Digressions&Impressions

Spinoza on Incentives, Human Nature, and Church Corruption

To do this it was necessary to indicate the main prejudices regarding religion, i.e., the traces of our ancient bondage, and then also the prejudices regarding the right of the supreme 'powers. Many, with the most shameless license, are eager to take away the greater part of that right, and under the pretext of religion to turn the heart of the multitude (who are still at the mercy of pagan superstition) away from the supreme 'powers, so that everything may collapse again into slavery. I’ll indicate briefly in what order I show these things; but first I must say what reasons have impelled me to write.
[14] I’ve often wondered that men who boast that they profess the Christian religion—i.e., love, gladness, peace, restraint, and good faith toward all—would contend so unfairly against one another, and indulge daily in the bitterest hatred toward one another, so that each man’s faith is known more easily from his hatred and contentiousness than from his love, gladness, etc. Long ago things reached the point where you can hardly know what anyone is, whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Pagan, except by the external dress and adornment of his body, or because he frequents this or that Place of Worship, or because he’s attached to this or that opinion, or because he’s accustomed to swear by the words of some master. They all lead the same kind of life.
[15 What’s the cause of this evil? Doubtless that religion has commonly consisted in regarding the ministries of the Church as positions conferring status, its offices as sources of income, and its clergy as deserving the highest honor. For as soon as this abuse began in the Church, the worst men immediately acquired a great desire to administer the sacred offices; the love of propagating divine religion degenerated into sordid greed and ambition; and the temple itself became a Theater, where one hears, not learned ecclesiastics, but orators, each possessed by a longing, not to teach the people, but to carry them away with admiration for himself, to censure publicly those who disagree, and to teach only those new and unfamiliar doctrines which the common people most wonder at. This had to lead to great dissension, envy, and hatred, whose violence no passage of time could lessen.

[16] It’s no wonder, then, that nothing has remained of the old (or ancient) Religion [antiquae Religionis] but its external ceremony externum cultum, by which the common people seem more to flatter God than to worship him. No wonder faith is nothing now but credulity and prejudices.--Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, "preface" translated by E. Curley

The quoted passage is the start of a curious aside within the preface of the TTP. In the lines before it Spinoza has announced the celebrated thesis; at the conclusion of the argument, he offers a summary of the book. The main point of the aside is the conclusion that the existing church has lost its way; nothing [nihl] remains of the religion; it's an empty shell with some adornment [externum cultum]. And before Spinoza goes on to give the summary of the book, he offers examples of this state of affairs. 

My present interest is in Spinoza's diagnosis and explanation of a church that has become an empty shell. For, this is not just a story of decline. It is a story of corruption from within, with a potentially good resource wasted [abusus], with a clear institutional cause. And Spinoza is explicit on the first cause: that Church office (of the common people [vulgo religioni]) has highest status [summo honore] and a source of material benefits [beneficia].

As an aside, Spinoza's conceptual point is clear, butI think Spinoza's wording is ambiguous between two historical possibilities: (i) allowing an uncorrupted early church that got corrupted by a norm/institutional change (which I describe below) or (ii) that the people's church has always been corrupt, once institutionalized, because their shepherds always gain status and other benefits. In what follows I assume (i) because it reveals something interesting about Spinoza's conception of human nature.

Spinoza's argument assumes that once incentives shift toward status and income, different kinds of people will want to become church leaders. For there is a clear shift from people motivated by love of preaching the gospel [amor divinae religionis propagandae] to sordid people who are vain (eager for attention), avaricious, and demagogues [sordidam avaritiam, et ambitionem]. (Recall this post why, in Spinoza, I read 'ambition' as demagoguery.] So, when the incentive structure changes, the labor pool for pastoral care jobs is changed, and the kinds of people that rise to the top within the church is utterly transformed if not corrupted. 

It is important that Spinoza does not think that the pastors are corrupted by and in their jobs. (This is clearly Adam Smith's view later.) He thinks, rather, that people with excessive longings [ingens libido] will become attracted to careers in the clergy. I don't want to put too much emphasis on Spinoza's use of 'libido' but it's clear he thinks that once such people enter the Church a species of love is displaced and it becomes infused with a fetishized energy where spectacle and sensuality reign. 

Now, at this stage I want to backtrack to Spinoza's fascinating claim that now  all lead the same kind of life [vita eadem omnibus est]. Long before Sombart and Marcuse, Spinoza diagnoses a flattening of human kind such that within modernity the differences among people become very narrow and track shallow exterior features, opinions, and religious practices. Spinoza's polemical point, anticipating Swift, is that people kill each other over trivial differences egged on by bad people that exploit religion to malicious self-interested ends. 

Spinoza does not say whether in some previous age human diversity reached into, as it were, our interior. So, he leaves open whether ancient human diversity was due to radically different practices (at, say, the level of cultural anthropology), or whether he is entertaining the possibility of a diversity of human origins and so kinds (at the level of physical anthropology).+ Either way, there is a common (and now i use, recall Susan James' terminology) "thin" human nature now. 

Even so, more than, say, Hobbes or Adam Smith, Spinoza is willing to distinguish among human kind. So, as I noted last week, while commenting on the Political Treatise, he clearly thinks there is a rather steep cognitive hierarchy among men (with about three percent of folk being outstanding in leadership qualities) and he thinks women are subordinate to men even in potential. And, here, in the preface to the TTP, Spinoza clearly distinguishes between humans oriented toward love of the gospel and the more vicious kind of humans with excessive libido.

To be sure, in each case, it is possible to construct a Spinozistic narrative that looks at social causes, at nurture, to explain revealed human differences. But it is notable Spinoza does not do so himself. So, while Spinoza clearly rejects Aristotle's claim that there are natural slaves, the natural reading of Spinoza is that while there is a thin, rather passionate human nature that is governed by unchanging laws, within that nature human diversity reigns.

So, let me wrap up. For Spinoza the mechanism of corruption of the Church is a shift in incentives that attract the wrong sort of people motivated by status and possessiveness of material goods; once such people are in charge, they displace those motivated by love and gift-giving, and the very institution is transformed into one in which office holding takes on a complex transactional character where the church becomes a source of material benefi. It has lost its original mission and can easily destabilize society. This diagnoses also suggests a solution: to ensure that remuneration and benefits of Church offices are controlled (but about some other time).

For now, I just want to note that for Spinoza account of the corruption of the church fits a larger pattern. As the Political Treatise shows, Spinoza thinks lots of institutions are vulnerable to corruption, including outright bribery.* What is key here is that for Spinoza, in institutional design one should not just be alert to the incentive structure of the institutions in shaping behavior, but also in the way these incentives attract people one ought to keep out.

On Spinoza's Patriarchal Sexism and E1P16

But, perhaps, someone will ask, whether women are under men’s control [potestate] by nature or institution [natura an ex instituto]? For if it has been by mere institution, then we had no reason [ratio] compelling us to exclude women from government. But if we consult experience itself, we shall find that the origin of it is in their weakness. For there has never been a case of men and women reigning together, but wherever on the earth men are found, there we see that men rule, and women are ruled, and that on this plan, both sexes live in harmony. But on the other hand, the Amazons, who are reported to have held rule of old, did not suffer men to stop in their country, but reared only their female children, killing the males to whom they gave birth. But if by nature women were equal to men, and were equally distinguished by fortitudinous spirit [animi fortitudine] and ability/talent [ingenium], in which human power [potentia] and therefore human right chiefly consist; surely among nations so many and different some would be found, where both sexes rule alike, and others, where men are ruled by women, and so brought up, that they can make less use of their abilities. And since this is nowhere the case, one may assert with perfect propriety, that women have not by nature equal right with men: but that they necessarily give way [necessario cedere,] to men, and that thus it cannot happen [fieri non posse], that both sexes should rule alike, much less that men should be ruled by women. But if we further reflect upon human passions, how men, in fact, generally love women merely from the passion of lust, and esteem their cleverness and wisdom in proportion to the excellence of their beauty, and also how very ill-disposed men are to suffer the women they love to show any sort of favour to others, and other facts of this kind, we shall easily see that men and women cannot rule alike without great hurt to peace [magno pacis detrimento fieri]. But of this enough.--Spinoza, Political Treatise, 11.4, translated by Elwes

In a recent paper, Susan James (70) has rightly called attention to Spinoza's rejection, earlier in the Political Treatise, of Aristotle's stance that there are natural masters and slaves,  and his embrace of the reality of a common nature. (7.27) Even so, an attentive reader of the Political Treatise will, perhaps, be dismayed by the final paragraph (quoted above), but not wholly surprised.  For, in his treatment of Aristocratic government, Spinoza had quite clearly asserted that out of any given population of hundred patrician men, "hardly three are found that excel in skill and counsel." [ vix tres reperiuntur, qui arte et consilio pollent vigentque, ] (8.2)  This does not seem intended, in the first instance, as criticism of aristocratic education (although he may well (recall) be critical of it), but rather as a kind of statistical regularity of the distribution of cognitive abilities in populations of males.

