. Descartes then

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proceeds to indicate that, in showing that doubt engages (proves) the necessary relationship between thought and existence, he demonstrates the necessary existence of God (as that which cannot be thought without existing). The difference here, then, between Descartes and Spinoza is rhetorical (strategic), not substantive. I begin in doubt, with Descartes, only to discover that I have begun with the necessary existence of God. I begin with the necessary existence of God, with Spinoza, only to discover (1) that I am ignorant of the causes of my appetite in seeking my good (i.e., it is doubtful) and (2) that my beginning with the necessary existence of God as love of neighbor is something that I have to prove time and again throughout my political and ethical life as I eternally make the transition to ever greater (when not merely to lesser) perfection. That we begin with God as the one thing that cannot be conceived (by us) without existing necessarily—that we begin with the creation of human desire as lo! very good—and that, nevertheless, we begin ignorant of God as the cause of our desire as he is the cause of himself is dramatically represented in what Spinoza calls the story of the first man. When Adam (together with Eve) disobeys the impossibly contradictory command of God that he not know (that he not be responsible for) good and evil, that he not know God or consequently himself, his lapsus represents the fact that he is not free to fall. His fall expresses his impotence and his lack of freedom, the fact that he is not mentis compos (in possession of his own mind). Adam is like us, Spinoza points out, because he begins conscious of his appetite in seeking his utile (good) yet ignorant that God is the cause of his desire (conatus) as he is the cause of himself. Spinoza is unremitting in exposing the contradiction of theologians who, in thrall to the superstition that God is the supernatural first and final cause of nature, believe that Adam is free to fall. These theologians hold that the fall of our first parents is due to their sin, not to their lack of sin, as Spinoza demonstrates. For Spinoza knows that there can be no sin outside of knowledge of good and evil, outside of the covenant, outside of the knowledge of God as that which cannot be thought without necessarily existing. The story of Adam and Eve, Spinoza shows us, captures the paradox of beginning not only with the necessary existence of God—in the Genesis account of creation from nothing: from nothing outside of (without) the necessary existence of God—but also with, simultaneously, human beings as constituted by conatus. The story of the first man (and woman) reveals to us the fact that there is no transition to knowledge of God, to knowledge of good and evil, to knowledge of necessary existence from a position outside of and thus in ignorance of it—in the garden of Eden. Consequently, we see that the story of Adam and Eve is an account self-conscious of its own contradictions. It is intended by its author(s) to demonstrate to us that its beginning is impossibly

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contradictory, that we cannot (be commanded by God to) begin without knowledge of God, without knowledge of good and evil, without the paradoxical knowledge of contradiction. The story of the fall of Adam, in exposing the contradiction that, just as not even God can act in contradiction of himself, so human beings are not free to fall, exhibits the paradox that we can truly begin only with knowledge of good and evil. There is no beginning outside of (without) knowledge of God as the good we desire and practice as love of neighbor. The relationship between Spinoza’s accounts of the ontological argument (at the beginning of part I of the Ethics) and of conatus (early in part III) is precisely the relationship between the stories of creation (in Genesis 1) and of Adam and Eve (in Genesis 2–3). We begin with God as the one thing that cannot be conceived without existing, as the one thing whose freedom to create ex nihilo demonstrates, not that he is supernatural (and so simply the contradictory natural thing that, by analogy, is the end of nature) but that, as the cause of himself, he is the cause of all things. The doctrine of “creation from nothing” is the revelation—the teaching, the account, the story—that thought and existence cannot be found outside of (without) their necessary relationship. Thought and existence are each created from nothing, from nothing outside of (without) their necessary relationship. The paradox here, one of innumerable paradoxes, is that thought is not deduced from existence and that existence is not deduced from thought; for neither is found outside of (without) the other. Either/or. Either we begin necessarily—freely—with both. Or we make no beginning at all as we vanish into the final cause, our ignorance of which is reflected in the teaching of the ancient Greeks that nothing can come from nothing, that is, that everything is (incommunicable being), the fatal necessity of whose dictum renders all thought and all existence contradictory. There are, consequently, we see, two doctrines of necessity in the world, that of freedom (necessary existence) and that of fate, the second of which opposes thought and existence to each other in such a way that to think is to reflect ignorance of existence and to exist is to equate thought with ignorance. The doctrine of creation from nothing is the theological account of the concept of necessary existence that is the basis of the ontological argument. It is important to remember that “necessary existence” is the shorthand account for understanding that existence is necessary because it is not found outside of (without) thought and that thought is necessary because it is not found outside of (without) existence. Existence is created from nothing—outside of (without) thought; and thought is created from nothing—outside of (without) existence. There is, as Derrida would say, nothing outside of (without) the necessary relationship of thought and existence. The creation of the nec-

