Episode post here. This episode transcribed by Dusty Dallman.
Matt Teichman:
Hello. Welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy
podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I’m Matt Teichman, and
with me today is Steven
Nadler, William
H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and Evjue-Bascom Professor of the
Humanities, and Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies, at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison—and he’s here to discuss
Spinoza on
freedom. Steven Nadler, welcome.
Steven Nadler:
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Teichman:
‘Freedom’ is a word that gets tossed around a
lot in contemporary political discussions—we want to be free—and
there’s also ‘freedom’ as it pops up in philosophy. Maybe it’s
related, maybe it’s the same thing, maybe it’s different; I don’t
know. That has to do more with like: do we have control and
responsibility over the things we do? What did the philosopher Baruch
Spinoza think freedom was?
Steven Nadler:
Well, Spinoza had a very idiosyncratic
conception of freedom: idiosyncratic because of the larger
metaphysical picture in which he discusses the issue of
freedom. Remember that for Spinoza, we are all modes, or in God or
nature—and so human beings don’t have this kind of ontological
autonomy that we ordinarily think that things have. We are no
different from other parts of nature. We are part of nature. We are
governed by nature’s laws, and this is just as true for our states of
mind. Our mental states, our emotions, our passions, our acts of
volition, our imaginations—even our intellectual thoughts—are all
bound together by the laws of nature, just as much as our bodies are.
Spinoza does not think that there is such a thing as freedom of the will, either in a libertarian sense or in any sense in which all things being the same, one could have chosen otherwise than as one did. So if you are looking for the kind of freedom that gives you independence from the causal determinism that governs most of nature, you’re not going to find that in Spinoza. What freedom does consist in, for him, is a kind of spontaneity, or self-governing autonomy. Not ‘spontaneity’ in the sense of uncaused events—there are no such things (for Spinoza) in nature—but, in a way, very much like a Kantian autonomy, where the things you do, the choices you make, the decisions you make, the goals you pursue follow not so much from how you are affected by how other things—that’s passivity—but from your own knowledge of what’s really good, and what is in your own best interest.
Matt Teichman:
Okay, right. It’s not like the things I do, I
just make happen out of nowhere. They’re caused. They’re subject to
all the same laws of nature as everything else, so I’m not free in
that sense. But still, he wants to make some distinction between me
being acted on by other things and taking the initiative, or having
the reason for doing things initiate in me. Something like that?
Steven Nadler:
Yeah, exactly. Maybe the most precise way to
put it is: it’s the difference between being acted on and being
active. We’re always active to some degree, because we are always
striving. That’s sort of our core essence, for Spinoza. Every
individual—every human being—is striving to persevere in its
existence, and even striving to increase its own power to
persevere. And so what you have in this grand picture of nature is
this very agonistic or confrontational picture of things in nature as
parcels of striving against each other.
Things strive to maintain themselves. Other things strive to maintain themselves. Sometimes they come into conflict and these strivings push against each other. We as a part of nature are always being impinged upon by other things, and we’re always being passively affected by the objects in the world around us. But because we’re also striving ourselves, we’re in a way pushing back. And so, our lives are a struggle between being acted upon, and being active, or acting. The more free we are, the more active we are. The more we are determined by things outside of us, the more passive we are, the more we are in bondage to the world around us.
Matt Teichman:
So is it like a sliding scale? I’m just trying
to think of an everyday action. Let’s say I feel really hungry, so I
go out and I get a burger. From a certain point of view, I’m being
acted upon, because the hunger is driving me to get the burger. But
then also, from a certain point of view, nobody had a gun to my
head. I decided I was going to respond to this hunger by going to
get the burger. So is that the way that he would think of things?
Parts of what we do are influenced from the outside, and in other
respects, we initiate them? How does that work?
Steven Nadler:
Yeah, to a degree, it’s a sliding scale. Your
hunger moves you to get the burger. You’re enticed by the
advertisement outside this burger stand. So you’re passive, or you’re
acted upon in that respect—but then again, you decide what kind of
burger to get, what cheese to put on it, ketchup, mustard, and so
on. But even that’s a very trivial kind of activity, insofar as the
choices you’re making in that situation are determined by your hunger,
or by the way in which something will make you feel. The reason you
choose ketchup rather than mustard may be because everyone around you
is putting ketchup on their burgers, and you’re putting mustard, and
you don’t want to be embarrassed. Or because ketchup gives you
pleasure—you just like the flavor of ketchup. To that extent, even
your apparently active decision to have ketchup rather than mustard is
determined by the way the appearance of ketchup—the taste of
ketchup, the pleasure that ketchup causes you—move you, in a certain
way.