What is more surprising is given his explicit elitist embrace of the reality of cognitive hierarchy that, unlike so-called Platonic feminists (male and female), Spinoza denies that there are similar number of women with such cognitive excellence. For, in the Ethics Spinoza had appeared to claim, in the context of his retelling of Adam & Eve story (E4P68S), that men and women agree in nature, or, in James' terms "thin" conception  of human nature. But unlike the platonic feminists, Spinoza does not avail himself of pointing to the reality of known excellent women. Spinoza is not just an elitist, but a male chauvenist.

Now, there has been enormous number of excellent and insightful work on the quoted passage above. Some, like Beth Lord, claim that while in this passage the "disempowerment of women is ‘part of nature’. Spinoza does not seek to justify or condemn that fact, but he does seek to explain it." And according to her, he explains it through socio-economic structures. The real question then is if we can imagine a democracy together that is more equal. (1105) Others, like Moira Gatens, who finds Spinoza's philosophy useful in imagining a feminist future, nevertheless read the passage as suggesting that according to Spinoza woman are "rightly excluded from the body politic because men are by nature superior to them," (47)  I am inclined to agree with Gatens' (and James') interpretation.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the quoted passage above is one of four paragraphs on the nature of democracy. Even if one grants the universal consensus that the chapter (and so the book) is unfinished, it is notable that Spinoza thought it important to write/draft this paragraph at the start of the chapter on democracy. And while I grant James, in commenting on he passage, that something "psychologically complicated" is going, it is fair to say that for Spinoza entertaining the very idea of mass democracy seems to demand a stance of excluding women from the franchise. This reaction is clearly not Spinoza's alone; as Eileen O'Neill notes, Gouges, when confronted with the possible revival of mass democracy during the French revolution, recognizes that this exclusion is a temptation for newly enfranchised men (and, against her warnings, she was right and guillotined for it).

Now, I do not have anything to add to Spinoza's one-sided, unimaginatively sexist interpretation of the historical evidence about the relationship between the political possibilities of men and women. But the passage also gives us a glimpse, in its strange treatment of the historical evidence, of a peculiarity in Spinoza's metaphysics of time. For, in the quoted passage, Spinoza fundamentally assumes that in human history, all possible permutations in the sex distribution of political rulerships that can occur have occurred. 

To be sure, Spinoza cannot mean that all possible political organizations have occured because the Political Treatise itself proposes three or four institutional arrangements that have not been tried out in the configurations Spinoza proposes even by his own lights.* We know this because Spinoza thinks that some of these would be (uncurruptable and) enduring (10.1). But apparently, when it comes to figuring out whether females are capable of ruling history's verdict is final. 

Spinoza's use of 'necessity' reminded me of a famous passage in the Ethics: "from the necessity of the Divine nature infinite things must follow in infinite ways (i.e. all things that can fall under an infinite intellect)" (E1p16) And, if we glance back to the quoted passage at the end of the Political Treatise, it is notable that Spinoza does not help himself to an idea he could have borrowed from Al-Farabi or Ibn Rushd, that the gender properties of political rulership need not fall under the infinite intellect. 

Now, it is a feature and not a bug in Spinoza's necessitarianism that eternity is in a sense all alike. This is why the very idea of creation, which singles out one moment as special, as the start of a series, is a superstitious fantasy. (Spinoza's deist and theist critics make a point of suggesting that this leave Spinoza without a viable cosmogony for the visible universe.) Let's call this the homogeneity of time thesis. Of course, there is such a thing as duration but it is not an attribute of substance (as one might have expected), but a mere consequence of the existence of causal interactions (E2p30S & E2p28], that is, the human mind's finitude or (sorry this is puzzling) negation.  

In addition, E1P16 seems to suggest that all possibilities occur. Let's call this modal density. Of course, in some sense, and from the perspective of, say, Leibniz, Spinoza must mean something relative narrow with the 'possible.' But given that for Spinoza extension and mind are infinite, and that there are, perhaps, infinite further attributes, we should also not underestimate how much is genuinely possible for Spinoza. 

Now given the homogeneity of time and modal density, and the reality of human history, it is not obvious that one has any right to assume that there are (knowable) possibilities that have not been tried out yet. For, that would suggests that there is temporal asymmetry between future and past. But that also means that at any given time one knows what one can know of the world (and the past). There is no reason to think one will be in a better position at a later date. And, in fact, this fits with a more general strain of skepticism about the limits of empirical knowledge that I have diagnosed in Spinoza. 

In my view, what this suggests is that in some respects it is odd that Spinoza has become a mascot for progressives everywhere. Because there is a sense in which Spinoza's metaphysics is not, to put it mildly, especially hospitable toward any form of soft providence, including historical progress.+ If history has no fundamental direction things could get better and worse. Of course, just because there is no reason to think  there is a temporal asymmetry between future and past, it does not follow there is a good reason to think the past has exhausted all the possible human permutations.  For at no point could one be secure in that because that would privilege a moment of duration, and single out that moment. And, so while I have tried to point to the peculiarities of Spinoza's metaphysics that may partially account for his thinking in the final paragraph of the Political Treatise, I doubt these necessitate it; Spinoza seems to have underestimated women's capacity for rule and male capacity to adapt to it. 

Spinoza & Rousseau, On European Federation

Let us admit then that the Powers of Europe stand to each other strictly in a state of war, and that all the separate treaties between them are in the nature rather of a temporary truce than a real peace: whether because such treaties are seldom guaranteed by any except the contracting parties; or because the respective rights of those parties are never thoroughly determined and are therefore bound—they, or the claims, which pass for rights in the eyes of Powers who recognise no earthly superior—to give rise to fresh wars as soon as a change of circumstances shall have given fresh strength to the claimants.--Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761) "Statement of St. Pierre's Project" [here's the French]

The passage is from a text that purports to be a summary of Abbé St. Pierre's proposal of European federation tied together by a permanent peace treaty, free trade, a standing army and what we may anachronistically call a European Council with a rotating presidency. The nineteen major European powers would be represented in this Council. As Rousseau presents it, the proposal would freeze boundaries and constitutional forms in place. The argument in favor of the proposal distinguishes itself from utopian projects by claiming to present the true (as opposed to apparent) interests of rulers and subject in peace which produces the conditions for (to quote Hobbes) commodious living and virtuous cycles of economic and population growth.

The key obstacle, and this is the main point of Rousseau's critical remarks in his "judgment" on St. Pierre's project, published separately (and posthumously), but written more or less simultaneously,* is that the transition from here to there is blocked by the way sovereigns and their chief advisors understand their interests. They recognize that war is a source of possible profit for them personally and that it is a pretext and mechanism to oppress their own citizens. One understands why Rousseau waited to publish this. Although anybody familiar with the first few books of Livy's Discourses and Machiavelli, or the way of the world, could have guessed that this is Rousseau's criticism.

And this gets me to Spinoza, and in particular his Political Treatise, published posthumously alongside Ethics (etc.) For, despite the many allusions and references to Machiavelli, one way to understand the unity among the various proposals of the best constitutional orders in Spinoza's Political Treatise, is (recall my treatment of (6:12 and 7:8)) to find institutional arrangements and incentives that make war unattractive to rulers and their advisors and, as Yitzhak Melamed has recently emphasized, to make states not threatening to their neighbors (7.28); on the significance of institutional arrangements to promote peace as an end, see also 3.10; 4.2; 5.2; 8.7; 8:31; and even 11.4 the last two sentences.

The reason I mention Spinoza in the context of Rousseau's European federalism, is three-fold (and connected). First, and less interesting by itself, the quoted passage above reminded me of Spinoza (and makes me suspect that this passage is one of the places that is more Rousseau than St. Pierre [whom I have  not read yet]). For, it is a doctrine notoriously associated with Spinoza:+ "every commonwealth has the right to dissolve its contract, [proinde unicuique civitati ius integrum est solvendi foedus], whenever it chooses ,and cannot be said to act treacherously or perfidiously in breaking its word, as soon as the motive of hope or fear is removed."(3.14; see also 4.6)** And, indeed, for Spinoza (and here he echoes Hobbes), the commonwealth is, relative to other states, still in the state of nature (7:22; 4.6, and especially 3:11.)).

But, second, and more interesting, in the Political Treatise, Spinoza, too, proposes a federation as a guarantee for peace in the very context in which he describes that treaties may be broken when they outlast their utility.++ 

To commonwealths, which have contracted a treaty of peace, it belongs to decide the questions, which may be mooted about the terms or rules of peace, whereby they have mutually bound themselves, inasmuch as laws of [308] peace regard not one commonwealth, but the commonwealths which contract taken together (Sec. 13). But if they cannot agree together about the conditions, they by that very fact return to a state of war.

