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The Actual and the Rational: Hegel and Objective Spirit

Jean-Francois Kervegan

This book develops a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel’s work, and results from a lifelong investigation on his theory of the “objective spirit”. It entails four parts. The first part demonstrates ... More

This book develops a non-metaphysical reading of Hegel’s work, and results from a lifelong investigation on his theory of the “objective spirit”. It entails four parts. The first part demonstrates that the “abstract (i. e. private) law” plays a strategic role in the inner structure of objective spirit; it allows Hegel to overtake the alternative between natural law and history. The second part is dedicated to the "civil society", that means to the probably most inventive part of Hegel’s theory of the objective spirit. It highlights the aporias of the social space, which constitute a negative justification of the political sphere (the State); nevertheless, the State must not be conceived as a mere extension of the civil society. Starting with an analysis of the implicit discussion among Hegel and Tocqueville about the nature of political modernity, the third part investigates Hegel’s criticism of the democracy and his conception of the representation; Hegel’s “liberal constitutionalism” suggests a reappraisal of the paradigm of liberal democracy. The last part shows that Hegel’s doctrine of the objective spirit raises the issue of subjectivity in non-subjectivist terms; it provides the opportunity to reassess in a positive sense the concept of “morality”, as a normative interface between the subject and the institutionalized universe of the “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). The book ends with a reflection on the “passion of the concept” that lights up the whole philosophy of Hegel.Less

After Parmenides: Idealism, Realism, and Epistemic Constructivism

Tom Rockmore

In After Parmenides, Tom Rockmore takes us all the way back to the beginning of philosophy when Parmenides asserted that thought and being are one: what we know is what is. This idea created a ... More

In After Parmenides, Tom Rockmore takes us all the way back to the beginning of philosophy when Parmenides asserted that thought and being are one: what we know is what is. This idea created a division between what the mind constructs as knowable entities and the idea that there is also a mind-independent real, which we can know or fail to know. To counter this, Rockmore argues that we need to give up on the idea of this real, and instead focus on the objects of cognition that our mind constructs. Though we cannot know mind-independent objects as they “really” are, we can and do know objects as they appear to us. If we construct the object we seek to know, then it corresponds to what we think about it. After Parmenides charts the continual engagement with these ideas of real and the knowable throughout philosophical history from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Marx, and others. This ambitious book shows how new connections can be made in the history of philosophy when it is reread through a new lens.Less

The Challenge of Nietzsche: How to Approach His Thought

Jeremy Fortier

Friedrich Nietzsche has been one of the most widely read authors in the world from the time of his death to the present day, as well as one of the most controversial. He has been celebrated as a ... More

Friedrich Nietzsche has been one of the most widely read authors in the world from the time of his death to the present day, as well as one of the most controversial. He has been celebrated as a liberating theorist of individual creativity and self-care, but also condemned as the inhumane advocate of anti-modern politics and hierarchical communalism. This book contends that Nietzsche’s complex legacy is the consequence of a self-conscious and artful tension within his work. That tension is reflected by the two major character-types that he established in his writings, the Free Spirit and Zarathustra, who represent different approaches to the conduct and understanding of life: one that strives to be as independent and critical of the world as possible, and one that engages with, cares for, and aims to change the world. Nietzsche developed these characters at different moments of his life, in order to confront from contrasting perspectives such elemental experiences as the drive to independence, the feeling of love, and the assessment of one’s overall health (or well-being). Understanding the tension between the Free Spirit and Zarathustra takes readers to the heart of what Nietzsche identified as the tensions central to his life, and to all of human life. The book highlights the fact that Nietzsche equipped his writings with retrospective self-commentaries and an autobiographical apparatus that clarify how he understood his development as an author, thinker, and human being, as well as the challenges that he left for readers to confront on their own.Less

Contesting Nietzsche

Christa Davis Acampora

This work offers a rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, it shows how ... More