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essary relationship of thought and existence is precisely from nothing—from nothing that does not involve and express the cause of itself.14 We begin with God as the cause of itself and so as that which we cannot think without existing. But we also begin ignorant that God is the cause of all things as he is the cause of himself. But this ignorance, I emphasize, is not Socratic ignorance of contradiction but acutely driven awareness of the contradiction that constitutes desire. What I desire is contradictory, not because desire here reflects lack (nothing) or ignorance but because desire is the self-conscious recognition that I can establish a necessary relationship between my desire and the good only insofar as this relationship is necessary to the thought and the existence of all human beings. The way out of—the liberation from—the natural state of contradiction in which Adam and Eve are conscious of their appetite in desiring their good but ignorant of the causes of their appetite is to fall, unfreely, into the knowledge that in the civil covenant all human beings are sinners solely insofar as they love their neighbor as themselves, insofar as they hold up the necessary existence of the neighbor as the true standard of their life. The fall into the freedom to sin, into knowledge of good and evil, into love of neighbor is unfree precisely because it can be explained solely from the position of the civil, not from the position of the natural state. Human beings are not free not to be free. Human beings are not born free—in the natural state. Human beings are made (created) free—they become free (ontologists, prophetic hermeneuts, and democrats)—in the civil state. Rousseau dramatically captures the paradox at the heart of the contradiction between the natural state and the civil state, the very paradox of beginning in contradiction, in the famous passage with which he initiates the Social Contract, as found at the head of this chapter. He appears to oppose—and he is conventionally viewed as opposing—natural freedom (“man is born free”) and social enslavement (“and everywhere he is in chains”). But then Rousseau poses two questions that force us to rethink how he conceives of the relationship between the natural state and the civil state, between nature and freedom. He asks, first: how did this change—this transition from the natural state to the civil state—take place? His answer is remarkable: I do not know. He asks, second: what can render this change—the transition from the natural state to the civil state—legitimate? What can make the chains by which human beings are bound legitimate? What can transform the natural chains of bondage into the social bonds of freedom? His answer is, again, remarkable: I believe I can resolve this second question. In other words, his purpose in writing the Social Contract, Rousseau informs us, is to provide a theory of democracy in which he shows that freedom involves and expresses the necessity (the obligation, the duty) of loving your neighbor as yourself.

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When Rousseau tells us that he does not know how the change from the natural state, in which human beings are born free, to the civil state, in which they are in chains, takes place and that he will exclusively be concerned with answering the second question of how to make these chains legitimate or liberating, he signals to us his understanding that the transition from the natural state to the civil state can be known solely from the perspective of the civil state (the social contract). To hold that human beings are born free or are naturally free presupposes the critical distinction between the natural state and the civil state. The very concept of natural freedom, like Spinoza’s claim that democracy is the most natural and thus the freest of all civil states, presupposes that the “transition” from the natural state to the civil state has (always) already taken place. In fact, it turns out that the “natural state” describes the self-interest or egoism (the enmity) of singular individuals that can be “resolved” or legitimated (made lawful) solely through what Rousseau calls the general will and Spinoza the sovereignty of the multitudo or the pactum of the democratic civil state. Rousseau recognizes that the natural state of contradiction is precisely like the impossibly contradictory state of Adam and Eve. How contradiction becomes (is made) paradox, how unfree (contradictory) nature becomes (is made) free is unknowable and unknown as contradictory, natural, and unfree. The transition is knowable and known solely as paradoxical, civil, and free. There is no free fall into sin, for freedom and sin (or human oppression) both presuppose the (democratic) civil state. Human beings are not free to fall. Human beings are not free not to be free. Rousseau knows that there is no return to the natural state, no return to the Garden of Eden beyond (that is, without or before) knowing good and evil. Indeed, there is no return to the Garden at all for the very reason that there is no original, first, or prior departure from the Garden. The story of the first man (and woman), as we have seen, is the story of the impossibly contradictory (natural) state, which cannot be understood as the first or the true beginning of human beings. Thus Spinoza demonstrates in Ethics IV.68, as we saw, that, if human beings were born free, in the natural state, they would have no concept of good and consequently no concept of evil. But then, when he goes on to indicate that, because the original premise is impossible, the proposition has to be rejected as false, he observes that the falsity of the original premise and so of the proposition itself is what Moses represents in the story of the first man. The only true beginning for human beings is the covenant in which they overcome the natural contradiction between desire and the good by making love of neighbor the standard of necessary existence outside of (without) which there is no desire constituting good or consequently evil. The very recognition of social oppression presupposes knowledge of good and evil in the covenant or in what Rousseau calls the social contract.