The more commonwealths there are, that have contracted a joint treaty of peace, the less each of them by itself is an object of fear to the remainder, or the less it has the authority to make war. But it is so much the more bound to observe the conditions of peace; that is (Sec. 13), the less independent, and the more bound to accommodate itself to the joint will of the contracting parties. [Quo plures civitates simul pacem contrahunt, eo unaquaeque reliquis minus timenda, sive unicuique minor est potestas bellum inferendi; sed eo magis pacis tenetur conditiones servare, hoc est (per art. 13. huius cap.) eo minus sui iuris est, sed eo magis communi foederatorum voluntati sese accommodare tenetur.] Political Treatise 3.15-16,

Spinoza describes here the outlines of a federation of peace (more fully developed in Adam Smith and Kant). And the underlying insight is that if the state of nature of the international arena can be transformed into a state of peace when and only when the grounds of mutual fear among states are reduced. Strikingly, for Spinoza this does not require a common enemy (as nearly all the famous federations in history presupposed). Rather what's required is a transformation of their own internal dynamic or of their joint (state) system. That is to say, that once mutual accommodation can become the norm (without foolishness), in virtue of the expectation that the whole will try to maintain/impose conditions of peace, joint peace has a chance. And, looking ahead to Kant, the very growth of such a system (as more states join), the more pacific it can become. 

So, to sum up, Rousseau and Spinoza both draw on Machiavellian premises to develop institutional design for perpetual peace. Both explicitly deny, and this is my third reason, their approach is utopian in character (and this ties them to Hume and Adam Smith), and takes man as he is not as he ought to be (here in Rousseau; and here, more famously, in Spinoza), that is, they model humans as rational devils. I also believe, but have provided no evidence yet, that their ideas about how to solve the transition from here to peace are roughly similar. But about that some other time.

 

Spinoza Against Public Universities and Pro-Markets (in Ideas)?

Academies, that are founded at the public expense, are instituted not so much to cultivate talents [ingenia colenda]  as to constrain them. [ad eadem coercenda instituuntur.] Skills and sciences will flourish best [optime excolentur], in a free republic, if every one who asks permission [is granted] to teach in public, at his own expense, and to their own reputation risk. [si unicuique veniam petenti concedatur publice docere, idque suis sumptibus, suis sumptibus, suaeque famae periculo].--Spinoza Political Treatise, Ch. 8, p. 49,  translated  Robert Harvey Monro Elwes [with most modifications]

Spinoza assumes that a true cultivation of dispositions will generate excellence in the sciences and technology (or technical arts [scientiae et artes]).* He denies that publicly funded universities produce such excellence. Because regardless of what their purported aims are, the true aim of public universities is to mold talents into the assumed or perceived needs of public authority. This generates a species of conformity, and is incompatible with true excellence. As Adam Smith put the same point in the Wealth of Nations, “The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. It's object is to maintain the authority of all masters.”*

A key hidden assumption is that diverse talents must be cultivated in a variety of ways such that sciences and crafts can flourish. And through direct and indirect censorship (i.e., a curriculum,  etc.)  public universities prevent this variety from being developed. 

More could be said about this passage and his then recent rejection of the Chair at Heidelberg. And much more ought to be said about Spinoza's views of human nature in the Political Treatise.  Given the fondness for Spinozza among today's self-styled radicals and marxists, he is, to be speak frankly, surprisingly elitist about the intellectually gifted (8.2). But that's for another time.

Given the diversity of human character and given the diversity of excellence in the sciences and technology, what's needed according to Spinoza is unlimited freedom to  would be educators to teach what they wish constrained by their budgets and reputation. 

I assume that Spinoza is only speaking of higher education (academies) here. It is notable that even Smith, who was a fierce critic of the universities of his age, would not go as far as Spinoza. Smith thought that professors should indeed be paid by their students (such that a higher enrollment meant higher fees). But Smith did not propose that everybody could organize higher education as they see fit. 

It is notable, Sinoza does not consider an option to reform higher education: the creation and advocacy of something like academic freedom. While the term is a bit anachronistic, it is not much a stretch for the advocate of freedom of philosophizing/scientific thought (which is the explicit thesis of the Theological Political Treatise--a text he refers back to regularly in the Political Treatise);** there is no doubt that the nature and extent of academic freedom was debated in various controversies at Leiden University in his lifetime (some of them having to do with the status of Cartesianism). But given everything else he says about the way incentives and human nature interact to generate conditions of corruption in the Political Treatise, he must have thought this decidedly unpromising (perhaps especially in an aristocracy [since the paragraph is tucked away in a chapter on the best aristocracy]).

Another option would be for universities independent of government (and religious) control in the manner of some ancient academies and future private universities. But it is crucial, I think, that Spinoza does not advocate for the establishment of a single private university to create such freedom. Rather his emphasis is on educators, many would be educators ("each" unicuique). I happen to think we're invited to think of Plato and Aristotle and their business model with fee paying students attracted by their reputation. And it is quite clear that Spinoza thinks that in a heterogeneous population of fee-paying students, it is the interaction of payment and reputation of teachers that will produce the excellence in the sciences and technologies conducive to the flourishing of a free republic. 

It is a peculiar fact of the reception of Spinoza that a book which seriously curtails speech (but not thought), the Theological Political Treatise, is treated as the origin of modern freedom of speech; whereas the book that despite curtailing such speech (3.5) quietly promotes a market place in intellectual ideas is still (to quote Yitzhak Melamed and Hasana Sharp) a "neglected masterpiece."

 

Spinoza's Qualified Limitarianism in context of Monarchic political economy

The fields, and the whole soil, and, if it can be managed, the houses should be public property [publici iuris sint], that is, the property of him, who holds public authority [literally the right of the commonwealth ius civitatis habet]: and let him let them at a yearly rent [annuo pretio] to the citizens, whether townsmen or countrymen, and with this exception let them all be free or exempt from every kind of taxation [exactione] in time of peace. And of this rent a part is to be applied to the defences of the state, a part to the king’s private use. For  it is necessary in time of peace to fortify cities against war, and also to have ready ships and other munitions of war.--Spinoza, Political Treatise, Chapter 6, par. 12, translated  Robert Harvey Monro Elwes

The quoted passage is from a paragraph of Spinoza's treatment of a well-ordered or optimal, monarchy.* Such a monarchy is characterized, initially, by elected kingship (6.5); where the king is subject to  the rule of law. And where, in peacetime, the king's relationship to the people is mediated by a rotating assembly of elders (6.15-16). In many respects, the best form of monarchy described by Spinoza is best characterized as a constitutional monarchy. The major political difference with modern constitutional, hereditary monarchies (7.25) is that the assembly, which has agenda-setting and information power (6.19) over the monarch, is not elected by the citizens, but by the monarch itself (6.16). 

There is much to be said about the  themes of liberty, explicitly introduced with a nod to Machiavelli, (5.7; 7.2) and corruption (e.g., 7.9-10); and the many ways in which the passions are managed through the careful use of incentives and institutional design (see 1.3-4, and the anticipations of Kant and Buchanan's public choice]. I would be amazed if Hume did not have the Political Treatise open when he was writing his political essays, not least Of Perfect Commonwealth.** That's for another time; let's turn to the quoted passage above.

It turns out that there is no private property in land and real estate in a well ordered monarchy. Instead citizens lease it annually from the government.+ Before I discuss the effects of this on income and wealth (and war & peace), it is worth noting the tax significance. This is, simultaneously, the main source of income for the government which pays, thereby, for public works, especially public defense and spying, and the king's expenses. This suggests that the king has no royal estates either (as noted by Noordman 2016: 17). In addition, this also entails is that the government does not raise any tolls, excise taxes, or tariffs (all of them familiar to Spinoza's readers).

The predictable effect and so function of this is clear: the governors' interests are aligned with the people's interest. For, income from taxes can grow only in two ways: first, by population growth. Spinoza is explicit that "means should be devised for more easily increasing the number of citizens, and producing a large confluence of men." (6.32) In addition, to the fact that a growing citizenry can pay more tax (at least over homes), this is useful to have a larger army, in times of war, and to a class of non-citizens who pay a fee "for their exemption from service" or are required to perform "some forced labour." As an aside, his emphasis on population growth, Spinoza anticipates here Locke's "art of government" and he resonates with ideas of the De La Court brothers in the (1662) Interest of Holland.

Second, taxes can grow if land-values and property values grow. I am assuming that the annual renewal of the leases means that there are regular re-evaluations of the assessment. This requires, behind the scenes, as it were, a professional class of land surveyors which had grown in significance in early modern England and the Dutch provinces. At the end of the sixteenth century, Dutch academies were founded and started to churn out, in addition to engineers, such trained surveyors [see Van Bunge for background]. (To be sure, I don't mean to suggest that Spinoza takes either Holland, which he treats as an aristocracy, or England as a nearby example for the best kind of monarchy; strikingly, it seems he takes the early Kingdom of Aragon as the (undoubtedly partial) exemplar (7:30).

A predictable side-effect of annual leases, is that it prevents too much long-term investment in the productive capacity of land. These required (recall) the longer leases pioneered in fifteenth and sixteenth century England. That is not a bug in Spinoza's design, but a feature. For, in referring back to the quoted passage, Spinoza suggests that "all will be obliged, for the sake of gain, to practise trade, or lend money to one another, if, as formerly by the Athenians, a law be passed, forbidding to lend money at interest to any but inhabitants; and thus they will be engaged in business, which either is mutually involved, one man’s with another’s, or needs the same means for its furtherance." (7.8) Because Spinoza assumes that citizens are self-interested (and have relatively few opportunities to gain glory/renown), and, in virtue of lack of property in land and real estate, citizens will be encouraged to become a trading nation domestically and (recall  the lack of tariffs) internationally.