This work offers a rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s crucial notion of the agon. Analyzing an array of primary and secondary sources and synthesizing decades of Nietzsche scholarship, it shows how the agon, or contest, organized core areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing an appreciation of the subtleties of his notorious views about power. By focusing so intensely on this particular guiding interest, the book offers a vantage point from which to view this iconic thinker. Though existence—viewed through the lens of Nietzsche’s agon—is fraught with struggle, the book illuminates what Nietzsche recognized as the agon’s generative benefits. It imbues the human experience with significance, meaning, and value. Analyzing Nietzsche’s elaborations of agonism—his remarks on types of contests, qualities of contestants, and the conditions in which either may thrive or deteriorate—the book demonstrates how much the agon shaped his philosophical projects and critical assessments of others. The agon led Nietzsche from one set of concerns to the next, from aesthetics to metaphysics to ethics to psychology, via Homer, Socrates, Saint Paul, and Wagner. In showing how one obsession catalyzed so many diverse interests, the book sheds light on some of this philosopher’s most difficult and paradoxical ideas.Less

Encounters & Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete

Seth Benardete

Ronna Burger (ed.)

This book presents a portrait of the life and works of Seth Benardete that reflects on both the people he knew and the topics which fascinated him throughout his career. The first part of the book ... More

This book presents a portrait of the life and works of Seth Benardete that reflects on both the people he knew and the topics which fascinated him throughout his career. The first part of the book discloses vignettes about fellow students, colleagues, and acquaintances of Benardete's who later became major figures in the academic and intellectual life of twentieth-century America. We glimpse the student days of Alan Bloom, Stanley Rosen, George Steiner, and discover the life of the mind as lived by well-known scholars such as David Grene, Jacob Klein, and Benardete's mentor Leo Strauss. We also encounter a number of other learned, devoted, and sometimes eccentric luminaries, including T.S. Eliot, James Baldwin, Werner Jaeger, John Davidson Beazley, and Willard Quine. In the book's second part, Benardete reflects on his own intellectual growth and on his ever-evolving understanding of the texts and ideas he spent a lifetime studying. Revisiting some of his recurrent themes—among them eros and the beautiful, the city and the law, and the gods and the human soul—he shares his views on thinkers such as Plato, Homer, and Heidegger, as well as the relations between philosophy and science, and between Christianity and ancient Roman thought.Less

Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting

Richard L. Velkley

This book examines the complex philosophical relationship between Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss. It argues that both thinkers provide searching analyses of the philosophical tradition’s origins in ... More

This book examines the complex philosophical relationship between Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss. It argues that both thinkers provide searching analyses of the philosophical tradition’s origins in radical questioning. For Heidegger and Strauss, the recovery of the original premises of philosophy cannot be separated from rethinking the very possibility of genuine philosophizing. Common views of the influence of Heidegger’s thought on Strauss suggest that, after being inspired early on by Heidegger’s dismantling of the philosophical tradition, Strauss took a wholly separate path, spurning modernity and pursuing instead a renewal of Socratic political philosophy. The book rejects this reading and maintains that Strauss’ engagement with the challenges posed by Heidegger—as well as by modern philosophy in general—formed a crucial and enduring framework for his lifelong philosophical project.Less

Kant and Phenomenology

Tom Rockmore

Phenomenology, together with Marxism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy, dominated philosophy in the twentieth century—and Edmund Husserl is usually thought to have been the first to develop the ... More

Phenomenology, together with Marxism, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy, dominated philosophy in the twentieth century—and Edmund Husserl is usually thought to have been the first to develop the concept. His views influenced a variety of important later thinkers, such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who eventually turned phenomenology away from questions of knowledge. This book, which argues for a return to phenomenology's origins in epistemology, does so by locating its roots in the work of Immanuel Kant, tracing the formulation of Kant's phenomenological approach back to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. In response to various criticisms of the first edition, Kant more forcefully put forth a constructivist theory of knowledge. This shift in his thinking challenged the representational approach to epistemology, and it is this turn, the book contends, that makes Kant the first great phenomenologist. The book then follows this phenomenological line through the work of Kant's idealist successors, Fichte and Hegel.Less

Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy

Jennifer Mensch

Because it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which ... More

Because it laid the foundation for nearly all subsequent epistemologies, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has overshadowed his other interests in natural history and the life sciences, which scholars have long considered as separate from his rigorous theoretical philosophy until now. This book draws a link between these spheres by showing how the concept of epigenesis—a radical theory of biological formation—lies at the heart of Kant’s conception of reason. As the book argues, epigenesis was not simply a metaphor for Kant but centrally guided his critical philosophy, especially the relationship between reason and the categories of understanding. Offsetting a study of Kant’s highly technical theory of cognition with a mixture of intellectual history and biography, the book situates the epigenesis of reason within broader investigations into theories of generation, genealogy, and classification, and against later writers and thinkers such as Goethe and Darwin. Distilling vast amounts of research on the scientific literature of the time, it offers a look not only at Kant’s famous first Critique but at the history of philosophy and the life sciences as well.Less

Maimonides and Spinoza: Their Conflicting Views of Human Nature

Joshua Parens

Until the last century, it was generally agreed that Maimonides was a great defender of Judaism, and Spinoza—as an Enlightenment advocate for secularization—among its key opponents. However, a new ... More

Until the last century, it was generally agreed that Maimonides was a great defender of Judaism, and Spinoza—as an Enlightenment advocate for secularization—among its key opponents. However, a new scholarly consensus has recently emerged that the teachings of the two philosophers are in fact much closer than was previously thought. This book sets out to challenge the now predominant view of Maimonides as a protomodern forerunner to Spinoza—and to show that a chief reason to read Maimonides is in fact to gain distance from our progressively secularized worldview. Turning the focus from Spinoza's oft-analyzed Theologico-Political Treatise, the Ethics has at its heart a nuanced analysis of his theory of human nature. Viewing this work in contrast to Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed, the book makes clear that Spinoza can no longer be thought of as the founder of modern Jewish identity, nor should Maimonides be thought of as having paved the way for a modern secular worldview. It dramatically revises our understanding of both philosophers.Less

Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed" in Translation: A History from the Thirteenth Century to the Twentieth

Josef Stern, James T. Robinson, and Yonatan Shemesh (eds)

Moses Maimonides’ twelfth century Guide of the Perplexed is the greatest philosophical text in the history of Jewish thought and a major philosophical work in all three faiths of the Middle Ages. ... More

Moses Maimonides’ twelfth century Guide of the Perplexed is the greatest philosophical text in the history of Jewish thought and a major philosophical work in all three faiths of the Middle Ages. Yet, for almost all of its history, the Guide has been read, commented upon, and criticized in translation rather than in its original Judeo-Arabic. This volume is the first to tell the story of the translations and translators of Maimonides’ Guide and its impact in translation on philosophy from the Middle Ages to the present day. The history focuses on the translators’ understanding of the book as reflected in their choice of words and syntactic formulations for the translation, on desiderata such as consistency in translation, and on the ways in which the translations might have shaped readers’ interpretations in ways not intended by Maimonides himself. It highlights the ways in which the translated text led to the development of a philosophical vocabulary within the target languages, the influences of earlier translations on later ones and of other philosophical works on translations of the Guide, and on general methodological questions of translation. The volume is also a cultural history of the Guide and recovers and reclaims its translators, their lives and cultures, philosophical backgrounds, and training, their motivations and reasons for undertaking the task of translation, and their roles in the creation and development of the Maimonidean tradition.Less

The Moral Meaning of Nature: Nietzsche’s Darwinian Religion and Its Critics

Peter J. Woodford

What does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, about ethical values, or even about the meaning and purpose of life? Notable contemporary debates have indicated the continuing ... More

What does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, about ethical values, or even about the meaning and purpose of life? Notable contemporary debates have indicated the continuing cultural weight of such questions. This book aims to shed new light on them by examining the significance of an early philosophical discussion of Darwin in late 19th-century Germany. It begins with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings stage one of the first - and still most influential - confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. By examining Nietzsche’s negotiation of the relationship between science and religion and showing that his appropriation of evolutionary thinking was driven by a unique existential question about the moral meaning of evolution, it complicates and critiques a standard rendition of Nietzsche’s significance for the contemporary understanding of religion. It then goes on to show how three other thinkers influential in their respective disciplines—the historian of Christian origins Franz Overbeck, the sociologist Georg Simmel, and the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert—responded to Nietzsche’s “Life-philosophy” (Lebensphilosophie). Each of these critics offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the picture of evolution emerging from the biological sciences, to his negotiation between science and religion, and to the normative dimensions embedded in his concept of life. They also each offered alternative ways of making sense of Nietzsche’s unique questioning of the moral meaning of biological evolution.Less

