III Political Ethics

HAD he lived longer it would have dawned perhaps even on the German historians that Spinoza’s basic interest was not in metaphysics so much as in political ethics. The Ethics, because it is the most sustained flight of reasoning in philosophy, has gathered round it all the associations that throng about the name of Spinoza, so that one is apt to think of him in terms of a mystical “pantheism” rather than of coördinative intelligence, democracy, and free thought.¹ Höffding considers it a defect in Spinoza’s philosophy that it takes so little notice of epistemology: but should we not be grateful for that? Here are men suffering, said Spinoza, here are men enslaved by passions and prelates and kings; surely till these things are dealt with we have no time for epistemological delicacies. Instead of increasing the world’s store of learned ignorance by writing tomes on the possibility of a subject knowing an object, Spinoza thought it better to give himself to the task of helping to keep alive in an age of tyrannical reaction the Renaissance doctrine of popular sovereignty. Instead of puzzling himself and others about epistemology he pondered the problem of stimulating the growth of intelligence and evolving a rational ethic. He thought that philosophy was something more than a chess-game for professors.

There is no need to spend time and space here on what for Spinoza, as for Socrates and Plato, was the problem of problems,—how human reason could be developed to a point where it might replace supernatural sanctions for social conduct and provide the medium of social reconstruction. One point, however, may be profitably emphasized.

A careless reading of the Ethics may lead to the belief that Spinoza bases his philosophy on a naïve opposition of reason to passion. It is not so. “A desire cannot be restrained or removed,” says Spinoza, “except by an opposite and stronger desire.”² Reason is not dictator to desire, it is a relation among desires,—that relation which arises when experience has hammered impulses into coördination. An impulse, passion or emotion is by itself “a confused idea,” a blurred picture of the thing that is indeed desired. Thought and impulse are not two kinds of mental process: thought is impulse clarified by experience, impulse is thought in chaos.