Spinoza presents a picture of the good human life in which being rational and being reasonable or sociable are mutually supporting: the philosopher makes the best citizen, and citizenship is the best route to philosophy and adequate ideas. Crucial to this mutual implication are the roles of religion and politics in promoting obedience. It is through obedience that people can become “of one mind and one body” in the absence of adequate ideas, through the presence of shared empowering imaginations and emotions.
References to Spinoza follow these conventions.For the Political Treatise, the translation is Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, Introduction by Steven Barbone and Lee Rice (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), with chapter, paragraph, and page numbers. For the Theological-Political Treatise, the numbers refer to chapters and pages from Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans . Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001). For the Latin of the TTP, I use Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus/ Traité Théologico-Politique, Oeuvres, vol. III (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999) (henceforth TTP). For the Ethics in English, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), with parts, propositions, corollaries, and scholia indicated in the usual way. Thus E4p42s refers to Part 4, scholium to proposition 42. The most accessible Latin version is at http://users.telenet.be/rwmeijer/spinoza/works.htm?lang=E.
2.
Steven B.Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 151: "The striking paradox of the Treatise is that Spinoza argues for the sharpest possible separation of philosophy and theology only to settle in the end on the radical subordination of theology to political control."
3.
I have made a detailed argument for this distinction between the TTP and the Ethics in "Spinoza and the Invention of Morality,"History of Philosophy Quarterly23 ( 2006): 357-74. In an article whose theme I find closest to mine, Pascal Severac, "Convenir avec Soi, Convenir avec Autrui: Éthique Stoicienne et Éthique spinoziste,"
4.
Studia Spinozana12 (1996): 105-20, calls Spinoza’s a "morale de la convenance" (105). Severac then raises the question of why, while for the stoics the primary agreement is with the self, for Spinoza, it is with others.
5.
Other similar uses of convenire occur at E4app32, E4p188s, E4p35, E4p59dem. I am grateful to Steve Barbone for doing the work of a research assistant here.
6.
The TTP and the Ethics both see agreement and sociability as the route to rationality. The Ethics also shows that rationality is equally the route to sociability. They differ in that the TTP declares that acts of justice and charity are sufficient for salvation while the Ethics holds out for salvation as the activity of wisdom. That difference does not affect my argument here.
7.
"In so far as men are subject to passive emotions, to that extent they cannot be said to agree in nature" (E4p32). "In so far as men live under the guidance of reason, to that extent only do they always necessarily agree in nature." "In so far as men live under the guidance of reason, to that extent they always necessarily agree in nature" (E4p35). This distinction between reason as unifying and passion as divisive depends on Spinoza’s own ideas of reason and passion. In Hobbes, for example, rationality can as easily make people enemies as friends, and only a common passion of fear and awe for the sovereign will unite a people. "Now (although Hobbes thinks otherwise) reason is entirely in favor of peace" ( TTP, 238, n33).
8.
For an argument along the same lines, see Etienne Balabar, "Jus-pactum-lex: On the Constitution of the subject in the Theologico-political Treatise," in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze ( Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 171-206. Reprinted in Genevieve Lloyd (ed.), Spinoza: Critical Assessments (London, UK: Routledge, 2001), vol. IV, 31-63.
9.
Spinoza’s method of interpreting Scripture creates a community of agreement among the prophets. He reads them as agreeing on moral teachings, while explaining away apparent disagreements as accommodations to different audiences, and as caused by their different temperaments. If we treat each other as agreeing in self-preservation and the desire to increase power, we too will discount our differences. Therefore the reading of the Bible provides a model for toleration and, consequently, agreement.
10.
16/178. "In a democracy, irrational commands are still less to be feared: for it is almost impossible that the majority of a people, especially if it be a large one, should agree in an irrational design: and, moreover, the basis and aim of a democracy is to avoid the desires as irrational, and to bring men as far as possible under the control of reason, so that they may live in peace and harmony: if this basis be removed the whole fabric falls to ruin." E4AppXV: "The things that beget harmony (concordiam) are those which are related to justice, fairness, and being honorable. For men find it difficult to bear, not only what is unjust and unfair, but also what is thought dishonorable, or that someone rejects the accepted practices of the state. But especially necessary to bring people together in love, are the things which concern Religion and Morality."
