Sección digital Otras reseñas enero de 2009

MALINOWSKI-CHARLES, Syliane: Affects et consciente chez Spinoza. L’automatisme dans le progrès éthique. Hildesheim, Olms, 2004.- 257 pp. ISBN 3-487-12781-4.

Francisco Javier Espinosa Antón

 

The four keys of the book appear in the title. The author offers the Spinoza’s thought about the role of the affects and the awareness of itself in the ethical development when this is considered automatic and necessary. She wants to explain the concordance between the automatism of the mind and the awareness of itself in the Spinoza’s philosophy. The Dutch philosopher thinks, she states, this awareness is not a free resort which controls the ideas, but only ideas of ideas, videlicet ideas caused, like everything else idea, under the effect of laws which are applied to the mind (p. 11). She thinks that we can talk about the ethical progress in Spinoza without succumbing to the temptation to the finalism if the necessity of the process and the automatic mechanisms of the mind are emphasized (p. 236). According to this interpretation of Spinoza’s thought, what makes the mechanic process of ideas to be an ethical progress are the affects. As we can see, it is a very interesting approach.

The book, which comes into being from her doctoral thesis, is very well organized. The first section concerns the different aspects of the causality in the Spinoza’s philosophy. The second section relates to study the awareness of itself and its connection with the affects and the ethical life. The third one explains the functions of the affects and the awareness of itself in the cognitive and ethical progress. A summary of the main points and a wide bibliography concludes this work.

When the scholars explain the Spinoza’s words, they usually talk about the immanent causality of God in every thing and the necessary causality by which some things cause others. The author accepts this explanation but she wants to see a third aspect of causality which helps us to understand how the human beings feel the relationship between the mind and the body. She calls it the “causalité vécue” (p. 15). She states that the mind and the body interact indirectly through the Substance (p. 14), as according to Spinoza we can not say that the body and the mind interact each other directly. Then a change in a body modifies the Substance which in turn produces immediately a corresponding expression in the mind of this body (p. 52). This is what guarantees “l’unité vécue” of the man in the two attributes (p. 36). If I understand correctly this suggestion, I could say for example that when a stone breaks my leg, the Substance has a new modification in the attribute of extension which it passes immediately on to the attribute of thought so that my mind feels sadness. As a body A is modified by another body B, the body A “modifies” directly the Substance (as this body A is a finite expression of the Substance). That is why this Substance in turn expresses itself in a different way in the mind which is correspondent with this body (p. 53).

This explanation can solve some important problems of Spinoza’s philosophy but it seems to clash with some foundation stones of the spinozism. How do we fit this explanation to the immutability and the impassivity of the Deus seu Natura seu Substantia? How can we understand that the Substance develops or evolves thanks to these modifications (pp. 13 and 21)? Would it not be better to admit the problems of the Spinoza’s philosophy instead of filling his lacks with concepts which hardly accommodate to other elements of the Spinoza system?

Let us continue. This causality through the Substance expresses, she says, the unity of the mind and the body which we experience in the affects (p. 15). The indirect causality, then, explains how the affects are in the heart of the experience which the mind feels about its body (p. 83).

The author interprets the affects as modifications of the ideas, that is, as modes of modes. When do the ideas have these modifications which we call affects? When a rise or a decrease of power occurs. This way, the affects are what allows the mind to feel the power progress of its body and itself (p. 69). The mind feels its body and itself in the affects, which have been produced by the power variations.

The second section links the affects to the awareness of itself which is just the idea of an idea. Every time we have a new idea (because our body has had in turn a new change), an idea of the new idea occurs, that is, there is an awareness of itself. This is why the awareness of itself is the awareness of the power variations of the body and the mind (p. 105), but it is not a question of a just intellectual idea because the rise of power makes us to feel joy and the decrease makes us to feel sadness. For that reason the awareness of itself is an emotional and experiential knowledge (p. 106). What causes joy to us is loved by us, we wish it, we try to find it and we call it good; what causes sadness to us is hated by us, we try to avoid it and we call it bad. As we can feel emotionally our power changes as joy or sadness, we can do assertions about the good and the bad; in other words, we can do ethical judgments (p. 116). As the joy reinforces our body power and our awareness of our selves, it reinforces our being, which necessarily tends to look for the enjoyable encounters with the other beings and a rise of the mind power and of the awareness of itself. That is why she says that the ethics is a job of the increase of the awareness (p. 127) and that the affects are the source from which the mind draws its strength to progress towards the reinforcement of its being (p. 101).

The third section shows the role which the affects and the awareness of itself play in the course from a life which is based on the inadequate knowledge until the more perfect life, which is based on the intellectual knowledge, going through the intermediate stage of the knowledge by common notions. The author wants to show a view in which we can see the continuity of the three kinds of knowledge (p. 150) because she thinks that there are some tools in the first one which are used to go to the second one and that in this there are also some elements which push the mind into the third one.

The human beings start by having a knowledge of the things by their senses, but they misinterpret this information and construct a fragmentary and distorted view of the world; however, on the basis of these experiences, she says, they can do some comparisons and emphasize what is common to all the bodies (pp. 157 & 190), so that they can form common notions by means of which they construct a kind of map of what is common to us in the world. This interpretation is certainly adequate. This way they reach the second kind of knowledge. What makes them to be more powerful and happy is just what is common to them (what is opposite to them erodes them). This way we can see the link between the search for the joy, the search for the rise of relationships with the things which are common to us and the search for the common notions. Perhaps this important link is not very highlighted by the author, given its importance. However, she emphasizes the significant following aspect: we already have true ideas in these common notions; as we automatically make ideas from these true ideas, this awareness of our true ideas leads us to know us as a thought power and to wish to increase this power.

The affects give the mind the necessary tools for an automatic increase (p. 169): as the joy affects are stronger than the sadness affects, the human beings can make progress by means of using the joyful affects against the affects of sadness (p. 163). There is an interesting interaction between affects, ideas and ethics, as the ideas of right and wrong and the ethical judgments are just a reflection of the affects of joy or sadness (p. 171).

The passage from the second kind of knowledge to the third one is also a continuation because the intuition arises from the reason like an effect arises from its cause (p. 183). From the knowledge of common notions the mind manages to know the essence of the extension and of the thought as the attributes of an infinite power that we call Deus seu Natura. Then the mind joyfully feels all things (also itself and its body) in God and knows its body and itself to be just finite modal expressions of God. This way the mind acquires the feeling and the joy of itself in God. The amor erga Deum, which rises from the second kind of knowledge, turns into the amor Dei intellectualis when the human beings manage to have the third kind of knowledge, which knows all things sub specie aeternitatis (Spinoza says: sentimus, experimurque, nos aeternos esse). This amor Dei intellectualis nurtures the mind’s desire to carry on knowing according to the third kind of knowledge (p. 226). In accordance with the author we could say that the very structure of the adequate knowledge is a conatus or a desire to know which has developed the means of its own survival by the reinforcement of the affects (p. 232).

Lastly I will say that she neither explains too much the function of politics in this ethical way to the happiness nor the part of the ethics which relates to the virtue of generosity and the human relationships. Perhaps these questions will be the subject of a next work which will be as interesting as this book.