Some Spinoza on Sin and the Fall with Alex Douglas (and some Dan Dennett)
While completing this post, I learned that my teacher and later very good friend (including of this blog—i knew something was amiss when I didn’t receive his nearly daily responses to my digresssions during the last two weeks—)), Daniel Dennett passed away. My condolences to Susan and his children, and also his assistant Teresa. I will probably do a memorial piece on him next week. While my use of him in my piece on Synthetic Philosophy is familiar enough, I also wrote a short Spinozistic paper on him back in 2018 (here) to which he responded, by making my point for me in a much more elegant way (here), in which also he notes that he read Spinoza back as an undergraduate at Wesleyan, although did not not think much of him. (As Bryce Huebner has also emphasized of the pre-analytic historical figures, Nietzsche was far more important to Dan’s development than Spinoza.)
The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza (2024, Routledge) by Alexander Douglas (St. Andrews) 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. With a description of that you would expect a massive, plodding volume. But it’s slim, even elegant with sparklingly clear prose on one of the most difficult topics in Spinoza’s project, his account of beautitude.
Today my focus is on some material in the third chapter, “ambition and the fall.” I very much like what Douglas has to say about Spinoza on ambition so in this post I am going to ignore that. (That’s because I have been invited to comment on his book at St. Andrews.) Now, it’s important for Douglas’ overall argument that (I now quote his “conclusion”) Spinoza’s “theory of beatitude” is structurally analogous to the “Augustinian” version, and in particular that “our fallen condition” keeps us from beatitude. While the Augustinian suggests “we escape the Fall in this life then we are rewarded with beatitude in another, Spinoza identifies beatitude and the escape. Beatitude – his version – is the escape from sin and death, and it occurs in this life.” (p. 126.) This is not an isolated claim, as Douglas suggests “I have argued that Spinoza’s notion of beatitude is cast against the background of a doctrine of the Fall.” (p. 123)
Now, even if one has doubts about, say, Steve Nadler’s or Jonathan Israel’s tendency to read Spinoza as an atheist and a materialist who founds in age of secularism, it is a bit startling to see so much emphasis on The Fall in Spinoza. To be sure, Douglas doesn’t think Spinoza’s version is Judeo-Christian. I quote again, “The term ‘beatitude’ has a Christian flavour to it, and I will argue that Spinoza’s thinking follows the general pattern of the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall and salvation. But his theory of beatitude isn’t ultimately Judeo-Christian either – again, this is not least because it is detached from any ultimate teleological picture.” (preface, p. xii) What Douglas means by this is, it seems, that “beatitude is something we can enjoy only after death” even though Spinoza “would agree with Augustine that sin is what prevents us from achieving it.” (p. 85)
Now, unfortunately, Douglas never tells us, I think, what the metaphysical/ontological or epistemological status of “following the general pattern” means here. In addition, while removing a certain teleology and enjoyment after death, Douglas has added sin. Douglas’ Spinoza (echoing Clare Carlisle) is a certain kind of heterodox Christian. We see this, too, if we go to Douglas’ interpretation of Spinoza’s account of ‘sin,’ he avoids the temptation to put a lot of distance between Spinoza and Augustinian Christianity:
Spinoza uses ‘sin’ (peccatum) in a non-theological sense, to mean disobeying the civil authority (E 4p37s2; TTP ch.16, O3.506). But if we look past the specific word, we can see that Spinoza recognises the condition that, according to Augustine, cuts us off from beatitude, beginning with the Fall of Adam. Spinoza also makes reference to this Fall, proposing that through it humanity enters into a condition of fearing death rather than desiring life, or fearing evil rather than desiring good (E 4p68s; TTP 4.11, O3.200). A life of constant fear is not a beatific life. Thus the condition of the Fall cuts us off from beatitude, for Spinoza just as for Augustine. But Spinoza believes that we can overcome the condition of the Fall in this life. (Douglas, p. 14, the accompanying footnote cites Carlisle. [For Ethics novices, E4p37s2 means “Ethics part 4, proposition 37, 2nd scholium.”]
