Love,God,and perfection in Spinoza: Comments on Steven Nadler

Abstract

In building his account of human blessedness in Ethics 5, Spinoza offers two closely related conceptions of the love of God: the love toward God and the intellectual love of God. While Steven Nadler maintains that these loves are different affects, I argue that these are different descriptions of the same thing: any instance of the active affect that is a love toward God is at the same time an instance of the intellectual love of God. Spinoza’s views about society and its importance for education and human perfection are, I argue, nicely compatible with this account of the love of God, which suggests that all human beings possess, albeit in different degrees, the same sort of knowledge of God.

Introduction

Steven Nadler starts with a passage from the Theological Political Treatise (hereafter TTP), in which Spinoza writes that the most perfect human mind loves the most perfect object and so knows and loves God (TTP IV, G III.59–60/C II.127–8). ¹ He reminds us that many commentators – he quotes Jonathan Bennett but names Edwin Curley and Ferdinand Alquié in notes – have difficulty with Spinoza’s concept of the love of God. Then, he suggests that we might begin to understand the love of God in Spinoza by studying a significant precedent in the works of Maimonides.

While I have some concerns about the details of Nadler’s view that I set out below, I find Nadler’s pursuit of this strategy to be generally helpful and productive. By showing us that Spinoza adapts and recasts a traditional view, Nadler helps us to approach Spinoza’s different, difficult claims about the love of God. In particular, I think that the distinction between one sense of love that matters to us insofar as we endure and another that matters to us insofar as we are eternal is the best starting point for the interpretation of Spinoza’s remarks about love in Ethics 5. Because this love associates closely with human understanding and human perfection, the distinction also stands to inform our interpretation of these views in Spinoza.

At the outset, the significance of Nadler’s subject matter deserves to be emphasized. The subject of Ethics 1 is God. A close study of the Ethics begins with the reader’s acquisition of – or so Spinoza hopes – the knowledge of God. Just because God is everything, seeking this knowledge is not some otherworldly endeavor, reserved for a few intellectual spirits with unusual and refined tastes. In Spinoza’s hands seeking the knowledge of God is seeking, generally, to understand existence. The Preface to Ethics 2 introduces the subject matter of the rest of the Ethics:

I move now toward explaining things that must follow necessarily from the essence of God, or the eternal and infinite being. Indeed, not all of them–for infinite things in infinite ways must follow from this being as we have demonstrated in Part 1, Proposition 16–but only those that can lead us, as if by the hand, to knowledge of the human mind and its highest blessedness. (2 Preface) ²

Blessedness (beatitudo) on Spinoza’s account, consists in the constant and eternal love of God (5p36s). ³ The whole of the Ethics, then, presents an account of God and an account of what leads to the knowledge of God and the love of God. Where, then, scholars dismiss elements in the second part of Ethics 5 as items that are not worth studying or beyond our understanding, they dismiss the culmination of a systematic body of argument and find that Spinoza’s own accounts of his central subjects are beyond our grasp.

In addressing Ethics 5, Nadler suggests that Spinoza follows Maimonides in distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge of God and, accordingly, two kinds of affects arising from that knowledge. This view has a strong basis in Spinoza’s distinction between the second kind of cognition, reason, and the third kind of cognition, intuition, which is also clearly present at 5p36s. For my own part, I am inclined to conclude, following Alexandre Matheron and despite the distinction between reason and intuition in the Ethics, that these are or are very nearly the same affect. ⁴ Central to this interpretation is the distinction in the Ethics between the temporal and the eternal. Transition in most accounts of the affects must be, I think, a temporal notion for Spinoza. Love insofar as we endure is a transition over time to more perfection or power. Love, insofar as we are eternal is a degree of perfection or power itself, understood without relation to another such degree. It cannot be a temporal transition. However – or so I will argue – all of the elements of any temporal transition can be redescribed in atemporal terms on Spinoza’s view. That is, the affect in question need not be described or understood temporally; indeed, Spinoza holds about affects as he does about any truths than can be understood durationally, it is better understood in terms that do not invoke duration.

