proceedings of the aristotelian society 137th session
issue no. 1 volume cxvi 2015 / 2016
the 108th presidential address freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
susan james birkbeck, university of london
m o n d a y, 5 o c t o b e r 2 0 1 5 17.30 - 19.15
the chancellor’s hall senate house university of london malet street london wc1e 7hu united kingdom
This event is catered, free of charge & open to the general public
contact
mail@aristoteliansociety.org.uk www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk
Š 2015 the aristotelian society
biography Susan James is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her books are Passion and Action: The Emotions in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1997); Margaret Cavendish: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics: The Theologico-Political Treatise (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is currently working on a collection of essays, Spinoza on Learning to Live Together. This year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Susan James as the 108th President of the Aristotelian Society. editorial note The following paper is a draft version that can only be cited or quoted with the author’s permission. The final paper will be published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Issue No. 1, Volume CXVI (2016). Please visit the Society’s website for subscription information: www.aristoteliansociety. org.uk.
freedom and nature:
a spinozist invitation
susan james
Can we deal with existing environmental threats without giving up a significant degree of freedom? The answer is often thought to be no, but in this lecture I sketch a Spinozist invitation to view the matter in a different light. Spinoza’s conception of liberty is fundamentally a republican one, but, unlike other defenders of this tradition, he argues that we can be made unfree by non-human things such as viruses or weather patterns. Insofar as we are subject to their arbitrary power, we are already in a condition of servitude. If we adopt this Spinozist diagnosis of our condition, the problem we confront is not so much whether we are willing to give up existing freedoms as whether we can find the means to overcome existing forms of servitude.
GREENHOUSE GASES accumulate. Sea levels rise. Weather patterns become more violent. Some of the gravest threats to our way of life, and even to the survival of humanity, are undoubtedly environmental, and have at least in part been brought on by our own activities. Yet, as our individual and collective attitudes attest, we are finding them difficult to confront – how much easier to push them to the back of the mind or pin our hopes on the discovery of a new and spotlessly clean form of energy. We cannot see what to do about them – small differences are differences, to be sure, but how can our efforts to recycle or switch off the lights measure up to what we know to be the scale of the problem? Still worse, we have so far been unable to address them collectively. Even modern states, with all their power, have not managed to implement policies that might make our ways of life sustainable. These familiar threats pose urgent political challenges, but also set us a philosophical test, since our capacity to deal with them will partly depend on how we view the threats themselves, and thus how we assess any remedies we are offered. Among people who live in the wealthier parts of the world, an unwillingness to embrace environmentally friendly measures is sometimes grounded on the conviction that they demand an unacceptable sacrifice of liberty - our liberty to choose how much we travel, to shop without regard to air miles, to live in brightly-lit cities, and so on in a seemingly endless list of privations. The costs of an environmentally sustainable way of life appear to be exceptionally high. No surprise, then, that we drag our feet. As long as we view the problem in these terms, we face a stark dilemma: we either continue to put our ways of life in danger or try to reconcile ourselves to diminished levels of freedom. But we may also wonder
4
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
whether this is the only way to characterise our options. Is the conception of freedom presupposed in this account the only one available to us? Must we envisage an environmentally friendly way of life as one in which we lose freedom, or might we somehow come to see it as liberating? Even the question is liable to raise a sigh as images of living in yurts and growing vegetables swim before our eyes. But perhaps we should not simply dismiss it. Confronted by our attachment to a view of freedom that puts our way of life in danger, it may not be a bad idea to consider whether we are working with our fullest and most productive understanding of liberty. Following this line of thought, I shall offer a Spinozist defence of the claim that learning to live within the constraints imposed by our natural environment is an integral aspect of living freely and that, insofar as we fail in this task, we become subject to a form of servitude. Rather than damaging our freedom, the process of struggling to release ourselves from the destructive powers of natural forces can enhance it. Needless to say, the Spinozist position I shall explore does not provide immediate solutions to our environmental problems. How could it? Rather, it provides us with an opportunity to investigate an ambitious picture of what freedom can amount to, and of the traits we need to cultivate in order to enjoy it. It is, in effect, an invitation to try to put this vision to work and see if we can use it to ameliorate the dilemma I have outlined. According to Spinoza, people can be so deeply mistaken about the nature of liberty that they will fight for servitude as if for freedom.1 The question is whether we, too, may unwittingly be falling into this trap when we resist efforts to accommodate ourselves to nature on the grounds that doing so will render us less free.
remodelling republican liberty Spinoza’s analysis of liberty shares the central commitments of the broadly republican conception of freedom articulated by many of his Dutch contemporaries, a conception that in turn drew heavily on Roman Law.2 At the heart of this view lies the assumption that one lives freely when one is not subject to the power of other agents who can treat you as they choose. Benedict de Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise ed. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.5. Henceforth TTP. My translations are taken from the forthcoming second volume of Edwin Curley’s Collected Works of Spinoza.
