Baruch Spinoza

Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677), one of the most important figures in early modern philosophy after Descartes, was born into a middle-class family in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community. In 1656, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community for unspecified “monstrous deeds” and “abominable blasphemies”, and his family and friends were commanded to break off all relations with him. Around 1659, he gravitated towards Leiden, where he studied at the university, and in 1661-63 he settled in the suburb of Rijnsburg, where he began to work as a lens grinder, also making telescopes and microscopes, while composing his first (unpublished) philosophical works, the Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-Being and the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. After moving to The Hague in 1663, he published his first book, The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, and began work on what was to become his major work, the Ethics. In 1670, he anonymously published the explosive Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, a wide-ranging critique of religious superstition, conducted through detailed biblical criticism, which was soon banned and led to his notoriety across Europe.

The Ethics was published posthumously in 1677 and is divided into five parts. Part One concerns ontology (theory of substance). Starting from the idea that a substance is by definition unlimited, Spinoza quickly deduces that there is only one true substance, God or Nature (Deus sive natura), which expresses itself in infinite attributes. We only know two of these attributes, thought and extension, but they are univocal in nature, regardless of whether they are considered as belonging to God, or as experienced by finite beings such as ourselves. In turn, these attributes express themselves in infinite ‘modifications’ or ‘modes’. The world is not different from God, but the immanent expression of God. The conclusion of Part One is that “Whatever exists expresses in a certain and determinate way the power of God” (E I P36). In his doctoral thesis, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (1968, translated as Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza), Deleuze will elaborate at length on the implications of Spinoza’s ontology of power: every human being’s power is “part of the infinite power of God” (E 4 P4), but “the part turns out to be irreducible, an original degree of power distinct from all the others” (Expressionism, 91-92). This conception forms the basis for Spinoza’s development of theories of natural right (Expressionism, 257-265).

Part Two of the Ethics concerns epistemology (theory of ideas). Spinoza defends a parallelism between thought and extension: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (E 2 P7).

Parts Three to Five present a theory of human emotion (or affect) that serves to ground an ethics in the narrower sense, a political anthropology, and a practical theory of how to control the emotions so as to attain ‘beatitude’. What increases the body’s power of action also increases the mind’s power of thinking; conversely, what diminishes the body’s power of action diminishes the mind’s power of thinking (E III P11). The former involves a passage to a greater perfection, and Spinoza calls this joy; the latter involves a passage to a lesser perfection, and Spinoza calls this sadness. Love is “joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause”; hate is “sadness with the accompanying idea of an external cause” (E III P13, Scholium). This simple polarity forms the basis for an entire ethics and is the central source for Deleuze’s own ethical thought; he discovers a similar basic polarity in Nietzsche. The framework allows for a powerful psychological analysis of the negative affects (such as resentment and guilt) that tend to enslave human thought. Ethics is correspondingly distinguished from morality, which is dominated by judgment and the negative affects. In an interview from 1988, Deleuze observed that his early work “all tended toward the great Spinoza-Nietzsche equation” (Negotiations, 135). The ultimate aim is to rediscover that “original degree of power” that experience and negative emotion have conspired to hide from us.

Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza is a close reading of Spinoza which nevertheless contains a number of innovations. Spinoza is placed in relation to Neoplatonic philosophies of emanation and Renaissance philosophies of ‘explication’ (Nicholas de Cusa and Giordano Bruno). Deleuze claims that these philosophies also involve seeing the world as the expression of God (or the One), but that Spinozist immanence is the inescapable terminus of these lines of thought. Deleuze also introduces the concept of intensity into Spinoza’s thought in order to elaborate on the idea of essential ‘degrees of power’.

However, Spinoza’s conception of substance is criticised in Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze moves to a post-Kantian framework of temporal synthesis. This discrepancy between Spinozist and Kantian frameworks in Deleuze’s thought has become one of the central puzzles for Deleuze scholarship.

The monumental 1980 lecture course ‘Spinoza and the Velocities of Thought’, recently translated here, includes a later attempt to confront this apparent discrepancy. Deleuze contends that the post-Kantian concern with time, temporality and finitude was simply “unknown” in the 17^th century. The resurgence of notions of infinity in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century mathematics, however, provides the theoretical conditions for a new return to Spinoza (Session 10, Part 3). [Edited: C Kerslake, 2024]