In more detail, I am inclined to accept an interpretation of Spinoza on which two closely related conceptions of the love of God matter to Ethics 5. One concept, which Spinoza refers to by the phrase ‘amor dei’ without qualification, concerns duration and an affect that is, like other active affects such as nobility and tenacity, an increase in a mind’s power. A second concept, which Spinoza refers narrowly to intellect – ‘amor intellectualis dei’ – concerns eternity and a mind’s power without respect to change or duration. As I understand Spinoza, these concepts amount to different descriptions of the same thing: any instance of the active love of God may be understood – indeed, since Spinoza makes durational understanding limited, better understood – in terms of the intellectual love of God. The intellectual elite may differ from others in possessing a deeper understanding of the two different concepts and minds characterized more fully by the love of God, but they do not differ in having different affects.

Here, in defending this view, I will start, to make the best direct case for the view that I can, with a close reading of central passages in Ethics 5 – 5p33 and its demonstration and scholium – that concern the love of God. Then, I will re-emphasize a feature of Spinoza’s view that distinguishes him from Maimonides and that Nadler describes well toward the end of his remarks: the social dimension of Spinoza’s perfectionism. Although I think that this critical dimension of Spinoza’s view is consistent with both interpretations of the propositions concerning love and God in Ethics 5, I think that it is more compatible with a view on which the love toward God and the intellectual love of God are the same affect understood in different ways. Spinoza’s views about society, I think, complement the direct case: they are compatible with a conception of human perfection on which we all possess the same sort of knowledge and love of God to different degrees. A central question that I have for Nadler is whether his different conception of the intellectual love of God sits easily with the same views.

The love toward God and the intellectual love of God

The elements of the Ethics that matter the most to our understanding of the relation between the love toward God and the intellectual love of God, in my view, are 5p33, its demonstration, and a scholium that follows. In these elements, Spinoza refers to both concepts and offers an account of the relation between them.

5p33: The intellectual love of God [amor dei intellectualis], which arises from the third kind of cognition, is eternal.

Demonstration: The third kind of cognition is eternal (5p31 and 1a3); therefore (by the same axiom, 1a3), love that arises from it is necessarily also eternal.

Scholium: Although this Love toward God [hic erga deum amor] has had no beginning (5p32), it has nevertheless all the perfections of love, just as if had arisen, as we have pretended in the corollary to the preceding proposition [i.e., 5p32c]. Nor is there any difference here, except that the mind has had eternally these same perfections that we have just pretended come to it now and that it has with it the idea of God as an eternal cause. Thus, if joy consists in the transition to greater perfection, blessedness surely must consist in this, that the mind is endowed with this same perfection [ipsa perfectione]. ⁵

An initial bit of evidence suggesting that Spinoza does not take the two sorts of love to be deeply different is the beginning of the scholium. There, Spinoza refers to ‘this’ love toward God. The antecedent of the pronoun ‘this’ surely is the intellectual love of God that is the subject of 5p33 and the demonstration. Therefore, Spinoza begins the scholium by referring to the intellectual love of God either as simply identical to or perhaps as a variety of the love toward God.

On the view, however, that the two loves are deeply the same thing, puzzles immediately arise. Most striking, it is a distinctive feature of the love toward God that it has a beginning and it is a distinctive feature of the intellectual love of God that it is eternal, that is, that is does not have a beginning. How could two such different things be in any sense the same?

I suggest that the rest of the text of the scholium offers the means, at least, to describe this puzzle in a way that helps us to think about it more deeply. Spinoza sets out two differences between the love toward God and the intellectual love of God. First, and this recalls the immediate problem, the mind has the intellectual love of God eternally, whereas the love toward God is something that is in time and has a beginning. Second, and this seems to me to be something new, the intellectual love of God, Spinoza writes, has with it the idea of God as an eternal cause. Perhaps these differences should be understood (1) as differences in the ways that we might consider one and the same thing or perhaps (2) they should be understood as differences between two different constituents of a human mind. Finally, (3) it may be that one difference is merely a matter of the way the two loves are understood – one is considered durationally and the second is considered eternally – but that the other marks two genuinely distinct things: the intellectual love has, but the love toward God need not have, the idea of God as an eternal cause. I will argue that the first of these options is the best.

