On Douglas on Beatitude in Spinoza, part II

Last week (recall) I published a digression on The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza (2024, Routledge) by Alexander Douglas (St. Andrews). As I said the book is a banger: it combines moral psychology, comparative theorizing (Spinozism and Daoism), and reception of Spinoza all in the service of a contextually sensitive interpretation of Spinoza. In it I was critical of Douglas’ general strategy to treat Spinoza’s doctrine of beatitude as a kind of escape from (Spinoza’s version of) The Fall. But as I granted at the end of that post, I left Douglas’ account of Spinoza’s views on beatitude untouched.

Now, the heart of the book is really a characterization of what Spinoza means by beatitude and this is illustrated and illuminated by some very suggestive, even lovely, material from Daoist writings. It’s really so beautiful, and beautifully done that it seems awful to criticize it. So what follows gives me no joy.

Now, in the Ethics, beatitude/beatitudo (which Curley translates as ‘blessedness’) is first introduced in the preface to Part II of the Ethics. Spinoza mentions it as the criterion that informs his restriction on or selection of the material that will describe in it: “I pass now to explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or the infinite and eternal Being—not, indeed, all of them, for we have demonstrated (IP16) that infinitely many things must follow from it in infinitely many modes, but only those that can lead us, by the hand, as it were, to the knowledge of the human Mind and its highest blessedness.” Unfortunately this is not very informative, although it suggests (perhaps implies) that understanding of highest blessedness falls under our knowledge of the human mind because blessedness here looks like a property or quality of minds.

Near the end of part II, Spinoza again mentions blessedness. This occurs at the end of a very long scholium to the corollary to proposition 49. The corollary affirms the identity of the will and the intellect. And then Spinoza states “it remains now to indicate how much knowledge of this doctrine is to our advantage in life.” (Keep this in mind.) That is, Spinoza claims that there is a certain practical benefit to be derived in our lives from having a particular theoretical understanding of our mind. Spinoza then writes (in Curley’s translation):

Insofar as it teaches that we act only from God’s command, that we share participate/partake [participes] in the divine nature, and that we do this the more, the more perfect our actions are, and the more and more we understand God. This doctrine, then, in addition to giving us complete peace of mind, also teaches us wherein our greatest happiness, or blessedness, consists: viz. in the knowledge of God alone, by which we are led to do only those things which love and morality piety advise. [amor et pietas]*

Here blessedness clearly seems to consist of knowledge of God alone. And in particular the kind of knowledge of God that guides our practical activity.

This doesn’t amount to much, but in Part II of the Ethics, blessedness is this-worldly, it is a species of knowledge of God, and it is action-guiding. In fact, it restricts our activity to things we do from love or piety.* I actually think that our participation in God’s nature is rather important to understanding what’s going on here. But I leave that dangling.

Somewhat surprisingly, Spinoza then skips any talk of blessedness/beautitudo in Part III and for nearly all of Part IV. But he returns to it in the appendix to Part IV, in what he calls its fourth chapter (although it’s more like a paragraph). I’ll quote the whole passage:

In life, therefore, it is especially useful to perfect, as far as we can, our intellect, or reason. In this one thing consists man’s highest happiness, or blessedness. Indeed, blessedness is nothing but that satisfaction of mind that stems from the intuitive knowledge of God. But perfecting the intellect is nothing but understanding God, his attributes, and his actions, which follow from the necessity of his nature. So the ultimate end of the man who is led by reason, i.e., his highest Desire, by which he strives to moderate all the others, is that by which he is led to conceive adequately both himself and all things that can fall under his understanding. E4app4

In the first two sentences of the quote, Curley has chopped up what is really one long sentence: “In vita itaque apprime utile est intellectum seu rationem quantum possumus perficere et in hoc uno summa hominis felicitas seu beatitudo consistit.” Here blessedness just is the this-worldly perfection of our intellect/reason. In fact, it seems that blessedness is ahh a mental state that is a byproduct of the intuitive knowledge of God.

In fact, in the original Dutch translation, it all reads rather deflationary when it it comes to blessedness: “want de zaligheit is niets anders, dan de geruftheit zelve des gemoeds.” [beatitudo nihil aliud est quam ipsa animi acquiescentia] Here blessedness just is a kind of peace of mind of the sort one may find associated with certain Stoic and Epicurean doctrines.+

Now, I don’t want to claim there is nothing difficult here. What intuitive knowledge of God is is not so easy to explain. And why the “perfecting the intellect” is nothing but “understanding God, his attributes, and his actions, which follow from the necessity of his nature” is also a bit strange. After all why would the content of knowledge (understanding God etc.) be identical to the perfecting of the instrument of knowledge (the intellect)? But the difficulty is not in what beatitude/blessedness involves.

Now, Douglas has decided to use ‘acquiescence’ as a kind of translation of acquiescentia. But this generates unnecessary confusion because the words have very different connotations. We can see this when Douglas treats of 4app4. He uses it to make the following claim: “although Spinoza elevates self-acquiescence, he does not deny God as the ultimate human end. Rather, beatitude is for him a type of acquiescence that consists of the recognition of God. It is ‘nothing other than that acquiescence of the soul [animi acquiescentia], which arises from intuitive cognition of God’ (E 4app4, O4.432).” (p. 61) This seems to me bordering on mystification because it doesn’t convey Spinoza’s position at all.

