On Blessedness in the Short Treatise

I have published a few papers on Spinoza, but I am genuinely unsure what to make of his third kind of ‘intuitive’ knowledge so after some youthful indiscretions I have been rather cautious about writing ambitious works on his metaphysics. I also find his early work, Korte Verhandeling (or Short Treatise), just wild. But because I am traveling up to Scotland for an event to celebrate Alexander Douglas’ The Philosophy of Hope, I have been looking at various passages on beatitude or blessedness in Spinoza. (Recall this post and this post.)

The Korte Verhandeling has a whole chapter (XIX) on blessedness (Gelukzaligheid). But it’s not the first mention of ‘gelukzaligheid.’ Just before, at the end of chapter XVIII, Spinoza writes in Dutch according to Wikisource (which basically follows Schaarschmid):

Ook brengt ons deze kennisse daar toe dat wij alles aan God toe eigenen, hem alleen beminnen, omdat hij de heerlijkste en alder volmaaktste is en ons zelven alsoo hem geheel opofferen: Want hierin bestaat eigentlijk en de waare godsdienst en ons eeuwig heil en gelukzaligheid.

Curley translates it as follows with my corrections:

[Finally], this knowledge also brings us to the point where we attribute everything to God, love him alone, because he is most magnificent glorious and supremely most perfect, and offer ourselves entirely to him. For that is what [actual and] true religion and our eternal salvation and happiness blessedness really consist in.

Now, true religion is a rather important topic in Spinoza’s Theological Political Theory (and also crucial in Hume and Adam Smith). Here my interest is in blessedness [gelukzaligheid in Dutch; beatitudo in Latin]. So, it looks as if blessedness just is the effect of the kind of knowledge that makes us love God. This is reiterated at the start of chapter XIX, which suggests that the love of God just is “our greatest blessedness.” But then, somewhat oddly, does not treat of blessedness

The only paragraph in the chapter that really comes close is worth quoting in full is this:

[14] So whatever else apart from this perception happens to the soul cannot be produced through the body. And because the first thing the soul comes to know is the body, the result is that the soul loves the body and is united to it. But since, as we have already said, the cause of love, hate, and sadness must be sought not in the body, but only in the soul (for all the actions of the body must proceed from motion and rest), and because we see clearly and distinctly that the one love is destroyed by the perception of something else that is better, it follows from this clearly that if we once come to know God (at least with as clear a knowledge as we have of our body), we must then come to be united with him even more closely than with our body, and be, as it were, released from the body.

Curley’s ‘as it were’ captures nicely the ‘als daar…als dan…als met….als van…’ construction in Spinoza’s Dutch (Zo volgt daaruijt klaarlijk, Indien wij eens God komen te kennen ten minsten met een zoo klaar een kennisse als daar wij ons lichaam mede kennen, dat wij als dan ook nauwer met hem als met ons lichaam moeten vereenigt worden en als van het lichaam ontslagen zijn.) I mention this because Douglas (p. 41) seems to read it without the ‘as it were’ and treats Spinoza here as a kind of dualist. (He uses it to interpret TTP 4; “It might indicate that Spinoza was, when writing that passage, still committed to an earlier dualistic theory, according to which knowledge of God can make us ‘released from the body’ (KV 2.19, O1.360).”)

Be that as it may, clear and distinct knowledge of God leads to a kind of as it were disembodied union with God. This actually foreshadows Spinoza’s views in the Ethics, where adequate knowledge involves an identity between mind and object known and, where as I have argued in the past, our minds become, as it were, angelic in character (because representationally we ignore or inattentive the body to which we are attached). The real difference between Ethics and Short Treatise is that in the former the ‘union’ is treated as a kind of participation or sharing in (and that language is absent in the earlier work).

Crucially, in Short Treatise, Spinoza returns to precisely this union later at the start of chapter XXII, when he discusses what he calls the fourth kind of knowledge:

We have said that this kind of knowledge is not a consequence of anything else, but an immediate manifestation of the object itself to the intellect. And if the object is magnificent and good, the soul necessarily becomes united with it, as we have also said of the body.