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The lines that I cite from two of the major poems of Wallace Stevens at the head of this chapter, the first poem long, the second brief, brilliantly express the paradox that is central to the myth of creation and hence to the myth of the first man.15 The mythical fall from paradise as the impossibly contradictory, natural state beyond good and evil presupposes the story of the covenant as the eternal transition on the part of men and women to ever greater (when not to lesser) perfection. From the beginning, in the beginning, Stevens informs us, Adam in Eden is the father of Descartes, whose doubt, we can say, entails conceiving of God as the malicious demon who undertakes to bind man and woman to the impossible contradictions of the natural state. But Adam, together with Eve, is like us modern Cartesians in recognizing that life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation. It is only within the paradoxically strange because necessary relationship of thought and existence that we can doubt the nonsense—the nothing, the nihilism—of demonic contradiction. The first idea of God, therefore, is not our own, because there is no first idea that does not belong to, that is not embodied in, the necessary existence of the neighbor. This is what Stevens calls the myth before the myth begins, the myth that is venerable, articulate, and complete. There is no beginning outside of (without) beginning with the complete articulation of the venerable cause of itself as the necessary relationship of thought and existence, at once divine and human. There is no transition to ever greater (when not simply to lesser) perfection without beginning with the perfect myth of beginning, which means, Stevens tells us, that we no longer live in a time in which merely possible mythology reflects our ignorance of the necessary embodiment of the actual existence of the neighbor in our lives. To consider a time when myth was possible but not actual is to become exquisitely conscious of the difference between the ancient time of absolutely not judging and the biblical and thus the modern time of judging absolutely. It is to see the fundamental difference between the oracular myth of Socratic ignorance and the Cartesian story of Adam who falls from the myth of possible ignorance into the story of actually knowing good and evil as the necessary relationship between thought and existence. It is to see with Descartes, the son of Adam, that God and neighbor cannot be doubted outside of (without) being thought to exist and outside of (without) existing as thought. It is to see that the contradictory ignorance of the natural state as simply possible cannot be comprehended outside of (without) the actual, concrete history (story) of the (democratic) civil state—“here in Connecticut”—that is complete before it begins. For the civil state is what Stevens calls the image’s truth, where image (myth, story) is not found outside of (without) its truth and where truth is not found outside of (without) its image. Unlike the contradictory image of nature (the contradictory nature of image and the nature of

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contradictory image), the paradoxical image of truth, in expressing the actual myth that is venerable, articulate, and complete, must belong, Stevens tells us, to the nature of its creator. Indeed, the image must express not just the nature of its creator but actually the nature of its creator increased. It is solely the myth, insofar as it is complete and articulate, which can be completely or eternally articulated or, in other words, perfected. It is solely when the image paradoxically belongs to truth and is not simply the reflection of contradictory nature that it increases the truth, that it represents the enlargement of its creator. What we have, therefore, in the poems of Stevens is a remarkable evocation of the story of Adam as the father of modern philosophy who lives in a time, not of natural, contradictory possibility but of creative, paradoxical actuality. Because the venerable myth of creation is articulate and complete from the beginning—God is causa sui—the first idea is not my own. For the one thing of which I can have a first idea is that which I cannot think without necessarily existing, which is God, together with the neighbor. That I cannot have a first idea outside of (without) the existence of God (and the neighbor) and that God, consequently, is not a first or a final cause but the one whose existence is not given outside of (without) the first idea of human beings leads us to see, with Stevens, that the first idea is the image’s truth. Just as the first idea is not my own but also, first, God’s (and the neighbor’s), so the image must be of the essence of the creator. It is the essence of its creator increased. In oracular time, by contrast, when myth is the mere possibility of natural contradiction, the image is not truthful paradox but natural contradiction. Because all images in oracular time are natural, they reflect the contradictory opposition between image (appearance) and nature (soul, form). What is (in-finite) image contradicts (finite) truth, and what is (finite) truth contradicts (infinite) image. But now, Stevens informs us, we live in a time when the image is not natural but creative, not contradictory but paradoxically truthful. Human beings are created in the image, not of nature but of God. The paradox, consequently, is that images are not found outside of (without) their truth and that truth is not found outside of (without) its images. Indeed, in Stevens’ hermeneutical envisioning of the ontological argument, just as there is one thing that cannot be imagined without (outside of) existing in truth— the human image of God—so it is no less the case that the nature or essence of God and human beings is increased in and through—as—its images. The more images we know the more truth we create, and the more truth we know the more images we create. (The negative version of this proposition is equally patent: the fewer images we create the more impoverished is our concept of truth, and vice versa.) The paradox that we encounter here in Stevens’ poems is that the venerable myth is completely articulate and articulately complete before, that is, insofar

