Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding

By Peter Winch and David Cockburn

This volume unites Peter Winch’s previously unpublished work on Baruch de Spinoza. The primary source for the text is a series of seminars on Spinoza that Winch gave, first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then at King’s College London in 1989. What emerges is an original interpretation of Spinoza’s work that demonstrates his continued relevance to contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and establishes connections to other philosophers - not only Spinoza’s predecessors such as René Descartes, but also important 20th Century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. Alongside Winch's lectures, the volume contains an interpretive essay by David Cockburn, and an introduction by the editors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785275456

Book preview

Peter Winch’s depth as a philosopher comes out in the depth of his engagement with Spinoza. Spinoza’s ethical concerns resonated with Winch’s own; and his lectures are wonderfully expressive of how he saw philosophy itself. Winch’s discussions of the complex relation between Descartes’s philosophy and that of Spinoza are among the most valuable features of this fine book.

– Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia

This volume deserves to be celebrated at several levels. It collects previously unpublished work on Baruch Spinoza by Peter Winch, one of the most important British philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. It offers an original interpretation of Spinoza, highlighting the enduring significance of Spinoza for current debates in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. It places Spinoza’s thought in philosophical conversation not only with predecessors such as René Descartes, but also with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil, whose thought was studied in depth by Winch in groundbreaking contributions.

– Maria Rosa Antognazza, Professor of Philosophy, King’s College London

Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein publishes new and classic works on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophy. This book series aims to bring Wittgenstein’s thought into the mainstream by highlighting its relevance to twenty-first-century concerns. Titles include original monographs, themed edited volumes, forgotten classics, biographical works and books intended to introduce Wittgenstein to the general public. The series is published in association with the British Wittgenstein Society.

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein sets out to put in place whatever measures may emerge as necessary in order to carry out the editorial selection process purely on merit and to counter bias on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and other characteristics protected by law. These measures include subscribing to the British Philosophical Association/Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) Good Practice Scheme.

Series Editor

Constantine Sandis – University of Hertfordshire, UK

Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding

by Peter Winch

Edited by

Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © By Peter Winch; Edited by Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-543-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-543-7 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Editors’ Introduction

Winch, Spinoza and the Human Body, by David Cockburn

Note on the Text

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Method and Judgement

Chapter 2. Substance and Attributes

Chapter 3. Negation, Limitation and Modes

Chapter 4. Mind and Body

Chapter 5. The Emotions, Good and Evil

Chapter 6. The Life of Reason

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

A number of people have helped with this project. David Cockburn generously lent us the audiotapes of Winch’s Swansea seminars and gave us permission to use them. He has also provided encouragement as well as helpful and detailed feedback on multiple drafts of the manuscript. Drew Johnson helped with the laborious process of transcribing the audio recordings of the seminars. He also helped search through the Peter Winch archives at King’s College London for relevant supplementary texts. We are grateful to the King’s College London archives for permission to use the Peter Winch archival material for background research. Among others who have provided useful feedback and support, we would like to mention Raimond Gaita, Lars Hertzberg, Lynette Reid and Christopher Winch. We are grateful to the Austrian Science Fund FWF (project P 29072 ‘Spinoza on the Concept of the Human Life Form’, led by Professor Ursula Renz) for providing financial support for Sarah Tropper. Michael Campbell’s work was supported by the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value (registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425), which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic (OP VVV/OP RDE). In addition, we would like to thank Constantine Sandis, Megan Greiving and the staff at Anthem Press for their enthusiasm for this project and their support.

Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper

Editors’ Introduction

Michael Campbell and Sarah Tropper

Peter Winch was a British philosopher known for his work in the philosophy of social science and ethics, as well as for his interpretations of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil. But it is less well known that, throughout his career, Winch also engaged in various ways with Spinoza’s philosophy. He published two articles on Spinoza’s thought, one a critical notice of Jonathan Bennett’s book, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics,¹ the other a discussion of the relation between mind and body in the Ethics.² Alongside this, in his other work Winch referred to Spinoza’s views, either in passing or as a foil, when discussing topics such as the nature of religious belief and the relationship between metaphysics and ethics.³