1
Spinoza’s interest in the contribution of the natural environment to a free way of life is arguably particularly indebted to the work of his fellow republican, Pieter de la Court. In Interest van Holland ofte gronden var Hollands-Welvaren (1662), translated as The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland (1702), De la Court emphasizes the environmental aspects of republican liberty.
2
5
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
To take the stock example, a master possesses the freedom to do what he likes with his slaves, and it is the fact that they are subject to his power that makes them unfree. Their vulnerability constitutes their servitude, regardless of whether the master treats them well or badly. Thus conceived, freedom and servitude come in degrees; a chattel slave will be less free than the citizen of a democracy who is largely well protected by the law, but remains in certain ways subject to her employer. Equally, some forms of freedom may be more valuable than others; freedom from chattel slavery is normally more valuable than freedom from dependence on an employer within a democratic state. Yet again, some forms of unfreedom are less present than others; the chattel slave whose master treats her well is as unfree as a fellow-slave who is beaten every day, but the quality of her servitude is not as oppressive. Through all these variations, freedom consists in being able to sustain the capacity to live as one wants, rather than as someone else wants one to live. Because republican theorists have traditionally been concerned with political liberty, their interests have tended to focus on the relations between individual people, and between individuals and states. Furthermore, this set of concerns is reflected in their formulations of what freedom is. For example, republicans standardly claim that the distinction between freedom and servitude lies in the difference between being able to act according to your own arbitrium or will and being subject to the will of another. What renders an agent unfree is subjection to the will of someone who can, with impunity, treat them as they choose. Freedom is consequently a function of relationships between agents who possess wills, and it is implicitly assumed that, at least among finite things, this condition restricts the domain of liberty. Putting aside non-human animals (who are sometimes held to be capable of volition) we are left with individual humans, and entities such as states in which law or convention determine how the will of individuals is to be collectively expressed. Living freely or in accordance with one’s own will is thus mainly construed as a capacity of human beings. The same assumption is implicit in a related formulation of the republican position, this time to the effect that one is free insofar as one is sui iuris or able act in accordance with one’s own right. In this case, freedom only extends to things that possess ius, and once again it is widely agreed that this is primarily a feature of human beings. By contrast with rocks, waves or rabbits, humans are bearers of rights and, since they also possess wills, are capable of exercising their rights voluntarily or for themselves. One person can therefore render another unfree by arbitrarily suppressing the right of the second person to act in accordance with their own will, as can human associations such as states or households. Beyond this, how-
6
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
ever, few if any natural things are capable of living freely or sui iuris, and thus of limiting one’s liberty. Freedom is therefore mainly regarded as a human trait; but one feature of the republican analysis sits uneasily with this outlook. To live freely, republicans repeatedly argue, one must be protected from the arbitrary power of other agents, and when one loses this protection one loses liberty. One way of being unfree is to be vulnerable to another person who can treat you as they wish, and here we return to familiar figures such as the slave master, the tyrant, and the patriarchal father or husband. However, there seems no reason to assume that humans and human associations are the only things that can reduce our freedom. After all, the world is full of viruses, gases, torrents or hurricanes, which exercise their power over us with impunity. Why should we not describe our vulnerability to them as a form of servitude that diminishes our liberty? In this respect, then, the republican view invites us to envisage freedom as dependent on our relationships with non-human as well as human things. To live freely, it suggests, is to be protected against all arbitrary power, regardless of its source, and the more we fail to meet this condition the less free we become. Reflecting on this proposal, one may feel that it sets the bar too high; as well as making freedom impossible to attain, it points in the direction of a way of life so cautious and risk averse as to be the very opposite of free. Perhaps these presumed implications help to explain why few writers within the republican tradition attempted to theorise nature as the domain of freedom, and why most concerned themselves only with political liberty. In Spinoza, however, we find an exception. The arguments of his Ethics and his two political works (the TheologicoPolitical Treatise and the Political Treatise) provide a metaphysical basis for a more expansive conception of liberty that nevertheless retains the essential features of the republican view.3 Nature, Spinoza argues, contains an infinity of finite individuals, yoked together by an overarching system of causes and effects and continually interacting with one another. This pattern of relationships is determined by the power of each individual to maintain itself in existence or, as the Ethics puts it, to persevere in its being.4 How an individual perseveres in its being or exercises its power varies from one kind of thing to another, and indeed among individuals of a single kind. But despite these variaSpinoza, ‘Ethics’ in The Collected Works of Spinoza vol. 1, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton University Press, 1985). (Henceforth E.) Spinoza, ‘Political Treatise’, in Spinoza’s Political Works ed. A.G. Wernham (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1958). Henceforth TP.