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as it begins to be completed and to be articulated as the first idea that is not, first, my idea. For, just as truth is not found outside of (without) its images, so the completely articulate myth—the ontological argument—is not found outside of (without) its beginning, its history, its temporal embodiment in what Spinoza calls conatus. As there is one thing that I cannot imagine without existing—my neighbor as the image’s truth—so the relationship between image and truth, between the human being and God, and between thought and existence is dynamic and dramatic. The image’s truth, as the essence of its creator increased, is not the finite beginning or the final end but the infinite way in which the transition to ever greater (when not simply to lesser) perfection is not to go beyond Adam as the father of Descartes but, in not standing still, at least to get as far as Spinoza, Adam’s grandson, the son of Descartes. Not to advance further than but to advance at least as far as truly understanding the thought of Spinoza is to discover that modernity is not an advance beyond but the very advancement of (when it is not a retreat from) comprehending the three elements—the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy—that are central to his three great texts that have been the focus of this study: Theologico-Political Treatise, Political Treatise, and Ethics. The paradox that has been fundamental to this study is that our understanding of modernity can advance and will advance only insofar as it advances ever deeper into an understanding of the Bible—an understanding that is at once ontological, hermeneutical, and politico-ethical. Spinoza is singularly important in helping us comprehend the paradox of our modern advance as the advance of our modern paradox. For what he demonstrates, above all, is that there is no advance beyond but only in and through—to—the Bible and its God. In showing us that this advance is at one and the same time philosophical and theological, rational and faithful, secular and religious, and so at once political and ethical, he puts us on notice that any attempt on our part to advance philosophy beyond theology, reason beyond faith, or the secular beyond the religious— and vice versa—is to regress in our comprehension of both. Indeed, how can human beings advance further than God? Yet they can surely advance further in their understanding that God is the one thing that they cannot think without necessarily existing. For to advance at least as far as the ontological argument is to make the radical discovery that God does not exist outside of (without) human thought and that human beings do not exist outside of (without) the thought of God. (God cannot be thought outside of or without human existence, and human beings cannot think outside of or without the existence of God.) It follows equally, therefore, that it is solely the fool of the Psalms who says in his heart that he advances further than God, although we can surely always advance further in understanding that the neighbor is the one thing that we cannot think—desire or love—without existing necessarily.

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It is no less true that, insofar as we advance (in) modernity as the ontological, the hermeneutical, and the democratic comprehension of the Bible and its God, so we also advance (in) our understanding of the Bible and its God as the modern comprehension of the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy. When we separate modernity from the Bible such that we do not oppose one to the other, we discover that modernity is no less about God than human beings and that the Bible is no less about human beings than God. The paradox, as always, is that divine being and human being are given together— in the ontological argument, in hermeneutics, and in democracy. If only one—God or human being—is given in opposition to the other, then neither is truly given. The advance in modernity that is biblical and the advance in the Bible that is modern together embody the temporality of necessary existence that Spinoza names eternity. Eternity describes the relationship between desire (conatus) and the good when, according to what he calls the dictates of reason, our desire necessarily constitutes the good. But the relationship between desire and the good remains contradictory, lacking all necessity, until and unless we come to the recognition that we can constitute a necessary—an eternal—relationship between desire and the good only insofar as the desire that is our good is the desire that is the good for all human beings and that the good that is our desire is the good desired by all human beings. We see, then, that there is no progress within the common order of linear or circular nature, where singular individuals are destroyed by yet more powerful singular individuals, just as big fish eat little fish. Rather, there is eternal transition to yet greater perfection solely insofar as we advance, faithfully and rationally, in our love of neighbor—ontologically, hermeneutically, and democratically. It is only if we begin with the venerable, articulate, and complete concept of the ontological argument that we can advance (in) the necessary relationship between thought and existence, at once divine and human, as the very constitution of modernity. We can legitimate as necessary the chains binding thought and existence solely insofar as we recognize them to be neither natural nor supernatural but at one and the same time divine and human. To advance (in) our understanding of modernity in light of Spinoza is to discover how important it is to think through the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy both individually and in their rich interrelationships. It is extraordinary to discover that, precisely because each of them is constituted by the necessary relationship of thought and existence, all three of them, in being both philosophical and religious, are at one and the same time modern and biblical. That there is a common relationship between human beings and God in the ontological argument, between reader and text in hermeneutics, and between (among) singular individuals in the politics and ethics of democracy indicates how comprehensive Spinoza’s vision is. In-