To address the question of duration and eternity, the first difference that Spinoza finds between the love toward God and the intellectual love of God, I will introduce an example (that also speaks to the educational theme of this special issue). Suppose that Koa successfully completes a problem in mathematics that he works on from 2:30 to 2:32 in the afternoon of December 8, 2023. His mind becomes more powerful in the course of the accomplishment and, what is the same thing, more perfect. This is a change that Spinoza associates with a mind’s actual essence (3p7), or striving to persevere in being (3p6, 3p9): Koa strives with greater power, and it is in virtue of this change to his striving that he is more perfect (3p11 and 3p11s). Koa’s experience during this time may be characterized, on the basis of Spinoza’s first definition of the affects at 3p11s, as one of laetitia or happiness. ⁶ Given Spinoza’s accounts of the active affects at the end of Ethics 3 and his account of the love toward God in Ethics 5, we may add that, since mathematics is a component of nature, Koa knows God in mastering his exercise and his laetitia is love toward God.

On Spinoza’s view, human beings have, in addition to actual essences, formal essences. The relation between these two sorts of essences should matter to the present discussion because the most salient difference between them is that actual essences are durational, belong to us while we are alive, but formal essences are eternal. ⁷ What a formal essence amounts to is a difficult issue. Here is a suggestion, which Leibniz’s accounts of complete concepts inspires: the formal essence of a mind consists in all truths about that mind and does not change over time. ⁸ Thus, it is true of Koa before December 8, during the exercise, and now that his mind possesses a certain degree of perfection at 2:30, another degree at 2:31, and another degree at 2:32. We may redescribe the transition that is the love toward God in these eternal terms, and a complete description of the various degrees of perfection that Koa has at these different times will be true if and only if the ascription of the states as a change is also true. Thus, we have two descriptions of one and the same thing.

If this were all that there were to the intellectual love of God, by 5p33, we might conclude quickly that the love toward God and the intellectual love of God are the same thing, understood in two different ways. Spinoza does distinguish changes in perfection from possessing perfection, both in the scholium and in his definitions of the affects (explication following 3App3). As the example shows, however, each degree of perfection in the change is itself an eternal truth. Of course, it is also an eternal truth that Koa has the conjunction of all of these perfections at different times: Koa has perfection degree n at 2:30 and n + 1 at 2:30:01 and n + 2 at 2:30:02. So understood, the intellectual love of God is a redescription of the love toward God, and, for Spinoza as for a B theorist today, because genuine knowledge is always from the standpoint of eternity (see, e.g. 2p44c2, 2p43, and their use at 4p63s) it is a better redescription. Spinoza’s use of ‘pretend’ (fingere) at 5p33s to refer to the durational affect is evidence that this is his view.

However, Spinoza adds a second, cognitive condition to his account of the intellectual love of God at 5p33s that complicates the case for this thesis: the intellectual love of God has with it the idea of God as an eternal cause. In my example, there is nothing about this in the original account of Koa’s accomplishment and, on the face of it, it would not seem to be part of what is required for the accomplishment. So perhaps it is this, the idea of God as an eternal cause, that distinguishes the knowledge that gives rise to the love toward God from the knowledge that gives rise to the intellectual love of God. Such a view would fit neatly with the sort of view that Nadler finds in Maimonides: one sort of knowledge is knowledge of the consequences of God’s activity without any knowledge of God directly; another, a better and rarer sort of knowledge is knowledge of God directly. This condition is problematic for the identification of the sorts of knowledge that give rise to the two kinds of love and so for the identification of them.