Winch’s interpretation of Spinoza developed out of a close reading of the Ethics and De Emendatione, and he gave two sets of seminars on them; first at the University of Swansea in 1982 and then again at King’s College London in 1989. Despite the progress in Spinoza scholarship made since then, Winch’s reading remains worthy of consideration due to its idiosyncrasies both of style and content. His aim is not only to introduce his audience to Spinoza’s thought but also to encourage them to engage with this difficult material on their own terms. Winch finds three issues to be central to Spinoza’s philosophical concerns, namely, the position of man in relation to the universe; the inseparability of the theoretical and practical; and the relation of judgement, ideas and the world. This focus yields an engaging interpretation of Spinoza’s work, one that takes the ethical and metaphysical aspects of the Ethics to be inseparable, and which unifies them under the concept of the understanding. Winch expresses this conviction, in characteristically laconic fashion, at the beginning of the seminars:

Generalising, we can say that Spinoza’s enquiry has ethical, metaphysical and epistemological aspects, all internally related. Ethics presupposes both metaphysics and epistemology; the former, because the good life for men is something that requires understanding and the latter, because the nature of man and of the world and of the relation between them has to be understood. And metaphysics presupposes epistemology because we have to enquire what sort of understanding man is capable of and what sort of understanding it is possible to have of these particular kinds of questions. But epistemology presupposes metaphysics too, since understanding is itself a relation of man to the world and to himself, and we need to grasp the nature of the terms of this relation.⁴

For Winch’s Spinoza, the characteristic mark of the human condition is that of vacillation. We are tossed one way and then another by our emotions, thereby passing judgements on things in a piecemeal fashion and without any surety that these evaluations can be finally justified by reference to a single, coherent outlook. Both in terms of what happens to us and how we react to it, we are at the mercy of forces that we do not understand. We call some things good and others evil as our inclination and attention dictates; we judge, condemn, blame, praise, extol, envy and admire, at different times and to varying degrees. Sometimes aware of the arbitrariness in this process we belatedly use reason to try to bring our scattershot evaluations under control. We appeal to this or that authority to justify ourselves, or we formulate some theory which we identify as our ‘moral outlook’, in the hope that by so doing we will bring stability, coherence and consistency to the results of our passing judgements. But a person’s commitment to any such outlook is only as stable as the emotional life which undergirds it, and her conformity to it is only as close as her ability to draw out the consequences of the doctrine in her life. We rationalise away some wrongdoings and fixate on others. We are selective about whom we forgive and how readily we do so. We do not hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold others. In these and other ways we show that our evaluations are, despite our best efforts, unstable and inconsistent. The reason for this, Spinoza thinks, is that in evaluating things as good or bad we think that we are speaking objectively, being guided by the impersonal faculty of reason, but are in fact simply evaluating things in relation to our own interests. The upshot of refusing to draw out the connection between evaluative judgement and the interests of the judger is confusion, at once ethical and metaphysical, since ‘to be confused about the nature of good and evil is to be confused about one’s own nature and about the nature of one’s relation to the rest of the world.’⁵

Accordingly, the first step in attaining a clear understanding of the world is to realise that good and evil as we ordinarily ascribe them to things are impediments to seeing things objectively. To judge something evil is to say, inter alia, that things could have been better. But, according to Spinoza, everything follows from something else, and ultimately from God’s nature, by necessity. Accordingly, no sense can be attached to the ‘could’ in ‘could have been better’. As a consequence, necessity and contingency do not form a pair; ‘necessity’ describes the ultimate metaphysical relation holding between particulars, whereas ‘contingency’ describes a lack of understanding of the relations between particulars which arises from the limitedness of an individual’s perspective.

This holds also for human nature. Our tendency to judge people or deeds as good or evil stands in the way of our understanding them, as these judgements occasion reactions in us which incorrectly attribute free agency to some individual, when in fact all changes are nothing other than the unfolding of God’s nature. Beliefs in chance or in free agency distort our perception by presenting objects to us not as they are, but rather in the light of an imagined cluster of possibilities, that is, in the light of how we imagine they might otherwise be or become. Since that nimbus of possibilities is determined by our imagination, it is an expression of a certain inadequacy in our ideas. Being able to see things clearly and adapt one’s emotional life accordingly, that is, to achieve a different perspective on the turmoils in which the world engulfs us, would be to achieve ‘blessedness’.