3
4
EIIIp6.
7
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
tions, we can think of nature as a field of interacting individuals, where the powers through which individuals maintain themselves are constantly at work. Each individual does what it can to remain in existence as its environment alters, until something external destroys it. Among republican theorists, the ability to exercise one’s own power is, as we have seen, traditionally identified with the notion of being sui iuris or able to act according to one’s own right, just as being dependent upon the power of another is identified with being subject to their right. Reiterating this set of claims, Spinoza argues that ‘the natural right of each individual extends as far as its determinate power’.5 Once we allow that individual things continue to exist by exercising their power to persevere in their being, it is a short step to the claim that, in exercising its power, an individual exercises its right. In doing what it is empowered to do by virtue of being the thing it is, it acts rightfully so that, for example, ‘everything a man does in accordance with the laws of his nature he does by the sovereign right of nature, and he has as much right against other things in nature as he has power’.6 In the human sphere, this conclusion has startling implications. ‘As the wise man has the supreme right to do everything that reason dictates, … so the ignorant and weak-minded have the supreme right to do everything that appetite urges …’.7 But the equation of right with power has a no less striking effect on the way we think about non-human things, since they too can be said to exercise their power to persevere in their being by right. For instance, if a plant exercises its power to continue to exist by moving towards the sun it does so rightfully, just as a stone exercises its right when it resists being broken by a hammer. Adopting the republican formulation we have already explored, we can say that each of these things acts sui iuris or in accordance with its own right; and this is what it is to act freely.8 Insofar, then, as an individual of any kind strives to remain in existence or exercises its own right, it acts freely; and since any individual strives in this fashion for as long as it exists, any existing thing must be at least somewhat free. We have here the beginnings of a comprehensive analysis of freedom and servitude,9 but it is still not clear what the distinction between acting in accordance with your own right and being acted on by something else amounts to. What sort of power qualifies a thing as active and hence constitutes its own right? We act, Spinoza explains, when ‘something 5
TTP, p.195.
6
TP 2.4.
7
TTP, p.196.
8
TP 2.11.
9
EIIp13s.
8
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
happens, in us or outside us, of which we are the adequate cause … By contrast, … we are acted on when something happens in us, or something follows from our nature, of which we are only the partial cause’.10 In the Ethics, these definitions are introduced to throw light on the character of human freedom, but they apply quite generally. The more an individual thing affects the external things it encounters, the more it acts or exercises its right and the more free it becomes; correspondingly, the more it is affected by external things, the more it is acted on and the greater its unfreedom or servitude. An individual’s power to act is therefore constituted by its causal efficacy, though this in turn is a complex phenomenon. It has a quantitative dimension, as when one kind of stone has a greater power than another to resist the blows of a hammer; and a qualitative one, as when a plant has the power to turn to the sun but not to survive a hard frost.11 Furthermore, as Spinoza repeatedly emphasises, an individual’s power to act may be more or less sustainable.12 As their names indicate, short-lived plasma cells have less power to persevere in their being than long-lived plasma cells, and are consequently less free. Since an individual’s power to act cannot be straightforwardly read off from a cursory study of its behaviour, we may be unable to determine when one thing acts on another. ‘No one has yet determined’, Spinoza reminds us, ‘what bodies can do’.13 Perhaps we can hazard that a plant is acted on when it is killed by a frost, and a child is acted on when weakened by a virus. But even if these particular examples do not convince, Spinoza has given us an analysis of freedom and servitude that, by contrast with most republican interpretations of liberty, extends throughout the realm of nature. The continual interplay of individuals’ rights or powers expresses their changing levels of freedom and servitude, and this is as true of soup ladles, plants or electricity grids as it is of human beings.14 Moreover, when we think about our own situation we need to think about it in these terms.
