Sub specie aeterni. A: “You withdraw faster and faster from the living; they will soon strike you out of their lists!” B: “It is the only way to participate in the privilege of the dead. A: “In what privilege?” B: “No longer having to die.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science T

he scholium to proposition 20 of Book V of Spinoza’s Ethics presents five aspects in an unusually summarizing fasion of “all that the Mind, considered in itself, can do against the affects” or more simply the “remedies for the affects,” If Ethics––the title of the book––is 1 properly understood as Deleuze suggested, i.e. as an ethology which, with regard to man and animals, “only considers their capacity for being affected,” proposition 20 and it’s scholium should be the 2 natural point of closure of the entire text. Indeed, even Spinoza himself wrote at the end of the scholium that with this proposition, he has “completed everything,” yet, he goes on to say, only that which “concerns this present life.” What is about to begin––the next twenty-two propositions until the actual end of the book––then, would suppose to be on something like the next life, or in his own words that it is to pass to those things which pertain to “the Mind’s duration without relation to the body.” In what way, then, are they a part of the Ethics? 3 Of these ending propositions it has been noted by Curley that they are “generally regarded as more than usually obscure,” which partially, perhaps, is because of his argument for the eternally of the mind contradicting his earlier ascription of duration to the mind. Indeed, these propositions seems 4 relatively more ‘stand-alone’ then the rest of the texts in this Book, even the beginning propositions–– propositions 21 onward––refer only to the more metaphysical part, namely Book I and II, of the Ethics. It leaves the readers wonder if that is the case, why would it be necessary to only reveal the eternity of the soul––which configures an entirely metaphysical issue––not in Book II, but only here at the very end of the entire book?

With all these hints extravagated, this paper venture to claim the rhetorical moves Spinoza had made with regard to these unusually obscure ending passages, namely that he tries to afford side by side, not one, but a multitude of different ethics for different readers. On the nature of esoteric writing of Spinoza Strauss has written extensively, yet they were geared entirely toward the Tractatus Politicus (TP) and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP). If, as Later Strauss has claimed, that the “genuine refutation of orthodoxy” would require the proof of the intelligibility of the world without a mysterious God, and that Spinoza’s Ethics is a failed attempt at such a philosophic system for the “clear and distinct account of everything” that it presents remains “fundamentally hypothetical,” what is 5 entailed then is the essential connection between the TTP and Ethics, that is, the political vision of religious emancipation in the former should be supplemented by dissemination of the ethical insight of the latter.

Then, a tacit contradiction emerged naturally for Strauss, that if the political treatises of Spinoza are to be read esoterically, it is altogether unclear why the Ethics, bearing an essential 605 1 Deleuze 27 2 606 3 Ibid 4 Stauss 29 5 connection to them, is not to be read in a similar fashion. This essay, therefore, argues precisely for the possibility of such a reading, that there is not simply the eternal tension between the multitude and the wise, as Strauss insightfully perceives in the TTP, but even among the ‘wise’ there exists a gradation 6 which is exemplified by the second and third types of knowledge (cognitio) Spinoza distinguished in Book II of the Ethics; that is, if the faculty of imagination is to be altogether debased as the ignorance of the multitudes––and religion exists to foster obedience and restrain their passion––there is still a distinction between reason (ratio) and what Spinoza calls the “intuitive knowledge,” (scientia intuitiva) and derived from each of the latter two distinct kinds of knowledge are two sets of ethics, which perhaps are examplified by the ‘free man’ and the ‘wise man’. If such is really the case, historical-contextual 7 nuance are added to Spinoza’s own conception of his posthumously published Ethics, that he was not intending to simply write a book of conduct or character, but also have properly considered it’s affects upon publication, that is to say, he is self-conscious of the book’s ethological dimension, just like people have claimed with regard to his political treatises, which perhaps undermines the claim of opposing the Ethics to TTP as a treatise opposing to an intervention or theory opposing to practice since it also contains the religious aspect of affecting differently people with distinct levels of intellectual apprehension, which in turns undercuts the Straussian thesis that the failure of Spinozist version of Enlightenment lies in the unprovability of the rationality of the world in this treatise––and therefore it has the same “cognitive status” as other orthodox religions, for it was not Spinoza’s intention to prove 8 such a case to begin with.

