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A Spinozan Critique of Imaginative Freedom DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 8-2018 The logic of imagination: a Spinozan critique of imaginative freedom Amanda Parris DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Parris, Amanda, "The logic of imagination: a Spinozan critique of imaginative freedom" (2018). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 260. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/260 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE LOGIC OF IMAGINATION: A SPINOZAN CRITIQUE OF IMAGINATIVE FREEDOM A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy July, 2018 BY Amanda Parris Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois ii For my friend Anne Dienethal and my father, Bill Parris, without whom… iii iv CONTENTS DEDICATION iii ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS viii INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE IMAGINATION CAN DO 1 The Ontology of the Imagination 2 The Logic of the Imagination 12 “The Greatest Affect of All”: A Spinozan Critique of the Cartesian and Hobbesian Configurations Of Freedom 16 PART I. THE CARTESIAN CONFIGURATION OF FREEDOM: THE SELF OF IMAGINATIVE DETERMINATION 21 Chapter 1. “Like God”: Freedom and Self in the Philosophy of Descartes 25 Section 1. Freedom As Self-Determination 27 Section 2. The Anatomy of the Cartesian Self 40 Chapter 2. God and Stone: A Spinozan Critique Of Cartesian Freedom 59 Section 1. The Spurious Absolute 63 Section 2. The Spurious Subject 79 Section 3. The Anthropo-theological Circle 88 PART II. THE HOBBESIAN CONFIGURATION OF FREEDOM: THE SOCIALITY OF IMAGINATIVE DETERMINATION 101 Chapter 3. The Monster of Malmesbury: Freedom And Sociality in the Philosophy of Hobbes 106 Section 1. A Relational Account of Hobbesian Freedom 109 Section 2. Hobbes’s Lupine Sociality 132 v Chapter 4. “This Is What Surpasses All Monstrosities”: A Spinozan Critique of Hobbesian Freedom 150 Section 1. The Nature of Human Nature 155 Section 2. Lupine Sociality: Imaginative Comparison 162 Section 3. Lupine Sociality: The Mortal Imaginary 173 Section 4. The Vermicular View: Spinoza’s Collective Conception of Freedom 184 BIBLIOGRAPHY 208 vi vii ABBREVIATIONS AND TRANSLATIONS Unless otherwise noted, translations of Spinoza’s writings are from The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vols. I and II, ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 2017). Translations of Descartes’ writings are from The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, eds. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1985), volume III, trans. Antony Kenny (1991), with marginal pagination to Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: J. Vrin, 1964- 1974). Abbreviations are used as follows: AT Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, cited by volume and page number. CM Spinoza’s Metaphysical Thoughts (Cogitata Metaphysica), the Appendix to his Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, cited by part and chapter. CPP Spinoza’s Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae), cited by part and proposition. CSM Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vols. I and II, cited by volume and page number. CSMK Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III, cited by page number. E Spinoza’s Ethics (Ethica), cited by part and proposition. Ep Spinoza’s Letters (Epistolae), cited by number. KV Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (Korte Verhandeling von God, de Mensch en des zelfs Welstand), cited by book and chapter. TIE Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione), cited by paragraph number. TTP Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus), cited by chapter and paragraph number. TP Spinoza’s Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus), cited by chapter and paragraph number. Spinoza’s Ethics and Principles of Cartesian Philosophy are cited using the following abbreviations: a axiom app appendix c corollary d demonstration def definition def.aff. definition of the affects l lemma p proposition post postulate pref preface prol prolegomenon s scholium viii ix Introduction What the Imagination Can Do In the Fifth and final Part of the Ethics, “Of the Power of the Intellect, or On Human Freedom,” Spinoza claims an affect toward a thing we imagine to be free is “the greatest affect of all” (E5p5).1 That which is imagined to be free is imagined simplicter, that is, “without others” (E3p49d), to the exclusion of other causes. Imaginative freedom therefore focuses and intensifies the affects, deepening affective investment such that the image of freedom becomes real unfreedom. Because Spinoza formulates his own account of human freedom as the overcoming of disempowering affects, Gatens and Lloyd are right to suggest that for Spinoza “freedom is fundamentally the emergence from the illusion of freedom.”2 But in order to emerge from such illusions, we must understand both Spinoza’s concept of imagination and the logic by which it produces disempowering images of freedom. That is, we must understand what the imagination can do. In this Introduction I will lay out the ontological place of the imagination in the philosophy of Spinoza, explain the opposition between the imagination and the intellect that I consider fundamental to Spinoza’s ethical project, and outline the Cartesian and Hobbesian configurations of freedom that serve as models of the operation of the imagination. 1 Benedictus Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza Vols.I and II, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985, 2017). 2 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (New York: Routledge, 1999), 51. Gatens and Lloyd limit this claim to the illusion of free will, but as we will see in Part II below, a Spinozan analysis reveals that even a deterministic image of freedom, like the Hobbesian configuration, can be destructive of freedom. In their own analysis of Spinozan freedom, they argue, quite problematically, that Spinoza is a modern Stoic. The Ontology of Imagination In the first English-language work devoted to Spinoza’s concept of imagination, The Significance of Spinoza’s First Kind of Knowledge, de Deugd argues for the importance of imagination in Spinoza’s philosophy on the grounds of its role in the production of the entia imaginationis against which he builds his philosophical system: contingency, universals, good and evil, and free will.3 Just a few years later, Deleuze similarly identifies a “triple illusion” endemic to imaginative consciousness: final cause, free will, and the theological illusion. In his final philosophical work, written with Guatarri, Deleuze adds the illusions of transcendence, universals, the eternal, the discursive, finally admitting, “But the list is infinite.”4 The position of the late Deleuze and Guatarri is close to that of Althusser, who describes Spinoza’s theory of the imagination as “inexhaustible.”5 In this work I hope to go some way toward explaining the senses in which Spinoza’s concept of imagination is infinite and inexhaustible. In what follows we will encounter many of the illusions that de Deugd and Deleuze and Guattarri list. But the work of philosophy is not merely to list entia imaginationis. Rather, it is to demonstrate the truth of entia imaginationis, that is, to explain the imaginative mechanisms that cause them and, more importantly, to trace their effects for life. Deleuze and Guattari observe, “It would be wrong to think that all these illusions logically entail one another like propositions, but they resonate and reverberate and form a thick fog.”6 In examining the work of imagination, we will 3 Cornelis de Deugd, The Significance of Spinoza’s First Kind of Knowledge (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1966). 4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 49. 5 Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978-1987, eds. Francois Matheron and O. Corpet (London: Verso, 2006), 178. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 50. 2 expose the logic, or the determinate order and connection, peculiar to imaginative thought, and the co-ordination of its mechanisms, their resonance and reverberation, in the production of disempowered existence. Spinoza defines the imagination in the Second Part of the Ethics, “On the Human Mind”: “Next, to retain the customary words, the affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things, though they do not reproduce the figures of things. And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines.” In the early and abandoned Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza classifies imagination as one of the four “ways of perceiving” (TIE 19), while in the Ethics
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