Abstract
This paper explores the ethical and political implications of Spinoza’s naturalistic psychology of the affects, especially of hatred and its reflexive ‘internalization’. His account calls into question whether forgiveness is ever really justified, or whether it could ever possibly be virtuous. So we might well wonder why a discussion of Spinoza’s psychology of hatred belongs in a discussion about forgiveness, reconciliation, revenge, or ameliorating violent conflict. As Spinoza defines hatred, it is only an awareness of one’s agency being diminished; and it encompasses any “negative reactive attitude”. If forgiveness and pardon are justified only if, and when, blame is justified, and blame necessarily entails being subject to “negative reactive attitudes”, and entails an individual “taking up the position of the judge”, then forgiveness and pardon is never justified—at least as long as one lives under the powers of a civil state. Spinoza’s view, however, appears to authorize a broad posture of forbearance towards all wrongdoers I will then explore what this broad forbearance involves, as an alternative response to wrongdoing to blame and forgiveness. It does not involve foregoing just punishment (in contrast to revenge) under terms of reasonable civil law. But it involves cultivating “strength of mind” and thus, genuine ‘agency’, and seeking unqualified liberation from the motivational power of any form of hatred. Here, one will forebear others unconditionally, and embody peace as a virtue.
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Notes
- 1.
Spinoza text footnote. Political Treatise (PT) 5.4. All quoted English translations of Spinoza’s texts come from Edwin Curley, ed. and trans., The Collected Works of Spinoza (2 Vols), (Princeton University Press, 1985), unless otherwise noted. Citations will abbreviate Volume (CI or CII), followed by page number. Citations for quoted texts will subsequently be bracketed in text, along with page and vol. location in Karl Gebhardt, ed. Spinoza Opera (4 vols), (Heidelberg, C. Winter, 1925). I will use the following standard, short reference to Spinoza’s writings. For Ethics: followed by part number, followed by: Appendix = app, Axiom = ax, Corollary = c, Definition = def, Definition of emotion = def.em., Proof = pr, Explanation = exp., Lemma = lemma, Proposition = p, Postulate = post, Preface = pref. Scholium = s. For the Short Treatise (Korte Verhandlung), KV; Theologico-Political Treatise (TTP), and the Political Treatise (PT), each followed by a section number.
- 2.
C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory, (1930): 40.
- 3.
Theologico-Political Treatise TTP§, 7th tenet of the vero religio.
- 4.
See Newberry (2001) for an account of the theory of emotions informing Butler’s account of resentment and forgiveness.
- 5.
Joseph Butler (1987), “Upon Resentment” and “Forgiveness of Injuries”, Sermons VIII, XI: 92–112.
- 6.
EIIIp29s and PT §2.24.
- 7.
See E4p45. I will typically use the term “hatred” as opposed to “hate” where Spinoza uses forms of either the Latin odium or Dutch haat. The reason is that hatred seems to specify an emotional response or affective state or disposition which is often construed (as Spinoza specifies) as an ‘opposite’ to love. “Hate”, on the other hand, has come to specify a wider discursive phenomenon that is not necessarily affectively “charged”, but perhaps constitutes conditions under which specific groups of people, based upon some identity they are presumed to bear, are liable to be targeted with hatred.
- 8.
Agency is not a term that Spinoza uses. When I use it to represent his view, I take it to mean an individual’s capacity to act to the end of persevering in being as the being one is. It entails resistance to annihilation and to being ‘morphed’ into a different ‘nature’—a being defined by a different ratio of motion between its parts, and thus its relative power, within a nexus of efficient causes. An finite individual ‘perseveres’ as a mode of being just so long as it can be cited as an efficient cause of effects that. For human ‘natures’, this includes being both the subject and cause of affects—states of relative strength or weakness of the body that are paralleled by a conscious awareness of joy/pleasure and sorrow/pain, together with an image or idea of a cause, ‘external’ to oneself. See Kisner (2011).
- 9.
This claim reflects a reading of EIVp59.
- 10.