I used ‘temptation’ above not just to be cheeky, but also because Douglas could have used this material to turn Spinoza into a neo-Hobbesian. I say this not just because of the first sentence and the significance of avoiding fear in this life to Spinoza’s picture as drawn by Douglas. (I return to this first quoted sentence below.) But also because earlier on the page, Douglas had noted how important security (securitas) is to Spinoza’s argument to gain avoid despair and have hope in this earthly life (p. 14). While it is always dangerous to argue from omissions, Douglas’s omission of Hobbes here is surely deliberate because he had used Hobbes to introduce Augustine’s conception of the problem of this worldly hope at the beginning of the chapter. And the significance of Hobbes to the salient issues is never mentioned again.*
In fact, while there are very minor passing references to Hobbes, there are none to Bacon or Machiavelli at all. This is a fascinating decision for somebody so alert to Spinoza’s context. (Douglas wrote a brilliant book on Spinoza’s intellectual contetx, Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology. OUP 2015.) I return to the significance of this below.
The material quoted on p. 14 suggests that Spinoza treats the reality of the Fall in the way that Augustine does (“this Fall”). This is quite remarkable. In addition, Douglas treats Spinoza as offering a account in which The Fall plays the role of cause of which the effect is “humanity enters into a condition of fearing death rather than desiring life, or fearing evil rather than desiring good.” Now, as is well known Augustine’s account of how to read Genesis is not a naïve form of literalism. But even so, it accepts the divinity of revelation. So, it is quite stunning that Douglas does not tell us how we should read Spinoza who “is well known as a heretic…I propose that his greatest heresy was the claim that beatitude can exist in this life and this world, and the path to it can be shown by philosophy.” (p. xi, emphasis added; I have to admit this is not what I think of as the top three heresies of Spinoza.) All of this helps explain the significance of The Fall to Douglas’ interpretation of Spinoza, and so he devotes a fine chapter to his interpretation of Spinoza’s presentation of it E4p68S.*
Before I get to my disagreements with Douglas over E4p68S (which, alas, will be in a future post), I want to note how controversial his use of E4p37s2 is. For, it is true that in it Spinoza treats sin as ‘disobeying the civil authority.’ But he does so in the context of describing a contrast between the state of nature and the post-social contract civil state. Here’s Spinoza in Curley’s translation:
From this we easily understand that there is nothing in the state of nature which, by the agreement of all, is good or evil; for everyone who is in the state of nature considers only his own advantage, and decides what is good and what is evil from his own temperament, and only insofar as he takes account of his own advantage. He is not bound by any law to submit to anyone except himself. So in the state of nature no sin can be conceived.
But in the civil state, of course, it is decided by common agreement what is good or what is evil. And everyone is bound to submit to the state. Sin, therefore, is nothing but disobedience, which for that reason can be punished only by the law of the state. On the other hand, obedience is considered a merit in a citizen, because on that account he is judged worthy of enjoying the advantages of the state.
So, Spinoza explicitly asserts that in the state of nature sin cannot be conceived. I may have missed it, but I don’t think Douglas even acknowledges this fact (although it is implied by his treatment).
Now, it’s possible that X exists even though one cannot conceive of X or bring X under any description. But Douglas explicitly uses Anscombe to poo-poo an analogous move like this to criticize Sartre’s (Heideggerian) effort to speak of man’s existence as nothing preceding the definition of man (pp. 19-20; I would have liked to have seen Douglas discuss, say, De Dijn’s interpretation of the nature of natura naturans in Spinoza). So by Douglas’ lights in the state of nature we should say there is no sin on Spinoza’s account.
And in this respect Spinoza is a follower of Hobbes, who in Leviathan XIII writes when describing the state of nature, “The Desires, and other Passions of man, are in themselves no Sin.” In fact, later in Leviathan, Hobbes anticipates the other half of E4p37s2: “First, that where Law ceaseth, Sinne ceaseth.” (Leviathan XXVII, but the whole chapter is relevant.)