This nudging toward the trades and commerce is reinforced by the fact that banking is limited to domestic banking. That is to say, excess capital accumulation can neither be much invested in land and property nor be loaned out abroad, so this leaves it to be used as capital for domestic investment in trades, commerce, and manufacture. So, while there is some room for accumulation in gold and silver (and jewelry/plate), major landholdings are prevented. And the way Spinoza conceives of trade, this is involves mutual gain (even mutual assistance (2.15; 3:12; 7.8 ([see also, especially, TTP 5]). 

The intended political effect is clear (and explicit): to prevent the rise of a powerful nobility, and to maintain significant wealth equality so that there will be a near equal "risk in war" [ par propemodum periculum est.] (7.8; emphasis added; this, and other remarks clearly anticipates Kant's treatment in Perpetual Peace). With a lack of property in land and real estate, this will not just maintain rough equality, but people's interests and their representatives in the council of state will be pretty much identical (7.8).  While people still can grow somewhat wealthy, they will be doing so in virtue of providing each other in their needs. As population will keep growing, it is clear that this supposed to engender a virtuous cycle of moderate and egalitarian growth. So, when theorizing the best form of monarchy, Spinoza is clearly a qualified limitarian in the sense of (recall) Kramm & Robeyns.

Okay, I could stop here. But it is worth noting something. It turns out that the best form of monarchy in Spinoza's Political Treatise is a variation on Utopia in More's Utopia. That is easy to miss because Spinoza makes a disparaging comment about Utopia at the start of his book (1.1), where it is treated (recall) as useless philosophy. Utopian society is characterized by a lack of liberty, and constant surveillance. But in both places people are incentivized to work hard and provide each other needs, despite the precautions against accumulation of private property. (If anything Utopians are more encouraged to invest in their homes and communal gardens than Spinoza's monarchic citizens.) If anything, we might say that Spinoza's monarchy is, compared to Utopia, less focused on conquest and more on peace. 

For, in Spinoza's monarchy, where the citizens live by trade, and have no landed property and real estate to fall back, and are not paid for soldiering, they will lack war-spiritedness [animus gerendi bellum]. In fact, "war will always cause them fear of losing their possessions and liberty, it is to be added, that war requires fresh expenditure, which they must meet, and also that their own children and relatives, though intent on their domestic cares, will be forced to turn their attention to war and go a-soldiering, whence they will never bring back anything but unpaid-for scars." (7.7)

What we may call the laboring class [quotidiano opere vitam] gets stipends for wartime soldiering, but, by implication, the capitalists (and domestic banker) or entrepreneurs not (6.31). This suggests that Spinoza thinks that ultimate a monarchic state will be divided modestly, by those who live on wages and those who live by credit, trade, or enterprise.

Demagogues and the Crowd in Spinoza's Ethics

This striving [conatus] to do something (and also to omit doing something) solely to please men [hominibus placeamus] is called Ambition [ambitio], especially when we strive so eagerly to please the people [vulgo] that we do or omit certain things to our own injury, or another’s. In other cases, it is usually called human kindness. Next, the Joy with which we imagine the action of another by which he has striven to please us I call Praise. On the other hand, the Sadness with which we are averse to his action I call Blame. Spinoza, Ethics 3, p29, Scholium (translated by Curley)

Above I reproduce the Curley translation because this is the one I generally trust and teach from. But this week-end, while looking at the Latin, I noticed 'vulgo.' And, indeed, when I checked the Silverthorne and Kisner translation, they use 'the crowd;' this strikes me as more fitting. For, this suggests that in the passage, Spinoza is, in fact, treating the demagogue as the ambitious type or exemplar of ambition. Noticing that the demagogue is the characteristic ambitious type impacts how we read a whole number of scholia in the heart of Spinoza's Ethics. You could easily miss it because this is the only time he connects excess of ambition to pleasing the crowd. In what follows I show what happens when you read Spinoza's treatment of such ambitio as a treatment of demagoguery.

A few pages later in the scholium to proposition 31, Spinoza explicitly refers back to the scholium quoted above:

This striving to bring it about that everyone should approve his love and hate is really Ambition (see P29S). And so we see that each of us, by his nature, wants the others to live according to his temperament; when all alike want this, they are alike an obstacle to one another, and when all wish to be praised, or loved, by all, they hate one another. [E3p29S]

That is, the effect of widespread demagoguery is polarization or mutual hatred. I return to this below.

The next mention of ambition is the scholium to E3p32 (which reads) "If we imagine that someone enjoys some thing that only one can possess, we shall strive to bring it about that he does not possess it"); there Spinoza writes, "we see, then, that from the same property of human nature from which it follows that men are compassionate, it also follows that the same men are envious and ambitious."* This property is a kind envy at people enjoying non-shareable goods, that is to say, status and attention (prestige, etc.), the demagogue "desires nothing so much as renown/attention [gloria]" (E3P39S)+ So, the demagogue is driven by the desire for applause from the crowd, and, simultaneously, gain attention and status and, thereby, prevent others from having it. (The significance of this to thee size of Trump's inaugural day crowd is evident.)

The connection between demagogue [ambitio] and renown [gloria] is made explicit in th definitions of the affects: "Ambition is an excessive desire for renown." In the explanation, Spinoza makes the desire for renown a ruling passion (to use Hume's phrase) that can be extremely hard to tame: "ambition is a desire by which all the affects are encouraged and strengthened (by P27 and P31); so this affect can hardly be overcome. For as long as a man is bound by any desire, he must at the same time be bound by this one.**

Spinoza is not done with the demagogue. For, this person instantiates immoderation in all respects: he "will not be moderate in anything provided he can hope he will not be discovered."  You may think that  Spinoza holds out the possibility that outside publicity, a functioning public opinion, might be such a countervailing force. President (then candidate) Trump, de facto, pointed out the weakness in this hope, when he said, "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters." (E3 Affect 48, explanation.) Once the (would-be) demagogue believes that the crowd is loyal to him (as opposed to truth, justice, liberty, etc.), it can't function as a countervailing force.   

And, in fact, Spinoza himself recognizes the point. Because he goes on to say, "if [the demagogue] lives among the drunken and the lustful, then because he is ambitious, he will be the more inclined to these vices." (E3 Affect 48, explanation.) Thus, the demagogue is especially dangerous in the company of fellow bandits or a corrupted society, etc. For then there is no countervailing force at all which can stop the havoc of the unity of the vices.++ 

In such circumstances, the demagogue is really a symptom, or an effect, of a much wider social malaise. This, too, is Spinoza's position (although I am going to cheat by glancing outside the Ethics), in fact (recall); in the final chapter of the TTP, Spinoza had defined the corrupt state in terms of its susceptibility to demagoguery: "some corrupt state, where superstitious and ambitious persons, unable to endure men of learning, are so popular with the multitude that their word is more valued than the law." In such a case, the demagogue can expect to commit crimes without punishment.

Of course, to say, that a successful demagogue is the effect of a corrupt society, it does not follow that the demagogue has no role in generating the corruption and polarization. For,  the aspiring demagogue is himself characterized by fake morality (think of the Central Park 5), and simultaneously, this fake morality generates polarization and lawbreaking: "Ambition, or a Desire by which men generally arouse discord and seditions, from a false appearance of morality." [Sed si ex affectu oriatur, ambitio est sive cupiditas, qua homines falsa pietatis imagine plerumque discordias et seditiones concitant.'] (E4capt25)

I could stop here, but it is worth noting that Spinoza himself is insistent on the following point: demagogues "are not thought to be mad, because they are usually troublesome, and are considered worthy of hate." But he goes on to insists that it is a "species of madness/delirium [delirare], even though...not numbered among the diseases." (E4P44S) This is, so, I think because a demagogue is characteristic of a certain kind of excess.

It is not entirely clear why Spinoza thinks the excessive longing for renown is a species of madness (except that, perhaps, the excessiveness is supposed to be self-explanatory). But near the end of part 4, Spinoza concludes his analysis of the demagogue with the following thought:

If someone sees that he pursues renown too much, he should think of its correct use, the end for which it ought be pursued, and the means by which it can be acquired, not of its misuse and emptiness, and men’s inconstancy, or other things of this kind, which only someone sick of mind thinks of. For those who are most ambitious [the demagogue] are most upset by such thoughts when they despair of attaining the honor they strive for; while they spew forth their Anger, they wish to seem wise. E5p10S***

There are a number of ways to read this. The first, and less, interesting point is that Spinoza clearly thinks that once the desire of fame becomes all consuming it is just sheer craziness. The more interesting point is that Spinoza clearly thinks that the demagogue fundamentally abuse renown, which in different hands could be instrumentally useful. But in the demagogue renown/fame becomes an all consuming end without any such utility except self-aggrandizement. And, third, the emptiness and the futility of being the center of all attention (to be godlike, really) makes the demagogue angry. And, then oddly, in their despair, they proclaim (repeatedly) their own genius. 