Readers should note that this claim raises a potential problem for readers of Spinoza, if not Spinoza’s own view of the constitution and legitimacy of state power. In a letter of June 2, 1764, to Jarig Jelles, (Letter 50, Shirley pp. 89191), Spinoza differentiates his view of the legitimacy of state power from Hobbes by claiming that on his view, “a State has right over a subject only in proportion to the excess of its power over that subject.” In the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) 20, he marvels about the extent to which sovereign powers can make subjects so dependent upon “another’s words” that “it can properly be said to belong to his right.” But he goes on to insist that sovereign power can never extend its power over exercising judgement and over individual’s emotions or affects. It is also clear enough that an ‘excess’ of power is however much, by whatever means, or through inducing whatever effect, is necessary to effect obedience to law beyond an individual’s obedience by way of exercising her own powers of mind. Whatever Spinoza means by ‘judging’ or ‘taking up the position of judge’, he is not referring to individual subjects affective responses alone, but to any expression of an individual’s own power to resist or avenge injuries at the hands of another individual. We will see below, however that on Spinoza’s view, avenging is necessarily motivated by hatred. But bringing a wrongdoer before a judge who exercises her power through the right of the state, to “uphold justice”, can be motivated by reasoned desire, entirely without hatred. Vengeance, then, is necessarily ‘base’ and ‘lawless’; but punishment in accordance with the law of the state (‘getting one’s due’) can be non-hateful and rationally authorized, to any individual’s end of persevering in being as the being one is.
- 11.
Spinoza rejects the idea, a primary feature of ‘the introspective conscience’ in Augustine and resonating as Augustinian themes throughout scholastic moral psychology and subsequent traditions of thought, including Joseph Butler, that one should hate sin or vice within oneself and others, and that one can hate vice or sin without hating the one who bears it. Augustine argued that hatred of vice/sin in oneself was actually genuine self-love.
- 12.
See Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii (2). This text represents perhaps the first delineation of hatred in philosophical literature, and Aristotle’s differentiation of hatred from anger in this text is widely cited in scholastic sources, most especially in the widely influential moral psychology of Aquinas.
- 13.
Spinoza makes it clear in EIVp56 that abjectio, along with pride, are cases where subjects’ ignorance of themselves is “extreme”, and thus, are most “impotent” of spirit.
- 14.
Marshall (2013), 95.
- 15.
Lee Rice (1999), 161–2.
- 16.
Sorrow/pain (tristitia), joy/pleasure (laetitia), and desire encompass all passive affects, as Spinoza understands them. See the explication of E3def.em4.
- 17.
See EIIIp49. The argument above recapitulates that of the demonstration.
- 18.
On ‘agreement’ (convenientia), see Sangiacomo (2015) and Steinberg. Readers should note that ‘disagreement’, or one nature’s being ‘contrary to’ another, is not a function of absolute difference. And loving a common thing is not enough, by itself, to constitute ‘agreement in nature.’ If there is no ‘agreement (convenientia) in nature’ whatever, then there is only indifference, because one does not, in itself, effect the power of the other. Spinoza argues that only if two men ‘love the same thing’ but one has the idea of that thing in his possession (and enjoys its possession) and the other has the idea of that thing lost (and thus suffers the loss), they are ‘contrary’ in nature, and thus regard each other with hatred, and aim to injure each other. See EIVp33s. So hatred can emerge only within a dialectic of resemblance (agreement) and difference (agreement failure) ‘in nature’.
- 19.
EIIIp46.
- 20.
See TTPXVI[59]–[60] (CII. p. 294). See also PT IV.4 (CII, pp. 526–27.) When I use the term ‘oppression’, I broadly mean exercises of sovereign power to legislate that (i) motivate out of fear or manipulated resentment, and that (ii) do not have the good, or what Spinoza calls the ‘genuine advantage’ of subjects in view as the ‘end’ of law making.
- 21.
- 22.
See EIVp37 and E4IV38; but note that the first of these propositions is a descriptive restatement of the love command, and the second essentially an argument for it. See Green (2007) for an argument that EIVp37 restates the love command as ‘divine law’ as Spinoza conceives it.
- 23.
- 24.
Spinoza even extends the notion that blame (vituperium) or censure ‘injures’, constitutes ‘abuse’, and weakens those who are motivated by it to act as law and reason require to prophets’ reproach of wrongdoing and injustice. “For we’ve seen above that though the prophets themselves were endowed with a divine virtue, still, because they were private men, the freedom they showed in warning, chiding, and reproaching people aggravated them more than it corrected them. (TTP 19[45]. GIII/236, C p. 341).” It will be clear in the following section that the prophets’ being “private men” is significant. An individual who blames, and who does not exercise the ‘public’ office of ‘judge’, censures as a “private” person.