Nietzsche's Journey to Sorrento: Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit

Paolo D'Iorio

Nietzsche's Journey to Sorrento situates the turning point in Nietzsche's philosophy at the moment of his 1876 sabbatical in Sorrento. Nietzsche traveled to Southern Italy, accompanied by his friends ... More

Nietzsche's Journey to Sorrento situates the turning point in Nietzsche's philosophy at the moment of his 1876 sabbatical in Sorrento. Nietzsche traveled to Southern Italy, accompanied by his friends Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée, to recover his health, which was declining in the Northern climate of Basel, where he was a professor of philology. In Sorrento, he underwent a transformative experience that would lead him to renounce his earlier work, highly influenced by the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, and to abandon his professorship at the University of Basel so as to become a true philosopher. Also in Sorrento simultaneously to him was Richard Wagner, previously a figure of towering importance to the philosopher, but who had disappointed him irreparably with the first Bayreuth Festival. It was in Sorrento that Nietzsche saw the composer for the last time and made the definitive decision to forego the metaphysics of the artist, which he had placed so much faith in with The Birth of Tragedy. It is also at this time that he initiated his Philosophy of the Free Spirit, writing the book Things Human, All Too Human. D'Iorio advances the thesis of a continuous development from Nietzsche's early research on the scientific aspects of the pre-Platonic philosophers and this new step in his thinking. The upshot of the overall argument is Nietzsche's new affirmation of life and of all that is human, in the face of the Platonic devaluation of human things, which the philosophical tradition previously tended to support.Less

Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period

Paul Franco

While much attention has been lavished on Friedrich Nietzsche’s earlier and later works, those of his so-called middle period have been generally neglected, perhaps because of their aphoristic style ... More

While much attention has been lavished on Friedrich Nietzsche’s earlier and later works, those of his so-called middle period have been generally neglected, perhaps because of their aphoristic style or perhaps because they are perceived to be inconsistent with the rest of his thought. This book gives this section of Nietzsche’s oeuvre its due, offering analysis of the three works that make up the philosopher’s middle period: Human, All too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. It is Nietzsche himself who suggests that these works are connected, saying that their “common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit.” The book argues that in their more favorable attitude toward reason, science, and the Enlightenment, these works mark a sharp departure from Nietzsche’s earlier, more romantic writings and differ in important ways from his later, more prophetic writings, beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Nietzsche these works reveal is radically different from the popular image of him and even from the one depicted in much of the secondary literature; they reveal a rational Nietzsche, one who preaches moderation instead of passionate excess and Dionysian frenzy. The book concludes with a wide-ranging examination of Nietzsche’s later works, tracking not only how his outlook changes from the middle period to the later but also how his commitment to reason and intellectual honesty in his middle works continues to inform his final writings.Less

On Descartes' Passive Thought: The Myth of Cartesian Dualism

Jean-Luc Marion

Although Descartes is often thought to advocate a strong dualistic split between mind and body, valuing the mind over the body and even doubting the latter’s existence, this careful treatment of the ... More

Although Descartes is often thought to advocate a strong dualistic split between mind and body, valuing the mind over the body and even doubting the latter’s existence, this careful treatment of the Sixth Meditation, The Passions of the Soul, and Descartes’ letters to Elizabeth and Christina shows that such strict dualism is not supported by the texts. In fact, Descartes draws a distinction between bodies in general (in the external world) and his own body—the flesh or meum corpus—which is so closely connected to the mind as to be indubitable. In this way he anticipates phenomenological distinctions between Körper (body) and Leib (flesh). Descartes speaks of “my body” as a third “primitive notion” (or actually the first), one that uniquely unites soul and body by having each take on characteristics of the other. He also maintains that “sensing” is a kind of “thought,” namely passive thought that receives the impressions given to it. A full account of thinking requires such passive thought. To reduce thinking to pure activity (such as memory or imagination) without also considering its passive modes (sensing) is actually an impoverished account. Descartes’ particular insights on this issue are misread or ignored by many of his followers to the present day. This final exploration into Descartes shows not only the overall coherence of his thought but also the connection between the two types of onto-theo-logical constitutions of Cartesian metaphysics outlined in earlier works (the metaphysics of the cogitatio and that of the causa).Less