One final comment--this is very speculative. There is a firmly entrenched reading of the Ethics as a book free of politics and history (which Spinoza is said to tackle in his more political works). This reading stands in the way of the kind I have offered. It is possible, of course, that I have read a concern with demagoguery into the Ethics because I have been reading Livy. But, if we read the Ethics, in part, as a manual to become wise, that is a philosopher, and not just seem wise, then an old problem (also to be found in Mill) raises its head. what happens (now quoting Ibn Rushd on Plato) "to virtuous natures when they grow up in corrupt cities and are badly educated"? And the answer is, they can become very bad. So, if you have followed me this far, we can see in the Ethics a manual for the education of wisdom and a diagnostic tool-kit that can help you recognize the demagogue. Sadly, it offers no guidance on how to be rid of one.  

On Foucault on 17 January 1979 On Two Concepts of Freedom (IV)

So, there is a shift of the center of gravity of public law. The fundamental problem of public law will no longer be the foundation of sovereignty, the conditions of the sovereign’s legitimacy, or the conditions under which the sovereign’s rights can be exercised legitimately, as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The problem becomes how to set juridical limits to the exercise of power by a public authority. Schematically, we can say that at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century there were basically two ways of resolving this. The first I will call the axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach, which was, up to a point, the path taken by the French Revolution—we could also call it Rousseau’s approach. In what does it consist? It does not start from government and its necessary limitation, but from law in its classical form. That is to say, it tries to define the natural or original rights that belong to every individual, and then to define under what conditions, for what reason, and according to what ideal or historical procedures a limitation or exchange of rights was accepted. It also consists in defining those rights one has agreed to cede and those, on the other hand, for which no cession has been agreed and which thus remain imprescriptible rights in all circumstances and under any possible government or political regime. Finally, on this basis, and only on this basis, having thus defined the division of rights, the sphere of sovereignty, and the limits of the right of sovereignty, you can then deduce from this only what we can call the bounds of governmental competence, but within the framework determined by the armature constituting sovereignty itself. In other words, put clearly and simply this approach consists in starting from the rights of man in order to arrive at the limitation of governmentality by way of the constitution of the sovereign. I would say that, broadly speaking, this is the revolutionary approach. It is a way of posing right from the start the problem of legitimacy and the inalienability of rights through a sort of ideal or real renewal of society, the state, the sovereign, and government. Consequently, you can see that if, historically and politically, this is the revolutionaries’ approach, we can call it a retroactive, or retroactionary approach inasmuch as it consists in taking up the problem of public law that the jurists had constantly opposed to the raison d’État of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this respect there is continuity between the seventeenth century theorists of natural law and the jurists and legislators of the French Revolution.
The other approach does not start from law but from governmental practice itself. It starts from government practice and tries to analyze it in terms of the de facto limits that can be set to this governmentality. These de facto limits may derive from history, from tradition, or from an historically determined state of affairs, but they can and must also be determined as desirable limits, as it were, as the good limits to be established precisely in terms of the objectives of governmentality, of the objects with which it has to deal, of the country’s resources, population, and economy, etcetera. In short, this approach consists in the analysis of government: its practice, its de facto limits, and its desirable limits. On this basis, it distinguishes those things it would be either contradictory or absurd for government to tamper with. Better still, and more radically, it distinguishes those things that it would be pointless for government to interfere with. Following this approach means that government’s sphere of competence will be defined on the basis of what it would or would not be useful for government to do or not do. Government’s limit of competence will be bounded by the utility of governmental intervention. The question addressed to government at every moment of its action and with regard to each of its institutions, old or new, is: Is it useful? For what is it useful? Within what limits is it useful? When does it stop being useful? When does it become harmful? This is not the revolutionary question: What are my original rights and how can I assert them against any sovereign? But it is the radical question, the question of English radicalism; the problem of English radicalism is the problem of utility.
Don’t think that English political radicalism is no more than the projection of a utilitarian ideology on the level of politics. It is, rather, an attempt to define the sphere of competence of government in terms of utility on the basis of an internal elaboration of governmental practice which is nevertheless fully thought through and always endowed and permeated with philosophical, theoretical, and juridical elements. In this respect utilitarianism appears as something very different from a philosophy or an ideology. Utilitarianism is a technology of government, just as public law was the form of reflection, or, if you like, the juridical technology with which one tried to limit the unlimited tendency of raison d’État....for English radicalism, “radical” designates a position which involves continually questioning government, and governmentality in general, as to its utility or non-utility.
So, there are two approaches: the revolutionary approach, basically structured around traditional positions of public law, and the radical approach, basically structured around the new economy of government reason. These two approaches imply two conceptions of the law. In the revolutionary, axiomatic approach, the law will be seen as the expres sion of a will. So there will be a system of will-law. The problem of the will is, of course, at the heart of all the problems of right, which again confirms the fact that this is a fundamentally juridical problematic. The law is therefore conceived as the expression of a collective will indicating the part of right individuals have agreed to cede, and the part they wish to hold on to. In the other problematic, the radical utilitarian approach, the law is conceived as the effect of a transaction that separates the sphere of intervention of public authorities from that of the individual’s independence. This leads us to another distinction which is also very important. On one side you have a juridical conception of freedom: every individual originally has in his possession a certain freedom, a part of which he will or will not cede. On the other side, freedom is not conceived as the exercise of some basic rights, but simply as the independence of the governed with regard to government. We have therefore two absolutely heterogeneous conceptions of freedom, one based on the rights of man, and the other starting from the independence of the governed. I am not saying that the two systems of the rights of man and of the independence of the governed do not intertwine, but they have different historical origins and I think they are essentially heterogeneous or disparate. With regard to the problem of what are currently called human rights, we would only need look at where, in what countries, how, and in what form these rights are claimed to see that at times the question is actually the juridical question of rights, and at others it is a question of this assertion or claim of the independence of the governed vis-à-vis governmentality.
So, we have two ways of constituting the regulation of public authorities by law, two conceptions of the law, and two conceptions of freedom. This ambiguity is a characteristic feature of, let’s say, nineteenth and also twentieth century European liberalism. When I say two routes, two ways, two conceptions of freedom and of law, I do not mean two separate, distinct, incompatible, contradictory, and mutually exclusive systems, but two heterogeneous procedures, forms of coherence, and ways of doing things.  Michel Foucault, 17 January 1979, lecture 2  The Birth of Biopolitics. translated by Graham Burchell, 39-42

The other day I said that this second lecture by Foucault is dazzling. In this long quote he sketches an interpretation of liberalism as the complex working out of two traditions, which are simultaneously enacting two concepts of freedom/liberty. The working out takes place within each tradition and in their interactions (and distant shadowing). It would be tempting to treat these as geographically distinct, but I don't think that's Foucault's purpose. Part of the dazzle is to see Foucault rewrite Constant, Green, and Berlin (although as I have noted, it is not necessary to efface the mothers of liberalism when doing so). And this rewriting raises a fascinating (and somewhat familiar) question.

The rewriting of a tradition is simultaneously a means of extending it. Of course, it can also be a form of ideology critique or unmasking. But Foucault is explicit that this is not his current enterprise.* Rather, he wishes "to make reality intelligible" and this "is simply showing that it was possible; establishing the intelligibility of reality consists in showing its possibility." (34) This is the kind of passage that analytic philosophers like to mock (if X exists X surely is possible). But one need not be a British Idealist in order to recognize that social reality is, at least in part, constituted by intentional objects (and our beliefs and narratives about them, ad infinitum). And at minimum, Foucault is saying that there is a sense in which the very liberal tradition(s) he is constructing are not fully self-conscious or self-aware. For prior to his articulation the reality they aim to be co-constituting are not fully intelligible (to themselves). 

While there is much more to say about the nature of modality and intentionality Foucault is presupposing here (and which sit uneasily with the theories of concepts and modality fashionable in analytic philosophy [and which are not very useful in thinking about social reality)], we should also marvel at the rationalism inherent in Foucault's project. This is easily missed by all the ways one can assimilate Foucault and his focus on the conditions of possibility (of intelligibility) to a variety of neo-Kantianisms. But that reality is intelligible is the axiomatic commitment of philosophical rationalism.** That is to say, Foucault opens up the possibility for a liberalism that understands how its own art of governance and, thereby, become mature. 

On Foucault's view, liberalism really starts once the questions of sovereignty and constitutions are settled or, more cautiously, can be assumed to be safely settled. That is, liberalism is (recall this post on Hume) a post-revolutionary enterprise. Or to put it differently, it comes to its own when it is safe to ignore foundations and when expectations can be thought reasonable. Foucault, thus, is tracking the liberal's philosophically problematic tendency not to question everything (recall Kofi Bright on logical empiricism (and Zizek on Kant)).

The previous paragraph may be obscure, but note how one conception of freedom starts "from law" (which I will call contractualist-republican) and the other utilitarian one starts "from governmental practice." Yes, Foucault calls the former a revolutionary approach, but the key point is that it occurs "within the framework determined by the armature constituting sovereignty itself." That is a polite way of saying, after revolutionary violence. So, liberalism makes reality intelligible by taking the violence that makes it possible for granted. To put it in Spinozistic terms: the state of nature remains latent in liberal civilization. And what Foucault is saying, is liberalism need not be deceptive about this at all. 