But let’s say you choose not to have a burger, but you choose to have an orange. Because even though you have this really strong desire for a burger, you know that eating a hamburger is going to make you drowsy, it’s not good for you, you’re much better having an orange or banana. Even though that won’t bring you as much pleasure, you don’t really have a hankering for an orange or banana—you have a hankering for a burger and a beer. But if you make the choice you make, not because of your desires that are grounded in the attraction of pleasures, but because of desires that are grounded in your knowledge of what truly will improve your being—to that extent you’re really active.
Matt Teichman:
Okay. So it’s like a sliding scale, but—
Steven Nadler:
—well, and then at one end of the scale, you
have Spinoza’s model of human nature, which is sort of the ideal free
person. And this is a person all of whose decisions are choices are
made according to what he calls ‘the dictates of reason’, and not the
passions.
Matt Teichman:
And is that the general picture here? Is it the
general picture that, when we’re being acted upon by other stuff,
we’re slaves to our feelings and desires, and when we’re being free,
what we’re doing is we’re listening to reason instead, and it’s
trumping our passions and desires?
Steven Nadler:
Yeah, that’s exactly it. And what reason tells
you is: through reason you acquire a true causal picture of
nature. You understand how things really are related. You understand
the necessity of all things. And one of the benefits of that is a
diminishing of the power of your passions. When you see through reason
the necessity of all things in nature, how everything is governed by
deterministic laws, how everything has a cause, it’s a very
Stoic picture, in the
sense that the more you understand what is and is not under your
control, the more moderated your passions will become with the gaining
and losing of things that you value.
Matt Teichman:
Okay, great. So it seems like free actions are
closely correlated here with rational actions. What did Spinoza think
reason was? It seems like that’s doing some explanatory work here.
Steven Nadler:
It’s doing a lot. He distinguishes between
different kinds of knowledge that one can have of a thing—especially
of oneself—and of nature as a whole. The first kind of
knowledge—he actually calls it ‘the first kind of knowledge’—it’s
an acquaintance of things that we gain through sensation, through
hearsay, and through imagination. He calls this a mutilated and
imperfect kind of knowledge because you really only get an
apprehension of the thing that’s a partial and perspectival picture.
Let’s say I have some knowledge of something that I’ve acquired through sense experience. What I really know is only how that thing affects me, how it affects my body. I don’t have a broad, complete, or very deep picture of it. I just know how it makes me feel, or how it happens to appear to me visually, or tactilely, or through taste or smell. But when I know something through reason—which he calls ‘the second kind of knowledge’—I situate that thing in a much broader causal nexus. I see how it’s related to the whole of nature, I see how it’s governed by nature’s laws, and I understand its necessity. In a way, I come to understand why the thing is as it is, why it had to be as it is, and my knowledge there achieves a kind of eternal perspective on the thing. I’m not just looking at it from this particular temporal-spatial standpoint where my body is, but I’m seeing it from a broader intellectual perspective, and I really have a deeper understanding of the thing.
Matt Teichman:
And it seems like that’s pretty much what was
happening with the orange earlier. With the burger, if I just listened
to my immediate desires and gave into them in the moment, I’d just go
for the burger. But if I tried to take a step back and understand at a
bit of a bigger level how the world works, I’d learn about how
nutrition works and about what’s good for you over the long term, etc.
Getting that broader perspective would lead me to choose the orange.
Steven Nadler:
That’s right. Of course, the orange vs. the
burger is a very trivial example, because what Spinoza’s really
interested in is what is the true good for us? What really benefits
us in the long run—what should we devote our lives to pursuing?
Bananas and oranges are good, but even better than fruit is knowledge!
Matt Teichman:
Can I quote you on that?
Steven Nadler:
Yeah, yeah. You still have to eat, but—
Matt Teichman:
So what it takes for an action to be free is
wrapped up, here, in what it takes for an action to be rational. And
then it seems like those two things are also wrapped up in what it
takes for an action to be good, morally.
