Browsing by Subject "Spinoza"

Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before

Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize

bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of

activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition

of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith,

devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across

confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal,

emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans

and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency

and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John

Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis

of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate

developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's

configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives

towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza

and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and

determinism.

I investigate how Baruch de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche conceive of difference as bearing a distinctive normative significance for modern social and political life. Both Spinoza and Nietzsche ascribe special importance to the difference embodied by exceptional individuals, and to the attitudes towards difference that such individuals avow when they interact or cooperate with other individuals in society. I then reanimate this neglected aspect of their writings in my own constructive proposal. In particular, I argue that by inhabiting and harnessing our differences, we can realise new yet unknown possibilities that make for deep and meaningful social change.

According to Spinoza, exceptional individuals--namely, free men or those who live solely by the guidance of reason--avow the attitude of generosity towards individuals they engage. That is to say, the free man actively seeks to establish close friendships with other individuals in society, so that he may increase their power of acting through direct and dynamic interactions. In such interactions, the free man initiates others to the life of reason by getting them to directly experience what it is like to exercise their own powers of thinking, feeling, and acting. Nietzsche criticises Spinoza for diluting the depth and richness of human experience with the formulas and categories of logic, reason, or conscious thought. For instance, Spinoza credits his own affirmative stance towards all things to logical necessity, thus eliding what Nietzsche takes joyful affirmation to involve, namely, experiencing every moment of one's own existence "as good, as valuable, with pleasure." For Nietzsche, we modern individuals have come to develop ways of thinking and feeling that preclude us from harnessing our own lived experiences, and thus the expanse of difference between any one self and another. We have instead become inclined to affects like envy, pity, vanity, or ressentiment, whereby we gain our sense of well-being or power by placing ourselves on par with the persons with whom we associate. To these affects, he contrasts the pathos of distance, in which the lure or influence of one's value perspectives derives from the depth of one's immersion in one's own lived experiences and from the expanse of the difference between oneself and others. Nietzsche nonetheless believes that the pathos of distance can only thrive in an aristocratic social order, with its living hierarchy of rank and value distinctions.

I argue that we need not follow Nietzsche in this. I develop an alternative account of the pathos of distance as an affect whereby the difference one embodies engenders neither opposition nor exclusion, but rather triggers the drive for self-overcoming in those who are receptive to it. On my account, exceptional individuals cultivate and embody a way of life that wields a nourishing and life-transfiguring effect on other individuals, albeit only to the extent that they also value one another's singularities or differences. Exceptional individuals still play a distinctive role in society but not through "living structures of domination."

To illustrate this account, I present and analyse a specific kind of social change, in which people who are disadvantaged and oppressed harness their own lived experiences, with the help of exceptional individuals, to drive deep and creative forms of social change. I call this `organic social change.' Through this analysis, I inaugurate an attitude towards difference that I call `inhabiting difference.' In relation to our own specificity, we inhabit our own difference when we harness the hitherto latent powers and inchoate possibilities that our own lived experiences afford. In relation to the specificity of others, we inhabit their difference to the extent that we avow an attitude of open and abiding patience towards the singularity of their lived experiences, and cultivate direct and dynamic relationships in which they may harness powers and possibilities out of their own lived experiences. To establish the distinctive importance of inhabiting difference, I show how it facilitates empowering modes of social cooperation, and thus helps us realise new yet unknown social and political possibilities.

While both intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva) and reason (ratio) are adequate ways of knowing for Spinoza, they are not equal. "The greatest virtue of the mind" and "the greatest human perfection" consist in understanding things by intuitive knowledge, which Spinoza regards as superior to reason. Understanding why on Spinoza's account intuition is superior to reason is crucial for understanding his epistemological and ethical theories. Yet, the nature of this superiority has been the subject of some controversy due to Spinoza's parsimonious treatment of the distinction between reason and intuitive knowledge in the Ethics. In my dissertation, I explore this fundamental but relatively unexplored issue in Spinoza scholarship by investigating the nature of this distinction and its ethical implications. I suggest that these two kinds of adequate knowledge differ not only in terms of their method, but also with respect to their representative content. More specifically, I hold that unlike reason, which is a universal knowledge, intuitive knowledge descends to a level of particularity, including an adequate knowledge of one's own essence as it follows directly from God, which represents a superior form of self-knowledge. Attaining this superior self-knowledge makes intuitive knowledge the culmination of not only understanding but also happiness. Since, for Spinoza, there is an intrinsic relationship between the pursuit of knowledge and how we live our lives, I argue that these two ways of knowing are at the same time two ways of living.

Gilles Deleuze's definition of the other as the expression of a possible world has introduced a novel ontological organization into philosophy. It makes possible the conception of a singular being which may be expressed by a potentially infinite number of possible worlds. This, in turn, has lead Deleuze to propound the idea of "a life," immanent and impersonal but singularly determinate, as different from the universe of subjects, objects, and the transcendence that appears as their concomitant. This study resituates Wallace Stevens in the ontological universe of "a life" as opposed to the common practice of associating him with the questions of subject, object, and transcendence. It observes that Stevens's poetry primarily invests the field of the other, which functions as the structure of the perceptible. The result is a poetry predominated by a yearning for the immanence of "a life," an outside, that escapes the limits of the subject and is "disappointed" with the function of transcendence, rather than being explained by them. The study argues that Stevens's poetry can be read as a dramatization, itself regulated by an affective charge, of the passion for an outside, which goes beyond the framework of subjectivity and "feels" the inhuman stirring beneath the human.