11.
Steven B. Smith , Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 78. "According to the Treatise, truth is not a property of Scripture but pertains exclusively to the method of interpreting Scripture. Rather than harmonizing truth with the Bible or the Bible with truth, truth becomes a property of the process of interpretation alone."
12.
See Michael Rosenthal, "Tolerance as a Virtue in Spinoza’s Ethics,"Journal of the History of Philosophy34, no. 4 (2001): 535-57.
13.
Preface/4: "I have often wondered that men who make a boast of professing the Christian religion, which is a religion of love, joy, peace, temperance and honest dealing with all men, should quarrel so fiercely and display the bitterest hatred toward one another day by day."
14.
See too 4/48-9: "We ought to define and explain things through their proximate causes. . . . We plainly have no knowledge as to the actual co-ordination and interconnection of things-that is, the way in which things are in actual fact ordered and connected-so that for practical purposes it is better, indeed, it is essential, to consider things as contingent."
15.
Norman O. Brown, "Philosophy and Prophecy: Spinoza’s Hermeneutics,"Political Theory14 (1986): 190. "Prophecy [is] the fundamental form of the principle of authority in human affairs." The prophet should be believed and obeyed because of his or her goodness, while the sovereign because of his or her power.
16.
Michael Rosenthal , "Spinoza’s Dogmas of the Universal Faith and the Problem of Religion,"Philosophy and Theology13 (2001): 53-72, and Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason ( 1989).
17.
See too E4App25: "Courtesy (modestia), that is, the desire to please men which is determined by reason, is related to morality. But if it arises from an affect, it is ambition, or a desire by which men generally arouse discord and seditions, from a false appearance of morality. For one who desires to aid others by advice or by action, so that they may enjoy the highest good together, will aim chiefly at arousing their love for him, but not at leading them into admiration so that his teaching will be called after his name."
18.
See too the Political Treatise, 3.7, 51. "The right of a commonwealth is determined by the power of a power guided as if by one mind; but this union of minds is quite inconceivable unless the commonwealth does its best to achieve those conditions which sound reason declares to be for the good of all men."
19.
Political Liberalism, 129. "Holding a political conception as true, and for that reason alone the one suitable basis of public reason, is exclusive, even sectarian, and so likely to foster political division." "The advantage of staying within the reasonable is that there can be but one true comprehensive doctrine, though . . . many reasonable ones."
20.
Political Liberalism, 50. See too "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," 230: "The aim of justice as fairness as a political conception is practical, and not metaphysical or epistemological. That is, it presents itself not as a conception of justice that is true, but one that can serve as a basis of informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons." Richard Rorty, "Religion as Conversation-Stopper,"Common Knowledge3 (1994): 5. "It is precisely because the liberal state does not aim for moral truth that its citizens must recognize themselves under such peremptory dialogic obligations."
21.
Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), 129. "Even the absolute sovereign, strictly speaking, has no right to claim that its laws are true because the force of juridical norms derives not from their truth value but solely from their utility and the ability of the sovereign to enforce them. If . . . democratic polities are distinguished by the degree to which they permit critical reflection on their institutions and laws then democratic polities are more able to acknowledge the immanence of normativity and to tolerate their peaceable transformation through time."
22.
Therefore Spinoza has greater affinities with someone like Raz than with Rawls. See, e.g., Joseph Raz, "Liberalism, Skepticism, and Democracy,"Iowa Law Review74 (1989): 761-86, and "Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence,"Philosophy and Public Affairs19 (1990): 3-46.
23.
Richard Rorty , "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, ed. Merrill Peterson and Robert Vaughan ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), reprinted in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Machalowski (Oxford: Blackwell , 1989), 293: "Moral commitment, after all, does not require taking seriously all the matters which are, for moral reasons, taken seriously by one’s fellow citizens. It may require just the opposite. It may require to josh them out of the habit of taking topics so seriously. There may be serious reasons for so joshing them. More generally, we should not assume the aesthetic is always the enemy of the moral. I should argue that in the recent history of liberal societies, the willingness to view matters aesthetically . . . to be content to indulge in what Schiller called ‘play’ and to discard what Nietzsche called ‘the spirit of seriousness’ has been an important vehicle of moral progress."