10
EIII def. 2.
On this distinction see Moira Gatens, ‘Spinoza’s Disturbing Thesis. Power, Norms and Fiction in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’, History of Political Thought , 30.3 (2009), 455-68.
11
12
EIVp69.
13
EIIIp2s.
On electricity grids see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), pp.24-8.
14
9
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
the human case Despite the broad applicability of his account of liberty, Spinoza shares with his fellow-republicans a special interest in human freedom, and is particularly concerned to explain what it is for humans to act and be acted on. The character of our human power to persevere in our being reflects the kind of thing we are, and therefore has an intellectual dimension that shapes the nature of our capacity to act. We humans act, Spinoza argues, insofar as we have adequate or true ideas, and are acted on insofar as our ideas are inadequate or confused. ‘Insofar as our mind has adequate ideas it necessarily does certain things [acts], and insofar as it has inadequate ideas it necessarily undergoes certain things’15 Implicit in these claims is the idea that what gives us our distinctive power to affect external things is our grasp of the relationships at work within the natural domain of which we are a part. In our human case, it is by understanding the powers of individual things and the pattern of their interactions that we become most active and best able to protect ourselves against servitude. So just as a plant has a particular way of manifesting the power that belongs to it or is its own, so too do we, and it is only when we are guided by adequate ideas that we act for ourselves, as opposed to being guided by things outside [us] and determined to do what their constitution demands. Spinoza describes the process of acquiring and using adequate ideas as reasoning, so that it is through reasoning that we manifest our power to act.16 This already indicates where we should look in order to get a better grasp of the nature of human freedom. But what is it, exactly, to reason or have adequate ideas, and thus to act in accordance with our own power or right? It is tempting to assume that Spinoza conceives of philosophical reasoning as a self-contained and self-validating kind of thinking. Suppose you already have adequate ideas of certain premises and now go on to derive a set of conclusions from them. The causes of this operation the adequate ideas that constitute the premises together with the exercise of reason that enables you to infer one conclusion from another - are in your mind, and your commitment to them is not indebted to the way that external things affect you. You see why the premises are true and how the conclusions follow from them, and actively derive each step of the argument from its predecessor. When you reason in this fashion, you determine your own thoughts, and rather than being acted on by other things, you act.17 Both the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus offer some tex15
E3p1
16
EIIp40s2.
17
E4p28.
10
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
tual support for such a reading.18 But if reasoning is construed in this fashion it is not obvious how it will make us more active and less vulnerable to the power of external things. For example, I may know that A follows from B without being able or motivated to do anything about it. To see how reasoning constitutes our power to act, we first need to take account of Spinoza’s claim that our experiences of acting and being acted on are themselves affective. When an external thing acts on us it modifies our affects, so that the world as we encounter it contains individuals that are, for example, lovable, enviable or frightening. These things move us to respond to them by arousing our desires, and in the process render us passive.19 Rather than being affected by us, they subject us to their power, thus diminishing our freedom. When we reason, however, the situation changes. There is something satisfying or pleasurable about the process of coming to know more about ourselves and our environment which, as well as breeding intellectual conviction, motivates us by giving rise to animositas - a desire or determination to do what reason dictates.20 Together, our knowledge of what the world is like and the accompanying determination to live in the light of this knowledge constitute our power to reason, or as Spinoza also says, to understand. Reasoning or understanding is thus our characteristically human way of exercising our own power to persevere in our being, and since ‘a free man is led by the dictate of reason alone’ the more we reason the more freely we live.21 The process of becoming more active and free therefore has two inseparable aspects. On the one hand, it is a matter of extending our rational knowledge of the powers of individual things and their resulting patterns of interaction, a project that demands intellectual insight, together with the capacities to persevere in the face of intellectual obstacles and overcome prejudice. On the other hand, it is a matter of putting our knowledge into practice or extending our ability to live in accordance with it,22 and for this we need both the ingenuity to counteract passive affects and the resourcefulness to devise ways of life that protect us from arbitrary power. Since, as Spinoza points out, it is possible to be convinced without being attracted23, both aspects have to be worked at. Acting tests our theoretical and practical ingenuity, and only by cultivating both dimensions of our power can we succeed in enlarging our freedom. 18
For example, EIIp43-4; EIVp35; TTP p.13-14.