On this issue, I think that a precedent quite different from the works of Maimonides is helpful to my case. The hyperbolic doubt of Descartes’s Meditations yields some degree of uncertainty about nearly all of our beliefs. Setting aside the belief in one’s own existence, Descartes argues notably that beliefs about number and figure – even if, as in the example of Koa’s problem in mathematics, they have nothing to do with real existence – cannot really be knowledge without the right sort of knowledge of God. We can have thoughts and beliefs, certainly, without any knowledge of God, but we cannot have any genuine knowledge (again, with the possible exception of ‘I am’) unless we know God. ⁹

Spinoza differs from Descartes both methodologically and also in his account of God’s relation to the world, and he is frequently highly critical of Descartes. Nevertheless, I think that Spinoza follows Descartes at least to this extent: in his view, the investigation of the world starts with the investigation of God and knowledge of the world starts with the knowledge of God. Spinoza begins his account of metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, and ethics with an account of God in Ethics 1, making that account the foundation for all that follows. He explicitly argues that this – understanding divine nature first and before proceeding to anything else – is the correct order of philosophy (2p10s). Finally, and note here, the stark difference between Spinoza and Maimonides, Spinoza argues that every human mind has adequate knowledge of God’s essence (2p47, 2p47s). Surely, there is, in Spinoza’s view, a great deal more to be known about God beyond this knowledge. Nevertheless, it is somehow present in us as a common notion that serves as a basis for further knowledge (2p46dem). The sort of knowledge that generates a common love of God on Maimonides’s account as Nadler describes it, knowledge of consequences of God’s actions without substantial knowledge of God, could not for Descartes be knowledge at all. I think that the same is true for Spinoza. For Spinoza, 2pp46-2p47 show that it is true at least that in any instance of knowledge a human mind also has knowledge of God’s essence. In Spinoza, as in Descartes, it is this knowledge of God that prevents us from falling into error, especially in mathematics (2p47s). There is, then, reason to think that in any knowledge at all, on Spinoza’s account, the human mind works in some way from the knowledge of God. Because any human mind knows what it knows (2p43), there is then some reason to think that any knowledge at all, for Spinoza, meets the second condition set out at 5p33s.

These are very difficult issues, and I acknowledge that I do not fully understand the relation between reason and intuition in the Ethics; ¹⁰ what Spinoza means by claiming the knowledge of God’s essence is a common notion; or what he takes different kinds of cognition to be like in the mind that experiences them. It is clear to me, however, that we cannot distinguish between the love toward God and the intellectual love of God in Spinoza by insisting that the former does not where the latter does arise in a mind that lacks knowledge of God’s essence. Such a distinction may have a significant basis in Maimonides, but the basic commitments of the Ethics and, explicitly, 2p47, rule it out for Spinoza.

Perfection as a collective enterprise

I will argue now that an advantage of an interpretation that closely associates durational and eternal conceptions of the love of God in Spinoza is that it reinforces Spinoza’s long-held views about perfection and society. Spinoza maintained throughout his works, although with different emphases and terminology, that every human mind can attain perfection to some degree, that this attainment is valuable, and that this good, in all, should be promoted both by individuals within society and by the laws and structure of society itself. The passages in which Spinoza describes his views about society and the good suggest, I think, that there is no further, higher good that the elite can attain. Instead, those who reach the very highest extent of perfection in society possess the same good as others but in in higher degree.

In his early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE), Spinoza describes his own project as one of helping others in society understand the union of the mind with the whole of nature:

The highest good is to arrive, if possible with other individuals, at the enjoyment of such a nature. What that nature is, I will show in its place: certainly, it is knowledge of the union that the mind has with all of nature. I aim, therefore, at this end: to acquire such a nature and to strive that many might acquire it with me. It is for my happiness [felicitate] that I work so that many others will understand in the same way that I do, so that their intellects and desires unite harmoniously with my intellect and desire. So that this might happen, it is necessary to understand as much about nature as is necessary for the attainment of such a nature, and, next, to form a society of the desired kind, so that as many people as possible, as easily and securely as possible, may attain it. (Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect §§13-14, G2.8.23-9.3)

If it is correct to associate the narrator of the TIE with Spinoza himself, the young Spinoza’s project is both personal and social. He wants to achieve knowledge of the union of the self and nature, and he wants to help as many people as possible to achieve as much of the same sort of knowledge as they can. The project has two parts, which might be read in isolation as steps to be pursued one after the other but which, I argue below, are best pursued at once: to attain the knowledge in question for oneself and to form a society that has as its goal the attainment of this knowledge, to whatever extent possible, for all.