Due to the scope of this essay, its structure will be rather schematic, and portray the arguments mostly in an exergetical fashion. We will first cover the more metaphysical Book I and II, retracing the genesis of Spinoza’s definition of distinct types of cognitions and their respectively assigned properties. In the next section, we will, by examining mainly book IV and V, detail the ethics derived by reason, before the finally, in the last section, comparing it with the ethics derived from attaining the so-called intuitive knowledge.

Imagination, Reason, Intuition The distinction between imagination and intellect first appears in proposition 14 of Book I, when Spinoza demonstrates the unitarity of the substance. Spinoza claims that the divisibility or measurability of the substance is really the product of our imagination for it would be absurd to see an infinite quantity as composed of either, first, a finite part with an infinite part since it is recursive, or, second, a summation of finite parts since the sum would still be finite; while if we attend to it with intellect, that is, “as it is a substance,” it would be found to be “infinite, unique, and indivisible.” 9 Spinoza goes on to say, that anyone who knows the difference between intellect and the imagination will know that matter is “everywhere the same,” and the parts are distinguished in it “only insofar as we conceive matter to be affected in different ways,” so that the parts are distuinguished only “modally, but not really.” That is to say, whenever any two things we perceive to be different is solely 10 because we are using imagination to attend to the aspects of them that are distinct, while in themselves they are really the same substance, and substance, as opposed to specifically conceived matter, is “neither generated nor corrupted.” 11 Even though from here we are yet to attain the differentiation between reason and intuition, we have at least an opposition between imagination and intellect, the latter of which is composed of reason and intuition. And specifically, we at least attain a hint to the general feature of the intellect, namely that they perceives substance as it is in itself, and therefore infinite, unique, and indivisible.

Strauss 245 6 See Soyarslan 7 Ibid 29 8 BkI P15S 9 Ibid 10 Ibid 11 In Book II Spinoza further illustrates the divide between imagination and intellect such that the former is defined by an operation of the Mind when it regards external bodies “as present to us.” The 12 general argument of Spinoza in the first half of Book II up to proposition 31 is to say that because there are external things and we can only imagine them, and we can, too, only imagine their affection to our own bodies and therefore only imagine our own bodies being affected. Yet to imagine is to have an inadequate idea, so the argument really culminates to that we have only an inadequate idea of our own body, other singular things, and of our mental selves, as long as we are attempting to “perceives things from the common order of nature,” i.e., so long as it is “determined externally.” The question, then, is 13 how are we to perceive things “internally,” from the fact that it “regards a number of things at once, to understand their agreements, differences, and oppositions,” so as to really grasp things “clearly and distinctly”? 14 The rest of the propositions before reaching the definitions of the three types of knowledge in proposition 40, I will argue, really is venturing to answer this question of how do we conceive things internally so as to have adequate ideas of them, and, to be exact, there is really two ways to do them which prefigures the latter two types of knowledge––reason and intuitive knowledge––as defined in proposition 40. The two types of true and adequate knowledge are laid out, first and foremost, from proposition 32 to 34, where Spinoza claims that ideas related to God are true, absolute and adequate; 15 and secondarily from proposition 37 to 39, where Spinoza specifies a type of knowledge that is “common to all,” by which he means the objects “are equally in the part and in the whole,” is can also be conceived adequately. It is immediately noted, in proposition 37, that this type of knowledge does 16 not constitute the essence of any singular thing. Therefore this is simply the second type of knowledge 17 which is ratio, for it is common and which Spinoza believes to be the “foundation of reasoning.” But 18 also because it does not relate to the essence of singular things, but only those Universal notions about which we are unable to imagine “a determinate number of singulars.” 19 Here the characteristics of knowledge from reason is explicated clear by Spinoza, namely that it is common in things and that it regards the universals. By contrast, the third type of knowledge, intuitive knowledge, Spinoza explains, proceeds from “an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the [formal] essence of things.” If anything, it 20 reminds the reader of the method of eidetic reduction of Husserl which attempts to uncover unchanging structure of reality or things-in-themselves by stripping away accidental features. Its contrast with reason, then, is that even though both methods are to grasp the essence of things–– contrary to imagination which can only posit their actual existence––reason grasps their universal essence while intuition grasps theie singular essence. Yet what does this really mean, and what implication do they bare?

