VII Virtue as Power

FREEDOM of expression is the corner-stone of Spinoza’s politics; the postulate without which he refuses to proceed. But Spinoza does not have to be told that this question of free speech precipitates him into the larger problems of “the individual vs. the state”; he knows that that problem is the very raison d’être of political philosophy; he knows that indeed the problem goes to the core of philosophy, and finds its source and crux in the complex socio-egoistical make-up of the individual man.

The “God-intoxicated” Spinoza is quite sober and disillusioned about the social possibilities of altruism. “It is a universal law of human nature that no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.”¹ “This is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.”² This confident reduction of human conduct to self-reference does not for Spinoza involve any condemnation: “reason, since it asks for nothing that is opposed to nature, demands that every person should ... seek his own profit.”³ Observe, reason demands this; this same self-seeking is the most valuable and necessary item in the composition of man. Spinoza, as said, goes so far as to identify this self-seeking with virtue: “to act absolutely in conformity with virtue is, in us, nothing but to act, live, and preserve our being (these three have the same meaning) as reason directs, from the ground of seeking our own profit.”⁴ This is a brave rejection of self-renunciation and asceticism by one whose nature, so far as we can judge it now, inclined him very strongly in the direction of these “virtues.” What we have to do, says Spinoza, is not to deny the self, but to broaden it; here again, of course, intelligence is the mother of morals. Progress lies not in self-reduction but in self-expansion. Progress is increase in virtue, but “by virtue and power I understand the same thing”;⁵ progress is an increase in the ability of men to achieve their ends. It is part of our mental confectionery to define progress in terms of our own ends; a nation is “backward” or “forward” according as it moves towards or away from our own ideals. But that, says Spinoza, is naïve nonsense; a nation is progressive or backward according as its citizens are or are not developing greater power to realize their own purposes. That is a doctrine that may have “dangerous” implications, but intelligence will face the implications and the facts, ready not to suppress them but to turn them to account.

It was the passion for power that led to the first social groupings and developed the social instincts. Our varied sympathies, our parental and filial impulses, our heroisms and generosities, all go back to social habits born of individual needs. “Since fear of solitude exists in all men, because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself and procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men by nature tend towards social organization.”⁶ “Let satirists scoff at human affairs as much as they please, let theologians denounce them, and let the melancholy, despising men and admiring brutes, praise as much as they can a life rude and without refinement,—men will nevertheless find out that by mutual help they can much more easily procure the things they need, and that it is only by their united strength that they can avoid the dangers which everywhere threaten them.”⁷ Nihil homine homini utilius. Men discover that they are useful to one another, and that mutual profit from social organization increases as intelligence grows. In a “state of nature”—that is, before social organization—each man has a “natural right” to do all that he is strong enough to do; in society he yields part of this sovereignty to the communal organization, because he finds that this concession, universalized, increases his strength. The fear of solitude, and not any positive love of fellowship, is the prime force in the origin of society. Man does not join in social organization because he has social instincts; he develops such instincts as the result of joining in such organization.