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deed, we shall advance (in) our comprehension of modernity only insofar as we learn to see with Spinoza that the ontological argument constitutes both hermeneutics and democracy, that hermeneutics is central not only to the ontological argument but also to democracy, and that democracy is at once ontological and hermeneutical. The modernity of Spinoza is uniquely due to his profound understanding of the ontological argument, hermeneutics, and democracy as all fundamentally biblical. We shall advance (in) our understanding of modernity only insofar as we comprehend the biblical thought of Spinoza as profoundly modern. Notes 1. In the Republic Socrates indicates to his interlocutors that the true lawgiver, although not concerned with the laws in either a badly-governed or a well-governed polis, will be concerned “for the Delphic Apollo . . . to enact the greatest, finest, and first of laws”—those involving the establishment of “temples, sacrifices, and other forms of service to gods, daimons, and heroes, the burial of the dead, and the services that ensure their favor. We have no knowledge of these things, and in establishing our city, if we have any understanding, we won’t be persuaded to trust them to anyone other than the ancestral guide. And this god, sitting upon the rock at the center of the earth, is without a doubt the ancestral guide on these matters for all people” (427bc). In the context of discussing the one substance, the unmoved mover, and the one heaven in Metaphysics XII, Aristotle notes that “our forefathers in the most remote ages have handed down to us their posterity a tradition, in the form of a myth, that these substances are gods and that the divine encloses the whole of nature. . . . We must regard this as an inspired utterance, and reflect that, while probably each art and science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished, these opinions have been preserved like relics until the present. Only thus far, then, is the opinion of our ancestors and our earliest predecessors clear to us” (1074b). 2. See Hunter, the last chapter of whose Thucydides is entitled “General Conclusions: The Least Objective Historian.” 3. Also Mark 12.17 and Luke 20.25. 4. Anselm informs us that it was his monks who requested that he put into writing for them his arguments proving the existence of God based, not the authority of Scripture but on reason. See volume I of my study and my piece “The Ontological Argument for Existence.” Also see my comment on Murdoch’s conception of the ontological argument in appendix I (in volume I). 5. See Fishbane and Levinson for an analysis of how the Bible itself is interpretative from the beginning. 6. See the final paragraph of Fear and Trembling for a brilliantly succinct epitome of Greek philosophy as blindly based on contradiction and thus as repeating the world’s old story that one must go further. We read there that Heraclitus, in supporting the notion of flux in opposition to Parmenides, wrote that “one cannot walk

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through the same river twice.” He had a disciple (Cratylus) who, in order to go further than his teacher, showed that “one cannot do it even once. Poor Heraclitus, to have a disciple like that! By this improvement, the Heraclitean thesis was amended into an Eleatic thesis [of Parmenides] that denies motion, and yet that disciple wished only to be a disciple of Heraclitus who went further, not back to what Heraclitus had abandoned” (123). 7. See my study “Spinoza and the Separation Between Philosophy and Theology.” 8. Thucydides, Plato (in his political works), Aristotle (in the Politics and Ethics), Polybius, and Livy (beloved by Machiavelli) all show that rulers, whatever their number—one, some, or many—always rule over (in their opposition to) others, consistent with the concept of nature according to which, as Spinoza and the fishermen overheard by Pericles (see chapter 2) observe, big fish eat little fish. The biblical (i.e., the unnatural or paradoxical) image of the lion lying down with the lamb in the peaceable kingdom would have been inconceivably contradictory to the Greeks as to the Romans. 9. See the brilliant studies of Foster, who shows that the concept of nature central to early modern science presupposes biblical theology and its doctrine of creation ex nihilo. 10. While the Epicureans, including Lucretius, remove final causes from the gods, they continue to hold that their end is natural, that nature is their end. Since they identify their end with nature and nature with their end (to know the good is to be the good), whatever they do is natural and the natural is whatever they do. In thus being unable to distinguish themselves from nature or nature from themselves, the Epicureans remain ignorant of themselves, of nature, and of their end. 11. In his essay “Odysseus’ Scar,” which, while famous, scholars and thinkers by and large evade, Auerbach profoundly grasps the interrelationship of interpretation, the Bible, and modernity. He writes that, unlike the Bible, which demands interpretation, “the Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, . . . but he cannot be interpreted” (13). In the context of distinguishing between (Greek) legend and (biblical) history, Auerbach writes further: “If the text of the Biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of interpretation on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute authority forces it still further in the same direction. . . . Thus while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as complete truth with a claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim forces it to a constant interpretative change in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an incessant and active development with the life of man in Europe” (15–16). Also see “The Moral Necessity of Metaphor” in which Ozick shows that metaphor, involving morality and memory, is biblical. Citing Lev. 19.34 and 24.22, together with Ex. 23.8, she writes: “Without the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger’s heart. . . . Nowhere beyond the reach of the Pentateuch did the alien and the home-born live under the same code” (67). 12. In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant poses the same dialectic as Spinoza between the pagan world of antiquity and the biblical