From this it follows incontrovertibly that this knowledge is what produces love; so if we come to know God in this way, then we must necessarily unite with him, for he cannot manifest himself, or be known by us, as anything but the most magnificent and best of all. As we have already said, our blessedness consists only in this union with him.

So, here blessedness just is the effect of, or identical with, the union of God when He is known without mediation to the soul. Later near the start of Chapter XXVI, Spinoza refers back to this passage in order to suggest that it’s this knowledge of God, and “only this knowledge” that “destroys” the passions in us (or, perhaps, at least the bad passions). So this suggests that Blessedness is a kind of absence of (bad) passions. This, too (recall), anticipates the Ethics, which treats it as “complete peace of mind” (that is the effect of third kind of knowledge: “blessedness is nothing but that satisfaction of mind that stems from the intuitive knowledge of God.”) [The real difference between the two books on this issue seems to be a somewhat different account of the different kinds of knowledge.]

Now, in the Short Treatise the fourth kind of knowledge is explicitly beyond reasoning. (This reminds me of Al-Ghazali.) And this point is emphasized in one of my favorite passages in Spinoza’s Short Treatise (and presumably much loved by Wittgenstein), in which Spinoza puts quite a bit of distance between his own practice and Descartes’ reliance on the method of doubt and his evil demon:

But because this can make no progress unless we have first arrived at the knowledge and love of God, it is most necessary to seek him. And because, after the preceding reflections and considerations, we have found him to be the greatest good of all goods, we must stand firm here, and be at peace. For we have seen that outside him, there is nothing that can give us any salvation. True freedom is to be and to remain bound by the lovely chains of the love of God

Finally, we see also that reasoning is not the principal thing in us, but only like a stairway, by which we can climb up to the desired place, or like a good spirit which without any falsity or deception brings tidings of the greatest good, to spur us thereby to seek it, and to unite with it in a union which is our greatest salvation and blessedness.

I could stop here. But recall that Douglas (echoing Carlisle) has argued that Spinoza’s account of blessedness is offered as a third-worldly escape from (Spinoza’s version of) Original Sin. Now original sin strikes me as absent in this work. The original (unknown) editor of Short Treatise, suggests in the outline, that Spinoza tackles the nature of sin in Chapter 6 of the work (on God’s predestination). I quote the final paragraphs:

And also, why has he not created man so that he could not sin?…

As for the question, why did God not create men so that they would not sin? the following reply will serve: whatever is said about sin is said only in respect to our knowledge, as when we compare two things with each other, or [consider one thing] in different respects. For example, if someone has made a clock precisely to strike and show the time, and that mechanism agrees well with its maker’s intention, one says it is good; if not, one says it is bad, notwithstanding the fact that then it could also be good, provided his intention had been to make it confused and so that it did not strike at the hour.

We conclude, then, by saying that Peter must agree with the Idea of Peter, as is necessary, and not with the Idea of Man; good and evil, or sins, are nothing but modes ways of thinking [wijzen van denken], not things, or anything that has existence. Perhaps we shall show this more fully in what follows.

For all things and actions which are in Nature are perfect. [emphasis added; I translated wijzen als ways although modes is closer to the Ethics]

Whatever one might wish to say about this passage (and Spinoza’s use of the clock analogy suggests he is reflecting on Cicero and Boyle here, too), I think it is fair to say that in the Short Treatise Spinoza is explicitly deflationary and anti-realist about sin. So that at least in the Short Treatise the account of beatitude is offered without even hinting to be following what Douglas calls “the general pattern of the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall and salvation.” (p. xi)* So, this raises the intriguing suggestion that in some respects the Ethics is more pious toward Christianity than the Short Treatise.

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*I also would deny that in Short Treatise beatitude is offered as a response to an absence of this-worldly security. But that’s for another time.