However, in order to achieve such a state it is not sufficient to assent to a general doctrine of determinism. According to Winch, the reasons for this are to be found in Spinoza’s conception of language and thought, since making a genuine judgement, which is equivalent to having an idea, requires more than simply assenting to a certain combination of words. Rather, a judgement or an idea essentially involves commitment, and this requires it be in harmony with the larger patterns of judgements (and thereby also of actions and responses) which characterise the life of the judging subject. In this way, metaphysical reflection has an ethical dimension, in the sense that general doctrines, if they are genuinely grasped, are also applied to the circumstances of one’s life. As Winch puts it, ‘One frees oneself from bondage not through abstract knowledge of good and evil, but through coming to understand the concrete particularities of one’s situation, one’s relation to the environment.’⁶

The notion of ‘the particularities of one’s situation’ bears special emphasis here. Confused ideas are the result of limitations in our necessarily perspectival view of the world. The route to blessedness goes through the progressive refinement of ideas towards greater adequacy, a refinement which goes hand in hand with an alteration of one’s conception of self; a diminution in the sense of importance ascribed to the particular bodily existent that is one’s body, and the replacement of a strict self/other distinction with a view of nature as an unbounded nexus of causes.

As already indicated, central to Winch’s reading of Spinoza is the latter’s account of what constitute genuine ideas. Winch takes the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (1662) as preparing the ground for the later Ethics (started in the 1660s, prepared by Spinoza for publication in 1674, but published only posthumously in 1677), and finds in them a conception of ideas according to which every genuine idea contains some truth within it. Putting it roughly, an idea is a judgement, and as such makes a truth claim about a certain thing’s being some way or another. Thus, not every kind of combination of a subject and a predicate qualifies as an idea. Ideas presuppose a genuine connection between subject and predicate, and therefore cannot be formed at will. To put it another way, judgements are identifiable as the judgements that they are by virtue of their content, that which they are about. Accordingly, even a false judgement enjoys a degree of success, for in making it one manages to say something meaningful. Therefore, for Spinoza, truth and falsity are not an all or nothing affair; there are grains of truth even in the most egregiously incorrect judgements. Falsity is a privation and so requires a relation to truth:

Only in relation to truth that there could be such a thing as falsity. I can be wrong about something if I’m right about something else, but I can’t be wrong about everything. What would I be wrong ‘about’? Moreover, I don’t need some general criterion by which to distinguish truth and falsity. ‘Truth is the standard both of itself and of the false.’ (EIIp43s, C 1:479) If I can think at all, there must be some truth in what I think and I must use this in order to sift out truth and falsity in the rest of what I think.⁷

This conception of judgement secures the assumption that the mere exercise of the capacity to formulate judgements guarantees the existence of a ‘world’, of something beyond the particular judgement, which forms its subject matter. On Winch’s reading, the framework of substance, attributes and modes in the Ethics is therefore not designed to be an external guarantor of the possibility of true ideas, that is, of a distinct realm of independent objects to which our ideas correspond if they are true. Rather, the world is a presupposition for our having any ideas at all. Therefore, substance, attributes and modes as defined by Spinoza in the first book of the Ethics are to be treated as explications or preconditions of the possibility of ideas and as indications of their underlying structure. Spinoza’s definitions and axioms are thus not to be evaluated independently for their truth or plausibility (any more than Euclid’s axioms should be), but are justified if (and only if) they form an integral part of a coherent explication of the relation between thought and reality. Putting it another way, Winch takes the main driving force and presupposition in Spinoza’s reasoning to be a demonstration of the ultimate intelligibility of the world, which provides at the same time the explanation of our ability to speak meaningfully about it.

In a sense, Winch thereby turns the order of reasoning presented in the Ethics around and utilises his understanding of Spinoza’s conception of ‘ideas’ as judgements in Part II in order to shed light on the book’s opening definitions. According to this approach, we have – and so are entitled to start with – a given idea. As an idea, it is a judgement and hence a genuine connection of a subject with a predicate, as opposed to the mere putting together of words or images. Though such an idea might be inadequate in a number of respects and to a great degree, its being an idea of a world cannot be called into question – for the result of calling into question all given ideas would be to call into question even the idea that our ideas can all be called into question. Moreover, and more importantly, since Spinoza denies the metaphysical possibility of the world’s having been otherwise than it is, ‘a world’ must be ‘the world’. Thus, the world is a presupposition for having any ideas at all. Genuine thinking is always thinking about the world and therefore also always constrained by the world.