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world of modernity. Either the mind (consciousness) conforms to natural objects. Or natural objects conform to the mind (consciousness). Kant shows that the critique of pure reason—which involves his demonstration that reason is fundamentally practice (thinking) and that we can have a reliable science of natural objects solely insofar as we relinquish the transcendental illusion (idolatry) of knowing the thing in itself— elaborates the second, that is, the only choice, the choice of paradox: that natural objects conform to the mind (of human subjects). When the human mind (of subjects) conforms to the objects (of nature), the contradictions that Kant associates with the antinomies, the paralogisms, and the ideal of pure reason (the pseudo-ontological argument) erupt. Human subjects, whose practice establishes and is established by the necessary relation of thought and existence, constitute the world as primordially political and ethical. 13. Except for ethics and religion, as Descartes makes clear in part III of the Discourse on Method. 14. Concerning the famous phrase that Spinoza uses—Deus seu natura: God or nature—several things are to be noted: 1. He uses it infrequently. (See Ethics IV.Pref.) 2. In identifying God and nature Spinoza intends to eliminate all hierarchical notions (e.g., supernatural miracles and natural, final causes), which limit the absolutely infinite power and freedom of God. 3. He also invokes (in I.29S) the scholastic distinction between natura naturans (creating nature) and natura naturata (created nature). While avoiding the language of creation as contaminated by philosophers and theologians with the anthropomorphisms of final causation, he critically distinguishes between nature as infinite (God) and nature as finite (modes), between what is in itself (essential nature as necessary existence) and what is in another (inessential nature as that which is necessitated or determined by another). Still, the distinction between infinite (God) and finite (mode) becomes in all three of Spinoza’s works under consideration in this study the distinction between human nature (the civil state) and the common order of nature (the natural state). Thought and existence—freely (undecidably) divine or human—adhere to “God or nature” as natura naturans, not as natura naturata. 15. See my study “The Image’s Truth: Wallace Stevens and the Hermeneutics of Being.”

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See also in Between Philosophy and Religion, volume I: • Appendix 1: Critical Commentary on Works Relating to Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity, and • Appendix 2: Strauss on the Bible, Philosophy, and Modernity.

Texts Aristotle. The Complete Works. 2 vols. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bible. Revised Standard Version. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method. Tr. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980. ———. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. II (includes The Meditations on First Philosophy and The Search for Truth). Tr. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hegel, G. H. F. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Tr. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991. ———. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. 3 vols. Ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. ———. The Philosophy of History. Tr. J. Sibree. New York: Dover Publications, 1956. Kant, Immanuel. “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History.” In Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, 2nd enlarged ed., tr. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. — 327 —

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———. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety. Tr. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. ———. Fear and Trembling. Tr. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———. Philosophical Fragments. Tr. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Maimonides. The Guide of the Perplexed. 2 vols. Tr. Shlomo Pines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Anti-Christ. In The Portable Nietzsche, tr. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1954. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées sur la Religion. 3rd ed. Ed. Louis Lafuma. Paris: J. Delmas et Cie, 1960. Plato. Republic. Tr. G. M. A. Grube. Rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. In The Social Contract and the Discourse. New York: Washington Square Press, 1967. ———. Du Contrat Social (including both Discourses). Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962. The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Spinoza, Baruch/Benedictus de. Ethics. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. I, ed. and tr. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. ———. Ethics. Tr. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982. ———. Ethics. Tr. W. H. White. In Spinoza: Selections, ed. John Wild. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. ———. The Letters. Tr. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995. ———. Opera. 4 vols. Ed. Carl Gebhardt. Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuchhandlung, 1925. ———. The Political Works (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in part; Tractatus Politicus). Ed. and tr. A. G. Wernham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. ———. Theological-Political Treatise. Tr. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. (Note that the second edition of 2001 is not a revised translation. Nor are all the errors found in the first edition corrected.) Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Vries, Theun de. “Conversation on the Borderline: Leibniz at Spinoza’s [Deathbed].” In Studia Spinozana 6 (1990).