- 25.
This is clearest in PT5.4.
- 26.
- 27.
See Voss (1981) on Spinoza’s counterposition of opposing affects.
- 28.
See EIIIp40dem.
- 29.
Norlock (2008).
- 30.
It is important that Spinoza continually recapitulates this point in both the Ethics and political treatises. See TTP XVI.55–60 (CII,293-4). Compare to EIVp37s2 and PT 2.23 (CII, p. 516).
- 31.
Steinberg (2019), p. 41.
- 32.
See, perhaps most starkly, PT II.23, (CII, p. 516.) We might point out that Spinoza’s claim about the conceivability, and thus the ideas and language of wrongfulness and ‘sin’, presupposing an actual ‘lawmaking’ exercise of sovereign power, anticipates a range of views about the sources and nature of moral normativity—as diverse as Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy of morals’ and Elizabeth Anscombe’s rejection of ‘modern moral philosophy’.
- 33.
Short Treatise (KV) II§18[5]. (CI, 128)).
- 34.
Seneca, De Ira I xiv 2, I xiv–xv 2. At least one of Spinoza’s remarks about punishment also imply a paternalistic interpretation of at least some cases (concern for the wrongdoer’s betterment, as well as that of his victim in KV II§18).
- 35.
See Olsthorn (2016) and Zuk (2015) on Spinoza’s constructivist account of justice. Steinberg (2019) identifies courses of this view. Green (2019a) for a more extensive examination of the way that Spinoza reconciles the legitimacy of civil judgement and punishment with his endorsement of the biblical love commands.
- 36.
See Spinoza’s definition of vindicta in E3def.em.37.
- 37.
This recognition is implicit in Spinoza’s denial that ‘sin’ can exist beyond the bounds of the state. If what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is entirely a matter of the common law of the state, then there is no other moral ‘law’, violation of which counts as disobedience. See PT 2[19]. See also Spinoza’s letter, of 5 January, 1665, to Willem van Blijenbergh, (Letter 19). “I maintain that it is only be speaking improperly or in merely human fashion that we say that we sin against God, as in the expression that men make God angry.” (CI, p. ***)
- 38.
See James (2012), pp. 66–67, 99–105.
- 39.
See TTP IV.41, CII, p. 136. Here, as in Spinoza’s interpretation of Adam’s subjection to death as a result of eating the ‘forbidden’ fruit, punishment “privation of understanding”. See also Spinoza’s letters: Two of the more pertinent are of 5 January, 1665, to Willem van Blijenbergh (Letter 19), (CI, p. 360). See also the later letter of 7 February, 1676, to Henry Oldenburg (Letter 78) where Spinoza rejects the image of God as a judge. (CII, p. 481).
- 40.
See Green (2013), 195–233 for an argument that by the definitions of blame given in E3p29s and TP2.24, blame is a form of hatred.
- 41.
See EIIIdef.em.20.
- 42.
Spinoza articulates his most developed definition of justice in TTP16[42], CII. p. 290. It is said to be “constancy of mind” to render every person what is hers “by civil right.” The use of “constancy of mind” in this context implies that Spinoza does embrace the longstanding idea that justice is a virtue, at least where the motivation arises from the strength or activity of one’s own mind. Aristotle’s definition echoes in PT3[23]: (S. p. 689): “a man is called just who has the constant will to render to each man his own; and he is called unjust who endeavors to appropriate to himself what belongs to another”. The specification that what one is ‘due’ is a function of ‘civil law’ reflects Spinoza’s thoroughgoing constructivism about justice and other normative moral principles.
- 43.
TTP16[25], CII p. 287. is where Spinoza makes this claim most clearly. But it is also implied in EIVp37s.
- 44.
See TTP7[32]–[33], CII. p. 177, and 19[6]–[9] and [28]–[29], CII pp. 333–34, 338, for Spinoza’s argument against the permissibility of ‘turning the other cheek’ and the implication that the love command does not authorize doing so where the state upholds claims of justice through its offices and power.
- 45.
- 46.
- 47.
- 48.
Hobbes De Cive IV§VII (1983), 79. See especially his comment on Matthew 5 v. 39.
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Green, K. (2022). Spinoza on Hatred and Power and the Challenge of Reconciliation. In: Satne, P., Scheiter, K.M. (eds) Conflict and Resolution: The Ethics of Forgiveness, Revenge, and Punishment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77807-1_4
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