Love, God, and perfection are not explicit in this passage from the TIE, but they are not far from the surface. In the fourth entry to the appendix to his account of bondage in Ethics 4, Spinoza associates human happiness (felix) with blessedness, an affect that, in turn, he identifies with the intuitive knowledge of God (4App4). Blessedness, however, just is the love of God by 5p42s. Spinoza’s God, moreover, may be recognized in the references to nature in the TIE. ‘All of nature’ in the TIE just is what Spinoza understands by God in the Ethics. Comparing TIE §§13-14 with Ethics 4, Appendix 4 helps to show this close association between nature and God as objects of knowledge:

In life, therefore, it is especially useful to perfect, as far as we can, the intellect. . .[P]erfecting the intellect is nothing other than understanding God and the attributes and actions of God which follow from the necessity of his nature. Therefore, the final goal of a man who is led by reason, that is, the highest desire by means of which he tries to regulate all the others is that by which he is moved to an adequate conception of himself, and also of all things that can fall under his understanding.

What it is to understand God, the Appendix makes clear, is to understand oneself and whatever else one can understand, an object of understanding recognizably similar to the union of the self with all of nature in the TIE passage. Further evidence of this association may be found in Ethics 4p28. In the TIE passage, Spinoza contends that the highest good is to arrive at an understanding of the union of one’s mind with all of nature. At 4p28 he characterizes the highest good more concisely as the knowledge of God. Finally, to address perfection, the project of the TIE is clearly to help oneself and other to make progress in some sense. We want to understand as much as we can. In this entry to his appendix, Spinoza recasts this project, the goal of understanding what we can understand, in terms of perfection: we aim at the knowledge of nature and are more perfect to the extent that we can know nature.

The (to my eyes) nicely democratic vision of the TIE is missing at 4 Appendix 4, which is highly individualistic. The social project of the TIE does not disappear in the Ethics, however. Spinoza argues there that the pursuit of understanding, for those who have it as a conscious goal, is a collective enterprise. In a series of propositions leading to his accounts of society in the scholia to 4p37, Spinoza argues that when we act from reason we always agree in nature (4p35); that one human being acting from reason is always the greatest help to another (4p35c2); and that the good that those who desire virtue pursue for themselves – that is, the knowledge of God – they also pursue for others (4p37). One of the free man propositions, 4p71, summarizes these views:

4p71: Only free men are most beloved [gratissimi] to one another.

Dem.: Only free men are the greatest help to one another and joined to one another by the greatest necessity of friendship (4p35 and 4p35c1), and they strive to benefit with equal eagerness for love; therefore (3def.aff.34), only free men are most beloved to one another. ¹¹

Love is prominent in these passages: as he notes in this demonstration, Spinoza defines gratia or gratitudo in terms of love in his definition of the affects. The point is useful because this sort of love, a sort that arises from knowledge, appears likely to be active rather than passive. It arises from understanding. The love that people have toward one another insofar as they possess knowledge, then, is similar to the love of God as Spinoza discusses it in Ethics 5. Indeed, following the hint of the TIE and 4App4, since to know God is just to know oneself and whatever else one can understand, these passages suggest that knowing one another and so loving one another in this way just is knowing God in some way. (There is, after all, nothing else in existence to know!)