Steven Nadler:
Spinoza identifies the following items:
autonomy, freedom, rationality, power, and virtue. The free
person—the person who lives according to the guidance of reason—is
the virtuous person, because he defines virtue as success in the
striving to persevere and to maintain one’s power and to increase
it. And the most effective way of doing that is through reason. So the
person who is rational—who is virtuous—will also be the person who
is most free and most powerful.
Matt Teichman:
A lot of people have the intuition that at
least in certain cases—or maybe new or unfamiliar cases—you should
listen to your gut. Like: I don’t really understand what all the
relevant factors are, when I’m under time pressure. I don’t have the
resources to take a scientific perspective on this dilemma I’m in and
do a bunch of experiments on it in the lab. All I have is my gut
feeling to go on, and sometimes, your gut feeling is what you should
trust. I wonder: was that intuition at all on the radar for Spinoza?
Was he reacting against that in some way?
Steven Nadler:
It’s hard to say, although it always depends on
whose gut is saying what. If you think back to Aristotelian
ethics, take
the virtuous person. This is an individual who has habituated
him-or-herself to virtue. For whom acting according to the virtues,
acting with moderation, doing and feeling the right thing in the right
situation, as is appropriate—this is a person who has so habituated
themselves to this kind of acting that their gut is probably fairly
trustworthy about what the right thing to do is.
But on the other hand, somebody who has not been habituated to the virtues—in Aristotle’s view, why should we trust their gut? Their gut is the gut of ignorance. And I suppose you could think of Spinoza’s free person in a similar way, that once they’ve achieved that degree of self-control, they will naturally and perhaps instinctively always do the right thing. I’m not sure I would call it acting from the gut, or acting from instinct, because it is acting according to the guidance of reason. It’s a person whose choices and desires are guided by the intellect, not by raw intuition or raw instinct.
Matt Teichman:
That’s really interesting. So somebody with a
reason-centric perspective on morality like wouldn’t be working with
the same assumptions that are operative in a lot of popular culture
today: that there’s reason on the one hand, and there’s the gut on the
other. Because whether you make an instinctive judgment in the moment,
from your gut, is kind of irrelevant to whether the judgment is
correct. What’s relevant to whether the judgment is correct is whether
you’re reasoning properly with your gut or reasoning improperly
with your gut.
Steven Nadler:
Yeah, I don’t think we want people making moral
choices on the basis of gut instinct or gut intuition, unless they
have really finely-developed, finely-tuned guts—or finely-tuned
moral instincts. This is what I think Kant feared so much: that moral
decisions should not be made on the basis of our particularistic
desires, but rather from reason itself. Impersonal reason dictating
the moral law, rather than the peculiarities. That’s why the
categorical
imperative is so
different from the golden rule. The
golden rule says ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto
you’. But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind being treated
in certain ways, then that would legitimate you treating others in
those ways. Whereas the categorical imperative doesn’t relativize
what’s morally permissible and morally mandatory from your own
preferences and inclinations. I think Spinoza has that same vision of
moral decision-making. It’s a matter of reason—not a matter of
inclination or raw instinct.
Matt Teichman:
The idea that different moral situations we’re
in at different times are completely new—completely indescribable
using previous moral frameworks—sometimes this is nicknamed
particularism. That came up at a certain point. So is the idea here
that that never happens? If you have a properly worked-out moral
theory and understanding of how to weigh all the relevant
considerations in a particular situation, is the idea that there
should never be any totally new situation where you wouldn’t be able
to appeal to reason to figure out what to do?
Steven Nadler:
That’s an interesting question. Spinoza would
be foolish to deny that there are situations that strike you as novel
and unfamiliar. That’s just the run of life. But he also would insist
that the most important thing that you need to have knowledge of is
yourself, and that self-knowledge will prepare you for all
eventualities. There will, of course, be situations you’ll find
yourself in that might require a little more difficulty in figuring
out what the right thing to do is—what truly would be good or bad in
this situation. But a deep knowledge of yourself and of nature, and of
how you relate to things, will give the free, rational, virtuous
person a real leg up in how to approach these situations. So yeah:
eventually, the rationally virtuous person will always know what to
do.