With regard to the first question it is helpful to go back to the first scholium of proposition 40 where Spinoza explicates the limitation of human intellect. He explains that the reason human forms notions of Transcendental viz. Being, Thing and Something, as well as notions of Universal like Man, Horse, Dog is because the human Body, being limited, is capable of forming “distinctly only a certain BkII P17Schol 12 P29Schol 13 Ibid 14 P32, 34 15 P38 16 P37 17 P40 Schol1 18 Ibid 19 Ibid Schol2 20 number of images at the same time,” and the images will begin to be confused if “that number is exceeded.” That is to say, such notions that categorize singular things, that is, the idea of language in 21 common parlance, is to Spinoza really a supplementation to our limited intellect since we cannot represent all singular things “at once” which is the way he defines knowledge by regarding things as “disposed internally” instead of “from fortuitous encounters,” i.e. “externally.” 22 It is altogether unclear, too, why Spinoza regards the knowledge by reason to be true and adequate if it grasps only the universal essence of things which, as discussed above, is merely a remedy for the limitation of the intellect; One possible explanation, however, is to read this in accordance with Spinoza’s insistence on the practical aspects of things which examplifies in his equation of power to usefulness or advantages, which I will explain later when comparing the ethics derived from knowledge by reason with the ethics derived from knowledge by intuition.

With regard to the second question of what is the significance of such distinction between the second and third types of knowledge, I will claim that such distinction is crucial even in structuring the entire treatise. By the end of Book II we attain the parallelism not only between Mind and Body and other Attributes but, to some extend if we appropriate the term’s definite usage, between Thinking and Willing, or between the way one knows things and the way one lives one’s life––for “the singular volitions and the ideas are one and the same.” And, by the summarizing Appendix we can deduce, that Book III is nothing but the introduction of Spinoza’s system of affects which are ways by which the mind can be affected, both by passion and action, while Book IV and the first part of Book V––up to proposition 20––is nothing but the ways by which those negative affects can be restrained with the use of reason. If this part is the ethical instruction manual of how to pass from imagination to reason, the last part of the treatise is how to pass from reason to intuition and attains what Spinoza calls the ultimate beatitude or blessedness (beatitudo); and these altogether means nothing but the distinction of types of knowledge since they corresponds to, this paper claims, different ways of living and different types of people in a society––the ignorant, the free man, and the wise man––which is what this book is all about.

With this we have answered the question of the distinction between different types of knowledge––that imagination regards the actual existence of objects, reason regards the universal essence while intuition regards the their singular essence––as well as the question of why these distinctions matter––they epitomizes the structure of different ethics which is the objective of the book. Now we will pass to explicate especially the ethics entailed by the use of reason, before finally comparing it with the way of living by intuition.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy After setting up his “affect theory” in Book III, Spinoza moves on to detail how one, based on the ways affect functions, is to become more powerful or virtuous––which is the same thing and also the essence of man. His answer, as we mentioned, lies in the use of reason. It is, however, not simply 23 that reason can eliminate those passions acting upon us, since, even in the very first proposition Spinoza has warned us, that although sometimes the fear of evil disappears once we realized, with reason, such evil was imagined, there are times the fear would not disappear even when we come to grasp rationally the necessity of encountering those evils. Thus, Spinoza concludes, that imaginations do not disappear “through the presence of the true insofar as it is true,” but because there “occurs others, stronger than them, which exclude the present existence of the things we imagine.” 24 Therefore, for reason cannot completely eradicate the affects from passion which diminishes our power of being, or––which comes to be the same thing––that true knowledge of good and evil Ibid Schol1 21 P29Schol 22 BkIV D8 23 P1Schol 24 does not restrain affect in so far as it is true but “only insofar as it is considered as an affect”. 25 Therefore the proper role of reason, as Spinoza proposes, is a meta one: to know “both our nature’s power and its lack of power,” so we can determine “what reason can do in moderating the affects,” and, which I take to be crucial “what it cannot do.” 26 Indeed, such a realization of the limit of reason as reason is critical for his formulation of what an ethical life is like based on reason. At the very end of the Appendix of Book IV, Spinoza conclude that man’s place in nature is “very limited” and “infinitely surpassed” by the power of external causes. 27 That is to say, no matter how much we strive to increase our power of being, there is and always will be things surpassing our power and is capable of destroying us. To this, Spinoza’s solution is to understand that if we are “conscious that we have done our duty…the better part of us will be entirelly satisfied.” 28 That is to say, if we can rationalize there is no better things we could have done in the situation, we would be contend even if we are encountering unavoidable passions.