Studies Auerbach, Erich. “Odysseus’ Scar.” In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Tr. Peter Hallward. London & New York: Verso, 2001.

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———. Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. Tr. Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. Theoretical Writings. Ed. and tr. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Cooper, David A. God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997. Cullmann, Oscar. “Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament.” In Immortality and Resurrection—Death in the Western World: Two Conflicting Currents of Thought, ed. Krister Stendahl. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965. Dooley, Sean. The Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, A Race against Time—A True Story about Birdwatching. Crows Nest, New South Wales, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2005. Eisen, Robert. The Book of Job in Medieval Jewish Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Fishbane, Michael A. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Foster, M. B. “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science.” Mind 43 (1934). ———. “Christian Theology and the Modern Science of Nature.” Parts I and II. Mind 44–45 (1935–1936). Hunter, Virginia J. Thucydides: The Artful Reporter. Toronto: Hakkert, 1973. Levinson, Bernard M. Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Matheron, Alexandre. Individu et Communauté chez Spinoza. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969. Moreau, Pierre-François. Spinoza: L’Expérience et L’Éternité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Moral Necessity of Metaphor: Rooting History in a Figure of Speech.” Harper’s Magazine (May 1986). Polka, Brayton. “The Image’s Truth: Wallace Stevens and the Hermeneutics of Being.” In On Interpretation: Studies in Culture, Law, and the Sacred (vol. 5 in the Graven Images monograph series), ed. Andrew D. Weiner and Leonard V. Kaplan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. ———. “The Ontological Argument for Existence.” In Philip Goodchild, ed., Difference in Philosophy of Religion. London: Ashgate, 2003. ———. “Spinoza and the Separation Between Philosophy and Theology.” Journal of Religious Studies 16, nos. 1–2 (1990). Ravven, Heidi M. “The Garden of Eden: Spinoza’s Maimonidean Account of the Genealogy of Morals and the Origin of Society.” Philosophy and Theology 13, no. 1 (2001) (special issue on Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutics). Stark, Rodney. For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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Abraham (of Genesis), 80, 82, 106, 117, 134n32, 138n68, 240, 306 See also Kierkegaard Adam (and Eve of Genesis/Garden of Eden), xiii, xv, 5, 9–13, 27, 30, 38, 41, 72, 75, 78–102, 105–6, 110, 112–19, 123–25, 138n69, 138nn73–74, 139n77–79, 139n81, 146, 159–60, 224–25, 235, 242, 267, 276, 285n24, 289, 315–21 Anselm, St., 5, 16, 290, 297, 323n4 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 16, 132n16 Aristotle (Aristotelian/Aristotelianism), 2–3, 6, 15–16, 20, 26–27, 58, 126, 133n18, 133n27, 135n49, 136n51, 137n67, 139n81, 141n93, 152, 216, 250, 286n28, 292, 298, 308, 323n1 Politics, 59, 105, 136n50, 147, 304, 308, 324n8 Auerbach, Erich, 324n11 Augustine, St., 9, 138n71, 139n81, 215

213, 215–25, 278, 291, 295–97, 303–5 Condemnation of 1277, 133n18 contradiction (concept of), 305, 312–13, 316, 318 See also paradox (concept of) Cooper, David A., 141n91 creation (biblical concept of), 32, 56–57, 88, 135n49, 286n28, 308, 315–17, 319, 328n9 Cullman, Oscar, 286n28 Curley, Edwin, on translations in the Ethics, 133n21, 134n35, 135n47, 137n60 Cusa, Nicholas of, 290 Descartes, René, xv, 5–6, 16, 22, 27, 113, 117, 126, 131n6, 131n9, 133n19, 133n22, 133n24, 243, 267, 289, 314–15, 319–21, 323n13 Dooley, Sean, xv

Badiou, Alain, 131n9, 140n90, 286n28 Caravaggio, 26, 128, 132n15 Christ (Jesus), 12, 80–81, 85, 100–101, 112–17, 126, 129, 134n32, 200,

Eisen, Robert, 137n67 Epicurus (Epicureans), 20, 26, 133n25, 141n93, 307 Lucretius, 136n49, 293, 324n10