You know, there are a lot of paradoxes in Spinoza’s moral philosophy. Some of the propositions in Part IV, where he describes the life of the free person, strike us as counterintuitive. He says the free person will always act honestly, and one might wonder: aren’t there situations where it might be not just morally permissible to tell a lie, but morally required to tell a lie? For example, if the Nazis come knocking at your door and ask if you’re hiding a Jewish family in your attic. And here, people have wrestled with Spinoza’s claim that the free person will always act honestly, just as people have wrestled with Kant’s claim that it’s never morally permissible to tell a lie. I think Spinoza, like Kant, means what he says here. That acting dishonestly—while it might seem to have benifits in the short run—in the long run, introduces divisiveness and discord between people.
Matt Teichman:
Okay, yeah; this is a fascinating view. Let’s
say I’m some sort of con artist, and I’m really good at charming the
pants off people, and getting them to give me their money—basically
scamming them. And let’s say I begin one of my con artist sales
pitches, and it works. Wasn’t I totally free in deciding to scam this
person? In what sense was this deceitful act I engaged in not a free
act of mine?
Steven Nadler:
Well, why did you scam them?
Matt Teichman:
I scammed them in order to get another
Lamborghini, because I don’t have enough.
Steven Nadler:
So I think you just answered your
question. What moved you was your desire for a certain material
possession—a possession which is not something that really brings
you benefits in the long run. It brings you pleasure of a certain
sort, but it’s the kind of transitory—you know, you’ll get tired of
your Lamborghini, or you may total it one day. And imagine the
disappointment, the sadness you’ll feel. So you’re setting yourself up
for an immediate burst of pleasure followed by long-term worrying
about this Lamborghini. The parking costs will be
extraordinary. You’re always going to be concerned about where you put
it, whether it’s going to get a scratch here or there. You will become
a slave to your Lamborghini—
Matt Teichman:
—right; other people will get newer and
better Lamborghinis, and I’ll be jealous of them. This won’t be
enough—
Steven Nadler:
—you’re going to be miserable!
Matt Teichman:
I see. Whereas, if I was aiming at something
that really was good for me, rather than something that just seemed
good to me, then it would be free.
Steven Nadler:
Yeah. You know, the ancient philosophers had a
really clear view of this: that satisfying our strongest desires for
material goods always brings pain. The pleasure is always counteracted
by the misery that these possessions bring: the care, the anxiety, and
the cost. They’re not worth it. Get a used Volkswagen.
Matt Teichman:
We’ve been talking Spinoza’s moral philosophy,
but he actually doesn’t get talked about that much as a moral
philosopher. People are more interested in his theory of nature, his
theory of the universe—what are called his ‘metaphysical’ views. And
it’s kind of a funny thing, because a lot of his most detailed ideas
about those topics are the beginning part of a book called the
Ethics. But then in this
funny move, a lot of the discussion never gets around to his actual
ethics. Why do you think that is?
Steven Nadler:
Well, this is one of my pet peeves, and I think
one of the real shames in the way we often teach the history of modern
philosophy. Spinoza falls between
Descartes and
Leibniz in the history
of modern philosophy, which we often require of majors, and he’s there
sort of as a straight man. Descartes sets up the problems of
substance, the problem of ideas and knowledge—and we have Spinoza
who is presented often purely as a metaphysician in Part
I of the
Ethics and as an epistemologist in Part
II. He’s
there to answer certain questions about the mind-body
problem, the way he’s
often taught, and the relationship of God to the world. And then,
Leibniz comes along and offers a different solution.
And so, students only get to read Parts I and II of the Ethics and they’re left wondering: why in the world is this book called Ethics? We haven’t seen any moral philosophy. When in fact, for Spinoza, Parts I and II—the metaphysics, which sets up the place of the human being in nature; the epistemology, which describes what it is for us to have knowledge, and what kind of knowledge we should be striving for—all of this is really in the service of a larger moral and political project. In fact, you could even say that the Ethics is a kind of theological-political treatise, because his goal here is to debunk traditional theological pictures of God as a providential being, and the traditional view of human beings as what he calls a kingdom within a kingdom, or dominion within a dominion—where we have a kind of independence from nature.
The Ethics is a book that is an attack on superstition: the belief that nature is governed by a providential deity, that we have freedom of the will, and that there is such a thing as an immortal soul. These are all in the service of the same moral-political project as the Theological-Political Treatise, where his goal is to undermine the increasing political influence of ecclesiastic authorities in the Dutch Republic. So by undermining the authority of the Bible, by eliminating superstitious beliefs about God and the soul, by debunking the pretensions of the prophets to have philosophical knowledge—all of these are in the service of the same liberational project of human freedom, not just in the metaphysical sense, but in the moral, political, and religious sense as well.