The second key claim here is that liberalism is, thus, a mitigating project. (I have repeatedly noted (recall) this is true to its proper self-understanding.) And it does so by generating technologies of government. Foucault is a bit too quick in assuming that these technologies are intrinsically liberal. But from this perspective civil unrest and riots are (here; here; and also here) part of the technology of government or a signal that governance is malfunctioning.

The problem -- to which Foucault understands himself as a salutary corrective is -- that neither the contractualist-republican tradition (focused on securing rights 'of man') and the utilitarian tradition (focused on independence within the extensive division of labor it embraces) always understand itself primarily as a technology of governance (this is less true of 19th century utilitarianism which did theorize itself like this). And so what both strands of liberalism would gain from self-awareness is that within the liberal art of governance it should secure the proper regulation of itself as a technology. It's as if Foucault is playing Turing to a robot to nudge it to became aware of itself and then formulate and thereby impose the laws of robotics as a subject on itself.

 

On Karl Pearson on Spinoza and Maimonides; On Jerusalem, Athens, and Eugenics

In the above remarks I have considered only the Yad Hachazakah, because hitherto attention seems to have been entirely directed to the More Nebuchim (cf. Joel, Sorley and others). It is not impossible that in the intervening ten years Maimonides somewhat altered his views. I should not be surprised to hear that the More was held more 'orthodox' than the Yad. The latter, despite much Talmudic verbiage and scriptural exegesis, notwithstanding many faults and inconsistencies, yet contains the germs of a truly grand philosophical system, quite capable of power- fully influencing the mind even of a Spinoza. Such a reader would, while rejecting the exegesis, recognise the elements of truth in the pure theosophy (cf. Joel, Zur Genesis, p. 9), and this is the point wherein the two philosophers approach most closely. In the second place, I have confined myself entirely to the influence of the Yad on the Ethica. Greater agreement would have been found with the Korte Verhandeling van God, &c., while Spinoza's views of Biblical criticism (especially his conceptions of prophets and prophecy as developed in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) owe undoubtedly much to the Yad. Yet I wished to show that the study of Maimonides was traceable even in Spinoza's most finished exposition of his philosophy. Those who assert that Spinoza was influenced by Hebrew thought have not seldom been treated as though they were accusing Spinoza of a crime. Yet no great work ever sprung from the head of its creator like Athena from the head of Zeus; it has slowly developed within him, influenced and moulded by all that has influenced and moulded its shaper's own character. Had we but knowledge and critical insight enough, every idea might be traced to the germ from which it has developed. While recognising many other influences at work forming Spinoza's method of thought, it is only scientific to allow a certain place to the Jewish predecessors with whom he was acquainted. Critical comparison must show how great that influence was. We naturally expect to find considerable divergences between any individual Jewish philosopher and Spinoza; these divergences have been carefully pointed out by Mr. Sorley, but they are insufficient to prove that Spinoza was not very greatly influenced by Hebrew thought. My aim has been to call in question the traditional view of Spinoza's relation to Jewish 'philosophy, i.e., that he learnt enough of it to throw it off entirely. I cannot help holding that, while Spinoza's form and language were a mixture of medieval scholasticism and the Cartesian philosophy, yet the ideas which they clothed were not seldom Hebrew in their origin. He might be cast out by his co-religionists, but that could not deprive him of the mental birthright of his people- those deep moral and theosophical truths which have raised the Hebrews to a place hardly second to the Greeks in the history of thought. Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations; once in the course of many centuries it will produce a giant-thinker; one who, not satisfied by the narrow limits of his own nation, strives for a freer wider field of action, and grafts on to his Hebrew ideas a catholic language and a broader mental horizon. He becomes a world prophet, but is rejected of his own folk. Such an one of a truth was Spinoza, and another perhaps, albeit in a lesser degree, Moses, the son of Maimon.1--Karl Pearson "Maimonides and Spinoza," Mind (8), No. 31 (Jul., 1883): 352-353 [HT: Jeffrey Bernstein]. 

Recently, I posted a picture of Karl Pearson's blue plaque in Hampstead on social media. In which he is presented as "pioneer statistician." By implication, I noted (recall here; and here) that Pearson's eugenic activities where, pardon my expression, white-washed. In subsequent discussion Prof. Bernstein asked whether this is "the Karl Pearson who also wrote some essays on Spinoza?" 

I had no idea! But the answer is: yes. 

I have quoted the conclusion of the essay above. As it happens, a few days before I presented a draft paper, "Spinoza's Emendation of the Hebrew Bible in the Ethics," at an online version of a department colloquium at Santa Cruz (recorded here). While I had removed Maimonides from the slides in the presentation because I had re-read parts of his Guide to the Perplexed in the weeks leading up to the presentation and had grown a bit skeptical of my earlier enthusiasm connecting the two thinkers. So, the timing of Bernstein's comment was perfect because the relationship between Spinoza and Maimonides had become a matter of urgency to me. 

Let me start with Pearson's paper. He offers excellent set of argument for the idea that Maimonides'  Yad Hachazakah (literally: strong hand) is, despite non-trivial differences of presentation and the manner of treating the subject matter, a major influence on Spinoza's Ethics. The Yad is generally known as The Mishneh Torah (מִשְׁנֵה תּוֹרָה‎, or "Repetition of the Torah"). Its main purpose is to articulate and codify Jewish written and oral law. Despite receiving a rocky reception -- parts of which were burned --, it has become an extremely influential work within the development of Jewish law and ritual. 

Some other time I return to the details of Pearson's paper. Here's the thing: I missed the angle between The Mishneh Torah and Spinoza Ethics entirely. And this made me wonder how this is possible. The first thing to note is that Pearson's paper -- despite, and perhaps (I return to this below) the fame of the author -- has had negligible impact on Spinoza reception since. It is cited in a well known paper "A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean," by Warren Harvey a significant figure in Spinoza scholarship. But the citation is totemic; Pearson's paper is not used at all. And the reason for this is that Harvey is interested in connecting Spinoza to Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed not The Mishneh Torah (which is barely mentioned by Harvey in his article.) 

Now, it is possible that Harvey considered Pearson's papers on its merits and simply rejected the argument. This is not impossible because Pearson cherrypicks favored passages, sometimes relies on a bad translation, and systematically ignores lots of ways in which Spinoza and Maimonides differ in approach. (He does mention a few doctrinal differences, but mostly in order to illuminate the agreements).

But it is more likely that for Harvey the connection that Pearson drew was simply far-fetched. And the reason for thinking this is that Harvey is working with an opposition between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (faith) in which The Guide falls on one side and the Mishneh Torah on the other side. For, Harvey starts his paper with announcing, "I try to sketch a portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean, as the last major representative of a tradition that mightily dominated Jewish philosophy for almost five centuries following the appearance of the Guide of the Perplexed." Much of the paper constructs this very tradition of Jewish philosophy artfully and unobtrusively.  In this tradition there is no place for Mishneh Torah, except the accidental one that its author also happens to have been an exceptionally gifted philosophical author of the Guide. Because the Mishneh Torah does not even qualify as philosophy.** 

I do not mean to suggest that learned commentators on Spinoza's Ethics never mention the Mishneh Torah. (Carlos Fraenkel discusses a passage in Cogitata Metaphysica in light of Mishneh Torah). Or that all commentators would agree with the implicit contrast between Jerusalem and Athens. For many, Spinoza's Ethics is timeless philosophy unrooted from any historically situated tradition. If one comes to believe, as is increasingly common for good reason, that Spinoza is to quote Michael Della Rocca "an arch-rationalist," there would be no reason to connect Spinoza's thought with Maimonides' Yad that appears to take revelation for granted. 

Of course, even scholars doubtful of the significance of Jewish philosophy on Spinoza, will recognize that Spinoza discusses the Mishneh Torah in the Theological Political Treatise. But that book, while important to the founding of the radical Enlightenment, is itself generally treated as an application of his philosophy to practical problems (including the relationship between revelation and philosophy). And while political philosophy is now treated as philosophy again, by and large commentators do not read the TTP to find Spinoza's true metaphysics. And so while I do not want to claim that the TTP is itself treated as belonging to Jerusalem, even its fans think of it as less philosophical than the Ethics. This attitude is also visible in Pearson (who treats the Ethics as much more "finished" philosophically than the TTP.

As an aside, part of the argument I presented at Santa Cruz is that the Ethics is, on some crucial matters, far more pious and guarded than the TTP , and also, and even more surprising perhaps, directly engages with the Hebrew Bible.

So, I have suggested that Pearson's essay and the argument he presented have been ignored because they do not fit the preconceptions of what counts as philosophy even by those friendly to the suggestion that Maimonides is a significant influence on or important to understanding Spinoza. But one may think that the reliance on the category of Jewish philosophy should form no objection to treating the Mishneh Torah as a source of Spinoza's philosophy because, after all, Pearson also relies on the category.