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Fishbane, Michael, 323n5 Foster, M. B., 324n9 Hegel, G. H. F., 5, 9, 83, 127, 131n7, 131n9, 132n11, 221, 224 Heraclitus, 293, 295, 298, 323n6 Hobbes, Thomas, 155, 281n6 Hume, David, 133n28, 273 Hunter, Virginia, 323n2 Isaiah (Book of), 114, 117, 180, 293–94 Jesus. See Christ Job (in the Book of), 80–81, 100, 117, 125, 137n67 Kant, Immanuel (Kantian), 5, 7–9, 83, 110, 126–27, 131n9, 132n11, 135n48, 141n93, 183, 185, 187, 189, 221, 285n25, 308, 323n6, 324n12 Kierkegaard, Søren, 9, 12, 50, 127–28, 132n11, 138n68, 221, 240 Fear and Trembling, 132n12, 323n6 Philosophical Fragments, 108–9, 140n88 Works of Love, 136n54 See also Abraham Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 1, 6, 12, 124, 133n28 Levinson, Bernard M., 323n5 Lucretius. See Epicurus (Epicureans) Machiavelli, Niccolò, 155, 158, 204–6, 281n7, 283n10, 296, 304, 324n8 Maimonides, 6, 16, 137n67, 139n81, 141n91, 216, 294, 298, 301 Matheron, Alexandre, 136n58, 285n26 Metamorphoses (of Ovid), 136n49 miracle (concept of), 81, 215–18, 223–25 Montaigne, 10–12, 26, 46, 58, 101, 110–13, 117, 132n13, 134n34, 150, 292, 294–95, 298, 306, 310, 312 “Of Repentance,” 108–9, 124

Moreau, Pierre-François, 284n21, 285n26 Murdoch, Iris, 323n4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9, 131n11, 221, 311 Ockham, William of, 290 ontological argument, xiv, 5–6, 18–19, 27–29, 36, 53, 57, 126–27, 133n19, 135n42, 174, 193–94, 235, 238, 241, 247, 249, 274, 276, 278, 280–81, 285n26, 290, 297, 307, 309–14, 316, 321–23 Ozick, Cynthia, 324n11 Paradise Lost (of Milton), 9, 138n69, 138n71 paradox (concept of), 305, 312–13, 316 See also contradiction (concept of) Parmenides, 293, 298, 323n6 Pascal, Blaise, 26, 83–84, 109–10, 112–13, 117, 127, 135n48, 138n70, 143, 146, 152, 272, 293–94 Paul, St., 137n63, 140n90, 141n92, 164, 177–80, 282n8, 286n28, 293, 301 I Corinthians (Letter of), 112–17, 128 Romans (Letter of), 115–16 Plato (Platonic/Platonism), 2–3, 5, 11, 15, 20, 26, 57–59, 126, 136n49, 141n93, 151–52, 216, 250, 286n28, 294, 298, 307–8, 323n1, 324n8 See also Socrates Plutarch, 295, 307, 309 Ravven, Heidi M., 139n81 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63, 136n55, 185, 289, 308, 317–18 Seneca. See Stoics (Stoicism) Shakespeare, William, 26, 132nn14–15 King Lear, 110, 132n11, 216

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Parolles (in All’s Well That Ends Well), 1, 11, 124–25, 132n14 Pericles, 164–65, 324n8 Troilus and Cressida, 124 Shirley, Samuel, 130n3, 284n21 Socrates (Socratic), 11–12, 14, 57, 79, 81, 83, 112, 125, 128, 160, 237, 240, 242, 267, 286n28, 292, 294–95, 298, 308, 312–14, 317, 319, 323n1 Crito, 58–59 See also Plato Stark, Rodney, 132n17 Stevens, Wallace, xv, 289, 319–20, 325n15

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Stoics (Stoicism), 6, 15, 20, 26, 126, 141n93, 152, 243, 250, 267, 307, 309 Seneca, 294 Strauss, Leo, ix, xv the three kinds of knowledge, 47, 51, 120–29, 191, 220, 235, 240, 243, 245–48, 251, 257–62, 265, 269–75, 285nn25–26, 287nn30–31, 297, 310 Thucydides, 323n2, 324n8 Valla, Lorenzo, 132n16 Vico, Giambattista, 27 Wernham, A. G., 281n5, 284n21

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About the Author

Brayton Polka is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and of Social and Political Thought and Senior Scholar at York University in Toronto. He is the author of, in addition to numerous studies on hermeneutics and ontology, three previous books: Depth Psychology, Interpretation, and the Bible: An Ontological Essay on Freud (2001); The Dialectic of Biblical Critique: Interpretation and Existence (1986); and Truth and Interpretation: An Essay in Thinking (1990).

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