19
EIIIp3s.
20
EIIIp59.
21
E3p67.
22
E4p20.
23
EI App.
11
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
If liberating ourselves is a matter of generating wide-ranging ways of life that reflect our surest knowledge and within which we are secured against servitude, one of the first truths we need to grasp is that, as individuals, we have comparatively little power to become free. Although we correctly attribute power or right to individual human beings, the right we are referring to is so slight and fragile as to be almost a fiction.24 The only way to significantly increase our power is therefore to combine forces, and of all existing things, the most useful to us are, in Spinoza’s considered opinion, other human beings. ‘If two men unite and join forces, then together they have more power … than either alone’, and the greater the number of people who combine in this way, the more powerful they will be.25 At first glance, this conclusion may seem unpromising. People who live in communities often find themselves subject to factions or officials who reduce rather than extend their freedom, and shared ways of life can be oppressive and frustrating. Without denying the force of these objections, Spinoza responds in characteristically republican style. Although communities may fail to generate worthwhile forms of freedom, they are our only chance. The challenge is therefore to devise collective ways of life that do in fact enhance our individual liberty by protecting us from arbitrary power and enabling us to become increasingly active. Picking up this gauntlet, Spinoza outlines two types of association, one achievable, the other not. The first, an idealised community of the wise, is composed of members who possess an exceptional level of rational knowledge, together with the virtues that allow them to live as it dictates. Each recognises that the optimal way to maintain and extend their power is to ensure that others have no reason to disempower them, and also recognises that the way to realise this goal is to commit to a way of life that is equally advantageous to all. Each therefore exercises their power by treating others with unfailing justice, honesty, kindness and humanity.26 The result is a community in which no one exercises arbitrary power over anyone else. Instead, each individual is able to embrace the effects that others have on them as contributions to their own power or right and enhancements of their freedom. Together, these wise people constitute a community that qualifies as an individual in its own right, a body politic with a power to act that derives entirely from the power or understanding of its individual members, each of whom plays an equal part in upholding norms from which they 24
TP 2,13; TTP p. 197-8.
25
TP 2.13.
26
E4p37s1.
12
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
all benefit.27 Other than the commitment of each individual to living cooperatively the collective has no independent power to maintain itself, so that if they were to stop co-operating it would collapse. Nevertheless, out of their contributions arise powers that none of them individually possess, including the power to sustain a free way of life. Spinoza’s community of the wise provides a model of a perfect republic that, although it cannot be realised, can serve us as a guide. While the only comparable type of community that we can manage to create is a state, where co-operation is sustained not only by individual understanding but also by the coercive force of law, we can still aspire to the kind of freedom that a community of the wise exemplifies. However corrupt our states may be, Spinoza insists, their goal ‘is not to restrain men by fear and make them subject to someone else’s control, but on the contrary to free each person from fear so that he may live as securely as possible, i.e. so that he may retain to the utmost his natural right to live and exist without harm to himself or anyone else. The end of the state, I say, is [to ensure that men’s] mind and body should perform their function safely, that they should use their reason freely, and that they should not contend with one another in hatred, anger or deception, or deal unfairly with one another. So the end of the state is really freedom.’28 Like its ideal counterpart, a state aims to create circumstances in which individuals are able to live as co-operatively as possible in the light of their shared understanding by maintaining conditions in which, as republicans traditionally put it, the safety of the people is the supreme law.29 However, states have to contend with the fact that their members’ commitment to co-operation is limited.30 Since no one can be at the peak of understanding all the time, a state cannot simply trust to individuals, whether subjects or sovereigns, to sustain a free way of life.31 To be sure, the power of the community will be increased when its members are able to co-operate on the basis of their understanding32, but the state, as Spinoza sees it, is an arena of agonistic conflict in which individuals and groups engage in unending struggle to realise their own ends. The goal of politics is thus to maximise freedom in these circumstances by protecting individuals from their own short-sightedness. States and communities of the wise are therefore individuals of distinct kinds. Whereas the power of the latter derives 27
EIIp13 A2’’Def.