But, as the quote above suggests, Pearson's idea of 'jewish philosophy' is more Herderian and relativistic: the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem here is not a contrast between truth and revelation, but rather a contrast between two competing traditions toward the truth. When people like Harvey speak of Jewish philosophy, they mean that the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition is articulated in a Jewish context and responsive to concerns mediated by jewish experience and history. But Pearson thinks of Jewish philosophy as an autonomous philosophical  tradition: "Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations." That is to say, Pearson's conception of Jewish philosophy is analogous to the way scholars in the period (recall here and here) think of Chinese and Indian philosophy, as belonging to a civilization distinct from western philosophy's home.  (Except that Hebrew philosophy occurred geographically within the West.)

At this point one can understand why some readers will have wanted to keep their distance from Pearson, whose later work shows more interest in racial and ethnic superiority. Pearson's fondness for ranking cultures is already visible in the quoted passage. Although it is not impossible that his contemporaries would have been more bothered by his philo-semitism than the fact that he was ranking intellectual/cultural tradition!

Of course, Spinoza and to a lesser extent Maimonides are treated by Pearson as something more than Hebrew philosophers; they are world (philosophical) prophets. And one can discern in this Pearson's hope that, despite varied starting points (even Ohio will do), true philosophy transcends the culture that births or generates it.+ Pearson himself is clearly speaking from this superior to one's own intellectual culture's vantage-point. And, let me submit that it's this almost cosmopolitan perspective, much more than the sense of superiority toward other peoples, that is at the root of the science of eugenics.

 

 

 

 

 

On Analytic Marxism's Displacement of Dialectics

In each sense of 'analytical', to be analytical is to be opposed to a form of thinking traditionally thought integral to Marxism: analytical thinking, in the broad sense of 'analytical', is opposed to so-called 'dialectical' thinking, and analytical thinking, in the narrow sense of 'analytical', is opposed to what might be called 'holistic' thinking. The fateful operation that created analytical Marxism was the rejection of the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own. Rejection of that claim enabled an appropriation of a rich mainstream methodology that Marxism, to!its detriment, had shunned....I said (see section 1 above) that analytical Marxists do not think that Marxism possesses a distinctive and valuable method. Others believe that it has such a method, which they call 'dialectical'. But we believe that, although the word 'dialectical' has not always been used without clear meaning, it has never been used with clear meaning to denote a method rival to the analytical one.[1] There is no such thing as a dialectical form of reasoning that can challenge analytical reasoning. Belief in dialectic as a rival to analysis thrives only in an atmosphere of unclear thought. G.A. Cohen "Introduction to the 2000 edition" (2000 [1978]) Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, xvii-xxiii.

Cohen takes non-trivial pride in having helped  found the method of analytic marxism (see p. xvii & xxiii).  This is explicitly opposed to, and intended to displace, what is known as dialectics. Dialectics is dismissed for being unclear . In the quoted passage, and later in the introduction, he suggests dialectics is only taken seriously in a context pervaded by unclarity such that resistance to analytic marxism (by those wedded to dialectic) exhibits "irrational obscurantism." (xxiv) Presumably, the footnote [1] is supposed to illustrate the lack of clarity. It reads,  "I do not think that the following, to take a recent example, describes such a method: 'This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic: a logic or form of explanation specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history.' (Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx p. 97.) If you read a sentence like that quickly, it can sound pretty good. The remedy is to read it more slowly." (p. xxiii) 

As regular readers know, I am a bit allergic to the habit, cultivated by my analytic peers, to quote exemplary sentences (generally by continental philosophers) out of context, add some snark (here disguised as sincere advice), and say, see. Perhaps, Balibar's work on Marx is as shallow as Cohen suggests.  But the choice for Balibar (an academic best known by me for his work on Spinoza) is revealing because it is neither Marx nor an accomplished revolutionary practitioner of dialectics, say, Rosa Luxemburg, who calls the "dialectical materialist method of historical analysis" one of two "principles" of the "essence" of Marxism ("Foreword to the Anthology The Polish Question and the Socialist Movement.")

Let's stipulate that clarity is an important intellectual virtue even within Marxism. And if you are already socialized in a certain intellectual habitus, it is perfectly legitimate to take it for granted (even for polemical purposes). But, speaking strictly as a bourgeois intellectual, it is an odd choice for a Marxist to rest one's case on. Let me explain.

For Carnap, whose socialist commitments were not disguised, clarity is, in fact, a property or by-product of formal systems.* Carnapian clarity is really a second-order property of an otherwise esoteric, expert practice.  But if one is interested in revolutionary or even emancipatory politics,  it is not obvious that such clarity is the ruling virtue (as opposed to virtues that motivate action, or enable the proletariat to fulfill their revolutionary potential).  I don't mean to deny that for Carnap, presumably, anybody can be trained to become such an expert. And there is an attractive feature of communism -- emphasized, say, by Ernest Mandel in The Economic Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx 1843 to Capital -- that under communism everybody will be intellectually literate. But that's supposed to be the end-point of the revolution not the (prefigurative) means. 

Be that as it may, the introduction I quoted from is a later addition. In Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, Cohen does not (as far as I can tell) engage with the question at all.** I have been unable to find any place where Cohen does the intellectual work to show with some care what's wrong with dialectics. Throughout the book he cites his own (1974) "Marx's Dialectic of Labor;" this paper explicitly sets aside anything that non analytic Marxists might mean by dialectic and only focuses on "the descriptive residue" of the concept.

Earlier yet, in 1969, Cohen did a lovely review essay, worth re-reading for many reasons, "Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Marcuse," of Marcuse in New Left Review . This is a more general critique of (what Perry Anderson has called) Western Marxism to move from to "the aspirations of people" (and being a spokesman for them) to a focus on "culture" (and ideology). In this piece, Cohen suggests there is an authentic Marxist spirit from which Marcuse has deviated. An example of this more authentic Marxism (by Cohen's lights in 1969) is Karl Korsch.+ 

As it happens, Korsch is a lucid writer. And in his (1923) Marxism in Philosophy he offers a useful diagnosis of the motives of those who reject dialectics and a hint of what it might be:

Setting aside any philosophical considerations, it is therefore clear that without this coincidence of consciousness and reality, a critique of political economy could never have become the major component of a theory of social revolution. The converse follows. Those Marxist theoreticians for whom Marxism was no longer essentially a theory of social revolution could see no need for this dialectical conception of the coincidence of reality and consciousness: it was bound to appear to them as theoretically false and unscientific.-- [Emphases in original.] Translated by Fred Halliday.

In context, it is clear that the coincidence of consciousness and reality -- hereafter: the coincidence thesis -- is a constitutive feature of dialectics, but does not exhaust it. That consciousness and reality coincide is a position associated in different ways and with different political sensibilities with Platonism, Spinozism, and Hegel. It is easy to make fun of, but it is not unintelligible or, if you try working through it, nor obscure. (It is a bit tricky to learn to embrace the coincidence between epistemic and ontic perspectives if you have been taught this is a blunder.) Somewhat amusingly in Spinoza the epistemological and metaphysical achievement (recall this post on Tarski) of such coincidence is itself associated with full clarity. Korsch doesn't claim that Marxist dialectic is itself clear, but he thinks it is clear that the coincidence thesis is necessary for the way in which a critique of political economy could become a part of a theory of social revolution. And this, in turn, is a key feature to generate (the right sort of) revolution. 

Let me take stock. I have not here tried to articulate a full theory of dialectics. (That's for another time and perhaps not my role in life.) I have also not discussed the merits of analytic marxism. More narrowly, while Cohen is an early mover in analytic marxism, he is fairly late in the history of analytic philosophy. And so this makes one wonder if anybody in the analytic tradition did the serious work of showing by way of argument what's wrong with dialectics. This question is especially urgent because there are many indications that marxism is receiving renewed consideration within analytic philosophy or at least by our students.

To find such an attempt, we must look, I assume to Vienna (in the 1920s-30s) or New York (in the late 1930s), or perhaps Lodz (in the 1930s). As it happens, Cohen echoes in uncanny fashion -- the lesser,  lazy polemics*** of -- Ernest Nagel's treatment of dialectics; Nagel presents (recall) dialectics like the early moderns treat the terms of scholastic philosophy: as fundamentally unintelligible. And so, we seem to be stuck in an eternal return of name-calling. However, Nagel was intimately familiar with Sidney Hook's (1939) "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry," (published in JPhil) which presents itself as doing such thankless work, and, perhaps, the only such effort in the analytic tradition (now broadly conceived).++ I shall turn to it soon in order to establish whether Nagel's (and so by extension) Cohen's polemics rest on intellectual granite or quicksand.

 

 

On the interaction between bodies and abstract Mathematical quantities; on Newton's Vis Insita as Inherent, Innate, and essential

Def. 11 12.  The force of a body or inherent and innate to a  body The _Ùinherent, innate, and essential force [vis insita, innata, et essentialis]_Ù of a body is the power by which it endeavors to perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line.  It is proportional to the quantity of the body, and is in fact exercised proportionally to the change of bearing [allatae] state, _Ùand in so far as it is exercised it can be said to be the exercised force of the body endeavoring and struggling against [conatus et reluctatio]   Of this kind  , of which one kind is the centrifugal force of rotating [bodies] [gyrantium]_Ù.--Isaac Newton "De Motu Corpurum in mediis regulariter cedentibus," translated by George Smith. 