The emphasis on seeking knowledge collectively at 4p71 marks a commitment in Spinoza, I think, to a modern conception of scientific knowledge, on which communities of thinkers rather than individuals achieve great advances in understanding. In the Ethics, however, Spinoza does not limit his aims for society to those an elite group whose activities are characterized by knowledge. As in the TIE, his aim is to help all people in society to whatever degree that he can. Here is a passage from Ethics 4 that is elitist in a way but that, in a deeper way, shows this commitment:

Because men rarely live from the dictates of reason, these two affects, humility and repentance, and also hope and fear, bring more advantage than harm. Since men will sin, it is better to sin in that direction. For, if weak-minded men were all uniformly arrogant, ashamed of nothing, and afraid of nothing, what bonds could bring them together or control them? The mob is terrifying unless it is afraid. No wonder, then, that the prophets, who cared about the common good and not that of the select few, commended humility, repentance, and reverence so much. Really, those who are subject to these affects can be led much more easily than others, so that, in the end, they can live under the guidance of reason, that is, they can be free and enjoy the life of the blessed. (4p54s)

Spinoza’s references to the mob and to the select few here are unattractive. His characterizations of the prophets, which I read as attributing to them some a noble lie on which passions are genuine virtues, is also unattractive and is, in addition, badly implausible. (I think that the account of the Theological Political Treatise, which I like to consider to be later and better considered, is much more plausible: a theme of TTP 2 is that the prophets are highly imaginative people who believe their own testimony.) Nevertheless, the end of this passage shows that Spinoza continues to adhere to the project of the TIE: he wants all members of society, the mob included, to be free and to enjoy the life of the blessed, and he recommends the cultivation of passions in them both because it makes the mob less of a threat to all and because these passions can help people, eventually, to love under the guidance of reason, be free, and enjoy the life of the blessed.

Spinoza emphasizes the love of God in the TTP (see especially, Chapter 4 at G3.60-61; Chapter 6 at G3 87; Chapter 12 at G3.165). ¹² In discussing divine law in Chapter 4, Spinoza offers an account of the love of God that is recognizably similar to those of the earlier TIE and the Ethics (composition of the Ethics began earlier than that of the TTP but was interrupted for the TTP): ‘The idea of God demands [dictat] this: God is our highest good, or the knowledge and love of God is the final end to which we should direct all our actions’ (Chapter 4, G3.61). In arguing there that faith in historical narratives cannot yield this knowledge, Spinoza offers a basis for the knowledge of God that, again, makes it available to all: ‘Love of God arises from knowledge of him; knowledge of God, however, must be drawn [hauriri] from common notions that are certain and known through themselves’ (Chapter 4, G3.61). ¹³ A common notion belongs to all human minds – indeed the account of the Ethics suggests that it belongs to all minds (2p38-2p40s2) – alike. No specialized knowledge, such as the knowledge of historical narratives, and no elite knowledge is required for it. Spinoza’s emphasis in the TTP on the freedom to philosophize, which is a good state belongs to all, reinforces this point: in a good society, all pursue the good understood in terms of the knowledge of God. ¹⁴

Once again, the point that some kind of knowledge of God is a common notion for Spinoza may be a critical distinction between Spinoza’s view and Maimonides’. As we have seen, Spinoza also makes such knowledge a common notion in the Ethics (see 2p46dem and 2p47s), and there he writes that what each mind knows is ‘God’s infinite and eternal essence’ (2p46). As Nadler shows, on Maimonides’s accounts, we do not have any knowledge of God’s essence or, if we do know something of it, this is incomplete knowledge and an extremely rare possession. ¹⁵ Spinoza must take us not to know God entirely in knowing God’s essence. As we have seen, he goes into the Ethics and elsewhere to make the attainment of the knowledge of God the goal of a person who is living well, a position suggesting that there is more knowledge to be had. Where Spinoza gives a broad account of that knowledge, he emphasizes good advice, education, and free judgment (Chapter 7, G3.116). Still, he takes all human minds to have substantial knowledge of God from the outset. This view is a basis for his claims about social as well as personal perfection.

