Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA 299
sufficient, as where he has to fall back on X in arguing that men cannot use each
other as means to their own goal. Spinoza is the more radical thinker of the two.
We can know God only in so far as we adequately understand ourselves as part of
Nature, or God. Our being a part of Nature is essentially our being caused by
Nature to exist and to act in a certain determined way. This excludes teleology.
Second, in analysing our being part of Nature in more detail, we should not
‘prefer to curse and laugh at the Affects and actions of men, rather than
understand them’, but to ‘consider human actions and appetites just as if they
were a question of lines, planes, and bodies’ (E III Praef). Indeed, Spinoza wants
to judge human actions according to their correspondence with reason, but here
we should take ‘reason’ to be Spinoza’s theory of human nature. So by really
naturalizing M, Spinoza is driven to eliminate X as irrelevant to his problem. Or,
in a slightly different light, if morality is to live according to one’s own nature, X
is internalized.
We might sum up by saying that those who live by their passions believe or
imagine they are free and their own master, whereas one who lives according to
reason knows he is determined (by his own nature) and is therefore really free.
Isn’t thus our imagination of freedom a passion that may lead us in the end to real
freedom?
Affects, passions, freedom: censuring the theory of the faculties
Spinoza presents his moral philosophy in the three last parts of the Ethics,
dealing respectively with the affects, with the passions, and with human
freedom. Fundamental propositions of the first two books are applied, such as the
thesis of the parallelism of mind and body, and the doctrine of ideas. In this
context we should first discuss Spinoza’s rebuttal of the doctrine of the three
faculties as he found it defended by his Neostoic-Aristotelian predecessors. One
step in his argument is formulated at the end of Book II, where it is argued that will
and intellect are one and the same (E II P49C). A further step is the integration
of both will and intellect with acting, by means of the appetite.
First, Spinoza argues that ‘there is in the Mind no absolute faculty of
understanding, desiring, loving, etc. From this it follows that these and similar
faculties are either complete fictions or nothing but Metaphysical beings, or
universals, which we are used to forming from particulars’ (E II P48S). From
thinking oneself to be free, as we have already seen, we may be apt to conclude
that freedom exists, but only wrongly so. Universals are not to be formed by way
of generalization. Our so-called faculties are to be investigated as singulars.
Spinoza is interested in particular volitions, not in the obscure faculty of willing,
and he defines a volition as the affirming or denying of something true or false.
Volition is a mental category, and therefore it is to be seen in relation to ideas.
Having an idea, and affirming it, or conversely having the idea that something is
not the case, and denying it, cannot be different from each other. Spinoza is
focusing here exclusively on the affirming/denying part of volition, thereby