Debating Kant & Spinoza with Boehm (IV): The Moral Critique of Spinoza

[W]e believe that things could have been different because we demand that they ought to have been different. We ask why something happened despite the fact that it ought not to have happened. Our insistence that necessitarianism is false is thus grounded in a moral conviction, which is also a positive cause for demanding an explanation of the world—using the PSR. In the most authentic manifestations of the PSR , we do not ask “why” but we cry in moral outrage—outrage against an earthquake taking thousands of innocent lives, the premature death of a loved one, or the course of history, teaching us about the political evils generated by human society. We ask why the world is as it is because we demand justice from God or nature; we strive to theoretically understand the world with a commitment to changing it, bringing it to justice.

Of course, a rationalist like Spinoza believes that everything is just the way it is. Moral outrage against God or world is anthropomorphic...

Now metaphysical proposition that everything is just the way that it is, as well as the success of rationalistic prescriptions for remedying anthropomorphic moral rebellion, depend on the PSR having shown that we know that things are necessary. This is an assumption that hasn’t been justified. In the final analysis, then, if deciding whether our moral outrage against the world is unfounded and illusory—or whether illusory is the thought that everything is known to be explicable—there is good reason to think it is the latter. In this point lies the deepest difference between Kant’s position and Spinoza’s, the reason that their philosophies need to be confronted. No philosopher strived like Spinoza to ground practical rationality in theoretical rationality: This is why a book that is so heavily metaphysical—a book that in fact collapses practical reasoning into theoretical-geometrical speculation—is called the Ethics. The Kantian project aspires to turn that philosophical enterprise on its head: It is not only that theoretical reasoning cannot override the practical; in fact, it is grounded in it. (Omri Boehm Kant's Critique of Spinoza, 183-185)

The passages (partially) quoted above are Boehm's attempt at decisive burden shifting (on behalf of Kant) in the Kant vs Spinoza debate (which is really a debate between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism or between regulative Spinozism and metaphysical Spinozism). For, while Boehm is right to suggest that Spinoza does not have the resources to convince somebody who ultimately denies Spinozistic premises that the ontological version of the PSR ("for every p that exists, there is a reason why it exists,") is true, he has admirably shown that the Kantian, too, runs out of resources to decisively refute the Spinozist. Spinoza's ontological argument, the Causa Sui, and the (ontological) version of the PSR are an interconnected package of commitments. In so doing, Boehm has helped us discern what the true philosophical landscape is from a Kantian perspective (even if, Boehm often ignores further complications that are immanent in this landscape due to the more familiar contributions and challenges of Leibniz and Hume and not yet fully assimilated moves by Newton).

In an earlier post, I already partially commented on Boehm's attempt at burden shifting. I believe that the unduly voluntarist conception of agency that seems to be a shared commitment among the participants of the Pantheismusstreit, prevents Boehm from grappling both (i) with the Spinozistic conception of freedom, that is, acting from reason, as well as with (ii) the distinction between necessetarianism (which, let's stipulate, Spinoza and Spinozism embraces) and the doctrine of fatalism. (I also suggested that Boehm fails to let the Spinozist criticize the Kantian conception of freedom.) On (ii) I invoked evidence from Adam Smith's treatment of the Stoics that an embrace of the doctrine of necessity generated not fatalism but the "most heroic magnanimity and most extensive benevolence." So, it's empirically not true that the embrace of necessetarianism must lead to fatalism. It is, of course, an interesting question (both on the assumption that necessetarianism is metaphysically true or that is false) why such belief turns out not to necessitate just one kind of response among agents.

There is also, I think, a mistake in Boehm's account of Spinoza's conception of reason, which is not (in Kantian terms) purely theoretical. In the Ethics, at E4p35, Spinoza ends up (by appealing to E3p3 &E3D2) equating adequate ideas and his conception of agency with living under the guidance of reason. This, in turn, is acting from virtue (E4p24); reason is, thus, the foundation of morality (E4p18s). That is to say, in Kantian terms, Spinoza treats practical and theoretical reason as (roughly) identical. (It is misleading to construe this as a collapse of one into another because there is no evidence that Spinoza privileges theoretical reason.) This is not a glitch in Spinoza's system, but crucial to his account of the origin and nature of justice (that is, political order) in his political philosophy both as presented in the Ethics (see Scholium 2 to E4p35,) and in the Theological Political Treatise (Chapter 16).

In the Empiricist tradition reason is a kind of content neutral faculty or set of operations. As Don Rutherford (2008) has shown Spinoza anticipates this in some sense because acting from reason in Spinoza also means to pick out the causal power of reason on behavior (or set of ideas that follow from it). But, as Rurtherford acknowledges, for Spinoza "reason" can have substantial content such that everyone who has it or is guided by it, or its maxims, will agree (about the good; again see E4p18S1); that is, reason sets ends. (This is why Spinoza can appeal to in his political writings.) My own view is that Spinoza does not say enough to justify this latter claim as available within the (temporal) political order (again see Rutherford for excellent, somewhat more optimistic discussion), although, as I have noted, acting from reason is our true, or authentic, self (but a self that lacks a lot of individuality). But if there is a criticism to be made of Spinoza, it is not one that helps the Kantian (who is ultimately saddled with a similar problem to solve on the content of reason--it is no surprise that ultimately, Kantian practical reason becomes a kind of coherence requirement [and that's one that the Spinozist can accept]).

So, a Spinozist (who knows something of striving after all), need not disagree with the Kantian claim that "we strive to theoretically understand the world with a commitment to changing it." In Spinozism, this commitment to change the world comes for free. Because to act from the guidance of reason is, in Spinoza, not a call to quiet-ism (or fatalism, etc.) but to be moved to aid one's (political) neighbor (E2p49S). (Of course, it does not follow that Spinoza has no space for pure theoretical contemplation of the sort that Kant seems to rule out.) It is notable that Boehm's interpretation of Spinoza rests here on the form of the Ethics,* not its textual content.

 

* I have argued that the form of the Ethics signals neither an embrace of mathematical physical nor a signal that Spinoza rests his case on a pure theoretical reason.

Comments

[Jason Brennan]

This seems to be strawmannirg epistocrats. Epistocrats need only hold that some people happen to be better at, and others incompetent at, politics for the same reason some people happen to be better at, and other incompetent at plumbing. Don't need to discuss human nature or have any big theory of that.

[Schliesser, Eric]

Let's praise, then, cautious epistocrats, Jason! (You know the ones that do not use 'smart' and 'dumb' liberally.) [I think you intended this as a response to a different post!]