28
TTP p.252.
29
TP 7.5.
30
TTP p. 199.
31
TP2.8.
32
TTP p.198.
13
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
directly from that of its members, the power of a state is also constituted by various coercive mechanisms, of which the foremost is the law. There is of course a constant danger that neither states nor their subjects will do their job well. On one side, sovereigns and other officials may corrupt institutions for their private ends, and legal institutions may ossify to the point where they obstruct rather than enhance the pursuit of freedom. On the other side, the individual inhabitants of a state may disrupt it to such an extent that it is unable to protect them and may even fall apart. Spinoza suggests that the most effective antidotes to these problems lie in institutional design – in the creation of political systems that both constrain individuals to uphold conditions in which they are protected from arbitrary power, and allow them to use their understanding to live increasingly freely. In the model republics he sets out in the Tractatus Politicus these ends are largely achieved by means of political inclusion: the best way to protect a community from the state’s arbitrary power is to ensure that policy decisions are made by large and relatively diverse assemblies, in which many groups are represented and vested interests cancel each other out.33 Nevertheless, since the symbiosis between state and individual is always less than complete, so too is freedom. The threats to liberty that arise from within are never entirely or conclusively overcome, and the task of keeping them at bay requires continual ingenuity and attention. Discussing these problems, Spinoza sometimes speaks contemptuously of individuals who are bent on flouting the law and exercising arbitrary power over one another, and who, when they join forces, can destabilise the polity. If a state is to remain free, this vulgus, as Spinoza calls it, must be coerced into obedience; but in truth its deficiencies are ones that, to varying degrees, we all share. In the first place, we all suffer from the insufficiency of our knowledge. We often do not know enough about the causes and effects of our actions to be sure when we are acting and when we are not, when we are exercising our own power or right and when we are being acted on by external things. In addition, even when we have a theoretical grasp of what is going on, we may not know how to live by it. We may not know how to counteract the force of our passive affects or make our shared knowledge collectively compelling. People who lack both these capacities have comparatively little power to act. A state may coerce them into living as if they possessed more of it than they do, but when it adopts this strategy it makes a greater contribution to their freedom than they are able to do for themselves. There remains a sense in which, as individuals, they remain relatively unfree, and 33
See also TTP p.200-1.
14
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
a sense in which their political liberty outweighs its individual counterpart. The state, we could say, carries the burden of protecting them from arbitrary power in the face of their own passivity. Alongside this kind of case, it is also possible for our freedom to be limited by a gap between our knowledge and our capacity to act on it. Wise people confronted by a bad law may foresee the enslaving effects of existing legislation and be able to envisage more liberating legal arrangements. They know how the law could be improved, and may find themselves torn between conforming to the status quo on the grounds that it is part of a legal system on which their freedom depends, and resisting it because it is liable to result in the exercise of arbitrary power.34 Spinoza is not a principled opponent of political resistance, but he emphasises the risks that it runs; we know from experience that political revolutionaries often turn out to be unable to carry their ideas through, and are liable to destroy more freedom than they create. This cautious attitude is reflected in his diagnosis of the wise people’s dilemma. Although they recognise how it would in principle be possible to produce a more active way of life, they do not know how to put their knowledge into practice by making the laws they imagine into a political reality. Since the measure of their understanding is not what they can envisage in the way of a free life, but what they can do to realise it, their lack of practical know-how acts as a brake on their freedom. When the state coerces them into obeying the law, it protects its own freedom and may to some extent protects theirs. But the fact that neither is able to take advantage of their potentially liberating knowledge reveals the limits of their power. As these cases indicate, freedom as Spinoza conceives it is a practical political achievement. In order to realise it, states and individuals must be alive to the demands of understanding; but they must also appreciate the need to compensate for, and adapt to, the lack of it. To live freely we must learn to act together in a shifting social landscape, where the threat and reality of arbitrary power is never absent, and our power to combat it must continually take new forms. environmental politics Spinoza’s interest in political freedom is driven by his conviction that states and the individuals who live in them are mutually vulnerable. Nothing poses a greater threat to the power of a state than its own members, and nothing is better placed to reduce individuals to subjection than a state. At the same time, states and their members are mutually dependent. While their relations can be treacherous and destructive, their capacity to respond to one another gives them a tremendous combined potential to 34
TTP, ch.20, pp250-9.