Now, Douglas recognizes that “some mystery remains.” (p. 62) He goes on to claim that “When turning to the subject of beatitude, the self drops out (acquiescentia in se ipso) and is replaced by the soul (acquiescentia animi). This shift in language, I believe, is of the utmost significance. By shifting his terminology, Spinoza is trying to tell us is that the soul at rest doesn’t have a self – at least not as we usually think of the self.” (p. 62)

Now, I actually agree with Douglas that the subject of beatitude is in an important sense without self in the usual sense. But that’s not in virtue of the character or nature of beatitude, but rather in virtue of the character of intuitive knowledge. As I argued back in 2011 (while responding to Susan James), “When one is focused on intuitive (the third kind of) knowledge, one is inattentive to the idea of one's own body: with the third kind of knowledge, in particular, the mind coincides with the essences which it beholds.” (p. 515; notice that this begins to try to make sense of the weirdness noted above about the identity between the content of knowledge and the instrument of knowledge.)

The problem is that Douglas’s claim about ‘recognition of God’ is textually ungrounded. Building on work of Clare Carlisle he claims that “the third kind of cognition cognises God as the exemplar.” (p. 62) This is not a doctrine one can find in the Ethics and Douglas has recourse to a passage in TTP from Chapter 13. (As I noted last week, the relationship between Ethics and TTP is not wholly straightforward; but let’s leave that aside.) But that passage is not giving us Spinoza’s views; rather it is negative in character. In fact, the point of the passage is (as is clear from the subsequent paragraph) to show that in revelation “God accommodated himself to the imaginations and preconceived opinions of the Prophets.”

So, where are we? I have said nothing about Spinoza’s doctrine of eternity and how it connects to his doctrine of beatitude in Ethics V. So, by no means do I want to suggest that the above has resolved all kinds of difficulties. But I have emphasized two features of Spinoza’s position: first that there is nothing mysterious in what Spinoza means by ‘beatitude.’ In fact, his view on what beatitude is, is quite deflationary. In fact, Spinoza does for beatitude what “the ever shrewd” Machiavelli does for ‘gloria.’ He domesticates it and brings it down to earth. (Douglas never mentions Machiavelli.)

Second, Spinoza’s official doctrine is that beatitude is intimately connected to a form of knowing. Douglas recognizes this at various points, but also repeatedly underplayed it in his view. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, in this book Douglas never confronts the fact that for Spinoza, God and Nature are the same [Deus, sive Natura]. So, what is known, also in the third kind of intuitive knowledge, is not an exemplar of God, but nature.

Here are two characteristic passages from Douglas’ conclusion:

Spinoza identifies beatitude and the escape [from The Fall]. Beatitude – his version – is the escape from sin and death, and it occurs in this life. To achieve it is not only to stop fearing death; it is never to die. The key to understanding how this can be possible is breathtakingly simple, though in my case it took an encounter with the Zhuangzi to see it clearly. To die is not to become nothing. It is to stop being what you are. But if you are defined expansively – if there is nothing that you are not – then you can’t die. (p. 126)

The beatific person pursues no determinate being. Her being emulates the superdeterminate being of God, expressed in any and every form it might take. What guides her movements through the world is a kind of spontaneity so difficult to describe that Daoist philosophers resort to calling it ‘non-action’, wuwei 無為. (p. 127)

So, in my view Douglas had turned a relatively straightforward even deflationary doctrine of beatitude into something quite different. And he has turned ‘intuitive cognition’ into something quite different than what I take to be Spinoza’s doctrine (that I have only hinted at here).

I have argued all of this without engaging the complex material in the latter propositions of Ethics V. Spinoza there does defend an account of eternity of the mind that I have bracketed here. But it is legitimate to bracket it because in it he relies on the deflationary account of beatitude defended above. For, even in part V of the Ethics, Spinoza reiterates the point that blessedness just is the effect of the third way of knowing at E5P42Dem (drawing on E5P32C): “Blessedness consists in Love of God (by P36 and P36S), a Love which arises from the third kind of knowledge (by P32C).”**

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*The original Dutch translation renders ‘piety’ as godvruchtigheidheid (or godliness). Which actually makes sense of what Spinoza is saying, but also leaves it ambiguous.

+It is no surprise that Spinoza is read as a neo-Stoic.

**In fact, I think E5P32C actually explicitly rules out the idea that we are emulating God or treat him as a kind of exemplar:

From the third kind of knowledge, there necessarily arises an intellectual Love of God. For from this kind of knowledge there arises (by P32) Joy, accompanied by the idea of God as its cause, i.e. (by Def. Aff. VI), Love of God, not insofar as we imagine him as present (by P29), but insofar as we understand God to be eternal. And this is what I call intellectual love of God. [emphasis added]