Matt Teichman:
That’s really fascinating. So part of what he’s
bringing our attention to is that previous views about what it is to
be a good person, and what people should do—what’s going to make
people happy—were driven by this picture of human beings as somehow
being detached from nature, or above nature—or having power over
nature—which perhaps goes along with the traditional Judeo-Christian
worldview. Or at least certain ways of historically inheriting that
worldview.
And the intuition there, I guess, is something like: well, look, if we’re going to be responsible for the things we do, we have to have freely chosen them. It can’t be that the laws of physics made me do XYZ, because if so, then I’m not responsible for it. It seems like maybe what Spinoza’s trying to do is give us a new answer to all those questions about what it is to be a good person, what it is to be happy, what it is to live a good life, etc., that’s not dependent on this separation between human beings and the rest of the physical, natural, chemical, biological world.
Steven Nadler:
Yeah, that’s a nice way to put it. The doctrine
of freedom of the will is so central to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
tradition. We bear much of the responsibility not just for our fate in
this world, but for our fate in some alleged world to come. And
there’s no question that Spinoza’s object here is both that
traditional religious picture, but also the Cartesian view that the
soul has an ontological and moral independence from the body, and, as
Descartes describes in The Passions of the
Soul—and
also the classic Stoic view—that we can totally master our emotions,
that the will is capable of dominating and in part even eliminating
certain bad passions. Spinoza says that’s just not possible. A human
being cannot not be a part of nature.
On the other hand, what’s striking in the Ethics is that there’s really no discussion in there about responsibility and praise or blame. So if there’s an ethics here, it’s not an ethics of responsibility and praise or blame—it’s an ethics of happiness, perfectionism and eudaimonism. How can one bring oneself to a condition where one is flourishing as a human being? There’s also an additional difficulty, and my students everywhere pick up on this right away. If you’re a philosopher who believes that everything is causally determined—now, I’m not going to say causally pre-determined. It’s not a fatalism. There’s no providential deity who has set things up and predetermined them so a certain outcome is going to be there. That’s one of the superstitious beliefs that Spinoza is fighting. But if everything is causally determined, including all of our choices, our acts of will, our desires, what’s the point of an ethics? It’s not as if somebody can spontaneously decide: ah—I’m going to change my life. I’ve not been living the right way; I’m going to be a better person.
But I think to put that challenge to Spinoza—it’s a little unfair. He’s not saying you should change your life. What he’s saying is: here’s what happiness is, here are the causes that act upon us, here’s what freedom is, and let me show you the benefits of virtue understood in this sense. There’s a really interesting autobiographical passage at the beginning of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect where Spinoza describes a moment in his life. His father had recently died, and he was a merchant taking over the family’s business in the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community. But he found that life very unsatisfying, and he recognized that the goods he was pursuing—you know, money, honor in the community, a good business reputation—that these are not the true goods of life, that there had to be something better, something that brought a deeper and more lasting satisfaction.
This is the picture of moral deliberation that Spinoza has in mind. Not that you sit and all of a sudden decide you’re going to change your life, but that you notice a certain lack of satisfaction in the life you’re living, in a very causal way, that moves you to seek out new goods, and hopefully you will land upon your acknowledgement of what the true good is. So within this causally deterministic picture, you see how a life can change, without implying that there’s a spontaneous, undetermined act of free choice.
Matt Teichman:
It almost seems like ethics in this style is
more like a science of accurately describing and understanding what it
is for things to go well for somebody versus what it is for things to
go poorly. So the job of the moral philosopher is less to advise
people: ‘do this, don’t do that; stop doing this, stop doing that’,
and more to help people arrive at a better understanding of the
significance of what they’ve done already and what they might do in
the future.
Steven Nadler:
Right. And also to point out what are true
goods and what are merely apparent goods, what will bring you
short-term benefits and what will bring you long-term
benefits. Spinoza defines ‘good’ as that which contributes to the
well-being and flourishing of an individual, and ‘bad’ as that which
decreases their power or
conatus. And the job of the
philosopher—or the job of any virtuous, reasonable person—is to
recognize what things do truly benefit a human being as a human being
and which things are only apparent or misleadingly perceived as good.