15
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
create free ways of life. When Spinoza discusses the freedom of states, his thoughts are therefore mainly turned inward to their relations with the people who live in them. He is keenly aware that states also exist among other kinds of individuals whose powers outstrip their own and, as we have seen, is committed to the view that a state’s freedom can be affected by its relations with non-human things. But to make his analysis of freedom complete, he needs to address the implications of these issues and explain how states can protect themselves from the arbitrary power of the natural environment. A distinctive feature of many non-human natural things is that they are, as far as we know, unable to adapt to us. Although states may be able to negotiate with other states, and by this means produce yet more powerful individuals, there is no negotiating with the sea or the weather.35 Confronted by such forces, a state must either try to master them, or alter its own way of life so that they no longer diminish its power or right to live freely. Following the first strategy one might hold back the sea by building a dyke, and following the second one might acknowledge the power of the ocean by moving a city to higher ground. Spinoza has no truck with the providential claim that nature is adapted to human ends or made for our use.36 However, as a firm exponent of the view that individuals of all kinds have the right to do anything in their power, he endorses the first strategy without blenching. Humans, he argues, have the right to use other natural things for their own ends, and are under no obligation to hold back. For example, they can eat animals, and to think otherwise is to fall prey to unmanly compassion.37 But this encouragement to subdue the earth comes with a warning. Since we are prone to overestimate our power to act, our efforts to consolidate and extend it are liable to backfire. We need to learn to appreciate the extent of our vulnerability and proceed cautiously, taking account of the limits of our understanding, and of our physical weakness. In some cases, we may be able to subject natural things to our power without endangering our freedom; but where we cannot, the only way forward is to try to defeat the arbitrary powers of external things by adapting our way of life to the ineluctable forces of nature. Individually and collectively, we can either employ these two strategies to ensure as far as possible that we are not arbitrarily acted on, or else resign ourselves to a degree of servitude. It may seem that the second and more concessive strategy counsels nothing but resignation. To adapt ourselves to greenhouse gases, rising 35
EIVp37s1.
36
EI App.
37
EIVp37s1.
16
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
sea levels and so on, we shall after all have to give up the freedoms we care about and live in yurts. Spinoza’s approach does not rule out the possibility that this may turn out to be the most we can achieve; perhaps, in order to survive, we shall have to live in ways that now strike many of us as unacceptably impoverished. Nor does it rule out the possibility that communities who have to live like this will be comparatively miserable. Learning to counteract the negative passions that external things arouse in us by cultivating our active understanding of them and coming to view our relationship with nature in a different light is, he acknowledges, extremely difficult. Using the ancient forms of training that Foucault examines in The Care of the Self, some individuals may acquire the power to remain active and unruffled in the face of a vastly more restricted existence, but many people can be expected to suffer from regret, disappointment and grief, together with the resentment, fear and anger that these passions are in turn liable to cause.38 Living freely will consequently become harder for them, and the obstacles that communities have to deal with in order to sustain liberating ways of life will increase. Nevertheless, and despite these sombre possibilities, Spinoza is by no means an advocate of resignation. Our freedom, after all, consists in exercising our power to live in the light of the surest knowledge we possess, by cultivating our reason or understanding in all the ways we can, and to abandon this task is to succumb to the power of external things. We should therefore continue to subdue the earth as long as we can safely do so, and where we need to adapt to it, we should use our understanding to create alternative forms of living that we can enter into cheerfully. If the prospect of life in a yurt fills us with a sense of desolation, we must exercise all our power to devise alternatives that answer to our knowledge of our environment, but are also within our collective power to embrace. Since, there is no telos or limit to our efforts to persevere in our being, and since we do not yet know what the body can do, nothing in our own power gives us grounds for abandoning the attempt to live more freely. Because Spinoza ties human freedom so closely to our knowledge, theoretical and practical, his notion of a free way of life is a fluid one. The freedom of a community is constituted by what it knows and what it can do with its knowledge, and will therefore vary from case to case. For example (and here Spinoza uncritically echoes an early-modern European outlook), in a despotism such as the Ottoman Empire the way of life that sovereigns and subjects regard as free is premised on such a restricted level of understanding as to be nothing but servitude. By contrast (and here Spinoza’s tongue is somewhat in his cheek), the inhabitants of the city of Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin Books, 1986).