Moreover, continuing from the theme of Book IV, the beginning of Book V concludes another yet related remedy of reason conscious of its own finitude, namely to operationalize imagination. Proposition 10, for instance, directly affirms our power of “ordering…affections of the Body according to the order of the intellect” to counterbalance evil affects. Spinoza promptly points out 29 that, …The best thing, then, that we can do, so long as we do not have perfect knowldge of our affects, is to conceive a correct principle of living, or sure maxims of life, to commit them to memory, and to apply them constantly to the particular cases frequently encountered in life. In this way our imagination will be extensively affectd by them, and we shall always have them ready. 30 Perhaps one is immediately reminded of the discussion on memory from Book II, when Spinoza claims that it is nothing other than a certain “connection of ideas in the Mind involving the nature of things which are outside the human Body…according to the order and connection of the affections of the human Body.” This is the proposition right after the one introducing the notion of imagination–– 31 ragarding external things as actually present with the affections of the human Body. It is clear, 32 therefore, that memory is simply the connections of imagined things arised from the affections on the human Body, which is itself an imagination. To memorize, thus, is simply to commit not to reason––to regard things in their universal essense––but to resort imagination––to have ideas of things as they actually exists. With this, it is not difficult to see what Spinoza says from the block quote above is precisely that when we have no pefect power to grasp the essence of things––and to eliminate negative passions––the best thing we can do is to resort to some imagination––by having inadequate ideas and therefore benign passions acting upon us––to increase our power of being.

Thus, we see clearly from this section that the way Spinoza envisions reason to counterbalance affects is never to simply understand the nature and causes of all things, but to, for one, understand one’s powerlessness––even reason’s powerlessness––from which our intellect can be content in the face of unavoidable sadness; and for two, utilizing other affects from imagination to restrain the undesirable ones by which the Mind is currently acted upon. With this we can move on to the next section, which P14 25 P17Schol 26 Appendix XXXII 27 Ibid 28 P10 29 Ibid Schol 30 BkII P18Schol 31 P17Schol 32 will introduce the ethics derived from intuitive knowledge in the final part of Book V, and compare it with this one derived from reason.

Amor Fati, Amor Dei? We already know from section one that the essential difference between reason and intuitive knowledge is that the former can grasp merely the universal essence of things while the latter can grasp their singular essence, and the notion of the universal only exists because of the limitation on part of the Mind to conceive many things at once, which necessitates universal notions each representing a multitude of singular things. That is to say, for Spinoza, universals are simply epistemic framework relative to the subject, instead of ontological and in the things themselves. Indeed, even in Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect Spinoza claims, …Although these fixed and eternal things are singular, nevertheless, because of their presence everywhere, and most extensive power, they will be to us like universals, or genera of the definitions of singular, changeable things, and the proximate causes of all things. 33 This has serious implication for Spinoza. Specifically, since the derivation in Book II of the Mind being durational relies upon the assumption that it can conceives only its durational extended body as the body actually exists; yet this is to understand things as an universal notions. To consider things 34 singularly, however, Spinoza claims, is to consider it independent of actual existence and universal essence, and only as it is in itself, i.e., through the essence of God which is eternally necessary. The 35 result of this consecutive steps of deduction is that Mind, once conceiving things singularly, will be rid of its temporality as originally understood in Book II. That is to say, the Mind is eternal and does not perish with the body it conceives.

This metaphysical result has moreover an ethical implication for Spinoza and, this paper claims, differs from the one derived from knowledge by reason. The most obvious consequence is, together with the thesis of parallelism between affect and understanding, that such comprehension of things through their eternal essence is the most certain means, in Spinoza’s own words it is what he calls the ‘intellectual love of God’ (Amor Dei intellectualis), which, even surpassing the Love of God derived from reason, is the only type of Love that is eternal. 36 The specifics of how the Love of God differs under the second and third types of knowledge matters since it will help us understand why only the latter Love is eternal. With reason, as it has been shown in section two, that it’s ultimate solution to remediate the affects on the Mind, in plain words, is either acting in accordance with memorized maxims, which utilizes other imaginations to counter- balance the present one that is causing sadness, or to rest content, when one is still sad, realizing that there was nothing else one could have done to make it better.