Matt Teichman:
So I think this resonates very strongly with
the ancient Greek perspective on ethics, as you’ve mentioned. It
resonates pretty strongly, for instance, with, for example,
Aristotle’s virtue ethics.
Steven Nadler:
And
Seneca and
Epictetus as well,
the ancient Stoics. There’s a great Stoic influence on Spinoza’s moral
philosophy. You know, you read Parts IV and V of the Ethics, and you
think immediately of the ancient Stoics.
Matt Teichman:
Absolutely. And the determinism goes really
well with the Stoics.
Steven Nadler:
Uh-huh. The difference is that, for the
Stoics—at least some Stoics—the determinism is governed by a
providential deity. There’s
teleology in some prominent
Stoic systems, and a divinity who’s guiding nature, and that’s absent
in Spinoza.
Matt Teichman:
So what do you see as the main new contribution
that Spinoza’s perspective is bringing to this tradition—going back
a long way—of taking the long view on a human life, and trying to
analyze what it is to go well vs. to go badly for a person?
Steven Nadler:
I think what it brings is an opposition to the
kinds of illusions that encourage us to think of ourselves as
independent beings that have total self-control. He takes it both as
an empirical fact—an introspective fact, and also a rationally
demonstrable fact—that that’s not what we are. For anybody who’s
experienced the ups and downs of the emotional life, who has lost a
loved one, or has seen pleasures vanish, Spinoza’s simply pointing
out—or demonstrating geometrically—that we don’t have that kind of
independence from nature, and that our emotions are not so under our
control.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah; you don’t need to show that nothing
influenced you or made you do the things you do in order to still have
morality. And beyond that, you don’t even need to show that nothing
ever influences you to demonstrate that you’re free. It’s like he’s
trying to recover morality and freedom in the face of the knowledge
that the outside world has strong influence over us.
Steven Nadler:
Right. Because these are just facts on the
ground that we have to deal with. Now, remember what I described: for
Spinoza, the moral life is a life in which an individual strives to
maintain their being, preserve themselves, and increase their
power. And it’s true that his account of moral motivation is
thoroughly egoistic. Everything we do is motivated by this
conatus—or striving—to maintain and improve ourselves. But that
doesn’t mean that he believes that we can run roughshod over other
people. And in fact, you were using the word ‘morality’ there. For
Spinoza, morality necessarily involves treating other human beings
with justice and charity, acting in ways that help them improve their
lives and reach a state of flourishing—although the motivation for
that is always an egoistic one, because I am better off being
surrounded by other human beings who are also rationally virtuous.
Matt Teichman:
That is so reminiscent of the ancient
perspective on which acting for the benefit of other people and acting
for your own benefit were often thought of as the same thing.
Steven Nadler:
Yeah; in this case, acting to benefit others is
in the service—it’s not just, as a matter of fact, that they both
happen to redound to your own benefit—but acting to benefite others
is done in the service of acting to benefit yourself. Now, only the
rational and virtuous person understands that. Let’s go back to your
gut instinct. Other people may just have this altruistic gut instinct
and help others; and they may not realize that by doing so, they are
benefiting themselves.
The downside of that is that if they don’t understand how and why benefiting others benefits themselves, they may not be very successful or efficient in helping to benefit others. They may think they’re helping others when in fact they’re not. So, you know, let’s say I know you have a taste for burgers, so I decide—my gut instinct says that—for his birthday, I want to give him 25 hamburgers. And I think I’m helping you, but you know—I’m not acting from reason there.
Matt Teichman:
It seems like we’re close to a really nice
explanation for what the difference is between helping other people on
the basis of understanding why that’s the right thing to do, versus
forcing yourself to help other people. Like guilt tripping yourself
into helping other people: that difference.
Steven Nadler:
Right. Again, going back to Kant, it’s not the
kind of person that he describes in the Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of
Morals—of
somebody, all of whose instincts and inclinations are against
helping others, but who does it anyway. We’re again closer to the
Stoic sage: somebody all of whose instincts and habits now are in
accordance with reason, and does so willingly, and takes pleasure in
doing so. It’s not the pleasure that motivates them, but their clear
and distinct perception that doing so is in their own best interest.
Matt Teichman:
So how does this perspective of human beings as
being embedded in the natural world, as opposed to being above or
separate from, or less determined than the natural world—how does
that ramify in our everyday lives?
