Spinoza: Superior Empiricist

Why are Spinoza’s common notions interesting or relevant to contemporary political theory? There have been a number of excellent works that treat of the fundamental importance of the imagination as far as political organisation is concerned. I am thinking in particular of Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics (and a number of his essays), Lloyd and Gatens’ Collective Imaginings and of course Negri’s The Savage Anomaly. The necessity of engaging with the intersection of Spinoza’s theory of imagination and politics would be sufficiently justified for no other reason than that most people, most of the time, in their interactions,

These two quotations need a lot of unpacking to dispel the apparent contradiction. The crucial word, I will argue, that dispels the apparent contradiction is: ‘solely’.

So what is the knowledge of the first kind? [...] I launch myself [into the water], I splash about as one says. Why does one want to say ‘splash about’? Splashing about is very simple. Splashing about, this precise phrase indicates so that one sees clearly, that it’s all a matter of external relations: sometimes the wave slaps me and sometimes it carries me; these are the effects of a shock. [...]. Then sometimes I laugh and sometimes I snivel, as a result of what the wave does to me, makes me laugh or knocks me senseless. I’m affected passionately: “Ha mum, the wave fought me!” A cry that we will not stop having so long as we remain in the first kind of knowledge.

This is why Macherey sees Spinoza more as a philosopher of alienation than expression – for Macherey passions are alien to our power of activity, for Deleuze they involve, though to the lowest degree possible, that power. So is Macherey right? The only response using his own fine phrase, is that “if we look carefully at what Spinoza says, this seems very doubtful. On this particularly difficult question, I would claim rather bluntly” that Macherey is wrong and that I have in fact already dealt with this question. To remind you: “The essence of the mind is constituted by adequate and inadequate ideas” [IIIP9Pr] that is by common notions and passions, and man’s essence is his conatus. As a consequence we may also reject Macherey’s claim about one of the links between Spinoza and Marx, that of alienation. There is no alienation: Spinoza the anti-humanist.

The very term random should alert us to the likelihood of this being a serious misreading of what Spinoza means by a passion. Passions are contingent, but this is a purely epistemological (though necessary) definition: Spinoza the metaphysical determinist. “Inadequate and confused ideas follow by the same necessity as adequate, or clear and distinct ideas” (IIP36). There is then, no reason to believe that passions are random. Are they, however, still too unstable to do the work of preparing the way for our achieving common notions?

The opposition of actions and passions should not conceal the other opposition that constitutes the second principle of Spinozism: that of joyful passive affections and sad passive affections. One increases our power, the other diminishes it. We come closer to our power of action insofar as we are affected by joy. The ethical question falls then, in Spinoza, into two parts: How can we come to produce active affections?But first of all: How can we come to experience a maximum of joyful passions?

I realise that as it stands this is merely suggestive, but I think that it may well be a way of concretising the notion of joyful passion in a way that makes Macherey’s worries superfluous. Finally, on this reading of the common notions as knowing-how rather than knowing-that, reason, rather than being abstractive or facultative, becomes thoroughly embodied and embedded. Unfortunately it would take a paper twice as long as this one to go into the full ramifications for trying to tie Deleuze and the Churchlands together to articulate a clear understanding of the move from imagination to reason.

Some topics in this essay:
Deleuze Macherey, Joyful Passions, IIIP3 IIIP7, IV Ethics, Lloyd Gatens, Fluctuatio Animi, Deleuze Churchlands, Ethics Spinoza, Repetition Deleuze, Likewise Spinoza, common notions, joyful passions, inadequate ideas, adequate ideas, staying afloat, common notion, existence joyful passions, macherey 1996, joyful passion, existence joyful, essence mind, solely terms own, formation common notions, form common notions, mind constituted adequate,