Finally, the Political Treatise (TP) similarly, makes a state good to the extent that in it citizens can attain the human good, which is to be understood primarily in terms of not merely in bare freedoms of speech and association but in the state’s ability to bring citizens to attain knowledge through good public institutions and culture. The work follows the tradition of Machiavelli closely, I think, in that in it Spinoza is particularly concerned to deal with human beings and human states as they are. In the course of this project, he frequently balances the instrumental but critically important good of stability against the intrinsic but difficult-to-attain good of citizens. In aristocracies (TP 8.12) and even more in monarchies (TP 7.5), the good of citizens is frequently–and rightly–compromised for stability. Still, even where he permits the good of the citizens to be compromised, Spinoza continues to adhere to his conception of this good. It is self-rule conceived as self-direction to the good of knowledge. ¹⁶

This view changes little, then, between the TIE and the TP. Spinoza consistently makes it his project to bring everyone to the extent possible to the possession of knowledge. He takes everyone to have some significant capacity for knowledge, even if passions and other external obstacles frequently hamper most of us. Furthermore, and this is somewhat conjectural, I think that Spinoza considers the acquisition of knowledge, in a distinctively modern way, to be a collective enterprise, on which even the most enlightened in society depend heavily upon one another in their efforts to attain knowledge. This is what the modern scientific community is like, and it suggests that the sort of knowledge that Spinoza seeks, in trying to understand God, is similar to the sort of knowledge that we, collectively seek today.

Nadler recognizes the social dimension of Spinoza’s commitment to perfection understood as the acquisition of knowledge. This view, moreover, is not inconsistent with the position that Nadler takes about the relation between the love toward God and the intellectual love of God in the Ethics. I think, however, that it does not, in a way, sit easily with that view. As I understand Nadler’s position, one reason that he has for taking these to be distinct affects is that the love toward God is instrumental – it helps the mind to resist the influence of harmful passion – whereas the intellectual love of God is an intrinsic good. Nadler writes, ’The ordinary love of God is about moderating the emotions we experience as durational beings and thus fostering a temporal increase in power. The intellectual love of God, on the other hand, is something that transcends this immediate therapeutic project, and the benefits that attend it go beyond, and are superior to, the relief of current emotional turmoil’ (2024: 263). A concern about this view, from the perspective of Spinoza’s commitment to the social good, is that it makes knowledge, or most knowledge, for the vast majority of people a merely instrumental good. Spinoza comments about society suggest, however, that knowledge is a single sort of good that all can attain although to different degrees.

Conceptually – that is, considered apart from any particular interpretative issue – there are goods that can hold both instrumental and intrinsic value. Thus, for example, a theorist of well-being might hold that health is both an instrumental good, inasmuch as health enables the person who has it to achieve meaningful life goals and exercise valuable capacities, but also an intrinsic good, in the sense that human lives are intrinsically better to the extent that we are healthy. In the Ethics, the best candidate for a good like this one is the knowledge of God, which, Spinoza argues, is the human mind’s greatest advantage or good – that is, what is most useful to it – and also the mind’s greatest virtue (4p28dem).

I think that Nadler is absolutely right that Spinoza focuses, in the earlier elements of Ethics 5, on the instrumental value of the knowledge of God and, in the later elements where he turns to the human mind without respect to the body, on the intrinsic value of this knowledge. I do not find in this change of subject, however, a reason for taking the loves in question, that is the active affects, to differ. Rather, it seems to me that Spinoza’s claims are also consistent with a view on which the knowledge of God gives rise to a single affect that reflects both its instrumental and intrinsic value and on which the affect has different labels that emphasize these two sorts of value. The intrinsic value of knowledge may be, for Spinoza, more important than its instrumental value. Certainly, as Nadler suggests, its value goes beyond the relief of current emotional turmoil. These points alone do not, however, show that the affect in question lacks instrumental value altogether or that it differs from another sort of active affect that has instrumental value.