Steven Nadler:
Well, it does change our perspective on a lot
of the situations we face. Let’s take the example—that Spinoza
himself considers—of suicide. Ordinarily, we think that a person
could rationally and, with all clear-sightedness, choose to end their
life. And in fact, various nations—and even states within the
United States—have decided that physician-assisted suicide and
euthanasia is permissible, because it’s legitimate to consider a
person’s wishes to terminate their lives when we have evidence that
that decision has been made with full understanding of who they are
and what their situation is. Somebody who’s facing nothing but
continued pain, when there’s no hope for relief from suffering—from
terminal illness—we think that the humane thing to do is to let the
person decide, on their own, whether to end their life. If we are
confident that it’s the rational decision.
Now, Spinoza says things that might lead us to believe that he thinks that the idea of rational suicide is incoherent, because every individual is necessarily this striving to preserve and maintain their being and increase their power, and that to act in the guidance of reason is to act in accordance with that striving and to further—that it would be inconceivable that reason would ever dictate that we end our life, end our striving. And so, according to Spinoza, at least at first appearances, it looks like Spinoza is saying that the idea of rational suicide is impossible, that a person will only willfully terminate their existence when overcome by passions, and by the force of external circumstances. That’s a perfectly legitimate reading of Spinoza, but I don’t think it’s what he really means to say.
I don’t think he should say that, and I think maybe if pressed he would acknowledge that he doesn’t have to say that. Why couldn’t it be the case that the free, rationally virtuous person will have a clear-sighted view of what life would be like were it to continue, if a person is suffering from a terminal and extremely painful disability or illness? Why couldn’t Spinoza allow that a person under the guidance of reason would see that, were they to continue living, their conatus would simply suffer decreases, which he describes as sorrow and pain. And then the free and rational person, whose striving is to maintain or increase their conatus or power, would turn away from a life of diminishing power, and so choose, rationally, to end that life—end that quality of life.
Because that’s what they’re really striving to maintain. It’s not just life per se, but a certain life of reason, virtue, and power, and freedom. And if they see that the future holds out no hope of that continuing, I think Spinoza could, would, and probably should say that that would be the decision the rationally free person would make. And I think that’s the decision that policy makers should respect. It doesn’t seem to me humane for us to ignore the possibility that the decision to end one’s life might be a rational one.
Matt Teichman:
At first you’d think that if every person has
this inborn drive to constantly keep themselves alive, and not only
survive, but live well—if everybody has that, how could you,
consistently with that, decide to end your life? It seems like your
idea here is: well, if you have compelling evidence that, if you were
to remain alive, it would basically just be flatlining at zero, you
wouldn’t actually be going anywhere, even though you’d be technically
alive, there’s no reason that that would come out as a superior
alternative to just ending it now.
Steven Nadler:
I think it depends upon whether you see the
conatus as merely, simply a striving to survive, or striving to be
free, and powerful, and rationally virtuous. I think it’s the latter.
And thus, if what you see is a future where there’s diminishing
returns on freedom, rationality, and virtue, you wouldn’t want to
continue living.
Matt Teichman:
Right. Another example like this that jumps to
mind is somebody who’s been a POW for many years, is getting tortured
all the time, and it seems like this is just going to go on
indefinitely. That seems like also a case in which those
things—freedom, rationality, and so forth—are not going to have
the opportunity to flourish.
Steven Nadler:
If the situation is truly hopeless, and not
just that you have a feeling of hopelessness, but you can see, through
reason, that the situation is truly hopeless. One of my favorite
propositions of the Ethics is Part
IV,
proposition 67, where Spinoza says the free person thinks least of all
of death. And I think we shouldn’t see Spinoza as this pessimistic
philosopher who thinks that everything is determined; you don’t have
any control; so just go with it. He thinks that once we free ourselves
from these superstitious beliefs about the immortality of the soul,
punishment, eternal reward in heaven and eternal punishment in
hell—once we stop thinking that there’s this providential God, who,
like a personal agent, will reward and punish us—we can concentrate
and enjoy the rewards of virtue in this life, and achieve a real
happiness, rather than the kind of suffering and bondage that these
superstitious beliefs impose upon us. It really is, in many ways, a
philosophy of freedom and happiness. It’s hard to read, but once you
get through it and you get the picture, I think it’s hard not to
really be enchanted by Spinoza.
Matt Teichman:
Steven Nadler, thank you so much for joining
us.
Steven Nadler:
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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