Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

306 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
and crude resources are not acquired without some degree of mutual
help.
(TTP V)
Spinoza is arguing here from ‘universally valid principles’, and one is tempted to
refer to E IV 18S: ‘To man, then, nothing is more useful than man’. But if we
look into Spinoza’s arguments for this notion of mutual utility, we find two
statements explained. First, referring back to E II Post4, he states that men can
never do without external things in their striving for the preservation of their
being. Second, he deduces that no external things are ‘more excellent than those
that agree entirely with our nature’. Men who agree in all things will therefore
seek the common good of all. They will want nothing for themselves that they do
not desire for other men. As often in Spinoza, we have here the choice between a
minimal and a maximal interpretation. If we take ‘agree’ in a maximal sense, it
seems to indicate the agreement of all living equally according to the dictates of
reason, but then we would have difficulty in understanding how, for example, a
farmer and a philosopher can completely agree with each other. We would not
want this agreement to consist in a shared certainty about the necessity of mutual
help, since that is what we are trying to understand. On the minimal
interpretation, agreement refers to those things about which persons in fact
agree, as, for example, in an exchange of external goods. That is, to man nothing
is more useful than man because people find their exchanges profitable as soon
as they come to an agreement. On this minimalist interpretation only, agreement
(s) explain mutual help. We may understand Spinoza to allude to this last
interpretation when he concludes E IV 18S by justifying his argument so as ‘to win,
if possible, the attention of those who believe that this principle—that everyone
is bound to seek his own advantage—is the foundation, not of virtue and
morality, but of immorality’. Reading this last remark against the background of
de la Court, we easily see Spinoza here defending the morality of mutual aid on
the basis of the diversity of human capabilities and preferences and the
subsequent possibility of mutual advantage in agreed-upon exchange.
There is one type of agreement, however, that stands out as a prerequisite for
mutual aid, that is, good faith, the determination ‘to keep appetite in check in so
far as it tends to another’s hurt, to do to no one what they would not want done to
themselves, and to uphold another’s right as they would their own’ (TTP XVI), or,
in the expression of E IV 18S, that men ‘want nothing for themselves that they
do not desire for other men. Hence, they are just, honest (faithful), and
honourable.’ Men can only provide each other external goods if they recognize
each other as equals in a fundamental respect. That was also the opinion of
Velthuysen. He, however, formulated it as a normative principle, whereas
Spinoza confines himself to a prerequisite. If men do not keep their agreements,
mutual aid is impossible. For Spinoza, unlike in Grotian natural law, for example,
it is no self-evident rule that men should keep their promises. It is a fact about