38
17
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
Amsterdam are able to live in a fashion that answers to their richer understanding and protects them from arbitrary power: ‘We happen to have the rare good fortune to live in a republic in which everyone is granted complete freedom of judgment, and is permitted to worship God according to his understanding, and in which nothing is thought to be dearer or sweeter than freedom’.39 As a community’s knowledge grows the demands that a free way of life imposes on it will alter, so that living freely requires a certain flexibility – an openness to the opportunities that new knowledge creates, the practical expertise to adapt to it, and a wary sensitivity to the vulnerabilities that it may generate. So as well as guarding its current understanding of freedom and protecting its existing liberties, an active community will foster its capacity to embrace changes to its way of life that flow from its evolving knowledge of its environment. Which adaptations it can make, and how successfully it can embrace them, will in turn reflect its existing understanding – its grasp of what is going on and its capacity to live accordingly. But the more it can resist ossification and rigidity, the better placed it will be to sustain its freedom. One may feel inclined to object that this conception of liberty as a moving target is too demanding. Even if we accept Spinoza’s claim that freedom consists in the absence of arbitrary power, and are willing to agree that, as our understanding of the arbitrary powers to which we are subject grows, the project of liberating ourselves changes shape, it may still seem that he places too much emphasis upon this single value. Living freely is important, but so is living comfortably within the bounds of tradition. Can we not allow that, despite being subject to the arbitrary power of various features of our environment, we have enough freedom to get along and do not need to stretch ourselves to increase it? What we feel about this plea may of course depend on where we are living and who we are, but Spinoza’s reply is intended to be comprehensive. As we have seen, existing things act or exercise their power in different ways, and humans are distinguished by the fact that their activity consists in understanding. This is our human way of persevering in our being, and it is only by exercising our power in this fashion that we live freely. To actively relinquish it, we would have to abandon the project of understanding on rational grounds, by finding compelling reasons to eschew further investigation of the world, giving up the attempt to live in the light of our knowledge, or both. But the first possibility is incoherent, and as long as we continue to grasp what the world is like, so too is the second; we shall want to live as our surest knowledge dictates. It is of course possible for us to passively relinquish our freedom by becoming subject to the arbitrary power of other things. For example, the threats 39
TTP p.6.
18
susan james
freedom and nature: a spinozist invitation
draft paper
posed by our environment may make us so fearful that we lose all hope of finding a solution to them and give up attempting to do so. In this case, however, we are not exercising our own power. Our debilitating passions and the attitudes associated with them reflect the manner in which we are being acted on by external things, and mark a diminution of our active power to understand. To abandon the project of persevering in our being by extending our understanding would therefore be to give up being what we are, and this is not within our power. We are as it were condemned to live as freely as we can, by collectively adjusting ourselves not only to one another, but to our natural environment as well. Rather than interpreting our current situation as one where many existing freedoms are threatened, Spinoza urges us to see that we are already in a condition of servitude. Our subjection to the arbitrary power of environmental forces, combined with our inability to overcome this power by counterforce of adaptation, is a significant infringement of our liberty. Rather than worrying about how to keep such freedoms as we have, we need to ask ourselves how, in the light of our growing knowledge, we are going to become more free. How are we going to put our knowledge into practice and generate ways of life that will enhance our liberty by reducing our vulnerability to arbitrary environmental powers? The threat we face is therefore not that we may have to abandon our current way of life for one that is not so free. The depletion of our liberty is already under way, and we are bound to resist it as far as we can. Our task is to make our resistance effective, by engaging with nature in a fashion that manifests our understanding, and sustains our power to live freely.
19
the aristotelian society
president: Susan James (Birkbeck) president-elect: Tim Crane (Cambridge) honorary director: Rory Madden (UCL) editor: Matthew Soteriou (Warwick) lines of thought series editor: Scott Sturgeon (Oxford) executive committee: Corine Besson (Sussex) / Kimberley Brownlee (Warwick) Rowan Cruft (Stirling) / Alison Hills (Oxford) / Adrian Moore (Oxford) / Samir Okasha (Bristol) / Robert Stern (Sheffield) managing editor: Hannah Carnegy (UCL) assistant editor: David Harris graphic & web designer: Mark Cortes Favis administrator: Josephine Salverda (UCL)
w w w. a r i s t o t e l i a n s o c i e t y. o r g . u k