Applying such method to the Love of God results in proposition 14 to 20 of Book V, which appears almost in a quasi-imperative gesture such as “this Love toward God must engage the Mind most;” “no one can hate God;” “he who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in 37 38 return,” and so on, which coheres with the conclusion that the most reasonable action is to do so in 39 accordance with memorized maxims. On the contrary, the Love of God understood from the perspective of intuitive knowledge has no need for maxims perhaps for counteracting sadness from, for 41 Curley 33 BkII P8C 34 P23 35 P34C 36 P16 37 P18 38 P19 39 instance, one is not loved back by God and have to understand that God loves no one and hates no one. Since, sub specie aeternitatis, the intellectual Love of God already renders everything as expressing 40 the essence of God and is God, and such Love to God therefore is already God’s Love for oneself, since one is already God. Such is the result of comprehending things in there singular essence with 41 intuition. And it is only from here Spinoza can derives his last proposition rendering blessedness and virtue to be the same thing. Since blessedness is the Love from God, and virtue the Love of God; even with reason one has to reckon with hating God when tragedy happens or not been loved back when one loves, namely one still searches for blessedness with virtue; yet with intuition one no longer distinguishes blessedness and virtue, Loving and being Loved, and therefore engages in such self- propelling activity ad infinitum.

Conclusion: On a Remembered Kind of Writing… The contrast between life by maxims and life by intelletual love from the previous sections seem to bear a similar contrast between obedience and truth in the TTP, which are the respective purposes of religion and philosophy. Yet if we take up the common reading that such contrast in TTP is to be compared with the duel of imagination and intellect, we can see a similar gradation going on even within the intellect, between intuition and reason, which entails that there should be another differentiation in the TTP perhaps to which we have yet to find correspondence. But if we move carefully enough, we will find two equally motivated yet incompatible reading of this tripartite distinction, based upon assumption of Spinoza’s own conception of perhaps the ‘ultimate’ ethics.

If the intellectual Love of God is indeed the final purpose he has assigned for mankind to achieve, then Strauss’ critique is still apt by examining how it does not exclude the possibility of revealation. Yet if Spinoza’s ultimate position is reason which he praised most about across different texts, then how are we to understand this intuitive knowledge that appears at the end of the ethics as almost an appendix? One way to reconcile such contradiction is to understand truly with Spinoza that the ethics derived from reason is, as we concluded, to realized the lack of power of reason and learn to use imagination to remediate the negative affects, or in his own words, to memorize some “maxims of life.” If such is the case, then the intellectual Love of God is nothing but the ultimate maxim Spinoza wants us to memorize.

Just like the Myth of Er at the end of Plato’s Republic, based on this interpretation, Spinoza similarly tells a tale that directs the seemingly rational aiming public to such a hypothetical goal, and the whole book is not a treatise that is proved in geometrical order, but considered as an external object to which we have only confused ideas, and can affect our mind for proper remediation. Thus considered, we can perhaps respond to the Straussian critique of the incapacity of Spinoza’s deployment of reason in his project of enlightenment to create an universal religion, for Spinoza’s reason is always already considering the unreasonableness necessarily embedded within each individual mind. Even the whole book is inserted with the last part regarding intuitive knowledge as a noble lie to direct readers achieving the eternity of the soul in a more secularised, universal fashion. Therefore, if we are really to adopt this reading, we can indeed respond to Strauss that if he, as he claims, had read TTP too literally by not reading it literally enough, he perhaps still, too, didn’t read the Ethics too literally by not reading it literally enough. The Ethics was never a rationalized sequences of proof but an affective intervention aiming not at all, like Strauss’ assumption, at going superior than orthodox religions in terms of ‘cognitive status’. Spinoza simply stretagized to go beyond them by being more affective, by having more power, which is the one and only maxim by which anything in the world perseveres.

P17C 40 P36 41