Spinoza’s accounts of the ways in which different people may be brought, in a good society, to become more perfect help, I think, to show the way in which Spinoza thinks about instrumental value and the affects. Humility, reverence, repentance, and many other passions – devotion is an emphasis of the Theological Political Treatise ¹⁷ – can help a person overcome the influence of extremely harmful passions such as anger. They are, particularly for those who lack knowledge, valuable instrumental goods. Spinoza assures readers, however, that these same passions lack intrinsic value: they are inadequate, imaginative ideas. Humility, for example, Spinoza regards as a form of tristitia (4p53) and so intrinsically evil. Devotion, a variety of wonder, arises from the idea of a miracle and, therefore, associates with highly irrational ideas. Knowledge is not the perfect remedy for harmful passions, on Spinoza’s account. ¹⁸ It does not always give rise to an affect as powerful as the passion that it opposes (4p7). In some circumstances, as this point and Spinoza’s discussions of the instrumental value of passions at 4p37s2, 4p54s, and elsewhere suggest, a given passion may have higher instrumental value than knowledge.

Still, other things being equal, knowledge is a better tool against passion than another passion. First, knowledge is never itself an intrinsic evil as many passions, such as pity and humility are, and it is never an instrumental evil as all passions other than cheerfulness (hilaritas) may be. Knowledge is only good and, indeed, is the only such good (4p27). Second, because knowledge is true, it is continually confirmed and so reinforced by experience. As a result, affects that arise from knowledge, even if they can be less powerful than passions, tend to be more powerful. Finally, because only passions bring people into conflict, knowledge is also always prosocial. Motives from knowledge always bring people to agree. The instrumental value of knowledge, then, is considerable on Spinoza’s account.

In society, we might resort to the cultivation of reverence or devotion or even fear in citizens who are otherwise dangerous to others or unable to acquire knowledge. The cultivation of reason, however, is better for individuals and society alike, and this is one reason that Spinoza has for the project of bringing as many people as much as possible to knowledge. The importance of knowledge to Spinoza’s account of human perfection, however, does not end with its instrumental contributions to social cooperation and the management of passion. Spinoza argues that we should cultivate reason or knowledge in ourselves and others simply because it is valuable to acquire them: we are perfect to the extent that we are reasonable. I think that Spinoza’s references to the intellectual love of God can be understood as a way of emphasizing the importance of this aspect of the value of knowledge. Beyond its instrumental value, understanding is itself the intrinsic good that we aim to secure by freeing ourselves from passion and building societies characterized by cooperation and, as minds, we are more perfect only insofar as we understand. These are different functions of knowledge, but it is not clear that the knowledge that holds instrumental value differs in kind from the knowledge that holds intrinsic value.

Conclusion

I agree with Nadler about Spinoza’s emphasis on the social. We differ, however, I think, on the relation between the love toward God and the intellectual love of God, so let me finish by summarizing my view about that relation. I prefer my interpretation on which the ‘love toward God’ and the ‘intellectual love of God’ refer, with different emphases, to the affect that arises from knowledge to what I take to be Nadler’s interpretation, on which the terms refer to two different affects, for three reasons. First, all knowledge on Spinoza’s accounts of the power of the mind has both instrumental and intrinsic value. The view on which these are two different affects suggests that some knowledge has only instrumental value and the other knowledge has only intrinsic value. Second, as I read the Ethics whatever is durational may be understood sub specie aeternitatis, that is, from some eternal standpoint. It seems to me, generally, that Spinoza restricts himself to the eternal standpoint on knowledge at the end of the Ethics. This restriction does not concern a different realm of existence. Spinoza’s claims about the eternal life of the mind do not concern a being different from the durational being of the mind; they are, rather, different ways of describing one and the same thing. ¹⁹ It stands to reason that a durational affect associated with knowledge and an eternal affect associated with knowledge should, likewise, be different ways of considering that affect. Third and finally, although Spinoza does occasionally resort to elitist language, his basic commitments are highly democratic. A view on which there are two different sorts of knowledge, one of which can be attained by all and the other of which is only ever attained by the sage is not strictly speaking inconsistent with such a vision. It sits uncomfortably with that vision, however. Spinoza certainly rejects as evil societies that rest content with a majority who are restrained by powerful passions that are instrumental to peace, and I see little reason to think that he would accept resting with a kind of knowledge that is merely instrumentally good. A view on which there is one kind of knowledge, which all of us have to some degree and which all of us should aspire to, both for ourselves and for others, seems better suited to Spinoza’s accounts of perfection in society.