It’s hard to see how this Hobbesian material in Spinoza’s Ethics can be made to fit with Augustine’s account of The Fall. It’s also not obvious how one can interpret this Hobbesian material in the Ethics as following ‘the general pattern of the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall.’ For me the natural reading (recall here long before I confronted the Carlisle/Douglas approach) is that E4p37s2 is directed against Augustine. In fact, how to relate the material here on the state of nature with the material later on the Adam of Eve story ought to be a hermeneutic puzzle that Douglas would have to confront. I would argue actually that E4p68s is indeed anti-Hobbesian, but not because Spinoza is in a broadly Augustinian framework.
Now, I am myself inclined to the view that in the Scholia of the Ethics, Spinoza is not speaking strictly philosophical but actually offering a kind of emendation of religion and theology. In fact, I close with a suggestion on this related to E4p68S.
Somewhat oddly, Douglas does not discuss the proposition (E4p68) that precedes the Scholium that describes The Fall. This proposition is rather tricky and I will quote it in Curley’s translation only to give you a sense of how Spinoza introduces his version of the Fall (and then I will make my point).
p. 68: If men were born free, they would form no concept of good and evil so long as they remained free.
Dem.: I call him free who is led by reason alone. Therefore, he who is born free, and remains free, has only adequate ideas, and so has no concept of evil (by P64C). And since good and evil are correlates, he also has no concept of good,
q.e.d.
Schol.: It is evident from P4 that the hypothesis of this proposition is false, and cannot be conceived unless we attend only to human nature, or rather to God, not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar only as he is the cause of man's existence. This and the other things I have now demonstrated seem to have been indicated by Moses in that story of the first man. For in it the only power of God conceived is that by which he created man, that is, the For in it the only power of God conceived is that by which he created man, that is, the power by which he consulted only man's advantage. And so we are told that God prohibited a free man from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and at as soon as he should eat of it… [emphasis added]
Douglas starts his treatment (on pp. 34-34) of this Scholium with the last sentence (that I have partially quoted). Here I just want to note the significance that whatever we want to make of the Hebrew Bible’s account of the Fall, we need to inscribe it in two two of Spinoza’s frameworks. First, let’s call this the intra-Ethics framework, how to relate an imaginative story to a demonstration. This is no simple matter (as has been much discussed since Della Rocca’s Representation and the Mind-body Problem in Spinoza). But l will leave it dangling here.
Second, and this is the systematic ‘'Ethics-cum-TTP (etc.) framework,’' and more important in the present context, here in the Scholium to E4p68, Spinoza is far more pious than in the TTP. (This tends to be missed by folk who treat the Ethics as real philosophy, and the TTP as mere Biblical Hermeneutics.) For here Spinoza pretends to accept Moses as the author of the Pentateuch. But this traditional ascription has been thoroughly demolished in chapter 8 of the TTP (where Spinoza suggests that Ezra has cobbled the Hebrew Bible together for political purposes).
The significance of the previous paragraph is this: the emphasized sentence in E4p68s shows that for Spinoza, scripture (sometimes anticipate(s) the demonstrations of philosophy. This suggests that what Spinoza is doing in E4p68s is a kind of rationalization of Scriptures. (This is also clearly going on in the very next quoted sentence after the emphasized one. Compare that with Genesis 1.28-30.) However, in the TTP this practice is precisely what Spinoza criticizes Maimonides for!
So, where are we? At minimum Douglas’s interpretation relies on material that cannot be taken in the straightforward way he presents it. And that the wider context often generates pressure on his readings of this material of the Ethics.
It doesn’t follow, of course, that Douglas’ account of Spinoza on beatitude is false. He could claim, after all, that I am right that Spinoza is doing a kind of emendation of Scriptures and that this leads to Spinoza’s account of beatitude Douglas defends. For all I know that’s his own view. What I call ‘emendation’ might be captured by Douglas ‘general pattern.’ So, this post is not intended as a shortcut by refuting a step in the whole argument; after all one can reach a true conclusion despite false premises.
*Back in January 2015 I blogged about this passage (see here; here; here), and I try not to repeat myself if I have nothing new to say.