Because there is such a close relation between ideas and their objects, an investigation into the structure inherent in thought reveals at the same time the structure the world has. As much as our ideas belong to a system of ideas, so do their objects, bodies, belong to a physical system. For this reason, the object of the system of ideas is nothing but the physical system of cause and effect. According to Winch, this is what Spinoza tried to capture in the claim that both extension and thought are attributes of the same substance. Ideas and their physical objects belong to the same world and any genuine investigation into ideas or into bodies will form an aspect of a greater explanation in which the relations of ideas and objects are unified. Therefore, different investigations into the nature of the world form a systematic whole, and to have a full understanding of this nature would also entail grasping how these different investigations can and do form such a systematic connection. And so, in the opening definitions of the Ethics, where we find the definition of substance as conceived through itself and modes as conceived through something else, ‘we are exploring the structure of thinking. And this is, at the same time […] an exploration of the structure of reality’.⁸

Winch tries to bring out some of the distinctive features of Spinoza’s system by reading them as a critique of Descartes’s conception of the relation between the world and ideas concerning it. He illustrates this by contrasting Spinoza’s treatment of method in De Emendatione with the radical skeptical doubt which drives the argument in the first chapters of the Meditations. In the latter, radical or methodological doubt is supposed to lead to the conclusion that, in a first instance, only the cogito, that is, that I myself exist and am a thinking thing, can be known with absolute certainty. The process of sceptical doubt requires that we remove our assent from every idea whose truth or accuracy has not been proven beyond all doubt. Virtually all ideas fail this test, given the unreliability of sense perception, the possibility of mistaking dreaming and being awake and, ultimately, the possibility of an evil genius constantly deceiving us. Indeed, so long as God is not introduced as an external guarantor for the truth of ideas, there is only one thought which is absolutely immune from sceptical doubt, namely that I am a thing that doubts, asserts, wills and senses – that is, a thinking thing.

As Winch emphasizes, in De Emendatione Spinoza argues that Cartesian doubt is a self-defeating process, because the state in which the sceptic would be left is unrecognisable as one of meaningful doubting. Apart from the fact that doubting is just an expression of insufficient knowledge rather than a method that can be applied on any occasion and to any idea simply through an act of will, if we are willing to use the concept of doubting without constraint we will succeed only in undermining intelligibility across the board, thus pulling the rug out from under our own feet:

On Spinoza’s argument, if Descartes’s recipe for his hyperbolical doubt is really taken seriously, it won’t even yield the cogito – that supposed paradigm of clearness and distinctness. It won’t yield that because it will equally undermine confidence in the intelligibility of our attempts to express the cogito. On Descartes’s argument we couldn’t even be sure we were expressing anything intelligible when we made those sounds.⁹

The problem with Descartes’s method, therefore, is not merely that sceptical doubt as a method misunderstands the nature of doubt, but also that its ultimate result would be to undermine thought entirely. Since this is paradoxical, it shows that there must be some problem in the way that Descartes is conceiving of the process of doubting – and since to doubt is to suspend denial or assent regarding the truth or falsity of a particular idea, that problem must ultimately be located somewhere in the underlying structure of ideas, truth and acts of giving or withholding assent. The difference between Descartes and Spinoza regarding ideas turns not only on a difference regarding the nature of doubt and the character of ideas, but more fundamentally on their differing conceptions of what makes language meaningful. It is because of this concern that Spinoza attacks Descartes’s conception of true judgements as corresponding to how things are. Descartes, like many others, assumes that ideas are mental items distinct from the various objects of the external world that they represent, and that their truth and falsity is determined by the fact as to whether things are as the ideas represent them to be. He separates thought and world so radically from each other that there is no incoherence in supposing that all ideas that have any relation to the external world might be false; since for these ideas truth is a matter of correspondence with an external reality, we can simply select in our minds the totality of all ideas and suppose that for each of them the required correspondence relation fails to hold.

Winch’s Spinoza finds this picture unacceptable because it makes a mystery of how it is that we can make genuine, meaningful judgements. Starting from the Cartesian picture of ideas, no helpful investigation into the mind and its content can be undertaken. The difference, as Winch sees it, between Spinoza’s and Descartes’s conception can be spelled out as follows: Descartes takes ideas to be mental items that have content independent of their truth or falsity and it is therefore only once we willingly put together ideas and form judgements that the question of the truth of their content arises, that is, only then can we ask whether there is anything is in the world that corresponds to the judgement we have formed. Whereas, for Spinoza, as we have seen, we cannot separate the fixing of the content of a thought from that which determines its truth: the world is involved in specifying what our thought is about, and this involvement already guarantees that a given idea will contain some degree of truth. Furthermore, it is part of the nature of an idea to demand assent, doubt or rejection on part of the thinker; these postures of mind are essential to the character of the idea as such and are not incidental to it.

Accepting Spinoza’s view means reconsidering the notion of thinking. To make a claim of the form ‘I think’ is to abstract from particular acts of thinking, particular judgements of the form ‘I think that p’, which in turn have