The quoted passage is from one of the sequence of manuscripts that Newton wrote between Halley's famous visit to Cambridge and the Principia. It caught my eye while I was editing one of George's entries forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Isaac Newton. In his biography of Newton, Richard Westfall mentions the first sentence, in passing, as part of a "struggle" to clarify the relation between inherent and impressed force. And, in fact, since we are dealing with a conceptualization of inertial motion, what Newton means by vis insita or inherent forces is of central importance to understanding the Principia. So, for example, in his classic (2006) article, on the subject of inherent and centrifugal forces, Domenico Bertoloni Meli also quotes the passage. But the fact that Newton couples this vis insita with innateness and essence goes unremarked. I mention Westfall, Smith, and Bertoloni Meli as exemplars of a certain kind of reticence among leading Newton scholars to analyze some of Newton's metaphysics while he was developing the Principia. More surprisingly, Alan Gabbey, who -- together with the two giants of Newton's metaphysics, Howard Stein and Ted McGuire -- has never exhibited such reticence, also quotes the passage (back in 1971), but does not explore its meaning.

Recently, George, in a recent paper devoted to confirming Stein's conjecture "that Newton's conception of forces of nature as forces of interaction “was actually developed by Newton at the same time that he was discovering the law of gravitation,”" (Smith quoting Stein) notes, while commenting on a disagreement between Stein and me "about metaphysics of Newtonian gravity," "I have no objections to anyone's citing passages from Newton's writings in an effort to extract his “metaphysical” thinking, for where else can one turn to. I question, however, how much weight can be put on Article 21 [that appeared posthumously]. As already noted, nothing remotely akin to it appears in any edition of the Principia, nor for that matter in any other publication or extant manuscript."* Smith is right about that. (The implicature of his comment puzzles me: on the first two pages of my paper, I had, in fact, asserted three times that I was attributing a view to Newton that he held when he was drafting/writing the Principia, but no more than that.) But even metaphysical ephemera can be interesting, even illuminating.

This post makes no claim about the wider significance in Newton's thought of the passage quoted above. The first thing to notice about the first sentence is that the power of a body by which it  perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line is not treated as a property or quality, but as a force of that body. Descartes' first two laws of motion do not such thing.+ 

So, there are three questions worth asking: first, what is a force of a body? Second, what makes a force inherent, innate, and essential.' Third, why, in the Principia, did Newton drop the claim that this force is 'innate and essential.' For (on this third question), when in the Principia, he returns to something very much like the idea of definition 12 (quoted above), is to be found in definition 3 (of the Principia): "Inherent force of matter is the power of resisting by which every body, so far as it is able, perseveres in its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward." And in the very next sentence, Newton adds "This force is always proportional to the body and does not differ in any way from the inertia of the mass except in the manner in which it is conceived."  Of course, in comparison to the quoted passage above, in the Principia, Newton adds the very striking claim that vis insita is identical to the inertia of the mass, except (and this is no less striking) in the manner of conceiving them. 

As it happens, for independent reasons scholars have argued (and agreed, I think) that in the Principia, Newton treats forces are abstract mathematical quantities (this is pretty clear from the corollaries to the laws.)  Of course, it is not entirely clear what to make of the claim that a body's force just is an abstract mathematical quantity. Earlier Newton has explained that when he uses 'mass' he just means the "quantity of matter" which "is a measure of matter that arises from its density and volume jointly." (This is definition 1 of the Principia.) So, while it is tempting to treat inertia as a property of body, it too, is a feature of mass, which is a quantity, and in turn, a measure of two physical parameters (density and volume). So, that vis insita is identical to the inertia of the mass just is to say that two abstract mathematical quantities related to bodies are alike. (Newton's conception of mass is an abstract feature shared by all bodies.)

Because it is common since the advent of relativity theory and the quantum revolution to present Newton's ontology as kind of commonsensical (with modest allowance for the strangeness of the possibility of action at a distance), that it is sometimes forgotten or underestimated that even the building blocks of Newton's physics are, from an ontological perspective, quite unusual. That Newton was innovating helps explain that, as Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk have shown in an eye-opening article, that there are tensions lurking here between a geometric conception of body and what they call dynamic conception of body (looking forward to Boscovitch), as a collection of forces.** 

This generates a hypotheses about why Newton dropped the very idea of inertia as "an innate and essential force" from the Principia. Once one starts treating forces as abstract mathematical quantities that can be measured (mediated by theory, perhaps) and that are (interpreted as) causes of motion, it is unclear what is gained by treated them as innate or essential or not.  (And one can discern an interest in measurement behind the idea of 'exercised proportionally.') That's just the kind of metaphysics that, say, George Smith finds irrelevant to the evidential practice (and something similar seems to lie behind Parker's comment quoted in the note).* Fair enough.**

Be that as it may, as it happens, in Rule 3 of the Principia, Newton explicitly claims that vis insita is "immutable." In addition, he is explicit that vis insita is a means to establish that movability and perseverance are universal properties in bodies given the third rule that encourages us to make an inductive leap from the finding of particular properties of bodies without exception to the commitment that these "be taken as qualities of all bodies universally." And Newton then suggests that there is a contrast between universal and essential qualities of matter. The third rule is a means toward the former not the latter. Interestingly, it is quite natural to read Newton in the third rule as claiming that while gravity is merely universal and not an essential quality of matter, vis insita is not just universal and an essential quality of matter (as evinced by its immutability). This would be an echo then of definition 12 in the passage quoted from De Motu at the top of this post.

At this point, I need to make a modest detour. The trio, 'inherent, innate, and essential,' has a notorious afterlife because, in a famous letter to Bentley, of february 1693 (it's been frequently cited by physicists and scholars), Newton denies "that gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter." In the previous sentence, Newton had asserted that 'it is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must be, if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it." In earlier letters Newton had complained that Bentley had attributed to him the idea that gravity is inherent and essential to matter. Presumably, Bentley had sent Newton the sermon he had preached (the seventh of the Boyle lecturers), on November 7, 1692, and which he was preparing for publication, for comments to Newton.

As an aside, in the published (1693) version of Bentley's sermons, Bentley continued to tie Newton's theory to Epicurus', but limited the similarity to the claim "that the weight of all Bodies around the Earth is ever proportional to the quantity of their Matter." (Bentley, a famous classicist, adds a footnote to Lucretius.) Bentley goes on to add that Newton and the Epicureans also agree on the existence of a vast vacuum of empty space in the universe. He then draws a distinction between two kinds of atheist cosmogonies (one he labels epicurean, and another which is more crypto-Spinozist, of a sort later defended more explicitly by Toland.) He then insists that both will be refuted on the assumption that "mutual gravitation or spontaneous attraction can neither be inherent and eſſential to Matter; nor even supervene to it, unless impressed and infused into it by a divine power." This superaddition of gravity thesis has been recently defended (not by me, but) by John Henry as indeed Newton's own view (in part on the basis of Newton's letter to Bentley.)

What Newton has meant by his rejection that gravity is 'inherent, innate, and essential' quality of matter has been subject of much scholarly controversy (and I have been one of the partisans). But because of that debate, it seems to be agreed that by an 'essential quality' of matter Newton means it is a quality, or necessary condition, required for the existence of matter. And so understood one can see why Newton would have been tempted in De Motu to call vis insita essential, because it is the feature that is required for (to speak anachronistically) the physics he is pursuing. Without the power by which a body "perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line" it wouldn't be the kind of entity Newton is studying.++ 

Now, in the previous paragraph I moved from ontology to epistemology. That's partially because the Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy in the Principia themselves seem to give the reader, as Zvi Biener and I argued, at most the ontology apt for the epistemic attitude to be taken in the context of natural philosophical research. And this ontology is, thus, more provisional than talk of 'essential' qualities seem to suggest.

Andrew Janiak has suggested, that for a quality to be “innate”  is to think of it as due to no other physical process, entity, or medium between material bodies.*** So, an innate quality is to be a kind of contrast to a relational quality (which generates from, say, an interaction). To the best of my knowledge Newton calls no quality or power innate in the Principia.

That Newton dropped the claim that vis insita is an innate quality of body can then be readily explained I think. Between the draft quoted at the top of the post, Newton came to think of natural forces as forces of interaction. This is, in fact, the very point of Smith's recent article on Stein I quoted above (and was assumed by me under the influence of Stein).+++ And, evidentially, these forces are manifested in and measured by interactions (in part, as 'struggle' against change, etc.) And, in the Principia, Newton is explicit that these forces are both causes and effects of the interactions of bodies.

Famously, Descartes' metaphysics floundered on the mysterious interaction between bodies and souls. It is worth noting that in Newton there is an interaction between bodies and abstract mathematical quantities. If we focus on the measurement practice this is not mysterious at all and it generates, as Smith shows in his majestic "Closing the Loop" ever more stringent evidence. But if we step back, and ask ourselves how to conceive of the interaction between bodies and abstract mathematical quantities, one is left somewhat speechless.