The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger

Rocco Rubini

This book provides an overdue cultural translation of modern Italian intellectual and philosophical history, a development bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci. It shows Italian ... More

This book provides an overdue cultural translation of modern Italian intellectual and philosophical history, a development bookended by Giambattista Vico and Antonio Gramsci. It shows Italian philosophy to have emerged during the age of the Risorgimento in reaction to eighteenth-century French revolutionary and rationalist standards in politics and philosophy and in critical assimilation of the German reaction to the same, mainly Hegelian idealism and, eventually, Heideggerian existentialism. Specifically, this is the story of modern Italian philosophy told through the lens of Renaissance scholarship. It introduces Anglo-American readers to Italian philosophy as it reflected a Renaissance precedent it wished to enliven, reactivate, and improve in support or criticism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century upheavals: unity (Risorgimento), empire (Fascism), and democracy (Republicanism). This Renaissance or humanist focus clarifies the Italian philosophical “difference” vis-à-vis the main strands of Continental philosophy (French, German, and their American elaborations), a “difference” that, perhaps to our advantage today, sheltered Italian inquiry from the self-confuting framework of the postmodern moment. By identifying the presence of Renaissance humanism in modern philosophical thought and in the scholarship of Bertrando Spaventa, Giovanni Gentile, Ernesto Grassi, Eugenio Garin, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, among others, The Italians' Renaissance recovers a tradition in Renaissance studies that runs parallel to, and separately from, the one initiated by Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). In so doing it calls for a renewed dialogue between students of philosophy and of the Renaissance, a dialogue that would prevent the study of the origins of modernity from turning into a form of antiquarianism.Less

The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War

John McCumber

This book argues that the domestic tumult of the early Cold War favored a “new and improved” philosophical paradigm for America, better adapted to the times than other approaches. Comprised of ... More

This book argues that the domestic tumult of the early Cold War favored a “new and improved” philosophical paradigm for America, better adapted to the times than other approaches. Comprised of heterogeneous elements that mainly shared a mathematical veneer and their adaptability to Cold War political pressures, this “Cold War philosophy” valorized concepts of scientific objectivity and practices of market freedom, while prudently downplaying the anti-theistic implications of modern thought. Enforced by “sticks” from outside the university, encouraged by “carrots” proffered from within, and imposed in California by a draconian vetting system for job candidates, Cold War philosophy rapidly became central to academia. The clearest statement we have of its main themes is Hans Reichenbach’s The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, which this book places into the context of Cold War pressures on American philosophy. The main alternatives to Cold War philosophy, pragmatism and existentialism, were disfavored because their open commitments to atheism were unacceptable to powerful American religious forces; Reichenbach’s naturalism, like that of other logical positivists, was hidden behind long and technical discussions of “reduction.” The positive doctrines of Cold war philosophy were largely shared with rational choice theory; but where such theory was presented as an empirical theory of market and voting behavior, Cold War philosophy presented a theory of the properly functioning human mind everywhere and always, making it what the times required: an effective counter-ideology to global Marxism.Less

The Powers of Pure Reason: Kant and the Idea of Cosmic Philosophy

Alfredo Ferrarin

The book is a full-fledged examination of Kant on reason. Reason is about a comprehensive vision that understands itself (from sciences and cognitions to action to all objects of its legislation) in ... More

The book is a full-fledged examination of Kant on reason. Reason is about a comprehensive vision that understands itself (from sciences and cognitions to action to all objects of its legislation) in relation to its ends. A rigorous analysis of the different meanings of key concepts throughout Kant’s works, such as ideas, concepts, intuition, the a priori, mathematics, metaphysics and critical philosophy, and categories and judgment, forms the heart of this book.Less

Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre's Appropriation of Hegel and Marx

Terry Pinkard

Although Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason fell from favor as interest in existentialism and Marxism faded, Sartre claimed CDR was a formal, a priori theory of collective and ... More

Although Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason fell from favor as interest in existentialism and Marxism faded, Sartre claimed CDR was a formal, a priori theory of collective and individual agency. In it, he brought to bear an appreciation of Hegel, an appropriation of one of Heidegger’s main critiques of Sartre, and his interest in Marxism to develop an original social and political theory. Reviewing Sartre’s thought in CDR, Transcendence of the Ego, Being and Nothingness, and Existentialism is a Humanism, this book shows how Sartre used what was at work in some strains of French Hegelianism to develop a conception of the relation between practice and singular act as that of a practice “showing itself” in the individual acts of agents acting in terms of it, in which the agents are not instantiations of a general rule but who manifest the practice in their acts. On that basis, he was able to construct a version of Hegel’s “concrete universal” that was a more tragic theory of historical development than Marxism allowed. The book then traces Sartre’s work on a new “ethics” allied with his new views in which he jettisoned his earlier mentions of “salvation” in favor of a conception of the “sacred” without in any way jettisoning his steadfastly secular, atheistic stance. The new ethics emerge in his unpublished 1964 “Morale.”Less

The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795-1804

Dalia Nassar

While the notion of the absolute is most often identified with Hegel’s philosophical system, The Romantic Absolute explicates the significance of the absolute in the epistemology and metaphysics of ... More

While the notion of the absolute is most often identified with Hegel’s philosophical system, The Romantic Absolute explicates the significance of the absolute in the epistemology and metaphysics of romantic thinkers between Kant and Hegel, and investigates the ways in which three major figures of philosophical romanticism--Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling--sought to articulate a cogent conception of the absolute. The Romantic Absolute argues that for the romantics, the absolute was neither a solely epistemological nor a solely metaphysical idea, but encompassed both epistemology and metaphysics, and can thus only be understood from both perspectives. The romantics insisted that the absolute cannot be reduced to either being or knowing, because as absolute, it must underlie both. In turn, precisely because the absolute is the ground of being and knowing, the romantics concluded that it must be inherently relational. This relational conception of the absolute, i.e., of the absolute as the mediation of being and knowing, or as the realization of the infinite in the finite, is the most complex and innovative aspect of early romantic philosophy. In significant ways, The Romantic Absolute departs from the widespread view of romanticism as a skeptical movement that anticipates post-structuralism. By elaborating the distinctive character of the romantic conception of the absolute, The Romantic Absolute sheds new light on philosophical romanticism, and argues that in romantic thought, we find one of the most rigorous attempts to grasp the relation between mind and nature in a coherent, but non-reductive way.Less

Spinoza and the Cunning of Imagination

Eugene Garver

The Ethics starts with God, and Part 1 gradually descends from God through its infinite modes to the individual—the finite modes—including individual human beings. The rest is spent showing how the ... More

The Ethics starts with God, and Part 1 gradually descends from God through its infinite modes to the individual—the finite modes—including individual human beings. The rest is spent showing how the individual can return to God, finally uniting with God in the intellectual love of God. In between God and the intellectual love of God, or human freedom, lies the argument of the Ethics and the career and destiny of human beings. Readers have puzzled over how freedom is possible in a causally determined world. Through the plot of the Ethics, its readers move from being subjects of the geometric method to being its practitioners, and the cunning of imagination is that movement. The challenge of the Ethics is to see two sides of the imagination; it is this ambivalence that drives Spinoza’s argument. Spinoza’s imagination comprises ideas of how we are affected, as opposed to adequate ideas of the understanding, which show how things really are. Imagination is our original endowment; being guided by reason is an achievement. While imagination is inferior to reason, there are better and worse ideas of the imagination. Some ideas of the imagination bring people together, others create conflicts. Some ideas lead to our being more rational, others move us in the opposite direction. This is the ambivalence of the imagination. Its cunning drives people forward to achieve a rational, blessed life that is beyond its own ideas and desires. And so the Ethics ends: good things are as difficult as they are rare.Less